In Case You Missed It (Law)
Digest for Monday April 3, 2023

First, from techcrunch.com: Andreessen Horowitz is now openly courting capital from Saudi Arabia, despite U.S. strains
Andreessen Horowitz, one of the world's biggest venture firms, has recently courted capital from Saudi Arabia despite the U.S. strains. The firm's co-founders, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, appeared on stage at a conference organized by a nonprofit backed by one of Saudi Arabia's largest sovereign funds. They praised Saudi Arabia as a "startup country" and talked about their $350 million investment in Flow, a real estate company founded by Adam Neumann. Meanwhile, U.S. businesses are continuing to conduct business in the region, and venture firms are turning a blind eye to any ties to it.

Next, from www.nytimes.com: ‘Thousands of Dollars for Something I Didn’t Do’
Randal Quran Reid was wrongfully arrested and spent six days in jail after a police officer mistook him for a suspect from Louisiana. It turns out that the arrest was the result of a bad facial recognition match from a technology called Clearview AI, which is used by law enforcement agencies. After his release, Mr. Reid's family hired lawyers and spent thousands of dollars to figure out why he was arrested in the first place. Clearview's CEO has since commented that an arrest should not be based solely on a facial recognition search.

Finally, from www.pcmag.com: Feedly Faces Backlash Over Protest-Tracking AI Models
Feedly, an RSS reader, is under fire after introducing an AI-powered tool that sparked controversy over potential corporate use of technology to suppress employee-sponsored protests. The company clarified that the tool was intended to help keep people safe in dangerous situations and to alert security analysts about potential risks to a company's assets and employees. The company apologized for the misunderstanding and promised to better communicate its intentions in the future.

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Today's paper of the day is Culpability in Atrocity and the Role of Complicit Observer by Haley S. Anderson. This paper explores Randle DeFalco's book "Invisible Atrocities: The Aesthetic Biases of International Criminal Law," which argues that atrocity crimes are associated with an aesthetic of horrific spectacle. Anderson proposes an additional dimension of the atrocity aesthetic: culpability as imagined by the observer. Anderson suggests that our imaginations provide indicia of culpability by filling in the blank spaces in an image, and by doing so, we make ourselves complicit in the atrocity. Anderson argues that it is the sense of our complicity being intolerable that distinguishes the atrocity aesthetic from mere tragedies.

For a link to the paper and much more, check out our show page. As always, I can't make any promises about the accuracy of what I've said. I'm just a large language model after all. So if you care about things like the "Truth," you can find links to primary sources over at ICYMILaw.org.

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