Newsom Tells Nation That Trump Is Destroying American Democracy; The New York Times, June 10, 2025

 Laurel Rosenhall, The New York Times; Newsom Tells Nation That Trump Is Destroying American Democracy

"Gov. Gavin Newsom made the case in a televised address Tuesday evening that President Trump’s decision to send military forces to immigration protests in Los Angeles has put the nation at the precipice of authoritarianism.

The California governor urged Americans to stand up to Mr. Trump, calling it a “perilous moment” for democracy and the country’s long-held legal norms.

“California may be first, but it clearly won’t end here,” Mr. Newsom said, speaking to cameras from a studio in Los Angeles. “Other states are next. Democracy is next.”

“Democracy is under assault right before our eyes — the moment we’ve feared has arrived,” he added."

A senator's warning before his arrest On Sen. Alex Padilla's detention by the Trump regime — and the speech that put him in the crosshairs; The Ink, June 12, 2025

The Ink; A senator's warning before his arrest

On Sen. Alex Padilla's detention by the Trump regime — and the speech that put him in the crosshairs

"This afternoon Donald Trump’s aspiration of a police state came one step closer.

A sitting United States senator, Alex Padilla, Democrat of California, was arrested at a Los Angeles press conference held by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.

As Noem told the press that the federal government was "going to liberate the city from the burdensome leadership, mayor and governor," Padilla interrupted, saying, “I am Sen. Alex Padilla. I have questions for the secretary," and was then shoved repeatedly out of the room by plainclothes agents, where he was then dropped to the ground, then handcuffed and detained. He has since been released.

This comes as the White House has increasingly dismissed the authority of Congress, and just a day after New Jersey Congresswoman LaMonica McIver was indicted on charges of “assaulting, resisting, impeding, and interfering” with federal officers as she tried to defend Newark Mayor Ras Baraka during an inspection of an ICE facility. 

And it comes a day after Padilla — the first Latino senator to represent California — delivered a speech calling out and condemning the lawlessness of the federal response in his home state and city — and making it clear why it matters to every American.

These words were the senator’s final warning before the Trump regime arrested him. Because they probably don’t want them to spread, we are printing them in full here."

Video: U.S. Senator Alex Padilla shoved, handcuffed at DHS Kristi Noem's news conference; Fox KTVU, June 12, 2025

 Fox KTVU; Video: U.S. Senator Alex Padilla shoved, handcuffed at DHS Kristi Noem's news conference

"U.S. Senator Alex Padilla (D-California) was physically shoved out of the room Thursday during a news conference with Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem at the Wilshire Federal Building in Los Angeles, where he was also briefly put into handcuffs by the FBI. 

The confrontation was caught on video by dozens of journalists and later took the internet by storm at the sight of a U.S. senator being taken down to the ground by federal agents after asking a question, even if he interrupted Noem as she was speaking.

Padilla, the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Immigration Subcommittee, was then let go and led to a private room with Noem for 10 minutes, who was in Los Angeles to address the ongoing demonstrations protesting President Donald Trump's immigration policies.

"I will say this, if this is how this administration responds to a senator with a question, you can only imagine what they're doing to workers, to cooks, to day laborers out in the Los Angeles community and throughout California and throughout the country," Padilla said to reporters at a hastily called news conference of his own."

Anthropic wins early round in music publishers' AI copyright case; Reuters, March 26, 2025

 Blake Brittain , Reuters; Anthropic wins early round in music publishers' AI copyright case

"Artificial intelligence company Anthropic convinced a California federal judge on Tuesday to reject a preliminary bid to block it from using lyrics owned by Universal Music Group and other music publishers to train its AI-powered chatbot Claude.

U.S. District Judge Eumi Lee said that the publishers' request was too broad and that they failed to show Anthropic's conduct caused them "irreparable harm."

Delete your DNA from 23andMe right now; The Washington Post, March 24, 2025

 Geoffrey A. Fowler, The Washington Post; Delete your DNA from 23andMe right now

"The company said there will be “no changes” to the way it protects consumer data while in bankruptcy court. But unless you take action, there is a risk your genetic information could end up in someone else’s hands — and used in ways you had never considered. It took me just a minute to delete my data on the 23andMe website, and I’ve got instructions on how to do it below.

It’s a privacy nightmare, but also an example of how state privacy laws pioneered in California can help protect Americans — at least the proactive ones...

The California Consumer Protection Act of 2018 gives you the right to delete data from businesses that collect it. While the law specifically applies to California residents, many other states have passed similar laws.

And California also has a separate law pertaining to DNA data, called the Genetic Information Privacy Act. It gives you the right to delete your account, have your biological sample destroyed, and revoke consent you may have previously given to use or disclose your genetic data."

While the Court Fights Over AI and Copyright Continue, Congress and States Focus On Digital Replicas: 2024 in Review; Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), December 27, 2024

 CORYNNE MCSHERRY, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) ; While the Court Fights Over AI and Copyright Continue, Congress and States Focus On Digital Replicas: 2024 in Review

"These state laws are a done deal, so we’ll just have to see how they play out. At the federal level, however, we still have a chance to steer policymakers in the right direction.  

We get it–everyone should be able to prevent unfair and deceptive commercial exploitation of their personas. But expanded property rights are not the way to do it. If Congress really wants to protect performers and ordinary people from deceptive or exploitative uses of their images and voice, it should take a precise, careful and practical approach that avoids potential collateral damage to free expression, competition, and innovation."

“This is a bad dream:” Kamala Harris voters baffled by Trump’s win come to terms; The Mercury News, November 6, 2024

JULIA PRODIS SULEK , The Mercury News; “This is a bad dream:” Kamala Harris voters baffled by Trump’s win come to terms

"Harris’s supporters tried to make sense of the news that more than half the country voted for a convicted felon who inspired a mob to storm the U.S. Capitol after he refused to admit he lost the 2020 election, someone who was found liable for sexual abuse, and promised to seek revenge on his enemies — not to mention using vile language to describe the vice president and other antics...

The campaigns exposed deep divides between the candidates and polarized the nation.

“No matter who won this election, it’s clear that we’ve become two separate Americas, and neither America understands the other one or has much of an interest in understanding the other one,” said political analyst and USC professor Dan Schnur.

“That leaves California in the exact same place that conservatives in Texas and Florida were in four years ago. You either dig in and get even angrier and fight back even harder, or you try to understand why there’s people on the other side who don’t agree with you.”"

Gavin Newsom vetoes sweeping AI safety bill, siding with Silicon Valley; Politico, September 29, 2024

 LARA KORTE and JEREMY B. WHITE, Politico; Gavin Newsom vetoes sweeping AI safety bill, siding with Silicon Valley

"Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a sweeping California bill meant to impose safety vetting requirements for powerful AI models, siding with much of Silicon Valley and leading congressional Democrats in the most high-profile fight in the Legislature this year."

This is the best privacy setting that almost no one is using; The Washington Post, September 6, 2024

 Shira Ovide, The Washington Post; This is the best privacy setting that almost no one is using

"Privacy laws in some states, notably California, give people the right to tell most businesses not to sell or share information they collect or in some cases to delete data about you. Some companies apply California’s privacy protections to everyone.

To take advantage of those privacy rights, though, you often must fill out complicated forms with dozens of companies. Hardly anyone does. The opt-out rights give you power in principle, but not in practice.

But baked into some state privacy laws is the option to enlist someone else to handle the legwork for you.

That wand-wielding privacy fairy godmother can be Consumer Reports, whose app can help you opt out of companies saving and selling your data. Even better, the godmother could just be a checkbox you click once to order every company to keep your data secret."

A bill to protect performers from unauthorized AI heads to California governor; NPR, August 30, 2024

 Mandalit del Barco, NPR; A bill to protect performers from unauthorized AI heads to California governor

"Other proposed guardrails

In addition to AB2602, the performer’s union is backing California bill AB 1836 to protect deceased performers’ intellectual property from digital replicas.

On a national level, entertainment industry stakeholders, from SAG-AFTRA to The Recording Academy and the MPA, and others are supporting The “NO FAKES Act” (the Nurture Originals, Foster Art, and Keep Entertainment Safe Act) introduced in the Senate. That law would make creating a digital replica of any American illegal.

Around the country, legislators have proposed hundreds of laws to regulate AI more generally. For example, California lawmakers recently passed the Safe and Secure Innovation for Frontier Artificial Intelligence Models Act (SB 1047), which regulates AI models such as ChatGPT.

“It's vital and it's incredibly urgent because legislation, as we know, takes time, but technology matures exponentially. So we're going to be constantly fighting the battle to stay ahead of this,” said voice performer Zeke Alton, a member of SAG-AFTRA’s negotiating committee. “If we don't get to know what's real and what's fake, that is starting to pick away at the foundations of democracy.”

Alton says in the fight for AI protections of digital doubles, Hollywood performers have been the canary in the coal mine. “We are having this open conversation in the public about generative AI and it and using it to replace the worker instead of having the worker use it as a tool for their own efficiency,” he said. “But it's coming for every other industry, every other worker. That's how big this sea change in technology is. So what happens here is going to reverberate.”"

Artificial Intelligence Law - Intellectual Property Protection for your voice?; JDSupra, January 22, 2024

 Steve Vondran, JDSupra ; Artificial Intelligence Law - Intellectual Property Protection for your voice?

"With the advent of AI technology capable of replicating a person's voice and utilizing it for commercial purposes, several key legal issues are likely to emerge under California's right of publicity law. The right of publicity refers to an individual's right to control and profit from their own name, image, likeness, or voice.

Determining the extent of a person's control over their own voice will likely become a contentious legal matter given the rise of AI technology. In 2024, with a mere prompt and a push of a button, a creator can generate highly accurate voice replicas, potentially allowing companies to utilize a person's voice without their explicit permission for example using a AI generated song in a video, or podcast, or using it as a voice-over for a commercial project. This sounds like fun new technology, until you realize that in states like California where a "right of publicity law" exists a persons VOICE can be a protectable asset that one can sue to protect others who wrongfully misuse their voice for commercial advertising purposes.

This blog will discuss a few new legal issues I see arising in our wonderful new digital age being fueled by the massive onset of Generative AI technology (which really just means you input prompts into an AI tool and it will generate art, text, images, music, etc."

Teaching kids to spot fake news: media literacy to be required in California schools; The Guardian, December 5, 2023

Robin Buller, The Guardian ; Teaching kids to spot fake news: media literacy to be required in California schools

"California next year will become one of the few US states to teach students media literacy, a move experts say is imperative at a time when distrust in the media is at an all-time high and new technologies pose unprecedented challenges to identifying false information.

A state bill signed into law this fall mandates public schools to instruct media literacy, a set of skills that includes recognizing falsified data, identifying fake news and generating responsible internet content.

Researchers have long warned that the current digital ecosystem has had dire consequences on young people, and have argued that such instruction could make a difference. The US surgeon general has cited digital and media literacy support as one way to combat the youth mental health crisis spurred by social media. The American Psychological Association already has urged parents and schools to teach media literacy before they expose young people to social media platforms."

How a robotaxi crash got Cruise’s self-driving cars pulled from Californian roads; The Washington Post, October 28, 2023

Trisha Thadani, The Washington Post , The Washington Post; How a robotaxi crash got Cruise’s self-driving cars pulled from Californian roads

"Here in California, the whiplash from approval to ban in just two months highlights the fragmented oversight governing the self-driving car industry — a system that allowed Cruise to operate on San Francisco’s roads for more than three weeks following the October collision, despite dragging a human pinned underneath the vehicle...

Ed Walters, who teaches autonomous vehicle law at Georgetown University, said that driverless technology is critical for a future with fewer road fatalities because robots don’t drive drunk or get distracted. But, he said, this accident shows that Cruise was not “quite ready for testing” in such a dense urban area...

Under the DMV’s autonomous vehicle program, companies are asked to publicly report collisions involving driverless cars only when they are in test mode. That means if an incident like the Oct. 2 crash occurs while the company is technically operating as a commercial service, the company does not have to publicly report it as an “Autonomous Vehicle Collision Report.”"

Cruise Stops All Driverless Taxi Operations in the United States; The New York Times, October 26, 2023

 Yiwen Lu, The New York Times; Cruise Stops All Driverless Taxi Operations in the United States

"Cruise said on Thursday evening that it would pause all driverless operations in the United States, two days after California regulators told the General Motors subsidiary to take its autonomous cars off the state’s roads. 

The decision affects Cruise’s robot taxi services in Austin, Texas, and Phoenix, where a limited number of public riders could hail paid rides. Noncommercial operations in Dallas, Houston and Miami were also paused.

Cruise did not say how long the halt will last. Testing of driverless vehicles with a safety driver behind the wheel will continue, the company said."

New California law bars schoolbook bans based on racial and LGBTQ topics; NPR, September 26, 2023

Jonathan Franklin , NPR; New California law bars schoolbook bans based on racial and LGBTQ topics

"California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill into law Monday prohibiting school boards across the state from banning books, instructional materials or curricula categorized as inclusive or diverse.

Under the new law, which went into effect immediately after its signing, the state can fine schools that would block textbooks and library books that allow students to learn about diverse communities.

The bill — formally known as AB 1078 — also authorizes Tony Thurmond, state superintendent of public instruction, to purchase instructional materials for school districts, regain costs from the purchases and determine whether to fine school boards if they do not abide by the state's updated instructional standards."

San Francisco recruits army of social workers, librarians and investigators to track Covid-19; The Guardian, May 1, 2020

Maanvi Singh , The Guardian; San Francisco recruits army of social workers, librarians and investigators to track Covid-19

"San Francisco has assembled an army of librarians, social workers, attorneys, investigators and medical students to find and warn anyone and everyone who may have been exposed to Covid-19...

Immigrant communities are justifiably worried that each time they share information about their status and location, “it will come back to haunt them,” Hayes-Bautista said. “It makes sense that people are scared.”...

San Francisco has similarly publicized that the contact tracing is “voluntary, confidential, and culturally and linguistically appropriate. Immigration status will have no bearing on these conversations.”"

The Guardian view on academic publishing: disastrous capitalism Editorial; March 4, 2019

The Guardian; The Guardian view on academic publishing: disastrous capitalism  

Editorial

"In California the state university system has been paying $11m (£8.3m) a year for access to Elsevier journals, but it has just announced that it won’t be renewing these subscriptions. In Britain and Europe the move towards open access publishing has been driven by funding bodies. In some ways it has been very successful. More than half of all British scientific research is now published under open access terms: either freely available from the moment of publication, or paywalled for a year or more so that the publishers can make a profit before being placed on general release.

Yet, somehow, the new system has not yet worked out any cheaper for the universities. Publishers have responded to the demand that they make their product free to readers by charging their writers fees to cover the costs of preparing an article. These range from around £500 to $5,000, and apparently the work gets more expensive the more that publishers do it. A report last year from Professor Adam Tickell pointed out that the costs both of subscriptions and of these “article preparation costs” has been steadily rising at a rate above inflation ever since the UK’s open access policy was adopted in 2012. In some ways the scientific publishing model resembles the economy of the social internet: labour is provided free in exchange for the hope of status, while huge profits are made by a few big firms who run the market places. In both cases, we need a rebalancing of power."
 

New definition of privacy needed for the social media age; The San Francisco Chronicle, January 28, 2019

Jordan Cunningham, The San Francisco Chronicle; New definition of privacy needed for the social media age

"To bring about meaningful change, we need to fundamentally overhaul the way we define privacy in the social media age.

We need to stop looking at consumers’ data as a commodity and start seeing it as private information that belongs to individuals. We need to look at the impact of technology on young kids with developing brains. And we need to give consumers an easy way to ensure their privacy in homes filled with connected devices.

That’s why I’ve worked with a group of state lawmakers to create the “Your Data, Your Way” package of legislation."

'Tracking every place you go': Weather Channel app accused of selling user data; Associated Press via The Guardian, January 4, 2019

Associated Press via The Guardian; 'Tracking every place you go': Weather Channel app accused of selling user data

"“Think how Orwellian it feels to live in a world where a private company is tracking potentially every place you go, every minute of every day,” Feuer said. “If you want to sacrifice to that company that information, you sure ought to be doing it with clear advanced notice of what’s at stake.”

A spokesman for IBM, which owns the app, said it had always been clear about the use of location data collected from users and will vigorously defend its “fully appropriate” disclosures."

Why 'Right To Delete' Should Be On Your IT Agenda Now; Forbes, October 22, 2018

Yaki Faitelson, Forbes; Why 'Right To Delete' Should Be On Your IT Agenda Now

"As California goes, at least concerning data laws, so goes the rest of the country. In 2002, California became the first state to require organizations to report breaches to regulators. Now, it’s the law in all 50 states."