Issues and developments related to ethics, information, and technologies, examined in the ethics and intellectual property graduate courses I teach at the University of Pittsburgh School of Computing and Information. My Bloomsbury book "Ethics, Information, and Technology" will be published in January 2026. Kip Currier, PhD, JD
"A total of 467 separate conflicts that require recusal, meaning at least temporarily the official cannot handle certain matters, have been identified in 15 of these ethics letters filed so far by senior Trump administration officials or those pending confirmation,according to a tallyby Campaign Legal Center.
The largest number of these recusal requirements will be imposed on Howard Lutnick, a Wall Street financier and the nominee forCommerce Departmentsecretary, who at least initiallymust refrainfrom being involved in certain matters involving 106 different corporate entities.
To outside ethics lawyers, this is a minefield of potential problems, and reason to be apprehensive, given that during Mr. Trump’s first term, several of his cabinet members failed to honor ethics promises they made to avoid actions that benefited their families or financial interests...
Richard Painter, who served as a White House ethics lawyer during President George W. Bush’s tenure and has written a book on federal ethics policies, said that he expects that the second term of Mr. Trump will feature even less compliance with ethics rules.
“The tone of this administration is going to be a lot more confrontational to the norms of government than even the first Trump administration,” he said, pointing to the recent firing of the inspectors general and the lack of an ethics memo, like every president since Mr. Obama has issued. “It is discouraging. Very discouraging.”"
"People who are incarcerated can’t check social media, read any book they want, look up the latest basketball game score, surf the web to look for new shoes, or use online search engines to research a legal question. Traditional library reference services assume patrons have basic freedoms—the ability to check out books or to access the internet. This isn’t the case for prison reference, where answering even simple questions can become surprisingly complex, especially when responses must also meet prison surveillance requirements for length and content.
Willie Kearse has seen how even these constrained reference services for prison inmates are in high demand. Formerly incarcerated for 24 years over a wrongful conviction, Kearse is now the Community Engagement Specialist for Parole Prep, an organization that advocates for the release of people serving life sentences in New York State. "Libraries inside are often limited by strict rules, censorship, and resources going missing,” he said. “If you put in a book request, it’s not even there. You have to go to an outside organization, like [the Prison Library Support Network] PLSN, to get help.”
Established in 2015, PLSN works to meet the information needs of people who are incarcerated through a nationwide letter-writing project. Since the reference by mail program started in 2021, the New York City–based collective of librarians, graduate students, and activists has responded to nearly all of the 3,000 queries it has received from people in prisons across the United States, with the majority of letters coming from Texas, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, and Florida."
"As a cabal of Elon Musk flunkies works around the clock to infiltrate and sabotage various federal agencies on behalf of President Donald Trump, the world’s richest man — just named a special government employee — is warning along with Washington allies that the consequences for publicly naming these staffers may be severe.
On Sunday, with Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) seizing control of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the billionaire vowing to eliminate it altogether, Wiredreported the identities of six software engineers with jobs in his wrecking crew. They span in age from 19 to their mid-twenties and have minimal government experience (if any), though most have connections to either Musk or his onetime PayPal colleague Peter Thiel, another right-wing Silicon Valley billionaire whose data analytics firm Palantir holds valuable U.S. defense contracts. They are Akash Bobba, Edward Coristine, Luke Farritor, Gautier Cole Killian, Gavin Kliger, and Ethan Shaotran.
These young men have been involved in Musk’s sweeping efforts to gain access to the communication systems, personnel files, and other sensitive information at agencies including USAID, the Treasury Department, the Office of Personnel Management, the General Services Administration, and the Small Business Administration, in certain cases freezing employees out of their work accounts and putting others on leave...
Musk, who professes to champion free speech but has typically clamped down on content shared via his social media platform X if he doesn’t want it publicly disseminated, has already moved to silence those who share the names of DOGE team members carrying out his orders to wrest control of the levers of federal spending."
"Elon Musk has taken control of government employees’ private data by having his cronies illegally install a commercial server at the Office of Personnel Management.
Musk and his handpicked associates at the fake “Department of Government Efficiency” are using theirill-gotten access to control federal databases containing Social Security numbers, home addresses, medical histories, and other sensitive personal information, according to journalists Caleb Ecarma and Judd Legum at Musk Watch."
"The engineers are Akash Bobba, Edward Coristine, Luke Farritor, Gautier Cole Killian, Gavin Kliger, and Ethan Shaotran. None have responded to requests for comment from WIRED. Representatives from OPM, GSA, and DOGE did not respond to requests for comment.
The six men are one part of the broader project of Musk allies assuming key government positions. Already, Musk’s lackeys—including more senior staff from xAI, Tesla, and the Boring Company—have taken control of theOffice of Personnel Management(OPM) andGeneral Services Administration(GSA), and havegained accessto the Treasury Department’s payment system, potentially allowing him access to a vast range of sensitive information about tens of millions of citizens, businesses, and more. On Sunday, CNNreportedthat DOGE personnel attempted to improperly access classified information and security systems at theUS Agency for International Developmentand that top USAID security officials who thwarted the attempt were subsequently put on leave. The Associated Pressreported that DOGE personnel had indeed accessed classified material."
"DeepSeek, sponsored by a Chinese hedge fund, is a notable achievement. Technically, though, it is no advance on large language models (LLMs) that already exist. It is neither faster nor “cleverer” than OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude and just as prone to “hallucinations” – the tendency, exhibited by all LLMs, to give false answers or to make up “facts” to fill gaps in its data. According to NewsGuard, a rating system for news and information websites, DeepSeek’s chatbotmade false claims30% of the time and gave no answers to 53% of questions, compared with 40% and 22% respectively for the 10 leading chatbots inNewsGuard’s most recent audit.
The figures expose the profound unreliability of all LLMs. DeepSeek’s particularly high non-response rate is likely to be the product of itscensoriousness; it refuses to provide answers on any issue that China finds sensitive or about which it wants facts restricted, whether Tiananmen Square or Taiwan...
Nevertheless, for all the pushback, each time one fantasy prediction fails to materialise, another takes its place. Such claims derive less from technological possibilities than from political and economic needs. While AI technology has provided hugely important tools, capable of surpassing humans in specific fields, from the solving of mathematical problems to the recognition of disease patterns, the business model depends on hype. It is the hype that drives the billion-dollar investment and buys political influence, including a seat at the presidential inauguration."
"Last month, Rep. Josh Brecheen (R-Oklahoma) introduced aresolutioncalling for the House to recognize Budde’s sermon as a “display of political activism and condemning its distorted message.”
Budde, according to the resolution, promoted “political bias instead of advocating the full counsel of biblical teaching.”
On Sunday, after the service, she pondered the lawmaker’s action.
“It isn’t political activism for a pastor to ask for mercy,” she said. “It is an expression of Christian faith and the teachings of Jesus.”"
"What is a country? The way its people govern themselves. America exists because its people elect those who make and execute laws. The assumption of a democracy is that individuals have dignity and rights that they realize and protect by acting together.
The people who now dominate the executive branch of the government deny all of this, and are acting, quite deliberately, to destroy the nation. For them, only a few people, the very wealthy with a certain worldview, have rights, and the first among these is to dominate.
For them, there is no such thing as an America, or Americans, or democracy, or citizens, and they act accordingly. Now that the oligarchs and their clients are inside the federal government, they are moving, illegally and unconstitutionally, to take over its institutions.
The parts of the government that work to implement laws have been maligned for decades. Americans have been told that the people who provide them with services are conspirators within a “deep state.” We have been instructed that the billionaires are the heroes.
All of this work was preparatory to the coup that is going on now. The federal government has immense capacity and control over trillions of dollars. That power was a cocreation of the American people. It belongs to them. The oligarchs around Trump are working now to take it for themselves.
Theirs is a logic of destruction. It is very hard to create a large, legitimate, functioning government. The oligarchs have no plan to govern. They will take what they can, and disable the rest. The destruction is the point. They don’t want to control the existing order. They want disorder in which their relative power will grow...
The best people in American federal law enforcement, national security, and national intelligence are being fired. The reasons given for this are DEI and trumpwashing the past. Of course, if you fire everyone who was concerned in some way with the investigations of January 6th or of Russia, that will be much or even most of the FBI. Those are bad reasons, but the reality is worse: the aim is lawlessness: to get the police and the patriots out of the way.
In the logic of destruction, there is no need to rebuild afterwards. In this chaos, the oligarchs will tell us that there is no choice but to have a strong man in charge. It can be a befuddled Trump signing ever larger pieces of paper for the cameras, or a conniving Vance who, unlike Trump, has always known the plot. Or someone else...
Almost everything that has happened during this attempted takeover is illegal. Lawsuits can be filed and courts can order that executive orders be halted. This is crucialwork.
Much of what is happening, though, involves private individuals whose names are not even known, and who have no legal authority, wandering through government offices and issuing orders beyond even the questionable authority of executive orders. Their idea is that they will be immunized by their boldness. This must be proven wrong.
Some of this will reach the Supreme Court quickly. I am under no illusion that the majority of justices care about the rule of law. They know, however, that our belief in it makes their office something other than the undignified handmaiden of oligarchy. If they legalize the coup, they are irrelevant forever.
Individual Democrats in the Senate and House have legal and institutional tools to slow down the attempted oligarchical takeover. There should also be legislation. It might take a moment, but even Republican leaders might recognize that the Senate and House will no longer matter in a post-American oligarchy without citizens."
[Kip Currier: Information professionals and centers can be leaders in preserving histories -- like that of influential astronomer Vera Rubin. Right now, too, libraries, archives, and museums can continue to collect books by and about these kinds of trailblazers. They can digitize and make available illuminating records and artifacts, like diaries and photos. They can create interactive exhibits and virtual reality experiences to raise our awareness of their struggles and triumphs.
Once this phase of selective erasure and targeted minimization of historically marginalized persons and groups has inevitably passed, so too can information professionals, historians, reporters, authors, and myriad others work to restore these pioneering people to the historical record.
A larger question is why the current administration is laboring so hard to erase and undervalue the histories and achievements of individuals who have inarguably faced discrimination -- and in countless inspiring instances have surmounted formidable barriers -- as members of disenfranchised communities?
Why do they fear these histories and uplifting achievements?
They work to erase these histories so that others won't be empowered by these stories and lessons. Not knowing these stories enables the erasers to control the narratives and, more importantly, influence how people think. They don't want people to be aware of what boundary breakers have done to break through barriers to equal opportunities. Why?
They benefit from unequal power structures. They fear equality and change. They want to define "truth". So, they stoke fear, apathy, division, and distrust to fortify the inequitable power structures that advantage them and disadvantage everyone else.
The world has seen revisionist campaigns like this many times before, though, and I'm confident that truth and reason will eventually prevail again. But it's going to take hard work and strategy and creativity and resilience and teamwork to achieve.
Media outlets, like ProPublica and others committed to truth telling and accuracy of information, serve inestimable roles in uncovering deception, revealing truths, and reporting the facts. As the renowned lawyer John Adams (and future 2nd President of the United States from 1797-1801) pointed out to a Massachusetts court in 1770, "Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence."
Those of us in the information professions who care about truth and the historical record -- and the stories of everyone, not just the privileged few -- are going to have to do our parts to stand up to the self-appointed revisionists, censors, and erasers. Many information professionals are already stepping up in ways that make a positive difference every day. Like challenging those who want to remove books from our libraries.
Filmmakers, graphic novelists, photographers, screenwriters, faith leaders, investigative reporters, musicologists, grant funders, poets, independent bookstores, lawyers, actors, civil watchdog groups, data analysts, publishers, ethnographers, artisans, and countless others are also working to push back against erasure and disenfranchisement of diverse peoples.
I will share stories about ongoing efforts to counter the silencing of diverse voices in future blog posts throughout this year.]
[Excerpt]
"During his first presidential term, Donald Trump signeda congressional actnaming a federally funded observatory after the late astronomer Vera Rubin. The act celebrated herlandmark research on dark matter— the invisible, mysterious substance that makes up much of the universe — and noted that she was an outspoken advocate for the equal treatment and representation of women in science.
“Vera herself offers an excellent example of what can happen when more minds participate in science,” theobservatory’s website said of Rubin— up until recently.
By Monday morning, a section of her online biography titled, “She advocated for women in science,” was gone. It reappeared in a stripped-down form later that day amid a chaotic federal government response to Trump’scampaign against diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
While there are far more seismic changes afoot in America than the revision of three paragraphs on a website, the page’s edit trail provides an opportunity to peer into how institutions and agencies are navigating the new administration’s intolerance of anything perceived as “woke” and illuminates a calculation officials must make in answering a wide-open question:
How far is too far when it comes to acknowledging inequality and advocating against it?"
[Kip Currier: The late Toni Morrison, 1993 Nobel Prize Winner for Literature, observed that "Access to knowledge is the superb, the supreme act of truly great civilizations.” Fittingly, that inspirational declaration greets visitors at an entrance to New York Public Library, one of the world's greatest repositories of knowledge.
As the Trump administration, in just its first weeks, continues to "disappear" information and impede access to knowledge, as illustrated by this NBC News article, the role of libraries, archives, and museums in preserving information and providing access to knowledge and the full range of human experience has never been greater in the nearly 250 year history of the U.S.
It is incumbent upon those who work in and on behalf of libraries, archives, and museums to prepare themselves for the concerted governmental and oligarchic efforts and pressure that will likely soon manifest against them, as they strive to safeguard the nation's memory, historical record, and collections from censorship, removal, and destruction.]
[Excerpt]
"The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday is scrubbing a swath of HIV-related content from the agency’s website as a part of President Donald Trump’s broader effort to wipe out diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives across the federal government.
The CDC’s main HIV page was down temporarily but has been restored. The CDC began removing all content related to gender identity on Friday, according to one government staffer. HIV-related pages were apparently caught up in that action.
CDC employees were told in a Jan 29. email from Charles Ezell, the acting director of the U.S. office of personnel management, titled “Defending Women,” that they’re not to make references or promote “gender ideology” — a term often used by conservative groups to describe what they consider “woke” views on sex and gender — and that they are to recognize only two sexes, male and female, according to a memo obtained by NBC News.
Employees initially struggled with how to implement the new policy, with a deadline of Friday afternoon, the staffer said. Ultimately, agency staffers began pulling down numerous HIV-related webpages — regardless of whether it included gender — rushing to meet the deadline. It was unclear when the pages might be restored.
“The process is underway,” said the government agency staffer, who requested anonymity for fear of repercussions. “There’s just so much gender content in HIV that we have to take everything down in order to meet the deadline.”
The White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Communications representatives within the CDC’s HIV and STD prevention departments did not return requests for comment; last week, the Trump administration ordered all employees of HHS, which includes the CDC, to stop communicating with external parties.
Trump’s sweeping executive order to wipe out DEI programs across the federal government threatens to upend the CDC’s efforts to combat HIV among Black, Latino and transgender people — groups disproportionately affected by the virus — according to public health experts."
[Kip Currier: Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness Against Thy Neighbor.
Call out the people and social media sites that knowingly spread falsehoods and harmful statements.]
[Excerpt]
"UPDATE: A video and additional statement from Jo Ellis have been added since the article was originally published.
A trans woman who has been wrongly named as one of the pilots in a deadly mid-air collision between a helicopter and plane in Washington, D.C., is asking people to help stop the spread of the fake news online. The crash killed 67 people, including U.S. Army members and some families tied to the figure skating community.
"Some craziness has happened on the internet and I’m being named as one of the pilots of the DC crash," posted Jo Ellis, a Chief Warrant Officer 2 (CW2) – UH60 Black Hawk Pilot in the Virginia National Guard...
She took to Facebook on Friday morning, asking for help stopping the spread of the wrong information, including uploading a proof of life video and issuing a statement.
She said neither she nor the families of the crash victims deserve to be tied to this tragedy for a political agenda, calling the move "insulting."...
Trump cites FAA DEI efforts as factor in crash with no evidence
On Thursday, President Donald Trump said the crash "could have been" the fault of Biden- and Obama-era hiring practices focused on diversity, equity and inclusion.
“Hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability and dwarfism – all qualify for the position of a controller of airplanes pouring into our country," he said, specifically talking about the Federal Aviation Administration's criteria to hire air traffic controllers."
The governor’s plan is to detect and flag anomalies for Medicaid providers, meaning an AI system would likely be trained to identify unusual or suspicious patterns in billing and payment data.
Suspicious patterns could include:
Billing for an excessive number of services: Flagging providers who bill for significantly more services than their peers
Billing for unnecessary or inappropriate services: Flagging claims for services that are not medically necessary or do not align with the patient's diagnosis
Billing for services not rendered: Flagging claims for services that were never actually provided
Unusual billing patterns or trends: Flagging providers whose billing practices deviate significantly from established norms or show sudden, unexplained changes
In an interview with Government Technology, Commissioner of Minnesota IT Services (MNIT) Tarek Tomes explained that this use case aligns with the state’s AI strategy of leaning into less controversial use cases that don’t reinvent any wheel, as many private-sector financial institutions already use similar technology.
“In our private lives, if we have suspicious credit card transactions, we generally get a text message asking, ‘Is this really you?’" said Tomes. “So using AI and machine learning to really look at patterns — both successful and unsuccessful patterns of transactions, and to be able to flag transactions for further review or further investigation is going to be a really important capability to add to those areas in government that have high transactions where financial benefits are paid out.”
At this point, it’s a waiting game until April or May to see if the AI pilot will be approved in the state’s budget. In the meantime, Tomes said MNIT is researching vendors and the capabilities they provide, especially in terms of low-fidelity prototypes.
If the pilot funding gets a green light from lawmakers, human beings will still play an essential role in the fraud detection process, investigating the flagged transactions for actual evidence of wrongdoing or fraud."
"Artists can copyright works they made with the help of artificial intelligence, according to a new report by the U.S. Copyright Office that could further clear the way for the use of AI tools in Hollywood, the music industry and other creative fields.
The nation’s copyright office, which sits in the Library of Congress and is not part of the executive branch, receives about half a million copyright applications per year covering millions of individual works. It has increasingly been asked to register works that are AI-generated.
And while many of those decisions are made on a case-by-case basis, the report issued Wednesday clarifies the office’s approach as one based on what the top U.S. copyright official describes as the “centrality of human creativity” in authoring a work that warrants copyright protections."
"The Vatican on Tuesday called for governments to keep a close eye on the development of artificial intelligence, warning the technology contained "the shadow of evil" in its ability to spread misinformation.
"AI generated fake media can gradually undermine the foundations of society," said a new text on the ethics of AI, written by two Vatican departments and approved by Pope Francis.
"This issue requires careful regulation, as misinformation—especially through AI-controlled or influenced media—can spread unintentionally, fuelling political polarization and social unrest," it said."
"Following the sentencing of former Senator Bob Menendez, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington President Noah Bookbinder, a former federal corruption prosecutor, released the following statement:
“Bob Menendez’s blatant corruption made a mockery of the Senate and was one more piece of the shattering of Americans’ trust in our government in recent years. We applaud Judge Stein for handing down a serious sentence in line with these very serious offenses. By sending Menendez to prison, the judge has shown that the system can work. And Americans can feel secure in the knowledge that, in at least some cases, corruption does not go unpunished.”"
The Vatican has released a comprehensive document offering new guidelines for the ethical development and use of artificial intelligence, with a focus on areas such as warfare and healthcare...
Ultimately, the Vatican’s guidelines encourage deeper engagement with the humanities, suggesting that AI’s rise should inspire renewed interest in understanding and valuing the human condition. This approach positions AI as a tool for enhancing, not diminishing, human creativity, empathy, and moral responsibility. Through continued dialogue and regulation, the Vatican hopes to steer AI development towards a future that aligns with ethical and spiritual values."
In a week of political and religious tension, sparks flare at the National Cathedral. Host Amanda Henderson and RNS Executive Editor Roxanne Stone delve into how this sermon—calling for mercy and justice—reshaped the national discourse and exposed the fractures between competing Christianities. From Trump’s invocation of divine authority to the shifting influence of evangelical power, they explore how faith and politics are shaping America’s identity and future."
"Today, the U.S. Copyright Office is releasingPart 2of its Report on the legal and policy issues related to copyright and artificial intelligence (AI). This Part of the Report addresses the copyrightability of outputs created using generative AI. The Office affirms that existing principles of copyright law are flexible enough to apply to this new technology, as they have applied to technological innovations in the past. It concludes that the outputs of generative AI can be protected by copyright only where a human author has determined sufficient expressive elements. This can include situations where a human-authored work is perceptible in an AI output, or a human makes creative arrangements or modifications of the output, but not the mere provision of prompts. The Office confirms that the use of AI to assist in the process of creation or the inclusion of AI-generated material in a larger human-generated work does not bar copyrightability. It also finds that the case has not been made for changes to existing law to provide additional protection for AI-generated outputs.
“After considering the extensive public comments and the current state of technological development, our conclusions turn on the centrality of human creativity to copyright,” said Shira Perlmutter, Register of Copyrights and Director of the U.S. Copyright Office. “Where that creativity is expressed through the use of AI systems, it continues to enjoy protection. Extending protection to material whose expressive elements are determined by a machine, however, would undermine rather than further the constitutional goals of copyright.”
In early 2023, the Copyright Office announced a broad initiative to explore the intersection of copyright and AI. Since then, the Office has issued registration guidance for works incorporating AI-generated content, hosted public listening sessions and webinars, met with experts and stakeholders, published a notice of inquiry seeking input from the public, and reviewed more than 10,000 responsive comments, which served to inform these conclusions.
The Report is being released in three Parts. Part 1 was published on July 31, 2024, and recommended federal legislation to respond to the unauthorized distribution of digital replicas that realistically but falsely depict an individual. The final, forthcoming Part 3 will address the legal implications of training AI models on copyrighted works, including licensing considerations and the allocation of any potential liability.
"In another sweeping move of his second term, President Trump fired more than a dozen inspectors general, the non-partisan watchdogs appointed to protect against abuses of power, waste and mismanagement across federal agencies. White House correspondent Laura Barrón-López discussed the impact with Glenn Fine, former inspector general for the Department of Justice."
"It was the first Sunday since a fellow Episcopalian, Bishop Mariann E. Budde, delivered a sermon that many observers heard as an echo of passages like the one from Luke. Speaking at a prayer service at the National Cathedral in Washington the day after President Trump’s inauguration, she faced the president andmade a direct plea: “Have mercy.”
After the service, Mr. Trump called Bishop Budde a “Radical Left hard line Trump hater” in a social media post. His foes immediately hailed her as an icon of the resistance. But for many progressive Christians and their leaders, the confrontation was more than a moment of political catharsis. It was about more than Mr. Trump. It was an eloquent expression of basic Christian theology, expressed in an extraordinarily public forum...
“A plea for mercy, a recognition of the stranger in our midst, is core to the faith,” Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe, the Episcopal Church’s top clerical leader, said in an interview. “It is radical, given the order of the world around us — it is countercultural — but it’s not bound to political ideology.”...
The clergy members addressed it directly in their sermons, too. At Church of the Transfiguration, the associate rector, the Rev. Ted Clarkson, acknowledged to the congregation that aspects of the bishop’s sermon might have been “hard to hear.” But “mercy is truth,” he said, “and I expect a bishop to preach the truth.” (Bishop Budde preached on Sunday at a church in Maryland.)...
Bishop Budde’s message seemed to be resonating beyond the usual audience for Sunday sermons.
Her most recent book, “How We Learn to Be Brave,” was listed as temporarily out of stock on Amazon Friday afternoon. At that time, the book was No. 4 on the site’s list of best-sellers, 11 spots above Vice President JD Vance’s memoir “Hillbilly Elegy.”
The publisher of Bishop Budde’s book, Avery, an imprint of Penguin Books, was scrambling to reprint “a significant number of books,” said Tracy Behar, Avery’s president and publisher."
