Appearing before Parliament, Meta, Google and X struggle to explain how fake political video circulated for so long A member of the UK Parliament's lower house who was the victim of a deepfake AI campaign this week had a rare chance to confront the Big Tech executives who helped spread it. Their answers disappointed.…
In December, the Trump administration signed an executive order that neutered states’ ability to regulate AI by ordering his administration to both sue and withhold funds from states that try to do so. This action pointedly supported industry lobbyists keen to avoid any constraints and consequences on their deployment of AI, while undermining the efforts of consumers, advocates, and industry associations concerned about AI’s harms who have spent years pushing for state regulation. Trump’s actions have clarified the ideological alignments around AI within America’s electoral factions. They set down lines on a new playing field for the midterm elections, prompting members of his party, the opposition, and all of us to consider where we stand in the debate over how and where to let AI transform our lives. In a May 2025 survey of likely voters nationwide, more than 70% favored state and federal regulators having a hand in AI policy. A December 2025 poll by Navigator Research found similar results, with a massive net +48% favorability for more AI regulation. Yet despite the overwhelming preference of both voters and his party’s elected leaders—Congress was essentially unanimous in defeating a previous state AI regulation moratorium—Trump has delivered on a key priority of the industry. The order explicitly challenges the will of voters across blue and red states, from California to South Dakota, scrambling political positions around the technology and setting up a new ideological battleground in the upcoming race for Congress. There are a number of ways that candidates and parties may try to capitalize on this emerging wedge issue before the midterms. In 2025, much of the popular debate around AI was cast in terms of humans versus machines. Advances in AI and the companies it is associated with, it is said, come at the expense of humans. A new model release with greater capabilities for writing, teaching, or coding means more people in those disciplines losing their jobs. This is a humanist debate. Making us talk to an AI customer-support agent is an affront to our dignity. Using AI to help generate media sacrifices authenticity. AI chatbots that persuade and manipulate assault our liberty. There is philosophical merit to these arguments, and yet they seem to have limited political salience. Populism versus institutionalism is a better way to frame this debate in the context of US politics. The MAGA movement is widely understood to be a realignment of American party politics to ally the Republican party with populism, and the Democratic party with defenders of traditional institutions of American government and their democratic norms. This frame is shattered by Trump’s AI order, which unabashedly serves economic elites at the expense of populist consumer protections. It is part of an ongoing courting process between MAGA and big tech, where the Trump political project sacrifices the interests of consumers and its populist credentials as it cozies up to tech moguls. We are starting to see populist resistance to this government/big tech alignment emerge on the local scale. People in Maryland, Arizona, North Carolina, Michigan and many other states are vigorously opposing AI datacenters in their communities, based on environmental and energy-affordability impacts. These centers of opposition are politically diverse; both progressives and Trump-supporting voters are turning out in force, influencing their local elected officials to resist datacenter development. This opposition to the physical infrastructure of corporate AI is so far staying local, but it may yet translate into a national and politically aligned movement that could divide the MAGA coalition. Any policy discussions about AI should include the individual harms associated with job loss, as employers seek to replace laborers with machines. It should also include the systemic economic risks associated with concentrated and supercharged AI investment, the democratic risks associated with the increased power in monopolistic and politically influential tech companies, and the degradation of civic functions like journalism and education by AI. In order for our free market to function in the public interest, the companies amassing wealth and profiting from AI must be forced to take ownership of, and internalize, these costs. The political salience of AI will grow to meet the staggering scale of financial investment and societal impact it is already commanding. There is an opportunity for enterprising candidates, of either political party, to take the mantle of opposing AI-linked harms in the midterm elections. Political solutions start with organizing, and broadening the base of political engagement around these issues beyond the locally salient topic of datacenters. Movement leaders and elected officials in states that have taken action on AI regulation should mobilize around the blatant industry capture, wealth extraction, and corporate favoritism reflected in the Trump executive order. AI is no longer just a policy issue for governments to discuss: it is a political issue that voters must decide on and demand accountability on.
300 families undergo 6-week trial to test impact on sleep, school, and home life The UK government will trial different levels of restrictions on social media for under-16s with the help of 300 families, alongside a public consultation that has already gathered nearly 30,000 responses.…
Police found cameras pointing at infrastructure Indian authorities have reportedly ordered an audit of the nation’s CCTV cameras, after police uncovered what they claim was a Pakistan-backed surveillance operation.…
GitHub is adopting AI-based scanning for its Code Security tool to expand vulnerability detections beyond the CodeQL static analysis and cover more languages and frameworks. [...]
Attacks leveraging the 'PolyShell' vulnerability in version 2 of Magento Open Source and Adobe Commerce installations are underway, targeting more than half of all vulnerable stores. [...]
A proof-of-concept attack on Context Hub suggests there's not much content santization A new service that helps coding agents stay up to date on their API calls could be dialing in a massive supply chain vulnerability.…
They cleverly mimic most traits of a real phone Smartphones have fast become the basis of our digital identities, securing payment systems and bank accounts. Now virtual devices that pretend to be real handsets have become a key tool for financial scammers, according to one company. …
Threat actors are evading phishing detection in campaigns targeting Microsoft accounts by abusing the no-code app-building platform Bubble to generate and host malicious web apps. [...]
Ex-CISA boss also says no reason to panic about AI and security RSAC 2026 "Everybody feels massive FOMO if they don't get to RSAC," Jen Easterly says.…
Four former NSA bosses walk onto the stage at RSAC… rsac 2026 There's a theoretical red line with cyber warfare. Cross it, and the US will respond with a physical attack like missile strikes. And that line "is whatever the President says it is," according to former NSA boss retired General Paul Nakasone.…
A new info-stealing malware called Torg Grabber is stealing sensitive data from 850 browser extensions, more than 700 of them for cryptocurrency wallets. [...]
Citrix has patched two NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway vulnerabilities, one of which is very similar to the CitrixBleed and CitrixBleed2 flaws exploited in zero-day attacks in recent years. [...]
AI accounts are becoming part of the cybercrime supply chain, sold like email accounts or VPS access. Flare Systems shows how underground markets bundle and resell premium AI access at scale. [...]
Sen. Ron Wyden is warning us of an abuse of Section 702: Wyden took to the Senate floor to deliver a lengthy speech, ostensibly about the since approved (with support of many Democrats) nomination of Joshua Rudd to lead the NSA. Wyden was protesting that nomination, but in the context of Rudd being unwilling to agree to basic constitutional limitations on NSA surveillance. But that’s just a jumping off point ahead of Section 702’s upcoming reauthorization deadline. Buried in the speech is a passage that should set off every alarm bell: There’s another example of secret law related to Section 702, one that directly affects the privacy rights of Americans. For years, I have asked various administrations to declassify this matter. Thus far they have all refused, although I am still waiting for a response from DNI Gabbard. I strongly believe that this matter can and should be declassified and that Congress needs to debate it openly before Section 702 is reauthorized. In fact, when it is eventually declassified, the American people will be stunned that it took so long and that Congress has been debating this authority with insufficient information. Over the decades, we have learned to take Wyden’s warnings seriously.
Omnissa telemetry suggests business buyers are loving Apple and Google End-user compute vendor Omnissa, the company formed by the spin-out of VMware’s virtual desktops, applications, and device management biz, has dug into the telemetry it collects from customers and painted a picture of the world’s enterprise hardware fleet – and the news is better for Google and Apple than it is for Microsoft.…
Cyber rights org retools for the days of AI and unrestrained government interview The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) on Tuesday appointed Nicole Ozer to succeed Cindy Cohn as the cyber rights group's executive director when Cohn departs this summer.…
Crims 'creating a snowball effect' across open source projects RSAC 2026 Thousands of organizations' cloud environments have been infected with secret-stealing malware as a result of the Trivy supply-chain attack last week, and now the crims that compromised the open source scanners are working with notorious extortion crews like Lapsus$.…
Python interface for LLMs infected with malware via polluted CI/CD pipeline Two versions of LiteLLM, an open source interface for accessing multiple large language models, have been removed from the Python Package Index (PyPI) following a supply chain attack that injected them with malicious credential-stealing code.…
Nearly 300 employees caught up in intrusion at benefits provider Navia Almost 300 HackerOne employees are caught up in a data breach, with the bug bounty biz slamming a third-party benefits provider for a weeks-long delay in notification.…