Mr. Musk made the remark in a post on X in response to a post by former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who offered his own critical commentary on a trial that he believes is “tearing our country apart.”

President Trump’s trial got underway on April 15 in a case officially known as The People of the State of New York v. Donald J. Trump, in which the former president is accused of hiding so-called “hush money” payments to an adult film actress by falsifying business records.

He has repeatedly denied wrongdoing and, before he entered the courtroom on Monday, reiterated his position that the case is politically motivated.

“This is really an attack on a political opponent. That’s all it is,” President Trump told reporters outside the courtroom before going inside.

‘Legal Stretch’

In the case, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg charged President Trump with 34 counts of falsifying business records.

Such charges would normally be a misdemeanor but Mr. Bragg elevated them to the rank of felonies by claiming that the payments were part of a scheme to influence the 2016 election by burying potentially embarrassing news coverage of President Trump’s alleged tryst with adult film performer Stormy Daniels in exchange for $130,000 in “hush money” payments.

The former president has denied the affair and on April 10, he shared a photograph on social media of a document bearing the heading “Official Statement of Stormy Daniels” that’s dated Jan. 30, 2018, and bears her signature.

“I am not denying this affair because it was paid ‘hush money’ as has been reported in overseas owned tabloids,” the undersigned statement reads. “I am denying this affair because it never happened.”

Ms. Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, has since recanted the contents of the letter, claiming she signed it under pressure from her representatives, before writing a salacious “tell-all” book about the alleged affair, from which she’s made an undisclosed sum.

She owes President Trump around $670,000 in court fees and interest from several failed lawsuits, including one in which she accused the former president of defamation over a tweet.

Ms. Daniels recently told Jeffrey Toobin, the former CNN legal analyst who quit after he was caught masturbating on camera during a work-related Zoom call, that she has no intention of paying up and is “prepared to go to jail” before sitting for a deposition about her finances and filling out a form listing her assets.

Prosecutors have the option of calling Ms. Daniels as a witness in President Trump’s criminal trial after the judge denied the former president’s request to block testimony from her and his former personal attorney Michael Cohen.

Meanwhile, a number of people have raised objections to Mr. Bragg’s legal maneuver to spin the misdemeanor charges into felonies, including Mr. Ramaswamy, who in a video posted on X on April 15 called the trial “a joke” and Mr. Bragg’s moves a “legal stretch.”

‘Lawfare’

Mr. Ramaswamy said that for Mr. Bragg to be able to elevate the 34 alleged instances of falsifying business records to felonies, he needs to prove that the records were falsified to advance an underlying crime.

Mr. Bragg has claimed that President Trump essentially defrauded voters in the 2016 presidential election by allegedly paying Ms. Daniels to keep quiet about the alleged affair and so preventing negative news coverage.

Mr. Ramaswamy sees this reasoning as invalid and politically motivated.

“It’s almost as though they decided this is the person we’re going to prosecute,” Mr. Ramaswamy said in the video. “And then we’re going to figure out what we’re going to charge them with after the fact.”

“Well, guess what, that’s exactly what happened,” he continued, adding that Mr. Bragg was elected as district attorney on the promise of going after President Trump for some crime or other.

“This is a politician keeping his campaign promise,” Mr. Ramaswamy said. “That is a bastardization of our legal system.”

He warned that the same tactic could be used by the other side in the future, a tit-for-tat that threatens to tear the country apart.

“The same shoe can fit the other foot and if we keep going down this direction, we’re not going to have a country left in the complete absence of a legal argument,” he said.

“To even bring this case against Trump isn’t just embarrassing to Alvin Bragg,” he continued. “It’s embarrassing to our country.”

Mr. Musk posted his agreement with Mr. Ramaswamy’s take.

“This case is obviously a corruption of the law,” the Tesla CEO wrote.

“Lawfare,” he added.

Mr. Bragg’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

That’s one conclusion after officials announced a 90-day suspension for a Colorado lawyer who submitted a motion to court that “cited case law that he found through the artificial intelligence platform, ChatGPT.”

The problem is that the lawyer, Zachariah C. Crabill, “did not read the cases he found … or otherwise attempt to verify that the citations were accurate.”

The software had given him case citations that either were “incorrect” or simply “fictitious.”

Legal columnist Eugene Volokh explained, “The presiding disciplinary judge approved the parties’ stipulation to discipline and suspended Zachariah C. Crabill (attorney registration number 56783) for one year and one day, with ninety days to be served and the remainder to be stayed upon Crabill’s successful completion of a two-year period of probation, with conditions.”

Crabill had been hired by a client to prepare a motion to set aside judgment in the client’s civil case. Crabill submitted the motion, after using ChatGPT, only to discover later that the cases were fake.

“But Crabill did not alert the court to the sham cases at the hearing. Nor did he withdraw the motion. When the judge expressed concerns about the accuracy of the cases, Crabill falsely attributed the mistakes to a legal intern. Six days after the hearing, Crabill filed an affidavit with the court, explaining that he used ChatGPT when he drafted the motion,” the report said.

That, the decision in the case ruled, amounted to a violation of a legal requirement that a lawyer competently represent a client.

It isn’t the first time such a catastrophe has developed. WND reported a few months ago a judge blasted a filing in federal court in Manhattan after discovering it was doctored by artificial intelligence and contained “bogus” information.”

As in “made-up” cases and citations.

The New York Post reported at the time the controversy is just the latest to involve AI, which has made abrupt tech advances in recent months, to the point experts are warning that its development needs to be paused for now.

The Post reported it was a lawyer from a “respected Tribeca firm” who conceded recently his filing “was written with the help of an artificial intelligence chatbot on his behalf.”

It was Steven Schwartz, who is with Levidow, Levidow & Oberman, who admitted he asked ChatGPT to find cases relevant to his own case, “only for the bot to fabricate them entirely,” the report said.

The dispute was over a case filed by Schwartz’s partner, Paul LoDuca, against Avianca airlines on behalf of Robert Mata, who claimed an injury from a metal serving cart.

The airline asked the court to toss the action, and Schwartz “filed a brief that supposedly cited more than a half dozen relevant cases,” the report said.

But those cases, Miller v. United Airlines, Petersen v. Iran Air and Varghese v. China Southern Airlines, and others were fabricated by ChatGPT, the report said.

Content created by the WND News Center is available for re-publication without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact [email protected].

One example is a gas station in Philadelphia (a city that has frequently been in the news lately due to growing crime problems, having set a new personal record for annual murders) that has hired security armed with rifles to protect patrons, mainly from car jackings, since motorists are especially vulnerable to attack while pumping gas.

One thing I found notable from a Fox News interview of the head of security Chief Andre Boyer (other than the fact that journalists at a “conservative” outlet are just as clueless as other journalists about what an AR15 is) is his response to a question about whether he and his agents will intervene when witnessing a crime in progress. Chief Boyer responds, “We have to. We have a contract to protect our clients and our clients’ assets.”

As I have noted previously, the fact that voluntarily hired security has a contractual obligation to provide services to the people who pay them is in stark contrast to government police. On multiple occasions, the US Supreme Court has opined that US citizens have no constitutional right to police protection and officers cannot be held legally liable for failing to protect them. You must pay them under penalty of law, but they are not required to provide anything in return.

Also noteworthy is a comment the interviewer makes that “the number one job of the government, whatever level, whether federal, state, local, is to keep their citizens safe. So, if you’re hiring an outside agency that’s a clear indicator that government is failing its people.” Regarding the first part of that statement, Judge Andrew Napolitano would strongly disagree: it is not the job of the government (if it is to have any job at all) to keep you safe but rather to keep you free.

Regarding the second part of that statement, the interviewer gives far too much credit to the government. To say categorically that any hiring of private security means the state is failing to do its job assumes godlike powers on the part of the state. As mentioned above, it is wrong to assume that the state’s threat of capturing and punishing lawbreakers is primarily responsible for the peace and orderliness we enjoy under normal circumstances. Perhaps since there are an estimated three to four people employed in private security for every government police officer, the Fox News interviewer would consider this proof that the government cannot do its number one job and is unfit to exist.

Car theft is not only a major issue in Philly but in Portland, Oregon, as well. Both cities are experiencing historic highs in crime. In response to the explosion of car theft in Portland, a Facebook group named “PDX Stolen Cars” was formed to crowdsource locating stolen vehicles. According to the founder of the Facebook group, Titan Crawford, “I had found a stolen car in my neighborhood. I knew it was stolen. I contacted the police and they said there’s not a whole lot we can do right now. So I was like, ‘Well see if I can do something.’”

Mr. Crawford has been disillusioned of the idea that the government is the ultimate protector of property rights: “It would be cool if the city could do this and I didn’t have to.” I imagine many people thought the same thing about government schools. Fortunately, an increasing number of parents are able to get some of their tax money back to send kids to a school of their choice. Instead of being taxed to pay for police services they don’t receive, perhaps some residents of Portland would be interested in “police choice.”

Burlington, Vermont, is having a similar experience with bike thefts, along with the Facebook groups created to deal with it because the government police are too busy. They are too busy to deal not only with bike thefts but property destruction, retail larceny, assaults by homeless people in parks, and open-air drug markets (financed by stolen bikes). And, as elsewhere, residents have found that they are on their own in dealing with these things.

One might point out that another common theme among these cities is the fact that their politicians all committed to “defunding the police” to some degree. This movement, while short-lived and ultimately overstated in how much budgets were cut, was successful in reducing police staffing and recruitment. Does the corresponding rise in crime and disorder indicate, then, that government police are crucial in maintaining order?

No. Rather, the lesson one should take from the “defund the police” experience (to the extent that one believes that it was a misguided, if not horrible, idea) is that it is an outcome that is only possible when policing is under political control. It was not a case of individuals deciding to abstain from buying when they no longer wanted a particular service.

The taxpayer-funded monopoly on policing became even less effective without leaving any more money in taxpayers’ pockets. Drawing another parallel with government schools, which closed without returning the taxpayers’ money, several cities cut police funding and staffing while keeping the money that taxpayers ostensibly paid for that purpose. It truly is only the government that can take your money, barely provide a service they’ve monopolized, and then insist on how necessary they are for the provision of that service.

Now, especially with the rise of the Soros-funded district attorneys, Americans are realizing that they are responsible for their own safety and security. This function, like the education of their children, cannot be outsourced to the government. The silver lining is that, as people build parallel institutions, the less dependent upon government they become and the more obvious the overstatement of the state’s necessity for order becomes. This is a necessary step for getting us on the road to rediscovery of an ethos of liberty and self-reliance.

About the Author

Tate Fegley is Chair of Business and Economics at Montreat College and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute.

Article cross-posted from Mises.

Chatbot Passed the Uniform Bar Exam

Word on the street is that the latest Microsoft-backed AI has passed the universal bar exam, an exam that lawyers in the United States have to pass in order to get licensed to practice law. Not only did it pass it but its score “fell in the top 10% of test takers.”

The AI software, made by the Microsoft partner OpenAI, is called “GPT-4.” It is an upgrade from GPT-3.5, which is what the recently famous ChatGPT program is based on. In case you are curious, “GPT” stands for “Generative Pre-trained Transformer,” which is a computer language model that uses “deep learning” to produce text.

Deep learning stands roughly for combing through vast amounts of data, algorithmically extracting meaningful characteristics of different types, and then summing them up in a way that makes it look like the computer “understands.”

This software falls under the definition of “generative AI,” which is the type of AI that goes beyond analyzing large amounts of data and producing a summary and that is capable of generating its own “creative” output based on the data is has analyzed.

Per OpenAI’s GPT-4 Technical Report, the program was tested “on a diverse set of benchmarks, including simulating exams that were originally designed for humans.”

An Interlude

Can I please use this opportunity to express my annoyance with the popularization of the hipster use of the word “humans” instead of “people,” as if there is ever going to be a point in time when robots grow sentient and start participating in society not as a type of technology at the hands of whoever is in charge but as living beings in their own right?

This is of course never going to happen (although the patent owners may pretend). This is nonsense and fiction. But calling people “humans” introduces a new of viewing ourselves through externalized mechanical eyes. It is yet another magical trick by the crazies in high chairs to disconnect us from our innate personality and our souls. It also helps the tyrants to bring about “robot citizens” and give them “rights.”

The “robot citizens” may even include “financial actors,” to justify the fraud! And when the actual people complain about the absurdity of it based on the fact that robots aren’t actually “human,” they’ll be accused of having a phobia of some sort.

Using “humans” instead of “people” when describing us all just makes the trickery a tad easier because, are these machines or software products people? Obviously they are not. We know they are not people. But are they maybe a little bit human-like? Trying to be human? Wanting to be human? Deserving to be human? Don’t you think they at the very lease deserve-human-like rights? Etc.

Back to the Topic of AI Passing the Bar Exam

Anyway, according to OpenAI, the company used the necessary precautions to ensure that the AI product didn’t just mechanically reproduce already known correct answers to the already known questions on the bar exam. In their own words: “we did no specific training for these exams.

A minority of the problems in the exams were seen by the model during training; for each exam we run a variant with these questions removed and report the lower score of the two. We believe the results to be representative.”

“Exams were sourced from publicly available materials. Exam questions included both multiple choice and free-response questions; we designed separate prompts for each format, and images were included in the input for questions which required it.

The evaluation setup was designed based on performance on a validation set of exams, and we report final results on held-out test exams. Overall scores were determined by combining multiple-choice and free-response question scores using publicly available methodologies for each exam.”

“On a simulated bar exam, GPT-4 achieves a score that falls in the top 10% of test takers. This contrasts with GPT-3.5, which scores in the bottom 10%.” Here are the uniform bar exam scores and for the LSAT test results, according to GPT-4 Technical Report:

Uniform Bar Exam (MBE+MEE+MPT)

• GPT-4: 298 / 400 (approximately 90th percentile)
• GPT-4 (no vision): 298 / 400 (approximately 90th percentile)
• GPT-3.5: 213 / 400 (approximately 10th percentile)

LSAT

• GPT-4: 163 (approximately 88th percentile)
• GPT-4 (no vision): 161 (approximately 83rd percentile)
• GPT-3.5: 149 (approximately 40th percentile)

Here is what a mainstream review of the software, written by Dr. Lance Eliot and published on law.com, has to say:

Does the passing of the simulated uniform bar exam imply or prove that GPT-4 is legally capable and fully ready to perform legal tasks on par with human lawyers?

The answer is a resounding No, namely that despite the wink-wink implication or innuendo, all that can be reasonably said is that GPT-4 was able to use its extensive computational pattern-matching of words related to other words in order to successfully derive answers to the presented exams.

My comment: I think it is important to emphasize the fact that the “wink-wink” component is a big part of the AI myth. We need to remember it when it comes to all AI “work,” not just the tasks that people do in their currently still prestigious career paths. And is it possible that when the overlords came up with their conveyors and “systems management,” they just duped us point-blank?! Back to Dr. Eliot’s analysis:

“As I’ve stated in my prior posted piece entitled “Best Ways To Use Generative AI In Your Law Practice,” care needs to be exercised in overstating what generative AI can attain. Furthermore, the comparison of GPT-4 to “human-level performance” smacks of anthropomorphizing of AI. This is a dangerous slippery slope of taking people down a primrose path that current AI is sentient or human-like in abilities.

Generative AI such as GPT-4 is notably handy as an aid for lawyers and can be a huge leg-up in performing legal tasks. That being said, relying solely on generative AI for legal efforts is unsound and improper.

The key takeaway for lawyers is that you ought to be giving serious and deep consideration to leveraging generative AI such as GPT-4. No doubt about that. GPT-4 is even better at aiding lawyers than ChatGPT. I’ve said over and over again that lawyers and law practices using generative AI are going to outdo and outperform attorneys and firms that aren’t using generative AI.”

Generative AI

Let’s talk for a second about generative AI. Here is what Reuter’s has to say:

“Generative artificial intelligence has become a buzzword this year, capturing the public’s fancy and sparking a rush among Microsoft (MSFT.O) and Alphabet (GOOGL.O) to launch products with technology they believe will change the nature of work.”

“The most famous generative AI application is ChatGPT, a chatbot that Microsoft-backed OpenAI released late last year. The AI powering it is known as a large language model because it takes in a text prompt and from that writes a human-like response.”

“GPT-4, a newer model that OpenAI announced this week, is ‘multimodal’ because it can perceive not only text but images as well. OpenAI’s president demonstrated on Tuesday how it could take a photo of a hand-drawn mock-up for a website he wanted to build, and from that generate a real one.”

Here is my favorite bit: “Cybersecurity researchers have also expressed concern that generative AI could allow bad actors, even governments to produce far more disinformation than before.” Oh no, governments spreading misinformation? Impossible. Never once happened in human history. At least, not our government. Not here and not now, and not against us (phew). A short video explainer by Reuters (narrated by AI?).

Paying Attention to the Upside-Down Language of AI

One of the things to pay attention to in the talk about AI is the use of the word “harm.” What is “harmful language”? On the intuitive level, we know (calls for violence or child abuse, for example, are actually harmful language) — but in the official, robotic context, “harmful language” is whatever they say it is on a given day.

In an imaginary honest society, in a society where the leaders wouldn’t try to mess with language and with people’s heads, the desire to put in tight controls around what can come out of a robot’s mouth could be a neutral and noble goal. It is a robot, after all. But we don’t live in an honest society, society, and the leaders are already trying to label any “wrongthink” as “hate speech.”

So naturally, as the trend with AI proceeds, and as AI replaces educators and bureaucratic decision making, people facing censorship might be squeezed more and more into the torture of “talking to the hand.” A mechanical hand.

The weaponization of language and automated interactions have been on my mind a lot. In my interview with Dr. Bruce Dooley, we discussed the weaponization of the word “harm” in medicine by the Federation of State Medical Boards. In my 2022 article, “Who is the Terrorist?” I wrote about the ideas about harm and disinformation, put forward by the DHS last year. And a few years before COVID, I wrote an essay titled, “Love & Automation: The Creepy Touch of a Mechanical Mother”:

“The defenders of efficiency typically try to impose it on other people — while allowing themselves to remain just as human and free-roaming as they wish to be. The famous example is how the likes of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates limit their own children’s access to technology while telling the rest of the world that technology is universally and ubiquitously amazing.

Factory owners gladly impose efficiency on the former independent craftsmen and their descendants. Office managers impose efficiency on the office slaves. Makers of software sell efficiency to the general population. But in their own shoes, the salesmen of efficiency like to look at the sky and smell the flowers.”

What Can Be Done With AI in the Legal Field?

As of this second, AI can possibly do the work that is usually done by paralegals and junior lawyers. It can customize template-based documents, such as contracts and form letters. It can go through vast piles of documents quickly and summarize the case for more senior lawyers to review. It can also write draft legal documents, citing the laws and the precedents that apply.

According to a Brookings Institution review, in the legal field, AI can take care of some of the most time-consuming tasks:

“Consider one of the most time-consuming tasks in litigation: extracting structure, meaning, and salient information from an enormous set of documents produced during discovery. AI will vastly accelerate this process, doing work in seconds that without AI might take weeks. Or consider the drafting of motions to file with a court.

AI can be used to very quickly produce initial drafts, citing the relevant case law, advancing arguments, and rebutting (as well as anticipating) arguments advanced by opposing counsel. Human input will still be needed to produce the final draft, but the process will be much faster with AI.”

“More broadly, AI will make it much more efficient for attorneys to draft documents requiring a high degree of customization — a process that traditionally has consumed a significant amount of attorney time.

Examples include contracts, the many different types of documents that get filed with a court in litigation, responses to interrogatories, summaries for clients of recent developments in an ongoing legal matter, visual aids for use in trial, and pitches aimed at landing new clients.

AI could also be used during a trial to analyze a trial transcript in real time and provide input to attorneys that can help them choose which questions to ask witnesses.”

“DoNotPay”

One of the first popular AI legal tech products, branded as “the world’s first robot lawyer” was created in 2015 by Josh Browder, the founder of DoNotPay. That particular software was designed to help people write effective responses and letters to fight unjustly issued tickets, cancel subscriptions, and so on. Once the word got out, the company was able to receive significant investor funding.

In January 2023, the company announced that their AI would act as an informal “attorney” in court, helping the client to fight a speeding ticket.

“A program trained with the help of artificial intelligence is set to help a defendant contest his case in a U.S. court next month … Instead of addressing the court, the program, which will run on a smartphone, will supply appropriate responses through an earpiece to the defendant, who can then use them in the courtroom.”

“Since this is the AI’s very first case, DoNotPay is ready to take on the burden of punishment if the AI’s advice does not help the client. Since it is a speeding ticket, DoNotPay will pay for the speeding ticket. If it wins though, it will have a massive victory to its credit.” The AI was supposed to assist the client in court in February 2023. But then it didn’t.

Good morning! Bad news: after receiving threats from State Bar prosecutors, it seems likely they will put me in jail for 6 months if I follow through with bringing a robot lawyer into a physical courtroom. DoNotPay is postponing our court case and sticking to consumer rights:

— Joshua Browder (@jbrowder1) January 25, 2023

And then the company was sued for “practicing law without a license.” “The robot lawyer is facing a proposed class section lawsuit filed by Chicago-based law firm, Edelson and published on the website of the Superior Court of the State of California for the County of San Francisco.”

The way it looks to me, the people-facing, cheaply priced version of AI is seen as a threat by the big boys, and so they want to put a stop to that. I mean, can you imagine a world in which lowly peasants use cheaply priced AI (fast calculator) products to benefit themselves — and possibly even without sending all their personal data to the Central Mother Ship? The outrage.

“Ross”

Another AI product, also branded as “the first artificially intelligent attorney, was Ross.” “Ross” was the AI product made by Ross Intelligence, a startup founded in 2014 by three Canadian students. The product was based on IBM’s Watson series of AI products for business. Spoiler: the company was shut down in 2020. Here is from Futurism (2016):

“Law firm Baker & Hostetler has announced that they are employing IBM’s AI Ross to handle their bankruptcy practice, which at the moment consists of nearly 50 lawyers. According to CEO and co-founder Andrew Arruda, other firms have also signed licenses with Ross, and they will also be making announcements shortly.”

“Ross, ‘the world’s first artificially intelligent attorney’ built on IBM’s cognitive computer Watson, was designed to read and understand language, postulate hypotheses when asked questions, research, and then generate responses (along with references and citations) to back up its conclusions. Ross also learns from experience, gaining speed and knowledge the more you interact with it.”

But like I said, in 2020, Ross Intelligence was shut down. That seemingly had to do not with any underlying philosophical issues of using AI in the legal field — but with corporate competition. It was more about the fight of the mobs and the question of who gets to benefit from the potential dollar waterfall.

It was shut down as a result of the company’s financing being blocked by the lawsuit filed by Thompson Reuters who claimed that Ross Intelligence used TR data to build their legal tech AI.

“ROSS Intelligence, a company that sought to innovate legal research through the use of artificial intelligence, and that helped to raise awareness of AI throughout the legal industry, is shutting down its operations, as a lawsuit against it by Thomson Reuters has crippled its ability to raise new financing or explore potential acquisition and left it without sufficient funds to operate.”

“Thomson Reuters sued ROSS in May, alleging that it stole content from Westlaw to build its own competing legal research product. ROSS did this, TR alleged, by “intentionally and knowingly” inducing the legal research and writing company LegalEase Solutions to use its Westlaw account to deliver Westlaw data to ROSS en masse.”

The Owner of the AI Sets the Tone

As usual, the devil is in the detail. If AI technology is used to help regular people accomplish with the tasks that have been previously out of reach without being rich — and without the abuse data offloading to the Central Mother Ship — it could be a useful thing.

And this will be the selling point during the initial phases of the technology rollout. The bait is supposed to taste good, this is how it always works.

But if a collective habit develops for the use of chatbots and coherent-sounding, language-producing fast calculators in our everyday professional lives, and once the sufficient amounts of data have been scooped, the useful stuff will be moved behind a very hefty paywall. And perhaps, at that time, the middle class and even the upper middle class lawyers will get “deprecated,” just like many have been “deprecated” before them. Time will tell!

“Gradually Then Suddenly”: The Conquest

Let’s talk about the concept of the bait. Life works in mysterious ways, and history works in long time spans. The attack on human agency and personality and on our relationship with nature and our own emotional richness started thousands of years ago. Today, we are dealing not just with the intentions and the incessant scamming of Klaus Schwab, the alphabets, and their owners upstairs — but also with the consequence of the scams put forth by the tyrants and tricksters from the past.

Today, we are paying the price not only for the collective imperfect choices of the people underneath the boot of the big tyrants of today (including our own) — but also for the imperfect choices made by tyrant victims of the past, when some people were possibly startled, or bullied, or tricked, or bribed into accepting soul compromises of their time.

And then they passed the compromise on to their children. And they passed it to their children. And so on. See how this works?

Even on a smaller scale, it works “gradually then suddenly.” For example, the U.S. pandemic preparedness model that bit us all in 2020 was set in motion in the early 2000s, during Bush. After being prepared, it sat there behind the bushes (a pun!) for 15 years, waiting to enter the stage. And then it entered the stage with vengeance. And here we are!

The Condemnation of the Algorithmic Model

All these AI developments may be a compliment to the power of technology but they are also a condemnation of the state of our civilization.

Remember the question I asked in the beginning? I asked, what is the point of our time on Earth? And what are we doing with our civilization if our lives are so mechanical that even a dumb fast calculator can do our “intellectual work” more efficiently than we do? What is our “work”?

Did they — gradually and then suddenly — get us? Have our own “human” cognitive models and angles from which we analyze the world become so algorithmic that a stupid machine can outdo us at the “thinking” task? Not good.

And speaking of law, there was a time in history — before our communities and individual people became invisible pawns under various dominating entities — when even “law and order” wasn’t algorithmic but was based on the subjective and honest desire to do what’s right in the spiritual sense.

And I think on a local level, it still happens sometimes, but the “domination” mentality has poisoned our minds, and the algorithm was put in place to keep a semblance of goodness where the goodness had been undermined.

I think that the existential role of the horrible Great Reset is to make that algorithmic poison so big, so obvious to our eyes that we simply can’t be in denial anymore and have to rebel against the ancient abuse of our souls. Because we are more than a collection of formulas. We are more than algorithms.

We are of spirit and water, we have souls, we are capable of navigating subjectivity and thriving at it, we can feel, touch, love, savor our relationships — and that is the point of us being here.

The very feeling of being alive — the breath and the skin — is why we are here. And when someone is trying to further reduce us to pattern-matching machines, we have the full right to say, “No.” I want like to end this article with a quote from a sci-fi story that I wrote in 2019 (I only added a line about a pandemic to it in 2020):

“In order to gain control over the economy and human bodies, they needed to first gain control over people’s thinking. So they created a strong push to shift all major human activities to the digital domain as digital footprints were initially much easier to track and monetize. They set up breadcrumbs and made the transition look like fun.

Simultaneously, they built strong relationships with some of the most influential citizens and organizations of the time. Tech leaders promised easy surveillance to law enforcement — and free access to education and entertainment to common citizens. Everybody thought they were getting a great deal!

They gave the people previously unseen opportunities to create new worlds — both on the developer side and on the user side — but nobody except the top execs knew that the new worlds came with hidden trackers and treacherous on-off switches that could be activated at any point.”

“Early warnings came from artists who figured out that their work was being used as a bait to attract people to tech platforms. But artistic types were not respected members of society, and their cries were drowned in optimistic speeches about the bright future of everything.

Then came the media. After news companies starting crumbling and many journalists found themselves without an income, they realized that the game was rigged. But they, too, were swept out of the way. Some made a bargain and took tech funding, some became “gig economy” workers, and some learned how to code.

Then, at a critical point in time, there was a pandemic of some sort, and powerful technology leaders, including some of the IHT official saints, managed to use their influence on governments to legally mandate digitization of all aspects of life. It was then that unregulated human contact was made illegal and smart wearables and AI assistants became mandatory.”

“By the time lawyers, doctors, bankers, and government officials were personally impacted and practically enslaved on a massive scale, it was too late. Big Tech controlled every aspect of life, tracked everything, and funded every industry. It became the default law enforcement agency and the default news publisher, and thus it had the power to make or break any pundit, academic, or politician.

Everyone — from governments to low-level assistants-to-robots — depended on technology for every life function. Sex and baby permits required impeccable Digital Citizen Scores. No one could even get a low-level job without abiding by algorithms — and most jobs were automated anyway. Municipal councils owed money for smart city maintenance. The grip was total.”

“And while many felt instinctively uneasy about giving up privacy and cognitive autonomy, they also felt alone and helpless. Jobs outside of tech were scarce, competition was harsh, and very few had the luxury to even ponder the big picture. So people kept their heads low and did what they had to do to feed their families — complied, wore mandatory smart masks, and learned how to code if they were allowed.

Developers and other high-level tech industry workers preserved their financial independence and cognitive autonomy the longest — gated coder communities became a fixture on every smart urban hub — but eventually they, too, became obsolete, as AI grew sophisticated enough to produce itself.

Shortly after the institution of biologically compromised governance was deprecated, Big Tech became Interplanetary Holy Tech, and you know the rest.”

Does this sound familiar? If it does, now is a good time for all of us to ponder why we were born on Earth, why were are alive here and now, with all our gifts — and to follow through with the unique, brave and important tasks that we are here to do. With heart.

About the Author

To find more of Tessa Lena’s work, be sure to check out her bio, Tessa Fights Robots.

• The 2022 annual transparency report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) reveals the FBI has been surveilling millions of American citizens — without warrants or proper cause
• Between December 2020 and November 2021, the FBI scoured private emails, texts and other electronic communications of 3.4 million U.S. residents, without obtaining a single warrant. Between December 2019 and November 2020, just under 1.3 million Americans were surveilled in this manner
• There’s also been a sharp uptick in the number of times government officials asked for the identity of individuals surveilled to be revealed, a practice known as “unmasking”
• Supposedly, FBI agents were looking for signs of potential terrorist activity. They also sought to prevent hacking attacks. In the process, they violated the constitutional privacy rights of millions, and considering the hacking attacks that have occurred anyway, this mass surveillance doesn’t seem to be achieving its stated aim
• Two attorneys and two journalists are suing former CIA director Mike Pompeo in Spanish High Court for illegally surveilling them and copying private data from their electronic devices and passports while they were visiting Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy. The agency is also listed as a defendant, for purposes of forcing them to expunge all collected records

In the aftermath of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI’s) unprecedented August 8, 2022, raid¹ on former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in Florida, many are starting to question the FBI’s actions, not just in this case, but in a more general sense.

What’s become clear through this raid is that the FBI has been weaponized to hunt down and neutralize political opposition. On the surface, Republicans appear to be the target, but more specifically, the target is really anyone who disagrees with and wants to stop what we now know is a global coup by an unelected technocrat elite.

The raid on the former president shows that no one is safe from government overreach (or more precisely, the overreach of a government captured by the globalist cabal). This is made all the more disturbing by the fact that the FBI has been surveilling millions of American citizens — without warrants or proper cause.

Public assurances aside, the agency has repeatedly been caught acting lawlessly (the FBI-infiltrated kidnapping plot of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer being just one of the more recent examples²), and that lawless behavior is a piece of evidence that suggests it’s been captured by powers that do not have the welfare of American citizens at heart.

FBI Illegally Spies on Millions of Americans

According to the American Civil Liberties Union, the FBI is violating Americans’ privacy “on an enormous scale.” As reported by Bloomberg,³ the 2022 annual transparency report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) reveals the FBI, between December 2020 and November 2021, scoured private emails, texts and other electronic communications of some 3.4 million U.S. residents, without obtaining a single warrant.

Between December 2019 and November 2020, just under 1.3 million Americans were surveilled in this manner. The report also notes there’s been a sharp uptick in the number of times government officials asked for the identity of individuals surveilled to be revealed, a practice known as “unmasking.”

Supposedly, FBI agents were looking for signs of potential terrorist activity and sought to prevent hacking attacks. But in so doing, they violated the constitutional privacy rights of millions, and considering the hacking attacks that have occurred anyway, this mass surveillance doesn’t seem to be achieving its stated aim.

Privacy Rights Help Prevent Tyrannical Overreaches

While some say you have nothing to worry about if you’re not doing anything wrong, that old adage has long since worn out because, again, we’re dealing with an agency whose job it is to take out political opponents. You don’t need to do anything illegal or criminal to be targeted for neutralization.

“Wrong-think” is now a “crime” in and of itself, so you better believe that privacy matters. You do not want the FBI to rifle through your personal correspondence. They will find something, some sentence, some idea, some opinion, with which to hang you, figuratively speaking.

Just look at Dr. Simone Gold. She’s now serving a prison sentence over what amounts to medical opinion. She didn’t do anything criminal or illegal. She’s a political prisoner.

But by “political prisoner,” I’m not exclusively referring to opponents of the Democrat Party. The true political opposition parties in this day and age are the technocratic Great Reset insiders (who have infiltrated all political parties) on one side, and the rest of us, who see the playbook and don’t want to submit to their planned slave system, on the other.

Congress Must Protect Americans’ Fourth Amendment Rights

In response to the ODNI’s report, Ashley Gorski, a senior attorney with the ACLU’s National Security Project stated:⁴

“Today’s report sheds light on the extent of these unconstitutional ‘backdoor searches,’ and underscores the urgency of the problem. It’s past time for Congress to step in to protect Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights.”

According to Bloomberg,⁵ the “authority” used to surveil Americans by the millions was Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). It’s set to expire at the end of 2023, unless Congress renews it. Clearly, they shouldn’t, as it’s being grossly misused.

“Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime,” Lavrentiy Beria, Joseph Stalin’s secret police chief, once said.⁶ Beria oversaw the expansion of Stalin’s gulags for political dissidents, and bragged he could prove criminal conduct by anyone, anywhere. Framing innocent people is nothing new. It’s not even all that difficult, especially if you have access to everything a person has ever said, thought or done.

CIA Sued Over Fourth Amendment Rights Violations

The Central Intelligence Agency is also making headlines, and for the same disturbing reason. As reported by Newsweek,⁷ the CIA illegally surveilled and recorded Julian Assange’s conversations with American attorneys, journalists, doctors, celebrities and at least one U.S. Congressman while holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London to avoid extradition.

The CIA also obtained copies of visitors’ passports, photographs of the IMEI and SIM card numbers in their cell phones (which allows devices to be identified on any network and are essential for surveillance targeting), as well as copies of the private data from their phones and other electronic devices brought into the embassy.

Passports and electronic devices had to be handed over to security guards and could not be brought inside. Unbeknownst to visitors, everything was then meticulously photographed and copied in their absence.

Four Americans who visited Assange are now suing then-CIA director Mike Pompeo in Spanish High Court, seeking damages for violation of their Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure. The agency as a whole is also listed as a defendant, for the purpose of forcing them to expunge all collected records.

Plaintiffs include two New York attorneys on Assange’s legal team, and two American journalists who interviewed him. Lead plaintiff, attorney Margaret Kunstler, told Newsweek:⁸

“As a criminal attorney, I don’t think that there’s anything worse than your opposition listening in on what your plans are, what you intend to do, on your conversations. It’s a terrible thing. It’s gross misconduct. I don’t understand how the CIA … could think that they could do this. It’s so outrageous that it’s beyond my comprehension.”

Attorneys aren’t the only ones bound by confidentiality. Doctors and journalists also rely on confidential relationships with patients and sources, so the arbitrary copying of everything on their private devices is a gross privacy violation against any number of individuals they may have had interactions with.

CIA Crossed Lines That Shouldn’t Be Crossed

The four plaintiffs are also seeking damages against UnderCover Global, a Spanish security firm that provided embassy protection. The lawsuit was launched after whistleblowers from the firm came forward, admitting they illegally spied on Assange’s visitors, copied their passports and electronic devices, and then passed everything on to the CIA.

UnderCover Global CEO David Morales allegedly was being paid “substantial sums of money to share surveillance data with the CIA.” According to Newsweek:⁹

“Legal experts, including a former senior intelligence official, told Newsweek that the allegations in the lawsuit, if proven, show the CIA crossed lines drawn to protect American citizens from surveillance by overzealous intelligence agencies.”

According to Tim Edgar, professor at Brown University and former deputy privacy and civil liberties officer for the ODNI, the copying of visitors’ cell phone data is particularly difficult to defend.

“That seems to me like a very excessive amount of collection,” he told Newsweek. “What’s the expected intelligence value from that? It’s a high bar to justify. If it’s just everyone who visited Assange, then it’s not like you have a specific reason to look at a particular phone.”

During one visit, actress Pamela Anderson wrote down her email and Apple ID passwords to get help with technical security from Assange. A photograph of the slip of paper with her passwords and PIN numbers was given to the CIA.

This hardly seems justifiable from a national security standpoint. It smacks of perversion, really, and one wonders how many CIA agents have sifted through Anderson’s private messages for no other reason than pure titillating entertainment.

Seizure of Privileged Material Makes Fair Trial Impossible

But getting back to more serious matters, the CIA’s blanket data collection “may make it impossible for Assange to get a fair trial,” attorney Richard Roth, another plaintiff in the lawsuit, told Newsweek. Making matters even worse, when Assange was arrested by British police in April 2019, the embassy turned over all of Assange’s legal papers and computers to the U.S. Department of Justice. As noted by Roth:¹⁰

“When a federal prosecutor comes after a lawyer with a search warrant and seizes their devices, there are multiple layers of review and protection for privileged lawyer-client communications. None of that happened here. They just grabbed everything.”

When done in accordance to law, a court will typically appoint a special master, someone who is independent from the prosecuting government, to make sure privileged communications, such as lawyer-client communication, are segregated from the communication handed over to the prosecution.

Alphabet-Soup Agencies and The Great Reset

Since the beginning of the COVID pandemic, we’ve seen ever more egregious overreaches by government. Intelligence agencies have gone so far as to slap a “domestic terrorist” label on anyone who expresses an opinion that counters the narrative directed by the globalist cabal. This is why privacy rights must be protected at all costs.

In August 2021, former assistant secretary for Homeland Security Juliette Kayyem proposed putting all unvaccinated Americans on a no-fly list. Doctors who speak out against the medical tyranny that is COVID standard of care are being stripped of their medical licenses.

Global organizations such as the International Grand Committee on Disinformation (IGCD), which consists of “an international array of legislators, policy advisers, and other experts,” are working together to end free speech worldwide, and every click, comment and online search can and will be used against you.

The digital identity they want to roll out depends on the same kind of intrusive mass surveillance the FBI and CIA have been caught doing, but covering every person on the planet, and without any legal barriers impinging on the kind of information they can gather about you.

In the end, if the technocratic cabal gets their way, you won’t even be able to use a public toilet without a compliance passport giving you the green-light.¹¹ That’s already the case in China, as you can see in the video below.

China
No green QR code ( Covid app ), no public toilet for you pic.twitter.com/7PwwXICNTG

— Songpinganq (@songpinganq) July 25, 2022

Tell Congress to Rein in Out-of-Control Surveillance Powers

Surveillance powers have always been sold to us as something that will protect us. It’s high time to realize we’ve been sold a lie. All the surveillance acts are, in fact, being used against us, and for all we know, that’s what they were intended for all along.

After all, The Great Reset didn’t emerge out of nothing, overnight. It’s a plan that’s been in the works for decades, and the digital surveillance network required for it to function as an “open-air prison” has been built up around us for just as long.

We were fooled into thinking it was for our own good, for our protection, but it’s not. It’s to ensure we won’t have the ability to rebel when the final pieces of the Great Reset plan are put into place.

As suggested by Gorski with the ACLU, we need to urge members of Congress to step in and revoke or severely restrict government surveillance powers, and reaffirm the absolute supremacy of the U.S. Bill of Rights. These are rights that cannot be taken from us, come hell or high water — or deep state billionaires with egos the size of Mount Everest.

The way things look, many government agencies — including the FBI and CIA — also need to be dismantled, and only put back together if absolutely necessary, and if so, in new, more limited forms with greater public oversight and more checks and balances.

Make no mistake, this is the highest-stakes game in human history. We’re facing nothing short of the enslavement of all of humankind, and our intelligence agencies are proving — through their questionable, biased and often lawless actions — which side they’re really on.

• ¹ Fox News August 8, 2022
• ² Biz Pac Review August 16, 2022
• ^3, 4, 5 Bloomberg April 29, 2022
• ⁶ Oxford Eagle May 9, 2018
• ^{7, 8, 9, 10} Newsweek August 15, 2022
• ¹¹ Sociable November 23, 2020