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Jim Jordan Subpoenas FBI Agent Who Flagged Tweets + More
Jim Jordan Subpoenas FBI Agent Who Flagged Tweets
Congressman Jim Jordan, acting as the chair of the House Judiciary Committee, has formally summoned FBI agent Elvis Chan via a subpoena, demanding he come forth and share information about the FBI’s active involvement in online censorship.
This move comes amidst escalating concerns around freedom of speech, and as a potentially significant case regarding the same issue is hovering on the doorstep of the Supreme Court.
Accusations lobbied by Jordan point towards potential intimidation and collaboration between the Executive Branch and larger corporate bodies in order to suppress speech. Chan, who served as the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force liaison to companies like Facebook and Twitter, was expected to cooperate with Jordan, but his refusal to appear without having either his personal or an FBI lawyer present paved the way for the issuance of the subpoena.
The landmark case, Missouri v. Biden, might soon find itself under the Supreme Court’s scrutiny. It encapsulates the contention by Missouri and Louisiana against the federal government’s alleged influence on social media platforms to remove certain content, particularly that related to COVID-19.
Judge Blocks California Law Meant to Increase Online Safety for Kids
A federal judge on Monday temporarily blocked an online child protection law in California and said it probably violates the Constitution.
Under the law, known as the California Age-Appropriate Design Code, digital platforms would have to vet their products before public release to see whether those offerings could harm kids and teens. The law also requires platforms to enable stronger data privacy protections by default for younger users.
U.S. District Court Judge Beth Labson Freeman granted a request Monday by the tech trade group NetChoice for a preliminary injunction against the measure, writing that the law probably violates the First Amendment and does “not pass constitutional muster.”
The initial ruling deals a massive blow to state lawmakers, who passed the law with broad bipartisan support last year, and to children’s safety advocates, who touted the measure as one of the strongest children’s online safety laws in the United States. Lawmakers in several other states have since pushed to replicate the standards, modeled after regulations in the United Kingdom.
Screen Time Is Contributing to Chronic Sleep Deprivation in Tweens and Teens — a Pediatric Sleep Expert Explains
The Philadelphia Inquirer reported:
A growing body of research is finding strong links between sleep, mental health and screen time in teens and tweens — the term for pre-adolescent children around the ages of 10 to 12. Amid an unprecedented mental health crisis in which some 42% of adolescents in the U.S. are suffering from mental health issues, teens are also getting too little sleep.
And it is a vicious cycle: Both a lack of sleep and the heightened activity involved in the consumption of social media and video games before bedtime can exacerbate or even trigger anxiety and depression that warrant intervention.
I am the lead physician of the sleep center at Seattle Children’s Hospital, where I study various pediatric sleep disorders. Our team of physicians and providers routinely observe firsthand the negative effects of excessive screen time, and particularly social media, both of which affect not only sleep, but also the physical and mental health of our patients.
Studies across the world in over 120,000 youth ages 6 to 18 who engage in any sort of social media have repeatedly shown worsened quality and decreased quantity of sleep. This is happening across the globe, not just in the U.S.
Google and the Department of Defense Are Building an AI-Powered Microscope to Help Doctors Spot Cancer
Dr. Nadeem Zafar is a pathologist, the kind of doctor who carries out clinical lab tests on bodily fluids and tissues to diagnose conditions like cancer. It’s a specialty that often operates behind the scenes, but it’s a crucial backbone of medical care.
Late last year, Zafar’s colleague consulted with him about a prostate cancer case. It was clear that the patient had cancer, but the two doctors disagreed about how severe it was. Zafar believed the cancer was more aggressive than his colleague did.
Zafar turned to his microscope — a canonically beloved tool in pathology that the doctors rely on to help make their diagnoses. But the device is no ordinary microscope. It’s an artificial intelligence-powered microscope built by Google and the U.S. Department of Defense.
The AI-powered tool is called an Augmented Reality Microscope, or ARM, and Google and the Department of Defense have been quietly working on it for years. The technology is still in its early days and is not actively being used to help diagnose patients yet, but initial research is promising, and officials say it could prove to be a useful tool for pathologists without easy access to a second opinion.
Google Bard Update Reveals a More Powerful AI — but It Might Scare Privacy Purists
Google has built a new model for Bard which it is calling the most capable iteration of the AI yet. Google provided an update on the new version of Bard which it calls “more intuitive, imaginative and responsive than ever before,” offering greater levels of quality and accuracy in the chatbot’s responses.
That includes giving Bard the ability to get its hooks into your emails in Gmail, and data in Google Drive and Docs, meaning you can get the AI to find info across your various files, or indeed summarize a piece of content if needed.
Bard will also be able to pull data in real-time as needed from Google Maps, Google’s travel features (hotels and flights), and YouTube, all of which will be extensions that are enabled by default (you can disable them if you wish, but they’re switched on by default in the new Bard).
Some other stuff will set some alarm bells ringing for folks, particularly the more privacy-conscious out there. Do you really want Bard’s tendrils snaking into every corner of your Google Drive, Docs, and Gmail? Doesn’t that sound like the beginning of a scenario of a nightmarish overreach from the AI?
Digital Second Amendment Unveiled: Anti-Woke AI Bot Equips Users With ‘Newest Weapons of Digital Age’
Mainstream AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Microsoft‘s Bing, and Google‘s Bard attempt to sound neutral or refuse to answer provocative questions because their AI trainers and corporate funders are ‘woke’ and embrace government censorship. Many folks complained earlier this year about left-leaning biased answers from these woke AI bots.
“The danger of training AI to be woke — in other words, lie — is deadly,” Elon Musk posted on X in December after another user asked OpenAI CEO Sam Altman for a version of ChatGPT with the “woke settings” turned “off.” This led Musk to tweet earlier this year about creating his own uncensored chatbot that is free of corporate or governmental control.
Musk likely kicked off the counter bot (anti-woke bot) movement. The first of its kind, GatGPT, free of safety filters and woke guardrails, has been released by Defense Distributed, the company that pioneered the first 3D-printed firearm over a decade ago.
The team that built GatGPT, led by Cody Wilson, contends AI safety is a pretext for censorship and political control. They have declared a “[[Digital Second Amendment]]” that pledges to protect and distribute “the newest weapons of the digital age, not just to defend ourselves against corporate and government depredation, but to defend our civic identity and humanity.”
Elon Musk’s New X Pricing Plan Would Mean Free Speech Isn’t Quite Free
Billionaire CEO Elon Musk said Monday he plans to introduce a monthly fee to use his social media platform X, previously known as Twitter.
The new subscription payment to access X would be smaller than the $8 fee currently charged for X Premium, Musk said during a live-streamed event with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The topic of their discussion was artificial intelligence, and Musk’s comments on X’s pricing plan came after Netanyahu mentioned the problem of bot accounts that amplify hate speech.
“The single most important reason we’re moving to have a small monthly payment for use of the X system is it’s the only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots,” Musk replied, according to Axios.
Musk explained that a subscription fee would make it more difficult for people to create bot accounts because each account would need to register a new credit card.
Google to Pay California $93 Million Over Location-Tracking Claims + More
Google to Pay California $93 Million Over Location-Tracking Claims
Google has agreed to pay $93 million to the state of California to settle claims it tracked the location of users without their knowledge. Under the terms of the proposed agreement, Google must also provide more information about the location data it collects on users.
The settlement follows a “multi-year” investigation by California’s Department of Justice, which found that Google deceived users into thinking they weren’t getting tracked when they actually were. According to the complaint, Google continued to collect and store location data on users even when they disabled the “Location History” setting within its apps and services, allowing the company to use this information for targeted advertising.
California is one of the many states that sued Google over its location tracking feature. After doling out $85 million to settle Arizona’s location-tracking lawsuit last year, it paid another $392 million to settle similar lawsuits from 40 states, including Oregon, New York, and Florida.
TikTok Fined $368 Million in Europe for Failing to Protect Children
A major European tech regulator has ordered TikTok to pay a €345 million ($368 million) fine after ruling that the app failed to do enough to protect children.
The Irish Data Protection Commission, which oversees TikTok’s activities in the European Union, said Friday that the company had violated the bloc’s signature privacy law.
An investigation by the DPC found that in the latter half of 2020, TikTok’s default settings didn’t do enough to protect children’s accounts. For example, it said, that newly-created children’s profiles were set to public by default, meaning anybody on the internet could view them.
TikTok didn’t sufficiently disclose these privacy risks to kids and also used so-called “dark patterns” to guide users toward giving up more of their personal information, the regulator noted.
Courts Strike a Blow Against White House’s Social Media Censorship
A federal appeals court delivered a win for free speech last week, rebuking the White House and several agencies by maintaining a freeze on their policing of our speech.
Most importantly, the court validated the argument that the U.S. government has been illegally censoring Americans by proxy via social media companies, in a breathtaking and massive violation of the First Amendment.
Critical aspects of the three-judge panel’s opinion, however — namely the government actors it absolved of culpability, and its minimizing of the size and scope of the freeze — made for only a qualified victory for our first freedom.
DHS Awards $20 Million to Program That Flags Americans as Potential ‘Extremists’ for Their Online Speech
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has awarded 34 grants to as many organizations, worth a total of $20 million, whose role will be to undergo training in order to flag potential online “extremist” speech of Americans.
The money will be spent from the Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention (TVTP) grant program for the fiscal year 2023, while the recipients include police, mental health providers, universities, churches and school districts.
The DHS announcement came on the anniversary of 9/11, but it showed that the focus is now on Americans rather than some foreign terrorist threat (or even foreign terrorist gangs in the habit of “invading” U.S. soil).
And the way the terrorist threat is defined here looks more like a drive to suppress dissent to dominant narratives pushed by the government and large traditional and social media who work in concert with the federal authorities.
Ban on COVID Vaccine Mandate Passes Arkansas Legislature
Arkansas lawmakers have passed a bill on Thursday that prohibits the state from mandating someone to get a COVID-19 vaccine.
The special session called by Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders was said to be spotlighting tax cuts and redefining state FOIA laws. While the controversial FOIA bill has run into some roadblocks, the ban on vaccine mandates for COVID-19 was filed and subsequently sailed through the Senate and House.
The bill bans the State of Arkansas, a state agency or entity, a political subdivision of the state, or a state or local official from mandating or requiring someone to receive any type of COVID-19 vaccine. It goes on to specify that getting the vaccine can’t be a condition of “education, employment, entry, or services from the state or a state agency or entity” for obtaining a licensure, certificate, or permit from a state agency.
The Department of Health is also to make the “potential risks and harms associated” with the COVID-19 vaccine publicly available.
China to Manage Monkeypox as Disease on Par With COVID
China plans to manage monkeypox in the same way it handles infectious diseases such as COVID-19 starting from Sept. 20, health authorities said on Friday, after detecting around 500 cases of the viral infection last month.
Monkeypox will be managed under Category B protocols, the National Health Commission (NHC) said in a statement. Under this category, China could take emergency measures such as restricting gatherings, suspending work and school or sealing off areas when there is an outbreak of a disease.
Category B infectious diseases currently include COVID-19, AIDS and SARS. China puts infectious diseases into three classes, with the top level Category A giving authorities the power to quarantine patients and their close contacts.
China downgraded the management of COVID-19 to Category B from Category A at the end of 2022 after almost three years of strict restrictions that included locking down entire cities.
Big Tech Wields AI Might to Accelerate Cancer Research
Major tech companies are throwing their weight behind artificial intelligence in cancer care, lending their technological prowess to legacy institutions and startups trying to navigate a fast-evolving area of medicine. Why it matters: The explosion in AI has the potential to transform how the medical system researches and treats cancer, but only if the underlying tech is there to support it.
Driving the news: Microsoft’s research subsidiary last week announced it’s pairing its supercomputing power with the capabilities of Memorial Sloan Kettering’s health tech spinout Paige to build one of the world’s largest image-based AI models for digital pathology and oncology.
The big picture: Tech giants like Microsoft, Google and Amazon have been battling for their expanding corners of the healthcare universe for years. Cancer is one of the major areas where those companies have set their sights.
Be smart: It’s not just the tech giants that are leaning into AI for cancer care. Pharmaceutical brands such as Moderna are bullish on its potential for cancer drug development.
The Online Safety Bill Is Just the Tip of the U.K. Surveillance State Iceberg
It all starts in 2019. The Online Harms whitepaper marked the first step into the government’s mission of making the U.K. “the safest place to be online,” building the premises for the debut of the Online Safety Bill two years later.
Now, after surviving three prime ministers, two government crises, and doubling up its pages on the way, the Bill is in its final stages in Parliament and likely to become law very soon. Yet, internet experts and privacy advocates are still concerned the new provisions will jeopardize citizens’ security instead.
To make things worse, U.K. lawmakers are also pushing for an update to another controversial bill: the 2016 Investigatory Powers Act, also known as the “Snooper Chart” for its wide-ranging surveillance powers.
That’s why many commentators, including digital rights groups, cryptographers, academics, VPN services, and encrypted messaging app providers are now calling for new assurances the two proposals won’t be used together for greater control over public communications.
House GOP Bill Would Ban DHS From Forming Another ‘Ministry of Truth’ + More
House GOP Bill Would Ban DHS From Forming Another ‘Ministry of Truth’
In April of 2022, the Department of Homeland Security created a “disinformation governance board” for the purpose of combating “misinformation related to homeland security, focused specifically on irregular migration and Russia.”
After it was quickly outed as the Biden administration’s Ministry of Truth headed by a total nutcase who peddled the Trump-Russia hoax and discredited Hunter Biden laptop theory (and is now a registered foreign agent), DHS killed the Disinformation Governance Board three months later.
Now, House Republicans are set to unveil legislation that would ban the DHS from forming any sort of similar censorship entity, the Washington Examiner reports.
The bill is set for a Thursday introduction by Rep. August Pfluger (R-TX), along with Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Ronny Jackson (R-TX). It would bar federal funds from being “authorized to be appropriated or otherwise made available” to the DHS for the purpose of establishing any sort of similar governance board.
“Partisan government officials running a ‘disinformation board’ sounds ridiculous to most people, but yet the Biden administration tried to control the speech of American citizens,” said Pfluger, who sits on the Homeland Security Committee along with Greene. “DHS should be focused on securing the border and preventing terrorist attacks, not fact-checking social media and censoring Americans.”
A Long List of Tech Companies Are Rushing to Give Themselves the Right to Use People’s Data to Train AI
Over the last couple of months, companies as varied as Twitter, or X, Microsoft, Instacart, Meta, and Zoom have rushed to update their terms of service and/or privacy policies to allow the collection of information and content from people and customers as data to train generative artificial intelligence models.
Tweets, web searches and apparently even grocery shopping are now an opportunity for companies to build more predictive tools like Bard and ChatGPT, which is owned by OpenAI and receives considerable backing from Microsoft. Zoom, after a public upset at the idea of video calls being fed to a large language model used to train AI, is the only company to subsequently change its updated use policy to say explicitly that user videos would not be used this way.
Such backlash hasn’t stopped more companies from deciding their platforms should be training grounds for AI. One of the latest to alter their terms of service is Rev, a popular service for transcribing recorded conversations and phone calls that also does things like closed captions for videos.
In the latest version of Rev’s Terms of Service, the company added a section it calls “Your content, including services output.” That section now states that it not only has a broad license to use all of the content uploaded to its platform “whether publicly or privately,” it can use the information “to improve the services, e.g., to train and maintain Rev’s ASR speech-to-text model, and other Rev artificial intelligence models.”
The Usual Suspects of Big Tech Claim AI Will Kill Us All or End World Hunger
The U.S. federal government is still swimming in circles trying to form some sort of plan to regulate the exploding AI industry. So when the usual suspects of big tech again returned to Capitol Hill on Wednesday for a closed-door meeting on potential AI regulation, they came prepared with the same talking points they’ve been presenting for the last several years, though with an added air of haste to the proceedings.
At the artificial intelligence forum hosted by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, the big boys all laid their cards on the table, hoping to get the kind of AI regulations they want. Elon Musk, who recently established the late-to-the-party company xAI, again reiterated his stance that AI threatens humanity, according to the Wall Street Journal in a conversation with Schumer after the fact. It’s the same position he’s held for years, though it won’t stop the multi-billionaire from using data harvested from Twitter and Tesla for training his upcoming AI models.
According to CBS News, Musk told reporters that AI companies need a “referee,” referring to the potential that big government would act as the middle manager for big tech’s latest foray into transformative technology. Of course, there’s a wide variety of opinions there.
Good old Bill Gates, the original co-founder of Microsoft, went full tech evangelist reportedly saying that generative AI systems will — somehow — end world hunger.
Biden Admin Takes Swipe at Ted Cruz Over School Mask Mandates
Education Secretary Miguel Cardona took a swipe at Sen. Ted Cruz over mask mandates in schools. Cruz last week criticized a Maryland elementary school principal’s decision to temporarily impose a mask mandate following a COVID-19 outbreak.
“Our schools must stay open,” Cardona said at a breakfast with reporters hosted by The Christian Science Monitor on Wednesday, The Dallas Morning News reported.
The Texas senator hit out at the Maryland school’s mask mandate on social media on Wednesday, September 6. “If you want to voluntarily wear a mask, fine, but leave our kids the hell alone,” Cruz wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
“Look, this is utterly absurd. Mask mandates are wrong,” Cruz said. “This is all about controlling people, whether it’s mask mandates, whether it’s vaccine mandates, whether it’s having the 437th booster. Enough is enough is enough… if you want to wear a damn mask, fine, but don’t be a hypocrite and don’t force other people to.”
Developers Can Now Build Censorship-Resistant Apps With Google’s New Tool
App developers can now build censorship-resistant services and evade the grip of authoritarian governments thanks to Google‘s new tool.
The team at Jigsaw, a Google unit working on promoting internet freedoms worldwide, has just released a new software developer kit (SDK) so that its VPN service can be integrated directly into web apps.
The tool comes as a direct response to Iran’s harsh internet crackdown during a long year of protests. Now, days from the first anniversary of Mahsa Amini‘s death, the apps’ creators have developed a means to outsmart the Islamic Republic and allow citizens to keep accessing the open internet.
Canada Official Tells Residents to Get ‘Masks Ready’
Canadian Chief Public Health Officer Dr. Theresa Tam told residents this week to get their “masks ready” amid ongoing discussions surrounding the possible return of mask mandates. Tam and other Canadian health officials wore face masks during a press briefing on Tuesday.
When asked about their decision to mask up, Tam said, “It is a layer of protection. We hope people have developed the habit of using masks as needed during the rest of our season, not just for COVID, but all the other respiratory pathogens that will be transmitted around this time.”
Tam continued, “I do think now is the time to get your masks ready if you don’t already have them. In our own particular context, we certainly, in our area, there’s been an uptick in some of the COVID-19 indicators.”
Her comments come amid ongoing speculation about the possible mask mandates. Earlier this month, some schools in the United States announced the partial return of mask mandates in response to rising COVID-19 hospitalizations, however many of these mandates were for a specific period of time and have since ended.
Are COVID Airline Mask Mandates Coming Back? What to Know
Are COVID Airline Mask Mandates Coming Back? What to Know
Despite COVID-19 hospitalizations steadily inching up in the U.S., mask mandates on planes are unlikely to make a comeback, experts told Newsweek. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued an order in January 2021 requiring people to wear masks on public transportation, including planes and in transportation hubs.
The mandate was struck down by a federal judge on April 18, 2022, freeing airlines, airports and other transportation hubs to make their own decisions about mask requirements. All the major airlines quickly switched to a mask-optional policy.
Some businesses, schools and hospitals have imposed mask mandates in response to an uptick in COVID cases, prompting some concern that masks may soon be required on planes.
The spokesperson said the CDC’s advice for individual and community actions around COVID-19 “are tied to hospital admission levels, which are currently low for more than 92% of the country.” A CDC spokesperson also recently said that “rumors we’ve seen about plans for mask mandates are not true.”
Researchers Used Wi-Fi Signals to See Through Walls. Game-Changing Breakthrough? Or Privacy Nightmare Waiting to Happen?
Scientists have engineered a technology that lets people read letters and see objects through walls using Wi-Fi signals.
The system, developed by researchers with UC Santa Barbara, traces the edges of objects on the other side of solid barriers, including English letters of the alphabet. In one experiment, for example, the team used the technology to decipher the word “BELIEVE” from the other side of a wall, with letters imaged one by one.
The system relies on Keller’s geometric theory of diffraction, also known as the Keller cone, to interpret what may be on the other side of the wall. If and when mature, the technology may be useful for several different applications, including crowd analytics, identifying individuals, and giving smart spaces a much-needed boost.
The success of this approach, however, may pose serious privacy and security questions. Cybercriminals could incorporate this technology into an existing attack vector, or authorities could abuse it in some contexts, such as law enforcement.
People Injured or Bereaved by COVID Vaccines ‘Speak in Code Online Over Censorship Fears’
People left injured or bereaved from vaccines are being forced to speak in code online about their symptoms for fear of censorship, the COVID Inquiry has heard.
Baroness Hallett, the inquiry’s chair, was told at a hearing on Wednesday that healthcare workers are afraid to speak out about side effects they have had from the jab, over fears they will be punished by their bosses.
It comes as campaign groups representing hundreds of people who suffered illness or lost loved ones after being vaccinated will be allowed to give evidence to the public inquiry.
Anne Morris KC, representing U.K. CV Family, Vaccine Injured Bereaved U.K. (VIBUK) and the Scottish Vaccine Injury Group, told the inquiry: “Censorship is a very real issue for the vaccine injured and bereaved. Their support groups have been shut down by social media platforms and their experiences censored by the mainstream media.
“They have to speak in code online for fear of having the only source of support taken away from them.”
Dutch Groups Launch Major Privacy Lawsuit Against Google
Two Dutch consumer groups have launched a wide-ranging lawsuit against Google, alleging the company has been committing ‘large-scale privacy violations.’
The Consumers’ Association and the Foundation for the Protection of Privacy Interests claim the company has been collecting users’ online behavior and location data, without providing enough information or having obtained their permission.
The company then shares that information with hundreds of parties via its online advertising platform, they say. The data includes, for example, highly sensitive personal data about health, ethnicity and political preference.
“Google is constantly monitoring everyone. Even when using third-party cookies — which are invisible — Google continues to collect data through other people’s websites and apps, even when someone is not using its products or services,” says Ada van der Veer, chair of the Foundation for the Protection of Privacy Interests.
City Council in Texas Votes to Ban All COVID Vaccine, Mask Requirements
A Texas city council voted on Tuesday to prohibit the enforcement of any COVID-19 mandate implemented at the federal or state level. The City of Odessa’s resolution was presented by City Council Member Chris Hanie, who said residents should decide for themselves whether to mask up, KOSA reported.
State Representative Brian Harrison, who served as chief of staff of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services under the Trump administration partnered with the City of Odessa.
“Joe Biden and his administration are trying to bring back COVID tyranny for round two,” Harrison said. “It is incumbent on states, freedom-loving patriots, elected republicans,” he added. “I don’t care quite frankly what party you are. If you believe in freedom, it’s incumbent on you to stand up and push back against another round of COVID tyranny.”
Harrison said he believes Odessa is the first city in the state to ban coronavirus mandates.