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This Week's Updates:
CfA Urges FEC to Investigate Steve Schmidt, Dean Phillips Campaign for Illegal Coordination
This week, CfA filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) calling on the agency to investigate the Dean Phillips’ campaign and allied political strategist Steve Schmidt for violations of the Federal Election Campaign Act, which prohibits substantial coordination between super PACs and candidates. CfA’s complaint points to multiple public statements made by Schmidt declaring that he was directly advising Phillips on his campaign and had been involved in its design. Phillips, for his part, told a Time Magazine reporter that Schmidt had called him to suggest he run for president. The two eventually met in person, Phillips recalled: “…we sat at my kitchen table, and in two weeks, we stood up a presidential campaign.” A short time later, Schmidt decamped to start the Pass the Torch USA PAC, which immediately began running advertisements in support of Phillips.
The rhetoric in Pass the Torch’s ads strongly echoes Phillips’ messaging, which is part of the same strategy that Schmidt appears to have crafted during his stint with the campaign. If the communications by Pass the Torch were created, produced, or distributed after substantial discussions between Schmidt and Phillips, it would constitute a prohibited coordinated communication and a violation of FEC rules.
Meta, Harvard, and the Cost of Influence
Last month, CfA’s Tech Transparency Project (TTP) published a searchable database of donations made to U.S. academic institutions by both Meta and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), a grantmaking organization led by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chen. Now, TTP Director Katie Paul has appeared on NPR’s Marketplace Tech to explain how companies like Meta use donations to colleges and universities to further their own interests – a form of influence that’s less obvious than typical lobbying, but that also serves to sway policymakers and shape public discourse.
Here’s an excerpt of Katie’s interview:
NPR’s Lily Jamali: The database that TTP compiled looks at grants to institutions over the last five years. One of the biggest grants made by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative was for artificial intelligence research at Harvard. Meta and these other big tech companies have obviously been investing very heavily in AI and then you have, on the other side, researchers trying to understand the technology. I wonder how concerned you are by potential conflicts of interest specifically when it comes to AI.
Katie Paul: With AI right now, there’s a lot of potential for conflict of interest because we’re not just seeing a race when it comes to the development of this technology, but also a race to see who can influence Congress the fastest. As there’s more interest in regulating this kind of technology, particularly generative AI and its potential for disinformation, we see a lot of efforts on the part of major companies to try to influence these pending AI policies before Congress has a chance to catch up on the harms.
FTC Takes Aim at Voice Cloning Scams
This week, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced that it has begun accepting submissions for its Voice Cloning Challenge, which is meant to encourage the development of tools for detecting and preventing voice cloning scams. Lately, this type of fraud has been on the rise. By scraping data from publicly available videos or audio clips, scammers can use AI programs to mimic a person’s voice and place calls to family members asking for money. In November, the Senate Special Committee on Aging heard testimony from Gary Schildhorn, an attorney from Philadelphia who received a disturbing call using the voice of his son, Brett. In the call, Brett claimed that he had been arrested for drunk driving, was injured, and needed money for bail. Schildhorn was quickly bombarded with calls from a fake public defender, who told him to wire money through Bitcoin ATMs. He eventually realized something was wrong, and called his daughter-in-law to check in with Brett, who was safe and hadn’t been in an accident.
Schildhorn’s testimony illustrates several challenges the FTC is seeking to overcome with this design contest: the scammers used untraceable burner phones, and directed their victims to send payments in BitCoin, which could not be retrieved. When he went to law enforcement, they told him his recourse was limited. An ideal solution, according to the FTC’s contest guidelines, would place increased responsibility on “upstream actors” rather than consumers. Until some technical solution or screening tool can be developed, the FTC advises Americans to directly call other family members and verify any urgent requests for cash that are received over the phone.
