Iranian Election Hacking | Climate Migration Comes Home | Stadiums Are Embracing Face Recognition, and more

By canceling a plea bargain agreed to by the prosecution and defense alike and approved by the convening authority of the commissions, Austin’s decision signaled that the death penalty is the only appropriate sentence in the 9/11 cases, which may qualify as “censuring” or “admonishing” the convening authority and the judge for permitting the parties to agree to a plea bargain. By taking over the job of the convening authority, the secretary is dictating the results of the operations of the commission—potentially violating 10 U.S.C.§ 837 and the Military Commissions Act.
Did Austin consult with the White House before he made this decision? He did not say. But if he did, that would raise particular concerns that the decision violated the prohibition against unlawful command authority in Title 10 and the Military Commissions Act.
Whether or not the commission upholds Austin’s decision and therefore his authority, one conclusion about this incident is undeniable: The plea agreement the secretary canceled was the only realistic option for achieving a conviction in the military commissions system for these defendants, as a 2022 report issued by the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law (CERL) of the University of Pennsylvania concluded, which one of us co-chaired with Harvey Rishikof, a former convening authority of the military commissions. Forbidding the plea agreement has thus deprived the victims’ families, as well as the American public, of an opportunity to reach badly needed closure with respect to the 9/11 attacks and has likely removed the last chance for a guilty verdict in these cases. Thus, even if Austin possesses the authority to cancel plea deals in the military commissions, doing so is profoundly unwise and short-sighted, and it undermines the closure the parties involved deserve.

Climate Migration Comes Home  (Noah J. Gordon, Lawfare)
The sky was burnt orange and the smoke was coming. If the fire advanced through the buffer zone, it would reach his California town and then his porch. He suddenly understood why Ellen from down the road was considering fleeing to somewhere like Vermont, if she could only find the right house. This was different from his reporting on Syrians seeking refuge in Europe or Central Americans looking for safety across the U.S. border; this was climate migration hitting home.
Abrahm Lustgarten, an investigative reporter writing about climate change at ProPublica and for the New York Times, opens his latest book with this personal anecdote about the deadly 2020 California fire season. It’s a fitting curtain-raiser to a book that compellingly frames climate migration as not only an indirect security risk for U.S. foreign policymakers to consider but also a pressing issue for today’s U.S. residents.
It is this former perspective on climate-related mobility—as a destabilizing factor abroad—that takes priority in the U.S. policymaking apparatus. For example, the October 2021 White House Report on Climate Migration focuses nearly entirely on displaced people outside of the U.S. The National Intelligence Council warns that climate impacts could push “poor Central American farmers” into cities or toward the southern U.S. border. The most prominent climate migration bill considered by the present Congress proposed creating a new category of foreign “climate-displaced persons” who could be eligible for admission into the U.S.(There is no clear legal definition of a “climate refugee,” nor are people displaced by climate change covered under the 1951 Refugee Convention.) 
With both Republicans and Democrats working to restrict the existing right to asylum, the outlook for the U.S. to significantly expand its availability to climate-displaced people around the world is not great. In the near term, the U.S. will likely continue to use stopgap measures to spare some climate victims from removal or deportation, such as the Temporary Protected Status available to citizens of select countries that have suffered an environmental disaster.
But at a time when U.S. cities are getting so hot that Arizona burn centers are filling up with patients injured by falling on scalding pavement, there’s real value in what Lustgarten has published: a well-written, informative analysis of how climate change is shaping where Americans can live. “On the Move” ably weaves together Lustgarten’s personal reporting with his analysis and write-ups of academic studies.

Stadiums Are Embracing Face Recognition. Privacy Advocates Say They Should Stick to Sports  (Caroline Haskins, Wired)
Thousands of people lined up outside Citi Field in Queens, New York, on Wednesday to watch the Mets face off with the Orioles. But outside the ticketing booth, a handful of protesters handed out flyers. They were there to protest a recent Major League Baseball program, one that’s increasingly common in professional sports: using facial recognition on fans.
Facial recognition companies and their customers argue that these systems save time, and therefore money, by shortening lines at stadium entrances. However, skeptics argue that the surveillance tools are never totally secure, make it easier for police to get information about fans, and fuel “mission creep” where surveillance technology becomes more common or even required.
The MLB’s facial recognition program, dubbed Go-Ahead Entry, lets participating fans go on a separate security line, usually shorter than the other queues. Fans download the MLB Ballpark app, submit a selfie, and have their face matched at an in-person camera kiosk at a stadium’s entrance.

The US Government Wants You—Yes, You—to Hunt Down Generative AI Flaws  (Lily Hay Newman, Wired)
At the 2023 Defcon hacker conference in Las Vegas, prominent AI tech companies partnered with algorithmic integrity and transparency groups to sic thousands of attendees on generative AI platforms and find weaknesses in these critical systems. This “red-teaming” exercise, which also had support from the US government, took a step in opening these increasingly influential yet opaque systems to scrutiny. Now, the ethical AI and algorithmic assessment nonprofit Humane Intelligence is taking this model one step further. On Wednesday, the group announced a call for participation with the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, inviting any US resident to participate in the qualifying round of a nationwide red-teaming effort to evaluate AI office productivity software.
The qualifier will take place online and is open to both developers and anyone in the general public as part of NIST’s AI challenges, known as Assessing Risks and Impacts of AI, or ARIA. Participants who pass through the qualifying round will take part in an in-person red-teaming event at the end of October at the Conference on Applied Machine Learning in Information Security (CAMLIS) in Virginia. The goal is to expand capabilities for conducting rigorous testing of the security, resilience, and ethics of generative AI technologies.
“The average person utilizing one of these models doesn’t really have the ability to determine whether or not the model is fit for purpose,” says Theo Skeadas, chief of staff at Humane Intelligence. “So we want to democratize the ability to conduct evaluations and make sure everyone using these models can assess for themselves whether or not the model is meeting their needs.”

Why Everyone’s Suddenly Talking About Iranian Election Hacking  (Rishi Iyengar, Foreign Policy)
As November’s U.S. presidential election draws closer and the campaigns of former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris kick into high gear, so have efforts by hackers from Washington’s adversaries aimed at disrupting or influencing the vote. One adversary in particular is playing an increasingly prominent role: Iran.
Iranian state actors have stepped up their efforts to interfere in this year’s election through online disinformation and influence operations as well as cyberattacks on both presidential campaigns, three U.S. agencies—the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)—warned in a joint statement on Monday.
They’re not the only ones sounding the alarm. In the past three weeks alone, current and former intelligence officials as well as cyber threat researchers from Microsoft and Google have shared a growing body of evidence of Iran’s hacking efforts. As several of them have pointed out, Iran’s targeting of U.S. elections isn’t new—hackers linked to Iranian security services have attempted to interfere with presidential and midterm races dating back to at least 2018.
However, “Iran perceives this year’s elections to be particularly consequential in terms of the impact they could have on its national security interests, increasing Tehran’s inclination to try to shape the outcome,” the U.S. agencies wrote in their statement. “We have observed increasingly aggressive Iranian activity during this election cycle.”