Category «Legal Research»

Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, March 15, 2025

Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, finance, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and online security, often without our situational awareness. Four highlights from this week: The 200+ Sites an ICE Surveillance Contractor is Monitoring; US cities warn of wave of unpaid parking phishing texts; OPM watchdog to investigate IT risks tied to DOGE’s agency access; and A Brand-New Botnet Is Delivering Record-Size DDoS Attacks.

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Subjects: AI, Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, Privacy, Search Engines

America’s clean air rules boost health and the economy − here’s what EPA’s new deregulation plans ignore

The Trump administration announced on March 12, 2025, that it is “reconsidering” more than 30 air pollution regulations in a series of moves that could impact air quality across the United States. “Reconsideration” is a term used to review or modify a government regulation. While Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin provided few details, Prof. Richard Peltier discusses how the breadth of the regulations being reconsidered affects all Americans. They include rules that set limits for pollutants that can harm human health, such as ozone, particulate matter and volatile organic carbon.

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Subjects: Climate Change, Economy, Energy, Government Resources, Healthcare, Legal Research, United States Law

Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, March 8, 2025

Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, finance, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and online security, often without our situational awareness. Four highlights from this week: 89% of enterprise AI usage is invisible to the organization; The Digital Packrat Manifesto; Cellebrite Is Using AI to Summarize Chat Logs and Audio from Seized Mobile Phones; and Flock Threatens Open Source Developer Mapping Its Surveillance Cameras.

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Subjects: AI, Civil Liberties, Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, Legal Research, Privacy

Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, March 1, 2025

Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, finance, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and online security, often without our situational awareness. Five highlights from this week: Trump has purged government websites; The Wayback Machine is trying to preserve the record; Turn off your read receipts. They’re a security risk; You can now easily remove personal info from Google Search results; Google plans to end SMS verification in favor of QR codes; and Verizon isn’t doing enough to protect customers from robocall scams.

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Subjects: Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, Email Security, Encryption, Privacy

What Is OpenAI’s Powerful New Deep Research Tool Capable Of? I Use It to Analyze the Legality of President Trump’s Pause of Federal Grants

On February 2, 2025 OpenAI released Deep Research, an AI agent capable of completing multi-step research tasks and synthesizing large amounts of online information. OpenAI’s chief product officer Kevin Weil said it can complete complex research tasks in minutes that might take a person many hours or days, according to The New York Times, adding that it should be particularly useful for people in fields such as finance, science and law. Robert Ambrogi created a comprehensive and expertly crafted series of prompts to evaluate Deep Search’s ability to research and analyze the legality of the Trump administration’s temporary pause of federal grant and financial assistance programs, and then to outline the potential legal remedies available to recipients of those grants and financial assistance.

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Subjects: AI, Government Resources, Legal Research, United States Law

Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, February 22, 2025

Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, finance, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and online security, often without our situational awareness. Five highlights from this week: Musk Ally Demands Admin Access to System That Lets Government Text the Public; How Phished Data Turns into Apple & Google Wallets; Identity is the Breaking Point—Get It Right or Zero Trust Fails; Chase Says Making Payments Over Social Media Is Too Messy, Will Block Zelle Transactions; and FTC Launches Inquiry into Big Tech Censorship Practices.

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Subjects: AI, Communications, Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, Economy, Email Security, Encryption, Financial System, Legal Research

How to find climate data and science the Trump administration doesn’t want you to see

Research librarian Alejandro Paz and policy scholar Eric Nost, who belong to a network called the Public Environmental Data Partners, a coalition of nonprofits, archivists and researchers who rely on federal data in our analysis, advocacy and litigation, are working to ensure that data remains available to the public.

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Subjects: Climate Change, Energy, Environmental Law, Government Resources, Legal Research

NOAA’s vast public weather data powers the local forecasts on your phone and TV – a private company alone couldn’t match it

Atmospheric scientists Christine Wiedinmyer and Kari Bowen, who is a former National Weather Service forecaster, explain NOAA’s central role in most U.S. weather forecasts. They underscore why the Trump/DOGE plan to eliminate these two critical agencies and replace them with one private company to provide comprehensive weather data in a reliable way that is also accessible to the entire public, is not a reasonable plan.

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Subjects: Climate Change, Environmental Law, Government Resources

Climate and DEI Deleted From Government Websites, Federal Workers Fired, Colleges Erase Programs

Since January 20, 2025 America has been catapulted into an unimaginable inflection point. Sabrina I. Pacifici chronicles seismic events in recent weeks which have upended America’s democracy, jeopardized our economy, financial system, national security, science and medical communities, and fractured our national identity, at home and around the world. This is a commentary, and a guide written by a law librarian and former federal employee who was the target of a similar purge by Trump in 2018, to what and who has been targeted and purged, an overview of the process used to do so, and a perspective on the impact of these sweeping, deeply damaging and likely illegal actions.

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Subjects: Climate Change, Constitutional Law, CRS Reports, Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, Digital Archives, Economy, Education, Ethics, Financial System, Government Resources, Healthcare, Legal Research, Privacy, United States Law
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