WASHINGTON – A U.S. Senate Judiciary subcommittee overseeing technology issues will hold a hearing Tuesday on Chinese hacking incidents, including a recent incident involving American telecom companies.

The hearing to be chaired by Senator Richard Blumenthal will review the threats “Chinese hacking and influence pose to our democracy, national security, and economy,” his office said, adding the senator plans “to raise concerns about Elon Musk’s potential conflicts of interest with China as Mr. Musk becomes increasingly involved in government affairs.”

Musk, the head of electric car company Tesla, social media platform X and rocket company SpaceX, emerged during the election campaign as a major supporter of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump. Trump appointed him as co-head of a newly created Department of Government Efficiency to “slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.”

Musk, who was in China in April and reportedly proposed testing Tesla’s advanced driver-assistance package in China by deploying it in robotaxis, did not immediately to requests for comment.

The hearing will include CrowdStrike Senior Vice President Adam Meyers and Telecommunications Industry Association CEO David Stehlin, Strategy Risks CEO Isaac Stone Fish and Sam Bresnick, research fellow at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology at Georgetown University,

Last week, U.S. authorities said China-linked hackers have intercepted surveillance data intended for American law enforcement agencies after breaking in to an unspecified number of telecom companies, U.S. authorities said on Wednesday.

The hackers compromised the networks of “multiple telecommunications companies” and stole U.S. customer call records and communications from “a limited number of individuals who are primarily involved in government or political activity,” according to a joint statement released by the FBI and the U.S. cyber watchdog agency CISA.

The announcement confirmed the broad outlines of previous media reports that Chinese hackers were believed to have opened a back door into the interception systems used by law enforcement to surveil Americans’ telecommunications.

It follows reports Chinese hackers targeted telephones belonging to then-presidential and vice presidential candidates Donald Trump and JD Vance, along with other senior political figures, raised widespread concern over the security of U.S. telecommunications infrastructure.

Beijing has repeatedly denied claims by the U.S. government and others that it has used hackers to break into foreign computer systems.

Last month, a bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers asked AT&T, Verizon Communications and Lumen Technologies to answer questions about the reporting hacking of the networks of U.S. broadband providers. REUTERS

WASHINGTON – A previously confidential directive by Biden administration lawyers lays out how military and spy agencies must handle personal information about Americans when using artificial intelligence, showing how the officials grappled with trade-offs between civil liberties and national security.

The results of that internal debate also underscore the constraints and challenges the government faces in issuing rules that keep pace with rapid advances in technology, particularly in electronic surveillance and related areas of computer-assisted intelligence gathering and analysis.

The administration had to navigate two competing goals, according to a senior administration official Joshua Geltzer, the top legal adviser to the National Security Council, “harnessing emerging technology to protect Americans, and establishing guardrails for safeguarding Americans’ privacy and other considerations”.

The White House last month held back the four-page, unclassified directive when President Joe Biden signed a major national security memo that pushes military and intelligence agencies to make greater use of AI within certain guardrails.

After inquiries from The New York Times, the White House has made the guidance public. A close read and an interview with Mr Geltzer, who oversaw the deliberations by lawyers from across the executive branch, offers greater clarity on the current rules that national security agencies must follow when experimenting with using AI.

Training AI systems requires feeding them large amounts of data, raising a critical question for intelligence agencies that could influence both Americans’ private interests and the ability of national security agencies to experiment with the technology.

When an agency acquires an AI system trained by a private sector firm using information about Americans, is that considered “collecting” the data of those Americans?

The guidance says that does not generally count as collecting the training data – so those existing privacy-protecting rules, along with a 2021 directive about collecting commercially available databases, are not yet triggered.

Still, the Biden team was not absolute on that question. The guidance leaves open the possibility that acquisition might count as collection if the agency has the ability to access the training data in its original form, “as well as the authorisation and intent to do so.” NYTIMES