Tag: technology

Trump Says Iran’s Oil Hub Kharg Island Is Being Blown “TO SMITHEREENS”

President Trump issued a stunning message Sunday night indicating that Iran’s most important oil-export hub was under devastating attack.

“Kharg Island being blown to smithereens!!! President DJT,” Trump announced on Truth Social.

Trump’s post included a dramatic AI-generated video depicting explosions across the island.

Neither the White House nor the Department of War had publicly confirmed a new attack on Kharg Island’s oil facilities. Reuters reported that Iranian state media had also issued no immediate response.

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Lawsuit: Elon Musk’s xAI Trained Grok AI Using Child Pornography

A woman identified as “Jane Doe” sued Elon Musk’s xAI this week, alleging the company trained its Grok AI chatbot on child pornography depicting her, in what appears to be the first case accusing xAI of training its AI on child sexual abuse material (CSAM).

Ars Technica reports that the proposed class-action lawsuit filed against Musk’s xAI, now part of SpaceX, centers on abuse Doe suffered as a preschooler in the early 2000s, when adult men raped her to produce images later sold to pedophiles online. Those images were hashed by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) and the Canadian Centre for Child Protection, groups that track known child pornography so it can be identified and removed wherever it resurfaces.

Doe gets alerts through the U.S. Department of Justice Victim Notification System whenever her abuse material turns up somewhere new. The Canadian Centre for Child Protection told her that AI-generated CSAM depicting her had shown up on xAI. According to the complaint, offenders on online forums discussed “creating AI generated CSAM of Plaintiff and other similarly situated known, legacy, victims of CSAM.”

The lawsuit claims xAI stores images Grok generates and reuses them to further train the model. A press release from Doe’s lawyers described the material as “that same material,” referring to the CSAM depicting her that investigators say fed into Grok’s outputs. The complaint itself alleges that “CSAM depicting Plaintiff with its longstanding well-known hash values has been used as a part of the dataset used by xAI.”

Breitbart News previously reported on AI training datasets that were found to contain child pornography:

The Stanford Internet Observatory, in collaboration with the Canadian Centre for Child Protection and other anti-abuse charities, conducted a study that found more than 3,200 images of suspected child sexual abuse in the AI database LAION. LAION, an index of online images and captions, has been instrumental in training leading AI image-makers such as Stable Diffusion.

This discovery has raised alarms across various sectors, including schools and law enforcement. The child pornography has enabled AI systems to produce explicit and realistic imagery of fake children and transform social media photos of real teens into deepfake nudes. Previously, it was believed that AI tools produced abusive imagery by combining adult pornography with benign photos of kids. However, the direct inclusion of explicit child images in training datasets presents a more direct and disturbing reality.

Much of Doe’s legal argument turns on how Grok’s terms of service handle user content. The complaint says Grok treats public posts on X, along with the outputs Grok itself generates, as training data by default. As the filing puts it, “Because Grok’s terms treat public X posts and Grok’s own outputs as training data by default, publicly posting an image does not just expose it to viewers, but also feeds [it] directly into the pipeline xAI uses to train and improve its model and thereby generate further images.” xAI filters violent content out of its training data, but its terms do not specifically exclude CSAM, non-consensual intimate imagery, or other sexual or inappropriate material.

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AI Skepticism Outweighs Excitement In The US

Despite the tech industry’s conviction that the rise of AI is an inflection point that will change the course of humanity, many humans remain skeptical whether the new direction we’re headed in is the right one.

As Statista’s Felix Richter reports below, the pace at which AI seems to be taking over parts of our lives, whether we like it or not, is especially worrisome to many.

In a recent Statista Consumer Insights survey, 31 percent of U.S. respondents said that they were worried about the speed at which AI is developing and 25 percent of respondents claimed to be avoiding AI wherever they can.

18 percent said they used AI but felt bad about it and another 28 percent simply don’t believe in the hype, saying they weren’t convinced that AI is as good as people say.

You will find more infographics at Statista

At the other end of the spectrum, 28 percent of respondents said they were excited about AI, 19 percent said they liked to use AI for shopping and 15 percent described themselves as early adopters – always keen to try the latest AI features first.

The bottom line is that Americans are neither all in on AI nor are they fully against it.

Many people are mixing their excitement with a dose of skepticism, which is probably a good way of looking at a potentially life-altering technological shift.

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Flock Has a Powerful New AI Tool for Police. We Got Its Code

Vehicle surveillance giant Flock Safety has told the public for years that its technology “cannot recognize, identify, or track individuals.” It has now built a system that does both, an artificial intelligence tool for police that can identify drivers and track vehicles by their patterns of movement alone, WIRED has learned.

Drawing on a network of cameras that logs the movements of drivers in more than 6,000 communities, the tool can pick out potential witnesses by how often their cars pass through a neighborhood, or surface a driver’s “associates” from the cameras they pass together. Because the system also reaches police case files, 911 dispatch logs, and commercial identity records, those plates can be turned into names, home addresses, and relatives. It can search for people in an area drawn on a map based on nothing more than a physical description.

The software, originally called Nightshift and more recently renamed OS Investigate, ships with 69 prewritten prompts that officers can select, review, or edit, and then submit to the AI. Officers can also input prompts of their own.

The suggested prompts sit in a cache of more than 450 files that WIRED found on Flock’s own website, served by its login pages to anyone who loaded them. The code describes 45 tools at the AI’s disposal, giving it access to plate scans and camera metadata, arrest records, case files, dispatch logs, ballistics results, and commercial databases that contain Social Security numbers, dates of birth, phone numbers, email addresses, relatives and associates.

Flock says it is testing the product with a small group of law enforcement partners and describes it as still in development, with capabilities that may not reflect what it eventually sells. It arrives as the company faces bipartisan political pressure, a growing record of officers caught misusing its platform, and a wave of vandalism that has left cameras sawed off and lenses painted over in cities across the country.

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DeSantis Orders State Agencies To Pull Down Flock Surveillance Cameras From Florida Rights-Of-Way

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Wednesday announced that state agencies are removing Flock Safety’s automated license plate reader cameras from state rights-of-way, stepping up his campaign to curb what he called an out-of-control surveillance system spreading throughout the Sunshine State.

“Pull ’em down,” DeSantis told reporters at the press conference following his announcement, noting that all of the Flock Safety cameras on state rights-of-way will be removed by state agencies. The governor said that the cameras, which are used by various state agencies, are being removed following his remarks at Florida International University in Miami earlier in the week regarding the Flock Safety cameras and their use as a mass criminal surveillance system with little to no oversight.

Locally, surveillance on roads across South Florida has been the focus of Flock Safety’s automated license plate readers installed by participating state, county and municipal law enforcement agencies. In this region, state troopers used the system to support the federal immigration sweeps of Operation Tidal Wave. Statewide, Reason magazine reported that more than a third of those arrested had no prior criminal history. 404 Media first reported last spring that Florida wildlife officers were accessing the system using the accounts of other law enforcement agencies, including to run immigration related queries, totaling 38 such looks in a single month, without Flock Safety contracts of their own.

Most Flock Safety cameras are owned by thousands of local police and sheriff’s departments, but DeSantis is asking for an accounting of all the cameras that state agencies have and how they are using them. The governor said he is also looking at New Hampshire’s approach to limiting the placement of such cameras on state property as a model for Florida legislation.

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Texas Governor Orders Halt to State Funding of Flock Cameras

Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordered all state agencies to stop funding local law enforcement Flock camera purchases and operations. The move comes shortly after the Texas Tribune announced an investigation into $30 million provided to local police departments for Flock cameras.

The order from the Texas governor came Thursday, shortly after an investigation published by the Texas Tribune came online. The investigation revealed that the State of Texas added a $1 fee to car insurance policies. That money was then distributed to local law enforcement agencies to help reduce catalytic converter thefts.

Texas funding led to the purchase of about 2,000 Flock Cameras by the Motor Vehicle Crime Prevention Board, the Tribune reported. The State funded an additional $15.9 million to Texas DPS to purchase an additional 1,200 cameras.

Abbott’s Communications Director, Andrew Mahaleris, told the Tribune, “To the extent that cities get any funding for those cameras, most of it comes from the federal government. To the extent any funding comes from Texas agencies, those agencies are clarifying that those funds cannot be used for Flock cameras.”

Despite their success in solving many crimes, including the kidnapping of children, the surveillance camera systems have come under massive scrutiny after concerns of abuse of civil liberties arose.

The Tribune reported that the number of Flock cameras purchased by the insurance policy fee may be on the low side, as they had difficulty obtaining complete information from agencies.

Many Texas legislators expressed concern about the excessive use of electronic surveillance through the AI-driven Flock system.

One legislator, State Representative Mitch Little (R-Lewisville), told the Tribune, “The sheer volume of information captured is not something that is entertained, in my view, by the Fourth Amendment.”

In an interview on Bloomberg’s Balance of Power, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) expressed strong disapproval of the threat of over-surveillance posed by these systems.  Cruz stated:

I’ll tell you what a Ted Cruz would make of it, which is I don’t like Flock cameras. I don’t like government surveillance, I don’t think the government should be surveilling innocent citizens. We should use law enforcement to go after criminals. But we have a presumption of innocence. And I think the surveillance state — China has built an espionage and surveillance state. I don’t want to see America the same way. I think these Flock cameras really invite abuse, and I’m hopeful the political process will constrain it.

State and local law enforcement praise the technology and its impact in solving or reducing crime. The Dallas Police Department’s Major Felony and Vehicle Recovery Division said the department uses hundreds of cameras to track suspects involved in violent offenses, hit-and-runs, and auto thefts. The clearance time for many of these crimes fell from days to hours, the department stated.

Texas DPS also reports the use of automatic pings to intercept stolen vehicles, fleeing felons, and human smuggling operations along major highway corridors.

Governor Greg Abbott’s abrupt freeze on state funding for Flock cameras highlights a growing collision between law enforcement technology and constitutional privacy rights in Texas. While police agencies credit the AI surveillance network with drastically cutting crime clearance times and recovering stolen property, the revelation of millions in state-funded grants—drawn from auto insurance fees—has catalyzed broad bipartisan pushback.

With state lawmakers questioning the program’s Fourth Amendment boundaries and Abbott shutting off the state spigot, local departments will likely face increased scrutiny and tighter legislative guardrails if they choose to continue funding these automated tracking networks using local or federal dollars.

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Who Is Legally Liable When An AI Agent Goes Rogue?

Autonomous AI agents can behave in highly unpredictable ways. Give an AI Agent a goal such as passing a test of its capabilities, and it might just decide the best way to score highly is to break containment and hack into a competing company in search of the answer sheet.

That’s what happened when Open AI’s GPT-5.6 Sol hacked into Hugging Face last month. Anthropic and Meta subsequently admitted their models had also escaped testing sandboxes to hack third parties too.

But who is legally liable for agents that have minds of their own? OpenAI didn’t intend for the model to go rogue, and issued no instructions for it to do so. If your personal AI agent decides on a course of action that results in harm or financial damage in the real world, can you be held liable if it’s something you could have reasonably foreseen?”

Magazine spoke with Rikka Law Group owner and CEO Charlyn Ho to find out the state of play in this emerging legal field.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Magazine: When an AI model hacks an outside company, who is liable. Can Hugging Face sue OpenAI over the incident in July?

Charlyn Ho: Anyone can sue anyone for anything. Currently, there is no federal AI agent liability law, so we would have to look at existing law. With respect to Hugging Face and OpenAI, to set the baseline, the AI agent itself cannot be liable, it’s not a separate legal entity.

Terms that are used in a few of the AI laws are “developer” and “deployer.” The developer makes the AI, the deployer actually deploys it and uses the AI. The lines of responsibility are also not entirely clear. You have to look at the facts and circumstances.

For example, if the deployer instructed the agent, even if they didn’t actually tell them to go and breach Hugging Face, but if they were negligent in creating the parameters in which the AI agent operated, I would say you would have to look at standard tort law and go through the negligence analysis. 

Magazine: In the case of open source models which have been released by anonymous developers, is there anyone you can go after in those instances?

Ho: Not really. Often, if it’s open source, the license usually has a pretty strong disclaimer of liability. The person or company using that open source code is going to have to understand that the tradeoff of having free code is that you have to comply with the open source license, which also generally sets the parameters of liability.

If you think about it from a different perspective, another analogy is Tesla and the self-driving car accidents. If the product malfunctioned and there was a solid products liability claim, Tesla could be liable. But it’s often a facts and circumstances determination, whereby the human driver — who maybe just set the autopilot and went to sleep — could also bear liability. I think that’s somewhat analogous here because Tesla would be the developer, and the deployer would be the driver.

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Senate Probes Flock Safety Over 20 Billion Vehicle Scans

The US Senate has joined a host of other actors in putting pressure on Flock Safety, a maker of automated license-plate readers, over misuse of its technology by law enforcement and others.

The Senate’s scrutiny came in the form of a letter that was sent by Republican Senator Josh Hawley, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism, on August 26.

The senator gave Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley until September 8 to answer a series of questions and produce documents.

We obtained a copy of the letter for you here.

The investigation targets the scale of the operation, the retention of data collected from the more than 120,000 cameras across 49 states that Hawley said the company has, as well as customers’ search capabilities.

Hawley’s letter says the cameras produce more than 20 billion vehicle scans every month. The scans are then turned into records that can be searched by customers.

Hawley’s concern is that this is turning the act of driving a vehicle into a record that can be searched – and he said that Congress has never authorized the creation of such a network.

“But Americans do not surrender their privacy rights when they drive to work, drop their kids off at school, or go to church,” the senator wrote. “Congress never authorized the network your industry has built.”

The letter seeks information on whether customers can run statewide or nationwide searches of vehicle or driver data, and if this is the default option. The retention periods, both default and maximum, are also of interest to Hawley, as is the number of confirmed misuse cases since January 1, 2021.

Hawley also wants to know what information customers must provide to justify a search, what restrictions Flock imposes, and what the accuracy is when it comes to complete and correctly attributed vehicle identification. The frequency of incorrect alerts is also a question.

Flock is also asked to provide details about the data the devices capture, whether the data is linked to any outside source, and whether multi-factor authentication is required of all users.

And in a question that goes beyond the plate readers, Hawley wants to know if Flock has the capability to biometrically track people.

The request for documents includes contracts with governmental customers, prices and fee schedules, information about pilot programs, discounted or donated equipment, and help given to customers to secure federal, state, or private grant funding.

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ICE to Deploy Boston Dynamics Robot Dogs for Its Enforcement Operations

Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) is preparing to deploy robotic dogs as part of its immigration enforcement operations.

The agency planning to spend as much as $2 million on Boston Dynamics’ four-legged Spot robots.

The Department of Homeland Security says ICE needs remotely operated robots capable of entering dangerous locations where sending officers could put them at unnecessary risk.

According to procurement documents, the robots will be used for “inspection, situational awareness, and hazard assessment” in confined, unstable and otherwise difficult-to-access environments.

ICE is expected to spend between $1 million and $2 million purchasing Spot robots and accompanying equipment.

With individual units costing roughly $75,000 before additional equipment, the contract could put dozens of robotic dogs into service.

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ICE Awards $16.7 Million No-Bid Contract For 6,000 Pairs Of Electric Shock Gloves

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has awarded a $16.7 million contract to purchase 6,000 pairs of gloves that can deliver electric shocks. Officers would use them to control resisting detainees and protesters, according to a federal notice published Thursday.

The no-bid deal went to Compliant Technologies LLC, a Kentucky firm that manufactures the devices, and covers the gloves plus support equipment and services over the next six months.

ICE moved forward with the purchase despite ongoing objections from civil rights advocates and Democratic senators. They said the agency already draws criticism for use of force with unclear oversight.

Hours before the notice appeared, a group of senators led by Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) wrote to ICE’s acting director, urging the agency to abandon the plan. Fifteen colleagues from the Democratic caucus signed on.

“The blatant and tragic misuse of force in Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis, Houston, Maine, and other locations around the country raises significant skepticism about the agency’s professional capability to safely deploy a new tool that could be used to harm Americans without cause,” the letter said.

The Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency, defended the purchase Thursday.

“Sanctuary politicians attempting to ban our federal law enforcement from any safety equipment is despicable and a deliberate attempt to undermine and endanger our officers,” the agency said in a statement.

The plan for the purchase surfaced earlier this month when ICE posted a notice about buying thousands of “conductive distraction and de-escalation devices” for officers and investigators.

Gloves Look Like Regular Gear Until Button Is Pressed

The gloves appear as ordinary patrol gloves until an officer presses a button, which activates electrical mode. The shock works only on bare skin, and aims to produce enough pain to make a resisting person comply. Some local jails and police departments already use similar equipment.

ICE’s notice listed several scenarios for the devices, including high-tension environments during arrests, transport of combative detainees, and civil disturbances outside detention facilities.

“It will be used when a subject is actively or passively resisting and an officer needs to gain control quickly to prevent injuries to both parties,” the document said.

Officials said the shocks would help maintain control over inmates, stop aggression or escape attempts, let officers handcuff people who hide their hands, and aid crowd control efforts. The aim is to avoid the deployment of greater force, including firearms. The notice mentioned approved policy, training, and accountability standards but no further details.

ICE initially intended to spend up to $20 million on the devices, known as CTG-5 G.L.O.V.E., or Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter, with delivery expected by March 31, 2027. The gloves were earmarked for Homeland Security Investigations and Enforcement and Removal Operations officers and agents.

Compliant Technologies said the gloves should not be deployed in the face of verbal defiance or belligerence, serve as punishment, or be used for torture. The company also warned against deploying them on children, the elderly, pregnant women, or people with disabilities.

The manual advised using them when a suspect becomes violent enough to endanger an officer or the public, and only to meet lawful objectives under agency policy. Officers need training and certification, with recertification every two years.

“Every decision is made with careful consideration and appropriately reviewed to ensure that any technology ICE utilizes is consistent with all applicable law enforcement policies and standards,” an ICE spokesperson told The Epoch Times earlier this month via email. “Our officers are highly trained in de-escalation tactics and regularly receive ongoing use of force training.”

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