The 800 pound gorilla at the negotiating table?

https://www.wsj.com/business/deals/u-s-government-expected-to-get-multibillion-dollar-fee-in-tiktok-deal-685e3944?st=Z4pVCZ&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

U.S. Government Is Expected to Get Multibillion-Dollar Fee in TikTok Deal

The Trump administration is expected to collect a multibillion-dollar fee from investors as part of the complicated transaction to take control of TikTok’s U.S. operations, the latest in a string of lucrative government deals with the private sector.

Investors in the TikTok deal would pay the government the fee in exchange for negotiating the agreement with China, people familiar with the matter said. President Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping approved a preliminary framework for the deal Friday.

The final structure and amount of the payment haven’t been finalized as deal talks continue but the fee could end up totaling billions of dollars, the people said. The government recently agreed to become Intel’s largest shareholder and take 15% of the sales from an Nvidia artificial-intelligence chip made for the Chinese market in exchange for granting export licenses.

I like it, but I’m not sure this is enough. Why not have offenders pay for the time wasted checking their work by others.

https://futurism.com/judge-humiliating-punishment-lawyers-using-ai

Judge Gives Humiliating Punishment to Lawyers Caught Using AI in Court

AI tools have become a hit with lawyers. But judges have shown they have little patience for when their experiments with the tech go wrong.

When combing over a document submitted by two defense lawyers from the firm Cozen O'Connor, district judge David Hardy found at least 14 citations of case law that appeared to be fictitious, Reuters reported. Others were misquoted or misrepresented.

After being confronted, the two defense lawyers soon pleaded guilty: one of them had used ChatGPT to draft and edit the document.

Where other judges have sanctioned lawyers for committing similar sins, judge Hardy offered a humiliating ultimatum last week that's borderline cruel and unusual. 

The two stooges could pay $2,500 each in monetary sanctions, face removal from the case, and be referred to the state bar.

Or, instead, they could swallow their pride and write to their former law school deans and bar officials explaining how they screwed up — plus volunteer to speak on topics like AI and professional conduct.

Those who do not study history…

https://www.bespacific.com/president-says-broadcasters-should-lose-licenses-for-criticizing-him/

President Says Broadcasters Should Lose Licenses for Criticizing Him

The New York Times Archive – Goebbels Ends Careers of Five ‘Aryan’ Actors Who Made Witticisms About the Nazi Regime: BERLIN, Feb. 4, 1939: “Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels today ended the professional careers of five “Aryan” actors and cabaret announcers by expelling them from the Reich’s Chamber of Culture on the grounds that “in their public appearances they displayed a lack of any positive attitude toward National Socialism and therewith caused grave annoyance in public and especially to party comrades.” The five include perhaps the best known German stage comedians who survived previous Chamber of Culture purges and still dared to indulge in political witticisms—namely, Werner Finck, Peter Sachse and “The Three Rulands,” represented by Helmuth Buth, Wilhelm Meissner and Manfred Dlugi. Their expulsion means that they are henceforth forbidden to appear before the public in Germany. Besides motivating this action in an official communiqué, Dr. Goebbels also publishes a long article in the Voelkischer Beobachter in which he denounces them as “brazen, impertinent, arrogant and tactless” and generally imitators and successors to Jews. Simultaneously he denounces the “society rabble that followed them with thundering applause—parasitic scum, inhabiting our luxury streets, that seems to have only the task of proving with how little brains people can get along and even acquire money and prominence.” As regards the details of the “crimes” of which the five are accused, Dr. Goebbels mentions that they made political witticisms about the colonial problem, the Four-Year Plan and Chancellor Hitler’s monumental building program and one of them even raised the question of whether there was any humor left in Germany today. What amused the public most, however, and presumably roiled the National Socialist authorities most—although Dr. Goebbels does not mention it—is that they deftly, but unmistakably, caricatured some gestures, poses and physical characteristics of National Socialist leaders—sometimes with bon mots that made the rounds of the country. Dr. Goebbels says that the National Socialists proved during their struggle for power that they had a keen sense of humor that could kill opponents with ridicule. But as National Socialism proposes to remain in power 2,000 years it has neither the time nor the patience to apply that method to the “miserable literati.” If the anti-German press of Paris, London and New York, Dr. Goebbels says, or the democratic governments in Western Europe, should now again complain about the lack of freedom of opinion in Germany it does not matter, “for after all during the last year the Fuehrer reconquered 10,000,000 Germans for the Reich.”

• See also The New York Times: “Networks threatened: President Trump said he believed federal regulators should revoke broadcast licenses over late-night hosts who speak overly negatively about him, a day after ABC pulled Jimmy Kimmel’s show “indefinitely” after pressure from the Federal Communications Commission chairman. Congressional Democrats said they planned to introduce long-shot legislation to bolster legal protections for people targeted by the president for speaking freely…”

• See also Axios: The New York Times is confident it can defeat President Trump’s $15 billion defamation lawsuit, the paper’s executive editor Joseph Kahn said Thursday at an Axios Media Trends Live event. The paper is aggressively defending itself at a time critics accuse some other media organizations of not standing up to the administration. “Well he’s wrong on the facts. He’s wrong on the law and we’ll fight it, and we’ll win,” he told Axios’ Sara Fischer. “I don’t think the president of the United States should be suing media organizations for libel, full stop. I think that’s wrong,” Kahn said. “But I especially think it’s wrong when he’s wrong on the facts, when he’s wrong about the story, when he misunderstands the protections that the law offers to media organizations under the Supreme Court’s interpretation of libel law, and I think it’s incumbent on us to fight that to the end.”

• See also Politico: “Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension from the late-night airwaves has thrust lawmakers, government officials and the president to the forefront of the debate over free speech while also deepening the partisan divide amid the fallout over conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s killing. Since Disney announced Wednesday night that it would pull Kimmel’s show indefinitely over the comedian’s comments about Kirk’s slaying, Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr — who last night pressured ABC and local broadcasters to “to take action” against Kimmel — on Thursday morning defended his decision and accused the late-night show host of misleading Americans; House Democratic leadership in turn called on him to resign; and President Donald Trump told reporters in the U.K. that Kimmel was fired over bad ratings.”

• See also Washington Post Gift Article – Kimmel’s suspension confirms what many suspected after Colbert’s cancellation. Media companies must punish Trump critics if they want their mega-mergers approved.

Here’s looking at you, kid.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/09/surveying-the-global-spyware-market.html

Surveying the Global Spyware Market

The Atlantic Council has published its second annual report: “Mythical Beasts: Diving into the depths of the global spyware market.”

Too much good detail to summarize, but here are two items:

First, the authors found that the number of US-based investors in spyware has notably increased in the past year, when compared with the sample size of the spyware market captured in the first Mythical Beasts project. In the first edition, the United States was the second-largest investor in the spyware market, following Israel. In that edition, twelve investors were observed to be domiciled within the United States—­whereas in this second edition, twenty new US-based investors were observed investing in the spyware industry in 2024. This indicates a significant increase of US-based investments in spyware in 2024, catapulting the United States to being the largest investor in this sample of the spyware market. This is significant in scale, as US-based investment from 2023 to 2024 largely outpaced that of other major investing countries observed in the first dataset, including Italy, Israel, and the United Kingdom. It is also significant in the disparity it points to ­the visible enforcement gap between the flow of US dollars and US policy initiatives. Despite numerous US policy actions, such as the addition of spyware vendors on the Entity List, and the broader global leadership role that the United States has played through imposing sanctions and diplomatic engagement, US investments continue to fund the very entities that US policymakers are making an effort to combat.

Second, the authors elaborated on the central role that resellers and brokers play in the spyware market, while being a notably under-researched set of actors. These entities act as intermediaries, obscuring the connections between vendors, suppliers, and buyers. Oftentimes, intermediaries connect vendors to new regional markets. Their presence in the dataset is almost assuredly underrepresented given the opaque nature of brokers and resellers, making corporate structures and jurisdictional arbitrage more complex and challenging to disentangle. While their uptick in the second edition of the Mythical Beasts project may be the result of a wider, more extensive data-collection effort, there is less reporting on resellers and brokers, and these entities are not systematically understood. As observed in the first report, the activities of these suppliers and brokers represent a critical information gap for advocates of a more effective policy rooted in national security and human rights. These discoveries help bring into sharper focus the state of the spyware market and the wider cyber-proliferation space, and reaffirm the need to research and surface these actors that otherwise undermine the transparency and accountability efforts by state and non-state actors as they relate to the spyware market.

Really good work. Read the whole thing.

Perspective.

https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2025/09/17/how-americans-view-ai-and-its-impact-on-people-and-society/

How Americans View AI and Its Impact on People and Society

Americans see a role for AI in some areas of society but want more control over its use. About half say it’ll erode creative thinking

Toward automated lawyers…

https://www.artificiallawyer.com/2025/09/17/ai-tools-sometimes-better-than-human-lawyers-study/

AI Tools Sometimes Better Than Human Lawyers – Study

A new benchmarking study of legal AI tools, which included August, Brackets, GC AI and SimpleDocs, has found that ‘several AI tools met or exceeded the baseline’ of expected performance for contract drafting as compared to human lawyers.

The study ‘Benchmarking Humans & AI in Contract Drafting’ by Legalbenchmarking.ai used a comparison group of experienced lawyers. Results (see below) were evaluated by three main dimensions: usefulness, reliability, and the overall support provided by the AI platform, e.g. how well does the solution support the drafting of a contract.

(Related)

https://neurosciencenews.com/beahvior-morality-ai-neuroscience-29696/

When Machines Become Our Moral Loophole

A large study across 13 experiments with over 8,000 participants shows that people are far more likely to act dishonestly when they can delegate tasks to AI rather than do them themselves. Dishonesty rose most when participants only had to set broad goals, rather than explicit instructions, allowing them to distance themselves from the unethical act.

Researchers also found that AI models followed dishonest instructions more consistently than human agents, highlighting a new ethical risk. The findings underscore the urgent need for stronger safeguards and regulatory frameworks in the age of AI delegation.

How to tariff the past?

https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/tariffs-are-missing-the-real-enemy-yesterdays-products/

Tariffs Are Missing the Real Enemy: Yesterday’s Products

Are President Trump’s tariffs proving that two and a half centuries of economic analysis exaggerated the virtues of free trade? Have economists been wrong all these years to insist that consumers should be free to buy imports even when the prices of imports are quite low and their purchase takes business away from particular American firms and workers?

Most economists, including myself, believe not. But if we’re mistaken, our professional duty demands that we point out that Trump’s protectionism is insufficiently ambitious; it should go much further. Trump’s protectionism overlooks a source of low-priced goods that poses a far worse threat than do foreign producers to American producers and workers. That source of low-priced goods is the past.

Goods sold in resale markets cost nothing to manufacture today. If, as Trump and other protectionists argue, it is necessary to tariff goods imported from abroad to protect US manufacturers from low-cost foreign competitors, then it is equally necessary to tariff goods imported from the past. The past exports to us at much lower costs than even the cheapest foreign producers.

Someone in Boston who buys a used Buick from his neighbor withholds demand from US-based automobile producers no less than does someone in Houston who buys a new Hyundai from Korea. Were it true that taxing Americans’ purchases of imported cars is a just means of stimulating US automobile production, it must also be true that taxing Americans’ purchases of used cars is an equally just means of achieving this same goal.

Everyone’s future?

https://www.bespacific.com/the-nypd-is-teaching-america-how-to-track-everyone-everyday-forever/

The NYPD Is Teaching America How To Track Everyone Everyday Forever

The New York Times – [no paywall ]: “…Most of this material — gathered by social media analysis, drone surveillance and more — will never be reviewed by any court and will be entirely inaccessible to anyone outside of law enforcement. For almost 90 percent of the technologies it deploys, the department has stated that it has no obligation to obtain a warrant.

Will the AI agree to be managed?

https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/agentic-ai-at-scale-redefining-management-for-a-superhuman-workforce/

Agentic AI at Scale: Redefining Management for a Superhuman Workforce

For the fourth year in a row, MIT Sloan Management Review and Boston Consulting Group (BCG) have assembled an international panel of AI experts that includes academics and practitioners to help us understand how responsible artificial intelligence (RAI) is being implemented across organizations worldwide. In spring 2025, we also fielded a global executive survey yielding 1,221 responses to learn the degree to which organizations are addressing responsible AI. In our most recent article, we explored the relationship between explainability and human oversight in holding AI systems accountable. This time, we dive deeper into accountability for agentic AI. Although there is no agreed-upon definition, agentic AI generally refers to AI systems that are capable of pursuing goals autonomously by making decisions, taking actions, and adapting to dynamic environments without constant human oversight. According to MIT’s AI Agent Index, deployment of these systems is increasing across fields like software engineering and customer service despite limited transparency about their technical components, intended uses, and safety.

Is I is or is I ain’t?

https://www.bespacific.com/voters-run-through-trump-administration-citizenship-check/

33 million voters have been run through a Trump administration citizenship check

NPR: “Tens of millions of voters have had their citizenship status and other information checked using a revamped tool offered by the Trump administration, even as many states — led by both Democrats and Republicans — are refusing or hesitating to use it because of outstanding questions about the system. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) says election officials have used the tool to check the information of more than 33 million voters — a striking portion of the American public, considering little information has been made public about the tool’s accuracy or data security. The latest update to the system, known as SAVE, took effect Aug. 15 and allows election officials to use just the last four digits of voters’ Social Security numbers — along with names and dates of birth — to check if the voters are U.S. citizens, or if they have died.”

(Related)

https://www.bespacific.com/how-do-you-prove-your-citizenship/

How Do You Prove Your Citizenship?

The Atlantic – ICE won’t say. [gift article] “In Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s telling, citizenship checks by ICE officers are as straightforward and frictionless as presenting yourself at the entrance to a Costco. Just show a membership card, and you’ll be on your merry way. Kavanaugh wrote an opinion this week, concurring with the Court’s majority, that would afford Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers broad latitude to detain and question someone based on factors such as ethnic appearance, speaking Spanish, and speaking English with an accent. The risk that nonwhite Americans will be racially profiled or subject to unlawful detention should be weighed against the brevity of an encounter with ICE, Kavanaugh wrote..

…The problem is that ICE does not say what it accepts as definitive proof of legal status. Is it a driver’s license? A green card? A folder of immigration documents? Donald Trump’s mass-deportation campaign has swept up U.S. citizens and permanent residents over the past several months, leaving some detained for days despite individuals presenting officers with evidence of their legal status. Kavanaugh’s depiction of an immigration check shows “a fundamental misunderstanding about verification of citizenship,” John Sandweg, an attorney who served as the top official at ICE during part of Barack Obama’s first term, told me. “There is no national database or birth registry,” Sandweg said. “There is no place for ICE to quickly check and do facial recognition. An officer’s not going to just take someone’s word for it if they have reasons to believe they’re in the country unlawfully.” It can take days or weeks for ICE or someone’s attorney to track down their birth records, Sandweg added. “The idea that it’s going to be done in a Home Depot parking lot is ludicrous…”

Tools & Techniques.

https://www.bespacific.com/gptzero/

GPTZero

What is GPTZero? [Free version is available with less components than fee based versions] “GPTZero is the first and leading AI detector that allows you to identify specific content in a document or text that has been generated by a large language model (LLM), such as ChatGPT. Founded in January 2023, GPTZero has served over 10 million users to date and works with 100+ organizations in education, hiring, publishing, legal and more. AI detectors work by looking for patterns in text that are more likely to have been written by a machine than a human. The most common factors they look for include: GPTZero uses its own proprietary model that takes hundreds of factors into consideration and boasts the highest detection accuracy in the industry…Independent benchmarks, like our partners at Penn State’s AI Research Lab, and our own large-scale testing show that GPTZero is the most accurate AI detector, with a 99% accuracy rate when spotting AI-generated text vs. human writing, a false negative rate under 2%, and a false positive rate under 1%. This means we correctly classify AI writing 99 out of 100 times, and keep misclassification of text to an absolute minimum. Unlike many competitors, GPTZero can reliably detect “mixed documents” (where human and AI writing are combined) with 96.5% accuracy rate. While no AI detector can ever truly be 100% perfect, we are committed to being a leader in responsible adoption of AI generation and AI detection technologies…”

Exposing the Secret Police?

https://pogowasright.org/dhs-says-filming-posting-videos-of-ice-agents-is-doxxing-vows-prosecutions/

DHS Says Filming, Posting Videos of ICE Agents Is “Doxxing,” Vows Prosecutions

This one pushes my irony button. Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg reports:

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) says filming and posting videos of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents constitutes “violence,” and has threatened to potentially charge people who take videos and photos of agents conducting immigration raids in their communities, despite First Amendment protections.

DHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin told the Center for Media and Democracy that “videotaping ICE law enforcement and posting photos and videos of them online is doxxing our agents.”

“We will prosecute those who illegally harass ICE agents to the fullest extent of the law,” she said.

Read more at Truthout.

Potential model?

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/13/california-advances-effort-to-check-kids-ages-online-amid-safety-concerns-00563005

California age verification bill backed by Google, Meta, OpenAI heads to Newsom

A California bill to check kids’ ages online is heading to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk, after it secured rare support from major tech giants, including Google, Meta and Snap.

The proposal, which would require device makers and app stores to verify user ages, cleared the state Assembly 58-0 in the early hours of Saturday with backing from Republicans and Democrats.

Google and Meta, plus other tech firms like OpenAI and Pinterest, rallied around the online age verification plan this week despite recently sparring over similar measures in Utah and Texas. They argue the measure from Democratic state Assemblymember Buffy Wicks offers a more reasonable solution and hope it becomes a de facto national standard for other states weighing mandatory age-checks amid bipartisan concerns about kids’ safety online.

A point…

https://journals.ekb.eg/article_451203_0.html

"The Legal Authority of Artificial Intelligence-Based Evidence in Judicial Proof "

The integration of artificial intelligence technologies into criminal evidence collection represents a significant paradigm shift in judicial practice. Tools such as machine learning and big data analytics enable the identification of hidden patterns and the extraction of precise indicators from various digital sources including smart surveillance and mobile devices. However, these advancements raise critical legal concerns about the admissibility of AI-generated evidence, particularly in light of the exclusionary rule, which mandates the legal acquisition of evidence. Judicial assessment of such evidence now requires not only a legal understanding but also a deep technical grasp of how the data is generated and processed.

Legislatively, many legal systems lag behind in establishing robust frameworks that govern the legality of AI-assisted evidence collection especially in cases involving non-consensual data gathering or uncertain data provenance. This regulatory vacuum places immense responsibility on the judiciary to reconcile the efficiency of modern technology with constitutional protections such as the right to privacy and fair trial. Consequently, the study emphasizes the need to formulate comprehensive legal structures that define clear standards for AI use, ensuring that its deployment remains consistent with fundamental criminal justice principles.

Tools & Techniques.

https://pogowasright.org/rayhunter-what-we-have-found-so-far/

Rayhunter: What We Have Found So Far

Cooper Quintin writes:

A little over a year ago we released Rayhunter, our open source tool designed to detect cell-site simulators. We’ve been blown away by the level of community engagement on this project. It has been installed on thousands of devices (or so we estimate, we don’t actually know since Rayhunter doesn’t have any telemetry!). We have received dozens of packet captures, hundreds of improvements, both minor and major, documentation fixes, and bug reports from our open source community. This project is a testament to the power and impact of open source and community driven counter-surveillance.

If this is your first time hearing about Rayhunter, you can read our announcement blog post here. Or if you prefer, you can watch our DEF CON talk. In short, Rayhunter is an open source Linux program that runs on a variety of mobile hotspots (dedicated devices that use a cellular connection to give you Wi-Fi). Rayhunter’s job is to look for cell-site simulators (CSS), a tool police use to locate or identify people’s cell phones, also known as IMSI catchers or Stingrays. Rayhunter analyzes the “handshakes” between your Rayhunter device and the cell towers it is connected to for behaviors consistent with that of a CSS. When it finds potential evidence of a CSS it alerts the user with an indicator on the screen and potentially a push notification to their phone.

Understanding if CSS are being used to spy on protests is one of the main goals of the Rayhunter project. Thanks to members of our community bringing Rayhunter to dozens of protests, we are starting to get a picture of how CSS are currently being used in the US. So far Rayhunter has not turned up any evidence of cell-site simulators being used to spy on protests in the US — though we have found them in use elsewhere.

Read more at EFF.org.

Related: How ICE Is Using Fake Cell Towers To Spy On People’s Phones