Summary Teach Us Consent received 89% of its 2024/25 revenue from government. Albanese then showcased the group while presenting his digital crackdown as change driven from below. FOI records show private lobbying with Reset Australia and Digital Rights Watch, a reply from a senior prime ministerial adviser the next morning, and a meeting scheduled for…
Read article
SUMMARY The US-funded Atlantic Council is pushing the EU to finance organizations that help enforce its digital censorship laws against American technology companies. The Council received at least $10.8 million in disclosed US government support during 2019–2024, including millions from the State and Defense departments. DFRLab’s report, developed through workshops with the Global Disinformation Index,…
Read article
SUMMARY EU law allows the Commission to compel employee-level access to AI models for specified evaluations, backed by fines and powers to restrict models’ availability. The EU’s voluntary code sets expectations for privileged outside scrutiny, while Brussels pays evaluators to develop tests and assessment methods. The campaign for permanent embedding extends into the EU’s advisory…
Read article
Australia’s Federal Court has ruled that eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant cannot impose a messaging-service standard on X simply because the social media platform lets users send direct messages. The 12 August decision blocks the regulator’s attempt to layer a more intrusive set of detection rules on top of the code already governing X. In…
Read article
SUMMARY Prime Minister Andy Burnham has ordered security chiefs to create a National Centre for Information Defence to “detect, attribute and disrupt” hostile state information attacks. The centre is expected to work with intelligence agencies, police, government departments and social media companies. Burnham also cast a “negative, corrosive narrative about life in Britain” as a…
Read article
SUMMARY The RAND corporation receives hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. taxpayer funding anually via the federal government. RAND has partnered with METR, the well-funded AI safety org that Anthropic wants to embed as government-mandated AI safety evaluators in every company, despite concerns over the organization’s ideological biases. The joint RAND-METR initiative is backed…
Read article
SUMMARY There is growing pressure from the media and industry for sweeping federal AI regulations, including mandatory embedding of third-party “safety evaluators” inside frontier AI companies. Some of the individuals and organizations positioning themselves as AI safety experts are regulatory migrants from the “counter-disinformation” field, including one AI safety researcher who was a fellow of…
Read article
SUMMARY British police forces recorded at least 62,199 arrests under three communications offences between 1 January 2021 and 31 December 2025, according to a report from the UK organiation Big Brother Watch. The same research found 18,520 charges, while separate Ministry of Justice data recorded 12,292 convictions in England and Wales; the datasets cannot be…
Read article
SUMMARY Independent journalist Nick Shirley has sued California Attorney General Rob Bonta and Secretary of State Shirley Weber, asking a federal court to block the speech-related provisions of AB 2624 before they become operative. The complaint alleges that the law remains content- and viewpoint-discriminatory, overbroad and vague despite amendments adopted after a public backlash forced…
Read articleSUMMARY A new investigation identifies €56.76 million in contracts and grants linked to implementation of the EU Digital Services Act. The figure is not a pot of DSA fines handed directly to NGOs: it combines multi-year awards to advocacy groups, consultancies, technology suppliers and an EU agency. The DSA separately makes the largest platforms finance…
Read article