Roswell, New Mexico, remains synonymous with the “discovery” of alien life on Earth—and a US government coverup. But history shows the reality may be far less out of this world—and still fascinating.

Across the 75 years since something—_something_—crashed outside Roswell in early July 1947, the very name itself has taken on a life of its own: Today, it’s shorthand for UFOs, extraterrestrials, and a vast government conspiracy, perhaps even where the very idea of the deep state itself was born. The city of 50,000 in southeastern New Mexico, about three hours from Albuquerque and El Paso, has leaned into its infamy: There’s a UFO museum, a space walk, and even a flying-saucer-shaped McDonald’s, not to mention any number of kitschy souvenir stands.

Untangling what exactly happened there, though, was a half-century journey through secret government programs, the Cold War, nuclear secrets, and the rise of conspiracy theories in US politics. We know something did crash in Roswell in late June or early July 1947, just weeks after the age of the flying saucer dawned. The modern age of UFOs began on June 24, 1947, when a 32-year-old Idaho businessman named Kenneth Arnold, an experienced rescue pilot with some 4,000 hours of mountain-high-altitude flight time, noticed a bright light out the window of his CallAir A-2 prop plane while flying near Mount Rainier in the Pacific Northwest.

At first, Arnold assumed it was just a glare from another plane—but then he realized he was looking at as many as nine objects, seemingly in formation and moving at tremendous speed through the air, stretched out over perhaps 5 miles. “I could not find any tails on these things,” Arnold later recalled. “They didn’t leave a jet trail behind them. I judged their size to be at least 100 feet in widespan. I thought it was a new type of missile.” As the lights continued to move together “like the tail of a Chinese kite, kind of weaving and going at a terrific speed,” he used his dashboard clock to time how long it took them to fly from between Mount Rainier and Mount Adams. It was astonishing. According to the measurements, these things—whatever they were—were moving somewhere around 1,200 to 1,700 miles per hour, far faster than anything known at the time. Altogether, Arnold watched the objects for about three minutes, during which time he even opened his airplane window to make sure he wasn’t catching a reflection off his windshield.

When he landed, he told friends at the airport about the strange sighting, and a day later, repeated the story to reporters at the _East Oregonian_. The first version of the article referred to the objects as “saucer-like aircraft,” and headline writers across the country subsequently shorthanded the label to “flying saucers.” The reports and interviews Arnold gave after he landed ignited national interest and made headlines across the country. Week by week, dozens more “flying saucer” sightings were reported in what ultimately totaled more than 34 states.

It was against this backdrop that some wreckage found outside New Mexico was delivered and shown to the commander of the Roswell Army Air Field. From the moment he saw it, Colonel William Blanchard knew something was odd about the wreckage spread out before him. The jagged wooden pieces and scraps of reflective material, hastily gathered from a crash site discovered a day earlier, were not from any aircraft he could identify, and the strange symbols weren’t any language he recognized—they looked, if anything, like hieroglyphs.

It had been found, he had been told, by a local rancher named Mac Brazel. The local sheriff, guessing it was military, had sent Brazel onward to the nearest air base to report the find, and soon after, two military intelligence officers, Major Jesse Marcel and another anonymous man whom Brazel would describe as being in plainclothes, had traveled back with him to investigate, wandering around the field and gathering up the fallen “rubber strips, tinfoil, a rather tough paper, and sticks” before transferring them back to the headquarters of the 509th Bombardment Wing.

Here’s the Proof There’s No Government Alien Conspiracy Around Roswell

Netflix, Spotify, Twitter, PayPal, Slack. All down for millions of people. How a group of teen friends plunged into an underworld of cybercrime and broke the internet—then went to work for the FBI.

The Mirai Confessions: Three Young Hackers Who Built a Web-Killing Monster Finally Tell Their Story

An effort to reauthorize a controversial US surveillance program by attaching it to a must-pass spending bill has civil liberties advocates calling foul.

Some of the United States’ largest civil liberties groups are urging Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer not to pursue a short-term extension of the Section 702 surveillance program slated to sunset on December 31.

The more than 20 groups—Demand Progress, the Brennan Center for Justice, American Civil Liberties Union, and Asian Americans Advancing Justice among them—oppose plans that would allow the program to continue temporarily by amending “must-pass” legislation, such as the bill needed now to avert a government shutdown by Friday, or the National Defense Authorization Act, annual legislation set to dictate $886 billion in national security spending across the Pentagon and US Department of Energy in 2024.

“In its current form, \[Section 702\] is dangerous to our liberties and our democracy, and it should not be renewed for any length of time without robust debate, an opportunity for amendment, and—ultimately—far-reaching reforms,” a letter from the groups to Schumer says. It adds that any attempt to prolong the program by rushed amendment “would demonstrate blatant disregard for the civil liberties and civil rights of the American people.”

The letter, which was first reported by Bloomberg Law, cited reporting by WIRED and CQ Roll Call. Schumer did not respond to a request for comment.

As WIRED has previously reported, surveillance under the 702 program may technically continue for another six months, regardless of whether Congress reauthorizes it by the end of December. The program was last certified by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in April 2023 for a full year. “Transition procedures” codified in the statute permit surveillance orders to “continue in effect” until they expire.

The 702 program is controversial for its collection of communications of “US persons.” The program legally targets roughly a quarter million foreigners each year, gathering the content of their text messages, emails, and phone calls, but collaterally intercepts an unknown but presumably large amount of American communications as well. This interception takes place with the compelled cooperation of US telecommunications companies that handle internet traffic at stages along global networks.

The program includes procedures for intercepting, storing, and querying the information in ways that are designed to “minimize” the odds of Americans’ rights being violated, but the rules are also subject to various exemptions. A top criticism of the 702 program is that it permits the Federal Bureau of Investigation to access the calls and emails of US citizens without a warrant and without evidence they’ve committed a crime.

The 702 program was last reauthorized in 2018 following a similarly contentious debate. The program currently permits the National Security Agency to target foreigners under an array of circumstances related to counterterrorism, espionage, and nuclear proliferation, though is also prominently used today to investigate and combat cybercrime and drug trafficking.

On November 7, a bipartisan, bicameral coalition of US lawmakers introduced a comprehensive privacy bill called the Government Surveillance Reform Act, led in part by veteran Senate Intelligence Committee member Ron Wyden. Among other provisions aimed at restricting warrantless surveillance and the collection of location data by police, the bill would impose several reforms of the 702 program, ensuring the FBI obtained a warrant before querying the database using “US Person” identifiers.

The GSRA is widely supported by the civil liberties groups whose letter advises Schumer against a short-term extension of Section 702.

“I plan to vote against any continuing resolution that extends FISA Section 702 without meaningful reforms," Wyden tells WIRED. "Massive surveillance programs that violate Americans’ privacy should not be rushed through without reform or review. Congress must have a real debate about reforming warrantless government surveillance of Americans. Therefore, the administration and congressional leaders should listen to the overwhelming bipartisan coalition that supports adopting commonsense protections for Americans’ privacy and extending key national security authorities at the same time.”

US Privacy Groups Urge Senate Not to Ram Through NSA Spying Powers

Plus: A DDoS attack shuts down ChatGPT, Lockbit shuts down a bank, and a communications breakdown between politicians and Big Tech.

Drones, hidden cameras, thermal vision scopes—these are just a few examples of the high-tech equipment recommended by the animal liberation group Direct Action Everywhere, according to a manual released by the organization this week. The document, which was reviewed by WIRED, is a rare glimpse into how the organization is using tech to target factory farms in often brazen operations that have rescued pigs, goats, ducks, and chickens.

Extremist groups are experimenting with generative AI to flood social media with propaganda and misinformation, researchers at Tech Against Terrorism have told WIRED. A new report from the group details how, in recent months, terrorists and other extremist organizations have been using artificial intelligence to manipulate imagery and thwart content moderation. As platforms have struggled to keep up with this flood of extremist content, a new tool called Altitude, built in collaboration between Tech Against Terrorism and Google, is seeking to address the problem. The tool centralizes the collection of verified terrorist content, allowing companies to easily vet posts shared to their platforms.

Israel is exacerbating the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza by likely imposing devastating internet blackouts in the region. Last week, Israel reportedly imposed a full internet shutdown in the area as its troops moved into the Gaza Strip. After internet access was restored, the area suffered two additional connectivity blackouts. The most recent lasted for about 15 hours on Sunday as Israel was carrying out an intense operation to cut off Gaza City in the north from southern Gaza.

In other infrastructure news, a report from the ​​cybersecurity firm Mandiant reveals that last year, the Russian military intelligence agency known as Sandworm carried out a power grid attack targeting a Ukrainian electric utility causing a blackout for Ukrainian civilians. According to the report, the cyberattack coincided with the start of a series of missile strikes targeting Ukrainian critical infrastructure across the country.

The third GOP presidential primary debate was livestreamed on Rumble, a YouTube alternative home to what the Southern Poverty Law Center says is one of America’s most notorious white nationalists, Nick Fuentes. Since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas conflict last month, Fuentes has used his Rumble channel to push antisemitic hate speech and Holocaust denial conspiracies, racking up hundreds of thousands of views. Fuentes’ YouTube account was terminated in 2020 after Google demonetized it.

And there's more. Each week, we round up the security and privacy news we didn’t cover in depth ourselves. Click the headlines to read the full stories, and stay safe out there

On Wednesday, you and everyone you know had trouble getting ChatGPT to ghostwrite their emails as developer OpenAI was hit by what it thought was a distributed denial-of-service attack. For nearly two hours, users who tried to access the chatbot were greeted with a message telling them “ChatGPT is at capacity right now.”

In a tweet, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman initially blamed its outage on a surge in interest in the platform's new features. By Wednesday night the company announced that the periodic outages were due to an “abnormal traffic pattern reflective of a DDoS attack.”

While it’s unclear who is behind the attack, a group known as Anonymous Sudan claimed responsibility on Wednesday, posting on Telegram that it had targeted OpenAI for "general biases towards Israel and against Palestine." OpenAI has since resolved the issue.

The US arm of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China was hit by a ransomware attack that disrupted trades in the US Treasury market on Thursday. The bank appears to be the latest victim of the prolific ransomware gang known as Lockbit. According to the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Lockbit has hit 1,700 US organizations since 2020 and extorted more than $100 million in ransom demands. Last month it threatened Boeing with a leak of sensitive data.

"ICBC has been closely monitoring the matter and has done its best in emergency response and supervisory communication," China's foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said at a press conference.

Signal is beta testing usernames that will allow people to communicate using the encrypted service without exchanging phone numbers, further enhancing the app's privacy applications. The feature will go live in early 2024.

Support for usernames is a major step for the messaging service as Signal has apparently been working on the feature for years. Though accounts will still need to be associated with a phone number at setup, the introduction of usernames will allow users to connect without having to share it.

Cooperation between government, researchers, and tech companies aimed at countering disinformation online is evaporating thanks to a sustained campaign by US Republicans in the press, courts, and on Capitol Hill. Tech employees tell NBC the FBI has halted communications with social media firms about foreign influence campaigns, a move the FBI director attributed to a September ruling in the country's most conservative appellate court forbidding the government from "significantly" encouraging social media companies to remove misinformation.

“We’re having some interaction with social media companies,” FBI director Christopher Wray said in testimony last week to the Senate Homeland Security Committee. “But all of those interactions have changed fundamentally in the wake of the court rulings.”

According to NBC, all the FBI’s interactions with tech platforms now have to be supervised by Justice Department lawyers.

Signal Is Finally Testing Usernames

Top senate officials are planning to save the Section 702 surveillance program by attaching it to a must-pass piece of legislation. Critics worry a chance to pass privacy reforms will be missed.

Leaders in the United States Senate have been discussing plans to extend Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) beyond its December 31 deadline by amending must-pass legislation this month.

A senior congressional aide tells WIRED that leadership offices and judiciary sources have both disclosed that discussions are underway about saving the Section 702 program in the short term by attaching an amendment extending it to a bill that is sorely needed to extend federal funding and avert a government shutdown one week from now.

The program, last extended in 2018, is due to expire at the end of the year. Without a vote to reauthorize 702, the US government will lose its ability to obtain year-long “certifications” compelling telecommunications companies to wiretap overseas calls, text messages, and emails without being served individual warrants or subpoenas.

Whether the authority is reauthorized before expiring on January 1 or not, the actual surveillance is likely to continue into the spring, when this year’s certifications expire.

Extending the program by attaching it to another bill that Congress can’t avoid is a risky political maneuver that will cause significant unrest among a majority of House lawmakers and a number of senators who are working to reform the 702 program. A top priority for privacy hawks is curtailing the ability of federal law enforcement to use 702 data “incidentally” collected on Americans. The 702 program collects communications from two sources: internet service providers and the companies that conduct traffic between them. The latter source is tapped less frequently but intercepts a greater quantity of domestic communications.

An aide to Jim Jordan, the Republican chair of the House Judiciary Committee, said Jordan was firmly on the side of the reformers and would not support extending 702 through a temporary measure. Chuck Schumer, the senate majority leader, did not respond to a request for comment Thursday afternoon.

“America’s security and its citizens’ rights demand more than a short-term fix. Congress has had all year to scrutinize and address this crucial policy question,” says James Czerniawski, a senior policy analyst at the nonprofit Americans for Prosperity. “Doing a short-term extension punts the ball on the critical reforms desperately needed to this program to protect Americans civil liberties.”

While surveillance of US calls is illegal and unconstitutional without a warrant based on probable cause, the government is permitted to collect domestic calls for specific national security purposes under procedures created to minimize its access to them later. The US National Security Agency, which conducts electronic surveillance for the Pentagon, is only permitted to eavesdrop on foreigners who are overseas. Those foreigners, however, many of whom are likely government officials and not criminals or terrorists, frequently exchange calls and emails with people inside the United States, and those get collected as well.

Roughly a quarter of a million people are targeted by the program each year, and it is estimated that the number of individual messages collected reaches into the hundreds of millions.

While the NSA is not allowed to target the communications of “US persons” (an umbrella term for US citizens, legal residents, and corporations), the government has long been permitted to query the database for information on US persons without obtaining warrants.

It is known that the 702 program collects significant numbers of US communications, but the exact quantity is unknown, even to the government. The NSA argues that it would be unfeasible to count the number of Americans incidentally spied on without analyzing the collection thoroughly, further imperiling people’s rights. Privacy watchdogs who have classified knowledge of the program say the term “incidental” is deceiving, in that it makes the volume of the collection sound small.

The term is also frequently conflated with wiretaps that accidentally target Americans, which is called “inadvertent” collection. Incidental collection is factored into the program as an acceptable risk to Americans’ civil liberties, ameliorated by various internal procedures approved by the Justice Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Critics of the program say these procedures are frequently violated and do little to nothing to stop the FBI from warrantlessly accessing Americans’ calls and emails without evidence that they’ve committed a crime.

Congressional offices striving for a reform—introduced this week in the form of a bipartisan, bicameral bill known as the Government Surveillance Reform Act (GSRA)—say the White House has lobbied Congress for a “clean” reauthorization. Renewing the 702 program for another four to five years without additional privacy safeguards is in line with the intelligence community’s own desires.

The same sources say other bills may also be in the works and could drop by December, excluding many of the additional protections offered by the GSRA. The bill, which has significant support in the House, bans warrantless FBI searches of 702 data but also curtails the use of commercial data available to the government—a known loophole for evading warrant requirements available to law enforcement and intelligence agencies at virtually all levels of government. Many Republicans favor the bill because it would strip security clearances from federal employees caught abusing their access to the database.

Cynthia Choi, cofounder of the nonprofit Stop AAPI Hate, which tracks incidents of discrimination against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, said the GSRA would prove particularly crucial in the fight for privacy of immigrant communities. “It is disappointing to learn that Majority Leader Schumer and other congressional leaders are reportedly considering depriving us of this critical opportunity to stop the unjust warrantless surveillance of our family and friends,” she says. “They are well aware that we have experienced decades of wrongful targeting, and they should be fighting alongside us to ensure these issues are addressed as soon as possible.”

Senate Leaders Plan to Prolong NSA Surveillance Using a Must-Pass Bill

US government officials continue to warn that the public and private sectors need to identify and root out China-backed attackers lurking in industrial control systems.

The United States National Security Agency is often tight-lipped about its work and intelligence. But at the Cyberwarcon security conference in Washington DC on Thursday, two members of the agency’s Cybersecurity Collaboration Center had a “call to action” for the cybersecurity community: Beware the threat of Chinese government-backed hackers embedding in US critical infrastructure.

Alongside its “Five Eyes” intelligence alliance counterparts, the NSA has been warning since May that a Beijing-sponsored group known as Volt Typhoon has been targeting critical infrastructure networks, including power grids, as part of its activity.

Officials emphasized on Thursday that network administrators and security teams need to be on the lookout for suspicious activity in which hackers manipulate and misuse legitimate tools rather than malware—an approach known as “living off the land”—to carry out clandestine operations. They added that the Chinese government also develops novel intrusion techniques and malware, thanks to a substantial stockpile of zero-day vulnerabilities that hackers can weaponize and exploit. Beijing collects these bugs through its own research, as well as a law that requires vulnerability disclosure.

The People’s Republic of China “works to gain unauthorized access to systems and wait for the best time to exploit these networks,” Morgan Adamski, director of the NSA’s Cybersecurity Collaboration Center, said on Thursday. “The threat is extremely sophisticated and pervasive. It is not easy to find. It is pre-positioning with intent to quietly burrow into critical networks for the long haul. The fact that these actors are in critical infrastructure is unacceptable, and it is something that we are taking very seriously—something that we are concerned about.”

Microsoft’s Mark Parsons and Judy Ng gave an update on Volt Typhoon’s activity later in the day at Cyberwarcon. They noted that after seemingly becoming dormant in the spring and most of the summer, the group reappeared in August with improved operational security to make its activity more difficult to track. Volt Typhoon has continued attacking universities and US Army Reserve Officers’ Training Corps programs—a type of victim the group particularly favors—but it has also been observed targeting additional US utility companies.

“We think Volt Typhoon is doing this for espionage-related activity, but in addition, we think there’s an element that they could use it for destruction or disruption in a time of need,” Microsoft’s Ng said on Thursday.

The NSA’s Adamski and Josh Zaritsky, chief operations officer of the Cybersecurity Collaboration Center, urged network defenders to manage and audit their system logs for anomalous activity and store logs such that they can’t be deleted by an attacker who gains system access and is looking to hide their tracks.

The two also emphasized best practices, like two-factor authentication and limiting users’ and admins’ system privileges to minimize the possibility that attackers can compromise and exploit accounts in the first place. And they emphasized that not only is it necessary to patch software vulnerabilities, it is crucial to then go back and check logs and records to make sure that there aren’t signs that the bug was exploited before it was patched.

“We are going to need internet service providers, cloud providers, endpoint companies, cybersecurity companies, device manufacturers, everybody in this fight together. And this is a fight for our US critical infrastructure,” Adamski said. “The products, the services that we rely on, everything that matters—that’s why this is important.”

The NSA Seems Pretty Stressed About the Threat of Chinese Hackers in US Critical Infrastructure

Small platforms without resources to handle takedown requests have been weaponized by terrorist groups that share their content online. A free new tool is coming to help clean house.

Terrorist groups have found a home on smaller, less well-known online platforms in recent years where they store, share, and link to content such as violent beheading videos and recruitment propaganda.

Those platforms have struggled to deal with the problem due to a lack of resources and expertise, but a new tool being built by a Google subsidiary in collaboration with a terror-tracking NGO is seeking to solve that problem.

Launched in Paris on Friday, Altitude is a free tool built by Jigsaw—a unit within Google that tracks violent extremism, misinformation, and repressive censorship—and Tech Against Terrorism, a group that seeks to disrupt terrorists’ online activity. The tool aims to give smaller platforms the ability to easily and efficiently detect terrorist content on their networks and remove it.

The project is also working with the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, which is an industry-led group founded in 2017 by Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, and YouTube that hosts a shared database of image hashes—a kind of digital fingerprint—of terrorist content.

After years of missteps and failing to deal with the problem of removing terrorist content from their networks, big tech platforms like Facebook, Google, and X (formerly Twitter) have—with the help of dedicated NGOs and law enforcement—largely removed this content from their networks, with the notable exception of Telegram. As a result, terrorists have moved to less regulated and under-resourced platforms where their presence either goes unnoticed or cannot be dealt with because the companies involved simply don’t have the resources to cope with a flood of takedown requests.

“Islamic State and other terrorist groups didn't give up on the internet just because they no longer had the megaphone of their social media platforms. They went elsewhere,” Yasmin Green, the CEO of Jigsaw, tells WIRED. “They found this opportunity to host content on file-hosting sites or other websites, small and medium platforms. Those platforms were not welcoming terrorist content, but they still were hosting it—and actually, quite a lot of it.”

While there are some tools on the market that work in a similar way to Altitude, they are prohibitively expensive for a lot of smaller companies. Experts like Green believe that tools like this need to be open source and free of charge.

The new tool can be integrated straight into the backend of whatever platform it is working with. It then connects to Tech Against Terrorism’s own Terrorist Content Analytics Platform, which centralizes the collection of content that has been created by officially designated terrorist organizations. The database allows all the platforms using Altitude to easily check whether a piece of content has been verified as terrorist content.

Altitude will also provide context about the terrorist groups the content is associated with, other examples of this type of material, information on what other platforms have done with the material, and, eventually, even information pertaining to the relevant laws in a particular country or region.

“We are not here to tell platforms what to do but rather to furnish them with all the information that they need to make the moderation decision," Adam Hadley, executive director of Tech Against Terrorism, tells WIRED. “We want to improve the quality of response. This isn’t about the volume of material removed but ensuring that the very worst material is removed in a way that is supporting the rule of law.”

Tech Against Terrorism works with more than 100 platforms, almost all of which don’t want to be named because of the negative impact on their business of being linked to terrorist content. The type of companies that Tech Against Terrorism works with include pastebins, messaging apps, video-sharing platforms, social media networks, and forums.

For many of these smaller platforms, dealing with takedown requests from governments, civil society organizations, law enforcement, and the platform's own users can be overwhelming and result in companies going to one extreme or the other.

“Platforms can become easily overwhelmed by the takedown requests, and they either ignore them all or they take everything down,” Hadley says. “What we're looking for is to try to create an environment where platforms have the tools to be able to properly assess whether they should remove material or not, because it's imperative to take down terror content, but it's also really important that they're not just removing any content because of concerns about freedom of expression.”

The Israel-Hamas war has shown what an important role Telegram continues to play in allowing terrorist groups to spread their messages. While efforts to hold Telegram to account have had limited success in recent weeks, terror content remains accessible, and it is from here that the content is quickly shared on a multitude of other platforms. And this is where the Altitude tool can make a difference, according to Hadley.

“Ideally, the content wouldn’t be put up on Telegram in the first place,” Hadley says. “But given that it is, the next best thing we can do is make sure that other platforms that are being co-opted into this by terrorists are aware of this activity and have the right information to take down the material in an appropriate fashion.”

This New Tool Aims to Keep Terrorism Content Off the Internet

Experts are finding thousands of examples of AI-created content every week that could allow terrorist groups and other violent extremists to bypass automated detection systems.

Extremist groups have begun to experiment with artificial intelligence, and in particular generative AI, in order to create a flood of new propaganda. Experts now fear the growing use of generative AI tools by these groups will overturn the work Big Tech has done in recent years to keep their content off the internet.

“Our biggest concern is that if terrorists start using gen AI to manipulate imagery at scale, this could well destroy hash-sharing as a solution,” Adam Hadley, the executive director of Tech Against Terrorism, tells WIRED. “This is a massive risk.”

For years, Big Tech platforms have worked hard to create databases of known violent extremist content, known as hashing databases, which are shared across platforms to quickly and automatically remove such content from the internet. But according to Hadley, his colleagues are now picking up around 5,000 examples of AI-generated content each week. This includes images shared in recent weeks by groups linked to Hezbollah and Hamas that appear designed to influence the narrative around the Israel-Hamas war.

“Give it six months or so, the possibility that \[they\] are manipulating imagery to break hashing is really concerning,” Hadley says. “The tech sector has done so well to build automated technology, terrorists could well start using gen AI to evade what's already been done.”

Other examples that researchers at Tech Against Terrorism have uncovered in recent months have included a neo-Nazi messaging channel sharing AI-generated imagery created using racist and antisemitic prompts pasted into an app available on the Google Play store; far-right figures producing a “guide to memetic warfare” advising others on how to use AI-generated image tools to create extremist memes; the Islamic State publishing a tech support guide on how to securely use generative AI tools; a pro-IS user of an archiving service claiming to have used an AI-based automatic speech recognition (ASR) system to transcribe Arabic language IS propaganda; and a pro-al-Qaeda outlet publishing several posters with images highly likely to have been created using a generative AI platform.

Beyond detailing the threat posed by generative AI tools that can tweak images, Tech Against Terrorism has published a new report citing other ways in which gen AI tools can be used to help extremist groups. These include the use of autotranslation tools that can quickly and easily convert propaganda into multiple languages, or the ability to create personalized messages at scale to facilitate recruitment efforts online. But Hadley believes that AI also provides an opportunity to get ahead of extremist groups and use the technology to preempt what they will use it for.

“We're going to partner with Microsoft to figure out if there are ways using our archive of material to create a sort of gen AI detection system in order to counter the emerging threat that gen AI will be used for terrorist content at scale,” Hadley says. “We're confident that gen AI can be used to defend against hostile uses of gen AI.”

The partnership was announced today, on the eve of the Christchurch Call Leaders’ Summit, a movement designed to eradicate terrorism and extremist content from the internet, to be held in Paris.

“The use of digital platforms to spread violent extremist content is an urgent issue with real-world consequences,” Brad Smith, vice chair and president at Microsoft said in a statement. “By combining Tech Against Terrorism’s capabilities with AI, we hope to help create a safer world both online and off.”

While companies like Microsoft, Google, and Facebook all have their own AI research divisions and are likely already deploying their own resources to combat this issue, the new initiative will ultimately aid those companies that can’t combat these efforts on their own.

“This will be particularly important for smaller platforms that don't have their own AI research centers,” Hadley says. “Even now, with the hashing databases, smaller platforms can just become overwhelmed by this content.”

The threat of AI generative content is not limited to extremist groups. Last month, the Internet Watch Foundation, a UK-based nonprofit that works to eradicate child exploitation content from the internet, published a report that detailed the growing presence of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) created by AI tools on the dark web.

The researchers found over 20,000 AI-generated images posted to one dark web CSAM forum over the course of just one month, with 11,108 of these images judged most likely to be criminal by the IWF researchers. As the IWF researchers wrote in their report, “These AI images can be so convincing that they are indistinguishable from real images.”

Here’s How Violent Extremists Are Exploiting Generative AI Tools

Omegle connected strangers to one another and had a long-standing problem of pairing minors with sexual predators. A legal settlement took it down.

Omegle, the video and text chat site that paired strangers together to talk, ultimately shut down as part of a legal mediation with a female user who sued the company, claiming its defective and negligent design enabled her to be sexually abused through the site.

Omegle’s chatting service was shut down Wednesday, just a week after it settled a court case with a plaintiff identified as A.M. Her lawsuit, filed in 2021, alleged that she met a man in his thirties on Omegle who forced her to take naked photos and videos over a three-year period. She was just 11 when it began in 2014.

“The permanent shutdown of Omegle was a term negotiated between Omegle and our client in exchange for Omegle getting to avoid the impending jury trial verdict,” Carrie Goldberg, an attorney who represented A.M., tells WIRED. Attorneys for Omegle did not respond to a request for comment on the settlement. Emails to Omegle were not returned.

Omegle, founded in 2009, regained popularity during 2020 as Covid-19 lockdowns kept people at home. That popularity was, at least in part, driven by it becoming a place where lonely people could chat and also a place for sexual exploration. But its very design was different from other social apps: It instantaneously paired strangers on camera.

“Virtually every tool can be used for good or for evil, and that is especially true of communication tools, due to their innate flexibility,” Leif K-Brooks, Omegle’s founder, wrote in a note announcing the site’s end. “The telephone can be used to wish your grandmother ‘happy birthday’, but it can also be used to call in a bomb threat. There can be no honest accounting of Omegle without acknowledging that some people misused it, including to commit unspeakably heinous crimes.” K-Brooks’ note did not mention the settlement in his statement, but blamed the closure of Omegle on unspecified “attacks” against communication services.

There’s a flaw in K-Brooks’ argument: The telephone doesn’t connect children and teens directly to sexual predators with the click of a button. Omegle’s model allowed sexual predators to sign on and click through a roulette of people, continuously jumping from one to another until they were face-to-face with who they were looking for.

Omegle has a long, problematic history of sexual abuse issues. In August, a man was sentenced to 16 years in prison after admitting to chatting with approximately 1,000 minors on Omegle and recording many of them undressing. The recent settlement with A.M. stems from a $22 million lawsuit which claims the man who abused her had saved thousands of sexually exploitative images of children, including some of A.M. In 2022, a CBC reporter spent time on Omegle and found that the majority of the people she matched to chat with appeared to be men who were either naked or off-camera.

In 2022, there were 608,601 reports of child exploitation on Omegle to the nonprofit National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s CyberTipline. Of all the sites the center tracked, only Facebook, Google, Instagram, and WhatsApp ranked higher.

In the US, social platforms are often protected by Section 230, a broad act that shields them from liability for the content their users post. But the judge in A.M.’s case found last July that Omegle’s design was at fault and it was not protected by Section 230: It could have worked to prevent matches between minors and adults before sexual content was even sent, the judge said.

K-Brooks wrote that he took a “good Samaritan” approach “to implement reasonable measures to fight crime and other misuse.” That included “basic safety and anonymity,” as well as “a great deal of moderation behind the scenes” that used both AI and human moderators. “Omegle punched above its weight in content moderation, and I’m proud of what we accomplished,” he wrote.

Omegle ultimately was brought down by a lawsuit from a sexual abuse survivor. But abusive content will still circulate around the web, and it shows how far away a long-term solution is. “We’ve got to ask ourselves some pretty good questions about how we even permitted this for so long,”  said Signy Arnason, associate executive director of the Canadian Centre for Child Protection, a charity focused on reducing sexual abuse and exploitation of children. “If we don’t address things at the regularity level, we’re just waiting for another site to backfill what Omegle.”

Omegle Was Forced to Shut Down by a Lawsuit From a Sexual Abuse Survivor

Meta now offers users an ad-free option, but it’s only available in Europe for those who can afford the €10-a-month subscription.

Meta just launched its first ad-free option for Facebook and Instagram. The update is in response to the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, passed in 2018. Subscriptions for the ad-free experience are only available to users located in the EU as well as Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland.

In these locations, anyone 18 and older on Facebook or Instagram now gets to decide whether they want to use the social media platforms for free or pay €10 every month for ad-free access. Meta provides the ad-free option without charge to users who are younger than 18.

What happens if you sign up? “We don't use any data for ad purposes at all. That turns off first-party data as well as stopping any third parties, like Nike, sending us information about you,” says Alex Dziedzan, a policy communication spokesperson at Meta. While it won’t be used for targeted advertising, Meta confirms that first-party data about you will still be used for functions not related to advertising.

Users who choose the free option allow Meta to perform targeted advertising by tracking their information. The company previously argued that consent was not required to target adults in the EU with hyper-specific advertising—before changing course and rolling out this new subscription tier for Facebook and Instagram. Earlier in 2023, Meta received a billion dollar fine for transferring data on European users to the United States.

When will this option roll out in the US? It’s unlikely Meta will ever offer an ad-free experience for users in the US, unless American lawmakers pass more aggressive legislation to regulate data privacy.

How to Get Ad-Free Facebook

If it’s an option that’s available in your region, you can expect to see a pop-up the next time you log in to Facebook or Instagram with a sign-up option for the ad-free social media. “This is part of our process for getting consent under the GDPR,” says Dziedzan. “It's a requirement for us to make sure that everyone sees the choice that they can make.” He emphasizes that Meta is not hiding this new option from users.

A subscription to ad-free Facebook or Instagram costs €10 per month if you sign up on your desktop. Anyone who signs up through the smartphone app pays €3 more a month for the subscription. No matter where your subscription starts, the ad-free plan includes both in-app and web browsing.

Want to sign up later? You can find the option in the Settings of your Facebook or Instagram account. Return to the same place if you ever want to get rid of your Meta subscription.

Your subscription can cover multiple profiles in your accounts center, for now. Meta plans to increase the price for users with more than one Facebook or Instagram in March of next year. After the company’s introductory pricing ends, each additional account will cost €6 a month if you sign up in your browser or €8 if you sign up in-app.

“If you have, let's say, a Facebook account and an Instagram account you would have to pay for both,” he says. “The reason for that is they’re two separate services.” So a person who signs up in a browser for ad-free access in their Facebook and Instagram accounts can soon expect to pay around €192 a year.

Why Is This Change Controversial?

It’s common for services, like Netflix, to offer ad-free versions of their products at a higher price. So why are privacy experts critical of Meta’s subscription plan?

“When you’re buying Netflix, you’re buying the convenience of not seeing ads,” says Thorin Klosowski, a security and privacy activist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Buying into not being tracked is more about a pay-for-privacy scheme.” If Meta tracks the browsing habits of every adult user, except those who cough up €10 or more a month, then aspects of online privacy are out of reach for people without disposable income.

Dziedzan disagrees with the characterization of Meta’s ad-free subscription as a pay-for-privacy plan. He points out the privacy options that are available to all Facebook and Instagram users, like the ability to turn off aspects of third-party advertising. “The GDPR still applies to everybody who chooses to use the free version of our service, as do all the other privacy laws,” says Dziedzan.

Privacy advocates continue to push back against Meta’s advertising. “We already disagree with behavioral advertising to begin with,” says Klosowski. “Paying to get out of that just adds a second layer of confusion for users and grossness from the company.”

Source

Wired