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More and More, Artificial Intelligence Is Keeping the World Under Watch

The Washington Post reported:

The world is increasingly under watch. A new report from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) examines trends in surveillance using artificial intelligence — and the upshot is more cameras are turning on in more places, with little oversight to ensure new capabilities aren’t abused.

The People’s Republic of China is, of course, well known for its always-on system of biometric and social media monitoring that enables it to exert control over the Uyghur Muslim minority in the Xinjiang region, not to mention keep close tabs on the rest of its citizens living behind the Great Firewall.

Yet the threat, as it turns out, is broader: Even liberal democracies are experimenting with surveillance infrastructure; police departments in the United States, for instance, have seized on facial recognition software developed by Clearview AI with the help of a trove of images scraped from the internet.

Biden Vaccine Mandate for Federal Employees Blocked Again as Appeals Court Dissolves Earlier Ruling

Forbes reported:

The Biden administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for federal employees has once again been blocked in court — at least for now — as a federal appeals court ruled Monday it will rehear the case and threw out its previous decision that upheld the vaccine requirement.

The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the vaccine mandate in April, after a district court judge blocked the requirement in January, siding with the anti-vaccine organizations and federal employees who brought a lawsuit challenging it.

The court accepted a request Monday from the challengers to rehear the case en banc, which means that the court will issue a judgment from all the judges on the appeals court, rather than a panel of a few judges, as was the case with the April ruling.

The 5th Circuit — known to be one of the most conservative courts in the country — set a hearing for the week of September 12, meaning the mandate will remain blocked at least until then.

EU Renews Digital COVID Pass Despite 99% Negative Public Feedback

The Epoch Times reported:

Acting on a proposal of the European Commission, the European Parliament, as expected, voted on June 23 to renew the EU Digital COVID Certificate for another year. The vote was 453 for, 119 against, and 19 abstentions.

The certificate regulation had been scheduled to expire on June 30. Earlier this month, a delegation from the parliament had already reached a “political agreement” with the Commission on renewing the certificate, thus making the June 23 vote virtually a foregone conclusion.

The EU has opted to extend the COVID certificate despite the overwhelmingly negative results of a public consultation on the subject that was launched by the European Commission under the heading of “Have Your Say” and that was open to the public from Feb. 3 to April 8. The consultation elicited over 385,000 responses — almost all of which appear to be opposed to renewal.

Kyrie Irving Will Return to the Nets on His $36.5 Million Player Option

The Washington Post reported:

The shaky union between Kyrie Irving and Kevin Durant remains intact, at least for now.

Irving will pick up his $36.5 million player option with the Brooklyn Nets for the 2022-23 season rather than test the market as an unrestricted free agent, a person with knowledge of the decision confirmed Monday night.

The 30-year-old guard’s future with the Nets had been the cause of much speculation following a disappointing first-round playoff exit and a tumultuous regular season in which he played only 29 games because of eligibility issues surrounding his decision to remain unvaccinated. Irving has a Wednesday deadline to formally pick up his option.

But nothing about Irving’s Nets tenure has been typical, and owner Joe Tsai and General Manager Sean Marks were hesitant to make a long-term commitment. Irving has appeared in just 103 games over the past three seasons because of health concerns, personal absences and his months-long vaccination saga.

China Slashes COVID Quarantine Time for International Travelers

Channel News Asia reported:

China on Tuesday slashed the quarantine time for inbound travelers by half in a major easing of one of the world’s strictest COVID-19 curbs, which have deterred travel in and out of the country since 2020.

Quarantine at centralized facilities has been cut to seven days from 14, and subsequent at-home health monitoring has been reduced to three days from seven, the National Health Commission said in a statement.

The latest guidelines from the health authority also eased quarantine requirements for close contacts of people who have tested positive for the new coronavirus.

Censors Delete Discussion of Beijing’s Future COVID Control

Associated Press reported:

Digital censors quickly deleted a hashtag “the next five years” Monday as online discussion swirled in response to reported remarks of Beijing’s Communist Party secretary saying that the capital city will normalize pandemic prevention controls over the course of the next five years.

Beijing’s Communist Party chief, Cai Qi, made the remarks Monday morning as part of a report on the Party’s management of the city.

“In the next five years, Beijing will resolutely, unremittingly, do a good job in normalizing pandemic prevention controls,” according to a cached version of the remarks in Beijing Daily, the main Communist Party mouthpiece in the capital city. The city “will implement high-quality regular PCR tests, and screening at key points, strictly inspect entries in residential communities, work units and public institutions,” it said.

The current version of the Beijing Daily no longer has the phrase “in the next five years.” On Weibo, the hashtag “the next five years” was deleted.

U.K. Unlikely to Return to Mandatory COVID Restrictions Despite Rising Cases

CNBC reported:

Mandatory COVID-19 restrictions are unlikely to be reintroduced in Britain this summer, health researchers and physicians have said, even as the country enters a new wave of infections.

Health researchers and physicians say they don’t foresee a return to obligatory public health measures unless there is a major shift in the virus’ behavior.

The majority of new infections are being driven by Omicron BA.4 and BA.5, two newer variants that have now become the dominant strains in Britain, the U.K. Heath Security Agency said Friday.

Though both have been designated “variants of concern,” scientists say there is currently no evidence to suggest either causes more serious illness than previous strains, and they are unlikely to behave drastically differently.

A Reporter Tried the AI Instagram Wants to Use to Verify Age. Here’s What It Found.

CNN Business reported:

Instagram is testing new ways to verify its youngest users’ ages, including by using artificial intelligence that analyzes a photo and estimates how old the user is. Meta-owned Instagram said in a blog post on Thursday that AI is one of three new methods it’s testing to verify users’ ages on the photo-sharing site.

The move is part of an ongoing push to make sure the photo-sharing app’s youngest users see content that is age-appropriate. It comes less than a year after disclosures from a Facebook whistleblower raised concerns about the platform’s impact on younger users.

Several CNN employees — all adults over the age of 25 — tried an online demo of Yoti’s age-estimation technology. The demo differs from the experience Instagram users will have in that it takes a selfie, rather than a short video, and the result is an age-range estimation, rather than a specific age estimation, Yoti’s chief marketing officer, Chris Field, said.

Among other issues, Luke Stark, an assistant professor at Western University in Ontario, Canada, who studies the ethical and social implications of AI, is also concerned that the technology will contribute to so-called “surveillance creep.”

“It’s certainly problematic because it conditions people to assume they’re going to be surveilled and assessed,” he said.

People’s Trust in Digital Systems Is Failing: Here’s How We Earn It Back

Newsweek reported:

The companies that operate in the digital world are losing their customers’ trust. Not all of that is their fault. The internet, after all, wasn’t initially designed for security concerns. Its creators apparently didn’t read Hobbes.

Although the wide-open and sharing nature of the internet brings us many benefits, it also has led to many catastrophic losses of personal information. It will not be easy to earn back the trust these events have caused, but it can be done.

There are plenty of reasons why people’s trust in digital systems is rapidly degrading. We’re bombarded with information 24 hours a day. Every time we want to look at a website, we’re asked to hand over personal information. Technology like biometrics and location tracking seems to be getting more invasive. There are, however, three main reasons why trust is failing.

I Saw First-Hand How the Tech Giants Seduced the EU — and Undermined Democracy

The Guardian reported:

The tide is seemingly turning against Meta, Google and other tech giants. Groundbreaking new European Union legislation is imminent, aimed at forcing the large digital platforms to do more to keep users safe and cutting down market abuses, data capture and surveillance infrastructure.

As the Digital Services Act package was being finalized, the very public crossing of swords between Elon Musk and the European Commission over Twitter captured headlines. Yet the Musk spectacle was a sideshow.

Much more urgently in need of scrutiny is big tech’s hidden lobbying against the DSA. It is unlikely that Brussels has previously seen campaigns on such a scale and practices so out of line with the requirements of a democratic, open society.

The DSA will be rubber-stamped by the European parliament next week. When it finally comes into force this year, it will allow Europe for the first time to neutralize some of the harms caused by social media platforms. But the compromises made in getting here also reflect the extraordinary power of tech companies to influence decision-making, and by extension to subvert our democracies.