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Key U.S. officials tell Threat Status that the intelligence community is readying new rules for internal use of AI.
…The Biden administration has formally recognized opposition candidate Edmundo González as the winner of Venezuela’s election, despite the regime’s claims that President Nicolás Maduro won the July 24 vote.
…Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah warned Israel that the conflict between the two sides has “entered a new phase.”
…A division of the Royal Navy that provides logistics support to the British fleet at sea is going on strike this month because its officers say they are “overworked, underpaid and undervalued.”
…And Washington Times Asia Editor Andrew Salmon takes us inside “Zero Day,” a Taiwanese TV thriller that offers a realistic look at a possible Chinese attack on the island democracy.
It was the biggest East-West exchange of prisoners since the end of the Cold War. The massive prisoner swap Thursday between the U.S., its allies and Russia saw the return of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and former Marine Paul Whelan to U.S. soil. The two detained U.S. citizens had been imprisoned in Russia on espionage charges that the U.S. government rejected as bogus.
Alsu Kurmasheva, a Russian-American radio journalist who was detained in Russia in June 2023 on charges of spreading false information about the Russian army, also was among those the Kremlin released.
In exchange, Russian President Vladimir Putin demanded and got Vadim Krasikov, who was convicted in Germany in 2021 and sentenced to life in prison for killing a former Chechen rebel in a Berlin park two years earlier, on the orders of Moscow’s security services.
Both President Biden and Mr. Putin cast the exchange as a win for their side. Mr. Putin greeted the returning Russian prisoners as their plane landed in Moscow. Mr. Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris did the same as the returning Americans landed in Maryland.
Earlier in the day at the White House, Mr. Biden hailed the return of “falsely accused Americans” held prisoner in Mr. Putin’s Russia.
It’s a question analysts will likely be asking for years. And Mr. Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, certainly thinks so. In a social media post, Mr. Trump referenced the seemingly imbalanced nature of the exchange.
“Are we releasing murderers, killers, or thugs? Just curious because we never make good deals, at anything, but especially hostage swaps,” he said.
Indeed, two top Russian cybercriminals — Vladislav Klyushin and Roman Seleznev — were part of the deal, in addition to Mr. Krasikov and other unsavory characters. The U.S., meanwhile, got back journalists, military veterans, dissidents and other nonviolent, noncriminal figures.
It’s become something of a pattern. In 2022, the Biden administration secured the release of imprisoned WNBA star Brittney Griner in exchange for infamous Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout.
The U.S. intelligence community is readying new rules for internal use of artificial intelligence, creating a first directive to govern how spies adopt and deploy the rapidly advancing technology.
The Times’ Ryan Lovelace has all the details after an exclusive interview with John Beieler, the U.S. intelligence community’s AI chief. He said the directive is still a work in progress focused on such things as the ethical use of AI and ongoing monitoring of models once they are deployed.
It’s been a busy news week in the secretive world of spies and counterintelligence. The Times’ Bill Gertz had a look earlier this week at the Pentagon’s new plan to take a more offensive stance in the effort to thwart foreign spy networks.
And Mr. Gertz also offers this troubling story about TikTok and its role as a weapon of the Chinese Communist Party. The CCP and China’s military leaders, he reports, view TikTok as one of several strategic tools for both political-influence operations and military support, according to an open-source intelligence report on the popular short-video sharing app.
The report by two former military and intelligence experts warns that TikTok’s extensive influence in the U.S. will be used by Beijing to target young people and “shift American narratives subtly to favor a more China-centric worldview.”
The report made public recently examines the fallout from the law signed by Mr. Biden in April to force TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, to sell the American operation to a non-Chinese government-linked owner within a year or be banned nationally, a directive the company is fighting in court as a violation of the First Amendment.
If you still doubt China’s direct control over the popular app, remember this piece from Mr. Lovelace earlier this week: The U.S. intelligence community says that TikTokcensored content outside of China on behalf of the communist government in Beijing, according to a heavily redacted Justice Department legal brief. If true, those allegations would offer more proof of the Chinese government’s direct hand in using TikTok to push its own preferred narratives abroad, despite the company’s denials.
After days of casting doubt on the official government results of Venezuela’s presidential election, the Biden administration went several steps further on Thursday. The State Department said the U.S. recognizes Mr. González, a former diplomat, as the rightful winner of the election — not Mr. Maduro, the incumbent socialist president who is widely suspected of engineering fake voting results to keep himself in power in the July 24 vote.
“Given the overwhelming evidence, it is clear to the United States and, most importantly, to the Venezuelan people that [Mr. González] won the most votes in Venezuela’s July 28 presidential election,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement.
It’s not clear what the administration’s next move might be. So far, Mr. Maduro has insisted he’ll remain in power, and the Venezuelan military seems to be on his side.
China recently hosted leaders from Hamas and the Palestinian Authority’s Fatah Party, with the two rival factions signing a declaration laying out what the governance of a post-war Gaza Strip might look like.
And that could be a major win for China, according to national security and foreign affairs columnist Jed Babbin.
“Hamas will use the Beijing Declaration to claim some degree of diplomatic legitimacy,” he says in a new piece for The Times. “That is part of what China has in mind, of course. Other parts of China’s game are to make itself equal or superior to the U.S. in arbitrating an end to the Israel-Hamas war. China can use that leverage with the Arab states to damage what is left of former President Donald Trump’s Abraham Accords.”
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