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Category Archives: Legal Research

Police seldom disclose use of facial recognition despite false arrests

Washington Post via MSN – Hundreds of Americans have been arrested after being connected to a crime by facial recognition software, a Washington Post investigation has found, but many never know it because police seldom disclose their use of the controversial technology. Police departments in 15 states provided The Post with rarely seen records documenting… Continue Reading

EDGAR Next – Improving Filer Access and Account Management

EDGAR Filers: Understand and Prepare for EDGAR Next – The SEC adopted changes to EDGAR filer access and account management (“EDGAR Next”) on September 27, 2024. From September 30, 2024 through March 21, 2025, filers will be able to prepare for enrollment, and a Beta environment will be available for testing. Enrollment begins March 24,… Continue Reading

Unlocking AI for All: The Case for Public Data Banks

LawFare: “The data relied on by OpenAI, Google, Meta, and other artificial intelligence (AI) developers is not readily available to other AI labs. Google and Meta relied, in part, on data gathered from their own products to train and fine-tune their models. OpenAI used tactics to acquire data that now would not work or may… Continue Reading

License Plate Readers Are Creating a US-Wide Database of Political Lawn Signs and Bumper Stickers

Wired: While people put up signs in their yards or bumper stickers on their cars to inform people of their views and potentially influence those around them, the ACLU’s Stanley says it’s intended for “human-scale visibility.” not to that of machines. “They may want to express themselves in their communities, to their neighbors, but they… Continue Reading

The Supreme Court Needs a Mandatory and Enforceable Code of Ethics

“The City Bar, through its Rule of Law Task Force, Federal Courts Committee, Professional Responsibility Committee, and Professional Ethics Committee, asserts that Congress has the Constitutional authority to enact binding and enforceable ethics rules for the U.S. Supreme Court, and endorses the creation of a Judicial Investigation Panel and an Office of the Inspector General… Continue Reading

Heritage Foundation Staffers Flood Federal Agencies With Thousands of Information Requests

ProPublica: “Three investigators for the Heritage Foundation have deluged federal agencies with thousands of Freedom of Information Act requests over the past year, requesting a wide range of information on government employees, including communications that could be seen as a political liability by conservatives. Among the documents they’ve sought are lists of agency personnel and… Continue Reading

Trump’s crimes, Supreme Court’s culpability

Follow-up to previous posting – Judge Chutkin unsealed Jack Smith’s redacted immunity brief v Trump see The Cornerstone of Democracy, Essentials, October 2, 2024: A compendium of the best reporting and commentary surrounding the pivotal 2024 elections in the United States….What you will find are links, with brief commentary, to work that I believe advances the… Continue Reading

Judge Chutkin unsealed Jack Smith’s redacted immunity brief v Trump

Via Court Listener – 165 pages – IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA UNITED STATES OF AMERICA v. DONALD J. TRUMP, Defendant. CRIMINAL NO. 23-cr-257 (TSC) GOVERNMENT’S MOTION FOR IMMUNITY DETERMINATIONS. The defendant asserts that he is immune from prosecution for his criminal scheme to overturn the 2020 presidential election… Continue Reading

AI assistants are blabbing our embarrassing work secrets

Washington Post [unpaywalled]: “Corporate assistants have long been the keepers of company gossip and secrets. Now artificial intelligence is taking over some of their tasks, but it doesn’t share their sense of discretion. Researcher and engineer Alex Bilzerian said on X last week that, after a Zoom meeting with some venture capital investors, he got… Continue Reading

Tor and Tails privacy projects merge

BoingBoing: “The Tor Project protects user privacy and anonymity on the network. Tails is a portable operating system that does so in the software. The two projects are merging, writes Pavel Zonaff, who hails the move as the “natural outcome of the Tor Project and Tails’ shared history of collaboration and solidarity.”Countering the threat of… Continue Reading

The late summer release for GovInfo included 85 individually tracked system changes

GovInfo – RSS Feeds for Searches, Browse Pages Updates, and New Mobile Buttons – The late summer release for GovInfo included 85 individually tracked system changes. Highlights were functionality to create RSS feeds based on search criteria, design improvements for mobile button display, browse updates that include migrating the Public and Private Laws collection to the… Continue Reading