|
Resident of the world, traveling the road of life
|
Michael Kalus posted a photo:
"Busy street scene leading toward the wooded hills of Kyoto's Higashiyama district with pedestrians, traffic and traditional streetscape. The photograph records an everyday detail of Kyoto beyond the city’s better-known postcard views.
Location: Higashiyama, Kyoto, Japan"
Michael Kalus posted a photo:
"Visitors wearing kimono pause on the approach to Chion-in Temple in Kyoto while others make their way toward the historic temple buildings. The photograph places traditional Japanese dress within the movement and routines of contemporary city life.
Location: Chion-in, Higashiyama, Kyoto, Japan"
Michael Kalus posted a photo:
"Monochrome view of the coffee roasting area inside % Arabica Kyoto. The scene documents Kyoto’s contemporary café culture and the visual details of the space.
Location: Kyoto, Japan"
Today we have a report by Antonia Juelich at the Cambridge Programme on AI Science and Policy, CASP: “‘God has helped us, and so will AI’: How the Terrorist Group Boko Haram Uses Frontier AI”. Oh no! The bad guys have AI! [CASP, PDF, archive]
CASP’s organisational mission is to produce criti-hype — reports that act like they’re warning about AI, but their real job is to make the AI look super-cool. If the AI can work for terrorists, it can definitely do your TPS reports.
Juelich went to Nigeria and interviewed former members of the terrorist group Boko Haram about how the group had used chatbots in 2024 and 2025.
The 15 interviewees did not use the chatbot themselves. All of this is only these guys repeating their senior commanders’ stories of how they used the chatbot.
But it’s very scary, OK? Serious implications:
Terrorist adoption of AI has thus advanced further and more systematically than prior analysis has recognized, making it a present and growing reality that warrants attention from policymakers, security communities, and AI developers.
Let’s say the murderous terrorists are using the chatbot. But Juelich says “present reality” — not present danger. Is there any present danger? What are Boko Haram using the bot for?
It has aided in attack planning, weapons troubleshooting, and the design of explosive devices, as users have successfully circumvented some safeguards.
Sounds bad! So what precisely does that entail? Here’s the New York Times covering the report as serious evidence of AI being of substantial assistance to terrorism: [NYT, archive]
We saw in a movie how motorcycles can jump over bridges … We used A.I. to learn how to do this. We gave it information, like what motorcycles we use and the distance we need to jump and so on, and it gave us steps on what we have to do.
Sounds enabling! But the NYT left off the punchline — what happened next:
We dug holes and filled them with broken glass and fire to practice. 18 of us died in the process. Eight of us managed to do it.
The chatbot’s advice killed two-thirds of the squad! A chatbot took out 18 terrorists without firing a shot.
Why did the bot suggest practicing with a flaming pit full of broken glass? Because Boko Haram got the AI to tell them this by asking for script ideas for an action movie. That was their jailbreak.
They could have filled the pits with water or something for practice. But no, the bot said fire and glass, so they used fire and glass.
I can appreciate the researcher not saying to the murderous terrorists’ faces, “that’s really dumb.” But it’s really very dumb.
At this point I’m wondering if the terrorists are having a lend of the researcher. I expect it gets boring out there between strikes, you’ve got to have your fun.
Leaping a firepit is literally the example the New York Times used to make the chatbot sound dangerous. They go straight from this very dumb story to calling chatbots “digital nuclear weapons.”
What Boko Haram does with this “digital nuclear weapon” is just use it as a fancy search engine:
when ISWAP fighters were handed out new guns and they did not know how to correctly use them, they approached their qaid, who passed on the message to a specialist, who in turn replied, “just ask Grok,” which they then did.
Using Grok? Sounds like a win — for their opponents.
Is AI making Boko Haram more dangerous than other training methods they have access to would have? Well, we can’t actually say that:
These perceptions and revealed preferences indicate uplift, though it is important to note that it cannot be conclusively determined.
Juelich just admitted her 93-page report doesn’t show that anything happened.
But the perception itself matters, since the belief that AI improves performance drives institutional investment and potentially the pursuit of higher-risk capabilities.
CISP is saying that the real threat is thinking the AI works. That sounds like we can fight terrorism by telling people that AI is lying trash.
Let’s be clear what happened here — Boko Haram used chatbots that had read the whole Internet and answered questions. That is, a search engine, reading existing information.
That’s a sort of threat? But so is reading in general. And if Boko Haram have chatbots, they have the internet.
The substantial threat is Boko Haram’s disregard for their own members’ lives. I’m pretty sure that’s what makes the group a serious threat.
Not one bit of the problem here is AI. That’s just CASP’s hook to make the report sound scary.
You definitely need to fund CASP to do more research into how frightening the AI is! Lack of funding is the true terrorist threat.
The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) announced it will let its surveillance contract with automated license plate reader company (ALPR) Flock expire, becoming the largest police department in the country to drop its contract. Notably, the decision came after an audit of ALPR technology found that, in a two-month period, the LAPD had improperly "investigated" 161 people whose cars were flagged as stolen in the LAPD’s ALPR system but were not actually stolen.
The news that LAPD pulled over 161 innocent people in two months because of improper tagging in the department’s system comes after several high-profile incidents in which people in other states were accosted by police because of data entry or clerical errors in ALPR systems. Joel Feder, an editor of the car journalism website The Drive, detailed a harrowing tale in which he was tracked for days and ultimately pulled over by police in Minnesota because the license plate of the car he was reviewing for the website had been entered into the Flock system as stolen by a police department in California. Monday, the website MotorBiscuit wrote about an innocent woman who was jailed for 13 days because she drove a black Dodge Durango and police searched the Flock system for a Black Dodge Durango suspected of being involved in a fatal hit-and-run accident.
A new report by the LAPD Office of the Inspector General (OIG) suggests that instances of people being falsely pulled over because their license plates have shown up on an ALPR “hot list” are very common, and that the surveillance of people on hot lists that ultimately result in no action from police is staggering. Many ALPR systems have this “hot list” feature, which is where police enter a license plate and get a ping or notification about the vehicle’s whereabouts whenever it passes a connected ALPR camera. In a two-month period between August 1 and September 30, 2025, the LAPD’s cameras generated more than 210.5 million license plate reads, according to the report.
“During the review period, officers acknowledged 161 alerts as accurate license plate matches; however, subsequent investigations determined the vehicles were not stolen,” the report reads. “In addition to creating an inconvenience for vehicle owners, these inaccuracies can affect individual liberty interests, erode public trust, and potentially create substantial legal and financial liability concerns.”
The report notes that this happened because of “inaccurate or outdated information, increasing the risk of unnecessary enforcement actions, including vehicle stops and wrongful detentions, or a confrontation with serious consequences,” and that in many cases, license plates remained on a hot list after a stolen vehicle had already been recovered or was reported as not stolen, meaning the cops are in some cases pulling over the lawful owner of the vehicle.
Notably, the report states that when police get an ALPR hot list hit, the department generally considers any subsequent action to be a “high-risk” stop, meaning the risk of confrontation or potential danger is greatly increased from routine traffic stops for running a red light or speeding.
“When a license plate matches with a vehicle of interest on a Hot List, an alert will appear on the police vehicle’s Mobile Digital Computer,” the report reads. “Often, officers will approach the vehicle with extreme caution or conduct a ‘high-risk’ stop. This involves calling for back up, air support, and a supervisor and ordering the suspect out of their vehicle.” The report says, “department policy requires officers to attempt to verify the accuracy of the ALPR alert prior to conducting a stop,” but that often does not happen. The report also states that, on the vast majority of hot list hits, no action is taken by police meaning that specific people are being subjected to tracking and surveillance for no readily discernible reason. In the two-month audit period, 5,911 different license plates were tracked. No action was taken against 4,575 of those cars.
The LAPD said in response to the report that cars improperly flagged as stolen “generally result from the timing of record updates outside of the Department’s control, such as delays by another jurisdiction or a vehicle owner in clearing a plate from a Hot List after a vehicle has been recovered or is no longer wanted.” In other words, LAPD is often relying on other police departments to remove license plates from a hot list, highlighting the problems with networking different surveillance systems together.
The LAPD OIG report, which appears to have directly led the LAPD to allow its Flock contract to expire, studied the use of three different ALPR systems the department has been using, including static, pole-mounted cameras from Motorola and Flock and cameras in police cruisers made by Axon. In total, the department has nearly 2,000 ALPR cameras; LAPD accesses data for both Flock and Axon systems through Flock’s backend thanks to a data sharing partnership between Axon and Flock, according to the report. The report said the department was able to recover 337 stolen cars during the two months and that ALPR data led to 74 arrests total.
Both the OIG and the LAPD determined that the ALPR system needs to be reconsidered. The OIG suggested that the LAPD “suspend the deployment of new ALPR cameras and the execution of new ALPR-related contracts pending public input and a broader reassessment of vendors and data practices” and “strengthen oversight of ALPR data access.” The LAPD allowed its Flock contract to expire over the weekend, and said it would not enter into new contracts until going through a full audit process.
Log in
