Cindy Cohn and Bruce Schneier trace how post-9/11 mass surveillance infrastructure, originally justified for counterterrorism, has expanded into routine domestic policing, immigration enforcement by ICE, and private security systems like facial recognition and license plate readers. They highlight that government agencies increasingly rely on private companies' data—including purchasing information directly from data brokers, as confirmed by FBI Director Kash Patel—rather than going through traditional legal channels.
lawfaremedia.org
· 2026-09-15
The NSA, CISA, and FBI jointly identified six Chinese AI companies—DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun, and Z.AI—as running large-scale campaigns since late 2024 to extract the underlying capabilities of leading US AI systems like Claude, GPT, Gemini, and Grok. The agencies said these firms likely operated with the Chinese government's awareness and used tactics such as mass fake-account API abuse and prompt injection to expose hidden reasoning processes.
arstechnica.com
· 2026-09-09
The NSA, CISA, and FBI issued a joint advisory alleging that Chinese AI companies, including DeepSeek and Moonshot AI, have run large-scale campaigns since 2024 to extract capabilities from leading US models like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Grok. The agencies say these firms used millions of queries routed through multiple accounts, APIs, proxies, and cloud providers to generate synthetic training data and build competing models such as DeepSeek's R1/R3 and Moonshot's Kimi-K2/K3.
slashdot.org
· 2026-09-08
Router manufacturers and security experts note that routers, as small computers, accumulate memory buildup and temporary files that degrade performance over time. Restarting a router clears this cache, refreshes connections with your modem and internet provider, forces a rescan of less congested Wi-Fi channels, and disrupts malware or lingering connections attackers could exploit. This differs from a factory reset, which erases all saved settings including network name and password.
engadget.com
· 2026-09-05
Senator Ron Wyden sent a letter to NSA Director General Joshua M. Rudd asking the agency to update its public guidance on VPN configurations. He argued that current recommendations don't help Americans facing foreign surveillance—including government staff, contractors, journalists and human rights defenders—choose which VPNs actually protect their communications.
arstechnica.com
· 2026-09-03
Special Master Jose Linares has denied the Justice Department's motion to reconsider his earlier ruling allowing Apple to obtain documents from 14 federal agencies, including the CIA, FBI, NSA and Department of Defense. The DOJ had argued Linares used the wrong legal standard and that Apple's requests were overly burdensome and only marginally relevant, but Apple countered that these objections failed on every point, and Linares agreed.
9to5mac.com
· 2026-08-27
IBM built a top-secret cryptographic computer called Harvest for the National Security Agency, which operated from the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 until the mid-1970s. The machine processed data up to 200 times faster than other computers of its era and included the first automated tape library, robotically retrieving magnetic tape cassettes on demand. IBM also created a custom programming language, Alpha, so analysts could describe cryptographic problems the way Fortran was used for scientific computation.
spectrum.ieee.org
· 2026-08-25
GoKawiil