The Terrorism Warning Lights Are Blinking Red Again | Inside the City Policed by Machines | How Game Theory Can Make AI More Reliable | An Object Lesson from Covid on How to Destroy Public Trust, and more

Al Qaeda Calls on Fighters to Return to Afghanistan to Create a Terrorist Safe Haven Once Again  (Gariel Diamond, New York Sun)
The de facto leader of Al Qaeda, Sayf Al-Adl, is calling on jihadists across the globe to travel to Afghanistan, marking an effort to re-establish the country as a safe haven for the terrorist group. “The loyal people of the Ummah,” the global Islamic community, “interested in change must go to Afghanistan, learn from its conditions, and benefit from” the Taliban’s experience, Adl said in a pamphlet titled, “This is Gaza: A War of Existence, Not of Borders.” This is a call for fighters to train in Afghanistan before launching attacks on “Zionists” and the West, according to the Long War Journal. “This is incredibly important. Many will heed the call” and make the pilgrimage, the director of the Allison Center for National Security at the Heritage Foundation, Robert Greenway, tells the Sun.

How Safe Are Fans at Euro 2024? A Security Expert Is Worried  (Oliver Moody, DW)
“Everyone is going to look at Germany during those couple of weeks when we have the championship here,” Hans-Jakob Schindler of the Counter Extremism Project told DW. “That means our adversaries are going to try to do whatever they can to disrupt this.” Fears of a terrorist attack on the Euros have increased since an attack on a concert hall on the outskirts of Moscow claimed by an offshoot of the so-called “Islamic State” group left 145 people dead. A threat subsequently published in an IS propaganda magazine suggested the tournament was a target. Still, Schindler said the public nature of that threat makes it less likely that a coordinated attack is planned.

Boko Haram Terrorists Now Use Elon Musk’s Starlink for Internet Connection  (Leadership News)
Some members of the Boko Haram terrorist group have been caught using Starlink, the super-fast device owned by billionaire Elon Musk in Sambisa Forest. According to a counter Insurgency Expert and Security Analyst, Zagazola Makama, the Nigerian troops “Operation Hadin Kai” successfully killed a top commander of the sect, Tahir Baga, and recovered digital connectives like Starlink Wi-Fi system, mobile phones amongst other weapons. Starlink which is owned by the second richest man in the world, announced its presence in Nigeria in January 2023 with the aim of providing low-cost internet to remote location in the country and is sold for N450, 000 on pre-order. The terrorist group were said to have fled and abandoned the items when they could no longer withstand the firepower of the Nigerian troops.

California Public University Academics End Pro-Palestinian Strike Under Court Order  (Steve Gorman, Reuters)
Thousands of University of California academic workers who went on strike at six campuses protesting administrators’ response to pro-Palestinian protests returned to the job on Monday under court order, but their union vowed more protests to come. An Orange County Superior Court judge late on Friday granted a temporary restraining order sought by the university, which asserted that the walkout stemmed from non-labor issues and that it violated the no-strike clause in the union’s contract. University officials had originally petitioned the California Public Employment Relations Board, but the panel twice rejected their requests for an injunction. Unionized academic researchers, graduate teaching assistants and post-doctoral scholars walked off the job over what they called unfair labor practices in the university’s handling of pro-Palestinian demonstrations in recent weeks.

Biden Administration Tries to Plug Loophole That Released Migrant Linked to Terrorism into the U.S.  (Julia Ainsley, NC News)
The Biden administration is giving immigration judges and asylum officers more access to classified information to help them determine which migrants might have ties to terrorism or pose a threat to public safety. The change in policy follows an April 11 NBC News story that revealed an Afghan migrant on the terrorist watchlist was released on bond by an immigration judge in Texas after prosecutors from Immigration and Customs Enforcement withheld information about a possible connection to terrorism because the evidence was classified. Instead of arguing that the man was a national security risk, the prosecutors argued he was a flight risk, two sources familiar with the case said. Mohammad Kharwin, 48, was caught crossing the border in 2023, but released because the Border Patrol lacked biometric information connecting him to the terror watchlist.

The Terrorism Warning Lights Are Blinking Red Again  (Graham Allison and Michael J. Morell, Foreign Affairs)
rom his confirmation hearing to become director of Central Intelligence in May 1997 until September 11, 2001, George Tenet was sounding an alarm about Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. In those four years before al Qaeda operatives attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Tenet testified publicly no fewer than ten times about the threat the group posed to U.S. interests at home and abroad. In February 1999, six months after the group bombed the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, he claimed, “There is not the slightest doubt that Osama bin Laden … [is] planning further attacks against us.” In early 2000, he warned Congress again that bin Laden was “foremost among these terrorists, because of the immediacy and seriousness of the threat he poses” and because of his ability to strike “without additional warning.” Al Qaeda’s next attacks, Tenet said, could be “simultaneous” and “spectacular.” In private, Tenet was even more assertive. Breaking with standard protocols, he wrote personal letters to President Bill Clinton expressing his deep conviction about the gravity of the threat. And several times in 2001, he personally discussed his concerns about al Qaeda’s plans with President George W. Bush and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. The CIA and the FBI may not have uncovered the time, place, or method of the 9/11 plot, but Tenet’s warnings were prophetic.
Two and a half decades later, Christopher Wray, the director of the FBI, is sounding similar alarms. His discussions within the Biden administration are private, but his testimony to Congress and other public statements could not be more explicit. Testifying in December to members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Wray said, “When I sat here last year, I walked through how we were already in a heightened threat environment.” Yet after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, “we’ve seen the threat from foreign terrorists rise to a whole nother level,” he added. In speaking about those threats, Wray has repeatedly drawn attention to security gaps at the United States’ southern border, where thousands of people each week enter the country undetected.
Wray is not the only senior official issuing warnings. Since he became commander of United States Central Command (CENTCOM) in 2022, General Erik Kurilla has been pointing out the worrying capabilities of the terrorist groups his forces are fighting in the Middle East and South Asia. These include al Qaeda, the Islamic State (also known as ISIS), and especially Islamic State Khorasan (ISIS-K), the ISIS affiliate that operates in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Christine Abizaid, the outgoing director of the National Counterterrorism Center, described “an elevated global threat environment” while speaking at a conference in Doha last month. And in testimony before the House Judiciary Committee just last week, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, speaking about the possibility of a terrorist attack on the United States, said that the “threat level … has gone up enormously.”

Trump’s Vows of ‘Revenge’ Against His Opponents Gain Volume  (Ro Garver, VOA News)
Former President Donald Trump has been increasingly clear about his intention to use the power of the presidency to seek revenge on those he considers his political enemies if his bid to retake the White House is successful in the November elections.
Trump’s promises of retaliation are not new. Since entering the political arena in 2015, he has used the politics of grievance to motivate many of his supporters. While addressing a crowd last year at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, Trump declared, “I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”
However, in the days after he was found guilty of 34 felony counts in a New York state court last month, a case in which he has not yet been sentenced, Trump’s promises of revenge have not been made on behalf of his supporters, but as a reaction to his own personal legal difficulties.
Political scientist James A. Morone, a professor at Brown University, told VOA that Trump’s explicit pledge to use the power of the federal government to persecute his political enemies has no clear parallel in the country’s history.
“This is really unprecedented for a president to be doing this,” Morone said. “And really, the historical precedents are quite the contrary.”
Even after the Civil War, Morone said, there were no prosecutions of prominent former Confederate officials and military officers. Former Confederate President Jefferson Davis was arrested and charged with treason, but he was never prosecuted, and the charges against him were eventually dropped, allowing him to return to private life as a U.S. citizen.
Morone said that Trump’s rhetoric is particularly worrisome because it sends a message to current and future public officials who may feel they need to demonstrate their loyalty to him.
“Every time he gives a speech or an interview that says, ‘Revenge is coming. Revenge can be good,’ they’ll be sitting around thinking, ‘OK … let’s think of what we can do to put ourselves in good standing as Trump warriors,’ ” Morone said.
“You could easily imagine it leading to real harm,” he said.

Germany Will Deport Anyone Glorifying Terrorism, Says Olaf Scholz  (David Crossland, The Times)
Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, has announced plans to deport immigrants who commit serious crimes or glorify acts of terrorism after public uproar over a knife attack by an Afghan asylum seeker in Mannheim in which a police officer was killed.
“Anyone who exploits our protection, like the perpetrator in Mannheim, has forfeited our protection. There is zero tolerance,” Scholz said in a toughly worded speech to parliament amid mounting pressure on his government to crack down on radical Islamists.

The Islamic State’s Resurgence in Mozambique  (Charlie Winter, Lawfare)
On May 10, the Islamic State’s Mozambican affiliate executed one of its most ambitious attacks in recent years, targeting the town of Macomia in northern Cabo Delgado. This coordinated dawn assault involved dozens of militants attacking from multiple directions, highlighting a marked shift in the group’s tactics from hit-and-run raids to more organized, multipronged operations.
Longitudinal analysis of Islamic State-Mozambique (IS-M) attack and communications data evidences a significant transformation in its operations in recent months. While the organization’s activities were characterized by opportunism through much of 2023, it is evolving toward more complex assaults and expanded recruitment efforts.
It is no coincidence that this shift correlates closely with the winding down of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) military mission, which has been active in Mozambique since July 2021 and is scheduled to end in July 2024. The mission, dubbed the SADC Mission in Mozambique (SAMIM), consists of 1,900 personnel from eight countries, along with dozens of armored vehicles, a transport plane, and even a naval strike craft. While relatively modest in size, its impact has been significant, with SAMIM forces providing extensive intelligence, tactical, and material support to their Mozambican counterparts. About 1,500 SAMIM troops are from the South African National Defense Force and, until April of this year, most of those 1,500 soldiers had been deployed at the Mihluri base on the outskirts of Macomia.
The drawdown of SADC forces seems to have created a strategic vacuum that IS-M is now exploiting to escalate its activities in the region.

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.
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 LONG VIEW

How Game Theory Can Make AI More Reliable  (Steve Nadis, Wired)
Imagine you had a friend who gave different answers to the same question, depending on how you asked it. “What’s the capital of Peru?” would get one answer, and “Is Lima the capital of Peru?” would get another. You’d probably be a little worried about your friend’s mental faculties, and you’d almost certainly find it hard to trust any answer they gave.
That’s exactly what’s happening with many large language models (LLMs), the ultra-powerful machine learning tools that power ChatGPT and other marvels of artificial intelligence. A generative question, which is open-ended, yields one answer, and a discriminative question, which involves having to choose between options, often yields a different one. “There is a disconnect when the same question is phrased differently,” said Athul Paul Jacob, a doctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
To make a language model’s answers more consistent—and make the model more reliable overall—Jacob and his colleagues devised a game where the model’s two modes are driven toward finding an answer they can agree on. Dubbed the consensus game, this simple procedure pits an LLM against itself, using the tools of game theory to improve the model’s accuracy and internal consistency.

The Race to Get Ahead One of the Deadliest Natural Disasters  (Umair Irfan, Vox)
If you felt the ground starting to shake, would you know what you’re supposed to do?
You should. You might be more vulnerable to an earthquake than you realize: According to the US Geological Survey, almost 75 percent of the US population lives in an area that could experience a damaging quake. 
Right now, we get scarily little notice before the ground below starts to tremble. Earthquakes create a potent threat even in places that are well prepared — and they’ve proven catastrophic in places that aren’t. One of the deadliest disasters of the 21st century is the January 12, 2010, 7.0 magnitude earthquake in Haiti, which killed more than 220,000 people, with some estimates topping 300,000. Another is the magnitude 9.1 earthquake and ensuing tsunami on December 26, 2004, which claimed about 230,000 lives. As populations grow in seismically active areas, many more people will be at risk.
The World Meteorological Organization observed that between 1970 and 2019, the number of disasters, mostly related to weather, increased fivefold, but deaths fell by two-thirds. Even as climate change worsens downpours, floods, fires, and heat waves, improvements in weather forecasting, longer lead times for warnings, more resilient infrastructure, and better responses in the aftermath have continued to save more lives.
Yet for earthquakes, progress has been much slower. They’re a stubborn outlier in a decades-long downward trend in disaster fatalities, and recent events have shown just how deadly they can be.
But there are ways to save lives, and Japan presents an important example. 

Trump Is Not America’s Le Pen  (Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic)
Anglo-American media always need a shorthand to sum up this messy, nuanced, continent-wide horse race, and on the morning after Sunday’s vote, they found one: The Rise of the Far Right. And the follow-up talking point? America might head this way too.
Now let me make it more complicated.
When applied to France, the scary headlines were fair enough: Marine Le Pen’s anti-establishment, far-right National Rally party (which has in fact been a part of the French establishment for decades, though never in charge) swept the board, which in that system means it won about a third of the votes.
Almost everywhere else, the banner headline was wrong. 
For Americans, the message from these elections is alarming and unexpected, but not because of what is happening in Europe. Gaze across the continent, whether at Giorgia Meloni, the Italian prime minister whose party originated in Mussolini’s fascist movement, or Le Pen, whose roots truly lie in Vichy, or Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, who once called his country’s Parliament “fake,” and you will see far-right leaders who have succeeded precisely by appearing to tack to the center, trying to sound less extreme, and dropping previous objections and embracing existing alliances, such as the European Union and NATO. They do talk a lot about immigration and inflation, but so do mainstream parties. Their goals may secretly be more radical—Le Pen may well be planning to undermine the French political system if she wins, and I don’t believe that she has cut her ties to Russia—but they are succeeding by hiding that radicalism from voters.
Donald Trump is not like these politicians. The former president is not tacking to the center, and he is not trying to appear less confrontational. Nor does he seek to embrace existing alliances. On the contrary, almost every day he sounds more extreme, more unhinged, and more dangerous. Meloni has not inspired her followers to block the results of an election. Le Pen does not rant about retribution and revenge. Wilders has agreed to be part of a coalition government, meaning that he can compromise with other political leaders, and has promised to put his notorious hostility to Muslims “on ice.” Even Orbán, who has gone the furthest in destroying his country’s institutions and who has rewritten Hungary’s constitution to benefit himself, doesn’t brag openly about wanting to be an autocrat. Trump does. People around him speak openly about wanting to destroy American democracy too. None of this seems to hurt him with voters, who appear to welcome this destructive, radical extremism, or at least not to mind it.
American media clichés about Europe are wrong. In fact, the European far right is rising in some places, but falling in others. And we aren’t “in danger” of following European voters in an extremist direction, because we are already well past them. If Trump wins in November, America could radicalize Europe, not the other way around.

What Americans Really Think About Immigration  (Jerusalem Demsas, The Atlantic)
Activists may not want to hear it, but the truth is immigration is a political loser. This is the sort of political analysis we’ve heard from centrist and liberal political operatives wary of repeating the mistakes of 2016. That was the year the British public voted to leave the European Union, sending shockwaves through the West. The Brexit vote was largely seen as driven by xenophobia—Leavers warned that remaining in the EU would allow migrants to flow unchecked across the channel. And across an ocean, many heralded Donald Trump’s victory as proof that the American public was hostile to newcomers and would no longer tolerate significant levels of immigration.
But just last week, the Biden administration issued a rule seeking to make it harder for people to request asylum in the United States. It’s a decision made in the context of the president’s tough reelection chances and reflects the hope some have that cracking down at the border could gain him some political points.
Attitudes toward immigration—particularly in the U.S.—are a lot more complicated than many political commentators would have you believe. Vaguely cracking down at the border often doesn’t address the very real concerns people have about how immigration policy is working. Views of immigration are highly contingent on the method of entry and the perceived scarcity of jobs and housing—not to mention the country of origin of the incoming immigrants and the intangible feeling about whether the country “controls” its own borders or if people are gaming the system by coming illegally.

An Object Lesson from Covid on How to Destroy Public Trust  (Zeynep Tufekci, New York Times)
As for the repeated assertion that Covid originated in a “wet market” in Wuhan, China, not in an infectious diseases laboratory there, N.I.H. officials were privately expressing alarm over that lab’s lax biosafety practices and risky research. In his public testimony, Fauci conceded that even now there “has not been definitive proof one way or the other” of Covid-19’s origins.
Officials didn’t just spread these dubious ideas, they also demeaned anyone who dared to question them. “Dr. Fauci Throws Cold Water on Conspiracy Theory That Coronavirus Was Created in a Chinese Lab” was one typical headline. At the hearings, it emerged that Dr. David Morens, a senior N.I.H. figure, was deleting emails that discussed pandemic origins and using his personal account so as to avoid public oversight. “We’re all smart enough to know to never have smoking guns, and if we did we wouldn’t put them in emails and if we found them we’d delete them,” he wrote to the head of a nonprofit involved in research at the Wuhan lab.
I wish I could say these were all just examples of the science evolving in real time, but they actually demonstrate obstinacy, arrogance and cowardice. Instead of circling the wagons, these officials should have been responsibly and transparently informing the public to the best of their knowledge and abilities.
I hope the pandemic, both as lived experience and now as rewritten history, has proved that paternalistic, infantilizing messaging backfires. Transparency and accountability work.
In the four-plus years since Covid emerged, millions of people died, but so did something harder to quantify: the trust of a great many people in the science of public health. The authorities will have to live with the consequences, and so, unfortunately, will all the rest of us.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Conspiracy Theory of Western Decline  (Cathy Youn, Bulwark)
The latest sensation in the “heterodox” media ecosystem is a long essay by celebrated author and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali titled “We Have Been Subverted.” Bari Weiss, whose Free Press website published it this week, touted it as “one of the year’s most important essays.” Ali’s husband, British historian Niall Ferguson, called it “essential.” Several tweets linking to the essay went viral.
In fact, the essay is notable mainly for one thing: it represents a startling plunge, for Ali and evidently for the Free Press, into outright, unabashed conspiracy theory.
Chinese propaganda, radical Islamism, and homegrown social justice radicalism absolutely deserve criticism and pushback (and they are already getting it: for instance, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion statements, which Ali asserts are “now a requirement at universities across America,” have already been jettisoned by some major institutions including Harvard and MIT). But the Grand Unified Theory of Subversion should be just as resolutely rejected. Like all conspiratorial explanations of complex phenomena, it inhibits rather than promotes understanding.
Many people agree with Ali that “Western” values—“the rule of law, a tradition of liberty, personal responsibility, a system of representative government, a toleration of difference, and a commitment to pluralism”—are worth preserving and are currently under attack. But the attack is not coming only from the left. And paranoia about left-wing subversion can easily feed right-wing desires for an authoritarian state that crushes pluralism, tolerance, and liberty in the name of crushing the insidious enemy.

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.

Inside the City Policed by Machines  (Dhruv Mehrota, Wired)
The first and largest police drone operation in the countryus 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.

MORE PICKS

Why California Is Swinging Right on Crime  (Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic)
That hard pivot to the politics of law and order describes not only California’s governor, but the Golden State as a whole. Voters and the politicians who represent them, mostly Democrats, embraced progressive attitudes and rhetoric toward criminal-justice reform for at least a decade. By the summer of 2020, the University of Southern California politics professor Dan Schnur told the Financial Times, “it appeared we were witnessing a seminal shift in public thinking on these issues.” But just two years later, he continued, “more traditional approaches to public safety” were resurgent.
San Francisco recalled its progressive district attorney, Chesa Boudin, in 2022. That city’s progressive mayor, London Breed, now says, “Compassion is killing people. And we have to push forth some tough love.” Los Angeles’s progressive mayor, Karen Bass, keeps trying to hire more cops. Many Californians favor harsher penalties for what are now misdemeanors.
Why did the politics of crime change so rapidly? Rising crime surely played a major part. Still, crime does not approach the rate that afflicted California during the 1980s and ’90s, when law-and-order concerns last dominated its politics. And there is intense new concern about crime even in Orange County, Ventura County, and the Central Coast, where it has increased less than elsewhere and most residents are neither unsafe nor governed by overreaching progressives. I doubt the pendulum would be swinging as far or as fast but for changes in the tenor of crime that Californians have seen, most often via video. In fact, viral videos and their outraging, perception-changing, galvanizing effects may have propelled both outraged skepticism of tough-on-crime tactics and the backlash to it.

How Washington Missed the Boat on AI Regulation  (Bhaskar Chakravorti, Foreign Policy)
“The longer we wait, the bigger the gap becomes.” With those wise words, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer drew attention to an urgent need: closing the gulf between the pace of innovation and the pace of policy development regarding artificial intelligence in the United States.
But then he promptly released an AI policy road map guaranteed to widen that gulf. In May, the Schumer-led Bipartisan Senate AI Working Group released a report after a nearly yearlong process of educational briefings, nine “Insight Forums,” and engagement with more than 150 experts and produced a proposal with few specifics other than urging the federal government to spend $32 billion a year on (nondefense) AI innovation.
The task of formulating actual regulations and policy designed to build public trust in AI was pushed off to unnamed “relevant committees.”
Even on matters as weighty as national security, the road map concluded with a grab bag of disjointed advice. Overall, it appears that Congress is worried about throwing sand in the gears of the AI industry’s innovation agenda. Its operating mantra appears to be: move slowly and make sure not to break anything.

Ransomware Is ‘More Brutal’ Than Ever in 2024  (Jordan Pearson, Wired)
Today, people around the world will head to school, doctor’s appointments, and pharmacies, only to be told, “Sorry, our computer systems are down.” The frequent culprit is a cybercrime gang operating on the other side of the world, demanding payment for system access or the safe return of stolen data.
The ransomware epidemic shows no signs of slowing down in 2024—despite increasing police crackdowns—and experts worry that it could soon enter a more violent phase.
“We’re definitely not winning the fight against ransomware right now,” Allan Liska, a threat intelligence analyst at Recorded Future, tells WIRED.

Hackers Impersonating As Fake Toll Payment Processor Across The U.S.  (Tushar Subhra Dutta, Cyber Security News)
A convincing phishing scam recently targeted a cybersecurity researcher’s (Jonathan Munshaw) wife with a fake text claiming she owed unpaid New Jersey E-ZPass highway tolls.
The message prompted visiting a fraudulent site mimicking the legitimate E-ZPass website to pay fictitious fines. 
The timing coincided with a recent trip to the state where they have active E-ZPass accounts for automatic toll payment, lending credibility to the scam attempt. 
E-ZPass is an electronic toll collection system used across multiple U.S. states and managed by various agencies, which the scammers exploited by spoofing New Jersey’s official website alarmingly well.
Cybersecurity researchers at Talos Intelligence recently discovered that hackers had been actively impersonating fake toll payment processors across the U.S.

How Much Worse Would a Bird-Flu Pandemic Be?  (Katherine J. Wu, The Atlantic)
Our most recent flu pandemic—2009’s H1N1 “swine flu”—was, in absolute terms, a public-health crisis. By scientists’ best estimates, roughly 200,000 to 300,000 people around the world died; countless more fell sick. Kids, younger adults, and pregnant people were hit especially hard.
That said, it could have been far worse. Of the known flu pandemics, 2009’s took the fewest lives; during the H1N1 pandemic that preceded it, which began in 1918, a flu virus infected an estimated 500 million people worldwide, at least 50 million of whom died. Even some recent seasonal flus have killed more people than swine flu did. With swine flu, “we got lucky,” Seema Lakdawala, a virologist at Emory University, told me. H5N1 avian flu, which has been transmitting wildly among animals, has not yet spread in earnest among humans. Should that change, though, the world’s next flu pandemic might not afford us the same break.

Biden’s Border Crackdown Could Disproportionately Affect Families  (Hamed Aleaziz and Miriam Jordan, New York Times)
A new border crackdown unveiled by the Biden administration this week is likely to disproportionately affect families, whose soaring numbers in the last decade have drastically changed the profile of the population crossing the southern border.
Family units have come to represent a substantial share of border crossers, accounting for about 40 percent of all migrants who have entered the United States this year. Families generally have been released into the country quickly because of legal constraints that prevent children from being detained for extended periods.
They then join the millions of undocumented people who stay in the United States indefinitely, under the radar of the U.S. authorities, as they wait for court dates years in the future.
But according to a memo issued by the Homeland Security Department and obtained by The New York Times, families will be returned to their home countries within days under President Biden’s new border policy, which temporarily closed the U.S.-Mexico border to most asylum seekers as of 12:01 a.m. Wednesday.
The implications of the new policy are enormous for families, who are some of the most vulnerable groups making the journey to the United States. Advocates warn that it could have dangerous repercussions, making parents more likely to separate from their children or send them alone to the border, because unaccompanied minors are exempt from the new policy.

MIT Researchers Ordered and Combined Parts of the 1918 Pandemic Influenza Virus. Did They Expose a Security Flaw?  (Matt Field, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists)
Without proper guardrails in place, experts and governments worry, artificial intelligence (AI) could make it easier for more people to do harm with biology. Perhaps advanced chatbots could help devise a biological attack plan, or they could de-skill the process of making a pathogen to the point at which many could do it. Maybe an AI could help develop new toxins. One critical chokepoint to preventing this misuse, experts say, is the synthetic gene industry. Numerous companies have emerged in recent years to fulfill orders for synthetic DNA. Once difficult to make, the genetic blueprint for life can now be purchased online. And while synthetic genetic sequences have many uses in medicine, the life sciences, and other fields, they could also be useful in a less desirable area: bioweapons.
But just how susceptible the gene synthesis industry is to misuse remains an open question. Many companies screen customers to judge their suitability for handling the synthetic material as well as orders to determine if they correspond to the genetic sequences of dangerous toxins or pathogens. To help shore up any gaps, the White House issued an executive order on AI last fall that calls for the government to develop ways to stress test these screening systems.
But in the meantime, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) conducted their own “red team” test of industry safety measures, arriving at what they characterize as an alarming conclusion. They were able to order and receive all the genetic material necessary to recreate the 1918 pandemic influenza virus and the toxin ricin. “Our results demonstrate that nearly all DNA synthesis screening practices employed in October of 2023 failed to reject lightly disguised orders that could be assembled to produce viable select agents, including a pandemic virus,” the team wrote.
The team sent in orders for small fragments of the hazardous genetic sequences to many synthesis companies, thereby splitting the orders to evade detection. In some cases, they “camouflaged” sequences by appending unrelated genetic code to concerning fragments. In other cases, they both camouflaged and mutated the fragments to further conceal the ordered sequences. And the team succeeded—receiving orders 88 to 100 percent of the time in various test categories.
On their face, the results of the study appear concerning.

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.

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.