Exactly. That’s what is so scary. “You hack my electric grid, I nuke your tractor factory!”
https://www.zdnet.com/article/no-such-thing-as-cyber-warfare-australias-head-of-cyber-warfare/
'No such thing' as cyber warfare: Australia's head of cyber warfare

Warfare is warfare, espionage is internationally normal, and cyber is just one of a suite of potential capabilities for a military response, says Major General Marcus Thompson.

… "Any response that the government might choose to make that involves the military could occur using any capabilities that the military has available, including of course capabilities that sit within ADF [Australian Defence Force] and the Australian Signals Directorate [ASD]," he said.
"A military response would be one of any number of options, or could be part of a suite of options, that the government of the day could consider."






No doubt the FBI will point to laws like these and insist we are falling behind. Sweden seems a much different world.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/swedish-police-cleared-to-deploy-spyware-against-crime-suspects/
Swedish police cleared to deploy spyware against crime suspects

Spyware should be able to turn on device cameras and microphones, get encrypted chat logs.

… The new technical capabilities granted to Swedish police are part of a 34-point plan to upgrade law enforcement powers when investigating gang or violent crimes.
Damberg said that granting police the legal and technical capabilities to intercept encrypted communications was a top priority, as they were being left behind by criminal groups who now often use services like Signal and WhatsApp to coordinate operations.
The minister told local press that 90% of all the communications police have intercepted for investigations in recent years have been encrypted.
Damberg told local news outlet Omni that Malmö Police believe that there has not been a single murder in the city of Malmö in recent years that has not been preceded by communication between gang members in encrypted form.
… More than a decade ago, German authorities began deploying a malware strain named the Bundestrojaner (Federal Trojan) as part of their investigations.
Sweden's police plan is similar, and they plan to deploy malware with spyware-like capabilities on suspects' devices. The idea is to listen in on encrypted audio or video calls in real-time, or extract chat logs from encrypted instant messaging apps.



(Related) Both sides of the encryption debate?
https://www.lawfareblog.com/rethinking-encryption
Rethinking Encryption
… During the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s very public disagreement with Apple over encryption in 2016, I was the bureau’s general counsel and responsible for leading its legal efforts on that matter.
… public safety officials should also become among the strongest supporters of widely available strong encryption.






The more the merrier?
https://www.dataprivacymonitor.com/ccpa/a-balancing-act-a-brief-overview-of-california-privacy-laws/
A Balancing Act: A Brief Overview of California Privacy Laws






As impactive as the GDPR?
https://fortune.com/2019/10/24/german-eu-data-ethics-ai-regulation/
A.I. Regulation Is Coming Soon. Here’s What the Future May Hold
If you want to know how the global regulation of artificial intelligence might shape up in the coming years, best look to Berlin.
Last year Angela Merkel’s government tasked a new Data Ethics Commission with producing recommendations for rules around algorithms and A.I. The group’s report landed Wednesday, packed with ideas for guiding the development of this new technology in a way that protects people from exploitation.
… The group—whose members work in academia, industry and regulation—also called for a mandatory labeling scheme that would apply to algorithmic systems that pose any potential threat to people’s rights, and said people affected by algorithmic decisions should be able to get “meaningful information” about how those decisions were reached.
It also called for an update to liability rules, to make sure companies can be punished for rights violations and bad decisions made by algorithms that would otherwise be made by human employees.
… “If Germany’s guidelines were to inspire the EU’s forthcoming A.I. legislation, the EU will indeed manage to set a global standard—a blueprint on what to do to fail in the digital economy,” Chivot wrote in a statement.






Do what I mean, not what I say! A TED talk.
https://boingboing.net/2019/10/23/746627.html
The problem with artificial intelligence is that it will do exactly what we ask it to do



(Related) No one noticed? Don’t they compare the number of incoming reports with how they are directed?
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/oct/24/police-database-flagged-9000-cybercrime-reports-as-security-risk
Police database flagged 9,000 cybercrime reports as 'security risk'
Thousands of reports of cybercrime were quarantined on a police database instead of being investigated because software designed to protect the computer system labelled them a security risk.
The backlog at one point stretched to about 9,000 reports of cybercrime and fraud, some of them dating back to October last year. The reports had been made to Action Fraud and handed to the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau (NFIB), run by the City of London police.






I’ve used this a bit over the last couple of months. Definitely worth exploring.
https://www.geekwire.com/2019/ai2s-semantic-scholar-search-engine-now-takes-full-sweep-scientific-papers/
AI2’s Semantic Scholar search engine now takes in the full sweep of scientific papers
Seattle’s Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence says its academic search engine, Semantic Scholar, is now in high gear — thanks to a power boost from Microsoft that helped expand its reach to every field of science.
Over the course of just a few months, Semantic Scholar’s database has gone from indexing 40 million research papers in computer science and biomedicine to taking in more than 175 million papers. The database not only covers the time-honored physical sciences, but also political science and sociology, art and philosophy.






A safe way to train Ethical Hackers to use the TOR browser?
https://www.bespacific.com/bbc-news-launches-dark-web-tor-mirror/
BBC News launches ‘dark web’ Tor mirror
BBC News: “The BBC has made its international news website available via Tor, in a bid to thwart censorship attempts. Tor is a privacy-focused web browser used to access pages on the dark web. The browser can obscure who is using it and what data is being accessed, which can help people avoid government surveillance and censorship. Countries including China, Iran and Vietnam are among those who have tried to block access to the BBC News website or programmes.
Instead of visiting bbc.co.uk/news or bbc.com/news, users of the Tor browser can visit the new bbcnewsv2vjtpsuy.onion web address. Clicking this web address will not work in a regular web browser. The dark web copy of the BBC News website will be the international edition, as seen from outside the UK. It will include foreign language services such as BBC Persian, BBC Arabic and BBC Russian…”