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Xi Tells PLA TO Build 'Intelligent Military System' As Beijing Leans Into Drones And AI

China's Xi Jinping told the People's Liberation Army this week to intensify the military application of artificial intelligence and unmanned systems, telling a Politburo study session that the force should build toward what the official readout called an "intelligent military system." The directive landed days before the PLA's ninety-ninth anniversary and squarely on the modernization targets Beijing has set for its centenary in 2027.

According to the state news agency Xinhua, as noted by Bloomberg, Xi told the session that the PLA should strengthen the military application of unmanned intelligent technologies, deepen the development of networked information systems, and gradually build an intelligent military. The report singles out autonomous and AI-enabled capability as the direction of travel and ties it to the "intelligentization" doctrine that has guided PLA planning for years. Xi paired the technology push with a renewed anti-corruption drive inside the military and the familiar insistence that the armed forces answer, always, to the Party.

The Race With Washington

Obviously this is about geopolitical dominance. Beijing's public posture increasingly treats AI and unmanned platforms as the technologies that will reshape modern warfare, and Xi's remarks land while the United States pours its own money into military AI and autonomous systems. Analysts who track the PLA describe intelligentization as a whole-of-nation effort, mobilizing not just the armed forces but the country's scientific and industrial base, with the most ambitious version of the goal being to match or exceed US military capabilities by mid-century.

Meanwhile, reviews of Chinese research surfaced PLA-linked work using Western AI models, obtained through distillation, to train domestic defense tools, a reminder that the "intelligent military" Xi is describing is being assembled in part from the same frontier-model capabilities the West is trying to fence off through export controls.

It's no secret that unmanned and AI-enabled systems are a key priority for Chinese military modernization, and it it comes as Washington's own hawks are warning that permitting delays and data-center backlash could hand Beijing the edge in exactly this contest...

In short:

https://www.zerohedge.com/ai/xi-tells-pla-build-intelligent-military-system-beijing-leans-drones-and-ai

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'Iran lawmaker proposes underground 'governance cities' to protect officials'

An Iranian lawmaker has proposed building underground "governance cities" inside mountains to protect provincial officials from assassination during the ongoing conflict.

"Given the wartime conditions prevailing in the country, which will continue, we need to build governance cities across the provinces, particularly in provincial capitals," Tehran lawmaker Ali Khezarian said.

He said the facilities would allow government officials and administrators to be moved underground and "into the heart of mountains" to protect them from assassination during attacks on Iran.

https://www.iranintl.com/en/202608012484

Wichita Man Sues City To Rip Out Its 200-Camera Flock Dragnet

A Wichita machinist, Mason Grimmett, sued his own city this week, arguing that the roughly 200 Flock license-plate readers the police department has bolted around town amount to warrantless dragnet surveillance forbidden by the Kansas Constitution. The complaint, filed in Sedgwick County District Court by the Kansas Justice Institute, does not ask for money - rather, it asks a judge to declare the program unconstitutional and shut it down.

The cameras are made by Flock Safety, one of the largest plate-reader vendors in the country, and Wichita started installing them in 2020. The institute now describes the city as saturated with them - close to 200 AI-powered cameras photographing every passing vehicle and logging its make, model, color, plate, and identifying marks into a searchable database. Grimmett, a lifelong Wichita resident who testified against the program at a public meeting in June, argues that the system violates Section 15 of the state constitution, which guards against unreasonable searches and seizures, and that the city is, in the complaint's language, tracking and databasing law-abiding Kansans "without a warrant, without probable cause, without reasonable suspicion" and without any judicial oversight at all.

The Cops Who Already Abused It

Grimmett points to several local cases in which Kansas police used Flock cameras to stalk people, including abuse by former Kechi Police Lt. Victor Heiar, who was sentenced to eighteen months of probation for using Flock cameras to track a woman. According to local reports, a former detective was also accused of using plate-reader technology to stalk his wife, and a Sedgwick-area police chief reportedly ran an ex-girlfriend through the cameras 164 times. The institute is not disputing that the cameras help solve crimes. Its point is that they photograph everyone, all the time, and that the same access which cracks a burglary case also lets a jealous cop follow whoever he pleases.

"This is America, and we don't tolerate warrantless surveillance," said Sam MacRoberts, the institute's litigation director, who says that if the government wants to monitor a citizen it ought to go to a judge and explain why. Grimmett says he cannot drive to work, the gym, a doctor's appointment, a polling place, or a meeting of the local Sunflower Privacy Alliance without being catalogued by the department and by Flock.

Part Of A Widening Front

Lawsuits over Flock cameras are starting to stack up. In April, three San Jose residents filed a class action over that city's nearly 500 cameras. In February, a separate class action in San Francisco accused Flock of sharing plate-reader data with ICE, CBP, the FBI, and ATF in violation of California's ALPR Privacy Act, the sort of out-of-jurisdiction access that keeps surfacing in audits elsewhere and that has already pushed at least one California city to suspend its cameras pending review. The pushback has reached Congress, too, where a cluster of Republican bills - Rep. Thomas Massie's move to withhold federal funds from any city running the cameras, and Rep. Tim Burchett's Protection Against Mass Surveillance Act, which names Flock explicitly - now takes aim at the government-contract model the company runs on. Wichita's department has previously described its own program as self-auditing, and the city had not filed a response to Grimmett's suit as of Friday.

None of this will surprise regular readers who have watched the license-plate-reader map fill in city by city while the contracts governing who can query the data stayed conveniently vague. Grimmett, meanwhile, is betting that a state constitution's search-and-seizure clause is the faster route to pulling the cameras down, and a ruling in his favor would hand every other saturated Flock city a template...

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/wichita-man-sues-city-rip-out-its-200-camera-flock-dragnet

Aoun calls for exclusive state authority over Lebanon

Lebanese President Joseph Aoun said on Saturday that the Lebanese Army must be the only armed force in the country and that there should be no legal weapons beyond the state's jurisdiction.

"There is no legitimacy for any weapon outside the legitimacy of the state, and there is no protection for this country except through its national army," Aoun said in a statement marking Lebanese Army Day. "The army alone possesses the decision, the force, and the legitimacy to be the state's exclusive military arm."

He further called for army units to be fully deployed along the southern border and for the state to exert exclusive jurisdiction over its territory to allow citizens to safely return to their cities and villages.

https://breakingthenews.net/Article/Aoun-calls-for-exclusive-state-authority-over-Lebanon/66829944

''Russia warns of Arctic tensions over Norway, NATO'

Russia and Norway's mechanisms for preventing dangerous incidents in the Arctic are not fully operational due to the policies of Oslo and NATO, Russian Ambassador to Norway Nikolai Korchunov told Russia's RIA Novosti on Saturday.

"Norway and its NATO allies are pursuing a path of escalation in the Arctic, increasing risks and escalating conflict," Korchunov told the outlet, adding that there is "no point in talking about a serious and substantive dialogue on maintaining stability and security" in the northern region, due to Oslo's compliance with the West's intention to inflict a "strategic defeat" against Russia.

https://breakingthenews.net/Article/Russia-warns-of-Arctic-tensions-over-Norway-NATO/66829846