A WIRED investigation found thousands of Eventbrite posts selling escort services and drugs like Xanax and oxycodone—some of which the company’s algorithm recommended alongside addiction recovery events.

“Listings like these do not have a home on Eventbrite,” Chris Adams, the company’s head of platform product, tells WIRED in a statement. “This is a spam attack, coordinated by a few bad actors attempting to draw audiences to third-party sites.” Adams says Eventbrite is taking the issue “very seriously” and the “identified illegal and illicit activity has been removed.”

Eventbrite’s help center says it uses a “combination of tools and processes” to detect content that goes against its rules. These include, its pages say, using machine learning to proactively detect content, a “rules-based” system, responding to reports from users, and human reviews.

“Our investigation determined this is abnormal activity, a misuse of the Eventbrite platform, and based on our findings, Eventbrite did not profit from these listings, and there have been no finalized ticket purchases identified,” Adams says.

Eventbrite appears to have removed most, if not all, of the illicit listings that WIRED identified after we alerted the company to the issue. Because of the way WIRED collected the data, however, the thousands of listings found on Eventbrite are likely the tip of the iceberg. WIRED obtained the data used for its analysis by collecting listings Eventbrite deemed were “related” to hundreds of events found through simple keyword searches. These keyword searches and their related events likely do not capture the entirety of illicit events published on the platform.

Even within this limited dataset, our analysis found that, on average, 169 illicit events have been published daily.

The vast majority of the listings WIRED found used common tactics, whether they pushed drugs, escort services, or online account details. The spammy pages were often listed as online “events.” The events do not actually happen but rather act as a way for those posting them to publish their activities online. Most of them were free; however, some tried to charge people to “attend” through Eventbrite. It is not clear whether anyone has paid for any of the events.

Searching for various controlled substances, such as brand-name opioids, brought up results on Eventbrite. These “events” mostly pushed people away from the platform to online pharmacy websites, which say people can buy medicines without prescriptions.

John Hertig, an associate professor at Butler University College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, says there are thousands of online pharmacies operating at any time and that the vast majority of them are illegal—with websites often selling drugs not approved by the FDA or failing to be licensed in the country where they are selling into.

“The other major issue that we see in terms of illegality is not requiring a prescription,” Hertig says. “You see a lot of this: ‘easy, hassle free, simple process, no doctor needed.’ That's illegal.” Typically accounts claiming to sell medicines through non-official platforms, such as those on Eventbrite, will not be doing so legitimately, Hertig says, and that brings risks around whether what they are selling is safe.

As well as websites, those claiming to sell illicit services on Eventbrite pushed people to chat privately on WhatsApp or Telegram. Our analysis identified as many as 60 unique Telegram accounts and 65 WhatsApp numbers in the dataset. WhatsApp spokesperson Joshua Breckman says the platform encourages users to report suspicious activity and that it will respond to valid law enforcement requests. Telegram did not respond to a request for comment.

Eventbrite Promoted Illegal Opioid Sales to People Searching for Addiction Recovery Help

Two judges in London have ruled that WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange can appeal his extradition to the US on freedom of speech grounds.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange can appeal his extradition to the United States, a British court has said.

Two judges at the High Court in London today said Assange can officially challenge his extradition order from the United Kingdom in the long-running dispute over the leaking and publication of military secrets.

Following a two-hour hearing, at which Assange was not present due to health issues, the judges allowed Assange to appeal his extradition on freedom of speech and freedom of expression grounds. The decision, the latest in a years-long legal battle, follows a UK High Court ruling in May that asked the US government to provide more “assurances” about the conditions Assange would face if he were extradited. In that instance, the court said it required more convincing that Assange would have free speech protections, that his Australian nationality would not prejudice him in any trial, and that he would not later be sentenced to death.

The judges, Victoria Sharp and Jeremy Johnson, have now considered arguments from both sides on the three issues and decided to allow Assange to appeal the “assurances” about how his trial would be conducted and First Amendment grounds. (Assange’s team did not contest assurances from the US government that he would not be given the death penalty.)

The decision to grant an appeal, which will be seen as a partial win for Assange, means the long-running saga will likely extend over months to come.

Assange faces 18 charges in the US, all but one under the Espionage Act, for publishing classified information related to the US-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. A conviction under the act would require prosecutors to demonstrate that Assange not only obtained national defense information but also released it with the intent to injure the United States—a major hurdle for US prosecutors in a case against an award-winning journalist.

Assange’s attorneys say he could face up to 175 years in prison, though US prosecutors have claimed publicly that they expect him to serve no more than five.

Prosecutors in the US allege that Assange, 52, overstepped his role as a journalist in online conversations with a source, Chelsea Manning, a former Army intelligence analyst, by allegedly offering to help the then-22-year-old private crack a hashed password that could have hypothetically furthered her illicit access to a classified Defense Department network.

Manning was arrested in 2010 on suspicion of having leaked purportedly classified footage of a US airstrike in Baghdad. The damning video, which came to be known as “Collateral Murder,” depicted a helicopter attack in which at least 12 civilians, including two Reuters journalists, were gunned down. (The Pentagon later assessed that the footage was not, in fact, classified.)

Manning, who spent more than a year and a half in pretrial confinement, confessed in 2013 to leaking more than 750,000 documents. A third of the cache consisted of diplomatic cables that, while portrayed as highly damaging by the Obama administration, were in large part simply embarrassing for US diplomats, who wrote candidly about the behavior of foreign leaders in their reports back home.

Ultimately, Manning was convicted on six Espionage Act offenses and one computer hacking charge. Only 229 of the documents were held against her in court. She was acquitted of “aiding the enemy,” a charge that could have carried a life sentence. Her 35-year sentence was commuted by former president Barack Obama in 2017 in one of his final acts of office.

In 2019, Assange was forcibly removed from the Ecuadorian embassy in London where he’d lived under asylum for seven years and sentenced by a British court to 50 weeks in prison for skipping bail. He’s been held in Belmarsh prison ever since, pending the completion of his extradition hearings, which were repeatedly delayed as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic.

A British court initially barred the US from extraditing Assange in 2021, citing mental health issues and an increased risk of suicide. That decision was overturned on appeal after US prosecutors offered assurances designed to ameliorate concerns about the harsh conditions inside US prisons, including the system’s frequent use of prolonged isolation, a practice comparable to torture and revealed by research to have deleterious if not irreversible effects on the mind.

The prosecutors were also made to agree not to subject Assange to the death penalty or to what the country calls “special administration measures,” the practice of wiretapping calls between prisoners and their lawyers to “prevent the disclosure of classified information.”

Prosecutors additionally agreed not to deny Assange, an Australian citizen, the opportunity to seek a First Amendment defense, though there is no guarantee he would succeed. (The Espionage Act does not differentiate between journalists and nonjournalists.) Speaking recently with the Associated Press, Stella Moris, Assange’s wife and the mother of his two children, said the US assurances were laden with “weasel words.”

WikiLeaks editor in chief Kristinn Hrafnsson told reporters this month that the question of whether Assange can defend himself by relying on his status as a journalist should be a simple “yes or no question.” However, US prosecutors have stated the “applicability” of the First Amendment is “exclusively within the purview of the US Courts.”

“The US simply cannot guarantee his safety and well-being as it has also failed to do for the hundreds of thousands of people currently imprisoned in the US,” said Julia Hall, Amnesty International’s expert on criminal justice in Europe.

Free press organizations in the US have warned that the prosecution of Assange would set a dangerous precedent and have a chilling effect on journalists who obtain classified information. The Assange case represents the first time that the Espionage Act has been used against a publisher of classified materials who was not himself involved in its theft. The US Supreme Court has long recognized the right of journalists to publish leaked materials even when they are criminally obtained by a source.

“The indictment is a mishmash of accusations, including the risk of penalizing any reporter who does more than sit back and passively wait for material to be leaked to them,” Alan Rusbridger, the former editor of The Guardian, said in 2019.

The Committee to Protect Journalists says the arguments laid out in the Assange indictment could establish “a legal pathway for the prosecution of journalists and severely weaken the First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of the press,” adding: “Journalists’ right to report on matters of public interest without fear of censorship or retribution could be harmed.”

WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange Can Appeal His Extradition to the US, British Court Says

Plus: Three arrested in North Korean IT workers fraud ring, Tesla staffers shared videos from owners’ cars, and more.

Laser warfare, among all the long-unfulfilled imaginings of science fiction writers, is right up there with flying cars. Now it's finally becoming a reality. After decades of research, the US military is actively deploying laser defense systems in the Middle East to shoot down drones launched by adversaries like Yemen's Houthi rebels, one of several recent deployments of laser tech in actual combat situations.

In less _pew_\-_pew_\-oriented security news, the debate continues over the extension of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, signed by President Biden last month, as 20 civil liberties organizations sent a letter to the Justice Department demanding more clarity on when the NSA can demand US tech companies cooperate in its wiretaps. Elsewhere, WIRED obtained emails showing how New York City decided to deploy a gun-detection system called Evolv in subways despite false-positive rates as high as 85 percent.

At the Google I/O developer conference, meanwhile, the search giant debuted a new AI-based feature in Android that's designed to detect if a phone has been stolen and automatically lock it down. And we dug into the stakes for financial privacy and surveillance posed by the $2.3 billion Tornado Cash money laundering case, whose cofounder was found guilty and sentenced to more than five years in prison on Tuesday.

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.

The system known as SS7—which connects cellular networks run by different providers—and its more recent upgrade called Diameter have long been considered a serious security and privacy problem. Researchers have warned that hackers who can gain access to a mobile provider's system or even create their own have the ability to reroute cellular data, allowing them to track individuals or eavesdrop on their communications. Now one US official is raising the alarm that this technique has been used numerous times against real victims in the US.

As first reported by 404 Media, CISA's senior adviser for telecommunications, Kevin Briggs, responded to questions from the Federal Communications Commission in a public filing, confirming that he has seen multiple cases of Americans tracked via SS7 or Diameter, including one person whose location was tracked with the technique in March 2022 and three more the next month. He also warned that there were signs that many more people had been targeted, but that spies had used techniques to mask their exploitation of the system.

The revelation sounds a clear warning that telecoms—and their regulators—need to do more to lock down a known, critical vulnerability that leaves any of hundreds of millions of Americans open to espionage. “Much more could be said,” Briggs cryptically concluded his statement, “but this ends my public comments.”

**US Feds Bust a North Korean Remote Tech Worker Scheme**

The post-pandemic era of the virtual workplace has led to a strange new problem: North Korean tech workers secretly infiltrating US companies as remote workers to earn money for the world's most authoritarian regime. This week the Justice Department announced three arrests, including one American woman in Arizona and a Ukrainian man in Poland, who allegedly helped to enable thousands of North Korean workers based in China and Russia to obtain jobs in Western companies, often with fraudulent job applications and stolen identities. A third man, a Vietnamese national, was arrested in Maryland for allegedly offering his own identity to the North Koreans as cover. In total, the North Korean workers got jobs at more than 300 companies—including a high-end retail chain and a major Silicon Valley tech firm—and cumulatively earned at least $6.8 million, the Justice Department said. Much of that money was funneled to the regime of Kim Jong-Un, including to its weapons programs.

**Tesla Staff Collected and Shared Sensitive Videos From Cars**

Given that Teslas are massive collections of cameras on wheels, they've always held the potential to serve as powerful surveillance devices. But Tesla drivers probably weren't expecting all that video surveillance to be turned on them. Reuters this week revealed that Tesla staff have collected and circulated videos recorded by cars' cameras, which have included everything from mundane shots turned into memes, to a violent video of a child on a bicycle being struck by the car, to a fully naked man approaching his vehicle. (They also included a video that showed a submarine used in a James Bond movie in Elon Musk's garage, filmed from cameras on the Tesla CEO's own car.) Tesla assures customers in its privacy fine print that videos collected by Tesla's staff remain anonymous and aren't linked to any particular vehicle. But seven former staffers told Reuters that the videos are linked with location data that could likely be used to identify vehicle owners.

**FBI Busts Cybercriminal Site BreachForums—Again**

BreachForums has long been one of cybercriminals' most well-known gathering places for selling hacking tools and stolen data. Now it's been taken down—for the second time in two years—in an FBI operation that also seized the Telegram channel for the forum and that of its alleged operator, who goes by the name Baphomet. That bust follows the arrest of the site's previous administrator, Conor Brian Fitzpatrick, last year, when the FBI seized a previous incarnation of the site. That earlier version of BreachForums itself replaced an older cybercriminal marketplace called RaidForums. Given that history, the latest BreachForums takedown is perhaps “the least surprising infosec news of the year,” writes security entrepreneur and HaveIBeenPwned creator Troy Hunt.

US Official Warns a Cell Network Flaw Is Being Exploited for Spying

Google is introducing new AI-powered safety tools in Android 15 that can lock down your phone if thieves nab it.

Billions of Android phones are getting new tools to stop phone thieves from accessing your information and to slow down their criminal behavior, Google announced today at its I/O developer conference. Android phones will soon use artificial intelligence to automatically detect when they have been snatched from your hand and lock themselves, as part of the new changes that include adding extra protections to secure your phone if it has been stolen.

The upgrades—some of which will come with the Android 15 operating system, while others will be compatible with older phones—come as phone companies are increasingly building extra measures into their software to thwart rampant levels of phone thefts and further protect people’s data. As well as the stolen phone tools, Google is introducing new changes to Android 15 that will scan how apps are using “sensitive permissions” in real time to detect potentially suspicious app activities.

Around the world, phone thefts are a huge problem—in London, for example, a phone is stolen every six minutes. Thieves riding electric bikes or scooters can snatch phones out of people’s hands, pickpockets can easily nab devices from bags, and others are known to peer over shoulders to learn a phone’s PIN before they steal the device.

Stolen phones can be resold if they are unlocked or passed on to others who can break them down for parts and sell those components. However, some criminals will also try to access banking or crypto apps and transfer money. “The thieves profit from the physical device themselves, but they also increasingly are trying to get into the content of the device, where the most valuable data is stored,” Jianing Sandra Guo, an Android security and privacy product manager at Google, tells WIRED. Some thieves, if they have a locked phone, spam people with phishing emails and messages to friends to try and get login details.

Google’s anti-theft tools have been designed to add more protection before a phone is stolen, during the theft, and after a phone has been taken, Guo explains. In keeping with Google’s and the wider tech industry’s push, some of these have been built using artificial intelligence as a key component.

Courtesy of Google

Android’s new Theft Detection Lock uses Google’s AI to determine when your phone has been snatched from your hand. If it detects this, the phone’s screen will automatically be locked. Using smartphone sensors, such as the accelerometer and gyroscope, Google trained its algorithms to detect sudden changes in the phone’s positioning and the motions that might indicate it has been snatched.

“There’s a grabbing of the phone, changing hands, and then an attacker running, biking, or even driving away with a device,” Guo says. To train the algorithm, Google’s research staff studied how phones are commonly stolen, then its teams re-created snatching events against each other to collect data about what a simulated theft looks like.

Thieves stealing phones, Guo says, will often open the camera app when they don’t know the phone’s PIN, to stop them from losing access to the device. They also often try to disconnect it from cell networks for a long period of time so they can’t be locked out of the device remotely. The company’s new Offline Device Lock will lock your screen when the phone is offline for an extended period of time, if the setting is turned on.

To increase protections before a phone is stolen, Google says in a blog post, the company is adding four data protection features that can help keep your information locked down. The first stops your phone from being set up after a factory reset, unless the person knows your login details. “This renders a stolen device unsellable, reducing incentives for phone theft,” Google vice president Suzanne Frey writes.

There’s also a new “private spaces” option where you can store sensitive apps, such as banking apps, that require a second PIN or use of your biometrics, such as a fingerprint, to access. There are also extra authentication controls being put in place: If a thief tries to disable Google's Find My Device location-tracking service they will need to also use your PIN, password, or biometric information to unlock it. If a thief does know your PIN, it will also be possible to turn on the need for biometric authentication to make changes to important Google account and device settings, such as a PIN change or turning off anti-theft settings.

The extra authentication features are similar to those introduced by Apple in its Stolen Device Protection system that debuted in iOS 17.3 earlier this year, although Google’s theft motion detection goes further than these tools. The aim of all anti-theft options is to lock down the information stored on phones but also to make it harder for criminals to abuse devices when they have them. Making it more difficult for criminals to resell phones or transfer money may help to deter thefts.

If your phone does get stolen, Android already allows phones to be locked and wiped. However, Guo says, the experience of having a phone swiped from your hands is a “traumatic” experience, and in the aftermath, people may not remember all their Google account login details to close off access to the phone. To address this, Google’s new Remote Lock feature will allow people to lock their phone using just a phone number. “The content of the device is protected, and it buys the user a lot of time … to be able to organize themselves and do further remediation,” Guo says.

Google’s new protections around factory resets will launch with Android 15, while some of the other features will be available later this year. Guo says that, where possible, Google has tried to make the features work on versions of the software as old as Android 10.

Aside from the anti-phone-theft tools, Android is coming with other security and privacy updates. Google’s app safety system, Google Play Protect, scans billions of apps every day to detect malware, but now this is being expanded to do live scanning on people’s phones to better detect suspicious behavior. “With live threat detection, Google Play Protect’s on-device AI will analyze additional behavioral signals related to the use of sensitive permissions and interactions with other apps and services,” Dave Kleidermacher, a Google vice president, writes in a blog post.

Other security-related updates to Android 15 include hiding notifications and one-time passwords from appearing if you are sharing your phone’s screen with others, hiding login details if you are logging in to an app or website while sharing your screen, and identifying when cell connections are unencrypted and alerting people if there is a “potential false cellular base station” or IMSI catcher nearby that is logging a user’s phone.

_Updated 2:45 pm ET, May 15, 2024, to clarify that several new features will be included in updates that are separate from Android 15 itself, according to Google._

Android Update: Theft Detection Lock Knows When Your Phone Is Stolen

A coalition of digital rights groups is demanding the US declassify records that would clarify just how expansive a major surveillance program really is.

Last month, US president Joe Biden signed a surveillance bill enhancing the National Security Agency’s power to compel US businesses to wiretap communications going in and out of the country. The changes to the law have left legal experts largely in the dark as to the true limits of this new authority, chiefly when it comes to the types of companies that could be affected. The American Civil Liberties Union and organizations like it say the bill has rendered the statutory language governing the limits of a powerful wiretap tool overly vague, potentially subjecting large swaths of corporate America to warrantless and secretive surveillance practices.

In April, Congress rushed to extend the US intelligence system’s “crown jewel,” Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The spy program allows the NSA to wiretap calls and messages between Americans and foreigners abroad—so long as the foreigner is the individual being “targeted” and the intercept serves a significant “foreign intelligence” purpose. Since 2008, the program has been limited to a subset of businesses that the law calls “electronic communications service providers,” or ECSPs—corporations such as Microsoft and Google, which provide email services, and phone companies like Sprint and AT&T.

In recent years, the government has worked quietly to redefine what it means to be an ECSP in an attempt to extend the NSA’s reach, first unilaterally and now with Congress’ backing. The issue remains that the bill Biden signed last month contains murky language that attempts to redefine the scope of a critical surveillance program. In response, a coalition of digital rights organizations, including the Brennan Center for Justice to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is pressing the US attorney general, Merrick Garland, and the nation’s top spy, Avril Haines, to declassify details about a relevant court case that could, they say, shed much-needed light on the situation.

In a letter to the top officials, more than 20 such organizations say they believe the new definition of an ECSP adopted by Congress might “permit the NSA to compel almost any US business to assist” the agency, noting that all companies today provide some sort of “service” and have access to equipment on which “communications” are stored.

“Deliberately writing overbroad surveillance authorities and trusting that future administrations will decide not to exploit them is a recipe for abuse,” the letter says. “And it is entirely unnecessary, as the administration can—and should—declassify the fact that the provision is intended to reach data centers.”

The Justice Department confirmed receipt of the letter on Tuesday but referred WIRED to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which has primary purview over declassification decisions. The ODNI has not responded to a request for comment.

It is widely believed—and has been reported—that data centers are the intended target of this textual change. Matt Olsen, the assistant US attorney general for national security, appeared on an April 17 episode of the _Lawfare_ podcast to say that, while unable to confirm or deny any specifics, data centers today store a significant amount of communications data and are an “example” of why the government viewed the change as necessary.

A DOJ spokesperson pointed WIRED to an April 18 letter by Garland that claims the new ECSP definition is “narrowly tailored.” The letter includes written reflections on the provision by the assistant attorney general, Carlos Uriarte, who writes that the “fix” is meant to address a “critical intelligence gap” resulting from changes in technology over the past 15 years. According to Uriarte, the DOJ has committed to applying the new definition internally “to cover the type of service provider at issue” before the court.

Ostensibly this means the government is promising to limit future surveillance directives to data centers (in addition to the companies traditionally defined as ECSPs).

The surveillance court that oversees FISA and the appeals court that reviews its decisions sided two years ago with an unidentified company that fought back after being served an NSA order. Both courts ruled that it did not, in fact, appear to meet the criteria for being considered an ECSP, as only part of its function was storing communications data. Finding the government’s interpretation of the statute overly broad, the court reminded the government that only Congress has the “competence and constitutional authority” to rewrite the law.

Digital rights groups argue that declassifying additional information about this FISA case may help the public understand which types of businesses are actually subject to NSA directives. Practically speaking, they say, that information is no longer a secret anyway. “Declassifying this information would cause little if any national security harm,” the letter says. “The New York Times has already revealed that the relevant FISC case addressed data centers for cloud computing.”

In the aftermath of the FISA court’s ruling, the NSA and other spy agencies began lobbying the House and Senate intelligence committees to aid the administration in redefining what it means to be an ECSP. Members of both committees have subsequently portrayed the court’s ruling as a “directive” that Congress needs to expand the NSA’s reach. In a floor speech last month, Mark Warner, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said, “So what happened was, the FISA Court said to Congress: You guys need to close this loophole; you need to close this and change this definition.”

But in fact what the court asserted was that the government had exceeded its authority and that it was Congress’ job, not the Justice Department’s, to revise the law. “Any unintended gap in coverage revealed by our interpretation is, of course, open to reconsideration by the branches of government whose competence and constitutional authority extend to statutory revision,” the court said.

This would culminate in new language being proposed that quickly alarmed legal experts, including top civil liberties attorneys who’ve appeared before the secret court in the past. The surveillance fears quickly spread to Silicon Valley. The Information Technology Industry Council, one of the tech industry's top lobbying arms, warned that companies like Facebook and IBM were interpreting the bill as having “vastly expanded the US government’s warrantless surveillance capabilities.”

This expansion, the firm added, would also hinder the “competitiveness of US technology companies” and arguably imperil the “continued global free flow of data between the US and its allies.” Customers internationally, it argued, would likely begin taking their business elsewhere should the US government turn data centers into surveillance watering holes.

Concerns about the new ECSP definition have been circulating since December. While largely dismissing them, members of the House and Senate intelligence committees made a few adjustments in February, exempting a handful of business types. This came in response to popular concerns that Starbucks employees and hotel IT staff might be secretly conscripted by the NSA. FISA experts such as Marc Zwillinger—a private attorney who has appeared twice before the FISA Court of Review—noted in response to those adjustments that Congress’ rush to exempt a handful of businesses only served to demonstrate that the text was inherently too broad.

Intelligence committee members kept the pressure on lawmakers to reauthorize the Section 702 program with the sought-after language, going as far as to suggest that another 9/11-style attack might occur if they failed. The power of the committees was on full display, as while neither actually have primary jurisdiction over FISA, a majority of the Section 702 bill that passed was authored by intelligence committee staff.

Even while supporting the new framework and dismissing the intensity of civil society’s concerns, Warner did eventually step forward to acknowledge the new ECSF definition needed additional tweaking. First, on the Senate floor in April, he said that Garland shared his “view” that the language “could have been drafted better.” Later, in response to questions from reporters, he added: “I’m absolutely committed to getting that fixed.”

That appears unlikely to happen soon. According to The Record, Warner indicated that the best time to update the language again would be in the “next intelligence bill,” presumably referring to legislation this fall broadly reauthorizing the intelligence community’s work.

In the meantime, however, more than half of Congress is running for election, and the next US president will have greater surveillance powers than any other before. No one can say for sure who that president will be or how they’ll make use of that authority.

_Updated 2:20 pm ET, May 14, 2024, to clarify statements by Matt Olsen, assistant US attorney general for national security, to the_ Lawfare _podcast._

Secrecy Concerns Mount Over Spy Powers Targeting US Data Centers

NYC mayor Eric Adams wants to test Evolv’s gun-detection tech in subway stations—despite the company saying it’s not designed for that environment. Emails obtained by WIRED show how the company still found an in.

There was a lot of overlap with former members of the NYPD. Adams and Banks came up together as police officers—as did a then-account-executive of Evolv, also name-dropped by Chitkara in the email to the mayor’s staff. Dominick D’Orazio, who had been Evolv’s sales manager in the northeast US before being promoted to regional manager in April, was a commander in Brooklyn South whose reporting line included Banks—who was, at the time, deputy chief of patrol for Borough Brooklyn South. (Banks has denied meeting D’Orazio in his capacity as an Evolv employee.)

Evolv’s connection to the NYPD is something George, Evolv’s CEO, has used to market the company’s technology. “About a third of our salespeople were former police officers,” George said at a conference in June 2022. “The one here in New York was an NYPD cop, and he’s a really good sales guy because he understands who we’re selling to. He has the secret handshake.”

David Cohen, former NYPD deputy commissioner of intelligence, also sits on Evolv’s Security Advisory Board.

The Mayor’s Office has been keen to stress that it is not set on Evolv being a permanent fixture. “To be clear, we have NOT said we are putting Evolv technology in the subway stations,” Kayla Mamelak, deputy press secretary of the Mayor’s Office, tells WIRED in an email. “We said that we are opening a 90-day period to explore using technology, such as Evolv, in our subway stations.”

Civil rights and technology experts have argued that utilizing Evolv’s scanners in subway stations is likely to be futile. “This is Mickey Mouse public safety,” says Albert Fox Cahn, founder of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, a privacy advocacy organization. “This is not a serious solution for the largest transit system in the country.”

Moreover, deploying the company’s technology might not just be ineffective—it’s also likely to add more police officers to the daily rhythms of New Yorkers’ lives, heightening Adams’ pro-cop agenda. The NYC subway has 472 stations. “That is roughly 1,000 subway station entrances,” explains Sarah Kaufman, director of the New York University’s Rudin Center for Transportation. “That means that Evolv would have to be at every single entrance in order to be effective, and that of course would require monitoring.”

According to the draft policy posted by the NYPD, the process surrounding weapons-detection technology in the subway is extremely vague, and still relies heavily on police officers. “The checkpoint supervisor will determine the frequency of passengers subject to inspection (for example, every fifth passenger or every tenth passenger),” the document reads. It will also be based on “available police personnel on hand to perform inspections.”

The NYC subway has an estimated 3.6 million daily riders. Stopping every 10th passenger would mean 360,000 searches a day.

“It’s going to mean that people are routinely going to have to go through invasive and inconvenient searches,” says Cahn. “What’s really emblematic here is that the city keeps trying to go for security measures that are highly visible, even when they’re highly ineffective.”

**School Supplies**

In the email thread to the NYC officials who attended the meeting, Chitkara touted Evolv’s successful deployment in schools. But there, too, the scanners have failed to detect weapons and guns on multiple occasions. While the Adams administration was being persuaded to pilot the technology, internal emails obtained from a large school district that uses Evolv’s technology illustrate how everyday objects were being mistaken by the scanners.

“I know the simple solution is to tell kids not to use binders but rather regular notebooks,” Jacqueline Barone, principal of Piedmont Middle School, part of Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools in North Carolina, wrote at the end of 2022. “But it hurts my soul to have to tell kids or teachers that certain supplies can’t be used because the scanners mistake them for weapons.”

Internal Emails Reveal How a Controversial Gun-Detection AI System Found Its Way to NYC

Tuesday’s verdict in the trial of Alexey Pertsev, a creator of crypto-privacy service Tornado Cash, is the first in a string of cases that could make it much harder to skirt financial surveillance.

In the fall of 2020, as crypto scammers and thieves began to realize the full potential of a financial privacy tool called Tornado Cash—a clever new system capable of shuffling users' funds to cut the trail of crypto transactions recorded on the Ethereum blockchain—Alexey Pertsev, one of the creators of that service, sent a note to his fellow cofounders about this growing issue. He suggested crafting a standard response to send to victims pleading with Tornado Cash for help with stolen funds laundered through their service. “We must compose a message that we will send to everyone in similar cases,” Pertsev, the then-27-year-old Russian living in the Netherlands, wrote to his colleagues.

Tornado Cash cofounder Roman Semenov answered three minutes later with a draft of their stock response—essentially pointing to the fact that the service's novel design meant it ran on the Ethereum blockchain, not on any server they owned, and was thus out of their hands. “It is a decentralized software protocol that no one entity or actor can control,” the message read. “For that reason, we are unable to assist with respect to any issues relating to the Tornado Cash protocol.”

That statement would remain Tornado Cash's position two days later when hackers affiliated with the North Korean government stole roughly $275 million worth of coins from the crypto exchange KuCoin and funneled a portion of the loot through Tornado Cash to cover their tracks. Tornado Cash would maintain that stance as, according to Dutch prosecutors, a billion-plus dollars more of stolen funds flowed through the service over the next two years, part of at least $2.3 billion in total funds from criminal and sanctioned sources that made up more than 30 percent of the service's overall transactions from 2019 to 2022.

Now, two years after Pertsev's arrest and indictment for money laundering, that “out-of-our-hands” decentralization defense has become one of the central arguments for his innocence. On Tuesday, it will be put to the test when a panel of three Dutch judges rules on the criminal charges that could send Pertsev to prison for years. Privacy advocates believe the result of the case—the first of two, as the New York prosecution of another Tornado Cash cofounder, Roman Storm, is expected to go to trial this coming September—could also shape the future of cryptocurrency privacy and may determine the limits of services like Tornado Cash or other open source software creations to offer a safe haven from financial surveillance.

Dutch prosecutors have accused Pertsev of essentially creating the perfect money laundering machine by designing Tornado Cash to work as a set of “smart contracts”—a type of decentralized service made possible by Ethereum's unique features, in which code is copied to the thousands of Ethereum nodes that store the cryptocurrency's blockchain—and thus preventing Tornado Cash's creators from identifying or controlling who used the service to hide the origins and destinations of their funds.

Pertsev's defenders, on the other hand, point out that those properties are also exactly what makes Tornado Cash such a powerful tool for privacy. “This is the entire point of a decentralized system,” says Sjors Provoost, a Dutch cryptocurrency developer and author of _Bitcoin: A Work in Progress,_ who attended Pertsev's trial. “These are completely clashing worldviews. There's the worldview of privacy and decentralization, and there's the government worldview of surveillance, in which you need to be able to check every transaction.”

Since US and Dutch prosecutors indicted Tornado Cash's cofounders and the US Treasury sanctioned the service in 2022, the case has become a cause célèbre in some cryptocurrency circles, many of whose adherents argue that a guilty verdict could not only damage financial privacy but also set a dangerous precedent that developers of open source software can be held liable for the actions of those who use their tools. Ethereum's inventor, Vitalik Buterin, has noted publicly that he used Tornado Cash to anonymize a donation to Ukraine following Russia's invasion, as an example of the service's legitimate use for privacy. US National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden has compared Tornado Cash's functioning on the Ethereum's blockchain to a water fountain built in a park—a kind of public utility where “you push a button and privacy comes out”—and has called the crackdown on Tornado Cash and its cofounders “deeply illiberal and profoundly authoritarian."

Yet the Dutch prosecutors and Netherlands' financial law enforcement agency, known as FIOD, which led the investigation of Pertsev, argue that the case isn't actually about a fundamental conflict between privacy and security, or liability for open source code, or any other larger principle. Instead, they say, it's about Pertsev's specific, informed decisions to enable thieves on an enormous scale. “It's all about the choices of our suspect,” M. Boerlage, the case's lead prosecutor, tells WIRED in an interview. “He made choices writing the code, deploying the code, adding features to the ecosystem. Choice after choice after choice, all while he knew that criminal money was entering his system. So it's not about code. It's about human behavior.”

****A Room Without a Lock—or Walls****

Dutch prosecutors contend that, despite the Tornado Cash creators' claims, they did exert control over it. Aside from its decentralized “smart contract” design, they point to Tornado Cash's web-based user interface for interacting with its blockchain-based smart contract: a fully centralized tool running on infrastructure the creators built and managed, which nonetheless had no monitoring or safeguards to prevent its abuse by criminals for money laundering. In fact, prosecutors found that during the time of their investigation, 93.5 percent of users sent their transactions to Tornado Cash through that web interface, which was far simpler to use than directly interacting with the blockchain-based service.

Pertsev's defense didn't respond to WIRED's repeated requests for an interview. But his lead defense attorney, Keith Cheng, has countered that there would have been no point in monitoring or blocking users on that web interface when anyone could circumvent the website altogether to interact directly with the smart contract or even to build their own interface. “The Tornado Cash smart contracts could be accessed directly at any point of time,” Cheng told an audience at the ETHDam cryptocurrency conference in Amsterdam last year. “Implementing checks within the surrounding infrastructure is akin to adding extra locks to a door that lacks surrounding walls.”

The prosecution points out that Tornado Cash could have at least _tried_ to put locks on that door, given that the vast majority of their users, both legitimate and criminal, were walking through it. More fundamentally, they argue that it was Pertsev's decision to put into place a system that he knew from the start would include basic elements he couldn't control. “Building and deploying something unstoppable is also a decision,” says Boerlage.

That question of decentralization and control nonetheless makes the Tornado Cash case a far less straightforward prosecution than those against the founders of simpler bitcoin-based “mixer” services like Bitcoin Fog or Helix, which were similarly intended to prevent cryptocurrency tracing. In each of those earlier cases, the administrators—now both convicted of money laundering conspiracy—hid their connections to the services. By contrast, Pertsev and his cofounders appear to have been confident enough in their remove from the money launderers who used Tornado Cash that they operated fully in the open, under their real names. “This complete transparency does not exactly indicate criminal activity,” Pertsev's attorney Cheng told ETHDam.

At the same time, the prosecution argues that Pertsev was both aware of and untroubled by the millions and ultimately billions of dollars in stolen cryptocurrency flowing through Tornado Cash, which reached a peak in the spring of 2022. They argue that Pertsev continued to maintain and develop pieces of the system—such as its centralized frontend—even as the service was used to launder the stolen funds from 36 distinct cryptocurrency heists, many of which prosecutors say he and his cofounders discussed in their communications. In the meantime, he also profited handsomely, in part from Tornado Cash's issuing its own crypto token, ultimately making more than $15 million and buying himself a Porsche.

When North Korean hackers stole more than $600 million from the blockchain-based game _Axie Infinity_ in March of 2022, Tornado Cash cofounder Semenov wrote anxiously to Pertsev and Storm that “the fucking disaster is about to begin,” perhaps fearing that their service would be used by the perpetrators of that massive heist, as it already had been in well over a dozen others. Pertsev weighed in 10 minutes later, writing “noticed after 5 days, lol," an apparent reference to how long it seemed to have taken _Axie Infinity_ to discover the theft. Sure enough, less than a week later, hundreds of millions of dollars in stolen _Axie Infinity_ funds began to pour into Tornado Cash.

Prosecutors have pointed to Pertsev's “lol” as a sign of his flippant disregard for the victims whose funds, they argue, he was helping to launder. His defense has countered that he was merely expressing surprise.

That same month, perhaps in response to the growing spotlight on Tornado Cash's use by criminals, Pertsev and his cofounders did, in fact, implement a free tool from blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis that would block transactions from sanctioned Ethereum addresses via their web interface. The prosecution has pointed out that the free tool was easily circumvented—hackers could merely move their stolen coins to a different address before sending them into Tornado Cash—and described the effort as “too little and too late."

In their statement to the court, Dutch prosecutors suggest a different solution, if Pertsev had actually cared about Tornado Cash's exploitation by criminals. “What was the simplest option? Take the UI offline and stop advertising. Plain and simple,” they write. “Stop offering the service.”

In the conclusion of that same statement to the court, they point out that under Dutch law the maximum prison sentence for money laundering at the scale Pertsev allegedly committed is eight years, and they ask that Pertsev be sentenced to five years and four months if he's found guilty.

****The Tornado Rolls On****

Cryptocurrency advocates focused on privacy and civil liberties will be closely watching the outcome of Pertsev's case, which many see as a bellwether for how Western law enforcement and regulators will draw the line between financial privacy and money laundering—including in some immediate cases to follow.

The US trial of Tornado Cash's Storm in a New York court later this year, as well as the US indictment last month of the founders of Samourai Wallet, which prosecutors say offered similar privacy properties to Tornado Cash's, are more likely to directly set precedents in US law. But Pertsev's case may suggest the direction those cases will take, says Alex Gladstein, the chief strategy officer for the Human Rights Foundation and an advocate of bitcoin's use as a human rights tool.

“What happens in the Netherlands will color the New York case, and the Tornado Cash cases are really going to color the outcome of the Samourai case,” Gladstein says. “These cases are going to be historic in the precedents they set.”

Gladstein, like many crypto privacy supporters, argues that anyone weighing the value of tools like Tornado Cash should look beyond its use by hackers to countries like Cuba, Venezuela, and India, where activists and dissidents need to hide their financial transactions from repressive governments. “For human rights activists, it’s essential that they have money the government can’t surveil,” Gladstein says.

Regardless of the verdict in Pertsev's case or that of his cofounder Roman Storm in the fall, Tornado Cash's founder's core argument—that Tornado Cash's underlying infrastructure has always been out of their hands—has proven to be correct: Tornado Cash lives on.

True to its promise of decentralization, Tornado Cash still persists after its cofounders indictment in the fall of last year—and is now out of their control. In March, $283 million flowed into the service.

Courtesy of Chainalysis

When the tool's centralized web-based interface went offline last year in the wake of US sanctions and the two cofounders' arrests—Roman Semenov, for now, remains free—Tornado Cash transactions dropped by close to 90 percent, according to Chainalysis. But Tornado Cash has remained online, still functioning as a decentralized smart contract. In recent months, Chainalysis has seen its use tick up again intermittently. More than $283 million flowed into the service just in March.

In other words, whether it represents a public utility for financial privacy and freedom or an uncontrollable money laundering machine, its creators' claim has borne out: Tornado Cash remains beyond their control—or anyone's.

The $2.3 Billion Tornado Cash Case Is a Pivotal Moment for Crypto Privacy

Amid a rising tide of adversary drones and missile attacks, laser weapons are finally poised to enter the battlefield.

The age of the laser weapon is finally upon us.

The United States Army has officially sent a pair of high-energy laser weapons overseas to defend American troops and US allies against enemy drones, the service recently revealed, marking the first publicly known deployment of a directed-energy system for air defense in military history. And, according to a top official, those weapons are actively blasting threats out of the sky.

The weapon, known as the Palletized High Energy Laser (P-HEL) and developed by the American defense contractor BlueHalo based on the company’s 20-kilowatt Locust Laser Weapon System, first arrived in an unspecified location overseas and “commenced operational employment” in November 2022, according to an April press release from the company. A second system arrived overseas “earlier this year.”

While the Army initially declined to indicate where the P-HEL systems were sent and whether they had achieved a “kill” against an adversary drone, citing operational security concerns, the service’s top acquisition official recently confirmed that the new laser weapons had in fact succeeded in neutralizing incoming threats in the Middle East.

“They've worked in some cases,” Doug Bush, the Army’s assistant secretary for acquisition, logistics, and technology, told _Forbes_ this month. “In the right conditions, they're highly effective against certain threats.”

News of the P-HEL’s deployment comes as the US military seeks to aggressively bolster its air defense capabilities amid a dramatic increase in drone and missile attacks against US troops by Iran-backed militias in the Middle East, as well as against US Navy warships operating in the Red Sea by Houthi rebels in Yemen following the October 7 attack in Israel by Hamas.

Since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas conflict, the US Defense Department has been slowly but surely hinting at the use of laser weapons downrange. But the arrival of the P-HEL in the Middle East for operational use is a technological victory for the US military, which has actively pursued research related to directed-energy weapons since the 1970s. Even more significantly, it may also represent a tipping point for the development and use of laser weapons more broadly by militaries around the world.

BlueHalo’s LOCUST Laser Weapon System (LWS) combines precision optical and laser hardware with advanced software, artificial intelligence (AI), and processing to enable and enhance the directed energy “kill chain”.Photograph: BlueHalo

**Light at the End of the Tunnel**

Following its creation in 1960 by American engineer and physicist Theodore Maiman, the laser—technically an acronym for “light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation”—almost immediately became a futuristic weapon of choice among both science fiction writers and military planners. This wasn’t surprising: While Maiman touted the potential scientific applications of his discovery when he first unveiled it to the country later that year, the laser immediately conjured up visions in the public consciousness of the Martian “heat ray” from H. G. Wells’ _War of the Worlds_, so much so that many of the contemporary headlines from its debut were variations of the _Los Angeles Herald_’s “L.A. Man Discovers Science Fiction Death Ray,” according to Jeff Hecht’s book _Beam: The Race to Make the Laser_. “In reality, the laser was more of a Life Ray than a Death Ray,” Maiman would later recall thinking of his invention’s medical applications, according to his memoir.

The Pentagon began exploring the military applications of lasers almost immediately, from relatively practical uses like designators for laser-guided bombs to more far-fetched concepts like the Strategic Defense Initiative of the 1980s, also known as “Star Wars.” But only in the past few decades has the underlying technology advanced to the point where laser weapons are effective against their intended targets.

In the mid-2000s, the Air Force successfully used its Boeing 747-based YAL-1 airborne laser to defeat ballistic missiles in flight during tests, while the Army’s Humvee-mounted Zeus-HMMWV Laser Ordnance Neutralization System system deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq to zap landmines, improvised explosive devices, and unexploded ordnance. By 2014, the Navy’s AN/SEQ-3 Laser Weapon System (LaWS) was successfully disabling drones and small boats during testing from the bow of the Austin-class amphibious transport dock USS _Ponce_ in what the service billed at the time as the world’s first “active laser weapon.” (When the _Ponce_ was decommissioned in 2017, the LaWS’s successor system, the Technology Maturation Laser Weapon System Demonstrator, was installed on the San Antonio-class amphibious transport dock USS _Portland_, which successfully tested it in 2020 and 2021).

Apart from intermittent attempts at developing a non-lethal “laser rifle” over the decades, the Pentagon has generally envisioned employing modern directed-energy weapons primarily for defensive purposes. If successfully developed, high-energy lasers in particular could prove highly effective at short-range air defense missions against helicopters and low-flying attack aircraft, as well as blasting incoming rockets, artillery, and mortars out of the sky, according to a 2023 Congressional Research Service report on the US military’s directed-energy weapons programs. With enough power, a sustained laser beam could neutralize fast-moving hardened threats like cruise missiles and, eventually, even ballistic missiles.

After decades of technological progress, the US military is finally making the dream of laser weapons an operational reality: Not only has the Pentagon increasingly poured money into research and development, spending roughly $1 billion a year on at least 31 directed-energy programs since 2020, but the department has also finally deployed several mature laser weapons alongside US forces abroad in recent years for testing.

Those laser weapons include the Air Force’s High-Energy Laser Weapon System, a Raytheon-developed dune-buggy-mounted system developed for air base defense that saw testing overseas in 2021; the Marine Corps’ Compact Laser Weapon System, which Marines have been training on in the Middle East since 2021; Lockheed Martin’s 60-kilowatt High Energy Laser with Integrated Optical-dazzler and Surveillance (HELIOS), which currently adorns the bow of the Navy’s Arleigh Burke-class destroyer USS _Preble_; and the Army’s 50-kilowatt Stryker-mounted Directed Energy Maneuver-Short Range Air Defense (DE M-SHORAD) system, or “Guardian,” which consists of a laser turret mounted on a Stryker infantry carrier, a platoon of which arrived in the Middle East in February for “real world testing.” The Army also recently took receipt of a 300-kilowatt “Valkyrie” laser system designed explicitly to deal with incoming cruise missiles.

The adoption of BlueHalo’s Locust laser weapon system in particular likely won’t stop with the P-HEL. In 2023, the company received contracts not just to develop the new 20-kilowatt Army Multi-Purpose High Energy Laser (AMP-HEL) system that’s designed to integrate with the service’s next-generation Infantry Squad Vehicle light utility vehicle, but also a potential laser system for the Marine Corps’ Joint Light Tactical Vehicle that’s set to replace the service’s aging Humvee fleet.

The US military isn’t the only conventional fighting force pushing for a directed-energy element of its air defenses. The UK Royal Navy in April announced that it planned to fast-track the installation of its new 50-kilowatt “DragonFire” high-powered laser onto a warship by 2027 instead of 2032 as originally planned “as the need for weapons to counter drone and missile threats—like those fired by Houthi rebels—grows,” the service said in a statement. Less than a week later, US House Republicans unveiled their long-delayed security assistance package for Israel that included $1.2 billion for the development of the Israeli military’s “Iron Beam” laser air defense system “to counter short-range rocket threats” amid attacks from Hamas militants. Meanwhile, countries like Russia, China, France, India, and Turkey, among others, have all invested heavily in the development of laser systems in recent years, according to the Rand Corporation.

During a trial at the MOD’s Hebrides Range, the DragonFire laser directed energy weapon (LDEW) system achieved the UK’s first high-power firing of a laser weapon against aerial targets. The range of DragonFire is classified, but it is a line-of-sight weapon and can engage with any visible target.Photograph: UK.gov

**Cheap Threats**

The development and fielding of directed-energy weapons like lasers has taken on such new urgency among world governments in recent years due to the rapid proliferation of relatively cheap one-way attack drones among both professional militaries (see: the 2020 conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan and Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine) and irregular forces like Yemen’s Houthis in the Red Sea, ISIS cells in Iraq and Syria, and Iran-backed militias across the Middle East. In 2021, then-Central Command chief Marine General Frank McKenzie Jr. warned US lawmakers that weaponized commercial off-the-shelf drones have become the greatest threat to US forces in the region since the advent of the improvised explosive device during the early years of the Global War on Terror.

That threat is very real. In January, three US service members were killed and more than 40 others were injured in a drone attack conducted by an Iran-backed militia on a military outpost in Jordan near the Syrian border. As of mid-February, more than 140 additional service members had been injured in attacks launched against American forces in Iraq and Syria since mid-October, according to the Pentagon, 130 of whom were suffering from traumatic brain injuries. That more American troops weren’t killed in these attacks was essentially a matter of luck, according to Army General Michael "Erik" Kurilla, the current head of Central Command.

"There are several incidents where \[drones\] coming into a base hit another object, got caught up in a netting or other incidents where, had they hit the appropriate target that they were targeting, it would have injured or killed service members," Kurilla told lawmakers during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing in March.

This rising tide of adversary drones has prompted US military commanders to clamor for more directed-energy options, as has the increased threat of missile attacks. As the rate of Houthi potshots at American warships and merchant vessels in the Red Sea began to spike in January, the Navy’s current surface warfare boss publicly emphasized that the service needed to rapidly accelerate the rate of development and fielding of its directed-energy assets not just to deal with drones but also incoming cruise and ballistic missiles.

“What we’re facing in the Red Sea is more than just drones. We’re looking at land-attack cruise missiles, we’re looking at anti-ship ballistic missiles that are getting shot in the Red Sea by the Houthis. And our ships are dealing with all of those,” the Naval Surface Forces commander, vice admiral Brendan McLane, told reporters in early January. “One of the things that I think we really need to get after quicker is we need to accelerate the development of directed-energy weapons, whether it’s a laser, whether it’s a microwave.” Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro echoed McClane’s comments the next day, telling reporters that he was “very, very excited” to boost investments in laser weapon research and development for the service.

Developing and fielding laser weapons isn’t just a matter of practicality, but price tag. Rather than force warships and ground troops to expend costly munitions like the $2.1 million-a-shot Standard Missile-2 naval missile and $480,000-a-shot FIM-92 Stinger missile on comparatively inexpensive drones, a laser weapon can defeat incoming threats with a basically negligible cost-per-shot ($1 to $10, per an April 2023 Government Accountability Office assessment) and, with a suitable power source, a near-infinite magazine. Given the fact that the US military has already expended nearly $1 billion in munitions since October to defend against Iran-backed attacks in the Red Sea and elsewhere (at an average of $100,000 per shot, per officials), lasers and other directed-energy weapons may prove far more cost-effective in the long run for a Pentagon explicitly looking to keep counter-drone costs down.

“I would love to have the Navy produce more directed energy that can shoot down a drone, so I don't have to use an expensive missile to shoot it down,” as Kurilla put it in his testimony before lawmakers in March.

The confluence of technological advancements and the urgent need posed by the rise of weaponized drones has created circumstances that may induce the US and its allies to even more rapidly develop and employ laser weapons around the world.

But challenges remain. Chief among them is ensuring that laser weapons systems actually produce a coherent laser beam as expected outside the controlled setting of a lab in the real world, where "substances in the atmosphere—particularly water vapor, but also sand, dust, salt particles, smoke, and other air pollution—absorb and scatter light, and atmospheric turbulence can defocus a laser beam," according to the Congressional Research Service. While atmospheric problems are particularly pronounced for shipboard lasers, the CRS report notes that these systems can be engineered to hit a “sweet spot” in the electromagnetic spectrum to overcome the atmospheric absorption inherent to maritime operations. Time will tell with the operational deployment of the P-HEL and testing of the DE M-SHORAD in the Middle East whether those systems can adjust to more inhospitable conditions.

Beyond functional issues, there’s also the question of teaching service members to operate a laser effectively in a combat setting. The CRS report notes that “thermal blooming”—where a sustained laser beam heats up the air it’s passing through, which in turn defocuses the beam—makes head-on (or “down-the-throat”) shots against incoming targets less effective, a problem that will require a training and doctrinal fix in order to compensate. And while many of the US military laser weapons in development require minimal training to use (the BlueHalo Locust on which the P-HEL is based runs on an Xbox controller), the 2023 GAO assessment indicated that the US military will need to develop brand new “tactics, techniques, and procedures” for operating the novel systems in complex combat environments. The laser may work, but it’s up to service members to get the most out of it.

“What we don’t know yet for directed-energy systems necessarily is how to fight \[with\] them,” said Army lieutenant general Robert Rasch, head of the service’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office, which manages its directed-energy portfolio, in August. “How to fight lasers on the battlefield, how to integrate kinetic and non-kinetic effectors, like directed energy, and our traditional air-defense missiles into the battle space.”

**A Problem in Search of a Solution**

Even with additional training, evolving threats like rapidly moving drones or cruise missiles hardened against interception will require a significant boost in power that most existing systems simply can’t generate yet. Take the Navy’s shipborne 60-kilowatt HELIOS laser weapon: While the service wants to scale the system to 300 kilowatts to burn through the nose cones of incoming cruise missiles, the Navy’s surface warfare boss at the time, Rear Admiral Ron Boxall, previously stated in 2019 that the fleet’s new Flight III Arleigh Burke-class destroyers are already maxed out on juice (or “out of Schlitz,” as Boxall put it) due to the requirements of operating the warships’ brand-new AN/SPY-6 Air and Missile Defense Radar. As laser weapons become more robust to counter increasingly complex threats, those power requirements are only going to increase.

And even if laser weapons actually do end up operating effectively downrange with the right technology and training, US service members are then faced with complicated logistics considerations when it comes to keeping them up and running. Laser weapons are extremely complex machines, which makes their repair and maintenance in austere environments a significant challenge for deployed service members who may not have the right tool or facilities on hand. Indeed, the GAO assessment noted that many of the internal mechanisms critical to directed-energy weapons are so sensitive that they typically require a specialized “clean room” for repairs; in one recent case, a laser weapon sent to an operational environment for testing “had to be returned to the manufacturer in the United States” for maintenance after encountering battery and cooling challenges.

“Lasers are complicated. This is not a Humvee that’s sitting in the motor pool,” as Lieutenant General Daniel Karbler, the head of the Army’s Space and Missile Defense Command, reportedly said in August 2023. “Many of the some of the main \[laser\] components … you’re not going to have a supply room or maintenance office full of repair parts.”

Taken together, all of these challenges could pose a serious potential roadblock to the widespread proliferation of laser weapons across the US military. As the GAO report notes, many promising military technologies too often fall into the so-called “valley of death”—a limbo between ongoing R&D and the actual acquisition and operational use of a new system—because the various military branches “may require a higher level of technology maturity than the science and technology community is able to fund and develop.” While military commanders may clamor for laser technology today, challenges like beam coherence and thermal blooming may prove insurmountable regardless of how much time and patience the Pentagon pours into development, a prospect that could relegate laser weapons to an R&D graveyard alongside other ambitious projects like the Navy’s electromagnetic railgun. The P-HEL may represent a new beginning for laser weapons, but it could also end up as an exception that proves they aren’t ready for prime time yet.

Maiman, the physicist who invented the laser, once famously derided his creation as “a solution in search of a problem,” an idiom often used to describe innovations that don’t address any real issue and, in turn, don’t offer any real value. But more than a half-century after the laser’s introduction into America’s modern technological vocabulary, the rise of deadly drones and missile threats has presented the laser weapon with a pressing issue worth solving. And while the laser is still far from becoming a ubiquitous piece of military technology, it holds the potential to revolutionize how US troops counter airborne threats overseas—and, in time, change the face of modern warfare as we know it.

Welcome to the Laser Wars

Plus: China is suspected in a hack targeting the UK’s military, the US Marines are testing gun-toting robotic dogs, and Dell suffers a data breach impacting 49 million customers.

Law enforcement in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia this week named a Russian national as the person behind LockBitSupp, the pseudonym of the leader of the LockBit ransomware gang that the US says is responsible for extracting $500 million from its victims. Dmitry Yuryevich Khoroshev has been sanctioned and charged with 26 criminal counts in the US, which combined could result in a prison sentence of 185 years. That is, if he’s ever arrested and successfully prosecuted—an extremely rare event for suspects who live in Russia.

Elsewhere in the world of cybercrime, WIRED’s Andy Greenberg interviewed a representative of Cyber Army of Russia, a group of hackers who have targeted water utilities in the US and Europe and are said to have ties to the notorious Russian military hacking unit known as Sandworm. The responses from Cyber Army of Russia were littered with pro-Kremlin talking points—and some curious admissions.

A deputy director of the FBI has urged the agency’s employees to continue to use a massive foreign surveillance database to search for the communications of “US persons,” sparking the ire of privacy and civil liberty advocates who unsuccessfully fought for such searches to require a warrant. Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act requires that “targets” of the surveillance program be based outside the US, but the texts, emails, and phone call of people in the US can be included in the 702 database if one of the parties involved in the communication is foreign. An amendment that would have required the FBI to obtain a warrant for 702 searches of US persons failed in a tie vote earlier this year.

Security researchers this week revealed an attack on VPNs that forces some or all of a user’s web traffic to be routed outside the encrypted tunnel, thus negating the entire reason for using a VPN. Dubbed “TunnelVision,” the attack impacts nearly all VPN applications, and the researchers say the attack has been possible since 2022, meaning it’s possible that it’s already been used by malicious actors.

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.

Microsoft has developed an offline generative AI model designed specifically to handle top-secret information for US intelligence agencies, according to _Bloomberg_. This system, based on GPT-4, is isolated from the internet and only accessible through a network exclusive to the US government. William Chappell, Microsoft's chief technology officer for strategic missions and technology, told _Bloomberg_ that, theoretically, around 10,000 individuals could access the system.

Although spy agencies are eager to leverage the capabilities of generative AI, concerns have been raised about the potential unintended leakage of classified information, as these systems typically rely on online cloud services for data processing. However, Microsoft claims that the model it created for the US government is “clean,” meaning it can read files without learning from them, preventing secret information from being integrated into the platform. Bloomberg noted that this marks the first time a major large language model has operated entirely offline.

Sky News reported this week that Britain's Ministry of Defence was the target of a significant cyberattack on its third-party payroll system. On Tuesday, Grant Shapps, the UK defence secretary, informed members of Parliament that payroll records of approximately 270,000 current and former military personnel, including their home addresses, had been accessed in the cyberattack. “State involvement” could not be ruled out, he said.

While the government has not publicly identified a specific country involved, Sky News has reported that the Chinese government is suspected. China’s foreign ministry has denied the allegations, saying in a statement that it “firmly opposes and fights all forms of cyber attacks” and “rejects the use of this issue politically to smear other countries.”

The payroll company, Shared Services Connected, had known about the breach for months before reporting it to the government, according to _The Guardian_.

The United States Marine Forces Special Operations Command (MARSOC) is testing robotic dogs that can be armed with artificial-intelligence-enabled gun systems. According to reporting from The War Zone, the manufacturer of the AI gun system, Onyx Industries, confirmed to reporters at a defense conference this week that as many as two of MARSOC’s robot dogs, developed by Ghost Robotics, are equipped with its weapons systems.

In a statement to The War Zone, MARSOC clarified that the robot dogs are “under evaluation” and are not yet being deployed in the field. They noted that weapons are just one possible application for the technology, which could also be used for surveillance and reconnaissance. MARSOC emphasized that they are fully compliant with US Department of Defense policies on autonomous weapons.

The US Marine Corps has previously tested robotic dogs armed with rocket launchers.

Days after a hacker posted to BreachForums offering to sell data from nearly 50 million Dell customers, the company began notifying its customers of a data breach in a company portal. According to the email sent to the people impacted, the leaked data contains names, addresses, and information about purchased hardware. “The information involved does not include financial or payment information, email address, telephone number or any highly sensitive customer information,” the email to affected customers states.

Microsoft Deploys Generative AI for US Spies

TunnelVision is an attack developed by researchers that can expose VPN traffic to snooping or tampering.

Researchers have devised an attack against nearly all virtual private network applications that forces them to send and receive some or all traffic outside of the encrypted tunnel designed to protect it from snooping or tampering.

TunnelVision, as the researchers have named their attack, largely negates the entire purpose and selling point of VPNs, which is to encapsulate incoming and outgoing Internet traffic in an encrypted tunnel and to cloak the user’s IP address. The researchers believe it affects all VPN applications when they’re connected to a hostile network and that there are no ways to prevent such attacks except when the user's VPN runs on Linux or Android. They also said their attack technique may have been possible since 2002 and may already have been discovered and used in the wild since then.

**Reading, Dropping, or Modifying VPN Traffic**

The effect of TunnelVision is that “the victim's traffic is now decloaked and being routed through the attacker directly,” a video demonstration explained. “The attacker can read, drop or modify the leaked traffic and the victim maintains their connection to both the VPN and the internet.”

The attack works by manipulating the DHCP server that allocates IP addresses to devices trying to connect to the local network. A setting known as option 121 allows the DHCP server to override default routing rules that send VPN traffic through a local IP address that initiates the encrypted tunnel. By using option 121 to route VPN traffic through the DHCP server, the attack diverts the data to the DHCP server itself. Researchers from Leviathan Security explained:

> Our technique is to run a DHCP server on the same network as a targeted VPN user and to also set our DHCP configuration to use itself as a gateway. When the traffic hits our gateway, we use traffic forwarding rules on the DHCP server to pass traffic through to a legitimate gateway while we snoop on it.
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> We use DHCP option 121 to set a route on the VPN user’s routing table. The route we set is arbitrary and we can also set multiple routes if needed. By pushing routes that are more specific than a /0 CIDR range that most VPNs use, we can make routing rules that have a higher priority than the routes for the virtual interface the VPN creates. We can set multiple /1 routes to recreate the 0.0.0.0/0 all traffic rule set by most VPNs.
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> Pushing a route also means that the network traffic will be sent over the same interface as the DHCP server instead of the virtual network interface. This is intended functionality that isn’t clearly stated in the RFC. Therefore, for the routes we push, it is never encrypted by the VPN’s virtual interface but instead transmitted by the network interface that is talking to the DHCP server. As an attacker, we can select which IP addresses go over the tunnel and which addresses go over the network interface talking to our DHCP server.
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> We now have traffic being transmitted outside the VPN’s encrypted tunnel. This technique can also be used against an already established VPN connection once the VPN user’s host needs to renew a lease from our DHCP server. We can artificially create that scenario by setting a short lease time in the DHCP lease, so the user updates their routing table more frequently. In addition, the VPN control channel is still intact because it already uses the physical interface for its communication. In our testing, the VPN always continued to report as connected, and the kill switch was never engaged to drop our VPN connection.

The attack can most effectively be carried out by a person who has administrative control over the network the target is connecting to. In that scenario, the attacker configures the DHCP server to use option 121. It’s also possible for people who can connect to the network as an unprivileged user to perform the attack by setting up their own rogue DHCP server.

The attack allows some or all traffic to be routed through the unencrypted tunnel. In either case, the VPN application will report that all data is being sent through the protected connection. Any traffic that’s diverted away from this tunnel will not be encrypted by the VPN and the internet IP address viewable by the remote user will belong to the network the VPN user is connected to, rather than one designated by the VPN app.

Interestingly, Android is the only operating system that fully immunizes VPN apps from the attack because it doesn't implement option 121. For all other OSes, there are no complete fixes. When apps run on Linux there’s a setting that minimizes the effects, but even then TunnelVision can be used to exploit a side channel that can be used to de-anonymize destination traffic and perform targeted denial-of-service attacks. Network firewalls can also be configured to deny inbound and outbound traffic to and from the physical interface. This remedy is problematic for two reasons: (1) A VPN user connecting to an untrusted network has no ability to control the firewall, and (2) it opens the same side channel present with the Linux mitigation.

The most effective fixes are to run the VPN inside of a virtual machine whose network adapter isn’t in bridged mode or to connect the VPN to the internet through the Wi-Fi network of a cellular device. The research, from Leviathan Security researchers Lizzie Moratti and Dani Cronce, is available here.

_This story originally appeared on_ _Ars Technica._

Source

Wired