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A Backroom Deal Looms Over a High-Stakes U.S. Surveillance Fight
Twice in the past decade, legislation limiting the United States government’s domestic surveillance powers sailed through the U.S. House of Representatives. Attached to bills that would ultimately become law, both of these pro-privacy amendments were killed off in the final hours of consideration — erased each time in secret meetings held among a select group of congressional power brokers. Capitol Hill sources familiar with ongoing negotiations over a top U.S. surveillance program fear House leaders may once again scrap popular civil-liberty-focused reforms.
Last week, House members became aware that closed-door discussions were ongoing at the highest levels concerning the latest pro-privacy reforms to gain widespread legislative support. Public reporting on the discussions, first disclosed by Politico, set off a firestorm of speculation over whether another deal may have been quietly struck to prolong a domestic surveillance program no longer assumed to have the support of a majority of Congress.
Sources with knowledge of ongoing negotiations over the future of Section 702 — a controversial but pivotal U.S. foreign surveillance program — say a host of pro-privacy reforms, including new warrant requirements for obtaining commercially available data, have gained serious traction among an anomalous coalition of progressives and conservatives otherwise at odds on most matters. WIRED granted these sources anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about ongoing negotiations.
A source with knowledge of the 702 fight tells WIRED that last week House Speaker Mike Johnson and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise met privately about drafting a new bill to reauthorize the program — an attempt to somehow merge existing bills introduced separately in December by the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees. The history of genuine privacy legislation being killed off in these closed-door sessions immediately sparked concerns among reformers.
Google Vows to Use AI Models and Work With EU Anti-‘Disinformation’ Groups and Global ‘Fact-Checking’ Groups to Censor ‘Misinformation,’ ‘Hate’
Does the European Parliament need the “support” for its elections from a tech behemoth like Google? Google certainly thinks so, as does the EU.
And Google is doing it the best way it knows how: by manipulating information. A blog post on the giant’s site calls this “surfacing high-quality information to voters.”
Working with EU’s various “anti-disinformation” groups and “fact-checkers” from around the world to facilitate censorship is also part of the promised “support package,” while the targets of this censorship will be the usual list of online bogeymen (as designated by Google and/or governments), real or imagined: manipulated media, hate, harassment, misinformation.
All this will have to be done at scale, Google notes, hence the promise of bringing in more AI (Large Language Models, LLMs, included) than ever.
U.S. Judge Blocks Ohio Law Restricting Children’s Use of Social Media
A federal judge on Monday prevented Ohio from implementing a new law that requires social media companies, including Meta Platform’s (META.O) Instagram and ByteDance’s TikTok, to obtain parental consent before allowing children under 16 to use their platforms.
Chief U.S. District Judge Algenon Marbley in Columbia agreed with the tech industry trade group NetChoice that the law violated minors’ free speech rights under the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment.
It marked the latest court decision blocking a state’s law designed to protect young people online as federal and state lawmakers look for ways to address rising concerns about the dangers posed by social media to the mental health of children.
Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, a Republican, called the ruling disappointing. He cited “overwhelming evidence that social media has a negative effect on the mental health of minors, including increases in depression and suicide-related behavior.”
Major Companies Are Reportedly Using This AI Tool to Track Slack and Teams Messages From More Than 3 Million Employees. Privacy Experts Are Alarmed.
Aware, a software startup, is using AI to read employee messages sent across business communication platforms like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Workplace by Meta. Its purpose: to monitor employee behavior in an attempt to understand risk.
Some of the biggest American companies — including Starbucks, Chevron, T-Mobile, Walmart, and Delta — use Aware to assess up to 20 billion individual messages across more than 3 million employees, the company said, per CNBC.
But even though workplace surveillance is nothing new, some experts have expressed concerns that using nascent AI technology to track employees can lead to faulty decision-making — and a privacy nightmare.
Brianna Ghey’s Mother Warns Tech Bosses More Children Will Die Without Action
The mother of Brianna Ghey has called for her murder to be a “tipping point” in how society views “the mess” of the internet, warning that a generation of anxious young people will grow up lacking resilience.
Esther Ghey said technology companies had a “moral responsibility” to restrict access to harmful online content. She supports a total ban on social media access for under-16s — a move currently under debate in certain legislatures, including Florida in the U.S.
Talking to the Guardian, the 37-year-old food technologist said tech bosses were also culpable when it came to the wave of anxiety and mental health problems affecting children, which she said had led to “a complete lack of resilience in young people.”
She said tech companies should reflect not just on Brianna’s murder, but also on “the amount of young people that have taken their own lives” as a result of their harmful experiences online.
‘Behind the Times’: Washington Tries to Catch Up With AI’s Use in Healthcare
Lawmakers and regulators in Washington are starting to puzzle over how to regulate artificial intelligence in healthcare — and the AI industry thinks there’s a good chance they’ll mess it up.
“It’s an incredibly daunting problem,” said Bob Wachter, the chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of California-San Francisco. “There’s a risk we come in with guns blazing and overregulate.”
Already, AI’s impact on healthcare is widespread. The Food and Drug Administration has approved some 692 AI products. Algorithms are helping to schedule patients, determine staffing levels in emergency rooms, and even transcribe and summarize clinical visits to save physicians’ time. They’re starting to help radiologists read MRIs and X-rays. Wachter said he sometimes informally consults a version of GPT-4, a large language model from the company OpenAI, for complex cases.
Fertility Tracker Glow Fixes Bug That Exposed Users’ Personal Data
A bug in the online forum for the fertility tracking app Glow exposed the personal data of around 25 million users, according to a security researcher.
The bug exposed users’ first and last names, self-reported age groups (such as children aged 13-18 and adults aged 19-25, and aged 26 and older), the user’s self-described location, the app’s unique user identifier (within Glow’s software platform) and any user-uploaded images, such as profile photos.
Security researcher Ovi Liber told TechCrunch that he found user data leaking from Glow’s developer API. Liber reported the bug to Glow in October and said Glow fixed the leak about a week later.
In a blog post published on Monday, Liber wrote that the vulnerability he found affected all of Glow’s 25 million users. Liber told TechCrunch that accessing the data was relatively easy.
EU Lawmakers Ratify Political Deal on Artificial Intelligence Rules
Two key groups of lawmakers at the European Parliament on Tuesday ratified a provisional agreement on landmark artificial intelligence rules ahead of a vote by the legislative assembly in April that will pave the way for the world’s first legislation on the technology.
Called the AI Act, the new rules aim to set the guardrails for a technology used in a broad swathe of industries, ranging from banking to cars to electronic products and airlines, as well as for security and police purposes.
The rules will also regulate foundation models or generative AI like the one built by Microsoft-backed OpenAI (MSFT.O), which are AI systems trained on large sets of data, with the ability to learn from new data to perform various tasks.
EU countries gave their backing earlier this month after France secured concessions to lighten the administrative burden on high-risk AI systems and offer better protection for business secrets. Big Tech however remained guarded, worried about the vague and general wording of some of the requirements and the impact of the law on innovation.
