Dear Mr President,
The first week of your second term started off with radical intent. On Day 1 you rescinded 78 of President Biden’s executive orders and signed 20 new ones, more than any other President on his first day. However, it is your Oval Office announcement on day two about the AI Stargate Project, named suspiciously to evoke memories of Operation Warp Speed, a project you unfortunately still view as a triumph of your first administration, that has set alarm bells ringing.
The Stargate Project is a new company planning to invest $500billion over the next four years ‘to build new AI infrastructure [by which they mean data centres] for Open AI in America’. It was set up by four partners: Open AI, the company behind ChatGPT; Oracle, the world’s third largest software company whose name is taken from the codename for the 1977 project it undertook for its very first customer, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA); SoftBank, a Japanese investment firm, and MGX, an AI and technology investment firm established by the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund in 2018.
More and bigger data centres usually means more surveillance, which was meant to have gone out of fashion in 1989 with the Berlin Wall coming down, symbolically ending the Cold War with the ‘Free World’ winning. It consigned to the dustbin of history the hitherto most efficient and prolific of personal data gatherers, the East German Stasi, with their vast network of informants andpredilection for collecting genital swab samples from detainees to more effectively target police dogs on their delicate bits should the need arise. They may be more sophisticated but this new Stargate outfit is, I suspect, after something just as sensitive, each individual’s unique DNA signature, and curing cancer is the heartstring they’re tugging on to make it palatable. Sure, the company is promising it will deliver 100,000 construction jobs in the US, but does the personalised ‘precision’ cancer ‘vaccine’ market really need up to 20 new data centres to make it viable?
The danger, Mr President, is that Stargate could be the portal to a far more dystopian future than the one presented in the Oval Office. Aspects of the project bear a strong resemblance to the War-on-Terror panopticon, the Total Information Awareness project. This Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) project envisioned tracking every aspect of an individual’s activities and interactions with other people for terrorism prevention purposes. Just imagine the possibilities for surveillance if something like the £37billion Test and Trace system the UK built to map the spread of SARS-CoV-2 could be linked to every other bit of information that exists in databases about a person? A single unique identification number for each person, call it digital ID if you will, would make AI data mining of the interoperable databases so much easier. It’s Stasi-like surveillance on steroids. Who needs informants when people inform on themselves?
mRNA was the stardust sprinkled on the announcement by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison who said, ‘Cancer diagnosis using AI has the promise of just being a simple blood test, then beyond that, once we gene sequence that cancer tumour you can then vaccinate the person, design a vaccine for them – design a vaccine for every individual person – to vaccinate them against that cancer and you can make that vaccine, that mRNA vaccine, you can make that robotically using AI in about 48 hours.’
If only that little fairy story were true, Mr President. One of the first people to call it out was Dr Robert Malone, the originator of the idea that mRNA could be used for vaccines. He said: ‘Who doesn’t want a universal cancer vaccine? Who doesn’t want to have this miracle that Larry Ellison is predicting? I would be the first to applaud, however, having been in this space for my entire career and knowing what the setbacks and challenges are, I gently say, I wish them luck. The cancer market is a multi-trillion dollar global market. It doesn’t need government incentives, unlike biodefense.’
Prior to the pandemic, BioNTech, Moderna and CureVac, the only mRNA company whose SARS-CoV-2 mRNA ‘vaccine’ failed to obtain an authorisation, all started out in the business of developing mRNA gene therapy cancer therapeutics. Historically cancer has been a far more lucrative market than vaccines. BioNTech was the leader in this area but prior to 2020 60 per cent of its cancer projects failed to progress from early trials. In fact one feature shared by the mRNA genetic vaccines pumped into people over the last three years is that by an amazing coincidence they’ve been found to contain the same short gene sequence [called a PAM sequence] required as a tag for the recipients genome to be edited using CRISPR-Cas. Could this be necessary to help the cancer vaccines work, or is eugenics back in fashion under another name?
It sounds to me, Mr President, as if Mr Ellison’s been talking to Moderna, a company whose origins lie in DARPA’s War on Terror-era Super-Soldier ‘Killproofing’ project. They were set up to commercialise the modified-RNA genetic vaccines DARPA dreamt up and which were sling-shotted into a money-spinning behemoth by Operation Warp Speed. Moderna invested heavily in robotic manufacturing and say they are an ‘AI first company’ who want to use it to turn their scientists into ‘super human creators’. As they put it, their ‘changemakers’ are ‘Embracing the Creator’s Spirit’. Little good and great harm came out of their original effort to slap things up in 48 hours – the SARS-CoV-2 vaccine – and now I suspect they want to play God again, which is where Mr Ellison and the Stargate AI come in. It sounds like an excuse to collect individuals’ unique DNA sequences.
Putting cancer back on the agenda would help Merck recoup their investment in Moderna. In 2016 Merck handed Moderna cash to build its factory in Norwood, Massachusetts, as part of their personalised cancer therapy collaboration. It was separate from the infectious disease collaboration that Merck announced it had divested itself from on the day the UK’s MHRA authorised use of the Pfizer/BioNTech mRNA-SARS-CoV-2 injectable and just before Moderna’s profits rolled in.
Some proposals called for DNA genetic fingerprints to be included in biometric national digital ID systems. The lure of personalised cancer vaccines could be attractive enough for some people, blissfully unaware of any potential downsides, to give up these genetic fingerprints voluntarily. There are more sinister possibilities for the use of this information. It’s already been posited that human immune system altering bioweapons could be developed. What risks could possibly be posed by allowing AI databases to design personalised cancer vaccines [biotechnology intended to alter the human immune system] in 48 hours?
There’s another danger. In the darkest version of a dystopian future, DNA genetic fingerprints could enable companies to claim ownership of individuals’ DNA.There are two legal rulings that could make this possible. The first involves a company called Myriad Genetics Ltd which tried to patent the BRCA breast cancer gene. In 2013 a US Supreme Court judgement ruled against Myriad saying that naturally occurring human DNA couldn’t be patented but synthetic DNA could. The second legal precedent was set in a Canadian court judgement against Percy Schmeiser, a farmer whose wheat was contaminated by genes from Monsanto patented wheat – the rule is that even without consenting to receive the licensed product, the recipient is bound by the patent licence. This meant Schmeiser case could no longer plant his own seeds because they were contaminated with genes Monsanto owned. If patented genes administered by mRNA have integrated into someone’s DNA or their offspring’s DNA, could the patent owner in this disturbing dystopian future own and control those people? It’s too early to tell, but not inconceivable.
What Stargate AI asked the US government for help with was ensuring that there is sufficient electricity supply to operate the data centres. Mr President, you have pledged to issue ‘emergency declarations’ to ensure they get it saying, ‘We have an emergency, we have to get this stuff built. They have to produce a lot of electricity, and we’ll make it possible for them to get that production done very easily.’ The emergency here seems to be linked to Moderna’s falling profits and share price.
It’s easy to see why Stargate AI and its deliberate echo of Operation Warp Speed captured your attention, but it would be a misfortune for humanity for you to miss the danger signals a second time. These data centres may be privately built and operated but upon closer examination it appears to be a wolf in sheep’s clothing hiding outsourced elements of DARPA’s Total Information Awareness project.
