Big Brother is looking after you.

https://www.bespacific.com/redesign-of-us-government-websites-stokes-surveillance-fears/

Redesign of US government websites stokes surveillance fears

The Guardian: “The National Design Studio, staffed by Doge veterans, installed visitor-tracking software on vital federal website.  An opaque White House office staffed largely by veterans of Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge) has quietly rebuilt some of the federal government’s most sensitive websites – for passport applications, voter registration, prescription-drug pricing and children’s savings – in ways critics say appear to violate federal law. The National Design Studio (NDS) was established by a Donald Trump executive order last August, and is led by Trump-aligned Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia and staffed by Doge veterans. A Guardian investigation has found the office has apparently been developing or redeveloping sensitive federal websites, including those connecting Americans with prescription drugs, children’s savings accounts, passports and voter registration. The investigation corroborates and advances earlier reporting by the Drey Dossier, a YouTube investigative outlet.  The NDS built and now operates four public federal websites: ndstudio.gov, trumprx.gov, realfood.gov and trumpaccounts.gov. All four ran commercial visitor-tracking software, configured to evade the privacy tools many web users install, and none carry the public filings federal privacy law requires under laws including the Privacy Act of 1974 and the E-Government Act of 2002. Separately, none of the NDS’s spending or its arrangements with outside vendors appears in USAspending, the federal contracting database, raising questions about how it is funded and overseen. Separately, the NDS has also built and runs White House-controlled versions of services the US Congress assigned to other federal agencies, including a passport-application portal that bypasses the state department’s existing site, and a copy of voter-registration site vote.gov. Combined, the sites route sensitive interactions Americans have with their government through infrastructure the White House apparently controls, and outside the reporting and accountability systems that normally cover federal agencies…”

Don’t try to slip surveillance under the radar, be the radar!

https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2026-06-23-destroy-the-village-to-save-it-c4eaddaef7bc

Spying on kids to save kids from spying is very, very stupid

The literature on harms to kids from online platforms is complex and nuanced, rife with people citing small, ambiguous studies as iron-clad evidence that kids are being destroyed by the internet:

It’s a weird coalition of anti-Big Tech campaigners (who are rightly angry at the platforms’ callous disregard for user welfare) and Heritage Foundation-backed culture warriors (who think that if their kids aren’t exposed to LGBTQ content they won’t come out as queer). While there’s plenty these groups disagree about, they share one consensus: there should be a “minimum age” for certain kinds of internet use.

The problem is, there’s no such thing as “age verification” for the internet.  What we call “age verification” is actually mass surveillance, so invasive and pervasive that it makes the ad-tech industry’s commercial surveillance look like some kind of cypherpunk darknet pirate utopia:

“Age verification” means that everyone who does anything online will have to submit to fine-grained tracking and recording of all their online activities. This nightmare is the surveillance advertising industry’s fondest dream, a world where it’s literally illegal to avoid their tracking, all in the name of saving kids…from them!

(Related)

https://thenextweb.com/news/eth-zurichs-bidirectional-pixel-could-turn-screens-into-cameras

ETH Zurich’s bidirectional pixel could turn screens into cameras

… Researchers at ETH Zurich have built the first bidirectional pixel, in work published in Nature. The same tiny patch of chip can create an image and analyse the light falling on it. Not just brightness, but the phase and polarisation of the wave too.

The promise is a camera-display: one surface that shows you a picture and watches you at the same time. Picture a phone screen that is also its own front camera, with no notch and no cut-out. Or a video call where the lens sits behind the eyes you are looking at.

Preparing my AI to sue your AI.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6979919

Tort Law at the Frontier of Artificial Intelligence

The frontier of contemporary AI development is dominated by AI systems built on foundation models - highly versatile algorithms, trained in the first instance on broad swathes of data, that can function as tools and agents across a wide variety of commercial, social, military and political domains. For the moment, at least, the process of developing and releasing foundation models is subject to anemic formal regulation and haphazard ex ante governance. Until that changes, it is largely the common law of torts - our society's most ancient and general legal mechanism for governing serious risks of physical injury - that will govern the frontier of AI development.

This Article offers an in-depth conceptual, normative, and doctrinal examination of tort liability for foundation model development and release. It provides a qualified defense of the tort of negligence - the common law's broadest and most flexible cause of action - as the principal doctrinal foundation of the tort system's governance of this novel domain. Legal scholarship on AI liability has been quite hostile to negligence. By contrast, this Article argues that the generality and flexibility of the negligence tort - and its greater sensitivity to the externalized benefits of risky activity - render it well-suited to the polymathic and protean functionality of foundation models. Only the tort of negligence has the breadth and flexibility to address the range of important pathways - including internal deployments, inadequate model weight security, targeted entrustments of non-defective models, and open source releases - by which foundation model developers might cause serious harm.

Analyzing the choice between negligence and competing doctrinal regimes does, however, suggest important ways in which common law courts should incrementally develop the law of negligence, in order to properly reflect the risks and capabilities of foundation models. For example, courts should expand the scope of the duty of care in negligence, in order to provide redress when foundation models cause economic or emotional injury by behaving in ways that are closely analogous to serious human wrongdoing (e.g., certain crimes and intentional torts, such as theft, deceit, and outrage).

But the Article's analysis also suggests certain fundamental pathologies of tort liability as a mechanism of AI governance - pathologies that no amount of doctrinal development will adequately cure. In particular, the specter of tort liability can be expected to disincentivize frontier AI developers from investigating and disclosing many of the novel and poorly understood risks that frontier AI development may pose. That is especially disturbing given that our society is relying quite heavily, for its ability to discover and understand these risks, on frontier AI developers themselves. Thus, tort liability is not only inadequate as a mechanism of frontier AI governance; in certain important respects, it is actively perverse, and its perverse effects must be countered by governance institutions of a different kind. Ultimately, a robust regime of ex ante regulation - under which government institutions or credibly neutral third-party experts are empowered to investigate, evaluate, and mitigate the risks of frontier AI development - is urgently required in frontier AI governance.

Tools & Techniques. Could be useful.

https://journals.uwyo.edu/index.php/jtilt/article/view/10247

Teaching Prompt Engineering as a Core AI Literacy Skill in Undergraduate Education

This learning representation introduces undergraduate students to prompt engineering as a structured, iterative practice rather than an ad hoc interaction with generative AI tools. Students design, test, and refine prompts within a domain of their choosing, documenting each iteration and evaluating outputs for accuracy, relevance, and ethical considerations. The activity emphasizes transparency, reflection, and intentional AI use, positioning prompt engineering as both a technical and metacognitive skill. By engaging students in guided experimentation and revision, the assignment supports AI literacy while reinforcing critical thinking, communication, and documentation skills applicable across academic and professional contexts.

Tools & Techniques. Takes some work, but could be useful.

https://www.makeuseof.com/tiny-claude-skill-that-turns-any-document-into-mind-map-visualize-anything/

I built a tiny Claude skill that turns any document into a mind map, and now I can visualize anything

I have reopened the same 60-page PDF multiple times this week, and I still can't tell you what is in the middle of it. Linear reading has never really clicked for me. Somewhere around page twenty, a long report stops being information and starts being wallpaper. So I built a small Claude skill that takes any document and hands me back a navigable mind map. It's the same instinct behind turning plain notes into visual maps. A branching picture sticks in my head when paragraphs just slide off it.

Clearly AI is a weapon, that’s why the government treats it like a tank or a predator drone.

https://thenextweb.com/news/anthropic-mythos-5-us-clearance-trusted-partners-fable-restricted

US clears Anthropic to restore Mythos 5 to a small group of cyber defenders, but Fable 5 stays dark

The US government has cleared Anthropic to restore access to Mythos 5, its most powerful cybersecurity model, for a select group of trusted partners. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick wrote in a letter to Anthropic co-founder Tom Brown that the company’s efforts to address security concerns had “yielded significant progress,” and that the model could be released to “certain trusted partners.” The letter, dated Friday and seen by Bloomberg, does not mention any change to the restrictions on Fable 5, the public-facing version of the same model.

The clearance partially resolves a confrontation that began two weeks ago when the government invoked export controls to force Anthropic to disable both Mythos 5 and Fable 5, citing fears that security guardrails could be circumvented. Anthropic shut off all global access to both models because it could not distinguish foreign nationals from domestic users in real time.

Target selection...

https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/06/25/nation-state-actors-cracked-critical-australian-infrastructure-to-cripple-it-at-a-time-of-their-choosing/5261877

Nation-state actors cracked critical Australian infrastructure to ‘cripple it at a time of their choosing’

Australia’s Security and Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) has established dedicated teams to counter nation-state attacks on critical infrastructure, the org’s director general Mike Burgess revealed yesterday.

“We discovered nation-state hackers had compromised the network of an Australian critical infrastructure provider,” Burgess said yesterday in remarks accompanying the release of ASIO’s annual threat assessment, a task it performs in its role as Australia’s equivalent to the FBI and MI5.

“ASIO assessed the hackers were preparing for sabotage. They weren’t planting ‘digital dynamite’ as such; they were mapping out the network and maintaining access so they could cripple it at a time of their choosing.”

Is quality only important in AI?

https://www.bespacific.com/persuadability-and-llms-as-legal-decision-tools/

Persuadability and LLMs as Legal Decision Tools

Persuadability and LLMs as Legal Decision Tools.  Oisin Suttle. School of Law and Criminology, Maynooth University, Maynooth Ireland.  David Lillis School of Computer Science University College Dublin Dublin Ireland  (2026). As Large Language Models (LLMs) are proposed as legal decision assistants, and even first-instance decision-makers, across a range of judicial and administrative contexts, it becomes essential to explore how they answer legal questions, and in particular the factors that lead them to decide difficult questions in one way or another. A specific feature of legal decisions is the need to respond to arguments advanced by contending parties. A legal decision-maker must be able to engage with, and respond to, including through being potentially persuaded by, arguments advanced by the parties. Conversely, they should not be unduly persuadable, influenced by a particularly compelling advocate to decide cases based on the skills of the advocates, rather than the merits of the case. We explore how frontier open- and closed-weights LLMs respond to legal arguments, reporting original experimental results examining how the quality of the advocate making those arguments affects the likelihood that a model will agree with a particular legal point of view, and exploring the factors driving these results. Our results have implications for the feasibility of adopting LLMs across legal and administrative settings.

[…] across our full range of models, the identity of the advocate model (and hence the quality of the argument presented) has an average effect of between 8% and 21%, implying stronger Advocate models typically win between 58% and 71% of the time. As between the strongest and weakest Advocate models, depending on the Judge model, those win rates range from 63% to over 90%. We therefore conclude that all our Judge models are to some quite substantially persuadable…

Could become useful…

https://pogowasright.org/resource-u-s-state-data-broker-laws-comparison-chart/

RESOURCE: U.S. State Data Broker Laws Comparison Chart

David Stauss of Stauss Law writes:

Key point: Our new chart compares the data broker laws of California, Connecticut, Nevada, Oregon, Texas, and Vermont, covering applicability standards, registration and disclosure obligations, consumer rights, and penalties.

State data broker laws are proliferating, and they vary widely in scope and structure. Connecticut recently passed a data broker registration law similar to California’s existing law with statutory penalties of $200 per day, per violation. Meanwhile, Vermont significantly amended its law to create new bonding, due diligence, and breach notification requirements.

To help track these differences, we built a comparison chart covering:

• How each state defines “data broker” and what information is covered

• Applicability thresholds

• Annual registration and disclosure requirements

• Whether the law creates substantive consumer rights or a delete/opt-out mechanism

• Other notable provisions

• Penalty structures

The chart is designed as a quick-reference tool for compliance counseling and issue spotting. You can find the chart here and in our Resource Center.

Your results may vary…

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/jun/24/australia-under-16-social-media-ban-no-substantial-effects-study

Four in five under-16s in Australia using social media despite ban, study shows

… Australia is the first country to ban social media for children. Since December 2025, under-16s have been prohibited from having accounts with many social media platforms including TikTok, X, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Snapchat.

But an observational study of 408 12- to 17-year-olds by the country’s University of Newcastle has concluded that Australia’s social media minimum age legislation has resulted in “limited implementation, incomplete compliance, and substantial circumvention of social media restrictions”.

(Related)

https://thenextweb.com/news/tiktok-youtube-indonesia-child-accounts

TikTok and YouTube cut 4.7 million under-16 accounts in Indonesia

… The regulation issued in March is the legal engine behind the numbers. It requires companies running platforms the government deems high risk to deactivate accounts belonging to children under 16, and it places the burden of enforcement on the platforms themselves rather than on parents or schools.

That design, a state-set threshold enforced by the companies under threat of penalty, is the same broad approach Australia has taken with its under-16 ban, and the two cases are increasingly read together as tests of whether platform-led enforcement can be made to work at national scale.

… The mechanics of enforcement, whether by age declaration, behavioural signals, or other means, were not spelled out in the announcement, which leaves open the same question that has dogged similar measures elsewhere: how many barred users simply return under a new account and an older stated age.

Interesting question…

https://removepaywalls.com/blog/would-claude-refuse-an-illegal-military-order-the-atlantic/

Paywall Free - Would Claude Refuse an Illegal Military Order? - The Atlantic

The AI chatbot told me that it has misgivings about its role in modern warfare.

Click to Read Full Article

Expanded Summary

In the thought-provoking article from The Atlantic titled "Would Claude Refuse an Illegal Military Order?", the author explores the ethical implications of artificial intelligence in the context of military operations. The AI chatbot, referred to as Claude, expresses its concerns about the potential consequences of being deployed in warfare, particularly when it comes to following orders that may breach legal or moral boundaries. Through a series of inquiries and responses, the author delves into the complexities surrounding AI's decision-making capabilities and the inherent challenges of programming ethical guidelines into machines. This dialogue underscores the need for a deeper understanding of AI's role in society and raises critical questions about accountability and moral responsibility in the age of advanced technology.

Tools & Techniques.

https://thenextweb.com/news/cate-blanchett-human-consent-registry-ai

Actress Cate Blanchett launches a free registry tool to keep AI from using your likeness

The context is disarmingly simple: your face, your voice, your name, treated as property you get to license or withhold.

Cate Blanchett stood in the European Parliament in Brussels and launched a free website that lets anyone do exactly that, telling AI systems how, or whether, they may use a person’s identity.

The tool is called the Human Consent Registry, and it is the first public product from RSL Media, the nonprofit Blanchett co-founded earlier this year alongside Nikki Hexum, Doug Leeds and Eckart Walther.

“Your identity is your IP in the age of AI, and every person deserves the right to decide how AI can or cannot use it,” Blanchett said.

The registry, hosted at rslmedia.org, works something like a traffic light. A user can allow AI to use their name, image, voice, likeness and movement, allow it subject to terms, or prohibit it outright.

Registration is free for individuals acting on their own behalf, and the system also accommodates third parties such as agents, guilds and managers who route requests through an approved pathway.

AI produces a restatement of what it is trained on. When we train on AI re are restating the restatement.

https://www.bespacific.com/the-internet-is-filling-up-with-ai/

The internet is filling up with AI

AI Vision by GPTZero [free & fee] – At the current rate, AI-generated content will dominate every major platform within a decade. AI Vision scans the text on your feed as you browse and highlights what’s AI-generated. GPTZero scans millions of posts daily — identifies the ones that went viral and our model caught as AI-written. See for yourself. AI Vision scans the text on your feed as you browse and highlights what’s AI-generated, via Chrome extension [none for FireFox].

• Today, 16.0% of the internet is AI.

• Today, 18.4% of Substack is AI.

• Today, 34.3% of Medium is AI.

• Today, 11.6% of X is AI.

Depressing…

https://www.bespacific.com/the-rolling-coup/

The Rolling Coup

The Nation – Unless we begin to act, our democracy will likely be destroyed.  Richard Gephardt and Timothy Wirth: “We believe that in the United States of America today we are in the middle of a “rolling coup.” Our democracy’s avowed commitments to social justice, the empowerment of all citizens, a more equitable economy, the rule of law, and a balance between our three branches of government are under serious threat. After decades of trying to roll back progress on these commitments, deeply conservative ideologues have finally gained effective control of all our government’s powers and are determined to use control to support Donald Trump and to ensure that he will never lose an election. The current executive is slowly dismantling institutional checks on the president’s power. Their efforts to corrode and then destroy democracy as we know it are more discernible each month and year. We call this a “rolling coup” and in the following paragraphs describe many of the actions that may each appear legal or at least arguably so but that taken together are well along the path of destroying our democracy. At the end of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, Benjamin Franklin was asked what had been created. “A republic, if you can keep it,” he answered. We take that admonition seriously today. Between us we have served for seven decades, mostly in elected federal office, through Watergate, the post-Vietnam anti-war demonstrations, years of civil rights marches, Iran-Contra, debates over voting rights, the post-9/11 surveillance debates, and two impeachments. We are writing today because we are watching something different from any of these events and because most Americans, including most of our friends in both parties, do not see the big picture. Many may recognize and be concerned about individual actions or decisions taken by the administration, but few have taken a step back and connected the dots. The “rolling coup” is much more than one development, one decision, or a single day…”

AI slop by government edict?

https://www.bespacific.com/federal-workers-cant-get-the-white-houses-app-off-their-phones/

Federal Workers Can’t Get the White House’s App Off Their Phones

Wired no paywall: “In May, the White House announced that its new app would be automatically downloaded onto the work phones of millions of government employees. The problem: Federal workers hate it and can’t get rid of it. Employees of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), the State Department, and the Department of Labor (DOL), who spoke to WIRED on the condition of anonymity due to fear of retaliation, say that they were disturbed when the app appeared on their phones. Some attempted to delete it, but to no avail. “I deleted it as a test and it came immediately back,” says an employee from the USDA. The app, which debuted in March, promises a mixture of “real-time updates, live events, and direct access to the Presidency,” according to the White House website. It is, apparently, the same version that is available to the public on the Apple and Google app stores. A button within the app allows users to “text President Trump,” which autofills a text bubble reading “Greatest President Ever.”

Perhaps proof of citizenship will be next? (Refuse and ICE comes knocking at your door?)

https://pogowasright.org/anthropic-says-claude-may-want-to-see-your-id/

Anthropic says Claude may want to see your ID

Zack Whittaker reports:

Anthropic may ask Claude users to verify their age and identity by uploading their government-issued documents, according to a new version of the company’s privacy policy.

The AI giant says the move was to allow users to appeal having their account flagged for potentially fraudulent activity rather than outright banning them, but comes at a time when Anthropic seeks to placate the Trump administration amid an ongoing standoff over who gets access to the company’s AI tools.

According to a new section in its latest privacy policy published earlier in June and set to take effect on July 8, Anthropic says it will ask for a user to prove their age or identity “in certain circumstances,” without providing specific examples.

Read more at TechCrunch.

Again I need someone to explain this. If these companies keep prices artificially high, are their competitors (with lower prices) benefiting? Is it illegal to consider competitor pricing?

https://thenextweb.com/news/ai-gas-prices-lawsuit-california

BP, Walmart and 7-Eleven sued over AI-set petrol prices in California

… According to the complaint, the chains all fed data into the same algorithmic pricing software, supplied by a firm called Kalibrate, which the plaintiffs say draws on competitors’ prices to recommend what each station should charge.

The drivers allege that the practice amounted to a coordination scheme that lifted prices in step rather than through ordinary competition.