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Home Insurance Executives Are Raking It In—at Your Expense

American Prospect: “Climate disasters are causing “record-high insurance losses,” a recent CNN article began, citing insurance industry research. The first half of 2025 brought about “a new market reality,” it said, with climate-related losses for insurers setting a record for the January-to-June period. It is true that insurance companies have made some large payouts for …

Subjects: Climate Change, Economy, Environmental Law, Financial System, Legal Research

Epstein’s Estate Includes Book Said to Have Note From Trump, Lawyer Says

The New York Times – no paywall – “The lawyer, who represents victims of Jeffrey Epstein, said he believed the estate would turn the book over to the authorities if asked. A lawyer for hundreds of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims said the disgraced financier’s estate has a copy of a birthday book in which President Trump …

Subjects: Censorship, Congress, Freedom of Information, Government Documents, Legal Research

How big tech is force-feeding us AI

Blood in the Machine: “I do not think it will shock anyone to learn that big tech is aggressively pushing AI products. But the extent to which they have done so might. The sheer ubiquity of AI means that we take for ground the countless ways, many invisible, that these products and features are foisted on …

Subjects: AI, E-Records, Economy, Financial System, Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research, Privacy, Search Engines

Deportation Data Project

Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ICE collects data on every person it encounters, arrests, detains, transports via flight, and deports. We post below data that ICE produced in response to several FOIA requests by multiple organizations. Crucially, in some data releases, there are linked identifiers across data types such as arrests and detainers, allowing merges that …

Subjects: Civil Liberties, E-Records, Freedom of Information, Government Documents, Legal Research

What is AI Reading – Report by Muck Rack

Muck Rack Complete Report – Snipped from Executive Summary • Citations affect responses: Simply enabling or disabling the ability for AI to search the web drastically modifies responses, indicating that the systems are truly basing their responses on the cited works. • Journalism and earned media are important drivers: More than 95% of links cited …

Subjects: AI, Copyright, E-Commerce, E-Government, Education, Government Documents, Intellectual Property, Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research, Search Engines, Social Media

New ICE mobile app pushes biometric policing onto American streets

BiometricUpdate.com: “U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has quietly deployed a new surveillance tool in its Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) arsenal – a smartphone app known as Mobile Fortify. Designed for ICE field agents, the app enables real-time biometric identity verification using facial recognition or contactless fingerprints. Based on leaked emails reported by 404 Media, the …

Subjects: Civil Liberties, E-Government, E-Mail, E-Records, Government Documents, Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research, Privacy, Social Media

Here’s the list of websites gig workers used to fine-tune Anthropic’s AI models

Business Insider – Its contractor left it wide open. “An internal spreadsheet obtained by Business Insider shows which websites Surge AI gig workers were told to mine — and which to avoid — while fine-tuning Anthropic’s AI to make it sound more “helpful, honest, and harmless.” The spreadsheet allows sources like Bloomberg, Harvard University, and …

Subjects: AI, Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, Education, Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research, Social Media

GAO has published the titles of new restricted reports

“The following products have been determined to contain either classified information or controlled unclassified information by the Executive Branch audited agencies and therefore cannot be publicly released. As such, they have not been posted to GAO’s website and have product numbers that end in C (classified) or SU (controlled unclassified information). Many also have an …

Subjects: Censorship, Congress, Government Documents, Legal Research