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Posted by nmeagent 17 hours ago

Feds Target AI Critics as "Foreign Agents"(www.kenklippenstein.com)
352 points | 374 commentspage 5
iAMkenough 16 hours ago||
Just another example of the Executive Branch stripping First Amendment rights from Americans.

It will go to court, and taxpayers will pay for endless appeals by the Executive Branch.

Or like in Egbert v Boule (2022), the SCOTUS will decide that even if your constitutional rights are violated, you’re not owed any damages unless Congress establishes a policy for what to do when your constitutional rights are violated by the federal government.

simianwords 12 hours ago||
There are plenty of stupid people who believe things like AI uses a lot of water even in USA. There's absolutely no need of cee cee pee to fund all this. Any one who believes foreign agents had any impact on the anti AI sentiment in USA has no theory of mind of these people
someonebaggy 11 hours ago|
How do you know foreign agents didn't spread the water narrative?
jdw64 13 hours ago||
Hello, "foreign agents" of Hacker News. What country are you from?
usernametaken29 15 hours ago||
> but somehow the Trump administration has convinced itself the public concern was manufactured in China.

Wait a minute here. Critical journalism could dissect how opinions are formed. It’s far from speculative that the White House opinion about AI opposition is informed by AI companies. They’ve been warning about China for a long time. So there’s really no somehow. Vested interests with massive amounts of money are lobbying and succeeding to convince the government that any opposition to AI is outside influence. It’s not somehow, it’s deliberate. Do better.

Kim_Bruning 14 hours ago||
Oh, this is Putin's playbook, right?

Declare everyone who opposes you to be "Foreign agents".

In Putin's case it worked; he managed to drive pretty much all independent journalists out of Russia.

walrus01 14 hours ago|
Standard Belarus/Lukashenko playbook as well, which at this point might as well be Russia itself.
chrisjj 8 hours ago||
> Two days prior, President Trump began a spate of social posts declaring that opposition to AI is a traitorous, treasonous conspiracy theory tracing back to China.

This is unsupported by the reported Trump statements.

excalibur 13 hours ago||
> “There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China,” Trump posted on September 14. “Conspiracy Theorists, Treasonists, Traitors, and Leakers, BEWARE!”

> “The people that say AI is going to destroy the World, and that Data Centers are bad for your neighborhood,” Trump also posted, “are Revolutionaries, but Revolutionaries for a Bad and Evil Cause.”

Pot calling the kettle black, as always.

someonebaggy 10 hours ago|
"every accusation is a confession"
ltbarcly3 12 hours ago||
There seems to be a coordinated and funded effort to spread FUD about AI and datacenters across multiple countries, including the US, Canada, and the Philippines. The most obvious source of funding would be China for a lot of reasons. Taking payments from a foreign government to attempt to influence Americans is against federal law.

This isn't necessarily some weird corrupt conspiracy.

fhdhcndndn 11 hours ago||
> Taking payments from a foreign government to attempt to influence Americans is against federal law.

Unless that foreign government is Israel. Then it's a crime to refuse their payments.

naishoya 11 hours ago||
says a 6 day old account which is potentially in violation of the US statutes to post falsehood.
someonebaggy 10 hours ago|||
He's right though.
rshaskrot 8 hours ago|||
He’s right that it’s legal to take payments from Israel to influence Americans?

Or is he right that it’s a crime to refuse such payments?

Or is he right to make stuff up about Israel and use it to create a diversion when the topic was something negative about China?

someonebaggy 4 hours ago|||
It is literally a crime to refuse payments from Israel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-BDS_laws
takerollo 2 hours ago||
You are either being disingenuous or have the reading comprehension of a very cheap language model.

Anti-BDS laws do not make it a crime to refuse payments from the Israeli government to influence Americans.

someonebaggy 2 hours ago||
says a 50 minute old throwaway account with one comment
fhdhcndndn 8 hours ago|||
Shalom!
ltbarcly3 20 minutes ago||
This is overtly antisemetic, from a 6 day old account with a nonsense username.

Why don't you use a non throwaway account and stand by your behavior?

Why is this tolerated on HN??

fhdhcndndn 6 minutes ago||
How else am I supposed to greet my israeli friends on the internet?
ltbarcly3 10 hours ago|||
Claiming that jews are somehow above the law or "the system" acts always in their favor because they somehow influence it is a classic antisemitic trope. You are being antisemitic, please stop.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben-Ami_Kadish

fhdhcndndn 10 hours ago|||
So you're telling me that the existence of US anti-boycott laws aimed at israel is actually antisemitic?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-BDS_laws#Anti-BDS_laws_in...

Or just acknowledging that they exist?

ltbarcly3 12 minutes ago||
None of those laws make it 'illegal' to boycott Israel, so you are just full of crap.

They require government contractors to not participate in certain boycotts, which is completely in line with long standing US policy. Doing otherwise would be insane, the government would be funding both it's own stated objectives and the opposite.

When the shoe is on the other foot you support this behavior. I don't see you crying over half the countries in the middle east forcing every company they work with to boycott Israel.

fhdhcndndn 30 seconds ago||
They're literally called anti-boycott laws in their official title? My brain is not capable of such advanced level mental gymnastics.
someonebaggy 8 hours ago|||
You are the only person who said Jew. Methinks the lady doth protest too much.
ltbarcly3 3 hours ago||
It's interesting that confronting antisemitism gets me misgendered.
someonebaggy 3 hours ago||
By "confronting antisemitism" you mean "making everything about Jews, then calling it antisemitic"? That's antisemantic.
ltbarcly3 18 minutes ago||
You clearly didn't read the thread at all. I was saying China is likely funding campaigns to discourage AI investment outside of china, and it is illegal to take such money. Then people came out of the woodwork to try to change the subject to Israel (you know, the Jewish state?)

I only replied that bringing up Israel out of nowhere in reply to a discussion about the US government and China is clearly an attempt to change the subject, and making false claims about Jews, especially when they fit the usual Elders of Zion pattern of "Jews control the world so they have different rules" is antisemetic, which it is.

ltbarcly3 10 hours ago|||
And their only other comment is calling for AI to be 'tightly controlled' by regulation.
fhdhcndndn 10 hours ago||
Clearly china made me commit such a heinous thoughtcrime.

Edit: and by the way, that's a total misrepresentation of what I wrote. AI companies are attempting regulatory capture to protect their business, which should be opposed by all means possible.

naishoya 3 hours ago||
What you wrote had no content regarding AI, regulatory capture as protection of business, nor opposition to such action as a proposed course of action.

What you wrote was: "Unless that foreign government is Israel. Then it's a crime to refuse their payments." which is false on the face of it, anti BDS laws have still not been proven to be constitutional where they have been passed or proposed in a few states, and the wiki entry shows a significant lack of 'name the US Civil or Criminal Code' in any of the references; the only source of "38 states have passed" type wording is an article in an unsourced foreign publication.

So either you are not comprehending the state of anti-BDS legislation, or do comprehend it and are intentionally being misleading. There may be some regulations which prohibit the US gov't from accepting contracts or bids from organizations which are boycotting Israeli business but that is not the same as being 'illegal to boycott' by any stretch of an overactive imagination.

Also, this entire line of conversation has ZERO BEARING on the original topic which is about a particularly egregious misbehavior on the part of the US gov't. which has echoes of 1930's Germany's use of "National Security" to restrict freedom of the press and used that same premise in increments to restrict all manner of personal freedoms to greater and greater extremes without judicial oversight. The application of this approach is broader than the scope of AI conversation as this same approach has been championed by Trump staffer with a history of writing in support of those 1930's actions. This should be concerning to anyone with a mind to prevent repetitions of nefarious and malicious historical pretexts leading to loss of freedom.

There's nothing gained by adding unrelated and incorrect statements to the thread, and my prior comment stands. Posts from a less than 1 week old account with nothing substantive, useful or true in this conversation which is behavior consistent with long-standing troll farm noise here on HN. If you're not a troll account, then stop acting exactly like one. Otherwise, shut up and go away.

ltbarcly3 14 minutes ago||
He's referring to my comment about his other comment (his account only had 2 at the time!) about AI.

He is misinformed and intentionally trying to change the subject away from China though, and it worked.

rshaskrot 8 hours ago||
There also seems to be a coordinated effort to bring up Israel whenever China is being discussed negatively.
tptacek 15 hours ago|
Klippenstein. He's counting on you not looking up the elements of a FARA violation charge. You can't accidentally violate FARA simply by opposing AI; you have to literally be an agent of (that is, under the direction of) China, and a felony violation has to be willful.

The DOJ announcement is surely in supremely bad faith, as is everything else in Trump's DOJ. But this kind of breathless response is exactly what they're hoping for by publishing this stuff.

nixon_why69 14 hours ago|
You're right that there is supposed to be a legal bar for being "directed by" a foreign government, but would you want to gamble on the jury pool setting the bar that high?

Look at the hacker news comment section any time China comes up, and then consider that the average American is considerably less sophisticated.

tptacek 14 hours ago||
Yeah, if I'd had no knowing contact with elements of the government of China, I'd take that bet every day of the week and twice on Sundays. I don't even think it'd get to a jury.
nmeagent 9 hours ago|||
You can beat the rap, but you can't beat the ride, and as outright fascism flourishes, you might not even manage the former. When you spend years in an ICE gulag because your speech crosses some nebulous line, it will matter very little what legal rights you think you have.
nixon_why69 14 hours ago|||
Ok, that covers you, but there are 100M party members, any Chinese-descended or Chinese-married person in the US probably has a connection to a party member.

"Have you, now or in the past, had contact with a member of Chinese Communist Party?" sounds really scary compared to "Is your uncle a mid-tier director at Huawei?" even though they're describing the same fact.

tptacek 13 hours ago||
If you want to formulate a bank-shot argument about how this preys on people of Chinese ancestry, I'm fine with that. All I'm here to say is that you can't plausibly be charged with a FARA violation simply for arguing or protesting for a policy position that China happens to want you to take; the DOJ bears the burden of proving that you knew you were coordinating with China, directly, and, if it's a felony, willfully (that, is, voluntarily, deliberately, with a purpose to break the law).

Read Klippenstein's piece again. Does he want you to know this?

nixon_why69 13 hours ago||
You can't plausibly be arrested by ICE if you're in the US legally, in theory, but look where we are.

I'm afraid that a paranoid, worst-case, bad faith assumption isn't something we can handwave away anymore.

dtornabene 39 minutes ago||
amazing how his responses stopped immediately after posting this very obvious and overwhelming rebuttal.
tptacek 9 minutes ago||
Is that really how you think conversations work?

The fact is that I don't have a stake in analyses about whether the administration is operating in good faith. I'm an opponent of the administration. I'm already sold on that point.

My problem is with the Ken Klippensteins who are engagement farming with posts that misinform people about how the law works.

If you're already winding up with a reply about how the law doesn't matter anymore, ask yourself "why are we talking about this then?" If it doesn't matter, they don't need to announce anything, and their announcement has no content.

As it stands: the announcement really doesn't have any content anyways; they generate this stuff specifically to rile people like you up, and Klippenstein feeds off that energy like a remora.

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