Disarming the Deep State: AI’s Role in Government Transparency

AI IS THE NEW FBI. Here’s how the new administration could use a Twitter Files-like strategy to defang the deep state.

Recall: when @elonmusk acquired Twitter, one of his first acts was to simply reveal every “conspiracy theory” to actually be conspiracy reality. Shocking emails showed Twitter really had colluded with the state to secretly censor citizens. Of course, political dissidents long suspected this to be true…but now they had proof. These revelations delegitimized the old regime, and built the case for radical reform of Twitter. That’s the key idea: revelation justified reform. All we need to do is extend this tactic, with some modification, to the entire federal bureaucracy.

The Twitter Files were relatively easy to pull off because Twitter as a company was less than twenty years old, and most of its internal communications were still on a single system. But the federal government isn’t like that. It’s much older, much bigger, and much more complex. The files of even one agency go all the way back to COBOL and file cabinets. And few journalists could make sense of such a mess within a short timeframe. However, we now have AI. So, suppose we tackled the agencies in order. Start with the security services that faked Russiagate, censored the Hunter Biden story, and manufactured the many show trials of Trump. Use the president’s expansive declassification powers to pull as many documents as possible into a single filestore. Collect whatever you can collect legally. And then let it rip with AI. Ask questions like:

a) Who exactly was in close contact with the 51 “former” officials that misled the world into thinking Hunter’s laptop was Russian disinformation?

b) Which senior officials were routinely leaking to journalists in violation of their official oaths?

c) And how exactly did the election get ‘fortified’ in 2020, again?

The questions are simple, but the answers will be crazy. And a good AI like Perplexity can generate them in seconds. With every citation provided. Thing is, you can’t trust a corrupt agency like the FBI to conduct an investigation like this anymore, especially when it’s investigating itself.

But you don’t have to because AI is the new FBI.

You do this to one agency at a time. You drip, drip, drip the revelations. Maybe you even make the AI search engine public. Once you’ve done that, you’ve built the case for reform. Then you push the reforms through, which might mean shutting down the agency entirely. And you turn to the next agency. In this fashion, you nail it, then scale it. Don’t take on the entire administrative state at once. Divide and conquer, going after the most vicious first, and taking on (say) the Department of Agriculture last. Remember, federal agencies evolved over decades to obfuscate their internals to nosy humans. But they have no natural resistance to AI. Indeed, no agency can withstand this kind of AI interrogation. So, this is how a small group of Elon-directed engineers can carve a path through DC, without the aid of a single corrupt bureaucrat or journalist.

All they need is AI to ask the questions and X to distribute the answers. It’s the Twitter Files, but for the entire federal government, and enabled by AI. And that’s how the digital network defangs the deep state.

Balaji Srinivasan on X