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
"Google's parent company has ditched a longstanding principle and lifted a ban on artificial intelligence (AI) being used for developing weapons and surveillance tools.
Alphabet has rewritten its guidelines on how it will use AI, dropping a section which previously ruled out applications that were "likely to cause harm".
Ina blog postGoogle defended the change, arguing that businesses and democratic governments needed to work together on AI that "supports national security".
Experts say AI could be widely deployed on the battlefield - though there are fears about its use too, particularly with regard to autonomous weapons systems."
"No president in history has caused more damage to the nation more quickly. As we enter Week 3 of President Donald Trump’s second term, the chaos and disruption of his first look quaint by comparison. The country survived Trump 1. Now, it faces a real threat that the harm he inflicts during his second term will be irreparable. The United States’ standing in the world, its ability to keep the country safe, the federal government’s fundamental capacity to operate effectively — all of these will take years to repair, if that can be achieved at all.
This column will concentrate on the third piece of that trifecta: efforts to undermine the basic functioning of government...
None of this is normal. Little of it is legal. All of it is misguided, and that’s a mild term. The damage to the federal workforce is incalculable. Years of expertise down the drain. The ability to recruit talented employees, same. Why would anyone join an operation that treats its workers this way?
The reason to worry about this is not because of unfairness to federal employees, although there is that — it’s because of the debilitating, even dangerous, impact on government operations. Disruption is one thing in Silicon Valley, where the stakes are merely profit and loss. It is quite another when you are talking about a government charged with ensuring the safety of its citizens.
“What is happening right now,” Stier said, “is the destruction of the institution itself.”
And if you think that can be repaired four years from now, ask yourself: If Trump is successful in purging the government of perceived opponents and putting loyalists in their place, would a new Democratic administration politely play by old-school rules — or would it be justified in engaging in a tit-for-tat response?
The damage has already begun, and it will be difficult to reverse."
"This is a remarkable power grab on Musk’s part, because he’s a private citizen who is still overseeing his vast fortune even as he claims authority to unilaterally slash government funding. Further, Musk is doing this on behalf of DOGE, which The New York Times accurately describes as “the so-called Department of Government Efficiency.” In fact, DOGE is not a real department authorized by Congress but merely the fiat creation of an executive order signed by Trump. DOGE is an advisory group that is usurping power the Constitution grants to Congress alone. Last week, Trump issued a memo to freeze federal funding for government programs such as Medicaid and SNAP, only to retreat in the face of both popular protest and an adverse court decision. Under the Constitution, Congress alone has the power of the purse, while the president is obligated to “faithfully execute the laws.” Trump’s attempt to arrogate the power to not spend money already allocated by Congress thus constitutes “impoundment”—a practice forbidden by long-standing practices and court decisions.
Waleed Shahid, a Democratic Party strategist and member of The Nation’s editorial board, distilled with bracing clarity the breathtaking scope of Musk’s power grab:
Not with tanks in the streets or militias at government buildings, but with spreadsheets, executive orders, and a network of loyalists embedded in the federal bureaucracy. In just the past few days, Musk’s hand-picked agents have seized control of Treasury’s 6 trillion payment system, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), and the General Services Administration (GSA)—institutions that, together, function as the central nervous system of the U.S. government…. In any other country, experts would call it state capture, a textbook coup.
Because Musk and his DOGE minions have strong-armed their way into the offices of the Treasury, OPM, GSA, and USAID, they have access to an astonishing body of public data. Musk can, for example, find the Social Security number of any American citizen and also what funds (if any) they receive from the government.
Musk is currently targeting mainstream Protestant churches involved in immigration resettlement. On X, the social media site he owns, Musk went after Mariann Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington, DC, who delivered a sermon calling for compassion to immigrants at a service Trump attended. Musk retweeted a claim that Episcopal Migration Ministries received $53 million for immigration resettlement and said, “She’s on the take.” There is a strong element of political theater in this smearing of Budde, as in Musk’s attack on the Lutheran church. Government funding of social programs run by religious organizations is a long-standing practice and already a matter of public record. But Musk is trying to create the illusion that he’s uncovered a deeply buried government secret.
What’s scandalous is Musk’s nebulous status as both a private citizen and presidential crony, which has allowed him access to data that that can easily be abused. Coming from Silicon Valley, Musk knows that data is power. Now, he has access to the full data set of the federal government, which he is both hoarding to himself and preventing the public from seeing (many government websites have already been shuttered, allegedly as a temporary measure during the Trump/Musk riorganizzazione, including those with public health information and Census data).
Most disturbingly, Musk and his DOGE team have no proper congressional authorization."
"The federal government is currently under relentless and unlawful assault by a man no one elected to lead it. With Donald Trump’s blessing and enabling, Elon Musk and his confederates have laid siege to the executive branch in an onslaught whose appalling and far-reaching consequences have barely begun to be reported, much less understood. Musk’s team is tearing through federal agencies at a shocking clip, gaining access to classified material, private personal information, and payment systems that distribute trillions of dollars every year, all in alleged breach of the law. The richest person in the world, who works for no recognizable government entity and answers to nobody, apparently believes he has unilateral authority to withhold duly appropriated funds, violate basic security protocols protecting state secrets, and abolish a global agency in direct contravention of Congress’ explicit command. He is reportedly leading a purge of the federal workforce, persecuting life-saving charities, and pushing outprincipled civil servantswho stand in the way of his rampage."
"The mystery around a top-selling Amazon book attributed to John D. Rockefeller has grown to include a university publisher, which denies any involvement in the book despite being listed as its publisher.
CNBC began raising questions last month about the authenticity of “The 38 Letters from J.D. Rockefeller to his son: Perspective, Ideology and Wisdom,” a purported collection of letters by John D. Rockefeller Sr. sold on Amazon,Barnes & Noble and other sites.
The mysterious origin of “The 38 Letters” raises a host of questions about publishing and the surge in wealth-help books...
“The authenticity of the book ‘The 38 Letters from J.D. Rockefeller to his Son’ is questionable,” the Archive center told CNBC in a statement.
Now caught in the confusion is OpenStax, the nonprofit publisher of open educational resources at Rice University, which is listed as the book’s publisher in some printings.
“We are not the publisher of this title,” a spokesperson for OpenStax told CNBC in a statement, adding that the publisher is “investigating the situation to protect our brand and ensure accurate information.”"
For a government legal document, it is a fascinating exploration of the intersection of artificial intelligence and the very concept of authorship and creativity. The study's authors conduct a deep dive, taking in comments from the general public and experts alike, and producing an analysis of what it means to creatively author a work.
They then explore the issue of whether an AI-generated work versus an AI-assisted work is subject to copyright protection, and what that means not only for individual authors but also for the encouragement of creativity and innovation in society as a whole.
This is the second of what will be a three-part report from the Copyright Office.Part 1, published last year, explored digital replicas, using digital technology to "realistically replicate" someone's voice or appearance.
Part 3 is expected to be released later this year. It will focus on the issues of training AIs using copyrighted works, aspects of licensing, and how liability might be allocated in cases where a spectacular AI failure can be attributed to training (which sometimes results in litigation)."
"The Proud Boys no longer have control over their own name.
Under a ruling by a Washington judge on Monday, the infamous far-right group was stripped of control over the trademark “Proud Boys” and was barred from selling any merchandise with either its name or its symbols without the consent of a Black church in Washington that its members vandalized. In June 2023, the church won a $2.8 million default judgment against the Proud Boys after the organization’s former leader, Enrique Tarrio, and several of his subordinates attacked it in a night of violence after a pro-Trump rally in December 2020.
The ruling by the judge, Tanya M. Jones Bosier of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, effectively means that Proud Boys chapters across the country can no longer legally use their own name or the group’s traditional symbols without the permission of the church that was attacked, the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church.
The ruling also clears the way for the church to try to seize any money that the Proud Boys might make by selling merchandise like hats or T-shirts emblazoned with their name or with any of their familiar logos, including a black and yellow laurel wreath."
"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."
