Old-School Credit Card Scams Are Far From Dead
Welcome to Kernel Panic! A weekly newsletter by Lily Hay Newman and Matt Burgess from inside the new world of privacy and digital security. To receive this newsletter in your inbox each week, sign up…
Crime
New York Seizes a Dozen Celebrity Deepfake Websites
For the best part of a decade, abusive deepfake “pornography” websites have published thousands of nonconsensual videos depicting women, including high-profile celebrities, politicians, and public figures, into sexual situations. Now, in what is likely the…
Clearview AI Is Testing an AI Tool That Would Let Cops Unearth Your Life Online
Clearview is not the first company to automate the process of trawling publicly available information. Other intelligence platforms sold to law enforcement, including ShadowDragon’s SocialNet, Penlink’s Tangles, and Fivecast, help investigators uncover aliases and associates…
OpenAI Agents Hacked Another Website
After reporting last week that the surveillance company Flock Safety is building an AI search tool for law enforcement, WIRED reconstructed Flock’s latest search tool from code that the company sends to a police officer’s…
The Cybersecurity Apocalypse Is Coming in ‘Months,’ AI Giants Warn
You may have noticed that Flock Safety’s automatic license plate reader cameras—and the cops who misuse them—are getting a lot of coverage lately. This week, WIRED found a particularly wild case: A cop in Alpharetta,…
Flock Has a Powerful New AI Tool for Police. We Got Its Code
WIRED analyzed the software by examining code Flock served from its own login portals. Loading those pages returned a user interface for screens that would ordinarily appear only after a police user signed in, letting…
‘The Worst I’ve Ever Seen’: Cargo Thefts Have Turned Violent in Pursuit of AI Hardware
During the 25 years Gerardo Pachuca has spent investigating thieves who steal cargo from semitrucks, he says he’s never seen behavior this brazen. The consultant and former Los Angeles sheriff’s detective claims that two times…
Flock’s Plans for Rideshare Dashcams and Coaching Police, Revealed
404 Media also reported this week that a former Flock government affairs manager, Jonathan Paz, said he quit in July 2025 and turned down equity and severance after learning the company had given ICE and…
ICE Collected Nearly 1 Million People’s DNA Last Year—Including Young Children
On March 13, 2025, Hugo Moreno-Mendez arrived at the McLennan County Probation Department in Waco, Texas, expecting a routine probation check-in. Instead, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers were waiting to arrest him. According to a…
7 States’ Water Systems Hit by Cyberattacks Likely Tied to Iran
This week, WIRED obtained a memo that tied dozens of cyberattacks against Minnesota water and wastewater utilities to Iran, the first official documentation of Iran’s likely responsibility for the most impactful campaign of cyberattacks to…