Nineteen Islamist terrorists murdered 2,979 people on September 11, 2001. The government’s counterterrorism (CT) response to 9/11, which was the deadliest terrorist attack in world history, included domestic security measures like the TSA, the PATRIOT Act, surveillance, and numerous wars overseas that we lost. The costs of 9/11 were horrific, and the response was gargantuan. When studying public policy, we must ask: Was the counterterrorism response to 9/11 worth it? Did it save enough lives to pay for itself or at least break even?

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In 1942, scientists working on what became the Manhattan Project confronted a disturbing possibility: could an atomic explosion become hot enough to ignite a self-sustaining nuclear reaction in the atmosphere?

They took the question seriously and did the physics. Hans Bethe, Emil Konopinski and others examined whether the reactions could release energy faster than the atmosphere could dissipate it, and their calculations showed they could not. Three years later, the Trinity test went ahead.

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In Brief

●  Stanford GSB researchers are building frameworks that keep AI under human control even as they become more autonomous.

●  In a cooperative game, an AI agent learns when to check in with a person and when to act alone.

Another framework sets up effective oversight of an untrusted model by pools of human or AI supervisors.

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Over the weekend, Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei called for artificial intelligence (AI) companies, including his own, to slow down their work. Sam Altman and Elon Musk, heads of rivals OpenAI and xAI respectively, agreed.

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September 11 marks one of the darkest days in US history. Terrorists murdered thousands of people on American soil, put countless people in fear for their safety, and left a scar in American history that can still be felt to this day. Yet what is less known is the financial surveillance that was expanded in the wake of the attack.

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The Department of Energy overstepped when it ordered an aging coal-fired power plant in Michigan to stay open past its planned retirement date last year, a federal court ruled on Friday. 

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Accepting crypto has become easier for online businesses, but managing what happens before and after a customer sends a payment can still involve several moving parts. A merchant needs to generate the payment, confirm that the correct amount has arrived…

Editor’s note: This piece is part of Lawfare’s collection “9/11 at 25: The Legal Architecture of the War on Terror, Twenty-Five Years On,” examining how 9/11 remains—or doesn’t—embedded in current legal and policy frameworks, a quarter century after the attacks. Read the full collection here.

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One of President Donald Trump’s closest aides, Natalie Harp, worked in the White House for more than a year without completing the normal security clearance process, according to a recent MS Now report.

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Artificial intelligence systems are starting to do more than answer questions. New AI “agents” can remember information from previous interactions, plan a series of steps and use digital tools to complete tasks.

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The argument in Washington over the past few months has been about whether to ban Chinese AI models or restrict them. What has been less examined is what Beijing intends to do with the open-weight – that is, publicly available and downloadable – models its labs have built. Beijing has started to answer that question, and not with one voice.

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A mother in New York State who claims to oppose vaccines because of her Catholic faith lost an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) this week—though Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch said they would have granted her application. For now, the woman’s kindergarten-aged son must be vaccinated to attend school. 

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The worst terrorist attack in world history occurred on September 11, 2001. Many security failures contributed to permitting the attacks to occur, including the inability of the legal immigration system to stop the 19 hijackers from receiving temporary nonimmigrant visas to travel to the United States. Fortunately, the system has improved, and vetting failures have become far less frequent after the attacks. 

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Argonne researchers study the movement of dust particles from concrete surfaces during a simulated radiological contamination scenario, measuring how pedestrians and moving cars affect the spread of the particles.

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As devastating wildfires continue to burn across the western U.S. and Canada this summer, they’re taking a serious toll on the electrical grid. Every year, wildfires, some sparked by birds or even high winds, cause significant damage to grid infrastructure.

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Reporting highlights

●  Evidence From Britain: A trove of evidence from Britain that became public only after the FBI closed its 9/11 investigation raises questions about a Saudi man who assisted two of the hijackers.

●  Suspicions: Material seized in 2001 from Omar al-Bayoumi, a Saudi student who had lived in San Diego, intensified suspicions about what he knew before the attacks.

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The Canadian digital asset market has recently seen significant progress, with regulated crypto investment products gaining more exposure across traditional financial markets. Filings submitted on the 9th by the Canadian Derivatives Clearing Corporation (CDCC) reveal that options linked to the…

ICODA's HackGPT shows why ranking #1 on Google won't get you cited by ChatGPT — and gives crypto projects a GEO framework that does.

Friday marks 25 years since the September 11 terror attacks. Americans are spending the week remembering those who lost their lives and honoring the first responders and others who sprang into action to help. The attacks cast a long shadow, stretching beyond Ground Zero, the Pentagon, and Flight 93 to transform not just the United States but the world.

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It was 25 years ago today that the Western world completely changed following the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11th, 2001. The shock of these horrific terrorist attacks caused a seismic shift in security policy both in Washington and Canberra. While the initial shock justified a major response, the focus on non-state and counterterrorist threats soon consumed a generation of national security policy, military resources, intelligence efforts and intellectual attention.

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