And with cell phones, we all
carry a surveillance device.
https://www.bespacific.com/the-new-surveillance-state-is-you/
The
New Surveillance State Is You
Wired
[no
paywall ]:
“Privacy may be dead, but civilians are turning conventional
wisdom on its head by surveilling the cops as much as the cops
surveil them. The Department of Homeland Security secretary has
spent 2025 trying to convince the American public that
identifying roving
bands of masked federal agents is
“doxing”
—
and
that revealing these public servants’ identities is “violence.”
Noem is wrong on both fronts, legal experts say, but her claims of
doxing highlight a central conflict in the current era: Surveillance
now goes both ways. Over the nearly 12 months since President
Donald Trump took
office for a second time, life in the United States has been torn
asunder by relentless arrests and raids by officers from Immigration
and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, and federal,
state, and local authorities deputized
to
carry out immigration actions. Many of these agents are hiding their
identities on the administration-approved basis that they are the
ones at risk. US residents, in response, have ramped up their
documentation of law enforcement activity to seemingly unprecedented
levels. “ICE watch” groups have appeared
across the country.
Apps for tracking immigration enforcement activity have popped up on
(then
disappeared from)
Apple and Google app stores. Social media feeds are awash in videos
of unidentified agents tackling
men in parking lots, throwing
women to the ground,
and ripping
families apart.
From Los Angeles to Chicago to Raleigh, North Carolina, neighbors
and passersby have pulled out their phones to document members of
their communities being arrested and vanishing into the Trump
administration’s machinery…”
Un-muddying
the waters?
https://www.bespacific.com/scholar-nudged-supreme-court-toward-its-troop-deployment-ruling/
How
a scholar nudged the Supreme Court toward National Guard troop
deployment ruling
The
New York Times Gift Article:
“Accepting an argument from a law professor that no party to the
case had made, the Supreme Court handed the Trump administration a
stinging loss that could lead to more aggressive tactics. The
Supreme Court’s Accepting an argument from a law professor that no
party to the case had made, the Supreme Court handed the Trump
administration a stinging loss that could lead to more aggressive
tactics. The Supreme Court’s refusal
on Tuesday to
let the Trump administration deploy National Guard troops in the
Chicago area was in large part the result of a friend-of-the-court
brief submitted
by a Georgetown University law professor named Martin
S. Lederman.
The argument Professor Lederman set out, and the court’s embrace
of it, could help shape future rulings on any further efforts by
President Trump to use the military to carry out his orders inside
the United States. Professor Lederman’s brief said that the
government had misunderstood a key phrase in the law
it had relied on,
which allows deployment of the National Guard if “the president is
unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United
States.” The administration said “the regular forces” referred
to civilian law enforcement like Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Professor Lederman argued that the great weight of historical
evidence was to the contrary. The regular forces, he wrote, was the
U.S. military. And, he added, “there is no basis for concluding
that the president would be ‘unable’ to enforce such laws with
the assistance of those forces if it were legal for him to direct
such a deployment.” Professor Lederman wrote his brief over a
weekend. “I hesitate to acknowledge that,” he said on a podcast
last month, “but it’s really true that I didn’t have like some
great background knowledge in this statute.” A veteran of the
Office of Legal Counsel, the elite Justice Department unit that
advises the executive branch on the law, Professor Lederman
identified what he called a glaring flaw in the administration’s
argument. “None of the parties were paying attention to it,” he
said. But the justices were. A week after Professor Lederman filed
his brief, the court ordered the parties to submit additional briefs
on the issue he had spotted. They did, and almost two months passed.
In the end, the majority adopted the professor’s argument, over
the dissents of the three most conservative justices. It was the
Trump administration’s first major loss at the court in many
months. During that time, the court granted about 20 emergency
requests claiming broad presidential power in all sorts of other
settings…”
See
also Steve
Vladeck – Four
Takeaways From the National Guard Ruling.
A deep dive into last Tuesday’s ruling in which a 6-3 majority of
the Court stopped the Trump administration from deploying federalized
National Guard troops into and around Chicago.
Worth
considering.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/12/are-we-ready-to-be-governed-by-artificial-intelligence.html
Are
We Ready to Be Governed by Artificial Intelligence?
Artificial
Intelligence (AI) overlords are a common trope in science-fiction
dystopias, but the reality looks much more prosaic. The technologies
of artificial intelligence are already
pervading many
aspects of democratic government, affecting our lives in ways both
large and small. This has occurred largely without our notice or
consent. The result is a government incrementally transformed by AI
rather than the singular technological overlord of the big screen.
Let
us begin with the executive branch. One of the most important
functions of this branch of government is to administer the law,
including the human services on which so many Americans rely. Many
of these programs have long been operated by a mix of humans and
machines, even if not previously using modern AI tools such as Large
Language Models.
A
salient example is healthcare, where private insurers make widespread
use of algorithms to review, approve, and deny coverage, even for
recipients of public benefits like Medicare. While
Biden-era guidance from
the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) largely blesses
this use of AI by Medicare Advantage operators, the practice of
overriding the medical care recommendations made by physicians raises
profound ethical
questions,
with life and death implications for about thirty
million Americans today.
… We
are not going to be fully governed by AI anytime soon, but we are
already being governed with AI—and more is coming. Our challenge
in these years is more a social than a technological one: to ensure
that those doing the governing are doing so in the service of
democracy.
