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Report: DOJ Asked Court to Hide Surveillance of Congressional Investigators
The former congressional investigator Jason Foster has exposed a five year secret surveillance operation conducted by the Department of Justice (DOJ) on members of congress and their staff. According to Foster, who now heads the Empower Oversight whistleblower center, the DOJ managed to obtain a federal court’s approval for this covert spying, largely centered on personal communication data of the targets.
Just The News reports that in his role as the chief investigative counsel for Senator Chuck Grassley on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Foster worked vigilantly to discern wrongdoings within the government. However, his communications were closely monitored as part of a federal leaks investigation, the evidence which has been recently unveiled to him by Google’s lawyers.
Foster divulged that the data pertaining to his personal conversations was procured by the government in 2017, a fact that should have been disclosed to him by 2018 under the initial court order. However, due to the DOJ’s petitions to the court to keep this surveillance confidential, Foster had been oblivious to the surveillance until recent months, nearly six years after his personal data was subpoenaed.
In a bid to conduct a thorough examination of the conspiracy, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan has petitioned both parties to initiate investigations. Additionally, Jordan has also requested that the country’s tech giants surrender any evidence pointing towards the DOJ’s surveillance tactics on congress members or their teams.
Senators Demand Documents From Meta on Social Media Harm to Children
A bipartisan group of U.S. Senators has written to Meta Platforms (META.O) CEO Mark Zuckerberg demanding documents about its research into the harm to children from its social media platforms. A whistleblower’s release of documents in 2021 showed Meta knew Instagram, which began as a photo-sharing app, was addictive and worsened body image issues for some teen girls.
“Members of Congress have repeatedly asked Meta for information on its awareness of threats to young people on its platforms and the measures that it has taken, only to be stonewalled and provided non-responsive or misleading information,” the senators wrote in a letter.
The letter follows a hearing with a new whistleblower last week and after a newly unsealed complaint filed by the Massachusetts Attorney General, the senators said.
Newly unsealed disclosures suggest Meta executives’ direct knowledge of the harm related to its products and concealment from Congress and the public, supporting former executive Arturo Béjar’s testimony to a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee, according to the senators.
Several Popular AI Products Flagged as Unsafe for Kids by Common Sense Media
An independent review of popular AI tools has found that many — including Snapchat’s My AI, DALLE, and Stable Diffusion, may not be safe for kids. The new reviews come from Common Sense Media, a nonprofit advocacy group for families that’s best known for providing media ratings for parents who want to evaluate the apps, games, podcasts, TV shows, movies, and books their children are consuming.
Earlier this year, the company said it would soon add ratings for AI products to its resources for families. Today, those ratings have gone live, offering so-called “nutrition labels” for AI products, like chatbots, image generators, and more.
The company first announced in July that it aimed to build a rating system to assess AI products across a number of dimensions, including whether or not the technology takes advantage of responsible AI practices as well as its suitability for children. The move was triggered by a survey of parents to gauge their interest in such a service. 82% of parents said they wanted help in evaluating whether or not new AI products, like ChatGPT, were safe for their kids to use. Only 40% said they knew of any reliable resources that would help them to make those determinations.
That led to today’s launch of Common Sense Media’s first AI product ratings. The products it assesses are ratings across several AI principles, including trust, kids’ safety, privacy, transparency, accountability, learning, fairness, social connections, and benefits to people and society.
Google’s Bard Expands Chatbot Access to Teens as ChatGPT Usage Surges
The Hollywood Reporter reported:
Usage of AI chatbots appears to be increasing, as Google’s AI chatbot, Bard will be available to teens in most countries starting Thursday, and ChatGPT was forced to temporarily pause new signups due to demand.
In a blog post Wednesday, Google outlined the potential uses among teens, highlighting prompts such as how to write a class president speech and science fair project ideas. Bard will also allow teens to type or upload a math equation and then provide step-by-step instructions on how to solve it.
The tech giant says it has also consulted with child safety and development experts on the usage of the chatbot among teens, who are available to use it as young as age 13 in the U.S. Among the safeguards, Bard will introduce a “double-check” feature that verifies answers with content across the internet, as well as safety features that prevent illegal or unsafe content from appearing in the answers.
Parents Are Suing Roblox for Exposing Children to Inappropriate Content. What You Need to Know.
Following in the footsteps of civil groups taking a legal stance against social media and tech giants, a group of families have filed a class action lawsuit against gaming platform Roblox.
The lawsuit accuses the Roblox Corporation of “negligent misrepresentation and false advertising” of the platform, marketing the mini-game hub as a platform for children while simultaneously showing underage users inappropriate or explicit content and allowing them to engage in inappropriate encounters.
The group also accuses the company of misleading parents into spending thousands of dollars on the site due to obscured prices and children’s ability to make in-game purchases using fictional “Robux.”
‘Experts’ Were Confident That They Knew What to Do About COVID. They Were Wrong About so Much.
The Orange County Register reported:
“Experts” were confident that they knew what America should do about COVID. They were wrong about so much. Officials pushed masks, including useless cloth ones. Dr. Anthony Fauci said, “Don’t wear masks” — then, “Do wear them.” Some states closed playgrounds and banned motorboats and Jet Skis. Towns in New York banned using leaf-blowers. California pointlessly closed beaches and gave people citations for “watching the sunset.” The list goes on.
Sen. Rand Paul’s new book, “Deception,” argues that government experts didn’t just make mistakes; they were purposely deceitful. A few weeks ago, this column reported how Paul was correct in accusing Fauci of funding virus research in Wuhan and lying about it.
He points out that Fauci, in private, told fellow bureaucrats that masking is pointless. Fauci wrote in one email: “The typical mask you buy in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out virus, which is small enough to pass through the material.”
Another mistake: the virus is 500 times more likely to kill people ages 65 and up than kill kids. But our government told parents: mask your children. Some states kept kids out of schools for two years.
