Russia is deploying an artificial intelligence-powered surveillance operation using facial recognition to identify those opposed to the government at public events, according to an analysis of leaked Kremlin documents obtained by Estonian journalists.

Aspects of the new system were reportedly used to assist in the arrests of people attending the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s funeral and were previously tested on fans attending soccer’s World Cup in Russia in 2018.

National Security Tech Correspondent Ryan Lovelace reports that President Vladimir Putin’s administration intends to spend more than $121 million on the AI system’s continued development from 2024 through 2026, according to leaked documents reviewed by the central European-based VSquare and international investigators.

Revelations about the Kremlin’s use of the technology come as the European Union prepares to implement bloc-wide rules that ban AI applications involving emotion recognition, “scraping” of facial images for surveillance and the manipulation of human behavior.

Key military-to-military talks between U.S. and Chinese officials played out in Hawaii in the backdrop of this week’s telephone summit between President Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Officials from the Pentagon’s Indo-Pacific Command, the U.S. Pacific Fleet, and U.S. Pacific Air Forces met with their Chinese counterparts in Honolulu for the first substantial operator-level talks between the two countries in more than two years.

The Military Maritime Consultative Agreement (MMCA) Working Group meeting comes amid heightened bilateral tension over increasingly aggressive Chinese military posturing toward the U.S.-backed island democracy of Taiwan. Mr. Biden has sought to reduce the friction with Mr. Xi following last year’s shoot down by a U.S. fighter jet of an alleged Chinese spy balloon.

In Honolulu this week, U.S. head of delegation Army Col. Ian Francis, director of Northeast Asia policy for the Indo-Pacific Command, said in a statement that “open, direct, and clear communications” with the Chinese military and all other military forces in the region is of “utmost importance to avoid accidents and miscommunication.”

U.S. Marines are running high-altitude training missions in the snow-packed Sierra Nevada to be ready to fight battles in places near China, Russia or the Arctic. National Security Correspondent Bill Gertz spent time on the ground at the Marine Mountain Warfare Training Center, witnessing one recent exercise that saw Marines conduct a simulated shore landing from ships to a mountainous island.

They were then instructed to fight across heavily forested mountains, in some places covered in snow up to 6 feet deep, toward an objective on the other side of the island about 9 miles away. The goal of the carefully planned operation was to seize an airport. 

Marine leaders won’t say it, but the mountain island scenario plays out exactly the way an amphibious landing would go on the east coast of Taiwan, one of the most mountainous islands in the world and an announced target of the Chinese government and its People’s Liberation Army.

The president of New York-based EcoHealth Alliance, which used U.S. taxpayer money to fund research at the Wuhan virus lab in China, will appear before Congress next month to once again defend his firm’s work. 

House Republicans who announced the meeting said Dr. Peter Daszak needs to clear up “inconsistent” information he had given about EcoHealth’s role in the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s work, which many experts now believe may have played a role in spawning the coronavirus pandemic. They contend his statements in a November appearance behind closed doors don’t match documents that the committees have seen.

EcoHealth funneled U.S. government grant money to the lab to help finance coronavirus research. But there is a disagreement over whether that money funded what’s known as “gain of function research,” which is where viruses are pushed to develop new features, including ones that might make them deadlier, to understand how they might evolve.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has accused the U.S., Britain and Ukraine of playing a role in the recent ISIS-K attack that slaughtered innocent concertgoers in Moscow, but the incident was a Putin intelligence failure, writes Threat Status columnist Daniel N. Hoffman, who asserts that Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) “failed to detect and preempt the threat.”

“In today’s Russia, there is no independent and impartial judiciary, no non-state media, and no real parliamentary oversight. There is only the Kremlin and what Mr. Putin refers to as the ‘vertical of power,’ which makes him alone responsible for the country’s successes and failures. That is what makes autocracies inherently brittle,” writes Mr. Hoffman, a former CIA Clandestine Service officer.

The “stakes could not be higher” for Mr. Putin, he argues, adding that “ISIS is ruthlessly focused on exacting retribution for Russia‘s alliance with Iran, its attacks on the Islamic State affiliate in Syria, and grievances among Muslims, especially in Tajikistan and Turkmenistan.” While Mr. Putin will “likely continue to search for someone to blame for the terrorist attack, … the incontrovertible fact remains that Russia is in the crosshairs of ISIS-K,” Mr. Hoffman writes.