Category «Civil Liberties»

During the Trump era, political violence has become an increasingly urgent problem

The New Yorker: Elected officials from both parties are struggling to respond. In the Line of Fire [no paywall] “America is a violent country. Nowhere else that is remotely as rich tolerates so many murders or so many weapons. But, sometime during the tumultuous decade of the Trump era, it began to seem that simply …

Subjects: Civil Liberties, Congress, Economy, Government Documents, Health Care, Legal Research, Social Media

Official White House Site Adds Purported Media Bias Tracker

Washington Post [and The Hill] – “A new White House webpage presents a “Hall of Shame” for news reports the president disagrees with, coming after the president has voiced personal attacks on female reporters at ABC, CBS, the New York Times and Bloomberg. The White House launched a page on its website Friday devoted to …

Subjects: Civil Liberties, E-Government, Free Speech, Freedom of Information, Government Documents, Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research

Tennessee public libraries close for Trump-inspired book purge

Popular Information: “One hundred and eighty-one public libraries in Tennessee are reviewing their children’s collections after Tennessee Secretary of State Tre Hargett (R) ordered them to remove books with LGBTQ themes or characters. Hargett suggested that libraries that made such books available to children were violating federal and state law. Some libraries have closed for days …

Subjects: Censorship, Civil Liberties, Free Speech, Freedom of Information, Legal Research, Libraries

Why you shouldn’t count on humans to prevent AI hiring bias

No Thoughts Just AI: Biased LLM Hiring Recommendations Alter Human Decision Making and Limit Human Autonomy. Kyra Wilson, Mattea Sim, Anna-Maria Gueorguieva1, Aylin Caliskan. Proceedings of the Eighth AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (AIES2025): “Despite bias in artificial intelligence (AI) being a risk of their use in hiring systems, there is no large-scale …

Subjects: AI, Censorship, Civil Liberties, E-Records, Economy, Knowledge Management, Legal Research, Search Engines

Epstein Files Search

Follow up to post – We created a searchable database with all 20,000 files from Epstein’s Estate – See also the new Epstein Files Search – powered by Justice for All Victims: Search Tags for Files, Images, People, Organizations, Countries. See also via Journalist Studio – Zeteo Scoured 26,000 Epstein Docs. Here’s What We Found. You …

Subjects: Censorship, Civil Liberties, Congress, E-Mail, E-Records, Freedom of Information, Government Documents, Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research, Search Engines

Use Of Open Source Information by the Federal Bureau of Investigation

Use Of Open Source Information by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. November 20, 2025. Prefatory Note – “This is an unclassified version of a comprehensive report by the staff of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (“PCLOB”) on the use of open source information by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”). All PCLOB oversight …

Subjects: Civil Liberties, Congress, E-Records, Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research, Privacy

Results from Redeployment of Military and Civilian Personnel to Immigration Enforcement

Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse “With the end of the government shutdown, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has just posted new data on the results the Trump administration has achieved from its massive redeployment of government military and civilian personnel to immigration enforcement. The data show surprisingly little has been accomplished given the huge expenditure of …

Subjects: Civil Liberties, Defense, Government Documents, Legal Research

DOGE ‘doesn’t exist’ – with eight months left on its charter

Follow up to The DOGE Has Arrived and The Story of DOGE, as Told by Federal Workers – see Reuters: “President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency has disbanded with eight months left to its mandate, ending an initiative launched with fanfare as a symbol of Trump’s pledge to slash the government’s size but which …

Subjects: Censorship, Civil Liberties, E-Government, Economy, Education, Financial System, Government Documents, Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research

How Cops Are Using Flock Safety’s ALPR Network to Surveil Protesters and Activists

EFF: “It’s no secret that 2025 has given Americans plenty to protest about. But as news cameras showed protesters filling streets of cities across the country, law enforcement officers—including U.S. Border Patrol agents—were quietly watching those same streets through different lenses: Flock Safety automated license plate readers (ALPRs) that tracked every passing car.  Through an …

Subjects: Censorship, Civil Liberties, E-Records, Free Speech, Freedom of Information, Government Documents, Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research, Privacy, Social Media

Former CFPB Enforcement Leaders Launch Strategic Litigation Project

“Three enforcement leaders formerly at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) are joining Protect Borrowers as senior fellows to launch a strategic enforcement project focusing on the weaponization of corporate power that is plunging working people into financial crisis. Eric Halperin, Cara Petersen, and Tara Mikkilineni bring decades of enforcement, litigation, and civil rights experience …

Subjects: Civil Liberties, Economy, Financial System, Legal Research

The Librarians – documentary film on censorship

Via Kottke –  The Librarians – As part of the fascist war on “woke”, tens of thousands of books have been pulled from the shelves of libraries around the country over the past few years. On the front line are the nation’s librarians, “first responders in the fight for democracy and our First Amendment rights”. The Librarians …

Subjects: Censorship, Civil Liberties, Education, Free Speech, Freedom of Information, Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research, Libraries, Privacy