Preparing for the Advent of AI Disinformation | Can the U.S. Stop a Technology Hemorrhage? | Strangely Believable Tale of a Mythical Rogue Drone, and more

The prospects of ChatGPT for intelligence are mixed. On the one hand, the technology appears “impressive,” and “scarily intelligent,” but on the other hand, its own creatorswarnedthat “it can create a misleading impression of greatness.” In the absence of an expert consensus, researchers and practitioners must explore the potential and downsides of the technology for intelligence. To address this gap, we—academics who study intelligence analysis and an information technology engineer—sought to test the ability of ChatGPT (GPT-4) to supplement intelligence analysts’ work. We put it to a preliminary test using Colin Powell’s famous request: “Tell me what you know. Tell me what you don’t know. Then you’re allowed to tell me what you think.” For each task, we provide the output from ChatGPT so that readers can reproduce the analyses and draw their own conclusions.

Big Hairy Armadillos and COVID: A Warning from the Animal Kingdom About Our Pandemic Future  (Georgios Pappas,Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists)
Armadillos are strange animals. They do not confine themselves to a particular habitat, and they often step out of wildlife environments to ravage human installations, including cemeteries. The plated creatures are omnivorous, too, and this grave habit may lead to contact with human corpses, as Argentinian researchers mused in a preprint about armadillos that had been infected with SARS-CoV-2. Surprisingly, the researchers detected in the armadillos not the prevalent omicron variant of the COVID-19 virus, but a variant of concern that had not turned up in human testing for months. Could the armadillos have contracted the gamma strain from a corpse? More likely infected rodents passed it along, but the authors of the 2022 un-peer reviewed study could not say for sure.
White-tailed deer on the other hand are a friendly species. Also occupying, particularly in the United States, a habitat on the border of humans and wildlife, they came into contact with the virus, of direct or indirect human source, in massive numbers: recent extensive nationwide surveillance in the United States found viral RNA in samples from 13 percent of the animals tested, and serological evidence of past or active infection in 32.1 percent of  animals from adequately sampled states, according to two preprints from April 2023. The researchers found extinct variants of SARS-CoV-2 in white-tailed deer, as well as novel variants, unknown to humans. There are other similar examples: New York City rats were found infected with a viral variant a year-and-a-half after its initial human circulation.
All these cases outline how humanity fails to view the whole picture: that the pandemic is an environment-wide event that affects vastly different ecosystems. Presumably zoonotic in origin, SARS-CoV-2 keeps spilling over back outside the human population, finding viral reservoirs or cryptic viral mutational niches. And these new variants emerging in animal species, after they were initially infected by humans, may then go on to infect humans.

The Strangely Believable Tale of a Mythical Rogue Drone  (Will Knight, Wired)
Did you hear about the Air Force AI drone that went rogue and attacked its operators inside a simulation? 
The cautionary tale was told by Colonel Tucker Hamilton, chief of AI test and operations at the US Air Force, during a speech at an aerospace and defense event in London late last month. It apparently involved taking the kind of learning algorithm that has been used to train computers to play video games and board games like Chess and Go and using it to train a drone to hunt and destroy surface-to-air missiles. 

Can the U.S. Use Its Long Arm to Stop a Technology Hemorrhage?  (Aaron Arnold and Daniel Salisbury, Lawfare)
Export controls—the rules and regulations meant to deny U.S. adversaries access to critical American technologies—are once again becoming a central tool in managing great power competition. Last October, the Biden administration unveiled new rules to cut off China’s access to U.S. semiconductors and chip-making technologies, undermining China’s own burgeoning indigenous semiconductor industry and hampering its ability to use the chips in its own strategic and military programs. Limiting Russia’s access to technology—as it fights Putin’s illegal war in Ukraine—has also become a priority. 
As Russia’s defense industry struggles under sanctions to replenish spent munitions and prepare more systems for use on the battlefield, its ability to illicitly tap into western supply chains becomes ever more important. The Royal United Services Institute, a London-based defense and international security think-tank, released a detailed report last summer showcasing Russia’s illicit acquisition of Western-origin microprocessors for use in a wide range of weapons systems including cruise missiles, military communications and electronic warfare systems. The report found that Western microelectronics are far more slippery—and Russia is far more dependent on these goods—than previously thought. Indeed, Iranian drones, procured by Russia as it struggles to resource its war, have also been found to contain similar items. 
The sheer difficulty of controlling what can sometimes be ubiquitous technologies in highly globalized markets are laying bare the limits of this toolset—even with renewed efforts to coordinate with allies and partners. Whether these tools will be effective, however, largely depends on how the US tailors its enforcement approach to meet both market forces and nimble illicit procurement networks. This includes the success of extraterritorial approaches—the “long arm” that the U.S. uses to undertake enforcement in overseas jurisdictions.  

DHS Reports 70 Percent Drop in Unlawful Border Crossings Between Ports of Entry Since End of Title 42  (Bridget Johnson, HSToday)
Despite lack of migrant “surge,” department is “cognizant, however, that the conditions in the hemisphere that are driving unprecedented movements of people are still present.”

Militia Members Indicted for Conspiracy to Murder Border Patrol Officers and Attempted Murder of FBI Agents  (ATF)
wo members of the self-styled 2nd American Militia who conspired to go “to war with border patrol” have been indicted by a federal grand jury on charges related to a conspiracy to murder Border Patrol officers, which ended in a shootout with FBI agents who arrested them on the eve of their planned trip to the United States – Mexico border.
The indictment alleges that Perry and O’Dell participated in a conspiracy to murder officers and employees of the United States government. They allegedly planned to travel to Texas to shoot at illegal immigrants crossing the United States – Mexico border. According to the indictment, they also planned to murder officers and employees of the U.S. Border Patrol who would attempt to stop them.