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Fauci Is Put on Notice, Told to Preserve Records for Major Free Speech Lawsuit
The New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA) non-profit has sent a letter to Dr. Anthony Fauci and several medical and other U.S. officials, as well as to Google, making sure they are formally notified of their obligations to preserve communications records. The records in question are relevant to a major First Amendment case alleging collusion between the government and tech companies, Murthy v. Missouri (formerly Missouri v. Biden), which is currently in the U.S. Supreme Court.
The NCLA letter specified that the request pertains to all documents and electronically stored information, under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 34. Those named in the letter are former chief medical adviser to President Biden Dr. Anthony Fauci, his colleague from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (that Fauci headed during the pandemic) Dr. David Morens, Adam Kirschner of the U.S. State Department, and Google General Counsel Halimah DeLaine Prado, among others.
The letter recalled that Fauci is a defendant in the landmark First Amendment case, alleging that he and other government officials named in Murthy v. Missouri — including the president himself — engaged in unconstitutional censorship of social media around COVID issues such as lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccines.
NCLA has joined the plaintiffs in Murthy v. Missouri and is now in that capacity requesting that Fauci, Morens, and others preserve all documents, including drafts and copies, and paper files maintained by their staff that are relevant to the case.
Washington Parental Rights Law Criticized as a ‘Forced Outing’ Measure Is Allowed to Take Effect
A new Washington state parental rights law derided by critics as a “forced outing” measure will be allowed to take effect this week after a court commissioner on Tuesday declined to issue an emergency order temporarily blocking it.
The civil liberties groups, school district, youth services organizations and others who are challenging the law did not show that it would create the kind of imminent harm necessary to warrant blocking it until a trial court judge can consider the matter, King County Superior Court Commissioner Mark Hillman said. A hearing before the judge is scheduled for June 21.
The law, known as Initiative 2081, underscores, and in some cases expands, the rights already granted to parents under state and federal law. It requires schools to notify parents in advance of medical services offered to their child, except in emergencies, and of medical treatment arranged by the school resulting in follow-up care beyond normal hours. It grants parents the right to review their child’s medical and counseling records and expands cases where parents can opt their child out of sex education.
How Internet Addiction May Affect Your Teen’s Brain, According to a New Study
Teens who spend lots of time on social media have complained of feeling like they can’t pay attention to more important things like homework or time with loved ones.
A new study has possibly captured that objectively, finding that for teens diagnosed with internet addiction, signaling between brain regions important for controlling attention, working memory and more was disrupted.
The findings are from a review, published Tuesday in the journal PLOS Mental Health, of 12 neuroimaging studies of a few hundred adolescents ages 10 to 19 between 2013 and 2022.
“The behavioral addiction brought on by excessive internet use has become a rising source of concern since the last decade,” the authors wrote in the study.
Google’s Hidden Logs Detail Thousands of Privacy Breaches
Call them mistakes, mishaps or reckless, a pattern of serious privacy breaches has been leaked from the big tech giant according to Google employee reports. In an era where data is as precious as gold, even giants like Google are not immune to pitfalls in handling the vast reservoirs of personal information flowing through their systems.
A six-year span of internal Google reports, unearthed by 404 Media, exposes a troubling array of privacy breaches affecting everything from children’s voice data to the home addresses of unsuspecting carpool users.
Another significant breach involved the exposure of email addresses from over a million users of Socratic.org, an educational platform Google had acquired.
This breach, which left sensitive data like geolocation information and IP addresses accessible via the platform’s page source, lingered undetected for more than a year, affecting numerous users, including children.
Americans Need COVID Closure. Congress Just Blew Its Chance.
Congress blew its chance Monday to give Americans some insight into the COVID pandemic that has dominated our lives for years. Following a 15-month inquiry, Republicans on the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic called Anthony Fauci to testify in public at a special hearing, but committee members spent most of the time posturing rather than probing the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Many of us still want to know why the U.S. had more burdensome restrictions yet still lost more people, per capita, than other countries. We still want a coherent, honest explanation for how the pandemic started. Some thoughtful scientists have suggested a bipartisan investigation similar to the 9/11 Commission to give Americans the answers we deserve. Yet yesterday, representatives from both parties showed no curiosity, either for themselves or for the American people.
Fauci was also evasive on questions about vaccine mandates when he repeated that “vaccines save lives” — a statement that’s true but irrelevant. Some cancer screenings and drugs “save lives” but we don’t force people to get them. He did admit that at first, the vaccines seemed to prevent transmission but that scientists’ understanding changed as the virus evolved and as vaccines’ protection waned.
Fauci’s Testimony Reverberates in Florida
The hearing served as a reminder of how Florida, under Gov. Ron DeSantis, essentially ignored Dr. Anthony Fauci’s advice. Down ballot, it’ll provide fodder to Republicans who will boast about DeSantis’ approach as they try to win over the support of voters, reminding many transplants why they rebuilt their lives here in the first place.
“There was no science,” Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.), who’s considering running for Florida governor in two years, wrote in a post on X about Fauci saying the six-feet social distancing recommendation from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention wasn’t based on clinical trials. Rep. Kat Cammack (R-Fla.) praised colleagues for “holding Dr. Fauci accountable.”
Fauci has been one of DeSantis’ favorite boogeymen. His gubernatorial reelection campaign sold “Don’t Fauci My Florida” merch and the governor often boasts that he prevented Florida from becoming a “Faucian dystopia.”
When he ran for president he promised to bring a “reckoning” to Fauci over his handling of the pandemic. Though DeSantis lost the GOP nomination, a Florida grand jury is still looking into the COVID vaccine and its manufacturers, and already criticized forced masking and lockdowns.
100,000 Models Show That Not Much Was Learned About Stopping the COVID Pandemic
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, scientists and public health institutions made bold claims about the effectiveness of various policy responses such as closing schools and banning public gatherings. These claims shaped government responses and had enormous effects on the lives of billions of people around the world. Are those claims supported by data?
To answer that question, we explored whether patterns in the epidemiologic data could support claims made in the scientific literature and by public health institutions about the effectiveness of policy responses to COVID-19.
We were optimistic we would find some policies that were consistently helpful. We thought the data would show that early shelter-in-place containment measures in the spring of 2020 were more effective in preventing deaths than those later in the pandemic, or that case numbers would not rise after restrictions on attending schools were lifted. That isn’t what we found, as we describe in a paper published today in Science Advances.
Looking at stay-at-home policies and school closures, about half the time it looked like COVID-19 outcomes improved after their imposition, and half the time they got worse. Every policy, COVID-19 outcome, time period, and modeling approach yielded a similar level of uncertainty: about half the time it looked like things got better, and half the time like things got worse.
Yet scientists used these data to make definitive conclusions.
Google to Start Permanently Deleting Users’ Location History
Google will delete everything it knows about users’ previously visited locations, the company has said, a year after it committed to reducing the amount of personal data it stores about users.
The company’s “timeline” feature — previously known as Location History — will still work for those who choose to use it, letting them scroll back through potentially decades of travel history to check where they were at a specific time.
But all the data required to make the feature work will be saved locally, to their own phones or tablets, with none of it being stored on the company’s servers.
Canada’s Extremist Attack on Free Speech
In 1984, George Orwell coined the term thoughtcrime. In the short story “The Minority Report,” the science-fiction author Philip K. Dick gave us the concept of “precrime,” describing a society where would-be criminals were arrested before they could act.
Now Canada is combining the concepts in a work of dystopian nonfiction: A bill making its way through Parliament would impose draconian criminal penalties on hate speech and curtail people’s liberty in order to stop future crimes they haven’t yet committed.
The Online Harms Act states that any person who advocates for or promotes genocide is “liable to imprisonment for life.” It defines lesser “hate crimes” as including online speech that is “likely to foment detestation or vilification” on the basis of race, religion, gender, or other protected categories. And if someone “fears” they may become a victim of a hate crime, they can go before a judge, who may summon the preemptively accused for a sort of precrime trial. If the judge finds “reasonable grounds” for the fear, the defendant must enter into “a recognizance.”
A recognizance is no mere promise to refrain from committing hate crimes. The judge may put the defendant under house arrest or electronic surveillance and order them to abstain from alcohol and drugs. Refusal to “enter the recognizance” for one-year results in 12 months in prison.
This is madness.
