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New York COVID Quarantine Rules Unconstitutional and Illegal: Judge
A New York Supreme Court judge this month quietly ruled that regulations mandating that people infected with or exposed to highly contagious communicable diseases be quarantined are a violation of state law, declaring them null and void. The Isolation and Quarantine procedures, known as Rule 2.13, were enacted in February.
Three Republican state legislators, Sen. George Borrello, assemblyman Chris Tague and assemblyman Michael Lawler, along with Uniting NYS, filed a lawsuit against Democrat Gov. Kathy Hochul, Commissioner of Health Mary Bassett, the state’s health department and the Public Health and Health Planning Council.
Plaintiffs argued that the Isolation and Quarantine procedures were in violation of the New York State Constitution and a violation of the separation of powers. In a July 8 ruling, Acting Justice of the Supreme Court of Cattaraugus County Ronald D. Ploetz sided with the plaintiffs, stating that the rule merely gives “lip service” to constitutional due process.
On Tuesday, Hochul told local media that she would be appealing the court’s decision, stating, “We feel very confident that if we appeal this, we will be successful.” New York Attorney General Letitia James’s office on Wednesday formally appealed the state Supreme Court ruling, according to local reports.
Gov. J.B. Pritzker Ends COVID Vaccine Mandates at Colleges as He Tweaks Many Statewide Pandemic Restrictions
Gov. J.B. Pritzker is ending Illinois’ COVID-19 vaccine mandate for college students and faculty and easing some testing requirements for unvaccinated healthcare workers, changes that come despite growing concerns about new coronavirus variants that appear more able to evade immunity.
The same vaccination and testing requirements that have been in place since last year for elementary and secondary schools, as well as daycare centers, will remain in effect.
But under Pritzker’s new rules, workers in hospitals and other healthcare facilities — aside from long-term care facilities — who aren’t fully vaccinated will have to continue to submit to weekly testing but only if they are in a high coronavirus transmission county as determined by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Philly Has Started Placing Unvaccinated City Workers on Leave. Here’s How the Numbers Break Down.
The Philadelphia Inquirer reported:
Philadelphia city officials placed about 270 workers on leave this month for failing to comply with the city’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate, and more than 1 in 6 of the city’s public-safety employees requested to be exempt.
More than 5% of the unionized employees in the Prisons Department were placed on leave, and nearly 4% of the Fire Department’s unionized force — which includes firefighters, paramedics and EMTs — are on leave as well, the data show.
The 30-day “U-Vax leave” began on July 6. Workers may use accumulated paid time off, and then will be unpaid if that is exhausted. Employees may be fired if they remain out of compliance after the leave period.
About 22% of the Fire Department and more than 15% of the Police Department requested exemptions, the highest proportion among the city’s largest departments. It’s significantly higher than, for example, the 8% of workers in the Streets Department who requested exemptions or the 3% in Parks and Recreation.
Australian Football League Lifts COVID Vaccine Mandate for Players and Club Staff
The Australian Football League (AFL) has removed its COVID-19 vaccine mandate, paving the way for exiled players to return to the top level. Players, coaches and club staff will no longer need two doses of an approved vaccine in order to train and play.
The move brings the league into line with government requirements that legislate only specific industries need employees to be fully vaccinated.
The league released a statement saying: “Those players who were not fully vaccinated and ineligible to play and departed their clubs, as a result, may now seek to re-enter the AFL or AFLW system.”
Mexico Says It Will Spend $1.5 Billion to Invest In Controversial ‘Smart’ Border Surveillance Tech
Following a wide-ranging meeting with U.S. President Joe Biden this week, Mexican President Andres Manuel López Obrador agreed to spend some $1.5 billion over the next two years investing in so-called “smart” border technology.
Though neither president provided concrete details on where the new funds would be allocated, previous smart border and smart wall pushes generally refer to a patchwork of facial recognition, drones, sensors, license plate readers, dog-like robots, DNA collection, and other emerging surveillance technologies that all strive to keep constant tabs on anyone entering or leaving the U.S.-Mexico border.
Though these so-called smart solutions seemingly offer an attractive alternative to sprawling physical barriers — particularly among Democratic lawmakers — they’ve simultaneously drawn intense scrutiny from academics and civil liberties groups who warn the technologies are ripe for abuse.
Censorship Will Kill Free Speech and Bury the Lessons of History
Patrick Provost, a tenured, published and respected Professor of Immunology at Université Laval who specializes in micro RNA, was suspended without pay for eight weeks for comments he made at a conference last December where he questioned the need for vaccinating children. The FDA, CDC and Health Canada themselves had at various times questioned the same issue.
Provost said, “I was just doing what I was hired to do. I searched the literature and gave a speech. Being censored for doing what I’ve been trained to do and hired to do is hard to believe.” But now we are all apparently supposed to be in lockstep groupthink. Thankfully his union has asked for his reinstatement with back pay.
There is a dangerous current running through society that for the sake of not offending anyone’s sensibilities, it is acceptable to engage in censorship. Public sanctioning of individuals daring to use certain words and express unpopular opinions.
This is wrong and dangerous. It kills free speech and buries the lessons of history. The only objective standard for limiting freedom of expression is overt incitement to violence. Every other standard is totally subjective and depending on who wields power, censorship can and has been used against the just and the innocent.
Technocracy: A Digital Slave System Where No Dissent Is Allowed
Through the Internet, people have been able to share information with each other in a way that was not possible before. According to the UN, this has not been entirely a good thing. People risk sharing “incorrect” information. It is therefore considered central to address what they term “infodemics” (the spreading of “dangerous” global rumors) and “false information.” Large-scale misinformation and undermining of “scientifically established facts” are seen as extremely serious problems.
The World Economic Forum (a UN Agenda 2030 partner since 2019) described the problem of “infodemics” in relation to pandemics as early as in its first Global Risks Report from 2006. The same report also called for top-down monitoring of global risks using satellites.
The problem was also raised in WEF’s latest Global Risks Report from 2022. This paints a serious threat to science, which means: Censure, denial and/or skepticism towards scientific evidence and the scientific community on a global scale, resulting in regression or stalling of progress on climate action, human health and/or technological innovation.
The fact that this procedure and ideas of “scientific consensus” are directly incompatible with the scientific method does not concern these actors because they still know what is best for us. Instead, there is a call for a form of “Ministry of Truth” that can evaluate and classify the information. This work will also be performed by their own well-drilled change agents.
A Legal Shield for Social Media Is Showing Cracks
An 11-year-old dies by suicide after she is sexually exploited on Instagram and Snapchat. Two teenagers are killed in a crash following a race using a Snapchat speed filter. A sexual predator uses Facebook to lure a 15-year-old girl into trafficking.
Social media companies for decades have been shielded from legal consequences for what happens on their platforms. But a sharp shift in public opinion and a bend in recent court rulings have the industry nervous that this could change — especially when damage is done to children online.
Lawsuits blaming social media platforms for teen suicides, eating disorders and mental collapses have picked up in the months since Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen told Congress that her company knew its products were addictive to kids and that their mental stability was suffering as a result.
And a bill moving through the California statehouse would make companies liable for addicting children, drawing comparisons to a strategy used against the tobacco industry.
Kids and Teens Now Spend More Time Watching TikTok Than YouTube, New Data Shows
Kids and teens are now spending more time watching videos on TikTok than on YouTube.
In fact, that’s been the case since June 2020 — the month when TikTok began to outrank YouTube in terms of the average minutes per day people ages 4 through 18 spent accessing these two competitive video platforms. That month, TikTok overtook YouTube for the first time, as this younger demographic began averaging 82 minutes per day on TikTok versus an average of 75 minutes per day on YouTube.
In the years since TikTok has continued to dominate with younger users. By the end of 2021, kids and teens were watching an average of 91 minutes of TikTok per day compared with just 56 minutes per day spent watching YouTube, on a global basis.
A New Attack Can Unmask Anonymous Users on Any Major Browser
Everyone from advertisers and marketers to government-backed hackers and spyware makers wants to identify and track users across the web. And while a staggering amount of infrastructure is already in place to do exactly that, the appetite for data and new tools to collect it has proved insatiable.
With that reality in mind, researchers from the New Jersey Institute of Technology are warning this week about a novel technique that attackers could use to de-anonymize website visitors and potentially connect the dots on many components of targets’ digital lives.
The findings, which NJIT researchers will present at the Usenix Security Symposium in Boston next month, show how an attacker who tricks someone into loading a malicious website can determine whether that visitor controls a particular public identifier, like an email address or social media account, thus linking the visitor to a piece of potentially personal data.
