Something to circulate…

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/10/introducing-our-new-surveillance-self-defense-guide-online-privacy-parents-and

Introducing Our New Surveillance Self-Defense Guide: Online Privacy for Parents and Youth

The internet is a vast and confusing place no matter your age. Trying to help youth engage with it safely and privately is a complicated topic that touches on many different skillsets and ideas. But just because it’s complicated doesn’t mean it’s impossible. We’ve launched our Online Privacy for Parents and Youth Surveillance Self-Defense guide in hopes to provide a framework for finding solutions that work for you. 

I doubt this is new. It may be a simple reorganization. Can you imagine that we have not had offensive capabilities before?

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/10/22/technology-support-office-dod-tech-spyware-sabotage-01100327

The Pentagon is quietly building an elite new tech sabotage agency

The creation of the Technology Support Office signals the Defense Department's intent to ramp up a range of aggressive covert activities abroad.

Perhaps too much?

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/empires-artificial-intelligence-niall-ferguson-eric-schmidt

Empires of AI

In the span of a few years, China and the United States have each assembled something future historians might recognize as a new kind of empire. Their dominions extend not merely over territory, trade routes, and airspace but over knowledge itself. By controlling the large language models, chips, physical infrastructure, and capital that provide the foundations for advanced machine cognition, Beijing and Washington are not only attaining new heights of economic performance and power projection; they are also setting the terms of all future scientific and intellectual progress. The term “AI superpowers” fails to capture the influence and reach that these rivals now wield. Even without active alliance building or coercion, they can make all other countries that seek access to advanced AI beholden to them.

How much is that times 50 states?

https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/meta-ordered-pay-25b-jury-finds-misled-facebook-users

Meta ordered to pay $25B after jury finds it misled users on data privacy

Meta Platforms has been ordered to pay $25 billion after a New Mexico jury found the company misled Facebook users over its handling of personal data and other practices in a case stemming from the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

New Mexico Judge Francis Mathew issued the penalty Wednesday after jurors found last month that Meta made dozens of misleading statements to users.

"Facebook's wrongdoing — over the course of years and systematically broadcast to the public — goes to the heart of Facebook's core business practices," Mathew wrote in his order.

Privacy Foundation seminar Generative AI in Law Practice and Legal Education Friday, October 23^rd from Noon – 2PM University of Denver, Sturm College of Law, Room 412

Speakers: Justice Maria E. Berkenkotter, Colorado Supreme Court Judge Lino S. Lipinsky de Orlov, Colorado Court of Appeals

Think of it as childish pranks aided by criminal adults…

https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/10/21/ai-has-potential-to-turn-script-kiddies-into-sophisticated-infrastructure-attackers/5304297

AI has 'potential' to turn script kiddies into sophisticated infrastructure attackers

When it comes to cyberattacks that shut down power grids, drinking-water systems, and other critical infrastructure, AI doesn’t – yet – turn script kiddies into sophisticated, nation-state attackers. But “the potential is there,” according to operational technology (OT) security experts.

"One thing that we've relied on for years is security by obscurity when it comes to utilities," said Steve Swick, former chief information security officer at American Electric Power. "The knowledge needed to do some of that stuff is getting less likely to be necessary," Swick added during a media panel ahead of the publication of Frenos' State of AI in Security report.

… “Basic access can recon documentation, and distill through that documentation very quickly to find out critical design features of your plant and facility,” said Paul Shaver, head of OT at Armadin, during the panel. “I can download the manual for almost any automation controller, parse through that very quickly, and come up with ways that I can exploit a dedicated feature of something that was not secure by design.”

Think, rethink, counter-think, etc.

https://arnaudbertrand.substack.com/p/whats-left-for-us-after-ai-chinas

What’s left for us after AI? China’s thinkers have very different answers

This is perhaps one of the great ironies of our time: China is increasingly shaping the future of AI, yet very few people in the West have the faintest idea how its key thinkers see it - its philosophers, sociologists or ethicists.

… Have you, for instance, ever heard of Zhao Tingyang? Probably not, and yet he may be the most original thinker on AI you’ve never read. He’s one of China’s most prominent philosophers, at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. While Silicon Valley spends billions trying to make AI share our values, he for one argues that doing so “may very well be a suicidal mistake”.

… Or take Liu Yongmou, a philosopher of technology at Renmin University in Beijing. His thinking is almost the opposite of ours. Where we fear machines that become more and more like us, he says that “humanity’s biggest problem is the machinization of humans, not the humanization of machines”

Might be useful…

https://www.bespacific.com/find-the-citations-that-need-a-second-look-before-you-file/

Find the citations that need a second look before you file.

CiteProof checks every citation in your brief against public court records — including AI-fabricated citations — and quoted passages in paid checks. You get a report that shows what verified, what needs your attention, and what we could not check.

A firm grasp of the obvious?

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/10/america-now-ally-russia/689066/

America Is Now an Ally of Russia

In the past week, the president of the United States has conclusively turned America into an ally of the Russian Federation.

Donald Trump has now abandoned pretense and is openly aiding the Kremlin in its war against a friend and partner of the U.S. The American commander in chief has abandoned the Western order, the most successful—and powerful—security arrangement in human history. To judge from the available evidence, he has not done so out of a cold calculation of the national interest. Instead, he has based his decisions on his own interests; his open admiration for Russia’s dictator; his resentment of Ukraine’s democratically elected president; and quite possibly other factors that so far have remained obscured from the American public.

Interesting article.

https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/ai-and-the-knowledge-problem-in-higher-ed/

AI and the Knowledge Problem in Higher Ed

A familiar bit of bureaucratic reasoning, described as “politician’s logic” in the British comedy Yes, Prime Minister, goes something like this: Something must be done. This is something. Therefore, we must do it.

I suspect some of the rush to create AI courses at colleges and universities reflects this sort of thinking. Universities recognize that artificial intelligence is changing the workplace. They want graduates to be prepared for those changes. Creating a course, or perhaps a sequence of courses, seems like an obvious response.

But it isn’t clear that creating an AI course will actually address the problem.

AI is already changing accounting, marketing, finance, nursing, engineering, economics, and dozens of other fields. Universities are understandably concerned about preparing students to use these tools. But what does it mean to promise graduates a working knowledge of AI? And who is qualified to teach it?

Good news and bad news.

https://www.bespacific.com/uneven-intelligence-of-ai-in-comparative-constitutional-law/

The (Currently) Uneven Intelligence of AI in Comparative Constitutional Law

Chilton, Adam, Langlois, Arthur, Dittmer, Jan-Ulrich; Versteeg, Mila: The (Currently) Uneven Intelligence of AI in Comparative Constitutional Law: From Years of Research to a Single Prompt?, VerfBlog, 2026/10/14, https://verfassungsblog.de/the-currently-uneven-intelligence-of-ai-in-comparative-constitutional-law/, DOI: 10.59704/a3baf260ef374567.  

This potential has inspired numerous projects exploring how AI could help scholarship on constitutional law. For example, there is research using AI to interpret constitutions, apply constitutional principles, and predict court rulings. Even the question of whether AI could improve the process of constitution-making has been studied. AI’s potential is particularly significant for comparative constitutional research. Systematically comparing legal systems requires locating sources from different jurisdictions, which are often difficult to access and only available in local languages. The creation of comparative legal datasets has thus involved considerable personnel, time, and financial resources. AI can overcome many of these obstacles. AI models can search for and translate foreign-language sources, filter them, and convert the filtered information into a dataset. In doing so, AI offers the prospect of datasets — which previously required years of research and the efforts of numerous experts and research assistants to compile — being just a prompt away. However, whether AI models can generate comparative law datasets that are qualitatively comparable to human-coded datasets has not yet been addressed (although Guha et al provide an example for a broader legal benchmarking exercise).5) We therefore conducted our own benchmarking study.6) We found evidence suggesting that recent AI models may be able to code simple factual data, but they are likely unreliable substitutes for expert human coders when conceptual or interpretive judgment is required.

Attacks on Ukrainian logistics in other countries.

https://www.lrt.lt/en/news-in-english/19/3086054/attempted-arson-at-lithuanian-firm-storing-starlink-equipment-pm-blames-russia

Attempted arson at Lithuanian firm storing Starlink equipment, PM blames Russia

“Just after midnight last night, there was another incident – an attempt was made to set fire to a Lithuanian company where Starlink communications equipment is stored. The authorities had warned the company about possible attacks, security had been stepped up, and the attempt failed,” Sinkevičius said in a post on Facebook.

If I refuse to pay the price they want, will that impact future offers? How do they know I refused, increased surveillance? (Privacy Foundation https://law.du.edu/content/the-privacy-foundation seminar on this topic Friday Oct 23^rd. Details soon?)

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/retail/2026/10/15/surveillance-shopping-prices/92124063007/

Are you paying more than other shoppers? How to protect your wallet

At a time when American shoppers are seeing price hikes from tariffs, the war with Iran and inflation, there's another reason some shoppers are paying different prices, some consumer advocates and lawmakers say.

It's surveillance pricing, which uses personalized information about you to potentially change the price. That is different than dynamic pricing, which is often called surge pricing, and changes with supply and demand.

"Pricing has changed in our economy and in our country,'' said Lindsay Owens, author of "Gouged: The End of a Fair Price – and What That Means for Your Wallet." "It used to be simple. How much does it cost to make the item, what's the profit margin and put a sticker on it. Now it is a highly engineered science. Companies hire physicists, they hire AI specialists. They build algorithms that can change prices in a nanosecond at retail locations across this country."

(Related)

https://digital.sandiego.edu/mcnair-summer/42/

What, Exactly, Is Surveillance Pricing?

(Related)

https://epic.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/explaining-surveillance-pricing-2026.pdf

EXPLAINING SURVEILLANCE PRICING AND OTHER DATADRIVEN PRICING PRACTICES

Moscow law?

https://criminaljustice.jurisocial.org/index.php/jjccj/article/view/6

Artificial Intelligence and the Transformation of Legal Decision-Making

Artificial intelligence is increasingly used to support legal and public decision-making, including legal research, document review, risk assessment, administrative processing, and other forms of decision support. Its use can improve speed, consistency, and institutional capacity, but it can also create risks concerning opacity, discriminatory effects, automation bias, procedural fairness, privacy, and the allocation of responsibility. This article examines those risks through qualitative doctrinal analysis and focused comparative policy analysis. It considers the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s decision in State v. Loomis, the European Union Artificial Intelligence Act, Canada’s Directive on Automated Decision-Making, Council of Europe guidance on AI and judicial systems, and selected interdisciplinary scholarship. The article argues that the central legal problem is not simply whether an AI system is accurate, but whether its use can be reconciled with requirements of lawful authority, reasoned decision-making, equality, contestability, institutional accountability, and effective remedy. The article further distinguishes decision-support systems from systems that materially automate or determine legal outcomes and argues that the required safeguards should be proportionate to the legal stakes and degree of automation. The analysis also considers Pakistan, where constitutional fair-trial, equality, dignity, and due-process principles provide an existing legal vocabulary for evaluating public-sector AI, while the National Artificial Intelligence Policy 2025 provides a policy framework rather than a substitute for legislation. The article concludes that responsible public-sector AI requires layered governance: lawful authority, impact assessment, procurement controls, validation and monitoring, meaningful human review, reasons and notice, auditability, access to remedy, and institutional technical capacity.

For nerds and doomers alike…

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/10/ai-neuron-blog-post/689058/

The Blog Post That Set the AI World on Fire

For the past 24 hours, Silicon Valley has been obsessed with a 26,000-word blog post by the AI researcher Nick Cammarata. The document has been called the “the most important essay,” “the most important result,” and “the single best piece of news” of the year, or in the history of AI research—or, perhaps, ever. Even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman lauded it. Cammarata makes a series of bold, almost astonishing claims about the nature of AI that, if true, would upend some of his industry’s basic assumptions about the very thing it is building. And after months of AI-hacking sprees and mounting public backlash against the industry, many people see Cammarata as offering a glimmer of hope when it comes to not just understanding but also controlling the technology being unleashed on the world.

Will the report reflect real reality or Trump reality?

https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/trumps-ai-task-force-to-commission-report-on-technologys-risks-12197951#publisher=newsstand

Trump's AI Task Force To Commission Report On Technology's Risks

President Donald Trump's artificial intelligence task force in its first meeting agreed on Thursday to address risks related to cybersecurity, biosecurity and "model control and accountability" as fears rise over the potential dangers posed by the technology.

The panel known as the Super Intelligence Force - using the president's preferred term for artificial intelligence - will commission a report from the President's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology to evaluate those and other concerns, according to a White House account of the meeting.

The task force will also "develop protocols and mechanisms for labs to provide early warnings and systemized notifications to the government of breaches, hacks, jailbreaks, and other issues," it said.

In addition, the group, led by Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton, plans to "establish a law enforcement and consumer protection coordination committee including the Department of Justice, Federal Trade Commission, and various agencies," the White House said.

AI for fun and profit?

https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/openai-ai-deepfake-evidence-courts-1826007

OpenAI Warns Courts May Have No Reliable Way to Spot AI Deepfake Evidence

AI-generated deepfakes could make it harder for US courts to establish whether audio and video evidence is genuine, creating a growing challenge for judges who must decide what material can be trusted in a trial.

Representatives from OpenAI and Meta raised the concern at a 15 October meeting of the US Judicial Conference's Advisory Committee on Evidence Rules in Boston. Their warning comes as the judiciary considers whether existing authentication standards can cope with increasingly convincing fabricated recordings.

However, the immediate scale of the problem remains unclear. A Federal Judicial Center survey found that only 15 of the 931 judges who responded had encountered a case in which a party challenged evidence on the grounds that it was a deepfake.

That gap between predicted risks and reported cases puts the judiciary in a difficult position: changing evidence rules too soon could create unnecessary burdens, while waiting too long could leave courts struggling to assess sophisticated fabrications.

Another infrastructure target…

https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/10/16/attack-on-bae-managed-system-disrupts-us-bankruptcy-courts/5303487

Attack on BAE-managed system disrupts US bankruptcy courts

The US' bankruptcy courts are currently down owing to what officials are calling a “cybersecurity incident.”

The Administrative Office of the US Courts said the websites and systems that support the Bankruptcy Noticing Center (BNC), which manages electronic comms related to bankruptcy cases, were pulled offline while the vendor investigates.

It just gets worser and worser.

https://www.cfr.org/articles/trumps-diesel-deal-with-russia-was-just-the-start

Trump’s “Diesel Deal” With Russia Was Just the Start

When U.S. President Donald Trump announced his diesel deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the end of last week, after the two of them had a long phone chat, it was easy to shrug off the move as a feeble effort to limit energy prices in advance of the midterms. Sure, the decision to buy more diesel by relaxing sanctions on Moscow was probably illegal. And yes, it was made without any consultation of U.S. allies. Worst of all, it came just as Russian attacks on Ukrainian cities were ramping up—a bad look, to say the very least. Yet if all the diesel deal showed was that Trump was a bad negotiator (we knew that, right?), that he cared little for alliance solidarity (ditto), and that he was willing to let Putin have a few billion dollars in additional export earnings, the real-world impact of what the president had done might be relatively limited.

A week later, the story looks disturbingly different; the possible consequences, much more serious, and likely to last well beyond the midterms. A day after announcing new diesel imports from Russia, Trump began calling for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s removal from office. He followed this up by claiming that Moscow and Kyiv had agreed to suspend attacks on each other’s main energy targets (for the Ukrainians, that meant oil refineries in Russia; for the Russians, the Ukrainian electric grid). This, it quickly became clear, was pure invention. Reports suggested what had actually happened was that U.S. negotiators were pressing the Ukrainian government to do something far more radical than a mutual ceasefire—to cease its attacks unilaterally, whether Russia complied or not.

On another front, we find there is no clearly defined “front.”

https://carnegieendowment.org/emissary/2026/10/iran-b1-bomber-drones-new-era-military-diffusion

Why the Pentagon Was So Spooked About the B–1 Bombers in England

Since March, the United States had stationed a dozen B-1 Lancer long-range bombers at RAF Fairford in southern England to support its air war against Iran. These aircraft are especially valuable because they can fly at supersonic speeds while carrying massive payloads of guided and unguided weapons. The bombers that were stationed at Fairford are worth an estimated $3.8 billion and account for one-quarter of Washington’s B-1 arsenal.

Over the weekend of October 3, military commanders abruptly evacuated the entire B-1 fleet from Fairford amid fears of an imminent Iranian attack. The removal order was so sudden that the Pentagon reportedly lacked aerial refueling planes for the bombers even as they were taking off.

… What had spooked the Pentagon? Sensitive intelligence suggested that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) was planning a complex multistage drone attack against the base. Reportedly, they intended to use unmarked vans parked a quarter-mile from the fence line of Fairford to launch armed drones against the B-1s, which were sitting out in the open, as well as to target the several hundred U.S. military personnel stationed there.

The Iranian operation bore a striking resemblance to a similar effort, known as Operation Spider’s Web, carried out by Ukraine last year against Russia.