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NY Court Workers Fired for Refusing COVID Vax Must Be Rehired With Back Pay as State Board Scraps Mandate

New York Post reported:

New York court workers must be rehired — and given back pay with interest — if they were fired because they refused to get the COVID-19 vaccine, the state’s Public Employment Relations Board has ruled.

Under terms of the decision issued last month, the Unified Court System must immediately “cease and desist” from enforcing policies that require all non-judicial employees to be vaccinated or undergo regular testing. In addition, anyone “who lost accrued leave, compensation or employment” will have to be made “whole,” with interest paid “at the maximum legal rate,” according to the Feb. 24 decision obtained by The Post.

The decision affects at least about 25 court officers who were fired, said Dennis Quirk, president of the New York State Court Officers Association, one of 10 unions that challenged the mandate.

It’s unclear whether the decision will affect other state and Big Apple government employees who refused to get vaccinated, some of whom are suing New York City. A spokesperson for Mayor Eric Adams said the ruling won’t apply to city workers because it was “based on a different set of facts and laws” than those governing Big Apple employees.

FBI, Pentagon Helped Research Facial Recognition for Street Cameras, Drones

The Washington Post reported:

The FBI and the Defense Department were actively involved in research and development of facial recognition software that they hoped could be used to identify people from video footage captured by street cameras and flying drones, according to thousands of pages of internal documents that provide new details about the government’s ambitions to build out a powerful tool for advanced surveillance.

The documents, revealed in response to an ongoing Freedom of Information Act lawsuit the American Civil Liberties Union filed against the FBI, show how closely FBI and Defense officials worked with academic researchers to refine artificial-intelligence techniques that could help in the identification or tracking of Americans without their awareness or consent.

Program leaders worked with FBI scientists and some of the nation’s leading computer-vision experts to design and test software that would quickly and accurately process the “truly unconstrained face imagery” recorded by surveillance cameras in public places, including subway stations and street corners, according to the documents, which the ACLU shared with The Washington Post.

The internal emails, presentations and other records offer an unmatched look at the way the nation’s top law enforcement agency and military have aggressively pursued a technology that could be used to undermine Americans’ privacy and already has a counterpart in mass surveillance systems in London, Moscow and across China.

Pentagon Still Probing What Caused ‘Havana Syndrome,’ Even After Spy Agencies Found No Smoking Gun

Politico reported:

The Defense Department is continuing to conduct its own research into what the government calls “anomalous health incidents,” including what may have caused them and whether a weapon is responsible, according to five people familiar with the effort.

The research into the mysterious ailment referred to as “Havana Syndrome” that has affected more than 1,000 government employees over the past several years is continuing despite an intelligence community assessment released last week that said there was no evidence to support the theory that the incidents were caused by a foreign adversary wielding a weapon.

The illness was first reported in late 2016 when a group of U.S. diplomats serving at the U.S. embassy in Havana, Cuba, experienced severe headaches, temporary loss of hearing, vertigo and other symptoms similar to traumatic brain injury. Since then, hundreds more U.S. government personnel have reported these incidents, which many victims and experts still believe are the result of a directed-energy weapon.

The Pentagon is working on developing “defenses” against the syndrome and is investigating to see if it is possible that a weapon could be responsible, an intelligence official told reporters in a briefing on the findings last week.

Bill That Would Ban COVID Vaccine Mandates Heads to House Floor

KOMU 8 reported:

The Missouri House Rules Committee passed a bill Monday that would ban vaccine mandates by organizations across the state. House bill 700 passed in a vote of 7 “ayes” and 2 “noes.”

If passed by the General Assembly, public school districts, public charter schools, public bodies, political subdivisions, state departments, judicial officer, peace officer or anyone appointed by the governor, would not be allowed to mandate and require the following: COVID-19 vaccinations, a dose of messenger ribonucleic acid, receive any treatment or procedure intended or designed to edit or alter human deoxyribonucleic acid or the human genome and have placed under the student’s skin any mechanical or electronic device.

GOP Panel Ready to Block New Student Vaccination Mandates

Associated Press reported:

Wisconsin Republicans are preparing to again block a new policy from Democratic Gov. Tony Evers that requires students to get vaccinated twice against meningitis and tightening student chickenpox vaccination mandates.

The Legislature’s GOP-controlled rules committee is set to hold a public hearing on the policy Tuesday. A committee vote to block the policy could soon follow, perhaps within days.

State health officials in February announced they were trying again to implement regulations this fall that require students entering 7th grade to get vaccinated against meningitis. Students entering 12th grade must get a booster shot. Previously, the agency did not require students to get vaccinated against meningitis at all.

The health department also requires students to get vaccinated against chickenpox to enter every grade from kindergarten through 6th grade. In the past, a child was exempt if parents contacted the school district and said the child has already had the disease. Under the regulations beginning this fall, parents must provide evidence of infection from a healthcare provider to secure an exemption.

Biden’s Federal Employee Vaccine Mandate Faces a New Religious Discrimination Challenge

Government Executive reported:

A group consisting of nearly 10,000 federal employees has launched a new lawsuit against the Biden administration for its COVID-19 vaccine mandate, saying the currently paused requirement violates multiple laws that protect religious freedom.

In its new case, Feds for Medical Freedom alleged even unvaccinated employees at State who have received a religious exemption from the mandate have been left out of trainings, official events and balls, meetings and team-building exercises. They have been “berated,” harassed, coerced and ridiculed, according to the complaint. Requirements for unvaccinated workers to wear masks, quarantine at new posts or to enter vaccination status into a public calendar have outed employees who sought exemptions and led to further mistreatment, the employees said.

Several of the plaintiffs said they never received a decision on their exemption request, causing more stress and uncertainty. The adjudication process is paused across government as the mandate awaits resolution in court, but Feds for Medical Freedom said the delayed accommodation violated the Civil Rights Act. It said the same of the differential treatment, lost opportunities to travel and requirements to wear masks and test for COVID.

Eric Adams: NYC Shoppers Need to Ditch Masks to Show They Aren’t Crooks

New York Post reported:

Mayor Eric Adams wants the Big Apple’s retailers to make customers remove their masks in a bid to stem the ongoing shoplifting epidemic — but some merchants are wary of how they’re going to enforce that.

“We are putting out a clear call to all of our shops: Do not allow people to enter the store without taking off their face mask,” Adams said Monday on 1010 WINS radio. “And then once they’re inside, they can continue to wear it if they so desire to do so.

Adams said the move would help cops “use the technology we have available to identify those shoplifters and those who are committing serious crimes.”

When told his plan was “really putting the onus on the stores,” Adams said the NYPD was helping out by “beefing up our coverage in those BID [Business Improvement District] areas, those high-shopping areas, and we’re also beefing up our surveillance and practices.”

New Bill Will Give the Commerce Secretary the Power to Ban TikTok, Sen. Warner Says

CNBC reported:

A new bipartisan bill will empower the secretary of Commerce to take action against technology companies based in six foreign adversary nations, which would include China-based TikTok owner ByteDance, including banning them altogether, Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., said in an interview Tuesday on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”

The six countries included in the bill are China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela and Cuba, Warner said.

Last week, the House Foreign Affairs Committee passed a Republican-sponsored bill with similar goals along party lines. Still, several Democrats on the committee said they would like to support such a proposal, but hoped for more time and collaboration in crafting it.

Warner said he believes the risk that the Chinese government could direct TikTok to push or suppress certain messages is based on the potential for harm due to Chinese government access to U.S. users, rather than currently known issues. But, he said, the proposal would require the intelligence community to seek to declassify as much as possible if the administration wants to opt for a ban, to make the case to the public for why a technology truly is a national security risk.

Is the U.S. Government Ready for the Rise of Artificial Intelligence?

The Guardian reported:

We’re at a Frankenstein moment. An artificial intelligence boom is taking over Silicon Valley, with hi-tech firms racing to develop everything from self-driving cars to chatbots capable of writing poetry.

In recent weeks, members of Congress have sounded the alarm over the dangers of AI but no bill has been proposed to protect individuals or stop the development of AI’s most threatening aspects.

Sam Altman — the CEO of OpenAI, the company responsible for some of the most mind-blowing recent advances in AI — believes no company, including his, should be trusted to solve these problems. The boundaries of AI should be decided, he says, not by “Microsoft or OpenAI, but society, governments, something like that.”

But does anyone trust the government to do this? If not, how can “society” manage it? Where can we look for a model of how to protect ourselves from the downsides of an emerging technology with such extraordinary upsides, without stifling it?

The Privacy Loophole in Your Doorbell

Politico reported:

The police said they were conducting a drug-related investigation on a neighbor, and they wanted videos of “suspicious activity” between 5 and 7 p.m. one night in October. Michael Larkin, a business owner in Hamilton, Ohio, cooperated and sent clips of a car that drove by his Ring camera more than 12 times in that time frame.

He thought that was all the police would need. Instead, it was just the beginning. They asked for more footage, now from the entire day’s worth of records. And a week later, Larkin received a notice from Ring itself: The company had received a warrant, signed by a local judge. The notice informed him it was obligated to send footage from more than 20 cameras — whether or not Larkin was willing to share it himself.

As networked home surveillance cameras become more popular, Larkin’s case, which has not previously been reported, illustrates a growing collision between the law and people’s own expectation of privacy for the devices they own — a loophole that concerns privacy advocates and Democratic lawmakers, but which the legal system hasn’t fully grappled with.

Questions of who owns private home security footage, and who can get access to it, have become a bigger issue in the national debate over digital privacy. And when law enforcement gets involved, even the slim existing legal protections evaporate.