Category «Legal Technology»

What should journalists do when the facts don’t matter?

Most people agree that actual facts matter – in such activities as debate, discussion and reporting. Once facts are gathered, verified and distributed, informed decision-making can proceed in such important exercises as voting. But what happens when important, verified facts are published and broadcast widely, yet the resulting impact proves underwhelming – or even meaningless? If vital facts fail to affect the news audiences they intend to inform? Media scholar Prof. Michael J. Socolow addressed the conundrum facing American journalism after Nov. 5, 2024.

Subjects: Communications, KM, Legal Research

Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, November 9, 2024

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: Turning On “Do Not Track” Is Practically Useless; Using Google Authenticator? Read this; She Tried to Opt Out of Election Texts, Got a ‘Text-Pocalypse’; and Google Asked to Remove 10 Billion “Pirate” Search Results.

Subjects: Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, Legal Research, Search Engines

LLRX October 2024 Issue

  • Artificial Intelligence and Unconscious Bias Risk – Elizabeth Sweetland reviews: Meredith Broussard, More than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech (MIT Press 2023). 248 Pages.
  • Trump’s Election Lawyers Must Heed Their Ethical Duties – Attorneys Stephen Marcus and Bruce Kuhlik discuss the ethical responsibilities of lawyers in the context of predicted attempts by Donald Trump and his allies to undermine the 2024 U.S. presidential election. The authors argue that lawyers considering advocating unsubstantiated claims of election fraud should learn from the disciplinary actions taken against Trump’s 2020 election lawyers, adhere to their ethical duties, and follow the example of those who refused to violate their obligations to their profession and the Constitution after the 2020 election despite significant pressure to do so.
  • AI in Finance and Banking, October 31, 2024 – This semi-monthly column by Sabrina I. Pacifici highlights news, government reports, NGO/IGO papers, industry white papers, academic papers and speeches on the subject of AI’s fast paced impact on the banking and finance sectors. The chronological links provided are to the primary sources, and as available, indicate links to alternate free versions. Five highlights from this post: SEC to intensify scrutiny of AI tools; The Bank of England is establishing an Artificial Intelligence Consortium; Swift to Launch AI Fraud Detection for Global Banking in 2025; Economics of Artificial Intelligence Keynote; and Artificial Intelligence, the Economy and Central Banking.
  • How Meta Brings in Millions Off Political Violence – CalMatters and The Markup used Facebook’s AI model to count the millions of dollars it makes after violent news events By Colin Lecher and Tomas Apodaca.
  • Threatening ‘the enemy within’ with force: Military ethicists explain the danger to important American traditionsMarcus Hedahl, Professor of Philosophy, United States Naval Academy and Bradley Jay Strawser, Professor of Philosophy, Naval Postgraduate School worry that Trump’s actions while president, and his comments about his plans for a potential second term, may put the military in a tough position. The July 1, 2024, Supreme Court ruling giving the president immunity for official acts – potentially including as commander in chief of the military – would make that tough position even more difficult.
  • How foreign operations are manipulating social media to influence your views – Filippo Menczer and his colleagues study influence campaigns and design technical solutions – algorithms – to detect and counter them. State-of-the-art methods developed in our center use several indicators of this type of online activity, which researchers call inauthentic coordinated behavior. They identify clusters of social media accounts that post in a synchronized fashion, amplify the same groups of users, share identical sets of links, images or hashtags, or perform suspiciously similar sequences of actions.
  • How your online world could change if big tech companies like Google are forced to break up – The Department of Justice may be on the verge of seeking a break-up of Google in a bid to make it less dominant. Renaud Foucart explains that if the government goes ahead and is successful in the courts, it could mean the company being split into separate entities – a search engine, an advertising company, a video website, a mapping app – which would not be allowed to share data with each other.
  • AI in Banking and Finance, October 15, 2024 – This semi-monthly column by Sabrina I. Pacifici highlights news, government reports, NGO/IGO papers, industry white papers, academic papers and speeches on the subject of AI’s fast paced impact on the banking and finance sectors. The chronological links provided are to the primary sources, and as available, indicate links to alternate free versions. Six highlights from this post: FSB Roundtable on Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Finance; Mastercard Blockchain Patent Could Make Financial Audits Easier; Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Management Accountants (MA) – Future of AIMA Model; Financial Machine Learning; The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) is soliciting academic research papers on the use of artificial intelligence in banking and finance; and upcoming seminar – How technology is reshaping the future of money and finance.
  • Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, October 26, 2024Four highlights from this week: Three US industry groups sue FTC to block ‘Click to Cancel’ rule; National Security Agency Mobile Device Best Practices; EU slaps LinkedIn with $334 million fine for targeted advertising; and CFPB Orders Apple and Goldman Sachs to Pay Over $89 Million for Apple Card Failures.
  • Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, October 19, 2024Four highlights from this week: US Government Recovered $4 Billion Worth of Fraud With AI; Deepfakes Can Fool Facial Recognition on Crypto Exchanges; FTC announces rule to make it easier to cancel subscriptions; There’s Never Been a Better Time to Delete Your 23andMe Data. Here’s How to Do It; and For Customs and Border Protection, AI has been a ‘game-changer’
  • Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, October 12, 2024 – Four highlights from this week: Why Multi-factor authentication (MFA) alone won’t protect you in the age of adversarial AI; HHS to crack down on providers blocking access to electronic medical records; Justice Department, Microsoft disrupt Russian intelligence cyber scheme; and Reports: China hacked Verizon and AT&T, may have accessed US wiretap systems.
  • Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, October 5, 2024Four highlights from this week: Why Microsoft’s Security Initiative and Apple’s Cloud Privacy Matter; AI assistants are blabbing our embarrassing work secrets; PayPal’s data sharing controversy: New setting raises privacy concerns; and Are Lesser-Known Browsers More Secure?

LLRX.com® – the free web journal on law, technology, knowledge discovery and research for Librarians, Lawyers, Researchers, Academics, and Journalists. Founded in 1996.

Subjects: KM

How foreign operations are manipulating social media to influence your views

Filippo Menczer and his colleagues study influence campaigns and design technical solutions – algorithms – to detect and counter them. State-of-the-art methods developed in our center use several indicators of this type of online activity, which researchers call inauthentic coordinated behavior. They identify clusters of social media accounts that post in a synchronized fashion, amplify the same groups of users, share identical sets of links, images or hashtags, or perform suspiciously similar sequences of actions.

Subjects: AI, Competitive Intelligence, Legal Research, Search Engines, Social Media

How your online world could change if big tech companies like Google are forced to break up

The Department of Justice may be on the verge of seeking a break-up of Google in a bid to make it less dominant. Renaud Foucart explains that if the government goes ahead and is successful in the courts, it could mean the company being split into separate entities – a search engine, an advertising company, a video website, a mapping app – which would not be allowed to share data with each other.

Subjects: E-Commerce, Legal Research, Search Engines, United States Law

Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, October 12, 2024

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: Why Multi-factor authentication (MFA) alone won’t protect you in the age of adversarial AI; HHS to crack down on providers blocking access to electronic medical records; Justice Department, Microsoft disrupt Russian intelligence cyber scheme; and Reports: China hacked Verizon and AT&T, may have accessed US wiretap systems.

Subjects: AI, Cybersecurity, Healthcare, Privacy, Technology Trends

The Heritage Foundation’s Reckless Misuse of FOIA to Target Individuals

In this Opinion, researched and authored by Michael Ravnitzky, he says that the Heritage Foundation’s current public records campaign is an abuse of the FOIA process. In recent years, the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project and its publishing spinoff, The Daily Signal, have filed an unprecedented and overwhelming number of FOIA requests – 65,000 according to Reuters and more than 50,000 according to ProPublica. According to recent articles, the goal of the requests is to scrutinize government employees’ communications, to identify (for example, individuals using keywords or phrases such as “climate change”, “reduction in force” or DEI) and potentially remove civil servants perceived as obstructive to Trump’s agenda, in preparation for a potential Trump administration.

Subjects: Digital Archives, E-Discovery, Freedom of Information, Government Resources, Legal Research, United States Law

LLRX September 2024 Issue

Articles and Columns for September 2024 When Should Presenters Apologize? – Referencing decades of experience as a presenter and an attendee at presentations, Jerry Lawson cautions us not to begin a presentation with an apology, which can be compelled by a tech glitch or some other reason not within our control. Lawson states that the habit …

Subjects: KM

Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, September 28, 2024

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: LinkedIn Halts AI Data Processing in UK Amid Privacy Concerns Raised by ICO – they automatically opted in all users; Lessons from the CrowdStrike outage; Verizon faces lawsuit over allegedly illegal collection of voiceprints; New feature of iOS 18 and later: Request or give remote control in a Facetime call on an iPhone; and Telegram Will Share User IP Addresses, Phone Numbers With Police Upon Request.

Subjects: AI, Copyright, Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, Internet Trends, Legal Research, Social Media