EPA chief vows to take on Republican-led states over pollution rules rollback

EPA chief vows to take on Republican-led states over pollution rules rollback
Michael Regan defends civil rights record and denies abandoning communities who face brunt of toxic pollution

By Oliver Milman

Jun 18 2024

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jun/18/epa-michael-regan-republicans-climate-crisis

Republican-led states attacking protections shielding disadvantaged communities from industrial pollution will be confronted by the Biden administration, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has warned.

In a Guardian interview, Michael Regan, administrator of the EPA, also denied abandoning those who face the brunt of air and water contamination in the US.

Regan said that Biden has “gone further than any other administration since the EPA was formed in 1970” to advance environmental justice. He rejected criticism that the EPA was shying away from a deepening battle with a coalition of states that aim to prevent the federal government from challenging pollution on civil rights grounds.

Advocates have accused the EPA of retreating from civil rights cases in states including Louisiana, Texas and Michigan amid a Republican assault on using civil rights laws to combat environmental problems such as air pollution which, studies show, disproportionately affects people of color.

Last year, the EPA dropped an investigation into whether Louisiana placed Black residents in an industrial stretch of the state nicknamed “Cancer Alley” at heightened risk of cancer, despite finding initial evidence of racial discrimination. Louisiana had filed a lawsuit challenging the investigation, criticizing it as a “dystopian nightmare” and calling the EPA “social justice warriors fixated on race”.

Hopes that similar civil rights cases in Flint, Michigan, and Houston, Texas, could remedy separate instances of environmental discrimination have also been dashed since the decision.

“I think the Biden administration’s EPA has potentially achieved the biggest leap forward on justice and rights since the 1960s,” said Matthew Tejada, who was a senior official working on environmental justice at the EPA for a decade, before leaving in December. “There have been huge, undeniable wins.”

“But what happened with the civil rights program is a gut punch,” he added. “When it came to standing up to Louisiana on environmental injustice, the EPA flinched. That’s very troubling.”

Regan dismissed this, however. “We are absolutely willing to take on the states,” the EPA administrator said in an interview with the Guardian. “I completely reject the notion we are afraid to take on any state; we are willing to fight for people wherever they are. We are very much committed to civil rights.”

In April, Republican attorneys general from 23 states demanded the EPA stop compelling them to resolve air, water and other pollution under title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prevents racial discrimination by entities that receive federal funding.

The EPA has argued that this “disparate impact” provision means that states are violating the act if they force specific racial groups to face the dangers of pollution from highways, industrial plants and other sources.

“In practice, ‘environmental justice’ asks the states to engage in racial engineering in deciding to, for example, issue environmental permits,” the letterfrom the Republican-led states complains, pointing out that the supreme court views the EPA’s actions as potentially unlawful.

Regan conceded that the EPA was “very realistic” about the hostile reception it will get in certain courts, such as the conservative-dominated supreme court, which he called a “tough venue” to hear arguments that certain Americans face discrimination due to the pollutants they are exposed to.

The Civil Rights Act was “a difficult tool to use to achieve some of the goals we want to achieve”, said Regan. “We want to get at these immediate threats of pollution and we are trying to pursue tools in the toolbox that are stronger, faster and more readily available,” he added.

“We are not taking any legal action off the table but children in these communities need relief right now, grandmothers who have been breathing in pollutants for 20 years need relief right now. We have been very strategic.”

Regan cited a litany of regulatory, as well as legal, accomplishments made under Biden, such as the establishment of more stringent emissions rules for cars, trucks and power plants, key sources of pollution in low-income, Black and Hispanic communities, as well as specific actions to tackle a drinking water crisis in Jackson, Mississippi, and raw sewage in Alabama. A beefed-up environmental justice office, with 200 staffers, now sits in the heart of the EPA apparatus.

Regan, who has a history of environmental justice work as an official in North Carolina, made a trip to meet residents of Cancer Alley in Louisiana in 2021 which he said was “life-changing”. Last year, the EPA sued Denka, a manufacturer of neoprene, which is used to make wetsuits and other items, due to the cancer risk its emissions pose to Cancer Alley residents. In April, the agency passed a broader rule to slash emissions of toxins from chemical plants across the US.

“We were all shedding tears of joy when we passed that rule, which will reduce the cancer risk rate by 96% for communities like those that live near Denka,” said Regan.

“I was determined after that visit the EPA would take action. We did just that. We are very optimistic that our actions are taking root in these communities and communities are responding well.” He added that Biden had made environmental justice a “core pillar” of his administration.

Environmental groups have been critical of the Biden administration over its ongoing issuance of oil and gas drilling licenses, however, such the controversial Willow oil complex in Alaska, and for allowing oil and gas production to hit historic highs despite the impact upon the climate crisis and communities living near fossil fuel infrastructure.

Further opprobrium has been heaped upon the emerging industry of carbon capture and storage, which has received federal government support as a way to sequester emissions from industries and has spawned a fresh network of pipelines and other facilities through certain communities. In December, the EPA gave Louisiana, a bastion of oil and gas industry influence, the right to make its own environmental decisions over a boom in new CCS sites.

“No agency should be issuing carbon injection well permits, but especially not overwhelmed and understaffed agencies in fossil fuel states like Louisiana,” said Jane Patton, a campaigner at the Center for International Environmental Law.

Regan said the EPA wanted to “bring the community along” on sharing concerns over CCS and denied that the Biden administration was too accommodating to the oil and gas industry. “This administration has done more to reduce fossil fuel pollution than any administration, when you add up the tonnage we are by far in the history books,” he said.

Sharon Lavigne, a teacher and activist who met Regan on his tour of Cancer Alley, said the dropping of the civil rights investigation in Louisiana was “very disappointing” but that the administrator seemed moved by residents’ plight.

“He’s the only one who ever came down to see us, he saw himself how bad it is and I think it touched his heart, I could see in his face he was concerned and was thinking ‘how could people live like this?’” she said. “We can’t have any more death caused by this pollution, we don’t have time. I think he understands that.”

[snip]

‘Encryption is deeply threatening to power’: Meredith Whittaker of messaging app Signal

‘Encryption is deeply threatening to power’: Meredith Whittaker of messaging app Signal
By Alex Hern

Jun 18 2024

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/jun/18/encryption-is-deeply-threatening-to-power-meredith-whittaker-of-messaging-app-signal

Meredith Whittaker practises what she preaches. As the president of the Signal Foundation, she’s a strident voice backing privacy for all. But she doesn’t just spout ­hollow words.

In 2018, she burst into public view as one of the organisers of the Google walkouts, mobilising 20,000 employees of the search giant in a twin protest over the company’s support for state surveillance and failings over sexual misconduct.

Even now, after half a decade in the public eye, with ­congressional testimonies, university professorships and federal agency advisory roles under her belt, Whittaker is still firmly privacy-conscious.

It’s not unusual for business leaders to politely deflect the question when asked about their pay for the CV that accompanies these interviews, for instance. It’s somewhat less common to flatly refuse to comment on their age and family. “As a privacy advocate, Whittaker doesn’t answer personal questions that could be used to deduce her passwords or ‘secret answers’ for her bank authentication,” a staff member says after the interview. “She encourages others to follow suit!”

When she left Google, Whittaker shared a note internally that made it clear that she was committed to working on the ethical deployment of artificial intelligence and organising an “accountable tech industry”. She said: “It’s clear Google isn’t a place where I can continue this work.” That clarity, and lack of willingness to compromise, has led to Signal.

The Signal Foundation, created in 2017 with $50m in funding from WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton, exists to “protect free expression and enable secure global communication through open source privacy technology”.

It took over development of its messaging app, also called Signal, in 2018, and Whittaker came on board in the newly created role of president in 2022 – just in time to begin defending Signal, and encryption in general, against a wave of attacks from nation states and companies around the world.

Legislation such as Britain’s Online Safety Act (OSA) and the EU’s child sexual abuse regulation ­contained language that could be used to ban or crack private communications, while proposals by Meta to turn on end-to-end encryption for Facebook and Instagram sparked a vicious backlash from politicians such as Priti Patel, who called the plans “catastrophic” as UK home secretary.

Those attacks are nothing new, Whittaker says when we meet in the Observer’soffices. “You can go right back to 1976, when [Whitfield] Diffie and [Martin] Hellman were trying to publish the paper that introduced public key cryptography, which is the technique that allows us to have encrypted communication over the internet that works. There were intelligence services trying to prevent them.

“Through the 80s, there’s deep unease about the idea that the NSA [US National Security Agency] and GCHQ would lose the monopoly on encryption, and by the 90s, it ends up controlled under arms treaties – this is the ‘crypto wars’. You couldn’t send your code in the mail to someone in Europe; it was considered a munitions export.”

But then the huge push to commercialise the internet forced a softening – to a point. “Encryption for transactions was enabled, and large companies got to choose exactly what was encrypted. At the same time, the Clinton administration endorsed surveillance advertising as a business model, so there was an incentive to gather data about your customers in order to sell to them.”

Surveillance, she says, was a “disease” from the very beginning of the internet, and encryption is “deeply threatening to the type of power that constitutes itself via these information asymmetries”. All of which means that she doesn’t expect the fight to end any time soon. “I don’t think these arguments are in good faith. There’s a deeper tension here, because in 20 years of the development of this metastatic tech industry, we have seen every aspect of our lives become subject to mass surveillance perpetrated by a handful of companies partnering with the US government and other ‘Five Eyes’ agencies to gather more surveillance data about us than has ever been available to any entity in human history.

“So if we don’t continue to guard these little carve-outs of privacy and ultimately extend them – we have to throw some elbows to get a bit more space here – I think we’re in for a much bleaker future than we would be if we can hold this ground, and we can expand the space for privacy and free communication.”

The criticisms of encrypted communications are as old as the technology: allowing anyone to speak without the state being able to tap into their conversations is a godsend for criminals, terrorists and paedophiles around the world.

But, Whittaker argues, few of Signal’s loudest critics seem to be consistent in what they care about. “If we really cared about helping children, why are the UK’s schools crumbling? Why was social services funded at only 7% of the amount that was suggested to fully resource the agencies that are on the frontlines of stopping abuse?”

Sometimes the criticism is more unexpected. Signal was recently dragged into the US culture wars after a failed rightwing campaign to depose the new chief executive of National Public Radio, Katherine Maher, expanded to cover Signal, where Maher sits on the board of directors. Elon Musk got involved, promoting conspiracy theories that the Signal app – which he once promoted – had “known vulnerabilities”, in response to a claim that the app “may be compromised”.

The allegations were “a weapon in a propaganda war to spread disinformation”, Whittaker says. “We see similar lines of disinformation, that often appear designed to push ­people away from Signal, linked to escalations in the Ukraine conflict. We believe these campaigns are designed to scare people away from Signal on to less secure alternatives that may be more susceptible to hacking and interception.”

The same technology that brings the foundation criticism has made it popular among governments and militaries around the world that need to protect their own conversations from the prying eyes of state hackers and others.

Whittaker views this as a leveller – Signal is for all.

“Signal either works for everyone or it works for no one. Every military in the world uses Signal, every politician I’m aware of uses Signal. Every CEO I know uses Signal because anyone who has anything truly confidential to communicate recognises that storing that on a Meta database or in the clear on some Google server is not good practice.”

Whittaker’s vision is singular and does not entertain distraction. Despite her interest in AI, she is wary of combining it with Signal and is critical of apps such as Meta’s WhatsApp that have introduced AI-enabled functions.

[snip]

Opinion Indiana is revealing the real consequences of one-party rule

[Note:  This item comes from friend David P. Reed.  DLH]

Opinion Indiana is revealing the real consequences of one-party rule
By Mitch Daniels

Jun 18 2024

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/06/18/republicans-democrats-one-party-state-rule/

My home state’s citizens last month elected their next governor. No, I misspeak. Five percent of them elected him. Seven percent preferred a different candidate, and 88 percent never had a say in the decision.

The party now dominant in Indiana held its May primary, in which 12 percent of the 4.7 million registered voters participated. The winner captured 39 percent of that vote, or 5 percent of the electorate. November’s general election will be a laydown formality; the polls are basically closed, six months ahead of time, with a Republican assured of victory. This is “early voting” of a kind no one should advocate.

We have watched the national polarization that divides Americans in eerily equal numbers play out in vastly uneven ways, state to state. But talk of “red” and “blue” doesn’t capture either the full extent of the imbalance, or the knock-on consequences for the formation and pursuit of sound public policy.

The issue isn’t simply that states lean reliably Republican or Democratic. It’s that now a big majority are heavily, maybe irrevocably, tilted in one direction or the other. Where that obtains, office seekers pitch their initial appeals to the hard core on their side, as primary candidates always have. The difference is that, instead of the winner’s traditional post-primary imperative, to reach out to nonpartisans and even open-minded members of the opposing party, now their job is finished.

It happened pretty quickly. In the early 2000s, three-fifths of the states saw reasonable political balance between the two major parties. Today, “trifecta” government, meaning one-party control of the governorship and both legislative bodies, has become the norm across the 50 states. In 40 states, containing 83 percent of the American population, one party enjoys trifecta dominance, and often by overwhelming margins.

The roots of this phenomenon have been well studied. They include the cultural aggression of elite institutions and the predictable reaction to it, the nationalization of issues abetted by the collapse of local media and the pernicious effects of the antisocial media.

The gerrymandering that once exaggerated a dominant party’s political margin is no longer much of a factor; social clustering and these other factors have often done a more effective job than the political bosses ever did. In many jurisdictions today, one would have to reverse gerrymander, mixing geographies and crossing all kinds of legal boundary lines, to produce a truly competitive electorate.

Political campaigns need not necessarily be dispiriting, narrowcasting mudfests. They can be vehicles, in fact the best possible vehicles, for floating constructive ideas to an attentive public. Ideas proposed by a successful campaign have a higher likelihood of enactment after the election. Ideas fashioned not to stroke the erogenous zones of a riled-up minority of left or right, but to speak to the broader public in pursuit of a general election victory, evoke our common interest instead of our differences and antagonisms. But such campaigns rarely make sense these days.

In 2024, 30 states feature not only trifecta government but 2-to-1 majorities in at least one house. In that setting, both campaigns and governance look totally different than they do in genuine two-party polities.

I served as Indiana’s Republican governor from 2005 to 2013, limited to two four-year terms. In the first term, the Democratic opposition controlled one house of the General Assembly. The two gubernatorial contests during that period were hotly contested, and thought to be in doubt for most of the two election seasons. Once in office, to make effective change, we had to engage with our Democratic counterparts, even in the years when we achieved full but narrow legislative control.

Our campaign messages, as they had to, mostly centered on specific, new ideas: ethics reforms, access to health insurance, property tax caps, automatic tax refunds and many more, all couched in rhetoric stressing Indianans’ commonality as people, and the need for every part of the state to participate fully in its better future. Boy, is that passé.

This year, our next governor ran a smart race and won his victory fair and square. The problem is that neither he, nor any of his competitors, had an incentive to offer their soon-to-be employers a sense of how Indiana could move forward.

What voters saw instead, besides attacks on each other, were political advertisements centered on “standing up to China,” taking on foreign drug cartels and closing the Mexican border. It became difficult to tell whether these folks were running for secretary of state or secretary of homeland security. If they had any concrete suggestions more relevant to the job they were seeking, it obviously didn’t make sense to share them.

Wise policy and good government can and do emerge in lopsided states. But competition, always and everywhere, fosters innovation. In politics, it also compels a sensitivity and an outreach to the widest possible audiences. The contours of the current system don’t conduce to those outcomes; until that changes, we have to hope for candidates who, elected by 5 percent of the state, somehow come to consider their duty of service to all the rest.

The System Isn’t Built for Jan. 6, and Neither Are We

The System Isn’t Built for Jan. 6, and Neither Are We

By KATHERINE MILLER

Jun 18 2024

There won’t be a trial anytime soon — or maybe ever — for Donald Trump on charges related to Jan. 6. No matter the Supreme Court presidential immunity decision, even if the court rules that a trial can proceed, there almost certainly won’t be enough time before the election. If Mr. Trump is elected, there might not be a trial at all.

One of the things a trial gives you is an answer: There is an ending to a trial. In Manhattan last month, no matter how anyone felt about the guilty verdict, or the politics of the charges, or the cultural value of the case as a representation of what Donald Trump means in American life, Mr. Trump and everyone in the country got an ending. And that the trial itself was about such a narrow series of events and that so few people seem to have changed their minds after its ending might demonstrate how resolved the history of those hush payments already was.

Obviously endings to trials can go beyond guilt and acquittal; there are appeals that can lead to overturned convictions, and hung juries and mistrials that freeze out either possibility. But on some level even a hung jury provides an answer: Here is tangible evidence of a societal inability to resolve this issue.

There won’t even be an ending like that to Jan. 6, and if you think about it, there still isn’t a clean separation between the event and the politics of 2024.

The riot at the Capitol was happening and then it wasn’t. Mr. Trump eventually left, but didn’t leave. The House impeached, but the Senate acquitted. Prosecutors brought charges, but the process has spooled out into an in-between place.

Committees aired hearings and released transcripts; people wrote books and filed civil suits; individuals such as Rudy Giuliani have faced punishing financial penalties. And we have learned more and worse details about the inner workings of the Trump White House that melted down into disaster.

But Mr. Trump might still become president again, and he has never let go of the idea that animated Jan. 6 — that the election was stolen from him — and that idea has hardened in regular people.

It’s as if the country had a simultaneous, destabilizing experience, and it’s sitting there under the surface, and it must be doing something to the American psyche.

One of the things that makes Jan. 6 hard to neatly contain in the collective memory is the emotional, sloppy, accidental disaster nature of it. The event unfolded in public, and learning more about the lead-up to it tends to affirm the broad contours of what we knew when it took place. The select committee testimony and hearings, the indictments and civil suits and the many reported books are filled with examples of how ill conceived so much of what led to Jan. 6 was — and yet it eventually became a surreal scene where real people died, the police got beaten with American flags, aides and lawmakers ran and hid, and hundreds of people who believed Mr. Trump got wrapped up in the legal system.

The origin point of that day was Mr. Trump’s inability to accept that he lost, but everything in service of it is hard to wrap your head around. It’s not as if anybody needs a trial to form an opinion about Jan. 6. It’s not even that the criminal justice system absolutely had to be the way to handle this matter; it wasn’t, and charging or convicting Mr. Trump might have unintended consequences.

But a trial was possibly the last remaining avenue for a public re-examination of Jan. 6, certainly before the election, and possibly for years. Everyone has instead lived through an intense period of anticipating that consideration and its potential consequence, without getting it.

What all this lack of resolution can obscure is how fundamental this is to Mr. Trump as a political figure. Jan. 6 and his expansive idea of power being taken from him is something the voter has to embrace or reject or ignore or try to square with the other things the voter might care about. That the election was stolen from him is what Mr. Trump cares about, and that the transfer of power must take place is what the country was founded on, and that Mr. Trump’s endless words can manifest in cataclysmic real-life action is what people fear and the most hard-core supporters love about Mr. Trump.

That crisis is unforgettable and it is warping politics, just beneath the surface. It has to be part of why, on the edges, people who believe him about the election and take him at his word have developed an apocalyptic, distrustful view of even the most local institutions — because there truly wouldn’t be any other option but to believe the worst if something that immense had gone unchecked.

This is why a set of conservative politicians have developed elaborate cases for why the real issue was with security preparations or that there was some subversion — because if it was just Mr. Trump who’d allowed a mob to hit the Capitol because he was unhappy, then it would be unforgivable. And there are probably a good deal of people who just don’t want to think about it, no matter how much Mr. Trump is still thinking and talking about the 2020 election, no matter how much the fact of Jan. 6 is changing the voters and politicians around them.

[snip]

What’s the evidence for the surgeon general’s proposed social media warning?

What’s the evidence for the surgeon general’s proposed social media warning?
By Annalisa Merelli

Jun 17 2024

What’s the evidence for the surgeon general’s proposed social media warning?

United States Surgeon General Vivek Murthy wants to add a warning label on social media. “It is time to require a surgeon general’s warning label on social media platforms, stating that social media is associated with significant mental health harms for adolescents,” he wrote in an op-ed published on Monday in the New York Times, calling on Congress to take action to add the warning, which would be along the lines of the ones issued against tobacco and alcohol consumption.

Last year, Murthy published an advisory to help parents navigate children’s social media use. At the time, while concluding that “there isn’t enough evidence that it is safe for our kids,” Murthy also acknowledged in an interview with STATthat social media has some benefits, calling to “maximize the benefits and minimize the harms.”

His call to action on Monday was more strident, garnering praise from advocates of stricter social media controls, especially for young people. “Yes, this is a consumer product that is unsafe for children and teens,” wrote NYU social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, a strong proponent of limiting phone time, on X.

But for several experts operating in this field, the type and extent of social media harm exacted on children isn’t quite as clear as Murthy seems to suggest. Indeed, said Michaeline Jensen, a psychologist at the University of South Carolina, Greensboro, there isn’t sufficient evidence to conclude social media is safe — but there isn’t enough to conclude the opposite, either.

“The op-ed by Dr. Murthy really just says that social media is associated with significant mental health harms for adolescents, which feels like a very sweeping statement,” said Jensen, “given that the actual research evidence on this question is far from compelling to support that strong of a statement.”

Candice Odgers, a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, whose research focuses on the impact of social media on youth, said about 90% of studies in her area have been correlational. They “simply cannot answer the question on everyone’s mind, ‘does social media cause mental health problems in our kids?’” she wrote in a statement shared with STAT. The National Academies of Science agreed, publishing in a 2023 report that “available research that links social media to health shows small effects and weak associations… Contrary to the current cultural narrative that social media is universally harmful to adolescents, the reality is more complicated.”

Justifying the broader climate of skepticism and fear around social media, there are areas in which it has been shown to cause potential harm, said Jensen: cyber bullying, exposure to racism and discrimination, sleep and attention disruptions related to screen time, and social comparison, especially in matters of physical appearance, which can worsen eating disorders.

But there is also fairly strong evidence for some benefits, she said. “To the extent that young people are engaging on social media for online social interactions, social support, or information seeking around health conditions, those can be beneficial experiences — especially for young people who are otherwise isolated or stressed out in their offline lives,” said Jensen.

Asking teens themselves how they feel about social media doesn’t return a picture of doom: A 2023 survey from the Pew Research Center found that 32% of teens said social media platforms had “mostly positive” impact on their life, and only 9% said it had a negative impact.

Would a warning be able to capture the nuance of this research, Jensen wonders, or just capture the downsides? “I don’t know if they can have a three-paragraph surgeon general’s warning that could get at this nuance,” she said. The advisory Murthy published last year, she said, was far more specific, and easier to support, pointing to needs for sexual content warnings, privacy protection, or auditing from outside researchers.

“There’s certainly plenty of research suggesting that the surgeon general’s warnings on things like alcohol and tobacco did work,” said Jensen. “Those were some of the most effective public health interventions that we’ve had.” But the reason they were so effective, she said, is that there was exceedingly strong evidence to support the warnings. A weaker evidence base for a social media warning could even end up compromising the power of warning labels in the future.

Some researchers on X to the op-ed agreed, including Pete Etchells, a professor of psychology and science communications at Bath Spa University and the author of Unlocked: The Real Science of Screen Time. He posted that the warning “sets dangerous precedent, and is a good reminder that the urgency of wanting to ‘do something now’ makes evidence-based approaches all the more important.”

Teens certainly seem to be aware of the risks of social media. In the same Pew poll, when asked what they thought was the impact on their peers, teens reported less positive effects and more harmful ones. “I don’t know that there’s a young person out there who doesn’t know that people are saying that it’s harmful,” said Jensen.

Obeying In Advance

[Note:  This item comes from friend David Rosenthal.  DLH]

Obeying In Advance
By Cheryl Rofer

Jun 14 2024

Obeying In Advance

The first of Timothy Snyder’s 20 lessons on tyranny is “Do not obey in advance.”

1. Do not obey in advance.

Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.

In the last few days, we’ve had at least two examples of obedience in advance.

The Stanford Internet Observatory is shutting down. It’s been a source of information on the uses of social media to spread propaganda and has been the subject of Republican congressional investigations and lawsuits. Stanford has done a bit of reorganization magic, but the look is of capitulating to authoritarian pressure.

It’s not clear that the film about Donald Trump and Roy Cohn, “The Apprentice,” will be shown in the United States. Distributors in the US are shying away from it, although distributors in Canada, the U.K., France, Germany, and Japan have bought the rights.

This is fine.

Stanford Internet Observatory wilts under legal pressure

[Note:  This item comes from friend David Rosenthal.  DLH]

Stanford Internet Observatory wilts under legal pressure

Because who needs disinformation research at times like these
By Thomas Claburn

Jun 14 2024

https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/14/stanford_internet_observatory/

The Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), which for the past five years has been studying and reporting on social media disinformation, is being reimagined with new management and fewer staff following the recent departure of research director Renee DiResta.

The changes coincide with conservative legal challenges to the US university group’s online speech moderation efforts, particularly around elections. A Stanford spokesperson responded in a statement that insists SIO is not being dismantled and that the organization will continue to pursue its mission under new leadership.

Stanford’s spokesperson told The Register, noting that SIO will continue working on child safety and other online dangers. Just not election misinformation it seems, which is odd considering the year. There is a presidential race in the USA, for one thing, as well as a general election in the UK.

“Stanford remains deeply concerned about efforts, including lawsuits and congressional investigations, that chill freedom of inquiry and undermine legitimate and much needed academic research – both at Stanford and across academia,” the spokesperson told us.

The Register asked whether a new leader has been named, whether election integrity work will continue, and whether SIO will operate under the same name. We were referred to Jeff Hancock, director of the Stanford Social Media Lab and the Cyber Policy Center, under which the SIO operates. Hancock, however, had no comment.

Alex Stamos, the former chief security officer at Yahoo and Facebook who founded SIO, moved to an advisory role last November.

According to The Washington Post, only three staffers remain with SIO, which currently lists nine employees.

• X marks the spot where Twitter’s severance math doesn’t add up
• Meta will use your social media posts to train its AI. Europe gets an opt out
• Chucking Trump etc off Twitter after Jan 6 provides key data for misinfo experiment
• Twitter ‘supersharers’ of fake news tend to be older Republican women

SIO came under fire last year from the Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, overseen by House Judiciary chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH). Last summer the panel demanded documents from SIO related to its online speech moderation efforts and threatened legal action for non-compliance. Stanford is said to have partially complied.

SIO participated in the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) and the Virality Project (VP), along with other organizations, in an effort to limit online misinformation. Those efforts made it the target of legal groups like America First Legal, which sued SIO and those involved last November claiming [PDF] that the EIP, as a public-private partnership, violates First Amendment free speech rights.

A November 2023 report [PDF] from the subcommittee claimed, EIP was created at the request of the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and that “EIP provided a way for the federal government to launder its censorship activities in hopes of bypassing both the First Amendment and public scrutiny.” Under the First Amendment, the government is prohibited from policing speech, with limited exceptions.

Two lawsuits and two ongoing Congressional investigations, according to the Post, have saddled Stanford with millions of dollars in legal fees. Hence Stanford’s concern about lawsuits and congressional investigations “that chill freedom of inquiry and undermine legitimate and much needed academic research.” ®

How’s this for a bombshell – the US must make AI its next Manhattan Project

How’s this for a bombshell – the US must make AI its next Manhattan Project

A new essay on the rise of superintelligent machines pivots from being a warning to humanity to a rallying cry for an industrial complex to bolster American military defence
By John Naughton

Jun 15 2024

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jun/15/hows-this-for-a-bombshell-the-us-must-make-ai-its-next-manhattan-project

Ten years ago, the Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom published Superintelligence, a book exploring how superintelligent machines could be created and what the implications of such technology might be. One was that such a machine, if it were created, would be difficult to control and might even take over the world in order to achieve its goals (which in Bostrom’s celebrated thought experiment was to make paperclips).

The book was a big seller, triggering lively debates but also attracting a good deal of disagreement. Critics complained that it was based on a simplistic view of “intelligence”, that it overestimated the likelihood of superintelligent machines emerging any time soon and that it failed to suggest credible solutions for the problems that it had raised. But it had the great merit of making people think about a possibility that had hitherto been confined to the remoter fringes of academia and sci-fi.

Now, 10 years later, comes another shot at the same target. This time, though, it’s not a book but a substantial (165-page) essay with the title Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead. The author is a young German lad, Leopold Aschenbrenner, who now lives in San Francisco and hangs out with the more cerebral fringe of the Silicon Valley crowd. On paper, he sounds a bit like a wunderkind in the Sam Bankman-Fried mould – a maths whiz who graduated from an elite US university in his teens, spent some time in Oxford with the Future of Humanity Institute crowd and worked for OpenAI’s “superalignment” team (now disbanded), before starting an investment company focused on AGI (artificial general intelligence) with funding from the Collison brothers, Patrick and John – founders of Stripe – a pair of sharp cookies who don’t back losers.

So this Aschenbrenner is smart, but he also has skin in the game. The second point may be relevant because essentially the thrust of his mega-essay is that superintelligence is coming (with AGI as a stepping-stone) and the world is not ready for it.

The essay has five sections. The first charts the path from GPT-4 (where we are now) to AGI (which he thinks might arrive as early as 2027). The second traces the hypothetical path from AGI to real superintelligence. The third discusses four “challenges” that superintelligent machines will pose for the world. Section four outlines what he calls the “project” that’s needed to manage a world equipped with (dominated by?) superintelligent machines. Section five is Aschenbrenner’s message to humanity in the form of three “tenets” of “AGI realism”.

In his view of how AI will progress in the near-term future, Aschenbrenner is basically an optimistic determinist, in the sense that he extrapolates the recent past on the assumption that trends continue. He cannot see an upward-sloping graph without extending it. He grades LLMs (large language models) by capability. Thus GPT-2 was “preschooler” level; GPT-3 was “elementary schooler”; GPT-4 is “smart high schooler” and a massive increase in computing power will apparently get us by 2028 to “models as smart as PhDs or experts that can work besides us as co-workers”. En passant, why do AI boosters always regard holders of doctorates as the epitome of human perfection?

After 2028 comes the really big leap: from AGI to superintelligence. In Aschenbrenner’s universe, AI doesn’t stop at human-level capability. “Hundreds of millions of AGIs could automate AI research, compressing a decade of algorithmic progress into one year. We would rapidly go from human-level to vastly superhuman AI systems. The power – and the peril – of superintelligence would be dramatic.”

The essay’s third section contains an exploration of what such a world may be like by focusing on four aspects of it: the unimaginable (and environmentally disastrous) computation requirements needed to run it; the difficulties of maintaining AI laboratory security in such a world; the problem of aligning machines with human purposes (difficult but not impossible, Aschenbrenner thinks); and the military consequences of a world of superintelligent machines.

It’s only when he gets to the fourth of these topics that Aschenbrenner’s analysis really starts to come apart at the themes. Running through his thinking, like the message in a stick of Blackpool rock, is the analogy of nuclear weapons. He views the US as being at the stage with AI it was after J Robert Oppenheimer’s initial Trinity test in New Mexico – ahead of the USSR, but not for long. And in this metaphor, of course, China plays the role of the Soviet empire.

Suddenly, superintelligence has morphed from being a problem for humanity into an urgent matter of US national security. “The US has a lead,” he writes. “We just have to keep it. And we’re screwing that up right now. Most of all, we must rapidly and radically lock down the AI labs, before we leak key AGI breakthroughs in the next 12-24 months … We must build the computer clusters in the US, not in dictatorships that offer money. And yes, American AI labs have a duty to work with the intelligence community and the military. America’s lead on AGI won’t secure peace and freedom by just building the best AI girlfriend apps. It’s not pretty – but we must build AI for American defence.”

All that’s needed is a new Manhattan Project. And an AGI-industrial complex.

[snip]

Google, Cloudflare & Cisco Will Poison DNS to Stop Piracy Block Circumvention

[Note:  This item comes from friend Steve Schear.  DLH]

Google, Cloudflare & Cisco Will Poison DNS to Stop Piracy Block Circumvention

By Andy Maxwell

Jun 13 2024

https://torrentfreak.com/google-cloudflare-cisco-will-poison-dns-to-stop-piracy-block-circumvention-240613

A French court has ordered Google, Cloudflare, and Cisco to poison their DNS resolvers to prevent circumvention of blocking measures, targeting around 117 pirate sports streaming domains. The move is another anti-piracy escalation for broadcaster Canal+, which also has permission to completely deindex the sites from search engine results.

In France, where laws were introduced with site-blocking and similar anti-piracy measures already baked in, entertainment giant Canal+ seems intent on taking full advantage.

Like similar broadcasters with lucrative sports rights to exploit, Canal+ has a subset of viewers who prefer to consume from pirate sources which charge much less, or even nothing at all.

To maximize its existing site-blocking efforts through local ISPs, the French broadcaster has now taken the logical, albeit controversial, next step on the site-blocking ladder.

DNS Tampering at the Local ISP Level

In 2023, Canal+ went to court in France to tackle pirate sports streaming sites including Footybite.co, Streamcheck.link, SportBay.sx, TVFutbol.info, and Catchystream.com. The broadcaster said that since subscribers of local ISPs were accessing the pirate sites using their services, the ISPs should prevent them from doing so.

When the decision went in favor of Canal+, ISPs including Orange, SFR, OutreMer Télécom, Free, and Bouygues Télécom, were required to implement technical measures. Since the ISPs have their own DNS resolvers for use by their own customers, these were configured to provide non-authentic responses to deny access to the sites in question. 

In response, increasingly savvy internet users that hadn’t already done so, simply changed their settings to use different DNS providers – Cloudflare, Google, and Cisco – whose resolvers hadn’t been tampered with; at least not yet.

One More Step Up The Ladder: Public DNS Tampering

Use of third-party DNS providers to circumvent blocking isn’t uncommon so last year Canal+ took legal action against three popular public DNS providers – Cloudflare (1.1.1.1), Google (8.8.8.8), and Cisco (208.69.38.205), demanding measures similar to those implemented by French ISPs.

Tampering with public DNS is a step too far for many internet advocates but for major rightsholders, if the law can be shaped to allow it, that’s what will happen. In this case, Article L333-10 of the French Sports Code (active Jan 2022) seems capable of accommodating almost anything.

When there are “serious and repeated violations” by an “online public communication service” whose main objective is the unauthorized broadcasting of sports competitions, rightsholders can demand “all proportionate measures likely to prevent or put an end to this infringement, against any person likely to contribute to remedying it.”

Google, Cloudflare, and Cisco Ordered to Prevent Circumvention

Two decisions were handed down by the Paris judicial court last month; one concerning Premier League matches and the other the Champions League. The orders instruct Google, Cloudflare, and Cisco to implement measures similar to those in place at local ISPs. To protect the rights of Canal+, the companies must prevent French internet users from using their services to access around 117 pirate domains.

According to French publication l’Informé, which broke the news, Google attorney Sébastien Proust crunched figures published by government anti-piracy agency Arcom and concluded that the effect on piracy rates, if any, is likely to be minimal. 

Starting with a pool of all users who use alternative DNS for any reason, users of pirate sites – especially sites broadcasting the matches in question – were isolated from the rest. Users of both VPNs and third-party DNS were further excluded from the group since DNS blocking is ineffective against VPNs. 

Proust found that the number of users likely to be affected by DNS blocking at Google, Cloudflare, and Cisco, amounts to 0.084% of the total population of French Internet users. Citing a recent survey, which found that only 2% of those who face blocks simply give up and don’t find other means of circumvention, he reached an interesting conclusion.

“2% of 0.084% is 0.00168% of Internet users! In absolute terms, that would represent a small group of around 800 people across France!”

Court Rejected Arguments Against Blocking

In common with other courts presented with the same arguments, the Paris court said the number of people using alternative DNS to access the sites, and the simplicity of switching DNS, are irrelevant.

Canal+ owns the rights to the broadcasts and if it wishes to request a blocking injunction, it has the legal right to do so.

The DNS providers’ assertion that their services are not covered by the legislation was also waved aside by the court.

Google says it intends to comply with the order. As part of the original matter in 2023, it was already required to deindex the domains from search results under the same law.

At least in theory, this means that those who circumvented the original blocks using these alternative DNS services, will be back to square one and confronted by blocks all over again. 

Given that circumventing this set of blocks will be as straightforward as circumventing the originals, that raises the question of what measures Canal+ will demand next, and from whom.

[snip]

Accessible and ‘a pleasure to read’: how Apple’s podcast transcriptions came to be

Accessible and ‘a pleasure to read’: how Apple’s podcast transcriptions came to be

Apple rolled out a feature highly requested by both disabled users and podcast creators. Why did it take so long?

By Ari Saperstein

Jun 15 2024

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/jun/15/apple-podcast-transcription-feature

Ren Shelburne was fed up with trying to listen to popular podcast episodes her friends recommended. Shelburne, a photographer with partial hearing loss and an auditory processing condition, remembers struggling to finish a particular episode. It was a specific type of show: too many talking heads, complicated overlapping dialogue and, until recently, no transcription. “Those I’m just so lost on because there’s just too much going on at once,” Shelburne says. She couldn’t follow along, so she couldn’t discuss the show with her friends. “Podcasts are such a big part of pop culture and media at this point. I want to be able to be a part of that conversation.”

Weekly podcast listenership in the United States has more than quadrupled in the past decade, according to Pew Research. For some, though, the medium still feels inaccessible.

“Sometimes I miss something because of my hearing loss,” says Alexandra Wong, a Rhodes scholar studying digital accessibility, “and I have to go back and rewind it maybe like five or six times to make sure I can understand what’s going on with it.”

Shelburne and Wong are among the roughly 15% of adults in the US, some 37.5m people, who report difficulty hearing without an aid, many of whom rely on captions and transcripts to follow music, movies and podcasts. Video streaming companies like Netflix, Peacock and Hulu offer captions for nearly all their programming, and time-synced lyric captions have become increasingly standard in music streaming. The prevalence of video captions has been embraced by audiences beyond the disability community; 80% of Netflix viewers turn on captions at least once a month.

By contrast, podcasting companies have been late to the accessibility game. Sirius XM and Gimlet have faced lawsuits claiming they’re in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act for failing to provide transcripts. Spotify, which owns Gimlet, launched podcast transcriptions in September, but the feature is solely available for shows owned by the streaming service and podcasts hosted there.

Apple announced in March that automatically generated transcriptions would be available for any new podcast episodes played on its app via iPads and iPhones on the latest Apple operating system.

“Our goal is obviously to make podcasts more accessible, more immersive,” says Ben Cave, Apple’s global head of podcasts.

Sarah Herrlinger, who manages Apple’s accessibility policy, says the development of the transcription tool involved working with both disabled Apple employees and outside organizations. Transcription became a priority for Apple Podcasts because of increasing demand from both disabled users and podcast creators, she said.

“This is one of the top requested features from creators,” says Cave. “They’ve been asking for this.”

Apple’s journey to podcast transcripts started with the expansion of a different feature: indexing. It’s a common origin story at a number of tech companies like Amazon and Yahoo – what begins as a search tool evolves into a full transcription initiative. Apple first deployed software that could identify specific words in a podcast back in 2018.

“What we did then is we offered a single line of the transcript to give users context on a result when they’re searching for something in particular,” Cave recalls. “There’s a few different things that we did in the intervening seven years, which all came together into this [transcript] feature.”

Cave says that one of the big hurdles in the years of development was ensuring a high standard of performance, display and accuracy. A number of big leaps forward came from accessibility innovation at other departments within Apple.

“In this case, we took the best of what we learned from reading in Apple Books and lyrics in Apple Music,” says Herrlinger. Apple Podcast transcripts borrow time-synced word-by-word highlighting from Apple Music and make use of Apple Books’ font and contrasting color scheme for the visually impaired.

Apple has attempted to make up for its delay in releasing a transcription feature by offering a more wide-ranging one than its competitors. Amazon Music has offered auto-generated transcripts for podcasts since 2021, but they’re available only for their original programs and a smattering of other popular shows, with captions appearing as block text instead of word-by-word highlighting. Spotify released a transcript feature in September 2023 that includes word-by-word highlighting, but it is only available for Spotify originals and shows hosted on its platform.

In the war with Apple over music and podcast streaming, Spotify bungled the launch of an AI-powered translation tool last fall purporting to offer multiple podcasts in French, German and Spanish. The company has seemingly failed to deliver on specific promises made at the time. Currently, the streaming service appears to only have Spanish translations – and predominantly for just one podcast: The Lex Fridman Podcast. In its announcement, Spotify namechecked a number of podcasts as being a part of their translation program – such as The Rewatchables and Trevor Noah’s What Now? – that don’t have transcriptions available in languages other than English at the time of publication, nine months later. Spotify declined to comment when asked about these discrepancies.

Apple’s podcast app will transcribe every new uploaded episode. “We wanted to do it for all the shows, so it’s not just for like a narrow slice of the catalogue,” says Cave. “It wouldn’t be appropriate for us to put an arbitrary limit on the amount of shows who get it … We think that’s important from an accessibility standpoint because we want to give people the expectation that transcripts are available for everything that they want to interact with.”

Cave adds: “Over time, the entire episode library will be transcribed.” However, he says Apple is prioritizing transcripts for new content, declining to say when the transcriptions of back catalogues might come.

Disability activists and users said they believed Apple’s story that the company was working to get it right instead of launching a bad product, though it lagged behind competitors. They said they would rather wait for the right product than for a bad accessibility project to be rushed out.

“I respect that. Having captions and transcriptions that are inaccurate just defeats the purpose,” said Shelburne.

“I was knocked out on how accurate it was,” says Larry Goldberg, a media and technology accessibility pioneer who created the first closed captioning system for movie theaters. The fidelity of auto-transcription is something that’s long been lacking, he adds. “It’s improved, it has gotten better … but there are times when it is so wrong.”

Goldberg and other experts pointed to YouTube’s auto-generated closed captioning tool, available since 2009, as a subpar, rushed product. While YouTube says its transcriptions received a notable upgrade in 2023, the tool has been the subject of frequent criticism over the years for its lack of accuracy. It’s what some critics have dubbed as “craptions” – when the tool mistakes words like “concealer” for “zebra” and “wedding” for “lady”.

Goldberg recalls being shocked at one colleague’s reaction while discussing the misinformation consequences of unreliable transcription: it’s better than nothing.

“That’s your bar for quality? Better than nothing?” Goldberg said. “No, that’s just not good enough.”

In addition to making sure the transcripts capture speech as accurately as possible, Cave at Apple says a lot of work went into training the software to exclude things, too.

“We also want to make it a pleasure to read … That means we wanted to reduce the relative importance of things like filler words, like ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’.” For podcast creators who want those vocal disfluencies transcribed, Apple says they’ll have to upload a custom transcript.

The folks at Apple are already noticing the transcription tool used for a variety of surprising purposes.

“We’re seeing lots of users engaging with transcripts in the language learning space,” Cave says, noting that Apple Podcast transcripts supports English, Spanish, French and German-language podcasts.

“We often find that by building for the margins, we make a better product for the masses,” says Herrlinger. “Other communities will find those features and find ways to use them in some cases where we know this could benefit someone else.”

Goldberg, the accessibility expert, wants to see other platforms adopt Apple’s approach to transcription. His dream is that more companies might start treating podcast transcripts with the same priority given to video content.

[snip]