Mashed up by me from H.R. 1295 text via Congress.gov, Creative Commons photo of White House, and vector graphic of crown
Note: My Apr. 4 blog post—#TeslaTakedown Pt. 1 of 3: Crash course in Elon Musk, the DOGE coup, and resisting same—I published as part one of three. Under my own Douglasian reorganization authority, and to make my own life easier, I hereby declare this post part two of that series. Part three comes—eventually!
On June 4, Rolling Stone published my latest article: Republican bill would legalize DOGE and let Trump dismantle everything: The Reorganizing Government Act is a longshot in the Senate, but that could change—and so would the separation of powers. As usual, I drafted more text than could be squeezed in, so please find below bonus material—mostly concerning statutory presidential reorganization authority’s history and some political philosophy—for the truly autodidactic among ye.
A short history of reorganization authority power struggles
The Reorganizing Government Act of 2025’s House sponsor, Rep. James Comer (R-KY), portrayed his bill during the Mar. 25 House Oversight Committee session as a fairly routine granting of long-gone special powers. “I want to reiterate that between 1932 and 1984,” Comer said, “presidents submitted more than 100 reorganization plans, presidents from Roosevelt to Reagan, used this authority to create or dismantle federal agencies.” While President Reagan did briefly hold Congressionally granted reorganization authority, he didn’t use it to create or dismantle any federal agencies—he didn’t even submit a single reorganization plan to Congress. To give Comer’s Southern drawl the benefit of the doubt, it sounds like he just misplaced the clause “presidents from Roosevelt to Reagan” in his sentence. It should have gone after “between 1932 and 1984″—then it would have been accurate.
Comer also claimed “Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama requested renewed and expand[ed] authority” to submit reorganization plans. None of those past presidents obtained the authority, especially because, not to embarrass Comer or anything, Clinton never even asked. At the meeting, no Representative corrected Comer, but the Congressional Research Service report he received unanimous consent to enter into the record, does. (It also explains the accurate Reagan history.)
Clinton in 1993 tasked Al Gore with cutting bureaucratic costs, and in each term, the then-vice president’s National Performance Review pursued that mission. Among the Review’s thousands of pages was indeed the recommendation that the White House seek reorg. authority. But the Clinton administration never took up the idea in earnest, much less formally requested such powers from Congress. Comer’s claim, apparently an attempt to turn such minutiae into a main character to normalize an unprecedented power grab for Trump, is specious.
Back in January, Trump told Congress that DOGE “is headed by Elon Musk”; Musk claimed the austerity team is akin to the concluded National Performance Review, which was a White House-led task force—as DOGE arguably is.
Yet Gore’s crew traveled the country to listen to agency staff and compile their ideas into wonkish suggestions for Congress and Clinton to consider—and faced no serious legal challenges. In contrast, Musk and his 34-timefelon president stand accused, in the AFGE lawsuit, of top-down rogue lawbreaking to dismantle government unilaterally from under the White House cloak of an efficiency task force. In their complaint, the plaintiffs write: “In sum, OMB [Office of Management and Budget], OPM [Office of Personnel Management], and DOGE have usurped agency authority, exceeded their own authority, acted in an arbitrary and capricious manner, and ignored procedural requirements by requiring federal agencies throughout the government” to “Impose cuts to functions and staffing according to ‘targets’ and ‘goals’ imposed by DOGE.”
Musk boasted of his team, “all of our actions are maximally transparent”—yet they tellrequesterssuing for records underthe Freedom of Information Act, No way, even after a federal judge found in March that DOGE is “likely covered by FOIA.”
If the so-called Department of Government Efficiency were actually a cabinet-level department created through Congress, it’d be very subject to FOIA and other obligations. But DOGE’s ‘name’ is a mere label Musk styled after a dog- (or doge-)themed cryptocurrency he’sdeniedowning in a contentous, closed court case. The operatives’ continuing refusal to disclose their names and their literal opacity—papering over windows in a basement conference room—has encouraged accusations, including from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), that the crew of hacker-y twentysomethings is a “shadow government.”
At the Oversight session, Comer ignored or dismissed concerns about DOGE’s doings, painting his bill and the Trump administration as simply cleaning the government up of unnecessary bureaucrats: “We have to have a reorganization of the government—it’s gotten out of hand over the past 4 years! Bureaucracies have grown, bureaucrats have increased in number, and the people taking it on the chin in the federal workforce are the ones who actually do the work at the bottom of the organizational chart. This is a reorganization for them!” (Yeah, sure.)
Curiously, Comer didn’t discuss the first Trump administration’s reorganization authority request. The related Reforming Government Act of 2018 died prior to floor voting. Unlike Comer’s legislation, the Trump 1-erabills expressly forbade plans to ax independent regulatory agencies or all of their statutory programs and would have constrained the presidential powers by limiting them to “consolidation authority.” Like moving a computer file from one directory to another, deleting the former location’s in the process and hoping everything works out with the file in the fresh spot, consolidation authority would have presumably preserved whichever statutory programs’ existence when shifting their position in the org charts.
Consolidation authority similarly made the Trump 1 request less extreme than failed Republican reorg. authority legislation from earlier in the 21st century. President George W. Bush was, like top Trumpers now, pushing maximalist unitary executive theory: flex the presidency by bending or breaking the Constitution. Bush 43 would have obtained statutory reorganization authority—unexpiring—to propose ending departments, independent regulatory agencies, and some/all of either’s statutory programs, but only if his White House deemed the targets intelligence related. Obama’s request for two-year authority, by contrast, would have left independent regulators alone and stayed under consolidation authority for his plan to merge particular executive organizations: he said he’d arrange six of them into a new take on the Commerce Department, eliminating the old one in the process—so he technically needed the power to abolish departments. Republicans feared he wouldn’t stop with the Commerce Department, but that dispute seems minor compared to today’s Trumpian dismantlings: Neither Obama nor Bush 43 were boasting that they were gunning to end the Education Department altogether, as Trump is. And the expansive Reorganizing Government Act of 2025 envisions no consolidation authority constraint for Trump 2, making Comer’s comparison of his bill with Obama’s request bogus.
In hindsight, the Trump 1 effort comes off like a befogged dry run for the Heritage Foundation, much of the brainsbehind it—and behind today’s moreprepared, Project 2025-shaped Trump 2. After all, ideas for reorganization plans that emanated quietly from his relatively inexperienced, disarrayed first administration strangely amalgamized cross-partisan priorites: a smattering of low-profile, quasi-technical moves, among them merging food safety programs; centrist or liberal schemes like spinning off FAA air traffic control into a nonprofit corporation to better procure the latest, best staff and technology with less political interference; and conservative fixations such as prepping the U.S. Postal Service for privatization. That last is a jaw-dropping commonality between the 2018 and 2025 bids. In March, Musk agreed with Trump that the familiar, constitutionally authorized snailmailmen should be delivered to industry, saying, “we should privatize anything that can be[.]”
This most recent of reorg. authority’s three historical phases has seen Congress deny every presidential request for it since the statute last expired in (of all years) 1984.
Sometimes, these 21st-century bids have downplayed their expansive scopes by trading on the authority’s preceding, more widely popular mid-20th-century phase. That’s when Congress, often routinely, blessed most presidential reorg. plans, not infrequently advertised as merely improving the government’s operational mechanics. Reorganizers promised to steer clear of normative beliefs (somehow)—to remain agnostic about what Uncle Sam should do—and instead hyperfocus on tweaking how government operates.
These wonkish middle-phase plans—President Carter’s among them—have been lampooned as nothing more than “boxology”: shuffling agencies around on the org-charts without really fixing anything. Sometimes they have been rather mundane: President Kennedy’s first reorganization plan in 1963 restructured the Franklin D. Roosevelt presidential library with a change-up involving “ten guards, one repairman, and two janitors at a total cost of $87,000 a year.”
Other times, second-phase reorganization authority, largely freeing presidents from lawmakers’ snail-speed deliberations and entrenched dependencies on specific districts and states, facilitated surprising results quickly from a birds-eye view. For example, President Nixon’s third reorganization plan in 1970 created the Environmental Protection Agency, now targeted by DOGE.
Searches for historical evidence of major savings from this better-liked second period—or any period—of presidential reorganization authority will findlittle, aside from some of its uses in winding down World War II. The same report from 2012 that Comer entered into the record states that there have been “few instances in which reorganization plans resulted in documented cost savings.”
Reorganization authority’s earliest phase wasn’t so much about money, but about the first half of the 20th century generating widespread, amped-up hopes that significantly strengthening executive power to advance social goals could lead to sizable restructurings that would help heal the deep, long-lasting traumas of World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II.
The historical analogy isn’t lost entirely even on the unscholarly Donald Trump. He’s repeatedly invoked comparisons between himself and Roosevelt, who during the Great Depression and into the 1940s wielded enormous executive power mainly for very different ends: progressive New Deal social programs and fighting Axis countries instead of Trump’s You’re fired! commands for ever-smaller government and aligning with fascistleaders. Further, whereas Trump’s dismantlings this year have proceeded through a barrage of 150+ executive orders, many legally questionable—some paused by courts pending litigation—Roosevelt revamped government largely by ensuring Congress passed well-crafted, durable legislation.
Vanderbilt political science professor John A. Dearborn, who specializes in power shifts between Congress and presidents, told me that “FDR primarily viewed reorganization authority as a way to make government work more efficiently, and better, rather than simply as a tool to drastically cut back on agencies and functions.” That included a failed 1937 attempt to establish, at the same time as his proposed restructuring legislation would have granted him reorganization authority, a new Department of Public Works and a new Department of Social Welfare.
“Like Trump,” Dearborn said, “FDR was accused of seeking too much power for the presidency. He framed his ambitious reorganization proposal in 1937 as a way to ‘prove to the world that American Government is both democratic and effective’ while authoritarian systems were on the rise abroad. Congress scuttled many of the boldest elements of that plan”—among them not requiring him to seek Congressional review and its lack of an expiration date for his authority (almost always, when Congress extends the preorgative, it’s been on a temporary basis). “Nonetheless,” Dearborn continued, “while the reorganization authority lawmakers granted FDR in 1939 included some important limits on his powers, the law still relied on legislators’ assumption that a president would be uniquely focused on the good of the nation as a whole when formulating and submitting reorganization plans.”
The national culture backing FDR was an enormous facilitator of his reorg. plans and legacy. The culture back then was much more unified than today’s extreme polarization, as illustrated by the song “Why I Like Roosevelt,” originally from the 1940s. It’s embedded below as a 1990s-era recording of the elderly Willie Eason playing guitar in the Sacred Steel tradition and singing.
But another president Trump often mentions, this one trepidatiously, is much less well regarded, particularly due to his tariffs worsening the Great Depression. That’s Herbert Hoover, in 1932 the first president to receive from Congress statutory reorganization authority as presently understood, powers he’d championed as Commerce Secretary in 1924 for his then-boss, President Coolidge. During that year’s relatively mild recession, Commerce Secretary Hoover wrote that the public deserved “little right to complain about our economic situation”—foreshadowing Trump’s own Commerce Secretary, billionaire Howard Lutnick, lecturing this March that if Social Security checks go unsent, it’s “fraudsters” who’d complain, whereas in such dire straits, his elderly relatives would just hope for their next checks in patriotic silence.
Hoover ignored the warning a thousand-plus economists sent him and signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 to dramatically hike duties on imports. The Smoot-Hawley Act was a major part of that era’s tariff policy, which Trump said, in his Apr. 2 “Liberation Day” speech, would have stopped the Great Depression had tariffs—Hoover’s among them—been even more aggressive, as his own were: per Fitch Ratings, Trump’s early April effective tariff rate was reaching levels not seen since twenty years prior to 1929’s Black Thursday. His recent tariff de-escalation with China significantly decreased the total effective rate only temporarily and still has investors anxious over yo-yo-ing uncertainties. (On June 3 Trump doubled tariffs on steel and aluminum—from 25% to 50%—which will particularly affect neighbors Canada and México.)
Trump is likewise ignoring the warning of more than 700 economists and other scholars not to “repeat the catastrophic errors of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930.” Tariffs generally raise prices of imported goods, effectively disrupting manufactural supply chains and taxing consumer demand. In a bankster country that, starting in the later 20th century or so, has compensated for offshoring manufactural production by using the military, the spy-meddlers, Madison Avenue, monetized intellectual property enforcement, and more to manipulate much of the globe into keeping the U.S. dollar the default international currency, it’s particularly perilous to crater the buying power of the planet’s biggest importers at the same time as world leaders are losing faith in dealing with The Donald anyway.
Fears of international de-dollarization—and of saying goodbye to stock market gains and Treasury bonds—among money-capital factions may well undo Trump. In January, the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board called it “The Dumbest Trade War in History,” and even the high school economics teacher in the comedy flick Ferris Bueller’s Day Off managed to succinctly explain a 1986 version of why.
The economy’s bottom falling out would be a catastrophe Trump would presumably blame on anyone cast as his negative image—women, non-whites, poor people, those beyond U.S. borders in the supposed here be dragons lands—and leverage as pseudo-justification for further wrecking-ball powers, much of which the Reorganizing Government Act would legalize.
Akin to Hoover’s years of championing the idea until presidential reorganization authority became for the first time a real prerogative—and in his hands—Trump could claim that, to fix economic and other problems of his own making, Congress should grant him extreme powers, among them unmatched reorganization authority. It’s quite possible his allies would continue to paint it as nothing unusual, perhaps “not fit for camera” and along the lines of second-phase “boxology”—if they justify the authority to the public any more than the little they did at the Mar. 25 Oversight session.
Given such pessimisticprecedents, it’s worth reiterating that Congress has denied presidents the optional reorganization authority for the last four decades and counting.
Vanderbilt University political science professor David E. Lewis, an expert on presidents and the bureaucracy, told me that “In the late 1980s, as the Cold War was ending and the peace dividend beginning, Congress pursued military cuts on their own. They created a commission—the Commission on Base Realignment and Closure—to recommend changes and made themselves vote the recommendation up or down with no amendments allowed. Congress did not need the president to help them improve efficiency via structural changes. They did it themselves.”
Reorganizing the response: extra material about Federalist 51
Standing in the Oval Office on Feb. 11, Musk gave a muddled half-hour speech groping toward political philosophy as his five year old, X Æ A-Xii, rubbedboogers on the Resolute Desk and whispered to a scowling Trump sitting behind it: “You are not the president and you need to go away.”
Musk said that to understand the “whole point of democracy”—according to the FOIA-dodger, it’s being “responsive to the people”—we should imagine “ask[ing] the founders” as if they were alive today. Without specifying any founders or what they said, Musk then criticized the bureaucracy as an unelected fourth branch usurping democratic rule. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau he seeks to “Delete” would likely qualify as such a bureaucracy in his eyes, though that may have more to do with the consumer-protecting independent regulators’ jurisdiction over his companies Tesla and xAI, probably a conflict of interest for DOGE, than it does with anything approaching political philosophy.
Besides claiming the bureaucracy overpowers voters and Congress—a set of debatable, multifaceted questions, to which he simply asserted an axiomatic answer—Musk didn’t address the Constitution’s separation of powers.
Yet “Publius” did, in 1788.
“Publius” was the pseudonym of the founder—almost certainly James Madison, Bill of Rights champion and later, fourth president—who in Federalist 51 argued for ratifying the Constitution. He explained how the core document, if treated as more than mere magic paper, can defend “liberty” by preventing, or at least forestalling, power-grabs by any of the three branches that might aspire to tyranny. That’s a risk inherent to expansive reorganization authority given to presidents who enjoy compliant Congresses.
Each branch, Publius wrote, “should have a will of its own” with members “as little dependent as possible” on the others. Although the Constitution permits Congress to delegate powers such as reorg. authority to presidents—much as lawmakers may delegate certain other powers to various agents, say, to independent regulators, the task of ascertaining abstruse particulars of complicated regulations—if Congress hands over too much, it risks losing its own will.
In a famous line, Publius wrote that the secret to maintaining the separation of powers is this: “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” Congressional ambition to guard its own turf and expertly will its own authority can counteract presidential ambition to apotheosis.
While certainly imperfect, ambition counteracting ambition is a formula leaps and bounds away from Rep. Tim Burchett’s “fully support[ing] any effort that allows President Trump to make government more efficient.” But the Republican from Tennessee isn’t the only one giving himself over to The Donald.
Such toadyism to an autocrat aspirant emerges from right-wing ideologies, among their ideologues Christian Nationalists and Silicon Valley adherents of the “TESCREAL” variety pack of beliefs that often uphold sci-fi-style eugenics.
Crucially, the ideologies mostly unite against another point in Federalist 51: in “republican”—that is, kingless—”government,” Publius wrote, “the legislative authority, necessarily, predominates.”
Most predominant and consequential of the ideologies may be the neo-reactionary movement (NRx)—also called the Dark Enlightenment—which puts an outright despotic bow on the others.
Maximalist unitary executive theory from both Bush 43 and Trump
President George W. Bush was, like top Trumpers now, pushing maximalist unitary executive theory: flex the presidency by bending or breaking the Constitution, and the failed legislation for giving Bush 43 reorganization authority should be seen in that context. Of course, advocates of maximalist unitary executive theory would say they’re simply using the Constitution’s second article to the fullest. For a contemporary statement of the viewpoint, see Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership policy agenda guidebook drafted by the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank. They don’t use the concept of monarchy, but maximalist unitary executive theory certainly has the effect of facilitating the far-right project of getting the country there.
Soft coup to benefit foreign foes: National Labor Relations Board whistleblower Daniel Berulis
Berulis described DOGE arriving at the NLRB’s D.C. headquarters on Mar. 3 in a police-escorted black SUV to procure highly-privileged accounts on NLRB systems. Soon after, attempts to log in from Russia with those same credentials were geo-blocked, but followed by the DOGE accounts siphoning away reams of sensitive data to U.S.-based servers—final destinations unknown.
Per his lawyer, Berulis was threatened a week prior to filing his sworn whistleblower declaration: an unexplained note mentioning his then-forthcoming disclosure—complete with drone photos of Berulis walking his dog—was taped up on his home door.
In February, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) called DOGE a “shadow government,” a “hostile takeover,” and “part of a troubling pattern of Russian and Chinese Communist sympathizers increasing their influence on American foreign policy.”
U.S. statutes and federal regulations both formally identity, among others, the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation as foreign adversaries of the United States.
Guidelines touted by Kamala Harris at Bletchley Park in 2023
Note: On Sept. 22, the Daily Dot published my latest article, Election 2024: The future of TikTok and tech policy under Trump versus Harris. It’s an overview of where the two leading U.S. presidential candidates stand on various tech topics: TikTok, net neutrality, the FCC, Section 230, the digital divide, and more, with a few surprises along the way—such as power-to-the-people NYC Mesh. My article also discusses their stances on artificial intelligence. I had some paragraphs on that subject left over unused, so I decided to put together this quick blog post.If you’re an actual human reader, rather than an AI scraping my webpage, enjoy.
On Sunday, Vice President Kamala Harris, campaigning for the U.S. presidency, spoke at a fundraiser in Manhattan, raising more money—$27 million—than you or I will ever see, reportedly her highest-grossing fundraiser. It should help her warchest stay better funded by far than that of her main opponent, the twice-impeached first presidential felon Donald Trump and the Republican National Committee. But her speech? It echoed another she gave, nearly a year ago, at the U.K.’s Bletchley Park.
In both talks, she spoke of government collaboration with the AI industry, portraying it as voluntary rather than as demanded. Maybe aside from the helpfulness of machine translation services such as Google Translate, as well as other AI tools, and maybe beneath the opulence and publicity, things aren’t so safe. Or at least, the topic of artificial intelligence is too poorly understood for rando-journos to really give helpful hot takes without first boning up on the underlying material—material that started, more or less, some 80 years ago in/near Bletchley Park, though Harris didn’t mention the particular ghost in question when she was there last November.
To merit $27 million in a single day, Harris must have said something really interesting at Sunday’s swanky event venue, Cipriani Wall Street (pictured left), yeah? She did, if you’re a venture capitalist (or journalist) seeking more details on her tech positions, some of which she’s been circumspect about. Indeed, until Sunday, she hadn’t—as a presidential contender—stated openly her position on cryptocurrency, leaving Trump to chest-pound about being the “crypto candidate” while she focused on traditional voter concerns such as reproductive rights. According to Bloomberg, at Sunday’s fundraiser, Harris said, “We will encourage innovative technologies like AI and digital assets,” (read cryptocurrency for the latter) “while protecting our consumers and investors.”
Sounds a bit like former POTUS Barack Obama. We will do the good things that are important and that bring us hope and prosperity, and we will not do the bad things that cause problems for folks in this country. God bless you and God bless the United States of America. It’s a strategy: as long as Harris continues painting by numbers without enormous gaffes or grave October surprises, and sans whatever serious, hard-to-predict dangers might arise from election interference, I say she’ll probably sit behind the Resolute Desk come Jan. 20.
But what about AI? In terms of direct quotes from Harris, not much more has trickled out of her fundraiser speech thus far—not that I’ve seen. She did say, apparently in the same passage addressing cryptocurrency and AI, that she “will bring together labor, small business founders and innovators and major companies[.]” Some say that’s Harris pitching young men leaning Republican.
Likely so, but it’s also in line with something I mention in my Sept. 22 Daily Dotarticle: the voluntary industry agreement she facilitated as current Prez Joe Biden’s “AIczar.” She touted this AI safety agreement at the Bletchley Park inaugural global summit on AI in 2023, two days after Biden’s executive order on artificial intelligence calling for the United States to lead AI development while ensuring safety.
The bog standard campaign schmaltz and vagueness, combined with rejuvenated hopes after the happy Harris replaced the about-to-pass-out Biden, maybe make this stuff regarding AI, the industry, the voluntary non-binding safety promises—this We can all work together, biz, labor, even the guy passed out on the tarmac, wait is that Jo– stuff—feel enticing. Maybe it is: though the agreement is on paper non-binding, a presidential administration has antitrust and other levers at hand to knock companies in the head with reminders. But I doubt it.
Why am I not more certain, or why are AI agreements not critiqued in depth across news media? I’ve been given a few recommendations, but generally, I don’t know of any deep-digging investigative reports on where the AI industry is headed that, crucially, combine a valuable, highly literate philosophical perspective on what computers and artificial intelligence are accomplishing, and threatening, beyond the journo-exposés about Silicon Valley powers-that-be signing up for cryonics, aiming to infuse themselves with young blood, throwing zillions down shady corners, the youzhe. Know of some? Let me know. Astute philosophy, remember. I know that the TESCREALs/rationalists (today’s, not Spinoza) are orgiastic over their quasi-famous neckbeards pronouncing this or that, but I don’t agree with their scientism, so skip ’em. People who touch grass please.
We need better, more insightful assessments of artificial intelligence, because, among other reasons, algorithmicbias, as a chief aspect of it, is putting on steroids plain ol’ human bigotry’s human rights violations and bodycounts.
The Bletchley Park mansion, photographed by DeFacto in 2017
Harris gave her voluntary agreement! high-profile speech at the first global AI Safety Summit, which took place at none other than Bletchley Park. That country estate in England was once home to the British government’s Code and Cypher School, now called Government Communications Headquarters, the United Kingdom’s equivalent of the U.S. National Security Agency. At the first ever global summit on artificial intelligence, in other words, Harris was discussing its emergence precisely where the 1940s originated Five Eyes, the post-World War II secret-sharing alliance between five countries’ worth of intelligence agencies staffed by actual humans, including those of the United States.
At the summit, Harris discussed the Biden administration’s efforts to safeguard against AI dangers such as “algorithmic discrimination[,]” undertakings for which she was the seniormost Biden administration official involved. One such effort Harris spotlighted: the “Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights.” The non-binding Blueprint lays out expectations for technologists developing artificial intelligence systems—such as Google’s sentiment analyzer that a 2017 Vicearticle footnoted by the Blueprint found to be biased. Among other goals, the expectations aim at reinforcing and expanding existing anti-discrimination legal protections “to ensure equity for underserved communities[,]” defined to include “Indigenous and Native American persons,” as well as “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex” people, and various others.
Like a ghost unseen at the Bletchley Park summit, unmentioned in Harris’s Bletchley Park speech, late British mathematician Alan Turing, who dreamed up the idea of computer software in a 1936 math paper, worked at that same country estate for the Code and Cypher School in the 1940s cracking Nazi codes. Shortly after the end of World War II, Turing gave the first public lecture on AI. He said, “What we want is a machine that can learn from experience” and “alter its own instructions[.]” Interpreting those as Turing himself often did—by setting aside religious or philosophy of mind questions in favor of mathematical and engineering ones—today’s artificial intelligence is understood by experts as doingboth to some sizable degree.
In the longstanding philosophy journal Mind, Alan Turing in 1950 proposed what’s now called the Turing Test: essentially a guessing game or experiment where, by writing down questions and passing around slips of paper, a person tries to determine which responses are generated by an unseen human and which by an unseen AI—with the argument that, if the person can’t tell the responses apart, the AI should be considered to be thinking as legitimately as the unseen human is considered to be thinking. That’s how the Turing Test is typically presented—bereft of the gender codings in the 1950 original, which subtly and impishly (by 1950s standards) depict gender as something as fluid as intelligence.
Photographed in the 2000s, Bletchley Park stableyard cottages, one location where Turing worked
The original Turing Test is also not so behavioristic as it sounds from textbook glosses, with Turing’s actual writing praising the “quite a strong” counterargument “from Extrasensory Perception” (this is why read primary source and not just watch youtube vids). While in this portion of the paper he mostly sticks to familiar psionics language such as telepathy and precognition, one might discern someone living in a dissociated world where empathy (as emotional contagion, not as cognitive exercise) is regularly off the table, especially for someone sensitive, “good as a telepathic receiver” (see Turing’s best-known premonition), and required to keep silent. About classified secrets. About what he must have witnessed and heard of, the 1940s birthing the current world order dominated by spy agencies and an attempt at a global mono-empire underpinned by information technology. About even his own criminalized sexuality.
Sentenced for “gross indecency” under anti-homosexuality laws in 1952, one of the foremost founders of artificial intelligence was instructed by a British court to pick either estrogen-based chemical castration or imprisonment. Turing chose the former and, almost certainly as a consequence, was driven to alter his own instructions fatally in 1954 at home, alone.
It seems wrong to me that Harris, at Bletchley Park, did not mention him in her speech, though the U.K.’s government-backed Alan Turing Institute was among the contributors to the voluntary agreement. I assume she didn’t mention him at Cipriani Wall Street, either, despite his story as one of the foremost founders of AI—occasionally argued to be the founder—waiting as a perfect example of how good deeds especially get punished when you’re deemed to fall into the wrong group affiliation categories, and how that’s the kind of bias, now often enshrined into algorithms, that she says we need safeguards against. Marketing happyspeak, however, is what brings in the $27 million/night.
Artificial intelligence didn’t kill one of its founders, but bigotry, one of AI’s biggest problems, sure did. It’s presently up for grabs to what extent the 47th U.S. president, others in power, and the worldwide public can learn from such experiences as AI becomes increasingly more common, assuredly with dignity-depleting privacy violations in its train. Like some coked-up computerized version of the long and sorry history of human bias, algorithmic bias has zillions in funding, endless apologists, and a growing body count. Politicians limit themselves to the art of the possible, for better or worse, but definitely crop out anything their “possible” and “realistic” tunnel visions don’t have time for, like, say, omitting mention of Bletchley Park ghost Alan Turing and anybody else who might lie in a grassy field and dream up system-changing ideas such as computer software or artificial intelligence. More time spent understanding AI’s origination and its development over three quarters of a century would be a good start to transforming it from a pol- and journo-buzzword into something we can usefully self-govern.
Previously unpublished surveillance image of Trump co-defendant Misty Hampton outside the Coffee County elections office on Dec. 15, 2020.
Today I emailed a PDF letter to the Coffee County Commissioners, the Board of Elections and Registration, the election supervisor, the county administrator, the County and/or elections board’s legal representation—Jennifer Herzog and Tony Rowell for Hall Booth Smith; Ben Perkins and Wes Rahn for Oliver Maner—and the only newsman in the otherwise news desert county, editor of Douglas Now Robert Preston. I separately sent the letter to multiple Coffee County residents who have a history of boldly speaking out during public meetings.
The four-page letter does what this blog post’s headline says. On Dec. 19 of last year, the Daily Dot published my latest investigative article, of some 4000 words. It concerns a federal lawsuit over procuring the county’s records related to the infamous elections office breach, most memorably the missing silver laptop used at work for years by then-election supervisor and now Trump co-defendant Misty Hampton. Also on Dec. 19, I self-published a blog post with additional important information cut from the article due to length considerations. My letter takes three revelations from the article, and some information from the blog post—mostly, truths I uncovered about the county not coughing up records—and compressed them down to bullet points for the county leaders’ convenience.
Of the many goals here, one of them is for Coffee County to produce all records from the breach, its run-up, and its aftermath (another interesting goal is Hudson’s proposal; see the article and blog post for more on that one). The unprecedented elections office intrusions in Coffee County were part of an unprecedented campaign planned by top Trumpers, even Trump himself, to arrange for technicians/operatives to make, and take off with, exact copies of the voting software still used across the battleground state of Georgia and myriad jurisdictions beyond. Amplifying this information, sending it to editors, or even advancing it in some useful way (via phone calls, emails, records requests, digging in trash bins outside Dominion Voting Systems offices, et cetera) might, I don’t know, affect some sort of huge upcoming election thing and (more important than that outcome) the narratives we are made to tell ourselves about it. Yeah, seems like there’s something happening later this year on the 5th of November, what could it be again? Remember remember…
Without further ado, the PDF letter as a fancy embed (or download):
Misty Hampton in the Coffee County elections office with the silver laptop, Feb. 22, 2021
Note: All four surveillance images in this post, previously unpublished, are published here for the first time.
Today the Daily Dot published my new investigative article, entitled EXCLUSIVE: A missing laptop could be key to prosecuting Trump. This rural Georgia county only recently admitted that it exists. Prior to publication, I worked on it for about half a year.
Some material was cut to make the article shorter and more focused on the missing silver laptop.
However, of the cut passages, I can post below as paragraphs in a bullet-point list the ones that are, in my view, urgent and important. Think of them as DVD extras showing you deleted scenes from the theatrical release.
To be serious, I believe it might help residents of Coffee County—in the swing state of Georgia—as well as interested people elsewhere to have access to this information immediately. Without further ado:
Here’s a summary of the breach by the federal judge presiding over Curling v. Raffensperger, Amy Totenberg in the Northern District of Georgia.
For her account of the intrusions, Totenberg drew on cybersecurity experts’ declarations—including their review of computer forensics and the surveillance footage—in a Nov. 10, 2023 ruling: the breach included “various individuals and entities (1) providing and gaining unauthorized access to Coffee County voting equipment, data, and software over the course of multiple dates; (2) copying, downloading, and imaging the County’s equipment, data, and software; (3) uploading and sharing that data and software on the internet via a file-sharing website; and (4) further distributing physical copies of forensic voting material downloaded from Coffee County.” (Online distribution was via private access, not public internet.)
Some, notably Coffee breach-funding lawyer and onetime Trump lieutenant Sidney Powell, who has pleaded guilty, have tried to justify the intrusions by claiming the elections board approved the electronic collection of the computers’ contents. They offer insufficient documentation to support this claim; further, no board quorum has ever been found to have authorized copying the elections data nor does the security video show any quorum in the elections office during the breach. In a deposition, then-Board of Elections chair Wendell Stone denied that the board gave permission to examine their systems. The civil disobedience or altruism arguments sometimes made are undercut by the plundered proprietary voting software, almost three years later, having never reached the public, nor rival political campaigns, only the breachers’ allies, as far as can be determined.
If the subpoenas lawsuit is successful, it might spell out why the county’s public statements, which have focused on Hampton, have been so careful not to mention by name then-elections board member Eric Chaney, who was caught on film participating in the breach. “I didn’t do anything without the direction of Eric Chaney,” Hampton said in deposition. The plaintiffs in the subpoenas case go further, saying Chaney, who has not been charged, “warned Ms. Hampton of her impending termination the evening before” and characterizing him as a “key participant[] in planning and executing the breach.”
A letter that counsel for the plaintiffs in the subpoenas case sent to county attorneys in April and filed this month argues that crucial Eric Chaney-related records were improperly withheld by county manager Wesley Vickers and senior county lawyer Tony Rowell, a pair multiple interviewees described to me as the area’s de facto diarchy.
Examples of how the lawyers seem to have more power than the people they represent:
Listening to their lawyer Ben Perkins discuss legal issues at their Nov. 14 meeting, every elections board member said they were not informed of the desktop seizure before it happened, which he told them their then-underling, former election supervisor Rachel Roberts, had been involved in. Ernestine Thomas-Clark, who has long sat on the board, asked the lawyer to clarify how they could in theory terminate him when they hadn’t hired him. Fireable like any board vendor, Perkins was retained by county manager Vickers this June—an appointment some members have described as appearing out of nowhere one day, without their input or vote, something Perkins acknowledged in the meeting. Except for the two initial Oct. 24 motions, he has provided lawsuit filings to board members only when asked, according to board members who told me such requests were rare.
Surveillance footage—procured by Coalition for Good Governance despite months of Coffee claiming it had been irrevocablylost— shows senior county lawyer Tony Rowell in December 2020 meetings with people who would go on to participate in the breach. The plaintiffs’ analysis of the video shows that prior to the intrusions, Rowell spent hours and hours in the elections office with, among others, Misty Hampton, Eric Chaney, Ed Voyles, and Cathy Latham. Voyles, who has not been charged in the Georgia-Trump RICO case, chaired the elections board two years prior to the meetings. Latham, like Hampton a Trump co-defendant who has pleaded not guilty, chaired the Coffee Republican party at the time of the intrusions. Also a Trump fake elector (imposter in the Electoral College process), Latham was in a position to have possibly connected Coffee County with MAGA D.C. shortly before the breach.
Misty Hampton, Ed Voyles, and holding the coffee mug, Tony Rowell, in the elections office, Dec. 3, 2020
Ed Voyles (seated), Eric Chaney, Tony Rowell (holding cup) in elections office, Dec. 10, 2020
The Coffee County Commissioners, almost never mentioned in discussions on the breach and the most powerful county executives under law, have the ability to fire their vendor Hall Booth Smith—including Tony Rowell—and county manager Vickers, though not Oliver Maner (the elections board’s vendor for legal services). I repeatedly contacted all five commissioners with questions on the subpoenas lawsuit and a CCTV still of the silver laptop, asking if they’re satisfied with the performance of the county’s de facto diarchy. County commissioner Jimmy Kitchens told me “I have no comment”; county commissioner Oscar Paulk deferred to legal counsel Tony Rowell. The other three commissioners never responded.
In Judge Totenberg’s same Nov. 10, 2023 ruling, she concisely addressed the underexamined cybersecurity plight of state voting systems and the possible ripple effects of the breach: “The importance of the security, reliability, and functionality of state election systems, classified by the U.S. Homeland Security Department as critical national infrastructure, cannot be overstated in a world where cybersecurity challenges have exponentially increased in the last decade. The dynamics of how a breach in one part of a cyber system may potentially carry cybersecurity reverberations for the entire system for years to come exemplifies the important concerns raised in this case.”
The Curling v. Raffensperger plaintiffs seek to force the swing state of Georgia to (on the vote capture side) abandon mandatory electronic ballots and in most circumstances use hand-marked paper ones, that will (on the vote tallying side) still be scanned by computers but always audited.
The GBI report (critique; critique) omits reference to the silver Hewlett Packard altogether and instead, any laptops it mentions are either nondescript or an old black Toshiba. Their report acknowledges that the Toshiba had last been used in 2015—the Obama era, and thus not relevant to the breach, the run-up to it, or the aftermath, except as a red herring that the county many times brought up in place of the silver laptop.
Also per the GBI report, in August 2022, surrounded by three of his lawyers—including Rowell of the de facto diarchy—recently resigned elections board chair Wendell Stone refused to participate when the Bureau tried to interview him in person. Then, making his public statement in June 2023, Stone promised “transparent” elections to the locals in front of him—but did not share that eight days earlier, the GBI had seized their elections office desktop.
Local lawyer Jim Hudson’s proposal for independent and possibly pro bono counsel and the idea of asking the Department of Justice for help are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Hudson’s idea, while nebulous to some ears, at best would allow those most affected by the intrusions—Coffee voters—to participate in a bottom-up inquiry into all aspects of the breach and its aftermath, aided by the independent counsel and able to notify the Justice Department of any criminality discovered. The Department of Justice, by contrast, boasts multistate range and federal muscle, but without a strong defense of the local public interest in place, they would risk being seen, fairly or not, as just another set of politicized outsiders, at worst sparking more resentment than repair.
A November poll in the New York Times shows Trump ahead of President Joe Biden in five of six battleground states, including Georgia. Legally, nothing prevents an incarcerated individual from running for president, nor indeed, from serving as president. However, the Supreme Court might affirm state or local officials disqualifying Trump due to his inciting of the Jan.6 auto-coup attempt. If not, my guess is, Mar-a-Lago house arrest would be set up for such a presidency.
My final two paragraphs from an earlier iteration of the article:
With bold leadership missing like a silver laptop, jitters about the GBI or other law enforcement behind every Eastern red cedar—paranoid or justified—proliferate; simultaneously, the known extent of the Trumpers’ multistate breach plot grows, reminding voters from coast to coast that their jurisdiction could have been hit. “Scared to death” Matthew McCullough, fulminating against the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, must not be the only Coffee County official afraid “to go to jail.”
Aside from the immense force of the breach records lawsuit and its costs, it seems the only way the county’s status quo will change is if the region’s residents, perhaps in conjunction with the DOJ, perhaps aided by Hudson’s vision for independent counsel, reshape the area’s stepped landscape of power themselves. The Trump era cannot be locked up by any prosecutor, nor can it be compartmentalized away with the click of a television remote—the healing of truth and reconciliation would be more realistic. Cyber–vulnerable Election 2024 is less than a year away. Self-governance requires effort.
Misty Hampton with the silver laptop in the elections office, Dec. 15, 2020
This blog post, Extra material for my Daily Dot investigative article about Coffee County, Georgia missing laptop likely relevant to Curling and Trump cases, by Douglas Lucas, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (summary). The license is based on the work at this URL: https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2023/12/19/extra-material-dailydot-investigative-article-laptop/. You can find the full license (the legalese) here. To learn more about Creative Commons, I suggest this article and the Creative Commons Frequently Asked Questions. Please feel free to discuss this post (or the underlying article) in the comments section below, but if you’re seeking permissions beyond the scope of the license, or want to correspond with me about this post (or the article) one on one, email me: dal@riseup.net. And gimme all your money!
(5 years and 3 months, to be precise.) Okay: Material the media outlet cut from my piece, plus bits of context:
Brown spoke with WhoWhatWhy earlier this week from jail to emphasize the dishonesty with which the authorities have prosecuted him. He referred to his sealed detention hearing, saying the FBI’s agent Allyn Lynd testified under oath that laptop evidence proved the writer admitted to SWATing (placing false 911 calls to get locked-and-loaded police commandos out to a mark’s home). Brown said that not only did Lynd get away with that false allegation—which was at least explicable in that it served as a chief reason the judge denied bail—but the agent also got away with the weird claim that the defendant had lived in the Middle East.
“These people, these prosecutors, these FBI agents have blatantly lied so much,” Brown told us. “They aren’t rookies; these are people who have been around for a long time. So what that tells me—what that should tell everyone—is that they don’t lie for fun; they do it because it works. And the question is, Why does it work? And how bizarre is it that these things work? There doesn’t seem to be any negative feedback to prevent an FBI agent from lying on the stand.”
[…]
The prosecution throughout has twisted words to manufacture a case against his work and, in so doing, a case against what 21st-century journalism stands to become.
Brown, some of whose first writing sales were to America Online during its days as an Internet service provider, has long championed the decentralized, archival Internet as a better means of knowledge-production than the hierarchical media ecosystem where authors and pundits can lie persistently without consequences not unlike his prosecutors. After all, the use of hyperlinks—the primary controversy in his case—allows scrupulous authors and readers to cross-check data and call out errors in great detail.
Once Brown heard of Anonymous and WikiLeaks in 2010, he quickly realized how his crusade could be amped up with access to top-notch secrets and newways to collaborate digitally. Soon he was giving more and more interviews to the traditional media—some of which the Department of Justice trotted out in court last December—explaining his political ideas and findings about the authorities’ information warfare projects and techniques. Meanwhile, in chat rooms and on social media, he was showing others how to mine state-held business registrations, trademark filings, and press releases so they, too, could turn Anonymous’s hack-leaks into actionable news and analysis. His audience grew and grew.
The government didn’tlikethat at all. Prosecutors let their motive slip during a 2013 hearing, as first reported by WhoWhatWhy. That was when the Department of Justice made a failed attempt to prevent Brown, while his case was ongoing, from criticizing anyone in the government whatsoever. (They did succeed in gagging him and his lawyers, for several months, from speaking out about his legal battles.)
[…]
Despite the Department of Justice’s hammering of him, Brown has remained steadfastly defiant. Reading his allocution, he told his judge, predictably, “I hope to convince Your Honor that I sincerely regret some of the things that I have done” but added with trademark dry humor: “Like nearly all federal defendants.”
Extra material for WhoWhatWhy “Barrett Brown Sentenced to 5 Years, After Facing More Than a Century” article by Douglas Lucas is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. It does not affect your fair use rights or my moral rights. You can view the full license (the legalese) here; you can view a human-readable summary of it here. To learn more about Creative Commons, read this article. License based on a work at www.douglaslucas.com. Seeking permissions beyond the scope of this license? Email me: dal@riseup.net.
I'm a Texas-born, Seattle-based freelance writer/journalist currently living in Chiapas, México. Published at Rolling Stone, Foreign Policy, Salon, WhoWhatWhy, the Texas Observer, the Daily Dot, others. I write about anything and everything, but usually current events meets investigative journalism and philosophy; liberatory mental health; education; science fiction and fantasy; technology; justice; more. Also a former public ed substitute teacher.
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