Bruce Schneier

St. Lucie County in Florida discovered ( alt link ) a dozen Flock cameras whose ownership it can’t identify, and that the county government had not permitted. I am reminded of the decade-old story of StingRay cell phone surveillance devices in Washington, DC, whose operators were also unknown. My guess is that in the StingRay case, the devices were operated by foreign actors. This Flock case is more likely some local government entity that didn’t bother getting approval. Were I a foreign actor,…

This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared in The Guardian . New campaign finance disclosure data shines a light on which US political campaigns are using AI tools and how much they are spending on them. Candidates’, parties’ and committees’ spending reveals that AI is fast becoming an essential tool of politics. The candidates themselves are quiet about how they are using the technology in their own campaigns . It’s a sensitive issue that we have been tracking close…

Researchers at Northeastern University, in collaboration with Consumer Reports , evaluated how much modern cars spy in their drivers: To determine this, CR dug through thousands of pages of automakers’ privacy policies and asked questions of 15 different automakers­BMW, Ford, General Motors, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Mazda, Mercedes-Benz, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Stellantis, Subaru, Tesla, Toyota, and Volkswagen. We also reviewed corporate, regulatory, and legal filings from data brokers operating in the…

AI systems are regularly completing tasks in ways that their prompters don’t want or intend. Some of them are disturbing, and some of them are dangerous. This is something I’ve been calling “ genie behavior ,” because I think that really gets at the core of what’s happening. I wish the popular press would report on this better. I don’t like the “going rogue” framing because it deflects the responsibility from the prompters—often the AI companies themselves. And now, pretty much anything off-scr…

Modern messaging apps allow users to link their phone accounts to their computer desktop. Eavesdroppers are taking advantage of this capability: Apps such as WhatsApp Web and Signal Desktop allow people to use their accounts on other devices, such as laptops or desktop computers. Germany’s Customs Office has been using these features to connect a police-controlled computer to a suspect’s account. Once connected, messages can be delivered to that computer without the police having to crack the e…

ArsTechnica is reporting on a “new” attack against RSA, one that bypasses factoring. First, this attack isn’t new. The original research is from 2007 . What is new is the implementation. Second, it is a forgery attack. It allows an attacker to forge digital signatures. It does not recover the private key from the public key. Third, the attack only works against pure signatures. That is, signatures without any formatting or padding. This is not generally how we use RSA in practice. Fourth, speed…

I feel like someone who reads this blog will want to go to this : Families are invited to dive into the fascinating world of marine biology during an exciting, hands-on Family Squid Dissection at the Hands-On Science Center. Designed for curious learners of all ages, this unique experience combines an interactive lesson with the opportunity to explore the anatomy and adaptations of real ocean life. […] During the guided squid dissection, each family will work together to examine a squid up clos…

Earlier this month, Anthropic published a long report detailing all of the Claude misuses it detected. Daniel Meissler usefully summarized the report into 117 findings. A few of the highlights: AI agents increasingly handled reconnaissance, exploitation, data theft, propaganda production, surveillance workflows, and research while humans selected targets, set goals, and reviewed important outputs. The report describes attackers using AI to industrialize credential theft, cloud compromise, phish…

This is an impressive piece of malware . Its sophistication says nation-state to me, but there is no direct evidence and certainly no attribution.

New paper: “ Self-Jailbreaking: Language Models Can Reason Themselves Out of Safety Alignment After Benign Reasoning Training .” Abstract: We discover a novel and surprising phenomenon of unintentional misalignment in reasoning language models (RLMs), which we call self-jailbreaking. Specifically, after benign reasoning training on math or code domains, RLMs will use multiple strategies to circumvent their own safety guardrails. One strategy is to introduce benign assumptions about users and sc…