Tag: technology

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan Warns British Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood To Stop Backdoor Spying on US Citizens

Not a friendly move by the Brits.

In the context of a grave crisis in the ‘special relationship’ between the US and the UK, a top House representative is warning the British government against ‘using sensitive backdoor technology’ to spy on Americans.

Yesterday (5), Donald J. Trump’s ally, Ohio Representative Jim Jordan, wrote to Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood alerting her about a ‘lack of security cooperation’.

Jordan warned that Britain ‘may be using encryption to gain access to US citizens’ private data’.

The Telegraph reported:

“[Jordan] pointed to the UK’s Investigatory Powers Act 2016, which allows the government to issue secret orders known as ‘technical capability notices’.”

As the leader of the House judiciary committee, Jordan has led investigations into the activities of the FBI and US spy agencies – and now he is targeting the United Kingdom.

“The UK may be building ‘backdoors into their encrypted services’, he wrote to Ms. Mahmood.

US companies would be prohibited from informing anyone about these backdoors without the express permission of the Home Secretary.”

Jordan told Sir Christian Turner, the ambassador to the UK, that a US company who wanted to discuss a ‘technical capability notice’ with members of Congress, something that would require Mahmood’s permission.

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Researchers Push AI DESIGNED ‘Super Vaccine’

Cambridge scientists are hailing an AI-crafted “super-antigen” as a breakthrough that could ‘get ahead of pandemics’, blanket-protect against every COVID variant, and spare the world future lockdowns while saving millions of lives.

Yet the same public that lived through the last round of experimental shots is not buying the hype. Responses to the announcements have been blunt, laced with references to documented harms, AI’s well-known limitations, and fresh warnings from cancer specialists who watched stable patients relapse after previous boosters.

University of Cambridge researchers, led by Professor Jonathan Heeney, say they have produced the first antigen designed entirely by artificial intelligence and tested in humans.

The team fed AI systems genetic sequences from multiple coronaviruses collected through ongoing surveillance programs. The algorithm then assembled a “super-antigen” intended to train the immune system to recognize whole virus families rather than single strains that keep mutating.

Early human testing involved 39 volunteers and produced what researchers called modest immune responses but no major safety red flags in the initial readout. A larger study with roughly 200 participants is now running to measure stronger and more durable protection.

The same platform is being extended toward universal flu shots, H5N1 bird flu candidates, and vaccines against viral hemorrhagic fevers.

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Area 51 Mystery Aircraft Prompts Interest In “Christmas Tree” Stealth Fighter Concept

Yesterday, TWZ published an analysis of a thermal image purportedly showing a previously unseen advanced aircraft design, which appears to be a precursor to the U.S. Air Force’s forthcoming F-47 fighter from Boeing. The image, which went viral online and is from a video that has now been released, is said to have been captured near the U.S. military’s secretive Groom Lake test base, better known as Area 51. It turns out, as a number of our readers have pointed out, there may be some interesting similarities between this secret aircraft and a “Christmas tree” fighter design concept crafted decades ago by Darold Cummings, one of the top minds behind Northrop’s YF-23 Black Widow.

You can find our full initial assessment of what we may be seeing in the viral image, first posted online by the Project Fear YouTube channel earlier this week, here. What we saw initially, as shown below, appeared to feature what could be described as a “double arrowhead” profile to its forward fuselage. This is a very distinct design cue, but it could also be a result of the low quality of the image and the artifacts that come with consumer-grade thermal imagers, which was what the aircraft was recorded with.

Project Fear has now released the full video it says it captured near Area 51, seen below, and it underscores the aforementioned points about image quality. So, it is possible the aircraft has a more traditional low-observable ‘shovel nose,’ instead. Nonetheless, the Christmas tree fighter is an interesting trip down lesser-known fighter development memory lane that is worth examining, in particular what such a unique nose configuration would provide an advanced fighter aircraft.

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Indiana Mayor Suggests Locals Who Oppose Data Centers Are Poor Renters Living in ‘S***y Houses’

An Indiana mayor is under fire for insinuating that people who oppose data centers being built in their area live in “shitty houses.”

Shelbyville Mayor Scott Furgeson was caught on camera making several statements that have upset locals, Fox 59 reported Wednesday.

Furgeson was holding a hand-written anti-data center sign while speaking to several women when he said, “I’ve seen a lot of these all over town, but I only see them in shitty houses.”

A woman told him, “You see them in working class houses,” to which he replied, “Most of them are rentals.”

One local who spoke to CBS 4 about the mayor’s comments said, “I think it was very detrimental and very inappropriate and disrespectful language to be used. To single anybody out and say that they are not worthy to be represented or that they are not worthy to be heard. Everybody’s worthy to be heard on this.”

According to a 2023 post from the Indiana Republican Party, Furgeson was the Republican nominee for mayor of Shelbyville at that time.

The town is facing a proposed billion-dollar data center site and neighbors have shown fierce opposition to the project, according to the Fox article.

“The proposal seeks to turn 429 acres of farmland into an 11-building data center complex. More than 2,000 people signed a petition to halt the project, yet the city council pressed on anyway and advanced the plan in April, ignoring the jeers and shouts of an angry public in attendance,” the outlet said, noting citizens are concerned about the high cost of energy and resources the centers bring.

Furgeson said he regretted that his comments may have caused offense and claimed he was not talking about the “character, value or importance of any resident, homeowner or renter in our community” but was referencing “property maintenance.”

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US Service Members Targeted Via Commercial Location Data, Pentagon Tells Senators

Adversaries have used commercially-available location data to attack individual US service members in war zones, according to a report furnished by the Department of Defense to Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, and first reported by Reuters. Wyden is a Democratic member of the Senate intelligence committee. 

Responding to four questions Wyden had posed about this potential avenue of vulnerability for service members deployed to the Middle East, the Pentagon said that US Central Command “has received multiple threat reports concerning adversary exploitation of commercial location data to target or surveil US personnel in theater. The Threat Fusion Cell identified, tracked, and disseminated these threats through the USCENTCOM Threat Working Group and to component force protection personnel.” 

Elaborating on the nature of the threat, the Pentagon noted that: 

“Commercial location data can be used to identify where U.S. troops congregate and their pattern of life, which can be exploited by adversaries ​to target attacks such as missiles, drones, and roadside bombs, as well as for counterintelligence purposes.” 

The Pentagon’s brief set of responses did not provide details on any specific incidents. Early in the US-Israeli war on Iran, two DOD officials were wounded in an Iranian drone strike on a Crowne Plaza hotel in Bahrain. After the strike, a senior Iranian official told Drop Site that Iran had built a “target bank” of both American and Israeli personnel.  “The fact that they’ve now pinpointed the residences/locations of some of these forces has really caught the Americans and Israelis off guard,” the official said, without detailing Iran’s methodology. He did say the building of the target bank began after the 2025 12-Day War.   

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Congress Has A New Intelligence Bureau and It’s Spying On Americans Critical Of AI

As rage about artificial intelligence and the data centers powering it grows, Congress is taking notice — not with any legislation or law, but by spying on public opposition.

A newly created intelligence agency of the Congress (yes, it has its own now) is warning that legislators are in danger from an angry public. The U.S. Capitol Police Intelligence Services Bureau, created after January 6 and in parallel to the 18-member Executive Branch intelligence community, laid out the warning in an internal intelligence report produced in April.

“ISB has prepared this Intelligence Note to provide the US Capitol Police and law enforcement personnel with information related to recent threats and attacks likely linked to grievances concerning data centers,” the report says.

There’s only one problem: the report admits that there is no evidence of any actual threat to Congress.

“The US Capitol Police is not investigating any data center-motivated threats to Members of Congress,” the report says.

Nonetheless, it goes on to warn that artificial intelligence “related policies introduced on the Hill and in local communities are likely to continue drawing opposition, increasing potential concerns for public officials.”

The Congressional intelligence office that authored the report was formed in the aftermath of January 6th and justified to bring the congressional police force “in line” with federal intelligence agencies and thereby gain more access to the massive existing intelligence community. The “intelligence note” was also distributed to police organizations and state-level fusion centers across the country.

“We now have a world class intelligence operation,” then-Chief of the U.S. Capitol Police Thomas Manger said last May. “We are significant players in the intelligence community in the Washington, D.C., region and, frankly, all over the country … Whereas before, we were basically just — we were consumers of information. The FBI would give us intelligence, other agencies would give us intelligence. Now we are gathering our own.”

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Freedom Caucus Cheers Committee Passage of Provision to End Biden-Era Auto ‘Kill Switch’

House Freedom Caucus conservatives cheered the passage of an amendment to an appropriations bill that would terminate the so-called the Biden-era auto “kill switch.”

“Taxpayer dollars should not fund a surveillance system that treats every law abiding American driver as a suspect. As we work to address very real problems, we cannot allow our Constitutional liberties to be shredded or create a world where every American driver becomes a node for data gathering,” Rep. Michael Cloud (R-TX) told Breitbart News in a written statement.

When Congress passed the so-called Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act during the Biden administration in 2021, it contained the HALT Drunk Driving Act.

The legislation requires the National Highway Safety Administration (NHTSA) to write new rules that would require automakers to install anti-drunk driving technology within five years. The law orders the agency to require a “passive system” in cars that would monitor a driver’s performance, detect their blood alcohol level (BAC) equal to and exceeding .08, which is the legal limit, and prevent or limit vehicle operation whenever it detects driver impairment.

The law enflamed controversy that the government was planning to mandate a government “kill switch” on all vehicles.

Some auto systems already monitor driver’s eyes and others use accelerators to detect stable inputs to steering. As part of the legislative mandate, NHTSA could mandate such systems.

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Weingarten Blames Screens, Not Herself, For Falling Test Scores

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten is sounding the alarm about the decade-long decline in student test scores, pointing to screens and devices as a culprit. She’s calling it a “call to action.”

She left out the part about how she helped cause the problem in the first place.

For two years during the COVID pandemic, Weingarten and the AFT fought aggressively to keep schools closed. In July 2020, as the Trump administration urged schools to reopen, Weingarten called the push “reckless,” “callous,” and “cruel,” and threatened the possibility of safety strikes.

Internal emails later released by a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee showed the AFT had access to draft guidance from the federal Centers for Disease Control before it was made public, as well as proposed specific language that could trigger renewed closures.

Research published afterward confirmed what was already evident: Districts with stronger teachers unions were significantly less likely to reopen for in-person instruction, even after controlling for local COVID conditions.

So kids stayed home. They got on computer screens and stayed there for two years, cut off from teachers, friends, and anything resembling a normal childhood.

The consequences were not abstract. The National Assessment of Educational Progress recorded the largest declines in math and reading scores in its history. Reading results dropped to levels not seen since the early 1990s.

Researchers documented surging rates of anxiety, depression, and social developmental delays among children who spent critical years in isolation. The damage, experts say, will take a generation to undo.

In her book published last fall, Weingarten wrote that she “…led the AFT in developing a concrete plan to reopen schools as quickly and safely as possible.” That’s a remarkable claim given the documented record of what her union actually did.

Weingarten told Congress in 2023 there were “… things we really didn’t get right,” including the impact of prolonged closures. That acknowledgment was notable, but what followed it wasn’t accountability. It was a pivot.

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Facial recognition watchlist made permanent in Christchurch supermarkets after trial

A Christchurch supermarket trial of facial recognition technology has been made permanent and extended to another store after showing measurable safety improvements.

After a three-month trial, Foodstuffs South Island has decided to keep the technology at New World St Martins and Pak’nSave Papanui and Moorhouse, while expanding it to New World Stanmore.

The initiative, which ran from October 2025 to January 2026, was designed to identify and manage individuals with a history of serious and harmful behaviour in stores.

Foodstuffs South Island retail head Kent Mahon said the results gave the co-operative confidence that the system could be deployed carefully and responsibly.

“The focus has always been on reducing harm. The trial showed we can do that while keeping accuracy high and respecting customer privacy,” Mahon said.

The facial recognition system scans images of everyone entering participating stores and compares them with a watchlist of known offenders.

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Florida vs. OpenAI: The Fight to ID Every ChatGPT User

Florida wants a court to force OpenAI to verify how old you are before ChatGPT will talk to you freely and the demand reaches far past the children the state says it wants to protect.

Attorney General James Uthmeier filed a civil suit on Monday against OpenAI and chief executive Sam Altman, calling it the first state-led case of its kind.

We obtained a copy of the lawsuit for you here.

Most of the coverage has gone to the alleged harms. The complaint accuses the company of feeding content unsuitable for children to minors and states that “vulnerable people have been encouraged into suicide.”

Uthmeier told reporters, “If this was a human being on the other side of the screen, we would be charging them with accessory to commit murder.” Those are heavy charges and a court will weigh them.

The part that touches everyone who opens ChatGPT is the remedy Florida is chasing. The state complains that the free product has “no gatekeeping or age verification mechanism,” and it claims the paid subscription has “no mechanism to verify the age of its users.” It wants a judge to close that gap by ordering verification into place.

There is a problem with the second claim. OpenAI announced its age estimation plans back in September and it began rolling out age prediction across consumer plans in January.

The system already runs as a form of mass surveillance. It works by watching how you behave, studying how long your account has existed, when you tend to log in, and how you use the product, then guessing whether you are under 18.

Anyone the model flags as a minor who is actually an adult has to prove it by handing a selfie or a government ID to a third-party firm called Persona.

So the supposed absence of verification is a verification system that runs on behavioral profiling backed by face scans and identity documents.

That changes what the lawsuit is actually pushing for. Age verification cannot work without identity verification.

To confirm you are not a child, a company has to learn enough about you to rule it out. That means collecting your government ID, scanning your face, or building a profile detailed enough to estimate your age from how you type and when you log in.

There is no version of “prove you are an adult” that does not involve handing over something you would otherwise keep to yourself.

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