The tech trillionaire lashed on X following reports of potential investigations by Democrats following the upcoming midterms.
Trump sued the BBC. Now he has to answer its questions.
A federal judge ordered the president to sit for a deposition by Dec. 11 or risk sanctions, including dismissal of his $10 billion lawsuit
Russian military intelligence reportedly hacked Jared Kushner’s iPhone during Trump’s first term
Vanity Fair – The Art of the Deal: Jared Kushner’s Hacked Phone Revealed His Secret Negotiations—Including More Than $700 Million in Transfers – An exclusive excerpt from Princes and Thieves: Jared Kushner and Mohamed bin Zayed’s Secret Plot to Remake the Middle East examines how bank accounts linked the president’s son-in-law—and former senior adviser—to Israel, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia. [no paywall]
In late spring 2020, a source I knew to be reliable called me with a story. The Dutch government had hacked into Jared Kushner’s phone and monitored him as he accessed a Dubai-based bank account. What was odd, the source said, was that the money in the account—hundreds of millions of dollars—had come from a bank in Azerbaijan.
Most importantly, Kushner appeared to have transferred significant amounts of money from the Dubai account to other individuals, including a warlord, a mercenary and a one-time hit man. The story sounded preposterous, I told my source. And yet. Six months later, I found myself speaking with someone else about the UAE government and their use of mercenaries in conflicts around the Middle East and Africa when I asked, on a whim, whether they knew anything about Kushner and bank transfers from a UAE account. My acquaintance grew quiet. Then they replied, “Yes.”
Over the next four years, I came to learn that, sometime in late 2017, the Netherlands Defense Intelligence and Security Service (MIVD) made a startling discovery. A General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation (GRU) operative, a dark web hacker specializing in stolen bank data, was traveling to the UK for an espionage mission. They reached out to the British government for permission to apprehend him when he arrived. The British agreed. When the Russian national arrived in England, the Dutch informed him that he had two options: he could work for them against the GRU, or the British would arrest him.
Once in UK government custody, the operative would be charged with espionage. If convicted, he would spend years in a British prison. The Russian chose to change his employer. Later that year, the Russian operative gave the Dutch spies access to one of the GRU’s most sensitive assets. Located in Rostov, Russia, the GRU’s hacking and cyber team operated a remote server on which they stored some of their bounty.
During their search through these secret files, the Dutch found something astonishing: screenshots of Jared Kushner’s iPhone…As they monitored Kushner’s phone, they discovered he used it to log in to a UAE bank account. By the time the Dutch spies had visibility into the phone, the account had received hundreds of millions of dollars from a bank in Azerbaijan. Their initial assessment was that the bank account was affiliated with the government there…”
Don’t be fooled. The AI that was supposed to save us time is doing just the opposite
The Guardian: “The government says it can transform the state with AI, but it is no match for the resulting stream of machine-generated slop. And we all pay the cost. Another morning, another avalanche of emails. Even after a guilty cull, my inbox is sitting at well over 7,000, but lately I’ve started subscribing to the Quentin Crisp theory of housework: why bother, when after four years or so you stop noticing the accumulating dust? Empty inboxes just fill up again anyway.
In theory, email was supposed to save hours of meetings, phone calls and standing over photocopiers. Instead, we just spend hours deleting stuff people wouldn’t have bothered telling us if it had meant picking up the phone, but which they can now spam to their entire database at the click of a button. The glorious ease and convenience of being able to reach the world in seconds came, we now know, with the inconvenience of them being able to reach you right back.
And therein lies the challenge to the government’s hopes of AI helping to transform the machinery of the state on the cheap, saving not only time but billions of pounds in public money. It’s early days, but AI seems not so much to be streamlining public service delivery as gumming it up – partly because, as was once the case with email, the public is using it right back at them.
In a Substack post last week, the former civil servant Sam Freedman noted that governments around the world seem to be experiencing unusual surges in complaints, requests and responses to regulatory and official bodies since the adoption of ChatGPT. It’s the same story in the courts, with employment tribunal cases in England, Scotland and Wales reportedly rising by 39% in a year thanks in part to claimants using AI to draft claims, while magistrates and judges face a wave of people who can’t afford lawyers using ChatGPT to build cases that often don’t make sense. And all of this needs patient disentangling by a human, on the grounds that just because a defendant is citing precedents that don’t exist, it doesn’t mean there isn’t a genuine grievance buried in there somewhere…”
