The defense gets at least basic discovery about the facial recognition technology (FRT) used in a murder investigation, New Jersey's high court ruled Wednesday. The case, State v. Tybear Miles, is headed back down to proceed at the trial court level, where prosecutors will have to provide information such as what FRT tool was used, what image was searched, what results came back, and how police used those results in their investigation. Deeper technical material, like software source code, would not automatically have to be turned over.
Miles represents questions that courts across the U.S. will be answering as AI technology expands inside criminal justice. However, one of the main efforts to bring evidentiary rules in line with new technology has stalled. In Supplement 04, Plain Thinking dives deeper into the stalled changes to federal evidence rules on 1) machine outputs, and 2) deepfake challenges from opposing counsel.
Plain Thinking has moved to vorasync.ai. The first twenty-one issues of The Initial Report are preserved here as the public archive, and today's issue is open as part of that transition.
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Prosecutors in Queens, New York, used forgery statutes to charge a former city-council hopeful who ran his 2025 campaign on deepfakes, officials say. (Queens DA)
A federal judge in Manhattan rejected a fraud defendant's attempt to block the government from subpoenaing OpenAI for chat logs. (Reuters)
Sexually explicit deepfakes were part of a New York man's broader cyberstalking campaign on an out-of-state victim, authorities allege. (BleepingComputer / indictment)
New body cameras in Philadelphia can reportedly do real-time translation in 50 languages. (6abc Philadelphia)
A Northeast Ohio city amended its license-plate reader contract after records showed extensive outside-agency use of the system's data. (News 5 Cleveland)
An AI lawyer handled all pretrial legal work and trial preparation in an English small-claims case. (The Guardian)
Rhode Island joined a growing list of states turning AI ethics into written rules. Separately, a brand new law in the state bars therapy chatbots. (PYMNTS / Transparency Coalition)
The U.S. administration is again stepping in on a major AI company's new release, citing security concerns. (Yahoo Finance)
The EU is looking at strengthening Europol to combat more sophisticated cross-border crime. (European Commission)
Apple raised prices across its product catalog amid historic memory-chip shortages. (MacRumors)
Advanced AI is virtually unwrapping ancient scrolls containing never-before-seen philosophy. (New Scientist)
