Why America Fell Out of Love with Its Army | The Role of 'Active Clubs' in the American Far Right | Identifying Motivations Behind Mass Casualty Attacks, and more

Neo-Nazis in the U.S. No Longer See Backing Ukraine as a Worthy Cause  (Ben Makuch, Guardian)
Joshua Fisher-Birch, an analyst of the extreme right for the Counter Extremism Project, has kept tabs on rightwing extremists and their fascination with Ukraine. “Chatter among the American online extreme right regarding travel to Ukraine to fight against the Russian invasion has decreased in the last year,” he said, pointing out that in some cases talk about venturing to the war was “either never serious” or a blatant “attempt to raise money through crowdfunding, or was abandoned due to the brutal reality of the conflict or no longer seeing a goal for the American movement”. The threat of law enforcement has also acted as a major deterrent to rightwing extremists trying to join the Ukrainian war effort. “It’s also highly likely that efforts from both the US and Ukrainian governments made travel for these individuals more difficult,” he said. For European neo-Nazis, on the other hand, the conflict is on their doorstep. Unchecked Russian imperialism is still regarded as very much a close proximity threat by nationalist movements all over the continent. They see Americans and English speakers within their movement as ignorant to the reality of the Kremlin’s propaganda machine.

Man Allegedly Posted on Social Media That He Planned Racially Motivated Mass Violence: DOJ  (Luke Barr, ABC News)
A 26-year-old Florida man with ties to the Aryan white supremacist movement has been charged by federal prosecutors after he allegedly warned online “that he was planning to conduct a racially or … ethnically motivated mass casualty event,” according to court documents unsealed on Thursday. Alexander Lightner, of Venice, Florida, is charged with interstate communication of threats. He is accused of posting “several concerning” things on social media on Dec. 29, the court documents state. “2024 there shall be saints u fuq,” he allegedly wrote in one post. “I’ll delete this, but I say to you there is no surrender only death. Only purpose. It’s so over. It’s so begun.” The reference to “saints” is “an individual who commits an act of violence in furtherance of white supremacist and accelerationist goals,” according to the Department of Justice. On social media, Lightner allegedly also made reference to getting a “highscore” which, according to the DOJ, is a reference to the death toll amassed by an attacker who commits an act of mass violence.

HSToday Expert Threat Forecast: Part One – Terrorism  (Kristina Tanasichuk, HSToday)
In an election year, with risks and vulnerabilities facing the nation, experienced homeland security practitioners, a diverse group of professionals who have served both in and outside government, share their insights and concerns.

Mine-Spotting Drones and Tracked Robots: The Army’s Efforts to Breach Minefields with Tech  (Sam Skove, Defense One)
Faced with a thicket of mines, tank traps, and bunkers, future U.S. Army engineers might not rush to the front. Instead, they may reach for a remote control to choose from a menu of drones and tracked robots to sweep away the problem. 
Among the several units experimenting with new tech is the 18th Airborne at Fort Liberty, N.C., where engineers from the 20th Engineer Brigade ran a multi-day experiment in mid-December to test various options for breaching barbed wire, dragon’s teeth tank barriers, and deep ditches. 
Some of the greatest progress so far has come from drones, which the Army uses to map out the positions of enemy mines, said Maj. Scott Rayburn, who helped lead the experiments as operations officer for the 20th Engineer Brigade.  
The Army tested drone platforms such as the SkyRaider and small Anafi quadcopter, Rayburn said. The small, commercially available drones are not fielded in large numbers across the Army, but are approved for military use under the Defense Department’s Blue UAS program.  
The engineers then hung a variety of sensors on the drones, including LiDAR, to map the locations of possible mines. 
Using multiple types of sensors to identify mines is critical, Rayburn said. “No one camera is going to deliver everything that you need.”

Why America Fell Out of Love with Its Army  (Justin Overbaugh, Responsible Statecraft)
For the past several years now, a phalanx of defense officials and retired senior officers have been lamenting the dearth of people willing to serve in the U.S. military.
The problem is particularly acute for the Army, the largest of the U.S. forces, which fell short of its target by 25,000 recruits over the past two years. The situation is so grave that experts claim it imperils the all-volunteer force, an institution that has provided manpower for the American military for half a century.
If market dynamics are not the underlying cause of the crisis, what is? I believe that the Army fails to meet its recruiting goals not because of a challenging market environment, but rather because a sizable portion of the American public has lost trust in it and no longer sees it as an institution worthy of personal investment.
Professor of sociology Piotr Sztompka defines trust as “a bet about the future contingent actions of others.” He presents the concept of trust in two components: beliefs and commitment. Essentially, a person trusts when they believe something about the future and they act in accordance with this belief. This is directly relevant to recruiting: in a high trust environment, people are more likely to enlist because they have a reasonable expectation of future benefit.
Unfortunately, anyone considering service today can look to myriad examples of the Army failing to meet their end of the bargain. Whether it is a lack of adequate and safe housing for soldiers and their families, the persistence of sexual assault, an inability to address suicide rates or to accurately account for property and funds — or even to develop a comprehensive physical fitness test — the Army, and the Department of Defense more broadly, consistently fail to achieve results.
But these shortcomings, while disastrous, pale in comparison to the Army’s ultimate failure: the failure to win wars.

The New York Times’ Lawsuit Against OpenAI Could Have Major Implications for the Development of Machine Intelligence  (Mike Cook, The Conversation)
Last month, the New York Times newspaper filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, the owners of popular AI-based text-generation tool ChatGPT, over their alleged use of the Times’ articles in the data they use to train (improve) and test their systems.
They claim that OpenAI has infringed copyright by using their journalism as part of the process of creating ChatGPT. In doing so, the lawsuit claims, they have created a competing product that threatens their business. OpenAI’s response so far has been very cautious, but a key tenet outlined in a statement released by the company is that their use of online data falls under the principle known as “fair use”. This is because, OpenAI argues, they transform the work into something new in the process – the text generated by ChatGPT.
At the crux of this issue is the question of data use. What data do companies like OpenAI have a right to use, and what do concepts like “transform” really mean in these contexts? Questions like this, surrounding the data we train AI systems, or models, like ChatGPT on, remain a fierce academic battleground. The law often lags behind the behavior of industry.
If you’ve used AI to answer emails or summarize work for you, you might see ChatGPT as an end justifying the means. However, it perhaps should worry us if the only way to achieve that is by exempting specific corporate entities from laws that apply to everyone else.
Not only could that change the nature of debate around copyright lawsuits like this one, but it has the potential to change the way societies structure their legal system.