Memories. The AI, Privacy & Security Weekly Update for the Week Ending August 25th., 2026

EP 306. In this update.

Memory became evidence. It became leverage. It became the frontier where infrastructure, surveillance, and survival intersect.

We found Russian backdoors soldered into cameras before they left the factory.

License plate readers learned to work backward from a pattern to find the person who matches it.

A traveller wiped a phone with a duress code, and now faces federal charges for it.

An AI system flagged a man as a shoplifter, and a trained manager believed the machine over their own eyes.

Nine million faces got exposed in a single misconfigured bucket.

Quantum researchers just proved they can entangle memories 420 kilometers apart.

DNA and semiconductors merged into a new kind of AI memory that works like ours.

And nine people tried to smuggle restricted AI servers to China through a chain of intermediaries that almost worked.

These are some of the events that made the AI, Privacy, and Security news last week.  

Let’s go explore.

Find the full transcript of this podcast here.