Three military veterans once involved in the U.S. drone program have thrown their support behind a Yemeni man's legal fight to obtain details about why his family members were killed in a 2012 strike. The former soldiers' unusual decision to publicly endorse the lawsuit against President Obama and other U.S. officials adds another twist to Faisal bin Ali Jaber's four-year quest for accountability in the deaths of his brother-in-law and nephew, who he believes needlessly fell victim to one of the most lethal covert programs in U.S. history. The former enlisted service members told the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in a recent filing that they believe the 2012 drone strike serves as a case study of how mistakes frequently occur in the nation's targeted-killing program, where life-or-death decisions are based upon top-secret evidence. The veterans say they "witnessed a secret, global system without regard for borders, conducting widespread surveillance with the ability to conduct deadly targeted killing operations." Though the veterans did not disclose any personal knowledge of the strike that is alleged to have killed Jaber's relatives, they claim the military frequently labels the deaths of unknown victims as "enemy kills."

A 53-year-old man died Wednesday after his Tesla Model S crashed into a tree and burst into flames on a highway about 25 miles south of Amsterdam. Technical personnel from the company joined Dutch investigators at the scene "to establish the facts of the incident," including to confirm whether the car's Autopilot feature was engaged at the time. A Tesla spokesperson reportedly said: "We are undertaking a full investigation and will share our findings as soon as possible." While there has been no other official public statement from the company so far, Dana Hull, a reporter for Bloomberg, said on her Twitter page that Tesla confirmed the car's self-driving feature "was not engaged at any time." Updated from @TeslaMotors: "Thus far, we can confirm from the car's logs that Autopilot was not engaged at any time" https://t.co/RKEX3zkEB1 The cause of the accident in the Netherlands is still not known.

For some of the drunk drivers, speeders and red-light runners of Orange County, the most powerful person to know wasn't a judge, a prosecutor or a defense attorney. It was a low-level paper pusher who rarely saw the inside of a courtroom, authorities say. In 2010, word began spreading quietly through the seamier corners of the O.C's vibrant car enthusiast scene that there was someone working inside the county courts who, for a price, could make a criminal charge or ticket disappear. Over the five years or so that followed, Juan Lopez Jr. forged electronic records to close out more than 1,000 cases in ways that were favorable to the accused, according to a federal indictment unsealed Wednesday. Lopez, prosecutors allege, took advantage of his unchecked access to the court computer system to fabricate electronic trails of justice that was never delivered.

Darktrace, the U.K. cybersecurity startup whose backers include Autonomy founder Mike Lynch's Invoke Capital, has closed 65 million in fresh funding. The new round was led by global investment firm KKR, with participation from existing investor Summit Partners and new investors TenEleven Ventures and SoftBank. I understand the new investment gives the 2013-founded company a valuation of more than 400 million, while in a call Lynch told me the new backing was a typical growth round and will be used for further international expansion and for R&D. In particular, he said Darktrace is developing technology to help companies respond to not only human-written cyberattacks but also the pending threat of machine-learning-based attacks that, in classic sci-fi-comes-true-fashion, will increasingly see AI battling it out with AI on behalf of the good and bad folks, respectively. But let's step back and take a look at what Darktrace offers today.

If Japan, home to the world's largest public debt, wanted to save a bundle, it would close the Bank of Japan. Auctioning off its giant neo-baroque headquarter buildings around the nation and pink-slipping roughly 4,900 full-time employees would cheer Moody's and Standard & Poor's and plug holes in the national balance sheet. That's not going to happen, of course. But imagine if the BOJ had closed shop 17 years ago, right after it first cut interest rates to zero, and turned its function over to a computer program. Would the artificial-intelligence version of the BOJ be any closer to 2 percent inflation than the well-compensated humans occupying its buildings?

Editor's Note: Last month, Dark Reading editors named Deep Instinct the most innovative startup in its first annual Best of Black Hat Innovation Awards program at Black Hat 2016 in Las Vegas. As you reach for a water bottle, you don't pause to analyze its material, size or shape in order to determine whether it's a water bottle. Instead, you immediately reach for it, with complete confidence in its identification. If I show the same water bottle to any traditional computer vision module, it will easily recognize it. If I partially obstruct the image with my fingers, then traditional computer vision modules will have difficulty recognizing it.

In H. G. Wells's classic The War of the Worlds, the narrator pauses a moment to rue the fact that he didn't react sooner to the arrival of an "intelligence greater than man's"--in his case, Martians landing on earth. Comparing himself to a comfortable dodo in its nest, he imagined those ill-fated birds also dithering as hungry sailors invaded their island: "We will peck them to death tomorrow, my dear." As intelligent technologies take over more and more of the decision-making territory once occupied by humans, are you taking any action? Are you sufficiently aware of the signs that you should? To help you get the head start you may need, here are the signs that it's time to fly the nest.

Before Chris White could help disrupt Jihadi finance networks, crush weapons markets, and bust up sex-slave rings with search tools that mine the dark Web, he first had to figure out how to stop himself from plummeting through the open gun door of a banking Black Hawk helicopter. White was on his way to a forward operating base outside Kabul headquarters, as part of a secret intelligence cell to help confront the Taliban and al-Qaida, smash their encrypted online money stream, and win over the hearts and minds of the Afghanistan population. Slight and lanky and 28, White felt Dukakis-ridiculous in his unwieldy body armor and bulbous helmet with "Dr. White" scrawled in marker on duct tape across the front, and with the dust from liftoff, he was finding it hard to breathe. He was still struggling with the unfamiliar seat straps when the pilot hit the stick, sending White sliding toward the hot square of the door and the desert 200 feet below. Down there, Afghanistan was a messy, dangerous place for pretty much everybody. After nearly a decade of U.S.-led war, the American body count had hit 1,000, and civilian casualties were beyond calculation, as President Obama's 30,000-troop surge intensified the fighting that spring. Many feared the situation was only going from bad to worse. The U.S. was escalating drone strikes across the border in Pakistan. And U.S. command was under assault after Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the surge's architect, found himself without a job after he and his staff made disparaging remarks about the commander in chief in some music magazine. It is hard to imagine that only a few weeks earlier, White had been just another impossibly young-looking Harvard postdoc in flip-flops looking forward to a Cambridge summer. Helicopter gunships and war zones weren't on the radar; there were lattes in the square and rock climbing, and on the other side of campus, a prestigious fellowship in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, where he was working at the intersection of big data, statistics, and machine learning. He had earned academic pole position and had every expectation it would continue that way forever -- becoming a professor, building a lab, and sniping out white papers from a tenured ivory tower.

The car company announced last week that it would no longer use a vision system provided by MobileEye, an Israeli company that supplies technology to many automakers. This comes a few weeks after the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced that it was investigating a fatal accident that occurred while one of Tesla's cars was operating in Autopilot mode, a system designed to enable automated driving under a driver's supervision. It is unclear why Tesla is dropping MobileEye, but one reason may be the emergence of newer approaches to automated driving. MobileEye provides what amounts to an advanced image-recognition system, capable of identifying road signs or obstacles, such as other cars or pedestrians, on the road ahead. The company has said that it uses deep learning, a popular machine-learning technique based on training a many-layered network of simulated neurons to recognize input using a large number of training examples.

This article was originally published by the World Economic Forum. The doomsday scenarios spun around this theme are so outlandish--like The Matrix, in which human-created artificial intelligence plugs humans into a simulated reality to harvest energy from their bodies--it's difficult to visualize them as serious threats. Meanwhile, artificially intelligent systems continue to develop apace. Self-driving cars are beginning to share our roads; pocket-sized devices respond to our queries and manage our schedules in real-time; algorithms beat us at Go; robots become better at getting up when they fall over. It's obvious how developing these technologies will benefit humanity. But, then, don't all the dystopian sci-fi stories start out this way?