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Actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt is taking aim at AI companies whose models have carried out unprecedented cyberattacks, saying any company whose product does this should be criminally investigated.

The post Joseph Gordon-Levitt: AI Developers Should Be Under Investigation; ‘It’s a Company Committing Crimes,’ Not a Bot appeared first on Breitbart.

Americans are struggling with everyday expenses from fuel and food to health care and housing. Polling consistently shows that housing affordability is a top concern for Americans, and the underlying data makes it clear why. Rents have grown faster than take-home pay, and down payments take longer than ever to save for—exceeding 20 years in some of the largest housing markets. There is not enough affordably priced housing supply to keep up with demand, pushing costs even higher.

What is it about the housing market that has given rise to such long-term and persistent cost increases? We believe that a crucial cause lies in the fact that the housing industry does not rely on what nearly every other industry has taken for granted for the past few decades—digitized identities.

We’ve spent our careers on opposite ends of exactly this problem. One of us watched housing markets seize up from the inside during the Global Financial Crisis, when nobody—not lenders, not investors, not regulators—could get a straight answer about what was actually happening, building by building and loan by loan. The other spent a career at the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation, the institution built to solve almost the identical problem for securities.

Take stock of the physical things that move through the American economy, and one cannot miss the reliance on digital identities. A used car rolling off a dealer’s lot carries a VIN that instantly calls up its full history—every owner, every accident, every recall. A share of stock settles in seconds because it carries a CUSIP, a single identifier that every bank, broker, and regulator recognizes as the same thing. A shipping container crossing the Pacific has a standardized number that customs agents, ports, and logistics firms around the world can all read the same way.

Think about why Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz is leading a digitization revolution in health care—out of control health care costs can be brought in check with digital identities that provide information, reduce duplication, identify savings, and root out waste. Every American who has had to fill out the same medical form over and over knows exactly why Oz is leading this charge.

But buildings, one of the largest asset classes of the U.S. economy, lack any kind of standardized digital identity. Each building only has an imprecise analog address, linked to very little reliable operating data.

This has consequences. It forces owners, lenders, insurers, regulators, service providers, and manufacturers to repeatedly verify the same basic information through disconnected systems. Messy, fragmented, and hard-to-verify data inflates the operating costs of every multi-family residential building. Absent digitization, the power of technology to reduce costs is vastly diminished.

The scale of the problem is staggering—hundreds of billions of dollars are spent each year on building operations; trillions when financing costs are factored in. And the problem is felt most by the millions of Americans who struggle to pay the ever-increasing costs for the need for housing.

The Trump administration’s leadership in digitization will benefit our nation for generations. What seems like an obscure and technical issue is actually at the core of bringing cost savings to massive and complex industries. Health care and housing account for a massive piece of our economy and a huge share of the expenses of every American. The Trump administration is already leading a digitization revolution in health care—housing should be its next target.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.

Several Hollywood actors are trying to raise awareness about new union requirements that threaten their healthcare benefits.

The post Hollywood Actors Losing Health Insurance Make Desperate Public Pleas appeared first on Breitbart.

During his closing monologue on Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” host Bill Maher argued that the decline in crime is partially due to Democrats expanding the social safety net, but also because President Donald Trump has been tough. Maher

The post Maher: Trump Being Tough Helped Lower Crime, As Did Expanded Safety Net appeared first on Breitbart.

During his closing monologue on Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” host Bill Maher said that work by Democrats on Narcan availability “contributed a lot to the huge decrease in drug deaths. But so did closing the border and deporting

The post Maher: Trump Closing Border, Deporting Criminals, Striking Boats Helped Lower Drug Deaths, as Did Biden’s Work on Narcan appeared first on Breitbart.

A documentary about disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes -- who was sentenced to 11 years in federal prison for four counts of wire fraud and conspiracy -- has reportedly received an R rating for its graphic nudity.

The post Elizabeth Holmes Documentary Receives ‘R’ Rating for Graphic Nudity appeared first on Breitbart.

RealClearWire—Refrigerators are probably the last thing anyone would consider a national security vulnerability, which is precisely why the unusual refrigeration failures at U.S. military commissaries deserve more attention than they are getting.  

There is no public evidence that the incidents were caused by a cyberattack or a foreign adversary, and they may ultimately prove to be nothing more than equipment, software, or maintenance failures. But when refrigeration systems at multiple military installations experience problems within a relatively short period and at Fort Huachuca all of the commissary’s freezers reportedly went into defrost mode overnight, leaders at the Pentagon should be asking a larger question: If a sophisticated adversary wanted to test its ability to disrupt the infrastructure supporting America’s military without firing a shot, is this what it might look like? 

That question matters because China and other U.S. adversaries are no longer thinking about cyberwarfare simply as stealing secrets or attacking classified networks. They are looking for ways to penetrate the infrastructure America depends upon and, when necessary, create disruption, confusion, and delay. It echoes the familiar warnings of a certain rail conductor from a beloved children’s television show about a talking train.  

U.S. intelligence and cybersecurity agencies have already warned that Chinese state-sponsored actors have gained access to American critical infrastructure and, in some cases, appear to be positioning themselves for potential disruption during a future conflict. A coordinated attack against something as ordinary as refrigeration would therefore not have to cause catastrophic damage to be successful. The objective could be much simpler: get inside, disrupt operations, complicate the response, and watch how America responds. 

That is what makes the recent commissary incidents worth examining beyond the immediate loss of food or inconvenience to military families. If an adversary wanted to probe U.S. military infrastructure, attacking a commissary would carry considerably less risk than shutting down an airfield, disrupting a command center, or interfering with a weapons system.  

Yet it could still provide valuable intelligence about how quickly geographically dispersed incidents are identified, whether installations communicate with one another, when a maintenance problem becomes a cybersecurity investigation, which contractors and government agencies respond, and how long it takes the Pentagon to determine whether seemingly isolated failures are connected. 

In other words, the purpose would not be the refrigerator, the purpose would be to learn how and when we would respond to the incidents. 

That possibility becomes more important when viewed against what the U.S. government has already told us about China‘s cyber strategy. Federal cybersecurity and intelligence agencies have warned that the Chinese state-sponsored group known as Volt Typhoon has infiltrated communications, energy, transportation, water, and other critical infrastructure. The concern is not simply espionage. U.S. officials have assessed that these actors are positioning themselves inside American infrastructure so they could potentially disrupt operations during a crisis or conflict. 

Consider what this could mean during a potential confrontation in the Indo-Pacific. An adversary would not necessarily need to launch a massive cyberattack that immediately announces the beginning of hostilities.  

Communications through satellites could become unreliable. Ports could experience unexplained problems. Transportation networks and logistics facilities could slow, and building-control systems could begin malfunctioning. Military installations could begin dealing with what initially appear to be unrelated maintenance issues but in a compounded manner.  

None of those events alone would cripple the United States, but together they could consume resources, complicate logistics, slow decision-making, and create uncertainty at precisely the moment when speed matters most. 

That is the nature of the vulnerability Washington needs to confront. America’s military installations are filled with operational technology that most people would never consider part of the battlefield: heating and cooling systems, electrical controls, water systems, fuel distribution, warehouses, refrigeration, elevators, access controls, cameras, sensors, and building-management systems. Increasingly, these systems are digitally monitored, networked, automated, or remotely accessible. Those capabilities improve efficiency and reduce costs, but they also expand the potential attack surface. 

We have appropriately spent billions protecting classified networks, weapons platforms, satellites, communications systems, and command-and-control capabilities. But those sophisticated systems still depend upon an enormous amount of ordinary infrastructure. A fifth-generation fighter needs fuel. A data center needs electricity and cooling capacities. A logistics hub needs functioning warehouses and access controls. Military installations need water, power, communications, and transportation.  

An adversary does not necessarily have to defeat our most sophisticated weapons if it can create enough problems in the infrastructure surrounding them to slow our ability to use them. 

Fort Huachuca makes the current incidents particularly noteworthy. The installation supports significant Army intelligence, communications, network, and cyber missions. There is no evidence that its commissary was deliberately targeted, and we should be careful not to suggest otherwise until the facts are analyzed. But that is exactly why the incident presents an opportunity to ask whether the Pentagon has sufficient visibility across the operational technology operating on its installations and whether it could quickly distinguish a routine equipment malfunction from coordinated malicious activity. 

Congress should be asking those questions as well. As it considers the next National Defense Authorization Act, Intelligence Authorization Act, and defense appropriations bills, operational technology security should receive greater attention alongside traditional cybersecurity.  

Congress should ask the Pentagon how much installation infrastructure can be remotely accessed, where the hardware and software originate, who maintains those systems, what networks they touch, and whether the Department of War has the ability to identify similar anomalies occurring simultaneously across multiple installations. Cybersecurity requirements for the systems supporting military installations should be viewed as part of readiness, not simply generic facility management. 

There is also a broader industrial-base issue at play. We spend enormous amounts of time debating where the components in our weapons systems are manufactured, and rightly so. We should apply the same scrutiny to the digital and physical infrastructure supporting those weapons and the people who operate them. Supply-chain security cannot stop at the aircraft, missile, satellite, or autonomous system. It must extend to the connected infrastructure underneath the entire enterprise. 

The refrigeration failures may ultimately have a completely innocent explanation. In fact, we should hope they do. But the more important lesson is that America’s adversaries are actively searching for ways to disrupt the United States below the threshold of traditional conflict, and the systems we overlook may be precisely the systems they find most attractive. 

The next battle frontier may not begin with a missile launch or an attack on a satellite. It may begin with a series of small, seemingly unrelated failures designed to disrupt, complicate, and confuse us before we even realize we are under attack. And yes, that could include a simple refrigerator. 

This article was originally published by RealClearDefense and made available via RealClearWire. 

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal. 

On “The Alex Marlow Show,” Admiral Brian Christine talked about health impacts on the military. Christine said, “We spend a lot of money, tremendous treasure spent on chronic disease…lost productivity. So, it has a workforce ramification. 77%, get this, 77% of

The post Exclusive — There’s National Security Ramifications to Chronic Diseas’: HHS Admiral Waves Red Flag as Vast Majority of Americans Unfit to Serve in Military appeared first on Breitbart.

On “The Alex Marlow Show,” host and Breitbart Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow talked about China. Marlow said, “It feels like we’re talking a lot about whether or not the pandas are coming to the zoo or not and whether or not

The post China Sending U.S. Pandas; USA Sending China…Students? appeared first on Breitbart.

On “The Alex Marlow Show,” host and Breitbart Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow talked about the media. Marlow said, “That’s one of the reasons why he’s one of my faves in Washington. It’s such a clear explanation. And that’s the whole thing

The post Vance Makes Case Breitbart’s Coverage of Biden More Fair Than Politico’s Coverage of Trump appeared first on Breitbart.

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