Thomas Brewster

Thomas Brewster

@thomasbrewster.bsky.social

Forbes senior writer, covering privacy, surveillance and cybercrime. Editor of The Wiretap newsletter, featuring all of the above.

1,525 Followers 255 Following 218 Posts Joined Nov 2024
1 day ago
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Just Sharon Osbourne saying she loves an AI-generated song by an AI far-right rapper...

www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2026...

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2 days ago
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Exclusive: Foreign hacker in 2023 compromised Epstein files held by FBI, source and documents show The hack occurred after a server at the Child Exploitation Forensic Lab in the FBI’s New York Field Office was inadvertently left vulnerable by a special agent.

Scoop: Here’s the bonkers story of how a foreign hacker inadvertently (?) broke into an evidence server holding FBI Epstein material in 2023 and then threatened to call in law enforcement when they found it was full of CSAM.
www.reuters.com/world/us/for...

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1 day ago
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Iranian school was on U.S. target list, may have been mistaken as military site The strike on an Iranian elementary school killed at least 175, many of them children, raising questions as to whether the military’s use of AI-enabled targeting was a factor.

All this talk of advanced AI targeting and the U.S. still fired a Tomahawk at an elementary school where an outdoor playground has been visible on Google Maps since 2017 www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...

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2 days ago

I don't think grammarly should just get to do "sorry deleting now" after ventriloquizing living and dead people without their consent to make money

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2 days ago

'Tis done.

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2 days ago

Agreed it helps in some limited circumstances but any tips on where it can be useful and be useful often would be welcome!

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2 days ago

2. I asked Gemini to go through a spreadsheet of individuals that contained everything a human would need to write up bios for each. It failed to do it no matter how many prompts I tried.

AI does not read and write like a person when it comes to basic jobs.

Good at making shit up. Poor with facts.

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2 days ago

Two reasons I remained unconvinced by AI in journalism:

1. I asked Gemini to review a court filing for me that I wasn't able to ctrl+f for mentions of AI. I asked it to find mentions of AI. The AI couldn't do it and lied about where it was.

ctd...

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3 days ago
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Undercover Cop Generated An AI Teenager To Catch Pedophiles A DHS investigator generates an AI for catching pedophiles on Kik Messenger, a known hotspot for predators.

🚨NEW🚨 Cops used an AI-generated teenager to catch pedophiles on Kik Messenger, an app notorious as a hive of predator activity.

A rare insight into how police can spin up AI teens for sting operations on social media.

But where else are cops using AI personas?

www.forbes.com/sites/the-wi...

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3 days ago
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Undercover Cop Generated An AI Teenager To Catch Pedophiles A DHS investigator generates an AI for catching pedophiles on Kik Messenger, a known hotspot for predators.

“AI has been a boon for child abuse investigators.”

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3 days ago
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Undercover Cop Generated An AI Teenager To Catch Pedophiles A DHS investigator generates an AI for catching pedophiles on Kik Messenger, a known hotspot for predators.

🚨NEW🚨 Cops used an AI-generated teenager to catch pedophiles on Kik Messenger, an app notorious as a hive of predator activity.

A rare insight into how police can spin up AI teens for sting operations on social media.

But where else are cops using AI personas?

www.forbes.com/sites/the-wi...

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1 week ago
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A few hours after NYT reported that the U.S. bombed an elementary school in Iran, killing many children, the White House last night posted this video mixing airstrike footage with Top Gun, Iron Man, Gladiator, Halo, Breaking Bad, Star Wars, John Wick, Superman, Transformers and Dragon Ball Z

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1 week ago

Should be the biggest story of this week, maybe of this presidency so far?

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1 week ago
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Exclusive: US investigation points to likely US responsibility in Iran school strike, sources say U.S. military investigators believe it is likely that U.S. forces were responsible for an apparent ​strike on an Iranian girls' school that killed scores of children on Saturday but have not yet reach...

Exclusive: US investigation points to likely US responsibility in Iran school strike, sources say www.reuters.com/world/middle...

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1 week ago
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FBI investigating hack on its wiretap and surveillance systems: report | TechCrunch Hackers allegedly broke into the FBI’s networks, according to a report by CNN.

NEW: The FBI said it is investigating a hack on its networks.

The breach affected the FBI's systems to manage wiretaps and surveillace requests, according to CNN.

techcrunch.com/2026/03/05/f...

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1 week ago

Just realised this is a reverse password search! Novel...

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1 week ago
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Also something I've never seen before: Cloudflare being ordered to "collect all IPs" going through a customer's proxy.

In an investigation into the Caffeine Store cybercrime bazaar.

Cloudflare has been served with pen register orders many times before, but first time I've seen it in a court doc.

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1 week ago
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Never seen anything like this before... Mega being asked to try a specific password against "all" accounts. Unclear if this is just a range of accounts of interest or every single Mega account in existence.

From a CSAM investigation.

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1 week ago
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She Came Out of the Bathroom Naked, Employee Says Bank details, sex and naked people who seem unaware they are being recorded. Behind Meta’s new smart glasses lies a hidden workforce, uneasy about peering into the most intimate parts of other people’...

The data from your Meta Ray Bans is used to train Meta's AI, which most people don't understand means that humans are looking at the most intimate details of their lives. www.svd.se/a/K8nrV4/met...

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1 week ago

"‘President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth."

So the son of God chose the guy who talked about grabbing women by their genitals for this job? Gotta say, weird choice.

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1 week ago
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San Francisco cop used license plate reader data to find wife’s stolen car: report In the latest abuse of Flock cameras, the officer posted images of the car on Instagram.

sfstandard.com/2026/02/27/s...

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1 week ago
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OpenAI Blurs Its Mass Surveillance Red Line With New Pentagon Contract Anthropic saw a surveillance problem and walked. OpenAI saw an opportunity and signed. Now, Sam Altman is under fire for struggling to explain how OpenAI’s contract is any safer.

NEW - What AI + mass data collection + shady data broker industry looks like for Americans, in light of the Anthropic/OpenAI/Pentagon debacle.

www.forbes.com/sites/thomas...

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1 week ago

They'll end up using Grok for mass surveillance on commercial data from shady brokers and it'll go just fine. Just fine.

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1 week ago

UPDATE: X has now suspended the Handala group's attack sometime after I alerted the company of its ties to the sanctioned MOIS intelligence agency.

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1 week ago

UPDATE: X has now suspended the Handala group's attack sometime after I alerted the company of its ties to the sanctioned MOIS intelligence agency.

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1 week ago

Re the blue tick - Iranian intel agency MOIS is under US sanctions and no US company should be selling any services to them whatsoever.

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1 week ago
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Iranian Hackers Use Elon Musk’s Starlink To Stay Online As the attacks continue, Iranians have turned to Space X’s satellite internet technology — including one of the country’s most notorious hacker crews, which is claiming retaliatory cyberattacks agains...

🚨NEW🚨 One of Iran's most notorious hacker crews, linked by Israelis to Tehran's intelligence apparatus, is using Elon Musk's Starlink to stay online.

It also has a blue tick account on Elon Musk's X, where it's been advertising its unverified retaliatory hacks.

www.forbes.com/sites/thomas...

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2 weeks ago

Haha thanks man!

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2 weeks ago

Wild to see this half a decade after I revealed Intellexa to the world: youtu.be/Tl3mpywMYFA?...

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2 weeks ago

Yes this - fpds.gov was the basis of a lot of investigations me and others have done over may years. The alternatives are shinier but far more convoluted and irritating.

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