Articles and Columns for October 2023

• Research Guide: Law of Armed Conflict – In this period of wild claims and counterclaims, the subject of the Law of Armed Conflict, (LOAC), often referred to as International Humanitarian Law (IHL) or the Law of War (LOW), is a timely subject. Researching LOAC can challenge U.S. researchers and lawyers. There are no codified statutes or well-organized case law of the types familiar to most U.S. researchers. Jerry Lawson’s experience as a military and civil service lawyer and Sabrina I. Pacifici’s long career as a law librarian are the foundation for a series they will be updating on timely topic with potentially significant global repercussions.
• A Compilation of State Licensed Lawyer Databases – Every lawyer in the United States is licensed to practice in some state, but very few lawyers are licensed to practice in every state. As a result, the question often arises — is attorney X licensed to practice in state Y? This guide by expert librarian and researcher Toby Lyles identifies the licensing authority, usually the bar association for each state, to ascertain whether an attorney has a valid bar license to practice law in a specific state (or the District of Columbia).
• AI in Banking and Finance – October 31, 2023 – This semi-monthly column by Sabrina I. Pacifici highlights news, government documents and reports, industry white papers and academic papers on the subject of AI’s fast paced impact on the banking and finance sectors. Four highlights from this post: President Biden issued a landmark Executive Order to ensure that America leads the way in seizing the promise and managing the risks of artificial intelligence; Economic Growth under Transformative AI; Bank of England – Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning; and Financial intermediation and technology: what’s old, what’s new?
• Antisemitism has moved from the right to the left in the US − and falls back on long-standing stereotypes – Prof. Arie Perliger, director of the graduate program in Security Studies at the School of Criminology and Justice Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell addresses the fact the the U.S. is currently experiencing one of the most significant waves of antisemitism that it has ever seen. Jewish communities are shaken and traumatized. Jewish and civil rights organizations both in the U.S. and in other Western countries reported a rise in antisemitic incidents following the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and the subsequent Israeli military response. The Anti-Defamation League reported that in the first week after Hamas’ deadly attack, in which 1,400 Israelis were killed, antisemitic incidents in the U.S. tripled in comparison to the same week last year. Similarly, London police recorded a 1,353% increase in antisemitic crimes compared with the same period a year earlier. In addition, antisemitic symbols and rhetoric seem to be part of a growing number of protests that erupted around the globe following the escalation of the conflict between Israel and Hamas.
• 2023 Healthcare MiniGuide – Health care organizations, the federal government, academics, and various entities within the medical sector maintain a plethora of sites specific to health care issues. This guide by Marcus P. Zillman focuses on Healthcare Search Engines and Selected Bots and includes 7 Health Forums Online for Expert Support. Zillman’s guide incorporates both Eastern and Western medical practices.
• The Motivation of Manipulating Data and Information to a Desired Outcome – Some recent headlines have reported disturbing news about respected and respectable scholars falsifying or just ignoring data conclusions in scholarly papers. This is another example of the skepticism many of us have with the shifts in misinformation flooding our inboxes and newsfeeds, compelling each of us to exercise our critical thinking skills. And the examples we’re referring to aren’t even results of AI. It is human error, strong bias at play, or manipulative intention for one purpose or another. This leads us to another topic in our continuing explorations of human motivation. Why do we lie? Why do we cheat? Kevin Novak takes a deeper dive on this discussion about the issues and the people and actions that have been in the news recently.
• Face Scanning and the Freedom To “Be Stupid In Public”: A Conversation with Kashmir Hill – An interview by Ryan Tate with the New York Times reporter and long time privacy journalist Kashmir Hill on how investigating Clearview AI helped her appreciate facial recognition—and envision a chaotic future.
• Schrödinger’s AI – Where Everything and Nothing Changes – Whether speaking with lawyers and law students who haven’t gotten around to trying ChatGPT or collaborating with post-doc explainable and legal AI experts with 20+ years of machine learning and Natural Language Processing experience, Colin Lachance, legal tech innovator and leader, is no closer to understanding in what way and precisely when permanent change will come, but is unshakeably convinced that change will be enormous, uneven, disruptive and, in many cases, invisible.
• Why Google, Bing and other search engines’ embrace of generative AI threatens $68 billion SEO industry – Dr. Ravi Sen discusses how Google, Microsoft and others boast that generative artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT will make searching the internet better than ever for users. For example, rather than having to wade through a sea of URLs, users will be able to just get an answer combed from the entire internet. There are also some concerns with the rise of AI-fueled search engines, such as the opacity over where information comes from, the potential for “hallucinated” answers and copyright issues. But one other consequence is that Sen believes it may destroy the US$68 billion search engine optimization industry that companies like Google helped create.
• Predictive Policing Software Terrible At Predicting Crimes – Crime predictions generated for the police department in Plainfield, New Jersey, rarely lined up with reported crimes, an analysis by The Markup has found, adding new context to the debate over the efficacy of crime prediction software. Geolitica, known as PredPol until a 2021 rebrand, produces software that ingests data from crime incident reports and produces daily predictions on where and when crimes are most likely to occur. Aaron Sankin, Investigative Reporter and Surya Mattu, Senior Data Engineer and Investigative Data Journalist examined 23,631 predictions generated by Geolitica between Feb. 25 to Dec. 18, 2018 for the Plainfield Police Department (PD). Each prediction they analyzed from the company’s algorithm indicated that one type of crime was likely to occur in a location not patrolled by Plainfield PD. In the end, the success rate was less than half a percent. Fewer than 100 of the predictions lined up with a crime in the predicted category, that was also later reported to police.
• 2023 Developments in Legal AI and the Courts – Jocelyn Stilwell-Tong, Law Librarian, California Court of Appeal, Sixth Appellate District, has determined that although free AI online is useful, the developing products from major legal research platforms show great promise. These paid products control for issues like hallucinations, and provide citations supporting their work so a researcher can confirm the accuracy and context of the materials the AI is pulling from. Issues surrounding data governance (what the company does with your uploaded material and search history) can be controlled by contract, and the legal vendors understand that this is a concern for most legal clients.
• AI in Banking and Finance – October 15, 2023 – This semi-monthly column by Sabrina I. Pacifici highlights news, government documents and reports, industry white papers and academic papers on the subject of AI’s fast paced impact on the banking and finance sectors. Five highlights from this post: Bias, fairness, and other ethical dimensions in artificial intelligence; US Warns EU’s Landmark AI Policy Will Only Benefit Big Tech; Federal Reserve Vice Chair for Supervision Michael Barr said generative artificial intelligence could lead to a cybersecurity “arms race” for bank; Exporting the Surveillance State via Trade in AI; and Does Human-Algorithm Feedback Loop Lead to Error Propagation? Evidence from Zillow’s Zestimate.
• Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, October 29, 2023 – Four highlights from this week: Victims of Deepfakes Are Fighting Back; Without a Trace: How to Take Your Phone Off the Grid; Microsoft Fixes Excel Feature That Forced Scientists to Rename Human Genes; and Flipper Zero can now spam Android, Windows users with Bluetooth alerts.
• Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, October 21, 2023 – Six highlights from this week: LinkedIn Phishing Scam Exploits Smart Links to Steal Microsoft Accounts; Digital Dystopia – The Danger in Buying What the EdTech Surveillance Industry is Selling; Login.gov to add facial recognition tech; Temporary moratorium on use of facial recognition in NY; The Fake Browser Update Scam Gets a Makeover; and How to Spot and Avoid Zelle Scams in 2023.
• Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, October 14, 2023 – Four highlights from this week: Phishers Spoof USPS, 12 Other Natl’ Postal Services; Privacy prohttps://www.llrx.com/2023/09/pete-recommends-weekly-highlights-on-cyber-security-issues-october-14-2023/fessionals need to be aware of tech abuse; Is That ATM Safe? 8 Tips to Protect Your Debit or Credit Card; and Cybercrime Classification and Measurement.
• Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, October 7, 2023 – Four highlights from this week: Delete your digital history from dozens of companies with this app; Need a VPN? Here Are the Ones You Can Officially Trust; H&R Block, Meta, and Google Slapped With RICO Suit; and 3 Chatbot Privacy Risks and Concerns You Should Know About.

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