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the intercept
Leaked Cables Show Biden Pressuring Nations to Oppose Palestine's UN Membership
"This is the evidence that President Biden's talk about a two-state solution is nothing but idle talk," said one former Lebanese diplomat.
Apr 17, 2024
As the United Nations Security Council prepares to vote Thursday on Palestine's bid to become a full U.N. member, the Biden administration—which claims to support Palestinian statehood—is lobbying UNSC nations in an effort to wrangle enough "no" votes so that the United States can avoid resorting to a veto.
Leaked cables obtained by The Intercept show U.S. pressure on Security Council members including Malta—which currently presides over the body—and Ecuador.
While claiming that President Joe Biden backs "Palestinian aspirations for statehood," one of the cables asserts that "it remains the U.S. view that the most expeditious path toward a political horizon for the Palestinian people is in the context of a normalization agreement between Israel and its neighbors."
"We therefore urge you not to support any potential Security Council resolution recommending the admission of 'Palestine' as a U.N. member state, should such a resolution be presented to the Security Council for a decision in the coming days and weeks," the document advises.
The U.S. argument essentially is that the U.N. should not create an independent Palestinian state by fiat—even though that's precisely how the world body voted in 1947 to establish the modern state of Israel.
The renewed push for Palestine's U.N. membership comes as Israel wages a genocidal war on the Gaza Strip. The Palestinian Authority, which hasn't controlled Gaza for nearly two decades, rejected the Biden administration's requests to hold off on seeking full membership.
"We wanted the U.S. to provide a substantive alternative to U.N. recognition. They didn't," one unnamed Palestinian official told Axios on Wednesday. "We believe full membership in the U.N. for Palestine is way overdue. We have waited more than 12 years since our initial request."
As The Intercept's Ken Klippenstein and Daniel Boguslaw noted:
Since 2011, the U.N. Security Council has rejected the Palestinian Authority's request for full member status. On April 2, the Palestinian Observer Mission to the U.N. requested that the council once again take up consideration of its membership application. According to the first State Department cable, U.N. meetings since the beginning of April suggest that Algeria, China, Guyana, Mozambique, Russia, Slovenia, Sierra Leone, and Malta support granting Palestine full membership to the U.N. It also says that France, Japan, and Korea are undecided, while the United Kingdom will likely abstain from a vote.
Along with the United States, China, France, Russia, and the United Kingdom are permanent members of the UNSC, so they also have veto power.
Ahead of Thursday's planned vote, Spain has been doing its own lobbying in Europe to build greater support for Palestinian statehood. At a joint Tuesday press conference with Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, Slovenian Prime Minister Robert Golob said the question is "when, not if, but when is the best moment to recognize Palestine."
Belgium—which is seeking economic sanctions against Israel in response to its genocidal war on Gaza—is expected to join Spain's push for Palestinian statehood after the country's European Union presidency expires in June.
Currently, 139 of the U.N.'s 193 member states recognize Palestine as an independent state.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—who has also claimed to support a so-called "two-state solution"—has alternately boasted about thwarting Palestinian statehood.
Critics pointed to the leaked cables as more proof of U.S. duplicity and double standards on the Israel-Palestine issue.
"This is the evidence that President Biden's talk about a two-state solution is nothing but idle talk," Massoud Maalouf, a former Lebanese ambassador to Canada, Chile, and Poland, said on social media.
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The Intercept and Other Progressive News Sites Sue OpenAI
The media outlets claim the company violated copyright laws.
Feb 28, 2024
The Intercept, Raw Story, and Alternet joined forces on Wednesday to sue OpenAI for using copyrighted content to train its generative artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT.
The law firm Loevy + Loevy is representing the publications, and it has filed the lawsuit in the Southern District of New York. The firm claims OpenAI violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by using copyrighted content from news organizations to train ChatGPT.
"Had OpenAI trained ChatGPT using these works as they were published, including author, title, and copyright information, ChatGPT may have learned to respect third-party copyrights, or at least inform ChatGPT users that it was providing responses that were based on the copyrighted works of others. Instead, OpenAI removed that information from its ChatGPT training sets, in violation of the DMCA," the firm said in a statement.
NEWS: @RawStory is suing @OpenAI, creator of #ChatGPT.
“I think it's time for tech companies to be proactive in compensating publishers for their work,” Raw Story CEO @JohnByrnester told @corbinbolies of @TheDailyBeasthttps://t.co/dVX1q1qsvA
— Raw Story (@RawStory) February 28, 2024
OpenAI is facing multiple lawsuits over its use of copyrighted material, including from comedian Sarah Silverman and The New York Times. The Times lawsuit also references violations of the DMCA. OpenAI recently claimed the Times "hacked" ChatGPT to get it to reproduce its copyrighted content.
Publications like the The Associated Press have formed partnerships with OpenAI where they license their work to the company, rather than suing them over the use of copyrighted content. According to the AI-based text analysis company Copyleaks, approximately 60% of the content generated by ChatGPT-3.5 is plagiarized.
OpenAI argues its actions fall under "fair use." In 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court let a lower court ruling stand that said Google had not violated copyright laws by digitizing millions of books, so OpenAI may have a shot at winning with that kind of argument. It remains to be seen if any of the lawsuits against the company will make their way to the Supreme Court.
"Developers like OpenAI have garnered billions in investment and revenue because of AI products fundamentally created with and trained on copyright-protected material," said Loevy + Loevy partner Matt Topic, who represents the news organizations in the suits."The Digital Millennium Copyright Act prohibits the removal of author, title, and copyright notice when there is reason to know it would conceal or facilitate copyright infringement, and unlike traditional copyright infringement claims, it does not require creators to incur the copyright registration fees that often make traditional copyright infringement suits cost prohibitive given the massive scale of OpenAI's infringement."
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OpenAI Cuts 'Military and Warfare' Ban From Permissible Use Policy
"Given the use of AI systems in the targeting of civilians in Gaza, it's a notable moment to make the decision to remove the words," warned one policy analyst.
Jan 12, 2024
ChatGPT maker OpenAI this week quietly removed language from its usage policy that prohibited military use of its technology, a move with serious implications given the increase use of artificial intelligence on battlefields including Gaza.
ChatGPT is a free tool that lets users enter prompts to receive text or images generated by AI.The Intercept's Sam Biddle reported Friday that prior to Wednesday, OpenAI's permissible uses page banned "activity that has high risk of physical harm, including," specifically, "weapons development" and "military and warfare."
Although the company's
new policy stipulates that users should not harm human beings or "develop or use weapons," experts said the removal of the "military and warfare" language leaves open the door for lucrative contracts with U.S. and other militaries.
"Given the use of AI systems in the
targeting of civilians in Gaza, it's a notable moment to make the decision to remove the words 'military and warfare' from OpenAI's permissible use policy," Sarah Myers West, managing director of the AI Now Institute and a former AI policy analyst at the Federal Trade Commission, told The Intercept.
"The language that is in the policy remains vague and raises questions about how OpenAI intends to approach enforcement," she added.
An OpenAI spokesperson told Common Dreams in an email that:
Our policy does not allow our tools to be used to harm people, develop weapons, for communications surveillance, or to injure others or destroy property. There are, however, national security use cases that align with our mission. For example, we are already working with [the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] to spur the creation of new cybersecurity tools to secure open source software that critical infrastructure and industry depend on. It was not clear whether these beneficial use cases would have been allowed under "military" in our previous policies. So the goal with our policy update is to provide clarity and the ability to have these discussions.
As AI advances, so does its weaponization. Experts warn that AI applications including lethal autonomous weapons systems, commonly called "killer robots," could pose a potentially existential threat to humanity that underscores the imperative of arms control measures to slow the pace of weaponization.
That's the goal of nuclear weapons legislation introduced last year in the U.S. Congress. The bipartisan Block Nuclear Launch by Autonomous Artificial Intelligence Act—introduced by Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Reps. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), Don Beyer (D-Va.), and Ken Buck (R-Colo.)—asserts that "any decision to launch a nuclear weapon should not be made" by AI.
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