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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.
