Category: law
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power and consequences are directly proportional
“With great power comes great responsibility” — Uncle Ben in every Spider-Man media ever made We want fairness, and in that fairness we want those who are more powerful to be punished more when they use that power to harm. We want this because of a concept of fairness called “fairness as justice” which is…
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Thoughts on the inevitable attempts by organizations to control the use of LLMs by their members
This is a quick run-down of the major concerns I’ve heard voiced by organizations — mostly corporations and schools — about Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, and to a lessor extent about generative neural networks (gNNs) like Midjourney. It is admittedly cynical in the sense that taken together it sounds somewhat defeatist, but also…
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The litmus test for personhood
You are a person if you can be killed. You are a “legal person” if the State can kill you without violating their process. Equality of legal persons begins with comparing how difficult it is to execute the process that results in the State killing you without breaking the law and how long that takes. …
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Is Edward Snowden a traitor?
Probably not, and here’s why I say that. No matter the value you place on the two things that he undeniably has done – violate the various rules for the handling of classified information and in so doing expose the vast array of things being done by the United States in the domain of surveillance…
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deconstructing the Fourth Amendment
Since the USAToday story about the NSA warrant-less-wiretaps broke, we’ve been entertained by numerous inflamed public figures and hyperbolic claims to this or that, many of them centered on privacy, and the legality of searching vast stores of “generic” information. Most of these claims of legal violation come back to Amendment IV of the U.…
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Torture
Torture is a big topic these days in the American political conversation. Senator John McCain has brought forward a proposal to unambiguously disavow all methods of interrogation deemed to be “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment” by any agent of the United States, anywhere in the world. The White House has responded by shouting,…
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Wouldn’t it be nice if…
the government let people know what data it is holding about them? “The government, whether a State or Tribe or the Federal government, shall disclose the existence of all data bases and information stores and the contained fields, relationships, schema, and data dictionaries whenever that database or information store contains records of Citizens of the…
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oh what a wicked web we weave
So the big news of the day is that a Federal Judge of the 9th Circuit – the one in San Francisco – struck down the addition by Congress in the 1950s of the words “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance. This will send fundamentalists into a tizzy and, since it will have to,…
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a glimpse of the future?
Since the Supreme Court ruled ambiguously on Monday in the MGM v Grokster case the motives of software designers and programmers are now probative in pursuing civil and criminal actions involving copyright law. This story – Wired News: BitTorrent Whiz Extolled Piracy? [ archive.org ] – is about a manifesto once published on the web…
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speech & community under the radar?
This post on Line of Site about how the podcasting medium is so far ahead of curve and is by its very nature, a domain of unenforceability with respect to content and language (decency). Pretty interesting. It makes me wonder about the difference between ideas of society based (knowingly or not) on Rousseau and his…