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"Without new protections," they warned, "today's supercharged, AI-powered algorithms risk reinforcing and magnifying the discrimination that marginalized communities already experience."
U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sen. Ed Markey on Monday sent a letter urging the Biden administration to pursue additional action to protect civil rights and liberties related to federal agencies' use of artificial intelligence.
While recognizing the "strong steps" that the administration has already taken—such as President Joe Biden's October 2023 executive order—Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Markey (D-Mass.) stressed to Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Shalanda Young that "more must be done" to mitigate, prevent, and eliminate algorithmic bias and discrimination.
Specifically, the pair is pushing OMB to "require all federal agencies that use AI for consequential decisions to establish a civil rights office, if they do not already have one; ensure all civil rights offices are staffed with experts in algorithmic discrimination; and encourage federal agencies to establish additional safeguards to prevent algorithmic discrimination."
As the Biden White House explained in its 2022 Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights, "Algorithmic discrimination occurs when automated systems contribute to unjustified different treatment or impacts disfavoring people based on their race, color, ethnicity, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, and related medical conditions, gender identity, intersex status, and sexual orientation), religion, age, national origin, disability, veteran status, genetic information, or any other classification protected by law."
"Biased algorithms have increasingly been used to make or influence decisions, imposing real harm on Black, Brown, immigrant, and other marginalized communities."
The ACLU earlier this year sued Biden's National Security Agency in hopes of uncovering how it is using AI, and emphasized concerns that the NSA's use of such tools could harm civil rights and liberties.
The senators wrote Monday that "by ensuring that agencies have the resources, personnel, and policies to detect and mitigate bias, we can ensure that the AI age does not come at the expense of already marginalized and vulnerable communities."
"Without new protections," they warned, "today's supercharged, AI-powered algorithms risk reinforcing and magnifying the discrimination that marginalized communities already experience due to poorly trained and tested algorithms."
The senators highlighted how "biased algorithms have increasingly been used to make or influence decisions, imposing real harm on Black, Brown, immigrant, and other marginalized communities," citing examples from mortgage applications, hiring and employment, government benefits, and healthcare.
Earlier this year, OMB issued guidance regarding government use of AI tools, which Damon T. Hewitt, president and executive director of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, called "a significant step to implement meaningful safeguards."
Noting that the guidance directs agencies to "cease use of any AI that the agency finds cannot adequately mitigate unlawful discrimination," the senators argued that "OMB should also work with agencies to set strict guidelines to prevent algorithmic discrimination within relevant agency jurisdiction."
The OMB, they said, should push agencies to require recipients of federal funds and contracts "to complete pre-development, pre-deployment, and ongoing impact assessments to identify, mitigate, prevent, and eliminate biased AI," as well as "to allow individuals to opt out of AI-powered algorithms used in consequential decisions and instead request human decision-makers."
The senators also urged the office to pressure U.S. agencies to "fund the development of common, accessible resources for auditing algorithms—including open-source tools—for bias, discrimination, and other harms," and to "develop guidance on best practices for mitigating the development and deployment of biased AI-powered algorithms."
"Finally, because a regulation is only as strong as its enforcement, OMB should support federal agencies that take robust enforcement against any company found to violate these rules," the senators wrote, calling on Young to convene inspectors general to coordinate on best practices.
Reporting on the letter, Axios noted Monday that "Schumer's bipartisan AI roadmap fell short for civil rights organizations that wanted stronger language on algorithmic bias and discrimination."
Meanwhile, Markey has been a key force behind both the Algorithmic Justice and Online Platform Transparency Act and the Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act.
Most convention speakers called for unity by rallying their base against marginalized communities like immigrants, trans people, and others they consider undesirable.
The Republican National Convention here in Milwaukee seems very far away from Ripon, Wisconsin, the birthplace of the Republican Party.
As one approaches the RNC, inside the heavily guarded, temporary steel wall erected around Milwaukee’s downtown as part of this so-called National Special Security Event, one encounters a side street next to Media Row, filled with food vendors, a stage, t-shirt and souvenir booths, and a slew of organizations touting conservative issues. Also present is a replica of The Little White Schoolhouse, towed into place by the Ripon Chamber of Commerce. It was in the actual schoolhouse, still standing in Ripon some 90 miles northwest of Milwaukee, that a group of abolitionists launched their new Republican Party on March 20, 1854.
The abolitionists who met in Ripon in 1854 included many from a nearby socialist community known as Ceresco. They felt the freedom they sought should be enjoyed by all, including the millions of people enslaved in the U.S. Two years after the party formed, an Illinois lawyer named Abraham Lincoln joined. In 1858, he ran a failed Senate campaign against a pro-slavery Democrat, Stephen Douglas, then, in 1860, ran for president. Southern states began seceding within months of Lincoln’s election, launching the nation into civil war.
“They have nothing else to offer the American people. It’s scapegoating politics, rooted in stoking fear and stoking hate and creating the impression that there’s a dystopic reality at the border, which simply is not the case.”
Several years earlier, in 1850, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, giving bounty hunters from the South significant powers to abduct and remove suspected runaway enslaved people from the North to the South. When Joshua Glover, an escaped slave from Missouri living in Wisconsin, was caught and held overnight in the Milwaukee jail in 1854, a crowd of up to 6,000 formed, stormed the jail, freed Glover, and helped him escape to Canada. It was the Glover incident that spurred the Wisconsinites to finally launch their new abolitionist political party.
“Resolved… we will cooperate and be known as Republicans… we cordially invite all persons, whether of native or foreign birth, who are in favor of the objects expressed, to unite with us,” read one of the founding resolutions. The principal “object expressed,” their main goal, was the abolition of slavery in the United States.
One hundred seventy years later, the rhetoric pouring forth from the RNC podium sounds strikingly different. Back in 1854, immigrants were a large part of the population swelling new states like Wisconsin. Now, hostility to immigrants is a central theme of the Trump campaign. Former U.S. President Donald Trump ordered the streamlining of the GOP’s platform from 66 pages of detailed policy prescriptions to a compact, 16-page document.
“We must deport the millions of illegal Migrants who Joe Biden has deliberately encouraged to invade our Country,” it reads, promising to “begin [the] largest deportation program in American history.” Many delegates at the convention were enthusiastically holding signs that read, “Mass Deportation Now!”
On stage at the Fiserv Forum, MAGA Republican loyalists spoke from the podium, heaping praise on their party’s unquestioned leader, Donald Trump, just days after an attempted assassination that left him with a bloodied right ear over which he now wears a white bandage. A number of Republican delegates have been wearing symbolic ear patches in solidarity.
Speakers compared Trump to legendary leaders like President Abraham Lincoln, Civil War General then President Ulysses S. Grant and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. In the wake of last Saturday’s assassination attempt in Pennsylvania, several key Republicans, including Donald Trump himself, are calling for national unity. Unfortunately, most convention speakers are calling for unity by rallying their base against marginalized communities like immigrants, trans people, and others they consider undesirable.
“We are facing an invasion on our southern border—not figuratively, a literal invasion,” Texas Sen. Ted Cruz said from the podium. “Every day Americans are dying, murdered, assaulted, raped by illegal immigrants that the Democrats have released.”
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who has engineered an armed standoff between Texas National Guardsmen and U.S. federal border agents, and who proudly busses desperate migrants to cities run by Democrats, spoke as well:
“Biden has welcomed into our country rapists, murderers, even terrorists.” In fact, the crime rate in the immigrant population is far less than in the general U.S. population.
Responding on the Democracy Now! news hour in Milwaukee, Jean Guerrero, a senior fellow at the UCLA Latina Futures 2050 Lab, said, “They have nothing else to offer the American people. It’s scapegoating politics, rooted in stoking fear and stoking hate and creating the impression that there’s a dystopic reality at the border, which simply is not the case.”
The answer to the current threat to democracy is more democracy. “Knocking on doors and talking to people,” Christine Neumann-Ortiz, executive director of Voces de la Frontera Action, suggested as the best organizing strategy, speaking on Democracy Now! “You need to get the word out, because every vote counts.”
"Today's ruling blocks the state of Florida's cruel campaign to deny fundamental rights and basic healthcare to its transgender citizens," said one LGBTQ+ advocate.
A federal judge on Tuesday ruled that key sections of Florida's ban on gender-affirming healthcare for minors—which also limits adults seeking such care—are unconstitutional and that the Republican state lawmakers and GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis were acting with "anti-transgender animus" and not in the interest of public health when they approved the legislation.
"The state of Florida can regulate as needed but cannot flatly deny transgender individuals safe and effective medical treatment—treatment with medications routinely provided to others with the state's full approval so long as the purpose is not to support the patient's transgender identity," Judge Robert L. Hinkle of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida, Tallahassee Division, wrote in his 105-page opinion.
"Transgender opponents are of course free to hold their beliefs, but they are not free to discriminate against transgender individuals just for being transgender," Hinkle—an appointee of former Democratic President Bill Clinton—continued. "In time, discrimination against transgender individuals will diminish, just as racism and misogyny have diminished."
"To paraphrase a civil rights advocate from an earlier time, the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice," he added, referring to a famous quote by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Hinkle also struck down a provision of the law forcing adults seeking transition healthcare to meet with a doctor in person before beginning treatment.
One year ago, Hinkle temporarily blocked portions of the law prohibiting doctors from providing, and minors from receiving, so-called "puberty blockers" and other hormonal treatments, calling the proscription "purposeful discrimination" against transgender people.
Civil rights advocates cheered Tuesday's decision.
"Today's ruling striking down Florida's discriminatory restrictions on gender-affirming medical care is a huge victory for the transgender community and for the freedom of all Floridians and their families to make their own private medical decisions," Equality Florida executive director Nadine Smith said in a statement.
"Despite the governor and his rubber-stamp GOP supermajority continuously stripping away our rights, the brave plaintiffs, legal experts, and judges have dealt another powerful blow to DeSantis' agenda of censorship, surveillance, and government intrusion into our personal healthcare decisions," Smith added.
Simone Chriss, director of the Southern Legal Counsel's Transgender Rights Initiative, said in a statement:
The federal court saw Florida's transgender minor healthcare ban and adult restrictions for what they are—discriminatory measures that cannot survive constitutional review. Today's ruling blocks the state of Florida's cruel campaign to deny fundamental rights and basic healthcare to its transgender citizens. We are so proud of our brave plaintiffs, without whom we could not have achieved this victory for the state of Florida.
DeSantis—a failed 2024 GOP presidential candidate who has centered waging what fans and foes alike have called a "war on woke"—signed the gender-affirming care ban into law in May 2023 as part of what one activist condemned as "the most extreme slate of anti-trans laws in modern history."
Among the legislation signed that day were the so-called "Don't Say They" law prohibiting transgender public school students and staff from sharing updated preferred pronouns; S.B. 1438, which bans minors from attending "adult live performances" like drag shows; and H.B. 1521, which empowers cisgender people to order transgender people to leave publicly available restrooms or face criminal trespass charges that could result in up to a year behind bars for refusal to comply.
A spokesperson for DeSantis told The New York Times after Tuesday's ruling that "there is no quality evidence to support the chemical and physical mutilation of children."
"These procedures do permanent, life-altering damage to children, and history will look back on this fad in horror," she added.
Lucien Hamel, an adult plaintiff in the case, said Hinkle's ruling brought relief.
"I can't just uproot my family and move across the country," Hamel said in a statement. "The state has no place interfering in people's private medical decisions, and I'm relieved that I can once again get the healthcare that I need here in Florida."
Plaintiff Jane Doe—the mother of 12-year-old transgender girl Susan Doe—asserted that the ruling "means I won't have to watch my daughter needlessly suffer because I can't get her the care she needs."
"Seeing Susan's fear about this ban has been one of the hardest experiences we've endured as parents," she said in a statement. "All we've wanted is to take that fear away and help her continue to be the happy, confident child she is now."