Drones Warn New Yorkers About Storm Dangers | TikTok, Influence Operations, and U.S. Elections | The Case for AI Optimism, and more

How Project 2025 Would Put U.S. Elections at Risk  (Eric Geller, Wired)
The winner of the 2024 US presidential election will confront complicated questions about whether the government is doing enough to protect the country from cyber threats. But one leading conservative group is sidestepping those questions and pushing to shrink the government’s main cyber agency, calling it a bastion of far-left tyranny.
Project 2025, a widely circulated playbook from the influential right-leaning Heritage Foundation, takes aim at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on several fronts, especially its efforts to reduce dangerous online misinformation. If former president Donald Trump wins the election and appoints officials who follow the playbook’s recommendations for CISA, the five-year-old agency could face an unprecedented crisis.
Trump has disavowed Project 2025—a 900-page document full of controversial proposals—but its authors have close ties to his former administration and his campaign, and many of its recommendations align with Trump’s agenda. If he wins a second term, Trump is likely to embrace Project 2025’s combative approach to CISA, whose director he fired for debunking his lies about the 2020 election. That makes the 2024 election an existential moment for CISA.

TikTok, Influence Operations, and U.S. Elections  (Lance Hunter, HSToday)
In an era of heightened political polarization, finding bipartisan consensus in Washington, D.C. is often difficult. However, elected leaders from both parties have largely agreed on the danger posed by potential foreign influence operations and TikTok, as evidenced by the recently signed federal legislation, The RESTRICT Act. The act bans TikTok unless it is sold by its parent company, ByteDance, within a year. Influence operations, which are often part of a country’s information warfare strategies, refer to the “deliberate use of information (whether true or false) by one party on an adversary to confuse, mislead, and ultimately to influence the choices and decisions that the adversary makes.”  
Russian influence operations surrounding the 2016 Presidential election are well-documented. Russian influence operations directed at the U.S. remain an important national security issue due to Russia’s history of targeting the U.S. and its allies in influence operations and Russia’s use of information warfare in Ukraine. However, influence operations conducted by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) are also a serious concern for national security for multiple reasons.  

Ditching Factory Farming Can Help Prevent Another Pandemic  (Jonathan Safran Foer and Aaron Gross, Vox)
The most ambitious goal of the animal movement has always been to eradicate factory farming and inspire people to eat more plants and fewer animals. This only makes sense, as the scale of the violence endemic to industrial farming radically dwarfs all other forms of animal suffering.
Beyond the problem of the inevitable suffering involved in the slaughter of animals we consume, factory farming necessitates new forms of animal abuse such as intensive confinement, drugs that keep sick animals just alive enough to be profitable, and genetic modifications that induce diseases. (While genetic modification is often interpreted to mean direct edits to a genome, the USDA’s definition also includes selective breeding, the technique the factory farm industry has used to deform animals beyond recognition.) These harms to animals, as we will see, are tightly linked to harms to humans.
But the way forward for the animal movement may be less about swelling the ranks of vegetarians and vegans — which has long been its primary ambition — and more about identifying an overlapping consensus between social movements that center animals and those that center concerns like climate change and public health. These movements share an interest in shifting toward a more plant-based food system as never before. We should also share resources and tactics.

The Case for AI Optimism  (Michael R. Strain, National Affairs)
Artificial intelligence is sure to be economically disruptive. But workers in the United States have undergone multiple waves of disruptive technological change throughout history, and emerged better off as a result. Knowing that America’s experiences with technology-driven disruption proved a net benefit should give us confidence about our ability to come out ahead of the coming AI revolution.