Civil Rights & Constitutional Law
Election voting advice from AI chatbots 'inaccurate and unreliable'
A polling station in Budapest during Hungary's elections in April, on which the research was based. A polling station in Budapest during Hungary's elections in April, on which the research was based. AI chatbots provide inaccurate, inconsistent and unreliable guidance to voters asking which party they should back, a study suggests, often recommending the wrong party, not mentioning the right one, or listing parties not even running. "The results raise serious concerns about the reliability of general-purpose AI systems in electoral contexts," the study, published by the civil liberties group Liberties and based on research during this year's Hungarian parliamentary elections, concluded. "They misclassified profiles, omitted relevant parties and included parties not running in the election," said the report, shared with the Guardian.
The ACLU Is Arming Lawyers to Expose State Surveillance Secrets
A new toolkit for attorneys in Massachusetts targets the technologies police use--and conceal--to build criminal cases, from facial recognition to AI-written police reports. The American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts says it's releasing an online toolkit this week for criminal defense attorneys designed to uncover whether police used surveillance technologies --facial recognition, automatic license plate readers, gunshot detection systems, and more--to build the cases against their clients in secret. The toolkit, which the group describes as the first of its kind, is built around handcrafted legal motions that, when granted by a judge, will force prosecutors to reveal whether surveillance technology was used against a defendant. It covers an array of technologies, from "stingray" phone trackers and location data sold by commercial brokers to AI-drafted police reports and forensic tools that crack phones and siphon data from car infotainment systems. It also includes preservation motions--demands that surveillance data be saved before it is deleted automatically--aimed at government agencies and private vendors alike.
Israeli attacks on Gaza kill 14, including mourners attending funeral
'This is an apartheid regime' Does Trump have real leverage over Netanyahu? Multiple Israeli attacks across the Gaza Strip have killed at least 14 Palestinians, more than half of them in a drone strike on a funeral procession. Nine months into its so-called "ceasefire" with Hamas, Israel continues to violate it on a near-daily basis. At least 20 others were injured, the Al-Awda Hospital added. Witnesses said the drone targeted Palestinian mourners gathered outside the Ahmad Yassin Mosque as they waited to begin a funeral procession for a Palestinian killed in a separate attack earlier in the day in the same area.
Please Stop Making Me Opt Out of AI
I'm sick of "opt-out" toggles for automatically enabled generative AI features. It's past time to make "opt in" the default setting for sensitive features. In early July, Meta rolled out a new feature where anyone using its AI app could tag public Instagram accounts and generate images using their likenesses. Meta's decision to turn the feature on by default, so that Instagram users had to actively opt out, was controversial. Multiple Instagram creators posted viral videos explaining how to opt out and expressed frustration.
Hospital workers wounded in Israeli drone attack on Gaza's Kamal Adwan
'This is an apartheid regime' Does Trump have real leverage over Netanyahu? Hospital workers wounded in Israeli drone attack on Gaza's Kamal Adwan An Israeli drone attack on a hospital in northern Gaza injured staff members, despite a " ceasefire " being in place, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health. At least three people were hurt in the courtyard and three others nearby, medical sources said. The attack happened despite the facility being in the so-called Green Zone, an area under Israeli control. The ministry condemned the attack, describing it as part of Israel's "systematic targeting of health facilities".
Alarm over launch of facial recognition in UK shops that instantly alerts police
Customers inside a B&M store, which is one of more than 100 businesses that will be using the technology. Customers inside a B&M store, which is one of more than 100 businesses that will be using the technology. Civil liberties groups say Facewatch system in stores such as Sainsbury's and B&M is'dangerous escalation' Fri 10 Jul 2026 06.19 EDTLast modified on Fri 10 Jul 2026 06.57 Facial recognition technology in shops will soon alert police in real time to the presence of serious offenders, with civil liberties groups warning of a "dangerous escalation" towards surveillance and criminalisation in the retail sector. Facewatch, a facial recognition system used by more than 100 businesses including Sainsbury's, B&M and Spar to monitor thieves, said it was launching a UK-first feature to "alert police instantly when the most serious offenders trigger a live facial recognition match".
Conformal Bayes for Two-Sided Censored Gaussian Regression under Label Shift
Prediction under label shift becomes nonstandard when responses are censored. In a two-sided censored Gaussian model, latent values below $L$ and above $U$ are recorded at the boundary values, so the observed predictive distribution is mixed, with atoms at $L$ and $U$ and a continuous density on $(L,U)$. In this paper we develop conformal Bayes for this mixed-space setting by combining posterior predictive tilting with weighted conformal calibration. Under a two-sided Tobit Gaussian Bayesian prediction head with a Laplace posterior approximation, the tilted predictive distribution has left-atom, interior, and right-atom components, with a three-term closed-form normalizer. The resulting prediction set is a mixed highest density region that can combine boundary atoms with an interior interval and can reduce to atom-only sets under strong censoring. The main technical issue is that latent label shift does not directly give an ordinary density ratio on the observed censored scale. A latent exponential tilt induces tail-averaged atom weights at the censored boundaries, while the interior ratio remains density based. This yields a mixed observed-space calibration weight with two atom ratios and one interior density ratio. The weight corrects the calibration measure, while predictive tilting gives target-adapted mixed-HDR geometry. Synthetic experiments show that weighted tilted conformal Bayes restores marginal coverage with smaller sets than weighted source-score calibration, while revealing a trade-off between marginal coverage and component-wise behavior across atoms and interior observations.
Inside the Luddite Festival Harnessing Gen Z's Rage Against Big Tech
New York City's Summer of Ludd festival is teaching people how to live offline amid the suffocating presence of Big Tech. A papier-mâché woman is the backdrop to a play about the Luddite movement. On a Sunday evening in the middle of Tompkins Square Park in New York City's East Village, hundreds of people gather in front of a giant papier-mâché face of a woman wearing a crown. She's the backdrop of a play, her body made up of curtains that look like a dress but serve a dual purpose, allowing actors to scurry on and offstage. I'm here to watch a performance called " Luddite Recreations," which is a history of the Luddite movement--a group of artisans and textile workers who resisted the adoption of machines during the early years of the Industrial Revolution in England and whose resistance to being displaced from their work was met with violence by the British monarchy.