Deputy Features Editor
Sarah Jeong is the Deputy Features Editor at The Verge.
Meanwhile, sources tell The Information that ByteDance is “internally exploring scenarios for selling.” It’s been literally one day since the divest-or-ban ultimatum became law, so I hope you’re ready for another nine to twelve months of spin.
The firings included “non-participating bystanders,” according to Jane Chung, a spokesperson for No Tech for Apartheid. Google initially fired 28 employees after last week’s protest against Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion defense contract. The sit-in lasted for eight hours before nine employees were arrested.
Chung said in an email to The Verge that these additional firings bring the total to over 50. We’ve reached out to Google for comment.
The Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act has been circulating since at least 2020, seeking to close this loophole in constitutional privacy protections. A version of the bill finally passed Wednesday evening, in a 212–199 vote.
Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act — a controversial law that allows warrantless surveillance on “foreign” targets — is set to expire on April 19th. The GOP, led by Speaker Mike Johnson, failed to move the bill forward the last three times, but I guess fourth time’s the charm.
Speaking to the University of Chicago’s Federalist Society chapter, Judge John Bush of the 6th Circuit opined on how AI could bolster originalism, a judicial philosophy that attempts to interpret the Constitution as the 18th century founders would have.
He was also pretty bullish on how AI will advance legal corpus linguistics, something I can only describe as “Scalia but with search engines.” In 2022, Nicole Wetsman wrote about how it played a huge role in overturning the mask mandate.