Tag: technology

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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Goldman Sits Down With Anduril As ‘War Unicorns’ Reshape Defense Tech

Palmer Luckey’s defense startup, Anduril, is emerging as the Department of War’s answer to the urgent need for affordable, scalable advanced weaponry produced at lightning speed, rather than through the slow, over-budget procurement cycles that have long defined the legacy primes.

The twin conflicts raging across Eurasia and the Middle East, from the Russia-Ukraine war to the U.S.-Iran war, have forever altered modern warfare, with drones, seaborne drones, ground robots, and AI kill chains now reshaping the battlefield.

The quick rise of Anduril, something we call a “war unicorn,” has attracted the attention of Goldman analysts, who recently felt compelled to sit down with Anduril executives to better understand the story and how it will play a major role in the next phase of rebuilding America’s defense-industrial base.

Analyst Noah Poponak recently hosted Anduril co-founder and CEO Brian Schimpf and head of investor relations Allison Lazarus in New York to gain more color on how the defense company is solving the defense industry’s biggest bottleneck, speed.

Oculus headset creator Palmer Luckey, who founded the company in 2017, has focused on building lower-cost, scalable systems in categories such as drones, counter-UAS, and missiles, positioning itself against a legacy defense-industrial base that includes Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and many others.

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“Dystopian” Police.AI Launches in UK Amid False Arrests

A new UK national center launches within days, promising to find suspects in minutes, except it costs £115 million ($155M) and occasionally arrests the wrong person.

Police.AI, the body charged with pushing dystopian artificial intelligence across all 43 forces in England and Wales, comes with a seductive sales pitch from its frontman. Catch your suspect in minutes. Turn a weeks-long manhunt into a coffee break.

Alex Murray, National Crime Agency director and the National Police Chiefs’ Council’s first AI lead, wants facial recognition to do exactly that. The catch, and it is a fairly significant one, is that the technology keeps flagging innocent people.

Murray’s whole pitch is speed. “What took days, weeks, sometimes months can potentially take hours,” he said, describing AI tools that span CCTV analysis, searches of seized phones and the flagging of fake images.

He likes to point to a Bedfordshire fraud case where the software chewed through Romanian-language phone data from four suspects and produced guilty pleas. Notice the shape of the pattern, though. It is always a list of what the police get to do. The part where the rest of us get scanned, sorted and occasionally pulled off the street tends to fall off the slide.

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CT AFL-CIO President Warns AI Could Be The ‘Nail In The Coffin’ For Democrats 

Organized labor has found its next target: artificial intelligence. 

At a June 1 trade roundtable hosted by U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro in New Haven, Connecticut labor leaders warned that AI threatens workers and demands new government “guardrails.” But the discussion revealed something beyond concern: unions want a hand in writing the rules for how employers use it. 

The event, held at the Manufacturing and Technical Community Hub (MATCH), brought together DeLauro, Wisconsin Congressman Mark Pocan, Connecticut labor leaders, manufacturers, state economic development officials and Public Citizen, a progressive advocacy group. The official topic was trade policy. Before long, the conversation shifted to artificial intelligence. 

Connecticut AFL-CIO President Ed Hawthorne framed the issue in pointed terms.

“If the Democratic Party does not get out ahead of AI, it’s when the Democratic Party dies,” he said. “It’ll be the nail in the coffin, because we are the party of the workers, and if we are going to just sit back and let the tech industry and their money buy elections and not push back on that, we will no longer be the party of the workers, and that’s when we lose.”

Hawthorne also described AI as “the new NAFTA,” a warning that artificial intelligence could displace workers in ways similar to past trade disruptions. Those concerns are not baseless. AI will disrupt labor markets. Some jobs will disappear, others will change, and new occupations will emerge. Few serious observers believe the economy will be left untouched. 

But Hawthorne’s sharpest warning was political rather than economic. He was not simply saying AI could eliminate jobs. He was saying that if Democrats fail to satisfy organized labor’s demands on AI, they forfeit their claim to be the party of workers. That is a different kind of argument, and worth noting as such. 

The real question is how policymakers respond. At the roundtable, the answer increasingly centered on one word: “guardrails.” 

Participants repeatedly called for guardrails around AI and automation. In practice, that meant stronger worker input requirements, advance notice when AI is used in employment decisions, human oversight, appeal rights, bias testing and an expanded government role in governing how AI systems are introduced in the workplace. 

Some of that is defensible. Few Americans want hiring decisions or workplace discipline delegated to opaque systems with no accountability. Protections against deceptive deepfakes and discriminatory bias deserve serious consideration. But the discussion ranged well beyond basic safeguards. It sounded less like a targeted debate over genuine AI risks and more like organized labor ensuring no major workplace technology advances without union-approved conditions attached. 

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China Begins Banning AI Videos That ‘Vulgarize’ Regime-Approved Media

China’s National Radio and Television Administration (NRTA) announced on Monday that the state-run China Central Television (CCTV) has overseen the deletion of some 8,000 AI-altered videos from online platforms.

The videos were censored because they “distort, parody, or vulgarize classic Chinese films and television dramas and animated works.”

China’s state-run Global Times unironically relayed the triumphant announcement by two organs of the oppressive Communist government congratulating each other for doing a great job at censorship:

The NRTA has instructed major online audiovisual platforms to further strengthen their primary responsibility, enhance routine monitoring and screening efforts, and focus on removing non-compliant AI-altered videos that alter or distort classic film and television works based on the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature, historical themes, revolutionary themes, and exemplary heroic figures. 

Platforms have also been directed to remove various forms of disturbing or inappropriate animated content to continuously foster a healthy online audiovisual environment, CCTV reported. 

According to the NRTA, the campaign specifically targets three categories of non-compliant videos including the AI-altered content that seriously distorts the original spirit and character portrayals of the source material, content that promotes graphic violence or vulgarity, and content that misappropriates or alters Chinese cultural elements in ways that lead to distorted historical understanding. 

The Global Times gave the example of Lin Daiyu, the main character from an 18th-century romance novel called Dream of the Red Chamber, being inappropriately portrayed as a “violent combat character.”

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