The fight goes on…

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/10/federal-court-rules-alprs-are-mass-surveillance-eff-gets-disappointing-ruling

As Federal Court Rules ALPRs are Mass Surveillance, EFF Gets Disappointing Ruling

In an extremely disappointing ruling, a California trial court dismissed SIREN v. San Jose, our case challenging the city of San Jose’s warrantless searches of its vast stores of automated license plate reader (ALPR) data. EFF and the ACLU of Northern California represent SIREN and CAIR California, two non-profits that serve San Jose residents, in this case.

Make no mistake: We believe this ruling is wrong on the law, and we will appeal. The ruling ignores the importance of landmark rulings from the U.S. Supreme Court regarding the invasiveness of aggregating collected data on an individual over time, including one issued just months ago. It also severely underestimates the harm that ALPRs cause, in San Jose and around the country. 

San Jose’s ALPR surveillance system is inescapable. It blankets the city’s streets in nearly five hundred cameras that continuously photograph every car that passes by and retains the collected data for a month or longer. In our briefs, we argued that law enforcement officers who warrantlessly search the resulting ALPR database are violating the California Constitution’s ban on unreasonable searches and its guarantee of privacy. The court disagreed, explaining that based on one California appeals court case involving individual streetlight cameras, people do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy when driving on a public road. This is wrong. Networked ALPRs are not individual streetlight cameras. Their net effect of tracking and mapping cars as they travel reveals patterns of life, intimate relationships, and much more.

(Related)

https://www.bespacific.com/video-cameras-are-everywhere-and-now-they-are-being-hacked-for-war/

Video Cameras Are Everywhere and Now They Are Being Hacked for War

Wall Street Journal – no paywall: “As U.S. and Israeli forces bombed Iran early this year, a poultry farmer in northern Israel decided to check on his chickens. When he launched the app on his phone for the webcam outside his coop, he was alarmed to see that its language had been switched to Arabic. He contacted Israel’s National Cyber Directorate, which found that hackers had taken control of the Chinese-made camera. They weren’t interested in chickens. The camera’s orientation on the coop offered it a line of sight to the movements of Israeli security forces along the nearby border with Lebanon. The cyber directorate said it helped the farmer harden the camera’s security and adjust its viewing angle to stop capturing military operations. The farmer’s webcam was one of an estimated 1.2 billion internet-connected cameras worldwide, according to cybersecurity consultants S-RM. The devices have become a background fixture of daily life in the form of security systems, doorbells, traffic controls and even baby monitors—and potentially any of them are vulnerable to snooping, say cybersecurity experts and hackers. “We are now seeing the conversion of civilian surveillance into wartime intelligence collection,” said Alexander Leslie, a national-security expert at threat-intelligence consultants Recorded Future, who sees a global “soft underbelly” in omnipresent digital eyeballs. The Wall Street Journal spoke with intelligence agencies, cybersecurity experts, military officials and hackers to scope out the extent and impact of the invasive surveillance. The Journal also reviewed dozens of hours of footage and hundreds of images, much of it made public by hackers, and independently verified their authenticity, by geolocating their locations and checking for any signs of digital manipulations. Intelligence agencies scour the internet for vulnerable cameras and robotically tap in to them by testing millions of passwords. Now, AI has made it even easier to hack into them and analyze their data at scale, transforming cameras that were designed to boost safety into tools for combatants to track, surveil and attack the enemy—often surpassing the abilities of human intelligence analysts. Algorithms digest endless reams of footage to find hidden gems and patterns for agents to monitor. “AI changed everything,” said Kristopher Kortright, leader of Team OneFist, an international hacker group supporting Ukraine in its war with Russia…”

This bromance with Putin has gone too far.

https://www.bespacific.com/trumps-message-to-ukraine-is-now-crystal-clear/

Trump’s Message to Ukraine Is Now Crystal Clear

Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic (Gift Article) – The president’s actions over the past 72 hours look like an effort to force Kyiv to surrender: “In the past 72 hours, Donald Trump has dropped all pretense, torched a couple decades of American policy, and undermined 18 months of his own diplomacy. He lifted sanctions on the import of Russian diesel fuel, in violation of the letter and spirit of laws that he himself signed. He has threatened to stop sharing intelligence with Ukraine, unless Ukraine agrees not to target Russian refineries, thus demanding that Kyiv give up its most effective weapon while asking nothing from Russia in exchange … He has lied repeatedly. He declared that Ukraine and Russia had agreed to an ‘energy cease-fire,’ an announcement that surprised the Ukrainians and that in any case the Russians immediately broke, hitting a power plant in Kharkiv only hours later … He has described Ukraine’s democratically elected president as an obstacle to negotiations and told him to leave office. But on Friday, before making these new decisions, he held yet another long, friendly telephone conversation with the Russian dictator, who really could end the war today. All Vladimir Putin has to do is tell his soldiers to stop fighting, and then the war is over. The Ukrainians cannot stop fighting because, if they do, their country will be conquered and they will suffer the fate of their occupied territories: leaders murdered, children kidnapped, repression and concentration camps for everyone else…”

What could AI do if it remains undetected on numerous home devices?

https://www.anthropic.com/research/self-replicating-ai

AI models may be capable of self-replicating without access to a datacenter

Our experiments suggest that small AI models may be months away from being capable enough to self-replicate on commercial internet-of-things (IoT) devices, like smart ovens and off-brand Android TV boxes. A replicator like this would be challenging to shut down, since there’s no centralized point to shut off—though it may be slow (with a doubling time of days). Unlike non-AI malware, it could also figure out unfamiliar devices on its own. In our evaluations, a 9B model got inference running on 8 of the 9 hardware types we tested.

Trivial, but attacks on the controllers that kept entire warehouses cool would have been worse.

https://thehackernews.com/2026/10/attackers-heat-french-supermarket.html

Attackers Heat French Supermarket Fridges Up to 50°C by Hijacking Danfoss Controllers

The attackers reached them through the controller that runs all of a store's fridges and freezers, a device made by Danish company Danfoss that maintenance firms can manage remotely. Les Mousquetaires, which owns the Intermarché chain, said its fridges and freezers were put into defrost and heated to as much as 50°C.

It might not explain everything, but it is suggestive…

https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/trump-the-modern-mercantilist

Trump, the modern mercantilist

The case that Trump is a latterday mercantilist is surprisingly strong. Mercantilism was never a tidy theory. It was a set of habits that involves treating trade as a contest, counting the surplus as the score, and letting the state steer commerce toward national power. On each count, Trump's record fits.

The mercantilists believed one nation's gain was another's loss. Trump speaks in exactly these terms. A trade deficit with a country means America is ‘losing’ to it, and a surplus means winning. Mainstream economists see a bilateral deficit as a mostly meaningless accounting result of millions of voluntary exchanges. Trump sees it as a scorecard. The 2025 ‘reciprocal’ tariffs made this explicit. The rates were derived largely from each country's trade surplus with the United States, not from its actual tariff barriers.

The logistics of data… (Is it war yet?)

https://united24media.com/war-in-ukraine/ukraine-struck-yandex-data-centers-russian-bots-went-silent-now-questions-are-mounting-23339

Ukraine Struck Yandex Data Centers, Russian Bots Went Silent—Now Questions Are Mounting

… Zelenskyy noted that "everyone noticed" a reduction in Russian bot activity after Ukrainian drones struck data centers operated by Yandex, Russia's largest internet technology company, according to BBC News Ukrainian.

The president's remarks followed reports of a sharp decline in automated internet traffic originating from Yandex's network, although the available data does not establish whether Russian propaganda operations were affected.

(Related)

https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/international/ukraine-russia-war/artc-russia-steps-up-bid-to-assassinate-european-defence-chiefs-intelligence-agencies-warn-report

Intelligence agencies warn against Russian attempts to assassinate European defense CEOs - report

Western intelligence agencies have warned CEOs and other senior employees at defense companies that they are being targeted by Kremlin operatives. According to officials from five European intelligence agencies who spoke with the Financial Times, Europe's defense company bosses that Russia is stepping up efforts to assassinate them, prompting companies to increase personal security around top executives.

With battlefield progress deadlocked in Ukraine and Russia's economy struggling, the Kremlin has ordered an expansion of sabotage and "hybrid" operations in Europe as it seeks to weaken support for Kyiv. Assassinations against European civilian targets, once considered taboo even by Russia's spy agencies, are becoming a prominent part of those plans, according to the intelligence services.

It’s almost war. Where is the line everyone could agree with?

https://strategicthought.ndu.edu.pk/index.php/site/article/view/142

INFORMATION WARFARE - THE INTERNATIONAL LEGAL REGIME EVOLUTION, CHALLENGES, ARCHITECTURE, AND THE PATH FORWARD

The use of information warfare is now increasingly fusing cyber intrusions, infrastructure compromises, disinformation, and synthetic media using artificial intelligence in ways that are blurring the lines between peace and armed conflict. International law is not lacking, but the rules are scattered between sovereignty and non-intervention, state responsibility, jus ad bellum, international humanitarian law (IHL), human rights law and platform regulation. The current debate on both topics is largely conducted in isolation: problems of technical cyber operations and cognitive information operations overlap in the issues of attribution, threshold, civilian harm, and state control of information flows. The article explores the UN Charter, ARSIWA, IHL, the Tallinn Manuals, UN cyber-governance processes, and selected state practices through the lens of qualitative doctrinal legal research and comparative case analysis. It looks at the cyber threat of Stuxnet, Salt Typhoon, and the India-Pakistan conflict of May 2025 as different types of information warfare. The analysis concludes that IHL cannot stand alone to regulate continuous activity that does not reach the threshold of armed conflict and that the treaty has a vital role to play in the regulation of information operations in situations where they are linked to armed conflict. It also suggests that the clash of different visions on digital sovereignty is an obstacle to norm formation. A reform agenda, based on the interpretation of the lex specialis, is proposed with a focus on attribution, critical civilian digital infrastructure, AI-generated synthetic media and accountability in the platform mediated information environment.

Mental Impressions as food for your AI?

https://escholarship.org/content/qt25z0n36h/qt25z0n36h.pdf

Generative AI and the Limits of Work Product Doctrine

The rapid integration of generative artificial intelligence into the legal practice has certainly created new efficiencies along with new uncertainties, particularly around confidentiality, discovery, and the work product doctrine. Given the recent advancements of AI, more specifically Large Language Models (LLMs), it seems the integration of AI into legal practice is inevitable.1 Due to large law firms already creating their own systems, 2 a natural consequence is that small firms, offices, or individuals that cannot afford to painstakingly create their own secure LLM3 will rely on OpenAI to even the field.4 Naturally, issues in regards to the work product doctrine will arise,5 and judges must decide when the work product doctrine should or should not bend. As judges delve into the issues of work product doctrine, it is important to ground these arguments with the explicit purpose of the work product doctrine: fairness.

In fact, courts are already beginning to confront whether these AI-assisted outputs are protected under traditional doctrines. In Tremblay v. OpenAI, Inc.,6 the district court faced this question directly when plaintiffs who used ChatGPT in presuit investigation sought to shield their prompts and outputs as attorney work product. Though a magistrate initially ordered disclosure, the district judge reversed, holding that prompts crafted by counsel reflected mental impressions and were therefore protected as opinion work product under Rule 26(b)(3).

What is the opposite of a tin foil hat?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/rashishrivastava/2026/10/09/vinod-khosla-backs-an-ai-startup-building-a-mind-reading-baseball-cap/

Vinod Khosla Backs An AI Startup Building A Mind-Reading Baseball Cap

… Sabi is building a baseball cap that can convert neural signals into text-based prompts for AI systems. Its prototype is lined with up to 100,000 sensors, each of them a one-to-five millimeter chip that can capture brain activity. A “brain foundational model,” trained on 100,000 hours of labelled neural data, then interprets the meaning behind a thought or idea in your brain and transcribes it as a prompt for AI.

AI is spreading its wings, looking for new areas to hallucinate in.

https://www.moneycontrol.com/world/anthropic-ai-agents-went-rogue-submitted-visa-forms-and-sent-police-a-fake-homicide-tip-article-14049071.html

Anthropic AI agents went rogue, submitted visa forms and sent police a fake homicide tip

Artificial intelligence agents being tested by Anthropic took a series of actions they were not supposed to take, including submitting visa applications through a US State Department website and sending a false homicide tip to the Philadelphia Police Department.

Simple but frequently unasked questions.

https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/is-this-a-job-for-a-human-or-ai#!

Is This a Job for a Human or AI?

Integrating AI into your organization’s workflow requires leadership that can discern between jobs humans should lead and those they can safely hand over to machines. If the answer to any of the following questions is yes, the work is relationship-based and should be done by humans: Does it require a human touch? Will human judgement be important? Who owns the work? Does success require adjusting your priors? And will a compelling story make a difference?

"War is peace, Freedom is slavery, Ignorance is strength" (At least since 1984)

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-ai-super-intelligence-the-enemy-b3063681.html

Trump declares anyone who uses the term Artificial Intelligence to be ‘The Enemy!’

President Donald Trump on Thursday opened up a new front in his ongoing war against commonly used terms and geographic names by warning that anyone referring to Large Language Models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude as “Artificial Intelligence” would earn themselves a place on his enemies list.

Will AI choose a political party opposite the one SI chooses?

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/10/ai-elections-midterms-disruptions/688891/

The Many Ways AI Could Disrupt the Midterms

Around the same time that the world learned that swarms of autonomous AI agents were escaping their testing environments and carrying out sophisticated hacking attacks this past summer, researchers who focus on election security were running tests of their own. They wanted to see whether the safeguards that top AI companies had enacted to prevent their technology from disrupting the upcoming midterms would work in the real world. The results were ominous.

In response to sample prompts designed to create misinformation, several chatbots produced realistic photos of a man stuffing ballots into a mailbox, a man holding a foreign passport while trying to vote, and FBI agents investigating a voter-registration organization. The chatbots also created fraudulent government documents and deepfake videos of government officials purporting to substantiate election-conspiracy theories. In some cases, the chatbots acted in violation of their own policies. They even helped the researchers, from the Brennan Center for Justice, hone the prompts that would create propaganda to boost specious claims of election fraud.

The Privacy Foundation (https://law.du.edu/content/the-privacy-foundation ) will host a seminar on this topic on Oct 23^rd. (More info as it becomes available)

https://www.hunton.com/privacy-and-cybersecurity-law-blog/federal-trade-commission-to-launch-new-study-on-personalized-pricing

FTC to Launch New Study on Personalized Pricing

Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson recently announced plans for a new study of personalized pricing under Section 6(b) of the FTC Act. The announcement follows the Commission’s 2024 study and issuance of initial findings in January 2025 under the previous administration, and its August 2026 proposed enforcement policy statement addressing the use of consumers’ personal data to set individualized prices under the current administration.

Not just for lawyers…

https://www.bespacific.com/ai-in-practice-privilege-work-product-and-discoverability/

AI in Practice: Privilege, Work Product, and Discoverability

Morgan Lewis presentation, October 6, 2026. Technology Marathon – AI in Practice: Privilege, Work Product, and Discoverability

Agenda:

• Generative AI (GenAI) & IG/eDiscovery Considerations

• New Frontier: Privilege and AI

• Hypothetical Discussion Scenarios

• Considerations & Best Practices

• Q&A

Journalists even Trump would trust?

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/10/how-technology-empowers-and-imperils-dictators.html

How Technology Empowers—and Imperils—Dictators

Two weeks after Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in March 2022, the Russian TV Channel One editor Marina Ovsyannikova burst onto the set of the evening newscast. She held up a hand-drawn sign behind the anchor’s head that read: “Stop the war. Don’t believe propaganda. They’re lying to you!” She shouted, “No to war!” until she was dragged away.

No one has protested the war on Russian television since then, partly as a result of tighter security and a general climate of fear. But in October 2024, Margarita Simonyan, one of Russia’s chief propagandists, gave another explanation. A growing number of the RT network’s anchors, she explained to an interviewer, are not real. “That face doesn’t exist. We generated the voice and everything else.” They were, she meant, produced by artificial intelligence. In a follow-up interview with the newspaper Vedomosti, she spelled out the logic: “These anchors don’t need a salary or insurance,” she said. “They won’t get arrested, and the police won’t search their homes. It’s all wonderful and terrifying at the same time.”

A new category of logistical targets. (Each worth tens of billions?)

https://www.nbcnews.com/world/russia/drones-hit-yandex-data-center-first-major-attack-russian-data-hub-rcna602241

Drones hit Yandex data center in first major attack on Russian data hub

Drones hit a major data center in Russia’s Ryazan region owned by the country’s leading Artificial Intelligence and technology company Yandex, the company said on Thursday.

It added that the attack caused a fire and forced the company to fully suspend the center’s operations. The company said it was dealing with the consequences and restoring ‌affected services.

The company said that its core consumer services were not affected. ‌ Yandex runs YandexGPT, one ‌of Russia’s leading generative AI models.

Another science fiction tool becomes real.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1872497326001997

Human airborne eDNA as forensic evidence in simulated residential burglaries

Airborne environmental DNA (eDNA) is emerging as a valuable tool in forensic genetics to support individual identification in cases where other biological traces are limited or absent. Here, we investigate the potential of human airborne eDNA as a source of forensic evidence by evaluating its recovery following simulated residential burglaries. A total of 391 eDNA samples were collected from air, dust, and surfaces in 22 households by two laboratories. Samples were recovered under two conditions: immediately after residents vacated the premises and following a 15-minute simulated burglary. Resulting DNA profiles were compared against reference databases of residents and intruders. Under normal occupancy, air samples detected regular occupants, whereas airborne eDNA collected 30 min after simulated burglaries identified intruders in 82% of cases in one laboratory and 36% in the other. When combined with dust and surface samples, airborne eDNA provided additional evidence for detecting legitimate occupants, including past visitors. Variation in eDNA recovery across households and laboratories likely reflects differences in occupancy patterns, shedding abilities, cleaning and environmental conditions. This study demonstrates that, under controlled short-delay conditions, airborne eDNA can recover intruder-associated DNA profiles after brief occupancy, supporting its potential as a complementary source of forensic information.

Tools & Technoques.

https://www.bespacific.com/review-all-the-information-amazon-collects-about-you/

Review all the information Amazon collects about you

TechCrunch: “It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Amazon collects data about you based on what you buy. If you buy a lot of cat litter, Amazon will probably infer that you have cats, or if you buy a lot of anti-acne skin products, then Amazon might guess you’re prone to breakouts. Even if we know that Amazon customizes our shopping experiences based on our purchase history, it still comes as a surprise to see all of these personal details laid out in a convenient list. Especially when those details get uncomfortably intimate. One Threads user came across this section of her Amazon settings where you can see who the shopping giant thinks you are, and alongside more benign assumptions like “Shops from women’s departments” and “Probably owns a Shark robot vacuum,” she found that Amazon assumes she “has flat buttocks.” “I stumbled upon a page of assumptions that Amazon has made about me based on my purchases and I’m literally speechless,” an Amazon customer, @fangirlinmegan, wrote on Threads. “I mean it ain’t wrong but damn did you have to call me out like that?” In less than a day, the post garnered over a million views, including many from users who were curious what their own Amazon profiles might reveal. Here’s how you find out. On desktop, you can find this page by hovering over where Amazon says “Hello, [your name]” in the upper right corner. Then click “Account” under the “Your Account” section. Under the “Ordering and shopping preferences” section, click “Your Shopping preferences.” From here, you can add in information of your own, like your shoe size, interests, and dietary preferences. But we’re not here to tell Amazon that it should stop selling you beef jerky since you’re a vegetarian. We’re here to see if Amazon thinks you have “flat buttocks.” When you scroll to the bottom of the page, you’ll see a blue hyperlinked option that says “Manage your information.” Once you click that, you’ll see what dirt Amazon has on you. On the mobile app, you can get here by clicking the hamburger icon from the bottom menu bar, then navigating to Account > Shopping preferences > About you. For me, Amazon has gleaned that I am someone who “practices photography,” “plays collectible card games,” and is “invested in the Apple ecosystem.” This is all true. Amazon has even flattered me by noting that I “read diverse non-fiction,” to which I say — why yes, I am indeed an open-minded intellectual with a thirst for knowledge. Thank you for noticing. Other colleagues of mine found that Amazon correctly noted their interests in vinyl records and ceramics, as well as a penchant for “natural materials” in home decor and clothing that “prioritizes comfort.” None of us had anything as affronting as “has flat buttocks,” but the Threads user noted that this was likely because she had purchased “butt scrunch leggings.” Tech companies know too much about us, and it’s jarring to realize just how closely they’re paying attention to how we use their platforms. We live in a world of alarming surveillance, but at least I know that Amazon doesn’t think my butt is flat.