Many things are open research and intentionally funded as so, until a dual-use is found. My example was meant to show something that was intentionally funded and released openly, but only because USSR didn't know what they had and it's implications.

My personal confidence in this administration to do anything here in a meaningful way is non-existent. However, the very real problem of academic research funded by American dollars, in American labs, being passed to Geo-political adversaries before publish is pervasive and difficult to solve.

In a purely academic sense: i agree research should be fully transparent, except when a specific reason exists. The point is that sometimes we do not know it shouldn't be and that can be a real critical mistake. A way, and not the only way, to de-risk that is to enforce more strict criterion on the researcher(s) themselves.

Also: thank you for taking the time to reply. I'm a big fan of your work and personal blog.

It's a lot easier to get access to underpaid graduate students, fresh post-docs, etc who are doing the heavy researching lift day-to-day work. You have way more tools in your HUMINT arsenal with this population. Sometimes research has natsec implications even though it is not in pre-class or classified status.

A famous example of this is how the US created it's stealth technology initially.

"The foundation for a science-based approach to the development of stealth aircraft was laid by Petr Ufimtsev, a Soviet physicist. In 1962, Sovietskoye Radio publishing house issued his book Method of Edge Waves in the Physical Theory of Diffraction that described the mathematical rationale for the development of stealth vehicles.

In the USSR, these ideas did not go any further, however, the Americans were very enthusiastic about them. Ufimtsev’s physical theory of diffraction has become, they say, the cornerstone of a breakthrough in the stealth technology. In the 1970s, the work was started in the USA on the basis of this knowledge as a result of which breakthrough stealth aircraft − Lockheed F-117 fighter and Northrop B-2 strategic bomber – have been produced."

https://rostec.ru/en/media/news/visible-invisible-stealth-te...

Even more so for PHD work because the expectation is that after the training you will produce many things that make the cost of training you essentially negligible.

Compared to the US, nordic countries are more homogeneous and higher trust overall. If I was living in those countries, I'd defer more, due to it's culture and small size. By small size I mean population. Sweden is less than 11 million, smaller than the LA metro area.

My statement was not a ethical judgement that Sweden or Nordics are more trustworthy. Just that they are smaller with a more homogeneous, higher trust society. Thus if I were there I'd trust the government to more likely represent the will of the people broadly, as opposed to the US Congress.

If I lived in say, Sweden, I feel much more comfortable trusting their government to implement. In America, I feel I must always vote in a way that prevents giving any power to the government that I wouldn't want my political opponents to have over me.

The fundamental problem seems to be that screens as a basis for learning how to learn, study, and retain information in kids appears to be detrimental to developing that core skill we have already developed.

The FBI has a long history of attempting to infiltrate and destabilize these groups. In the early 2010s there was a push to infiltrate right leaning groups. They especially called out in their published documents disgruntled veterans returning from the wars and unhappy with leadership noting a worry they would use the skills picked up at war at home.

It's absolutely no surprise that the FBI would investigate this behavior.

This isn't a bunch of people organically protesting, this is an organized system designed to "target" ICE agents. The only difference is the payload delivery between physical disruption vs weapon based attacks.

It doesn't change the organization and tactics used to identify targets are the same methods and strategies used by insurgent groups to select targets and attack. AQI was very sophisticated for the technology they had. Their warriors were brave, cunning, and true believers with efficacious systems for what was available to them.

Twenty years of that, plus the rest of the middle east has now made it particularity common knowledge how to run insurgency cells worldwide. This combined with American expertise brought back and with people legally aiding these groups in setting up their C2 structures with what is effective and what works is no surprise.

This investigation should be no surprise to anyone. They use these techniques because they work. They are so effective at target acquisition, monitoring, and selective engagement that if they flipped from their current tactics to more violent ones it would be a large casualty event.

During the Obama administration, state and local LEO worked with ICE to deport. Now they are directed not to. Without that protection and cooperation from local officers, it becomes significantly harder and more dangerous to execute these operations. So they put masks on because the local agitators are doxxing them, threatening their families, and making life unsafe for the agents.

So now we have this lack of cooperation from local government that creates unsafe and dangerous operating conditions for ICE. What are they supposed to do? Not enforce the law because the local government says no? We already fought a war about Federal power versus state power. Heck, Obama (whom i voted for 2x) sued Arizona (Arizona v. United States, 567 U.S. 387) over supremacy of the Federal Government with respect to immigration.

There would be no problems if Minneapolis and Minnesota leadership reacted the way other cities like Memphis did. Instead they've explicitly, or tacitly, endorsed this escalating resistance movement. I can't imagine ever putting my hands on a LEO and expecting it to go well, yet they do it freely. Officers are only human, and day-in day-out of this, combined with very real actionable threats against your life, and family life are only going to create more tensions and more mistakes.

This is no invasion hostile force, this is a chosen focal point to challenge the will and ability of this administration to enforce the democratically made laws.

The structure of your message implies you are not American. DHS posts the people they deport here:

https://www.dhs.gov/wow

It's really hard to go down that list and say "yeah i'd rather have these people here than have ICE deporting people".

Anyone who ran convoys in the Middle East, patrolled, or did intel around it will know this playbook. The resistance is impressive because it's taken lessons learned from observing the US Military overseas dealing with insurgencies.

0 - https://www.usainscom.army.mil/iSALUTE/iSALUTEFORM/ 1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHIPEVj0pRo

Two things can be true: the "resistance" rings in MN are behaving like the insurgents the US has fought for decades in the Middle East, and ICE agents wrongfully killed a man.

Study 1 shows "Difference-in-Differences analysis of engagement with 154,122 posts by 1068 accounts before and after the policy change". All this tells us is that existing accounts did not have a noticeable change. It doesn't suggest anything about accounts created after where the culture of Twitter (appears) to have shifted quite a bit from before going private.

Basically "okay cool, existing accounts didn't change their behavior". What about new accounts? More anonymous accounts? Can we understand anything else about platform growth and interaction? What about classes of user w/ respect to verified users, anonymous accounts vs accounts tied to real identities?

Study 2 is also very limited to draw that conclusion because people are less likely to honestly report their engagement with content or beliefs that could be punishing in a given political environment. This was most astutely observed by the French polymarket user who crushed it betting on the 2024 election using neighbor-polling methodology [0]. Essentially, it appears to be more reliable to ask about the preferences of a respondent's social circle than ask the respondent directly.

[0] - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/french-whale-made-over-80-milli...