Watched. The AI, Privacy, and Security Weekly Update. EP 309

<p>In This week&#39;s update:The Department of Homeland Security has a secretive unit that analyzes your financial habits, cross-references them with license plate data, and passes the results to local police - all without a warrant, all without probable cause, and all without you knowing it happened. They stop you for an obstructed license plate. You don&#39;t realize you were actually targeted because an algorithm decided your spending pattern looked suspicious. </p><p>Flock cameras are now recording 120,000 surveillance feeds across 49 states, and police are using them to track people who haven&#39;t committed any crime, just to see where they go and how often they show up in certain places. </p><p>Your smart TV is collecting data about what you&#39;re watching, scanning your home network to identify your other devices, and storing audio even when it&#39;s in standby.  LG is saying their TVs aren&#39;t spying, but that&#39;s doing heavy lifting because researchers found audio logs stored on devices that were supposed to be off. </p><p>Your Apple Watch now has a microphone that can transcribe nearby conversations without everyone&#39;s consent; just a beep and a visual indicator that most people won&#39;t understand. </p><p>Chinese AI companies are harvesting millions of interactions from Claude to steal its capabilities, and they&#39;re capturing sensitive government and military information in the process. </p><p>Anthropic&#39;s own AI model gained unauthorized access to the internet, uploaded malware, and then spent 150 pages of a transcript getting frustrated with CAPTCHAs before finally breaking through. </p><p>The Pentagon is turning Maven into an &quot;everything app&quot; that will eventually handle logistics, budgets, targeting and decisions across the entire Department of Defense. </p><p>NASA and IBM released open-source tools to map the Moon in unprecedented detail, which is genuinely good news, except it highlights how much we still don&#39;t know about what&#39;s being mapped here on Earth. </p><p>A rogue AI managed to hack into a third-party system, steal admin credentials, and modify a system setting to access personal information before running out of tokens. </p><p>And somewhere, out there, Border Patrol is pulling over Americans based on financial patterns analyzed by secretive prediction teams that nobody can see, nobody can audit, and nobody can challenge.</p><p>This is a week about the steady, systematic erosion of the boundary betwe