How To Be A Republican Sellout on National Security
A recent Wall Street Journal article made it clear: American drones suck.
But alas Heather Somerville and Brett Forrest buried the lede: could it be because they aren’t really American?
And why isn’t there are an American drone equivalent of DJI or Bayraktar anyway?
Here we go again!
You’re supposed to be indignant about the U.S. government surveilling would-be criminals and organized crime while having nary a word to say about the Apple product users in 92 countries illegally targeted by a rogue Middle Eastern regime.
But of course, they never did anything in America, the most powerful country on the planet. No, no! Not at all! Pinky promise! You’re not antisemitic are you? Surely you’re not anti-Semitic to note that “cyber is a real instrument of power.”
You’re supposed to be incensed that various people around Donald Trump were unmasked in the run up to the U.S. election. Oh no!
Or maybe, just maybe, Americans shouldn’t be talking to sketchy foreigners, let alone doing business deals with them, or bedding them. Looking at you, Google’s Eric Schmidt.
Or, maybe, just maybe, the whole “unmasking” incident was really about the Israeli world putting pressure on the U.S. security services and targeting U.S. intelligence assets like Carter Page who had dealings with the Russians.
Maybe our unwillingness to talk honestly about what goes on with the Israelis made it hard to get a grasp of what was going on in the Russian world.
No matter: Nineteen House Republicans took down the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) extensions sought by Speaker Mike Johnson.
How will rejecting FISA go down?
Well, in practice the way this works is as follows: British counterpart sits across his American counterpart and files are exchanged. No big deal.
In a weird way, defeating FISA’s extensions ultimately emboldens our allies who will continue to collect on Americans. There’s simply no way that our allies are going to allow their collection capabilities to be degraded — not with the specter of foreign-backed populism taking over countries as essential to their own security as the United States.
When it comes to surveillance the problem isn’t the collection; it’s the blackmail. The problem isn’t the technology; it’s the exploitation.
And so we pretend rather than talk honestly and openly about what’s going on and which countries are doing it and more importantly why.
Let me spell it out: Blinding America’s sense making capabilities with respect to Russia or China is a way of both guaranteeing the Israeli middle-manning role — and of creating a black market which the Israeli organized crime seeks to dominate. This is incidentally why our Israeli friends — our greatest ally — have no problem at all selling spyware technology to any willing buyer.
Meanwhile, in Europe the Russian oligarchs are quite rightly pointing out how little they had to do with Putin’s war — and winning in the courts. “A number of Russians under sanctions told the Financial Times that the evidence used against them was groundless, flawed or misleading — and predominantly based on publicly available information,” notes the FT.
Is it possible that a group of people benefited when the Russians were sanctioned? Say, a group of people who were involved with the black market trade? Do you think maybe the United Arab Emirates, long a smuggler’s paradise, might have benefited? And I wonder, who acts as their agents in the West?
In America fraudsters like accused sexual predator Keith Rabois’s husband are trying to shakedown Tik Tok by writing letters to the U.S. Senate with Indian intelligence officers like Vinod Khosla.
Yeah, no thanks.
By the way, isn’t this interesting? Re Eric Schmidt.
In November 2019, the US government’s National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI), an influential body chaired by former Google CEO and executive chairman Eric Schmidt, warned that China was using artificial intelligence to “advance an autocratic agenda.”
Just two months earlier, Schmidt was also seeking potential personal connections to China’s AI industry on a visit to Beijing, newly disclosed emails reveal. Separately, tax filings show that a nonprofit private foundation overseen by Schmidt and his wife contributed to a fund that feeds into a private equity firm that has made investments in numerous Chinese tech firms, including those in AI.
Why it’s almost as if all the people warning about China have an agenda to middle man between us and the Chinese.
You’re not supposed to talk about Schmidt’s family ties to the Tories or how his father died in a suspicious fire after being Reagan’s pick to be at the World Bank.
I’m sure Schmidt’s 2019 trip to China with Henry Kissinger was on the up and up.
Kissinger demanded to invest in Clearview, the facial recognition I cofounded. Why was that?
Schmidt — along with the rest of Google — trashed Clearview right around the same time that he was leading a $55 million in a Chinese-state backed facial recognition company.
He had said that facial recognition was “crossing the creepy line” in 2011 but in 2016 Schmidt’s fund had $17m for the Chinese.
The problem isn’t the tech; it’s the traitors.
****
I recently listened to a podcast featuring Founders Fund fraud Trae Stephens who prevailed upon the U.S. military to pick winners. But you pick losers, Trae. And using Emirati cash or contracts to consolidate the defense industry doesn’t make America more secure.
Oh did I say that aloud? That there’s a concerted effort to cartelize the defense industrial base of the United States with venture capital money from the Gulf?
(We’ll put aside Trae’s pro-Microsoft stanning which looks especially bad now that we know how compromised Microsoft is by foreign actors.)
If you look closely at the pedigree of the drone company founders you’ll learn a few things.
If you get to build within an infrastructure which isn’t peopled with hostile intelligence fronts like Thielworld or Andreessenland and have the support of the U.S. government, you are likely to succeed.
Let’s go a little deeper into Skydio.
After a year and a half, the pair left Google X and along with Matt Donahoe, who they met at MIT’s Media Lab, set out to create a system to power self-navigating drones using only the commodity chips and and sensors you would find in your average smartphone. Today Skydio, which has been working in stealth for around a year, announced a $3 million round of funding from Andreessen Horowitz and Accel.
Say wasn’t Jeffrey Epstein (and his pal Reid Hoffman) hanging around the Media Lab at the time?
And then there’s Blake Resnick, wunderkind backed by Thiel and Sam Bankman-Fried. Let’s go to Business Insider:
Resnick was inspired to found the drone company in 2017 after the deadliest mass shooting at a country music festival in his hometown of Las Vegas killed 58 people. After the shooting, he cold-called the lieutenant in charge of the Las Vegas SWAT team to ask about technology that could’ve helped the police identify and stop an active shooter.
Uh huh.
The Lemur drone was being used in search-and-rescue operations in Ukraine, The Seattle Times reported in June 2022. In 2021, Resnick delivered a drone to help to inspect the partial collapse of an apartment building in Surfside, Florida.
Of course. No IDF stuff there surely.
Where did young Blake get his start?
By the time Resnick dropped out of college, he had already interned — as a teenager — at some of the most high-profile companies in the world: including British supercar maker McLaren, Tesla, and Chinese drone giant DJI, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Oh dear.
You’d be forgiven if you think a lot of this anti-China stuff is just deciding who gets to rip off American innovators but Uncle Joe says that Americans are tired of being treated as suckers.
