Month: August 2024

The online digital ID age verification creep in the US continues from a number of directions, through “recommendations” and “studies” – essentially, the government is nudging the industry to move in the direction of implementing digital ID age verification tools.

At this point, it is happening via various initiatives and legislation, still, without being formally mandated.

One instance is a recommendation coming from the Biden-Harris Administration’s Kids Online Health and Safety Task Force, which is telling online service providers they should “develop and inform parents about age verification tools built into the app or available at the device level.”

The task force is led by the Department of Health and Human Services, HHS (its Substance Abuse and Mental Health Service Administration, SAMHSA,) in what is referred to in official statements as “close partnership” with the Department of Commerce.

Related: The 2024 Digital ID and Online Age Verification Agenda

This initiative is presented as an industry guidance that will ensure the safety of youths on the internet, as well as their health and privacy.

One of the steps presented in the fact sheet refers to age verification. This is a hot-button issue, particularly among privacy and security advocates, considering the methods that would be necessary to prove somebody’s real-life identity online, and that this would have to apply to all users of a site or app.

Yet, the current White House is now “urging” the tech industry to, among other “critical steps” inform parents about developing and building digital ID tools into either apps or devices themselves.

The setting up of the task force and its recommendations are supposed to contribute to Biden’s “Unity Agenda,” while a report released last week talks about an “unprecedented youth mental crisis” as the reason for coming up with these recommendations for families and industry.

The initiative, announced in May, bases its claims about the metal crisis of previously unwitnessed proportions on a report put together by the US surgeon-general and his advisory concerning social platforms.

In addition to “sneaking in” the mention of age verification, the report also talks about the need to enact bipartisan federal legislation aimed at protecting the health, safety, and privacy of young people online.

Another point is urging the industry to advance “action to implement age-appropriate health, safety, and privacy best practices on online platforms through federal legislation and voluntary commitments.”

The documents’ authors from the several departments behind the task force also want platform data to become available to “independent researchers.”

The post Biden-Harris Task Force Urges Online Age Verification Digital ID Tool Development appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

Google is being accused of doing its part to “memory-hole” one of the most serious incidents in American politics in decades – the attempted assassination of former president, now presidential candidate, Donald Trump.

Google’s search engine is leaving out relevant results in the autosuggest feature, thus decreasing the likelihood of users learning more about the event, and importantly, the investigation into it.

Senator Roger Marshall, a Republican who is a member of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, has announced a probe into this behavior, blasting Google at the same time for yet again engaging in censorship of conservatives, and, demonstrating “willful discrimination against President Trump and users of (the) search engine.”

For these reasons, Marshall wrote to Google CEO Sundar Pichai to tell him that he should show up before lawmakers and testify about the company’s conduct. The importance of this type of censorship is all the greater since, as the senator notes, Google is the largest search engine in the world.

We obtained a copy of the letter for you here.

But now, according to him, it has turned into “a propaganda wing of the Biden-Harris Administration and the radical Left.” The senator sees this as a form of election interference, accusing Big Tech in general of bias in favor first of the Clintons, then Biden, and now Kamala Harris.

He also described Google’s censorship of information about the assassination attempt as proving that there is “no low” the giant won’t stoop to.

Google is claiming that no “manual action” has been done recently to affect search results and that it has a policy of “protections against autocomplete predictions associated with political violence” – yet people searching for “failed assassination attempt” got suggested results concerning former presidents Reagan, Ford, Bob Marley, and even Archduke Ferdinand – but not Trump.

“If the autocomplete function is truly reflective of the recent searches completed on Google, the self-learning algorithms should have easily adjusted their autocomplete function during a massive increase in search queries over the last two weeks,” Marshall stated.

Another Republican has addressed the situation. Congressman Matt Gaetz spoke about “autocomplete irregularities” on Google and wants the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to provide any documents that might show another case of collusion has happened, this time around the attempted assassination.

We obtained a copy of the letter for you here.

The post Lawmakers Marshall and Gaetz Call for Probes into Big Tech’s Alleged Censorship of Trump Assassination Attempt, Seek Google and DHS Testimony appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

The chipmaker, which has fallen behind competitors, is slashing 15 percent of its workforce.

The US District Court for the District of Oregon has granted a preliminary injunction in the Gilley v Stabin case, involving Portland State University political scientist Bruce Gilley, and the University of Oregon (UO) Division of Equity and Inclusion.

We obtained a copy of the order for you here.

It was Tova Stabin, at that time, June 2022, UO’s communications manager – who is named as a defendant in Gilley’s First Amendment-based lawsuit filed after he was blocked on Twitter by Stabin.

Stabin’s decision to block Gilley and thus have his posts removed from the UO Equity account, came as he responded to her asking Twitter to “interrupt racism.” Gilley’s post read, “All men are created equal.”

The latest decision came after the motion for a preliminary injunction was first denied as moot (because UO Equity lifted the block one day after Gilley filed, and ceased activity on its Twitter account) – but then the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals sent the case back to the lower court.

The decision means that UO Equity can no longer block Gilley, or hide, mute, or delete his posts.

According to Just The News, Stabin retired from UO shortly after Gilley was censored, but returned this year as a consultant for the school, in order to organize “a couple of fighting antisemitism workshops.”

When the blocking incident originally happened, Gilley wanted to know which policy allowed UO to do what it did and filed a request for public records to reveal this. Stabin was then cited in the response to the request as telling a colleague Gilley was “obnoxious” – and not only that but was “bringing obnoxious people to the site.”

The 9th Circuit’s decision back in March noted that UO first said it had no formal policy on social media, but that when Gilley sued, it suddenly changed this position by revealing guidelines that gave it the right to remove any comments it considered racist, hateful, otherwise inappropriate or offensive.

And to make the “rules” as broad as possible – also comments that are “out of context, off-topic or not relevant to the topic at hand.” That would be one way of saying, “obnoxious.”

However the appellate court was not impressed, stating that the case was not moot because of the policy’s “lack of formality and relative novelty, how easily (it) can be reversed, and the lack of procedural safeguards to protect from arbitrary action.”

For that reason, the 9th Circuit found, “Gilley has standing to seek prospective relief for his as-applied challenge,” and now the district court granted an injunction.

The post Political Scientist Wins Injunction Against University of Oregon Officials Over Social Media Censorship appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

The District Court for the Eastern District of New York has ruled that the US government must reverse course on its policy of warrantless searches of US (and foreign) nationals’ electronic devices as they enter the country.

We obtained a copy of the ruling for you here.

This is not the only court decision on this issue, while this particular outcome, requiring that border agents obtain court-issued orders before performing such searches, concerns the district that is the court’s seat – therefore also a major port of entry, JFK International Airport.

It was precisely at this airport that an event unfolded which set in motion a legal case. In 2022, US citizen Kurbonali Sultanov was coerced (he was told he “had no choice”) into surrendering his phone’s passport to border officers.

Sultanov later became a defendant in a criminal case but argued that evidence from the phone should not be admitted because the device was accessed in violation of the Fourth Amendment (which protects Americans against unreasonable and warrantless searches).

Of course, all these envisaged protections refer to US citizens, and even there prove to be sketchy in many instances. Foreign travelers (even though entering the country legally) are effectively left without any protections regarding their privacy.

Sultanov’s argument was supported in an amicus brief filed the following year by the Knight First Amendment Institute and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, who said that the First Amendment is violated as well when law enforcement gains access to phones without a warrant since it invalidates constitutional protections of speech, freedom of the press, religion, and association.

The New York Eastern District Court’s decision is by and large based precisely on that amicus brief. One of the arguments from it is that journalists entering the US are often forced to hand over their devices.

The court agreed that “letting border agents freely rifle through journalists’ work product and communications whenever they cross the border would pose an intolerable risk to press freedom,” said Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press attorney Grayson Clary in a press statement.

Meanwhile, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) said they were reviewing this ruling – and would not comment on what the agency said are “pending criminal cases.”

The post Landmark Ruling Strikes Down Warrantless Device Searches of US Citizens Borders appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

Imane Khelif has always defined herself as a woman, and has every right to compete.