Silicon Valley's Conservative Past And Nazi Dystopian Future

jacobin | Unlike Steve Jobs, who embraced the counterculture and sought to infuse the tech industry with some of its values, Thiel has long been hostile to the Left and all its cultural offshoots. Like Noyce before him, he believes that the Left’s influence slows technological progress and sets humanity back.

Thiel has been described as a libertarian because he funded initiatives like the Seasteading Institute for a time and has advocated for deregulation and slashing government spending on welfare and social programs. But he doesn’t just want a smaller state. He wants a particular kind of state, one reminiscent of the early days of Silicon Valley, when the tech industry and pro-capitalist governments collaborated to exercise global hegemony.

Chafkin writes that, especially after 9/11, Thiel was “no longer much of a libertarian, if he’d ever been one in the first place.” He’d originally positioned PayPal as an anti-establishment innovation that would give everyone their own Swiss bank account and “unilaterally strip governments of the power to control their own money supplies.” But he later complied with financial regulations and worked with the FBI to find money launderers — the same people whom he had described as personal Swiss bank account–holders. He benefited handsomely from the collaboration.

As he became a more prominent right-wing political figure by backing Trump, appearing at the 2019 National Conservatism conference, and funding so-called right-wing populist candidates like Josh Hawley and J.D. Vance, his companies also became more closely entwined with the US government. Thiel had invested in SpaceX and cofounded Palantir, two companies that rely heavily on lucrative public contracts, and even went so far as to sue the US government to gain access to them. Palantir, in particular, is a data-mining company that works with both major corporations and the US military and intelligence community.

Regardless of whether they identify as liberal or conservative, the tech industry’s leaders are embracing the military-industrial complex.

In 2019, Thiel took to the pages of the New York Times to argue for tech companies to work more closely with the US military. He criticized decades of US policy toward China and called out Google for opening an AI lab in China as it canceled an AI contract with the Pentagon — effectively accusing it of helping the enemy. In seeking to stoke a Cold War nationalism centered around opposition to China, Chafkin explains, Thiel wants “to bring the military-industrial complex back to Silicon Valley, with his own companies at its very center.”

And he’s not the only tech executive who feels this way — just the first to come out and say it, paving the way for the others. In February 2020 Eric Schmidt, whom Thiel once called “Google’s minister of propaganda,” wrote his own Times op-ed calling for the United States to take China’s technological threat more seriously. “For the American model to win,” he wrote, “the American government must lead.” A few months later, Zuckerberg positioned Facebook in opposition to China in front of US lawmakers, while other companies, including Amazon and Microsoft, have continued to fight for major contracts with the US military.

Regardless of whether they identify as liberal or conservative, the tech industry’s leaders are embracing the military-industrial complex. Thiel is not an outlier; he’s just a few paces ahead.

Cathedralist Political Narrative: Trump Is An Internet-Enabled Troll

theatlantic |  The president’s disruption engine is powered by three paradoxes. Each was made possible by technological innovations. All will endure long after this ringmaster moves his circus to another town.

Paradox #1: More information, less credibility

Trump’s cries about fake news get receptive audiences in part because we live in the most complex information age in human history. The volume of data is exploding, and yet credible information is harder to find. The scale of this information universe is staggering. In 2010, Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Google’s parent company Alphabet, noted that every two days, we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up to 2003. Today Google processes 61,000 search queries a second. That’s 5.2 billion queries a day.

Meanwhile, attitudes toward traditional information sources like the mainstream media and universities are souring, particularly among Republicans. Confidence in newspapers has declined by more than 20 points since 1977. Last month, a Pew survey found that for the first time, a majority of Republicans had a negative view of American universities.

Paradox #2: More connectivity, less civility

Today nearly half the world is online. By 2020 more people are expected to have cell phones than running water. But civility has not accelerated in tandem. In earlier times, it took some effort to deliver hurtful messages. In the U.K.’s Parliament building, seating in the House of Commons is designed to space the opposition at least two sword lengths apart from the ruling party—just in case.  Distance has its benefits. 

Paradox #3: The wisdom of crowds, the duplicity of crowds

Technology has unleashed the wisdom of crowds. Now you can find an app harnessing the experiences and ratings of likeminded users for just about anything. The best taco truck in Los Angeles? Yelp. The highest rated puppy crate? Amazon. Youth hostels in Barcelona? TripAdvisor. Researchers are even using the wisdom of crowds to better predict which internet users may have pancreatic cancer and not even know it yet—based on the search histories of other cancer patients.

But the 2016 presidential election revealed that not all crowds are wise, or even real. The wisdom of crowds can be transformed into the duplicity of crowds. Deception is going viral.

Eric Schmidt And Bill Gates Exemplars Of American Fatal Synergy

charleshughsmith |  The first question identifies the structural weak points in the system. These weak points could have any number of sources: they could be perverse incentives embedded in the system, elites caught up in their own enrichment, or even a willful blindness to the nature of the crisis threatening the system.

Here's an example in the U.S. system: corporations reap $2.4 trillion in profits annually, roughly 15% of the nation's entire output. Politicians need millions of dollars in campaign contributions to win elections. Those seeking political influence have not just billions but tens of billions. Those needing to distribute political favors will do so for mere millions.

Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens:

"I'd say that contrary to what decades of political science research might lead you to believe, ordinary citizens have virtually no influence over what their government does in the United States. And economic elites and interest groups, especially those representing business, have a substantial degree of influence. Government policy-making over the last few decades reflects the preferences of those groups -- of economic elites and of organized interests."

This asymmetry cannot be overcome. Indeed, the past 40 years have witnessed an increasing concentration of wealth and power in corporations and their lobbyists and a decline of political influence of the masses to near-zero. Every reform has failed to slow this momentum, which is constructed of incentives to maximize profits, gain political favors and win elections.

In a similar fashion, the Imperial Presidency has gained power at the expense of Congress for decades--a reality that scholars bemoan but the reforms allowed by the system are unable to stop. So we have endless wars of choice without a declaration of war by Congress, one of the core powers of the elected body.

An analogy to these systemic weak points is the synergies of an organism's essential organs: if any one organ fails, the organism dies even though the other organs are working just fine. In other words, any system is only as robust as its weakest essential component/process.

Whatever problems the system is incapable of resolving have the potential to bring down the system once they interact synergistically.

The second question identifies how many groups have been suppressed, silenced or ignored by those at the top of the heap. If these groups have an essential role in the system as producers, consumers and taxpayers, their demand to have a say in decisions that directly affect them is natural.

Another group with understandable frustrations at being left out of the decision-making are those in the educated upper classes whose expectations of roles in the top tier were encouraged by their families, society and training. When these expectations are not met because there are no longer enough slots in the top tier for the rapidly proliferating upper classes, the group left out in the cold has the time, education and motivation to demand a voice.

In other words, those denied access to resources, capital and agency who felt entitled to this access will not be as easily silenced as those who accept their low status and restricted access to resources, capital and agency as "the natural order of things."

All the groups that are denied a voice and access to resources, capital and agency are in effect a sealed pressure cooker atop a flame. The pressure builds and builds without any apparent consequence until it explodes.

The more that power is concentrated in the hands of the few, the greater the desperation of the groups who are locked out of power. As their desperation rises, some of these groups are willing to go to whatever lengths are necessary to effect change.

The process of explosive demands for change erupting is difficult to manage once released. The system's essential subsystems may be destabilized--the equivalent of organ failure--and once destabilized, it's often no longer possible to restore the previous stability.

In this environment, the common good falls by the wayside and the system collapses.

help stop COICA 2.0

Video - President Obama urged repressive regimes around the world to stop censoring the Internet. But at the same time, the United States Congress is hatching a plan to censor the Internet here at home. A new bill being debated this week would instruct the Attorney General to create an Internet blacklist of sites that US Internet providers would be required to block

DemandProgress | Oppose PROTECT-IP Act: U.S. Government Wants To Censor Search Engines And Browsers Tell Congress to Kill COICA 2.0, the Internet Censorship Bill

UPDATE: Great news. We don't always see eye-to-eye with Google, but we're on the same team this time. Google CEO Eric Schmidt just came out swinging against PROTECT IP, saying, "I would be very, very careful if I were a government about arbitrarily [implementing] simple solutions to complex problems." And then he went even further. From the LA Times:

"If there is a law that requires DNSs, to do X and it's passed by both houses of Congress and signed by the president of the United States and we disagree with it then we would still fight it," he said, according to the report. "If it's a request the answer is we wouldn't do it, if it's a discussion we wouldn't do it."

Big content is irate. The Motion Picture Association of America released a statement saying, "We’ve heard this ‘but the law doesn’t apply to me’ argument before – but usually, it comes from content thieves, not a Fortune 500 company. Google should know better."

ORIGINAL: We knew that members of Congress and their business allies were gearing up to pass a revised Internet Blacklist Bill -- which more than 325,000 Demand Progress members helped block last winter -- but we never expected it to be this atrocious. Last year's bill has been renamed the "PROTECT IP" Act and it is far worse than its predecessor. A summary of it is posted below.

Senators Leahy and Hatch pretended to weigh free speech concerns as they revised the bill. Instead, the new legislation would institute a China-like censorship regime in the United States, whereby the Department of Justice could force search engines, browsers, and service providers to block users' access to websites, and scrub the American Internet clean of any trace of their existence.

Furthermore, it wouldn't just be the Attorney General who could add sites to the blacklist, but the new bill would allow any copyright holder to get sites blacklisted -- sure to result in an explosion of dubious and confused orders.

Will you urge Congress to oppose the PROTECT IP Act? Just add your name at right.

PETITION TO CONGRESS: The PROTECT IP Act demonstrates an astounding lack of respect for Internet freedom and free speech rights. I urge you to oppose it.

Chuck Schumer's AI Conference

 CTH  |  According to a recent media report, Senator Chuck Schumer led an AI insight forum that included tech industry leaders: Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Tesla, X and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, NVIDIA President Jensen Huang, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, technologist and Google alum Eric Schmidt, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

Additionally, representatives from labor and civil rights advocacy groups which included: AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler, Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights President and CEO Maya Wiley, and AI accountability researcher Deb Raji. The group was joined by a list of prominent AI executives, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.

Notably absent from the Sept 13th forum was anyone with any real-world experience that is not a beneficiary of government spending. This is not accidental. Technocracy advances regardless of the citizen impact. Technocrats advance their common interests, not the interests of the ordinary citizen.

That meeting comes after DHS established independent guidelines we previously discussed {GO DEEP}.

DHS’ AI task force is coordinating with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency on how the department can partner with critical infrastructure organizations “on safeguarding their uses of AI and strengthening their cybersecurity practices writ large to defend against evolving threats.”

Remember, in addition to these groups assembling, the Dept of Defense (DoD) will now conduct online monitoring operations, using enhanced AI to protect the U.S. internet from “disinformation” under the auspices of national security. {link}

So, the question becomes, what was Chuck Schumer’s primary reference for this forum?

(FED NEWS) […] Schumer said that tackling issues around AI-generated content that is fake or deceptive that can lead to widespread misinformation and disinformation was the most time-sensitive problem to solve due to the upcoming 2024 presidential election.

[…] The top Democrat in the Senate said there was much discussion during the meeting about the creation of a new AI agency and that there was also debate about how to use some of the existing federal agencies to regulate AI.

South Dakota Sen. Mike Rounds, Schumer’s Republican counterpart in leading the bipartisan AI forums, said: “We’ve got to have the ability to provide good information to regulators. And it doesn’t mean that every single agency has to have all of the top-end, high-quality of professionals but we need that group of professionals who can be shared across the different agencies when it comes to AI.”

Although there were no significant voluntary commitments made during the first AI insight forum, tech leaders who participated in the forum said there was much debate around how open and transparent AI developers and those using AI in the federal government will be required to be. (read more)

There isn’t anything that is going to stop the rapid deployment of AI in the tech space.  However, for the interests of the larger American population, the group unrepresented in the forum, is the use of AI to identify, control, and impede information distribution that is against the interests of the government and the public-private partnership the technocrats are assembling.

The words “disinformation” and “deep fakes” are as disingenuous as the term “Patriot Act.”   The definitions of disinformation and deep fakes are where the government regulations step in, using their portals into Big Tech, to identify content on platforms that is deemed in violation.

It doesn’t take a deep political thinker to predict that memes and video segments against the interests of the state will be defined for removal.

global beta tests continue - was Miss Lindsey Graham at Bilderberg against Trump or for Neoconnery?

googlecache |  Coursera, Carnegie, Alphabet, Bloomberg, Hudson, Alcoa, CFR, AEI, WSJ; then of course every big bank and hedgefund.

Coursera, huh? And Alphabet?

Charles Murray (yeah, that Charles Murray) is there. I wonder what issues he's been asked there about? Why don't they ever invite Pat Buchanan?

Peggy Noonan, Niall Ferguson, Peter Thiel, Robert Rubin, Kissinger himself, Craig Mundie, David Petreaus, Lindsey f**king Graham...

Don't expect any of these people to mention they were ever there, or to talk about what was talked about.

https://www.chathamhouse.org/about/chatham-house-rule

Trump has officially shaken the elite to the core. Never in a million years would I think Bilderberg to stoop SO LOW as to invite Lindsey Graham. Lindsey Graham. I can't even...they usually stick to the rich elite that aren't public officials. Graham is a prop for the US IC to spread the notion that the US is full of war hungry politicians to the Saudis, the Gulf states, and other dictators that respect violence.

Virtually every American they invited has been publicly anti-Trump (Noonan and Ferguson signed the #NeverTrump letter); Thiel is a Trump RNC delegate (he's basically a spy), as is Kissinger (who has been Trump's informal diplomatic liaison during the campaign).

People around Clinton, like Eric Schmidt, are there.

You people that don't know anything about Bilderberg need to get with the program. Go to Sci-hub and search the academic literature.

Here's a quick history of Western diplomacy:

The Round Table, the Inquiry, Chatham House, Council on Foreign Relations, Bilderberg (Marshall, Schuman, Monnet), Club of Rome, Trilateral Commission...and they've been simmering since.

Too bad the censor happy mods took down the Official Bilderberg 2016 thread. I'm sure they'll take this one down too. Keep living in Oz, people. I'm sure you'll find that brain in your regressions and your "peer reviewed" bulls**t.

silicon valley could force NSA reform tomorrow...,

rsn | With Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras triumphantly returning to the US to accept the Polk Award with Barton Gellman and Ewan MacAskill yesterday, maybe it's time we revisit one of their first and most important stories: how much are internet companies like Facebook and Google helping the National Security Agency, and why aren't they doing more to stop it?

The CEOs of the major tech companies came out of the gate swinging 10 months ago, complaining loudly about how NSA surveillance has been destroying privacy and ruining their business. They still are. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg recently called the US a "threat" to the Internet, and Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google, called some of the NSA tactics "outrageous" and potentially "illegal". They and their fellow Silicon Valley powerhouses – from Yahoo to Dropbox and Microsoft to Apple and more – formed a coalition calling for surveillance reform and had conversations with the White House.

But for all their talk, the public has come away empty handed. The USA Freedom Act, the only major new bill promising real reform, has been stalled in the Judiciary Committee. The House Intelligence bill may be worse than the status quo. Politico reported on Thursday that companies like Facebook and are now "holding fire" on the hill when it comes to pushing for legislative reform.

The keepers of the everyday internet seem to care more about PR than helping their users. The truth is, if the major tech companies really wanted to force meanginful surveillance reform, they could do so tomorrow. Just follow the example of OKCupid from last week.

Mozilla, the maker of the popular Firefox browser, was under fire for hiring Brendan Eich as CEO because of his $1,000 donation in support of Prop 8 six years ago, and OKCupid decided to make a political statement of its own by splashing a message criticizing Mozilla before would-be daters could get to OKCupid's front page. The site even encouraged users to switch to another browser. The move made the already smoldering situation explode. Two days later, Mozilla's CEO was out of a job, and OKCupid got partial credit for the reversal.

The leading internet companies could easily force Congress' hand by pulling an OKCupid: at the top of your News Feed all next week, in place of Monday's Google doodle, a mobile push alert, an email newsletter: CALL YOUR MEMBER OF CONGRESS. Tell them to SUPPORT THE USA FREEDOM ACT and tell the NSA to stop breaking common encryption.

competing visions of a computer-controlled future

Spiegel | Federico Faggin has lived in the United States for more than 40 years, but he's still living la dolce vita in classic Italian style in his magnificent house on the edge of Silicon Valley. The elderly Faggin answers the phone with a loud "pronto" and serves wine and antipasti to guests. Everything about him is authentic. The only artificial thing in Faggin's world is what he calls his "baby." It has 16 feet -- eight on each side -- and sits wrapped in cotton in a cigarette case.

About four decades ago, Faggin was one of the first employees at Intel when he and his team developed the world's first mass-produced microprocessor, the component that would become the heart of the modern era. Computer systems are ubiquitous today. They control everything, from mobile phones to Airbus aircraft to nuclear power plants. Faggin's tiny creation made new industries possible, and he has played a key role in the progress of the last few decades. But even the man who triggered this massive revolution is slowly beginning to question its consequences.

"We are experiencing the dawn of a new age," Faggin says. "Companies like Google and Facebook are nothing but a series of microprocessors, while man is becoming a marginal figure."

The Worrying Speed of Progress
This week, when German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Google chairman Eric Schmidt opened CeBIT -- the digital industry's most important annual trade fair -- in the northern German city of Hanover, there was a lot of talk of the mobile Internet once again, of "cloud computing," of "consumer electronics" and of "connected products." The overarching motto of this convention is "Trust" -- in the safety of technology, in progress and in the pace at which progress unfolds.

This effort to build trust seems more necessary than ever, now that those who place their confidence in progress are being joined by skeptics who also see something dangerous about the rapid pace of development.

In his book "The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future," American computer scientist Martin Ford paints a grim picture. He argues that the power of computers is growing so quickly that they will be capable of operating with absolutely no human involvement at some point in the future. Ford believes that 75-percent unemployment is a possibility before the end of the century.

"Economic progress ultimately signifies the ability to produce things at a lower financial cost and with less labor than in the past," says Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. As a result, he says, increasing effectiveness goes hand in hand with rising unemployment, and the unemployed merely become "human waste."

Likewise, in their book "Race Against the Machine," Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, both scholars at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), argue that, for the first time in its history, technological progress is creating more jobs for computers than for people.

Fruity Pebbles Call Trump Fascist While Granny Goodness Partners With Googol to Overthrow Assad...,

 

WashingtonExaminer |  This sounds like a pretty huge deal, so you’d think the American media would be all over it. Not quite. In fact, the only story I’ve seen emanating from the U.S. press was published by the Washington Examiner.

Here are a few excerpts from the story titled, Clinton Email Reveals: Google Sought Overthrow of Syria’s Assad:

Google in 2012 sought to help insurgents overthrow Syrian President Bashar Assad, according to State Department emails receiving fresh scrutiny this week.

Messages between former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s team and one of the company’s executives detailed the plan for Google to get involved in the region.

“Please keep close hold, but my team is planning to launch a tool … that will publicly track and map the defections in Syria and which parts of the government they are coming from,” Jared Cohen, the head of what was then the company’s “Google Ideas” division, wrotein a July 2012 email to several top Clinton officials.

“Our logic behind this is that while many people are tracking the atrocities, nobody is visually representing and mapping the defections, which we believe are important in encouraging more to defect and giving confidence to the opposition,” Cohen said, adding that the plan was for Google to surreptitiously give the tool to Middle Eastern media.

Is this a technology company or the C.I.A.?

“Given how hard it is to get information into Syria right now, we are partnering with Al-Jazeera who will take primary ownership over the tool we have built, track the data, verify it, and broadcast it back into Syria,” he said.

“Please keep this very close hold and let me know if there is anything [else] you think we need to account for or think about before we launch. We believe this can have an important impact,” Cohen concluded.

The message was addressed to deputy secretary of state Bill Burns; Alec Ross, a senior Clinton advisor; and Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, Jake Sullivan. Sullivan subsequently forwarded Cohen’s proposal to Clinton, describing it as “a pretty cool idea.”

Cohen worked as a low-level staffer at the State Department until 2010, when he was hired to lead Google Ideas, but was tied to the use of social media to incite social uprisings even before he left the department. He once reportedly asked Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to hold off of conducting system maintenance that officials believed could have impeded a brief 2009 uprising in Iran. Julian Assange, who founded the secret-leaking website WikiLeaks, has for years referred to Cohen as Google’s “director of regime change.”

Longtime Liberty Blitzkrieg readers will be familiar with the name Jared Cohen, a figure who played a key role in the post: Highlights from the Incredible 2011 Interview of Wikileaks’ Julian Assange by Google’s Eric Schmidt (must read if you missed it the first time).

Moving along, I want to once again stress the fact that the U.S. media has completely ignored this story.

Jewish Billionaires Teaming Up For Pro-Israel/Anti-Hamas Media Drive

al-jazeera  |  A billionaire real estate tycoon in the United States is rallying support for a high-dollar media crusade to boost Israel’s image and demonise the Hamas armed group amid global pro-Palestinian solidarity protests.

The media campaign — called Facts for Peace — is seeking million-dollar donations from dozens of the world’s biggest names in media, finance and technology, according to an email seen by news website Semafor.

More than 50 individuals are being courted, including former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Dell CEO Michael Dell and financier Michael Milken. They have a combined net worth of around $500bn, Semafor said.

Some of the individuals, such as investor Bill Ackman, have publicly threatened to blacklist pro-Palestine students who are critical of Israel. On October 10, Ackman wrote on X, formerly Twitter, that he and other business executives wanted Ivy League universities to disclose the names of students who are part of organisations that signed open letters criticising Israeli policies in Gaza.

US billionaire Barry Sternlicht, who started the project, said the campaign would help Israel “get ahead of the narrative” as the world has reacted to the intensive Israeli attacks in the Gaza Strip.

“Public opinion will surely shift as scenes, real or fabricated by Hamas, of civilian Palestinian suffering will surely erode [Israel’s] current empathy in the world community”, Sternlicht wrote in an email soliciting contributions from the wealthy figures shortly after Hamas’s October 7 attacks on Israel, according to Semafor. “We must get ahead of the narrative.”

Israel has carried out relentless air strikes on the besieged Gaza Strip since October 7, killing at least 11,078 Palestinian people, including 4,500 children, displacing 1.5 million people, and wrecking much of the territory’s infrastructure, Gaza officials say.

Hamas’s surprise attack on Israeli territory on October 7 killed some 1,200 Israelis, according to Israeli officials.

Sternlicht’s media drive aims to brand Hamas as a “terrorist organisation” that is “not just the enemy of Israel, but of the United States”, he wrote. The goal is to draw $50m in private donations, paired with a matching contribution from a Jewish charity. Hamas is already designated as a “terrorist” organisation by the US and the European Union for its armed resistance against Israeli occupation.

 

 

 

Forget Silly Protests - Hon.Bro Dupree Esq., Taking Dirty KCK Cops to War

KCTV5 News

injusticewatch |  The request by a Kansas prosecutor to create a unit that would review cases involving evidence of wrongful convictions has exposed a schism among law enforcement officials who contend that the business of reviewing wrongful convictions should not be left to the local prosecutor.

The dispute was touched off after Wyandotte County District Attorney Mark Dupree asked the County Board in July for $300,000 to create the new conviction integrity unit.  The Kansas City, Kansas police chief, sheriff and two Fraternal Order of Police union presidents then sent a July 30 letter to Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt questioning the proposal, and asking Schmidt’s office to oversee any decisions by the local prosecutor to reopen past cases.

On Wednesday, Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner and Eric Gonzalez, the Brooklyn, New York prosecutor, were among 54 current and former law enforcement officials who signed a letter supporting the creation of the unit within Dupree’s office. Pursuing justice is not “at odds with community safety or victim support,” their letter states. “In fact, victims are safer – and we prevent further victimization – when communities trust that their law enforcement officials seek the truth rather than ‘win.’”

The issue has erupted months after Dupree cut short a hearing into Lamonte McIntyre’s claim that he had been wrongly convicted and spent 23 years in prison for a 1994 double murder, saying he was acting to correct a “manifest injustice.”

Questions of McIntyre’s conviction involved allegations of a corrupt police detective, a corrupt state prosecutor, misconduct by the trial judge and ineffective representation by his court appointed attorney. The July 30 letter by law enforcement officials challenging Dupree stated the prosecutor had “failed to fulfill its role as an advocate for the homicide victims(s) and the State” in that case.