Re: Skynet not a fantasy
When October Revolution happened in Russia the first thing Bolsheviks did was taking over Post and Telegraph. Add banks to it, and you are done.
Well, you would. Wouldn't you?
Imagine that you are given the job of conducting a revolution. This is not something that many of us will have put much thought into, but my first thought is that you'd have to remove the people at the top of the existing authority structure.
My second thought is that if you did that then they'd be back in power the day afterwards because they'd send out orders saying "we are being overthrown; arrest the imposters and release us!" to the police/army/airforce/navy" whom would likely be exceedingly confused as to the situation and probably a situation that they don't have a response plan prepared for, but after that then they'd probably do a recon, establish the forces holding the capitol and then move in forces to retake it and jail the insurrectionists.
Therefore, you'd have to separate those leaders from their security apparatus, and that would require technically severing their command control and communications. To reduce the chance of a spontaneous counter uprising then you'd want to wage a long propaganda campaign to separate those leaders from public support to reduce the risk that people at a low level would turn on the people guilty of high treason and eliminate them.
You'd also want control of news and communications as so far as possible to control inconvenient facts making their way down to people who might want to do something about it until it's way too late and you have control of the security apparatus. Modern technology has probably actually made this considerably more difficult to do than in ye olde days.
Aircraft won't be affected, because the designers were paranoid about stuff like this. I wouldn't get in anything that does over the air updates and allows the car access to steering commands, but everything else ought to be safe.
I'd also note that Britain would be a lot more difficult to do this to than many countries; in many countries the politicians actually have direct control over the security apparatus; in the UK all the security forces are sworn to the Crown with day to day control vested in their own chain of command with policy direction from politicians, so in addition to taking out parliament you'd also have to take out the King, everybody in the line of succession in the Royal Family and hundreds of different top level people in the police, army, air force, navy, MI5, GCHQ etc. One sees why our last revolution was the glorious revolution back in 1688 where the King was effectively fired and then replaced with a foreign prince who could bring in his own army to prevent a possible counter revolution.
Doing it in an autocracy (say Russia) would be both easier and more difficult; I doubt that there would be any opposition to offing Putin at a low level and none at a high level if you could take change of the KGB/FSB, however he has a large (regiment sized?) personal guard who you'd probably have to kill in their entirety to do it. One sees why he's busily getting Wagner slaughtered in as large job lots as possible; they are actually a direct threat to him.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
