Friday Round Up! 6/7/24
One reason to pay attention to Hunter Biden's prosecution is to remind ourselves how normal defendants, lawyers, and presidents behave.
This week Renato and I discuss what’s happening in Hunter Biden’s illegal gun possession case. But let’s do a quick recap of what’s NOT happening in that case. Hunter Biden is not lying about the charges against him, claiming that his rights are being violated, or accusing the FBI of planting evidence or trying to assassinate him. Hunter Biden is not publicly slamming the prosecutor, the judge, or the judge’s kids. As a result, Hunter Biden is not under a gag order. The people who support Hunter Biden aren’t trying to dox jurors in order to harass and intimidate them (or worse). The President of the United States, who happens to be Hunter Biden’s dad, isn’t trying to fire the Special Counsel prosecuting his son. The President is also not trying to fire the Attorney General who appointed the Special Counsel prosecuting his son. The President is not calling the case a “witch-hunt” or a “hoax,” threatening to order his Attorney General to prosecute the prosecutor, or calling on Democrats in Congress to hold hearings and compel the Special Counsel to testify. The President has given no indication that if his son is convicted, he would pardon him.
It is, in short, an extraordinary case involving the First Family, mainly because it is simply proceeding like any other criminal case — no threats, no protests, no delegitimizing of everyone involved. Frankly, it’s a refreshing change in that regard.
Articles worth reading:
This piece in The Nation by Elie Mystal, who read the section on DOJ in MAGA’s Project 2025 blueprint for autocracy in America. Pay attention. (Spoiler alert: It’s worse than you think.)
Noteworthy clips from this week:
My big picture overview of the Hunter Biden case. (In case you’re wondering why I am completely sweating by the end of this clip, it’s because my neighbor started mowing the lawn right before the hit, so I had to close all the windows, and then I had to close the doors to keep Pancake from catbombing me on TV, and my entire office turned into a 90-degree greenhouse in a matter of minutes)
Upcoming events:
Zoom Office Hours, Tuesday, June 18, 2-3 p.m. EDT. We’ll discuss the latest (which may include the Supreme Court’s decision, if one ever comes, on Trump’s immunity argument). Zoom link will be sent to paid subscribers at 11 a.m. Zoom office hours are not recorded.
Freedom Academy Book Club, Wednesday, July 10, 10-11 a.m.. I’m very excited that my former CNN colleague, Jim Sciutto, will be joining us to discuss The Return of Great Powers: Russia, China, and the Next World War. I love Jim’s work and insights into national security issues and this is a discussion you won’t want to miss! Paid subscribers will receive a Zoom link three hours before.
Enjoy your Caturday!
Come for the legal analysis, stay for the cat pictures. Thank you, Professor.
Well, I wound up with a double-header on Tuesdays and Thursdays for the summer term teaching. I just met both of my new sections of my digital literacy class on Thursday. That means I have to miss office hours through August 1st.
I'll throw this out there now since I can't be at office hours. It kinda intersects the cases being talked about. I know I had to bring it up with my digital literacy students in-class. Microsoft recently announced a feature called "Recall". Quite a few people in the tech sector became increasingly horrified when details dribbled out as to how this would be implemented. It would be a total boon to prosecutors, though. The goal of the feature would be to allow you to ask a natural language question to an AI system and be able to search back within the past 90 days or so to see what you did. To accomplish this, though, the system would take constant screenshots of everything that you did that would be uncensored and would capture everything including financial details, passwords, and medical information. Those screenshots would be transcribed by a computer vision AI running locally on your computer and saved in an unencrypted database that would be accessible to anybody that had your password/PIN to access the computer. A proof of concept attack was published that showed fairly quickly that you wouldn't need anything on the scale of NSO Group's Pegasus to do evil with this.
Although Microsoft said initially it would only be turned on by default on their new Copilot+ AI-enabled computers that they would be selling an additional detail dropped that it would later be pushed to all Windows 11 computers and enabled by default. The outrage in the IT sector got very loud at that point and people started discussing adversarial mitigations to be able to disable the new feature as quickly as possible. Microsoft finally backpedaled Friday and said that it would shift from the feature being opt-out to being opt-in but it would still ship it as part of the operating system.
Imagine if this existed in the criminal cases of Hunter Biden and Donald Trump as evidence.