Dead Drop: August 18

WATCHING WHAT YOU WATCH:  The MI5 Director General, Ken McCallum, revealed in a recent speech that his outfit has developed AI tools to help British intelligence figure out whether people who watch violent videos are on the road to becoming radicalized, and if they present a terrorism risk.  The UK’s domestic intelligence service has reportedly automated the process so that MI5 personnel don’t have to watch the gruesome videos themselves. “Understanding whether, say, a prolific contributor to extreme right-wing online forums is also watching graphic beheading videos, can help in assessing the level of risk they might pose,” McCallum told students at Glasgow University. Apparently, his pitch was in part, aimed at students with tech backgrounds who might be interested in a career in intelligence. But McCallum cautioned that being a spy is not like it is in the movies.  “I can confirm mathematically that James Bond is 94.83 percent fiction,” he said.  We’re not math majors, but we think there is a 99% chance McCallum was making that part up.

KARMA CATCHES UP, EVENTUALLY:  Russian operative Andrey Lugovoy, who has been accused of fatally poisoning anti-Putin dissident Alexander Litvinenko by putting polonium 210 in his tea, has reportedly developed cancer himself. Some people believe Lugovoy’s ailment may have been triggered by his 2006 tea tampering in London. According to The Sun, Lugovoy’s alleged co-conspirator, Dmitry Kovtun, died last year allegedly from “Covid complications.” The Sun probably put the phrase in quotations, just to make clear that not everyone was buying that cause of death. News of Lugovoy’s condition came from leaked emails and health records that apparently were obtained by a Ukrainian hacking group calling itself “Inform-Napalm.”  Of course, you can’t rule out that the Kremlin henchman’s health woes (if true) coiuld have been caused by a roll of the cosmic dice and not his dastardly deeds in a tea parlor – but one can’t help but wonder if the wheels of justice and karma finally caught up to him.