After eight months, one of the US’s most prominent crypto-crime investigators may finally be coming home.

For eight months, the criminal investigator who pioneered cryptocurrency tracing as a law enforcement technique has, in a bizarre twist of fate, been jailed in Nigeria facing charges of money laundering and tax evasion. Now he may finally be coming home.

On Wednesday in Abuja, a court ruled that criminal charges against Gambaryan, a Binance executive who previously served as an IRS criminal investigator for a decade, will be dropped on medical grounds as pressure from the US government has grown to secure Gambaryan's release.

Gambaryan was detained in February and later jailed after being invited to the country by Nigerian officials to discuss a dispute between the Nigerian government and Binance over its history of money laundering and the exchange's alleged role in devaluing the Nigerian national currency. He's since been held in the country's Kuje prison, where, according to his family and his attorneys, he's suffered acutely from a herniated disc in his spine that requires immediate surgery.

Despite the Nigerian court's decision to drop the charges against Gambaryan, first reported by Bloomberg News, Gambaryan is still in Nigeria and was returned to jail after the ruling, according to Patrick Hillman, a former Binance executive and colleague of Gambaryan's who has been involved with the lobbying effort to free him. “We’re all kind of waiting right now to hear that he’s on a plane, airborne, and headed home,” Hillman says. “Until we have verification of that, we’re all just clutching our shirt collars and waiting to make sure there are no other hiccups.”

A spokesperson for Gambaryan's family declined to comment, and Binance didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. The country's criminal case against Binance, despite Gambaryan's release, will continue, according to Reuters.

International pressure has steadily grown on Nigeria to release Gambaryan, whose health has visibly declined during his time in jail. In July, he attended a court hearing in a wheelchair. In September, a video captured him limping into court on a single crutch, pleading in vain for help from a Nigerian security guard.

Meanwhile, 16 members of Congress signed a letter to the White House calling for Gambaryan's case to be treated as a hostage situation. A resolution advanced in the House Foreign Affairs Committee called on the US to push for his release. Most recently, a group of state attorneys general similarly called on the White House to apply the necessary leverage to free Gambaryan.

Nigeria Drops Charges Against Tigran Gambaryan, Jailed Binance Exec and Former IRS Agent

The 115,000-plus files related to UN Women included detailed financial disclosures from organizations around the world—and personal details and testimonials from vulnerable individuals.

A database containing sensitive, sometimes personal information from the United Nations Trust Fund to End Violence Against Women was openly accessible on the internet, revealing more than 115,000 files related to organizations that partner with or receive funding from UN Women. The documents range from staffing information and contracts to letters and even detailed financial audits about organizations working with vulnerable communities around the world, including under repressive regimes.

Security researcher Jeremiah Fowler discovered the database, which was not password protected or otherwise access controlled, and disclosed the finding to the UN, which secured the database. Such incidents are not uncommon, and many researchers regularly find and disclose examples of exposures to help organizations correct data management mistakes. But Fowler emphasizes that this ubiquity is exactly why it is important to continue to raise awareness about the threat of such misconfigurations. The UN Women database is a prime example of a small error that could create additional risk for women, children, and LGBTQ people living in hostile situations worldwide.

“They're doing great work and helping real people on the ground, but the cybersecurity aspect is still critical,” Fowler tells WIRED. “I've found lots of data before, including from all sorts of government agencies, but these organizations are helping people who are at risk just for being who they are, where they are.”

A spokesperson for UN Women tells WIRED in a statement that the organization appreciates collaboration from cybersecurity researchers and combines any outside findings with its own telemetry and monitoring.

“As per our incident response procedure, containment measures were rapidly put in place and investigative actions are being taken,” the spokesperson said of the database Fowler discovered. “We are in the process of assessing how to communicate with the potential affected persons so that they are aware and alert as well as incorporating the lessons learned to prevent similar incidents in the future.”

The data could expose people in multiple ways. At the organizational level, some of the financial audits include bank account information, but more broadly, the disclosures provide granular detail on where each organization gets its funding and how it budgets. The information also includes breakdowns of operating costs, and details about employees that could be used to map the interconnections between civil society groups in a country or region. Such information is also ripe for abuse in scams since the UN is such a trusted organization, and the exposed data would provide details on internal operations and potentially serve as templates for malicious actors to create legitimate-looking communications that purport to come from the UN.

“You have a list of organizations and details about their staff and activities, and some of the projects I saw had budgets in the millions of dollars,” Fowler says. “If this data fell into the wrong hands or it reached the dark web, you could have scammers or an authoritarian government looking at which organizations are working where, and who they working with, to target them and even find out names of people they've been helping.”

This leads to the other crucial element of the finding: In addition to fueling scams and potentially exposing local organizations, the data could be exploited to directly target at-risk individuals with extortion attempts or even local law enforcement action.

“I saw letters from people who were victims of kidnapping, rape, abuse—people telling their stories probably believing that they will remain anonymous,” Fowler says. “There was a letter from someone who had gotten HIV who was helped out by a foundation, and they told their whole story of how their family and friends had turned on them.”

If the finding spurs infrastructure review and other detections, it could go a long way toward helping UN Women—and the sprawling ecosystem of UN organizations more broadly—to catch any other easy-to-fix errors and prevent potential data breaches.

Exposed United Nations Database Left Sensitive Information Accessible Online

The North Atlantic Fella Organization, which started as a way to fight Kremlin propaganda, has raised millions of dollars to send vital equipment directly to soldiers fighting Russia.

In May 2022, just months after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a disparate group of people from across the globe decided that they wanted to fight back.

This turned into the North Atlantic Fella Organization (NAFO), a decentralized online activist network designed to combat pro-Kremlin propaganda, primarily focusing on the platform then known as Twitter. The members, identified by cartoon Shiba Inu avatars, mocked Russian government accounts and used meme warfare to disrupt Moscow’s propaganda over the invasion.

But in November 2022, Elon Musk took control of the platform, changed its name to X, and effectively allowed Russia’s propagandists free rein to do whatever they wanted.

While NAFO members continued to push back, posting memes in response to any posts from official Russian accounts, they knew they had to do something else to alter the course of the war. And so, over the course of the past two years, they have helped to raise tens of millions of dollars for Ukrainian frontline forces, funding weapons, ammunition, medical equipment, and vehicles—many of them branded with the distinctive NAFO livery.

Among the items funded by these shitposting cartoon dogs is a $250,000 marine drone dubbed “Raccoon’s Revenge” that the Ukrainian government says was used to take out a Russian warship. The group has also funded thousands of drones that have become an increasingly important weapon in pushing back Russian forces. Those on the front line say that NAFO’s efforts are vital in combating Russia’s assault.

“This is our only way to win, because the Russian army is bigger than us. We need more drones. It is very, very important,” Oleksandr Sokolenko, a commander of the drone unit in the 79th Air Assault Brigade, tells WIRED. When he spoke to WIRED earlier this month, Sokolenko said he was in a trench between Vuhledar and Kurakhove in the Donetsk Oblast in eastern Ukraine.

Sokolenko first heard about NAFO’s work from a friend who was also in the Ukrainian army, and now believes the work they are doing to fund drones for his brigade is vital to their chances of winning the war.

“In the beginning, when I joined the army, I was in the infantry. But I recognized that drones are really very critical,” Sokolenko says. “So I decided to work with drones. My first time \[flying a drone\] it was a DJI Mavic, I dropped grenades from it. Now, it's my main work.”

Sokolenko, who joined the Ukrainian military when the war broke out, previously worked as an actor, appearing onstage and in movies. “It’s like Shakespeare said, all the world’s a stage,” Sokolenko joked, flagging that Ukrainian president Vlodomyr Zelensky had also been an actor before becoming a politician.

Because of NAFO’s decentralized structure, it’s impossible to get specific figures on how many people identify as members of the movement—fellas, in NAFO parlance—but one member believes it has to be in the thousands at least.

“You can't just fundraise $250,000 for a naval drone if there's not thousands of people \[involved\],” a UK-based fella, who did not want to be named over fears of threats from Russia, tells WIRED. That was funded in direct collaboration with United24, the Ukrainian government organization that was set up to allow people to help the Ukrainian war effort.

“It all started in November 2022, when United24 launched the first fleet of naval drones, a project that would later change the course of the maritime war,” a spokesperson for United24 tells WIRED. “Fellas were eager to help and to encourage their initiative. We made a special offer: to fundraise a NAFO drone and brand it with a name of their choice.”

The incentive worked, and in the space of just two months, NAFO had raised $276,429, and decided to call the drone Raccoon’s Revenge, a reference to the raccoons stolen by Russian zookeeper Oleg Zubkov during the Russian retreat from Kherson in November 2022.

In total, NAFO has raised close to $1 million across four fundraising campaigns in collaboration with United24. Their current campaign—dubbed Fellas Fury—is seeking to raise funds for remote control combat robots. Beyond official fundraising efforts in conjunction with the Ukrainian government, NAFO members have also launched numerous separate campaigns conducted in close collaboration with troops on the ground.

Because NAFO does not have a central leader, the fundraising efforts are organized on the basis of brigades or divisions, typically led by one person who has a connection to a particular unit or soldier in the Ukrainian army. These brigades and divisions usually focus on one specific item, whether its vehicles, rifles, drones, or medical equipment, and part of their fundraising efforts is the sale of patches, which have become a huge collectors item.

The fundraising drives are organized on Discord, Signal, and Telegram—but not on X, the platform that the NAFO movement has thrived on for years.

“People are being forced away from X, just because Russia basically bought the platform,” the UK-based fella tells WIRED, citing the prevalence of Russian bots and pro-Kremlin accounts allowed on the platform under Musk’s stewardship. X did not respond to a request for comment.

One of the most successful and prolific NAFO fundraisers has been Ragnar Sass, who runs the NAFO 69th Sniffing Brigade, which has raised more than $10 million to date for Ukrainian troops. That money has allowed Sass and his brigade to send more than 460 vehicles to Ukrainian troops, as well as more than 1,000 drones and other equipment to soldiers on the ground. They have even rescued 32 Ukrainian pets.

Sass’s brigade not only supplies the trucks, but also kits them out with custom technology designed specifically for combat such as jammers and night vision cameras. The trucks and jeeps are then painted, including NAFO lettering, and driven in convoys to the front lines in Ukraine.

“What makes us different, is that we are analyzing every week what are the most effective electronic warfare solutions,” Sass tells WIRED while coordinating his brigade’s 33rd convoy to the Ukrainian front lines.

Sass is an Estonian entrepreneur and cofounder of cloud-based software company Pipedrive, which was valued at more than $1 billion in 2020. He has been operating in Ukraine for more than a decade, and in 2019 launched a startup incubator in Kiev called Lift99.

When the war broke out in early 2022, Sass donated $20,000 to the Ukrainian army. “Many people followed, and by the end of day, we collected $200,000,” Sass says. By March 2022, Sass had organized his first convoy of 14 cars, and by June of that year, he joined with NAFO.

Sass’ operation incentivizes donations by offering a patch to anyone who donates more than €100 ($110), and he says to date they have sent out more than 10,000 patches to donors in more than 50 countries.

The NAFO fundraisers are needed, Sass says, because of the glacial pace that organizations like NATO operate in response to wartime situations.

“We are the fastest and most effective,” Sass says. “We can fundraise and deliver help in a matter of days. Like we did with Kursk: We started a campaign on Thursday evening. Next week, car and drones were handed over to units in Kursk. This war will be won by drones, and NATO procurement is from the stone age.”

Recently, British lawmaker David Taylor joined Sass on one of his delivery missions. “You are doing incredible work and I was proud to have joined you,” Taylor wrote in response to a post by the 69th Sniffing Brigade on X.

Taylor is far from the only high-profile figure who has publicly thanked NAFO for their efforts.

“A massive shoutout to the incredible NAFO Fellas for your unwavering support of Ukraine,” Andriy Yermak, the head of the office of the president of Ukraine, wrote on X earlier this month. “Your ongoing fight for truth and against disinformation is of immense importance.” General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the Ukraine ambassador to the UK and former commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armed forces, has a NAFO patch.

US congressman Adam Kinzinger is a NAFO member, and Mark Rutte, the secretary general of NATO, was recently presented with his very own framed Shibu Inu cartoon dog.

Ukrainian troops also regularly share their thanks to NAFO donors on social media, posting pictures of the vehicles or weapons funded by the group and how they were used in combating Russia.

“While carrying out some special tasks, I came across a vehicle that helps partially destroy Russian UAV every day,” Bohdan Patel, a 21-year-old Ukrainian soldier, posted on X alongside a picture of a truck with a NAFO patch emblazoned on the side. “Thank you to the NAFO community for the support, it is priceless.”

The Shitposting Cartoon Dogs Sending Trucks, Drones, and Weapons to Ukraine’s Front Lines

Immigration and Customs Enforcement's contract with Paragon Solutions faces scrutiny over whether it complies with the Biden administration's executive order on spyware, WIRED has learned.

A $2 million contract that United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement signed with Israeli commercial spyware vendor Paragon Solutions has been paused and placed under compliance review, WIRED has learned.

The White House’s scrutiny of the contract marks the first test of the Biden administration’s executive order restricting the government’s use of spyware.

The one-year contract between Paragon’s US subsidiary in Chantilly, Virginia, and ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) Division 3 was signed on September 27 and first reported by WIRED on October 1. A few days later, on October 8, HSI issued a stop-work order for the award “to review and verify compliance with Executive Order 14093,” a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson tells WIRED.

The executive order signed by President Joe Biden in March 2023 aims to restrict the US government’s use of commercial spyware technology while promoting its “responsible use” that aligns with the protection of human rights.

DHS did not confirm whether the contract, which says it covers a “fully configured proprietary solution including license, hardware, warranty, maintenance, and training,” includes the deployment of Paragon’s flagship product, Graphite, a powerful spyware tool that reportedly extracts data primarily from cloud backups.

“We immediately engaged the leadership at DHS and worked very collaboratively together to understand exactly what was put in place, what the scope of this contract was, and whether or not it adhered to the procedures and requirements of the executive order,” a senior US administration official with first-hand knowledge of the workings of the executive order tells WIRED. The official requested anonymity to speak candidly about the White House’s review of the ICE contract.

Paragon Solutions did not respond to WIRED's request to comment on the contract's review.

The process laid out in the executive order requires a robust review of the due diligence regarding both the vendor and the tool, to see whether any concerns, such as counterintelligence, security, and improper use risks, arise. It also stipulates that an agency may not make operational use of the commercial spyware until at least seven days after providing this information to the White House or until the president's national security adviser consents.

“Ultimately, there will have to be a determination made by the leadership of the department. The outcome may be—based on the information and the facts that we have—that this particular vendor and tool does not spur a violation of the requirements in the executive order,” the senior official says.

While publicly available details of ICE’s contract with Paragon are relatively sparse, its existence alone raised alarms among civil liberties groups, with the nonprofit watchdog Human Rights Watch saying in a statement that “giving ICE access to spyware risks exacerbating” the department’s problematic practices. HRW also questioned what it calls the Biden administration’s “piecemeal approach” to spyware regulation.

The level of seriousness with which the US government approaches the compliance review of the Paragon contract will influence international trust in the executive order, experts say.

“We know the dangers mercenary spyware poses when sold to dictatorships, but there is also plenty of evidence of harms in democracies,” says John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab who has been instrumental in exposing spyware-related abuses. “This is why oversight, transparency, and accountability around any US agency attempt to acquire these tools is essential.”

International efforts to rein in commercial spyware are gathering pace. On October 11, during the 57th session of the Human Rights Council, United Nation member states reached a consensus to adopt language acknowledging the threat that the misuse of commercial spyware poses to democratic values, as well as the protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms. “This is an important norm setting, especially for countries who claim to be democracies,” says Natalia Krapiva, senior tech-legal counsel at international nonprofit Access Now.

Although the US is leading global efforts to combat spyware through its executive order, trade and visa restrictions, and sanctions, the European Union has been more lenient. Only 11 of the 27 EU member states have joined the US-led initiative stipulated in the “Joint Statement on Efforts to Counter the Proliferation and Misuse of Commercial Spyware,” which now counts 21 signatories, including Australia, Canada, Costa Rica, Japan, and South Korea.

“An unregulated market is both a threat to the citizens of those countries, but also to those governments, and I think that increasingly our hope is that there is a recognition \[in the EU\] of that as well,” the senior US administration official tells WIRED.

The European Commission published on October 16 new guidelines on the export of cyber-surveillance items, including spyware; however, it has yet to respond to the EU Parliament's call to draft a legislative proposal or admonish countries for their misuse of the technology.

While Poland launched an inquiry into the previous government’s spyware use earlier this year, a probe in Spain over the use of spyware against Spanish politicians has so far led to no accusations against those involved, and one in Greece has cleared government agencies of any wrongdoing.

“Europe is in the midst of a mercenary spyware crisis,” says Scott-Railton. “I have looked on with puzzled wonderment as European institutions and governments fail to address this issue at scale, even though there are domestic and export-related international issues.”

With the executive order, the US focuses on its national security and foreign policy interests in the deployment of the technology in accordance with human rights and the rule of law, as well as mitigating counterintelligence risks (e.g. the targeting of US officials). Europe—though it acknowledges the foreign policy dimension—has so far primarily concentrated on human rights considerations rather than counterintelligence and national security threats.

Such a threat became apparent in August, when Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) found that Russian government hackers were using exploits made by spyware companies NSO Group and Intellexa.

Meanwhile, Access Now and Citizen Lab speculated in May that Estonia may have been behind the hacking of exiled Russian journalists, dissidents, and others with NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware.

“In an attempt to protect themselves from Russia, some European countries are using the same tools against the same people that Russia is targeting,” says Access Now’s Krapiva. “By having easier access to this kind of vulnerabilities, because they are then sold on the black market, Russia is able to purchase them in the end.”

“It’s a huge mess,” she adds. “By attempting to protect national security, they actually undermine it in many ways.”

Citizen Lab’s Scott-Railton believes these developments should raise concern among European decisionmakers just as they have for their US counterparts, who emphasized the national security aspect in the executive order.

“What is it going to take for European heads of state to recognize they have a national security threat from this technology?” Scott-Railton says. “Until they recognize the twin human rights and national security threats, the way the US has, they are going to be at a tremendous security disadvantage.”

ICE's $2 Million Contract With a Spyware Vendor Is Under White House Review

Donald Trump's opposition to “woke” safety standards for artificial intelligence would likely mean the dismantling of regulations that protect Americans from misinformation, discrimination, and worse.

If Donald Trump wins the US presidential election in November, the guardrails could come off of artificial intelligence development, even as the dangers of defective AI models grow increasingly serious.

Trump’s election to a second term would dramatically reshape—and possibly cripple—efforts to protect Americans from the many dangers of poorly designed artificial intelligence, including misinformation, discrimination, and the poisoning of algorithms used in technology like autonomous vehicles.

The federal government has begun overseeing and advising AI companies under an executive order that President Joe Biden issued in October 2023. But Trump has vowed to repeal that order, with the Republican Party platform saying it “hinders AI innovation” and “imposes Radical Leftwing ideas” on AI development.

Trump’s promise has thrilled critics of the executive order who see it as illegal, dangerous, and an impediment to America’s digital arms race with China. Those critics include many of Trump’s closest allies, from X CEO Elon Musk and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen to Republican members of Congress and nearly two dozen GOP state attorneys general. Trump’s running mate, Ohio senator JD Vance, is staunchly opposed to AI regulation.

“Republicans don't want to rush to overregulate this industry,” says Jacob Helberg, a tech executive and AI enthusiast who has been dubbed “Silicon Valley’s Trump whisperer.”

But tech and cyber experts warn that eliminating the EO’s safety and security provisions would undermine the trustworthiness of AI models that are increasingly creeping into all aspects of American life, from transportation and medicine to employment and surveillance.

The upcoming presidential election, in other words, could help determine whether AI becomes an unparalleled tool of productivity or an uncontrollable agent of chaos.

**Oversight and Advice, Hand in Hand**

Biden’s order addresses everything from using AI to improve veterans’ health care to setting safeguards for AI’s use in drug discovery. But most of the political controversy over the EO stems from two provisions in the section dealing with digital security risks and real-world safety impacts.

One provision requires owners of powerful AI models to report to the government about how they’re training the models and protecting them from tampering and theft, including by providing the results of “red-team tests” designed to find vulnerabilities in AI systems by simulating attacks. The other provision directs the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to produce guidance that helps companies develop AI models that are safe from cyberattacks and free of biases.

Work on these projects is well underway. The government has proposed quarterly reporting requirements for AI developers, and NIST has released AI guidance documents on risk management, secure software development, synthetic content watermarking, and preventing model abuse, in addition to launching multiple initiatives to promote model testing.

Supporters of these efforts say they’re essential to maintaining basic government oversight of the rapidly expanding AI industry and nudging developers toward better security. But to conservative critics, the reporting requirement is illegal government overreach that will crush AI innovation and expose developers’ trade secrets, while the NIST guidance is a liberal ploy to infect AI with far-left notions about disinformation and bias that amount to censorship of conservative speech.

At a rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, last December, Trump took aim at Biden’s EO after alleging without evidence that the Biden administration had already used AI for nefarious purposes.

“When I’m reelected,” he said, “I will cancel Biden’s artificial intelligence executive order and ban the use of AI to censor the speech of American citizens on Day One.”

**Due Diligence or Undue Burden?**

Biden’s effort to collect information about how companies are developing, testing, and protecting their AI models sparked an uproar on Capitol Hill almost as soon as it debuted.

Congressional Republicans seized on the fact that Biden justified the new requirement by invoking the 1950 Defense Production Act, a wartime measure that lets the government direct private-sector activities to ensure a reliable supply of goods and services. GOP lawmakers called Biden’s move inappropriate, illegal, and unnecessary.

Conservatives have also blasted the reporting requirement as a burden on the private sector. The provision “could scare away would-be innovators and impede more ChatGPT-type breakthroughs,” Representative Nancy Mace said during a March hearing she chaired on “White House overreach on AI.”

Helberg says a burdensome requirement would benefit established companies and hurt startups. He also says Silicon Valley critics fear the requirements “are a stepping stone” to a licensing regime in which developers must receive government permission to test models.

Steve DelBianco, the CEO of the conservative tech group NetChoice, says the requirement to report red-team test results amounts to de facto censorship, given that the government will be looking for problems like bias and disinformation. “I am completely worried about a left-of-center administration … whose red-teaming tests will cause AI to constrain what it generates for fear of triggering these concerns,” he says.

Conservatives argue that any regulation that stifles AI innovation will cost the US dearly in the technology competition with China.

“They are so aggressive, and they have made dominating AI a core North Star of their strategy for how to fight and win wars,” Helberg says. “The gap between our capabilities and the Chinese keeps shrinking with every passing year.”

**“Woke” Safety Standards**

By including social harms in its AI security guidelines, NIST has outraged conservatives and set off another front in the culture war over content moderation and free speech.

Republicans decry the NIST guidance as a form of backdoor government censorship. Senator Ted Cruz recently slammed what he called NIST’s “woke AI ‘safety’ standards” for being part of a Biden administration “plan to control speech” based on “amorphous” social harms. NetChoice has warned NIST that it is exceeding its authority with quasi-regulatory guidelines that upset “the appropriate balance between transparency and free speech.”

Many conservatives flatly dismiss the idea that AI can perpetuate social harms and should be designed not to do so.

“This is a solution in search of a problem that really doesn't exist,” Helberg says. “There really hasn’t been massive evidence of issues in AI discrimination.”

Studies and investigations have repeatedly shown that AI models contain biases that perpetuate discrimination, including in hiring, policing, and health care. Research suggests that people who encounter these biases may unconsciously adopt them.

Conservatives worry more about AI companies’ overcorrections to this problem than about the problem itself. “There is a direct inverse correlation between the degree of wokeness in an AI and the AI's usefulness,” Helberg says, citing an early issue with Google’s generative AI platform.

Republicans want NIST to focus on AI’s physical safety risks, including its ability to help terrorists build bioweapons (something Biden’s EO does address). If Trump wins, his appointees will likely deemphasize government research on AI’s social harms. Helberg complains that the “enormous amount” of research on AI bias has dwarfed studies of “greater threats related to terrorism and biowarfare.”

**Defending a “Light-Touch Approach”**

AI experts and lawmakers offer robust defenses of Biden’s AI safety agenda.

These projects “enable the United States to remain on the cutting edge” of AI development “while protecting Americans from potential harms,” says Representative Ted Lieu, the Democratic cochair of the House’s AI task force.

The reporting requirements are essential for alerting the government to potentially dangerous new capabilities in increasingly powerful AI models, says a US government official who works on AI issues. The official, who requested anonymity to speak freely, points to OpenAI’s admission about its latest model’s “inconsistent refusal of requests to synthesize nerve agents.”

The official says the reporting requirement isn’t overly burdensome. They argue that, unlike AI regulations in the European Union and China, Biden’s EO reflects “a very broad, light-touch approach that continues to foster innovation.”

Nick Reese, who served as the Department of Homeland Security’s first director of emerging technology from 2019 to 2023, rejects conservative claims that the reporting requirement will jeopardize companies’ intellectual property. And he says it could actually benefit startups by encouraging them to develop “more computationally efficient,” less data-heavy AI models that fall under the reporting threshold.

AI’s power makes government oversight imperative, says Ami Fields-Meyer, who helped draft Biden’s EO as a White House tech official.

“We’re talking about companies that say they’re building the most powerful systems in the history of the world,” Fields-Meyer says. “The government’s first obligation is to protect people. ‘Trust me, we’ve got this’ is not an especially compelling argument.”

Experts praise NIST’s security guidance as a vital resource for building protections into new technology. They note that flawed AI models can produce serious social harms, including rental and lending discrimination and improper loss of government benefits.

Trump’s own first-term AI order required federal AI systems to respect civil rights, something that will require research into social harms.

The AI industry has largely welcomed Biden’s safety agenda. “What we're hearing is that it’s broadly useful to have this stuff spelled out,” the US official says. For new companies with small teams, “it expands the capacity of their folks to address these concerns.”

Rolling back Biden’s EO would send an alarming signal that “the US government is going to take a hands off approach to AI safety,” says Michael Daniel, a former presidential cyber adviser who now leads the Cyber Threat Alliance, an information sharing nonprofit.

As for competition with China, the EO’s defenders say safety rules will actually help America prevail by ensuring that US AI models work better than their Chinese rivals and are protected from Beijing’s economic espionage.

**Two Very Different Paths**

If Trump wins the White House next month, expect a sea change in how the government approaches AI safety.

Republicans want to prevent AI harms by applying “existing tort and statutory laws” as opposed to enacting broad new restrictions on the technology, Helberg says, and they favor “much greater focus on maximizing the opportunity afforded by AI, rather than overly focusing on risk mitigation.” That would likely spell doom for the reporting requirement and possibly some of the NIST guidance.

The reporting requirement could also face legal challenges now that the Supreme Court has weakened the deference that courts used to give agencies in evaluating their regulations.

And GOP pushback could even jeopardize NIST’s voluntary AI testing partnerships with leading companies. “What happens to those commitments in a new administration?” the US official asks.

This polarization around AI has frustrated technologists who worry that Trump will undermine the quest for safer models.

“Alongside the promises of AI are perils,” says Nicol Turner Lee, the director of the Brookings Institution’s Center for Technology Innovation, “and it is vital that the next president continue to ensure the safety and security of these systems.”

A Trump Win Could Unleash Dangerous AI

A new document shows the Department of Homeland Security is concerned that Chinese investment in lithium batteries to power energy grids will make them a threat to US supply chain security.

Analysts at the US Department of Homeland Security shared an internal report to local agencies in August, warning them about the economic risks of using Chinese utility storage batteries. It warns that the dependence on Chinese batteries could hurt developing a secure supply chain in the US.

The document, first obtained by national security transparency nonprofit Property of the People and seen by WIRED, accuses Chinese companies of “using People’s Republic of China state support to quickly and cheaply enter the emerging US utility battery energy storage industry and create supply chain dependencies on China,” and asks that any suspicious activity be reported.

Specifically, the report alleges three companies—Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Limited (CATL), Build Your Dreams (BYD), and Ruipu Energy Co. Ltd. (REPT)—have “benefited from the various forms of state support and leveraged this to further business strategies for gaining US market share.”

Currently, CATL and BYD lead the global energy storage battery market by far, with 40 percent and 12 percent market shares, respectively, according to South Korean energy research firm SNE Research. Eight out of the 10 top companies in the industry are from China, so there are few alternatives to turn to when building grid storage.

The report says it builds on previous documents that analyzed Chinese “state-supported firms’ use of noncompetitive tactics in the electric vehicle and battery supply chains.” DHS did not respond to a request for further comment.

In 2022, CATL entered a deal with Primergy Solar to build the largest US solar and storage project in Nevada, which came online this year. Its battery products have also been used by Duke Energy, a North Carolina–based utility company, although the latter dropped CATL as a supplier for marine base electricity storage after concerns around national security were raised by, in part, lawmakers in Washington.

In an emailed statement, Fred Zhang, a CATL spokesperson, rejects the categorization that the firm has relied on state support to gain an edge. “CATL has achieved tremendous growth through continuous innovation, farsighted strategic planning, and a commitment to high-quality products at a reasonable cost,” the statement says.

BYD and REPT did not reply to WIRED’s request for comment.

Following efforts to curb Chinese EV companies’ competitiveness, the US government is now also concerned about how domestic utility companies could become too dependent on Chinese batteries for energy storage.

The US government has in recent years started to catch up in the battery industry. The Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill set out investment tax credits and other economic incentives to build up energy storage capacity in the country. In September it awarded another $3 billion in incentives to projects that boost domestic production of batteries.

These incentives are also the focus of the DHS report, which alleges that Chinese-based firms are targeting US incentives to further grow their market share. “BYD’s public website as of spring 2023 highlighted how US state incentives can make BYD utility storage systems an attractive investment,” the report claims. (WIRED was unable to find the BYD website referenced in the report.)

The CATL spokesperson says the company “does not receive any US federal or state incentives.”

As the US utility grids incorporate more renewable energy sources like solar and wind, it’s essential to build up a battery storage capacity that can store intermittent energy supply for times of heightened demand. And Chinese companies have dominated the global industry of producing lithium batteries for this job. These companies make over 80 percent of the EV battery cells in the world, and they had plans to invest another $2 trillion in 2023 into new production capacities inside and outside the country.

“Chinese original equipment manufacturers currently supply about 90 percent of the energy storage system batteries, actually a larger share than for EVs,” says Vanessa Witte, a senior research analyst at Wood Mackenzie who focuses on US energy storage. “There is a huge oversupply right now, partly due to softening EV demand, along with a number of Tier 2 and Tier 3 OEMs that have started new manufacturing facilities. The excess supply is a big reason the prices are so low.”

These batteries are essential for global energy transition, and Chinese battery companies see them as an opportunity to widen their product markets. They’ve become such an important industry that the Chinese central government emphasized their importance for the first time in its annual government report in March.

The battery supply chain has also emerged as one of the top economic and security concerns around China in the eyes of the US government. The Biden administration has so far raised a 25 percent tariff on Chinese-made lithium-ion EV batteries (and even higher for the EVs they power.) The government has also repeatedly sounded alarms about the national security threats of having Chinese-made equipment and parts in domestic infrastructure.

So far, the particular conversations around energy storage batteries have mostly surrounded cybersecurity, worried that the components could contain backdoor access for hacking like those that have been suspected in Chinese-made port cranes. Those concerns are “a bit overstated,” Witte says. “There haven’t been any incidents that would lend one to believe the battery management system is sending data to China or could disrupt our infrastructure.”

There have been several political efforts to restrict the use of Chinese-made batteries in the US. The pentagon will be the first to be banned from buying batteries from six Chinese companies, in an order which will become effective in 2027, but some congressmembers are still asking for CATL and other Chinese companies to be added to trade blacklists, and there’s a bill in Congress that would ban DHS from procuring Chinese batteries.

But the DHS report shows that the government is also looking at whether the dominance of Chinese batteries can be an economic issue.

“It is simplistic to see this as just unfair competition due to Chinese government support, as a lot of what China did, such as creating demand for batteries through EV subsidies, is not unlike what we see in the West today,” says Yayoi Sekine, head of energy storage research at BloombergNEF.

The pricing advantage that Chinese battery companies have are also the results of harsh market competition and a more established battery supply chain in China, she says, and these battery companies are willing to squeeze their own margins in exchange for keeping their market shares. “We think the US government's attempts to support a healthy battery industry domestically has been incredibly generous through the incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law,” says Sekine, “but it may still be challenging to compete on cost.”

US Government Says Relying on Chinese Lithium Batteries Is Too Risky

Plus: The alleged SEC X account hacker gets charged, Kroger wriggles out of a face recognition scandal, and Microsoft deals with missing customer security logs.

In what may be a first, the US Department of Justice this week charged a hacker with attempting to cause injury and death by launching distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against hospitals. Ahmed Omer and his brother Alaa are accused of carrying out a cyberattack spree that targeted hundreds of victims under the hacktivist banner Anonymous Sudan. The group’s DDoS victims included Microsoft’s Azure cloud services, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and Israel’s missile alert system, according to prosecutors. It was the brothers’ alleged attacks on hospitals, however, that drew the most serious accusations from the Justice Department, which singled out Ahmed for allegedly seeking to kill people with the crude cyberattacks that overwhelm systems, knocking them offline.

If someone told you there’s a tool that can—using only open source information—create a “cyber profile” of you that can locate your phone in real time or place you at the scene of a crime at any date in the past, would you believe them? Canadian firm Global Intelligence claims to have created such a tool, dubbed Cybercheck, which it has sold to police departments across the US. Cybercheck-generated reports have been used to help convict at least two people of murder. However, a WIRED investigation found that Cybercheck’s reports have produced information that is either inaccurate or impossible to verify. And open source experts say some of the information Cybercheck claims to include—such as a device’s pings to a specific wireless network—would be impossible to obtain from publicly available sources.

The scourge of nonconsensual deepfake images has continued to proliferate, including on Telegram, where millions of people used “nudify” bots to “remove the clothes” of anyone—usually women and girls. A WIRED investigation identified 50 such bots and 25 channels linked to the creation of these abusive AI-generated explicit images. Telegram removed all 75 channels and bots after WIRED reached out, but many of them will likely respawn.

The slow death of the password may have gotten a speed boost this week. The FIDO Alliance, a tech industry association, announced new efforts to help hasten the adoption of passkeys, the cryptographically generated codes that are already replacing less-secure passwords. These efforts include a new Credential Exchange Protocol, which makes it easier to migrate passkeys between platforms and devices, and Passkey Central, a resource for company IT departments that aims to make it easier for organizations to adopt passkeys.

A group of researchers revealed this week that they created an algorithm that generates a malicious prompt capable of instructing an AI chatbot to identify personal information fed into it by a user and secretly send it to an attacker.

Finally, we went back in time to explore how well the US Army’s “solider of tomorrow,” unveiled 65 years ago this week, predicted the future of US military tech.

And that’s not all. 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.

If you use uBlock Origin’s Chrome extension to filter out online ads, expect to get mildly annoyed in the near future. Google has begun implementing new Chrome extension standards, called Manifest V3, that will disable the legacy version of uBlock Origin’s extension that most users likely have installed. And while you might be thinking, “Google is a silverback gorilla of online advertising, of course they’re finally forcing me to see ads!” there is some good news. A new version of the ad-filtering extension that meets the Manifest V3 standards, uBlock Origin Lite, is now available. Then again, it won’t block as much as the previous iteration of uBlock. Still, as a Google spokesperson told The Verge, you have options: “The top content filtering extensions all have Manifest V3 versions available — with options for users of AdBlock, Adblock Plus, uBlock Origin and AdGuard.” Either way, you’ll need to install a new extension soon.

**Alabama Man Charged in Hack of the SEC’s X Account**

US authorities announced charges this week against a 25-year-old Alabama man accused of hacking the Security and Exchange Commission’s X account. Prosecutors claim Eric Council Jr. obtained personal information and the materials for a fake ID of a person who controlled the @SECGov account from unidentified coconspirators. Council allegedly used the fake ID to carry out a SIM-swapping attack, duping AT&T retail store staff into giving him a new SIM card, which he ultimately used to take control of the victim’s phone account. The coconspirators used that to gain access to the SEC’s X account, where they posted a fake announcement about Bitcoin’s regulatory status, which was followed by a price jump of $1,000 per bitcoin. Council stands charged of conspiracy to commit aggravated identity theft and access device fraud.

**Kroger Says It Won’t Use Facial Recognition in Its Grocery Stores**

The grocery store chain Kroger has never used facial-recognition technology broadly in its stores and has no current plans to, a spokesperson told Fast Company this week. The company has been facing a firestorm over its use of electronic shelving labels over concerns that ESLs could be used to impose surge pricing on popular items, and fears that the devices could also be deployed with facial recognition. The company did a single-store facial-recognition pilot of a technology called EDGE in 2019, but it did not move forward with the service. US lawmakers including Rashida Tlaib, Elizabeth Warren, and Robert Casey have publicly raised concerns about Kroger’s use of ESLs.

**Microsoft Is Missing More Than 2 Weeks of Cloud Customers’ Security Logs**

Microsoft told customers that it failed to capture more than two weeks of security logs from certain cloud services in September, including Microsoft Entra, Sentinel, Defender for Cloud, and Purview. News of the lost logs was first reported by Business Insider. The company said in the notification that “a bug in one of Microsoft’s internal monitoring agents resulted in a malfunction in some of the agents when uploading log data to our internal logging platform.” The blank extends from September 2 to September 19. A Microsoft executive confirmed to TechCrunch that the incident was caused by an “operational bug within our internal monitoring agent.”

System activity logs are crucial for all sorts of operations and are particularly used for security monitoring and investigations, because they can expose breaches and malicious activity. After Russian hackers breached US government networks through SolarWinds software in 2020, many agencies couldn’t detect the activity in their Microsoft Azure cloud services because they weren’t paying for Microsoft’s premium tier features, so they didn’t have adequate network activity logs. Lawmakers were outraged about the up-charge, and the Biden administration worked for more than two years to get Microsoft to make the logging services free. The company ultimately announced the change in July 2023.

Google Chrome’s uBlock Origin Purge Has Begun

Moldova is facing a tide of disinformation unprecedented in complexity and aggression, the head of a new center meant to combat it tells WIRED. And platforms like Facebook, TikTok, Telegram and YouTube could do more.

A TikTok video of actor Brian Baumgartner, from the American version of _The Office_, calling for the overthrow of the president of a small European country was an early sign that this would be no ordinary election.

Late last year, Baumgartner appeared among a lineup of American celebrities addressing Maia Sandu, the current, pro-European president of Moldova and proclaiming in bad Russian: “We, Hollywood stars, support the people of Moldova in their desire to overthrow you, Sandu.” These weren’t deepfakes. Instead the videos—which researchers suggested were part of a pro-Kremlin influence operation—were commissioned on Cameo, the app that lets anyone buy personalized greetings from celebrities. Neither Cameo nor Baumgartner’s representatives replied to WIRED’s request for comment.

For years, Moldova—a country similar in size to the US state of Maryland, sandwiched between the EU and Ukraine—has complained of Russian meddling. But more recently, as this former Soviet state prepares for a pivotal presidential vote and referendum on whether to join the EU, the country has become a cautionary tale about how the world’s biggest social media platforms can be exploited to create and fund a complex disinformation operation that sows discord around some of a society’s most divisive subjects.

Since war broke out in neighboring Ukraine two years ago, bots have been scouring the Moldovan internet, searching for authentic content to boost to wide audiences, such as videos of Ukrainian-refugees behaving badly. Then ordinary Moldovans complained their Facebook feeds were being inundated with political, often anti-government ads launched by pages with Vietnamese names. A year later, researchers estimated Meta had earned at least $200,000 from a pro-Kremlin ad campaign targeting Moldova alone. Russia’s foreign ministry did not reply to WIRED’s request to comment.

“It’s unprecedented in terms of complexity,” says Ana Revenco, Moldova’s former interior minister, now in charge of the country’s new Center for Strategic Communication and Combating Disinformation. What’s happening in Moldova on Facebook, Telegram, TikTok, and YouTube, she believes, carries a warning for the rest of the world. “This shows us our collective vulnerability,” she says. “Platforms are not only active here. If \[Russia\] can use them here, they can use them everywhere.”

Ahead of the vote on Sunday, accounts linked to Russia have reached new levels of aggression, Revenco says. “They activate accounts that have been created long ago and have been on standby,” she explains. “They are engaging bots, and they're synchronizing posts across multiple platforms.”

The EU referendum is a pivotal moment for Moldova. On Sunday, voters will face a yes or no choice on whether their country should enshrine its intention to eventually join the EU in its constitution and allow President Sandu to seek closer ties with the bloc, a move prompted by the war in Ukraine. A yes vote “would create the legal guarantee for the country to move towards the European Union, irrespective of governments in the future,” says Iulian Groza, executive director of the Institute for European Policies and Reforms, a nonprofit that wants to accelerate Moldova’s integration into Europe.

Polls suggest 55 percent of Moldovans support joining the EU. But more than one-third of eligible voters must turn up at the polling stations for the vote to be valid. That means pro-Kremlin forces in the country are encouraging people not to vote at all on Sunday, says Groza. “Those who campaign to boycott the vote, basically campaign for the referendum not to pass.”

Revenco believes there is evidence that Russia is behind the disorientating amount of online activity. “Police investigations throughout the last two years clearly saw the connection with the organized criminal groups, including those who are on the international sanctions list,” she says. “This investigation traces their connections indeed to Russia, including the military ecosystem, banking ecosystem, and financial, including those banks that are also on the international sanctions list.”

In October, police announced the seizure of piles of cash and mobile phones they linked to organizations associated with Ilan Shor, a fugitive Moldovan oligarch, living in exile in Russia. Police said these affiliates were preparing to organize vote-buying through Telegram—an allegation Shor called an “absurd spectacle.” On Telegram, bots have been offering up to $280 to people who post on Facebook against joining the EU. “They are outsourcing disinformation,” says Victoria Olari, research assistant at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, who is based in Moldova’s capital, Chișinău. “They're being paid to make posts for their friends, for their close circle of people.”

Olari described the Telegram bot as an example of how brazen Russia had become in Moldova. "This is the first time Russia is not hiding anymore; they are doing this openly,” she says. Government officials claim Russia spent around €50 million ($54.3 million) on election interference last year, with the amount expected to more than double by the end of 2024, according to Revenco.

Revenco says her team has been trying to reach out to social media platforms about the problems. “Communication is much better than, let's say, one year ago.” Yet there is still room for the platforms to do much more, she says.

The narratives she sees circulating are designed to increase anti-EU sentiment, pro-Russia sentiment, but also anti-Ukrainian sentiment, she adds. “AI is used in order to multiply the messages and reach out to a greater audience in a short time.” Revenco did not provide specific examples, but a deepfake video featuring President Sandu has been circulating on Telegram, according to think tank Watchdog MD, even as the polls suggest Sandu will be reelected this weekend.

Earlier this month, Meta said it had removed Facebook and Instagram accounts centered around a dozen fictitious, Russian-language news brands. The fake accounts behind this activity posted original content, including cartoons and criticism of President Sandu, Meta said in a statement. “The operators also posted about offering money and giveaways, including food and concert tickets, if people in Moldova would follow them on social media or make graffiti with the campaign’s brand names.” Telegram, TikTok parent Bytedance, and YouTube parent Alphabet did not respond to WIRED’s questions about the steps they’d taken to limit disinformation in Moldova ahead of the vote.

Although Telegram did remove accounts linked to Shor earlier this month, at the authorities’ request, Revenco does not seem impressed by the platforms’ efforts overall. “The fact that \[disinformation\] continues to be present and very creative in terms of using various capabilities of these networks once again proves that the efforts undertaken so far are not sufficient.”

The Disinformation Warning Coming From the Edge of Europe

Sixty-five years ago, the Army's leaders unveiled its “ultimate weapon” for the age of atomic warfare. Here’s how the service’s vision stands up to today's reality.

Then there’s the matter of the Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS), the Army’s futuristic “smart” goggles. Currently based on a ruggedized version of the Microsoft HoloLens 2 augmented reality headset, the IVAS is both night vision goggles and futuristic heads-up display, capable of feeding sensor inputs into a soldier’s line of sight. The Army has long experimented with helmet-mounted displays for decades as part of various “future warrior” programs, and the IVAS hasn’t been immune to the pitfalls of previous efforts—namely, complaints from soldiers about “mission-affecting physical impairments” like headache, nausea, and discomfort associated with prolonged use. And the future of the long-delayed headset now appears uncertain anyway: According to Breaking Defense, the service may end up going back to the drawing board with a new primary contractor for the sophisticated system as part of its IVAS Next initiative after auditing its existing night vision goggle capabilities. Still, between the ENVG-B and IVAS, helmet-mounted night vision devices have progressed far beyond anything Sawicki’s chain of command had previously imagined.

**Armor Up**

The bulletproof vest and camouflage suit combination that Sawicki donned for his AUSA debut, referred to in contemporaneous publications as “layered nylon armor” and “layered nylon vest,” is actually a bit closer to modern Army personal protective equipment than the flak jackets that were accompanying soldiers downrange during the Vietnam War. Currently under development, the Soldier Protection System (SPS) offers modern soldiers a “lightweight modular, scalable and tailorable suite of protective equipment,” according to the Army’s description. What this really means is that the protective ensemble comes in several different pieces that work together to maximize soldier survivability without impairing mobility; in terms of body armor, this refers primarily to the soft armor Torso and Extremity Protection subsystem and the hard armor Vital Torso Protection subsystem that, using reinforced ceramic plates, offer improved ballistic protection against small arms fire.

Protecting soldiers from bullets is one thing, but protecting them from the effects of nuclear explosions, as Army leaders told The New York Times Sawicki’s suit would, is another thing entirely—at least, in terms of equipment. While the well-worn Mission Oriented Protective Posture (MOPP) ensemble has been safeguarding Americans service members against chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear threats for years, it’s an entirely separate system of personal protective gear rather than one integrated into the SPS or the standard-issue Army Combat Uniform. And while the 1959 design calls for specially designed “‘welded’ combat boots” and “molded plastic gloves” to help protect soldiers on an irradiated battlefield, modern troops must, unfortunately, go into battle with their Army Regulation 670-1-authorized boots and tactical gloves, apart from what’s in their MOPP kit. Then again, if the nukes do start flying, nobody will survive long enough for ground combat anyway.

**Bullet Time**

While the 1959 “soldier of tomorrow” appears armed with an M14, advances in firearms technology have long since left the beloved battle rifle in the dust. The Army began replacing the M14 with the lighter-weight 5.56-mm M16 assault rifle in the late 1960s, which was itself replaced by the shorter-barreled M4 carbine during the Global War on Terror in the 2000s. Replacing the M16 and M4 family of rifles has proven difficult in the past, but it’s safe to say that the promises from Army brass in 1959 of a lighter standard-issue rifle for soldiers have, for the most part, come true in the intervening decades—even if the new XM7 rifle, recently adopted under the service’s Next Generation Squad Weapon (NGSW) program, is actually noticeably heavier than the M4.

So, too, has the promise of “new high-velocity bullets.” While the Army in the early 2000s fielded the 5.56-mm M855A1 Enhanced Performance Round for improved performance over the standard M855 ammo previously adopted in the 1980s, the service undertook a major small arms study in 2017 to determine whether soldiers required a different caliber ammunition to deal with the sudden proliferation of body armor among adversaries. The study determined that the Army’s next rifle should come chambered in 6.8 mm, which would purportedly offer significantly improved performance at range compared to both 5.56-mm and 7.62-mm rounds. From there, the Army ended up selecting Sig Sauer to produce its two 6.8mm NGSW systems in 2022, weapons the service began officially fielding earlier this year. It may have taken several decades, but the Army’s new high-velocity round is finally here.

**Rocket Man**

While certain elements of Sawicki’s combat kit are clearly represented in recent military innovations, others simply never came to fruition. The automatic foxhole-digging charges, for example, never materialized as an effective replacement for the beloved handheld entrenching tool, despite their prevalence among military futurists at the time. But if there’s one vision that has persisted in military and defense circles, it’s that of jetpack-equipped troops.

The Defense Department has pursued the militarized jetpack for decades, starting with research and development in the 1950s and culminating in October 1961 with the successful demonstration of Bell Aerosystems’s Small Rocket Lift Device (or, colloquially, the “Bell Rocket Belt”) for President John F. Kennedy at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The Army ended up abandoning development of the Rocket Belt over fuel constraints that limited its potential tactical applications, but US military planners would revisit the concept time and again in subsequent decades.

What the US Army’s 1959 ‘Soldier of Tomorrow’ Got Right About the Future of Warfare

So much jamming is taking place in northeastern Norway, regulators no longer want to know.

From the ground, northeastern Norway might look like fjord country, peppered with neat red houses and dissected by snowmobile tours through the winter. But for pilots flying above, the region has become a danger zone for GPS jamming.

The jamming in the region of Finnmark is so constant, Norwegian authorities decided last month they would no longer log when and where it happens—accepting these disturbance signals as the new normal.

Nicolai Gerrard, senior engineer at NKOM, the country’s communications authority, says his organization no longer counts the jamming incidents. “It has unfortunately developed into an unwanted normal situation that should not be there. Therefore, the \[Norwegian authority in charge of the airports\] are not interested in continuous updates on something that is happening all the time.”

Pilots meanwhile, still have to adapt, usually when they are above 6,000 feet in the air. “We experience this almost every day,” says Odd Thomassen, a captain and senior safety adviser at the Norwegian airline Widerøe. He claims jamming typically lasts between six and eight minutes at a time.

A map of GPS jamming over Europe on 17 October 2024.

Map: Courtesy of Benoit Figuet, Michael Felux and Raphael Monstein of SkAI Data Services and the Zurich University of Applied Sciences. Data sourced from the OpenSky Network.

When a plane gets jammed, warnings flash on cockpit computers and the GPS system used to warn pilots of a potential collision with terrain, such as mountains, stops working. Pilots are still able to navigate without GPS if they can communicate with ground stations nearby, explains Thomassen. But they are left with an eerie sense they are flying without the support of the latest technology. “You're basically \[going\] 30 years back in time,” he says.

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, jamming has dramatically increased across Europe’s eastern edges, and authorities in Baltic countries openly blame Russia for overloading GPS receivers with benign signals, meaning they can no longer operate. In April, a Finnair plane trying to land in Tartu, Estonia, was forced to turn back 15 minutes before landing because it could not get an accurate GPS signal.

Over the past decade, GPS systems have been considered so dependable that many smaller, more remote airports have started to rely on it completely instead of maintaining more expensive ground-based equipment, says Andy Spencer, a pilot and international flight ops specialist at OpsGroup, a member organization for pilots and others in the airline industry.

“In Norway, you're probably looking at a lot of airports that only have GPS approaches,” he says, referring to the phase of the flight where planes descend to the runway. “If there is an issue with GPS signals, these airports can become off limits.”

In Finland, even tractors capable of operating automatically have been disrupted. In May, the Finnish transport agency said the problem had intensified since Ukraine began targeting Russian energy infrastructure with drones, suggesting the jamming could be a side effect of Russia’s new drone defense systems. That same month, the agency changed its guidelines so that airlines have to report only GPS interference that has “exceptional effects.”

NKOM also attributes jamming above northeastern Norway to Russia. “In Finnmark, the interference is Russian jamming of several GNSS bands \[systems that help satellites and ground stations communicate\], not only GPS, originating from some place on the Russian side of the border,” Gerrard tells WIRED. Pilots aren’t the only people affected, he stresses. Across Norway, there have been cases of fishing boats unable to carry out certain tasks and diggers on construction sites no longer able to dig precisely, he says. The Russian embassy in Oslo did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.

NKOM’s decision to stop tracking jamming in Finnmark sets a dangerous precedent, says Melanie Garson, a professor focused on international conflict resolution at University College London. “By not reacting, how do you enforce a deterrent effect?” she asks, adding it is still unclear whether the government is going to find a solution to the jamming problem or leave it to the industries that are affected.

NKOM does try to “eliminate” GPS jamming when its source is inside Norwegian territory, says spokesperson Gerrard. The agency is also among several government departments that organizes the annual event Jammerfest, held on the Norwegian island of Andøya, to experiment with countermeasures. Since 2022, representatives from industry and government travel to the arctic circle to test how their systems respond to jamming and the more serious GPS spoofing, where GPS signals are faked to deceive a plane or other device about its own location.

Yet Widerøe pilots are concerned that this issue might feel remote to the American companies that make a lot of the equipment inside their planes. They believe it is the American Navstar satellite system being targeted because other devices like iPads—which can pick up signals from multiple satellite constellations—still work throughout periods of jamming.

“The providers of the navigation computers, they are mainly American,” says Rolf Fossgård, deputy VP of flight operations at Widerøe. He’s worried that if American businesses are not affected themselves, they might not be motivated to upgrade their systems to be jamming-resistant. “For a lot of European operators or Middle East operators, they are in need of this kind of equipment.”

It's unclear how the situation in the skies above Finnmark is going to evolve. Since 2022, most interference has hit planes above 6,000 feet—suggesting the device that is causing the jamming is located on the ground, and that the more sensitive part of a plane's journey, at lower altitudes, is protected by the curvature of the Earth.

But in April, Thomassen claims, he encountered his first case of jamming as he attempted to land. Flying into Båtsfjord, on Norway’s northern tip, his plane suffered jamming as it approached the runway. “We were able to land just fine based on visual contact with the airport,” he explains, adding that his company Widerøe is yet to verify why this case of jamming took place at such low altitudes.

Luckily the surrounding area is very flat, he says. “Norway is a mountainous country, so if the jamming were in other parts of the country, operational impact would be significant.”

Source

Wired