gattsuru
2hr ago
I think there's a plausible false light (and defamation per se) claim, given that the images in this situation were being shared and would be themselves illegal for her to produce. Even for deepfakes-of-adults, false claims of sexual promiscuity would fall into these categories. There's some theoretical examples where a Falwell v. Hustler-style defense would be relevant in the case of a public figure where the deepfakes were clear parody, but that's pretty far from the typical case. But from a traditional law perspective you don't have to pull a Gorsuch to find a civil tradition against this sorta stuff.
Useless, though, since the kid who did it's judgement proof. In theory, the state law would allow six months imprisonment per act, but in practice that's really not how the juvenile court systems work, and even an adult doing this to another adult is more likely to just end up with a fine. And while both the boy generating the deepfakes and those passing it around (or even receiving it) could probably charged with federal CSAM stuff, that's such a nuclear option it's extremely unlikely anyone would seriously even threaten it here.
Which is part of why the whole thing is such a mess.
gattsuru
5hr ago
Bestiality's a 'funny joke' because as much as people say they care about animals, they don't really care about animals that much unless they're more than a little nuts, and the possibility that someone they know might even consider it is pretty unimaginable. There was a big scandal in the furry fandom a little under a decade ago about a zoophilia-sadist ring (cw: no matter how strong your stomach, you don't want to look to close into this, yes, insert 'beating dead horse' joke here), and it got a lot of critical attention from furries (and even some other zoophiles), but as far as I can tell the only criminal convictions involved literal serial killers of animals or separate possession of CSAM. There was a lot of conduct there that was physically damaging or even likely fatal to the animal, but ultimately, it's something normal people see as gross because of what the bad actors are doing to themselves, less than what's happening to the animal.
Animal protective services aren't going to pull custody from Hassan Piker; that doesn't make putting a shock collar on a kid funny.
Beyond that, a lot of the post-1990s changes to attitudes about abuse of very young children were driven by vastly increased understanding of what psychological impact these actions had on their victims. The Breendoggle or various priest abuses had a number of different reasons they were able to shovel themselves under the rug, but one of the biggest is that it was largely assumed that victims would forget, merely not understand, or at worst become 'precocious': 'corruption of a minor' as a charge was a lot more literally considered than modern readers think. But a significant portion of human victims end up pretty messed up by stuff that doesn't leave bruises or injuries, especially when it's committed by a trusted figure.
[caveat: there's public information on this topic I'm not going to discuss here, and I'm going to encourage anyone who recognizes to not discuss here]
Any organization that can collect and process so much information on drone signals has capabilities comparable to traditional spy organizations.
That's... not strictly true, at least for lower tiers of "drone signals". You can (if you have a ton of money, and are a US citizen, and don't mind getting probed) just buy a commercial 'drone signal tracker' box and antenna kit. My guess is that the smarter ones do a lot of complex FPGA-based TDMA-like analysis work, but there's probably a few cheaper-tier ones that are just boxes stuffed full of SDRs. There are even STC'd variants for shoving into aircraft, though guessing from first principles I doubt they're very good. DJI even makes one for its specific protocol...
Which is the limiting factor: decoding traditional analog control signals doesn't tell you much about DJI's various protocols, which don't tell you about MAVLink, which doesn't tell you about some schmuck hackadayer's DIY version. Protocols are (notoriously) easy to make, and the .mil versions of a drone don't even have to use the same frequency bands as cOTS drones. Then we can throw in encryption, and you're really screwed. The only really universal response to radio control signals is triangulation, and a) that doesn't tell you much more than 'something was here' and b) are the sort of technology that has good solutions old enough to vote.
Blocking the more specialized drones that don't use radio signals gets a lot more complicated. AFAIK, we haven't seen any fiber cable drones in the continental United States, or purely-camera-driven drones... but it's a matter of when, not if.
Any security organization that can destroy, or hijack and control, drones at will, could use those capabilities against the government. Giving everyone ‘robust’ counter-drone capabilities is giving everyone (some) of the pre-requisites for throwing a coup.
Oh, I think it's much worse than that. I'd like to be in a world where the meta favors some type of tightly-targeted EMI weapon that burns out drone motor controllers -- that would still be costly to legitimate drones if misused, but mostly just drones. I don't think we live in that world, though.
Consider what a meta where physical interception with a net by a 300kph low-cost counter-drone looks like, includes, and could in the hands of a bad actor to non-drone known targets, including non-drone targets that are not considered 'critical infrastructure' but would cause tens, hundreds, or thousands of deaths if attacked. And that's still an optimistic case!
When the US opened up the US military Global Positioning Satellite network to global airlines in 1983 following the Korean Airlines Flight 007 disaster, it did not initially provide full capability. There was a policy of selective availability to globally degrade ‘civilian’ GPS signal. However, the Clinton Administration in 1996 made it US policy to provide (free) GPS access and facilitate integration into civilian and commercial applications, and in 2000 removed the selective availability policy.
Specifically, until 2000, GPS degradation was based on an additional psuedorandom delay... that had been turned off over short periods before during periods of military (during the Persian Gulf War) or civil (disaster response) need, and enough had been learned during those temporary turn-off periods that differential GPS had already made it possible to eliminate the noise factor for most applications, and both government and nongovernment orgs were pushing for an implementation. It was still a good thing that Clinton took out SA, but it's also something that was reaching the end of its usefulness as a technology already. The government implementation of dGPS/WAAS meant those higher-quality fixes remained under gov control that could be turned off with a flick of a switch if needed...
Until GLONASS was in good working order in 2011, and dual (or triple-) single-chip GPS/GLONASS/Beidou chips became the new standard (2015?). Now, there's really no way to degrade GPS signal short of just jamming it.
There are about 20,000 public and private airports in the US. Even if you took every single air defense artillery expect from every other military function and spread them around the country, you wouldn’t have enough for one dedicated military air defender per airport.
Tbf, the vast majority of the public airports are tiny, pretty irrelevant, and operate using local contractors for pretty much everything; almost all of the private ones are even more irrelevant to the calculus. To be less fair, you aren't defending the big international airports with one person, or even one person per shift.
Like, say, keeping a national policy that forces local police to become air pirates if they want to throw a jacket on a dangerous drone. Will they get prosecuted as such by government officials? Probably not. Might they get sued as such by private citizens? Maybe not. Could malefactors or ambulance-chasing lawyers sue them to try and coerce a settlement or deter an action? Absolutely.
Eh... anyone can try to sue over anything, but there's not really a lot of grounding for that case here. At least from people in this field, I've seen more concerns about second- or third-party harm (eg, taking down a drone and it landing one someone else).
At least pre-SAFER SKIES, one of the biggest issues was not the FAA or DHS, but FCC -- they really don't like anything even remotely close to signal jamming or devices that can accidentally jam stuff. For a while, the only way the FCC was letting even tests of long-distance drone signal jamming tech happen involved one of their designees standing directly behind the person holding the button down, in person. That's starting to change, but not quickly, and I'm skeptical that it can change as quickly as technology will in response. Dunno if SAFER SKIES changed that, though.
Tbf, the PROTECT Act stapled on a Miller test. They're still trying to bypass the 'prevailing community standards' bit, but compared to the pre-Ashcroft version that just pretended the Miller test didn't matter, it's a much wider retreat than, for example, US v. Lopez.
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