Steven Soderbergh On AI In Films: If There’s a Filmmaking Tool, I’m Going To Explore It

Culture

from the creatives-using-tools-as-tools dept

While we’ve taken some issues with his approach to copyright laws and enforcement in the past, there is no doubting that Steven Soderbergh is a filmmaking legend. This is a man who directed films like Traffic and Ocean’s 11. He talks about, and cares about, the art of filmmaking. And he’s apparently beginning to use AI in some limited ways.

You really have to pay attention to Soderbergh’s specific comments on how he’s using it, because I would argue that it’s exactly the right artistic approach to the conversation: limited, targeted uses that help achieve the artist’s vision rather than replace everything in a film with garbage slop. Interestingly, articles like this one from Salon still frame all of this as some betrayal of art on Soderbergh’s part. Here’s how Soderbergh describes how he’s using AI as part of an upcoming film about John Lennon and Yoko Ono.

“AI has been helpful in creating thematically surreal images that occupy a dream space rather than a literal space,” Soderbergh said. “And it’s been really fun because you need a Ph.D. in literature to tell it what to do.” Soderbergh relented that generative programs require “very close human supervision,” before going on to admit that he’s also using “a lot of AI” for an upcoming film about the Spanish-American War, to generate images of archaic warships and God knows what else.

I very much understand Soderbergh’s description of how he’s using this tool for his films, but I have no idea what the hell the commentary from Salon around the quote is on about. “And God knows what else” is perhaps the silliest comment in the post, because that statement only works if Soderbergh himself happens to be God.

I don’t believe he is, to be clear. And I think an artist like this one who finds the tool useful in achieving his overall artistic vision is something we should be paying attention to, not dismissing out of hand. The Salon piece notes that Soderbergh has routinely been a director who has embraced the use of new technology before launching into this diatribe.

But just because Soderbergh jumping at AI could be seen from a mile away doesn’t make it any less disappointing, nor does it excuse his reluctance to thoughtfully engage with others’ criticisms about the technology. If “The Christophers” is to be believed, art that tries to imitate a certain style is little more than hollow, emotionless posturing. Generative AI is the same: mere mimicry, devoid of the humanity that makes art . . . well, art. And by being so willfully averse to acknowledging the ways AI and art conflict — not to mention its ramifications for others in his industry — Soderbergh’s take on an artist losing his touch in “The Christophers” is disappointingly apt.

Of course the art that AI “creates” is mimicry and devoid of humanity. That’s definitionally how the tool works. And anyone who thinks they’re going to rely on an AI tool to “create art” is on a fool’s mission. It simply won’t work because it’s not designed to work that way. Instead, it’s a tool to get you some components of what you need to create an overall artistic vision, which is still led by a very human artist. Will there be work done by an AI on the margins in filmmaking that would normally have been done via paid workers in the industry. Perhaps. Likely, even. But will the limited use of these tools also lower the barrier of entry in terms of skill set needed and budget to produce films, thereby creating even more output of films overall? I’m struggling to see how that would not be the case.

And at the end of the day, there’s still an artist calling the shots. Perhaps fewer overall total artists involved in a single movie, but the limited use of AI tools doesn’t somehow suck the entire soul from a film anymore than the ease of digital footage editing over the use of film does. And just like a movie that is almost nothing other than pretty CGI graphics, but which otherwise sucks, lazy people trying to create entire films with AI are going to fail. And fail hard.

Say it with me now: there is more nuance to this conversation than the hardliners and evangelists are bothering to acknowledge.

In a follow-up chat with Variety, Soderbergh expanded on his initial comments about using AI in future films. “I’m just not threatened by it . . . Ten years ago, I would have needed to engage a visual effects house at an unbelievable cost to come up with this stuff,” he said. “No longer. My job is to deliver a good movie, period. And this tool showed up at a moment when I needed it. I don’t think it’s the solution to everything, and I don’t think it’s the death of everything . . . There are some people that I have absolute love and respect for that refuse to engage with it. That’s their privilege. But I’m not built that way. You show me a new tool, I want to get my hands on it and see what’s going on.”

That’s an artist saying that, folks, not some Silicone Valley tech bro. And, to be clear, he might get it wrong. He may use the tool and his product might suck out loud. But to try to abort the use of a tool before it’s even been explored seems silly.

Filed Under: ai, filmmaking, generative ai, steven soderbergh

NYPD Union Sues Oversight Board For Letting People Know How Awful Some Cops Might Be

Legal Issues

from the NYPD-exists-to-serve-itself dept

The NYPD’s biggest union is back in lawsuit mode. As usual, the impetus is accountability and transparency — things the Police Benevolent Association (PBA) and NYPD have been opposed to since their respective inceptions.

A law put on the books 50 years ago was finally erased 40 years after its enactment. “50-a” allowed the NYPD to withhold information about officers who had been accused of misconduct. It did not forbid the NYPD from releasing this information, however. And, because it didn’t, the NYPD often shared certain info with the public.

But in 2020, someone in the NYPD re-read the 1976 law and found a loophole. Well, it wasn’t actually a loophole. It was just an option the NYPD didn’t bother considering until the public had turned on cops in general following an impossible-to-ignore stream of unjustified killings of Black people by white cops, culminating in the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin.

Less than two months after that murder, the NYPD realized that while the law did not forbid the release of police misconduct information to the public, it also didn’t compel it. So, the NYPD demonstratively sat on its hands, forcing the NY legislature to finally write this law out of existence.

During this same time period, the city was seeking NYPD oversight that might be independent enough to actually be worthy of the term “oversight.” The Civilian Complaint Review Board” (CCRB) has existed in one form or another since 1953. Its effectiveness has been closely tied to whoever’s in the mayor’s office, its fortunes rising and falling with city leaders’ actual interest in police accountability. The result of nationwide protests was an actual effort to keep the CCRB from being controlled by the NYPD.

Now that Eric Adams is gone — along with his embrace of political and police corruption — the Police Benevolent Association is back in action, claiming (in court!) the CCRB should not be allowed to release misconduct files the CCRB is legally allowed to release. Samantha Max has more details for Gothamist:

New York City’s largest police union is suing the watchdog agency that investigates allegations of officer misconduct, saying the Civilian Complaint Review Board has stigmatized officers by sharing “inflammatory” records related to unsubstantiated allegations of sexual misconduct, bias-based policing and lying.

The Police Benevolent Association is urging the CCRB to redact officers’ identifying information when it turns over records related to these three categories of misconduct, if the officers were not found guilty of wrongdoing. 

There’s a lot of stuff to get into here, but let’s start with the final sentence. At the time the CCRB turns over records to public records requesters (most notably, 50-a.org, which is named after the now-dead law that used to prevent this sort of accountability), it may not know the final results of internal investigations. If that’s the sticking point the PBA chooses to stake its claim on, it’s just going to keep losing in the actual court and the court of public opinion.

It’s also notable that the PBA only considers “three categories” to be worthy of court-enforced secrecy. It implies that the cops the PBA most wants to protect are those most inclined to engage in these particular activities.

The PBA seems extremely upset by 50-a.org’s searchable database of police misconduct, but it has chosen to use the CCRB which normally obscures the nature of offenses it might be taking a look at.

CCRB Executive Director Jonathan Darche said at a board meeting in October that the agency does not specify in its public datasets when unsubstantiated abuse of authority complaints pertain to sexual misconduct, racial profiling or untruthful statements, because those types of allegations are “very prejudicial to the character of the officer.” 

The guidelines that cover the CCRB’s reporting do not apply to public records requests, however.

But he said the agency does not take those same privacy measures when releasing data pursuant to a court order or public records request.

Nor should they! The CCRB may be limited in its own reporting, but if the legislature wanted to limit what public records requesters could access, it would have done so when it overturned the law that previously made most police misconduct records inaccessible. And if the legislature wanted the CCRB’s internal guidelines to apply to its public records request releases, it has had more than seven decades to do so.

And that means the PBA should be headed for a swift loss in court. If the PBA doesn’t like what’s happening, it should take it up with state legislators, rather than ask the court to rewrite the law in its favor. I doubt the PBA will try to take it up with legislators because legislators are the reason it can no longer use a 1976 law to separate NYPD officers from accountability.

It’s too early to tell how this will all play out, but I want to highlight something else before we retire to the anteroom known as the comment section:

[CCRB Director Darche] said criminal defendants and prosecutors, for instance, should be allowed to know if an officer involved in a trial has been accused of lying.

The PBA, on the other hand, argues that disclosing these types of unsubstantiated allegations is “defamatory” and makes them available to “employers, landlords, educational institutions, banks and the public at large,” without giving officers a process to challenge or remove them. 

Seriously? Every arrest is a presumptive public record. Police agencies willingly share these with local newscasters, many of which treat these as part of their regular reporting. Mugshots and arrest records are shared everywhere and no one in the NYPD or the PBA gives a single fuck whether or not these “defamatory” assertions result in adverse reactions from “employers, landlords, educational institutions, banks, and the public at large.”

But when it comes to cops, no amount of secrecy is secret enough. They’re somehow owed absolute secrecy until these investigations have been closed. And even then, they’ll go to court to argue that substantiated claims are unfairly “prejudicial” during criminal trials.

Fuck these guys and their union reps. If they want to be given the benefit of the doubt when it comes to unsubstantiated allegations, they should extend this privilege to the people they’re supposed to be serving. Until they’re willing to do that, they have no legitimate complaint to raise.

I know I don’t expect Joe Whoeverthefuck from two blocks away to steer clear of sexual misconduct, lying, or being a racist. But I goddamn well expect that minimum level of competence from the people whose paychecks are reliant on my tax dollars. The PBA clearly believes the public owes everything to the cops it represents. And the people paying the PBA’s paychecks owe nothing to anyone.

Filed Under: 50-a, ccrb, nypd, patrick hendry, pba, police accountability, police misconduct

Someone Ask Alito: If December Was Too Late To Fix Unconstitutional Gerrymandering For The 2026 Midterms, Why Is May Okay?

Legal Issues

from the iokwyar dept

Last December, Justice Alito told Texans they had to vote under an unconstitutional gerrymander because changing maps in December would deprive them of “certainty” before the 2026 midterms. Yesterday, with voting already underway in Louisiana, he rushed the certified copy of the Callais ruling out the door so Southern states can hurry up and redistrict before that very same election.

It seems like a hypocrisy worth pointing out, even as Alito and the MAGA faithful will studiously look the other way.

I covered some of this on Friday after the Callais ruling first came out, but with Justice Samuel Alito rushing the certified copy of the decision to help speed up the redistricting of Southern states to wipe out Democratic districts, I feel like we need to make this point even clearer.

To briefly backtrack, in November, a Trump-appointed judge wrote an incredibly detailed ruling on why Texas’ attempt to gerrymander away Democratic districts was clearly unconstitutional. The ruling was 160 pages of incredibly thorough argument and analysis.

The ruling went to the Supreme Court where, on the shadow docket, it was overturned with a five paragraph explanation with little detail. Justice Alito added a concurrence, in which he talked up the importance of “certainty” for Texans on which map would be used for the 2026 election (still months away, and ignoring that if the lower court ruling held, the maps would remain as they were for the 2024 election, which everyone was used to). But, no, can’t interfere with the election map in December before an election year claims Samuel Alito:

I join the order issued by the Court. Texas needs certainty on which map will govern the 2026 midterm elections, so I will not delay the Court’s order by writing a detailed response to each of the dissent’s arguments.

Ah yes, certainty.

About that. On Monday, Alito agreed to rush making last week’s Callais ruling official. While normally there’s a 32-day waiting period, Alito said we needed to jump the gun… because he knows that a bunch of Southern states want to speed up their redistricting plans, even though some have already begun voting. In a pissy response to Justice Jackson’s dissent (which Alito calls “baseless,” “trivial,” and “insulting”) he also argues:

The dissent would require that the 2026 congressional elections in Louisiana be held under a map that has been held to be unconstitutional.

Um. Yes. But the Texas map was also held to be unconstitutional. In great detail. And you said it was too late to change it for this year’s election.

Meanwhile, Louisiana’s voting has already started. And you’re now rushing this decision, allowing Louisiana to try to claim a state of emergency to stop the voting, and ignore the will of the people… because you think it’s “insulting” that Louisiana might have to vote on districting that you’ve just declared unconstitutional.

Can some journalist please ask Alito why December was too late to fix Texas’s unconstitutional map — when voters there needed “certainty” — but May isn’t too late to halt an in-progress Louisiana election to fix theirs?

Literally the only consistent throughline is that both decisions favor the election of more Republican candidates.

Filed Under: calais, gerrymandering, louisiana, samual alito, supreme court, texas

Flock’s Sales Pitch Included Recordings Of Kids’ Gymnastic Classes

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the we-can-perv-it-for-you-wholesale dept

Flock Safety’s reputation is in tatters, thanks in large part to its own actions. First sold as a high-tech add-on for homeowners’ associations and gated communities, it soon spread to law enforcement agencies and the cities that employ them. Promising plenty of access to an existing network of privately-owned cameras, Flock insinuated — if not actually stated as much — that cities buying its systems would have access to recordings and ALPR records gathered elsewhere in the nation.

That has largely proven to be true. Law enforcement officers with access to Flock’s camera network have used it to do things like track the movements of a Texas woman who was seeking an abortion and allowing federal officers to hunt down migrants to detain and deport.

Flock has been so bad on the PR front that national surveillance powerhouse Ring pulled the plug on its fledgling partnership with Flock following backlash to its heartwarming-except-for-all-the-dystopia Super Bowl ad.

Even before the Big Game debacle, Flock had been shedding customers. The private sector still seems as interested as ever, but cities were either turning down Flock’s overtures or terminating their contracts with the surveillance camera company.

Flock still can’t get out of its own way, as Jason Koebler reports for 404 Media:

Residents of an Atlanta suburb have been rocked by the revelation that sales employees at Flock have been accessing sensitive cameras in the town to demonstrate the company’s surveillance technology to police departments around the country. The cameras accessed have included surveillance tech in a children’s gymnastics room, a playground, a school, a Jewish community center, and a pool.

While I can understand parents might appreciate cameras being used to protect their kids, they likely never expected that footage of their kids (sometimes clad in revealing clothing) would be used as a sales tool by Flock Safety.

In addition to Flock employees having access to these cameras and recordings, Flock (and its local law enforcement partners) have apparently been sharing this with hundreds of other government agencies. That’s what Dunwoody, Georgia resident Jason Hunyar discovered via records requests and an examination of information made available by Flock itself.

At the 3/23 city council meeting, Lt. Fecht told the public and the city council that only two external agencies (Brookhaven and Chamblee) can view our liveview cameras and that ‘anything liveview is definitely strictly reviewed and on a case by case’ basis’.

The city’s own audit logs prove otherwise. From the data in this file, just since the start of 2025, 1,271 external agencies have been granted permission to view live streams. 358 external agencies have been granted access to record these streams.

We don’t know who else has been accessing this footage, but the data makes it clear certain Flock sales reps and officials are extremely interested in footage of people in pools, gymnastic classes, and fitness centers.

One Flock employee, Randy Gluck, who lives in Raleigh and is a business development manager for their 911 products, was granted live-view access to our cameras. He looked at 54 cameras, with very strange patterns such as clicking through 5 traffic cameras on July 21st last year before settling on the Dunwoody Library camera. The Flock data does not tell us when he stopped watching that footage, but he didn’t look at anything else for two hours.

Two days later, Randy clicked through 3 private cameras at the JCC before he settled on JCC camera ‘Main Pool Right’. It was over 3 hours later before his next view on traffic cameras. 

[…]

This brings me to Bob Carter – Vice President of Strategic Relations and Business Development for Flock. Bob spends a lot of time looking through both our live footage and recorded footage. Just since the beginning of last year, he has done this 185 times.

Bob also has some interesting searches. On September 30th, 2025 – Bob looked at just one camera. This camera is in the gymnastics room of the JCC [Jewish Community Center].

A lengthy apology for all of this was given to the Jewish Community Center by none other than Flock CEO Garrett Langley. And while it’s nice to see an apology being offered, the apology doesn’t include any promises not to do this same sort of thing elsewhere, much less address the very real concerns that a number of Flock Safety employees have unfettered access to live cameras and recorded footage.

“You may have seen that questions have been raised about Flock employees’ access to security cameras near MJCCA property. While there is a lot of misinformation propagated by some of the voices making these allegations, I want to be direct and apologize for our poor judgement.”

[…]

“Because of our relationship with Dunwoody PD as a development partner–meaning we had explicit permission from Dunwoody to use their Flock system for both testing (for product improvement) and demonstration–Flock employees did occasionally access Dunwoody’s devices for those purposes,” Langley added. “I recognize that the choice to use MJCCA, rather than parts of the city, was a poor one on our part. I am cognizant of the additional, well-founded sensitivity of the Jewish community to security concerns at this time. Therefore, I would like to extend a formal apology to you and the entire MJCCA community for this poor decision. Candidly, it is because of the very real security concerns the MJCCA community is feeling that I am so proud of our partnership, and those with Jewish organizations across the country.”

While Flock management is apparently angry that some of its employees are now being called “child predators” following the publication of these access logs, it’s apparently uninterested in curbing access or installing guidelines that might deter questionable viewing habits in the future.

As for the city itself, it doesn’t seem to care that many residents are opposed to further Flock camera use based on what’s been uncovered here. The state’s attorney general took time from his busy running-for-governor schedule to praise Flock and the mayor of Dunwoody for their continued partnership.

When something like this can’t deter cities from continuing to do business with Flock, it makes the allegedly heartfelt apology issued by the company’s CEO look a lot less heartfelt. This isn’t someone offering contrition and promise to do better to a potential customer. This is someone saying the sort of stuff that sounds like contrition but is ultimately meaningless because neither Flock nor the city government actually care what the general public thinks of them.

Filed Under: alpr, dunwoody pd, garrett langley, georgia, surveillance state
Companies: flock, flock safety

Daily Deal: Adobe Lightroom 1-Year Subscription

Deals

from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept

Adobe Lightroom is a cloud-based photo editing and organizing tool designed for photographers of all levels. With an intuitive interface and advanced features, it allows you to create stunning images, manage your photo library, and work seamlessly across desktop, mobile, and web. Lightroom Classic provides robust tools for handling large volumes of images, offering precise control over photo organization and editing. It includes powerful modules like Develop and Map, making it ideal for desktop users who need in-depth editing capabilities. Enhance your photos effortlessly with easy-to-use editing tools. Adjust exposure, contrast, and color balance, crop and straighten images, and apply presets and filters with one click to achieve professional-quality results. With 1TB of cloud storage and automatic synchronization, Lightroom ensures your entire photo library is backed up and accessible from any device. Edit on the go and never lose your work—your photos are always at your fingertips. This one year subscription is on sale for $119.88.

Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackSocial. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

Filed Under: daily deal

Trump’s AI Oversight Plan Is Everything VCs Claimed To Hate About Biden’s Plan — Only Worse

Policy

from the gosh-who-could-have-predicted dept

A key takeaway of the Trump II admin is that they came in declaring a whole bunch of things to be stupid and worth ripping apart, only to later realize how important and structurally necessary those things were, and then rush to recreate them in a much sloppier, worse version. Now they’re doing it with AI policy.

As you may recall, under Biden, there was a push to get the frontier AI model companies to agree to do some voluntary testing in association with the government, to make sure that at least someone was looking over how some of the most powerful models might do bad things. Eventually, the administration worked out an agreement with OpenAI and Anthropic to give the newly established U.S. Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute (USAISI) (a part of NIST) early access to frontier models for some basic standardized testing. You can see an example of the testing results on Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 3.5 released a few months after that model was already on the market.

Not really a huge deal, but there was some grumbling and concerns among some that the U.S. government really shouldn’t be in the business of reviewing AI models. But some folks completely lost their minds about this. Notably, some of the top VCs in Silicon Valley, such as Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. Andreessen suggested that the Biden approach to regulating AI (which, again, was incredibly light touch and the product of many, many months of negotiations between AI supporters and skeptics) “would impose tyranny far beyond anything even imagined by the Communists and Fascists of the 20th Century.”

Around that time, both Andressen and Horowitz went all in for Donald Trump, citing Biden’s supposedly awful approach to AI (and cryptocurrency) as a key reason. To this day, if you hear either of them talk about this (as they seem to do on every podcast they can join), they repeatedly make extreme claims about how the Biden administration was out to destroy American AI innovation and (phew!) only Donald Trump has brought back sane policies.

Indeed, one of Trump’s first orders of business on Day 1 was to revoke Biden’s policy on AI safety reviews.

However, as we’ve been chronicling, it’s not as if the Trump administration has had any real coherent policy plan on AI. He sure claimed to have a plan, but much of it seemed to actually be focused on culture war bullshit about stopping “woke” AI from existing (which sure sounds like a suppression of speech, but alas). And then, when Pete Hegseth’s lackeys started throwing a shit fit that Anthropic wouldn’t let them use its tools to do mass surveillance on Americans, the admin declared Anthropic woke, and sought to destroy the company.

As we keep warning, the tech bros and VCs who embraced Trump’s version of MAGA fascism in the belief that through him they’d get the regulatory utopia they were hoping for were so obviously going to have the rug pulled out from under them.

And now we’re at that time for the latest rug pull. According to the NY Times, the Trump administration is planning to demand that they get to pre-vet all new AI models:

The administration is discussing an executive order to create an A.I. working group that would bring together tech executives and government officials to examine potential oversight procedures, according to U.S. officials, who declined to be identified in order to discuss deliberations over sensitive policies. Among the potential plans is a formal government review process for new A.I. models.

Oh. A formal government review process for new AI models? That seems more stringent and compliance-oriented than the voluntary setup that the Biden admin had created.

Also, with the Biden admin, the process involved a lot of careful deliberation and building out the capabilities within USAISI within NIST (a widely-trusted agency involved in setting technical standards). It appears the Trump admin version will be… a bit different and less well thought out:

Officials said that if the administration moved ahead with vetting A.I. models, the working group would help determine the agencies that would help with that effort. With no federal agency responsible for all government cybersecurity work, some officials said having the N.S.A., the White House Office of the National Cyber Director and the director of national intelligence oversee the model review was the best way to proceed.

So, we went from a voluntary, fairly light touch program under the Biden admin, where a bunch of tech standards nerds do a pretty straightforward safety review of models, with no further enforcement mechanisms… to one in which potentially the NSA and the intelligence community now gets early access to AI models with some sort of ability to approve or reject them.

What could possibly go wrong?

For starters: everything.

Meanwhile, just recently Marc Andreessen was going on podcasts talking about how happy he is that Biden’s “ruinous” federal attacks on AI are now gone and unlikely to return. Want to try again, Marc?

Look, this was always going to be the result. This is not to say that Biden’s AI policies were good. They weren’t. In typical Biden fashion there were too many competing voices in the room and so the eventually policy outcome was kinda meh. It would not have been my preferred approach. But it was hardly ruinous, let alone a kind of “tyranny far beyond anything even imagined by the Communists and Fascists of the 20th Century.”

But, as we’ve pointed out over and over again, even if you’re able to get on Trump’s good side, MAGA-style fascism is never good for you for very long. Sure you can try to cash out while the getting is good, but eventually that kind of fascism always fails. It’s simply unsustainable, and in the hands of a bunch of incompetent Trump courtiers, eventually it was always going to turn into some sort of effort to control and mold companies towards Trump and his cronies’ interests.

The end result here: we have a way worse version. Just as some of us have been warning about and predicting all along.

Amusingly, the author of Trump’s original AI policy, Dean Ball, wrote in his newsletter just before the NY Times released their article that:

the current trajectory of federal frontier AI governance is worse than the direction of AI policy under the Biden administration…

Gosh. Who could have possibly predicted that an administration full of incompetents, hangers-on, and power-hungry, mediocre, ignorant bros who want to pretend they’re the masters of the universe would fuck this one up?

Yeah, look, maybe next time, instead of embracing obvious fascism, just deal with the fact that sometimes within normal democratic structures you get bad policies you disagree with, rather than deciding we need to set fire to the constitutional order and the institutions that made American innovation so successful.

Hopefully, we can bring some of that back before it’s too late, so that next time, people like Marc Andreessen don’t set American innovation on fire just because the Biden admin hoped that people would check to make sure AI models were a bit safe.

Filed Under: ai, ai regulations, david sacks, dean ball, donald trump, frontier models, marc andreessen, regulations, vetting ai

Trump Does An RFK Jr.: Fires Entire 22 Member Board Of The National Science Foundation

Failures

from the nothing-to-see-here dept

The Trump administration’s war on science has been a furious one. Be it deep cuts to scientific research, policies that ignore scientific research, or the appointment of deeply unscientific people to lead scientific cabinet positions, it seems that Trump thinks that knowledge is the enemy.

You will recall how RFK Jr. fired every single member of the CDC’s ACIP vaccination panel last summer. It became obvious in the aftermath why he did so, after installing a cadre of anti-vaxxers to replace them and moving to shift immunization policy away from vaccines at the federal level. Trump appears to have taken a page from Kennedy’s playbook, as he recently terminated the entire board of the National Science Foundation days ago.

All 22 members of the National Science Board were terminated by the Trump administration via a terse email on Friday. The administration has provided no explanation for purging the board, which helps steer the National Science Foundation and acts as an independent advisory body for the president and Congress on scientific and engineering issues, providing reports throughout the year. The ousters represent another severe blow to the NSF and the overall scientific enterprise in America.

Members received a two-sentence email saying that, “On behalf of President Donald J. Trump,” their positions were “terminated, effective immediately.”

The post is filled with commentary from the board members and others pointing out that this leaves America with a gaping hole of leadership from a scientific advisory standpoint. The NSB advises both the Executive and Legislative branches. Trump has also nominated Jim O’Neill, an investor, to be the next Director of NSF. There is speculation that this move was done as a way to clear the field for O’Neill to replace them with hand-picked members that will further his tech bro agenda. He also already works for the federal government as Kennedy’s Deputy Secretary of HHS.

But maybe the explanation for the timing here is much more simple: Trump may have caught wind of a forthcoming NSB report about America falling behind in scientific research.

Multiple dismissed members believe the timing was deliberate, as the board was finalizing a report highlighting a widening U.S.–China gap in research and development spending. The report addresses areas central to Trump’s stated priorities, such as artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and the Moon race, but underscores lagging U.S. investment. Critics suggest the administration may seek a board more aligned with short-term political goals rather than long-term, exploratory research.

Now that sounds more like the Donald Trump I’ve come to know. This is less likely to be 4D chess at work then he simply didn’t want to be embarrassed by this report. There’s a simple test for whether that was part of the impetus here. If that same report does get finalized eventually and gets released, then it wasn’t. If we never get that report, it probably was. Simple.

But wasn’t isn’t simple is going to be digging ourselves out of the scientific debt that Trump is placing upon the country. If knowledge is power, as the saying goes, then America is less powerful today than it was before this administration.

Filed Under: donald trump, nsf, rfk jr., science, scientific research

The Open Social Web Needs Section 230 To Survive

Policy

from the if-you-believe-in-an-open-web... dept

If you want to overthrow Big Tech, you’ll need Section 230. The paradigm shift being built with the Open Social Web can put communities back in control of social media infrastructure, and finally end our dependency on enshittified corporate giants. But while these incumbents can overcome multimillion-dollar lawsuits, the small host revolution could be picked off one by one without the protections offered by 230.

The internet as we know it is built on Section 230, a law from the 90s that generally says internet users are legally responsible for their own speech — not the services hosting their speech. The purpose of 230 was to enable diverse forums for speech online, which defined the early internet. These scattered online communities have since been largely captured by a handful of multi-billion dollar companies that found profit in controlling your voice online. While critics are rightly concerned about this new corporate influence and surveillance, some look to diminishing Section 230 as the nuclear option to regain control. 

The thing is, that would be a huge gift to Big Tech, and detrimental to our best shot at actually undermining corporate and state control of speech online. 

Dethroning Big Tech

We’re fed up with legacy social media trapping us in walled gardens, where the world’s biggest companies like Google and Meta call the shots. Our communities, and our voices, are being held hostage as billionaires’ platforms surveil, betray, and censor us. We’re not alone in this frustration, and fortunately, people are collaborating globally to build another way forward: the Open Social Web. 

This new infrastructure puts the public’s interest first by reclaiming the principles of interoperability and decentralization from the early internet. In short, it puts protocols over platforms and lets people own their connections with others. Whether you choose a Fediverse app like Mastodon or an ATmosphere app like Bluesky, your audience and community stay within reach. It’s a vision of social media akin to our lives offline: you decide who to be in touch with and how, and no central authority can threaten to snuff out those connections. It’s social media for humans, not advertisers and authoritarians.

Behind that vision is a beautiful mess of protocols bringing the open social media web to life. Each protocol is a unique language for applications, determining how and where messages are sent. While this means there is great variety to these projects, it also means everyone who spins up a server, develops an app, or otherwise hosts others’ speech has skin in the game when it comes to defending Section 230.

What exactly is Section 230?

Section 230 protects freedom of expression online by protecting US intermediaries that make the internet work. Passed in 1996 to preserve the new bubbling communities online, 230 enshrined important protections for free expression and the ability to block or filter speech you don’t want on your site. One portion is credited as the “26 words that created the internet”:

“No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” 

In other words, this bipartisan law recognizes that speech online relies on intermediaries — services that deliver messages between users — and holding them potentially liable for any message they deliver would only stifle that speech. Intuitively, when harmful speech occurs, the speaker should be the one held accountable. The effect is that most civil suits against users and services based on others’ speech can quickly be dismissed, avoiding the most expensive parts of civil litigation. 

Section 230 was never a license to host anything online, however. It does not protect companies that create illegal or harmful content. Nor does Section 230 protect companies from intellectual property claims. 

What Section 230 has enabled, however, is the freedom and flexibility for online communities to self-organize. Without the specter of one bad actor exposing the host(s) to serious legal threats, intermediaries can moderate how they see fit or even defer to volunteers within these communities.

Why the Open Social Web Needs Section 230

The superpower of decentralized systems like the Fediverse is the ability for thousands of small hosts to each shoulder some of the burdens of hosting. No single site can assert itself as a necessary intermediary for everyone; instead, all must collaborate to ensure messages reach the intended audience. The result is something superior to any one design or mandate. It is an ecosystem that is greater than the sum of its parts, resilient to disruptions, and free to experiment with different approaches to community governance.

The open social web’s kryptonite though, is the liability participants can face as intermediaries. The greater the potential liability, the more interference from powerful interests in the form of legal threats, more monetary costs, and less space for nuance in moderation. And in practice, participants may simply stop hosting to avoid those risks. The end result is only the biggest and most resourced options can survive.

This isn’t just about the hosts in the Open Social Web, like Mastodon instances or Bluesky PDSes. In the U.S., Section 230’s protections extend to internet users when they distribute another person’s speech. For example, Section 230 protects a user who forwards an email with a defamatory statement. On the open social web, that means when you pass along a message to others through sharing, boosting, and quoting, you’re not liable for the other user’s speech. The alternative would be a web where one misclick could open you up to a defamation lawsuit.

Section 230 also applies to the infrastructure stack, too, like Internet service providers, content delivery networks, domain, and hosting providers. Protections even extend to the new experimental infrastructures of decentralized mesh networks.

Beyond the existential risks to the feasibility of indie decentralized projects in the United States, weakening 230 protections would also make services worse. Being able to customize your social media experience from highly curated to totally laissez-faire in the open social web is only possible when the law allows space for private experiments in moderation approaches. The algorithmically driven firehose forced on users by antiquated social media giants is driven by the financial interests of advertisers, and would only be more tightly controlled in a post-230 world.

Defending 230

Laws aimed at changing 230 protections put decentralized projects like the open social web in a uniquely precarious position. That is why we urge lawmakers to take careful consideration of these impacts. It is also why the proponents and builders of a better web must be vigilant defenders of the legal tools that make their work possible. 

The open social web embodies what we are protecting with Section 230. It’s our best chance at building a truly democratic public interest internet, where communities are in control.

Republished from the EFF’s Deeplinks blog.

Filed Under: activitypub, atprotocol, open social web, section 230

Section 702 Vote Pushed Back Another Six Weeks Following GOP’s ‘But With Cryptocurrency Ban’ Failure

Policy

from the many-wrenches-in-many-gears dept

The administration isn’t exactly winning here. The GOP has been opposed to a clean reauthorization since its first brush with warrantless surveillance back during the Biden administration. GOP members weren’t upset that the FBI routinely abused the NSA’s Section 702 collections to access US persons’ communications… unless those communications happened to be theirs.

Despite their mostly-performative opposition, Section 702 was again given a clean reauthorization. This time around, the GOP seems even more reluctant to give these powers a pass, despite it being clear President Trump would like this to happen.

Trump’s interest is more selfish than most. While he too has been performatively critical of the surveillance that swept up some of his MAGA buddies during Biden’s term in office, he’d definitely like for his FBI and DOJ to be able to warrantlessly surveil Americans he doesn’t like. Since both entities are nothing more than willing enablers of Trump’s vindictive whims, allowing the FBI to warrantlessly access US persons’ communications probably sounds wonderful. And since it appears he doesn’t believe there will ever be a regime change, he has no qualms about extending these spy powers in perpetuity with zero modifications, including those ordered by FISA court judges.

Somehow, even his party loyalists are reluctant to appease him. Section 702 has been on the verge of expiration multiple times, with only the periodic placement on temporary life support keeping these powers from being relegated to history.

With the powers set to expire at the end of April, the GOP offered up something halfway between a Hail Mary and deliberate sabotage, as Politico reports. While the House did manage to pass a three-year extension of Section 702, GOP House members added a rider that ensures this particular version wouldn’t be greenlit by the Senate.

The Senate is unlikely to clear the House-passed extension, which will be sent over with an unrelated, permanent ban on the Federal Reserve’s ability to issue a digital currency attached.

That provision was included at the behest of ultraconservatives, but it is so divisive across the Capitol that it has stalled a major affordable housing package for months. Senate Majority Leader John Thune earlier this week warned that the digital currency ban was “not happening” as part of spy law renewal.

Whether this clause was meant to keep the government from competing with Trump’s private sector offerings or just there to deter the Fed from paying closer attention to cryptocurrency market hardly matters. When John Thune is giving it a preemptive thumbs down, it’s a non-starter.

The Senate, however, received this GOP-spiked can and has only managed to kick it a bit further down the road. While some cynicism is warranted, it also buys time for surveillance reform advocates to gather the information they need to push back against yet another clean re-authorization.

The Senate approved the punt by a voice vote Thursday afternoon before the House passed it under fast-track procedures on a 261-111 vote.

As part of a deal Senate leaders cut with Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) to speed up the extension’s passage ahead of the midnight deadline, Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Mark Warner (D-Va.), the leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee, will send a letter telling the Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and the Justice Department to declassify an annual 702 court opinion within 15 days so it can be used as part of the negotiations.

This is not an unreasonable ask. The public has a right to know what the government thinks it can get away with under this surveillance power. What has always been pitched as a foreign-facing collection has been shown, for years, to be routinely accessed by Intelligence Community agencies for the sole purpose of accessing US persons’ communications without a warrant or even direct FISA court approval.

That an aggrieved Republican party may actually result in Section 702 reform is something that was never on anyone’s bingo card, especially since it’s usually been the same handful of Democratic party senators who have pushed back against these spy powers — something they have consistently done even when their own party has occupied the Oval Office.

Will reform actually happen this time? If history is any indication, a majority of Congressional reps will find some way to talk themselves out of their objections just in time to make it a problem for the next administration to solve. But there seems to be enough bipartisan opposition to a clean re-up to give reform a fighting chance.

Filed Under: fbi, fisa, gop, nsa, section 702, surveillance powers, surveillance state, trump administration, warrantless searches