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Comment by AnimalMuppet | Hacker News Reader

Hmm. The article seems to be about AIs enabling cyberattacks.

How bad would a cyberattack have to be to topple a government? I guess I could see a parliamentary government losing public confidence if it failed to prevent a severe enough attack. I'm not sure I see it for something like the US, where elections are fixed. It might swing the next election, but that's not the same as "toppling a government", is it?

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Aren't there plenty of countries which aren't exactly super-stable anyway? Might not take much to have select countries pushed over the edge. Especially if you have territorial disputes with neighboring countries looking to take advantage. For the U.S., what if Social Security payments suddenly stopped for 6 months? What if the U.S. lost records of Treasury Bills, and they couldn't be redeemed for a while? What if electricity went out for 30% of the population for three months? I would think it pretty cold comfort that the government didn't topple, because the next election results were a mix of democrats and republicans.

Suppose "hackers" released extremely embarrassing/incriminating but true information [the remaining Epstein files with documentation or whatever]. Suppose social engineering and communication channel control was used to play the summary on every news station. Suppose enough congressmen/MPs/etc were put on record calling for an administration/government's resignation (through falsifying public and private communication). Such an extreme media/communication channel hack might ultimately be revealed but it could create powerful enough momentum that it could force administration out.

Effective enough news investigations have toppled governments already.

  misinformation (already exists)
  personalized attacks to influence voting behavior (already exists)
  attacks of the financial system (the big one here)

Basically more of the same, but at much larger scale. The only way I could see five eyes react to this is if it turns out that our financial system is compromised.

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