They did it. Again. After some guy named Musk retwitted a deepfake video of Kamala Harris that made her look…not good, California snapped into action and enacted AB 2839, a law prohibiting materially deceptive election advertisements.

(1) California is entering its first-ever artificial intelligence (AI) election, in which disinformation powered by generative AI will pollute our information ecosystems like never before. Voters will not know what images, audio, or video they can trust.

It is a serious concern, standing alone, but was its impetus serious? Continue reading →

Perhaps the funniest (in the weird sense, not the humorous sense) reaction to Bruce Schneier’s apocryphal op-ed is that the small minds can’t get past his use of Israel’s exploding pagers and walkie-talkies to grasp the magnitude of what Schneier is trying to explain. If they could just let go of their hatred of Israel for a moment, they might realize that it was merely a flagrant example of a far larger, far deeper problem that cybersecurity experts like Schneier have been warning about for a long time.

Israel’s brazen attacks on Hezbollah last week, in which hundreds of pagers and two-way radios exploded and killed at least 37 people, graphically illustrated a threat that cybersecurity experts have been warning about for years: Our international supply chains for computerized equipment leave us vulnerable. And we have no good means to defend ourselves.

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Forget the twinkie defense. The new hip defense is the “family man defense,” raised according to Jessica Grouse in the New York Times to sanitize Sean “Puff Daddy,” etc., Combs’ crimes because he’s rich.

On Monday, Sean Combs was arrested in Manhattan on racketeering and sex trafficking charges. If he’s convicted of the racketeering charge, it could potentially land him a life sentence. His legal team defended him that day with references to his role as a father. “Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs is a music icon, self-made entrepreneur, loving family man and proven philanthropist who has spent the last 30 years building an empire, adoring his children and working to uplift the Black community,” they said in a statement. “He is an imperfect person, but he is not a criminal.”

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From the cries of outrage on social media, you would have believed that two NYPD officers shot a man because he failed to pay the subway fare. The problem was that the man, Derrell Mickles, not only tried to beat the fare, twice, but had a knife in his hand which he refused to drop when the cops commanded he do so. That little detail was omitted by those trying to whip up outrage over the shooting.

[A longer video is available as well.] Continue reading →

A thought experiment. You have 100 feet of shelving in a public library and 1,000 feet of books, with more coming every day. What do you, the librarian, do? You pick and choose which books to put on your shelf and use up your precious shelf space. It’s not because you’re a censor or book-hater, but because the laws of physics apply in libraries and two objects cannot occupy the same space.

In libe parlance, the problem is called “weeding.”

I want to talk about a particular twist in the dispute, which can be particularly well seen in a friend-of-the-court brief filed by the Freedom to Read Foundation, the Texas Library Association, and American Library Association. The passage, and the sources it cites, refer to the necessity to remove books on some criteria—this is called “weeding,” and some sources suggest that each year a public library would generally weed out 5% of its stock—and discuss which criteria are proper: Continue reading →

District of Maryland Judge Paula Xinis denied a motion to dismiss as to a school district’s “official” twitter “StaffPride” account. Why, you may wonder, would a school district have an official Pride account. That was at the heart of the matter.

In October 2022, the School Board announced the introduction of LGBTQIA+-themed books into the MCPS [Montgomery County Public Schools] curriculum. In response, several parents sought permission from MCPS for their children to “opt out” of any classroom instruction involving these books. Continue reading →

For most of us, the only time we consider the propriety of a sentence is when it applies to some outlier conviction we read about in the funny pages. What never quite makes it to our radar is the tens of thousands of mundane convictions of defendants whose names mean nothing beyond their families, friends and, in some cases, victims. At the moment of sentence, a process that’s primarily voodoo as an honest judge might admit, passions are strong and consequences taken seriously.

But what about 20 years later? Continue reading →

The video was more than enough for most people to conclude that the inexplicably unnamed Riverside County Sheriff’s Deputy was not merely wrong, but substantively no different than any other home invader. Others saw the potential for gaps in the context that might somehow make the deputy look less offensive, and so manufactured background facts the might exculpate the deputy or at least raised questions.

The contextual facts, however, were of little help to the deputy. They only made him look worse.

According to the video, a minor answered the door after the deputy rang the bell. Captions in the video say the minor closed the door after seeing the deputy, only for the deputy to open the door and let himself in. Continue reading →

To a criminal defense lawyer, confidentiality is a core value. It is, for lack of a less religious word, sacred. We know things. We learn things. We possess information that would be of extreme interest to others, whether at a cocktail party or in the courthouse hallway. We have great stories that would fascinate friends and acquaintances alike.

The information is often about people we dislike, maybe even despise, and revealing it will do great harm to people we would love to harm And yet, we will take our stories to our grave. At least I will. Continue reading →

An old-school union-busting gambit is to threaten employees that if they vote for a union, management will shut the business down and they will be out of work. What good is a union going to do for you if you have no jobs, they would argue. And this was an unfair labor practice under the Wagner Act, which protects the rights of workers to unionize without retaliation.

But Starbucks didn’t threaten to close three stores in Ithaca, New York. It closed three stores. Shut the doors. Took out its barista machines. Locked the doors. It claimed it was because the stores were unprofitable and had high management turnover. But an NLRB Administrative Law Judge found that it was just to bust the union in violation of Section 7. Continue reading →