Alexander Laufer

screenshot van een nieuwsbericht over gemeenten die beboet worden voor het heimelijk surveilleren van Moslims

Goed dat de AP een boete oplegt. Echter moet de zaak over het heimelijk surveilleren van Moslims worden onderzoek als etnisch profileren, resp. discriminatie van moslims in het bijzonder.

@amnestynl.bsky.social roept het kabinet op om een adequate aanpak van moslimdiscriminatie te implementeren.

Column | NSC en de staatsrechtelijke modderpoel In de VS rijden anonieme witte busjes rond met gemaskerde ICE-agenten die mensen intimideren, opjagen en met geweld afvoeren. Bestemming onbekend. Zonder toegang tot gezondheidszorg of juridische bijs...

Rosanne Hertzberger schetst het NSC als dwalend in een woestijnlandschap tussen technocratie (VVD) en autocratie (PVV).

De Toeslagenaffaire is echter niet primair een probleem van technocratie. Eerder van institutioneel racisme en de onderbuikgevoelens van Henk Kamp. De PVV in de VVD zeg maar.

Vrije verkiezingen zijn daarnaast ook niet de enige voorwaarden om van democratie te spreken

Wel fijn dat de NOS spreekt van de "ontvoerde" president Maduro

@proton.me is protonmail/calendar planning to develop some feature like those of hey mail, next to security developments?

De obsessie met efficiency lijkt bij de overheid geen grenzen te kennen.
De vraag is niet óf, maar wanneer het volgende schandaal zich voordoet

Amnesty roept de overheid op om over te gaan tot aselecte controles tenzij het kan garanderen dat mensen bij risicoprofilering niet worden gediscrimineerd

📣 Germany's close to reversing its opposition to mass surveillance & private message scanning, & backing the Chat Control bill. This could end private comms-& Signal-in the EU.

Time's short and they're counting on obscurity: please let German politicians know how horrifying their reversal would be.

We are alarmed by reports that Germany is on the verge of a catastrophic about-face, reversing its longstanding and principled opposition to the EU’s Chat Control proposal which, if passed, could spell the end of the right to privacy in Europe. signal.org/blog/pdfs/ge...

what are the most widely read digital newspapers by web traffic across the US and EU? do you know of any current repositories?

I collected some materials on critical AI from my perspective; hope it's useful: olivia.science/ai

"CAIL is as an umbrella for all the prerequisite knowledge required to have an expert-level critical perspective, such as to tell apart nonsense hype from true theoretical computer scientific claims"

The False Promise of “AI for Social Good” Abeba Birhane refutes industry claims about the technology's potential to solve complex social problems.

I couldn’t agree more with @abeba.bsky.social: “most AI4SG efforts… amount to “technosolutionism”: complex political, historical, and social issues are reduced to technical problems, implying that they can be solved through “innovation.””

www.project-syndicate.org/magazine/ai-...

it's so funny that all these economic pieces are like 'could it be that silicon valley has made a bad bet?' and then the bet is that a text prediction software will achieve consciousness

3.1 Rejection of expertise, ironically including our own Being in a colonizing discipline first demands and then encourages an attitude that might be called intellectual hubris. Furthermore, since you cannot master all the disciplines that you have designs on, you need confidence that your knowledge makes the ‘traditional wisdom’ of these fields unworthy of serious consideration. Here too, the AI scientist feels that seeing things through a computational prism so fundamentally changes the rules of the game in the social and behavioural sciences that everything that came before is relegated to a period of intellectual immaturity. Sherry Turkle (1984, p. 230) Every field that comes into contact with AI discourse becomes infected even within AI as a field of study (recall Table 1). Our colleagues have embraced these systems, uncritically incorporating them into their workflows and their classrooms, without input from experts on automation, cognitive science, computer science, gender and diversity studies, human-computer interaction, pedagogy, psychology, and law to name but a few fields with direct relevant expertise (Sloane et al. 2024). Meanwhile, technology companies have rushed to invest in ‘AI ethics’ or ‘AI safety’ to ethics wash their claims, thereby “laundering accountability” (as Abeba Birhane explains in Arseni 2025) and “distracti[ng] from real AI ethics” (Crane 2021), while censoring academics and thus, violating academic freedom (Gebru and Torres 2024; Gerdes 2022; Goudarzi 2025; Munn 2023; Ochigame 2019; Suarez et al. 2025; Tafani 2023).

We also go through many arguments that can be used as counters to typical false frames forced upon us, such as:

1. the powerful nonsense that we as experts know nothing

(Section 3.1 here doi.org/10.5281/zeno...)

3/n

Hoe banken moslims tot verdachten maken: ‘Heeft u ooit positief gestaan tegenover Hamas?’ Banken die vragen naar je mening over Hamas. Moslims die keer op keer op het matje worden geroepen, niet vanwege verdachte transacties, maar om hun naam, geloof of activisme. Wat is bedoeld als wapen ...

www.ftm.nl/artikelen/ho...

Hoe banken moslims tot verdachten maken

@ftm.nl Banken die vragen naar je mening over Hamas. Moslims die keer op keer op het matje worden geroepen, niet vanwege verdachte transacties, maar om hun naam, geloof of activisme. Wat is bedoeld als wapen tegen terrorisme, verandert in een systeem dat hele groepen wantrouwt

I considered writing a long carefully constructed argument laying out the harms and limitations of AI, but instead I wrote about being a hater. Only humans can be haters.

Het Nederlandse leger doet al jaren in het geheim zaken met de omstreden techreus Palantir – net als de politie Het Amerikaanse softwarebedrijf Palantir is diep verweven met de regering-Trump, maar ook met het Nederlandse leger. Dat doet al sinds 2010 zaken met het bedrijf, blijkt uit onderzoek van Follow the M...

www.ftm.nl/artikelen/he...

@ftm.nl: de Politie verzamelt enorme hoeveelheden data van onschuldige mensen, en hier wordt Palantir software op toegepast.
@amnestynl.bsky.social roept op tot onafhankelijk onderzoek en om gebruik van deze software onmiddellijk stop te zetten als de mensenrechten niet gewaarborgd zijn.

Amnesty launches ‘Breaking up with Big Tech’ briefing Amnesty International has launched a new briefing calling on governments to rein in the power of Big Tech companies in order to safeguard human rights.

🚨 Today we have launched the ‘Breaking up with Big Tech’ briefing which calls on governments to rein in the power of big technology companies in order to protect human rights.

amn.st/63326f4SHp

We have become an authoritarian state, and our top newsrooms are in denial | Press Watch The frog in the proverbial pot is dead.

Dan Froomkin of Press Watch: “The top story of the moment is the one story that our most influential newsrooms won’t touch: That the United State has become an authoritarian state.” [presswatchers.org]

"Age verification" laws are actually "upload your ID or get your face scanned to access every website, ending anonymity and associating your identity with everything you do online" laws and if more people understood that they would not be down for this authoritarian nonsense

RT if you also wish ill upon JK Rowling.

Screenshot of a forum Where a user asks what’s the point of give coding if he still needs to pay a dev to do the debugging

💀

Why We Shouldn’t Trust Facial Recognition’s Glowing Test Scores | TechPolicy.Press While lab evaluations of facial recognition may appear objective, they often ignore real-world performance, write Teo Canmentin, Juliette Zaccour & Luc Rocher.

Lab evaluations of facial recognition claiming a high level of accuracy have been used to justify the technology's vast deployment, but they often ignore how the software could perform in diverse, messy and unpredictable real-world environments, Teo Canmetin, Juliette Zaccour and Luc Rocher write.

According to established ECtHR case law, differential treatment that is solely or predominantly based on race or ethnicity can never be objectively justified. Even when race or ethnicity is used in combination with other characteristics, it is in violation of the prohibition of discrimination. /end

Specifically, the court explicitly refers to the previous analysis by Amnesty, in which we stated that using nationality as a risk criterion constitutes racial profiling. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs subjects individuals from certain countries to a more intensive assessment process. 4/

In its justification for the rejection, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs fails to mention of the use of the profiling algorithm and doesn’t provide an assessment of its impact on human rights. The court hereby mandates a Fundamental Rights Impacts Assessment. 3/

In a case brought by a woman of Moroccan nationality regarding the rejection of her application for a short-stay visa, a Dutch court ruled that the transparency requirements for a right to effective remedy were not met. 2/

💥 Important interim judgement by a Dutch national court concerning the right to an effective remedy and the right to non-discrimination when using a profiling algorithm for the allocation of short stay visa (Ministry of FA)

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