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Presidents Gain Too Much Power When Emergencies Like COVID Hit
President Biden’s decision on Jan. 30 to formally end the COVID-19 national emergency this spring, unilaterally relinquishing exceptional powers the executive branch has claimed for three years, is a milestone worth celebrating.
The time has come — indeed, the time is overdue — to go back to the regular order of implementing sweeping new programs and policies. That requires, with what should be rare exceptions, agreement of the executive and legislative branches.
The administration has dubiously used the continuing “emergency” to engineer roughly $400 billion in student loan forgiveness by executive fiat, even four months after Mr. Biden himself said on “60 Minutes” that the pandemic was “over.”
The Supreme Court previously stopped the White House from using the emergency declaration to put a moratorium on evictions and to mandate that large employers require their workers to be vaccinated.
Microsoft and Google Are About to Open an AI Battle
Microsoft is about to go head-to-head with Google in a battle for the future of search. At a press event later today, Microsoft is widely expected to detail plans to bring OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot to its Bing search engine.
Google has already tried to preempt the news, making a rushed announcement yesterday to introduce Bard, its rival to ChatGPT, and promising more details on its AI future in a press event on Wednesday.
The announcements put the two tech behemoths, known for their previous skirmishes with each other, on a collision course as they compete to define the next generation of search.
Both companies are chasing a revolutionary new future for search engines: one where the results look more like short, simple answers generated by AI than a collection of links and boxes to click on. Google teased its Bard chatbot yesterday, with queries that seem to be similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. And today, Microsoft is expected to boost its Bing search ambitions with the addition of a ChatGPT-like interface that will answer questions in a way no search engine has before.
Lawyers for U.S., Navy Seals Battle Over Revoked COVID Vaccine Mandate
A lawyer representing Navy Seals who do not want to be vaccinated against COVID-19 told a federal appeals court Monday that their lawsuit over a now-withdrawn vaccine mandate isn’t moot even though Congress passed legislation last December ordering the policy canceled.
During arguments before the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, attorney Heather Hacker said the service members still face the possibility of discipline over their refusal to get vaccinated and the government has not ruled out taking vaccination status into account when doling out future assignments.
Even though the mandate has been repealed, the Navy will continue to use vaccination status as a requirement for the class members to be able to fulfill their job duties,” Hacker said during the 40-minute argument. “It’s even worse now because the Navy will not even consider the plaintiffs’ requests for religious accommodation anymore.” The appeals court issued no immediate rulings on Monday.
Georgia Senators Vote to Bar COVID Vaccine Requirements
Georgia senators voted Tuesday to permanently block schools and most state and local government agencies from requiring people to get vaccinated against COVID-19.
The Senate voted 31-21 in favor of the bill, which would make permanent what had been a one-year ban enacted in 2022.
Sen. Greg Dolezal, a Republican from Cumming who is sponsoring the measure, said that when it comes to the COVID-19 vaccine at least, the government shouldn’t be able to force anyone to get it or refuse services to people who are unvaccinated.
Seattle, King County Will No Longer Require COVID Vaccinations for Employees
King County and the city of Seattle will no longer require proof of vaccination against COVID-19 for employees, ending one of the final pandemic protections at either level of government.
In a joint announcement Monday, King County Executive Dow Constantine and Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell announced that they would end the mandate, originally established in October 2021, citing guidance from Public Health — Seattle and King County.
Constantine also rescinded the county’s emergency proclamation on Monday, ending pandemic emergency protections that had been in place since March 2020. A spokesperson for the county said Monday there were no “significant operational impacts” from rescinding the emergency proclamation.
In total, 290 county employees were terminated because of the vaccine mandate, including 103 in King County Metro and 51 in the Sheriff’s Office. The city’s terminations, retirements and leaves related to the vaccine mandate disproportionately impacted a few departments, including the already staff-burdened Seattle police and fire departments.
Three U.S. Data Breaches Show Varied Healthcare Exposure Risks
Three recent data breaches from across the United States show that the risks of data breaches can come from multiple sources for healthcare providers. Employees, third-party vendor tools and cybercriminals all create data breach risks.
The DCH Health System in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, notified its patients on January 19 of a data-privacy breach. While conducting a routine privacy audit, the health system discovered one of the hospital’s employees “accessed the electronic medical records” of a patient without an apparent business reason.
After further investigation, the hospital discovered the employee had access to and viewed additional patient electronic records between September 2021 and December 9, 2022, “without a legitimate business need related to the employee’s job duties.”
The health system notified approximately 2,530 individuals that the employee may have accessed and viewed information including their name, address, date of birth, social security numbers, date of encounter, diagnoses, vital signs, medications, test results and clinical/provider notes.
Twitter Boss Elon Musk Accuses Government Agency of Being ‘Worst Offender in U.S. Government Censorship’
Elon Musk accused a federal agency Monday many have never heard of being the “worst offender in U.S. government censorship & media manipulation.”
Musk, who owns Twitter, was referring to the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), which journalist Matt Taibbi described as a “fledgling analytic/intelligence” arm to participate in guiding Twitter’s moderation of content and how it often used the media to clash with the tech giant beginning in February 2020 as the coronavirus pandemic was underway.
The twelfth installment of “Twitter files” was focused on the eagerness of the GEC to flag Twitter accounts.
“The GEC flagged accounts as ‘Russian personas and proxies’ based on criteria like, ‘Describing the Coronavirus as an engineered bioweapon,’ blaming ‘research conducted at the Wuhan institute’ and ‘attributing the appearance of the virus to the CIA,’” Taibbi wrote. “State also flagged accounts that retweeted news that Twitter banned the popular U.S. ZeroHedge, claiming the episode ‘led to another flurry of disinformation narratives.’ ZH had done reports speculating that the virus had lab origin.”
TikTok Is Crushing YouTube in Annual Study of Kids’ and Teens’ App Usage
For another year in a row, TikTok has found itself as the social app kids and teens are spending the most time using throughout the day, even outpacing YouTube. According to an ongoing annual review of kids’ and teens’ app usage and behavior globally, the younger demographic — minors ranging in ages from 4 through 18 — began to watch more TikTok than YouTube on an average daily basis starting in June 2020 and TikTok’s numbers have continued to grow ever since.
In June 2020, TikTok overtook YouTube for the first time, with kids watching an average of 82 minutes per day on TikTok versus an average of 75 minutes per day on YouTube, according to new data from parental control software maker Qustodio.
This past year, the gulf between the two widened, it said, as kids in 2022 saw their average daily use of TikTok climb to a whopping 107 minutes, or 60% longer than the time they spent watching video content on YouTube (67 minutes).
U.S. Senators Seek Answers From Meta on Whether User Data Was Accessed by China, Russia and Others
Top U.S. lawmakers on the Senate Intelligence Committee want answers from Meta on a newly disclosed internal investigation it conducted in 2018 that found tens of thousands of software developers in China, Russia and other “high-risk” countries may have had access to detailed Facebook user data before the company clamped down on that access beginning in 2014.
In a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Monday, Sens. Mark Warner and Marco Rubio, the chair and vice-chair of the Senate committee, cited a document unsealed last week in an ongoing privacy lawsuit involving the company.
That document, an internal slide presentation from 2018, suggested that nearly 87,000 developers in China, 42,000 in Russia and a handful based in Cuba, Iran and North Korea had access to Facebook user information through an earlier version of the company’s programming interfaces. The presentation provides an interim update on the probe, which found, among other things, that Iran was home to a “significant number of seemingly Russian developers” of Facebook apps.
Texas Is Banning TikTok From State Government Devices
The Lone Star State is charging ahead with a TikTok ban. On Monday, Governor Greg Abbott unveiled a new statewide model security plan to prohibit the app from government-issued devices and networks in order to address potential “vulnerabilities,” presented by its use. Predictably, the Republican governor also used the opportunity to take a swipe at China.
“The security risks associated with the use of TikTok on devices used to conduct the important business of our state must not be underestimated or ignored,” Abbott said. “Owned by a Chinese company that employs Chinese Communist Party members, TikTok harvests significant amounts of data from a user’s device, including details about a user’s internet activity.”
Abbott’s model plan will prohibit TikTok from all state-issued cell phones, laptops, desktops, tablets, and other devices able to connect to the internet. The plan goes a step further though and prevents government employees from conducting any type of state business on outside devices with TikTok or other prohibited software installed on them. All state agencies will need to implement their own policies to enforce the ban by February 15, 2023.
Chinese Tech Giant Baidu Launching ChatGPT-Style AI Bot
The Chinese tech giant Baidu announced Tuesday that it is developing an AI bot as the program ChatGPT increasingly gains popularity.
Baidu said in a tweet that it is creating an AI chatbot project called ERNIE Bot, which was first proposed as a language model in 2019. The program was capable of understanding 96 languages as of January 2021, according to a timeline of milestones for ERNIE included in the post.
The tweet did not state the expected release date for the program but said the public should stay tuned for further updates.
Baidu’s announcement comes after Google announced its own AI chatbot called Bard to rival ChatGPT. The program, which can provide highly detailed answers to inquiries from users, will become more widely available to the public in the “coming weeks.”
