OUR PICKSInside the City Policed by Machines | The Cyber Security Problem of Military Electrification | AI Giants Aren’t Doing Enough to Protect Their Secrets
· A Republican Election Clerk vs. Trump Die-Hards in a World of Lies
Cindy Elgan has overseen elections in rural Nevada without incident for 20 years, but now even her neighbors wonder if she’s part of “the deep state cabal”
· The Ukraine War Has Led to Radical Changes in the U.S. Army’s New Super Tank Design
Each new generation of tanks is heavier than the last. Not this time
· Nuclear Research Body Is Backdoor for Russian Spies, Says Ukraine
CERN has been urged to end an agreement with a body that is almost entirely made up of former Warsaw Pact nations and dominated by Moscow
· Power and Tension: The Cyber Security Problem of Military Electrification
What would it take for someone to hack a tank?
· US National Security Experts Warn AI Giants Aren’t Doing Enough to Protect Their Secrets
Susan Rice, who helped the White House broker an AI safety agreement with OpenAI and other tech companies, says she’s worried China will steal American AI secrets
· Inside the City Policed by Machines
A WIRED analysis of 22 million coordinates mapped out how police drones are used in a California border city. Some residents welcome the robots; others feel they now live in a surveillance dystopia
A Republican Election Clerk vs. Trump Die-Hards in a World of Lies (Eli Saslow, New York Times)
Cindy Elgan glanced into the lobby of her office and saw a sheriff’s deputy waiting at the front counter. “Let’s start a video recording, just in case this goes sideways,” Elgan, 65, told one of her employees in the Esmeralda County clerk’s office. She had come to expect skepticism, conspiracy theories and even threats related to her job as an election administrator. She grabbed her annotated booklet of Nevada state laws, said a prayer for patience and walked into the lobby to confront the latest challenge to America’s electoral process.
A Trump supporter handed her a notarized recall notice.It was something she’d feared for the last three and a half years, ever since former President Donald J. Trump lost the 2020 election, and his denials and distortions spread outward from the White House to even the country’s most remote places, like Esmeralda County. It had neither a stoplight nor a high school, and Elgan knew most of the 620 voters on sight. Trump won the county with 82 percent of the vote despite losing Nevada. In the days after the election, some residents began to suspect that he should have won by even more, and they parroted Trump’s talking points and brought their complaints to the county’s monthly commissioner meetings.
They falsely claimed the election was stolen by voting software designed in Venezuela, or by election machines made in China. They accused George Soros of manipulating Nevada’s voter rolls. They blamed “undercover activists” for stealing ballots out of machines with hot dog tongs. They blamed the Dominion voting machines that the county had been using without incident for two decades, saying they could be hacked with a ballpoint pen to “flip the vote and swing an entire election in five minutes.” They demanded a future in which every vote in Esmeralda County was cast on paper and then counted by hand. (Cont.)
