Tag: technology

MSNOW Pushes Tired Liberal Talking Point That Second Amendment Only Applies to Guns Available When it Was Written

MSNOW host Melissa Murray and a liberal guest who clearly advocates for gun control, recently pushed the tired talking point that the Second Amendment doesn’t apply to modern firearms, only the guns that were available when the Constitution was written.

Mind you, they said this on TELEVISION, which certainly wasn’t available when the First Amendment was written.

This is what the left flatly refuses to acknowledge about the Second Amendment. As they take full advantage of every new tool available for the advancement of free speech.

Partial transcript via NewsBusters:

MELISSA MURRAY, FILL-IN HOST: This consolidated set of cases has really captured the attention of many Second Amendment enthusiasts. The Second Amendment, as you know, involves the right to keep and bear arms. What do we know from the court in their most recent rulings about how the justices are likely to respond to this challenge to bans on semi-automatic weapons?

LEAH LITMAN, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN LAW SCHOOL: Unfortunately, the Supreme Court, or at least the Republican appointees, have shown they have a ton of zeal for basically cannibalizing and eliminating common sense gun control regulation because they’ve adopted an interpretation of the Second Amendment that maintains firearms that didn’t exist at the time the Second Amendment was ratified — those are still constitutionally protected.

And yet governments have to show that the regulation of those firearms that’s used today resembles the kind of regulations that were applied to firearms that looked substantially different than firearms do today. That is, the government would have to show that it is regulating AR-15’s in the same way that the government’s regulated especially dangerous weapons that existed in the 1700s and 1800s — like, I don’t know, muskets or bayonets. And based on that logic, the court last term struck down two gun control regulations, one at the federal level and one at the state level. So I think it’s very concerning that the court took up this particular case.

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Homeland Advanced Recognition Technology: The Largest US Biometric Database You’ve Never Heard Of

After being troubled by delays and budget concerns for nearly a decade, the Homeland Advanced Recognition Technology (HART) program will become the US government’s largest biometric database when it launches in September. The program has also been plagued by privacy concerns raised by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which has warned that HART has “gaps” in its privacy policies.

HART will be managed by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and will store and process biometric data such as digital fingerprints, iris scans, and faceprints that have been gathered by DHS and its various sub-agencies. According to DHS, government agencies may seek to access this data for national security reasons, law enforcement, immigration and border management, intelligence gathering, background investigations for national security positions, and certain positions of public trust.

While HART is set to complete “initial operating capability” in September 2026, the system is not scheduled to be fully completed until 2027. The system was originally announced in 2015 as a replacement for the legacy Automated Biometric Identification System (IDENT), which was originally developed in 1994 as a law enforcement system for collecting and processing biometric data from individuals apprehended by border security or immigration officials. In 2013, the DHS’ Office of Biometric Identity Management (OBIM) began plans to replace IDENT with HART. HART was set to become operational in December 2018 but was delayed numerous times due to budget concerns.

Since the initial announcement regarding the transition from IDENT to HART, the GAO and digital rights groups have raised concerns about the government upgrading and centralizing its repository of sensitive personal information of millions of Americas.

In February 2020, DHS published its original HART Privacy Impact Assessment to “assess and mitigate any potential privacy risks.” While the system wasn’t yet active, DHS said they “anticipated potential privacy risks associated with the privacy sensitive system” and “sought to proactively develop appropriate privacy safeguards to be implemented” throughout HART’s development.

In September 2023, the GAO released their own report detailing what it saw as “gaps” in privacy policies required by the Office of Management and Budget. The GAO said DHS implemented only five of twelve privacy requirements. GAO noted that the 2020 privacy impact assessment was “missing key information,” including on whose data will be stored in the system and the partners with whom the system will share the data.

The GAO report also said the HART program did not have “assurances that partners that provide information to the system will appropriately retain and dispose of personally identifiable information.” GAO concluded by stating that until DHS addressed these “privacy weaknesses,” there is no assurance that the personal data gathered on hundreds of millions of individuals will be “appropriately protected.”

In August 2024, DHS released an updated Privacy Impact Assessment for HART in an attempt to “clarify and address points raised by external oversight bodies.” The assessment provided answers to some of the questions posed by the 2023 GAO report, namely whose information will be stored and with whom it will be shared.

“HART will contain personally identifiable information, including biometric data and associated biographic information, on U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents, and foreign nationals,” the assessment stated.

The report says biometric data held in HART may be shared with every agency of the DHS, including Customs and Border Protection (CBP), U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), U.S. Secret Service (USSS), and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), as well as other federal agencies such as the State Department, the Department of Justice (DOJ), and the Department of Defense (DOD). It also states that biometric data may be shared with “elements of the Intelligence Community (IC).”

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Paxton “Child Safety” Plan Puts Legal Speech at Criminal Risk

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is currently running for the US Senate, and pushing online digital ID age verification checks in the name of “online safety,” has announced a data center plan that, among other things, vows to “protect children” by making data center companies criminally liable if the centers they operate “empower AI chatbots that undermine children’s safety.”

Paxton is effectively promising to author legislation that would introduce a novel form of liability, aimed at data centers – the physical and hardware part of the internet’s infrastructure – for the content that is generated by software running on their servers.

This is a clear departure from the principle, enshrined in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA), that internet infrastructure is not liable for third-party, user-generated content.

And, while Paxton’s plan speaks of chatbots that “undermine children’s safety” – a broad and vague term that can easily be abused to censor speech – the actual target could be any chatbot, and any speech.

And the liability would be criminal.

Paxton is quoted as saying in a post on X: “My Texas First Data Center Plan will protect our grid, our communities, and our children while ensuring America beats Communist China in the AI race,” he wrote.

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Undersecretary of War Says Whoever Wins AI Race Will Dominate Economically, Militarily

Undersecretary of War for Research and Engineering Emil Michael said Tuesday at Breitbart News’s latest policy event that whoever wins the AI Race, the United States or China, will dominate economically and militarily.

During Breitbart News’s “AI is Here: What to Fear, What to Embrace,” Breitbart News Washington Bureau Chief Matthew Boyle asked Michael what would happen if the United States loses the AI race to China, and what the stakes would be for Western civilization as a whole. Michael said that whoever emerges as the victor in the AI race will lead economically.

“If you think about the 20th century, the way I’ve described this is we had military power leading up through World War II, and that created sort of… peace besides the Cold War, and then that led to our technological dominance. The internet started here. The internet economy started here. The iPhone, the app economy started here, and… that led to our sort of economic dominance… military technology economy,” he said. “Now, in the 21st century, I think technological dominance will determine whether we are economically dominant and militarily dominant. It stems from the tech dominance.” 

“If AI is the central, newest, and most important new technology, if we’re not dominant in that, it threatens our military and economic dominance, and it’s just a different flow in the 21st century,” he added. “And whoever wins that technological race, I think, is going to be [sic] economically, and that means the dollar is the reserve currency. That means priceable are priced in dollars. That means American bonds are the kind of thing that people invest in for safety. That means we have much more control of the financial system and… can ensure that it’s used for good.”

“So I think,” Michael asked, “do you want the Chinese model or the American model in the 21st century? And that starts for who’s going to be dominant in technology.”

Taylor Budowich, the founder of Innovation Council Action Inc. and former White House deputy chief of staff, told Boyle in an earlier conversation at the event that allowing China to win the AI race is “not an option.”

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Tech Evangelist Bill Gates Suddenly Argues AI Needs to Slow Down to Protect Humanity

Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder and leftist billionaire who has spent years predicting that AI would free people from drudgery and speed cures for disease and climate change, published an essay Wednesday warning that without urgent government intervention, AI could cause more harm than good.

Bill Gates, who transformed himself from a software tycoon into a leftist icon of environmentalism and health philanthropy,  has now published an essay calling for an AI slowdown. This is a massive shift is a shift for a tech evangelist who has built his post-Microsoft career on faith in AI’s ability to fix hard problems. Gates said this is the first time in his life he wishes a new technology would advance more slowly.

“I’m surprised to feel this way,” Gates said. “I’ve never seen a problem that innovation can’t solve.”

Gates grouped his worries into three categories: safety threats such as AI-enabled hacking, biological weapons and fraud; job losses driven by AI and AI-powered robots; and risks to children, including stunted learning and damaged human relationships. Writing software code and enabling new kinds of cyberattacks are the two areas where he says AI has recently outpaced his own expectations. Asked about the latter, he used one word: “mind-blowing.”

Gates argued the AI industry cannot police itself and called on the U.S. government to take the lead in regulating it. He wants broad national and international frameworks to address AI’s risks to security, safety, jobs and other areas, built around collaboration between elected officials, subject-matter experts and ordinary citizens. The idea echoes a proposal from AI leader Demis Hassabis, who has called for international AI safety standards overseen by an expert body.

“My basic view is nobody’s shown up,” Gates said of the lack of government action so far. “So this is a shrill call, and I want this to be bipartisan.”

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Locals Have Every Right to Question Data Centers

Locals have every right to question data centers, Breitbart News social media director and Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI author Wynton Hall said during an interview on Breitbart News Daily.

Hall spoke about the debate over data centers and pointed out that the vast majority of Americans are already using AI, even if they do not realize it, as it is “baked into the algorithms that power everything from our our streaming services to our GPS and the rest.”

He explained that there are about 4,000 data centers in America, with thousands more to come as America must beat China in the AI race. However, Hall said Big Tech’s messaging on this has been terrible at addressing the concerns of communities.

“As I say in Code Red, we we want to beat China without becoming China. You know, we don’t want to live in a techno authoritarian CCP surveillance state. But I’ve never seen worse messaging. I’ve been doing, you know, very high-level ghostwriting and speechwriting and every other kind of thing for, you know, almost two decades. I’ve never seen worse corporate communication than we’ve seen around this issue, and I think it is quite frankly sort of a disaster for the AI titans, the industry, and it’s causing a lot of panic, a lot of of concern, and I think we’ve got to get clarity around this right away,” Hall said, walking through some of the main reasons Americans do not want AI data centers in their backyards.

“The reason 71 percent of Americans don’t want an AI data center in their backyard is really, you know, their electric, the water, and the noise. I mean, there are other existential issues, but those are sort of the bigger slices of the pie. And the concern for people, particularly in water-constrained areas, is the amount of water that you know these data centers will consume now,” he said.

“Berkeley Labs is projecting that by 2028, U.S. data centers could directly consume you know roughly between, they say, between 38 to 73 billion gallons annually, and that sounds enormous. That is enormous, but I think the thing that’s missing is some context because you know most people say, well, 38 billion, you know, 73 billion gallons of water for data center cooling to cool these, you know, systems. But just to put that [into] a little perspective, you know, American golf courses use 1.5 billion gallons of water every day, right? So, so even at that high end, if you’re talking about the future data center estimate, you know, golf course irrigation is roughly seven times that,” he said, explaining that this does not mean it is not an important conversation. This means, for starters, that data centers are probably not ideal for water-restrained communities, but there are other solutions as well.

He talked about the “closed loop direct chip cooling with the zero water evaporation for cooling during operations that can radically reduce the water consumption,” noting that there have already been solutions for the thousands of data centers that already exist. However, there has been terrible communication from the Big Tech elite, allowing others to sow seeds of fear around this technology.

“You have a closed loop system that you want to be built, and it — and it’s almost like a radiator in a sense, right? You’re not constantly pumping new fresh water in; you’re circulating, but not all systems are closed loop. And so, look, local people have a right to be concerned about these things, and this arrogance that we’re getting from the the Big Tech elite, you know — ‘Listen, peasants. You know, we know what’s best for you. Shut up and mind your betters,’” is “absolutely wrong approach,” Hall said.

“We need to get into the room, have a good old-fashioned debate, determine which communities it will benefit, which ones it won’t, and everyday people should be able to have a say. It’s not unreasonable to want to make sure that, you know, my electric bill is not going up. My water is not going to get drained, and I’m not going to listen to a hum all night,” he said. “I think that’s a very reasonable concern, and so I don’t think it has to be this zero-sum game.”

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Bluetooth Glitch Exposes Alibaba’s Secret Tracking Of Users, Developer Says

A San Francisco-based developer discovered that Alibaba Group’s AliExpress marketplace secretly hijacked his computer’s audio system through hidden browser scripts, allowing the website to run inaudible sound waves at zero volume to create “fingerprints” used to track devices without relying on cookies. 

The privacy-focused Brave browser revealed in a series of X posts that the AliExpress marketplace was keeping the developer’s computer audio system active through hidden browser scripts, potentially allowing the website to generate a unique identifier for his device.

The issue emerged when the developer’s Bluetooth headphones refused to transfer their audio connection from his computer to his phone while AliExpress was open. A deeper dive of the website’s code showed background scripts maintaining access to the computer’s audio-processing system without producing audible sound.

The scripts allegedly used the browser’s Web Audio API to process signals at zero volume. Small differences in how individual computers handle those signals can be measured and combined into an “audio fingerprint,” allowing websites to recognize devices even when cookies are deleted or blocked.

The developer also found that the scripts collected other device characteristics, including available memory, screen dimensions, and network information.

Here’s what Brave found:

1. Alibaba’s AliExpress was caught using users’ audio systems to track them. AliExpress wasn’t recording users but instead playing a silent sound and measuring how users’ specific devices processed it in order to fingerprint them.

2. Fingerprinting is a way that websites can identify you without cookies. Sites will note details about your device like your screen size or installed fonts. These details are then combined into a unique, persistent “fingerprint” that can be used to track you across the Web.

3. There are slight variations in how each device plays the same audio file due to differences in CPU, sound card, browser, etc. When AliExpress played the silent sound, it measured these small variations to help build fingerprints of users’ devices.

4. This tracking was discovered due to an unexpected side effect. A user with Bluetooth headphones noticed they couldn’t play music on their phone because the headphones were instead playing AliExpress’s silent sound from their PC.

Brave turned what it found into a sales pitch for its browser:

1. For 6+ years, Brave has protected users against audio fingerprinting, and other fingerprinting types, by default. Brave injects random data into the browser’s output so you show a different fingerprint to different sites. This fingerprint also resets across sessions.

2. Trackers are constantly finding new ways to fingerprint your device, so Brave keeps adding new protections. We recently added defenses against GPU fingerprinting, which stops sites from identifying you with your graphics card or drivers.

The findings raise new questions about browser fingerprinting, a stealthy way that uses silent audio processing for covert tracking. 

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Beijing Outraged as U.S. Warns Dominican Republic of Espionage Risk with Chinese Tech

The Chinese embassy in the Dominican Republic on Sunday accused its American counterpart of spreading “defamatory” remarks by sharing statements made by a U.S. official warning of the potential security dangers that come with using Chinese tech.

Over the past year, Trump administration officials have warned America’s Latin American allies of the great risks that come with using technology equipment made by Huawei, ZTE, and other companies linked to the Chinese communist party. The U.S. State Department’s Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Juan Pablo Segura reiterated the dangers of using Chinese tech in a social media post last week. Segura emphasized that Beijing forces tech companies to cooperate with the regime’s intelligence services, creating risks of spying, hacking, and network shutdowns.

“We urge U.S. partners in the Americas to quickly switch to trusted suppliers to protect their people and their sovereignty,” Segura wrote.

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Gov. Abbott: AI Data Centers ‘Dug Their Own Grave’

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott warned the booming artificial intelligence industry that data center developers have only themselves to blame for mounting voter backlash, saying they “dug their own grave” by failing to secure the support of local communities.

Abbott, a Republican who once hailed Texas as the “epicenter of AI development,” has taken an increasingly tough approach toward the industry as Texans raise concerns about soaring electricity demand, water use and infrastructure costs.

“Gaining the support of people in local communities is essential,” Abbott told ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday.

“They basically dug their own grave for the problem that’s been caused for them,” he continued. “And that’s why they got the backlash they deserve.”

Abbott’s warning marks a notable turn from last November, when he joined Google to announce a $40 billion investment in three Texas data center campuses.

But as projects have multiplied, Abbott has moved to make developers shoulder more of the costs.

In June, he directed state regulators to require data centers to pay the full cost of the electrical infrastructure they require and called for phasing out tax incentives for the industry.

Earlier this month, Abbott ordered regulators to audit data centers seeking to connect to the Texas power grid before allowing projects to move forward.

He also told “Fox News Sunday” last week that fewer than 10% of data center companies responded to a state request for information officials need to forecast future electricity demand.

Abbott’s approach has drawn criticism from President Donald Trump, who has argued that Texas should embrace the industry as America races to maintain its technological edge.

“For Texas to say no to data centers is a mistake,” Trump said, adding the industry “could be bigger than oil.”

The growing resistance to artificial intelligence computing centers is not limited to Texas.

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Congress is drowning in AI slop after staffers let unelected ChatGPT play lawmaker…

Leave it to Washington to discover a technology designed to make work easier and use it to create twice as much work.

Welcome to the Swamp.

Apparently, congressional staffers have discovered ChatGPT and Claude, and some are using AI to crank out actual legislative language. You know, the stuff that eventually becomes federal law and governs hundreds of millions of Americans.

Gee, what could possibly go wrong?

A lot, apparently…

Look, if AI is used correctly, it can be a really helpful organizational tool and can help us lowly humans spot things we might overlook. But there’s an art to using it the right way.

AI should work with you, not replace a functioning human brain.

But it seems that little distinction hasn’t reached the hallowed halls of Capitol Hill.

Taxpayers are now paying congressional staffers to type a few prompts into ChatGPT, copy whatever it spits out, and then wander off for an 80-dollar lunch while somebody tries to make heads or tails out of the AI slop that’s supposed to be “federal law.”

And according to Politico, it’s becoming a huge, messy problem.

The House Office of Legislative Counsel is one of Congress’ quality-control departments. The lawyers take policy ideas and turn them into legislative language that is supposed to work inside the convoluted maze of existing federal law.

But now, those lawyers are getting hammered with AI-generated proposals that look finished on the surface, but when you dig deeper, they’re a total AI slop fest.

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