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Jordan Subpoenas Biden Spy Chief for Big Tech Collusion Investigation
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) subpoenaed Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, the Biden administration’s spy chief, on Thursday as part of an investigation into alleged government collusion with Big Tech companies, The Daily Wire can confirm.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has so far provided a “woefully inadequate” response to multiple requests by the judiciary panel and its Weaponization subcommittee for communications with “private companies, and other third-party groups such as nonprofit organizations, in addition to other information,” Jordan wrote in a cover letter for the subpoena.
Jordan contended that it is “necessary” for Congress to “gauge the extent to which ODNI officials have coerced, pressured, worked with, or relied upon social media and other tech companies to censor speech.” He stressed that the scope of the inquiry includes ODNI, and the result could be legislation that could exact “new statutory limits” on the Executive Branch being able to work with companies to restrict content and deplatform users.
A Week Into 2024 and Big Tech Has Earned Enough to Pay Off All 2023 Fines
2023 surely was an eventful year in tech. To cite just a few key moments, generative AI became mainstream thanks to software like ChatGPT; we had to say goodbye to the iconic blue bird while welcoming Twitter‘s new name (I know very well the pain of writing ‘X, formerly known as Twitter’ over the past six months); and big tech companies got fined the most under GDPR’s data abuses for a total of more than $3 billion.
“What’s clear is that these fines, though they appear to be a huge amount of money, in reality are just a drop in the ocean when it comes to the revenues that the tech giants are making. In other words, they aren’t a deterrent at all,” Jurgita Miseviciute, Head of Public Policy & Government Affairs at Proton, told me.
Researchers at Proton have calculated that Alphabet (Google‘s parent company) needs only a bit more than a day to pay off its $941 million fines. Amazon and Apple‘s earnings of just a few hours are then enough to repay their data protection’s sanctions of $111.7 and $186.4 million respectively.
While biggest data abuse perpetrator Meta, which got a record $1.3 billion fine for its (mis)handling of EU user data in May last year, managed to accumulate all the necessary money in just about five working days.
Zuckerberg: King of the Metaverse Review — It Will Make You Even More Terrified of the Internet
Is Mark Zuckerberg — the Facebook ‘dictator’ — really evil? Nobody in this two-hour tell-all seems to know or care. But it will make you question every website you dangerously rely on.
Google’s unofficial company motto, at least until it was restructured into Alphabet Inc in 2015, was “Don’t be evil”. That is not a normal thing to have to say. It should have been a warning to us all that big tech’s default position might, in fact … be evil?
But, y’know — what ya gonna do? That is the question, and its merely rhetorical nature is underscored at every turn by the two-hour documentary Zuckerberg: King of the Metaverse. Mark Zuckerberg, of course, is the inventor (in his Harvard dorm in 2004 at the age of 20) of Facebook, the social media platform that now connects 49% of the global population, and he is its CEO. Or perhaps, as one of the many contributors to the film puts it, “its dictator”. He is personally worth about $100 billion — probably the greatest self-made fortune in history.
In a way, it doesn’t matter. What matters is the creation, not the man. It is clear now what it does, what it can do and what it will continue to do if not regulated — perhaps by people who understand how the internet works and why the greatest experiment ever carried out on a global population might benefit from a weather eye being kept on it. The relationship status of people v the metaverse? It’s complicated. Dangerously so.
School Software Breach Reveals Private Data on Millions of Users
Experts have uncovered a significant data breach involving a non-password-protected database containing more than four million records, totalling around 827GB, concerning private school data.
Cybersecurity researcher Jeremiah Fowler said the breach at Texas-based school security company Raptor Technologies includes sensitive school safety records and personally identifiable information relating to students, parents, and staff. While reviewing a sample of the documents, Fowler discovered school layouts, information about malfunctioning cameras and security gaps, background checks, student health information, court-ordered protection orders, and more.
Raptor Technologies has since taken action to secure the files, but how long they were leaked for and whether anybody else had gained access to them remains unconfirmed.
Fowler outlined hypothetical scenarios of misuse, emphasizing the huge risks associated with the exposed information that could prove to be seriously harmful to those involved, including schoolchildren and minors.
Your Medical Data Is Code Blue
Until last November, I had never heard of Perry Johnson and Associates. But they had heard of me. In fact, without my knowledge, they had information about me that even my closest friends and relatives might not know.
Because the company provides “transcription and dictation” services to Northwell Health, a medical provider that has treated me in the past, they had access to what they refer to as “certain files containing my health information as well as other personal data.
”This might have included my name, birth date, address, and medical record number, and information about my medical condition — including admission diagnosis, operative reports, physical exams, laboratory and diagnostic results, and medical history, which could include family medical history, surgical history, social history, medications, allergies, and/or other observational information.
The medical information of nearly 10 million people would be an invaluable resource to drug marketers, insurance companies, and manufacturers of bogus medical devices. And unlike personal finance information, there’s no way to make that information moot. You can get a new credit card or a new bank account, but you can’t get a new medical history.
Regulators Are Finally Catching Up With Big Tech
In the United States, in the absence of federal privacy legislation, regulators have already started to repurpose laws and rules they do have at their disposal to address some of the most egregious examples of Big Tech playing fast and loose with our rights and personal data. In 2023, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) continued to expand the regulatory heft of consumer protection regulations.
It took on the problem of dark patterns — deceptive design used by apps and websites to trick users into doing something that they didn’t intend to, like buying or subscribing to something — with a half-billion-dollar fine against Fortnite maker Epic Games.
The FTC also issued massive fines to Amazon for significant breaches of privacy through Alexa and Ring doorbell devices. There are no signs that, in 2024, the FTC will slow down, with rules in the pipeline to govern commercial surveillance and digital security. In 2024, we’ll see regulators in other fields and other parts of the world follow suit, bolstered by the FTC’s successes.
Amazon’s Cashierless Checkout Is Coming to Hospitals
Amazon is pitching its cashierless checkout technology to hospitals and other healthcare facilities.
The company on Thursday said the latest version of its Just Walk Out system lets healthcare employees pay for items at on-site cafes using their work badge. Hospital visitors will also be able to shop at JWO-enabled stores using credit cards and debit cards, as well as mobile wallets. It’s rolling out the tech at St. Joseph’s/Candler Hospital in Savannah, Georgia, Amazon said in a blog post.
Amazon’s JWO technology allows shoppers to enter a store by scanning an app and exit without needing to stand in a checkout line. Cameras and sensors track what items shoppers select and charge them when they leave. Some newer iterations of the technology remove the need for ceiling-mounted cameras, and instead use radio-frequency identification, or RFID, tags to keep track of which items are taken off the shelf.
Johns Hopkins Medicine Brings Back Mandatory Masking at All Facilities in Maryland
Johns Hopkins Medicine will resume universal mandatory masking at its facilities, the hospital system announced on Thursday. The policy update will take effect on Jan. 12.
The mandatory masking is for patients, visitors and employees regardless of vaccination status at all Johns Hopkins Medicine locations throughout Maryland because of an increase in hospitalizations from COVID, the flu and RSV.
Earlier this week, LifeBridge Health and the University of Maryland Medical System reinstated masking at its medical facilities.
U.K. Communications Regulator Forms 350-Person Team to Enforce U.K.’S New Online Censorship Law
The authorities in the U.K. are “thinking of the children” — but really, of online censorship, say critics — and in doing so, thanks to Online Safety Act, are dipping their toes into the long since established in the U.S. “revolving door” policy.
In the U.K. there is evidence of this flow going in one direction — from private Big Tech corporations to government jobs. Reports say that in order to implement the controversial law that considerably restricts online speech, the regulator tasked with this, Ofcom, has employed as many as some 350 new staff — those from tech giants among them.
Those who pushed its adoption for a long time and continue to justify it, as well as the new, ex Big Tech hires, like to frame and sell the legislation as necessary in order to protect children’s well-being online. However, this is also the easiest way to protect themselves from criticism, as few people are willing to argue against a case positioned in this way.
However, many still have and do, and the gist of their opposition to the act and nebulous terms like “legal but harmful content” that must be suppressed is that one of the provisions — forcing messaging apps to scan user content (with child sexual abuse always first mentioned as a target — but not the only one) means a serious threat to encryption and therefore, online safety of everyone, including children.
