Late last year, Nikkei Asia reported that Japan was planning to add thousands of personnel to its military cyber defense unit. Now, we might know why — according to a report from the Washington Post, hackers in China had "deep, persistent access" to Japanese defense networks. When the National Security Agency is said to have first discovered the breach in late 2020, NSA Chief and Commander of US Cyber Command General Paul Nakasone flew to Japan with White House deputy national security advisor Matthew Pottinger to report the breach to officials.

Despite briefings that reached as high as Japan's prime minister, the Washington Post reports that hacking from China remained an issue for several months, persisting through the end of the Trump administration and well into early 2021.

US Cyber Command initially offered Japan assistance in purging its systems of malware but were reportedly rebuffed because the country was not comfortable with another nation's military accessing their systems. Instead, Japan elected to use domestic commercial security firms to find vulnerabilities, relying on the US only for guidance on what those firms found. Japan would eventually adopt a more active national security strategy, which is said to include a new cyber command to monitor networks around the clock, and as many as 4,000 active cybersecurity personnel.

After a ransomware attack in June, the Colorado Department of Higher Education (CDHE) notified students on Friday of a potential data leak. In June, "unauthorized actor(s)" not yet publicly identified accessed CDHE systems in a ransomware attack. While authorities continue to investigate the full extent of the damage, the department has disclosed that the attack breached personally identifiable information like names and social security numbers.

"The review of the impacted records is ongoing and once complete, CDHE will be notifying individuals who are potentially impacted by mail or email to the extent we have contact information," CDHE wrote in a Notice of Data Incident. But the department warns students that the impact of the breach reaches across programs, from public schools to adult education initiatives, over a 16 year time period.

In response, CDHE is offering free access to Experian credit monitoring and identity theft protection to protect their data. The department recommends impacted groups keep an eye on their account statements and credit reports for suspicious activity. 

Education systems are a popular target for ransomware attacks. In 2022, at least 44 colleges and 45 school districts reported ransomware attacks, compared to 88 total education departments in 2021, according to data from Emsisoft. The Government Accountability Office recommended that the Department of Education and the Department of Homeland Security coordinate to evaluate school cybersecurity efforts across the country. 

Most taxpayers will have the option of going entirely paperless starting with the 2024 filing season. The IRS said today that it aims to “achieve paperless processing for all tax returns” by 2025. The agency says the IRS Paperless Processing Initiative will “eliminate up to 200 million pieces of paper annually, cut processing times in half and expedite refunds by several weeks.” The project is funded by President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.

The IRS expects the changes will solve the annoyance of transmitting digital documents in some cases but still having to mail paper ones in others. “For decades, taxpayers had to respond to notices for things like document verification through the mail, and IRS employees had to manually enter numbers from paper returns into computers one digit at a time, creating significant delays for taxpayers and challenges for IRS staff,” the US Treasury Department wrote today.

Starting next year (2024 filling season), taxpayers can digitally submit all correspondence — including many non-tax forms. The IRS says at least 20 additional e-File tax forms will be available digitally starting then. It estimates that over 94 percent of individual filers will never have to mail another tax form or document. The initiative will spare taxpayers from sending approximately 125 million paper documents annually.

By the 2025 filling season, “an additional 150 of the most used non-tax forms will be available in digital, mobile-friendly formats.” (The IRS cites research showing that around 15 percent of Americans rely solely on their phones for internet access.) It says all paper-filed tax and information returns — an estimated 76 million paper documents per year — will be processed digitally as soon as it receives them. Similarly, half of paper-submitted correspondence, non-tax forms and notice responses (another 60 million paper docs) will be recorded digitally. Finally, the IRS also plans to digitize up to one billion historical documents, making accessing older filing data easier for customer service agents and taxpayers.

The IRS says its Paperless Processing Initiative will help eliminate errors from manual data entry, speed up processing and let the agency pour more resources into taxpayer support. “Customer service employees do not currently have easy access to the information from paper returns and other correspondence submitted by mail,” the Treasury Department wrote. “Digitization and data extraction will give them access to that information they need to better serve taxpayers.”

The agency also expects digitization will help them to hold billionaires and corporations accountable. “When combined with an improved data platform, digitization and data extraction will enable data scientists to implement advanced analytics and pattern recognition methods to pursue cases that can help address the tax gap, including wealthy individuals and large corporations using complex structures to evade taxes they owe.”

After threatening to do so, X Corp (aka Twitter) has filed a lawsuit against The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), Bloomberg has reported. It claimed that the anti-hate group is illegally "scraping" its servers and cherry picking hateful posts as part of "a scare campaign to drive away advertisers," according to documents filed in San Francisco federal court. X Corp. is asking for unspecified monetary damages and an injunction barring the CCDH from accessing its data.

The Center published a research article in June asserting that X allowed explicitly racist and homophobic posts despite policies to the contrary, even after they'd been reported. However, X responded that the CCDH used poor methodology, and failed to study all 500 million posts on the service each day. It also maintained that the Center was taking funding from competitors or foreign governments as part of an "ulterior agenda," according to The New York Times. 

In a new blog post called "Protecting the public’s right to free expression," Twitter/X explained its reasoning for filing a legal claim against CCDH. "X is a free public service funded largely by advertisers. Through the CCDH's scare campaign and its ongoing pressure on brands to prevent the public’s access to free expression, the CCDH is actively working to prevent public dialogue," the post states.

It went on to note that the CCDH scraped its data, accessing it without authorization from Brandwatch, a Twitter partner that provides "consumer & market insights," "brand monitoring" and more. It added that CCDH's "'research' cited in aBloomberg article 'contained metrics used out of context to make unsubstantiated assertions about X (formerly Twitter).'"

"That’s why X has filed a legal claim against the CCDH and its backers," it stated. It also accused the CCDH of "targeting people on all platforms who speak about issues the CCDH doesn’t agree with," "attempting to coerce the deplatforming of users whose views do not conform to the CCDH's ideological agenda" and more. 

In a letter published earlier today, the CCDH countered Twitter's earlier allegations. It noted that it never claimed to be conducting a comprehensive study, and documented the methodology it did use. It wrote that X didn't provide any specific examples, and said it doesn't accept funding from companies or governments. It further stated that it "will not be bullied," will continue publishing its research and that a lawsuit with "frivolous" claims could prove risky.

"The public has the right to know if and how @ElonMusk’s leadership has led to more hate speech on Twitter,” the nonprofit tweeted earlier. "By threatening us, Musk is trying to hide the truth about his own failures. Platforms must be held accountable for spreading hate & lies."

A Congressional subcommittee is set to hold a hearing into UFOs, which are also referred to as unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP). The panel will hear "firsthand accounts" of UAP and "assess the federal government’s transparency and accountability" regarding possible threats to national security. You'll be able to watch the hearing below on July 26th at 10AM ET.

The hearing — conducted by the Subcommittee on National Security, the Border and Foreign Affairs — will also focus on drives for legislation to "bring transparency to UAPs." The subcommittee wants to force the federal government to provide US residents with "information about potential risks to public safety and national security" as well. According to Rep. Tim Burchett, “The Pentagon and Washington bureaucrats have kept this information hidden for decades and we’re finally going to shed some light on it."

The federal government has placed more of an onus on UAPs over the last few years (publicly, at least). In 2021, the Pentagon set up a task force to look into UAP sightings while NASA has established a separate panel to investigate the phenomena. The Department of Defense also created its own UAP investigative body, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), in 2022.

Among the three witnesses who will testify during the hearing is David Grusch. The former intelligence official recently claimed that the US government has been recovering alien spacecraft and the bodies of UAP pilots for decades. Grusch, who until July 2022 was the co-lead for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency's UAP analysis, also said there was evidence of "malevolent activity" by UFOs. His claims, for which he has not provided any physical evidence, led to the hearing.

Governing bodies worldwide have taken steps in recent years to boost local chip manufacturing, such as tax incentives and funding. For instance, the European Union just approved the Chips Act, regulations meant to improve its member states' semiconductor production capacity. First announced in February 2022, the Chips Act aims to use €43 billion ($47.5 billion) in investments to increase the EU's cut of microchip production to 20 percent in 2030 — it currently sits at about 10 percent. The Council of the European Union also hopes it will "attract investment, promote research and innovation and prepare Europe for any future chip supply crisis." The semiconductor industry is projected to be worth $1 trillion by 2030, led by smartphones, servers, data centers, and storage applications. 

In approving the Chips Act, the EU might remove some of its reliance on foreign entities, like China, to produce semiconductors. "With the Chips Act, Europe will be a frontrunner in the world semiconductors race," Héctor Gómez Hernández, Spanish Minister for Industry, Trade and Tourism, said about the development. "We can already see it in action: new production plants, new investments, new research projects. And in the long run, this will also contribute to the renaissance of our industry and the reduction of our foreign dependencies."

The EU's final approval of the Chips Act follows President Biden signing the CHIPS and Science Act into law in 2022. It made $52 billion in funding and tax credits available to the United States' semiconductor industry, with $39 billion of it set aside for semiconductor manufacturing initiatives — applications for funding first opened in Spring 2023. 

TSMC won't be making chips in Arizona on schedule. The Taiwan firm has delayed the start of 4-nanometer chip production at its first Phoenix, Arizona factory from 2024 to 2025. There aren't enough skilled workers available to complete construction on time, according to Chairman Mark Liu. The company is considering loaning technicians from its home country to help complete the project.

The Arizona facility is a highlight of the CHIPS and Science Act President Biden signed into law last year. The measure is meant to boost domestic semiconductor manufacturing, and includes $52.7 billion in funding and tax credits for companies building factories stateside. TSMC seeks $15 billion in tax credits for its two Arizona plants, although it anticipates investing a total $40 billion in the state.

The federal government isn't immediately concerned about the worker shortfall. In a statement, White House representative Olivia Dalton says provisions in the CHIPS and Science Act will get the "workforce we need."

The delay still poses problems for tech companies dependent on TSMC's manufacturing, most notably Apple. Future iPhones and Macs will use 4nm and 3nm chips made at the Phoenix plants. If the delay holds, Apple may have to either stall product launches or lean on alternative manufacturers. Intel is pouring $20 billion into two Arizona facilities due to start chip production in 2024, but those won't necessarily be available for Apple's needs.

The delay illustrates one of the key challenges of bringing more tech manufacturing to the US. While there's no shortage of money or desire, fewer workers are trained for the jobs as there are in Taiwan and other major production hubs. Apple contractor Foxconn may have an easy time finding factory workers in China, for example but they're not nearly as common in the US. Plants like the Mac Pro factory in Austin tend to focus on niche products that don't require large numbers of employees.

There's nonetheless pressure to get the TSMC factories up and running. Moves like this are not only expected to boost the US economy, but to diversify manufacturing away from China. The effort could address issues with labor conditions and limit problems if US-China relations deteriorate. They won't solve every issue (many components and raw materials also come from China), but they may reduce the fallout from political drama.

Microsoft, Google and OpenAI are among the leaders in the US artificial intelligence space that will reportedly commit to certain safeguards for their technology on Friday, following a push from the White House. The companies will voluntarily agree to abide by a number of principles though the agreement will expire when Congress passes legislation to regulate AI, according to Bloomberg.

The Biden administration has placed a focus on making sure that AI companies develop the technology responsibly. Officials want to make sure tech firms can innovate in generative AI in a way that benefits society without negatively impacting the safety, rights and democratic values of the public.

In May, Vice President Kamala Harris met with the CEOs of OpenAI, Microsoft, Alphabet and Anthropic, and told them they had a responsibility to make sure their AI products are safe and secure. Last month, President Joe Biden met with leaders in the field to discuss AI issues.

According to a draft document viewed by Bloomberg, the tech firms are set to agree to eight suggested measures concerning safety, security and social responsibility. Those include:

• Letting independent experts test models for bad behavior 

• Investing in cybersecurity

• Emboldening third parties to discover security vulnerabilities

• Flagging societal risks including biases and inappropriate uses

• Focusing on research into the societal risks of AI

• Sharing trust and safety information with other companies and the government 

• Watermarking audio and visual content to help make it clear that content is AI-generated

• Using the state-of-the-art AI systems known as frontier models to tackle society’s greatest problems

The fact that this is a voluntary agreement underscores the difficulty that lawmakers have in keeping up with the pace of AI developments. Several bills have been introduced in Congress in the hope of regulating AI. One aims to prevent companies from using Section 230 protections to avoid liability for harmful AI-generated content, while another seeks to require political ads to include disclosures when generative AI is employed. Of note, administrators in the Houses of Representatives have reportedly placed limits on the use of generative AI in congressional offices.

A typo has reportedly routed millions of US military emails — some containing highly sensitive information — to Mali. The problem stems from entering .ML instead of .MIL for the receiving email address domain. As reported by the Financial Times, the one-letter mistake has exposed data like “diplomatic documents, tax returns, passwords and the travel details of top officers” — and much more. Although the misdirected emails have (so far) landed with a contractor tasked with managing Mali’s country domain, control of .ML will soon revert to Mali’s government, which has ties to Russia.

The “typo leak” was exposed by Johannes Zuurbier, a Dutch contractor managing Mali’s country domain. Zuurbier says he made numerous attempts to warn the United States about the issue — beginning in 2014 — urging it to take it seriously; he says he hasn’t had any luck. He claims he started collecting the email this year as his contract’s expiration date (and handover of the domain, including the misfired emails, to the Malian government) approaches, as a last-ditch attempt to persuade the US to act with urgency. In a letter to the US in early July, Zuurbier wrote, “This risk is real and could be exploited by adversaries of the US.” He says he has collected around 117,00 emails, and nearly 1,000 more arrived last Wednesday alone.

Although Zuurbier says none of the messages were marked as classified, they still contain sensitive data about US military personnel, contractors and families. Reported contents include the travel plans for a May trip by US Army Chief of Staff, General James McConville, for a May trip to Indonesia. Other exposed information includes maps of installations, photos of bases, identity documents (including passport numbers), crew lists of ships, tax and financial records, medical data, ships’ crew lists, naval inspection reports, contracts, criminal complaints against personnel, internal bullying investigations and bookings. One email from an FBI agent included a Turkish diplomatic letter to the US, warning about possible operations by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

“If you have this kind of sustained access, you can generate intelligence even just from unclassified information,” former NSA head and retired four-star US Navy Admiral Mike Rogers told FT. Rogers says this isn’t uncommon, noting that people making mistakes isn’t out of the norm. However, he adds, “The question is the scale, the duration and the sensitivity of the information.”

Lt. Cmdr Tim Gorman, speaking for the Pentagon, told FT that the Department of Defense “is aware of this issue and takes all unauthorised disclosures of controlled national security information or controlled unclassified information seriously.” He said emails sent from .MIL to .ML address “are blocked before they leave the .mil domain and the sender is notified that they must validate the email addresses of the intended recipients,” which suggests the misdirected emails may have come from US military workers’ personal accounts.

The Apollo 11 moon landing was a seminal event in American history, one etched deeply into our nation's collective psyche. The event ushered in an era of unbridled possibilities — the stars were finally coming into reach — and its effects were felt across the culture, from art and fashion to politics and culture. In After Apollo: Cultural Legacies of the Race to the Moon, a multidisciplinary collection of historians, researchers and academics explore the myriad ways that putting a man on the moon impacted the American Experience.

University of Florida Press

Excerpted from “Scientists Without Borders: Immigrants in NASA and the Apollo Program” by Rosanna Perotti from After Apollo: Cultural Legacies of the Race to the Moon, edited by J Bret Bennington and Rodney F. Hill. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2023. Reprinted with permission of the University of Florida Press.

Space Travel and the Immigrant Experience

From NASA’s very beginnings, immigrant engineers, scientists, and technicians lent their talent, labor, and technical skills to the space program. But space travel itself always represented more than a scientific endeavor. Human spaceflight was one of the “great dreams” of the 1960s, as space historian Valerie Neal reminds us, and as a “big idea,” spaceflight relied heavily on American cultural narratives. The Apollo program (1963–1972) conjured the image of pioneering the frontier in the 1960s—exploration and discovery were indispensable to America’s history and continuing redefinition, and Americans welcomed the frontier as a metaphor for space exploration (Neal 15). The shuttle program (1972–2011) echoed the narrative of Americans “going to work.” As the Apollo missions were replaced by the space shuttle, NASA supporters and commentators depicted the shuttle crews with imagery associated with blue-collar labor: “astronaut repairmen made service calls in a vehicle often called a space truck."

Both of these narratives — “pioneering the frontier” and “getting the job done” — are closely associated with a third narrative that was becoming deeply ingrained in American national identity in the 1960s: the myth of the United States as a nation of immigrants and of the immigrant as the backbone of America’s egalitarian democracy. This American immigrant myth was not born in the nineteenth or even in the early twentieth century, when immigration was peaking and Congress struggled to impose limitations and quotas. The myth reached wide acceptance only in the early 1960s. It is no coincidence that John F. Kennedy presented the immigrant myth most succinctly in his pamphlet, A Nation of Immigrants, in 1963, as Kennedy was preparing to ask Congress to overhaul the nation’s immigration laws. At the same time, his administration was pressing furiously to put a man on the Moon by the end of the decade, a central goal of the New Frontier. Interestingly, Kennedy’s space proposals were a far more important policy priority for the administration than immigration reform (the latter was not accomplished until 1965, as we shall see later). But his articulation of the “nation of immigrants” narrative provided powerful imagery in support of the space program he championed from the start of his administration.

Kennedy’s articulation of the complex immigration myth featured not just a welcoming America, but an idealized immigrant, united with others by little other than a common love of freedom. Ours was “a nation of people with the fresh memory of old traditions who dared to explore new frontiers, people eager to build lives for themselves in a spacious society that did not restrict their freedom of choice and action." Citing Tocqueville, Kennedy noted that immigrants’ very poverty made them more inclined toward egalitarian democracy. No arena of American life was untouched by the influence of immigrants, and immigrants themselves were paragons of self-reliance, ingenuity, entrepreneurship, and pioneer spirit. “It was the future and not the past to which he was compelled to address himself,” Kennedy wrote, describing the motivations of the nineteenth-century immigrant.

Except for the Negro slave, he could go anywhere and do anything his talents permitted. A sprawling continent lay before him, and he had only to weld it together by canals, by railroads and by roads . . . This has been the foundation of American inventiveness and ingenuity, of the multiplicity of new enterprises, and of the success in achieving the highest standard of living anywhere in the world.

The space program was the next frontier in the natural progression toward excellence. It evoked not only the immigrant’s capacity for adventure and discovery but also his practicality and capacity to work hard and tame his surroundings. From the time of the English settlers, who “fought a rugged land” in the words of Kennedy, immigrants had to overcome adversity to earn their fortunes and shape their environment. They had worked as artisans, provided cheap labor for American farms, factories, mills, and mines, and climbed the economic ladder to provide succeeding generations with educational opportunities. They had moved forward to get the job done. Launched under the motto “Going to Work in Space,” the space shuttle was a vehicle that could deliver satellites and repair them in orbit, carry commercial payloads, and support a research laboratory. Astronauts would carry out their work all but rolling up their sleeves as builders and repair technicians, wielding robotic arms and power hand tools. Businesses could use the shuttle as a workhorse to launch satellites or develop manufacturing capabilities. All of this economic productivity in space could be expected to resonate with a nation whose increasingly diverse immigrant workforce was transitioning to a new economy. American society was reflected not only symbolically but practically in NASA’s missions. They produced results that appeared almost impossibly ambitious. NASA represented excellence: the best work in the world. Space travel also mirrored some of the risks and hardships of the immigrant experience. As the American public began questioning the nation’s investment in space travel through the 1980s, advocates harked back to this part of the immigrant narrative. In the aftermath of the 1986 Challenger tragedy, the Report of the Advisory Committee on the Future of the US Space Program (1990) reminded Americans that acceptance and resilience in the face of failure were a part of America’s pioneer and immigrant legacies:

In a very real sense, the space program is analogous to the exploration and settlement of the new world. In this view, risk and sacrifice are seen to be constant features of the American experience. There is a national heritage of risk-taking handed down from early explorers, immigrants, settlers, and adventurers. It is this element of our national character that is the wellspring of the U.S. space program.