Poverty, fentanyl, and lack of public funding mean morgues are overloaded with unidentified bodies. TikTok and Facebook pages are filling the gap—with AI proving a powerful and controversial new tool.

In 2021, an unidentified Black woman died by suicide after jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge. She was wearing hot pink nail polish, had a pink left eyebrow piercing and several tattoos—all distinguishing features that should have made it easier to identify her. Two years later, her identity is still unknown.

The tragedy of unidentified cadavers is something that Rionna Lee had been thinking about for years. Her mother used to transport human remains for New York’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, and would bring home morbid stories. One, Lee remembers, was of a man who had been hit by an MTA train. “One of the things that stuck out to me was the condition of his remains, which were scattered across the train tracks,” says Lee, 24, who now lives in Kingston, Pennsylvania. It distressed her to think of the families who would have to identify their loved ones; even more so, later, when she learned that some human remains would never be identified.

There are an average of 4,400 unidentified new cadavers per year in the US, and a total of 600,000 missing people across the country. Some of these cases are collected on databases, such as the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs), which helps medical examiners, coroners, law enforcement officers, and members of the public solve missing, unidentified, and unclaimed cases across the country. The true scale of the problem is unknown, as the data available for the average number of unidentified cadavers comes from a 2004 census. Just 10 states have laws requiring that cases be entered into NamUs, meaning that many reports are voluntary.

As she looked into cases—including the woman with the pink nail polish—Lee noticed a pattern in which were solved and which weren’t. The decisive factor was often money. Funding from private donors, sponsorship, and public support meant that law enforcement agencies were able to access cutting-edge technology, such as Othram, a forensic genetics company, which has been pivotal in cracking several high-profile cases. Those that weren’t solved didn’t have resources behind them. Often, they were from marginalized groups. Lee, who identifies as Black and LGBTQ+, felt the need to raise awareness among overlooked members of society, those whose deaths often go unnoticed: transient individuals, racial minorities, substance users, and members of the LGBTQ+ community.

Lee set up a TikTok to try to raise awareness. After a few false starts, she went viral, attracting a following of 128,000. She set up a Facebook group—Thee Unidentified & Unsolved—which now has 39,000 members, many of whom work together to solve unidentified and unsolved cases. Thee Unidentified & Unsolved is one of several volunteer social media communities that are filling a gap left by the US state, which is getting worse due to the overlapping crises of poverty, fentanyl, and shortfalls in public funding. Now, with AI image recognition more readily available, volunteers have new tools to help them identify the deceased. This brings with it new issues around privacy and consent, but those in the communities say their work brings closure to families. “I believe everyone starts off with a name,” says Lee. “I believe everyone should be able to leave this Earth peacefully with their name.”

Lee started her TikTok campaign in October 2021. There were already several popular accounts that focused on locating missing people, but few, if any, were working to identify the deceased. She created her own page, but TikTok doesn’t allow graphic content such as morgue photos, and she struggled for traction.

She focused on cases where the decedent had been found with items that might help their friends and relatives identify them. “One of the videos I posted that gained exposure was a man with an undetermined race. He was found with a Salvatore Ferragamo gold buckle belt,” says Lee. Her audience was curious how a person with such an expensive piece of clothing could go unidentified. Her engagement grew, and finally, on November 9, 2022, one of her TikTok videos—the case of a 2022 Union County Jane Doe, a Black woman who died after being struck by multiple vehicles on US Route 22 in Hillside, New Jersey—went viral, racking up 652,000 views. A couple of days later, another video hit a million views. She created the Facebook group later that month, because the platform allows graphic content, like morgue pictures, which TikTok doesn’t. The Facebook group now has more than 39,000 members.

There are around a dozen posts each day in the group, often unsolved cases from NamUs with pictures. Members scour the internet, looking for other images, comparing images with missing person sketches or social media profiles.

Some of the identification groups work globally, others are region or country specific or dedicated to unique circumstances, such as missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. Online detective groups often tread a delicate line between altruistic investigation and mob obsession.

Thee Unidentified has had to tread that line carefully. Earlier this year, the group helped identify Adonis Beck, a TikTok star also known as Pope the Barber. Beck was found dead on August 10. The news spread quickly, causing an influx of new members to the Facebook group. Kenyetta Burks, one of the group’s admins who had first posted Beck’s image on the group, removed the morgue photos as they were posted, but was inundated with requests from people trying to see them, many from fake accounts pretending to be relatives. Sometimes, the admins will notice comments from members who seem more intrigued by the circumstances of death than those who are empathetic to the topic of unidentified cases. In situations that appear voyeuristic, the person is suspended, and if the behavior is repeated, they are banned, Lee says.

These social media groups have helped some families find closure. In 2022, a teenage boy stumbled upon Lee’s TikTok page and identified his mother, a 2017 Jane Doe case, via her tattoos. She was hit by a vehicle while crossing a street in Pasadena, California and succumbed to her injuries in hospital. In May 2023, Burks posted a sketch, images, and information from NamUs in the Facebook group, which led to the identification of Dytavious Sanders, an MMA fighter from South Carolina, whose body was discovered earlier that month on May 9. Sander’s aunt identified him in the group and his mother asked for assistance in claiming his body.

One member of Thee Unidentified has recently began using a new tool, PimEyes, a controversial facial recognition search engine, as a means to identify the deceased via morgue photos. A quick upload produces search results in a matter of seconds. Photos from across the internet are organized in a single view, mugshots frequently among them. While this technology can accelerate the process of identifying the dead, it brings with it serious privacy concerns. In many cases, informed consent is neither obtained for the image uploaded nor the results that the technology returns, which can include the biometric data of private individuals. Thus far, a few members of the group have utilized this tool.

“While some individuals might be well-meaning, online sleuths are using dangerous surveillance tools,” says Madeleine Stone, senior advocacy officer at Big Brother Watch, a privacy campaign group. “By selling this technology, facial recognition companies risk violating the dignity of deceased individuals, but moreover are violating the privacy rights of the billions of people whose photos they have taken, processed and exploited without consent.”

PimEyes has been criticized by privacy advocates for scraping the internet for images, and giving users access to highly personal information about private individuals. PimEyes CEO Giorgi Gobronidze says that these threats are exaggerated, and that PimEyes doesn’t hold images, but just directs users to the URLs where images are hosted. “The tool is designed to help people to find the sources that publish photos, and if they shouldn't be there, apply to the website and initiate takedown.” Gobronidze says that PimEyes has many use cases, such as searching for missing people, including women and children in conflict areas, and actively cooperates with human rights organizations.

Lee says that the Thee Unidentified & Unsolved Facebook group “is not focused on the use of PimEyes…But I respect those who do use the tool and actually have successful outcomes.”

In other social media groups, PimEyes is slowly being introduced as an investigative tool for cases related to missing persons, cold cases, and human trafficking.

Experts also worry that this technology is not necessarily accurate, meaning that amateur sleuths could make mistakes with heartbreaking consequences. “This a noble goal, but a terrible approach,” says Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, an organization that litigates and advocates for privacy, fighting excessive local and state-level surveillance. “This technology is biased and error prone, and I worry that a lot of worried families will be wrongly told their missing loved one is dead.”

For all of the challenges presented by volunteer online communities, the reality is that they exist in a vacuum left by the authorities.

In 2021, 106,699 Americans died of an overdose. In Seattle, the fentanyl crisis is so bad that the number of overdose deaths has doubled in the last three years, causing the morgues to overflow. The “fourth wave” of the crisis recently descended upon the US, an ongoing mass-overdose event that has consumed law enforcement agencies, stretching the resources necessary for identifying the dead. For medical examiners, the “tsunami” of bodies has resulted in staff burnout, exhausted resources, and jeopardized many offices’ accreditation due to the necessity to conduct more autopsies than industry guidelines permit .

“Unfortunately, the opioid crisis has meant more individuals are coming into the Medical Examiner’s Office for examination,” says Dr. Constance DiAngelo, Philadelphia’s Chief Medical Examiner. “Many of these folks are not initially identified.”

The authorities just don’t have the resources to investigate every case thoroughly. “Our challenges are related to funding,” DiAngelo says. “Exhumations, reinterment, DNA extraction and processing, and genealogy comparisons are expensive. A case could cost between $2,500 to $10,000, and that doesn’t include the need for staff who can be dedicated to this type of work.”

In King County, where Seattle is located, there are currently 57 unidentified people that the Medical Examiner’s Office is working to identify. This dire situation is a reality across major American metropolitan areas. In situations where people are found without identification, it can take weeks, if not months, to locate next of kin.

That waiting, and not knowing, can be agony for people whose loved ones have disappeared—like the family of Kallie Catron. Catron’s mother, Crystal Newman, last spoke with her on October 14, 2022. Catron said she missed her two children and wanted to come home. “When Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s passed, my sister knew something was wrong and called to report a missing person,” says Sarah Forister, Catron’s aunt. “I guess you can say a mother knows when something is wrong with her baby.”

On January 22, 2023, Newman was sent a link to a post on Thee Unidentified’s TikTok page. Morgue photos, and images of her tattoos, confirmed it was Catron. “At first, we were so mad that’s how we found out,” says Forister. “But Kallie’s mom, me, and her cousins watched the video showing her morgue photo and all her identifying tattoos multiple times a day.”

Eventually, Lee asked the family if she could take down the video, as Catron had been identified. “I said yes, but please send me the video so I can watch it whenever I want to,” says Forister. Lee obliged. The community shared the family’s GoFundMe campaign to raise funds for Catron's funeral and to support her children. “We realized that if it wasn’t for Thee Unidentified community and Rionna, we could still be looking for Kallie,” Forister says.

Social Media Sleuths, Armed With AI, Are Identifying Dead Bodies

More than 60 groups advocating for Asian American and Pacific Islander communities are pushing the US Congress to reform the Section 702 surveillance program as Senate leaders move to renew it.

Dozens of prominent Asian American groups are asking United States lawmakers this morning to hold fast in the face of an anticipated campaign by congressional leaders to extend the Section 702 surveillance program by securing it, like a rider, to another “must pass” bill.

Sixty-three groups across the country representing and allied with Asian American and Pacific Islander communities have signed a letter of “strong opposition” to any “short-term extension” of the 702 program—surveillance, the groups say, that is almost certainly impacting Asian Americans at a disproportionate rate.

WIRED first reported last week on an effort underway by US Senate leaders to extend the 702 program, which is slated to expire at the end of the year but may continue until April under the program’s “transition procedures.” Emails from WIRED requesting comment from the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, have gone unanswered since Friday.

“Section 702 and related surveillance authorities have been misused to spy on Americans, including but not limited to protesters, journalists, campaign donors, and members of Congress,” says the letter, signed by the National Council of Asian Pacific Americans, the Sikh Coalition, Asian Americans Advancing Justice, and the Stop AAPI Hate coalition, among dozens of other groups. The consequences of unlawful surveillance have had a “devastating toll” on Asian Americans, they say, and on people’s “careers, livelihoods, and reputations.”

Demanding the 702 program be “pursued through standalone legislation” and open to debate, the letter says a short-term fix would alienate lawmakers already open to salvaging the program—albeit with heavily favored reforms. Renewing the program with a last-minute amendment tucked into a bill the government can’t function without would only serve to undermine the democratic process, the groups say, and “imperil the long-term viability of Section 702.”

“There are a lot of folks who are really worried,” says Andy Wong, managing director of advocacy at Stop AAPI Hate, a coalition of community-based groups. The impact of government surveillance on the broader Asian American community, he says, runs deep. "Whether it’s traveling or communicating with their loved ones or doing anything abroad, even if it’s completely innocuous, all of this surveillance has a chilling effect.”

“Approximately two-thirds of Asian Americans are immigrants,” says Joanna YangQing Derman, a program director at Asian Americans Advancing Justice, the civic engagement and civil rights nonprofit. “We are far more likely to have family, friends, and business associates abroad. As a result, Asian Americans are likely to be overrepresented in all the data that Section 702 enables the government to collect.”

The 702 program is used by the US National Security Agency (NSA) to target the electronic communications of hundreds of thousands of foreigners each year. The program, which works to gather intel for counterterrorism, espionage, and cyber defense investigations, relies on the compulsory assistance of US telecom providers—a power granted on a year-by-year basis through “certifications” by a secret court.

Despite the government’s avowed efforts not to intercept and store Americans’ internet communications in bulk, the NSA is known to capture significant volumes of domestic calls, texts, and emails between Americans and people overseas. The law, as it is, does little to prevent federal agents from dredging up the content of those calls or messages later without a warrant, for reasons often irrelevant to why they were captured in the first place.

On Monday, another letter directed at Senator majority leader Chuck Schumer was signed by more than 20 civil liberties groups that are likewise opposed to any attempt to prolong 702 surveillance, which falls under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), by linking its fate to a spending bill that will be inevitably negotiated at a high level, with little or no opportunity for amendment once it reaches the House or Senate floor. A leading contender for such a bill, a congressional source told WIRED last week, is the National Defense Authorization Act, annual legislation that’s considered “must pass,” and which will allocate roughly $886 billion in national security spending across the Pentagon and US Department of Energy next year.

The majority leader signaled openness to adopting other “must pass” legislation on Monday: an appropriations bill sponsored by House speaker Mike Johnson, which Schumer said “pleased” him, in that it avoided “steep cuts” and was “moving in our direction.” Attaching a 702 amendment to any stopgap spending bill at this hour, however, could serve as a poison pill, eliciting stiff opposition from House Republicans—such as the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Jim Jordan—for whom FISA remains a four-letter word.

Asian Americans Raise Alarm Over ‘Chilling Effects’ of Section 702 Surveillance Program

In its plans to implement a White House executive order, CISA aims to strike a balance between promoting AI adoption for national security and defending against its malicious use.

Last month, a 120-page United States executive order laid out the Biden administration's plans to oversee companies that develop artificial intelligence technologies and directives for how the federal government should expand its adoption of AI. At its core, though, the document focused heavily on AI-related security issues—both finding and fixing vulnerabilities in AI products and developing defenses against potential cybersecurity attacks fueled by AI. As with any executive order, the rub is in how a sprawling and abstract document will be turned into concrete action. Today, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) will announce a “Roadmap for Artificial Intelligence” that lays out its plan for implementing the order.

CISA divides its plans to tackle AI cybersecurity and critical infrastructure-related topics into five buckets. Two involve promoting communication, collaboration, and workforce expertise across public and private partnerships, and three are more concretely related to implementing specific components of the EO. CISA is housed within the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

“It's important to be able to put this out and to hold ourselves, frankly, accountable both for the broad things that we need to do for our mission, but also what was in the executive order,” CISA director Jen Easterly told WIRED ahead of the road map's release. “AI as software is clearly going to have phenomenal impacts on society, but just as it will make our lives better and easier, it could very well do the same for our adversaries large and small. So our focus is on how we can ensure the safe and secure development and implementation of these systems.”

CISA's plan focuses on using AI responsibly—but also aggressively in US digital defense. Easterly emphasizes that, while the agency is “focused on security over speed” in terms of the development of AI-powered defense capabilities, the fact is that attackers will be harnessing these tools—and in some cases already are—so it is necessary and urgent for the US government to utilize them as well.

With this in mind, CISA's approach to promoting the use of AI in digital defense will center around established ideas that both the public and private sectors can take from traditional cybersecurity. As Easterly puts it, “AI is a form of software, and we can’t treat it as some sort of exotic thing that new rules need to apply to.” AI systems should be “secure by design,” meaning that they've been developed with constraints and security in mind rather than attempting to retroactively add protections to a completed platform as an afterthought. CISA also intends to promote the use of “software bills of materials” and other measures to keep AI systems open to scrutiny and supply chain audits.

“AI manufacturers \[need\] to take accountability for the security outcomes—that is the whole idea of shifting the burden onto those companies that can most bear it,” Easterly says. “Those are the ones that are building and designing these technologies, and it’s about the importance of embracing radical transparency. Ensuring we know what is in this software so we can ensure it is protected.”

Finally, CISA will conduct assessments of the threats US critical infrastructure could face from AI-powered attacks. The agency plans to collaborate across the industrial control and critical infrastructure landscape to make recommendations for how these vital services—which are often built on always-on, legacy technology—can defend against novel threats and safely implement AI-powered protections.

“In last month’s Executive Order, the President called on DHS to promote the adoption of AI safety standards globally and help ensure the safe, secure, and responsible use and development of AI,” Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in a statement today. "CISA’s roadmap lays out the steps that the agency will take as part of our Department’s broader efforts to both leverage AI and mitigate its risks to our critical infrastructure and cyber defenses.”

In practice, it's a massive and unwieldy set of goals. And some, like plans to hold businesses accountable, hinge largely on voluntary commitments and collaborations. But CISA's “road map” is a gesture toward imbuing its efforts with some amount of transparency and public responsibility at a critical moment.

“Not only are these going to be the most powerful capabilities of our lifetime, they could potentially be the most powerful weapons of our lifetime,” Easterly says. “We need to ensure that we are protecting them and protecting our global citizenry from the malicious use of these capabilities.”

CISA Has a New Road Map for Handling Weaponized AI

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.”

Source

Wired