Pioneering Oversight Relaunch!
And the Weekly Roundup
Pioneering Oversight is back! It has been a long hiatus, much longer than I anticipated, but not without good reason. You can scroll straight to the Weekly Roundup if you’d like. Otherwise, I have some exciting news for the future of Pioneering Oversight. If you’re new to the blog, the About page has my background and some popular posts.
My last post, now unfortunately well over six months ago, preceded my summer in Poland and Ukraine, doing business development for the consulting company I co-founded, Forward Horizon Group. FHG has been at the forefront of supporting Ukraine through investment support, emerging dual-use technology testing, and pro bono NGO risk advisement.
In the midst of my work in Ukraine, I was accepted to, and began law school at the University of Washington. My legal education started in 2021, but now I will have the credentials and academic foundation to go with the international legal and regulatory education and experience I’ve accrued over the last few years. As a result, you’ll no doubt see the more legal flavor this newsletter takes on.
So, what will Pioneering Oversight look like? For starters, the Weekly Roundup of important legal and regulatory news will continue, published on Monday mornings, recapping the previous week. The “Inside the Covered Wagon” series will continue as well. If you remember, these featured more in-depth primers and analyses of emerging technology issues, such as autonomous weapons.
And what will change? You will notice a change in content. I will no longer focus solely on AI but all emerging technology, including everything from drones to clean energy to blockchain technology to quantum computing. If it’s cutting edge, I will cover it. There will, of course, be a strong AI lean since AI regulation is where I started, and it still happens to be the flavor of the week.
I’ll also interpret regulation in a broader scope. Administrative rules and laws are the bulwarks of regulation, but so are monetary and fiscal policies, barriers to innovation such as monopolies, or social pressures that consciously or unconsciously dictate where we decide to put up formal or informal regulations.
The one post-a-week tempo will gradually increase to two a week and become consistent sometime in February when I’ll begin to paywall some more in-depth analysis. I’m still working out the details, but paid subscribers will get access to more extended pieces of analysis and research on at least a twice-per-month basis.
So that’s the future of Pioneering Oversight—in-depth analysis at the intersection of emerging technology and our laws and regulations.
Weekly Roundup
New Year, new US
The new year brings in a new Executive administration and Senate leadership team. The right-leaning faction of Silicon Valley (SV), or at least the group adjacent to Elon Musk, will be nominated for several leadership roles. The WSJ has a good infographic showing the relationships between the new appointees, Musk, and his companies.
It isn’t just the government that is shifting its team either. Meta will promote a former aid to George W. Bush to its head of Global Policy, and they are surely not alone in shifting their policy team to align with the new administration. Tech companies face an array of not new challenges but ones with much higher stakes and global policy divergences, such as the starkly different approaches to speech censorship.
Not all players in the incoming administration are on the same page. Immigration reform around the H-1B visa is a sore point between the SV cohort and the new MAGA establishment. The H-1B visa program provides work visas for foreign workers in specialty professions, predominately technology jobs. As the linked WSJ article points out, this program is highly regulated, capped at 85,000 visas per year and dolled out by a lottery system. Attracting foreign talent has always been America’s competitive advantage, however, this program lags in visas issued compared with other developed countries. Wages for the immigrants are well below median wages for domestic workers, making it hard to critically evaluate the program. Companies that hire H1-B workers are more profitable, but is that because of the talent or cutting labor costs.
Feeding sexual exploitation
Sexual exploitation of minors, revenge porn, and nudify apps were not thingsI expected to cover so often when I started this newsletter. Unfortunately, the proliferation of AI tools, recommendation algorithms, and abysmal ID verification methods (both on the policy and technology side) make it a regular beat. Last month the Markup wrote a shocking report that 1 in 6 of our elected representatives in Congress were targeted by AI-generated sexually explicit deepfakes.
The New York Times’s latest in a child influencer investigative series details how a ring of “child model photographers” groom children through their parents by promising influencer fame. The Times reported that photographers are adept at navigating criminal law definitions of what constitutes child exploitation material. Social media companies put the responsibility for the accounts’ content on the parent.
For underage accounts run by a parent, the parent is responsible for the “content, privacy settings and any interactions with others,” said the [Meta] spokesman, Ryan Daniels.
“We use technology to prevent potentially suspicious accounts from interacting with teen accounts and accounts that predominantly feature minors, as well as from finding each other,” Mr. Daniels said, “and we’re continuing to expand this technology.”
The regulatory solutions protecting children from the ills of social media are painfully slow and often have divergent approaches.
There are multiple lawsuits across the U.S. against TikTok, including one filed last week by Utah, for knowingly profiting off sexual child exploitation on its livestream feature.
The UK backed away this week from an Australia-like ban on “under-16s” from having social media accounts.
A federal judge allowed California’s ban on addictive feeds for minors to remain in place.
The effect of this decision is that beginning Wednesday, companies will be prohibited from serving an addictive feed to a California-based user they know to be a minor, except with explicit parental consent. SB 976 defines an addictive feed as an algorithm that selects and recommends content for users based on their behavior, and not their explicit preferences.
ID verification laws exist in 17 U.S. states to access pornography. As the linked article points out, this method is haphazard and ineffective, and it simply “sends users elsewhere across the internet.” What this article fails to point out, along with other opponents of ID verification laws, is other more effective regulatory solutions.
The China hacks
This week, a ninth U.S. telecom provider said they were hacked by the Chinese Salt Typhon group. The Treasury Department responded by sanctioning a company that assisted the group in compromising hundreds of thousands of U.S. devices. This news comes as the U.S. Treasury itself was hacked by the PRC.
Noah Smith, over at NoahOpinion, sums up what feels like an unporportional reaction from the government and the public.
When Edward Snowden revealed the extent of U.S. government surveillance of Americans a decade ago, it caused a massive popular uproar. But except for a few elites in the national security establishment, the nation seems to have collectively shrugged at the fact that an unfriendly foreign government has access to the personal conversations of the American people. It’s kind of mind-boggling that Americans would be more tolerant of the CCP reading their texts than of the NSA doing the same.
What the appropriate response is, however, is more complex. Retaliation-in-kind (hack for a hack) would reveal U.S. capabilities and perhaps vulnerabilities in the PRC systems we don’t want to burn just yet. A kinetic response would be extremely escalatory and alter the norms for responding to cyber incursions. Additionally, it may very well be that the U.S. wants the status quo, willing to sacrifice phone records and other government documents in exchange for the its own ability to spy without meaningful retaliation–this is not an insignificant tradeoff.
Somewhat relatedly, “The Justice Department issued a final rule Dec. 27 that establishes new regulations to prevent Americans’ sensitive data from falling into the hands of foreign adversaries. The rule derives from a February executive order that bars data brokers from selling bulk caches of U.S. persons’ data to multiple foreign countries, including China and Russia.”
Capital conundrum
“The number of active venture capital investors has dropped more than a quarter from a peak in 2021, as risk-averse financial institutions focus their money on the biggest firms in Silicon Valley.”
This trend may seem like a problem for wealthy people in SV, however, the concentration of capital has two detrimental effects on democratic capitalism.
“The trend has concentrated power among a small group of mega-firms and has left smaller VCs in a fight for survival. It has also skewed the dynamics of the US venture market, enabling start-ups such as SpaceX, OpenAI, Databricks and Stripe to stay private for far longer.” Allowing the public to own parts of companies spreads wealth, risk, and responsibility across everyday citizens and large capital holders alike. In terms of new, disruptive technology like space travel and AI, which is fairly insulated from regulatory capture at the moment, publicly traded companies are one way to involve the citizenry in the innovation process.
The “thinning out [of] funding options for smaller companies” means that it will be harder for unconnected or new startup founders to break into the market they desire. A useful analogy might be if the only way you could become a doctor or lawyer was to go to Harvard or Yale.
The concentration of capital has its advantages, as SpaceX can attest to, but for the market to determine the best, most efficient companies, entrepreneurs need access to it. Competition breeds innovation and if this trends continues VC’s may become the new defense primes.
In other news
Turo and the host that rented the vehicle used in last week’s terrorist attacks will inevitably be under fire. It will be interesting to see how responsibility is allocated between the app and the host who rented the vehicle, what legal defenses they raise, and who funds their defense.
Kenya has a massive EV bus need but is struggling to meet demand. The domestic manufacturing sector is not developed enough to mass produce the necessary busses and there is a 25% import tariff on fully built EVs.
The current net neutrality regime appears dead after “The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, in Cincinnati, said the F.C.C. lacked the authority to reinstate rules that prevented broadband providers from slowing or blocking access to internet content.” The court cited Loper Bright, meaning that future net neutrality measures will probably need to come through Congressional legislation.
Surges on the electrical grid, potentially damaging to household appliances, have skyrocketed across the U.S. and are directly correlatable to increased data center usage from AI, Bloomberg reports. Power draws are expected to increase over the next decade, especially as quantum computing (a process that requires extremely cold temperatures) becomes commercially viable.
“Apple [was ordered] to pay $95m to settle claims Siri listened to users’ private conversations.”
Steve Wood over at PrivacyX Substack produced a great analysis of the use of “legitimate interests” as a personal data collection condition across different global regulatory regimes.
