U.S. Looks to Ban Election Betting | X Has Become the Top Platform for Hosting Hamas Videos | How UFO Sightings Became an American Obsession, and more

Elon Musk’s X Faces Axe from Anti-Terror Group Over Extremist Content  (Emma Yeomans, The Times)
Elon Musk has thrown the tech industry’s main anti-terror organization into turmoil amid claims X has become the top platform for hosting Hamas videos, The Times has learnt.
The Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT) is a coalition that seeks to remove terror content from tech platforms. Its members include Google, X, Meta and Microsoft.
Twitter — X’s former name — was a founding member and the company is also on the board of the international body. However, since Musk took over X and reduced content moderation, the company’s continued membership of GIFCT has led to internal unrest.
Musk has let banned extremists back on to X, allowed anyone to pay for a verification mark and sacked a large part of its content moderation team. This was part of the billionaire’s strategy of turning X into a “free speech” platform that has seen him clash with the prime minister over the government’s response to the riots.
That continued this weekend with Musk posting critical tweets about the prosecution of those who incited violence on social media.
X is now the easiest platform to find Hamas videos, according to the Community Security Trust (CST), a charity that combats extremism and antisemitism.
Members of GIFCT believe that X’s continued membership and position on the board is undermining the organization’s credibility, The Times has learnt.
Its independent advisory committee, which the Home Office sits on, said in its last annual report that it had “become increasingly concerned by significant reductions in online trust and safety capabilities for certain platforms and a perceived decrease in the priority of the issue, impacting companies’ ability to moderate extremist content online”. GIFCT sources said this statement was meant to refer to X.

MI5 Could Scrutinize Tommy Robinson Funding and Checks ‘May Extend to Farage’  (Oliver Wright, The Times)
The security services will be looking “very carefully” at who has funded the far-right leader Tommy Robinson, a former MI6 officer has said, after fears were raised that Russia had stoked the riots in the UK.
Christopher Steele, a former head of the Russia desk, said organizations such as MI5 would be looking into the background of people seen to encourage rioting to check whether they had links to the Putin regime.
He said this could extend to elected politicians like Nigel Farage, who queried whether the Southport knife attacker might have been “known to the security services”.
“I think the security service will be looking very carefully at the instigators of these activities, including people like Tommy Robinson, even conceivably Nigel Farage, who incidentally said that we were being misinformed by the government about Southport,” he told Times Radio.
“They’ll be looking at things like their travel movements, who they’ve been in touch with, monetary transfers and so on, because that will reveal or not, as the case may be, a pattern of behaviour which can lead to some conclusions about the degree to which Russia has been interfering in this situation.”

Exposed: How a Finnish Neo-Nazi Shared Arson Manual Before Riots  (Emma Yeomans, The Times)
A Finnish neo-Nazi shared instructions to commit arson and urged people to file false reports in order to waste police resources during the riots last week.
The man in his early twenties, whom The Times is not naming, can be revealed as an instigator of the far-right action last week. He helped run a group chat on the app Telegram, where tens of thousands of people shared ideas for riot locations and hateful content about immigrants and Jewish people.
Social media sites have come under increased scrutiny since the stabbings in Southport. Misinformation about the suspect spread quickly, as well as locations for possible protests and incitement for riots.
The individual is understood to live in southern Finland and began posting extreme right-wing content online as a teenager. According to police records unearthed by journalists at YLE, the Finnish public broadcaster, he was previously investigated by Finnish police for making an illegal threat. He became an administrator for the Southport Wake Up group on Telegram, which became connected to the riots.

ELECTION INTEGRITY

U.S. Looks to Ban Election Betting as Traders Flock to Prediction Sites  (Tony Romm, Washinton Post)
The U.S. government has embarked on a broad crackdown against election betting, relying on a mix of newly proposed rules and ongoing court cases to try to stamp out a nascent industry that critics call a potential threat to democracy.
To Democrats, these wagers on the outcome of a particular campaign invite more money into an electoral system that’s already rife with it. But the staunchest backers of political prediction marketplaces insist that the fears of election interference are overstated — and that the insights gleaned from their data serve a greater purpose.

See Why AI Detection Tools Can Fail to Catch Election Deepfakes  (Kevin Schaul, Pranshu Verma and Cat Zakrzewski, Washington Post)
Artificial intelligence-created content is flooding the web and making it less clear than ever what’s real in this election. From former president Donald Trump falsely claiming images from a Vice President Kamala Harris rally were AI-generated to a spoofed robocall of President Joe Biden telling voters not to cast their ballot, the rise of AI is fueling rampant misinformation.
Deepfake detectors have been marketed as a silver bullet for identifying AI fakes, or “deepfakes.” Social media giants use them to label fake content on their platforms. Government officials are pressuring the private sector to pour millions into building the software, fearing deepfakes could disrupt elections or allow foreign adversaries to incite domestic turmoil.
But the science of detecting manipulated content is in its early stages. An April study by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism found that many deepfake detector tools can be easily duped with simple software tricks or editing techniques.
Meanwhile, deepfakes and manipulated video are proliferating.

Trump’s Decline: His Interviews and Lies Get Worse  (Jennifer Rubin, Washington Post)
Trump seems unable to handle reality. His opponent is beating him by multiple metrics, especially crowd size. In response, he posted several obvious lies on Truth Social, claiming that “nobody was there” and that photos and video of Vice President Kamala Harris’s crowds were AI-generated (our own reporters were eyewitnesses to the event). As lawyer and anti-Trump commentator George Conway said on MSNBC, “He has completely lost it. This post is, beyond question, delusional. But is was also inevitable because he realizes … he’s not just running for the presidency, he’s running for his freedom.”
Trump’s nonsense is also meant to sow the seeds of doubt if the election does not go his way. He stated in the same post: “This is the way the Democrats win Elections, by CHEATING.” As my Post colleague Philip Bump wrote, “the point isn’t to increase Trump’s credibility. It’s to erode everyone else’s. That way, when they accurately report the results in November, Trump can remind his supporters to reject them if necessary.”
Trump might be conditioning voters for another “Stop the Steal.” But then again, he might be just losing it.

Kamala Harris’ Rally Crowds Aren’t AI-Generated. Here’s How You Can Tell  (Kyle Orland, Ars Technica / Wired)
Donald Trump may have coined a new term in his latest false attack on Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign. In a pair of posts on Truth Social over the weekend, the former president said that Vice President Kamala Harris “A.I.’d” photos of a huge crowd that showed up to see her speak at a Detroit airport campaign rally last week.
“There was nobody at the plane, and she ‘A.I.’d’ it, and showed a massive ‘crowd’ of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST!” Trump wrote. “She’s a CHEATER. She had NOBODY waiting, and the ‘crowd’ looked like 10,000 people! Same thing is happening with her fake ‘crowds’ at her speeches.”
The Harris campaign responded with its own post saying that the image is “an actual photo of a 15,000-person crowd for Harris-Walz in Michigan.”

Trump’s Big Lie About Harris’s Crowds  (Michelle Goldberg, New York Times)
When Donald Trump says something ludicrous and unhinged, it is often difficult to tell if he is acting out of feral political calculation or narcissistic injury. We saw this on Sunday, when he claimed that Kamala Harris had used A.I. to fake an image of an enthusiastic crowd greeting her when she arrived in Michigan.
“There was nobody at the plane, and she ‘A.I.’d’ it, and showed a massive ‘crowd’ of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST!,” Trump wrote on his vanity website Truth Social.
His argument, such as it was, was based on a conspiracy theory floating around febrile corners of the internet that purported to find evidence of Harris’s deception in a reflection on her plane. “Same thing is happening with her fake ‘crowds’ at her speeches,” Trump added. “This is the way the Democrats win Elections, by CHEATING — And they’re even worse at the Ballot Box. She should be disqualified because the creation of a fake image is ELECTION INTERFERENCE.”
One way to read this post is that Trump is delusional. He can’t cope with Harris besting him on the metric he’s long valued the most — the size of his audience — and so is denying reality and having a tantrum. But however disordered Trump’s mind might be, I suspect there’s also a sort of strategy at work here. He is helping his supporters build a rationale for rejecting the election results if Harris wins.

Trump’s Focus on Georgia Election Board Raises Fears for November Vote  (Amy Gardner, Washington Post)
The board met over two days this week to consider a long list of proposed rules, most of which passed with support from the three pro-Trump members.
Critics said the most concerning among the new rules is a standard that allows county-level election boards to demand “reasonable inquiries” if they have questions about the outcome of an election. The rule does not specify what a reasonable inquiry is, and it places no limits on the time frame of such a probe or what documents a board can demand.
Georgia law requires county boards to certify their results by the Monday following an election, but critics of the new rule say it could prompt partisan county boards of any ideological stripe to misinterpret their power and refuse to certify, thereby slowing the process of state-level certification. In a presidential election, the calendar for determining which presidential electors will convene and send their votes to Washington is fixed and inflexible, with disruptions having the potential to derail the process.

The Right Is Still Pushing Election Denial—and Pillows  (Leah Feiger, Wired)
The election denial movement lives on, thanks in part to the efforts of well-funded and well-organized far-right activists. Today on the show, CNN correspondent Donie O’Sullivan joins WIRED Politics Lab to talk about his forthcoming documentary examining election deniers’ new tactics, and what happens after the November vote.

Microsoft: Iran Accelerating Cyber Activity in Apparent Bid to Influence U.S. Eelection (AP / VOA News)
Iran is ramping up online activity that appears intended to influence the upcoming U.S. election, in one case targeting a presidential campaign with an email phishing attack, Microsoft said Friday.
Iranian actors also have spent recent months creating fake news sites and impersonating activists, laying the groundwork to stoke division and potentially sway American voters this fall, especially in swing states, the technology giant found.
The findings in Microsoft’s newest threat intelligence report show how Iran, which has been active in recent U.S. campaign cycles, is evolving its tactics for another election that’s likely to have global implications. The report goes a step beyond anything U.S. intelligence officials have disclosed, giving specific examples of Iranian groups and the actions they have taken so far. Iran’s United Nations mission denied it had plans to interfere or launch cyberattacks in the U.S. presidential election.

THE LONG VIEW

Forget Aircraft Carriers: The U.S. Navy Has an ‘Achilles Heel’  (Peter Suciu, National Interest)
A Big Challenge for the Navy: The U.S. Navy faces significant challenges, including a shortage of sailors and shipyards. Recruiting and retaining personnel has become difficult, leading to operational and safety concerns.
More Problems: The Navy’s shipbuilding capabilities are also in decline, with only a few shipyards remaining, and issues like rising costs, material shortages, and workforce problems exacerbate the situation.
What Next? The Navy is struggling to maintain its fleet, and without addressing these logistical challenges, building up a sufficient naval force seems unlikely.

‘I’m Afraid I Can’t Do That’: Should Killer Robots Be Allowed to Disobey Orders?  (Arthur Holland Michel, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists)
It is often said that autonomous weapons could help minimize the needless horrors of war. Their vision algorithms could be better than humans at distinguishing a schoolhouse from a weapons depot. They won’t be swayed by the furies that lead mortal souls to commit atrocities; they won’t massacre or pillage. Some ethicists have long argued that robots could even be hardwired to follow the laws of war with mathematical consistency.
And yet for machines to translate these virtues into the effective protection of civilians in war zones, they must also possess a key ability: They need to be able to say no.
Consider this scenario. An autonomous drone dispatched to destroy an enemy vehicle detects women and children nearby. Deep behind enemy lines, without contact with its operator, the machine has to make a decision on its own. To prevent tragedy, it must call off its own mission. In other words, it must refuse the order.
“Robot refusal” sounds reasonable in theory. One of Amnesty International’s objections to autonomous weapons is that they “cannot … refuse an illegal order”—which implies that they should be able to refuse orders. In practice, though, it poses a tricky catch-22. Human control sits at the heart of governments’ pitch for responsible military AI. Giving machines the power to refuse orders would cut against that principle. Meanwhile, the same shortcomings that hinder AI’s capacity to faithfully execute a human’s orders could cause them to err when rejecting an order.
Militaries will therefore need to either demonstrate that it’s possible to build ethical, responsible autonomous weapons that don’t say no, or show that they can engineer a safe and reliable right-to-refuse that’s compatible with the principle of always keeping a human “in the loop.”

How UFO Sightings Became an American Obsession  (Sarah Scoles, Wired)
In 1947, Kenneth Arnold was flying his CallAir A-2 between Chehalis and Yakima, Washington, when he took a detour to search for a downed Marine Corps aircraft. There was a reward for anyone who could find the plane, and who couldn’t use $5,000?
Arnold flew around searching for a while, and accidentally found something else—something much stranger than what he’d actually been looking for. As he watched, rapt, nine objects flew through the air in formation.
That’s nothing crazy, really. You’d call it a fleet and go on with your day. But the craft appeared to be traveling much faster than the jets of the time. Arnold allegedly clocked them, as they flew between Mount Rainier and Mount Adams, at significantly more than 1,000 miles per hour. When he landed back on the ground, he—he claimed later—told an East Oregonian reporter that the objects skipped like saucers on water, referring to their motion and not their shape. The reporter wrote, however, that the craft appeared “saucer-like.” That line soon rushed out on the AP wire. The term “flying saucer” showed up a day later—the first time of many times to come—when the Chicago Sun ran the headline “Supersonic Flying Saucers Sighted by Idaho Pilot.” The actual path of the saucer description, from Arnold’s mouth to our modern ears, is more complicated: The reporter held fast to the transcription, and as a National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena analysis notes, Arnold had plenty of opportunities to correct the record earlier.

Sorry, Richard Nixon  (David Frum, The Atlantic)
Fifty years ago today, Richard Nixon laid down the presidency of the United States, a casualty of the Watergate scandal.
The era of Watergate was one of sweeping political reform. In 1970, Congress reduced the once-awesome power of committee chairs and opened committee work—until then usually closed from public view—to greater public scrutiny. In 1971 and in 1974, Congress passed far-reaching campaign-finance laws. In 1975, Congress launched its first thorough investigation of intelligence agencies; in 1977, that oversight was made permanent in the form of the House and Senate intelligence committees. In 1978, Congress adopted ambitious conflict-of-interest rules for the whole federal government. Along the way, the Department of Justice launched hundreds of investigations into corruption within state and local government. One of those probes led to the downfall of Nixon’s first vice president, Spiro Agnew, for acts committed when he was the governor of Maryland in the 1960s.
For a long time, those reforms seemed the most enduring consequence of Watergate. But at the 50-year mark, that view looks complacent and mistaken. The truth is, the reforms didn’t stick. Some of them are formally defunct; others were simply disregarded. The more open congressional committees have degenerated into buffoonish theater, exiling the real work of Congress to informal dealmaking that is nearly as secret as in the days of almighty committee chairmen such as Wilbur Mills, who almost single-handedly ruled the House Ways and Means Committee from 1958 to 1974, and James O. Eastland, who dominated the Senate Judiciary Committee for two decades until 1978.
Watergate-era campaign-finance laws remain on the books, but their main effect is merely to complicate the rules, because federal-election campaigns are, more than ever, funded by huge donations from secret donors. As president, Donald Trump defiantly ignored conflict-of-interest rules by allowing tens of millions of taxpayer and donor dollars to flow to his personal businesses. Nobody successfully made much of a legal or political issue out of it. The intelligence committees still exist, but their credibility and utility suffered serious damage when unscrupulous Trump partisans in the House abused their power to protect their party leader from embarrassing revelations.
Maybe most enduringly, decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court have made convicting state and local officials of public-integrity offenses all but impossible—even as some of the justices themselves accept gratuities worth millions of dollars from wealthy admirers. In many other ways, large and small, American politics in 2024 has shrugged off the reforming instincts of the 1970s and reverted to pre-Watergate norms of nontransparency.

MORE PICKS

The U.K. Admits Failure in Pandemic Response and Offers Preparedness and Resilience Lessons  (Bob Kolasky, HSToday)
I read with great interest the recently published Module 1 of the United Kingdom government’s “UK Covid-19 Inquiry”. This is the first in a series of modules assessing the U.K’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The first module focuses on the resilience and preparedness of the United Kingdom, and many of its findings and recommendations are universal and almost certainly apply to the United States as well. 
Among the top-line findings was that: 
“Had the UK been better prepared for and more resilient to the pandemic, some of that financial and human cost may have been avoided. Many of the very difficult decisions policymakers had to make would have been made in a very different context. Preparedness for and resilience to a whole-system civil emergency must be treated in much the same way as we treat a threat from a hostile state.”

Seventy Miles in Hell  (Caitlin Dickerson, The Atlantic)
The Darién Gap was thought for centuries to be all but impassable. Explorers and would-be colonizers who entered tended to die of hunger or thirst, be attacked by animals, drown in fast-rising rivers, or simply get lost and never emerge. Those dangers remain, but in recent years the jungle has become a superhighway for people hoping to reach the United States. According to the United Nations, more than 800,000 may cross the Darién Gap this year—a more than 50 percent increase over last year’s previously unimaginable number. Children under 5 are the fastest-growing group.
The U.S. has spent years trying to discourage this migration, pressuring its Latin American neighbors to close off established routes and deny visas to foreigners trying to fly into countries close to the U.S. border. Instead of stopping migrants from coming, this approach has simply rerouted them through the jungle, and shifted the management of their passage onto criminal organizations, which have eagerly taken advantage. The Gulf Clan, which now calls itself Ejército Gaitanista de Colombia, effectively controls this part of northern Colombia. It has long moved drugs and weapons through the Darién Gap; now it moves people too.
Everyone who works in the Darién Gap must be approved by the cartel and hand over a portion of their earnings. They have built stairs into hillsides and outfitted cliffs with ladders and camps with Wi‑Fi. They advertise it all on TikTok and YouTube, and anyone can book a journey online. There are many paths through. The most grueling route is the cheapest—right now, about $300 a person to cross the jungle on foot. Taking a boat up the coast can cost more than $1,000.

What Do Americans Really Think About the Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?  (Scott D. Sagan and Gina Sinclair, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists)
In mid-August 1945, within weeks of the end of World War II, Americans were polled on whether they approved of the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  An overwhelmingly high percentage of Americans—85 percent—answered “yes.” That level of approval has gone down over the years, with (depending on the precise wording of the question) only a slim majority (57 percent in 2005) or a large minority (46 percent in 2015) voicing approval in more recent polls.
This reduction in atomic bombing approval over time has been cited as evidence of a gradual normative change in public ethical consciousness, the acceptance of a “nuclear taboo” or what Brown University scholar Nina Tannenwald has called “the general delegitimation of nuclear weapons.” This common interpretation of US public opinion, however, is too simplistic. Disapproval has indeed grown over time, but most Americans remain supportive of the 1945 attacks, albeit wishing that alternative strategies had been explored. These conclusions can be clearly seen in the results of a new, more complex public opinion survey, conducted for this article, that asked a representative sample of Americans about their views on the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, examined alternative strategies for ending the war, and provided follow-on questions to determine how the public weighs the costs and benefits of different strategies. Scratch beneath the surface, and the American public today, as in 1945, does not display an ethically based taboo against using nuclear weapons or killing enemy civilians, but rather has a preference for doing whatever was necessary to win the war and save American lives.

Thousands of Corporate Secrets Were Left Exposed. This Guy Found Them All  (Matt Burgess, Wired)
If you are where to look, plenty of secrets can be found online. Since the fall of 2021, independent security researcher Bill Demirkapi has been building ways to tap into huge data sources, which are often overlooked by researchers, to find masses of security problems. This includes automatically finding developer secrets—such as passwords, API keys, and authentication tokens—that could give cybercriminals access to company systems and the ability to steal data.
Today, at the Defcon security conference in Las Vegas, Demirkapi is unveiling the results of this work, detailing a massive trove of leaked secrets and wider website vulnerabilities. Among at least 15,000 developer secrets hard-coded into software, he found hundreds of username and password details linked to Nebraska’s Supreme Court and its IT systems; the details needed to access Stanford University’s Slack channels; and more than a thousand API keys belonging to OpenAI customers.
A major smartphone manufacturer, customers of a fintech company, and a multibillion-dollar cybersecurity company are counted among the thousands of organizations that inadvertently exposed secrets. As part of his efforts to stem the tide, Demirkapi hacked together a way to automatically get the details revoked, making them useless to any hackers.

California’s Fire-Insurance Crisis Just Got Real  (Caroline Mimbs Nyce, The Atlantic)
This is the reality of California’s new age of fire. Wildfires have gotten more ferocious in recent years, thanks in part to warming temperatures: Park is the fourth largest in the state’s recorded history. As homes in high-risk areas become harder to insure, premiums are rising, and some insurers are leaving the state altogether. The safety net that people once depended on has developed holes, and now people are falling through.
California’s insurance crisis first started around 2017. In that year and the ones that followed, a series of costly fires erased decades of profits, and forced insurance companies to reconsider their rates and their presence in the state. Premiums began rising, and in the past two years, major national companies including State Farm, Farmers, and Allstate, as well as smaller firms, have pulled back, declining to renew tens of thousands of policies. Coming on top of rising inflation and building costs, wildfires have made the cost of doing business just too high, insurers argue. For those living in areas where no private company will take on the risk, California offers a last-resort option called FAIR. From 2019 to 2024, as insurance companies retreated, the number of California FAIR plans has more than doubled. But FAIR plans are also getting more expensive. Many Californians are underinsured—and some are opting to go without insurance at all.

U.S. Judge Again Dismisses Mexico’s Lawsuit Against Most Gun Manufacturers  (AP / VOA News)
A U.S. federal judge in Massachusetts again dismissed a $10 billion Mexican government lawsuit against six U.S. gun manufacturers on Wednesday.
Mexico had argued the companies knew weapons were being sold to traffickers who smuggled them into Mexico and decided to cash in on that market.
However, the judge ruled that Mexico had not provided concrete evidence that any of the six companies’ activities in Massachusetts were connected to any suffering caused in Mexico by guns.
Mexico’s Foreign Relations Department said Wednesday the ruling would allow the lawsuit to proceed against a seventh manufacturer and a gun wholesaler.
Regarding the dismissal against the others, the department said, “Mexico is analyzing its options, among them presenting an appeal.”