Miss a day, miss a lot. Subscribe to The Defender's Top News of the Day. It's free.
Senate Passes Defense Bill Rescinding COVID Vaccine Mandate
A bill to rescind the COVID-19 vaccine mandate for members of the U.S. military and provide nearly $858 billion for national defense passed the Senate on Thursday and now goes to President Joe Biden to be signed into law.
The Senate passed the defense policy bill by a vote of 83-11. The measure also received broad bipartisan support in the House last week.
To win GOP support for the 4,408-page bill, Democrats agreed to Republican demands to scrap the requirement for service members to get a COVID-19 vaccination. The bill directs Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to rescind his August 2021 memorandum imposing the mandate.
Va. Students With Disabilities Win Legal Right to Request Masking in Class
Parents of students with disabilities in Virginia public schools have won the right to require that their children’s peers and teachers wear masks after the state government agreed to a settlement with several families who had filed a lawsuit challenging a statewide mask-optional policy.
The parents of 12 immunocompromised students with disabilities filed suit in February over an executive order issued by Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) and subsequent state law, both of which forbid school districts from requiring mask-wearing as a coronavirus mitigation measure.
The parents, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia, alleged that the imposition of mask-optional guidelines violated national disability law by making it impossible for their children to attend school safely to receive their federally guaranteed free and appropriate public education.
More Than a Third of Parents Oppose Vaccine Requirements in Schools, KFF Survey Finds
More than a third of U.S. parents say that vaccinating children against measles, mumps and rubella should be an individual choice and not a requirement to attend public school, even if that may create health risks, according to survey data published Friday by the Kaiser Family Foundation.
That’s a notable increase from pre-pandemic times. A similar poll from the Pew Research Center found that 23% of parents opposed vaccine requirements in schools in 2019, but that’s now jumped to 35% in the KFF survey.
All 50 states and the District of Columbia require children attending public school to be vaccinated against certain diseases, including measles and rubella. Exemptions are allowed in only some circumstances.
Former UVA Employees Sue, Claim They Were Fired for Not Having COVID Vaccine
A class-action lawsuit has been filed against the University of Virginia Health System for discriminatory COVID-19 policies and practices regarding religious groups and beliefs.
On Dec. 13, the Founding Freedoms Law Center joined with the law firm of CrossCastle, PLLC filed the lawsuit in federal court, according to the law center. We’re told the lawsuit names six former employees and is filed on behalf of several hundred former employees and applicants to whom UVA Health systematically refused religious accommodations.
The complaint outlines examples of the accused first amendment violations and includes a written list of what is referred to as UVA’s favored religions, according to Founding Freedoms.
Elon Musk Defends Banning of Journalists: ‘You Dox, You Get Suspended’
Twitter CEO Elon Musk defended his decision to ban several prominent technology reporters from the platform on Thursday night, claiming they violated Twitter’s policies on “doxxing.”
“You dox, you get suspended,” Musk said on a Twitter Spaces conversation with journalists. “End of story.” Doxxing is the act of sharing information like addresses, phone numbers and emails online in an attempt to allow others to harass the individuals.
The billionaire abruptly suspended the accounts of reporters from The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and other outlets on Thursday night who had covered Musk’s recent dispute with Jack Sweeney, the creator of @elonjet. Sweeney, who created the Twitter account that tracked the movements of Musk’s private jet, had his account suspended on Wednesday, despite previous assurances from Musk that he would not be banned.
“Same doxxing rules apply to ‘journalists’ as to everyone else,” Musk said in a tweet on Thursday night, later adding “Criticizing me all day long is totally fine, but doxxing my real-time location and endangering my family is not.”
Twitter Censorship Contributed to Destructive Pandemic Policies and Is Criminal, Says Former White House COVID Adviser
The recently revealed censorship that has plagued Twitter in recent years is “criminal,” according to former White House COVID adviser Dr. Scott Atlas, as it allowed “lies to be imposed on the public” during a pandemic that wrought untold damage worldwide.
“When correct science policy is blocked, people die, and people died from the censorship,” Atlas, a special coronavirus adviser during the Trump administration and contributor to The Epoch Times, said in an interview.
Atlas was speaking days after Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter, released troves of internal files showing how the previous Twitter team built a blacklist to limit disfavored tweets’ visibility without the knowledge of those using the platform. Among those flagged was Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford, whose tweet criticizing pandemic lockdowns shortly after joining the platform last August got him on the “trends blacklist” preventing the amplification of his tweets.
But such revelations, Atlas said, are “only the tip of the iceberg. This seems to be criminal behavior, and I think it needs to be investigated in the courts.”
California to End Mandatory Pay for Workers With COVID
California will stop making companies pay employees who can’t work because they caught the coronavirus while on the job.
For the past two years, California workplace regulators have tried to slow the spread of the coronavirus by requiring infected workers to stay home while also guaranteeing them they would still be paid.
But Thursday, the California Occupational Safety and Health Standards Board voted to end that rule in 2023 — in part because the rule has become harder to enforce. Only people who caught the virus while at work are eligible to keep getting paid. But the coronavirus is now so widespread that it’s much harder to tell where someone got sick.
Millions of IP Cameras Around the World Are Unprotected
Over 3.5 million active Chinese-manufactured IP cameras are only protected by a vendor’s default password, or lacking protection altogether, putting users at risk of snooping, experts have warned.
New research from CyberNews found over 458,000 devices protected only by default credentials operational in the U.S. alone, alongside almost 250,000 in the United Kingdom, with countries such as Mexico, China, the Korean Republic, India, Brazil and Russia also appearing on the list.
At least 21,000 cameras worldwide lack any authentication whatsoever, raising questions about invasions of privacy, and the impact IP cameras are having on the global uptick in cyber warfare.
All devices connected to the internet are in danger of being accessed by unknown and potentially malicious third parties. In the case of security cameras, threat actors can access the live feed, record sensitive personal data and use the camera as a vulnerable endpoint on a network.
Inventor of the World Wide Web Wants Us to Reclaim Our Data From Tech Giants
The internet has come a long way since Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web in 1989. Now, in an era of growing concern over privacy, he believes it’s time for us to reclaim our personal data.
Through their startup Inrupt, Berners-Lee and CEO John Bruce have created the “Solid Pod” — or Personal Online Data Store. It allows people to keep their data in one central place and control which people and applications can access it, rather than having it stored by apps or sites all over the web.
Users can get a Pod from a handful of providers, hosted by web services such as Amazon (AMZN), or run their own server, if they have the technical know-how. The main attraction to self-hosting is control and privacy, says Berners-Lee.
Not only is user data safe from corporations and governments, but it’s also less likely to be stolen by hackers, Bruce says.
Corporate Coalition Pushes Government to Create Digital ID Infrastructure
A group of private companies has published a digital ID blueprint encouraging state governments to implement policies involved in creating a digital ID system.
The blueprint was published by the Better Identity Coalition, a group of 27 U.S. companies, including Mastercard, Equifax, AT&T and more. The group either wants to stop the worry about ID fraud or to profit from preventing ID fraud by pushing to normalize digital IDs.
The coalition is encouraging states to make their department of motor vehicles the core of developing and maintaining digital ID systems because these departments are central to each state’s identification systems.
