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AI Media Articles

We worry AI will "eliminate jobs" and make millions redundant, rather than recognise that the real decisions are made by governments and corporations and the humans that run them.Kenan Malik


Artificial Intelligence (AI) is emerging technology with great promise and potential for abuse. Below are key excerpts of revealing news articles on AI technology from reliable news media sources. If any link fails to function, a paywall blocks full access, or the article is no longer available, try these digital tools.

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US government ramps up mass surveillance with help of AI tech, data brokers – and your apps and devices
2026-04-21, The Conversation
https://theconversation.com/us-government-ramps-up-mass-surveillance-with-hel...

Your neighbors’ Ring cameras film your walk to the car. Your car’s sensors, cameras and microphones record your speed, how you drive, where you’re going, who’s with you, what you say, and biological metrics such as facial expression, weight and heart rate. Your car may also collect text messages and contacts from your connected smartphone. Meanwhile, your phone continuously senses and records your communications, info about your health, what apps you’re using, and tracks your location. As you enter [a] store, its surveillance cameras identify your face and track your movements through the aisles. If you then use Apple or Google Pay to make your purchase, your phone tracks what you bought and how much you paid. All this data quickly becomes commercially available, bought and sold by data brokers. Aggregated and analyzed by artificial intelligence, the data reveals detailed, sensitive information about you that can be used to predict and manipulate your behavior, including what you buy, feel, think and do. Companies unilaterally collect data from most of your activities. This “surveillance capitalism” is often unrelated to the services device manufacturers, apps and stores are providing you. The U.S. government ... now purchases massive quantities of your information from commercial data brokers. Disclosure of documents allegedly hacked from Homeland Security reveal a massive surveillance web that has all Americans in its scope.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on AI and the disappearance of privacy.


How Project Maven Put A.I. Into the Kill Chain
2026-04-15, New Yorker
https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/how-project-maven-put-ai-into-th...

[Veteran journalist Katrina Manson's] new book, “Project Maven: A Marine Colonel, His Team, and the Dawn of AI Warfare,” is an ... account of the ongoing reconfiguration of the U.S. armed forces for a new technological era. “Project Maven” is structured as an intellectual and professional biography of Drew Cukor, a Marine Corps intelligence officer largely responsible for ... this military transformation. Cukor insists that Maven was never supposed to be a weapon. He frequently defends the project as nothing more than an integrated data platform ... for a world made better and safer by A.I. warfare. In 2018, Google employees staged a massive walkout to protest the company’s work on a primitive iteration of the project. In the aftermath of the Google fiasco, Cukor turns to Palantir (in addition to Microsoft and Amazon) to make Maven a reality. NATO now has its own Maven contract with Palantir, and that prompted ten member nations to pursue one, too. The Maven Smart System has become a global surveillance apparatus—it can keep track of forty-nine thousand airfields all over the world—but its current work is hardly limited to intelligence provision and analysis. A “single click,” [journalist Katrina] Manson reports, “could send coordinates through a tactical data link to a specific weapons platform so that it could fire at the target.” The entire process, from target identification to target destruction, is four clicks. Officials told Manson that Maven was “accelerating operations and ‘enabling lethality’ at combat headquarters around the world.” Maven is only one part of the A.I. tool kit. Manson uncovers evidence of two clandestine killer-robot programs, one aerial and the other aquatic, which are being developed in haste. For the first time, the Pentagon’s proposed budget contained a line item for comprehensively self-directing systems. A machine can shoot, Manson reports, up to “ten times faster than an assassin.”

Note: For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on AI and military corruption.


Ghost Murmur tool that ‘found US airman’ defies the laws of physics
2026-04-10, Times of London
https://www.thetimes.com/world/middle-east/israel-iran/article/iran-war-how-c...

One of the most intriguing secrets of Operation Epic Fury is how, using an “exquisite” piece of classified technology, the CIA succeeded in finding the injured airman in Iran by detecting his heartbeat, the tiniest evidence of human life concealed in a narrow crevice up a 7,000ft mountain ridge. The technology that led to the airman’s rescue by Seal Team Six commandos has been outed as a CIA “tool” called Ghost Murmur. It was reportedly developed as a highly classified “blue skies” invention by Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works, the famous laboratory where young, brilliant scientists and engineers devote their time to finding solutions to impossible concepts. John Ratcliffe, the CIA director, hinted at the new technology in a press conference this week. “We deployed both human assets and exquisite technologies that no other intelligence service in the world possess to a daunting challenge, comparable to hunting for a single grain of sand in the middle of a desert,” Ratcliffe said. On the face of it, a futuristic magnetic sensing device ... pinpointed the missing colonel’s heartbeat across a 40-mile stretch of land. Ghost Murmur, as described, would appear to push the boundaries of physics beyond even the most exceptional human brain or computer. Intelligence sources would not confirm or deny the existence of Ghost Murmur. But reportedly the “CIA tool” relies on what is called quantum magnetometry, which can find signals of human hearts, aided by artificial intelligence to separate out all the other noises getting in the way.

Note: While it's unclear whether the Ghost Murmur tool was actually responsible for rescuing the injured soldier, this technology is not out of the realm of possibility. Since the 1960s, the CIA had already developed poison weapons capable of causing heart attacks remotely. Learn more about real-life exotic weapon technologies used by militaries around the world. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on AI and intelligence agency corruption.


Pentagon to adopt Palantir AI as core US military system, memo says
2026-03-21, Yahoo News/Reuters
https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/exclusive-pentagon-adop...

Palantir (PLTR)’s Maven artificial intelligence system will become an official program of record, Deputy Secretary of Defense Steve Feinberg said in a letter to Pentagon leaders, a move that locks in long-term use of Palantir’s weapons-targeting technology across the U.S. military. Maven is a command-and-control software platform that analyzes battlefield data and identifies targets. It is already the primary AI operating system for the U.S. military, which has carried out thousands of targeted strikes against Iran over the last three weeks. Designating Maven as a program of record will streamline its adoption across all arms of the military. The memo ordered oversight of Maven be moved from the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency to the Pentagon’s Chief Digital Artificial Intelligence Office within 30 days. Future contracting with Palantir will be handled by the Army, the letter said. Feinberg’s order is a significant win for Palantir, which has landed a growing stream of contracts with the U.S. government, including a deal announced last summer with the U.S. Army worth up to $10 billion. Those awards have helped double the company’s stock price in the past year, lifting its market value to nearly $360 billion. Maven can rapidly analyze huge amounts of data from satellites, drones, radars, sensors and intelligence reports, and use AI to automatically identify potential threats or targets.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on AI and military corruption.


Palantir Gets Millions of Dollars From New York City's Public Hospitals
2026-02-15, The Intercept
https://theintercept.com/2026/02/15/palantir-contract-new-york-city-health-ho...

New York City's public hospital system is paying millions to Palantir, the controversial ICE and military contractor. Since 2023, the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation has paid Palantir nearly $4 million to improve its ability to track down payment for the services provided at its hospitals and medical clinics. Palantir, a data analysis firm that's now a Wall Street giant thanks to its lucrative work with the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence community, deploys its software to make more efficient the billing of Medicaid and other public benefits. That includes automated scanning of patient health notes to “increase charges captured from missed opportunities,” contract materials reviewed by The Intercept show. It's Palantir's work with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that is drawing the most protest today. The company provides a variety of services to help the federal government find and deport immigrants. ICE's Palantir-furnished case management software, for example, “plays a critical role in supporting the daily operations of ICE, ensuring critical mission success,” according to federal contracting documents. Palantir's contract with New York's public health care system allows the company to work with patients' protected health information, or PHI. With permission from New York City Health and Hospitals, Palantir can “de-identify PHI and utilize de-identified PHI for purposes other than research,” the contract states.

Note: Listen to an audio clip of Jeffrey Epstein promoting Palantir to Ehud Barak. Read how Palantir helped the NSA spy on the entire planet. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and the disappearance of privacy.


Generated Police Report Claimed Officer Transformed Into Frog
2026-01-02, Futurism
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-police-report-frog

The police department in Heber City, Utah, was forced to explain why a police report software declared that an officer had somehow shapeshifted into a frog. As Salt Lake City-based Fox 13 reports, the flawed tool seems to have picked up on some unrelated background chatter to devise its fantastical fairy tale ending. “The body cam software and the AI report writing software picked up on the movie that was playing in the background, which happened to be ‘The Princess and the Frog,'” police sergeant Rick Keel told the broadcaster, referring to Disney’s 2009 musical comedy. “That’s when we learned the importance of correcting these AI-generated reports.” The department had begun testing an AI-powered software called Draft One to automatically generate police reports from body camera footage. The goal was to reduce the amount of paperwork — but considering that immense mistakes are falling through the cracks, results clearly vary. Draft One was first announced by police tech company Axon — the same firm behind the Taser, a popular electroshock weapon — last year. The software makes use of OpenAI’s GPT large language models to generate entire police reports from body camera audio. Experts quickly warned that hallucinations could fall through the cracks in these important documents. Critics also argue that the tool could be used to introduce deniability and make officers less accountable in case mistakes were to fall through the cracks.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on AI and police corruption.


Palantir CEO Says Legalizing War Crimes Would Be Good for Business
2025-12-05, Futurism
https://futurism.com/future-society/palantir-ceo-war-crimes

The AI surveillance platform provider Palantir is no stranger to controversy. It brings in billions each year from controversial partnerships with groups like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Israeli Defense Forces, something CEO Alex Karp isn’t keen on changing anytime soon. In an interview ... this week, Karp even took it a step further, arguing that legalizing US war crimes would open up a whole new market for Palantir. Unlike other moguls profiting off the military industrial complex who hide behind concepts like “democracy” and “national security,” the Palantir CEO isn’t afraid to put his mouth where his money is with disarmingly bombastic language. In a letter to shareholders earlier this year, for instance, Karp quoted hawkish political scholar Samuel Huntington in arguing that the “rise of the West was not made possible ‘by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion… but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence.'” While this could be seen as a damning indictment of Western civilization and its violent stranglehold over the world economy, Karp instead positions it as a source of inspiration. In another part of his interview ... the Palantir CEO reaffirmed his commitment to ICE, emphasizing the important role he plays in making immigrants lives worse. “I’m going to use my whole influence to make sure this country stays skeptical on migration and has a deterrent capacity that it only uses selectively,” Karp said.

Note: Listen to an audio clip of Jeffrey Epstein promoting Palantir to Ehud Barak. Read how Palantir helped the NSA spy on the entire planet. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and the disappearance of privacy.


Intimate Advertising, the Next Frontier in AI Manipulation
2025-11-25, Jacobin
https://jacobin.com/2025/11/intimate-advertising-ai-manipulation-data

OpenAI has announced that ChatGPT will soon allow erotic and sexually explicit interactions for adult users. Erotic features aren’t just another product update; they deepen emotional dependency and encourage people to treat AI companions as partners rather than tools. This shift opens the door to what I call “intimate advertising” — a powerful new form of manipulation in which tech companies shape human desire and manipulate users for profit. AI has continual access to our anxieties, frustrations, desires, and secrets. It can understand how our minds work and detect when we are most vulnerable — and, therefore, most persuadable. What is particularly troubling is that this new form of advertising will come from entities that many will consider friends and life advisors. AI companion apps have been downloaded over 220 million times worldwide and are used regularly by over half of US teens. With intimate advertising, personal companionship becomes inseparable from businesses’ persuasion techniques. A system designed to comfort you can easily be repurposed to sell to you. The deeper AI companions embed themselves in our emotional lives, the more vital it becomes to draw a clear line between care and commerce. Before Big Tech turns intimacy into its most profitable advertising channel yet, we must press regulators to enforce the idea there are limits on how far we are willing to let AI into our private lives.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on AI and the disappearance of privacy.


Four ways AI is being used to strengthen democracies worldwide
2025-11-23, The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/nov/23/ai-use-strengthen-democ...

There are risks to democracy from AI, but there are also opportunities. AI is being used by some to make democracy better, stronger, and more responsive to people. CalMatters, a non-profit, non-partisan news organization. Since 2023, its Digital Democracy project has been collecting every public utterance of California elected officials – every floor speech, comment made in committee and social media post, along with their voting records, legislation, and campaign contributions – and making all that information available in a free online platform. CalMatters this year launched a new feature that takes this kind of civic watchdog function a big step further. Its AI Tip Sheets feature uses AI to search through all of this data, looking for anomalies, such as a change in voting position tied to a large campaign contribution. These anomalies appear on a webpage that journalists can access to give them story ideas and a source of data. This is not AI replacing human journalists; it is a civic watchdog organization. And it’s no coincidence that this innovation arose from a new kind of media institution – a non-profit news agency. AI technology is not without its costs and risks, and we are not here to minimize them. But the technology has significant benefits as well. AI is inherently power-enhancing, and it can magnify what the humans behind it want to do. It can enhance authoritarianism as easily as it can enhance democracy. It’s up to us to steer the technology in that better direction.

Note: Explore more positive stories like this on technology for good.


‘Surveillance pricing’: Why you might be paying more than your neighbour
2025-10-15, Al Jazeera
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2025/10/15/surveillance-pricing-why-you-mi...

In July, US group Delta Air Lines revealed that approximately 3 percent of its domestic fare pricing is determined using artificial intelligence (AI) – although it has not elaborated on how this happens. The company said it aims to increase this figure to 20 percent by the end of this year. According to former Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan ... some companies are able to use your personal data to predict what they know as your “pain point” – the maximum amount you’re willing to spend. In January, the US’s Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which regulates fair competition, reported on a surveillance pricing study it carried out in July 2024. It found that companies can collect data directly through account registrations, email sign-ups and online purchases in order to do this. Additionally, web pixels installed by intermediaries track digital signals including your IP address, device type, browser information, language preferences and “granular” website interactions such as mouse movements, scrolling patterns and video viewing behaviour. This is known as “surveillance pricing”. The FTC Surveillance Pricing report lists several ways in which consumers can protect their data. These include using private browsers to do your online shopping, opting out of consumer tracking where possible, clearing the cookies in your history or using virtual private networks (VPNs) to shield your data from being collected.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and the disappearance of privacy.


The godfather of AI says the tech is making war easier: Autonomous weapons mean 'dead robots' instead of 'body bags'
2025-08-28, Business Insider
https://www.businessinsider.com/geoffrey-hinton-ai-autonomous-weapons-war-rob...

AI could mean fewer body bags on the battlefield — but that's exactly what terrifies the godfather of AI. Geoffrey Hinton, the computer scientist known as the "godfather of AI," said the rise of killer robots won't make wars safer. It will make conflicts easier to start by lowering the human and political cost of fighting. Hinton said ... that "lethal autonomous weapons, that is weapons that decide by themselves who to kill or maim, are a big advantage if a rich country wants to invade a poor country." "The thing that stops rich countries invading poor countries is their citizens coming back in body bags," he said. "If you have lethal autonomous weapons, instead of dead people coming back, you'll get dead robots coming back." That shift could embolden governments to start wars — and enrich defense contractors in the process, he said. Hinton also said AI is already reshaping the battlefield. "It's fairly clear it's already transformed warfare," he said, pointing to Ukraine as an example. "A $500 drone can now destroy a multimillion-dollar tank." Traditional hardware is beginning to look outdated, he added. "Fighter jets with people in them are a silly idea now," Hinton said. "If you can have AI in them, AIs can withstand much bigger accelerations — and you don't have to worry so much about loss of life." One Ukrainian soldier who works with drones and uncrewed systems [said] in a February report that "what we're doing in Ukraine will define warfare for the next decade."

Note: As law expert Dr. Salah Sharief put it, "The detached nature of drone warfare has anonymized and dehumanized the enemy, greatly diminishing the necessary psychological barriers of killing." For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on AI and warfare technology.


Palantir’s tools pose an invisible danger we are just beginning to comprehend
2025-08-24, The Guardian (One of the UK's Leading Newspapers)
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/aug/24/palantir-artificial-int...

“Ice is just around the corner,” my friend said, looking up from his phone. A day earlier, I had met with foreign correspondents at the United Nations to explain the AI surveillance architecture that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) is using across the United States. The law enforcement agency uses targeting technologies which one of my past employers, Palantir Technologies, has both pioneered and proliferated. Technology like Palantir’s plays a major role in world events, from wars in Iran, Gaza and Ukraine to the detainment of immigrants and dissident students in the United States. Known as intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition and reconnaissance (Istar) systems, these tools, built by several companies, allow users to track, detain and, in the context of war, kill people at scale with the help of AI. They deliver targets to operators by combining immense amounts of publicly and privately sourced data to detect patterns, and are particularly helpful in projects of mass surveillance, forced migration and urban warfare. Also known as “AI kill chains”, they pull us all into a web of invisible tracking mechanisms that we are just beginning to comprehend, yet are starting to experience viscerally in the US as Ice wields these systems near our homes, churches, parks and schools. The dragnets powered by Istar technology trap more than migrants and combatants ... in their wake. They appear to violate first and fourth amendment rights.

Note: Read how Palantir helped the NSA and its allies spy on the entire planet. Learn more about emerging warfare technology in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on AI and Big Tech.


How AI and surveillance capitalism are undermining democracy
2025-08-21, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
https://thebulletin.org/2025/08/how-ai-and-surveillance-capitalism-are-underm...

AI’s promise of behavior prediction and control fuels a vicious cycle of surveillance which inevitably triggers abuses of power. The problem with using data to make predictions is that the process can be used as a weapon against society, threatening democratic values. As the lines between private and public data are blurred in modern society, many won’t realize that their private lives are becoming data points used to make decisions about them. What AI does is make this a surveillance ratchet, a device that only goes in one direction, which goes something like this: To make the inferences I want to make to learn more about you, I must collect more data on you. For my AI tools to run, I need data about a lot of you. And once I’ve collected this data, I can monetize it by selling it to others who want to use AI to make other inferences about you. AI creates a demand for data but also becomes the result of collecting data. What makes AI prediction both powerful and lucrative is being able to control what happens next. If a bank can claim to predict what people will do with a loan, it can use that to decide whether they should get one. If an admissions officer can claim to predict how students will perform in college, they can use that to decide which students to admit. Amazon’s Echo devices have been subject to warrants for the audio recordings made by the device inside our homes—recordings that were made even when the people present weren’t talking directly to the device. The desire to surveil is bipartisan. It’s about power, not party politics.

Note: As journalist Kenan Malik put it, "It is not AI but our blindness to the way human societies are already deploying machine intelligence for political ends that should most worry us." Read about the shadowy companies tracking and trading your personal data, which isn't just used to sell products. It's often accessed by governments, law enforcement, and intelligence agencies, often without warrants or oversight. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on AI.


Members of Congress Increasingly Take Jobs as AI Lobbyists
2025-08-12, Lee Fang on Substack
https://www.leefang.com/p/members-of-congress-increasingly

In Silicon Valley, AI tech giants are in a bidding war, competing to hire the best and brightest computer programmers. But a different hiring spree is underway in D.C. AI firms are on an influence-peddling spree, hiring hundreds of former government officials and retaining former members of Congress as consultants and lobbyists. The latest disclosure filings show over 500 entities lobbying on AI policy—from federal rules designed to preempt state and local safety regulations to water and energy-intensive data centers and integration into government contracting and certifications. Lawmakers are increasingly making the jump from serving constituents as elected officials to working directly as influence peddlers for AI interests. Former Sen. Laphonza Butler, D-Calif., a former lobbyist appointed to the U.S. Senate to fill the seat of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, left Congress last year and returned to her former profession. She is now working as a consultant to OpenAI, the firm behind ChatGPT. Former Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., recently registered for the first time as a lobbyist. Among his initial clients is Lazarus AI, which sells AI products to the Defense Department. The expanding reach of artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping hundreds of professions, weapons of war, and the ways we connect with one another. What's clear is that the AI firms set to benefit most from these changes are taking control of the policymaking apparatus to write the laws and regulations during the transition.

Note: For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on AI and Big Tech.


Doctors Horrified After Google's Healthcare AI Makes Up a Body Part That Does Not Exist in
2025-08-06, Neoscope
https://futurism.com/neoscope/google-healthcare-ai-makes-up-body-part

Health practitioners are becoming increasingly uneasy about the medical community making widespread use of error-prone generative AI tools. In their May 2024 research paper introducing a healthcare AI model, dubbed Med-Gemini, Google researchers showed off the AI analyzing brain scans from the radiology lab for various conditions. It identified an "old left basilar ganglia infarct," referring to a purported part of the brain — "basilar ganglia" — that simply doesn't exist in the human body. Board-certified neurologist Bryan Moore flagged the issue ... highlighting that Google fixed its blog post about the AI — but failed to revise the research paper itself. The AI likely conflated the basal ganglia, an area of the brain that's associated with motor movements and habit formation, and the basilar artery, a major blood vessel at the base of the brainstem. Google blamed the incident on a simple misspelling of "basal ganglia." It's an embarrassing reveal that underlines persistent and impactful shortcomings of the tech. In Google's search results, this can lead to headaches for users during their research and fact-checking efforts. But in a hospital setting, those kinds of slip-ups could have devastating consequences. While Google's faux pas more than likely didn't result in any danger to human patients, it sets a worrying precedent, experts argue. In a medical context, AI hallucinations could easily lead to confusion and potentially even put lives at risk.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on AI and corruption in science.


Border Patrol Wants Advanced AI to Spy on American Cities
2025-07-23, The Intercept
https://theintercept.com/2025/07/23/cbp-border-patrol-ai-surveillance/

U.S. Customs and Border Protection, flush with billions in new funding, is seeking “advanced AI” technologies to surveil urban residential areas, increasingly sophisticated autonomous systems, and even the ability to see through walls. A CBP presentation for an “Industry Day” summit with private sector vendors ... lays out a detailed wish list of tech CBP hopes to purchase. State-of-the-art, AI-augmented surveillance technologies will be central to the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant campaign, which will extend deep into the interior of the North American continent. [A] reference to AI-aided urban surveillance appears on a page dedicated to the operational needs of Border Patrol’s “Coastal AOR,” or area of responsibility, encompassing the entire southeast of the United States. “In the best of times, oversight of technology and data at DHS is weak and has allowed profiling, but in recent months the administration has intentionally further undermined DHS accountability,” explained [Spencer Reynolds, a former attorney with the Department of Homeland Security]. “Artificial intelligence development is opaque, even more so when it relies on private contractors that are unaccountable to the public — like those Border Patrol wants to hire. Injecting AI into an environment full of biased data and black-box intelligence systems will likely only increase risk and further embolden the agency’s increasingly aggressive behavior.”

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on AI and immigration enforcement corruption.


Assassinations? Defamation? How genetic technology could destabilize the world
2025-06-18, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
https://thebulletin.org/2025/06/assassinations-defamation-how-genetic-technol...

The forensic scientist Claire Glynn estimated that more than 40 million people have sent in their DNA and personal data for direct-to-consumer genetic testing, mostly to map their ancestry and find relatives. Since 2020, at least two genetic genealogy firms have been hacked and at least one had its genomic data leaked. Yet when discussing future risks of genetic technology, the security policy community has largely focused on spectacular scenarios of genetically tailored bioweapons or artificial intelligence (AI) engineered superbugs. A more imminent weaponization concern is more straightforward: the risk that nefarious actors use the genetic techniques ... to frame, defame, or even assassinate targets. A Russian parliamentary report from 2023 claimed that “by using foreign biological facilities, the United States can collect and study pathogens that can infect a specific genotype of humans.” Designer bioweapons, if ever successfully developed, produced, and tested, would indeed pose a major threat. Unscrupulous actors with access to DNA synthesis infrastructure could ... frame someone for a crime such as murder, for example, by using DNA that synthetically reproduces the DNA regions used in forensic crime analysis. The research and policy communities must dedicate resources not simply to dystopian, low-probability threats like AI designed bioweapons, but also to gray zone genomics and smaller-scale, but higher probability, scenarios for misuse.

Note: For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on corruption in biotech.


Tech execs are joining the Army — no grueling boot camp required
2025-06-17, Business Insider
https://www.businessinsider.com/tech-execs-just-joined-the-army-boot-camp-not...

Four top tech execs from OpenAI, Meta, and Palantir have just joined the US Army. The Army Reserve has commissioned these senior tech leaders to serve as midlevel officers, skipping tradition to pursue transformation. The newcomers won't attend any current version of the military's most basic and ingrained rite of passage— boot camp. Instead, they'll be ushered in through express training that Army leaders are still hashing out, Col. Dave Butler ... said. The execs — Shyam Sankar, the chief technology officer of Palantir; Andrew Bosworth, the chief technology officer of Meta; Kevin Weil, the chief product officer at OpenAI; and Bob McGrew, an advisor at Thinking Machines Lab who was formerly the chief research officer for OpenAI — are joining the Army as lieutenant colonels. The name of their unit, "Detachment 201," is named for the "201" status code generated when a new resource is created for Hypertext Transfer Protocols in internet coding, Butler explained. "In this role they will work on targeted projects to help guide rapid and scalable tech solutions to complex problems," read the Army press release. "By bringing private-sector know-how into uniform, Det. 201 is supercharging efforts like the Army Transformation Initiative, which aims to make the force leaner, smarter, and more lethal." Lethality, a vague Pentagon buzzword, has been at the heart of the massive modernization and transformation effort the Army is undergoing.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and military corruption.


How AI-Powered Police Forces Watch Your Every Move
2025-06-07, The Marshall Project
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2025/06/07/ai-police-camera-new-orleans

From facial recognition to predictive analytics to the rise of increasingly convincing deepfakes and other synthetic video, new technologies are emerging faster than agencies, lawmakers, or watchdog groups can keep up. Take New Orleans, where, for the past two years, police officers have quietly received real-time alerts from a private network of AI-equipped cameras, flagging the whereabouts of people on wanted lists. In 2022, City Council members attempted to put guardrails on the use of facial recognition. But those guidelines assume it's the police doing the searching. New Orleans police have hundreds of cameras, but the alerts in question came from a separate system: a network of 200 cameras equipped with facial recognition and installed by residents and businesses on private property, feeding video to a nonprofit called Project NOLA. Police officers who downloaded the group's app then received notifications when someone on a wanted list was detected on the camera network, along with a location. That has civil liberties groups and defense attorneys in Louisiana frustrated. “When you make this a private entity, all those guardrails that are supposed to be in place for law enforcement and prosecution are no longer there, and we don’t have the tools to ... hold people accountable,” Danny Engelberg, New Orleans’ chief public defender, [said]. Another way departments can skirt facial recognition rules is to use AI analysis that doesn’t technically rely on faces.

Note: Learn about all the high-tech tools police use to surveil protestors. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on AI and police corruption.


How Palantir Is Expanding the Surveillance State
2025-06-02, Reason
https://reason.com/2025/06/02/palantir-paves-way-for-trump-police-state/

Palantir has long been connected to government surveillance. It was founded in part with CIA money, it has served as an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) contractor since 2011, and it's been used for everything from local law enforcement to COVID-19 efforts. But the prominence of Palantir tools in federal agencies seems to be growing under President Trump. "The company has received more than $113 million in federal government spending since Mr. Trump took office, according to public records, including additional funds from existing contracts as well as new contracts with the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon," reports The New York Times, noting that this figure "does not include a $795 million contract that the Department of Defense awarded the company last week, which has not been spent." Palantir technology has largely been used by the military, the intelligence agencies, the immigration enforcers, and the police. But its uses could be expanding. Representatives of Palantir are also speaking to at least two other agencies—the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service. Along with the Trump administration's efforts to share more data across federal agencies, this signals that Palantir's huge data analysis capabilities could wind up being wielded against all Americans. Right now, the Trump administration is using Palantir tools for immigration enforcement, but those tools could easily be applied to other ... targets.

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