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The Supreme Court Is Building Its Own Surveillance State
Following the leak of a draft opinion striking down abortion rights, the Supreme Court’s police force (the Marshal’s Office) launched an unprecedented probe to uncover who leaked the decision. Already, authorities have demanded phone records, signed affidavits, and law clerks’ devices.
The scrutiny is so intense that many onlookers have suggested that clerks retain attorneys to protect their rights. While it’s unclear how broad the cellphone searches are, or the exact language of clerks’ affidavits, the intrusive probe reveals a disturbing about-face from the Supreme Court, and particularly Chief Justice John Roberts, on surveillance powers.
The searches are invasive — but apparently lawful. Clerks have been asked to turn over devices, but the phones haven’t been seized. And the affidavits are reportedly voluntary. But the reality is that clerks’ consent is coerced, prompted by the fear that they’ll be wrongly suspected of leaking the draft if they invoke their rights.
Judge Invalidates St. Paul Employee Vaccine Mandate
A judge has invalidated a COVID-19 vaccine mandate for St. Paul’s unionized city employees.
The Pioneer Press reported that Ramsey County Judge Leonardo Castro ruled Thursday that the city improperly imposed the mandate without negotiating with the employee unions.
The judge called the mandate an unfair labor practice. Castro wrote that city officials did what they thought was right in the face of the pandemic but the mandate is intrusive and requires employees to “forfeit their bodily autonomy in the name of maintaining their livelihood.”
Graduation Season a Time for Student Freedom, Not Censorship
When our Nation’s Founding Fathers wrote the Establishment Clause into the Bill of Rights, they envisioned it as a protective device — a means of safeguarding citizens from a federally-mandated religion. In just over two hundred years, it has instead become a weapon often wielded by government bureaucrats to stamp out any vestige of religion from our public life. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito even warned that religious liberty is “fast becoming a disfavored right.”
Among the most likely to brandish the Establishment Clause are school districts. Instead of cultivating conversations and curiosity, district officials are quick to quash any conversation that dare mention the Divine.
This time of year is particularly ripe for censorship. Instead of embracing the private speech of their brightest students, districts claim that the “separation of church and state” requires the government to rid graduation ceremonies of religious expression. Because the Constitution requires the opposite, First Liberty Institute often represents valedictorians who face censorship by school officials.
Alameda County Reinstates Mask Mandate Amid California Surge
Northern California’s Alameda County said Thursday it will reinstate an indoor mask policy as COVID-19 hospitalizations steadily increase in the nation’s most populous state.
The county with 1.7 million residents just across the bay from San Francisco will require face coverings in most indoor settings starting Friday at midnight.
While some school districts and universities have reinstated mask rules, Alameda is the first county to do so.
Supreme Court Temporarily Blocks Texas’s Social Media Moderation Law
The Supreme Court of the United States temporarily blocked a sweeping Texas law on Tuesday that restricts the ability of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to moderate content on their platforms. By a 5-4 vote, the justices granted an emergency request from the tech industry to block a lower court order that would have allowed the law to take hold, pending legal challenges.
The Supreme Court order is a loss for Texas. The state argued that its law, HB 20, which prohibits large social media firms from blocking, banning or demoting posts or accounts, does not violate the First Amendment.
The majority did not explain its thinking and Liberal Justice Elena Kagan did not lay out her own reasoning for her vote to allow the law to remain in place.
Google Settles Lawsuit With Illinois Residents for $100M. Here’s How to Get Your Money
Rockford Register Star reported:
Illinois residents are eligible to receive part of a $100 million class-action settlement involving another tech giant.
As with the class-action complaint against Snapchat, Google was accused of violating the Biometric Information Privacy Act regarding its use of a face regrouping tool in the Google Photos app.
Google used the tool to sort faces it spots in photographs by similarity. However, according to the suit, the company did not receive consent from millions of users before using the technology.
What each claimant will be paid isn’t known although a similar settlement involving Facebook saw 1.6 million users receive between $200 and $400. Payment amounts will depend on the number and validity of claims.
Internal Documents Show Amazon’s Dystopian System for Tracking Workers Every Minute of Their Shifts
Infamously, Amazon punishes and sometimes fires warehouse workers who it believes are wasting time at work. A new filing obtained by Motherboard gives detailed insight into how Amazon tracks and records every minute of “time off task” (which it calls TOT) with radio-frequency handheld scanners that warehouse associates use to track customer packages.
Examples and sample spreadsheets provided in the documents show Amazon tracking, down to the minute, the amount of time individual workers spent in the bathroom and infractions such as “talking to another Amazon associate,” going to the wrong floor of a warehouse, and, as an example, an unaccounted for 11-minute period where a worker “does not remember” what they were doing.
The documents provide new clarity about a much-talked-about but until now opaque process that is used to surveil, discipline, and sometimes terminate Amazon warehouse workers around the United States.
Musk’s Twitter Deal Faces Backlash From Advocacy Groups That Are Seeking to Block It
A dozen advocacy groups are launching a new campaign Friday aimed at blocking Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s $44 billion purchase of Twitter, warning he will degrade important safeguards on the platform if he’s allowed to take control.
The Stop the Deal campaign, shared exclusively with CNBC, includes plans to put pressure on government agencies to review the acquisition, persuade Tesla stockholders to take action against it ask advertisers to pull spending from the platform.
It highlights concerns that many progressives have shared about how Musk’s acquisition and plans for a more open platform could allow for more rampant hate and harassment on the platform.
Met Police Profiling Children ‘on a Large Scale,’ Documents Show
Metropolitan police documents say the force has been collecting “children’s personal data” from social media sites as part of a project to carry out “profiling on a large scale.”
The Met says the scheme, known as Project Alpha, helps fight serious violence, with the intelligence gathered identifying offenders and securing the removal of videos glorifying stabbings and shootings from platforms such as YouTube.
The unit, comprising more than 30 staff and launched in 2019 with Home Office funding, scours social media sites looking at drill music videos and other content.
A Met document, seen by the Guardian, says the project “will carry out profiling on a large scale,” with males aged 15 to 21 a focus of the project. After questioning, the force said both of these were a mistake.
FDA Warns DNA Sequencing Machines Could Be Hacked
U.S. regulators warned healthcare providers about a cybersecurity risk with some Illumina Inc. DNA-sequencing machines that could compromise patient data.
Several of Illumina’s next-generation machines have a software vulnerability that could allow an unauthorized user to take control of the system remotely and alter settings or data, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said in a letter Thursday. While there have been no reports of this happening, it’s possible that a hacker could alter a patient’s clinical diagnosis or gain access to sensitive genetic information.
Illumina has a near monopoly on the genetic-sequencing market and its machines are used for both research and in medical practice. The company said it has developed a software patch for the vulnerability and is working on a permanent fix.
