The Worst Hacks of 2023 | The Most Effective Way to Reduce Hate Crimes | An AI Future Is Much Shakier Than You Think, and more

Autocratic leaders of other countries will intuitively understand how to seek favor in such a system. To persuade the United States to overlook human-rights abuses, or to win approval for controversial arms sales, they will cultivate mid-level officials and steer development funds toward Trump-favored projects. 
It was just such a scenario, in which the virus of foreign interests imperceptibly implants itself in the American government, that the Founders most feared. They designed a system of government intended to forestall such efforts. But Trump has no regard for that system, and every incentive to replace it with one that will line his own coffers. Having long used the language of the five families, decrying snitches and rats, Trump will now have a chance to build a state worthy of his discourse.

Even Amid Texas Border Crackdown, Illegal Crossings Still High  (AP / VOA News)
Starting in March, Texas will allow police to arrest migrants who enter the state illegally and give local judges the authority to order them out of the country. The new law comes two years after Texas launched a smaller-scale operation to arrest migrants for trespassing. But although that operation was also intended to stem illegal crossings, there is little indication that it has done so.
The results raise questions about the impact arrests have on deterring immigration as Texas readies to give police even broader powers to apprehend migrants on charges of illegal entry. Civil rights organizations have already sued to stop the new law signed by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, calling it an unconstitutional overreach that encroaches on the U.S. government’s immigration authority.
On Thursday, the Justice Department told Abbott that it will also bring a lawsuit unless Texas reverses course on the new law by next week, according to a letter that was first obtained by Hearst Newspapers.
Since 2021, Texas authorities have arrested nearly 10,000 migrants on misdemeanor trespassing charges under what Abbott has called a “arrest and jail” operation: Border landowners enter agreements with the state authorizing trespassing arrests, clearing the way for law enforcement to apprehend migrants who enter the U.S. through those properties.
The arrests have drawn constitutional challenges in courts, including claims of due process violations. More recently, one landowner asked officials to stop the trespassing arrests on their property, claiming authorities never had permission in the first place.
Abbott had predicted the trespassing arrests would produce swift results. “When people start learning about this, they’re going to stop coming across the Texas border,” he told Fox News in July 2021, when Texas-Mexico border crossings reached 1.2 million that fiscal year.
That number has ticked up even higher over the past fiscal year, topping 1.5 million.

California Law Banning Most Firearms in Public Taking Effect as Legal Fight Over It Continues  (AP / VOA News)
A California law that bans people from carrying firearms in most public places will take effect on New Year’s Day, even as a court case continues to challenge the law.
A U.S. district judge issued a ruling Dec. 20 to block the law from taking effect, saying it violates the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and deprives people of their ability to defend themselves and their loved ones.
But on Saturday, a federal appeals court put a temporary hold on the district judge’s ruling. The appeals court decision allows the law to go into effect as the legal fight continues. Attorneys are scheduled to file arguments to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in January and in February.
The law, signed by Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, prohibits people from carrying concealed guns in 26 places including public parks and playgrounds, churches, banks and zoos.
The ban applies regardless of whether the person has a permit to carry a concealed weapon. One exception is for privately owned businesses that put up signs saying people are allowed to bring guns on their premises.

An AI Future Is Much Shakier Than You Think  (Dave Karpf, Foreign Policy)
The story that I often hear from AI evangelists is that technologies such as ChatGPT are here, and they are inevitable. You can’t put this genie back in the bottle. If outdated copyright laws are at odds with the scraping behavior of large language models, then our copyright law will surely need to bend as a result.
And to them I can only say: Remember the Ghost of Napster. We do not live in the future that seemed certain during the Napster era. We need not live in the future that seems certain to AI evangelists today. Right now, ChatGPT itself is a money-losing proposition, one that racks up losses with every question. It’s possible that it will be another Amazon, turning initial losses into monopoly power. But it might also be another WeWork, a company that so heavily inflated its own revenue projections that it couldn’t break even in today’s rental market.
Keep in mind it was only a year or two ago that the inevitable future of music and art was supposed to be Web3 and the mighty blockchain. NFTs weren’t just going to be receipts for pictures of cartoon apes, they were also going to be a new payment mechanism that funded artists. The whole thing evaporated once the crypto bubble burst. Digital futures are flimsy things.
The Ghost of Napster whispers that the trajectory of no technology is inevitable. New technologies are not exempt from old laws. Some digital disruptors can spend years skirting existing regulations (see, for instance, Uber and the entire gig economy), but copyright catches up faster than labor regulations. The trajectory of any emerging technology is not inevitable, especially when its intended trajectory undermines the interests of existing industries. Copyright law doesn’t bend to accommodate your vision of the digital future—the digital future bends to accommodate copyright law.
The boundaries of our creative industries are being renegotiated. Let’s hope that, this time, the artists themselves have a seat at the table.

The Most Effective Way to Reduce Hate Crimes  (Charles Fain Lehman, The Atlantic)
The tendency to emphasize the “hate” in hate crimes makes sense, given how we understand them. When we think about hate criminals, we often imagine what the criminologists Jack McDevitt and Jack Levin have called “mission” offenders: indefatigable bigots dead set on harming the groups they hate. And indeed, the worst hate criminals, like the Jacksonville shooter, tend to fit this profile. But when we focus on the worst cases, we miss something important about the others. Less than 1 percent of offenders are on a “mission,” according to an analysis of data from Boston (an admittedly non-representative location) from July 1991 to December 1992 that McDevitt and Levin published with the criminal-justice researcher Susan Bennett. By contrast, up to two-thirds are what McDevitt, Levin, and Bennett characterize as “thrill” offenders—those doing it for the excitement of victimizing someone.
Many hate crimes, in other words, are characterized not just by hate, but also by impulsive, disinhibited behavior. That kind of behavior characterizes much non-hate-criminal offending too, from car theft for joyrides to shoot-outs incited by minor slights. The average hate-crime offender is not a “specialist” in hate crime. Rather, most have extensive criminal histories and are similar in important ways to other criminals.
Of course, much like other crimes, hate crimes can have causes for which the appropriate remedy is not the criminal-justice system. Many people who commit hate crimes are mentally ill—nearly half of those arrested for hate crimes in New York City in the first half of 2022 were. Some hate-crime offenders are homeless or addicted to drugs, situations that may contribute to their offending. Treatment and social services are sometimes the right remedy in such cases, especially if they reduce a person’s recidivism risk.
Whether through the criminal-justice or social-services system, though, policy makers should address hate crimes by focusing on individual offenders, rather than trying to fight bigotry writ large. Hate, to be sure, is a challenge to a free, tolerant society. But a government response to hate crime that attempts to control hate qua hate is both inefficient and a potential threat to that same freedom. Far better—for victims, for public safety, and for society—to understand that hate criminals are criminals, and combat their crimes as crimes.

The Worst Hacks of 2023  (Lily Hay Newman, Wired)
With political polarization, unrest, and violence escalating in many regions of the world, 2023 was fraught with uncertainty and tragedy. In digital security, though, the year felt more like a Groundhog Day of incidents caused by classic types of attacks, like phishing and ransomware, rather than a roller coaster of offensive hacking innovation.
The cybersecurity slog will no doubt continue in 2024, but to cap off the past 12 months, here’s WIRED’s look back at the year’s worst breaches, leaks, ransomware attacks, digital extortion cases, and state-sponsored hacking campaigns. Stay alert, and stay safe out there.

Electric Cars Are Already Upending American  (Saahil Desai, The Atlantic)
Electric cars are already upending America. In 2023, our battery-powered future became so much more real—a boom in sales and new models is finally starting to push us into the post-gas age. Americans are on track to buy a record 1.44 million of them in 2023, according to a forecast by BloombergNEF, about the same number sold from 2016 to 2021 total. “This was the year that EVs went from experiments, or technological demonstrations, and became mature vehicles,” Gil Tal, the director of the Electric Vehicle Research Center at UC Davis, told me. They are beginning to transform not just the automotive industry, but also the very meaning of a car itself.
If the story of American EVs has long hinged on one company—Tesla—then this was the year that these cars became untethered from Elon Musk’s brand. “We’re at a point where EVs aren’t necessarily exclusively for the upper, upper, upper class,” Robby DeGraff, an analyst at the market-research firm AutoPacific, told me. If you wanted an electric car five years ago, you could choose from among various Tesla models, the Chevy Bolt, the Nissan Leaf—and that was really it. Now EVs come in more makes and models than Baskin-Robbins ice-cream flavors. We have more luxury sedans to vie with Tesla, but also cheaper five-seaters, SUVs, Hummers, pickup trucks, and … however you might categorize the Cybertruck. Nearly 40 new EVs have debuted since the start of 2022, and they are far more advanced than their ancestors. For $40,000, the Hyundai Ioniq 6, released this year, can get you 360 miles on a single charge; in 2018, for only a slightly lower cost, a Nissan Leaf couldn’t go half that distance.