Comment by trothamel
9 hours ago
It's putting AI processing out of the reach of hostile local, state, and international governments. Does it need to be a cover?
9 hours ago
It's putting AI processing out of the reach of hostile local, state, and international governments. Does it need to be a cover?
> It's putting AI processing out of the reach of hostile local, state, and international governments
It isn't... the hostile local government can seize the ssh keys you use to control it and take it over just fine.
The hostile international non-local super power just gained a new ability to jam communications or destroy it with a bit of deniability too.
So, that's generally not something local governments do in the US. They do things like increasing taxes on data centers, denying water rights, electric interconnection rights, etc. (At least, all of this has been threatened against data centers.)
The US government, and sub-governments routinely exercise control over data centres, typically by the simple act of issuing a subpoena or warrant or weird national security document. They will entirely retain this power. And the power to force compliance with force if they need to (though they typically don't).
Local governments in the US practically never exercise control over data centers by doing any of the things you just discussed. There's a reason why you're saying "this has been threatened". It's a strange new thing resulting from bizarre current behavior - behavior and a resulting trend that started after Elon started talking about space based data centers, and thus cannot be the cause of it.
PRISM[1] has been publicly-documented for over a decade. China, Iran, Russia, among others obviously also intervene in electronic communications at a low level.
I'm not caught up entirely, but I would imagine that NSA's capabilities have advanced beyond what has been published from slides created nearly 20 years ago.
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM
Local, state and international governments who wanted to crack down on AI could just arrest and execute the owners. None of whom plan on living in space anytime soon.
>hostile ... international governments
you mean other than China, russia, NK and Iran?
SpaceX's launch capacity is an order of magnitude larger that all four of those put together.
Which is irrelevant because offensive launches can destroy many orders of magnitude more launches worth of payloads. Even with simple kinetic means. Though these days I think I'd expect to see directed energy weapons adding even more zeros to that.
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Yeah, but any of those attacking US satellites means an apocalyptic war, and the provenance of the attack would be clear. You cannot exactly hide a suborbital rocket launch.
Even in Russian nationalist circles, the occassional idea of shooting down current Starlink satellites is usually met with derision from the rest of the discussion group (see, for example, topwar.ru comments). That is just step too far, too dangerous.
Meanwhile, on Earth, you have a lot of plausible deniability. "Some terrorist group sneaked in and planted a bomb, totally not our people."
A cover is going to have a plausible enough sounding justification that you’ll believe and defend