Digital Eldest Son, Pt. 1
A hypothesis on countering online disinformation
Motivations - Verifying that a program of this scale does not exist
The motivation for this program—I’ll tell you about the legal disclaimers since I’m basically verifying that such a program to tamper with the dangers of AI does not actually exist—but the motivation came from the Special Operations Group from Vietnam, where they called it Project Eldest Son. Within one or two years—yes, one year—the special operations... well, let me see.
So the SOG, which is composed of Army Special Forces, Air Force Air Commandos, and Navy SEALs, and working for what eventually will become the Joint Special Operations Command later on—decades later—under the Studies and Observations Group (or SOG), they created a program to sabotage the NVA and Viet Cong ammunition with high explosives, such as PETN, by capturing and tampering with the primers and the propellants of small arms ammunitions such as 7.62x39 (which is the standard AK ammunition) and even artillery shells.
Because at the time, it was a source of frustration that while the NVA and Viet Cong were not particularly professional, they did have much ammunition supplies. It was not just intended for killing people one by one through sabotage, but it was also very good in information warfare because it salted the narrative with propaganda to discredit the quality of Chinese and Russian-made munitions.
So what happened is that, for example, a bolt carrier group for an AK-47 is just under one pound. One pound is exactly 7,000 grains. Previously we talked about Blackout ammunition, which is a .308 caliber bullet loaded into a cartridge that can fit within a 5.56 magazine, which therefore did not have a lot of reach beyond 100 meters, but one hell of a punch. One pound is exactly 7,000 grains; a bolt carrier group is 1 pound, and .300 Blackout weighs 190 to 220 grains.
So should a PETN or high-explosive-trapped propellant pose as gunpowder or smokeless powder, get chambered into a live AK round, and then be resealed and littered within the ammunition cache of the communists, this would cause a catastrophic explosion. This is extremely graphic and yet largely was concealed as the effect of [bad] manufacturing. So that means that the power of 35 times the grain weight of a standard modern .300 Blackout ammunition—7,000 grains—is propelled at so much force that it would go into the eye socket of the enemy that is unaware of the sabotage. A Project Eldest Son round is immediately fatal and graphic.
Along with CIA chemists and facilitators and many special operations operators, they tampered with the ammunition by using [and] tampering with the supplies of enemy caches. This is a really interesting, graphic thing. Let’s see... so the leader of the Studies and Observations Group, Singlaub, saw a CIA technician load a sabotaged AK round into a bench-mounted AK rifle. It completely blew up the receiver and the bolt was projected backwards. Singlaub observed, ‘I imagine into the head of the firer.’ That’s basically gonna chop the communist’s head off. Yikes.
Eldest Son cartridges were originally loaded with a powder similar to PETN high explosive, but sufficiently shock-sensitive that an ordinary rifle primer would detonate it. The white powder, however, did not even faintly resemble gunpowder. So Ben Baker obtained a substitute explosive that so closely resembled gunpowder that it would pass inspection by anyone but an ordnance expert. Baker’s substitute powder generated a whopping 250,000 pounds per square inch (PSI), when the AKM and Type 56 AKs and RPD light machine gun could [only] accommodate a chamber pressure of 45,000 pounds per square inch.
Now remember, I only looked up the weight of the bolt carrier group of an AK-47 mass-produced, and that much power going at a specific feet per second from an exploded receiver into the head of a communist fighter would open... it would decapitate that person. And through this concept of Project Eldest Son, I want to talk to you about this program, which does not exist on paper and has never existed. And it’s really just a thought experiment.
Countering Misinformation by Exporting Hallucinating and Tampered AI as a weapon
Using the Project Eldest Son concept—which, as I said before, I am verifying that such a program to counter this threat of imminent AI-assisted fraud does not actually exist—I am proposing a way we can sabotage attempts at fraud.
I mean, that DoorDash scenario... if such a thing was true, it was very petty and barely ‘illiterate’ in its execution. It’s pretty obvious—and I can give you the links—that it was a low-tier kind of thing. It was probably able to deceive at first glance, but the very fact that the perpetrator got caught by the low-quality image generation clearly proves that it barely fooled anyone. It may have fooled the person long enough to take their time looking for their non-existent meal, which caused them to notify DoorDash, but that guy did not get away very far, okay? He eventually got reimbursed, and the customer promptly got a new order. So, fuck the guy that made the AI-generated photo.
But the story of alleged contractors defrauding clients by making AI-generated images? Now, that is really concerning. If you don’t know this, I have a degree—a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration and Accounting. One of my biggest attributes is the ability to trace a Statement of Cash Flows, which means I do know exactly what goes into your pocket, and there is a specific accounting method for this.
The most common method of contracting in construction is the Percentage of Completion (POC) method. So, even though a project is supposedly proposed at a specific rate, due to overheads, labor costs, labor shortages, union issues, and taxes, the cost tends to overrun. You can’t just instantly build a house in a day, alright? So, a $98 million house could become $150 million in four years as the sticker price changes with supplies and building materials—for example, lumber. This makes it a very lucrative target for fraudulent misrepresentation within the Percentage of Completion method.
If the fraudsters—the ones acting as construction contractors—understood this (and they clearly do, because anyone in the construction business, whether or not they are accountants, knows how the Percentage of Completion method works), that is what is particularly alarming. I am not exactly sure how we are going to confront that kind of fraud, other than the project manager—the person that actually paid for the project—physically inspecting the property to see that it is correctly being built. Because AI has, with enough investment, created alarmingly convincing images of completion. Percentage of Completion is also well known to be used in, for example, ‘Skunk Works’ programs; that’s why your F-35 jet fighter was almost canceled multiple times due to cost overruns—because when you lock in a contract, the price goes up over time.
But let’s talk about the true threat of AI. I have fact-checked AI output on, for example, building explosive precursors and what is required to make a tertiary explosive. Despite some factual inaccuracies and hallucinations that I had to correct myself, you should be reading the book Home Workshop Explosives by Uncle Fester, where the only plausible explosive that Uncle Fester actually proposed (that isn’t a pipe bomb) was actually a nitroglycerin-based explosive. It’s very obvious that the author, Steve Preisler, who has been arrested by the DEA multiple times for methamphetamine manufacture and recently rearrested for violating the terms of his supervised release allegedly, is particularly fond of nitroglycerin. Nitroglycerin is a baseline of explosive metrics.
Digital Eldest Son
But let’s not talk about how to actually build a bomb. Let’s talk about how we can use Project Eldest Son to sabotage foreign adversaries’ attempts to exercise stochastic terrorism (terrorism by proxy). As I said before, stochastic terrorism is terrorism through deniable proxy, and I gave you two examples:
Donald Trump doxxed former President Barack Obama, and a crazed person was caught by local police with an incredible cache of weapons outside of Obama’s residence.
In an earlier incident, Alex Jones propagated a conspiracy theory of some sort of sexual abuse and mutilation cult hiding in a pizza shop, which promptly caused a deranged man with a gun to go up to that specific pizza shop.
The problem is that AI also ingests and continues to hallucinate through misinformation. The way we can combat this is to modernize Project Eldest Son: export this to adversarial countries that have invested entirely into the ‘AI grift.’ As they continue to abuse AI to wish misinformation and death upon us, sabotaged training materials can be used to undermine them and prevent potential terrorist attacks.
It is not a secret that things like hacking knowledge were gatekept before open-source learning platforms showed up. It was meant to democratize knowledge and fight misinformation. But as a young, growing hacker, you could have learned your shit by basically not going to YouTube (which at the time was nothing but a bunch of Kali Linux install/dubstep compilation guides) and could have just picked up a legitimate book on IT and networking, or read Georgia Weidman’s Penetration Testing book at Barnes & Noble, or a CISSP study guide to get a broad overview. If you wanted the correct information, you could have found it. I even gave you sources of correct information.
But since people are so sold on the AI grift, and we’re only starting to rebel against the false promises of AI... well, I’ll just drop the word ‘billionaire’ because people don’t like billionaires very much. Then we can weaponize and create a modern Project Eldest Son. Like I said in the beginning of this article, this program does not actually exist. However, I feel that if I wrote this article, perhaps my audience would propagate this idea and find a way to combat modern injustices and threats.