Impact of the shut down…

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/03/cyber-law-cisa-2015-shutdown-00592501

Government flying partially blind to threats after key cyber law expires

A key law that helps the federal government guard against cyber threats to U.S. critical systems expired as the government shut down Wednesday, partially blinding Washington to attacks from adversaries that are only growing more sophisticated and persistent.

The Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act has been a pillar of the nation’s cyber defenses since it was signed into law in 2015, providing legal protections for organizations to share cyber intelligence with the federal government and each other.

Tools & Techniques.

https://www.makeuseof.com/turn-any-sketchy-pc-into-a-private-one-with-a-single-usb/

You can turn any sketchy PC into a private one with a single USB

If you have to borrow a computer at your hotel or use one at the library, you have no idea what that machine is loaded with. You might assume that using private browsing or quickly deleting your files will protect your privacy, but sadly, that may not be enough. If the computer has trackers installed, cached logins, or malware, forensic traces of your activity may still be recoverable from the storage drive even after clearing your history.

… Tails OS is built around an amnesic design. This means it runs entirely on the RAM of the host computer, so your history, searches, and every other activity disappear the moment the computer is shut down. It's different from private browsing or deleting files after the fact, because it leaves almost no traces. This is a form of built-in privacy, where the system is designed to forget everything. For this reason, even forensic tools will struggle to uncover your session history.

https://tails.net/install/index.en.html

Cuts hiding behind the shutdown? Death of 1000 cuts...

https://www.bespacific.com/trump-administration-knocks-out-at-least-15-oversight-websites-saying-igs-lied-to-the-public/

Trump administration knocks out at least 15 oversight websites, saying IGs ‘lied to the public’

(Related)

https://www.bespacific.com/government-workers-say-their-out-of-office-replies-were-forcibly-changed-to-blame-democrats-for-shutdown/

Government Workers Say Their Out-of-Office Replies Were Forcibly Changed to Blame Democrats for Shutdown

(Related)

https://www.bespacific.com/head-of-eisenhower-library-resigns-after-refusing-trump-directive/

Head of Eisenhower library resigns after refusing Trump directive

(Related)

https://www.bespacific.com/trumprx-could-let-government-steal-all-your-data-legal-expert-warns/

TrumpRx Could Let Government Steal All Your Data, Legal Expert Warns

Perspective.

https://fpf.org/blog/the-state-of-state-ai-legislative-approaches-to-ai-in-2025/

The State of State AI: Legislative Approaches to AI in 2025

To help stakeholders understand this rapidly evolving environment, the Future of Privacy Forum (FPF) has published The State of State AI: Legislative Approaches to AI in 2025. 

https://fpf.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/The-State-of-State-AI-2025.pdf

https://fpf.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/The-State-of-State-AI-2025-SUPPLEMENTAL.pdf

This report analyzes how states shaped AI legislation during the 2025 legislative session, spotlighting the trends and thematic approaches that steered state policymaking. By grouping legislation into three primary categories: (1) use- and context-specific measures, (2) technology-specific bills, and (3) liability and accountability frameworks, this report highlights the most important developments for industry, policymakers, and other stakeholders within AI governance.

Of course they did.

https://www.bespacific.com/ice-to-buy-tool-that-tracks-locations-of-hundreds-of-millions-of-phones-every-day/

ICE to Buy Tool that Tracks Locations of Hundreds of Millions of Phones Every Day

404 Media: Documents show that ICE has gone back on its decision to not use location data remotely harvested from peoples’ phones. “The database is updated every day with billions of pieces of location data. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has bought access to a surveillance tool that is updated every day with billions of pieces of location data from hundreds of millions of mobile phones, according to ICE documents reviewed by 404 Media. The documents explicitly show that ICE is choosing this product over others offered by the contractor’s competitors because it gives ICE essentially an “all-in-one” tool for searching both masses of location data and information taken from social media. The documents also show that ICE is planning to once again use location data remotely harvested from peoples’ smartphones after previously saying it had stopped the practice…”

The best way to get rich? Invent a new sin.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/10/use-of-generative-ai-in-scams.html

Use of Generative AI in Scams

New report: “Scam GPT: GenAI and the Automation of Fraud.”

This primer maps what we currently know about generative AI’s role in scams, the communities most at risk, and the broader economic and cultural shifts that are making people more willing to take risks, more vulnerable to deception, and more likely to either perpetuate scams or fall victim to them.

AI-enhanced scams are not merely financial or technological crimes; they also exploit social vulnerabilities ­ whether short-term, like travel, or structural, like precarious employment. This means they require social solutions in addition to technical ones. By examining how scammers are changing and accelerating their methods, we hope to show that defending against them will require a constellation of cultural shifts, corporate interventions, and eff­ective legislation.

Perspective.

https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/29/uk_russia_cyber_war/

UK may already be at war with Russia, ex-MI5 head suggests

The former head of MI5 says hostile cyberattacks and intelligence operations directed by The Kremlin indicate the UK might already be at war with Russia.

Baroness Manningham-Buller, who served as Director General of the intelligence agency from 2002 to 2007 and was the second woman to fill the role, made the claim on Lord Speaker's Corner, the podcast of the House of Lords.

She was referencing previous comments from Fiona Hill, the British-American foreign affairs expert who advised the White House on Vladimir Putin and Russia during Donald Trump's first term.

"Since the invasion of Ukraine, and the various things I read that the Russians have been doing here, sabotage, intelligence collection, attacking people, and so on... Fiona Hill, I think she may be right in saying we're already at war with Russia," the Baroness told podcast host Lord McFall of Alcluith.

"It's a different sort of war, but the hostility, the cyberattacks, the physical attacks, intelligence work, is extensive," she said.

(Related)

https://www.ft.com/content/0b351091-3f82-4f2f-bef2-a52a35f009f2?accessToken=zwAGP7EDMlsokc8LNRCRP4JPL9O-8qUqNfAJ8g.MEUCIQDNxAazoaM1u-aorgcHRS-I0yr9AFHC9yfOGfeUoUKTuQIgHbWuOdECv22YavmdfpPAzUtBEOadQ6WK4TW-VcqSum4&sharetype=gift&token=fdaa0fae-cfe1-4031-bdb1-2cf8af69eae1

The Russian spy ship stalking Europe’s subsea cables

Last November, a distinctive blue and white vessel set sail from a secluded inlet of Russia’s Kola Peninsula on a three-month voyage. The ship, seemingly a civilian craft, sailed around Norway, down the English Channel and up into the Irish Sea, before looping southwards to the Mediterranean and east towards Suez.

But this was no pleasure cruise of Europe’s Atlantic coastline: Moscow’s military spy ship Yantar, kitted with a full armoury of surveillance equipment, was on a mission to map and potentially intercept the undersea cables on which Nato allies rely for internet access, energy, military communications and financial transactions.

Perspective.

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2025/09/artificial-intelligence-may-not-be-artificial/

Artificial intelligence may not be artificial

The term artificial intelligence renders the sense that what computers do is either inferior to or at least apart from human intelligence. AI researcher Blaise Agüera y Arcas argues that may not be the case.

Agüera y Arcas, Google’s CTO of technology and society, traced the evolution of both human and artificial intelligence in ways that seem to mirror each other as part of a Wednesday event sponsored by Harvard Law School’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.  

“Why has the computational power of brains, not just of AI models, grown explosively throughout evolution?” said Agüera y Arcas, the author of the new book “What Is Intelligence? Lessons from AI About Evolution, Computing, and Minds.” “If we rewind 500 million years, we see only things with very small brains, and if we go back a billion years, we see no brains at all.”

According to Agüera y Arcas, human brains evolved to be computational, meaning that they process information by transforming various kinds of inputs into signals or outputs, and that most of the computation that brains do takes the form of predictions, which is what AI systems do.

“I hear a lot of people say that it’s a metaphor to talk about brains as computers,” said Agüera y Arcas. “I don’t mean this metaphorically. I mean it very literally … The premise of computational neuroscience is that what brains do is process information, not that they are like computers, but that they are computers.”