Last week, the Trump campaign falsely asserted that "homicides are skyrocketing in American cities under Kamala Harris." On Tuesday, the campaign offered a more nuanced and sophisticated critique of crime data cited by the Democratic presidential nominee. But it still does not support the earlier claim, which is inconsistent with numbers from several sources.

A "memorandum" headlined "Joe Biden's Lies on Crime" (a title that makes you wonder whether Trump forgot who his opponent is) notes that the FBI changed its crime data collection methods in 2021, switching from the old Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program to the new National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). The transition, which was aimed at generating "new and better data," resulted in a big decline in the number of participating law enforcement agencies. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the share of the population covered by participating agencies fell from the previous norm of about 95 percent to just 65 percent in 2021.

"The FBI's website reveals that the Q1 2024 data Joe Biden is citing comes from just 71% of the nation's law enforcement agencies," the Trump campaign says. "That means crime data from nearly one third of jurisdictions is missing." The overall NIBRS participation rate, which is relevant in assessing the FBI's final estimates for any given year, is higher: The FBI says 15,724 of 18,884 eligible agencies, or 83 percent, submitted data for 2022. The overall population coverage rate had risen to 85 percent by 2023. Still, the decline in participation since 2020 is a widely recognized problem.

The Trump campaign notes that "the FBI attempts to 'estimate' crime data for non-reporting agencies using a 'statistical weight' from reporting agencies similar in size and type"—a "practice of estimating crime numbers for agencies with missing data" that "has been going on since the 1960s." But historically, the missing data represented around 5 percent of the population, compared to 15 percent in 2023. A bigger gap magnifies the potential for error.

That is a perfectly reasonable point. But does it mean that homicides are, in fact, "skyrocketing"? No.

Nationwide, the FBI's preliminary numbers indicate, murders fell by 26 percent in the first quarter of this year compared to the same period last year. But other sources also report that homicides are falling this year, albeit by smaller percentages.

Based on a sample of 277 cities, AH Datalytics reports a 17.3 percent drop in murders so far this year, which is very large compared to historical trends. Most of these numbers come from "official" sources, meaning they were reported by local police departments or municipal governments. Some were compiled by state governments, and some came from local news outlets that track crime.

The Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ), based on data from 39 cities for the first half of 2024, reports that "most violent crimes," including homicide, "are at or below levels seen in 2019," the year before a huge spike in murders (which, as Trump wants us to forget, happened during his administration). The CCJ says the drop in homicides through June in "the 29 study cities providing data for that crime" was 13 percent.

According to a report from the Major Cities Chiefs Association (MCCA) that covers 69 cities during the same period, the total number of homicides fell by 17.4 percent. That is strikingly similar to the AH Datalytics estimate, although the latter analysis covers a lot more cities—including New York, which was not part of the MCCA sample but saw a 10 percent drop in homicides, according to AH Datalytics.

Instead of trying to defend its recent claim that "homicides are skyrocketing," the Trump campaign widens the focus, arguing that the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which includes crimes that are not reported to police, provides a more accurate picture of what is happening. The NCVS is not relevant in assessing homicide trends, since it does not cover homicides—the most serious violent crime and the one that is hardest to miss. And although the Trump campaign's criticism of the FBI numbers focuses on what happened in the first quarter of 2024, we do not yet have NCVS data for 2023, let alone this year.

The NCVS, like the FBI's system, has both strengths and weaknesses. But the Trump campaign deems it "by far the most credible and reliable barometer of crime nationwide." The NCVS, it says, "reveals that between 2020 and 2022 (the most recent year for which data is available), there was a 43% increase in violent crime, 58% increase in rape, 89% increase in aggravated assault, and a 56% increase in robbery."

Although these numbers omit 2023 and 2024, the Trump campaign wants us to believe they tell the true story of crime during the Biden administration. But the divergence between the NCVS and FBI numbers, especially in 2022, presents a puzzle that cannot be resolved simply by observing that the NCVS includes unreported crimes.

In 2002, when the FBI reported an overall 2 percent decline in violent crime, the NCVS results indicated a whopping 75 percent increase. Again, the latter number does not include homicide, which according to the FBI fell by 7 percent in 2022. But it does include respondents' reports of rape, which were up 58 percent, compared to the 6 percent drop estimated by the FBI; robbery, which rose by 47 percent according to the NCVS but only 1 percent according to the FBI; and aggravated assault, which more than doubled according to the survey but fell by 2 percent in the FBI's tally.

"Both too much and too little can be made of the divergence between the UCR and NCVS violent crime rates in 2022," the CCJ notes. "Divergent change in a single year should be viewed in the context of the similar long-term trends in the two indicators—and both sources show an appreciable decline in violent crime since the early 1990s." Still, "changes in the UCR and NCVS violent crime rates have rarely differed as much as they did" in 2022.

The 2021 changes in the FBI's reporting system and the concomitant decline in participation do not seem relevant here, since the participation rate was substantially higher in 2022 than it was in 2021. But if crime victims are increasingly disinclined to contact the police, that could help explain the striking 2022 divergence between the NCVS results and the FBI numbers.

According to the NCVS, the CCJ notes, "approximately 52% of serious violent crimes were reported to the police in 2021 and 48% in 2022, a relative decrease of nearly 8%. The decline in reporting crimes to the police was particularly large for aggravated assault, falling from 61% in 2021 to 50% in 2022, a decrease of 18%." But these changes in reporting behavior do not come close to fully accounting for the enormous differences between the NCVS and UCR numbers for 2022.

Beyond the difference between reported and unreported crimes, the NCVS and the FBI's system use different methods and measure somewhat different things. "As a household-based survey," the CCJ notes, "the NCVS does not include people who are homeless or those who live in institutions such as prisons, jails, and nursing homes. It also excludes crimes of violence against persons under 12 years of age. If persons included in the survey have experienced changes in violence that differ from the changes experienced by those excluded from the survey, that could help account for some of the divergence in violence rates."

The Bureau of Justice Statistics notes other possibly relevant differences between the two sources. For example, "the NCVS includes, but the [FBI system] excludes, attempted robberies, simple assault, [and] verbal threats of crime." The FBI system "includes, but the NCVS excludes, homicide, arson, commercial crimes, and human trafficking." The two sources also use different definitions of some crimes.

Another possible factor: While the FBI's 2022 numbers covered the calendar year, the 2022 NCVS asked about crimes experienced from July 1, 2021, through November 30, 2022. "Since the NCVS shows an increase in violent crime," The Marshall Project's Weihua Li and Jamiles Lartey suggest, "it's potentially because violent crime rates were higher in the latter part of 2021." They also note that "the victimization survey is historically much more volatile from one year to the next," suggesting "it may be influenced by statistical noise."

The Trump campaign describes the FBI's quarterly numbers as "garbage" and "fake statistics." But notwithstanding the preliminary nature of those numbers and the challenges associated with the transition to the new reporting system, they are broadly consistent, in direction if not magnitude, with what other sources indicate.

"Right now," Li and Lartey reported in June, "every source points to a decrease in violent crime." They quoted University of Miami criminologist Alex Piquero, an adviser to the CCJ Crime Trends Working Group, who said "the FBI's Q1 2024 data is incomplete, not inaccurate," adding: "There's no fudging of the numbers, and the drop is real. The question, of course, is how big that drop will be, and then how big that drop will be across crime types. That's the thing that we just don't fully grasp yet."

The post Trump's New, More Sophisticated Take on Crime Still Does Not Show 'Homicides Are Skyrocketing' appeared first on Reason.com.

I don’t know why I’m drawn to doomed litigation but there’s no denying this impulse.

I know what the plaintiff wants to achieve. That much is made clear by Justin Rodrich’s reporting on the lawsuit for the Daily Beast. But I don’t know how he (or any other pronoun! — it’s filed as “Doe”) expects this to stop a rogue state from trying to kill them, much less put $5 million in his pockets.

Nonetheless, here we are:

An FBI informant who leaked sensitive government secrets that reportedly then led to a deadly U.S. drone strike claims Iran’s fearsome security apparatus has targeted him for assassination over the perceived betrayal, forcing him underground, in an undisclosed location, following a botched kidnapping attempt.

In a heavily anonymized federal lawsuit obtained by The Daily Beast, “John Doe” says Iranian agents torched his car, broke into his home, and threatened his relatives after learning he was working with the American government. He now lives “in constant fear” of being killed by Iranian agents who have carried out dozens of hits and hundreds of abductions in various countries “with impunity,” according to his complaint.

Because Doe is a marked man, he went into exile in a nearby nation where he “must now avoid any public interaction, in order to remain safe,” the complaint states.

Unlike a lot of other fatally flawed (perhaps a poor choice of words in this case) litigation I’ve covered, Doe has a legitimate beef: a foreign nation is trying to kill him on, perhaps on his own soil — soil, it must be noted, that does not belong to the nation of Iran.

As legitimate claims go, demanding to be compensated for living in constant fear of your own safety is a pretty good one.

But the beef aside, how does the plaintiff expect this to actually go? For one thing, the federal court must agree that Washington, DC is the proper venue to hear this case. It may decide that it is, but in doing so, may provide a few hints for Doe’s assassins as to their general location.

The plaintiff has also secured legal representation. If you’re a state-sponsored hacker, that’s where you’re going first if you’re trying to discover the location of a person you want to kill.

And, since Iran has allegedly already engaged in intimidation, attempted kidnapping, and other threats on the informant’s life abroad, it’s unlikely the country is going to suddenly develop a healthy respect for US civil litigation procedures and respond to this lawsuit in a timely fashion… or at all, actually.

Iran has already broken the gentlemen’s agreement over assassination in foreign countries that you’re not actually at war with. Given that, the threat of default judgment isn’t actually a threat. It’s just one more thing you can file in your “IDGAF” drawer.

Even if the Iranian government does respond to this lawsuit, one would expect the invocation of sovereign immunity. One would also hope that a US Court would refuse to rule that sovereign immunity covers extrajudicial assassinations by countries not currently engaged in declared wars on said target and said target’s nation.

One would hope. But then again, maybe it won’t!. I mean, that’s exactly the thing that’s central to the initiation of Iran’s (alleged) assassination attempts:

An FBI informant who leaked sensitive government secrets that reportedly then led to a deadly U.S. drone strike claims Iran’s fearsome security apparatus has targeted him for assassination over the perceived betrayal…

We’re not technically or legally at war with Iran. And yet! So, that kind of ruins that argument. This government is only at war with things at the moment. There’s the War on Drugs. The War on Terror. The War on Fentanyl. The War on [Political Hot Button Topic Du Jour]. But we’re not at war with Iran. Nor are we at war with Yemeni wedding parties or foreign journalists, but nonetheless we’ve killed both with extrajudicial military actions and/or drone strikes.

While that adds more legitimacy to the plaintiff’s arguments and, conversely, detracts from the imagined defenses of the Iranian government, the lawsuit [PDF] doesn’t have a chance in hell of (1) stopping Iran from trying to kill this person, and (2) resulting in a $5 million payout to cover the alleged damages suffered due to the threatened person having to shut down his businesses.

So, as tragic and awful as the plaintiff’s situation is, this lawsuit only has the potential to make things worse. All of this means nothing when you’re dealing with a government willing to violate any number of official and unofficial agreements to kill someone on foreign soil. And that appears to be something Iran’s government is especially willing to do:

All told, Doe contends, the Islamic Republic of Iran, which in recent years has declared war on, among others, a podcaster in Vancouver who discussed sex on the air and a journalist in Brooklyn who criticized the regime, has “intentionally inflicted emotional distress, induced severe mental anguish and emotional and psychological pain and suffering, and caused the need for medical treatment.”

If there’s any entity in the US with some legal culpability, it might be the FBI, which clearly hasn’t done its best to protect this informant. Then again, it might just be the informant’s limited OpSec ability, which allegedly resulted in him being “followed” by Iranian agents and photographed entering the “US facility” where he turned over information to their handlers.

This is all very awful and hopefully the publications of these allegations, as well as the resulting lawsuit, will prompt the US government to do what it can to protect its source and adjust its diplomatic relationship with the Iranian government. But suing Iran isn’t going to stop it from trying to kill people it wants dead. And it certainly isn’t going to be offering any settlements to foreign residents who have, so far, managed to avoid being assassinated.

Britain's signals intelligence spy chief raised eyebrows this week with warnings that Russia is coordinating both cyberattacks and physical acts of sabotage against the West. There's evidence to back her claims—and the West may be returning the favor. Coming soon after FBI Director Christopher Wray warned that China is targeting American infrastructure, it looks like the world is not only fracturing once again, but that the hostile blocs are engaged in covert warfare.

Rumors of War

"We are increasingly concerned about growing links between the Russian intelligence services and proxy groups to conduct cyberattacks as well as suspected physical surveillance and sabotage operations," Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) Director Anne Keast-Butler told an audience at the United Kingdom government-sponsored CyberUK 2024 conference. "Before, Russia simply created the right environments for these groups to operate, but now they are nurturing and inspiring these non-state cyber actors in some cases seemingly coordinating physical attacks against the West."

Keast-Butler, whose agency is comparable to the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), also called out China, Iran, and North Korea as cybersecurity dangers. But naming Russian officials as being behind "physical attacks" raises the stakes. Sadly, her claims are well-founded.

Sabotage, Espionage, and Other Mischief

"A 20-year-old British man has been charged with masterminding an arson plot against a Ukrainian-linked target in London for the benefit of the Russian state," CBS News reported last month. That wasn't an isolated incident.

"In April alone a clutch of alleged pro-Russian saboteurs were detained across the continent," The Economist noted May 12 in describing what it called a "shadow war" between East and West. "Germany arrested two German-Russian dual nationals on suspicion of plotting attacks on American military facilities and other targets on behalf of the GRU, Russia's military intelligence agency. Poland arrested a man who was preparing to pass the GRU information on Rzeszow airport, the most important hub for military aid to Ukraine. Britain charged several men over an earlier arson attack in March on a Ukrainian-owned logistics firm in London whose Spanish depot was also targeted."

The GCHQ chief's warnings coupled with reality on the ground are alarming in themselves. Worse, they come after FBI Director Christopher Wray issued similar cautions in April about China.

"The PRC [People's Republic of China] has made it clear that it considers every sector that makes our society run as fair game in its bid to dominate on the world stage, and that its plan is to land low blows against civilian infrastructure to try to induce panic and break America's will to resist," Wray told the Vanderbilt Summit on Modern Conflict and Emerging Threats in Nashville, Tennessee.

Wray clarified that, by "infrastructure," he meant "everything from water treatment facilities and energy grids to transportation and information technology."

If that doesn't make you want to check that your pantry is stocked and that the water filter and generator are in working order, nothing will.

A Game Both Sides Can Play

Of course, in war of any sort, the implication is that both sides are involved in conflict. Western intelligence officials are loud in their warnings about foreign threats, but less open regarding just what their own operatives might be doing in Russia, China, and elsewhere. Still, there's evidence that this is hardly a one-sided war, shadowy though it may be.

In June 2022, The New York Times reported that Ukraine's defensive efforts relied heavily on "a stealthy network of commandos and spies rushing to provide weapons, intelligence and training." In addition to Americans, the story noted, "commandos from other NATO countries, including Britain, France, Canada and Lithuania, also have been working inside Ukraine."

American journalist and combat veteran Jack Murphy goes further, claiming the CIA, working through an allied spy service "is responsible for many of the unexplained explosions and other mishaps that have befallen the Russian military industrial complex." The targets include "railway bridges, fuel depots and power plants," he adds.

And if you wonder who blew up Nord Stream 1 and 2, well, so do a lot of people. Russia was initially accused, but it didn't make a lot of sense for the country's forces to destroy pipelines that generated revenue and fed western dependence on Russian natural gas. Since then, Denmark and Sweden have closed inconclusive investigations, journalist Seymour Hersh blamed American officials, and a report by Der Spiegel and The Washington Post placed responsibility on a rogue Ukrainian military officer.

The Wider War Is Here

Taken all together, the warnings from Keast-Butler and Wray, as well as acts of sabotage and arrests of foreign agents suggest that fears of a wider war resulting from Russia's continuing invasion of Ukraine may miss the point; the war could already be here. People looking for tanks and troops are overlooking cyber intrusions, arson, bombings, and other low-level mayhem.

"Russia is definitely at war with the West," Oleksandr Danylyuk of the Royal United Services Institute, a British defense and security think tank, told NBC News earlier this week.

Russian officials seem to embrace that understanding, with Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov commenting in March that the invasion of Ukraine, originally referred to by the euphemism "special military operation," is now more serious. "It has become a war for us as the collective West more and more directly increases its level of involvement in the conflict," he said.

Fortunately, a shadow war of the sort around us is less destructive than open military conflict, especially when the hostilities involve nuclear-armed powers. It's far better that spies hack the email accounts of government officials, as happened in the case of a Russian cyberattack on Germany's ruling Social Democrats, than that cities burn. But civilians still must live with the consequences of combatants attempting to do each other harm—particularly when the harm is to infrastructure on which regular people rely.

So, welcome to the world of global shadow war. Try to not become collateral damage.

The post World War War III May Already Have Started—in the Shadows appeared first on Reason.com.

On May 10, 1924, one of the worst events in history for American civil liberties happened: 29-year-old J. Edgar Hoover assumed the role of director of the then-Bureau of Investigation. Ambitious, power-hungry, and conniving, Hoover epitomized the snake in the proverbial garden. Under his watch, which lasted until his death in 1972, the FBI emerged as an alarming adversary to constitutional freedoms. 

Starting his career at the Justice Department in 1917 at only 22 years old, Hoover quickly ascended the ranks, often at the expense of Americans' civil liberties. By 1919, he headed the Justice Department's Radical Division, charged with destroying the supposed communist infiltration of America. Hoover's lifelong disdain for communists was matched only by his disregard for their constitutional rights, making this role a perfect fit for his ambitions. 

Hoover Cuts His Unconstitutional Teeth

As head of the Radical Division, Hoover began developing the dirty tricks he would become known for, relying on tactics fundamentally at odds with a free society. For example, he started compiling the secret files that made him infamous and feared by the political elite. "What Hoover accomplished during his first months at the Radical Division forever changed the nature of American politics," writes Beverly Gage in G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century, "launching an unprecedented experiment in peacetime political surveillance."

Under Hoover's leadership and fueled by the Espionage Act of 1917, federal agents aggressively pursued radicals—communists, socialists, and anarchists—tapping their phone lines and intercepting their mail. Hoover amassed more power, and at the tender age of 24, according to Tim Weiner in Enemies: A History of the FBI, Hoover "could call for the arrest of almost anyone he chose."

In April 1919, a coordinated anarchist campaign of mail bombs targeted prominent Americans, including Hoover's boss, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. Though none of the bombs met their intended targets, the first Red Scare was on. 

Hoover answered by organizing what became known as the Palmer Raids, with the initial raid in November 1919 leading to the mass arrests of nearly 1,200 suspected radicals—far more people than Hoover secured warrants for. Many rotted in city and county jails for months, and nearly 200 were deported under the Anarchist Exclusion Act of 1918.

But it was Hoover's encore the following January that epitomized what would become his lasting legacy: utter disregard for constitutionally protected rights. Beginning at 9 p.m. on January 2, 1920, Hoover led the largest mass arrests in American history. The raids continued into the week, and thousands were detained indiscriminately, many without warrants or just cause. 

According to Weiner in Enemies, "somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 people were swept up in the raids." However, he notes that we will likely never know the exact number as "no official accounting ever took place."

Rather than landing Hoover behind bars or at least ending his career, he evaded accountability and mastered the art of bureaucratic survival that protected him through eight presidential administrations. Before long, he was rewarded. On May 10, 1924, Attorney General Harlan Fiske Stone named Hoover acting director of the Bureau of Investigation. Stone was a believer in civil liberties, notably, and told Hoover he was on probation and that the Bureau was out of the secret police game. 

But Hoover would have the last laugh. Soon after, he revived his domestic intelligence operations and unconstitutional ways, often operating beyond public and political accountability scrutiny.

Friends in High Places

Presidential administrations throughout the 20th century—likely fearing Hoover and his secret files—left him unchecked and either actively supported or tacitly approved of his methods. Presidents from Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Richard Nixon found Hoover's capabilities useful for their political agendas, thus embedding a culture of surveillance and political manipulation that Hoover masterfully orchestrated. 

"He wasn't acting on his own," writes FBI Special Agent Paul Letersky in The Director: My Years Assisting J. Edgar Hoover. "Since before World War II, every president he'd served—those revered by the left and those revered by the right—knew what Hoover and the Bureau were doing in domestic security and surveillance." 

During the run-up to World War II, FDR turned Hoover loose, empowering the FBI director to return to gathering intelligence on American fascists and communists. Hoover revived secret warrantless wiretapping only two years after Congress banned it in the Communications Act of 1934. 

With war breaking out in Europe, Hoover's worries about internal subversion grew. On December 6, 1939, Hoover issued his agents a secret (read: unauthorized) order named "Internal Security." The agents were to begin compiling a list of "dangerous" people—not just immigrants but also American citizens—to be detained when the war came to American shores. 

The list was known as the Custodial Detention Program. It categorized people into three groups (A, B, and C), with people in Group A considered to be the most dangerous—if war broke out, they would be arrested and detained immediately. One conspicuous name in Group A was Roger Baldwin, one of the founders of the American Civil Liberties Union and its current chief. 

Attorney General Francis Biddle learned about the Custodial Detention Program in 1943 and ordered it shuttered. Hoover simply renamed it the Security Index. It would remain secret until after Hoover's death, growing to include well over 20,000 names, almost all Americans. 

But no matter how many laws or norms Hoover broke, he continued atop his powerful perch at the FBI. President Harry Truman didn't like Hoover. In the words of his Treasury Secretary John Snyder, Truman believed "Mr. Hoover had built up a Frankenstein in the FBI." 

John F. Kennedy—like his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy—wanted to send Hoover packing. Bobby Kennedy said Hoover was "frightening" and called the FBI "a very dangerous organization." But JFK ultimately concluded, "You don't fire God."

Hoover, if nothing else, was a survivor.

Seeing Red Again

Perhaps the most infamous example of Hoover's brazen attacks on American civil liberties was the Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO). Initiated in 1956, COINTELPRO's operations were characterized by illegal surveillance, organizational infiltration, and police harassment. With this tool in place, Hoover shifted his concentration to a new enemy: the civil rights movement and its leader, Martin Luther King Jr.

Hoover believed the Soviets—not black Americans fed up with segregation and racial injustice—were behind the civil rights movement. He also believed King was a Moscow stooge, which landed him on the Security Index.

The FBI's disdain for the civil rights movement was so visceral that agents would tip off police in Alabama about the plans of the Freedom Riders, a contingent of black and white demonstrators protesting Jim Crow laws. Freedom Riders were often met with overwhelming violence by both police and the Ku Klux Klan, who had also thoroughly infiltrated the Alabama police. 

In arguably the FBI's most infamous COINTELPRO operation, agents bugged MLK's hotel rooms as he traveled. The preacher had his own dark side. The bugs would frequently pick up the sounds of sex after late-night parties. In an effort to destroy King for good in November 1964, Hoover's intelligence chief sent the sex tapes to King's wife with a letter that gave him an ultimatum—suicide or disgrace. Its conclusion read:

King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have just 34 days in which to do…You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.

It would take the rifle of James Earl Ray to do what the FBI couldn't—end King's life.

Hoover's corruption extended into his personal realm, too. He maintained a luxurious lifestyle, heavily subsidized by the FBI's budget and, therefore, the American taxpayer. "The Bureau provided with him chauffeurs, handymen, gardeners, valets, and the tax accountants who sorted out the honoraria he received, totaling tens of thousands of dollars, from corporate grandees," explains Weiner in Enemies. "The gifts, given for ghostwritten speeches and articles, and as private awards for public service, supplemented the freely spent tax dollars that financed Hoover's four-star style." 

On May 2, 1972, Hoover's heart gave out in his sleep. While this ended his reign of terror, Hoover's methods and the culture he cultivated within the FBI have left a lasting imprint on American law enforcement and intelligence practices. Libertarians often describe government as a form of organized crime. Hoover's godfather-like dominion over the FBI makes that comparison harder to dismiss. 

A Man of Zeal

In his dissent in Olmstead v. U.S., which coincidentally legalized government wiretapping for a short time, Justice Louis Brandeis wrote: "The greatest dangers to liberty lie in insidious encroachments by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."

And therein lies the danger of men like Hoover. To give the devil his due, Hoover most certainly believed plunging his hands into the latrine was necessary to defend the country he loved from those he thought would destroy it. As Letersky writes in The Director, Hoover was "a man who in his sincere belief that he was protecting his country had repeatedly violated the principles of the Constitution on which the country was founded." 

The 100th anniversary of Hoover's rise to power should serve as a reminder that the FBI—and the national security state it exemplifies—remains a dagger pointed at the heart of American civil liberties. All the Bureau needs to break bad again is another man "of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding" to return to Hoover's dirty tricks. 

There is no greater domestic threat to American freedom than a secret police. Hoover proved that for five decades until the devil called him home. May his ghost never wander the FBI's halls.

The post An American Gangster at 100: J. Edgar Hoover's Authoritarian Legacy appeared first on Reason.com.

In December 2022, the Albuquerque Police Department (APD) received a tip that officers assigned to the APD's DWI unit were getting paid to make cases disappear. The tipster specifically mentioned Honorio Alba, one of several officers who would later resign amid a burgeoning corruption scandal featuring that very allegation. Yet an internal investigation found no evidence to substantiate the tip.

That episode, recently revealed by City Desk ABQ, helps explain why evidence of longstanding corruption within the DWI unit did not come to light until the FBI began looking into it. "We're dealing with stuff that we anticipate started decades ago, and we've done a lot of things that have got us to this point," Albuquerque Police Chief Harold Medina said at a press conference in February. "But we will continue to dig and look and leave no stone unturned and make sure that we get to the bottom of this."

It seems like the department left plenty of stones unturned when it had a chance to clean its own house before the feds stepped in. Instead of telling the FBI about the alleged corruption, the APD apparently did not take the situation seriously until after it heard from the FBI.

In October 2023, 10 months after the APD's Criminal Intelligence Unit launched its fruitless probe, the FBI informed Medina that it was investigating the DWI unit. The following month, Albuquerque's Civilian Police Oversight Agency received a letter from a local court official who said Alba reportedly had pulled over a speeding, flagrantly drunk driver and, instead of filing charges, referred him to a specific local defense attorney.

The FBI investigation became public knowledge after agents executed search warrants at that attorney's office and the homes of several officers in January 2024. Local news outlets began looking into DWI cases that had been handled by Alba and his colleagues. They found suspiciously low conviction rates that somehow had eluded the APD's investigators in 2022.

In response to the corruption allegations, the Bernalillo County District Attorney's Office dropped some 200 DWI cases, saying it could not rely on the testimony of the cops who had made the arrests. KOB, the NBC affiliate in Albuquerque, reported that Alba, who was honored as "Officer of the Year" by the New Mexico chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving last July, was the arresting officer in many of those cases.

KRQE, the local CBS affiliate, looked at DWI cases filed during the previous six years. It found that Joshua Montaño, a 19-year veteran, "was named as the officer in at least 36 cases" in which the defendants were represented by Thomas Clear, the lawyer whose office the FBI had searched. Nearly 90 percent of those cases "ended in dismissals."

City Desk ABQ examined "85 DWI cases dating back to 2017" involving Clear and Alba, Montaño, or two other members of the DWI unit, Harvey Johnson and Nelson Ortiz. It found that 14 percent of the cases ended with trial convictions or plea deals, which was "much lower than the Metro Court average of 56% convictions in DWI cases over the same years." The other 86 percent were dismissed, typically because officers did not show up at pretrial interviews or hearings. The "vast majority" of the defendants were arrested by Alba or Montaño.

Why didn't the APD discover any of this back in 2022? Acting Sgt. Jon O'Guin "started gathering information but—after looking through officer activity—didn't turn up any evidence," City Desk ABQ reports, citing a five-page "intel file" that it obtained through a public records request.

According to the tipster, APD spokesman Gilbert Gallegos told City Desk ABQ, three bars in Northeast Albuquerque were alerting police to intoxicated patrons so they could be nabbed after they drove away. "They were targeting individuals, who then could get their cases dismissed," Gallegos said, describing the tip. "So they would arrest and charge them and then get their cases dismissed and there would be some sort of payment for that."

In response to that tip, City Desk ABQ says, O'Guin examined "the activity of the seven officers who were on the DWI unit at that time, including Alba, Johnson and Montaño." But his investigation apparently was limited to the specific allegation, as opposed to the general claim that officers were helping arrestees avoid charges in exchange for payoffs.

In December 2022, the officers' activity "did not show any obvious indicators that would match the allegations of the information received for the initial complaint in regards to increased activity in the areas of the three locations mentioned in NE Albuquerque," O'Guin wrote in the intel file. "All officers' CAD [computer-aided dispatch] activity showed what would appear to be normal traffic stops and requests for assistance responses across the city." The same was true, he said, for October and November.

That summary of O'Guin's investigation is dated January 2024, by which point the FBI had collected enough evidence to obtain search warrants. "When the allegations were relayed from the FBI, the detective was asked to update the file with documentation of the work that was initially done," Gallegos explained. "So that part of the report was dated January 2024, when he provided that information."

Given the timing, O'Guin's gloss may have been deliberately self-exculpating. In any case, he evidently never thought to look at what was generally happening with the DWI cases that Alba et al. handled. If he had, he would have discovered the same curious pattern that reporters found after the FBI raids. Those high dismissal rates reinforce the allegation that these officers, after stopping drivers for DWI, would "get their cases dismissed" in exchange for "some sort of payment."

No corruption charges have been filed yet. But Alba, Montaño, Johnson, Ortiz, and Lt. Justin Hunt all resigned after they were placed on administrative leave pending the outcome of another internal investigation, this one prompted by the FBI probe and the letter to the Civilian Police Oversight Agency. On Tuesday, APD spokesman Daren DeAguero, a 15-year veteran who served in the DWI unit from 2014 to 2018, joined the line of exiting officers.

DeAguero resigned the same day he was scheduled to be interviewed by internal investigators. "Due to the current situation of receiving a letter of investigation with very little time to obtain adequate representation," he wrote in a memo to Medina, "I unfortunately will be ending my employment [with] the Albuquerque Police Department effective April 30, 2024."

Montaño was more expansive when he resigned on March 20. "When I was put on administrative leave, I thought there would be an opportunity for me to talk to the department about what I knew regarding the FBI's investigation," he wrote. "I thought there would be a time [when] I could disclose what I knew from within APD and how the issues I let myself get caught up in within the DWI Unit were generational. I thought there would be a time where I could talk about all the other people who should be on administrative leave as well, but aren't."

Montaño said he ultimately decided against cooperating with APD investigators. "In order for me to talk to the City about what I knew," he wrote, "I needed to not be the City's scapegoat for its own failures." He complained that Medina "has made it seem like there are just a few bad officers acting on their own." That is "far from the truth," Montaño said.

Among other things, the FBI reportedly is investigating claims that officers deliberately missed court dates, resulting in the dismissal of DWI cases. But according to Montaño, "officers all know that our attendance, or non-attendance, at Court is watched over and monitored." While "I take responsibility for my actions," he said, the responsibility for the alleged misconduct extends up the chain of command and more than a few years back in time—probably "decades," according to Medina himself.

"There is a much bigger story here," Montaño's lawyer, Thomas Grover, told City Desk ABQ. "If Officer Montaño is a cinder block in this saga, there's a whole wall to address. It goes outward and upward."

The post A Year Before Albuquerque's Police Corruption Scandal Made Headlines, an Internal Probe Found Nothing appeared first on Reason.com.

May Day was coming up and the feds were worried. In April 2015, the FBI and Department of Homeland Security sent out a bulletin warning that "anarchist extremists will probably engage in criminal or violent activity in one or more US cities on 1 May 2015 and may attempt to co-opt legal protest activity to carry out attacks."

It was the anniversary of the deadly 1886 labor unrest in Chicago's Haymarket. Several anarchists were executed for the violence back then, and in the 2015 bulletin's words, May 1 became "an international day honoring workers' rights that frequently results in anarchist extremist violence both domestically and internationally." To emphasize that anarchism was still a live threat, the Feds listed several recent anarchist attacks in their bulletin.

One of them, the firebombing of a congressional office in Kansas City, Missouri, was serious stuff. Police car tires were also slashed in Bloomington, Indiana; anonymous anarchists claimed online that the vandalism was in "Solidarity with the revolt in Ferguson." But another incident was more Parks and Recreation than V for Vendetta.

"In October 2014, 'some Bull City anarchists' chained the front door and glued the locks to a parking lot at a government facility in Durham, North Carolina, according to media reporting," the memo read. "The graffiti on the front of the building stated 'Solidarity with Missouri Rebels' and '[Expletive] the Police.'"

Reason was unable to locate any media reports from October 2014 mentioning the phrase "Bull City anarchists" or a parking lot incident in Durham like the one the bulletin describes.

Journalist Emma Best obtained a copy of the bulletin through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request and published it to the public records platform MuckRock late last month. The FBI heavily redacted the version it sent Best. Reason also found an original copy of the bulletin in the BlueLeaks document dump, a trove of homeland security "fusion center" files released by hackers in June 2020.

The parts of the bulletin that the FBI had chosen to redact are a story unto themselves. The original version states that there is "no specific credible reporting to indicate anarchist extremists are planning violent criminal activity." But the FBI censored that line in the version it sent to MuckRock and Best under FOIA.

Curiously, the FOIA version also censored the assessment that "anti-police and law enforcement sentiment will likely continue to serve as a prominent motivator for anarchist extremists in 2015, barring any significant changes in anarchist extremist rhetoric or major public events that could galvanize anarchist extremists against other traditional targets."

Editorializing aside, that prediction turned out to be true. Anarchists played a significant role in the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 and were often blamed for violence during the unrest. 

In the FOIA version of the bulletin, the FBI redacted its specific recommendations for local police, citing the "law enforcement techniques" exemption to the Freedom of Information Act. Not that any of the advice was hard to guess. Basically, if police see anarchists training or gathering weapons and barricade materials, they should be extra vigilant and try to confiscate the weapons.

But, the Feds warned, local police shouldn't get too paranoid.

"Some of these behavioral indicators may be constitutionally protected activities and should be supported by additional facts to justify increased suspicions," the bulletin noted. "Independently, each indicator may represent legitimate recreational or commercial activities; however, multiple indicators could suggest a heightened threat."

The post Feds Worried About Anarchists Gluing the Locks to a Government Facility appeared first on Reason.com.

SK hynix and TSMC plan to collaborate on HBM4 development and next-generation packaging technology, with plans to mass produce HBM4 chips in 2026. The agreement is an early indicator for just how competitive, and potentially lucrative, the HBM market is becoming. SK hynix said the collaboration will enable breakthroughs in memory performance with increased density of the memory controller at the base of the HBM stack.

Intel assembled the industry’s first high-NA EUV lithography system. “Compared to 0.33NA EUV, high-NA EUV (or 0.55NA EUV) can deliver higher imaging contrast for similar features, which enables less light per exposure, thereby reducing the time required to print each layer and increasing wafer output,” Intel said.

Fig. 1: Bigger iron — Intel’s brand new high-NA EUV machinery. Source: Intel

Samsung is slated to receive $6.4 billion in CHIPS ACT funding from the U.S. Department of Commerce (DoC) as part of a $40 billion expansion of its Austin, Texas, manufacturing facility, along with an R&D fab, a pair of leading-edge logic fabs, and an advanced packaging plant in nearby Taylor, Texas.

Micron and the U.S. government next week will announce $6.1 billion in CHIPS Act funding for the development of advanced memory chips in New York and Idaho, according to AP News.

Cadence unveiled its Palladium Z3 Emulation and Protium X3 FPGA Prototyping systems, targeted at multi-billion-gate designs with 2X increase in capacity and a 1.5X performance increase compared to previous-generation systems. Cadence also teamed up with MemVerge to enable seamless support for AWS Spot instances for long-running high-memory EDA jobs, and extended its hybrid cloud environment solutions through a collaboration with NetApp.

Fig. 2: At CadenceLive Silicon Valley, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang (r.) discussed accelerated computing and generative AI with Cadence CEO Anirudh Devgan. Source: Semiconductor Engineering

Quick links to more news:

Global
Markets and Money
In-Depth
Security
Education and Workforce
Product and Standards
Research
Quantum
Events
Further Reading

Global

After Taiwan’s recent 7.2 magnitude earthquake, TSMC reached more the 70% tool recovery in its fabs within the first 10 hours and full recovery by the end of the third day, according to this week’s earnings call. Some wafers in process were scrapped but the company expects the lost production to be recovered in the second quarter.  Also in the call, TSMC said they expect their “customers to share some of the higher cost” of the overseas fabs and higher electricity costs.

Advantest‘s regional headquarters in Taiwan donated $2.2 million New Taiwan dollars ($680,000 US) for aid to victims and reconstruction efforts related to the Taiwan earthquake that struck on April 3.

Japan’s exports grew by more than 7% YoY in March, driven by an 11.3% increase in shipments of electronics and semiconductor manufacturing equipment, much of it to China, according to NikkeiAsia.

China‘s IC output grew 40% in the first quarter, primarily driven by EVs and smartphones, according to the South China Morning Post.

In the U.S., the Biden Administration released a notice of funding opportunity of $50 million targeted at small businesses pursuing advances in metrology research and technology. Also, the U.S. Department of Energy announced a $33 million funding opportunity for smart manufacturing technologies.

Germany‘s Fraunhofer IIS launched its On-Board Processor (FOBP) for the German Space Agency’s Heinrich Hertz communication satellite. FOBP can be controlled and reprogrammed from Earth and will be used to investigate creation of hybrid communication networks.

Markets and Money

RISC-V startup Rivos raised more than $250 million in capital investments to tape out its first power-optimized chips for data analytics and generative AI applications.

Silvaco filed to go public on Nasdaq. The company also received a $5 million convertible note investment from Microchip.

Microchip acquired Neuronix AI Labs to provide AI-enabled FPGA solutions for large-scale, high-performance edge applications.

The advanced packaging market saw a modest 4% increase in revenues in Q4 2023 versus the previous quarter, with a projected decline of 13% QoQ in the first quarter of 2024, reports Yole. Overall, the market is expected to increase from $38 billion in 2023 to $69.5 billion in 2029 with a CAGR of 10.7%.

TSMC’s CoWoS total capacity will increase by 150% in 2024 due to demand for NVIDIA’s Blackwell Platform, reports TrendForce.

ASML saw a nearly 40% drop in new litho equipment sales QoQ in Q1 2024 and a 61% drop in net bookings as manufacturers reduced investments in new capital equipment during the recent semiconductor market slump.

Global PC shipments rose about 3% YoY in Q1 2024, and that same growth is expected for full year 2024, reports Counterpoint. Manufacturers are predicted to promote AI PCs as semiconductor companies prepare to launch SoCs featuring higher TOPS.

The GenAI smartphone market share is predicted to reach 11% by 2024 and 43% by 2027, reports Counterpoint. Samsung likely will lead in 2024, but Apple may overtake it in 2025.

The RF GaN market is expected to exceed $2 billion by 2029, fueled by the defense and telecom infrastructure sectors, reports Yole.

In-Depth

Semiconductor Engineering published its Manufacturing, Packaging & Materials newsletter this week. Top articles include:

• Electromigration Concerns Grow In Advanced Packages
• What Works Best For Chiplets
• Enabling Advanced Devices With Atomic Layer Processes

Plus, check out these new stories and tech talks:

• Architecting Chips For High-Performance Computing
• Future-Proofing Automotive V2X
• Secure Movement Of Data In Test
• Challenges With Chiplets and Power Delivery

Security

In security research:

• Seoul National University, Sandia National Laboratories, Texas A&M University, and Applied Materials demonstrated a memristor crossbar architecture for encryption and decryption.
• Robert Bosch, Forschungszentrum Julich, and Newcastle University investigated techniques for error detection and correction in in-memory computing.
• The University of Florida introduced an automated framework that can help identify security assets for a design at the register-transfer level (RTL).

DARPA conducted successful in-air tests of AI flying an F-16 autonomously versus a human-piloted F-16 in visual-range combat scenarios.

The National Security Agency’s Artificial Intelligence Security Center (NSA AISC) published joint guidance on deploying AI systems securely with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and international partners. CISA also issued other alerts.

Products and Standards

Samsung uncorked LPDDR5X DRAM built on a 12nm process that supports up to 10.7 Gbps and expands the single package capacity of mobile DRAM up to 32 GB.

Keysight revealed its next-generation RF circuit simulation tool that supports multi-physics co-design of circuit, electromagnetic, and electrothermal simulations across Cadence, Synopsys, and Keysight platforms.

Renesas released its FemtoClock family of ultra-low jitter clock generators and jitter attenuators with 8 and 12 outputs, enabling clock tree designs for high-speed interconnect systems in telecom and data center switches, routers, medical imaging, and more.

Movellus expanded its droop response solutions with Aeonic Generate AWM3, which responds to voltage droops within 1 to 2 clock cycles while providing enhanced observability for droop profiling and enabling fine-grained dynamic frequency scaling.

Efabless announced the second version of its Python-based open-source EDA software for construction of customizable flows using proprietary or open-source tools.

Faraday Technology licensed Arm’s Cortex-A720AE IP to use in the development of AI-enabled vehicle ASICs. Also, Untether AI teamed up with Arm to enable its inference acceleration technology to be implemented alongside the latest-generation Automotive Enhanced technology from Arm for ADAS and autonomous vehicle applications.

FOXESS used Infineon’s 1,200V CoolSiC MOSFETs and EiceDRIVER gate drivers for industrial energy storage applications, aiming to promote green energy.

Emotors adopted Siemens’ Simcenter solutions for NVH testing of next-gen automotive e-drives.

SiTime debuted a family of clock generators for AI datacenter applications with clock, oscillator, and resonator in an integrated chip.

JEDEC published the JESD79-5C DDR5 SDRAM standard, which includes a DRAM data integrity improvement called Per-Row Activation Counting (PRAC) that precisely counts DRAM activations on a wordline granularity and alerts the system to pause traffic and designate time for mitigation measures when an excessive number of activations are detected.

The LoRa Alliance launched its roadmap for the development of the LoRaWAN open standard for IoT communications, referring to long-range radio (LoRa) low-power wide-area networks (LPWANs).

Education and Workforce

Texas A&M introduced a new Master of Science program for microelectronics and semiconductors, which will begin in fall 2025.

The Cornell NanoScale Science and Technology Facility (CNF) is partnering with Tompkins Cortland Community College and Penn State to offer a free Microelectronics and Nanomanufacturing Certificate Program to veterans and their dependents.

Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) has more than 700 researchers and 25 research group focused on the chip industry, but the number is projected to grow significantly due to the Dutch government’s recent investment.

Research

Intel announced a large-scale neuromorphic system based on its Loihi 2 processor. Initially deployed at Sandia National Laboratories, it aims to support research for future brain-inspired AI. Intel is also collaborating with Seekr on next-gen LLM and foundation models.

Los Alamos National Lab, HPE, and NVIDIA collaborated on the design and installation of Venado, the Lab’s new supercomputer. “Venado adds to our cutting-edge supercomputing that advances national security and basic research, and it will accelerate how we integrate artificial intelligence into meeting those challenges,” said Thom Mason, director of Los Alamos National Laboratory in a release.

Penn State is partnering with Morgan Advanced Materials on a five-year, multi-million-dollar research project to advance silicon carbide (SiC) technology. Morgan will become a founding member of the Penn State Silicon Carbide Innovation Alliance. Also, Coherent secured CHIPS Act funding of $15 million for research into high-voltage, high-power silicon carbide and single-crystal diamond semiconductors.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) researchers found a more efficient way to extract lithium from waste liquids leached from mining sites, oil fields, and used batteries.

Quantum

Quantinuum said it reached an inherent 99.9% 2-qubit gate fidelity in its commercial quantum computer, a point at which quantum error correction protocols can be used to greatly reduce error rates.

D-Wave Quantum uncorked a fast-anneal feature to speed up computations on its quantum processing units, which reduces the impact of external disturbances.

MIT researchers outlined a new conceptual model for a quantum computer that aims to make writing code for them easier.

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Stanford University, Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat Munich, and Instituto de Ciencia de Materiales de Madrid researchers proposed a method that harnesses the structure of light to tweak the properties of quantum materials.

Events

Find upcoming chip industry events here, including:

Upcoming webinars are here.

Further Reading

Read the latest special reports and top stories, or check out the latest newsletters:

Systems and Design
Low Power-High Performance
Test, Measurement and Analytics
Manufacturing, Packaging and Materials
Automotive, Security and Pervasive Computing

The post Chip Industry Week In Review appeared first on Semiconductor Engineering.

The government had a few years to sort this out, but as usual, the final call came down to the last minute. Shortly after Section 702 expired at midnight, April 19, the Senate pushed through a two-year reauthorization — one pretty much free of any reforms.

This happened despite there being a large and vocal portion of the Republican party seeking to curb the FBI’s access to these collections because some of their own had been subjected to the sort of abuse that has become synonymous with the FBI’s interaction with this particular surveillance program.

The reauthorization passed to the Senate from the House had been stripped of a proposed warrant requirement and saddled with an especially expansive definition of the term “electronic communication service provider.” Here’s how Senator Ron Wyden explained it while speaking out against the amendment:

Now, if you have access to any communications, the government can force you to help it spy. That means anyone with access to a server, a wire, a cable box, a wifi router, a phone, or a computer. Think about the millions of Americans who work in buildings and offices in which communications are stored or pass through.

After all, every office building in America has data cables running through it. These people are not just the engineers who install, maintain and repair our communications infrastructure; there are countless others who could be forced to help the government spy, including those who clean offices and guard buildings. If this provision is enacted, the government could deputize any one of these people against their will, and force them to become an agent for Big Brother.

For example, by forcing an employee to insert a USB thumb drive into a server at an office they clean or guard at night.

This could all happen without any oversight. The FISA Court won’t know about it. Congress won’t know about it. The Americans who are handed these directives will be forbidden from talking about it. And unless they can afford high priced lawyers with security clearances who know their way around the FISA Court, they will have no recourse at all.

So, instead of reform, we’re getting an even worse version of what’s already been problematic, especially when the FBI’s involved. As the clock ticked down on this vote (but not really: the FISA court had already granted the Biden administration’s request to keep the program operable as-is until 2025), attempts were made to strip the bill of this dangerous addition and add back in the warrant requirement amendment that had failed in the House.

None of this worked, as Gaby Del Valle reports for The Verge:

Sens. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Josh Hawley (R-MO) introduced an amendment that would have struck language in the House bill that expanded the definition of “electronic communications service provider.” Under the House’s new provision, anyone “who has access to equipment that is being or may be used to transmit or store wire or electronic communications.” The expansion, Wyden has claimed, would force “ordinary Americans and small businesses to conduct secret, warrantless spying.” The Wyden-Hawley amendment failed 34-58, meaning that the next iteration of the FISA surveillance program will be more expansive than before.

Both Sens. Paul and Dick Durbin (D-IL) introduced separate amendments imposing warrant requirements on surveilling Americans. A similar amendment failed in the House on a 212-212 vote. Durbin’s narrower warrant requirement wouldn’t require intelligence agencies to obtain a warrant to query for those communications, though it requires one to access them.

The version headed to the president’s desk is the worst version. The rush to push this version of the bill through possibly gained a little urgency when two unnamed service providers informed the government they would stop complying with FISA orders pretty much immediately if the Senate didn’t renew the program.

One communications provider informed the National Security Agency that it would stop complying on Monday with orders under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which enables U.S. intelligence agencies to gather without a warrant the digital communications of foreigners overseas — including when they text or email people inside the United States.

Another provider suggested that it would cease complying at midnight Friday unless the law is reauthorized, according to the people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive negotiations.

We’ll never know how empty these threats might have been or if the Intelligence Community would have even noticed the brief interruption in the flow of communications. Section 702 has been given a two-year extension in the form approved by the Senate, superseding the FISA Court’s blessing of one more year of uninterrupted spying if discussions over renewal blew past the April 19, 2024 deadline.

If you’re a fan of bipartisan efforts — no matter the outcome — well… enjoy your victory, I guess. But there’s nothing about this renewal debacle that can actually be called a win. Unless you’re the FBI, of course. Then it’s all gravy.

SK hynix and TSMC plan to collaborate on HBM4 development and next-generation packaging technology, with plans to mass produce HBM4 chips in 2026. The agreement is an early indicator for just how competitive, and potentially lucrative, the HBM market is becoming. SK hynix said the collaboration will enable breakthroughs in memory performance with increased density of the memory controller at the base of the HBM stack.

Intel assembled the industry’s first high-NA EUV lithography system. “Compared to 0.33NA EUV, high-NA EUV (or 0.55NA EUV) can deliver higher imaging contrast for similar features, which enables less light per exposure, thereby reducing the time required to print each layer and increasing wafer output,” Intel said.

Fig. 1: Bigger iron — Intel’s brand new high-NA EUV machinery. Source: Intel

Samsung is slated to receive $6.4 billion in CHIPS ACT funding from the U.S. Department of Commerce (DoC) as part of a $40 billion expansion of its Austin, Texas, manufacturing facility, along with an R&D fab, a pair of leading-edge logic fabs, and an advanced packaging plant in nearby Taylor, Texas.

Micron and the U.S. government next week will announce $6.1 billion in CHIPS Act funding for the development of advanced memory chips in New York and Idaho, according to AP News.

Cadence unveiled its Palladium Z3 Emulation and Protium X3 FPGA Prototyping systems, targeted at multi-billion-gate designs with 2X increase in capacity and a 1.5X performance increase compared to previous-generation systems. Cadence also teamed up with MemVerge to enable seamless support for AWS Spot instances for long-running high-memory EDA jobs, and extended its hybrid cloud environment solutions through a collaboration with NetApp.

Fig. 2: At CadenceLive Silicon Valley, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang (r.) discussed accelerated computing and generative AI with Cadence CEO Anirudh Devgan. Source: Semiconductor Engineering

Quick links to more news:

Global
Markets and Money
In-Depth
Security
Education and Workforce
Product and Standards
Research
Quantum
Events
Further Reading

Global

After Taiwan’s recent 7.2 magnitude earthquake, TSMC reached more the 70% tool recovery in its fabs within the first 10 hours and full recovery by the end of the third day, according to this week’s earnings call. Some wafers in process were scrapped but the company expects the lost production to be recovered in the second quarter.  Also in the call, TSMC said they expect their “customers to share some of the higher cost” of the overseas fabs and higher electricity costs.

Advantest‘s regional headquarters in Taiwan donated $2.2 million New Taiwan dollars ($680,000 US) for aid to victims and reconstruction efforts related to the Taiwan earthquake that struck on April 3.

Japan’s exports grew by more than 7% YoY in March, driven by an 11.3% increase in shipments of electronics and semiconductor manufacturing equipment, much of it to China, according to NikkeiAsia.

China‘s IC output grew 40% in the first quarter, primarily driven by EVs and smartphones, according to the South China Morning Post.

In the U.S., the Biden Administration released a notice of funding opportunity of $50 million targeted at small businesses pursuing advances in metrology research and technology. Also, the U.S. Department of Energy announced a $33 million funding opportunity for smart manufacturing technologies.

Germany‘s Fraunhofer IIS launched its On-Board Processor (FOBP) for the German Space Agency’s Heinrich Hertz communication satellite. FOBP can be controlled and reprogrammed from Earth and will be used to investigate creation of hybrid communication networks.

Markets and Money

RISC-V startup Rivos raised more than $250 million in capital investments to tape out its first power-optimized chips for data analytics and generative AI applications.

Silvaco filed to go public on Nasdaq. The company also received a $5 million convertible note investment from Microchip.

Microchip acquired Neuronix AI Labs to provide AI-enabled FPGA solutions for large-scale, high-performance edge applications.

The advanced packaging market saw a modest 4% increase in revenues in Q4 2023 versus the previous quarter, with a projected decline of 13% QoQ in the first quarter of 2024, reports Yole. Overall, the market is expected to increase from $38 billion in 2023 to $69.5 billion in 2029 with a CAGR of 10.7%.

TSMC’s CoWoS total capacity will increase by 150% in 2024 due to demand for NVIDIA’s Blackwell Platform, reports TrendForce.

ASML saw a nearly 40% drop in new litho equipment sales QoQ in Q1 2024 and a 61% drop in net bookings as manufacturers reduced investments in new capital equipment during the recent semiconductor market slump.

Global PC shipments rose about 3% YoY in Q1 2024, and that same growth is expected for full year 2024, reports Counterpoint. Manufacturers are predicted to promote AI PCs as semiconductor companies prepare to launch SoCs featuring higher TOPS.

The GenAI smartphone market share is predicted to reach 11% by 2024 and 43% by 2027, reports Counterpoint. Samsung likely will lead in 2024, but Apple may overtake it in 2025.

The RF GaN market is expected to exceed $2 billion by 2029, fueled by the defense and telecom infrastructure sectors, reports Yole.

In-Depth

Semiconductor Engineering published its Manufacturing, Packaging & Materials newsletter this week. Top articles include:

• Electromigration Concerns Grow In Advanced Packages
• What Works Best For Chiplets
• Enabling Advanced Devices With Atomic Layer Processes

Plus, check out these new stories and tech talks:

• Architecting Chips For High-Performance Computing
• Future-Proofing Automotive V2X
• Secure Movement Of Data In Test
• Challenges With Chiplets and Power Delivery

Security

In security research:

• Seoul National University, Sandia National Laboratories, Texas A&M University, and Applied Materials demonstrated a memristor crossbar architecture for encryption and decryption.
• Robert Bosch, Forschungszentrum Julich, and Newcastle University investigated techniques for error detection and correction in in-memory computing.
• The University of Florida introduced an automated framework that can help identify security assets for a design at the register-transfer level (RTL).

DARPA conducted successful in-air tests of AI flying an F-16 autonomously versus a human-piloted F-16 in visual-range combat scenarios.

The National Security Agency’s Artificial Intelligence Security Center (NSA AISC) published joint guidance on deploying AI systems securely with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and international partners. CISA also issued other alerts.

Products and Standards

Samsung uncorked LPDDR5X DRAM built on a 12nm process that supports up to 10.7 Gbps and expands the single package capacity of mobile DRAM up to 32 GB.

Keysight revealed its next-generation RF circuit simulation tool that supports multi-physics co-design of circuit, electromagnetic, and electrothermal simulations across Cadence, Synopsys, and Keysight platforms.

Renesas released its FemtoClock family of ultra-low jitter clock generators and jitter attenuators with 8 and 12 outputs, enabling clock tree designs for high-speed interconnect systems in telecom and data center switches, routers, medical imaging, and more.

Movellus expanded its droop response solutions with Aeonic Generate AWM3, which responds to voltage droops within 1 to 2 clock cycles while providing enhanced observability for droop profiling and enabling fine-grained dynamic frequency scaling.

Efabless announced the second version of its Python-based open-source EDA software for construction of customizable flows using proprietary or open-source tools.

Faraday Technology licensed Arm’s Cortex-A720AE IP to use in the development of AI-enabled vehicle ASICs. Also, Untether AI teamed up with Arm to enable its inference acceleration technology to be implemented alongside the latest-generation Automotive Enhanced technology from Arm for ADAS and autonomous vehicle applications.

FOXESS used Infineon’s 1,200V CoolSiC MOSFETs and EiceDRIVER gate drivers for industrial energy storage applications, aiming to promote green energy.

Emotors adopted Siemens’ Simcenter solutions for NVH testing of next-gen automotive e-drives.

SiTime debuted a family of clock generators for AI datacenter applications with clock, oscillator, and resonator in an integrated chip.

JEDEC published the JESD79-5C DDR5 SDRAM standard, which includes a DRAM data integrity improvement called Per-Row Activation Counting (PRAC) that precisely counts DRAM activations on a wordline granularity and alerts the system to pause traffic and designate time for mitigation measures when an excessive number of activations are detected.

The LoRa Alliance launched its roadmap for the development of the LoRaWAN open standard for IoT communications, referring to long-range radio (LoRa) low-power wide-area networks (LPWANs).

Education and Workforce

Texas A&M introduced a new Master of Science program for microelectronics and semiconductors, which will begin in fall 2025.

The Cornell NanoScale Science and Technology Facility (CNF) is partnering with Tompkins Cortland Community College and Penn State to offer a free Microelectronics and Nanomanufacturing Certificate Program to veterans and their dependents.

Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) has more than 700 researchers and 25 research group focused on the chip industry, but the number is projected to grow significantly due to the Dutch government’s recent investment.

Research

Intel announced a large-scale neuromorphic system based on its Loihi 2 processor. Initially deployed at Sandia National Laboratories, it aims to support research for future brain-inspired AI. Intel is also collaborating with Seekr on next-gen LLM and foundation models.

Los Alamos National Lab, HPE, and NVIDIA collaborated on the design and installation of Venado, the Lab’s new supercomputer. “Venado adds to our cutting-edge supercomputing that advances national security and basic research, and it will accelerate how we integrate artificial intelligence into meeting those challenges,” said Thom Mason, director of Los Alamos National Laboratory in a release.

Penn State is partnering with Morgan Advanced Materials on a five-year, multi-million-dollar research project to advance silicon carbide (SiC) technology. Morgan will become a founding member of the Penn State Silicon Carbide Innovation Alliance. Also, Coherent secured CHIPS Act funding of $15 million for research into high-voltage, high-power silicon carbide and single-crystal diamond semiconductors.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) researchers found a more efficient way to extract lithium from waste liquids leached from mining sites, oil fields, and used batteries.

Quantum

Quantinuum said it reached an inherent 99.9% 2-qubit gate fidelity in its commercial quantum computer, a point at which quantum error correction protocols can be used to greatly reduce error rates.

D-Wave Quantum uncorked a fast-anneal feature to speed up computations on its quantum processing units, which reduces the impact of external disturbances.

MIT researchers outlined a new conceptual model for a quantum computer that aims to make writing code for them easier.

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Stanford University, Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat Munich, and Instituto de Ciencia de Materiales de Madrid researchers proposed a method that harnesses the structure of light to tweak the properties of quantum materials.

Events

Find upcoming chip industry events here, including:

Upcoming webinars are here.

Further Reading

Read the latest special reports and top stories, or check out the latest newsletters:

Systems and Design
Low Power-High Performance
Test, Measurement and Analytics
Manufacturing, Packaging and Materials
Automotive, Security and Pervasive Computing

The post Chip Industry Week In Review appeared first on Semiconductor Engineering.

Earlier this week, lawmakers on the House and Senate Appropriations Committees put forward six spending bills that would fund the government through the end of the year. In a press release, Republicans on the House committee bragged that the bills would "save taxpayers more than $200 billion over the next ten years"—a period of time over which the Congressional Budget Office predicts the national debt will expand by $20 trillion and eclipse the nation's gross domestic product.

Some of those savings come from cuts to federal law enforcement agencies, including the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF). Unfortunately, even those cuts are much more modest than they appear.

In their press release, House Republicans boasted that the appropriations package "utilizes the power of the purse to address the weaponization of the growing bureaucracy within the FBI and ATF." Specifically, they do this by "reversing [ATF's] anti-Second Amendment overreach…by significantly reducing its overall funding by $122 million, a 7% decrease" from 2023, as well as holding the FBI "accountable for targeting everyday Americans by reducing its overall operating budget by $654 million and cutting its construction account by 95%."

But these already-meager cuts don't involve very much actual cutting.

The FBI's salaries and expenses totaled over $10 billion in 2023, and it requested over $11 billion for 2024; the appropriations bill would grant $10.6 billion—a bit less than the FBI wanted but only about one-half percent less than last year's budget and certainly nothing approaching the 6 percent cut Republicans bragged about.

Republicans get around this with some tricky math: In a 2022 omnibus spending bill, the Bureau received $652 million toward the construction of a campus in Huntsville, Alabama. Republicans include the $652 million when touting a 6 percent cut, even though the money apportioned for salaries and expenses barely budged.

In fact, when Republicans bragged about "cut[ting] the FBI's construction account by $621.9 million"—for a whopping 95 percent decrease—that precipitous drop uses the one-time Huntsville cash as its starting point. Besides, the FBI only asked for a $61.9 million construction budget, which would have constituted a 90 percent decrease on its own.

Meanwhile, the ATF received $1.672 billion for salaries and expenses in 2023, while the appropriations bill would apportion $1.625 billion—a decrease of just 2.8 percent, not the 7 percent drop House Republicans claimed. That supposed 7 percent cut of $122 million comes from adding the $47 million cut in salaries and another $75 million cut from construction costs. The ATF did not request any construction money in its 2024 budget, so boasting that this a cut is laughable. Just like with the FBI, judging salaries and expenses in an apples-to-apples comparison yields a much more modest cut.

Any sort of fiscal discipline should be welcomed, of course. But it's not like Republicans are dedicated to pruning federal law enforcement agencies across the board.

"The Drug Enforcement Administration was an outlier in the bill, as it would receive a modest funding bump," writes Eric Katz at Government Executive. The bill would fund the DEA with $2.57 billion; when accounting for revenue from diversion control programs, Republicans say the department would receive "$42.4 million more" than it did in 2023.

The bill also directs not only the DEA but also the FBI to prioritize the policing of fentanyl. The FBI is directed "to allocate the maximum amount of resources" to target the "trafficking" of fentanyl and other opioids. There's no sign of any recognition that prohibition is exactly why fentanyl has proliferated in the first place and that harm reduction measures would be much safer and more effective than a law enforcement solution.

In fact, Republicans openly state in their press release that the cuts are not intended to save taxpayers money, noting that the bill "right-siz[es] agencies and programs and redirects that funding to combat fentanyl and counter the People's Republic of China."

Clearly, when the federal government consistently spends much more than it takes in, there is room to cut and an imperative to do so. It's unfortunate, then, that Republican lawmakers are bragging about plans to cut $200 billion over 10 years—1 percent of the anticipated federal debt accrued in that time—and it's even more disturbing to know that they're fudging the numbers to even get that much.

The post Republicans Use Fuzzy Math To Claim Large FBI, ATF Cuts in Budget Bill appeared first on Reason.com.

By Adam Kovac, Karen Heyman, and Liz Allan.

India approved the construction of two fabs and a packaging house, for a total investment of about $15.2 billion, according to multiple sources. One fab will be jointly owned by Tata and Taiwan’s Powerchip. The second fab will be a joint investment between CG Power, Japan’s Renesas Electronics, and Thailand’s Stars Microelectronics. Tata will run the packaging facility, as well. India expects these efforts will add 20,000 advanced technology jobs and 60,000 indirect jobs, according to the Times of India. The country has been talking about building a fab for at least the past couple of decades, but funding never materialized.

The U.S. Department of Commerce (DoC) issued a CHIPS Act-based Notice of Funding Opportunity for R&D to establish and accelerate domestic capacity for advanced packaging substrates and substrate materials. The U.S. Secretary of Commerce said the government is prioritizing CHIPS Act funding for projects that will be operational by 2030 and anticipates America will produce 20% of the world’s leading-edge logic chips by the end of the decade.

The top three foundries plan to implement backside power delivery as soon as the 2nm node, setting the stage for faster and more efficient switching in chips, reduced routing congestion, and lower noise across multiple metal layers. But this novel approach to optimizing logic performance depends on advances in lithography, etching, polishing, and bonding processes.

Intel spun out Altera as a standalone FPGA company, the culmination of a rebranding and reorganization of its former Programmable Solutions Group. The move follows Intel’s decision to keep Intel Foundry at arm’s length, with a clean line between the foundry and the company’s processor business.

Multiple new hardware micro-architecture vulnerabilities were published in the latest Common Weakness Enumeration release this week, all related to transient execution (CWE 1420-1423).

The U.S. Office of the National Cyber Director (ONCD) published a technical report calling for the adoption of memory safe programming languages, aiming to reduce the attack surface in cyberspace and anticipate systemic security risk with better diagnostics. The DoC also is seeking information ahead of an inquiry into Chinese-made connected vehicles “to understand the extent of the technology in these cars that can capture wide swaths of data or remotely disable or manipulate connected vehicles.”

Quick links to more news:

Design and Power
Manufacturing and Test
Automotive
Security
Pervasive Computing and AI
Events

Design and Power

Micron began mass production of a new high-bandwidth chip for AI. The company said the HBM3E will be a key component in NVIDIA’s H2000 Tensor Core GPUs, set to begin shipping in the second quarter of 2024. HBM is a key component of 2.5D advanced packages.

Samsung developed a 36GB HBM3E 12H DRAM, saying it sets new records for bandwidth. The company achieved this by using advanced thermal compression non-conductive film, which allowed it to cram 12 layers into the area normally taken up by 8. This is a novel way of increasing DRAM density.

Keysight introduced QuantumPro, a design and simulation tool, plus workflow, for quantum computers. It combines five functionalities into the Advanced Design System (ADS) 2024 platform. Keysight also introduced its AI Data Center Test Platform, which includes pre-packaged benchmarking apps and dataset analysis tools.

Synopsys announced a 1.6T Ethernet IP solution, including 1.6T MAC and PCS Ethernet controllers, 224G Ethernet PHY IP, and verification IP.

Tenstorrent, Japan’s Leading-Edge Semiconductor Technology Center (LSTC) , and Rapidus are co-designing AI chips. LSTC will use Tenstorrent’s RISC-V and Chiplet IP for its forthcoming edge 2nm AI accelerator.

This week’s Systems and Design newsletter features these top stories:

• 2.5D Integration: Big Chip Or Small PCB: Defining whether a 5D device is a PCB shrunk to fit into a package or a chip that extends beyond the limits of a single die can have significant design consequences.
• Commercial Chiplets: Challenges of establishing a commercial chiplet.
• Accellera Preps New Standard For Clock-Domain Crossing: New standard aims to streamline the clock-domain crossing flow.
• Thinking Big: From Chips To Systems: Aart de Geus discusses the shift from chips to systems, next-generation transistors, and what’s required to build multi-die devices.
• Integration challenges for RISC-V: Modifying the source code allows for democratization of design, but it adds some hurdles for design teams (video).

Demand for high-end AI servers is driven by four American companies, which will account for 60% of global demand in 2024, according to Trendforce. NVIDIA is projected to continue leading the market, with AMD closing the gap due its lower cost model.

The EU consortium PREVAIL is accepting design proposals as it seeks to develop next-gen edge-AI technologies. Anchors include CEA-Leti, Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, imec, and VTT, which will use their 300mm fabrication, design, and test facilities to validate prototypes.

Siemens joined an initiative to expand educational opportunities in the semiconductor space around the world. The Semiconductor Education Alliance was launched by Arm in 2023 and focuses on helping teach skills in IC design and EDA.

Q-CTRL announced partnerships with six firms that it says will expand access to its performance-management software and quantum technologies. Wolfram, Aqarios, and qBraid will integrate Q-CTRL’s Fire Opal technology into their products, while Qblox, Keysight, and Quantware will utilize Q-CTRL’s Boulder Opal hardware system.

NTT, Red Hat, NVIDIA, and Fujitsu teamed up to provide data pipeline acceleration and contain orchestration technologies targeted at real-time AI analysis of massive data sets at the edge.

Manufacturing and Test

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Office of Electricity launched the American-Made Silicon Carbide (SiC)  Packaging Prize. This $2.25 million contest invites competitors to propose, design, build, and test state-of-the-art SiC semiconductor packaging prototypes.

Applied Materials introduced products and solutions for patterning issues in the “angstrom era,” including line edge roughness, tip-to-tip spacing limitations, bridge defects, and edge placement errors.

imec reported progress made in EUV processes, masks and metrology in preparation for high-NA EUV. It also identified advanced node lithography and etch related processes that contribute the most to direct emissions of CO2, along with proposed solutions.

proteanTecs will participate in the Arm Total Design ecosystem, which now includes more than 20 companies united around a charter to accelerate and simplify the development of custom SoCs based on Arm Neoverse compute subsystems.

NikkeiAsia took an in-depth look at Japan’s semiconductor ecosystem and concluded it is ripe for revival with investments from TSMC, Samsung, and Micron, among others. TrendForce came to a similar conclusion, pointing to the fast pace of Japan’s resurgence, including the opening of TSMC’s fab.

‍FormFactor closed its sale of its Suzhou and Shanghai companies to Grand Junction Semiconductor for $25M in cash.

The eBeam Initiative celebrated its 15th anniversary and welcomed a new member, FUJIFILM. The group also uncorked its fourth survey of its members technology using deep learning in the photomask-to-wafer manufacturing flow.

Automotive

Apple shuttered its electric car project after 10 years of development. The chaotic effort cost the company billions of dollars, according to The New York Times.

Infineon released new automotive programmable SoCs with fifth-gen human machine interface (HMI) technology, offering improved sensitivity in three packages. The MCU offers up to 84 GPIOs and 384 KB of flash memory. The company also released automotive and industrial-grade 750V G1 discrete SiC MOSFETs aimed at applications such as EV charging, onboard chargers, DC-DC converters, energy, solid state circuit breakers, and data centers.

Cadence expanded its Tensilica IP portfolio to boost computation for automotive sensor fusion applications. Vision, radar, lidar, and AI processing are combined in a single DSP for multi-modal, sensor-based system designs.

Ansys will continue translating fast computing into fast cars, as the company’s partnership with Oracle Red Bull Racing was renewed. The Formula 1 team uses Ansys technology to improve car aerodynamics and ensure the safety of its vehicles.

Lazer Sport adopted Siemens’ Xcelerator portfolio to connect 3D design with 3D printing for prototyping and digital simulation of its sustainable KinetiCore cycling helmet.

The chair of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) suggested automakers that sell internet-connected cars should be subject to a telecommunications law aiming to protect domestic violence survivors, reports CNBC. This is due to emerging cases of stalking through vehicle location tracking technology and remote control of functions like locking doors or honking the horn.

BYD‘s CEO said the company does not plan to enter the U.S. market because it is complicated and electrification has slowed down, reports Yahoo Finance. Meanwhile, the first shipment of BYD vehicles arrived in Europe, according to DW News.

Ascent Solar Technologies’ solar module products will fly on NASA’s upcoming Lightweight Integrated Solar Array and AnTenna (LISA-T) mission.

Security

Researchers at Texas A&M University and the University of Delaware proposed the first red-team attack on graph neural network (GNN)-based techniques in hardware security.

A panel of four experts discuss mounting concerns over quantum security, auto architectures, and supply chain resiliency.

Synopsys released its ninth annual Open Source Security and Risk Analysis report, finding that 74% of code bases contained high-risk open-source vulnerabilities, up 54% since last year.

President Biden issued an executive order to prevent the large-scale transfer of Americans’ personal data to countries of concern. Types of data include genomic, biometric, personal health, geolocation, financial, and other personally identifiable information, which bad actors can use to track and scam Americans.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) released Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) 2.0 to provide a comprehensive view for managing cybersecurity risk.

The EU Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) published a study on best practices for cyber crisis management, saying the geopolitical situation continues to impact the cyber threat landscape and planning for threats and incidents is vital for crisis management.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $45 million to protect the energy sector from cyberattacks.

The National Security Agency (NSA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and others published an advisory on Russian cyber actors using compromised routers.  Also the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the UK National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), and partners advised of tactics used by Russian Foreign Intelligence Service cyber actors to gain initial access into a cloud environment.

CISA, the FBI, and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) updated an advisory concerning the ALPHV Blackcat ransomware as a service (RaaS), which primarily targets the healthcare sector.

CISA also published a guide to support university cybersecurity clinics and issued other alerts.

Pervasive Computing and AI

Renesas expanded its RZ family of MPUs with a single-chip AI accelerator that offers 10 TOPS per watt power efficiency and delivers AI inference performance of up to 80 TOPS without a cooling fan. The chip is aimed at next-gen robotics with vision AI and real-time control.

Infineon launched dual-phase power modules to help data centers meet the power demands of AI GPU platforms. The company also released a family of solid-state isolators to deliver faster switching with up to 70% lower power dissipation.

Fig. 1: Infineon’s dual phase power modules: Source: Infineon

Amber Semiconductor announced a reference design for brushless motor applications using its AC to DC conversion semiconductor system to power ST‘s STM32 MCUs.

Micron released its universal flash storage (UFS) 4.0 package at just 9×13 mm, built on 232-layer 3D NAND and offering up to 1 terabyte capacity to enable next-gen phone designs and larger batteries.

LG and Meta teamed up to develop extended reality (XR) products, content, services, and platforms within the virtual space.

Microsoft and Mistral AI partnered to accelerate AI innovation and to develop and deploy Mistral’s next-gen large language models (LLMs).

Microsoft’s vice chair and president announced the company’s AI access principles, governing how it will operate AI datacenter infrastructure and other AI assets around the world.

Singtel and VMware partnered to enable enterprises to manage their connectivity and cloud infrastructure through the Singtel Paragon platform for 5G and edge cloud.

Keysight was selected as the Test Partner for the Deutsche Telekom Satellite NB-IoT Early Adopter Program, providing an end-to-end NB-IoT NTN testbed that allows designers and developers to validate reference designs for solutions using 3GPP Release 17 (Rel-17) NTN standards.

Global server shipments are predicted to increase by 2.05% in 2024, with AI servers accounting for about 12%, reports TrendForce. Also, the smartphone camera lens market is expected to rebound in 2024 with 3.8% growth driven by AI-smartphones, to reach about 4.22 billion units, reports TrendForce.

Yole released a smartphone camera comparison report with a focus on iPhone evolution and analysis of the structure, design, and teardown of each camera module, along with the CIS dimensions, technology node, and manufacturing processes.

Counterpoint released a number of 2023 reports on smartphone shipments by country and operator migrations to 5G.

Events

Find upcoming chip industry events here, including:

Upcoming webinars are here, including topics such as digital twins, power challenges in data centers, and designing for 112G interface compliance.

Further Reading and Newsletters

Read the latest special reports and top stories, or check out the latest newsletters:

Systems and Design
Low Power-High Performance
Test, Measurement and Analytics
Manufacturing, Packaging and Materials
Automotive, Security and Pervasive Computing

The post Chip Industry Week In Review appeared first on Semiconductor Engineering.

There are a variety of reasons to alter, if not actually end, the Section 702 collection. Whatever value it may have in terms of national security, the very real fact is that it has been endlessly abused by the FBI since its inception.

It’s a foreign-facing collection, which means it harvests communications and data involving foreign targets of US surveillance. But there’s a massive backdoor built into this collection. Collecting foreign communications often means collecting US persons’ communications with foreign persons or entities.

That’s where the FBI has gone interloping with alarming frequency. US persons’ communications are supposed to be masked, preventing the FBI from engaging in warrantless surveillance of US-based communications. This simply hasn’t happened. And the FBI has not only performed second-hand abuse of this collection regularly, but it has equally regularly refused to be honest with the FISA court about its activities.

The latest rejection of a clean reauthorization of Section 702 has nothing to do with the FBI’s continuous refusal to play by the rules. Instead, it has to do with the few times it decided to engage in some backdoor action that targeted the party in power or people temporarily involved with inflicting four years of Donald Trump on a nation that was definitely greater before someone started promising to make it great again.

However, the FBI — despite having abused its access for years — continues to insist the program should not be ended or altered. It has actually admitted its backdoor searches would otherwise be illegal without this program and its side benefits — something that should have hastened legislators on both sides of the political aisle to shut the whole thing down until these critical flaws were patched.

Instead, the whole thing have devolved into the expected in-fighting. Some legislators proposed meaningful reforms to the program, which were soundly rejected by a lot of Republicans simply because some Democrats were involved. The Republicans heading up the House Intelligence Committee proposed their own reforms, but the only thing they really wanted to change was the FBI’s ability to place Republicans under surveillance.

Meanwhile, the Biden Administration has decided the FBI is right, no matter how often it’s been wrong. Ignoring years of casual abuse, the Biden team has pushed for a clean reauthorization — something it may not have done if it weren’t for all the Republicans demanding (mostly for self-serving reasons) the program be ended or altered.

Unfortunately, Section 702 continues to live on, even if it’s in an unresponsive coma at the moment. Rather than let the surveillance authority expire, a bi-partisan effort did the country dirty by extending it until April 2024 where it could be further disagreed about following the return of Congressional reps to Capitol Hill.

April just isn’t good enough, apparently. The Biden Administration wants to buy even more time without any termination or authorization, presumably in hopes that the current furor will die down and this executive power will be granted a clean re-authorization. (Of course, by that point, there may be an actual Fuhrer in play, given Donald Trump’s early sweeps of critical primaries.)

Here’s Charlie Savage with more details for the New York Times:

The Biden administration is moving to extend a disputed warrantless surveillance program into April 2025, according to officials familiar with the matter.

The decision by the administration, which requires asking for court approval, seemed likely to roil an already turbulent debate in Congress over its fate. The program has scrambled the usual partisan lines, with members of both parties on each side of seeing the program as potentially abusive of civil liberties or as necessary for protecting national security.

This is probably preferable to holding a budget bill hostage in an executive office display of “I’ll hold my breath until I get my way.” And it’s preferable to Republican efforts to alter Section 702 simply to protect themselves from illegal surveillance. But it’s definitely not preferable to actually engaging with the inherent problems of this surveillance program, all of which seem to lead back to the FBI and its insistence on abusing its access.

This throws these problems on the back burner for another year. And it will be yet another year where the FBI abuses its access. We can make this assumption because there’s never been a year where the FBI hasn’t abused this surveillance power. Refusing to address an issue that’s been publicly acknowledged for several years now just to ensure the NSA doesn’t lose this surveillance program is irresponsible. The Biden Administration’s apparently tactic agreement with assertions made by an agency that has proven it can’t be trusted doesn’t bode well for anyone.

And, if this yearlong reprieve results in a clean reauthorization, the Biden Administration will quite possibly be handing this renewed power to Republicans now allowed to engage in their worst excesses, thanks to the re-election of Dumpster Fire Grover Cleveland.

The best thing the current administration could do at this point is allow the authority to die, which would force Republicans who love power (but hate to see it wielded against them) try to reconcile their desire for a surveillance state with the inevitable reality they will sometimes be on the receiving end of this surveillance. The worst thing it can do is what it’s doing now: pressing the pause button because it doesn’t have the desire or willingness to go head-to-head with an agency that claims — without facts in evidence — the only way it can keep this country secure from foreign threats is by warrantlessly spying on Americans.

Enlarge (credit: Rob Engelaar | Getty Images)

Law enforcement agencies including the FBI and the UK’s National Crime Agency have dealt a crippling blow to LockBit, one of the world’s most prolific cybercrime gangs, whose victims include Royal Mail and Boeing.

The 11 international agencies behind “Operation Cronos” said on Tuesday that the ransomware group—many of whose members are based in Russia—had been “locked out” of its own systems. Several of the group’s key members have been arrested, indicted, or identified and its core technology seized, including hacking tools and its “dark web” homepage.

Graeme Biggar, NCA director-general, said law enforcement officers had “successfully infiltrated and fundamentally disrupted LockBit.”

Read 16 remaining paragraphs | Comments

I’m normally not a “ends justifies the means” sort of guy, but ever since some House Republicans started getting shitty about Section 702 surveillance after some of their own got swept up in the dragnet, I’ve become a bit more pragmatic. Section 702 is long overdue for reform. If it takes a bunch of conveniently angry legislators to do it, so be it.

The NSA uses this executive authorization to sweep up millions of “foreign” communications. But if one side of these communications involves a US person, the NSA is supposed to keep its eyes off of it. The same thing goes for the FBI. But the FBI has spent literal decades ignoring these restraints, preferring to dip into the NSA’s data pool as often as possible for the sole reason of converting a foreign-facing surveillance program into a handy means for domestic surveillance.

The FBI’s constant abuse of this program has seen it scolded by FISA judges, excoriated by legislators actually willing to stand up for their constituents’ rights, and habitually abused verbally at internet sites like this one.

Not that it has mattered. For years, the NSA (and, by extension, the FBI) has been given a blanket blessing of their spy programs by legislators who have been convinced nothing but a clean re-authorization is acceptable in terrorist times like these.

Fortunately for all of us, the future of Section 702 remains in a particularly hellish limbo. As Dell Cameron reports for Wired, Republicans are going to war against other Republicans, limiting the chances of Section 702 moving forward without significant alteration.

The latest botched effort at salvaging a controversial US surveillance program collapsed this week thanks to a sabotage campaign by the United States House Intelligence Committee (HPSCI), crushing any hope of unraveling the program’s fate before Congress pivots to prevent a government shutdown in March.

An agreement struck between rival House committees fell apart on Wednesday after one side of the dispute—represented by HPSCI—ghosted fellow colleagues at a crucial hearing while working to poison a predetermined plan to usher a “compromise bill” to the floor.

This makes it sound like this is a bad thing. It isn’t, even if those thwarting a clean re-auth have extremely dirty hands. Legislators should definitely take a long look at this surveillance power, especially when it’s been abused routinely by the FBI to engage in surveillance of US persons who are supposed to be beyond the reach of this foreign-facing dragnet.

Some in the House want the FBI to pay for what it did to Trump loyalists. Some in the House want the FBI to do whatever it wants, so long as it can claim it’s doing (our?) God’s work in its counterterrorism efforts. Excluded from the current infighting are people who actually give a damn about limiting surveillance abuses, shunted to the side by political opportunists, loudmouths, and far too many legislators who refuse to hold the FBI accountable.

What’s odd about this scuttling is the reason it happened. It had nothing to do with Section 702 and everything to do with the government’s predilection for buying data from brokers to avoid warrant requirements erected by Supreme Court rulings.

The impetus for killing the deal, WIRED has learned, was an amendment that would end the government’s ability to pay US companies for information rather than serving them with a warrant. This includes location data collected from cell phones that are capable in many cases of tracking people’s physical whereabouts almost constantly. The data is purportedly gathered for advertising purposes but is collected by data brokers and frequently sold to US spies and police agencies instead.

Senior aides say the HPSCI chair, Mike Turner, personally exploded the deal while refusing to appear for a hearing on Wednesday in which lawmakers were meant to decide the rules surrounding the vote. A congressional website shows that HPSCI staff had not filed one of the amendments meant to be discussed before the Rules Committee, suggesting that at no point in the day did Turner plan to attend.

And that’s where we are now: legislators refusing to authorize one form of domestic surveillance because it would rather give the feds a pass on a much more prevalent form of domestic surveillance. The former once ensnared some of Trump’s buddies. The latter has yet to do so.

The infighting continues, with one side being rallied by none of than Fox News, which prefers to cater to its base, rather than provide any reporting or analysis that might accurately portray current events. The spin being pushed by Fox claims the alterations added to the bill would somehow prevent the NSA (and, by extension, the FBI) from surveilling foreign terrorists.

A Fox News report published Thursday morning, while accurately noting that it was Turner’s threat that forced Johnson to cancel the vote, goes on to cite “sources close to the Intelligence Committee” who offered analysis of the events. The sources claimed that Turner was compelled to abandon the deal because the “compromise bill” had been sneakily altered in a manner that “totally screws FISA in terms of its ability to be a national security tool.”

While redirecting blame away from Turner and his cohorts, the claim is both false and deceptive, relying on assertions that, while farcical perhaps to legal experts, would be impossible for the public at large (and most of the press) to parse alone.

Section 702 still has a good chance to survive intact. This infighting actually makes it much less likely any true reform will take place. Grandstanding has replaced oversight. But, at least for now, we can be assured the surveillance program will remain one step away from being ditched until House Republicans can reconcile their desire to protect people like Carter Page with their desire to treat everyone a little bit on the brown side as a potential terrorist.