A Political Atlas of the World
1st Experiments with WebMapperGPT. Steven Feldman reports on his experiments with mapping LLMs. The result is available here. [h/t quantum of sollazzo]
Category «Civil Liberties»
Trump’s Battle With Big Law Firms Heads Into 2026: What to Know
Bloomberg Law: “There was perhaps no bigger story last year in the world of Big Law than President Donald Trump’s attacks on several of the nation’s largest law firms through punitive executive orders due to political affiliations and adversarial hires. Perkins Coie, Jenner & Block, Susman Godfrey, WilmerHale, and Paul Weiss Rifkind Wharton & Garrison …
The Trump Administration’s Continued War Against Science, Research, Public Health and the Rule of Law – Part 6
Via LLRX – The Trump Administration’s Continued War Against Science, Research, Public Health, and the Rule of Law – Part 6 – As we approach January 20, 2026, the one year mark of the second Trump administration, Americans are witnessing the exercise of vast, often illegal and unconstrained presidential powers, unprecedented in our history. The impact of …
Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, January 4, 2026
Via LLRX – Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, January 4, 2026 – 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 …
How TikTok Is Distorting the Memory of the Holocaust
Der Spiegel Guest Editorial by Eva Berendsen – political scientist and head of the communication and online education department at the Anne Frank Educational Center in Frankfurt. She has written extensively about the effects of social media on memory an artificial intelligence’s influence on racism and anti-Semitism. “Imagine for a moment your 13‑year‑old child stumbling across …
ChatGPT’s year-end review knows way too much. How to fix your privacy settings.
Washington Post [no paywall] – A clickable guide to the complicated privacy settings for ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Gemini and Meta AI. ChatGPT has been pushing its own year-end review like Spotify Wrapped. “Your year with ChatGPT” describes what you asked the bot in poems and pictures. It also reveals a giant hole in your privacy. …
The Department of Justice May Not Survive Pam Bondi
The New Republic: “At her confirmation hearing in January, Attorney General Pam Bondi tried to reassure senators about the job she would do as the nation’s top federal law-enforcement officer. Her “overriding objective,” Bondi said, would be to “return the Department of Justice to its core mission of keeping Americans safe and vigorously enforcing the …
Conservatives Want the Antebellum Constitution Back
The Atlantic Gift Article – The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments are in trouble. “…The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments make up the Civil War and Reconstruction amendments. The Thirteenth abolished slavery except as punishment for a crime, but America needed to do more to prevent the resurgence of the slave-owning South’s caste-based society. The Fourteenth …
Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves.
404 Media: “I am standing on the corner of Harris Road and Young Street outside of the Crossroads Business Park in Bakersfield, California, looking up at a Flock surveillance camera bolted high above a traffic signal. On my phone, I am watching myself in real time as the camera records and livestreams me—without any password …
The New Surveillance State Is You
Wired [no paywall]: “Privacy may be dead, but civilians are turning conventional wisdom on its head by surveilling the cops as much as the cops surveil them. The Department of Homeland Security secretary has spent 2025 trying to convince the American public that identifying roving bands of masked federal agents is “doxing”—and that revealing these …
How a scholar nudged the Supreme Court toward National Guard troop deployment ruling
The New York Times Gift Article: “The Supreme Court’s Accepting an argument from a law professor that no party to the case had made, the Supreme Court handed the Trump administration a stinging loss that could lead to more aggressive tactics. The Supreme Court’s refusal on Tuesday to let the Trump administration deploy National Guard …
Explore ways animals and plants protect human health and what’s at stake when species are endangered
Washington Post [no paywall]: “Explore the ways animals and plants protect human health and what’s at stake when species are endangered. This reporting was supported by the Pulitzer Center and is helping to rewrite the story of the big, bad wolf, with a surprise twist. Studies have found that wolves in the Midwest and Canada …
