What struck me most in reporting this out was that while the teacher I spoke to had serious privacy concerns, a recently-departed student felt the opposite. Younger generations don't seem as privacy conscious, from the conversations I've had over the years, now playing out in school surveillance.

Didn't get around to posting here as I've been off work and will be until mid-Jan.

🚨 NEW (ish) 🚨 Facial recognition, AI behavioral analysis, drones,, bathroom listening devices, Flock Safety car surveillance—schools across America are rolling out all manner of AI snooping tools. It's just not clear just how effective any of these tools are. www.forbes.com/sites/thomas...

‪What could go wrong? great reporting from @thomasbrewster.bsky.social AI Bathroom Monitors? Welcome To America’s New Surveillance High Schools www.forbes.com/sites/thomas...

ICE just spent another $300,000 on social media surveillance tool Tangles, per contract records. More here on that company: www.forbes.com/sites/thomas...

Here's HSI accidentally destroying iPhones in a major drug trafficking investigation at the Mexico border. They've asked Apple to provide data instead. Related: www.forbes.com/sites/the-wi...

🚨 NEW 🚨 Brinc, founded by 25-year-old Blake Resnick, is trying to get DJIs out of American cops drone fleets. Come December 23, the Chinese giant may not be able to put new devices in the hands of the police. Some cops are really not happy about it. www.forbes.com/sites/zoyaha...

🚨NEW🚨 At the southern border, officers use Cellebrite forensic devices to access iPhones of immigration crime suspects. Except they don't always get the data CBP wants. So CBP orders Apple to provide it instead. A CBP playbook on border surveillance. www.forbes.com/sites/the-wi...

🚨NEW🚨 At the southern border, officers use Cellebrite forensic devices to access iPhones of immigration crime suspects. Except they don't always get the data CBP wants. So CBP orders Apple to provide it instead. A CBP playbook on border surveillance. www.forbes.com/sites/the-wi...

Thanks for the shoutout in Forbes, @thomasbrewster.bsky.social www.forbes.com/sites/the-wi...

The new edition of Forbes magazine just dropped - the cover story is on two 30-year-old entrepreneurs from Poland, who sick of bad movie dubbing, built their own voice AI model. Today, it's worth $6.6 billion, they are new billionaires & are beating Silicon Valley's tech giants

I just got served an AI generated ad on YouTube for... Tai Chi?

Also ICYMI yesterday

ICYMI yesterday

you know, what if they aren't actually a commentary on journalism or the state of media. what if these people are just extremely weird

because stupid and smart are not mutually exclusive... "Google's Hot New Al Coding Tool Was Hacked A Day After Launch" (great report from @thomasbrewster.bsky.social) www.forbes.com/sites/thomas...

Update from Google on this one: turns out they take security seriously. No patch for the bugs scheduled yet.

A security researcher discovered a nasty flaw in Google’s Antigravity tool, the latest example of companies rushing out AI tools vulnerable to hacking.

🚨NEW🚨 An NSA contractor with Booz Allen used his work computer (!!!) to groom teenage girls, per previously-unreported court documents. Among his alleged handles? Charming_Analyst5077. He also used a photo of a dead friend when posing as a young man, DOJ said. www.forbes.com/sites/the-wi...

🚨NEW🚨 Google shipped its AI code editor Antigravity with a bunch of security vulnerabilities. The most severe, discovered within 24 hours of launch, allows for a persistent backdoor on target systems. It remains unpatched. www.forbes.com/sites/thomas...

🚨NEW🚨 Google shipped its AI code editor Antigravity with a bunch of security vulnerabilities. The most severe, discovered within 24 hours of launch, allows for a persistent backdoor on target systems. It remains unpatched. www.forbes.com/sites/thomas...

Court Watch is a totally indispensable source of important, interesting, bizarre court cases every week. I definitely feel as a paid subscriber I am supporting something that serves the public good. They're trying to turn 4; subscribe if you can www.courtwatch.news/p/help-us-tu...

Prosecutors have accused Brian Raymond, founder of AI infrastructure and consulting company Bitworks, and three others of selling coveted Nvidia chips to unspecified Chinese companies.

Also, follow and support @courtwatch.bsky.social please. They're doing excellent work.

🚨NEW🚨 A US AI founder and NVIDIA partner got caught trying to ship the most powerful of the chip maker's processors to China, the DOJ says. He just got offered a job at another NVIDIA partner as CTO. The offer has been rescinded. H/T @courtwatch.bsky.social www.forbes.com/sites/thomas...

Nice from @byrontau.bsky.social - a reminder that local police as well as federal have been using this stuff for years www.forbes.com/sites/thomas...

New: the airlines (Delta, United, American, etc) will shut down a program in which it sold hundreds of millions of your flight records to government agencies, including ICE, FBI, ATF, more. Comes after intense lawmaker-pressure and 404 Media's months-long reporting www.404media.co/airlines-wil...

The U.S. government has been contracting stealth startup Twenty, which is working on AI agents and automated hacking of foreign targets at massive scale.

NEW - OpenAI's GPT-5 was kind of a disappointment, right? But new analysis showed a sudden jump in OpenAI models' ability to write secure code. Anthropic's Claude somehow got worse. www.forbes.com/sites/the-wi...

NEW - Hackers started using large language models to code up attacks on systems running a popular AI orchestration tool. They then used those hacked AI systems to look for other vulnerable AI servers. Human + AI vs. AI is the current paradigm, evidently. www.forbes.com/sites/thomas...

🚨SCOOP 🚨The Pentagon is spending millions on a secretive startup that’s making hacking AI to help carry out operations on hundreds of targets at once. In-q-tel, the VC org founded by the CIA, is a backer of the startup, called Twenty. www.forbes.com/sites/thomas...

Both this and in their story on Bannon and Epstein, Guardian has done it right. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

"Twenty’s contracts are a rare case of an AI offensive cyber company with VC backing landing Cyber Command work; typically cyber contracts have gone to either small bespoke companies or to the old guard of defense contracting like Booz Allen Hamilton or L3Harris."

The Defense Department has been contracting stealth startup Twenty, which is working on AI agents and automated hacking of foreign targets at massive scale, reports my colleague @thomasbrewster.bsky.social www.forbes.com/sites/thomas...

ICYMI yesterday.

🚨SCOOP 🚨The Pentagon is spending millions on a secretive startup that’s making hacking AI to help carry out operations on hundreds of targets at once. In-q-tel, the VC org founded by the CIA, is a backer of the startup, called Twenty. www.forbes.com/sites/thomas...

Wonder if this also has something to do with the many millions of dollars Google gets from CBP and ICE for cloud contracts every year...

NEW: Google is taking legal action against Chinese cybercriminals responsible for sending out millions of scam text messages—including those parcel delivery scams. Google hopes the lawsuit will help to disrupt the scammers' sprawling infrastructure

Correction: $75m!

This is Tenzai, which is already worth $330 million after an $80 million seed round, just five months after launching.

AI agents are ready to hack your apps now... this time for good. Agents, built on frontier AI models from the likes of Anthropic and OpenAI, have been fine tuned by this startup to exploit customer applications with “elite, nation-grade offensive capabilities." www.forbes.com/sites/the-wi...

So just how much money is OpenAI dumping on this firehose of imbecilic video? More than $5 billion annualized, or around $15 million per day, according to Forbes estimates and conversations with experts www.forbes.com/sites/phoebe...

If you read an amazing article from Teen Vogue about politics in the last several years, chances are that Lex McMenamin wrote it. Any publication that is serious about meeting this moment would be lucky to have them.

Interesting - I'd heard of a cop's account getting hacked on at least one occasion. One thing I will note, however, is that Flock has been pushing and in some cases enforcing multi-factor authentication, per public records. See here for an email sent by Flock to a customer...

🚨🚨🚨 Absolutely insane stuff here. @lorenzofb.bsky.social spent months working on this story. Peter Williams, former L3Harris Trenchant boss — the division that makes cyber exploits, zero-days and spyware for Western governments — has pleaded guilty to selling Trenchant's exploits to Russia.

I'm sure this is fine. www.forbes.com/sites/thomas...

New: Videos show ICE/CBP agents are scanning peoples' faces on the street to verify citizenship. ICE has tool to instantly look up unprecedented number of databases with just a photo “I’m an American citizen so leave me alone” “Alright, we just got to verify that” www.404media.co/ice-and-cbp-...

SCOOP: On Mon, Kaspersky said it found new spyware called Dante targeting Windows users in Russia & Belarus, saying the spyware was developed by Milan-based Memento Labs. Memento's CEO confirmed to TechCrunch that Dante is its spyware, and blamed one of its government customers for getting caught.

Filling in for @thomasbrewster.bsky.social on this week's edition of our cybersecurity newsletter The Wiretap. What's inside: 🃏 The hacking at the center of the (alleged) NBA/Mafia poker cheating. 🤖 A startup working to make AI agents more secure. 🐞 Apple's bigger bug bounties And more!

I just wrote about this warrant, what it means for a potential new chapter of the "reverse warrants" saga, and some questions we should be asking for the future: cyberlaw.stanford.edu/eight-or-so-...