Don’t Be Fooled by the AI Apocalypse | Calls for Privacy Reforms After FBI Surveillance ‘Abuses’ | Undermining COVID Vaccination Efforts, and more

Notably, the shift in health information trails rhetoric from primarily Republican politicians who have reversed their positions on COVID-19 vaccines. Fierce opposition to measures like masking and business closures early in the pandemic fueled a mistrust of the CDC and other scientific institutions and often falls along party lines: Last month, a KFF poll found that 84% of Democrats said they were confident in the safety of COVID-19 vaccines, compared with 36% of Republicans. It’s a dramatic drop from 2021, when two-thirds of Republicans were vaccinated.

House Sidesteps Effort to Impeach Homeland Security Chief Over Border Policy  (Michael Macagnone, Roll Call)
The House voted Monday to parry an effort to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, following months of criticism from conservatives over Biden administration border policies.
The 209-201 vote sent the resolution from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., to the Homeland Security Committee. Democrats voted uniformly to back the motion to refer the Mayorkas resolution to the committee, along with eight Republicans.
Last week, Greene offered the privileged resolution in a way that required the House to vote on impeaching Mayorkas within a few days, and Democrats responded with the motion.

Don’t Be Fooled by the AI Apocalypse  (Matteo Wong, Foreign Policy)
Executive action, summits, big-time legislation—governments around the world are beginning to take seriously the threats AI could pose to society. As they do, two visions of the technology are jostling for the attention of world leaders, business magnates, media, and the public. One sounds like science fiction, in which rogue robots extinguish humanity or terrorists use AI to accomplish the same. You aren’t alone if you fear the coming of Skynet: The executives at the helm of the very companies developing this supposedly terrifying technology—at OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and elsewhere—are the ones sounding the alarm that their products could end the world, and efforts to regulate AI in the U.S. and the U.K. are already parroting those prophecies.
But many advocates and academics say that the doomsday narrative distracts from all of the more quotidian ways AI upends lives while allowing corporations to cast themselves as responsible stewards of dangerous technologies. The competing vision of AI’s harms is concrete, drawing from years of research on how workers are exploited and data are stolen to train AI, and how the resulting algorithms exacerbate biased policing, discriminatory hiring practices, emergency-room errors, misinformation, and more, as Amba Kak and Sarah Myers West, the executive director and the managing director of the AI Now Institute, respectively, wrote in an article last week.
Debates over whom AI is harming in the present, how, and what to do about it will directly shape the technology’s future. The four stories below offer a guide to which fears are real and which aren’t, why these two divergent AI narratives have come about, and the path that each might lead us down.

US Congress Report Calls for Privacy Reforms After FBI Surveillance ‘Abuses’  (Dell Cameron, Wired)
A report compiled by the Republican majority members of the US House Intelligence Committee says that agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation should be required under the law to obtain a “probable cause warrant” before scouring the database of a controversial foreign intelligence surveillance program for information related to domestic crimes.
The Section 702 program, authorized under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), has a history of being abused by the FBI, the Intelligence Committee says, necessitating a “complete review” of the program and “the enactment of meaningful reforms.”
The program, which targets the communications of foreigners overseas with the compulsory assistance of US telecom providers, has been the target of significant scrutiny on Capitol Hill, with federal lawmakers frequently airing concerns about its capacity to be turned against the American public, whose texts, emails, and internet calls are collaterally intercepted by the US National Security Agency in unknown quantities each year.