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Comment by rogerrogerr | Hacker News Reader

> The government can simply gag Sam, Dario, Musk on national security basis

Genuine question - can they really do this? Obviously if I, a not-even-millionaire, get a national security gag order, I'm going to follow it because I assume they'll bury me under the jail otherwise.

But the (b|tr)illionare class? I'd assume they have access to enough legal services to make even the government careful of trampling their first amendment rights. Is the national security gag order process so strong that the government doesn't have to worry about motivated, well-resourced actors buying really good lawyers and blowing up their favorite tool?

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> Federal Judge Rules Pentagon’s AI Blacklist [of Anthropic] Violated The Constitution

I don't see the common citizen having this as an option

Recall that the legal system is itself provided by "the government". It's a complex system. Whether one part of it is capable of exerting influence over some particular thing comes down to competing interests. For example in the US if the states and the federal legislature are in sufficient agreement about something the constitution ceases to matter - they could literally target a single person with an arbitrary law if they so chose. Our assurance that this won't happen comes down to the fact that getting any of them to agree on anything is an exercise in herding cats.

> But the (b|tr)illionare class? I'd assume they have access to enough legal services to make even the government careful of trampling their first amendment rights. Is the national security gag order process so strong that the government doesn't have to worry about motivated, well-resourced actors buying really good lawyers and blowing up their favorite tool?

Hard to hire a lawyer after being struck with a missile as an "emergency executive order after intelligence sources indicated they were in the process of endangering the nation", or however the executive of the day wishes to phrase it.

When something is genuinely national security, and "national security" isn't just an excuse, that is not off the table.

In the US, this would likely lead to the immediate launch of a new Business Plot, if the government weren’t already captured by those same interests. (Which also explains why your hypothetical won’t happen.)

There's a lot of ways it might go.

Won't be too surprised if the next Democrat leadership throws the book at Musk; and give how unpopular Data Centres are generally (and how uninterested Republicans seem to be in EVs), only mildly surprised if the next Republican after Trump likewise.

> access to enough legal services

A large part of the world (possibly Nations-transversal, in different amounts) does not work within the boundaries of legal guarantees. Wealth is not an effective enough protection.

They just exert pressure in different ways. "You want this big juicy government contract? Then you'd better follow our gag order."

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