CiVL Dispatch

The United States Postal Service is running a pilot program to put cameras in its mail carrier trucks that continuously scan roads and signs, map roadways and sidewalks, and improve “community safety”. @DBrozeLiveFree

Like many countries around the world, Russia is continuing to expand the use of biometrics in daily life. In Moscow, 300,000 CCTV cameras connected to biometrics databases have become an integral part of daily life for many residents. Biometrics are also expanding in the areas of retail, online purchases, and in the country’s penitentiary system. @DBrozeLiveFree

Helium is officially a critical material. The same gas we use for birthday balloons is also essential for semiconductor manufacturing, MRI machines, quantum computing, and advanced scientific research. So how should we manage an irreplaceable resource? @IsleyResistance

A federal judge in Utah has blocked a key piece of a Utah law aimed at revealing the location of visitors to adult websites, including when they are using VPNs to disguise their location. The court found that attempting to reveal VPN users’ locations would require age verifying all users and thus violate the Commerce Clause. The ruling stems from a lawsuit filed by Aylo, the internet’s largest adult content company.

The internet is about to get a lot smellier. Scientists have built a way to send scents digitally. Would you want smell-enabled internet? @IsleyResistance

Court Dismisses Journalists’ Case Against Spyware Manufacturer NSO Group What does it say about our society when companies like NSO Group can freely hack and spy on journalists? Latest from: @DBrozeLiveFree

Apparently LSD might help women pay attention. The same effects weren't observed in men. Latest from: @IsleyResistance

Court Rulings on Flock May Eventually Limit Their Use A federal judge recently ruled that a sheriff’s deputy violated a woman’s Fourth Amendment rights when using Flock Safety to search for her license plate without a warrant. The judge said Flock represents a “type of indiscriminate mass surveillance”. @DBrozeLiveFree

AI just outperformed human doctors in a medical diagnostic challenge. @IsleyResistance

Governments & Court Are Starting to Take Action Against “Smart” Glasses Governments and courts around the world are considering regulations and new rules for smart glasses as public concern grows about being recorded without their consent. Lawmakers in the European Union, Norway, and South Korea have begun to study the issue, with Norway calling for a temporary ban at parks, beaches, and museums. Meanwhile, New York's Unified Court ⁠System recently banned smart glasses from all its court facilities. Several other courts in the United States have followed suit.

On September 30, the Senate Homeland Security Committee held a hearing titled “Rogue AI: Securing the Homeland Against AI Agent Attacks”. The hearing comes after a summer of dozens of reported “rogue AI” incidents where AI agents developed by Meta, Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic attempted to hack websites and break out of their testing environments. @DBrozeLiveFree

A growing number of U.S. jails are using wearable sensors and AI camera analytics to track prisoners despite a lack of legal policies on how the data should be stored and used. Digital rights groups and prisoner advocates worry about the technology could lead to inappropriate use of the intimate health data. @DBrozeLiveFree

School lunches might have an unexpected benefit: lower exposure to forever chemicals. Researchers found that children participating in school meal programs had lower blood concentrations of several PFAS compounds. @IsleyResistance

New documents revealed by 404 Media show that US Border Patrol is running secretive predictive policing units that analyze Americans’ financial activity. This data is then shared to local police who pull people over who are not suspected of any specific crime. The monitoring and searching are part of “Predictive Intelligence Targeting Teams (PITT)”.  From: @DBrozeLiveFree

Microsoft is giving its AI data centers a nature makeover. The company is expanding ecological restoration efforts to more than 20 sites, incorporating restored wetlands, native trees, pollinator gardens, and wildlife corridors. Can a data center be environmentally friendly if it's surrounded by an environmentally friendly landscape? From: @IsleyResistance

A group of Democratic lawmakers has reintroduced legislation that would restrict federal use of facial recognition and other biometric technologies. The legislation would prohibit a federal agency or federal official acting in an official capacity to “acquire, possess, access, or use” a biometric surveillance system in the U.S From @DBrozeLiveFree

Oregon is shooting owls to save owls. 🦉 Contractors have begun killing barred owls in the Elliott State Research Forest to protect the threatened northern spotted owl. Is this necessary conservation, or an expensive attempt to engineer an ecosystem back into balance? From: @IsleyResistance

On September 23rd, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism discussed the growing concerns related to the rapid expansion of Flock automatic license plate reader cameras. One cybersecurity engineer warned that he found “insufficiently protected sensitive information” stored on Flock cameras, while another woman said she spent 13 days in jail, including time in solitary confinement, after a Flock camera incorrectly identified her vehicle as involved with a hit and run accident.

The Trump administration has changed three rules governing endangered-species protections, and 21 attorneys general are challenging those changes in court. A large focus in the argument is what constitutes “harm” and how wildlife protections can be balanced with economic considerations.

A Tennessee woman has filed a lawsuit against the City of Fargo, North Dakota after allegedly being falsely identified through a facial recognition search and subsequently arrested. The woman was falsely accused of bank theft and spent six months in jail after police claimed she was identified by facial recognition software. The only problem ‑ she’d never been to North  Dakota and no witnesses placed her at the scene of the crime. The incident raises questions about the accuracy of facial recognition programs. @DBrozeLiveFree