ten entirely by AI was passed in Brazil. Within a year, the French government
had produced its own AI model tailored to help the Parliament with the
consideration of amendments. By the end of that year, the use of AI in
legislative offices had become widespread enough that twenty percent of
state-level staffers in the United States reported using it, and another forty
percent were considering it.

These legislative members and staffers, collectively, face a significant choice:
to wield AI in a way that concentrates or distributes power. If legislative
offices use AI primarily to encode the policy prescriptions of party leadership
or powerful interest groups, then they will effectively cede their own power to
those central authorities. AI here serves only as a tool enabling that handover.

On the other hand, if legislative offices use AI to amplify their capacity to
express and advocate for the policy positions of their principals -- the elected
representatives -- they can strengthen their role in government. Additionally,
AI can help them scale their ability to listen to many voices and synthesize
input from their constituents, making it a powerful tool for better realizing
democracy. We may prefer a legislator who translates his principles into the
technical components and legislative language of bills with the aid of a
trustworthy AI tool executing under his exclusive control rather than with the
aid of lobbyists executing under the control of a corporate patron.

Examples from around the globe demonstrate how legislatures can use AI as tools
for tapping into constituent feedback to drive policymaking. The European civic
technology organization Make.org is organizing large-scale digital consultations
on topics such as European peace and defense. The Scottish Parliament is funding
the development of open civic deliberation tools such as Comhairle to help scale
civic participation in policymaking. And Japanese Diet member Takahiro Anno and
his party Team Mirai are showing how political innovators can build purpose-fit
applications of AI to engage with voters.

AI is a power-enhancing technology. Whether it is used by a judge, a legislator,
or a government agency, it enhances an entity's ability to shape the world. This
is both its greatest strength and its biggest danger. In the hands of someone
who wants more democracy, AI will help that person. In the hands of a society
that wants to distribute power, AI can help to execute that. But, in the hands
of another person, or another society, bent on centralization, concentration of
power, or authoritarianism, it can also be applied toward those ends.

We are not going to be fully governed by AI anytime soon, but we are already
being governed with AI -- and more is coming. Our challenge in these years is
more a social than a technological one: to ensure that those doing the governing
are doing so in the service of democracy.

This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared in Merion
West.

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Using AI-Generated Images to Get Refunds

[2025.12.30] Scammers are generating images of broken merchandise in order to
apply for refunds.

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LinkedIn Job Scams

[2025.12.31] Interesting article on the variety of LinkedIn job scams around the
world:

In India, tech jobs are used as bait because the industry employs millions of
people and offers high-paying roles. In Kenya, the recruitment industry is
largely unorganized, so scamsters leverage fake personal referrals. In Mexico,
bad actors capitalize on the informal nature of the job economy by advertising
fake formal roles that carry a promise of security. In Nigeria, scamsters often
manage to get LinkedIn users to share their login credentials with the lure of
paid work, preying on their desperation amid an especially acute unemployment
crisis.

These are scams involving fraudulent employers convincing prospective employees
to send them money for various fees. There is an entirely different set of scams
involving fraudulent employees getting hired for remote jobs.

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Flock Exposes Its AI-Enabled Surveillance Cameras

[2026.01.02] 404 Media has the story:

Unlike many of Flock's cameras, which are designed to capture license plates as
people drive by, Flock's Condor cameras are pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) cameras designed
to record and track people, not vehicles. Condor cameras can be set to
automatically zoom in on people's faces as they walk through a parking lot, down
a public street, or play on a playground, or they can be controlled manually,
according to marketing material on Flock's website. We watched Condor cameras
zoom in on a woman walking her dog on a bike path in suburban Atlanta; a camera
followed a man walking through a Macy's parking lot in Bakersfield; surveil
children swinging on a swingset at a playground; and film high-res video of
people sitting at a stoplight in traffic. In one case, we were able to watch a
man rollerblade down Brookhaven, Georgia's Peachtree Creek Greenway bike path.
The Flock camera zoomed in on him and tracked him as he rolled past. Minutes
later, he showed up on another exposed camera livestream further down the bike
path. The camera's resolution was good enough that we were able to see that,
when he stopped beneath one of the cameras, he was watching rollerblading videos
on his phone.

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Telegram Hosting World's Largest Darknet Market

[2026.01.05] Wired is reporting on Chinese darknet markets on Telegram.

The ecosystem of marketplaces for Chinese-speaking crypto scammers hosted on the
messaging service Telegram have now grown to be bigger than ever before,
according to a new analysis from the crypto tracing firm Elliptic. Despite a
brief drop after Telegram banned two of the biggest such markets in early 2025,
the two current top markets, known as Tudou Guarantee and Xinbi Guarantee, are
together enabling close to $2 billion a month in money-laundering transactions,
sales of scam tools like stolen data, fake investment websites, and AI deepfake
tools, as well as other black market services as varied as pregnancy surrogacy
and teen prostitution.

The crypto romance and investment scams regrettably known as "pig butchering" --
carried out largely from compounds in Southeast Asia staffed with thousands of
human trafficking victims -- have grown to become the world's most lucrative
form of cybercrime. They pull in around $10 billion annually from US victims
alone, according to the FBI. By selling money-laundering services and other
scam-related offerings to those operations, markets like Tudou Guarantee and
Xinbi Guarantee have grown in parallel to an immense scale.

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A Cyberattack Was Part of the US Assault on Venezuela

[2026.01.06] We don't have many details:

President Donald Trump suggested Saturday that the U.S. used cyberattacks or
other technical capabilities to cut power off in Caracas during strikes on the
Venezuelan capital that led to the capture of Venezu
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