#Judge Beryl Howell
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A three-judge panel of the District Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals has denied former President Trump’s request to block one of his attorneys from turning over documents to a grand jury looking into whether he broke the law by retaining classified documents at his Florida residence and whether he obstructed the investigation into his alleged retention of the documents.
Circuit Judges Nina Pillard, J. Michelle Childs and Florence Pan issued a brief order lifting an administrative stay of a lower court order compelling attorney Evan Corcoran to turn over documents – including recordings of Mr. Trump – to a grand jury working under the supervision of Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith.
The panel ordered Mr. Corcoran to comply with the 17 March order from District Judge Beryl Howell, who until last week was Chief Judge of the US District Court for the District of Columbia.
Judge Howell reportedly found that Mr. Smith, who had asked for an order compelling Mr. Corcoran’s testimony, had met the burden to show Mr. Trump had used the attorney’s legal advice in the commission of a crime.
Known as the “crime-fraud exception” to attorney-client privilege, the exception allows Mr. Smith to compel Mr. Corcoran to testify and produce documents that would ordinarily be shielded by the privilege, which generally guards communications between an attorney and a client.
The ruling means Mr. Corcoran will have to provide the grand jury evidence that could be used to indict Mr. Trump on charges that he obstructed a DOJ investigation into whether he unlawfully retained classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago beach club for more than a year after his term as President ended in January 2021.
#us politics#news#donald trump#republicans#conservatives#gop#2023#the independent#District Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals#classified documents#classified documents probe#obstruction of justice#department of justice#jack smith#special counsel#judge Nina Pillard#judge J. Michelle Childs#judge Florence Pan#Evan Corcoran#Judge Beryl Howell#crime-fraud exception#attorney client privilege
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A Dash of This, and a Dab of That ...
Well, my friends, it’s about time for me to vent a bit of the snark that’s been building this week … and you’ll be surprised that I don’t mention the “t-word” one single time!
What price tag on 48 years of a life?
You think you’ve had a rough life? Think of 70-year-old Glynn Simmons who was just exonerated after spending 48 years, one month and 18 days in a prison in Oklahoma for a crime he did…
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#Glynn Simmons#Judge Beryl Howell#Nikolas Cruz#Parkland school shooting#Ruby Freeman & Shaye Moss#Rudy Giuliani#Scot Peterson#wrongful imprisonment
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"A federal judge has ruled that artwork created solely by artificial intelligence cannot be copyrighted because “human authorship is an essential part of a valid copyright claim.”
The decision, issued by Judge Beryl Howell, stemmed from computer scientist Stephen Thaler’s efforts to copyright an image he said was created by an AI model, identified as Creativity Machine. Thaler claimed that as the owner of Creativity Machine, he was entitled to the copyright. The Copyright Office rejected that application on the grounds that human authorship is necessary to secure a copyright, prompting Thaler to sue.
Howell ultimately upheld the Copyright Office’s decision, citing long-standing precedent about human authorship. “The act of human creation — and how to best encourage human individuals to engage in that creation, and thereby promote science and the useful arts — was thus central to American copyright from its very inception,” Howell wrote. “Non-human actors need no incentivization with the promise of exclusive rights under United States law, and copyright was therefore not designed to reach them.” ...
Howell’s opinion did nod to the drastically shifting landscape of copyright law in the AI era. She even acknowledged Thaller’s own argument about the malleability of copyright law to account for changes in technology. But again, Howell noted that human authorship remained key."
-via Rolling Stone, August 18, 2023
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A federal judge on Friday upheld a finding from the U.S. Copyright Office that a piece of art created by AI is not open to protection. The ruling was delivered in an order turning down Stephen Thaler’s bid challenging the government’s position refusing to register works made by AI. Copyright law has “never stretched so far” to “protect works generated by new forms of technology operating absent any guiding human hand,” U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell found.
Yes, obviously.
How could AI created art be copyrighted if it's just literally a conglomerate of work that in many cases is already copyrighted?
This means the studios would presumably not be able to copyright their content, in the case that they use AI generated scripts for example, as those scripts would have depended on stolen work to begin with.
#byler#stranger things#wga strike#aftra strike#interesting#i do think that loopholes could exist#especially for actors and their likeness being used without their knowledge/consent#that's already happening#same with animators#i don't think this is going to solve things instantaneously#but it does at least somewhat curb this current vision of the possiblity writers could be taken over completely or even mostly by ai#bc how could you possibly copyright that?
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Another self proclaimed idiot goes to prison.
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Dirty Jack Smith and Obama Judge Beryl Howell Attempt to Cover-Up How Both Suggested Trump Was a 'Flight Risk' to Justify Secret X/Twitter Search Warrant | The Gateway Pundit | by Cristina Laila
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"Giuliani's renewed motion urging this Court to reverse its prior findings and rulings and to override the jury's considered verdict on the basis of five threadbare arguments falls well short of persuading that 'the evidence and all reasonable inferences that can be drawn therefrom are so one-sided that reasonable men and women could not have reached a verdict in [plaintiffs'] favor,'" U.S. District Judge Beryl A. Howell said in her ruling Monday.
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things I've learned about ai art so far
So with the distressingly plausible rumour that Matt "never witnessed a credible threat in his life" Photo is planning a deal with Midjourney, I decided to actually investigate machine learning properly. Here are things I have learned, in no particular order:
ai doesn't real
tumblr's image data is a dirty mess of untagged, improperly tagged, unattributed, misattributed, undescribed, poorly described, and outright stolen images, it's not good value for training a machine learning model
Midjourney is currently not even doing large-scale training and doesn't need new data
Midjourney seem unlikely to buy tumblr data
Midjourney quite possibly may not even know Matt "totes not a transphobe prommy" Photo is planning a deal with them
Matt "midlife crisis" Photo may just be building castles in the air about big lucrative machine learning deals he assumes are just out there waiting for him
Glaze and Nightshade don't work against Midjourney
Glaze and Nightshade don't work against DALL-E
Glaze and Nightshade don't work against LoRAs
Glaze and Nightshade work against Stable Diffusion under lab conditions. Maybe.
their results have been resistant to replication (that's science words for no one else can get it to work even when they try really hard)
Glaze and Nightshade use Stable Diffusion to generate the stenographic mask (iow the "poisoned" image is an ai generated and altered copy of the original)
Stable Diffusion encodes an invisible (stenographic) watermark to exclude its own output from subsequent training sets
this is because machine learning models collapse when trained on their own output
a tool to emulate this invisible watermark is available
only Stable Diffusion checks for it, the rest don't
Stable Diffusion's invisible watermark functions can be disabled
Glaze and Nightshade don't work against Stable Diffusion in the wild
there are several reasons for this
one is that it would require a substantial portion of images in a training set to be Glazed or Shaded to actually affect the model and do you have any idea how many images there are?
another is that training for image models isn't actually ongoing the way it is for text models
image models are no longer doing large-scale training crawls that would be affected by any countermeasures taken now
the large-scale training sets have been completed, they're done, it's over, they're not mass-indexing new images anymore
tumblr was probably already indexed no later than 2022
your art isn't "in" the training set
machine learning models don't download or copy images to a database, they "look" at them, "read" them, and do a bunch of statistics about them
that's literally why the fingers and teeth are like that, they don't snip out elements from existing images and smoosh them together (that's what human photomontage artists like me do thx), they calculate the statistical likelihood of the next part of a shape, and statistically the thing most likely to appear next to a tooth is another tooth
a mathematical description of some properties of your art might be in a training set and it's too late to do anything about it
r/StableDiffusion is a hive of scum and villainy
the most despicable ai hypebro strawman you can conceive of pales in comparison to the aggressively smug, self-entitled, gloating mediocrity of the comments in that sub
ai hypebros absolutely love trolling you
they love when you panic about ai, it gets them off
actual machine learning researchers find ai hypebros just as tedious and insufferable as the rest of us do
people on tumblr are really fucking ableist about machine learning
you people need to work on yourselves
in 2023 United States District Court Judge Beryl A. Howell ruled that ai generated images can’t be copyrighted, asserting that "Human authorship is a bedrock requirement of copyright."
it's free stock
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Prosecutors in the special counsel's office have presented compelling preliminary evidence that former President Donald Trump knowingly and deliberately misled his own attorneys about his retention of classified materials after leaving office, a former top federal judge wrote Friday in a sealed filing, according to sources who described its contents to ABC News.
U.S. Judge Beryl Howell, who on Friday stepped down as the D.C. District Court's Chief Judge, wrote last week that prosecutors in special counsel Jack Smith's office had made a "prima facie showing that the former president had committed criminal violations," according to the sources, and that attorney-client privileges invoked by two of his lawyers could therefore be pierced.
Trump has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing in his handling of classified documents.
In her sealed filing, Howell ordered that Evan Corcoran, an attorney for Trump, should comply with a grand jury subpoena for testimony on six separate lines of inquiry over which he had previously asserted attorney-client privilege.
Sources added that Howell also ordered Corcoran to hand over a number of records tied to what Howell described as Trump's alleged "criminal scheme," echoing prosecutors. Those records include handwritten notes, invoices, and transcriptions of personal audio recordings.
In reaching the so-called prima facie standard to pierce Corcoran's privilege, Howell agreed prosecutors made a sufficient showing that on its face would appear to show Trump committed crimes. The judge made it clear that prosecutors would still need to meet a higher standard of evidence in order to seek charges against Trump, and more still to prove his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
"It is a lower hurdle, but it is an indication that the government had presented some evidence and allegation that they had evidence that met the elements of a crime," Brandon Van Grack, a former top national security official in the Justice Department who is now in private practice, told ABC News.
Howell found that prosecutors showed "sufficient" evidence that Trump "intentionally concealed" the existence of additional classified documents from Corcoran, sources said, putting Corcoran in an unwitting position to deceive the government.
It's unclear what evidence Howell may have reviewed under seal from both DOJ and Trump's attorneys to help her arrive at her decision.
In response to ABC News, a Trump campaign spokesperson said, in part, "Shame on Fake News ABC for broadcasting ILLEGALLY LEAKED false allegations from a Never Trump, now former chief judge, against the Trump legal team."
"The real story here, that Fake News ABC SHOULD be reporting on, is that prosecutors only attack lawyers when they have no case whatsoever," the spokesperson said.
A spokesperson for the special counsel's office declined to comment to ABC News.
The developments described by sources illustrate another dimension of the former president's ongoing legal vulnerabilities. As Smith's classified documents probe marches forward, prosecutors in New York are mulling a separate indictment against Trump over hush payments he allegedly paid to an adult film star ahead of the 2016 presidential election. Trump also faces scrutiny in Georgia over his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election in the state, and Smith is continuing his own probe into Trump's attempts to interfere in the 2020 election.
Central to Smith's efforts in the classified documents probe is determining whether lawyers who represented the former president falsely certified in response to a grand jury subpoena that Trump had returned all classified records to the government or whether Trump himself sought to conceal records that he might have unlawfully retained.
Federal prosecutors have claimed that lawyers for Trump certified in June 2022 that a "diligent search" of Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate turned up just 38 classified documents stored in a secured storage room. But two months later, when FBI agents raided the premises, they found more than 100 additional documents marked classified -- some of which were located outside of the storage room, including in Trump's office desk, prosecutors said.
In her order last Friday, Howell was unsparing in her criticism of Trump's actions since early last year in response to the governiment's attempts to retrieve all classified documents taken from the White House. At one point she described Trump's interactions with officials from the National Archives as a "dress rehearsal," sources said, for his later efforts at misdirection in response to the grand jury subpoena.
As ABC News has previously reported, investigators sought to compel the testimony of Corcoran and another Trump attorney, Jennifer Little, as part of their probe, citing the crime-fraud exception, which allows for attorney-client privilege to be pierced in cases where it is suspected that legal services were rendered in the commission of a crime. Sources told ABC News that Howell ordered Little's testimony as well, with the exception of one of the topics for which she sought to assert attorney-client privilege.
Sources said prosecutors have sought to question Corcoran on how he aided another Trump attorney, Christina Bobb, in drafting the June 2022 statement to the Justice Department, which Bobb ultimately signed.
Attorneys for Trump were expected to appeal Howell's Friday ruling, sources said.
#us politics#news#abc news#2023#donald trump#republicans#conservatives#gop#jack smith#special counsel#classified documents#classified documents probe#attorney client privilege#Judge Beryl Howell#Evan Corcoran#Brandon Van Grack#Jennifer Little#Christina Bobb
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(via Daring Fireball: Holy Hell, Trump Did Use Twitter Direct Messages, There Were ‘Many’ of Them, and the Special Counsel Now Has Them)
Katelyn Polantz, reporting for CNN:
The special counsel’s investigation into Donald Trump and the aftermath of the 2020 election sought the former president’s Twitter direct messages, of which there were many, federal prosecutors and lawyers for Twitter revealed in newly unsealed transcripts from February court hearings about the search warrant. [...]
A lawyer representing Twitter, now called “X,” similarly confirmed in court that Trump’s account had several private messages between users on the platform. “X” was able to find both the sent direct messages and deleted messages for prosecutors, according to the transcripts.
“We were able to determine that there was some volume in that for this account. There are confidential communications,” a lawyer for Twitter said about @realDonaldTrump’s direct messages.
Alan Feuer and Maggie Haberman, reporting for The New York Times:
While it remained unclear what sorts of information the messages contained and who exactly may have written them, it was a revelation that there were private messages associated with the Twitter account of Mr. Trump, who has famously been cautious about using written forms of communications in his dealings with aides and allies.
The papers included transcripts of hearings in Federal District Court in Washington in February during which Judge Beryl A. Howell asserted that Mr. Smith’s office had sought Mr. Trump’s direct messages — or DMs — from Twitter as part of a search warrant it executed on the account in January.
In one of the transcripts, a lawyer for Twitter, answering questions from Judge Howell, confirmed that the company had turned over to the special counsel’s office “all direct messages, the DMs” from Mr. Trump’s Twitter account, including those sent, received and “stored in draft form.”
The lawyer for Twitter told Judge Howell that the company had found both “deleted” and “nondeleted” direct messages associated with Mr. Trump’s account.
I am not at all surprised that “deleted” DMs are not in fact deleted, but rather hidden. I am slightly surprised that Trump — famously averse not just to using email and text messages, but even to his own lawyers taking written notes in meetings, so as not to leave a chain of evidence for his lifelong criminal activity — would use, of all things, the infamously unencrypted direct messaging feature on Twitter. To be clear, this is a pleasant surprise.
Kyle Cheney, reporting for Politico, “Special Counsel Obtained Trump DMs Despite ‘Momentous’ Bid by Twitter to Delay, Unsealed Filings Show”:
Among the data the search warrant commanded Twitter to produce:
Accounts associated with @realdonaldtrump that the former president might have used in the same device.
Devices used to log into the @realdonaldtrump account.
IP addresses used to log into the account between October 2020 and January 2021.
Privacy settings and history.
All tweets “created, drafted, favorited/liked, or retweeted” by @realdonaldtrump, including any subsequently deleted.
All direct messages “sent from, received by, stored in draft form in, or otherwise associated with” @realdonaldtrump.
All records of searches from October 2020 to January 2021.
Location information for the user of @realdonaldtrump from October 2020 to January 2021.
As I speculated last week, nothing you do on Twitter is private. Not your DMs, not your “deleted” DMs, not your searches, not your location (if you’re foolish enough to grant Twitter/X access to it), not your draft posts.
Elon Musk comes out of this looking like he’d happily fellate Trump:
Ultimately, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell held Twitter in contempt of court in February, fining the company $350,000 for missing a court-ordered deadline to comply with Smith’s search warrant. But the newly unsealed transcripts of the proceedings in her courtroom show that the fine was the least of the punishment. Howell lit into Twitter for taking “extraordinary” and apparently unprecedented steps to give Trump advance notice about the search warrant — despite prosecutors’ warnings, backed by unspecified evidence, that notifying Trump could cause grave damage to their investigation.
“Is this to make Donald Trump feel like he is a particularly welcomed new renewed user of Twitter?” Howell asked.
“Twitter has no interest other than litigation its constitutional rights,” replied attorney George Varghese of WilmerHale, the firm Twitter deploys for much of its litigation.
But Howell returned to the theme repeatedly during the proceedings, wondering why the company was taking “momentous” steps to protect Trump that it had never taken for other uses. In the hearing on Feb. 7, 2023, Howell referenced Musk, asking: “Is it because the new CEO wants to cozy up with the former president?”
The unsealed court filing (PDF) is here, for your reading enjoyment. Hope you stocked up on popcorn, like I did, for indictment season.
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[favorite quote: “Elon Musk comes out of this looking like he’d happily fellate Trump” - ed.]
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The judge presiding over the upcoming damages trial against Rudy Giuliani said Friday she will tell jurors that the former Trump lawyer intentionally hid financial documents and other records in defiance of court orders.
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DEEP DIVE: Dishonorable Judge Beryl Howell EXPOSED IN DETAIL! Why the January 6th Judge That Presided Over Rudy Giuliani's Trial MUST BE IMPEACHED "Trump-Hating Judge Shredded The Constitution" | The Gateway Pundit | by Cara Castronuova
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