Inside the City Policed by Machines | The Cyber Security Problem of Military Electrification | AI Giants Aren’t Doing Enough to Protect Their Secrets

And when Elgan continued to stand up at each meeting to dispute and disprove those accusations by citing election laws and facts, they began to blame her, too — the most unlikely scapegoat of all. She had served as the clerk without controversy for two decades as an elected Republican, and she flew a flag at her own home that read: “Trump 2024 — Take America Back.” But lately some local Republicans had begun referring to her as “Luciferinda” or as the “clerk of the deep state cabal.” They accused her of being paid off by Dominion and skimming votes away from Trump, and even though their allegations came with no evidence, they wanted her recalled from office before the next presidential election in November.

The Ukraine War Has Led to Radical Changes in the U.S. Army’s New Super Tank Design  (David Axe, The Times)
For decades prior to Russia’s wider war on Ukraine, the US Army’s tank designs evolved in the same way. Each successive tank model was heavier than the last. 
The 1980s-vintage M-1 Abrams with its 105-millimetre main gun weighed 60 tons. The M-1A1, the main variant in the 1990s, added armor and swapped in a 120-millimetre main gun – growing its weight to as much as 68 tons. The latest version System Enhancement Package Version 3 of the current M-1A2 has even more armor protection and tips the scales at a whopping 74 tons.
Various M-1A2 models make up the bulk of the US Army’s 2,600-strong active tank fleet.
The US Army was planning for an even heavier M-1A2: the System Enhancement Package Version 4. But then Russia widened its war on Ukraine and, for the first time since World War II, major tank battles raged on European soil. The Americans watched closely as Russia’s Soviet-designed tanks clashed with Ukraine’s own ex-Soviet tanks – as well as donated Western tanks including, starting last autumn, 31 ex-American M-1A1s. 
What US Army officials observed on Ukrainian battlefields convinced them they had to change the way they developed tanks. It seems they saw tanks struggling in mud and soft soil while getting overwhelmed by swarms of tiny explosive drones. They concluded that future versions of the M-1 must be better-protected and better-armed without also being heavier. 

Nuclear Research Body Is Backdoor for Russian Spies, Says Ukraine  (Tom Ball, The Times)
Russia is being provided with a “backdoor for its spies” to Europe’s latest scientific technologies by CERN, the nuclear research body, Ukraine’s delegation to the group has claimed.
In December, members of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, voted to eject Russian and Belarusian members in response to the war in Ukraine.
However, dozens of Russian scientists are still able to access CERN through its continued co-operation with a separate, supposedly international organization called the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR).
CERN, to which Britain is party, was founded in 1954 under the unofficial motto of “science for peace”. It is one of the world’s largest centers for scientific research and is home to the Large Hadron Collider, the most powerful particle accelerator in the world.
JINR was set up in 1956 as the Soviet response to the founding of CERN. The institute is almost entirely made up of former Warsaw Pact nations and is dominated by Russia, which contributes more than 80 per cent of its budget.
On June 20, CERN’s international council of 23 member states is due to vote on whether to renew JINR’s collaboration agreement.

Power and Tension: The Cyber Security Problem of Military Electrification  (Kristen Csenkey and Alexis Rapin, War on the Rocks)
What would it take for someone to hack a tank? Modern Western militaries may well be about to find out. The militaries of the United States, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Australia, and other powers are contemplating the gradual introduction of electric vehicles into their motorized fleets. These initiatives are linked to national decarbonization strategies and are also meant to modernize these fleets for the future of warfare. However, electrification also entails an important and underestimated challenge: cyber security.
Indeed, future electric military vehicles are likely to include numerous computerized onboard systems and will be dependent on a charging infrastructure that is likely to be highly connected. This revolution in the making creates new possibilities for adversaries, who may soon attempt to compromise modern vehicles to gather strategically sensitive information or to undermine operational effectiveness. How could such situations materialize? What impact could they have on a state’s defense apparatus? And how can armed forces be better prepared to meet this challenge? Cyber attacks targeting “smart vehicles” could ultimately put lives at risk or destabilize power grids, among other realistic scenarios. Various measures are already available to modern militaries to tackle such challenges, which include the adoption of a secure-by-design approach, securing the cyber supply chain, and increasing the protection of data flows.

US National Security Experts Warn AI Giants Aren’t Doing Enough to Protect Their Secrets  (Paresh Dave, Wired)
Last year, the White House struck a landmark safety deal with AI developers that saw companies including Google and OpenAI promise to consider what could go wrong when they create software like that behind ChatGPT. Now a former domestic policy adviser to President Biden who helped forge that deal says that AI developers need to step up on another front: protecting their secret formulas from China.
“Because they are behind, they are going to want to take advantage of what we have,” said Susan Rice regarding China. She left the White House last year and spoke on Wednesday during a panel about AI and geopolitics at an event hosted by Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centered AI. “Whether it’s through purchasing and modifying our best open source models, or stealing our best secrets. We really do need to look at this whole spectrum of how do we stay ahead, and I worry that on the security side, we are lagging.”
The concerns raised by Rice, who was formerly President Obama’s national security adviser, are not hypothetical. In March the US Justice Department announced charges against a former Google software engineer for allegedly stealing trade secrets related to the company’s TPU AI chips and planning to use them in China.

Inside the City Policed by Machines  (Dhruv Mehrota, Wired)
The first and largest police drone operation in the country us an indication of a trend in policing that could hit the skies over your streets soon.
Since 2018, police in a border city in California called Chula Vista have been dispatching drones to investigate thousands of 911 calls. The drones are equipped with high-resolution cameras and powerful zoom lenses, recording everything in their path. They routinely fly over back yards, public pools, schools, hospitals, mosques, and even Planned Parenthood, in the process amassing hundreds of hours of footage above residents who have nothing to do with a crime.
The department says that its drones provide officers with critical intelligence about incidents they are responding to—which the CVPD says has reduced unnecessary police work, decreased response times, and saved lives.