Wrote to Tammy Baldwin about how Republicans want to censor LGBT content with the KOSA bill that she is sponsoring! I included the following Techdirt article in my email! Not one word, about it, in her reply to me (which is just a form letter)! In fact, I didn’t bring up anything that she mentioned! As she is a LGBT person, I thought that she’d be concerned but I guess not?!
Meanwhile, Republicans are now freely admitting that they’re going to use KOSA to force websites to censor LGBTQ content. They’re literally proud of it. The Heritage Foundation, which at least used to have some principled stances before being taken over by culture warriors without any principles, is bragging about how it will use KOSA in this manner:
We’ve talked a lot about KOSA, the “Kids Online Safety Act” that has massive bipartisan support in Congress. The latest version was introduced with 26 Senators as sponsors or co-sponsors. We’ve explained over and over again how the bill is unconstitutional and will actually do a lot to harm kids.
Congress has resurrected the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), a bill that would increase surveillance and restrict access to information in the name of protecting children online. KOSA was introduced in 2022 but failed to gain traction, and today its authors, Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), have reintroduced it with slight modifications. Though some of these changes were made in response to over 100 civil society organizations and LGBTQ+ rights groups’ criticisms of the bill, its latest version is still troubling. Today’s version of KOSA would still require surveillance of anyone sixteen and under. It would put the tools of censorship in the hands of state attorneys general, and would greatly endanger the rights, and safety, of young people online. And KOSA’s burdens will affect adults, too, who will likely face hurdles to accessing legal content online as a result of the bill.
So: In addition to opening the door to civil and/or criminal liability for E2EE services without ever mentioning the word “encryption” (as explained above), STOP CSAM is trying to lay the groundwork for justifying a later bill to more overtly ban providers from offering E2EE at all.
To save the children, we must destroy everything. That’s the reality of the EARN IT Act. I mean, you can get some sort of sense of what you’re in store for just by reading the actual words behind the extremely labored acronym: Eliminating Abuse and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies Act. Whew. It’s a mouthful. And, given the name, it seems like this would be Congress putting funding towards supporting moderation efforts that target abusive content.
Twitter published rules for the platform on Monday under new CEO Elon Musk that added to confusion over what content will be allowed on a Twitter that is under his control.
If only Clearview had managed to remain under the radar. If it had, it could have been the stealth privacy assassin multiple entities (both public and private) desire, but are unwilling to admit to using publicly. Even the rest of the facial recognition tech field wants nothing to do with Clearview and the billions of images/data points it has scraped from the public web. Clearview remains alone in its extreme odiousness — a villain rising head and shoulders above its already questionable competition.
One of its biggest known federal contracts is with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, particularly its investigative arm which has used it to track down both the victims and perpetrators of child sexual exploitation. Clearview in March also started offering its services for free to the Ukrainian military, in part to help identify dead Russian soldiers using Clearview’s repository of about 2 billion images scraped from Russian social media website VKontakte.
Ms. Cat’s Chronicles 
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