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.