The Age of the Drone Police Is Here | America’s Fingers-Crossed Strategy for Hurricane Season | How Safe Is America's Drinking Water Supply? | To Win the Chip War, the U.S. Must Prioritize Revolutionary Research, and more

His remarks amounted to a vigorous defense of the department as Mr. Trump and his allies have escalated their attacks on law enforcement after his conviction in Manhattan court last week and as the former president has been shadowed by other criminal cases.
Among Mr. Trump’s more extraordinary claims in recent weeks was the highly misleading statement that the Biden administration was prepared to kill him when the F.B.I. conducted a court-ordered search of his Mar-a-Lago estate in 2022 to retrieve classified documents.
“This is dangerous,” Mr. Garland said in response to a question by Representative Jerry Nadler, Democrat of New York, about the consequences of such an assertion. The claim, the attorney general said, distorted a standard Justice Department use-of-force policy that had also applied to a search of President Biden’s Delaware home.
“It raises the threats of violence against prosecutors and career agents,” Mr. Garland said. “The allegation is false.”

The MAGA Internet Calls for War  (Ali Breland, The Atlantic)
After a jury found Donald Trump guilty of 34 felony charges yesterday, Bronze Age Pervert, the alter ego of the edgelord influencer Costin Alamariu, retweeted one of his own posts from March. It is a movie clip depicting a scene of armed men storming buildings and gunning people down. In the text accompanying the post, Bronze Age Pervert jokes that the clip is real footage of a “well-planned neutralization operation” that will take place after Trump wins his reelection campaign.
The MAGA faithful are once again on the internet threatening violence. Lots of Republicans, of course, responded to Trump’s felony verdict with simple outrage rather than calls for a “neutralization operation.” But more extreme language has appeared all across the right-wing posting ecosystem. Some Proud Boys chapters responded with the word “war” on their Telegram channels, as reported by Wired, and Reuters found instances of Trump supporters calling for violence against jurors and the judge in the case, as well as calls for civil war and insurrection. An anonymous right-wing X account went viral by posting “Third World Problems Require Third World Solutions” on top of a video of the 2020 military coup in Myanmar.
The incitement of violence and aggressive political retribution is not new on the right, but it has often been confined to the hardened fringes. When it does leak out, it tends to be at least slightly obfuscated. Now though, “some of the more intense rhetoric is coming from the top,” Jared Holt, an extremism researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, told me. Auron MacIntyre, a podcast host for the right-wing outlet Blaze Media, called for Republican district attorneys to manipulate the courts and put “corrupt Democrats in jail immediately,” with “no excuses, no equivocation.” Sean Davis, the CEO of the right-wing publication The Federalist, posted that members of the right have a “moral obligation to terrorize the Left with its own rules and tactics until it is destroyed.”
So what’s going to happen next? Right now, probably nothing. There is always the possibility of people taking inspiration from online posts and engaging in real-world violence—such as when a conspiracy theory about pedophilia prompted a man to show up with a gun to a pizza restaurant in Washington, D.C., in 2016, or when a white-supremacist shooter in Buffalo, New York, killed 10 people in 2022. But mass mobilizations are hard and require work. There’s usually a pattern that precedes them. MAGA faithful and the far right did not wake up on January 6, 2021, and decide to storm the Capitol. The foundations for it didn’t even come in the days or weeks beforehand. Instead it was a process that bore out over the course of months. And that process could be tracked, in part, in the ever more heated rhetoric and violent memes that MAGA world spread across the web.

Trump’s Online MAGA Army Calls Guilty Verdict a Declaration of War  (Tess Owen, Wired)
The words “RIP America” trended on X minutes after a jury in Manhattan found former president Donald Trump guilty on all 34 felony counts for falsifying business records in connection to a hush money payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels.
Images of an upside-down American flag—a symbol of distress that became co-opted by the 2020 Stop the Steal movement—flooded social media, as Trump supporters, fringe extremists, right-wing pundits, and politicians voiced their anger.
Ever since the trial began, pro-Trump commentators—and Trump himself—have been priming MAGA online ecosystems to claim foul play if the jury found him guilty. The response to his felony conviction was predictably swift, with many characterizing it as a declaration of “war” from the “deep state.” Incendiary rhetoric about how the guilty verdict was a sign of America’s collapse reverberated from the mainstream right all the way to the fringes.

Quarter of Political Donations in EU Go to Extremist and Populist Parties, Data Reveals  (Carmen Aguilar García, Pamela Duncan and Lisa O’Carroll, Guardian)
A quarter of all private money donated to political parties in the EU is going to far-right, far-left and populist movements, boosting their finances by millions of euros before crucial European parliament elections next week. With the polls predicting a rise in support for hardline conservative, Eurosceptic and pro-Russia parties, the Guardian and other 26 media partners, led by the investigations group Follow the Money, are publishing Transparency Gap, the most extensive analysis yet of political financing in the EU. The data was gathered from the annual reports of more than 200 parties across 25 countries. It shows €150m (£128m), the equivalent of €1 in every €4 of all private donations made between 2019 and 2022, went to populist parties and those with the most extreme political views. Far-right groups have pulled in more than €97m, equivalent to €1 in every €7 of private money.”

Germany’s Far-Right Party Is Running Hateful Ads on Facebook and Instagram  (Victoria Elliott, Wired)
Earlier this month, a German court ruled that the country’s nationalist far-right party, Alternative for Germany (AfD), was potentially “extremist” and could warrant surveillance by the country’s intelligence apparatus.
Campaign ads placed by AfD have been allowed to appear on Facebook and Instagram anyway, according to a new report from the nonprofit advocacy organization Ekō, shared exclusively with WIRED. Researchers found 23 ads from the party that accrued 472,000 views on Facebook and Instagram and appear to violate Meta’s own policies around hate speech.
The ads push the narrative that immigrants are dangerous and a burden on the German state, ahead of the European Union’s elections in June.

Germany: Far-Right AfD Stumbles Ahead of EU Election  (Ben Knight, DW)
The leaders of Germany’s populist far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party are breathing a sigh of relief: Sunday’s local elections in the eastern German state of Thuringia were no triumph, but no disaster either. With the EU election looming, it seems no international scandal or internal row can deter its core voters.
Thuringia is one of the party’s major strongholds: Led by one of its most notorious figures, Björn Höcke, the Thuringian AfD has established itself as the biggest party in the state, regularly polling at over 30% — well above the national figures of around 15-20%.
But Sunday’s local council elections, seen as a barometer both for the European elections in June and the Thuringia state election in September, did not bring the “blue wave” (the party’s color) that some expected. Even though the party was able to increase its vote share on 2019 by 8 percentage points, reaching just under 26%, it was not able to claim a single mayor’s office. Nine AfD candidates will have to make do with competing in run-off votes in the coming weeks.

Once a Sheriff’s Deputy in Florida, Now a Source of Disinformation from Russia  (Steven Lee Myers, New York Times)
A dozen years ago, John Mark Dougan, a former deputy sheriff in Palm Beach County, Fla., sent voters an email posing as a county commissioner, urging them to oppose the re-election of the county’s sheriff.
He later masqueraded online as a Russian tech worker with a pseudonym, BadVolf, to leak confidential information in violation of state law, fooling officials in Florida who thought they were dealing with a foreigner.
He also posed as a fictional New York City heiress he called Jessica, tricking an adviser to the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office into divulging improper conduct by the department.
“And boy, did he ever spill ALL of the beans,” Mr. Dougan said in a written response to questions for this article, in which he confirmed his role in these episodes.
Those subterfuges in the United States, it turned out, were only a prelude to a more prominent and potentially more ominous campaign of deception he has been conducting from Russia.
Mr. Dougan, 51, who received political asylum in Moscow, is now a key player in Russia’s disinformation operations against the West. Back in 2016, when the Kremlin interfered in the American presidential election, an army of computer trolls toiled for hours in an office building in St. Petersburg to try to fool Americans online.
Today Mr. Dougan may be accomplishing much the same task largely by himself, according to American and European government officials and researchers from companies and organizations that have tracked his activities since August. The groups include NewsGuard, a company that reviews the reliability of news and information online; Recorded Future, a threat intelligence company; and Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub.
Working from an apartment crowded with servers and other computer equipment, Mr. Dougan has built an ever-growing network of more than 160 fake websites that mimic news outlets in the United States, Britain and France.
With the help of commercially available artificial intelligence tools, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT and DALL-E 3, he has filled the sites with tens of thousands of articles, many based on actual news events. Interspersed among them are also bespoke fabrications that officials in the United States and European Union have attributed to Russian intelligence agencies or the administration of President Vladimir V. Putin.
Between September and May, Mr. Dougan’s outlets have been cited or referred to in news articles or social media posts nearly 8,000 times, and seen by more than 37 million people in 16 languages, according to a report to be released Wednesday by NewsGuard.
The fakes have recently included a baseless article on a fake San Francisco Chronicle website that said Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, had smuggled 300 kilograms of cocaine from Argentina. Another false narrative appeared last month in the sham Chronicle and on another site, called The Boston Times, claiming that the C.I.A. was working with Ukrainians to undermine Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign.

THE LONG VIEW

The Near Future of Deepfakes Just Got Way Clearer  (Nilesh Christopher, The Atlantic)
Throughout this election cycle—which ended yesterday in a victory for Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party after six weeks of voting and more than 640 million ballots cast—Indians have been bombarded with synthetic media. The country has endured voice clones, convincing fake videos of dead politicians endorsing candidates, automated phone calls addressing voters by name, and AI-generated songs and memes lionizing candidates and ridiculing opponents. But for all the concern over how generative AI and deepfakes are a looming “atomic bomb” that will warp reality and alter voter preferences, India foreshadows a different, stranger future.
Before this election, India was rightly concerned about deepfakes. As cheap, accessible AI tools such as voice cloning have made it possible for almost anyone to create a political spoof, the country has already witnessed AI scandals. In the lead-up to four state elections at the end of last year, the fact-checking publication Boom Live clocked roughly 10 election-related audio deepfakes, according to the deputy editor Karen Rebelo. If a dozen audio fakes emerged during just a few state elections, Rebelo thought, the national election would see unprecedented volumes. “It was truly terrifying,” she told me. “I thought, We’re going to see one a day or one an hour.”
And indeed deepfakes, and especially audio clones, surfaced throughout the 2024 election cycle—including ones involving false election-result predictions, simulated phone conversations, and fake celebrity criticisms. In the first week of voting, deepfaked clips went viral of the Bollywood stars Aamir Khan and Ranveer Singh criticizing Modi—a big deal considering that India’s film stars don’t often chime in on politics. But the dire fears of Rebelo and others haven’t materialized. Of the 258 election-related fact-checks that Boom Live did, just 12 involved AI-generated misinformation. Others counted more than 12 AI fakes. Digvijay Singh, a co-founder of Contrails.ai, a deepfake-detection firm in India, told me that he helped fact-checkers investigate and debunk a little over 30 pieces of AI-generated media in April and May.
You might need only one truly believable deepfake to stir up violence or defame a political rival, but ostensibly, none of the ones in India has seemed to have had that effect. The closest India got was when footage of India’s home minister, Amit Shah, falsely claiming to abolish affirmative action for lower castes prompted arrests and threats of violence. Some outlets misreported the clip as a deepfake, but it had just been edited. In part, deepfakes haven’t panned out because of the technology itself: The videos and images were not that high-quality, and audio clips, although they sometimes crossed the uncanny valley, were run through detection tools from companies such as Contrails.ai. Though not perfect, they can spot signs of manipulation. “These were easy to debunk, because we had the tools,” Rebelo said. “I could test it immediately.”
Although deepfakes have not been as destructive in India as many had feared, the use of generative AI to make people laugh, create emotional appeals to voters, and persuade people with hyper-personalized messages contributes to what academics call the risk of gradual accumulation of small problems, which erodes trust. Politicians who embrace generative AI, even with good intentions, may be flirting with danger. Feigning a personal connection with voters through AI could act as the stepping stone toward the real risk of targeted manipulation of the public. If personalized voice clones become normal, more troubling uses of the technology may no longer seem out of bounds. Similarly, a barrage of mostly innocuous AI content could still damage trust in democratic institutions and political structures by fuzzing the line between what’s real and what’s not. India has witnessed many cases of politicians falsely trying to spin damaging clips as deepfakes—a much more believable argument when politicians are already sharing their own AI messages.

The Age of the Drone Police Is Here  (Dhruv Mehrotra and Jesse Marx, Wired)
On a Wednesday afternoon in August, Daniel Posada and his girlfriend were screaming at each other at a bus stop when someone called 911. From a rooftop a mile away, the Chula Vista Police Department started the rotors of a 13-pound drone.
The machine lifted into the air with its high-resolution camera rolling. Equipped with thermal imaging capabilities and a powerful zoom lens, it transmitted a live feed of everything it captured to a sworn officer monitoring a screen at the precinct, to the department’s Real-Time Operations Center, and to the cell phone of the responding officer racing to the scene.
It flew northwest at 392 feet above the southwestern border town, a suburb of San Diego, passing near a preschool and a church, then near a financial services center used by Chula Vista’s immigrant communities to send money to their families. En route to Posada, the drone—a Matrice 300 RTK—would cross the airspace of 23 blocks, potentially exposing thousands of Chula Vista residents to the gaze of law enforcement over an incident that had nothing to do with them.

AI Employees Warn of Technology’s Dangers, Call for Sweeping Company Changes  (Pranshu Verma and Nitasha Tiku, Washington Post)
A handful of current and former employees at OpenAI and other prominent artificial intelligence companies warned that the technology poses grave risks to humanity in a Tuesday letter, calling on companies to implement sweeping changes to ensure transparency and foster a culture of public debate.
The letter, signed by 13 people including current and former employees at Anthropic and Google’s DeepMind, said AI can exacerbate inequality, increase misinformation, and allow AI systems to become autonomous and cause significant death. Though these risks could be mitigated, corporations in control of the software have “strong financial incentives” to limit oversight, they said.
Because AI is only loosely regulated, accountability rests on company insiders, the employees wrote, calling on corporations to lift nondisclosure agreements and give workers protections that allow them to anonymously raise concerns.
The move comes as OpenAI faces a staff exodus. Many critics have seen prominent departures — including OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever and senior researcher Jan Leike — as a rebuke of company leaders, who some employees argue chase profit at the expense of making OpenAI’s technologies safer.

How 2024 Could Transform American Elections  (Russell Berman, The Artlantic)
The nation’s tiniest legislative chamber has been unusually prolific lately. In its most recent session, Alaska’s Senate overcame years of acrimony and deadlock to pass major bills to increase spending on public schools, combat climate change and a state energy shortage, and strengthen penalties for drug dealers. “The universal feeling,” Cathy Giessel, the senate’s majority leader, told me, “was that this was the most productive two years that we have experienced.”
Giessel, a Republican who first took office in 2010, attributes this success not to her colleagues, exactly, but to how they were chosen. In 2022, Alaska became the first state to experiment with a new kind of election. All candidates—regardless of party—competed against one another in the primary, and the top four vote-getters advanced. In November, the winner was determined by ranked-choice voting, in which people list candidates by order of preference. The system—called Final Four Voting—gave a substantial boost to moderates from both parties. Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski won a fourth term, and a centrist Democrat defeated Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor and 2008 GOP vice-presidential nominee, capturing a House seat that Republicans had held for a half century.
But Final Four had an even bigger impact in the state Senate, where Democrats narrowed the GOP’s long-standing majority. Giessel, who had lost in a traditional primary two years earlier, won her seat back. She and seven of her colleagues ditched three far-right GOP lawmakers to form a governing coalition with Democrats. The group decided to set aside divisive social issues such as abortion and gender identity and focus exclusively on areas where they could find common ground.
Final Four isn’t inherently ideological, but it appeals most to voters frustrated with polarization—“normal people who want normal things done,” as Scott Kendall, a former Murkowski aide who led the 2020 campaign to adopt Final Four in Alaska, put it to me.
The ideas that make up Alaska’s system aren’t new. California and Washington State have had nonpartisan primaries for years, and South Dakota voters could approve them in November. Maine has ranked-choice voting for federal elections; Oregon could adopt ranked voting this fall. But Alaska is the first state to combine the two reforms. Final Four backers hope that many more will follow, and they are pouring millions of dollars into ballot initiatives this year to expand it to Nevada, Colorado, Idaho, and Montana.
A sweep for Final Four would reshape not only state capitols but also Washington, D.C., where the system would, in the coming years, elect up to 10 of the U.S. Senate’s 100 members. Representing a combination of red and blue states, they could “form a problem-solving fulcrum” to address challenges that typically resist compromise, Katherine Gehl, who devised Final Four Voting and has spent millions of dollars campaigning for it, told me. “You really can see in Congress a difference with as few as 10 senators,” she said, citing comprehensive immigration reform as an example.

America’s Fingers-Crossed Strategy for Hurricane Season  (Juliette Kayyem, The Atlantic)
According to forecasts from a range of sources, the hurricane season that begins today could be the direst in recorded history. Abnormally warm waters in the Atlantic Ocean, coupled with the persistently strong winds formed by an emerging La Niña weather front, create dangerous conditions that could lead to as many as 25 named storms in the North Atlantic, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Amid the continuing threat of climate change, Americans can easily become inured to alarming projections year after year. Both the potential size of this year’s hurricanes and their expected frequency threaten to overwhelm society’s ability to help those in danger and make whole anyone who suffers losses.
America’s disaster-preparedness system doesn’t consist only of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and state and local first-response agencies; it also involves logistics supply chains, private and public insurers, and the regulators who shape the built environment. But none of these entities has the muscle or the resources to prepare for disasters that keep on coming—one after another after another.
People are not particularly attentive to risks that get a little bit worse every year, even when they add up, over the course of decades or generations, to a massive problem. And even when insurers jack up rates or drop coverage for people at elevated risk from climate-related disasters, public officials—including those, as I have previously noted, who claim to acknowledge the danger of a warming planet—do their best to dampen the signals that the market is trying to send.

All of which means that, especially if you live in a vulnerable area, the question isn’t whether society is ready for what this year’s weather may hold. It’s whether you are.

You Think You Know How Misinformation Spreads? Welcome to the Hellhole of Programmatic Advertising  (Steven Brill, Wired)
In 2019, other than the government of Vladimir Putin, Warren Buffett was the biggest funder of Sputnik News, the Russian disinformation website controlled by the Kremlin. It wasn’t that the legendary champion of American capitalism had an alter ego who woke up every morning wondering how he could help finance Vladimir Putin’s global propaganda network. It was because Geico, the giant American insurance company and subsidiary of Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, was the leading advertiser on the American version of Sputnik News’ global website network.
In 2019, other than the government of Vladimir Putin, Warren Buffett was the biggest funder of Sputnik News, the Russian disinformation website controlled by the Kremlin. It wasn’t that the legendary champion of American capitalism had an alter ego who woke up every morning wondering how he could help finance Vladimir Putin’s global propaganda network. It was because Geico, the giant American insurance company and subsidiary of Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, was the leading advertiser on the American version of Sputnik News’ global website network.
In fact, no one at Geico or its advertising agency had any idea its ads would appear on Sputnik, let alone what anti-American content would be displayed alongside the ads. How could they? Which person or army of people at Geico or its agency could have read 44,000 websites?
Geico’s ads had been placed through a programmatic advertising system that was invented in the late 1990s as the internet developed. It exploded beginning in the mid 2000s and is now the overwhelmingly dominant advertising medium. Programmatic algorithms, not people, decide where to place most of the ads we now see on websites, social media platforms, mobile devices, streaming television, and increasingly hear on podcasts. The numbers involved are mind-boggling. If Geico’s advertising campaign were typical of programmatic campaigns for broad-based consumer products and services, each of its ads would have been placed on an average of 44,000 websites, according to a study done for the leading trade association of big-brand advertisers.
Geico is hardly the only rock-solid American brand to be funding the Russians. During the same period that the insurance company’s ads appeared on Sputnik News, 196 other programmatic advertisers bought ads on the website, including Best Buy, E-Trade, and Progressive insurance. Sputnik News’ sister propaganda outlet, RT.com (it was once called Russia Today until someone in Moscow decided to camouflage its parentage), raked in ad revenue from Walmart, Amazon, PayPal, and Kroger, among others.
Every workday, approximately 2,500 people sit at desktops or laptops using these programmatic advertising algorithms to spend tens of millions of dollars an hour. They work at advertising agencies scattered around the world, or, in the case of some major companies, at their in-house advertising shops. Their titles might be “programmatic specialist,” “programmatic associate,” or “campaign manager.” What they have in common is that they are usually in their first jobs out of college. Although many work from home post-Covid, if they are in the office, they sit at carrels in large open spaces that resemble the trading floor of a stock brokerage.

To Win the Chip War, the U.S. Must Prioritize Revolutionary Research  (Chris MIller, Jordan Schneider and Arrian Ebrahimi, Washington Post)
Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo has described the effort to boost the U.S. semiconductor industry as a technological moonshot — a mirror of NASA’s famed Apollo program. But this moonshot can only succeed if those behind it dare to dream big — and dream up revolutionary technologies.
Through the Chips and Science Act, the Biden administration has begun to distribute $39 billion in manufacturing grants over five years to semiconductor chipmakers — a shot in the arm for businesses competing against heavily subsidized rivals in East Asia and an insurance policy in the event of Chinese aggression. But in the long run, U.S. success requires maintaining a technological edge, and that means an emphasis on research and development.
The Commerce Department has established a National Semiconductor Technology Center — the NSTC — to deploy up to $11 billion in R&D funds allocated by the Chips Act over the next five years. But what exactly should the NSTC do? We think it should focus on taking big swings, complementing industry while remaining independent of it.
The pace foreseen by Moore’s law — the prediction that the computing power of chips would double every few years — has slowed, imperiling the trend toward better, cheaper computing power. Sustaining Moore’s law is critical to our nation’s future prosperity and security, and to nearly every segment of technology. Guaranteeing another generation of exponential computing advances ought to be the NSTC’s central priority.
For the NSTC to have any impact, it must allocate funds creatively. The $11 billion the Chips Act provides for R&D is a small sum relative to the roughly $60 billion that U.S. chip firms spend on such efforts each year. Companies such as Intel and Samsung are already among the world’s top 10 spenders on R&D. Simply adding the NSTC’s funds to the pot won’t change much.
Yet most corporate R&D funding is spent not on “research” — i.e., big bets on risky, long-term, high-payoff technologies — but on “development,” the effort to fine-tune products and make them market-ready. This is understandable because companies exist to bring products to market. But it means that only a small share of the industry’s vast R&D spending goes toward researching revolutionary technologies that can disrupt established businesses.
The U.S. government has a storied history of supporting the long-run technological research that has made Moore’s law possible. The Defense Department’s R&D arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, provided seed funding for most of the key technologies used in today’s cutting-edge chips. DARPA experts in the 1970s recognized that industry tends to focus on incremental improvements rather than paradigm-shifting innovations. So the agency repeatedly took bets that industry wouldn’t, funding the software tools, computing architectures and machinery needed for far-reaching advances.
The NSTC should do the same.

MORE PICKS

It Was Legal Boilerplate. Trump Made It Sound Like a Threat to His Life.  (Alan Feuer, New York Times)
Even though the court-authorized warrant was executed while he was more than 1,000 miles away in the New York area, the former president in recent weeks has repeatedly promoted the blatantly false narrativethat the agents had shown up that day prepared to kill him, when the instructions in fact laid out strict conditions intended to minimize any use of deadly force.
“It’s just been revealed that Biden’s DOJ was authorized to use DEADLY FORCE for their DESPICABLE raid in Mar-a-Lago,” Mr. Trump wrote in a fund-raising email last month.
“Joe Biden was locked & loaded ready to take me out & put my family in danger,” the email said.
Mr. Trump’s baseless statements about the search are among the starkest examples of the ways in which he has sought to gain political advantage by attacking the criminal justice system and the rule of law itself.
They also reflect his escalating use of incendiary language on the campaign trail. Over the past several months, Mr. Trump has gone from accusing President Biden and his administration of weaponizing the justice system to undermine his campaign to asserting that Democrats are out to put him in prison. Now he is portraying himself as a political martyr whose very life could be in danger.
In addition to playing into his strategy of painting himself as a victim of a Deep State conspiracy, Mr. Trump’s warped version of the Mar-a-Lago search has also triggered a new legal battle between his lawyers and prosecutors in the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith. Mr. Smith’s team has charged him with illegally removing dozens of classified documents from the White House after he left office and obstructing the government’s repeated efforts to get them back.

A US Company Enabled a North Korean Scam That Raised Money for WMDs  (William Turton, Wired)
For years, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been unraveling what it asserts is a scam perpetrated by agents of North Korea, which used fake companies employing real IT workers to funnel money back to the regime’s military.
An American company played a key role in creating shell companies used as part of the scheme, a WIRED review of public records shows. Elected officials are now contemplating addressing loopholes in business-registration law that the scheme exposed.
In May, Wyoming secretary of state Chuck Gray revoked the business licenses of three companies linked to the North Korean scam: Culture Box LLC, Next Nets LLC, and Blackish Tech LLC. Gray said his office made the decision after receiving information from the FBI and conducting an investigation.

Inside the Biggest FBI Sting Operation in History  (Joseph Cox, Wired)
Sometime after midnight on May 26, 2020, a sleek black-and-white speedboat darted through the sea’s waves off the coast of Sweden. The two men on board were barreling toward a set of coordinates in the darkness, armed with navigation equipment, night vision goggles, and fishing rods. The Donousa, a black and red, 225-meter-long cargo ship, was sitting motionless in the water around 17 kilometers ahead.
On its way from Brazil to Poland, the Donousa had made this unofficial stop in the North Sea so that some corrupt sailors could throw nets holding 400 kilograms of cocaine—a quantity with a street value of about $39 million—into the water. Then the ship would light up the area “like a disco in the middle of the sea,” a member of the drug gang wrote in a text message. And with that, the speedboat crew would reel in the nets and whisk the drugs to docks on Swedish soil.
That was the plan as the courier understood it, anyway. Stationed onshore in a white van, his job was to wait for the speedboat to return, then transport its payload to a warehouse, all while fielding minute-by-minute commands from the operation’s mastermind and two other higher-ups. In an encrypted group chat, they peppered him with orders in Swedish: Stay calm, avoid looking shady, melt into traffic when the time comes. “You’ll drive slow as fuck.” The four men were all using Sky phones—pricey, customized devices that not only sent encrypted messages like Signal or WhatsApp did, but could also be remotely wiped on demand if they fell into the hands of law enforcement. By 2020, phones made by Sky and a handful of competitors had become a widespread and sophisticated part of the drug trafficker’s toolkit. For the truly paranoid, some brands even removed the GPS, camera, and microphone from their devices.

How Donald Trump Could Weaponize US Surveillance in a Second Term  (Thor Benson, Wired)
Every president of the United States has within their grasp the power of a vast surveillance state that has grown significantly over the past few decades and has beaten back any real effort to rein it in. Through America’s numerous enigmatic intelligence agencies, presidents possess the ability to dive deeply into the communications, movements, and relationships of everyday Americans. Presidents of both parties have abused the surveillance state, but under a second Trump administration, this power could be abused in ways it has never been before.
Donald Trump, a now convicted felon and the presumptive 2024 Republican presidential nominee, has said he plans to prosecute his political opponents should he return to the White House. He’s said he would allow states to monitor pregnant women and prosecute those who seek abortions. Trump wants to deport millions of undocumented immigrants. He plans to invoke the Insurrection Act to quell civil unrest, which means sending the military into the streets. The much publicized Project 2025 outlines how he would quickly replace thousands of career civil servants in the federal government with loyalists.
If a president was interested in prosecuting their political opponents, crushing protests, targeting undocumented immigrants, and had the right people in place to help them carry out those plans, surveillance could become a valuable tool for accomplishing those goals. Like former US president Richard Nixon in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Trump could use the surveillance powers available to him to monitor his political opponents, disrupt protest movements, and more.

In Shift, Biden Issues Order Allowing Temporary Border Closure to Migrants  (Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Hamed Aleaziz, New York Times)
President Biden issued an executive order on Tuesday that prevents migrants from seeking asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border when crossings surge, a dramatic election-year move to ease pressure on the immigration system and address a major concern among voters.
The measure is the most restrictive border policy instituted by Mr. Biden, or any other modern Democrat, and echoes an effort in 2018 by President Donald J. Trump to cut off migration that was blocked in federal court.
In remarks at the White House, Mr. Biden said he was forced to take executive action because Republicans had blocked bipartisan legislation that had some of the most significant border security restrictions Congress had considered in years.
“We must face a simple truth,” said the president, who was joined by a group of lawmakers and mayors from border communities. “To protect America as a land that welcomes immigrants, we must first secure the border and secure it now.”
Aware that the policy raised uncomfortable comparisons, Mr. Biden took pains to distinguish his actions from those of Mr. Trump. “We continue to work closely with our Mexican neighbors instead of attacking them,” Mr. Biden said. He said he would never refer to immigrants as “poisoning the blood” of the country, as Mr. Trump has done.
Still, the move shows how drastically the politics of immigration have shifted to the right in the United States. Polls suggest there is support in both parties for border measures once denounced by Democrats and championed by Mr. Trump as the number of people crossing into the country has reached record levels in recent years.

Arizona Weighs Texas-Inspired Law Allowing Cops to Enforce Immigration Law  (Arelis R. Hernández, Washinton Post)
Arizona is moving closer toward adopting a Texas-inspired law directing law enforcement agencies to arrest migrants who cross the border illegally, the latest effort by Republican state leaders to challenge federal authority on immigration.
The state legislature is expected to pass a resolution Tuesday that would send the measure to Arizona voters for approval in November. The copycat resolution mimics Texas’s Senate Bill 4 and is similar to a bill recently signed into law in Louisiana.
In the past year, the Iowa and Oklahoma legislatures have also enacted laws that mirror parts of the controversial Texas law, which is currently being challenged in court. Meanwhile, lawmakers in Tennessee, Florida and Georgia adopted measures to more easily penalize and report undocumented immigrants to federal authorities.
The constitutionality of the statutes closely resembling the Texas law hinges on the case before U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in the Fifth Circuit. In that case, opponents contend Senate Bill 4 is unconstitutional because it usurps federal authority on enforcing immigration laws. Lone Star leaders have expressed a willingness to challenge the federal government’s supremacy on immigration matters all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Ticketmaster Data Breach May Be Just the Beginning  (Matt Burgess, Wired)
One of the biggest hacks of the year may have started to unfold. Late on Friday, embattled events business Live Nation, which owns Ticketmaster, confirmed it suffered a data breach after criminal hackers claimed to be selling half a billion customer records online. Banking firm Santander also confirmed it had suffered a data breach impacting millions of customers and staff after its data was advertised by the same group of hackers.
While the specific circumstances of the breaches—including exactly what information was stolen and how it was accessed—remain unclear, the incidents may be linked to attacks against company accounts with cloud hosting provider Snowflake. The US-based cloud firm has thousands of customers, including Adobe, Canva, and Mastercard, which can store and analyze vast amounts of data in its systems.
Security experts say that as more details become clear about hackers’ attempts to access and take data from Snowflake’s systems, it is possible that other companies will reveal they had data stolen. At present, though, the developing situation is messy and complicated.

The Unusual Espionage Act Case Against a Drone Photographer  (Jordan Pearson, Wired)
The United States Department of Justice is quietly prosecuting a novel Espionage Act case involving a drone, a Chinese national, and classified nuclear submarines.
The case is such a rarity that it appears to be the first known prosecution under a World War II–era law that bans photographing vital military installations using aircraft, showing how new technologies are leading to fresh national security and First Amendment issues.
“This is definitely not something that the law has addressed to any significant degree,” Emily Berman, a law professor at the University of Houston who specializes in national security, tells WIRED. “There’s definitely no reported cases.”

Anduril Is Building Out the Pentagon’s Dream of Deadly Drone Swarms  (Will Knight, Wired)
When Palmer Luckey cofounded the defense startup Anduril in 2017, three years after selling his virtual reality startup Oculus to Facebook, the idea of a twentysomething from the tech industry challenging the giant contractors that build fighter jets, tanks, and warships for the US military seemed somewhat far-fetched. Seven years on, Luckey is showing that Anduril can not only compete with those contractors—it can win.
Last month, Anduril was one of two companies, along with the established defense contractor General Atomics, chosen to prototype a new kind of autonomous fighter jet called the Collaborative Combat Aircraft, or CCA, for the US Air Force and Navy. Anduril was chosen ahead of a pack of what Beltway lingo dubs “defense primes”—Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman.
“Anduril is proving that with the right team and business model, a seven-year-old company can go toe-to-toe with players that have been around for 70+,” Luckey wrote on social media platform X shortly after the contract was announced. The company declined to make anyone available for this article.

How Safe Is America’s Drinking Water Supply?  (James Bickerton, Newsweek)
Environmental Protection Agency’s stark warning this week warned the threat to the United States’ supply of drinking water is increasing, with infrastructure targeted by hackers linked to the Chinese, Iranian and Russian governments. Is our water safe?
The May 20 alert said that more than 70 percent of the water systems inspected by the EPA failed to meet basic security requirements set out in the Safe Drinking Water Act, with inspectors finding “alarming cybersecurity vulnerabilities at drinking water systems across the country.”
Professor Blair Feltmate, an expert in water systems at the University of Waterloo in Canada, told Newsweek cyberthreats to the U.S. water supply are “growing in sophistication” and are a particularly big threat to the southwest of the country, which is already “on the edge of being out of water.”
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which forms part of the Department of Homeland Security, warned specifically about the threat from foreign powers to the American water supply in alerts on December 1, 2023, and February 7 and May 1 this year.

Billionaire Gets 7 Months in Prison, Expulsion from U.S. After HSI New York Probe  (Matt Seldon, HSToday)
In a landmark case, Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) New York, in collaboration with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York, the FBI New York, and the Internal Revenue Service-Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI) New York, successfully prosecuted Hui Qin, a billionaire from the People’s Republic of China. Qin, also known as Qin Hui, Hui Quin, Muk Lam Li, and Karl, was sentenced to seven months in prison for making political contributions in the names of others, immigration fraud, and producing a false identification document.
Qin, a prominent figure listed on Forbes magazine’s List of Billionaires and operator of SMI Culture, a Hong Kong-based entertainment entity, pled guilty to the charges in March. Following his sentencing, he was ordered to abandon his status as a lawful permanent resident of the United States and be removed to a country other than China. The 56-year-old, who resided in Old Westbury, Long Island, and Manhattan, New York, has been incarcerated since his arrest on October 2, 2023.