Tech

Photograph: Heather Diehl/Getty Images Save this story Save this story Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren and Republican senator Josh Hawley are urging the US’s central energy information agency to provide better information on how much electricity data centers actually use. In a joint letter sent to the Energy Information Administration Thursday morning, seen by WIRED, Hawley and Warren press the agency to publicly collect “comprehensive, annual energy-use disclosures” on data centers.

Photo Illustration: WIRED Staff; Getty Images Save this story Save this story Six Democratic lawmakers are pressing the nation's top intelligence official to publicly disclose whether Americans who use commercial VPN services risk being treated as foreigners under United States surveillance law—a classification that would strip them of constitutional protections against warrantless government spying. In a letter sent Thursday to Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard , the lawmakers say that because VPNs obscure a user's true location, and because intelligence agencies presume that communications of unknown origin are foreign, Americans may be inadvertently waiving the privacy protections they're entitled to under the law.

Photo-Illustration: WIRED Staff; Getty Images Save this story Save this story Chinese-language online black markets have become one of the biggest drivers of cybercrime in history, processing tens of billions of dollars of illicit finance every year. Helping the trade in stolen data, money-laundering services, and even at times electrified shackles , these underground marketplaces have fueled scam operations and human trafficking around the world.