172301201
submission
SonicSpike writes:
A WIRED analysis of leaked police documents verifies that a secretive government program is allowing federal, state, and local law enforcement to access phone records of Americans who are not suspected of a crime.
A little-known surveillance program tracks more than a trillion domestic phone records within the United States each year, according to a letter WIRED obtained that was sent by US senator Ron Wyden to the Department of Justice (DOJ) on Sunday, challenging the program’s legality.
According to the letter, a surveillance program now known as Data Analytical Services (DAS) has for more than a decade allowed federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies to mine the details of Americans’ calls, analyzing the phone records of countless people who are not suspected of any crime, including victims. Using a technique known as chain analysis, the program targets not only those in direct phone contact with a criminal suspect but anyone with whom those individuals have been in contact as well.
The DAS program, formerly known as Hemisphere, is run in coordination with the telecom giant AT&T, which captures and conducts analysis of US call records for law enforcement agencies, from local police and sheriffs’ departments to US customs offices and postal inspectors across the country, according to a White House memo reviewed by WIRED. Records show that the White House has provided more than $6 million to the program, which allows the targeting of the records of any calls that use AT&T’s infrastructure—a maze of routers and switches that crisscross the United States.
172246173
submission
SonicSpike writes:
MIT alum and engineer Rep. Thomas Massie’s (R-KY) effort to defund a federal “kill-switch” mandate failed last week by a vote of 229 to 201.
But the Kentucky Republican’s push to kill the controversial provision, part of President Joe Biden ’s $1 trillion 2021 infrastructure law, gained an unlikely ally: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY).
Ocasio-Cortez was, originally, one of a few Democrats who joined Massie in opposing the mandate, which requires all motor vehicles manufactured after 2026 to include technology that can immediately turn off vehicles “if impairment is detected.” Ocasio-Cortez subsequently stated that her vote was a mistake and that she did not in fact support the amendment.
Massie said he spoke to the fiery New York congresswoman who said she had “genuine civil liberty concerns.”
“It almost sounds like the domain of science fiction,” Massie said. “That the federal government would put a kill switch in vehicles that would be the judge, the jury, and the executioner on such a fundamental right, as the right to travel freely.”
The text of the legislation, which supporters argue could reduce drunk driving, explicitly defines the technology as a system that can “monitor the performance of a driver of a motor vehicle” and “prevent or limit motor vehicle operation.”
172219489
submission
SonicSpike writes:
House Republicans and a few Democrats came close to blocking federal funding for a mandate that will soon require new car technology to measure driver behavior and shut down vehicles if drunken driving or other impairment is detected.
The measure failed in a late-night vote on Tuesday, but 199 Republicans and two Democrats voted for it, indicating a growing concern in Congress about the new mandate, which was included with little notice in a massive bipartisan infrastructure funding bill that President Biden signed into law in 2021.
The provision, now law, requires car manufacturers by 2026 to equip new vehicles with cameras and sensors aimed at detecting intoxication and eventually other dangerous driving behaviors. The new technology must be designed to prevent cars from operating if the sensors determine the driver is impaired, under the mandate.
The mandate and developing technology has stirred criticism and concern on Capitol Hill and beyond by those who warn that in-car monitoring will be intrusive and imperfect, and could leave motorists stranded.
“I think it’s going to be a train wreck,” Rep. Thomas Massie, Kentucky Republican, told The Washington Times on Tuesday.
172218453
submission
SonicSpike writes:
The evolving use of artificial intelligence technology, which gives machines the ability to mimic human input, has been put to uses that are creative, controversial and can be — consumer experts warn — crooked.
Known as AI for short, the technology has been used by students to get out of writing papers, by chess players to practice against an untiring opponent and by retailers to analyze customer preferences and provide “personal” shopping recommendations. Most recently, the use of AI by movie and television producers to replace human talent spurred Hollywood writers to go on strike and make headlines.
Getting too little attention, Florida’s consumer watchdog agency says, is the use of the technology to put images and information pulled from social media and other online sources to create convincing and personalized scam calls, texts and emails.
One example highlighted by the state Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services in a recent bulletin is a “grandparent” scam enhanced by technology.
In an older version of the scam, a caller would greet “Grandma” or “Grandpa” before saying, “It’s me — I know I sound funny because I have a cold,” and then make an urgent plea for money to get out of a scrape — such as bail or money to pay fines or car repairs after an accident. The plea comes with one more little request — not to tell anyone else about the mishap.
Now, using audio and video clips found online, the con artist can clone the voice of a family member to make the call more compelling.
172175694
submission
SonicSpike writes:
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk announced Thursday that the companyâ(TM)s Starlink satellite internet business âoeachieved breakeven cash flow.â
âoeExcellent work by a great team,â Musk said in a post on his social media platform, X, formerly known as Twitter.
Musk did not specify whether that milestone was hit on an operating basis or for a specified time period.
Earlier this year, SpaceX President and Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell said Starlink âoehad a cash flow positive quarterâ in 2022, and the overall SpaceX company reportedly turned a profit in the first quarter of 2023.
SpaceXâ(TM)s valuation has soared to about $150 billion, with Starlink seen as a key economic driver of the companyâ(TM)s goals. Two years ago, Musk emphasized that making Starlink âoefinancially viableâ required crossing âoethrough a deep chasm of negative cash flow.â
Musk has discussed spinning off Starlink to take it public through an initial public offering once the business was âoein a smooth sailing situation.â But timing of a Starlink IPO remains uncertain. Last year, Musk told employees that taking the business public wasnâ(TM)t likely until 2025 or later.
172101451
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SonicSpike writes:
An agency set up under Donald Trump to protect elections and key U.S. infrastructure from foreign hackers is now fighting off increasingly intense threats from hard-right Republicans who argue it’s gone too far and are looking for ways to rein it in.
These lawmakers insist work by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to combat online disinformation during elections singles out conservative voices and infringes upon free speech rights — an allegation the agency vehemently denies and the Biden administration is contesting in court. The accusations started in the wake of the 2020 election and are ramping up ahead of 2024, with lawmakers now calling for crippling cuts at the agency.
“CISA has blatantly violated the First Amendment and colluded with Big Tech to censor the speech of ordinary Americans,” Rand Paul (R-Ky.), the ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, which oversees CISA, said in a statement to POLITICO.
The fight over CISA underscores yet another way Trump’s election fraud claims are reverberating into 2024. And though the hard right doesn’t have enough votes to defund CISA today, the growing backlash against it has supporters worried that a hard-right faction could hobble the agency in the years ahead — undermining its efforts not just to secure future elections, but also protect key U.S. and federal networks from major hacks.
CISA had broad bipartisan support in Congress when lawmakers passed legislation creating the agency in 2018. At the ceremony where Trump signed it into law, he called it “very, very important legislation” to protect the U.S. against both nation-state hackers and cybercriminals.
172040681
submission
SonicSpike writes:
The Federal Aviation Administration has sounded the alarm on the danger of falling Starlink satellites, and SpaceX is not happy.
SpaceX's satellites, which are stationed in low-Earth orbit, are intended to only last five years before de-orbiting. Their expendable nature has an upside, though: they're also designed to be "demisable," or to burn up completely in the atmosphere during re-entry, posing little if any risk to those of us on the ground.
But the FAA begs to differ. In a report to Congress made public last week, the agency claims that by 2035, some 28,000 fragments from Starlink satellites falling back to Earth could survive re-entry each year.
That has unsettling implications. With so much debris, the report concludes, the chance of a stray satellite fragment hitting and killing someone on the ground will rise to 61 percent each year.
Just as terrifying is the risk that poses to aircraft, with the report concluding that there would be a 0.07 percent chance of a stray satellite fragment downing one each year — a significantly lower percentage, to be sure, but much too high for what would be an unprecedented aerial catastrophe.
SpaceX, which has so far launched 5,000 satellites and plans to launch thousands more, has fired back at the FAA's claims, calling the agency's analysis "nothing more than the culmination of several egregious errors, omissions, and incorrect assumptions," as quoted by Ars Technica.
It notes that the FAA's "deeply flawed" analysis, which was commissioned from the nonprofit Aerospace Corporation, is based on a 23-year-old study conducted by NASA. Other than being old, it argues, the problem is that study focused on satellites that not only were made of different materials than SpaceX's, but weren't even designed to be demisable. An unfair comparison, in other words.
Furthermore, Aerospace "did not even seek to review the Starlink demisability analysis, which should have been a fundamental part of its analysis," SpaceX said.
The near-flawless performance of its satellites is difficult to overlook, too. SpaceX claims it has already deorbited 325 of its satellites since 2020 with no debris being found, which would seemingly contradict the FAA's estimate that there would eventually be thousands of these fragments bombarding the Earth's surface every year.
"The fact that FAA simply accepted the Aerospace report without question or scrutiny raises concerns regarding FAA's technical competence to responsibly assess and regulate in this area," SpaceX said, per Ars.
Though SpaceX may have one government agency breathing down its neck, it does have another squarely in its corner: the Federal Communications Commission, which accepted SpaceX's position that its satellites are fully demisable.
172037723
submission
SonicSpike writes:
SpaceX has launched a new website dedicated to promoting its upcoming Starlink service for mobile phones.
On Tuesday night, the company debuted the “Starlink Direct to Cell” page with the tagline: “Seamless access to text, voice, and data for LTE phones across the globe.”
The system will tap the growing Starlink satellite network in Earth’s orbit to beam cellular connectivity to unmodified smartphones. A year ago, SpaceX originally said it was hoping to launch the service later this year with partner T-Mobile. But since then, the company has been mum on the progress.
The new site reveals SpaceX is now targeting next year to launch the service to power satellite-based text messaging. The company then plans on powering voice and text in 2025. The same system will also support cellular connectivity to IoT devices in 2025.
172002015
submission
SonicSpike writes:
The odds are low that in any given year a storm big enough to cause effects this widespread will happen. And the severity of those impacts will depend on many factors, including the state of our planet’s magnetic field on that day. But it’s a near certainty that some form of this catastrophe will happen someday, says Ian Cohen, a chief scientist who studies heliophysics at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.
To get ahead of this threat, a loose federation of U.S. and international government agencies, and hundreds of scientists affiliated with those bodies, have begun working on how to make predictions about what our Sun might do. And a small but growing cadre of scientists argue that artificial intelligence will be an essential component of efforts to give us advance notice of such a storm.
The most dangerous of these solar storms is known as a coronal mass ejection, when a gargantuan blob of charged particles is catapulted from the Sun’s atmosphere by rapidly shifting magnetic fields, at speeds in excess of 8,000 times that of sound. These happen often, but we’re rarely aware of them because they only affect us when they happen to strike earth.
What makes these huge blasts of particles so dangerous to our power grid and electronics is that, when they collide with Earth, the interaction of the sun’s magnetic field with our own can induce large currents in power lines on Earth. If you’ve ever moved a magnet back and forth across a copper wire to illuminate a lightbulb in science class, this is the same effect–but on a global scale. A solar storm can induce currents in power lines that are strong enough to trip safety mechanisms–or even seriously damage parts of our power-distribution infrastructure.
And while the undersea fiber-optic cables for internet data don’t carry electricity, they do have electrical signal-repeaters within them. These repeaters boost the optical signal as it travels the length of the cable. If they’re disabled, the cable ceases to function.
Solar storms can also pose a threat for satellites in higher orbits around earth–such as the ones that make up our GPS system–by bringing a spike in so-called killer electrons that can damage and, in extreme cases, disable the satellites. Closer to Earth, solar storms can heat the atmosphere, causing it to expand in a way that increases drag, which can cause some satellites in lower orbits to crash to the surface. This happened in February 2022, leading to the destruction of 40 Starlink satellites.
Solar storms have already struck again and again. In 1859, a now-legendary storm known as the Carrington Event hit, well before we built a civilization dependent on electronic devices that it could wreck. It caused auroras as far south as the Caribbean, made telegraph lines spark, caused fires at some telegraph stations, and shut down parts of the telegraphy network in the northern hemisphere.
171924923
submission
SonicSpike writes:
The United States has quietly acknowledged that Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard successfully put an imaging satellite into orbit this week in a launch that resembled others previously criticized by Washington as helping Tehran’s ballistic missile program.
The U.S. military has not responded to repeated requests for comment from The Associated Press since Iran announced the launch of the Noor-3 satellite on Wednesday, the latest successful launch by the Revolutionary Guard after Iran’s civilian space program faced a series of failed launches in recent years.
Early Friday, however, data published by the website space-track.org listed a launch Wednesday by Iran that put the Noor-3 satellite into orbit. Information for the website is supplied by the 18th Space Defense Squadron of the U.S. Space Force, the newest arm of the American military.
It put the satellite at over 450 kilometers (280 miles) above the Earth’s surface, which corresponds to Iranian state media reports regarding the launch. It also identified the rocket carrying the satellite as a Qased, a three-stage rocket fueled by both liquid and solid fuels first launched by the Guard in 2020 when it unveiled its up-to-then-secret space program.
171911285
submission
SonicSpike writes:
A U.S. security researcher is warning of a chilling effect after he was detained on arrival at a U.S. airport, his phone was searched, and was ordered to testify to a grand jury, only to have prosecutors reverse course and drop the investigation later.
On Wednesday, Sam Curry, a security engineer at blockchain technology company Yuga Labs, said in a series of posts on X, formerly Twitter, that he was taken into secondary inspection by U.S. federal agents on September 15 after returning from a trip to Japan. Curry said agents with the Internal Revenue Service’s Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI) unit and the Department of Homeland Security questioned him at Dulles International Airport in Washington DC about a “high profile phishing campaign,” searched his unlocked phone, and served him with a grand jury subpoena to testify in New York the week after.
According to a photo of the subpoena that Curry posted, the grand jury was investigating wire fraud and money laundering.
But Curry said he later received confirmation that the copy of his device data was deleted and the grand jury subpoena was canceled once prosecutors realized that Curry was investigating the theft of crypto, and not involved in it.
In a post, Curry said that in December 2022 he discovered that scammers had inadvertently exposed their Ethereum private key in the source code of a phishing website that had stolen millions of dollars worth of crypto. Curry said he imported the key to his own crypto wallet to see if there was anything left in the alleged scammers’ wallet, but that he found the key “five minutes too late and the stolen assets were gone.”
Curry said he was “on my home IP address and obviously not attempting to conceal my identity as I was simply investigating this.”
“We normally take this approach where it’s seeing if there’s anything we can do to help. And then if we can’t, obviously we can’t. It’s tricky, because there are so many of these phishing campaigns,” Curry told TechCrunch in a phone call.
171891137
submission
SonicSpike writes:
Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook said the use of artificial intelligence in the economy presents many unanswered questions for policymakers though there is some evidence that it could improve labor productivity.
“The impact of AI on the economy and monetary policy will depend on whether AI is just another app or something more profound,” Cook said in remarks prepared for delivery at the National Bureau of Economic Research’s conference on artificial intelligence in Toronto Friday. “Empirical evidence is still patchy, but there is work showing that generative AI improves productivity in a variety of settings.”
171793182
submission
SonicSpike writes:
In a new report, the federal department charged with analyzing how efficiently US taxpayer dollars are spent, the Government Accountability Office, says NASA lacks transparency on the true costs of its Space Launch System rocket program.
Published on Thursday, the new report examines the billions of dollars spent by NASA on the development of the massive rocket, which made a successful debut launch in late 2022 with the Artemis I mission. Surprisingly, as part of the reporting process, NASA officials admitted the rocket was too expensive to support its lunar exploration efforts as part of the Artemis program.
"Senior NASA officials told GAO that at current cost levels, the SLS program is unaffordable," the new report states.
171782352
submission
SonicSpike writes:
The federal government is reportedly funneling $22 million into developing ready-to-wear clothing that can record audio, video, and geolocation data through something its calling The Smart Electrically Powered and Networked Textile Systems program, or SMART ePANTS, for short, according to The Intercept. Garments slated for the production include shirts, pants, socks, and underwear, all of which are intended to be washable, The Intercept reported.
The program "represents the largest single investment to develop Active Smart Textiles (AST) that feel, move, and function like any garment," according to an August 22 press release from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
SMART ePANTS is being developed under the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, an agency that describes itself on its website as investing in "high-risk, high-payoff research programs to tackle some of the most difficult challenges of the agencies and disciplines in the Intelligence Community (IC)." In other words, funding moonshots like underwear that's as stretchable and washable as normal underwear, but can also record your every move.
If successful, though, the garments could significantly improve the capabilities of those working government agencies like the Department of Defense, first responders at the Department of Homeland Security, those in the Intelligence Community, or others working in high-stress environments like crime scenes and arms control, Dr. Dawson Cagle, the program manager for SMART ePANTS, explained in a press release from the IARPA.
171778248
submission
SonicSpike writes:
After complying with an FBI warrant and providing access to a safe, popular gun safe manufacturer Liberty Safe faced backlash from conservatives.
In a statement on Wednesday, Liberty Safe said it was asked by the FBI on August 30 for the access code to a safe, supplying it to the bureau after receiving proof of a warrant.
"Our company's protocol is to provide access codes to law enforcement if a warrant grants them access to a property," the company said. "After receiving the request, we received proof of the valid warrant, and only then did we provide them with an access code."
The safe belongs to Nathan Hughes, 34, of Arkansas, who has been charged with felony civil disorder and several misdemeanors in the January 6 siege on the U.S. Capitol.
The company added that it was unaware of any details surrounding the case and that it has repeatedly denied requests for access codes when a warrant wasn't present.
