Greetings all, and happy Friday!
Hope ye are keeping well, apologies for the radio silence. Things have been busy. And Mad. And all over the shop. Normal service to resume shortly. Hopefully 🙂 Ouch i just checked its been nearly a month, sorry!
Well look, i’m never going to cover everything from the last month in one newsletter. That would just be impossible. So i’ve collated a few highlights and pasted them below.
The judge caught having sex in their chambers is really interesting … because it really highlights the profound impact that LLMs can have the (in)ability to maintain anonymity. It echoes this piece we included previously, on an LLM disclosing a sex worker’s identity, unprompted.
Reuters also have a piece on the use of facial recognition in the context of protests in London. This is obviously really troubling from an expression/assembly context – given the primacy of political expression – and runs counter to the UN Model Protocol for Law Enforcement Officials to Promote and Protect Human Rights Rights in the Context of Peaceful Protests (which notes a distinction between pre-emptive facial recognition, and the investigation of criminality).
I think this article in the Modern Law Review, ‘From Estimation to Discrimination: Algorithmic Bias, Predictive Uncertainty, and Anti-DIscrimination Law’ is also worth flagging. The article focuses on engaging with how AI works, and what that means for legal analysis, which is really welcome. The focus is on UK anti-discrimination law, but it obviously reads across – and tracks, for example, with human rights due diligence approaches.
I’ll leave you this week with Olivia Rodrigo’s cover of ‘When a Good Man Cries’ by CMAT. Its gorgeous, but also included in light of this post by CMAT, about misogyny and the shite time she’s been having, and what hearing that cover meant. As a good friend said to me, ‘I’m a CMAT superfan and you should be too x’
Stay well, be lovely.
Reuters, On London’s streets, facial recognition tests the balance between security and liberty
Financial Times, US National Security Agency using Anthropic’s Mythos for cyber attacks,
WIRED, Meta Silently Added Face-Recognition Code for Its Smart Glasses to Millions of Phones
Netzpolitik, Daten-Schwarzmarkt: Deutsche Polizei nutzt offenbar rechtswidrig Databroker (google translate innit)
Biometric UPdate, UK migrant age assessment errors intensify debate over biometric age estimation
WIRED, The Pentagon Knew Enemies Could Track Troops’ Phones for Years. Now They Are
Sweden Herald, Police will be allowed to use AI for real-time facial recognition
The Spectator, Why we should let the police scan your face
Computer Weekly, Google AI engineer claims dismissal for opposing tech sales to Israel
Human Rights Watch, Looking the Other Way: EU Failure to Prevent Surveillance Exports to Rights Violators
Hidden Cities, How Sisi’s Militarized Urbanism Is Remaking Egypt
Realities of Algorithmic Warfare, AI, Targeting, and Civilian Harm (academic article)
Amnesty International, Global: Enormous data pipelines powering major generative AI systems are rooted in mass invasions of privacy by design
Above the Law, Judiciary Tried To Hide ‘Sex In Chambers’ Judge’s Name. It Left A Roadmap To Identify Eleanor Ross Instead.
The New Humanitarian, Data of 600,000 Gaza households exposed in WFP cyber-attack
ASPI, A Nobel economist models how AI rots the information environment
The HIll, Meta becomes latest to settle social media addiction case ahead of June bellwether trial
The HIll, Using AI for just minutes reduces focus and persistence, new study warns
The Hill, Amazon Ring sued over facial recognition
Rest of World News, The agentic divide: Why “good enough” AI isn’t enough to survive the new economy
BBC, Two arrests in Peterborough after first use of facial recognition (for theft – again, the necessity calculation desperately needs to be addressed)
The Conversation, Powerful AI is making facial recognition better at identifying you New York Times, From Cow-Milking Robots to Weed-Zapping Lasers, Farmers Are Embracing A.I.