AI Has a Political Problem | The Hack-for-Hire Industry | Resilient Supply Chains, and more

AI Has a Political Problem  (Patrick Tucker, Defense One)
Left-leaning media outlets are more skeptical of artificial intelligence than right-leaning outlets, a new study shows, which could make a significant difference in voters’ attitudes toward military and government use of AI—as well as how those technologies are regulated. 
The study, published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science in September and made public last week, looked at the way media outlets such as the Washington Post, CNN, the New York Post, and The Wall Street Journal, discussed AI, paying particular attention to specific sentiment tags to determine whether the coverage was positive or negative. The authors found “that liberal-leaning media show a higher aversion to AI than conservative-leaning media,” they wrote. “These partisan media differences toward AI are driven by liberal-leaning media’s greater concern about AI’s ability to magnify societal biases.”
The authors also note that social justice protests and campaigns that emerged after the 2020 death of George Floyd had a broad effect on the sentiment toward AI

The Hack-for-Hire Industry: Death by a Thousand Cuts + When Theft Doesn’t Work… Troll  (Tom Uren, Lawfare)
Reuters has published a report describing how the Indian firm Appin became ground zero for what grew into India’s hack-for-hire industry. 
Appin launched as an educational start up but pivoted into mercenary hacking and its alumni have spawned a number of copycat hack-for-hire firms. The industry is a scourge that subverts legal and commercial processes, but each individual hack-for-hire incident is difficult to prosecute in a way that deters the companies behind it.  
In a report last year Reuters revealed that email providers had provided access to a database of more than 80,000 emails sent by Indian hacking firms. 

Kenneth Chesebro: A Chief Architect of the False Elector Scheme  (Tom Joscelyn and Norman L. Eisen, Just Security)
Chesebro apparently played a crucial role in the alleged offenses in the indictment. We illustrated that through analyzing his part in the alleged RICO conspiracy charged in Count 1, encompassing the entirety of the effort to overturn the 2020 election. The State may be able to utilize Chesebro’s obligation to testify truthfully and provide documents, as well as the obligations of Ellis, Powell, and Hall to marshal additional support that the other co-defendants (1) knowingly and willfully (2) joined a conspiracy to unlawfully change the outcome of the election in favor of Trump which itself contained a common plan or purpose to commit two or more acts of racketeering activity; and (3) that one or more of the conspirators committed an overt act to effect the object of the conspiracy. The significant strength of the case in Georgia indicates the potential for similar charges to be brought successfully elsewhere, including other states. We think the facts analyzed in this article illuminate Chesebro’s role in the conspiracy to overturn the election charged in federal court as well.

Telegram’s Bans on Extremist Channels Aren’t Really Bans  (Vitoria Elliott, Wired)
In the wake of the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, people concerned about online extremism turned their attention to the encrypted messaging app Telegram, where a Hamas-aligned group posted graphic images of the group’s attacks to a channel that now has 1.9 million followers. That content was then shared widely across social media. Following public pressure on Apple and Google several weeks into the Israel-Hamas war, Telegram “restricted” two of the major channels used by Hamas. But it did not, as it may appear to some users, ban them. A WIRED investigation reveals that rather than ban or delete Hamas channels or those run by right-wing extremist groups, Telegram is hiding them from the users of the two major app stores, but they are still there. Some of the content from restricted channels is being shared broadly in unrestricted ones—despite Telegram’s mechanisms for stopping the sharing of such content. The findings show that while Telegram makes some of its most violative communities difficult to find, the people in restricted channels are still able to spread their messages, experts say, and the channels continue to function as spaces of radicalization.