The White House Strategy to Profit from AI Deregulation & the Consequences for Civil Liberties & Human Rights
Immigrants are the canary in the coal mine, but Americans won't understand that all of our civil liberties are under attack until it's too late.
The May/June 2025 issue of Mother Jones focuses on Trump's surveillance state and the use of technology. The cover story is an in-depth exposé revealing that Clearview AI's controversial facial recognition technology, has always been intended to promote a far right ideological agenda. Unsurprisingly, the mass surveillance technology is currently being used to help carry out Trump's xenophobic immigration policy. However, as Trump continues to slash and burn regulations and legal protections, many Americans are oblivious their own rights are now being placed at risk in the name of removing bureaucratic hurdles impeding Trump's mission.
The technology was introduced during Trump's first administration, after securing funding from right-wing billionaire Peter Theil. While Theil has played a more prominent role during Trump's second run as president, many Americans are unaware he was also active in the shadows during the earliest days of Trump's first term.
In fact, Theil actually pitched deregulating the FDA to Trump, long before Trump decided to partner with RFK Jr on FDA deregulation. Theil also helped select several of Trump's cabinet members, including Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) member, Michael Kratsios.
Kratsios may best be remembered from Trump's first term as his "De-facto science advisor with no science experience." De-facto because during his first term, Trump went longer than any president in modern history without picking an official science advisor. A 2018 article explains Kratsios early role during Trump's first Administration.
As the top-ranking official in the Office of Science and Technology Policy, Kratsios is now the de facto top science adviser in the White House. Kratsios is a 31-year-old with a political science degree and a focus on Hellenic (a.k.a. Greek) studies from Princeton who cut his professional teeth in Silicon Valley, according to Waldman. These are not exactly the qualifications you’d want for the person the president is supposed to turn to for advice on dealing with a disease outbreak, or an environmental disaster (though Archimedes’ principle does come in handy in explaining sea level rise).
Kratsios was former chief of staff to Peter Thiel before he was first brought to the White House in March of 2017 to advise the president on tech issues, and was eventually made Chief Technology Officer (CTO) during Trump's first administration.
Although he was the butt of a few jokes by the press during his time as defacto science advisor, he remained relatively quiet throughout Trump's presidency. However, as I've pointed out in a previous post, Kratsios was in the science leadership role during a time when Trump and fellow Republicans have accused the NIH of taking advantage of his empty cabinet position to sneak in dangerous science policy.
Pimento Mori
Further, Kratsios served as CTO under Trump, while some very questionable policy decisions regarding technology were made. However, neither the previous jokes regarding his lack of science experience nor his role in miserably failed COVID related tech policies (see example at the end of this post), were ever mentioned by the press when Trump picked Kratsios to serve as his official science advisor for his second term. In fact, the rare press coverage Kratsios' nomination received, frustratingly indicated that if anything, he was actually controversial for being so uncontroversial.
Despite efforts by some Americans to warn the entire Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, why they should not approve Kratsios' fitness, he sailed through both fitness hearings and the Senate confirmation with little resistance from Democrats. (Credit to Lisa Blunt Rochester, Andy Kim, Ed Markey, and Brian Schatz for at least trying to do their job and act as a safeguard.)
After Clearview AI secured funding from Theil during Trump's first term, they began offering free trials to hundreds of law enforcement clients around the country. The free trials resulted in many departments then purchasing licenses to access Clearview's faceprint database, which several local and state law enforcement agencies currently rely on to conduct routine police work.
Since 2020, the company has been accused of mass surveillance practices due to the use of Clearview services by both private corporations and law enforcement. Further, previous government investigations have revealed that federal agencies' use of the technology, against activists and protestors, failed to comply with privacy requirements.
A 2019 interview with Kratsios, reveals his dismissal of public concerns regarding facial recognition technology
Donahoe:
“Some private sector companies have called for government regulation of facial recognition, and there already are some instances of local governments regulating it. Do you expect federal regulation of facial recognition anytime soon? If not, what ought the parameters be?”
Kratsios:
“A patchwork of regulation of technology is not beneficial for the country. We want to avoid that. Facial recognition has important roles—for example, finding lost or displaced children. There are use cases, but they need to be underpinned by values.”
When asked by a member of the audience about bias in AI based on data from an earlier presentation:
“Frequently the example of finding missing children is given as the example of why we should not restrict use of facial recognition. But we saw Joy Buolamwini’s presentation on bias in data. I would like to hear your thoughts about how government thinks we should use facial recognition, knowing about this bias.”
Kratsios:
“Fairness, accountability, and robustness are things we want to bake into any technology—not just facial recognition—as we build rules governing use cases.”
Kratsios answer side stepped the question, but fairness and accountability never seemed to be essential ingredients for the receipe Clearview was using when they began "baking" their technology.
Using billions of images scraped from the internet and social media without permission, Clearview created a large biometric database, then used AI to analyze images and create a "faceprint" for every individual in the database.
Clearview's users can run a "probe photo" against it's database to gather private information about an individual without a warrant. If the photo matches any in the existing database, the user is provided with links to the websites where the database photos originated, which often included information regarding religious and political beliefs, sexuality, and names of others with connections to that individual, such as friends and family.
When most Americans hear Trump and data they typically think of DOGE creator and Theil's longtime friend?/rival, Elon Musk. Although Musk seems to have stepped back from his role in the White House, just as Kratsios was getting settled back in, from Kratsios own words, the Trump administration's focus on data began long before Elon gave Nazi salutes at Trump's inauguration.
In a June 2018 article, ominously subtitled, The president's most senior technology advisor claims the White House is quietly pursuing an aggressive AI plan, Kratsios explains
Speaking at EmTech Next, a conference held at MIT, Kratsios, who is deputy assistant to the president and deputy US chief technology officer, said the government is looking for ways to open up federal data to AI researchers. “Anything that we can do to unlock government data, we’re committed to,” Kratsios told MIT Technology Review. “We’d love to hear from any academic that has any insights.”
Data has been a key factor behind recent advances in artificial intelligence. For example, better voice recognition and image processing have been contingent on the availability of huge quantities of training data. The government has access to large amounts of data, and it’s possible that it could be used to train innovative algorithms to do new things. “Anything we can do to figure that out, we will work very hard on,” Kratsios added.
Further, the same 2018 article indicates there were always plans to use AI as part of Trump's immigration policy.
Kratsios said the government would pursue an immigration policy that would let AI talent in, and he signaled that the White House feels the US has a formidable lead over other countries. “It’s not surprising that countries are embracing an industry the US has been leading on for years,” he said.
Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE), is one of the largest U.S. customers of Clearview, and records show that ICE commonly used the technology under the Biden administration, with very little knowledge or oversight by officials who in charge of monitoring the use of the technology.
Since taking office for his current term, Trump has fired many Inspectors General who normally review technology use by Federal agencies in order to guard against abuses of civil rights and liberty. As Trump continues to reduce oversight and roll back protections, the potential for unethical use of this technology against all Americans will only increase.
Ongoing Concerns Regarding Civil Liberties under Trump Administration
This past March, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) began dismantling three civil rights offices following claims these offices were impeding immigration enforcement efforts:
The Office of the Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman is another independent office in the department responsible for helping people or businesses resolve issues with the agency that oversees immigration benefits.
The Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman is an independent office within Homeland Security — not connected to either Immigration and Customs Enforcement or Customs and Border Protection. Its job it is to make sure immigration detention facilities are safe and humane.
The Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (OCRC) was created by the Homeland Security Act of 2002, with the mission of protecting civil liberties in the department created in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. It investigates hundreds of complaints a year about the agency’s mission and recommends changes as necessary.
However, only two of those offices (Office of the Citizenship and Immigration Services and Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman) actually focus specifically on immigration.
A DHS spokesperson explained to the Associated Press (AP) that the restructuring of these offices was necessary due to interference regarding immigration policy, but assured the AP that Homeland Security was "committed to civil rights protections.” However, an employee of OCRC, who also spoke to the AP, but asked not to be identified due to fear of retaliation, provided some context as to why that statement would see to contradict the actions of DHS.
OCRC exists to investigate Homeland Security violations of civil rights and liberties for all Americans, including complaints and concerns regarding Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)
Top Democrat in the House Committee on Homeland Security, Bennie G. Thompson expressed concerns, “With Trump’s mass firing of the entire DHS Civil Rights and Civil Liberties workforce, he is ensuring in advance that there will be no transparency or oversight of his extreme agenda."
Further, the move to dismantle these offices occured after DHS started using unreliable polygraph lie detector tests against their own employees in February to determine if employees were leaking information to the press. Since then, other agencies including the DOD and FBI have also started using polygraphs to detect internal leaks.)
The same DHS spokesperson who reassured the AP of their commitment to protecting human rights in March, also released a reassuring statement in April regarding the use of polygraphs against federal employees.
"The Department of Homeland Security is a national security agency. We can, should, and will polygraph personnel."
Among several pieces of inside information that have been leaked by Federal employees, perhaps one of the most important and also most concerning, was a DOJ memo released by Pam Bondi, which shows the Trump administration gave ICE permission, as of March 14, to break into homes of suspected gang members without a warrant while searching for members of the Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua.
Constitutional Interpretation and Executive Authority
As one lawyer pointed out to USA Today in the article that first reported the leaked the memo:
“The home under constitutional law is the most sacred place where you have a right to privacy,” Sherman said. “By this standard, spurious allegations of gang affiliation means the government can knock down your door.
This point is especially important to remember, when considering the Trump Administration's argument for a constitutional interpretation which places executive authority above all other authority. Fears of a constitutional crisis brought about by the administration's rapid fire policy changes, and removal or reduction of multiple offices and positions which exist to create oversight and accountability for the government, make it imperative for Americans to understand the radical legal arguments that might be behind this interpretation.
The argument for this interpretation aligns very closely with an interpretation first proposed by a right wing Harvard Constitutional law professor, Adrian Vermeule, in 2020. While Vermeule has no official role in Trump's administration, his legal theories appear to heavily influence the arguments made by Trump's legal defense team.
Vermeule's theory of Common-good Constitutionalism argues that the constitution should be used to enforce law and order to protect the greatest number of Americans. Although some might argue the constitution has somewhat of an emphasis regarding "We the People," Vermeule argues that a president is chosen by the American people. Therefore, his duty as president, is to do what he believes necessary to protect them, which makes judicial interference with Executive Orders, unconstitutional and even a potential threat to American safety.
Vermeule's own argument closely overlaps with the work of German legal scholar and political theorist, Carl Schmitt. Schmitt believed that the threat of political influence by enemies (either at home or abroad) created a dangerous emergency, which warrants use of executive action beyond the boundaries of established law, for the safety and protection of the German people. The influence of Schmitt on Vermeule's work, should come as no surprise, given that Vermeule has long held a fascination and admiration with Schmitt's legal theories. This sentiment is frequently expressed throughout Vermeule's academic work, including a chapter written for the 2017 Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt, titled Demystifying Schmitt.
Schmitt provided the bulk of theoretical framework for the Third Reich, and is often described as the legal architect of the Nazi agenda. His arguments on legal theory support concepts such as the leader principle, (Führerprinzip) and enabled the Nazis to carry out acts of genocide without actually violating German law. This principle required party loyalty be pledged to the führer, and allowed Hitler's will to be placed above all written law.
While JD Vance has accused members from the opposing party of reading Schmitt's work, and using the same legal theories to hijack power, Vance himself has promoted arguments made by Adrian Vermeule in favor of unchecked executive authority via social media.
At the risk of being dismissed as an alarmist, I want to clarify that I am not accusing every academic and historian who analyzes Schmitt's work of supporting the Nazi agenda. However, in the context of 2025, I do point out the connection to Vermeule's work, and it's influence on the Trump administration, as a warning to others, that I'm sure most of those same academics and historians are already aware of.
I point it out because everyday Americans need to be made aware of the reality behind what people like JD Vance, Elon Musk, and multiple members of the Trump administration are actually arguing for, when they claim judges do not have authority over Trump.
Some Americans might hear Vance say that it's unconstitutional for a judge to interfere with a president's orders, and either agree with that sentiment, or just take his word for it as Vice President. The part that Vance and others always seem to leave out when they make the argument to the American public, is that this interpretation of the constitution, requires all other laws to be secondary to the President's authority. That includes your liberty as an American citizen.
Your own civil liberties and constitutional protections become a secondary concern when you accept that the constitution allows for unchecked executive authority. If the president orders it is necessary to allow your home to be broken into and searched to maximize public safety, this argument says dismissal of individual liberty is simply a necessary cost of keeping all of America as safe as possible.
While some Americans are warning that the Trump administration's acts to dismantle offices such as OCRL and dismissal of civil rights laws and protection, advance the policies, outlined in Project 2025, others dismiss these concerns and seem to believe their own rights would remain safe even if that were true, because the constitution guarantees protections that existed long before the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964.
It would be very difficult to find an American that believes they should not have the right to privacy and safety within their own home. Further, it would be almost impossible to convince most Americans that the constitution does not allow them to defend their home from invasion. However, that is exactly what a constitutional argument for unchecked executive power would allow.
Vermeule himself has publicly dismissed concerns of other legal experts in the U.S. over Trump's executive overreach. In March, 91 members of the Harvard Law faculty, released a letter to Harvard Law students, warning that the rule of law was being severely tested. Vermeule pushed back on these claims and released an opposing letter in response to his colleague's warning.
Vermeule's response, once again stood in contrast to the majority of experts, but closely echoed arguments made by the Trump administration.
The impression of a constitutional crisis is misleading. That impression was initially created by overreaching district judges selected by plaintiffs, who obtained temporary victories and leveraged those victories in the media. If there is a crisis, it does not arise from the actions of the administration but instead from a slew of highly aggressive judicial decisions that have transgressed traditional legal limits on the relationship between the judiciary and the executive branch — limits the courts respected during the Biden administration. — Adrian Vermeule, professor, Harvard Law School
One week ago, Trump was asked during an interview, if he believes he is required to uphold the constitution's guarantee of due process for everyone in the United States, and responded "I don't know, I'm not a lawyer."
By Vermeule's own definition, his legal theory of Constitutional Goodness, argues the central aim of the constitutional order is to promote good rule, not to ‘protect liberty’ as an end in itself.
While many Americans continue to believe that by virtue of being the right kind of American, their own liberty will always be protected regardless of what happens to others, they may want to think about why? Is it simply because they believe the constitution says so? If so, why do they believe the Constitution exists? Does it exist to protect their liberty, or does it exist to enforce the orders of a leader or king? I know why I believe it exists, but I'm also not Trump's lawyer or writing the legal theory that may be being used to support their arguments.
AI, Deregulation, and the Threat to Human Rights
In February of 2024, Peter Theil appeared as the keynote speaker for the first Conservative and Republican Conference, sponsored by the Harvard Salient, a student publication focusing on conservative interests. During his talk before a group of Harvard University students, Theil criticized academia and discussed the "diversity myth" before being joined on stage for a followup Q&A session with none other than Adrian Vermeule. Who could have known that within a year of that conference, following the surprise November 2024 re-election of Donald Trump, both men would be influencing White House policy related to their respective fields of technology and law. Small world.
In December 2024, Ton-That, the CEO of Clearview AI, announced he was resigning but would remain on board at Clearview as President.
While Clearview's early free trials had secured smaller law enforcement agencies, Forbes reported that Clearview remained unprofitable as of February of 2025, following a series of lawsuits and previous struggles to win large federal contracts. In March 2025, Ton-That announced he would be resigning as president, and in early April, shareholders voted to remove Ton-That from the board completely. Ton-That said the removal was unexpected. It's difficult not to notice parallels between the unexpected ousting of Ton-That from his own company, and the surprise ousting of Elon Musk from PayPal several decades earlier, following a coup led by Theil.
Given Theil's investment in Clearview and his shadowy role in the Trump White House starting during the previous administration, Trump's second term as president would seem to provide plenty of opportunities to finally grab and expand the federal contracts Clearview failed to previously secure.
While ICE was already in a position to use Clearview's technology to pursue Trump's mission on immigration, Americans should understand that Immigrants were never the only ones at risk. The FBI under Kash Patel appears to be another federal agency using Clearview, and the number of users will likely continue to grow as transparency decreases and pressure to prove loyalty to Trump's mission continues to increase.
As the administration continues to dismantle and destroy government departments and agencies that provide services which benefit the lives of most Americans in one way or another, the chances that dissent in America will continue to grow, are very high. However, so are the chances that the number of Americans who will be targeted using this technology in order to crush dissent.
Clearview's technology currently allows for the identification of nearly every person attending a protest using a single photo, as long as faces are visible.
At several protests in my own state over the last month, individuals have anecdotally reported law enforcement officers driving by, stopping briefly to snap a picture and driving away. There have also been accounts of some individuals who appear to be fellow protesters, showing up to a protest, snapping a picture of the group, and then leaving.
These examples may coincidental, but it is best to be on the lookout for this behavior, avoid photographing groups and posting photos online, and if possible, conceal your identity while protesting. Some private companies and citizens also have access to Clearview's technology, which could relate to the recent use of masks and full facial coverings used by ICE agents to conceal their own identity when detaining individuals.
There are currently no federal laws or protections regulating the use of this technology, and with the current administration in charge, the chances of any being created in the near future are virtually non existent.
The former CEO of Clearview, Ton-That embraced far right, neo-reactionary beliefs, and was at one point also close with Peter Theil and JD Vance's shared intellectual muse, Curtis Yarvin. Yarvin's own plans to dismantle democracy, which he has written about online for several years, includes what he refers to as a butterfly revolution, which mimics the moves made against the Federal Government by Trump and Musk.
Ton-That previously brainstormed online with others in the neo-reactionary movement about uses for facial recognition technology, and recruited several followers of Yarvin's philosophy to help grow Clearview. Unsurprisingly, the members ranged from white nationalists, to scam artists, and one individual who has publicly advocated for the legalization of child pornography. The ideas generated during this time from the members of the neoreactionary movement as well as based on feedback from clients in law enforcement and real estate, ranged from seemingly innocuous to blatantly despicable profiling reminiscent of phrenology combined with modern AI tech.
In 2024 a Commission on Civil Rights discussed the dangers of facial recognition:
While immigrants were most at risk, privacy advocates told the commission, they were just the initial target. “[They] are canaries in the coal mines on civil liberties because they are positioned as test cases for policies that roll back all of our shared liberties."
With protections for civil rights and liberties continuing to slip away while oversight and transparency continue to disappear almost daily, the use and abuse of this technology to target, profile, and crush dissent will only be growing. Whether it's due to fear, ignorance, or potentially even corruption, elected officials are failing to warn America of the severity of the danger we currently face from an internal threat.
As I mentioned in the first section of this post, it is difficult to comprehend how Peter Theil's protege, Michael Kratsios received Senate confirmation with almost no resistance from Democrats who were almost certainly aware of controversy surrounding deregulated facial recognition technology.
In a 2019 interview, Kratsios is directly asked about regulation of facial recognition technology, and dismisses the concern. Frankly, it's pretty appalling that the majority of Senators on a committee for a science advisor's fitness, apparently just accepted whatever narrative was shaped and presented to them by press coverage during hearings, rather than bothering to do any research into prior coverage of Kratsios career between 2017-2020.
Since his confirmation, Kratsios has wasted no time promoting U.S. AI policy, and Trump has asked Kratsios to 'Blaze a trail' for science and tech supremacy as he leads the U.S. in an AI race against China.
Last week, Kratsios spoke at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Los Angeles about the U.S. strategy to promote and protect science and technology. While not surprising given his previous comments over half a decade ago, and despite a lack of any existing current federal laws regulating AI, Kratsios' "promote" strategy emphasizes the necessity of deregulation.
It's both frightening and difficult to imagine how AI technology under this administration could possibly become more deregulated, especially alongside administration's repeated attempts to roll back civil rights protections. However, Kratsios insists that removing regulations acting as “barriers to innovation” will help foster progress in U.S. technology. Kratsios further insists that widespread adoption of U.S. tech solutions will improve domestic efficiency and set an example internationally.
"We as a country need to be having our great industry at companies, academic institutions and everyday Americans using this technology,” he said. “But also, even more importantly, we need to have the rest of the world running on an AI stack that is ours, that’s American.” Deploying these solutions within the federal government is also a critical step to promoting U.S. leadership in emerging tech and science realms. Kratsios said that accelerating adoption at a public- and private-sector level, potentially facilitated with the help of the deregulation policies, will help further drive U.S. innovation. “Those breakthroughs are only really valuable if we actually adopt them and allow the American people to fully realize the benefits of those technologies,” Kratsios said. “But if no one is using it, if the Department of Defense isn't actually adopting and using it in its stack, if all of our great financial institutions aren't attempting to leverage those models to drive better services for their customers, it really doesn't matter.”
In addition to his ever present focus on competition with China's AI, Kratsios once again seemed to pull out a phrase he (or somebody he works for) has been using since 2019 when he said the White House is contemplating the idea of creating an “ecosystem of trust” to entice others to adopt new U.S. technologies.
In 2019, Kratsios used the same phrase and expressed ideas that in retrospect should have warned us where we were headed all along. If Biden hadn't gotten in the way and slowed progress, maybe it's where we would already be. From the interview given by Kratsios in 2019:
Donahoe:
“You talk a lot about unique U.S. ecosystem. In which aspect of AI is the U.S. dominant, and where is China challenging us in dominance?
Kratsios:
“They are challenging us on machine vision. They have more data to work with, given that they have surveillance data.”
Donahoe:
“To what extent would you say the quantity of data collected and available will be a determining factor in AI dominance?”
Kratsios:
“It makes a big difference in the short term. But we do research on how we get over these data humps. There is a future where you don’t need as much data, a lot of federal grants are going to [research in] how you can train models using less data.”
Full dystopian nightmare coming to fruition aside, that ecosystem of dominance from 2019, morphing into an ecosystem of trust in 2025 seems delusional. I'm not sure if Kratsios is just trying to make a sales pitch to convince others or if he actually believes that, but the chances of any other country actually purchasing "adopting" U.S. AI tech is about as likely as the administration suddenly deciding to include human rights protections and regulations in their product.
Our former allies in the EU are currently aiming to become the global leader for more ethical and trustworthy AI via improved regulatory laws, while the U.S. is taking the polar opposite approach, and emphasizing the need for deregulation in their attempt to pick up where they left off in 2020 and dominate the global AI race.
Under Biden, the U.S. previously joined the U.K. and E.U., in September of 2024, signing the first “legally binding” treaty on AI, to ensure use of AI aligns with “human rights, democracy and the rule of law,” However, (and again, unsurprisingly) the Trump administration began distancing the U.S. from a unified stance on AI regulations, within the first month Trump took office in 2025.
At a global summit in Paris, this past February, the U.S. and U.K. refused to join dozens of other countries including France, China and India, agreeing to an "open", "inclusive" and "ethical" approach to AI development.
While the U.K. government claimed it did not sign due to concerns over national security and global governance, Vice President J.D. Vance indicated the U.S. refusal was simply due to concerns over strict regulations, stating it could "kill a transformative industry just as it's taking off". Vance vowed that the U.S. would not squander an opportunity to grow AI policies over safety concerns
As the U.S. continues to deregulate our AI technology in isolation and recklessly burn piles of money trying to get it done as fast as possible, other countries (countries who have not fired all of their scientists and researchers), are working together to create carefully crafted, human focused, ethical alternative, that will most likely be open source. Why would anyone be coming to us to buy our deregulated AI slop?
If I had to make a wild guess, open source AI means the death knell for the kind of global domination that Theil Kratsios may have dreamed of in 2019 when he talked about retaining U.S. values and coming together with others Western Democracies to ensure those values are retained.
Donahoe:
“A lot of conversation yesterday was about the tension between innovation and values, and how do you hold those things together and lead in both realms.”
Kratsios:
“We recognized that the U.S. hadn’t signed on to principles around developing AI. In May, we signed [the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development Principles on Artificial Intelligence], coming together with other Western democracies to say that these are values that we hold dear.
[Meanwhile,] we have adversaries around the world using AI to surveil people, to suppress human rights. That is why American leadership is so critical: We want to come out with the next great product. And we want our values to underpin the use cases.”
A member of the audience pushed further:
“Maintaining U.S. leadership in AI might have costs in terms of individuals and society. What costs should individuals and society bear to maintain leadership?”
Kratsios:
“I don’t view the world that way. Our companies big and small do not hesitate to talk about the values that underpin their technology. [That is] markedly different from the way our adversaries think. The alternatives are so dire [that we] need to push efforts to bake the values that we hold dear into this technology.”
Hypothetically, what if when Trump lost re-election to Biden in 2020, maybe a shadowy billionaire of silicon valley that funded his original campaign also lost his seat at the table for Global AI development? Would that billionaire who is also perhaps well known for using underhanded tactics against his rivals, theoretically do whatever necessary to regain his seat at the table in order to pick up where he left off? Including maybe partnering with another group of wealthy conservative individuals who had long been scheming their way back to their own lost seat in order to implement their own plans?
If all that were to happen, would there be a chance of those two powers combining their ideas into one, in order to create an AI dependent surveillance state free from regulations to protect the rights that cost them their power in the first place? That would be too crazy, right?
Regardless, given everything we now know about the unethical uses of Clearview AI during Kratsios' previous leadership and dismissal of regulations when promoting the technology, the Trump administration's repeated attempts to shift the U.S. away from consensus with the E.U.'s focus on the necessity of regulations, and further deregulate technology, should only increase previous concerns regarding unethical AI technology, privacy, and human rights.
Further, while Trump has asked Kratsios to utilize AI technology to blaze a trail for American dominance in 2025, it may also be worth noting that just over 5 years ago, in March of 2020, Kratsios was also tasked by Trump to use cutting edge technology to tackle COVID misinformation and track early cases of the virus in the U.S. in order to keep it from spreading.
Maybe things won't go quite so off the rails this time, but based on every history lesson ranging from 1930s Germany to 2020 in the United States, I really doubt it.
As Kratsios said in 2019, “A patchwork of regulation of technology is not beneficial for the country.”
Are regulations not beneficial for the country, or are they just not beneficial for business? Does the current executive branch believe those are two different questions?
Vermeule's Common Good Constitutionalism argues that the role of government is to steer society toward the common good, and using a strong rule to attain what is best for the greatest number of people is sometimes necessary. This is why placing executive authority above individual liberty is a necessary part of keeping America safe. Kratsios (acting as Theil's spokesperson) seems to be arguing his own authority as a “technologist,” enables him to know what is best for the country. This is why Technocrats believe it is their role, as elite technologists, to steer the commoners of society to greatness by exerting strong state control over society.
Whether the message is coming from Robespierre's Committee of Public Safety during the French Revolution, associates of the Heritage Foundation using Vermeule's legal theories in the courtroom, or associates of Theil spreading Yarvin's neo-reactionary theories at tech conferences, the core message the same. The elite authority know what's best for We the People. At what point will Americans decide that civil liberties and human rights are not an acceptable cost of doing business with the elites?
Jasmine Venet
Olivia Rinaldi White House reporter
