The new architecture of power: Best infosec long reads 6/27/26

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6/27/26: From browser-based side channels and AI-generated malware to predictive policing, frontier AI oversight, and suspected state-backed cyber sabotage, this week's long reads examine how advances in computing are expanding both technical capabilities and institutional power. The pieces explore what happens when increasingly sophisticated digital systems become embedded in critical infrastructure, public services, government decision-making, and national security, raising questions about security, accountability, and control that extend well beyond the technology itself.

British Police Built a Sprawling Crime-Prediction Machine. Some Results Couldn’t Be Trusted

Wired's Matt Burgess and investigative journalist Mark Wilding revealed that a UK police force quietly built extensive predictive-policing systems fueled by massive public-sector datasets, only to see some risk-scoring models abandoned amid concerns about accuracy, transparency, and public trust.

How the police have developed and used their predictive tools hasn’t always been clear to the public. John Pegram, the leader of a local police accountability group in Bristol, says he didn’t hear about the Offender Management App until 2023, years after it had been created. When he did learn about it, he began to suspect he might be included. “I think I knew I was on the app,” Pegram says.

In early 2024, Pegram filed a request to find out how the police were using his data. The police refused to say. Months later, after Pegram had hired solicitors to work on his case, the police confirmed he was on the app but declined to elaborate further. Like others across Bristol, the UK, and, increasingly, around the world, Pegram didn’t know whether he had been scored by an algorithm, what that score might be, or how it could affect his interactions with the authorities.

WIRED, working in partnership with the nonprofit newsroom Liberty Investigates, plus the Bristol Cable and Lighthouse Reports, obtained hundreds of pages of documentation from public records requests to build the most comprehensive picture to date of Avon and Somerset’s regional experiment with data collection and predictive analytics. (Liberty, the parent organization of Liberty Investigates, had some early involvement in a potential legal challenge to the program and continues to support Pegram’s litigation.)

The investigation reveals that at least two of these risk-scoring models were quietly abandoned after Bristol City Council staff deemed they could no longer trust them. Previously unreported documents show government inspectors and independent reviewers highlighting a startling lack of transparency about some elements of the program and warning that the systems could undermine public trust. Police data disclosed to WIRED—comprising more than 36,000 model performance scores—appear in some cases to show “genuinely poor predictive performance,” according to an independent analyst who reviewed the data for WIRED.

These findings come as the UK appears poised to embrace predictive analytics and artificial intelligence across the criminal justice system. A familiar face is helping lead the charge: the former chief constable of Avon and Somerset, Andy Marsh, who now heads the national standard-setting body for forces across England and Wales. As CEO of the College of Policing, Marsh has said that effective AI should be “injected like heroin” to speed up British police work. In a recent interview, Marsh said his organization was examining around 100 currently deployed AI tools, including for predictive policing. “Our job is to test the ones that work properly, test them with rigorous evaluation, and then spread them like wildfire through policing.”