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Follow up to previous postings – How Trump’s crackdown on law firms is undermining legal defenses for the vulnerable and What if the Big Law Firms Hadn’t Caved to Trump?, see also Above the Law: “Back in August, the New York Times reported that Kirkland and Paul Weiss (along with Skadden) — firms who had …
404 Media: “The FBI is attempting to unmask the owner behind archive.today, a popular archiving site that is also regularly used to bypass paywalls on the internet and to avoid sending traffic to the original publishers of web content, according to a subpoena posted by the website. The FBI subpoena says it is part of …
Announcing the launch of our Semantic Search API in CourtListener – a major leap forward in how you search legal data. We’ve been working diligently to bring semantic search to our case law database for quite some time. Back in March, we shared a status update with extensive details on the machine learning techniques and …
404 Media: “Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has publicly released an app that Sheriff Offices, police departments, and other local or regional law enforcement can use to scan someone’s face as part of immigration enforcement, 404 Media has learned. The news follows Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) use of another internal Department of Homeland Security …
EFF: “Amazon Ring’s upcoming face recognition tool has the potential to violate the privacy rights of millions of people and could result in Amazon breaking state biometric privacy laws. Ring plans to introduce a feature to its home surveillance cameras called “Familiar Faces,” to identify specific people who come into view of the camera. When …
The Authoritarian Stack: How Tech Billionaires Are Building a Post-Democratic America – And Why Europe Is Next [This article is largely a visualization with accompanying text – very well done]. “The Contract That Changed Everything – In late July 2025, deep within the Pentagon’s bureaucratic machinery, the U.S. Army quietly signed away a piece of …
Opinion, The Editorial Board, The New York Times, October 31, 2025. Gift Article – Countries that slide from democracy toward autocracy tend to follow similar patterns. To measure what is happening in the United States, the Times editorial board has compiled a list of 12 markers of democratic erosion, with help from scholars who have …
Austin-American Statesman – “…Nestled in a red-leaning suburb south of Houston, Pearland is one of several school districts turning to artificial intelligence to keep up with the law, Senate Bill 13, which requires boards to sign off on all library purchases. The legislation comes after a 2023 law first required schools to purge “sexually explicit” …
Spyglass: “A funny thing happened on the way to AI web browsers taking over the world: they’re now getting blocked left and right from doing the things that would make them useful. This is, to say the least, a problem. I first noticed it when OpenAI rolled out their ‘ChatGPT Atlas’ browser a couple weeks …
The Atlantic (Gift Article): The Nonprofit Doing the AI Industry’s Dirty Work. “The web archive Common Crawl has been quietly funneling paywalled articles to AI companies—and lying to publishers about it.” “The Common Crawl Foundation is little known outside of Silicon Valley. For more than a decade, the nonprofit has been scraping billions of webpages …
404 Media: “Most people probably have no idea that when you book a flight through major travel websites, a data broker owned by U.S. airlines then sells details about your flight, including your name, credit card used, and where you’re flying to the government. The data broker has compiled billions of ticketing records the government …
Cato Institute – “One of the striking features of the present administration is the regularity with which its leaders, from President Donald Trump on down, confidently describe the state of the law in ways entirely contrary to what had been seen as settled, on topics that range from flag burning to Congress’s TikTok ban to …
