A Generation Unplugged
The Oversight Roundup: Behind the school phone bans, public data used for assassinations, and foreign influence in the AI age.
Data aids and abetts
The political assasinations in Minnesota earlier this summer were only the latest of assassins using publicly available, collected, and collated information to find their victims. (Lawfare).
Data brokers are an old trade in the United States. Most people are familiar with credit reporting agencies. These agencies use a system to evaluate a borrowers risk for repaying loans, a system that used to rely on personal reputation, but now relies on vast amounts of data, such as social media postings, online trackers, purchase history obtained through online trackers, location data sold by phone apps.
For more information on how data brokers work and operate you can read this Proton blog post.
For an unsettling read on Equifax’s history and snooping policies you can start on page 91 the Equifax lawsuit complaint. Here is an excerpt:
One of the more infamous data brokers, Equifax, began business in 1899. By the middle of the 20th century the company “collected the most intimate details of an individual’s life, including information about their race and sexual habits, their church attendance, their home environment, and whether or not they were experiencing marital discord.” This information was often collected from old-fashion snooping, interviewing neighbors, or digging thourgh someone’s trash.
For a nation that carries world-class spying devices in its pocket 24/7, the reality is that there is no such thing as privacy anymore. That doesn’t mean citizens can’t claw back their lives. California has some of the best privacy laws in the nation, yet companies consistently ignore or make it impossible for people to delete their.
The Markup “Caught companies making it harder to delete your personal data online” by using secret code to hide delete requests from Google Search. A U.S. Senator is now pressing these companies for answers.
Russia, bypassing private sector surveillance, is ordering its state-run messaging app MAX to be installed on all cellphones, denying it will use the application for spying or suppressing dissent. (Reuters)
For a lighter data-breach story, read about the Panama playlists, a “hack” that exposed non-private playlists of around 50 prominent celebrities, politicians, and journalists. Even though all the information was already public (much like the data brokers collect), the author’s of this story point out it is still a little creepy having the information “exposed.”
Well into the social media age, we have grown accustomed to curating ourselves online. Picking top-four movies on Letterboxd is an intentional way to showcase our taste. We decide which vacation photos are most flattering or funny to post to our permanent grid on Instagram. Those books on a shelf in the Zoom background are chosen with care.
But these Spotify playlists were different, created for enjoyment, not for display. It was like seeing someone’s Netflix watch history — a slight invasion and a chance to judge what someone actually consumes rather than what the person claims to like. (NYTimes, Gift Article)
Back to school
17 states and the District of Columbia [are] starting this school year with new restrictions [on student’s phone use], bringing the total to 35 states with laws or rules limiting phones and other electronic devices in school. This change has come remarkably quickly: Florida became the first state to pass such a law in 2023. (AP News).
South Korea, France, Finland, Italy, the Netherlands, and China all have some sort of cellphone ban as well. (NYTimes)
Cellphone bans have mixed reviews; students seem 50/50, teachers love them, and parents generally don’t. While there aren’t definitive studies that can show benefits of banning the phones yet, anecdotal results are pretty straightforward: there is one less disruption in the classroom.
Who is the main stakeholder left out of the cellphone ban story? Social media companies—which are arguably the rootcause for the distractions. Meta has been busy, however. The Tech Transparency Project’s latest investigation found tactics that follow closely to Big Tobaccos tactics a generation ago:
Meta uses an array of influence tactics to try to shape the public narrative around kids and social media. [It] funds a collection of parent and child safety groups, including the National PTA, that go to bat for its initiatives involving kids.
Meta has also created something called the Trust, Transparency & Control Labs that publishes reports in support of its kid-focused products. Meta has at times framed these “labs” as a separate organization to regulators and others. [It also] has funded an array of academic research projects that foster a more benign view of Instagram, helping to support the company’s contention that academic research is inconclusive on the topic of social media’s impact.
Generative AI and cheating are another major concern for schools. How can you test when your students (even the good ones) are going to cheat? The answer is very simple: oral exams and blue books. No one likes either, but they are both tried, trusted, and proven ways to test a student’s ability to retain and analyze material. This guest essay discusses some of the history surrounding oral exams and advocates for their return, as well as the use of handwritten in-class essays. (NYTimes. Gift Article).
Foreign influence
The citizen is the bedrock of a republic, and their vote is sacrosanct. Interference, especially foreign interference, is a horrific perversion of democracy. Two stories this week:
How China Influences Elections in America’s Biggest City. The Chinese Consulate in Manhattan has mobilized community groups to defeat candidates who don’t fall in line with the authoritarian state. (NYTimes)
In New York City, social clubs backed by China undermined a congressional candidate who once challenged the regime on Chinese television.
They helped unseat a state senator for attending a banquet with the president of Taiwan.
And they condemned a City Council candidate on social media for supporting Hong Kong democracy.
In the past few years, these organizations have quietly foiled the careers of politicians who opposed China’s authoritarian government while backing others who supported policies of the country’s ruling Communist Party. The groups, many of them tax-exempt nonprofits, have allowed America’s most formidable adversary to influence elections in the country’s largest city, The New York Times found.
Algorithmic Foreign Influence: Rethinking Sovereignty in the Age of AI. Code now governs what users see, say, and know—across borders, without consent. It’s time to rethink what foreign influence really means. (Lawfare)
Recommender systems, large language models, and machine translation tools now shape civic discourse around the world. They promote certain narratives, erase others, and define what information is available to users—often in ways that reinforce inequality or favor dominant voices. Crucially, they do this without any intention to interfere. They act through infrastructure, not ideology.
This raises a difficult question: If artificial intelligence (AI) can reshape a nation’s public sphere without direction from a foreign power, is it foreign interference?
At first glance, the answer seems obvious: Interference requires intent. Under international law, the principle of non‑intervention is grounded in the assumption that harmful acts are purposeful and attributable to a state. Algorithms are neither. They lack agency, identity, and motive.
But if the outcomes—distorted political discourse, marginalized languages, eroded cultural autonomy—are functionally equivalent to classic interference, shouldn’t the law take effect to address it as such?
Breakneck
Dan Wang’s book, Breakneck, compares the state of engineering in the United States and China and has garnered rave reviews. It is on my reading list for as soon as I return to the states,, and I intend to write a book review of my own as soon as I finish reading it. In the meantime, here are two interviews with the author and two links where you can buy the book yourself. (Amazon. Bookshop.org)1
Rest of World. Why China has a tech manufacturing advantage over the U.S.
On industrial policy:
I’m really skeptical that Trump’s tariffs are going to boost manufacturing. The U.S. has lost some 40,000 manufacturing jobs since “Liberation Day” in April.
I think that Biden’s industrial policy instincts were more correct, but the execution was poor. It didn’t really seem like they needed to move at breakneck speed in anything aside from semiconductors. In everything else, they were much more obsessed with procedures rather than delivering results.
China Talk. Dan Wang.
On pluralism:
Jordan Schneider: … Someone you met in Chiang Mai who left China told you that contemporary China “feels like a space in which the ceiling keeps getting lower… To stay means that we have to walk around with our heads lowered and our backs hunched.” You also write that, “After six years in China, I missed pluralism. It’s wonderful for me to be in America now, in a society made up of many voices, not only an official register meant to speak over all the rest.”
On political freedoms & good governance:
Dan Wang: We can accept all of these [problems of city living in America as opposed to the efficiency in China]. But what we also have in New York — and this is part of the reason that I’m drawn back to the US again — are bookstores. At these bookstores, one can find books very critical of the US government, very critical of both the Republicans as well as the Democrats, who have both made incredible errors. For the most part, though there have been some restrictions on protests under Trump’s regime in America right now, there still is broad latitude for people to protest all of his illegal or inhumane actions, and that is still very real. Protest culture online is also very real.
What I’m saying is that I hope we don’t have to choose. The United States should be able to have, at its present levels of tolerance of dissent, as well as very functional cities that have good subways, good bus systems, nice airports, and where people are able to get around and have a rate of improvement that doesn’t come at truly absurd financial costs.
Intel-ligent stakeholders
What do President Trump and the country’s leading socialist Senator Bernie Sanders have in common? No, it is not that their net-worth is well above 7-figures or that they own multiple houses, it is that they both support the government taking shares in private corporations.
I’m ambivalent about the government’s move to take a stake in Intel, especially without Congressional Approval, but there are some potential upsides to it as well. This Lawfare article provides a good history of U.S. Government takeovers and the legality of the Intel Stake. The author also has a good LinkedIn post on the subject:
[…]
4. According to Intel's SEC filings on the government investment, in exchange for 9.9% of Intel, the government (a) agreed to disburse most of the remaining CHIPS money (about $6 billion from Commerce, and part of Intel's DoD grant), AND ALSO agreed to deem Intel as having complied with its grant obligations, e.g., to have completed most of the fabs. This despite the fact that several of the fabs are not, in fact compete. In exchange, Intel gave the government a 9.9% stake. (Intel is still on the hook for some of its DoD-specific obligations)
5. Basically, instead of CHIPS Act money being tied to Intel actually building all the fabs, the money is now tied to the government buying into Intel. That is a different thing. The specific deal is also different from the concept of the government getting shares as part of a grant to build fabs. In the SEC filing, there is less emphasis on fab building and more emphasis on government ownership.
In other news
Here is a tracker on the civil service firings (most of which are from the DoD purge).
And here is a story about a pediatric brain cancer treatment facility that is losing funding.
For an audio recording to be admitted as evidence in court, all that is needed is for someone “familiar with the voice” to vouch for its authenticity—a significant problem given how good AI deepfakes are. This Lawfare article lays out the problem and proposes some policy solutions.
Where does your e-waste go? Most of it goes to India. If you “recycle” old electronics, you should take a look at this story and see where they end up and who sorts through them.
Two new reports are out, one on Ukraine and the Law of War, and the other from SIPRI on bias in military AI.
Before you go
An excellent Guest Essay in the New York Times from Eric Schmidt and Selina Xu is titled “Silicon Valley Is Drifting Out of Touch With the Rest of America.” They discuss how Silicon Valley’s obsession with AGI, as opposed to integrating AI with the current economy—something China is currently excelling at—is damaging and not what Americans want.
The essay is also fitting with a Financial Times story titled “San Francisco without the rich: a photo-essay,” which captures what San Francisco was like when it was a high-functioning, romantic northern California city (FT Free Story).
I receive commissions on both these links. Bookshop.org buys from and supports independent bookstores. I realized I recommend a lot of books on Pioneering Oversight, and this fall I’ll create a separate page to collate all of them. I’ll always be transparent when I use an affiliate link, and I promise they won’t be obnoxious.