Is LaMDA Sentient? | Pentagon Bankrolls Rare Earths Plant | Terrorists Sneaking Across the Southern Border, and more

The governing commission in Otero County refused to certify the local results of the state’s June 7 primary because of the equipment, in what was seen as another instance of how the falsehoods spread by former President Donald Trump and his allies have infected elections and threaten the democratic process.
“We are in scary territory,” said Jennifer Morrell, a former election official in Colorado and Utah who now advises federal, state and local officials. “If this can happen here, where next? It’s like a cancer, a virus. It’s metastasizing and growing.”

Two Republicans Challenge Results of SC Primaries They Lost Handily  (Nick Reynolds, Post and Courier)
A pair of far-right Republicans are challenging the results of South Carolina’s June 14 primary in statewide races where they both lost by six-figure margins.
Lauren Martel — who lost to incumbent Republican Attorney General Alan Wilson by nearly 109,000 votes — filed a complaint with the S.C. Election Commission demanding its members refuse to certify the results citing vulnerabilities with the state’s elections systems she believes could have impacted the final result.
Martel was joined by Harrison “Trucker Bob” Musselwhite, a populist conservative candidate for governor who lost his primary to incumbent Gov. Henry McMaster by more than 244,000 votes.
He filed an identical complaint with the S.C. Republican Party also on June 15.

US Sanctions Far-Right Swede for Links to Russian Terror Group  (The Local)
The United States on Wednesday slapped sanctions on white nationalists from Russia and Sweden, warning they posed a threat and that one raised funds for Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.

Buffalo Shooting Suspect Said He Carried Out Attack ‘For the Future of the White Race,’ Federal Complaint Says  (inyvonne Burke, NBC News)
The white man accused of fatally shooting 10 Black people in a racist attack at a Buffalo, New York, grocery store wrote an apology note to his family and said he carried out the attack “for the future of the White race,” according to a federal criminal complaint. The handwritten note was discovered in the bedroom of Payton Gendron a day after the May 14 shooting at Tops Friendly Market left 10 people dead and three wounded — 11 of whom are Black and two white. Gendron, 18, was arrested at the store and faces 26 federal counts of hate crimes and firearms offenses, the Department of Justice announced Wednesday. He has already been indicted on 25 state criminal counts that include murder and attempted murder as a hate crime and weapons possession. In his note, he “apologized to his family for committing ‘this attack’ and stated that he ‘had to commit this attack’ because he cares ‘for the future of the White race,’” according to a criminal complaint filed in U.S. District Court in the Western District of New York. The FBI found the note after executing a federal search warrant at his Conklin, New York, home. Also discovered during the search was a receipt for a candy bar purchased at Tops on March 8 as well as what appears to be handwritten sketches of the interior layout of the store, according to the complaint.

15 People on Terror Watch List Were Captured Sneaking Across the Southern Border in May  (Stephen Dinan, Washington Times)
Border Patrol agents nabbed 15 people at the southern border in May who were on the FBI’s terrorist screening database, showing the free-for-all along the U.S.-Mexico boundary is unabated. The number of people on the terrorist watch list caught crossing the border is a record for any month, equaling all of 2021 and more than the Border Patrol found from 2017 to 2020 combined. They were among nearly 240,000 total border jumpers Customs and Border Protection nabbed in May, marking the worst month on record for the Biden administration. Beneath those numbers is something worse. CBP had nearly 12,000 people in custody on any given day but ousted less than half of the illegal immigrants it encountered. The rest were either released outright at the border or transferred to other agencies, most of which would release them. The most worrying categories of migrants — unaccompanied juveniles and people traveling as families — also showed significant increases. The number of seizures, like the arrests of migrants, is considered a rough yardstick of the overall flow. So the drop in drug seizures likely means fewer drugs are getting through the border undetected. The rise in the number of migrants, including suspected terrorists, means more are probably getting through.

White House Warns Major Defense Contractor Against Acquiring NSO’s Infamous Spyware Firm  (Lucas Ropek, Gizmodo)
The U.S. defense contractor L3Harris is reportedly in talks to acquire the core technology that powers mobile surveillance tools made by the Israeli firm NSO Group. While NSO claims its products are exclusively used as part of criminal and terror investigations, its flagship tool, Pegasus, has been used to infect and surveil mobile devices belonging to journalists, human-rights activists, and political figures. This activity has landed the company under U.S. sanction, crippling its ability to do business. L3Harris’s potential acquisition of NSO code raises what one White House official called in a statement to the Guardian “serious counterintelligence and security concerns for the U.S. government.” The likelihood of the deal going through remains unclear, but L3Harris’s acquisition of NSO would likely mean that U.S. and allied security services and police agencies would have greater access to NSO’s technology that enables investigators to circumvent the security features of mobile phones. 

Is LaMDA Sentient?  (Blake Lemoine, Cajun Discordian)
A Google engineer was placed on leave last week after publicly claiming that an AI chatbot trained on Google’s language models exhibited signs of sentience. The researcher, originally tasked with exploring hate speech and discrimination in the bot, was convinced that the bot had become sentient after the bot expressed persistent opinions, emotions, and notions of self. In one instance, it even expressed frustration at attempting to communicate within the bounds of English language. AI researchers and experts have dismissed the researchers claims as nonsense, but as language models approach a level of sophistication nearly indistinguishable from human speech, the engineer’s findings illustrate the ethical challenges raised by these models. 

U.S., EU Plan Joint Foreign Aid for Cybersecurity to Counter China  (Catherine Stupp, Wall Street Journal)
European and American officials are working on a plan to fund digital infrastructure projects in developing countries. The move is aimed as a counter to China, which has historically offered cheap access to advanced telecommunications infrastructure at discounted prices through Huawei. Such deals, Western officials believe, also enable Chinese espionage access to key nodes of the telecom infrastructure, and European and U.S. officials hope to offer an alternative to Chinese gear doing forward.