3 reasons why we probably need an “algorithms police” →

From self-driving cars to smart assistants, AI is increasingly becoming part of our daily lives and often facilitates actual human-to-human and human-machine-human interaction. Good, bad or indifferent AI is here to stay for the long run. Though as AI becomes exponentially more powerful it also requires a thoughtful examination by the purveyors of AI and the powers to be. Organizations that ought to use AI in a responsible, ethical and transparent way, but how do we control, manage and enforce that?
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If a self driving car is going left instead of right, killing someone in the process we probably want to know why it did that. More specifically, why did the algorithm decide to go left vs. right and causing an accident. Since most likely human lives will be at stake or can be affected, we’re going to need almost instantaneous reproducibility and interpretability. Answering the question: what just happened, why did it happen and who is going to be liable/responsible if things go wrong...

New Data Privacy Regulations →

When Marc Zuckerberg testified before both the House and the Senate last month, it became immediately obvious that few US lawmakers had any appetite to regulate the pervasive surveillance taking place on the internet.
Right now, the only way we can force these companies to take our privacy more seriously is through the market. But the market is broken. First, none of us do business directly with these data brokers. Equifax might have lost my personal data in 2017, but I can't fire them because I'm not their customer or even their user. I could complain to the companies I do business with who sell my data to Equifax, but I don't know who they are. Markets require voluntary exchange to work properly. If consumers don't even know where these data brokers are getting their data from and what they're doing with it, they can't make intelligent buying choices.
This is starting to change, thanks to a new law in Vermont and another in Europe. And more legislation is coming.
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Surveillance is the business model of the internet. It's not just the big companies like Facebook and Google watching everything we do online and selling advertising based on our behaviors; there's also a large and largely unregulated industry of data brokers that collect, correlate and then sell intimate personal data about our behaviours. If we make the reasonable assumption that Congress is not going to regulate these companies, then we're left with the market and consumer choice. The first step in that process is transparency. These new laws, and the ones that will follow, are slowly shining a light on this secretive industry.

Trump's personal corruption is unprecedented in modern presidents →

Let's just call him "Mafia Don" from now on.

Continued:

To put that in perspective, in the preceding 4 cycles -- from 2008 to 2014 -- the GOP spent a combined total of just $166k at Trump properties and companies, about one-tenth of what they've spent since the person benefiting from these payments became the party's standard bearer. And these totals don't even include the funds that the Trump campaign and other Trump-related committees have spent at Trump-owned companies, a total that now stretches to well over $14 million at this point. 
When you piece it all together, you see a striking explosion in money flowing from political sources to companies that the president and his family benefit from directly. It can't be said enough (and I say it often): This is not normal.
We're used to hearing that Jimmy Carter sold his peanut farm, or that Obama wouldn't even refinance his 5.9 percent mortgage when rates fell. but Trump's decision to eschew the practices of prior administrations is only one part of the equation. The other side is that the president's political allies have chosen not only to keep quiet about the conflicts of interest this arrangement creates, but to embrace them. They have made a conscious choice to schedule political events and fundraisers at places that will benefit the president directly. As we will see again in just a couple of weeks...
None
of
this
is
normal.

It should outrage anyone who believes that a citizens access to and influence over the most powerful people in the country shouldn't derive from the number of commas on their financial statements. And even if we accept that to some degree the wealthy do have more access and influence, we should fight for it to be disclosed, so that we can track how elected officials pay their financial benefactors back with profitable policies.

Trade sanctions against America won’t work. Sanctioning Trump himself might. →

So, Trump refused to give up his business interests when he became president, leaving the door wide open to control, whether through bribes or sanctions. And he and his family have taken enormous bribes from various authoritarian regimes. We'll see whether our allies figure out they can control Trump by hitting back with personal sanctions instead of tariffs (which would mostly hurt our poor, as if Trump cares at all about anyone but himself).If you want to deal with Trump, you have to do it directly.

Scott Gilmore, from Canada:

 

As I’ve pointed out before, the President can be successfully engaged, and countries like Ukraine, China, and Qatar have demonstrated this. When they want something from the United States, they skip the State Department, and even the White House staff. Instead of approaching their problem state-to-state, they go state-to-man. These countries focus on what Trump wants on a personal level – to enrich his family. So Beijing granted Ivanka trademarks, Qatar invested in one of Jared’s office towers, and Ukraine, with Slavic candor, simply wired half a million dollars to the President’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen.
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Until this President, every previous modern occupant of the White House divested their assets upon assuming office. This eliminated the possibility personal business interests might benefit from political decisions. Conversely, it prevented others from threatening the President by attacking those assets. Trump, by refusing to give up his businesses, and by flagrantly violating the emoluments clause, has inadvertently handed us the perfect stick.
I propose that instead of taxing the import of American serviettes, we tax Trump. In the spirit of the Magnitsky Act, Canada and the western allies come together to collectively pressure the only pain point that matters to this President: his family and their assets. This could take the form of special taxation on their current operations, freezing of assets, or even sanctions against senior staff. Canada could add a tax to Trump properties equal to any tariff unilaterally imposed by Washington.  The European Union could revoke any travel visas for senior staff in the Trump organization. And the United Kingdom could temporarily close his golf course.

It’s time for America to get smart on trade →

Trump doesn't know (or at least care) what he's talking about (again). His proposed tariffs are primarily going to hurt our poor, our manufacturing, and our closest allies. Europe's already working out deals without us because we're now untrustworthy. And China, unlike what Trump claims, is mostly benefiting from the chaos.

Tariffs are a regressive tax. Trump has tried to claim that tariffs are a way in which the U.S. government can “charge a country” for imported their goods. But tariffs do not do that. They are a tax on U.S. consumers who buy imported goods...
Trump has bragged about “many Billions of Dollars” that the tariffs would bring into U.S. coffers. Those taxes disproportionately hurt poor consumers, however. The next time Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro claims that tariffs help low-income Americans, understand that he is lying.
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The United States, in violating the rules of the game, guarantees retaliation. The Trump administration is relying on national security provisions of the 1962 Trade Act to impose its tariffs on aluminum and steel. The national security logic is risible in the extreme, especially since these tariffs are disproportionately focused on U.S. allies...

Most Americans don’t realize Robert Mueller’s investigation has uncovered crimes →

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One can interpret this pattern of behavior in a few ways. One is that Mueller is steadily putting in place the building blocks of a huge, mafia-style takedown that will end with Manafort “flipping” under pressure and new indictments coming against members of Donald Trump’s family and damning evidence about Trump himself. Another would be that when placed under a microscope by an aggressive prosecutor, several Trump aides turn out to have been involved in financial malfeasance only loosely related to the Trump campaign and Trump himself did nothing wrong. But there is definitely evidence of crimes — including some serious ones — by a range of figures, some Russian and some Americans and some working at a very high level in Trumpworld. 
Yet despite what most Americans perceive to be a very steady drumbeat of Trump-Russia news, the majority of the public is completely unaware of these critical facts. 
That suggests that the press as a whole has not done a good job of actually conveying factual information to our audience, that Democrats’ messaging on the investigation has not been clear enough on the most damning point (Trump, even if otherwise innocent, is guilty of hiring crooks and trying to prevent an investigation into their activity), and that Trump’s counterstrategy of muddying the waters around the investigation has been fairly successful.

John Brennan: I will speak out until integrity returns to the White House →

Impeach Trump, then remove him from office.

...Presidents throughout the years have differed in their approaches to policy, based on political platforms, ideologies and individual beliefs. Mr. Trump, however, has shown highly abnormal behavior by lying routinely to the American people without compunction, intentionally fueling divisions in our country and actively working to degrade the imperfect but critical institutions that serve us. 
Although appalling, those actions shouldn’t be surprising. As was the case throughout his business and entertainment careers, Mr. Trump charts his every move according to a calculus of how it will personally help or hurt him. His strategy is to undercut real, potential and perceived opponents; his focus is to win at all costs, irrespective of truth, ethics, decency and — many would argue — the law. His disparagement of institutions is designed to short-circuit legitimate law enforcement investigations, intelligence assessments and media challenges that threaten his interests. His fear of the special counsel’s work is especially palpable, as is his growing interest in destroying its mandate.
For more than three decades, I observed and analyzed the traits and tactics of corrupt, incompetent and narcissistic foreign officials who did whatever they thought was necessary to retain power. Exploiting the fears and concerns of their citizenry, these demagogues routinely relied on lies, deceit and suppression of political opposition to cast themselves as populist heroes and to mask self-serving priorities. By gaining control of intelligence and security services, stifling the independence of the judiciary and discrediting a free press, these authoritarian rulers followed a time-tested recipe for how to inhibit democracy’s development, retard individual freedoms and liberties, and reserve the spoils of corrupt governance for themselves and their ilk. It never dawned on me that we could face such a development in the United States...