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.
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment