Death of an Open A.I. Whistleblower

Todayville

Published

8 months ago

9 minute read

By John Leake

Suchir Balaji was trying to warn the world of the dangers of Open A.I. when he was found dead in his apartment. His story suggests that San Francisco has become an open sewer of corruption.

According to Wikipedia:

Suchir Balaji (1998 – November 26, 2024) was an artificial intelligence researcher and former employee of OpenAI, where he worked from 2020 until 2024. He gained attention for his whistleblowing activities related to artificial intelligence ethics and the inner workings of OpenAI.

Balaji was found dead in his home on November 26, 2024. San Francisco authorities determined the death was a suicide, though Balaji’s parents have disputed the verdict.

Balaji’s mother just gave an extraordinary interview with Tucker Carlson that is well worth watching.

If her narrative is indeed accurate, it indicates that someone has induced key decision makers within the San Francisco Police and Medical Examiner’s Office to turn a blind eye to the obvious indications that Balaji was murdered. Based on the story that his mother told Tucker Carlson, the key corrupt figure in the medical examiner’s office is David Serrano Sewell—Executive Director of the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.

A quick Google search of Mr. Serrano Sewell resulted in a Feb. 8, 2024 report in the San Francisco Standard headlined San Francisco official likely tossed out human skull, lawsuit says. According to the report:

The disappearance of a human skull has spurred a lawsuit against the top administrator of San Francisco’s medical examiner’s office from an employee who alleges she faced retaliation for reporting the missing body part.

Sonia Kominek-Adachi alleges in a lawsuit filed Monday that she was terminated from her job as a death investigator after finding that the executive director of the office, David Serrano Sewell, may have “inexplicably” tossed the skull while rushing to clean up the office ahead of an inspection.

Kominek-Adachi made the discovery in January 2023 while doing an inventory of body parts held by the office, her lawsuit says. Her efforts to raise an alarm around the missing skull allegedly led up to her firing last October.

If the allegations of this lawsuit are true, they suggest that Mr. Serrano is an unscrupulous and vindictive man. According to the SF Gov website:

Serrano Sewell joined the OCME with over 16 years of experience developing management structures, building consensus, and achieving policy improvements in the public, nonprofit, and private sectors. He previously served as a Mayor’s aide, Deputy City Attorney, and a policy advocate for public and nonprofit hospitals.

In other words, he is an old denizen of the San Francisco city machine. If a mafia-like organization has penetrated the city administration, it would be well-served by having a key player run the medical examiner’s office.

According to Balaji’s mother, Poornima Ramarao, his death was an obvious murder that was crudely staged to look like a suicide. The responding police officers only spent forty minutes examining the scene, and then left the body in the apartment to be retrieved by medical examiner field agents the next day. If true, this was an act of breathtaking negligence.

I have written a book about two murders that were staged to look like suicides, and to me, Mrs. Ramarao’s story sounds highly credible. Balaji kept a pistol in his apartment for self defense because he felt that his life was possibly in danger. He was found shot in the head with this pistol, which was purportedly found in his hand. If his death was indeed a murder staged to look like a suicide, it raises the suspicion that the assailant knew that Balaji possessed this pistol and where he kept it in his apartment.

Balaji was found with a gunshot wound to his head—fired from above, the bullet apparently traversing downward through his face and missing his brain. However, he had also sustained what—based on his mother’s testimony—sounds like a blunt force injury on the left side of the head, suggesting a right-handed assailant initially struck him with a blunt instrument that may have knocked him unconscious or stunned him. The gunshot was apparently inflicted after the attack with the blunt instrument.

A fragment of a bloodstained whig found in the apartment suggests the assailant wore a whig in order to disguise himself in the event he was caught in a surveillance camera placed in the building’s main entrance. No surveillance camera was positioned over the entrance to Balaji’s apartment.

How did the assailant enter Balaji’s apartment? Did Balaji know the assailant and let him in? Alternatively, did the assailant somehow—perhaps through a contact in the building’s management—obtain a key to the apartment?

All of these questions could probably be easily answered with a proper investigation, but it sounds like the responding officers hastily concluded it was a suicide, and the medical examiner’s office hastily confirmed their initial perception. If good crime scene photographs could be obtained, a decent bloodstain pattern analyst could probably reconstruct what happened to Balaji.

Vernon J. Geberth, a retired Lieutenant-Commander of the New York City Police Department, has written extensively about how homicides are often erroneously perceived to be suicides by responding officers. The initial perception of suicide at a death scene often results in a lack of proper analysis. His essay The Seven Major Mistakes in Suicide Investigation should be required reading of every police officer whose job includes examining the scenes of unattended deaths.

However, judging by his mother’s testimony, Suchir Balaji’s death was obviously a murder staged to look like a suicide. Someone in a position of power decided it was best to perform only the most cursory investigation and to rule the manner of death suicide based on the mere fact that the pistol was purportedly found in the victim’s hand.

Readers who are interested in learning more about this kind of crime will find it interesting to watch my documentary film in which I examine two murders that were staged to look like suicides. Incidentally, the film is now showing in the Hollywood North International Film Festival. Please click on the image below to watch the film.

If you don’t have a full forty minutes to spare to watch the entire picture, please consider devoting just one second of your time to click on the vote button. Many thanks!

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Artificial Intelligence

UK Police Chief Hails Facial Recognition, Outlines Drone and AI Policing Plans

Published on September 16, 2025

Todayville

By Ken Macon

Any face in the crowd can be caught in the dragnet of a digital police state.

The steady spread of facial recognition technology onto Britain’s streets is drawing alarm from those who see it as a step toward mass surveillance, even as police leaders celebrate it as a powerful new weapon against crime.

Live Facial Recognition (LFR) is a system that scans people’s faces in public spaces and compares them against watchlists.

Civil liberties groups warn it normalizes biometric monitoring of ordinary citizens, while the Metropolitan Police insist it is already producing results.

Britain’s senior police leadership is promoting these biometric and artificial intelligence systems as central to the future of policing, with commissioner Sir Mark Rowley arguing that such tools are already transforming the way the Met operates.

Speaking to the TechUK trade association, Rowley described Live Facial Recognition (LFR) as a “game-changing tool” and pointed to more than 700 arrests linked to its use so far this year.

Camera vans stationed on streets have been deployed to flag people wanted for serious crimes or those breaking license conditions.

Rowley highlighted a recent deployment at the Notting Hill Carnival, where he joined officers using LFR.

“Every officer I spoke to was energized by the potential,” he said to The Sun. According to the commissioner, the weekend brought 61 arrests, including individuals sought in cases of serious violence and offenses against women and girls.

Rowley claimed that the technology played “a critical role” in making the carnival safer.

Beyond facial recognition, Rowley spoke of expanding the Met’s reliance on drones. “From searching for missing people, to arriving quickly at serious traffic incidents, or replacing the expensive and noisy helicopter at large public events,” he said, “done well, drones will be another tool to help officers make faster, more informed decisions on the ground.”

The commissioner also promoted the V100 program, which draws on data analysis to focus resources on those considered the highest risk to women.

He said this initiative has already led to the conviction of more than 160 offenders he described as “the most prolific and predatory” in London.

Artificial Intelligence is being tested in other areas too, particularly to review CCTV footage.

Rowley noted the labour involved in manually tracing suspects through crowded areas. “Take Oxford Street, with 27 junctions—a trawl to identify a suspect’s route can take two days,” he explained.

“Now imagine telling AI to find clips of a male wearing a red baseball cap between X and Y hours, and getting results in hours. That’s game-changing.”

While the Met portrays these systems as advances in crime prevention, their deployment raises questions about surveillance creeping deeper into everyday life.

Expansions in facial recognition, drone monitoring, and algorithmic analysis are often introduced as matters of efficiency and safety, but they risk building an infrastructure of constant observation where privacy rights are gradually eroded.

Shaun Thompson’s case has already been cited by campaigners as evidence of the risks that come with rolling out facial recognition on public streets.

He was mistakenly identified by the technology, stopped, and treated as though he were a wanted suspect before the error was realized.

Incidents like this highlight the danger of false matches and the lack of safeguards around biometric surveillance.

For ordinary people, the impact is clear: even if you have done nothing wrong, you can still find yourself pulled into a system that treats you as guilty first and asks questions later.

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Artificial Intelligence

What are data centers and why do they matter?

Published on September 14, 2025

Todayville

From The Center Square

By Shirleen Guerra

Data centers may not be visible to most Americans, but they are shaping everything from electricity use to how communities grow.

These facilities house the servers that process nearly all digital activity, from online shopping and streaming to banking and health care. As the backbone of artificial intelligence and cloud computing, they have expanded at a pace few other industries can match.

Research from Synergy Research Group shows the number of hyperscale data centers worldwide doubled in just five years, reaching 1,136 by the end of 2024. The U.S. now accounts for 54% of that total capacity, more than China and Europe combined. Northern Virginia and the Beijing metro area together make up about 20% of the global market.

John Dinsdale, chief analyst with Synergy Research, said in an email to The Center Square that a simple way to describe data centers is to think of them as part of a food chain.

“At the bottom of the food chain, you’re sitting at your desk with a desktop PC or laptop. All the computing power is on your device,” Dinsdale said.

The next step up is a small office server room, which provides shared storage and applications for employees.

“Next up the chain, you can go two different directions (or use a mix),” he explained.

One option is a colocation data center, where companies lease space instead of running their own physical facilities. That model can support a multitude of customers from a single operator, such as Equinix.

The other option is to move to public cloud computing.

“You buy access to computing resources only when you need them, and you only pay for what you use,” Dinsdale said.

Providers like Amazon, Microsoft and Google run massive data centers that support tens of thousands of servers. From the customer perspective, it may feel like having a private system, but in reality, these servers are shared resources supporting many organizations.

Cloud providers now operate at a scale that was “unthinkable ten years ago” and are referred to in the industry as hyperscale, Dinsdale added. These global networks of data centers support millions of customers and users.

“The advent of AI is pushing those data centers to the next level — way more sophisticated technology, and data centers that need to become a lot more powerful,” he said.

What is a data center?

At its simplest, a data center is a secure building filled with rows of servers that store, process and move information across the internet. Almost every digital action passes through them.

“A data center is like a library of server computers that both stores and processes a lot of internet and cloud data we use every day,” said Dr. Ali Mehrizi-Sani, director of the Power and Energy Center at Virginia Tech told The Center Square. “Imagine having thousands of high-performance computers working nonstop doing heavy calculations with their fans on. That will need a lot of power.”

Some are small enough to serve a hospital or university. Others, known as hyperscale facilities, belong to companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Meta, with footprints large enough to be measured in megawatts of electricity use.

How big is the industry?

Synergy’s analysis shows how dominant the U.S. has become. Fourteen of the world’s top 20 hyperscale data center markets are in the U.S., including Northern Virginia, Dallas and Silicon Valley. Other global hotspots include Greater Beijing, Dublin and Singapore.

In 2024 alone, 137 new hyperscale centers came online, continuing a steady pace of growth. Average facility size is also climbing. Synergy forecasts that total capacity could double again in less than four years, with 130 to 140 new hyperscale centers added annually.

The world’s largest operators are American technology giants. Amazon, Microsoft and Google together account for 59% of hyperscale capacity, followed by Meta, Apple, and companies such as Alibaba, Tencent and ByteDance.

How much power do they use?

Large data centers run by the top firms typically require 30 to 100 megawatts of power. To put that into perspective, one megawatt can power about 750 homes. That means a 50-70 megawatt facility consumes as much electricity as a small city.

“Building one data center is like adding an entirely new town to the grid,” Mehrizi-Sani said. “In fact, in Virginia, data centers already consume about 25% of the electricity in the state. In the United States, that number is about 3 to 4%.”

That demand requires extensive coordination with utilities.

“Data centers connect to the power grid much like other large loads, like factories and even towns do,” Mehrizi-Sani said. “Because they need so much electric power, utilities have to upgrade substations, lines and transformers to support them. Utilities also have to upgrade their control and protection equipment to accommodate the consumption of data centers.”

If not planned carefully, he added, new facilities can strain local power delivery and generation capacity. That is why every major project must undergo engineering reviews before connecting to the grid.

Why now?

The rapid rise of AI has supercharged an already fast-growing sector. Training models and running cloud services requires enormous computing power, which means facilities are being built faster and larger.

“AI and cloud drive the need to data centers,” Mehrizi-Sani said. “Training AI models and running cloud services require massive computing power, which means new data centers have to be built faster and larger than before.”

Dinsdale noted in a report that the industry’s scale has shifted sharply.

“The big difference now is the increased scale of growth. Historically the average size of new data centers was increasing gradually, but this trend has become supercharged in the last few quarters as companies build out AI-oriented infrastructure,” he said.

Why certain states lead the market

Different states and regions offer different advantages. According to a July 2025 report by Synergy Energy Group, Virginia became the leading hub because of relatively low electricity costs when the industry was expanding, availability of land in the early years and proximity to federal agencies and contractors.

Texas and California are also major markets, for reasons ranging from abundant energy to the presence of technology companies.

Internationally, Synergy’s analysis shows that China and Europe each account for about a third of the remaining capacity. Analysts expect growth to spread to other U.S. regions, including the South and Midwest, while markets in India, Australia, Spain and Saudi Arabia increase their share globally.

What is at stake?

For most Americans, data centers are invisible but indispensable. Almost everything digital depends on them.

“Streaming movies, online banking, virtual meetings and classes, weather forecasts, navigation apps, social media like Instagram, online storage and even some healthcare services” all run through data centers, Mehrizi-Sani said.

Synergy’s forecast suggests the trend is unlikely to slow.

“It is also very clear that the United States will continue to dwarf all other countries and regions as the main home for hyperscale infrastructure,” Dinsdale said.

This story is the first in a Center Square series examining how data centers are reshaping electricity demand, costs, tax incentives, the environment and national security.