Human Oversight of AI Systems May Not Be Effective | Banning TikTok Won’t Keep Your Data Safe | An Unseen Problem with the Electoral College, and more

In the military arena, the importance of human oversight was recognized by the UK government in its February 2024 response to a parliamentary report on AI in weapon systems. The report emphasizes “meaningful human control” through the provision of appropriate training for the humans. It also stresses the notion of human accountability and says that decision making in actions by, for instance, armed aerial drones, cannot be shifted to machines.

An Unseen Problem with the Electoral College – It Tells Bad Guys Where to Target Their Efforts  (Barry C. Burden, The Conversation)
Over the past four years, Congress and state governments have worked hard to prevent the aftermath of the 2024 election from descending into the chaos and threats to democracy that occurred around the 2020 U.S. presidential election.
A new federal law cleaned up ambiguities that could allow for election subversion. New state laws have been enacted across the country to protect election workers from threats and harassment. Technology experts are working to confront misinformation campaigns and vulnerabilities in election systems.
But untouched in all of these improvements is the underlying structure of presidential elections – the Electoral College.

Notorious Iranian Hackers Have Been Targeting the Space Industry with a New Backdoor  (Lily Hay Newman, Wired)
The Iranian government-backed hacking group known as APT 33 has been active for more than 10 years, conducting aggressive espionage operations against a diverse array of public and private sector victims around the world, including critical infrastructure targets. And while the group is particularly known for strategic but technically simple attacks like “password spraying,” it has also dabbled in developing more sophisticated hacking tools, including potentially destructive malware tailored to disrupt industrial control systems. Now, findings from Microsoft released on Wednesday indicate that the group is continuing to evolve its techniques with a new multistage backdoor.
Microsoft Threat Intelligence says that the group, which it calls Peach Sandstorm, has developed custom malware that attackers can use to establish remote access into victim networks. The backdoor, which Microsoft named “Tickler” for some reason, infects a target after the hacking group gains initial access via password spraying or social engineering. Beginning in April and as recently as July, the researchers observed Peach Sandstorm deploying the backdoor against victims in sectors including satellite, communications equipment, and oil and gas. Microsoft also says that the group has used the malware to target federal and state government entities in the United States and the United Arab Emirates.
“We are sharing our research on Peach Sandstorm’s use of Tickler to raise awareness of this threat actor’s evolving tradecraft,” Microsoft Threat Intelligence said on Wednesday in its report. “This activity is consistent with the threat actor’s persistent intelligence gathering objectives and represents the latest evolution of their longstanding cyber operations.”

Banning TikTok Won’t Keep Your Data Safe  (Douglas Lucas, Foreign Policy)
The divest-or-be-banned TikTok ultimatum that U.S. President Joe Biden signed into law in April poses a dilemma for the app’s claimed 170 million U.S. users: allegiance to TikTok or the White House and Silicon Valley?
According to the law, Beijing-based ByteDance must divest from its U.S. subsidiary TikTok and sever Chinese control of the app’s U.S. operations by Jan. 19, 2025 (or, with an extension, April 19, 2025). Noncompliance would cost almost $1 trillion in penalties plus the application’s prohibition on domestic web hosts and app stores. U.S. internet service providers could still fetch the foreign-hosted TikTok website but without convenient upgrades, millions of consumers’ preexisting app installations would descend into buggy obsolescence—assuming Apple and Google don’t wipe the app off millions of devices altogether.
In May, TikTok and ByteDance called the drastic measures “unconstitutional” and divestment “not possible.” Emphasizing First Amendment rights, the two companies initiated a lawsuit predicted to reach the U.S. Supreme Court.
Yet there is a more decisive factor in this saga than Washington and Beijing crossing courtroom swords: an internet where a rogues’ gallery of pompous billionaires, authoritarian regimes, and opaque oligarchs own users’ public data—the building blocks of knowledge—and sell access to it.
But people can sell or share a ride to a physical library without hoarding all its books.
A true “knowledge commons” requires an alternative online ecosystem. Unfortunately, instead of a knowledge commons, today’s internet has become a race to expand control over every last piece of data, with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) among the frontrunners.

Why TikTok is a Weapon of Mass Distraction and Destruction  (Craig Albert, HSToday)
In a notably bipartisan act of cooperation, on April 23 the U.S. Senate passed a bill that would ban TikTok unless the owner of the popular social media app, ByteDance, would sell it to a non-Chinese company. President Biden promptly signed the bill but not without ByteDance filing a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the law.  This is on top of the $7 million it has already spent trying to lobby Congress and federal officials to prevent the TikTok-banning legislation from getting passed. It will now be up to the courts to decide whether to uphold the law or strike it down so the matter remains out of the hands of the public for now. But a lot can happen in a year and it remains important for the public to understand exactly why TikTok represents such a threat and why banning it was, while obviously not without controversy, the correct move from a homeland security perspective.