OUR PICKSThe Thomas Crooks Conspiracy Theories Aren’t Going Anywhere | The ACLU Fights for Your Constitutional Right to Make Deepfakes | Defining Cyberterrorism, and more
· The Thomas Crooks Conspiracy Theories Aren’t Going Anywhere
The FBI says Donald Trump’s would-be assassin acted alone; the CIA denies any association with him. But experts say the complex reasons for belief in conspiracies will likely keep people believing
· The ACLU Fights for Your Constitutional Right to Make Deepfakes
States across the US are seeking to criminalize certain uses of AI-generated content. Civil rights groups are pushing back, arguing that some of these new laws conflict with the First Amendment
· Defining Cyberterrorism: How Different Approaches Shape Data Collection
Amidst rising cyberattacks, there is a growing debate on whether these attacks should be deemed cyberterrorism
· National Security Threats Loom Over American Wheat Power
What is our resiliency to food disruption in the context of strategic competition with great powers below the threshold of armed conflict?
The Thomas Crooks Conspiracy Theories Aren’t Going Anywhere (Tim Marchman, Wired)
A would-be presidential assassin with no clear motive, shot dead at the scene; accounts from witnesses who’d warned police to no avail; video taken from a bewildering variety of angles. Minutes after Thomas Crooks came within an inch of killing Donald Trump, it was already clear what would happen next, and in the subsequent days a number of conspiracy theories indeed emerged, each more baroque than the last.
Tracing just one shows how easily and rapidly they proliferate. Famed hedge fund manager Bill Ackman wrote in a since-deleted X post, for example, that an anti-vaccine influencer’s video purporting to show that there were two shooters made “a powerful case.” Another anti-vaccine influencer, meanwhile, produced a chart tracing the paths of bullets from four shooters, and a third, affiliated with Alex Jones, asserted that his audio analysis showed there were three. (None offered a compelling explanation of how an entire team of assassins botched the job.)
While there’s no consensus among popular conspiracists on how many shooters there were and whether law enforcement agencies on the scene passively allowed or actively abetted the crime, they do seem to broadly agree it was an inside job carried out at the behest of the deep state. (The FBI says its ongoing investigation has turned up no reason to think Crooks had accomplices.) Who the specific culprits are supposed to be remains unclear. The Heritage Foundation, the think tank currently best known for its role in coordinating Project 2025, used cell phone location data to intimate the FBI was involved, while everyone from QAnon influencers to Ackman has invoked fictional CIA assassin Jason Bourne when not pointing the finger at the actual, real-life CIA. (“These claims are utterly false, absurd, and damaging,” a CIA spokesperson tells WIRED. “The CIA had no relationship whatsoever with Thomas Crooks.”)
