Tyler RobinsonA hearing largely to handle housekeeping duties was held Monday in court in Utah for the suspect charged with the assassination of Turning Point USA co-founder Charlie Kirk. The suspect,…

The Guns N' Roses frontman made the "neon-noir fever dream" in collaboration with Sumerian Comics. Continue reading…

  Leave have been used away from nature to cover Adam and Eve (fig leaves), decorate Roman columns (acanthus) and to advance Christian thought (holly and ivy). Leaves tell us stories, as must leaves in a book. In autumn, green leaves turn to flaming colours of reds and yellows. New shoots and new beginnings turn to feelings or melancholy and change. Here, Robert E. Jackson delves into his incredible collection of vintage photographs and shares snapshots on the theme of leaves. As ever, let’s imaging the stories between…       “Come, little leaves,” said the Wind one day, “Come to the meadows with me and play. Put on your dresses of red and gold; For Summer is past, and the days grow cold.” ― George Cooper, Come, Little Leaves     The falling leaves drift by the window The autumn leaves of red and gold I see your lips, the summer kisses The sun-burned hands I used to hold – Autumn Leaves, Nat King Cole     “It was one of those early November mornings that are as beautiful as any in spring. There was gold everywhere, drifts of it on the elm tree, flakes of gold under our feet, gold dust on the hedges, liquid gold in the refracted falling light.” ― Elizabeth Goudge, The Dean’s Watch     Why do you whisper, green grass? Why tell the trees what ain’t so? Whispering grass, the trees don’t need to know – Whispering Grass (Don’t Tell the Trees), The Ink Spots     Oh, it’s a long, long while from May to December But the days grow short When you reach September When the Autumn weather turns the leaves to flame One hasn’t got time for the waiting game – Frank Sinatra, September Song     “Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.” – Genesis 3:7     Well, it’s a marvelous night for a moondance With the stars up above in your eyes A fantabulous night to make romance ‘Neath the cover of October skies And all the leaves on the trees are falling To the sound of the breezes that blow You know I’m tryin’ to please to the calling Of your heartstrings that play soft and low – Van Morrison, Moondance     “It seemed as he had been falling for years. Fly, a voice whispered in the darkness, but Bran did not know how to fly, so all he could do was fall.” ― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones     We’ve lots more from Robert E. Jackson on the site. And you can follow him here for more great stuff. The post From Eve To Autumn – A Celebration of Falling Leaves appeared first on Flashbak.

Alaa Abd El Fattah is finally free and at home with his family. On September 22, it was announced that Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi had issued a pardon for Alaa’s release after six years in prison. One day later, the BBC shared video of Alaa dancing with his family in their Cairo home and hugging his mother Laila and sister Sanaa, as well as other visitors.  Alaa's sister, Mona Seif, posted on X: "An exceptionally kind day. Alaa is free." Alaa has spent most of the last decade behind bars, punished for little more than his words. In June 2014, Egypt accused him of violating its protest law and attacking a police officer. He was convicted in absentia and sentenced to fifteen years in prison, after being prohibited from entering the courthouse. Following an appeal, Alaa was granted a retrial, and sentenced in February 2015 to five years in prison. In 2019, he was finally released, first into police custody then to his family. As part of his parole, he was told he would have to spend every night of the next five years at a police station, but six months later—on September 29, 2019—Alaa was re-arrested in a massive sweep of activists and charged with spreading false news and belonging to a terrorist organisation after sharing a Facebook post about torture in Egypt. Despite that sentence effectively ending on September 29, 2024, one year ago today, Egyptian authorities continued his detention, stating that he would be released in January 2027—violating both international legal norms and Egypt’s own domestic law. As Amnesty International reported, Alaa faced inhumane conditions during his imprisonment, “including denial of access to lawyers, consular visits, fresh air, and sunlight,” and his family repeatedly spoke of concerns about his health, particularly during periods in which he engaged in hunger strike. When Egyptian authorities failed to release Alaa last year, his mother, Laila Soueif, launched a hunger strike. Her action stretched to an astonishing 287 days, during which she was hospitalized twice in London and nearly lost her life. She continued until July of this year, when she finally ended the strike following direct commitments from UK officials that Alaa would be freed. Throughout this time, a broad coalition, including EFF, rallied around Alaa: international human rights organizations, senior UK parliamentarians, former British Ambassador John Casson, and fellow former political prisoner Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe all lent their voices. Celebrities joined the call, while the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention declared his imprisonment unlawful and demanded his release. This groundswell of solidarity was decisive in securing his release. Alaa’s release is an extraordinary relief for his family and all who have campaigned on his behalf. EFF wholeheartedly celebrates Alaa’s freedom and reunification with his family. But we must remain vigilant. Alaa must be allowed to travel to the UK to be reunited with his son Khaled, who currently lives with his mother and attends school there. Furthermore, we continue to press for the release of those who remain imprisoned for nothing more than exercising their right to speak.

The European Union Council is once again debating its controversial message scanning proposal, aka “Chat Control,” that would lead to the scanning of private conversations of billions of people. Chat Control, which EFF has strongly opposed since it was first introduced in 2022, keeps being mildly tweaked and pushed by one Council presidency after another. Chat Control is a dangerous legislative proposal that would make it mandatory for service providers, including end-to-end encrypted communication and storage services, to scan all communications and files to detect “abusive material.” This would happen through a method called client-side scanning, which scans for specific content on a device before it’s sent. In practice, Chat Control is chat surveillance and functions by having access to everything on a device with indiscriminate monitoring of everything. In a memo, the Danish Presidency claimed this does not break end-to-end encryption. This is absurd. We have written extensively that client-side scanning fundamentally undermines end-to-end encryption, and obliterates our right to private spaces. If the government has access to one of the “ends” of an end-to-end encrypted communication, that communication is no longer safe and secure. Pursuing this approach is dangerous for everyone, but is especially perilous for journalists, whistleblowers, activists, lawyers, and human rights workers. If passed, Chat Control would undermine the privacy promises of end-to-end encrypted communication tools, like Signal and WhatsApp. The proposal is so dangerous that Signal has stated it would pull its app out of the EU if Chat Control is passed. Proponents even seem to realize how dangerous this is, because state communications are exempt from this scanning in the latest compromise proposal. This doesn’t just affect people in the EU, it affects everyone around the world, including in the United States. If platforms decide to stay in the EU, they would be forced to scan the conversation of everyone in the EU. If you’re not in the EU, but you chat with someone who is, then your privacy is compromised too. Passing this proposal would pave the way for authoritarian and tyrannical governments around the world to follow suit with their own demands for access to encrypted communication apps. Even if you take it in good faith that the government would never do anything wrong with this power, events like Salt Typhoon show there’s no such thing as a system that’s only for the “good guys.” Despite strong opposition, Denmark is pushing forward and taking its current proposal to the Justice and Home Affairs Council meeting on October 14th. We urge the Danish Presidency to drop its push for scanning our private communication and consider fundamental rights concerns. Any draft that compromises end-to-end encryption and permits scanning of our private communication should be blocked or voted down. Phones and laptops must work for the users who own them, not act as “bugs in our pockets” in the service of governments, foreign or domestic. The mass scanning of everything on our devices is invasive, untenable, and must be rejected. Further reading: EDRi’s Stop Scanning Me Fight Chat Control EFF and EDRi Coalition Statement on the Future of the CSA Regulation

This post was co-authored by EFF legal intern Olivia Miller. For most Americans—driving is a part of everyday life. Practically speaking, many of us drive to work, school, play, and anywhere in between. Not only do we visit places that give insights into our personal lives, but we sometimes use vehicles as a mode of displaying information about our political beliefs, socioeconomic status, and other intimate details. All of this personal activity can be tracked and identified through Automatic License Plate Reader (ALPR) data—a popular surveillance tool used by law enforcement agencies across the country. That’s why, in an amicus brief filed with the Virginia Court of Appeals, EFF, the ACLU of Virginia, and NACDL urged the court to require police to seek a warrant before searching ALPR data. In Commonwealth v. Church, a police officer in Norfolk, Virginia searched license plate data without a warrant—not to prove that defendant Ronnie Church was at the scene of the crime, but merely to try to show he had a “guilty mind.” The lower court, in a one-page ruling relying on Commonwealth v. Bell, held this warrantless search violated the Fourth Amendment and suppressed the ALPR evidence. We argued the appellate court should uphold this decision. Like the cellphone location data the Supreme Court protected in Carpenter v. United States, ALPR data threatens peoples’ privacy because it is collected indiscriminately over time and can provide police with a detailed picture of a person’s movements. ALPR data includes photos of license plates, vehicle make and model, any distinctive features of the vehicle, and precise time and location information. Once an ALPR logs a car’s data, the information is uploaded to the cloud and made accessible to law enforcement agencies at the local, state, and federal level—creating a near real-time tracking tool that can follow individuals across vast distances. Think police only use ALPRs to track suspected criminals? Think again. ALPRs are ubiquitous; every car traveling into the camera’s view generates a detailed dataset, regardless of any suspected criminal activity. In fact, a survey of 173 law enforcement agencies employing ALPRs nationwide revealed that 99.5% of scans belonged to people who had no association to crime. Norfolk County, Virginia, is home to over 170 ALPR cameras operated by Flock, a surveillance company that maintains over 83,000 ALPRs nationwide. The resulting surveillance network is so large that Norfolk county’s police chief suggested “it would be difficult to drive any distance and not be recorded by one.” Recent and near-horizon advancements in Flock’s products will continue to threaten our privacy and further the surveillance state. For example, Flock’s ALPR data has been used for immigration raids, to track individuals seeking abortion-related care, to conduct fishing expeditions, and to identify relationships between people who may be traveling together but in different cars. With the help of artificial intelligence, ALPR databases could be aggregated with other information from data breaches and data brokers, to create “people lookup tools.” Even public safety advocates and law enforcement, like the International Association of Chiefs of Police, have warned that ALPR tech creates a risk “that individuals will become more cautious in their exercise of their protected rights of expression, protest, association, political participation because they consider themselves under constant surveillance.”   This is why a warrant requirement for ALPR data is so important. As the Virginia trial court previously found in Bell, prolonged tracking of public movements with surveillance invades peoples’ reasonable expectation of privacy in the entirety of their movements. Recent Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, including Carpenter and Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle from the federal Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals favors a warrant requirement as well. Like the technologies at issue in those cases, ALPRs give police the ability to chronicle movements in a “detailed, encyclopedic” record, akin to “attaching an ankle monitor to every person in the city.”   The Virginia Court of Appeals has a chance to draw a clear line on warrantless ALPR surveillance, and to tell Norfolk PD what the Fourth Amendment already says: come back with a warrant.

Anthropic says its new AI model is robust enough to build production-ready applications, rather than just prototypes.

In my first column after the events of Jan. 6th, 2021, I criticized those who called the protest a “coup,” pointing out that, “Some of the same politicians and bureaucrats denouncing the ridiculous farce at the Capitol as if it were the equivalent of 9/11 have been involved for decades in planning and executing real …

The elusive Carl Dean was actually on one of Dolly Parton’s album covers, believe it or not. Dolly’s husband famously stayed completely out of her career, and out of the spotlight, until he passed away earlier this year in March at the age of 82. She’s spoken openly about how much he hated show business, and from pretty early on in her marriage, he told her he didn’t want anything to do with it. While in some ways, it might seem strange that fans rarely, if ever, saw Dean in public, I have to imagine that’s part of what kept Dolly so grounded and their marriage so strong. There were never prying eyes on them in the public, because no one really even knew what he looked like. Seeing at they were married for nearly 59 years, and together for 60 years, I’d say it was a very successful strategy. That type of strong, lasting relationship is something most can only dream of, especially for someone as famous as Dolly, and their story is just beautiful. The famous legend goes that they met outside of the Wishy Washy laundromat in Nashville in 1964, the same day that Dolly moved to Music City, as fate would have it. They dated for two years, and decided they wanted to get married. And actually, at the time of their wedding, Dolly’s newfound record label didn’t want her to get married at all. They thought it might tarnish her image, and as we all know, Dolly did what she wanted anyways… so she and Carl Dean secretly ran off to Ringgold, Georgia, along with Parton’s mom Avie Lee as a witness, and headed for the local courthouse. There are several decades-old photos of the two of them floating around online, but not much is known about him other than the scant details Dolly has shared over the years, like that he owned an asphalt paving business. And while he hated the “industry” and fame aspect of her career, Carl actually did participate in it… back in 1969, which was just three years after they got married in 1966, so maybe they were still in some sort of honeymoon phase? Not sure how she managed to pull this off, but Carl appeared on the cover of Dolly’s 1969 My Blue Ridge Mountain Boy album, which is named for a song she wrote solo on her fourth solo studio album. The album was released on this day in 1969, and was produced by Bob Ferguson. It peaked at #6 on the Billboard Top Country Albums chart, and it was her highest-charting album of  the 60’s. The song “My Blue Ridge Mountain Boy” was released as a single, and while it wasn’t a massive success on the charts, Dolly said in her 2020 book Songteller that she didn’t care, because she was never one to shy away from writing about tough topics. The song talks about a young woman who has grown up in the mountains and leaves her small town with big dreams, only to end up in New Orleans working as a prostitute. She still longs for her mountain boy back home, and it was certainly a daring song choice for the 60’s: “I wrote a lot of songs that people wouldn’t play on the radio, but I didn’t care. It bothered me at the time, but I never thought, ‘I shouldn’t have done that.’ Whatever I write is just what comes out of me, and I refuse to be judged.” I’ve always found it so interesting that Carl appears on the cover as the “blue ridge mountain boy,” with Dolly dreaming of him dressed as the woman in the song. Considering how much he hated the spotlight, I’d love to hear the story behind how that happened… I don’t think most people even know it’s him, but it is. Carl Dean is on the cover, which is pretty cool, and it’s one of my favorites of her album covers too for so many reasons. It’s a neat piece of Dolly’s lore and history within her musical career, and a neat little fun fact that I don’t think most fans know about. And if  you’ve never heard “My Blue Ridge Mountain Boy” before, now is the perfect time, because it’s an underrated gem and truly one of her best: “My Blue Ridge Mountain Boy”  The post Did You Know That Carl Dean Actually Appeared On One Of Dolly Parton’s Album Covers? first appeared on Whiskey Riff.