RISKS-LIST: Risks-Forum Digest Tuesday 16 May 2023 Volume 33 : Issue 71

ACM FORUM ON RISKS TO THE PUBLIC IN COMPUTERS AND RELATED SYSTEMS (comp.risks)
Peter G. Neumann, founder and still moderator

***** See last item for further information, disclaimers, caveats, etc. *****
This issue is archived at <http://www.risks.org> as
<http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/33.71>
The current issue can also be found at
<http://www.csl.sri.com/users/risko/risks.txt>

Contents:
Your DNA Can Now Be Pulled From Thin Air. Privacy Experts Are Worried
(Elizabeth Anne Brown)
An EFF Investigation: Mystery GPS Tracker On A Supporter's Car (via GG)
*Philadelphia Inquirer* hack prevents printing the Sunday paper (Sundry)
CEO of OpenAI calls for US to regulate artificial intelligence (Sam Altman)
ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web (The New Yorker)
Cybersecurity faces a challenge from AI'S rise (MSN)
Entering the singularity: Has AI reached the point of no return? (The Hill)
Research finds AI assistants may be able to influence users without
them being aware, akin to humans swaying each other through collaboration
and social norms (WSJ)
Rip and Replace: The Tech Cold War Is Upending Wireless Carriers (NYTimes)
Vice Media Group files for bankruptcy protection (Matthew Kruk)
Re: Near collision embarrasses Navy, so they order public San Diego webcams
taken down (Steve Bacher)
Re: Three Companies Supplied Fake Comments to FCC (Steve Bacher)
Interfaces: The Dangers of Ethical AI in Healthcare (S. Scott Graham)
Abridged info on RISKS (comp.risks)

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Date: Tue, 16 May 2023 04:50:48 -0700
From: geoff goodfellow <geoff@iconia.com>
Subject: Your DNA Can Now Be Pulled From Thin Air. Privacy Experts Are
Worried (Elizabeth Anne Brown)

[Today's *The New York Times* Science Times, A DNA Quandary,
Elizabeth Anne Brown, 16 May 2023: Tiny bits of genetic material
that humans leave everywhere can be collected and analyzed, raising
ethical concerns about privacy and civil liberties. PGN]

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/15/science/environmental-dna-ethics-privacy.html

David Duffy, a wildlife geneticist at the University of Florida, just wanted
a better way to track disease in sea turtles. Then he started finding human
DNA everywhere he looked.
<https://www.whitney.ufl.edu/people/current-research-faculty/david-duffy-phd/>

Over the last decade, wildlife researchers have refined techniques for
recovering environmental DNA, or eDNA -- trace amounts of genetic material
that all living things leave behind. A powerful and inexpensive tool for
ecologists, eDNA is all over -- floating in the air, or lingering in water,
snow, honey and even your cup of tea. Researchers have used the method to
detect invasive species before they take over, to track vulnerable or
secretive wildlife populations and even to rediscover species thought to be
extinct.
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/24/science/environmental-dna-sampling.html>
The eDNA technology is also used in wastewater surveillance systems
to monitor Covid and other pathogens.
<https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/11/health/covid-sewage-wastewater-data.html>

But all along, scientists using eDNA were quietly recovering gobs and gobs
of human DNA. To them, it's pollution, a sort of human genomic by-catch
muddying their data. But what if someone set out to collect human eDNA on
purpose?

New DNA collecting techniques are like catnip for law enforcement
officials, says Erin Murphy.
<https://its.law.nyu.edu/facultyprofiles/index.cfm?fuseaction=profile.overview&personid=31567>
a law professor at the New York University School of Law who
specializes in the use of new technologies in the criminal legal
system. The police have been quick to embrace unproven tools, like
using DNA to create probability-based sketches of a suspect.
<https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/24/science/building-face-and-a-case-on-dna.html>

That could pose dilemmas for the preservation of privacy and civil
liberties, especially as technological advancement allows more information
to be gathered from ever smaller eDNA samples. Dr. Duffy and his colleagues
used a readily available and affordable technology to see how much
information they could glean from human DNA gathered from the environment in
a variety of circumstances, such as from outdoor waterways and the air
inside a building.

The results of their research, published Monday in the journal Nature
Ecology & Evolution <https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-023-02056-2>,
<https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-023-02056-2> demonstrate that
scientists can recover medical and ancestry information from minute
fragments of human DNA lingering in the environment.

Forensic ethicists and legal scholars say the Florida team's findings
increase the urgency for comprehensive genetic privacy regulations. For
researchers, it also highlights an imbalance in rules around such techniques
in the United States -- that it's easier for law enforcement officials to
deploy a half-baked new technology than it is for scientific researchers to
get approval for studies to confirm that the system even works. Genetic
trash to genetic treasure. [...]
https://dnyuz.com/2023/05/15/your-dna-can-now-be-pulled-from-thin-air-privacy-experts-are-worried/

[Captured in a crowd, someone else's DNA might easily be associated with
you, mistakenly. It seems as if this has plenty of other risks as well.
PGN]

------------------------------

Date: Sun, 14 May 2023 02:51:46 -0400
From: "Gabe Goldberg" <gabe@gabegold.com>
Subject: An EFF Investigation: Mystery GPS Tracker On A Supporter's Car
(Electronic Frontier Foundation)

Being able to accurately determine your location anywhere on the planet is a
useful technological trick. But when tracking isn't done by you, but to you
-- without your knowledge or consent -- it's a violation of your
privacy. That's why at EFF we've long fought against dragnet surveillance,
mobile device tracking, and warrantless GPS tracking.

Several weeks ago, an EFF supporter brought her car to a mechanic, and found
a mysterious device wired into her car under her driver's seat. This
supporter, who we'll call Sarah (not her real name), sent us an email asking
if we could determine whether this device was a GPS tracker, and if so, who
might have installed it. Confronted with a mystery that could also help us
learn more about tracking, our team got to work.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/03/eff-investigation-mystery-gps-tracker-supporters-car

------------------------------

Date: Tue, 16 May 2023 10:33:50 PDT
From: Peter G Neumann <neumann@csl.sri.com>
Subject: *Philadelphia Inquirer* hack prevents printing the Sunday paper

[Thanks to Arik Hesseldahl for reporting this item.]

https://www.inquirer.com/news/philadelphia/philadelphia-inquirer-hack-cyber-disruption-20230514.html

[Monty Solomon noted another take on this:
Possible Cyberattack Disrupts The Philadelphia Inquirer
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/15/business/media/philadelphia-inquirer-cyberattack.html
PGN]

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Date: Tue, 16 May 2023 13:40:28 -0600
From: Matthew Kruk <mkrukg@gmail.com>
Subject: CEO of OpenAI calls for US to regulate artificial intelligence
(Sam Altman)

*The creator of advanced chatbot ChatGPT has called on US lawmakers to
regulate artificial intelligence (AI). *

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, testified before
a U.S. Senate committee on Tuesday about the possibilities -- and pitfalls
-- of the new technology.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65616866

------------------------------

From: Amos Shapir <amos083@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 16 May 2023 17:19:11 +0300
Subject: ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web (The New Yorker)

How ChatGPT is like lossy compression, and a cautionary tale of a famous
old bug of Xerox copying machines.

``Think of ChatGPT as a blurry *JPEG* of all the text on the Web. It
retains much of the information on the Web, in the same way that a *JPEG*
retains much of the information of a higher-resolution image, but, if
you're looking for an exact sequence of bits, you won't find it.''

More at (may be paywalled):
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-is-a-blurry-jpeg-of-the-web

------------------------------

Date: Sat, 13 May 2023 09:43:26 -0700
From: geoff goodfellow <geoff@iconia.com>
Subject: Cybersecurity faces a challenge from AI'S rise (MSN)

Earlier this year, a sales director in India for tech security firm Zscaler
got a call that seemed to be from the company's chief executive.

As his cellphone displayed founder Jay Chaudhry's picture, a familiar voice
said ``Hi, it's Jay. I need you to do something for me.''

A follow-up text over WhatsApp explained why. ``I think I'm having poor
network coverage as I am traveling at the moment. Is it okay to text here in
the meantime?''

Then the caller asked for assistance moving money to a bank in Singapore.
Trying to help, the salesman went to his manager, who smelled a rat and
turned the matter over to internal investigators. They determined that
scammers had reconstituted Chaudhry' voice from clips of his public remarks
in an attempt to steal from the company.