Technology

OpenAI Public Sector LLC, San Francisco, California, has been awarded a fixed amount, prototype, other transaction agreement (HQ0883-25-9-0012) with a value of $200,000,000. Under this award, the performer will develop prototype frontier AI capabilities to address critical national security challenges in both warfighting and enterprise domains. The work will be primarily performed in the National Capital Region with an estimated completion date of July 2026. Fiscal 2025 research, development, test and evaluation funds in the amount of $1,999,998 are being obligated at time of award. Office of the Secretary of Defense Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office, Washington D.C., is the contracting activity.

The Nectar project offers 'advanced data analysis' using a wide range of sensitive personal information

A controversial US spy tech firm has landed a contract with UK police to develop a surveillance network that will incorporate data about citizens’ political opinions, philosophical beliefs, health records and other sensitive personal information.

Documents obtained by i and Liberty Investigates show Palantir Technologies has partnered with police forces in the East of England to establish a “real-time data-sharing network” that includes the personal details of vulnerable victims, children and witnesses alongside suspects.

Trade union membership, sexual orientation and race are among the other types of personal information being processed.

The project has sparked alarm from campaigners who fear it will trample over Britons’ human rights and “facilitate dystopian predictive policing” and indiscriminate mass surveillance.

Numerous police forces have previously refused to confirm or deny their links with Palantir, citing risks to law enforcement and national security. However, forces in Bedfordshire and Leicestershire have recently confirmed working with the firm.

Liberty Investigates and i have learned that those projects involve processing data from more than a dozen UK police forces and will serve as a pilot for a potential national rollout of the tech giant’s data mining technology — which has reportedly been used by police forces in the US to predict future crimes.

“From Trump: ALL HELL JUST BROKE LOOSE! I WAS CONVICTED IN A RIGGED TRIAL!” one example text message in the complaint says. “I need you to read this NOW” followed by a link to a donation page.

By targeting design rather than content, lawmakers hope to regulate social media without constitutional roadblocks. Here’s why that’s a problem.

Meta announced today that it also wants to introduce ads on WhatsApp, which will be based on personal data from Facebook and Instagram. This further integrates WhatsApp into other Meta services - an originally independent app, which initially was available for just $1 per year without ads or data usage. This also means that Meta is consolidating its social networking monopoly. EU law was actually supposed to prevent this.

Major components of the surveillance network include the use of automated license plate reader (ALPR) technology, and monitoring of social media through “sock puppet” accounts. Meanwhile, Jackson County is using a third-party lease to make its publicly owned building available to ICE for its Southern Oregon field office, creating another “backdoor” for local government resources to be utilized by ICE despite Oregon’s status as a “sanctuary state.”

Our latest trove of public records total 313 pages. Below is an overview of the records, which were obtained through public records requests to the city of Medford, the city of Grants Pass, and Jackson County. We provide a downloadable copy of the records at the bottom of this blog post.

Whistleblower Disclosure.

Today, Rep. Stephen F. Lynch, Acting Ranking Member of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, sent a letter to Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella requesting information and documents in Microsoft’s possession regarding reports that individuals associated with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) attempted to remove sensitive information from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), raising serious concerns of technology-related misconduct.

“According to recent reporting by the National Public Radio (NPR) and whistleblower disclosures obtained by Democrats on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, individuals associated with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have attempted to use high-level systems access to remove sensitive information—quite possibly including corporate secrets and details of union activities. The whistleblower has also explained how the responsible individuals have attempted to conceal their activities, obstruct oversight, and shield themselves from accountability, including by deleting system logs and opening back doors into the NLRB case management system to send massive amounts of data outside of the agency. Potentially in connection with these efforts, a DOGE engineer reportedly wrote bespoke code that appears designed to remove data from NLRB and saved that code to a repository on Microsoft’s GitHub platform. Given Microsoft’s ownership of GitHub, I request information and documents in Microsoft’s possession regarding this incident,” wrote Acting Ranking Member Lynch.

Recent reporting by NPR disclosed how a DOGE engineer saved code to a GitHub repository titled “NxGenBdoorExtract,” suggesting that the code could have created a backdoor used to extract files from the NLRB’s internal case management system.

The exfiltration of large swaths of sensitive information through backdoor channels raises significant concerns about the legality of DOGE’s actions and its threat to independent federal agencies, as well as Elon Musk’s personal conflicts of interest with this case.

“Notably, the now-former de facto leader of DOGE, Elon Musk, owns and operates companies that have frequently run afoul of NLRB rules. For example, NLRB has taken action against Mr. Musk’s electric vehicle company Tesla for its attempts to discourage unionizing efforts, part of Mr. Musk’s ongoing anti-union actions. Mr. Musk’s social media company, X, also faced a complaint from NLRB after an employee was terminated for posting a tweet challenging the company’s return-to-office mandate. These cases raise concerns about Mr. Musk or anyone associated with DOGE having access to NLRB data, as any such access poses a serious conflict of interest,” concluded Rep. Lynch.

On January 7, 2025, Meta announced sweeping changes to its content moderation policies, including the end of third-party fact-checking in the U.S., and rollbacks to its hate speech policy globally that remove protections for women, people of color, trans people, and more. In the absence of data from Meta, we decided to go straight to users to assess if and how harmful content is manifesting on Meta platforms in the wake of January rollbacks.

Edit 1: The Orange Motherfucker Did it.

Scarred by long hours, low pay, and a hostile work culture, many chip workers are leaving for competitors, including American companies.

• Once a global leader, Samsung Electronics is losing in the fierce semiconductor race to dominate AI supplies.
• It’s also losing engineers, leaving the remaining staff to work long, intense shifts to compensate for vacancies.
• Engineers say they are required to falsify data and defects are slipping through, affecting chip quality.