A wave of mysterious cyberattacks has been overheating supermarket fridges and freezers across Europe, destroying massive amounts of food, with a similar incident reportedly hitting six US military commissaries in August. Zach and Elizabeth dig into the “why put a fridge on the internet at all” problem.
Plus, a DHS data breach from a group called ShinyHunters that exposed employee records including FBI agents’ home addresses.
Then: Avon and Somerset Police in the UK are rolling out live facial recognition vans, scanning the face of every person who walks past and flagging matches against a watch list, a technology Britain has quietly been using for years. Zach and Elizabeth connect it to a familiar pattern: military tech trickles into counter-terrorism, then into local policing, then it’s everywhere.
That pattern leads into the main event: a wave of reporting (including a police chief’s own op-ed) confirming that autonomous and semi-autonomous drones are about to become permanent fixtures over American cities, launching automatically on 911 calls and gunshot-detection alerts, with footage kept forever.
Zach Varnell
Zach Varnell is a cybersecurity expert and advocate for privacy and individual liberty. He is a founding member of Banish Big Brother, a nonprofit dedicated to combating invasive surveillance. He also runs Asteros, a security firm that helps software teams and compliance-driven organizations understand and reduce their real-world risk. His insights have been featured in publications like Infosecurity Magazine, Threatpost, ZDNET, and the Washington Examiner.