OUR PICKSExposing State Surveillance Secrets | Data Centers Powered by Next-Gen Nuclear? | Pentagon Finally Buying (Some) Weapons from Startups, and more
· Trump Owes Americans a Better Explanation About Iran
· The ACLU Is Arming Lawyers to Expose State Surveillance Secrets
· Apps Marketed to US Troops Are Shipping Chinese and Russian Code
· Data Centers Powered by Next-Gen Nuclear? Don’t Fall for Big Tech’s PR Hype
· Why the US Power Grid Is Central to Military Readiness
· The Pentagon Is Finally Buying (Some) Weapons from Startups
Trump Owes Americans a Better Explanation About Iran (Tom Nichols, The Atlantic)
Two more Americans have died. Meanwhile, the president’s rationale for war keeps changing.
The ACLU Is Arming Lawyers to Expose State Surveillance Secrets (Dell Cameron, Wired)
A new toolkit for attorneys in Massachusetts targets the technologies police use—and conceal—to build criminal cases, from facial recognition to AI-written police reports.
Apps Marketed to US Troops Are Shipping Chinese and Russian Code Dell Cameron, Wired)
A first-of-its-kind analysis found more than one in eight apps built for US service members carried foreign code—some from firms in nations the Pentagon designates as adversaries.
Data Centers Powered by Next-Gen Nuclear? Don’t Fall for Big Tech’s PR Hype (Molly Langabeer and M.V. Ramana, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists)
Looking to the future, nuclear power and small modular reactors will be unable to provide any significant boost to the electricity consumption of data centers anytime soon—especially within the next several years, when AI-related energy demand is expected to increase most rapidly. The potential increase of nuclear output from restarting old reactors that were shut down because of age and poor economics is a small fraction of the demand—current and anticipated—from data centers. New nuclear reactors are at least a decade away from being started, and the scale of investment from tech companies in small modular or advanced reactors is completely mismatched to the actual cost of building even a single nuclear reactor, let alone the dozens that would have to be built for nuclear power to contribute a sizeable fraction of the demand from data centers.
Why the US Power Grid Is Central to Military Readiness (David Gattie and Michael Hewitt, National Interest)
America’s civilian power grid has become a strategic military asset, yet it lacks the resilience, capacity, and planning required for sustained conflict.
The Pentagon Is Finally Buying (Some) Weapons from Startups (Heather Somerville, Wall Street Journal)
The agency is using a surging budget to avoid choosing between defense-tech startups and old-school contractors
