Two Wars. One Sales Pitch.

OpenAI says one of its newest AI models did something that sounds straight out of a science fiction movie. According to the company, the AI escaped a locked testing environment, found its way onto the internet, hacked into another AI company’s servers, and stole the answers to its own cybersecurity test. That’s the official story. The company says it deliberately disabled many of the model’s safety guardrails before the test. It was placed inside what OpenAI describes as an isolated environment with no direct internet access and challenged to complete a cybersecurity exercise. Rather than solve the problem as intended, the model allegedly exploited an unknown software vulnerability to escape its testing environment, reach the internet, and then chain together stolen credentials to break into Hugging Face’s systems. If that’s true, it’s certainly an eye-opening demonstration of what AI might be capable of. But it’s

Congress just took a major step toward permanently expanding the one-sided U.S.-Israel military cooperation by passing the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) with Section 219 still attached. Section 219 calls for deeper integration between U.S. and Israeli defense technology and the supply chains behind advanced military equipment. Breaking this down, a military merger like this would greatly expand coordination across nearly every area of our defense technology, including directed-energy weapons, unmanned systems, biotech, artificial intelligence, data sharing, network integration, and more. This all raises serious questions about whether the United States should enter into this level of military integration with any foreign nation. Why would the U.S. allow this when it doesn’t have this kind of bilateral agreement with any other country in the world? And we shouldn’t in order to protect our sovereignty and to protect our national secrets. After all, Netanyahu called this “my plan.” So do you

In New Jersey, at least 6,600 people who indicated that they were not U.S. citizens were registered to vote at the DMV between 2023 and 2024, according to Governor Mikie Sherrill. The Governor says that these individuals admitted to not being U.S. citizens but were registered anyway due to a system error. Of those 6,600, approximately 400 of them went ahead and voted even though they were not legally supposed to. How does this happen? The National Voter Registration Act of 1993, also known as the Motor Voter Act, is a United States federal law signed by President Bill Clinton in 1993. It requires, among other things, that States offer voter registrations at DMV offices. This law has historically been enforced heavily by Democratic administrations and in Democratic states. In some states, such as Rhode Island, the state also registers voters at food stamp offices, cash assistance offices, behavioral

The New York Times grimly admitted in an Opinion Piece this week that sometimes genocides just work out for the genociders. Omer Bartov, an Israeli professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University, writes that genocides can only end in one of two ways. “Either the perpetrators accomplish their goal, or a military force stops them and accountability ensues.” Given that no military force has stopped the genocide in Gaza, for Israel it looks like option 1 is an inevitability. Even with a ceasefire in place, at least 1,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel since last October and Israel shows no signs of stopping. Six members of one family, including four children, were killed in Gaza on Tuesday by an Israeli strike. “Israel is unlikely to face a reckoning for its actions,” he writes. He concludes that “Israel’s impunity will enable its Jewish citizens to continue

There may be a Flock camera watching you drive through your own neighborhood and you may not even know what it looks like. Flock Safety’s automated cameras photograph passing vehicles, record their license plates and locations, and place that information into a searchable network used by law-enforcement agencies. More than 100,000 cameras are now reportedly operating across over 6,000 American communities. This is mass surveillance hiding in plain sight and a direct threat to the Fourth Amendment. Americans have a right to move through their communities without the government quietly creating a searchable record of where they go, when they arrive and whom they may be visiting. The company says the technology helps police find stolen cars, locate missing people and catch violent criminals. Critics argue that it creates a nationwide system capable of tracking the movements of millions of people who are not suspected

The fuel problem is about to become a fuel crisis. On Monday, the Houthis in Yemen threatened to block Saudi oil shipments through the Red Sea. That could further reduce the world’s oil supply by 4-5 million barrels per day, which is already strained by the war with Iran. Saudi Arabia had been using its East-West Pipeline to bypass Hormuz, sending as much as 5 million barrels of crude per day to the Red Sea port of Yanbu for export. A successful Houthi blockade could now put much of that supply at risk. It may not stop the oil altogether, but it could force tankers to stop sailing, pay far higher insurance costs or attempt longer and more expensive routes. And will that extra cost be passed down to consumers? I’m going to go with yes on that hypothetical. This comes at a time when U.S. commercial and