“I say the message is two very simple things. First of all, don’t give power to the crazy people who started these problems in the first place,” Vance said in an interview with Newsmax’s Greg Kelly.
Swiss agricultural cooperative pays farms CHF7.2m drought relief SwissInfo
Trump declares victory in Greenland, but the deal exposes a deeper crisis of trust The Conversation
Sweden: Social Democracy Won the Century and Lost the Future Jacobin
US Gov Graph
We cannot govern systems we don’t understand, so we built a complete data model of the United States federal government – entities, positions, people, and the legal relationships between them. Built by CivLabfor you.
“Introducing the US Gov Graph – a complete map of the people and positions of power in the federal government.
To fix our institutions we must understand how they work, so we are using AI to model and monitor every government in America. This is Palantir for The People. We exist to set the conditions for an era of civic excellence unmatched since the Founding. We will need nothing less to navigate the age of AI. Self-governing civilization is counting on you.”
New Resource for Supreme Court Watchers
Supreme Court Report – Quantifying the U.S. Supreme Court’s behavior and making it legible for the public.
Revealed: The Humans Reading Your ChatGPT Chats
404 Media: “We have a big one today: OpenAI is hiring an army of human contractors to read real ChatGPT users prompts. I know this because Ive seen a bunch of internal documents, the system these people are using to read those prompts, and a bunch of the prompts myself. I seriously doubt many of ChatGPT’s more than 900 million users have any inkling that when they type a message into ChatGPT, a person somewhere may be reading that chat. This is especially concerning as more and more people turn to ChatGPT as a therapist or for other sensitive topics.
Read below for the details. OpenAI is hiring hundreds of contractors who read a massive stream of real users’ ChatGPT prompts, with the prompts sometimes including sensitive personal information, 404 Media has learned. The prompts these people review can include whole conversations between users and the chatbot, conversations that most of ChatGPT’s more than 900 million users probably don’t realize may be read by actual people.
The goal of these prompt review teams is to improve the responses ChatGPT gives to its users, with the contractors rating and critiquing the chatbot’s generated replies. Internal documents seen by 404 Media show contractors training ChatGPT to not anthropomorphize itself, and to be less sycophantic, a key problem for OpenAI whose over-sycophantic 4o model led in part to multiple peoples’ suicides, according to various lawsuits…”
The High Crime of “LMAO”: How Cops Are Treating Mass Surveillance As a Joke
EFF: “When law enforcement and tech salespeople pitch ALPRs to city councils, they stick to a familiar script.
They trumpet the technology, which is often provided by private companies like Flock Safety, Motorola Solutions, or Axon, as an essential tool for solving high-stakes crimes, such as car jacking, kidnapping, or murder. But when you strip away the carefully curated talking points, the data continues to reveal a different (and frankly, ridiculous) story. An EFF analysis of ALPR search logs from Flock Safety systems shows that officers across the country are spying on drivers for completely nonsensical “reasons.” Police are routinely searching the Flock database without providing any legitimate justification, making a mockery of our civil liberties by logging reasons like “LOL” (short for “laugh out loud”), “LMAO” (short for “laughing my ass off”), “sexy,” and “idk” (short for “I don’t know”) to access sensitive ALPR location data.
And in some cases, officers are just mashing keyboard buttons rather than articulating the nature of their searches. Flock Safety claims it has improved its system by requiring officers to select from a dropdownlist of crimes before running a search–but that only makes it easier for officers to hide improper searches behind the veneer of uniformity. The system does not require proof that the dropdown reason actually matches the true purpose of the search.
With no warrant requirements, limited guardrails, and deficient audit processes, ALPR databases have fostered a culture of unrestricted access to everyone’s location information. This culture of abuse has allowed police to treat a mass surveillance network like their own personal search engine, permitting the tracking of the movements of everyday citizens for low-level complaints, personal whims, and sometimes, seemingly, for the lols.
A Documented Culture of Abuse ALPR misuse isn’t a new phenomenon; it has dominated headlines for more than a year. We already know that officers regularly abuse these systems to stalk past and potential romantic partners.
We’ve seen ALPRs used to surveil protests, which can chill First Amendment-protected dissent, and seen officers try to use an ALPR system to track down a woman seeking an abortion. Typically, we learn about these uses from documents called “network audits,” which are long spreadsheets that document all the searches that run through an agency’s system. It is not unusual for even a small agency to have a record of millions of searches from thousands of external agencies across the United States. We’ve also uncovered horrific systemic profiling, with more than 80 law enforcement agencies using terms like “roma” and “g*psy” to target ethnic Romani people—often without any mention of a suspected crime.
And when police aren’t using ALPRs for stalking or profiling, they routinely use them for extreme low-level investigations: verifying whether a student lives in a specific school zone, running employment background checks, following up on loud music complaints, or targeting a motorcyclist simply for holding a cell phone. But somehow, it gets worse…”