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New York’s Hunger Games Governor Is Now ‘Collecting Data’ From ‘Surveillance Efforts’ on Social Media to Monitor ‘Hate Speech’
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) threw off some serious Hunger Games vibes Monday, announcing that the state of New York has been “collecting data” from social media platforms in order to combat “hate speech” following an alleged rise in antisemitic attacks.
The announcement came after Hochul met with the state’s Jewish leaders, local law enforcement and federal authorities.
“We’re very focused on the data we’re collecting from surveillance efforts — what’s being said on social media platforms. And we have launched an effort to be able to counter some of the negativity and reach out to people when we see hate speech being spoken about on online platforms,” she said, adding that New Yorkers “should not feel they have to hide any indications of what their religious beliefs are.”
Some definitions of ‘hate speech’ and ‘incitement to violence,’ plus a list of who’s judging speech to be hateful, would be nice.
Free Speech Has Never Been Easier, or More at Risk
I’ll take a leap and say that speech has probably never been freer in the world than it is today. Multiple venues, especially social media, allow people’s perspectives to take flight fluently, globally and frequently. Pick your format — print, audio, video, images — and you can easily put ideas in front of an audience. Huge audiences, potentially.
The culture of free speech is also under steady and ever more sophisticated assaults, perhaps because its ubiquity is threatening to any person or institution that holds an opposing viewpoint. The very thing that makes speech so free right now — ease of motion — is, perhaps, what also makes it more threatening.
If speech feels threatening, the solution isn’t to bottle it up. As Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis advised almost a century ago, “The remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”
But we are awash in efforts to enforce or encourage silence in our current, chaotic era. Everything from education and public health to political opinion, religion and art have offered fodder for attempted censorship.
Supreme Court Delivers Blow to Vaccine Skeptics
The U.S. Supreme Court rejected to hear an appeal relating to COVID-19 vaccine requirements in the workplace, dealing a blow to vaccine skeptics across the nation.
On Tuesday morning, the Supreme Court orders list showed that it was denying to hear any further arguments in the case Katie Sczesny, et al. v. Murphy, Gov. of New Jersey, et al. The case focused on four New Jersey nurses who filed a lawsuit against New Jersey’s COVID-19 vaccine requirements in the workplace, citing religious freedom and health concerns.
The Supreme Court did not provide any further explanation for its refusal to hear the case, but the decision allows a ruling in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit to stand. The lower court ruled that the vaccine mandate challenged by the nurses did not violate their Constitutional freedoms and allowed an executive order from New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy to stay in place.
The decision by the Supreme Court on Tuesday comes as some Americans have continued to question the effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccine and past requirements for workers to be inoculated during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Deepfakes Could Supercharge Healthcare’s Misinformation Problem
For all the promise that artificial intelligence holds for healthcare, one of the industry’s big fears is its potential to churn out more convincing misinformation.
Why it matters: AI experts are warning that tech used to create sophisticated false images, audio and video known as deepfakes is getting so good it could soon become almost impossible to distinguish fact from fiction.
The big picture: This technology is becoming better and more ubiquitous sooner than experts expected at a time when health information is being politicized and social media‘s already weak guardrails have been whittled down.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Wants to Build AI ‘Superintelligence’
OpenAI plans to secure further financial backing from its biggest investor Microsoft as the ChatGPT maker’s chief executive Sam Altman pushes ahead with his vision to create artificial general intelligence — computer software as intelligent as humans.
In an interview with the Financial Times, Altman said his company’s partnership with Microsoft’s chief executive Satya Nadella was “working really well” and that he expected “to raise a lot more over time” from the tech giant among other investors, to keep up with the punishing costs of building more sophisticated AI models.
Microsoft earlier this year invested $10 billion in OpenAI as part of a “multiyear” agreement that valued the San Francisco-based company at $29 billion, according to people familiar with the talks.
U.S. Privacy Groups Urge Senate Not to Ram Through NSA Spying Powers
Some of the United States’ largest civil liberties groups are urging Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer not to pursue a short-term extension of the Section 702 surveillance program slated to sunset on December 31.
The more than 20 groups — the Brennan Center for Justice, American Civil Liberties Union, and Asian Americans Advancing Justice among them — oppose plans that would allow the program to continue temporarily by amending “must-pass” legislation, such as the bill needed now to avert a government shutdown by Friday, or the National Defense Authorization Act, annual legislation set to dictate $886 billion in national security spending across the Pentagon and U.S. Department of Energy in 2024.
As WIRED has previously reported, surveillance under the 702 program may technically continue for another six months, regardless of whether Congress reauthorizes it by the end of December. The program was last certified by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in April 2023 for a full year. “Transition procedures” codified in the statute permit surveillance orders to “continue in effect” until they expire.
The 702 program is controversial for its collection of communications of “US persons.” The program legally targets roughly a quarter million foreigners each year, gathering the content of their text messages, emails, and phone calls, but collaterally intercepts an unknown but presumably large amount of American communications as well. This interception takes place with the compelled cooperation of U.S. telecommunications companies that handle internet traffic at stages along global networks.
U.K. Government Proposals Would Allow It to Mass Surveil All Users of an Internet Service Within Specific Timeframe
The U.K. government has presented draft amendments to the Investigatory Powers Act (IPA) — otherwise known as “Snoopers Charter,” a highly controversial piece of legislation allowing for wide-scale spying by intelligence agencies.
The plan now is to specify that the authorities have the right to carry out mass surveillance of an internet service within a specific timeframe — and do so “dragnet-style,” by spying on all users of that service during a given time.
The first comparison that springs to mind is that this is a purely digital version of another very controversial mass surveillance practice known as “geofencing,” which involves obtaining data from service providers on all persons who happen to be within a physical perimeter.
The amendments were introduced in the British parliament on November 8, and separate from the bill on amendments itself, the U.K. Home Office has released “explanatory notes” that are not in fact a part of the proposed legislation.
Nepal Becomes Latest Country to Ban TikTok, Citing Disruption of ‘Social Harmony’
Nepal became the latest country to ban video-sharing platform TikTok, saying that the popular app was disrupting “social harmony.”
Foreign Minister Narayan Prakash Saud said TikTok would be banned immediately following a Cabinet meeting on Monday, The Associated Press reported. He also said that the government has asked social media platforms to register and open a liaison office in the country, pay taxes and follow the country’s laws and regulations, the AP noted.
“The government has decided to ban TikTok as it was necessary to regulate the use of the social media platform that was disrupting social harmony, goodwill and flow of indecent materials,” Saud said.
TikTok, which is owned by Chinese company ByteDance, has faced intense scrutiny over the past year due to cybersecurity concerns that the Chinese Communist Party could potentially access data from TikTok. Several countries have already banned the platform of government phones, including Britain, New Zealand and the United States. Several states in the U.S. have also banned TikTok from government devices due to cybersecurity concerns.
