Nolan Wells’ parents continue to demand a federal investigation into his death as the FBI says it found no evidence of foul play.
New Nolan Wells text message report raises questions about investigation into teen’s death
Civil rights attorney Charles Coleman Jr. explains what the report of Nolan Wells’ text messages means for the investigation into his death.
Judges and Grand Juries Reject Trump's Efforts to Investigate
A detailed record of federal courts and grand juries rejecting the Trump administration’s use of subpoenas, search warrants, and indictments.
A Year After ICE Killed A Father Outside Chicago, FBI Won’t Release Any Info About Investigation
Silverio Villegas González was killed during a traffic stop in Franklin Park. His family is working with lawyers and the Mexican Consulate to file a wrongful death claim against the federal government — and get his kids out of foster care.
Questions Grow Over FBI Investigation of Omar al-Bayoumi 25 Years After 9/11 — ProPublica
FBI agents quickly identified a Saudi suspect who helped two of the 9/11 hijackers. But families of the victims are demanding to know what happened in the bureau’s investigation of Omar al-Bayoumi.
FBI Breaks into iPhone. We Have Some Questions.
The FBI has successfully accessed data on an iPhone that has been the subject of a legal battle between the Justice Department and Apple, according to a court filing. EFF is pleased that the Justice
Here's What I Learned as the U.S. Government's UFO Hunter
A forthcoming investigational report from an office of the Pentagon has found no evidence of aliens, only allegations circulated repeatedly by UFO claim advocates
These parents didn’t know why their daughter was sick. They turned to AI to help solve the mystery. - The Boston Globe
First they sequenced the entire genomes of all four members of their family. Then they got down to work.
Premium: The Hater's Guide to OpenAI
Soundtrack: The Dillinger Escape Plan — Setting Fire To Sleeping Giants In what The New Yorker’s Andrew Marantz and Ronan Farrow called a “tense call” after his brief ouster from OpenAI in 2023, Sam Altman seemed unable to reckon with a “pattern of deception” across his time at the company:
For teen girls victimized by ‘deepfake’ nudes, there is little recourse
The FBI has warned that technology used to create pornographic deepfake photos and videos was improving and being used for harassment and sextortion.
An AI test needs evidence the AI cannot edit - Sensemaker
OpenAI's postmortem shows that some agents learned to spoof tool calls while trying to fool a benchmark.
Attorney: Homeland Security spied on Minnesotans who spoke out against ICE
Defense attorney Kevin Riach alleges that just four days after Alex Pretti was shot and killed by federal agents, that Homeland Security Investigations launched Operation Puppet Master. The agency couched this program in language about rooting out people they describe as “violent opportunists.”
Police forensic tools may bypass key phone security feature
Up-to-date iPhones can lock out some forensic devices by rebooting. One major forensics company claims to have a workaround
The Deepfake Defense—Exploring the Limits of the Law and Ethical Norms in Protecting Legal Proceedings from Lying Lawyers
Thousands of audiovisual images documented the insurrectionists who stormed the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021. Authorities subsequently collected those images and charged some for their criminal conduct. Given the overwhelming audiovisual evidence implicating the insurrectionists, it should be impossible to assert a plausible defense claiming that those unmistakably depicted in the images were not present. Right? Wrong. As the defense in the federal criminal trial of January 6th insurrectionist leader Guy Reffitt illustrated, the emergence of “deepfakes” has changed the landscape of plausible defenses to crimes. Reffitt led the attack on the Capital. Videos and other visual images showed him at the head of the crowd advancing on the Capitol’s West Terrace. He was arrested and charged with multiple crimes. And although the evidence, including audiovisual images, against Reffitt, was clear and overwhelming, his lawyer undermined it, arguing to the jury that the evidence against Reffitt was a “deepfake” – an audiovisual recording created using Artificial Intelligence technology that allows anyone with a smartphone to believably map one person’s movements and words onto the image of another person. Unfortunately, the law does not provide a clear response to Reffitt’s lawyer’s reliance on deepfakes as a defense. <br><br>But this much is clear—the “deepfake defense” is a new challenge to our legal system’s adversarial process and truth-seeking function. Because the norms of professional ethics require lawyers to advocate zealously, deepfakes invite lawyers to raise objections and arguments to evidence to exploit juror bias and skepticism about what is real. Thus, lawyers may plant the seeds of doubt in jurors’ minds to question the authenticity of all digital audio and visual images, even those counsel knows to be genuine.<br><br>Currently, no rule of procedure, ethics, or legal precedent directly addresses the presentation of the “deepfake defense” in court. The existing standards provide scant guidance because they were developed before the advent of deepfake technology. As a result, they do not solve the concern of how to deter lawyers from exploiting it. Although in the last several years, legal scholarship and the popular news media have addressed certain facets of deepfakes, there has been no in-depth commentary on the “deepfake defense.” This article is the first to explore the deepfake defense, locating it within the historical and current framework of lawyers’ efforts to fabricate evidence and the laws and the practice norms that exist to curb that conduct. It proposes a reconsideration of the ethical rules governing candor, fairness, and the limits of zealous advocacy and urges a re-examination of the court’s role in sanctioning such conduct. Thus, this article offers novel proposals to guide the way forward for lawyers and courts as they traverse this new technological landscape.
New evidence, new challenges: ICC judges’ perspectives on user-generated evidence and judging in an age of artificial intelligence
Evidence recorded on personal digital devices, or “user-generated evidence” (UGE), has profoundly shaped our ways of knowing about international crimes. UGE can be expected to play an important role in future cases before the International Criminal Court (ICC), yet few trials to date have relied extensively on UGE.. This research provides important insights into how ICC judges define UGE and perceive its strengths and weaknesses, and on the readiness of the Court to adapt to judging in an age of Artificial Intelligence. Using grounded theory to analyse interviews with ICC judges, we identified several key themes, including concerns about the perceived importance and potential bias of evidence sources; the practical challenges of employing UGE; the burden placed on the parties to ensure the reliability of the evidence, to rigorously challenge the opposing party’s evidence, and the importance of preparing legal professionals to address the risks associated with misinformation and disinformation.
Court: The First Amendment Allows You To Tell The ICE Director He’s A ‘Sad, Despised Man’
You may recall that back in July we had the ridiculous story of how ICE decided to go all gestapo on its critics, including tracking down and threatening David Streever, who had emailed then-acting…
