It all sounds pretty dystopian: > Inside a white stucco building in Southern California, video cameras compare > faces of passersby against a facial recognition database. Behavioral analysis > AI reviews the footage for signs of violent behavior. Behind a bathroom door, > a smoke detector-shaped device captures audio, listening for sounds of > distress. Outside, drones stand ready to be deployed and provide intel from > above, and license plate readers from $8.5 billion surveillance behemoth Flock > Safety ensure the cars entering and exiting the parking lot aren’t driven by > criminals...

This academic year, I am taking a sabbatical from the Kennedy School and Harvard University. (It’s not a real sabbatical—I’m just an adjunct—but it’s the same idea.) I will be spending the Fall 2025 and Spring 2026 semesters at the Munk School at the University of Toronto. I will be organizing a reading group on AI security in the fall. I will be teaching my cybersecurity policy class in the Spring. I will be working with Citizen Lab, the Law School, and the Schwartz Reisman Institute. And I will be enjoying all the multicultural offerings of Toronto...

Reporting on the rise of fake students enrolling in community college courses: > The bots’ goal is to bilk state and federal financial aid money by enrolling > in classes, and remaining enrolled in them, long enough for aid disbursements > to go out. They often accomplish this by submitting AI-generated work. And > because community colleges accept all applicants, they’ve been almost > exclusively impacted by the fraud. The article talks about the rise of this type of fraud, the difficulty of detecting it, and how it upends quite a bit of the class structure and learning community...