On TikTok, Chinese manufacturers are advertising signal-blocking weapons with the breezy cadence of consumer lifestyle advertising. "Pew, pew, pew!" a woman wearing sneakers and high-waisted pink trousers says cheerfully in a video uploaded to TikTok. She is standing on what appears to be an industrial rooftop while demonstrating how to use a black device resembling an oversized laser tag gun. "Jamming gun, good," she adds, flashing a thumbs up. These days, nearly any product imaginable is available for purchase on TikTok straight from Chinese factories, ranging from industrial chemicals to mystical crystals and custom pilates reformers.

From threat modeling to encrypted collaboration apps, we've collected experts' tips and tools for safely and effectively building a group--even while being targeted and tracked by the powerful. Rarely in modern US history have so many Americans opposed the actions of the federal government with so little hope for a top-down political solution. That's left millions of people seeking a bottom-up approach to resistance: grassroots organizing. Yet as Americans assemble their own movements to protect and support immigrants, push back against the Department of Homeland Security's dangerous incursions into cities, and protest for civil rights and policy changes, they face a federal government that possesses vast surveillance powers and sweeping cooperation from the Silicon Valley companies that hold Americans' data. That means political, social, and economic organizing presents a risky dilemma. How do you bring people of all ages, backgrounds, and technical abilities into a mass movement without exposing them to monitoring and targeting by a government--and in particular Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection, agencies with paramilitary ambitions, a tendency to break the law, and more funding than some countries' militaries. Organizing safely in an age of surveillance increasingly requires not only technical security know-how, but also a tricky balance between secrecy and openness, says Eva Galperin, the director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit focused on digital civil liberties.

Fears over a drug cartel drone over Texas sparked a recent airspace shutdown in El Paso and New Mexico, highlighting just how tricky it can be to deploy anti-drone weapons near cities. A shocking but ultimately brief airspace closure over El Paso, Texas, and parts of New Mexico last week is stoking unease among pilots and the broader public about the status of United States anti-drone defenses. As low-cost UAV equipment proliferates around the world, analysts have repeatedly warned that destructive attacks perpetrated using drones are inevitable . It is challenging to develop nimble and safe countermeasures, though, given that things like jamming or attempting to shoot down a drone are difficult--or even impossible--to carry out safely in populated areas, much less densely populated cities. In the case of the El Paso incident, the Federal Aviation Administration originally set the airspace closure to last 10 days, but ultimately lifted it after eight hours.

Plus: Meta plans to add face recognition to its smart glasses, Jared Kushner named as part of whistleblower's mysterious national security complaint, and more. The widespread protests in Iran have exposed both Tehran's brutal tactics in the streets, where state authorities have killed thousands of demonstrators since early January, and extreme measures to block access to the global internet. As it has done repeatedly in the past, the Iranian regime cut off the country's residents from the global internet during the latest anti-government uprising. But it also shut down access to the country's intranet, known as the National Information Network, which new research found is becoming a mechanism of constant and pervasive surveillance that may ultimately be the only way Iranians can get online. The last remaining major nuclear weapons treaty between the United States and Russia just expired.

A new EPIC report says data brokers, ad-tech surveillance, and ICE enforcement are among the factors leading to a "health privacy crisis" that is eroding trust and deterring people from seeking care. When immigration agents enter hospitals and private companies are allowed to buy and sell data that reveals who seeks medical care, patients retreat, treatment is delayed, and health outcomes worsen, according to a new report that describes a growing "health privacy crisis" in the United States driven by surveillance and weak law enforcement limits. The report, published by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), attributes the problem to outdated privacy laws and rapidly expanding digital systems that allow health-related information to be tracked, analyzed, breached, and accessed by both private companies and government agencies. EPIC, a Washington-based nonprofit focused on privacy and civil liberties, based its findings on a review of federal and state laws, court rulings, agency policies, technical research, and documented case studies examining how health data is collected, shared, and used across government and commercial systems. "Unregulated digital technologies, mass surveillance, and weak privacy laws have created a health privacy crisis," the report says.

'In the Gaza Strip, we know that this massive trove of intercepted phone calls was used in airstrikes that killed civilians.' 'Data is control': what we learned from a year investigating the Israeli military's ties to big tech'In the Gaza Strip, we know that this massive trove of intercepted phone calls was used in airstrikes that killed civilians.' I n January this year, Harry Davies and Yuval Abraham first reported that Microsoft had deepened its ties to Israel alongside other major tech firms. Since then, the Guardian has published an award-winning series of investigations - in partnership with the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call - that has revealed a symbiotic relationship between Silicon Valley and the Israeli military. One investigation exposed an Israeli mass surveillance program scooping up virtually all Palestinian phone calls and storing them on Microsoft's cloud services - setting off an inquiry that ultimately prompted the company to cut off Israel's access to some of its technology.

Wastewater-based genomic surveillance has emerged as a powerful tool for population-level viral monitoring, offering comprehensive insights into circulating viral variants across entire communities. However, this approach faces significant computational challenges stemming from high sequencing noise, low viral coverage, fragmented reads, and the complete absence of labeled variant annotations. Traditional reference-based variant calling pipelines struggle with novel mutations and require extensive computational resources. We present a comprehensive framework for unsupervised viral variant detection using Vector-Quantized Variational Autoencoders (VQ-VAE) that learns discrete codebooks of genomic patterns from k-mer tokenized sequences without requiring reference genomes or variant labels. Our approach extends the base VQ-VAE architecture with masked reconstruction pretraining for robustness to missing data and contrastive learning for highly discriminative embeddings. Evaluated on SARS-CoV-2 wastewater sequencing data comprising approximately 100,000 reads, our VQ-VAE achieves 99.52% mean token-level accuracy and 56.33% exact sequence match rate while maintaining 19.73% codebook utilization (101 of 512 codes active), demonstrating efficient discrete representation learning. Contrastive fine-tuning with different projection dimensions yields substantial clustering improvements: 64-dimensional embeddings achieve +35% Silhouette score improvement (0.31 to 0.42), while 128-dimensional embeddings achieve +42% improvement (0.31 to 0.44), clearly demonstrating the impact of embedding dimensionality on variant discrimination capability. Our reference-free framework provides a scalable, interpretable approach to genomic surveillance with direct applications to public health monitoring.

The Age-Gated Internet Is Sweeping the US. Half of the country now requires age verification to watch porn or access "harmful" content. Digital rights advocates are pushing back against legislation they say will make the internet less safe. To prove you're an adult, you may have to upload your ID or submit to an age-verifying face scan. Members of Congress considered 19 online safety bills Tuesday that may soon have a major impact on the future of the internet as age-verification laws have spread to half of the US and around the world .

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Early detection of disease outbreaks is crucial to ensure timely intervention by the health authorities. Due to the challenges associated with traditional indicator-based surveillance, monitoring informal sources such as online media has become increasingly popular. However, owing to the number of online articles getting published everyday, manual screening of the articles is impractical. To address this, we propose Health Sentinel. It is a multi-stage information extraction pipeline that uses a combination of ML and non-ML methods to extract events-structured information concerning disease outbreaks or other unusual health events-from online articles. The extracted events are made available to the Media Scanning and Verification Cell (MSVC) at the National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), Delhi for analysis, interpretation and further dissemination to local agencies for timely intervention. From April 2022 till date, Health Sentinel has processed over 300 million news articles and identified over 95,000 unique health events across India of which over 3,500 events were shortlisted by the public health experts at NCDC as potential outbreaks.