The Department of Homeland Security collected data on Chicago residents accused of gang ties to test if police files could feed an FBI watchlist. Months passed before anyone noticed it wasn't deleted. On November 21, 2023, field intelligence officers within the Department of Homeland Security quietly deleted a trove of Chicago Police Department records. It was not a routine purge. WIRED has made this article free for all to read because it is primarily based on reporting from Freedom of Information Act requests. Please consider subscribing to support our journalism.

A video has surfaced of a senior official at Israel's cyber intelligence agency, Unit 8200, talking last year about the use of machine learning "magic powder" to help identify Hamas targets in Gaza. The footage raises questions about the accuracy of a recent statement about use of artificial intelligence (AI) by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), which said it "does not use an artificial intelligence system that identifies terrorist operatives or tries to predict whether a person is a terrorist". However, in the video, the head of data science and AI at Unit 8200 – named only as "Colonel Yoav" – said he would reveal an "example of one of the tools we use" before describing how the intelligence division used machine learning techniques in Israel's May 2021 offensive in Gaza for "finding new terrorists". "Let's say we have some terrorists that form a group and we know only some of them," he said. "By practising our data science magic powder we are able to find the rest of them."

The Israeli military's bombing campaign in Gaza used a previously undisclosed AI-powered database that at one stage identified 37,000 potential targets based on their apparent links to Hamas, according to intelligence sources involved in the war. In addition to talking about their use of the AI system, called Lavender, the intelligence sources claim that Israeli military officials permitted large numbers of Palestinian civilians to be killed, particularly during the early weeks and months of the conflict. Their unusually candid testimony provides a rare glimpse into the first-hand experiences of Israeli intelligence officials who have been using machine-learning systems to help identify targets during the six-month war. Israel's use of powerful AI systems in its war on Hamas has entered uncharted territory for advanced warfare, raising a host of legal and moral questions, and transforming the relationship between military personnel and machines. "This is unparalleled, in my memory," said one intelligence officer who used Lavender, adding that they had more faith in a "statistical mechanism" than a grieving soldier.

Mr. Abu Toha is one of hundreds of Palestinians who have been picked out by a previously undisclosed Israeli facial recognition program that was started in Gaza late last year. The expansive and experimental effort is being used to conduct mass surveillance there, collecting and cataloging the faces of Palestinians without their knowledge or consent, according to Israeli intelligence officers, military officials and soldiers. The technology was initially used in Gaza to search for Israelis who were taken hostage by Hamas during the Oct. 7 cross-border raids, the intelligence officials said. After Israel embarked on a ground offensive in Gaza, it increasingly turned to the program to root out anyone with ties to Hamas or other militant groups. At times, the technology wrongly flagged civilians as wanted Hamas militants, one officer said.

The best weapons are secret weapons. Freed from the boundaries of observable reality, they can hold infinite power and thus provoke infinite fear -- or hope. In World War II, as reality turned against them, the Nazis kept telling Germans about the Wunderwaffe about to hit the front lines -- "miracle weapons" that would guarantee victory for the Reich. The Stealth Bomber's stealth was not just about being invisible to radar -- it was also about its capabilities being mysterious to the Soviets. And whatever the Russian "dome of light" weapon is and those Cuban "sonic attacks" are, they're all terrifying.

With years of cybersecurity experience under his belt, security expert Mike Beck investigated whether he could teach AI to think like a cybersecurity analyst--and helped to transform the fight for online security in the process. Few people know what it's like to battle cyberattacks in a high-stakes environment better than Mike Beck. Without his expertise, London's biggest event in 2012 could have gone dark. Beck, a cybersecurity expert with a background in UK intelligence, joined the UK's MI5 domestic security service shortly before the 2012 Summer Games opened. When the UK government learned of a serious threat to the electricity infrastructure supporting the Games, they looked to one of their newest hires.

In another big move aimed at its healthcare clients, Amazon Web Services revealed this week that its Textract machine learning technology – which can help healthcare organizations more easily extract data from scanned documents – is now HIPAA eligible, joining a half-dozen other cloud-based AI tools. WHY IT MATTERS It's important to note that HIPAA-eligible is not the same as HIPAA-compliant – it just means that the technology is able to be customized and put to use in ways that are. Organizations can't simply install Textract and expect to be compliant. That said, with proper configurations, the tool can be deployed at healthcare and life science organizations whose tasks that require HIPAA compliance, said Textract Product Lead Kriti Bharti in an Oct. 10 blog post. "Critical healthcare information often lies within documents such as medical records and forms. Healthcare and life science organizations need to access data that is locked inside those documents in order to fulfil medical claims, streamline administrative processes, and process electronic health records," said Bharti.

The US Justice Department indicted two companies based in China and Taiwan and three individuals saying they conspired to steal trade secrets from US semiconductor company Micron relating to its research and development of memory storage devices. The charges against Taiwan-based United Microelectronics Corp, China state-owned Fujian Jinhua Integrated Circuit, Co, Ltd, and three individuals mark the fourth case brought since September as part of a broader crackdown against alleged Chinese espionage on US companies. US Attorney-General Jeff Sessions told a news conference that Chinese espionage has been "increasing rapidly", adding "cheating must stop". He said the government is launching a new initiative to crack down on Chinese espionage trade cases. In addition to the criminal case, the Justice Department also filed a civil lawsuit seeking to prevent the two companies from exporting any products created using trade secrets.

U.S. Bank's Chief Analytics Officer Bill Hoffman thinks the term "artificial intelligence" is a bit of a misnomer – he prefers to think about AI as a customized experience. "The'A' in AI should be'augmented,' not artificial," he said in an interview last year with CMO Australia. "There's nothing artificial about building a high quality, personalized relationship with a customer." Hoffman's less artificial approach to AI is transforming how U.S. Bank interacts with its customers and builds quality relationships with people. Hoffman was instrumental in U.S. Bank's adoption of Einstein, an AI platform offered by Salesforce, late last year.

Twitter trolls run by the Kremlin's Internet Research Agency. Denial of service attacks and ransomware deployed across Ukraine. Spies hidden in the heart of Wall Street. And a century-old fabricated staple of anti-Semitic hate literature. At first glance these disparate phenomena might seem only vaguely connected. Sure, they can all be traced back to Russia. But is there any method to their badness? The definitive answer, according to Russia experts inside and outside the US government, is most certainly yes. In fact, they are part of an increasingly digital intelligence playbook known as "active measures," a wide-ranging set of techniques and strategies that Russian military and intelligence services deploy to influence the affairs of nations across the globe. As the investigation into Russia's influence on the 2016 election--and the Trump campaign's potential participation in that effort--has intensified this summer, the Putin regime's systematic effort to undermine and destabilize democracies has become the subject of urgent focus in the West. According to interviews with more than a dozen US and European intelligence officials and diplomats, Russian active measures represent perhaps the biggest challenge to the Western order since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The consensus: Vladimir Putin, playing a poor hand economically and demographically at home, is seeking to destabilize the multilateral institutions, partnerships, and Western democracies that have kept the peace during the past seven decades.