To demonstrate ‘line crossing’
you need clearly defined lines. Do we no longer recognize them?
https://www.bespacific.com/how-the-media-should-cover-this-deranged-president/
How
the media should cover this deranged president
American
Crisis –
“The
moment I saw Trump’s crazy and dangerous Truth Social post on the
morning of Easter Sunday, I could imagine the freakout in newsrooms
across the country. The essence of it would be something like this:
“How much of this do we publish? How do we report this without
breaking with every one of our standards and traditions?”…Based
on my survey of regional-newspaper front pages on Monday morning,
very few came anywhere near rising to the occasion. Many chose not
to feature the story at all on their A1, or to give it much emphasis.
The Philadelphia
Inquirer and
the Los
Angeles Times did
relatively well, leading their front pages with it. Both used
Trump’s full language high up in their front-page story. There’s
been a lot of talk — including
here —
about
the media’s disastrous tendency to “sane-wash” Trump.
It
comes down to this: The press, because of its own conventions and
time-honored practices, normalizes him, and thus fails to get across
the extreme nature of this president’s behavior. Ten years of
sane-washing have had their effect. He remains in power, reelected,
undeterred.
On
seeing Trump’s post, I thought immediately of Mark Jacob’s
October piece about how the media is missing
the biggest story there is —
Trump’s
apparent mental illness. Jacob, a former Chicago Tribune editor,
wrote: “It keeps getting worse, and the mainstream media keep
making the same mistakes in their coverage of the King of Crazytown.”
After Trump claimed he “predicted” 9/11, Jacob
wrote on Bluesky that
“the media need to be writing about his mental unfitness every day
until we get rid of him and save our country.” But of course, that
didn’t happen then, and it didn’t happen this time. And now,
with this horrible Easter morning development, we’ve entered new
territory. But let’s get real. If traditional techniques and
language (“emphatic threats”) aren’t getting it done, what
actually would work?
I’ll make three suggestions, and would be happy to hear yours…”
Pushback.
https://www.bespacific.com/a-judge-mistakes-the-claude-chatbot-for-a-person/
A
Judge Mistakes the Claude Chatbot for a Person
Wall
Street Journal – no paywall:
“A federal judge in Manhattan ruled in February that when a
criminal defendant used an AI chatbot to prepare for his legal
defense, he waived attorney-client privilege. The prosecution can
now read every word he typed and the answers he received. If this
reasoning stands, the consequences will reach far beyond artificial
intelligence. The defendant in U.S.
v. Heppner wasn’t
a rogue litigant trying to replace his lawyers with a chatbot. He
was represented by counsel and had already received privileged
communications from his defense attorneys. His lawyers confirmed
that he used Anthropic’s Claude to organize and analyze that
material in preparation for meetings with counsel. He then shared
the AI’s outputs with his attorneys, who used them in developing
their strategy. Judge Jed Rakoff held that the Claude transcripts
were protected by neither the attorney-client privilege nor the
work-product doctrine. The court’s reasoning: By typing
information into an AI platform, the defendant “shared” it with a
third party, and because Anthropic’s privacy policy permits data
collection and potential further disclosure, no “reasonable
expectation of confidentiality” existed.
Wall Street
Journal – no paywall: “A federal judge in Manhattan ruled in
February that when a criminal defendant used an AI chatbot to prepare
for his legal defense, he waived attorney-client privilege. The
prosecution can now read every word he typed and the answers he
received. If this reasoning stands, the consequences will reach far
beyond artificial intelligence. The defendant in U.S. v. Heppner
wasn’t a rogue litigant trying to replace his lawyers with a
chatbot. He was represented by counsel and had already received
privileged communications from his defense attorneys. His lawyers
confirmed that he used Anthropic’s Claude to organize and analyze
that material in preparation for meetings with counsel. He then
shared the AI’s outputs with his attorneys, who used them in
developing their strategy. Judge Jed Rakoff held that the Claude
transcripts were protected by neither the attorney-client privilege
nor the work-product doctrine. The court’s reasoning: By typing
information into an AI platform, the defendant “shared” it with a
third party, and because Anthropic’s privacy policy permits data
collection and potential further disclosure, no “reasonable
expectation of confidentiality” existed.
The judge’s
error was straightforward: He treated an AI model like a person.
Throughout his opinion, he refers to the software engaging in
“communications” with the user. But AI isn’t a person; it is a
computing process. It can’t be deposed, call the police or betray
a confidence. The third-party disclosure rule exists because sharing
information with a human being creates a risk that the human will
further disseminate it. That risk doesn’t exist when the “third
party” is a statistical model running on a server. Judge Rakoff
considered, and dismissed, the obvious point that typing into an AI
tool is no different from typing into a cloud-based software, such as
Google Docs. His answer, that cloud computing “is not
intrinsically privileged in any case,” is a non sequitur. The
question isn’t whether Google Docs creates privilege. It’s
whether Google Docs destroys it. No lawyer in America thinks
drafting a confidential memo in Google Docs waives the privilege over
its contents. Judge Rakoff’s opinion doesn’t explain why the
same act in another application does. No court has ever gone this
far. The American Bar Association concluded in 2017 that lawyers may
use cloud computing without waiving privilege, provided they take
reasonable security precautions. State bar authorities in New York,
California and elsewhere have reached the same conclusion. The
entire legal profession has operated on this understanding for more
than a decade. Judge Rakoff’s opinion doesn’t cite, distinguish
or acknowledge any of these authorities….”
Food for
thought?
https://pogowasright.org/article-against-privacy-essentialism/
Article:
Against Privacy Essentialism
Privacy
scholar Daniel Solove writes:
I’m
pleased to share the final version of my article, “Against
Privacy Essentialism” 104
N.C. L. Rev. 613 (2026).
In this article, I examine a foundational
question: What is privacy? It is a question that has challenged
scholars, courts, and policymakers for years, and for good reason.
How privacy is defined shapes legal outcomes and influences how laws
and regulations are drafted, interpreted, and enforced. This article
explores why these questions matter and why our understanding of
privacy remains so consequential.
Download
for free on SSRN.
Modern war…
https://www.theregister.com/2026/04/07/iran_hackers_disrupting_us_water_energy/
Iran
cyber actors disrupting US water, energy facilities, FBI warns
Iranian-affiliated
actors have escalated intrusions targeting critical US water and
energy facilities, in some cases disrupting operations, the FBI and
American cyber defense agencies said on Tuesday.
… Iran's
cyber intrusions targeting critical infrastructure have been ongoing
since March, according to the feds, and they aim to disrupt
operational technology (OT) devices, specifically programmable logic
controllers (PLCs) manufactured by Rockwell Automation/Allen-Bradley.
PLCs are used
to control and monitor industrial equipment in water treatment
plants, food production sites, oil refineries, power grids, and other
critical facilities, and they've been a longtime favorite target of
Iranian cyber crews.
(Related)
https://www.theregister.com/2026/04/08/microsoft_armored_datacenters/
Microsoft
hints at bit bunkers for war zones
Microsoft is
reevaluating how it designs and builds datacenters in conflict-prone
regions after Iran began targeting Middle Eastern bit barns in
retaliation for US military operations.
… Smith
also called for "strong international rules to promote the
protection of civilian infrastructure," which he argued should
include datacenters.