Edward Snowden wrote on social media to his nearly 6 million followers, “Do not ever trust @OpenAI … You have been warned,” following the appointment of retired U.S. Army General Paul Nakasone to the board of the artificial intelligence technology company.
Snowden, a former National Security Agency (NSA) subcontractor, was charged with espionage by the Justice Department in 2013 after leaking thousands of top-secret records, exposing the agency’s surveillance of private citizens’ information.
In a Friday morning post on X, formerly Twitter, Snowden reshared a post providing information on OpenAI’s newest board member. Nakasone is a former NSA director, and the longest-serving leader of the U.S. Cyber Command and chief of the Central Security Service. He retired from the NSA, a position he held since 2018, in February.
Snowden wrote in an X post, “They’ve gone full mask-off: do not ever trust @OpenAI or its products (ChatGPT etc.) There is only one reason for appointing an @NSAGov Director to your board. This is a willful, calculated betrayal of the rights of every person on Earth.” He concluded the post, writing, “You have been warned.”
I have never heard anyone say that as a racial slur and I grew up with a bunch of racists. Historically it was, at least in some parts of the u.s.
I love William Gibson’s ‘Spook Country’ from 2007. I don’t remember any controversy about the title then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spook_Country
spook as in undesirable government creep?
because that title alone can be interpenetrated so many different ways without context
PS i checked the wiki but now that i know the other meaning, i likely explains some of the weird takes i got in the past.
I always knew of spook as a racial slur, but never heard it used that way. Spook was always used as a government intelligence officer, like CIA , FBI , NSA , MI6.
I’ve only heard it once, in Back to the Future:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_Hb-PhNLT0