Greetings all, and I hope ye are keeping well, and warm if you’re in London. Despite the fact that it is May. Whyyyyyy!??!
I’ll kick things off with some propaganda this week. Why not? The Nordic Journal of Human Rights has published a review of myself and Pete Fussey’s book on Facial Recognition Surveillance. And its really quite nice. So thank you very much to the reviewer. Also, on 26 May, at the Institute for Advanced Legal Studies (London), i’ll be participating in a lunchtime talk with Nathan Derejko – who is discussing his work on conflict identification, with a focus on non-international armed conflict. Claire Simmons is a co-panellist.
Oh! I’ve just received an email. This is actually the key propaganda message from today. Don’t ignore the above, but…‘Pushed into the shadows: Evidencing digital surveillance chilling effects and the erosion of the rights to freedom of assembly and of association’ has just been published. This is work myself and Pete Fussey have done in support of Gina Romero, the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Assembly. It really was a pleasure to support, and collaborate with, Gina, and I’m really happy with the report. It is based on over 150 interviews, and numerous written submissions, and sets out (a) to detail the specific impacts of the chilling effects across different contexts, and (b) to link this to human rights analysis, with a focus on assembly and association. I could talk about this for ever, but I think some interesting elements are (i) the actual detail, in particular the evidencing of chilling effects. I’m not aware of any equivalent work, particularly in terms of number and jurisdictional/context scope of research participants; (ii) the theorisation of the contemporary digital environment, and in particular the concept of a surveillance ecosystem; (iii) thinking through how human rights can respond to this, through a compound human rights harm lens. I’m very aware of learning lessons from past weeks, and avoiding the typos, repetition, general incoherence, when i’m in a rush. So apologies. The landing page for the report is here.
I’m slightly out of date with this one. But it definitely deserves to feature in the mad stuff AI can do folder. An injured Ukrainian soldier was lost about 30km behind Russian lines, for 33 days. He was somehow in contact with Ukraine, and they kept him resupplied with food via drone, but couldn’t rescue him. Until they sent an autonomous armoured casket to go and get him. Seriously. CBS has the story. And here is the video.
In case it may be of interest, this is a website that shows the information you transmit to a website, just by visiting the website (i.e. without engaging with it in any way). One for the privacy conscious among you: https://sinceyouarrived.world/taken
Just to note, and continuing on the previous week’s (brief, admittedly) Mythos chat: there are a few interesting stories below on AI-assisted hacking.
Apologies on the relatively short newsletter this week. It seems like the news has been a bit slow on the AI front (although not on the UK politics front), and i’m in a bit of a rush unfortunately. I’m also aware that emerging examples of specific AI use have been a bit lacking on the newsletter in the last while, i’m thinking on how to remedy this.
This week i’ll leave you with Miami, by Pigeon. OUTTANATIONAL is a really good, if really bizarre, album.
Stay well, be lovely.
Noema, We Need To Rewild The Internet (this sounds interesting)
Human rights Watch, Looking the Other Way: EU Failure to Prevent Surveillance Exports to Rights Violators
Financial Times, NHS to grant Palantir contractors ‘unlimited access’ to patient data
Joint Defense Team, Europol, Shadow Data and the Rule of Law: Why Secret Surveillance Must Face Judicial Control
Financial Times, Life without US tech
The Guardian, Forget the AI job apocalypse. AI’s real threat is worker control and surveillance
Nature, Re-thinking human machine interaction and the governance of AI in the military domain
The Hill, Pennsylvania lawsuit alleges AI chatbots posed as doctors, therapists
The Hill, Companies name AI as top reason for job cuts for second straight month: Analysis
SMEX, Lebanon’s data security problem, explained
EFF, A Hackers Guide to Circumventing Internet Shutdowns
Big Brother Watch, Big Brother Watch responds to the Met’s live facial recognition trial in Croydon
BBC, ID checks considered at ferry port to crack down on crime
Washington Post, Governments can’t agree on what AI actually is
The Register, Anthropic admits it dumbed down Claude when trying to make it smarter
New York Times, All Those A.I. Note Takers? They’re Making Lawyers Very Nervous.
The Conversation, How AI can lead to false arrests and wrongful convictions
New York Times, Google Says Criminal Hackers Used A.I. to Find a Major Software Flaw
The Guardian, AI-powered hacking has exploded into industrial-scale threat, Google says
Washington Post, In turf battle over AI, U.S. spy agencies vie for more sway than Commerce
Washington Post, A South Korean startup captures workers’ techniques to develop AI brains for robots
The Conversation, Hacking the bomb? What Claude Mythos AI reveals about the gamble of nuclear deterrence
WIRED, Meet the Sad Wives of AI WIRED, WhatsApp Adds Meta AI Chats That Are Built to Be Fully Private