Trump Administration Weighs Drone Strikes on Mexican Cartels | How to Stop Bioterrorists from Buying Dangerous DNA | The Most Dangerous Hackers You’ve Never Heard Of, and more

That’s according to the Great Replacement, a fringe conspiracy theory that was invented by the French writer Renaud Camus in the late 1990s and has become increasingly mainstream within the Republican Party. Prominent figures such as JD Vance, Elon Musk, and Tucker Carlson have spread the theory. President Donald Trump has echoed its language, and an October 2024 national poll found two-thirds of Republicans endorsing some form of the theory.
It turns out that the Great Replacement is real. However, it isn’t brown-skinned immigrants who are coming for your government, your job, and your culture. It’s AI.

Lawsuit Accuses Prominent Palestinian American of Supporting Hamas  (Adam Goldman, New York Times)
Families of victims of the Hamas-led terrorist attack on Oct. 7, 2023, sued a prominent Palestinian American businessman on Monday, accusing him of supporting Hamas by developing properties that were crucial to the terrorist group’s operations. According to the lawsuit, Bashar Masri, a wealthy developer, operated hotels and an industrial site in Gaza to “construct and conceal” a labyrinthine network of tunnels that allowed Hamas to “store and launch its rockets at Israel.” “The properties defendants developed with Hamas were not only part of the infrastructure Hamas used in connection with the Oct. 7 attack itself,” the lawsuit added. “Their development deliberately advanced Hamas’s false narrative that it was interested primarily in the economic development of Gaza and a grudging coexistence with Israel.”

More is More: Scaling up Online Extremism and Terrorism Research with Computer Vision  (Stephane J. Baele and Lewys Brace, Perspective on Terrorism)
Scholars and practitioners investigating extremist and violent political actors’ online communications face increasingly large information environments containing ever-growing amounts of data to find, collect, organize, and analyze. In this context, this article encourages terrorism and extremism analysts to use computational visual methods, mirroring for images what is now routinely done for text. Specifically, we chart how computer vision methods can be successfully applied to strengthen the study of extremist and violent political actors’ online ecosystems. Deploying two such methods – unsupervised deep clustering and supervised object identification – on an illustrative case (an original corpus containing thousands of images collected from incel platforms) allows us to explain the logic of these tools, to identify their specific advantages (and limitations), and to subsequently propose a research workflow associating computational methods with the other visual analysis approaches traditionally leveraged.

How to Stop Bioterrorists from Buying Dangerous DNA  (Steph Batalis and Vikram Venkatram, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists)
Along with new possibilities, the ability to custom-order genes also has the potential to open up new risks. Some DNA codes for genes from pathogens and toxins—sequences that could cause harm if misused. To limit such an outcome, experts from industry, government, and academia recommend screening orders and customers before filling an order.
In the United States, this screening is at a pivotal moment. A Biden administration executive order that would require researchers working with federal funds to order from companies that screen DNA orders was short-lived; the Trump administration rescinded the requirement less than three months after it went into effect. While many of the leading synthesis companies are committed to voluntarily screening orders as members of an industry-led consortium, the revoked executive order would have marked the first time that the practice was made standardized and compulsory. Since the new administration may retain some aspects of the Biden executive order, it remains unclear what the status of screening requirements will be moving forward.
But the issue of screening is not likely to go away as new science demands more synthetic genes.

How a $200 Check Can Put You on a Government Watch List  (Nicholas Anthony, CATO)
The Treasury’s new policy will undermine financial privacy in a time when more and more Americans are calling to strengthen it.