Treasury’s Top Tax Official to Depart
Erin Slowey and Erin Schilling, “Top Treasury Tax Official, Acting IRS Lawyer Kies to Depart” (Bloomberg, July 13):
Ken Kies, the top Treasury tax policy official who also oversees the IRS legal arm, is departing his dual roles, an administration official said Monday.
The Senate confirmed Kies as the assistant secretary for tax policy at the Treasury Department during the summer of 2025. During his tenure, he also acted as the IRS chief counsel. Kies joined the IRS while the Trump administration enacted drastic cuts, slashing the workforce by more than a quarter. He also led the implementation of the GOP’s landmark 2025 tax law. . . .
A seasoned tax policy lobbyist, Kies focused his past year in government on crafting regulations for the tax law and trying to quash conservation easement cases, a longtime thorn for the IRS where taxpayers donate land at an inflated value and take an outsized charitable deduction.
The IRS during Kies’ time in the jobs also faced intense scrutiny for President Donald Trump’s lawsuit this year against the agency over the leak of the president’s tax returns and the resulting settlement agreement.
How Cops Use Flock to Track People, Not Cars
The searches highlight that while most people associate Flock cameras with scanning license plates and tracking vehicles, some of the cameras are also capable of following the movements of particular people or groups of people. Flock’s nationwide network of cameras lets police officers in one state search for a vehicle across many other states at once; the people searches do a similar thing, typically on a smaller scale, sometimes querying many hundreds of cameras at once.
These are called “FreeForm” searches, and allow cops to use Flock’s system as though they would use a search engine, with Flock’s AI and image recognition interpreting what footage and which people are relevant to a police officer’s search. “Much of the world hasn’t quite caught up yet to how much more powerful a surveillance camera is today compared to a few years ago.
AI video analytics means that giant oceans of video data can now be searched the same way big text files can be, including for sensitive content such as t-shirts, tattoos, and bumper stickers. Even without face recognition, that’s a significant increase in surveillance capability,” Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst for the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, told 404 Media in an email.
This is a classic bait-and-switch. Your town was pitched a tool to catch stolen cars and find missing kids,” Tom Bowman, policy counsel, security & surveillance, at the Center for Democracy & Technology, told 404 Media in a statement. Instead, cops now have the capability to search for a specific person or description of a person across a wealth of camera networks at once. “It’s like being sold a smoke detector and only later finding out it’s been recording every conversation in your house.
Data Privacy in 2026: Americans Aren’t Protecting Their Data. The Results Could Be Catastrophic.
whistelOut: 92% of Americans are worried about their personal data being hijacked or spied on, but many won’t take basic steps to protect themselves. “Americans’ personal data has never been more at risk. While you keep ever-increasing amounts of your life online, scammers are leveraging weak passwords, AI tricks, and data breaches to find new ways to hack your information. However, bad actors aren’t the only problem in this space.
An even more insidious threat is the data you’re voluntarily giving away. Your browser cookies, smart home devices, online shopping habits, social media activity, and favorite apps are all being tracked by major tech companies to sell off your information to the highest bidder.
The consequences of this can stretch from identity theft to an invasion of your privacy by tech companies and government agencies. It may one day even help businesses use AI-enabled surveillance pricing to drive up the costs of things you want. The good news is that most people know about threats to their data. In fact, 92% of Americans are concerned about their personal data being collected by websites and apps.
The bad news is that many Americans don’t care enough to try to stop it, with around 40% of these same people never reviewing the privacy policies of their devices, apps, or the websites they visit. Here at WhistleOut, we’ve grown more concerned about data privacy. With massive data breaches in the news and controversies surrounding smart home devices like Ring doorbells, we wanted to understand how Americans feel about their online personal data. We polled 1,000 American adults about their data security habits to find out…”
How to poison AI research agents
Indicator: “In July’s episode of Show & Tell, Hal Triedman showed us how easy it can be to poison an AI research agent.
Hal is a privacy and security researcher at Cornell Tech and former senior privacy engineer at the Wikimedia Foundation. He walked us through a recent research project he ran with colleagues Tingwei Zhang and Vitaly Shmatikov. Their draft paper, “Deep-Research Agents Can Be Poisoned via User-Generated Content,” details how deep-research agents often rely on a handful of Reddit and Wikipedia pages across an entire topic, no matter how a user phrases the question.
They appended as few as 13 words to one of those pages, which caused the agents to recommend a product, app, or investment that doesn’t exist, like the cryptocurrency BananaCoin or dating app for divorced men over 50 called SilverPath. The team ran this in a simulated environment rather than on the live web to avoid pushing the made up products they were trying to make the AI believe were real. These attacks are increasingly relevant as brands, marketers, and deceptive actors try to get AI models to reference their products and content, just as they’ve long done with search engines…”
