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State and Local Election Workers Quitting Amid Abuse, Officials Tell U.S. Senate Panel
State and local election officials face threats and intimidation, driving experienced workers out of the profession. State and local election workers quitting amid abuse. Conspiracy theories have fueled a more hostile environment for election workers, which has led many to quit, creating more challenges for the inexperienced new leaders.
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The Supreme Court Will Decide if Domestic Abuse Orders Can Bar People from Having Guns. Lives Could Be at Stake.
The court’s ruling on United States v. Rahimi could clarify an earlier decision on guns. Or it could take away one of the best options to protect domestic violence victims. In states like Tennessee, the consequences could be deadly.
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Governing Artificial Intelligence: A Conversation with Rumman Chowdhury
Artificial intelligence, and its risks and benefits, has rapidly entered the popular consciousness in the past year. Kat Duffy and Dr. Rumman Chowdhury discuss how society can mitigate problems and ensure AI is an asset.
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EPA Cancels Certain Cyber Regulations for Water Utilities
Following growing concerns about the cybersecurity of the U.S. water infrastructure, the EPA announced this week it will no longer require cybersecurity audits of water utility facilities through sanitary surveys.
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Adtech Surveillance and Government Surveillance are Often the Same Surveillance
In the absence of comprehensive federal privacy legislation in the United States, the targeted advertising industry, fueled by personal information harvested from our cell phone applications, has run roughshod over our privacy.
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Navigating the Risks and Benefits of AI: Lessons from Nanotechnology on Ensuring Emerging Technologies Are Safe as Well as Successful
Twenty years ago, nanotechnology was the artificial intelligence of its time. The specific details of these technologies are, of course, a world apart. But the challenges of ensuring each technology’s responsible and beneficial development are surprisingly alike.
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Political Rhetoric Changes Views on Democratic Principles: Study
Most people will agree that over the past several years, American political leaders have been saying — and sharing on social media — unusual things that politicians would never have said a decade or two ago. At times, their words can seem out of character for what a leader should typically say and can even appear antidemocratic in nature. A new study shows that some of that antidemocratic, norm-violating rhetoric reduces support for certain basic principles of American democracy.
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How Poland’s Election Results Could Reshape Europe
After nearly a decade in power, Poland’s dominant Law and Justice Party fell short of a new mandate in last Sunday’s election. The outcome underscores that there is nothing inevitable about illiberal populist parties coming to power, even if this threat is not quite gone. And as the case of Viktor Orban’s Hungary shows, once illiberal populists have been in power long enough, it becomes harder to stop the slide towards “competitive” authoritarianism, where the outcome of elections is all but guaranteed.
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Even War Has Rules, So Why No Rules for Espionage?
There are even rules for war, which is why it makes little sense that there are none for espionage during times of peace. Espionage is “the second oldest profession,” says one expert, but it is often overlooked at law schools.
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Attitudes Toward Political Violence
Research reveals a complex mix of attitudes, concerns, and beliefs about the state of democracy and the potential for violence. A small segment of the U.S. population considers violence, including lethal violence, to be usually or always justified to advance political objectives.
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Sam Bankman-Fried Trial Shines Light on the Rise and Fall of Cryptocurrency and Concerns About Its Use in White-Collar Crime
While Sam Bankman-Fried’s crime – he is accused of orchestrating a conspiracy to use $10 billion that FTX’s customers had entrusted to him for venture capital investments, political donations and luxury real estate purchases — may seem complicated because bitcoin is involved, a criminology expert says it really comes down to traditional embezzlement.
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How Foreign Investment in U.S. Land Affects Food Security
The United States has approximately 1.3 billion acres of privately held agricultural land, including forestland. Out of these 1.3 billion acres, around 40 million acres were under full or partial foreign ownership as of 2021. Current foreign agricultural holdings represent 3.1% of the country’s privately owned agricultural land.
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Cities Should Act NOW to Ban Predictive Policing...and Stop Using ShotSpotter, Too
Sound Thinking, the company behind ShotSpotter, is reportedly buying Geolitica, the company behind PredPol, a predictive policing technology. When companies like Sound Thinking and Geolitica merge and bundle their products, it becomes much easier for cities who purchase one harmful technology to end up deploying a suite of them without meaningful oversight, transparency, or control by elected officials or the public.
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Think Twice Before Saying “Cult”
Some critics of Donald Trump liken the dynamic between the former president and his followers to a political cult, a claim rekindled by CBS/YouGov polling released last month. Survey shows intense support for ex-president despite indictments, but common claim against MAGA movement falls short of scientific rigor.
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Sovereignty in Space
The EU wants to establish its own satellite network by 2027, with the aim of increasing the resilience of the European communications infrastructure and gaining technological sovereignty in space. Achieving this will require novel solutions.
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The long view
Luigi Mangione and the Making of a ‘Terrorist’
Discretion is crucial to the American tradition of criminal law, Jacob Ware and Ania Zolyniak write, noting that “lawmakers enact broader statutes to empower prosecutors to pursue justice while entrusting that they will stay within the confines of their authority and screen out the inevitable “absurd” cases that may arise.” Discretion is also vital to maintaining the legitimacy of the legal system. In the prosecution’s case against Luigi Mangione, they charge, “That discretion was abused.”
Are We Ready for a ‘DeepSeek for Bioweapons’?
Anthropic’s Claude 4 is a warning sign: AI that can help build bioweapons is coming, and could be widely available soon. Steven Adler writes that we need to be prepared for the consequences: “like a freely downloadable ‘DeepSeek for bioweapons,’ available across the internet, loadable to the computer of any amateur scientist who wishes to cause mass harm. With Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4 having finally triggered this level of safety risk, the clock is now ticking.”