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Former White House Officials Say They Feared Putin Influenced the President’s Views on Ukraine and 2016 Campaign (Shane Harris, Josh Dawsey, and Carol D. Leonnig, Washington Post)
Almost from the moment he took office, President Trump seized on a theory that troubled his senior aides: Ukraine, he told them on many occasions, had tried to stop him from winning the White House.
After meeting privately in July 2017 with Russian President Vladi­mir Putin at the Group of 20 summit in Hamburg, Trump grew more insistent that Ukraine worked to defeat him, according to multiple former officials familiar with his assertions.
The president’s intense resistance to the assessment of U.S. intelligence agencies that Russia systematically interfered in the 2016 campaign — and the blame he cast instead on a rival country — led many of his advisers to think that Putin himself helped spur the idea of Ukraine’s culpability, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions.
One former senior White House official said Trump even stated so explicitly at one point, saying he knew Ukraine was the real culprit because “Putin told me.”
Two other former officials said the senior White House official described Trump’s comment to them.

A Year Inside a Growing American Terrorist Movement (James D. Walsh, New York Magazine)
Eleven years after Obama’s election, and three years into the Trump presidency, the threat of domestic terrorism can’t be ignored.

Why Some Cities and States Balk at Face Recognition Tech (Matt O’brien, AP)
Police departments around the U.S. are asking citizens to trust them to use facial recognition software as another handy tool in their crime-fighting toolbox. But some lawmakers—and even some technology giants—are hitting the brakes.

Meet the Mad Scientist Who Wrote the Book on How to Hunt Hackers (Andy Greenberg, Wired)
Thirty years ago, Cliff Stoll published The Cuckoo’s Egg, a book about his cat-and-mouse game with a KGB-sponsored hacker. Today, the internet is a far darker place—and Stoll has become a cybersecurity icon.

Facial-Recognition Technology Has a Racial-Bias Problem, According to a New Landmark Federal Study (Aaron Holmes, Business Insider)
Facial-recognition algorithms are more likely to misidentify people of color than white people, according to a federal study published on Thursday. The study found that black people and Asian people were up to 100 times as likely to produce a false positive than white men, and women were more likely to be misidentified than men across the board.

Death of Efforts to Regulate Autonomous Weapons Has Been Greatly Exaggerated (Neil C. Renic, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists)
The forecast looks gloomy for efforts to regulate emerging military technologies, such as lethal autonomous weapons systems, or LAWS. For example the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots has been striving since 2013 to secure a pre-emptive ban on the use of this weaponry, but no prohibition has materialized. Instead, some states have been intensifying their investment in autonomous weapons, in cooperation with the private sector. We seem to be moving ever closer to the use and normalization of this technology in war.
This raises two closely related questions: Has the regulation of LAWS failed?

How One City Hopes Language Monitoring Can Help It Defeat Hate(Charlotte Jee, MIT Technology Review)
Chattanooga, Tennessee, has the state’s worst record for racially motivated incidents. Now the city has called in the experts to monitor what is being said—and perhaps turn things around.