Login
Rand Paul Claims ‘Smoking Gun’ Ties Fauci, NIH to Research With ‘Desire’ to Create COVID-Type Virus
After Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., sent letters to 15 federal agencies requesting information on their purported newfound connections to a 2018 grant proposal that sought to experiment with a COVID-19-type microbe, the lawmaker told Fox News the development is the “smoking gun” critics had long sought.
Paul claimed the developments — to which he credited a Marine Corps whistleblower — tie the National Institutes of Health to the research and prove former National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci was untruthful in his denials before Congress.
The lawmaker, a doctor of ophthalmology who has been investigating COVID-19’s origins since the height of the pandemic, blasted the feds for allegedly keeping the research from the public. “Yeah, we found out about this first from a brave Marine who reported that this research — was a grant proposal back in 2018 — would have allowed Wuhan Institute to create a virus very similar to what COVID-19 turned out to be,” he said.
“But we only found out about this from a whistleblower — nobody else in government ever informed us, including Anthony Fauci.” Paul has long sparred with Fauci, who joined NIH in 1968, was appointed by former President Reagan to lead the NIAID and retired in December 2022.
Jim Jordan Summons Ex-Biden Admin Officials to House Hearing on Internet Censorship
House Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan invited three former Biden White House officials to appear at a May 1 public hearing to discuss their pressure on companies to censor online content — as the Supreme Court considers whether the administration violated the First Amendment by pressuring platforms such as Facebook to yank posts and videos.
Jordan (R-Ohio) invited former White House director of digital strategy Rob Flaherty, former COVID-19 coordinator Andy Slavitt and former COVID-19 digital director Clarke Humphrey after Flaherty and Slavitt flouted Jordan’s earlier subpoenas requiring their testimony in closed-door depositions.
“The Committee on the Judiciary is continuing to conduct its investigation into how and to what extent the Executive Branch has coerced and colluded with companies and other intermediaries to censor speech,” Jordan wrote to the group.
Jordan, who chairs the Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, issued legally binding subpoenas in November requiring that Flaherty and Slavitt appear at depositions in January, but the pair elected not to appear.
Supreme Court justices last month heard oral arguments in a lawsuit brought by Missouri and Louisiana against the Biden administration for pressuring social media companies to remove alleged misinformation, especially about COVID-19 vaccines.
House Panel to Hold Hearing on Privacy, Kids Safety Bills
The House Energy and Commerce Committee will hold a hearing next week on several technology policy bills, including a newly unveiled comprehensive data privacy bill and kids online safety bills, the committee announced late Tuesday. Wednesday’s hearing will include discussions of the American Privacy Rights Act, which was released Sunday by committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) and Senate Commerce Committee Chair Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.).
The bill would set in place regulations around how companies collect and use Americans’ data, and it would preempt state laws that have been enacted in recent years in lieu of federal guidelines.
The hearing will also consider discussions of an update to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA). House versions of the bipartisan bills, which advanced out of the Senate Commerce Committee in July, were introduced Tuesday and led by Rep. Kathy Castor (D-Fla.).
COPPA 2.0 would update privacy protections for children online, adding regulations around how data is collected and used by tech companies for users ages 16 and under. It would also ban targeted advertising practices. KOSA would add regulations that aim to mitigate concerns about the use of certain tools and features and their impact on children’s mental health.
Two Tribal Nations Sue Social Media Companies Over Native Youth Suicides
Two tribal nations are accusing social media companies of contributing to the disproportionately high rates of suicide among Native American youth.
Their lawsuit filed Tuesday in Los Angeles County court names Facebook and Instagram’s parent company Meta Platforms; Snapchat’s Snap Inc.; TikTok parent company ByteDance; and Alphabet, which owns YouTube and Google, as defendants.
“Enough is enough. Endless scrolling is rewiring our teenagers’ brains,” added Gena Kakkak, chairwoman of the Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin. “We are demanding these social media corporations take responsibility for intentionally creating dangerous features that ramp up the compulsive use of social media by the youth on our Reservation.”
Their lawsuit describes “a sophisticated and intentional effort that has caused a continuing, substantial, and long-term burden to the Tribe and its members,” leaving scarce resources for education, cultural preservation and other social programs.
Anxiety and Depression Is Spiking Among Young People. No One Knows Why.
State and local governments across the country are scrambling to find new strategies to slow an epidemic of kids’ mental illness that exploded during the pandemic.
But there’s a problem: No one knows what’s causing the spike. Even after the isolation and fear COVID wrought dissipated, levels of anxiety and depression remain sky-high.
Governments are forging ahead anyway, conducting a nationwide experiment in whatever ideas seem promising. That could ultimately help determine what works and save a generation. But some who treat children worry the lack of evidence to support many of the approaches threatens to waste time and money — or could even make matters worse.
Theories are plentiful. Depending on the researcher, doctor, therapist, lawmaker or business leader who’s talking, the epidemic level of children and teens’ mental illness is caused by loneliness, social media, the opioid-fueled destruction of families, social isolation from smartphones, climate change’s existential threat, political rancor, overactive parenting, phone-induced sleep deprivation, long COVID, the decline of churches and other social institutions, bad diets or environmental toxins.
Congress Bribes Itself to Renew Dystopian FISA ‘Sham Reforms’ That Actually ‘Codify Status Quo’
Late last year, Congress elected to punt the issue of FISA renewal — the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that was designed to surveil terrorists in foreign countries, and has since been horrendously abused by the U.S. intelligence community to target Americans — including former President Donald Trump.
Now, they have 9 days to go to come up with a permanent replacement. To that end, House Speaker Mike Johnson put forth “RISAA” — a bill backed by Ohio Rep. Mike Turner and the intelligence committee, and just passed through the House Rules Committee — where a final floor vote will likely take place on Thursday.
Privacy hawks, however, point out that it’s a steaming pile of shit with no meaningful language to protect privacy rights — except for members of Congress, who gave themselves a carve-out that requires the FBI to notify and seek consent from Congress before spying on them.
What’s more, critics say the RISAA essentially codifies surveillance abuses into law. Under Section 702 of the FISA, the government is authorized to gather foreigners’ communications if they have been flagged in connection with national security matters. The communications can be gathered even if the target was speaking about, or with, Americans.
How to Stop Your Data From Being Used to Train AI
If you’ve ever posted something to the internet — a pithy tweet, a 2009 blog post, a scornful review, or a selfie on Instagram — it has most likely been slurped up and used to help train the current wave of generative AI. Large language models, like ChatGPT, and image creators are powered by vast reams of our data. And even if it’s not powering a chatbot, the data can be used for other machine-learning features.
Tech companies have scraped vast swathes of the web to gather the data they claim is needed to create generative AI — with little regard for content creators, copyright laws, or privacy. On top of this, increasingly, firms with reams of people’s posts are looking to get in on the AI gold rush by selling or licensing that information. Looking at you, Reddit.
However, as the lawsuits and investigations around generative AI and its opaque data practices pile up, there have been small moves to give people more control over what happens to what they post online. Some companies now let individuals and business customers opt out of having their content used in AI training or being sold for training purposes.
AI Companies Would Have to Fess Up on What They Use to Train AI Under Proposed Law
Rep. Adam Schiff, a Democrat from California, proposed a new bill on Tuesday that would force AI companies to disclose what data was used to train their models. And while it’s already being celebrated by major players in the entertainment industry, it’s almost certainly going to upset big AI companies like OpenAI, which is being sued by the New York Times for copyright infringement.
Officially known as the Generative AI Copyright Disclosure Act, the proposed legislation would require that any AI company submit paperwork to the U.S. Copyright Office before the release of any new generative AI system in order to explain what copyrighted works were used to build its system.
Companies that have released generative AI products like ChatGPT and image generators like Midjourney have come under fire for using copyrighted works to train their models. The AI companies argue it’s all legal under the Fair Use doctrine of U.S. copyright law, but the rights holders say it’s a violation of their intellectual property rights. And some politicians seem to agree strongly with the rights holders.
Amazon, Walmart Workers Worry About Surveillance Tech in Warehouses
Nearly half of warehouse workers who participated in a recent survey of Amazon and Walmart employees said they feel like they’re being watched at work.
Most employees said they didn’t know how the company used that information — and roughly 40% said that the monitoring contributed to pressure to move faster, even if that meant increasing the risk of injury.
While the report showed Amazon and Walmart workers had the highest rates of concern about technology that monitored worker activity and the pressure to keep up with the pace of co-workers, it also illustrated that was a concern across the industry.
The “psychological effects” of surveillance and monitoring are “felt most viscerally and negatively” by Black, Latino and immigrant workers who face surveillance, monitoring and over-policing outside of the workplace, the authors wrote.
German Intelligence Chief Advocates for Monitoring Speech and Thought
The head of Germany’s domestic spy agency, Thomas Haldenwang, has penned an op-ed for a German newspaper and provided some insight into the way he understands freedom of expression, and more importantly, its limits.
Haldenwang, who is at the helm of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), defended in the article published by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung his policy of keeping watch on citizens, which includes things like “thought and speech patterns.”
Meanwhile, critics see this as a policy designed to advance restrictions on speech and economic freedoms, primarily aimed at political opponents. In fact, recent polls suggest that most citizens also believe that BfV has become a political tool, and this opinion is said to be strongly present among parties (other than, unsurprisingly, the Greens).
This can be interpreted as yet another example of authorities in a declaratively democratic country trying to find a way to restrict speech they don’t like regardless of its being formally legal — while at the same time being unwilling to legislate to outlaw it, either because of lack of political consensus, or fear of political backlash.
