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Arson attacks on the French high-speed rail network disrupted travel for hundreds of thousands of people ahead of the opening ceremony of the Olympics.
…The U.S. intel community’s chief AI officer tells Threat Status in an exclusive interview that American spy agencies need a better way of distinguishing man from machine in their analysis.
…The National Institute for Deterrence Studies just dropped a white paper calling for the U.S. to embrace a strategy of “dynamic parity” to address the expanding nuclear capabilities of China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia.
…Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is now headed to meet with former President Trump at Mar-a-Lago.
…British intelligence says a Ukrainian attack on a Russian ferry this week will “almost certainly” cause the Kremlin problems supplying forces across southern Ukraine.
……U.S. authorities in Texas have arrested Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, a longtime leader of Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel, and Joaquín Guzmán López, a son of another infamous cartel leader.
…And several world leaders joined the thousands gathered in Hanoi for the funeral of Vietnam’s Communist Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong.
John Beieler, the chief AI officer in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, tells Threat Status in an exclusive interview that the U.S. intelligence community needs to develop a better way of distinguishing man from machine as the global race for advanced artificial intelligence tools accelerates.
Mr. Beieler told National Security Tech Correspondent Ryan Lovelace that while no one is close to producing artificial general intelligence, or AGI, the task of even measuring whether anyone is capable of such an accomplishment is difficult.
Chinese researchers aim to merge AI and neuroscience in pursuit of AGI, according to a July 2023 report by the Georgetown University Center for Security and Emerging Technology. American technology dynamo OpenAI also is planning for AGI. In 2023, the company outlined its vision for AGI to “give everyone incredible new capabilities,” but cautioned that “drastic accidents and societal disruption” could ensue from AGI misuse.
Mr. Beieler says the U.S. intelligence community wants to ensure the worst outcomes don’t result from such powerful models’ deployment. “We don’t have a really good, consistent way of measuring the performance of models across the board,” he told Threat Status.
The Biden administration went along with U.S. intelligence agencies that recommended against releasing details to the public of a Chinese surveillance balloon that transited the United States unimpeded in early 2023, after it was shot down by an Air Force jet fighter over the South Carolina coast.
While China has insisted it was an errant weather balloon, U.S. military divers recovered a large amount of intelligence-collection gear in an underwater salvage operation. But all information about the balloon is being kept secret, White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan told the Aspen Security Forum this month.
U.S. intelligence agencies learned about “basically what is China up to with this thing, what capabilities do they have,” Mr. Sullivan said, describing the recovered equipment as “pretty sensitive.”
“So this was not a White House-directed decision” to withhold details from the public, he said, “but the intelligence community, the FBI, made a judgment that the best way forward would be for us to take those lessons, apply them, share them as necessary with others, but not make a big public show of it.”
A formal arraignment is set to occur next Tuesday in Texas in the case of Minsu Fang, the Chinese national charged by U.S. federal prosecutors this week with importing one of the largest-ever amounts of fentanyl precursor chemicals into the United States.
Washington Times Law Enforcement Correspondent Matt Delaney reports that Mr. Fang, 48, is charged with multiple offenses related to importing the synthetic opioid’s ingredients. Alamdar Hamdani, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Texas, said in a statement that a “historic seizure” of the ingredients “prevented the production of millions upon millions of deadly doses of fentanyl-laced pills.”
Fentanyl is about 50 times more potent than heroin and is driving an overdose epidemic in the United States. Prosecutors say Mr. Fang and his associates tried to avoid detection by mixing the chemicals in with other low-value imports and labeling them as having a “de minimis” value, or being worth less than $800.
Once the chemicals were in the country, Mr. Fang, who went by the alias “Fernando,” is accused of having them transported across the U.S. southern border to Mexico, where drug cartels produce almost all of the street fentanyl found in the United States.
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin used a Pentagon press briefing Thursday to praise President Biden’s foreign policy accomplishments and vouch for the security policy credibility of Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic nominee against former President Donald Trump in November.
It was Mr. Austin’s first press conference since the president dropped the bombshell that was ending his reelection campaign. While saluting what he called Mr. Biden’s “life of service,” Mr. Austin insisted that Ms. Harris also has been a key player in the administration’s foreign policy and national security discussions.
“She’s represented this country in the international area on the international stage a number of times,” Mr. Austin said. “She understands national security [and] international affairs. … She has always been there, she’s always been part of the process, and she’s always very engaged.”
Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are proponents of a “multipolar world” and they see NATO as an adversarial bloc because they know that, absent collective security, they can take advantage of smaller, weaker nations to impose their will militarily and commercially, writes retired CIA officer and Threat Status contributor Daniel N. Hoffman.
“There is no time like the present to bolster strong bipartisan commitment to NATO,” writes Mr. Hoffman, who argues that “if there’s a silver lining to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it’s the revitalization of NATO, for which we can thank President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the brave Ukrainians who are defending their country from the Kremlin’s onslaught.”
Last month’s NATO summit “marked the first time the alliance had so publicly and explicitly confronted the new ‘axis of tyranny’ — the deepening collaboration between Russia, North Korea, China and Iran that seeks to overthrow the U.S.-led liberal international order,” he writes.
Western intelligence services “will work overtime” and France’s security partners “will be critical” in preempting security threats to the Summer Olympics opening in Paris on Friday, according to retired CIA officer Theodore J. Singer.
“Threats to the Paris Games are manifold,” Mr. Singer wrote in an analysis published back in May by Securityinfowatch.com.
“First, Moscow and other malign actors will sponsor cyber and disinformation campaigns to discredit France, participant nations and sponsors,” he wrote. “Second, domestic violent extremists, whether organized groups or ‘lone wolves,’ will engage in violent unrest or acts to draw attention to racist, xenophobic and anarchic causes. Third, organized terror groups or religiously motivated individuals will see an opportunity to exact revenge and advance their goals.”
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