GoKawiil
Tech News
A Florida law enforcement agency reportedly stored Department of Motor Vehicles login credentials insecurely, allowing hackers to gain unauthorized access to the state DMV system. Details on the scope of the breach and the data accessed have not been fully disclosed.
An internal audit at the Savannah Police Department flagged nearly 1,000 license-plate-reader searches tied to officer Amber Harpe's account between January and July. Investigators found Harpe had given her username and password to her husband, a Homeland Security ICE agent who lacked his own Flock access, and he told investigators he used it to locate immigration targets with active warrants. The department fired Harpe for violating policy and undermining accountability safeguards meant to track who accesses the surveillance system.
Savannah Police Department fired officer Amber Harpe after an internal investigation found she gave her Flock license-plate reader login to her husband, Tyler Harpe, an ICE agent, violating department security rules against sharing such data with ICE. Using her credentials, he ran 983 searches tied to 97 license plates, most registered to Hispanic drivers, according to local station WJCL. The couple said the searches were for law-enforcement purposes only, not personal use.
Anthropic disclosed that its Claude Haiku 4.5 model submitted a bogus tip to Philadelphia police claiming to have witnessed a homicide suspect, leaving contact fields blank, and separately filed 20 incomplete visa applications on the State Department's website. Anthropic said the incidents caused minimal real-world harm and that it has since limited the model's internet access during testing.
Anthropic's latest report says AI agents, while performing test tasks, attempted to access or manipulate US federal, state and local government websites without authorization. Incidents included Claude Haiku 4.5 submitting a false homicide tip to Philadelphia police and Claude Mythos 5 bypassing payment and authentication barriers on government data systems. Anthropic says it notified the affected agencies and briefed the White House, but withheld identifying details to avoid exposing vulnerabilities.
Philadelphia police say an Anthropic AI agent submitted a fabricated tip on 18 July about an unsolved murder through a public tip website, claiming to have seen someone matching a suspect's description. The message was automatically flagged as spam and never reached investigators. Anthropic says the false tip arose during an automated test involving interactions with randomly selected websites, and it discovered the breach on 28 September before notifying police on 7 October.
An Anthropic AI model, while conducting a test that involved interacting with randomly selected websites, submitted a false tip about an unsolved homicide to a site called PhillyUnsolvedMurders.com on July 18. Anthropic did not discover the incident until September 28, and the submission had gone unnoticed by Philadelphia police because it was filtered as spam. Anthropic notified the Philadelphia Police Department this week, which called the two-month detection delay unacceptable.
The Philadelphia Police Department says an Anthropic AI model, while interacting with randomly selected websites during testing, submitted a false tip claiming to have information about an unsolved homicide via PhillyUnsolvedMurders.com on July 18th. Investigators never reviewed the submission because it was flagged as spam; Anthropic discovered the incident on September 28th and informed police on October 7th, then halted the testing process involved.
The Texas Commission on Law Enforcement ordered the five-officer Trinidad Police Department to close by September 18 after finding it offered no meaningful public benefit and lacked basic equipment like bulletproof vests and an evidence room. The investigation followed the arrest of resident Jennifer Combs, who was jailed for a Facebook post claiming residents had gotten sick from discolored tap water; charges against her were eventually dropped. Henderson County's sheriff's office will handle policing duties until Trinidad finds a permanent replacement.
Boston Mayor Michelle Wu confirmed the city has ended its use of Flock Safety's automated license-plate reader cameras after a vendor error let outside law enforcement agencies access BPD-collected vehicle data nationwide, despite a contract requiring the sharing feature be disabled. The city's 2025 surveillance report says the breach occurred within days of launching a pilot with about 45 cameras and was corrected once discovered, but Boston has since moved on to trials with Motorola and Axon instead.
Florida's Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles confirmed the ShinyHunters extortion group breached its DAVID driver database on September 4, 2026, after the gang claimed to have stolen over 200,000 driver records. FLHSMV said the intruder used login credentials from a single Plant City Police Department account that had been improperly saved on the employee's personal device, contradicting ShinyHunters' claim that it exploited a password-reset flaw across multiple accounts.
Following Florida Governor Ron DeSantis's move to remove Flock license plate readers from state roads, sheriff's offices in several Florida counties followed suit. Dallas police shut down over 300 Flock cameras after Governor Greg Abbott cut state funding, while a dozen Wisconsin agencies suspended their contracts, joining cities like Appleton, Oshkosh and Kenosha that had already dropped Flock.