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Happy Tuesday. Here's your Tuesday Tech Drop, the past week's top stories from the intersection of politics and the all-inclusive world of technology.
'But [his] emails!'
Roger Stone, a longtime adviser to Donald Trump who helped to push the fake electors scheme, told the Washington Post that one of his email accounts was reportedly compromised by a cyberattack that was targeting the Trump campaign. The news surrounding this hack has been moving quickly, so let's review the sequence of events so far.
- Aug. 10: Politico reports it received internal Trump campaign documents from someone calling themselves “Robert,” describing some of their contents but not sharing them.
- Aug. 10: Team Trump says it has been hacked and accuses Iran of perpetrating the hack without offering proof. Meanwhile, the campaign tries to shame news outlets not to publish anything resulting from the hack — the polar opposite of Trump’s stance on hacks that targeted Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016.
- Aug. 12: NBC News confirms the Washington Post reports that the FBI is probing the hack, alongside similar attempts made on the Biden-Harris campaign. Officials from what is now the Harris-Walz campaign said there is no evidence that any hacking attempt on it has been successful. The Post also interviews Stone, who says multiple email accounts of his were hit with cyberattacks. The Post’s sources allege Stone’s email was used to send Trump campaign officials a bogus link that could compromise the recipient's emails, too.
The juicy story here is that one of the most mischievous and aggressively outspoken figures in Trump’s orbit was the one whose private communications appears to have compromised — and possibly compromised others in the Trump campaign, as well.
But a notable subplot is the media’s markedly different response to hacked campaign documents when they come into their hands directly, as compared to the 2016 feeding frenzy over private communications stolen from the Clinton campaign and made public by Wikileaks. The Associated Press is out with a story on the media outlets that have thus far chosen not to publish documents they've received as a result of the hack.
Remember when Trump literally called on Russia to "find" missing Clinton emails and declared his love for WikiLeaks?
Now Trump is benefitting from a restraint that neither he nor the media have afforded other politicians in a similar situation. Joy Reid called out this double standard on Monday’s episode of The ReidOut.
Seniors learning about A.I.
Across the country, seniors are getting some training about the budding age of artificial intelligence — learning how the technology can benefit them and how it can be used to deceive and manipulate them. Class is in session.
Read more from in the Associated Press.
Musk was warned
Elon Musk received a warning from the European Union ahead of the digital debacle he hosted for Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on his social media platform X on Monday. The E.U. warned Musk not to run afoul of its rules around the spread of illegal content and disinformation on large social media platforms — a fitting warning, given his role in spreading the disinformation that recently fueled far-right riots in the U.K.
Read my colleague Anthony Fisher’s take on the Trump-Musk conversation here on MSNBC.com.
Team Trump tries to take TikTok by storm
The Trump campaign wants to make its candidate into a TikTok star as part of an effort to rehabilitate his public image — but Vice President Kamala Harris’ popularity with young people on the app is throwing a wrench in their plans.
Read more at The Washington Post.
Nadler pushes for X probe
New York Rep. Jerrold Nadler has called on Republican House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan to probe allegations of political censorship on social media platform X. Elon Musk, who has endorsed Trump, has allowed the platform to spread misinformation about Harris, while liberal accounts supporting her have been suspended and labeled as spam in what some believe is an effort to help Trump.
Read more at The Verge.
OpenAI warning
OpenAI, the creators of popular artificial intelligence-enabled chatbot ChatGPT, issued a warning about people becoming emotionally dependent on its voice mode. It’s an eerie warning, and we should all be cautious of the ways we can grow attached to our devices. But there’s reason to question this sort of Big Tech fatalism: A.I. experts have warned that this kind of apocalyptic, future-oriented focus can mystify the conversation around real harms artificial intelligence can — and does — pose in the present.
Read more at The Hill.
Khanna’s crypto outreach
Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., has been acting as a sort of liaison between crypto enthusiasts and the White House, seeking to thread the needle between promoting regulation and assuaging concerns from the largely wealthy, regulation-resistant power brokers in the crypto community.
Read more at CryptoSlate.
Trump’s A.I. lie
Trump’s latest lie about Harris — that her campaign used A.I. to generate images of her crowds — is an attempt to convince his followers to reject reality and lay the groundwork to question the election results should he lose this November. Read my latest blog post on it here.