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upstart writes:

Trump caving on Nvidia H20 export curbs may disrupt his bigger trade war:

The next front in Donald Trump's trade war will be chip tariffs—which could come by next month—but national security experts are warning that the president may have already made a huge misstep that threatens to disrupt both US trade and national security.

In a letter Monday to Department of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, 20 policymakers and professionals with a background in national security policy urged Trump to reverse course and block exports of Nvidia's H20 chips to China.

In April, the Trump administration decided against imposing additional export curbs on H20 chips after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang paid $1 million for a seat at a Mar-a-Lago dinner, NPR reported. Apparently, Nvidia's promise to invest $500 billion in AI data centers helped persuade Trump to change course, as did the terms of a temporary truce with China, in which the US promised to halt H20 chip controls in exchange for China restoring imports of rare earth minerals into the US.

In their letter, national security experts expressed "deep concern" that Trump may not have considered how Nvidia's H20 chips could endanger the US military's "edge in artificial intelligence" while serving as a "potent accelerator of China's frontier AI capabilities."

While these chips can't be used for AI training like the Blackwell and H100 chips still restricted by export curbs, they're "optimized for inference, the process responsible for the dramatic capabilities gains made by the latest generation of frontier AI reasoning models," experts warned.

Most likely, China will use the chips for AI models deployed by its military to "enable autonomous weapons systems, intelligence surveillance platforms, and rapid advances in battlefield decision-making," experts said. In that way, "by supplying China with these chips, we are fueling the very infrastructure that will be used to modernize and expand the Chinese military," they warned.

The Trump administration is notably investigating how chip tariffs and imports could harm national security, with a report due out in two weeks, Lutnick announced today. That report will supposedly help Trump determine if relying too much on other countries for chips poses a national security threat.

But experts seem to fear that Trump isn't paying enough attention to how exports of US technology could threaten to not only supercharge China's military and AI capabilities but also drain supplies that US firms need to keep the US at the forefront of AI innovation.

"More chips for China means fewer chips for the US," experts said, noting that "China's biggest tech firms, including Tencent, ByteDance, and Alibaba," have spent $16 billion on bulk-ordered H20 chips over the past year.

Meanwhile, "projected data center demand from the US power market would require 90 percent of global chip supply through 2030, an unlikely scenario even without China joining the rush to buy advanced AI chips," experts said. If Trump doesn't intervene, one of America's biggest AI rivals could even end up driving up costs of AI chips for US firms, they warned.

"We urge you to reverse course," the letter concluded. "This is not a question of trade. It is a question of national security."

USA bombs Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan
US President Donald Trump says American forces have conducted "very successful" strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan and that all US planes are now out of Iranian airspace.

Trump's Truth Social
"We have completed our very successful attack on the three Nuclear sites in Iran, including Fordow, Natanz, and Esfahan. All planes are now outside of Iran air space. A full payload of BOMBS was dropped on the primary site, Fordow. All planes are safely on their way home. Congratulations to our great American Warriors. There is not another military in the World that could have done this. NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE! Thank you for your attention to this matter."

[Updated 22 Jun 1313z - following statements by Secretary of Defence and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff--JR]

Operation Midnight Hammer

75 x TLAMs - Precision Guided Weapons (PGW), 14 x MOPs GBU-57 used by 7 B2s, operational feint by sending 6 x B2s westward into the Pacific area, 7 x B2s continued eastwards. The B2s are still airborne and were observed refuelling over the Azores a few hours ago on FlightRadar24 (at least 18 tanker aircraft operating racetracks but the B2s were still radio silent). TLAMs were also fired by USN assets in the southern Persian Gulf. Over 120 aircraft involved in the mission including F16, F22, F35, ISTAR, AAR. Battle damage assessment will take time to collect and analyse.

US forces involved in the attack were not engaged and appear to have achieved total surprise. All assets are accounted for but some are still airborne.

Original Submission

day of the dalek writes:

The Real ID Act was passed in 2005 on the grounds that it was necessary for access control of sensitive facilities like nuclear power plants and the security of airline flights. The law imposed standards for state- and territory-issued ID cards in the United States, but was widely criticized as an attempt to create a national ID card and would be harmful to privacy. These concerns are explained well in a 2007 article from the New York Civil Liberties Union:

Real ID threatens privacy in two ways. First, it consolidates Americans' personal information into a network of interlinking databases accessible to the federal government and bureaucrats throughout the 50 states and U.S. territories. This national mega-database would invite government snooping and be a goldmine for identity thieves. Second, it mandates that all driver's licenses and ID cards have an unencrypted "machine-readable zone" that would contain personal information on Americans that could be easily "skimmed" by anybody with a barcode reader.

These concerns are based on what happens when criminals access the data, but also how consolidating data from many government agencies into a central database makes it easier for bad actors within the government to target Americans and violate their civil liberties. These concerns led to a 20 year delay in enforcing Real ID standards nationally, and as a USA Today article from 2025 warns, once Americans' data is stored on a central repository for one purpose, mission creep is likely. If the centralized database is used to make student loan applications and income tax processing more efficient, what's to stop law enforcement from accessing it to identify potential criminals? Over the past two decades, criticism of the Real ID Act has come from across the political spectrum, with many people and organizations on both the left and right decrying it as a serious threat to privacy and civil liberties.

Much of these concerns have never been realized about the Real ID Act, but they are renewed with Executive Order #14143, signed by Donald Trump on March 20, 2025. This directs for the sharing of government data between agencies except when it is classified for national security purposes. The executive order does not include any provisions to protect the privacy of individuals.

Although Trump has not commented on how this data sharing will be achieved, the Trump Administration has hired a company called Palantir to create a central registry of data, which would include a national citizen database. Recent reporting describes a database with wide-ranging information about every American that is generally private:

Foundry's capabilities in data organization and analysis could potentially enable the merging of information from various agencies, thereby creating detailed profiles of American citizens. The Trump administration has attempted to access extensive citizen data from government databases, including bank details, student debt, medical claims, and disability status.

Palantir does not gather data on their own, but they do provide tools to analyze large repositories of data, make inferences about the data, and provide easy-to-use reports. There are serious concerns about the lack of transparency about what data is being integrated into this repository, how it will be used, the potential for tracking people in various segments of the population such as immigrants, and the ability to use this data to target and harass political opponents. Concerns about how Trump's national citizen database will be used echo fears raised from across the political spectrum about the Real ID Act, except that they are apparently now quite close to becoming reality.

Additional reading:

• Trump appears to be building an unprecedented spy machine that could track Americans (MSNBC)
• What is Palantir? The secretive tech company behind Trump's data collection efforts (Mashable)
• Former Palantir workers condemn company's work with Trump administration (NPR)
• Palantir filed to go public. The firm's unethical technology should horrify us (The Guardian)
• The Gleeful Profiteers of Trump's Police State (Mother Jones)
• Donald Trump's Reported Database Move Sparks Alarm: 'Dystopian' (Newsweek)

Original Submission