OUR PICKSProtecting American Investments in AI | Stochastic Terrorism | More Countries Want Nuclear Weapons, and more
· A Summer of Blackouts? Wheezing Power Grid Leaves States at Risk
· First Amendment Absolutism and Florida’s Social Media Law
· Protecting American Investments in AI
· The Buffalo Shooter, Stochastic Terrorism, and How to Counter It
· Even After Shootings, Experts Warn Against Cellphones in Schools
· Will More Countries Want Nuclear Weapons After the War in Ukraine?
· Racist and Violent Ideas Jump from Web’s Fringes to Mainstream Sites
· Our Narrative of Mass Shootings Is Killing Us
A Summer of Blackouts? Wheezing Power Grid Leaves States at Risk (Evan Halper, Washington Post)
Why the grid could buckle in large areas of the country as temperatures rise
First Amendment Absolutism and Florida’s Social Media Law (Alan Z. Rozenshtein, Lawfare)
The Eleventh Circuit’s opinion striking down most of Florida’s controversial social media law mostly gets the First Amendment right but also shortchanges the important government interests at stake.
Protecting American Investments in AI (Brian Drake, War on the Rocks)
Artificial intelligence is the most disruptive technology since the advent of nuclear fission. With market growth projections in the billions, AI is likely to infiltrate every aspect of life in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. Intelligence services will acutely feel the impact of AI as it opens new opportunities for and vulnerabilities to stealing secrets. Both Russia and China have prepared for this future through rapid AI adoption, using economic espionage against AI companies, and optimizing offensive intelligence to defeat opponent AI programs. The United States is woefully unprepared for the methods these adversaries will employ. Developing a robust counterintelligence strategy, security posture, and partnership structure for AI is vital to protecting the American economy and its intelligence services.
If intelligence is collecting and understanding secrets, counterintelligence is the other side of the coin. Counterintelligence protects sources and methods amassing information and disrupts adversary intelligence collection. Counterintelligence, as it stands today, is mostly reactive, under-resourced, and viewed as a paranoid sect of the intelligence community. As a result, the community’s major AI investments do not include counterintelligence missions. U.S. intelligence uses AI mostly for dissecting information about other countries’ militaries, processing dynamic data, and finding strategic weapons. All the while, counterintelligence considerations to protect those investments and negate adversary AI ecosystems are falling by the wayside.
