What’s more amusing than a process termed as “Spit and Acquit”? The name of the person administering it today.
Let’s go to my neighbor Orange County, California. The publication Voice of OC explains what “Spit and Acquit” is:
“The DNA collection program, colloquially known as Spit and Acquit, was started by former District Attorney Tony Rackauckus in 2007 and offered misdemeanor defendants a choice – face charges, or pay a small fee and submit your DNA to a countywide database.”
As far as I can tell, the database was used lawfully. A January 2025 report indicated that the database was used over 12,000 times to generate “hits or leads.” Yes, leads. As in “investigative leads.” Not arrest warrants. So no problem there.
But UCI criminology professor emeritus William Thompson was concerned about the potential for unconstitutional arrests, and initiated a lawsuit that was just settled.
“Now, anyone whose DNA was collected or is collected in the future will automatically have their DNA expunged after 15 years for a slate of misdemeanors, including things like altering a license plate, drinking alcohol in public and disobeying direction at a stoplight.
“Other people who commit crimes that make them ineligible for automatic deletion can petition to have their DNA profile removed after 25 years provided they have not reoffended in some other way.”
However, original District Attorney Rackauckus is long gone. This isn’t the U.S. Senate, after all. His replacement, elected in 2018, is…
The UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has established the following requirements for companies training generative AI models:
identify a lawful basis for doing so;
provide meaningful transparency;
enable people to exercise their rights; and
show that you have safeguards in place to materially reduce risk.
Biometric Update identifies the companies that have pledged to abide by these principles: Amazon, Anthropic, Apple, Cohere, DeepSeek, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Stability AI.
The UK ICO picks the good and bad companies. Google Gemini.
“We’ve opened formal investigations into X Internet Unlimited Company (XIUC) and X.AI LLC (X.AI) covering their processing of personal data in relation to the Grok AI system and its potential to produce harmful sexualised image and video content.”
Of course the UK effort suffers from the same drawback that the U.S. effort does. It only applies in a single country. All the other countries can go ahead and do their own thing.
NotebookLM creates video shorts now, so I created one based on thesetwo posts. Why does the FBI certify evil Communist Chinese products? And why does Europe rely on American certifications?
Correction: because the video short is…short, it addressed the first question but not the second.
What does it take to get a product onto the FBI Certified Products List?
So I created a second short on the second topic. (Mostly accurate; NIST doesn’t manage the Certified Products List.)
Tech sovereignty.
Plus an infographic as long as I was at it. Even though infographics don’t thrill me. Too danged busy. Although this one isn’t too bad.
Global Biometric Certifications.
Repurposing is good, even if the output is canned. If NotebookLM incorporated more advanced style guides so the content looked like mine rather than Google’s, it would be dangerously useful.
But remember one caution. I only use NotebookLM to process (a) my own content, and (b) non-copyrighted content such as U.S. Government publications. Be cautious of feeding someone else’s copyrighted content into NotebookLM. It’s probably legal, but…
If you thought IAL1 was a nothingburger, what about the Joint Commitment on Frontier Responsibilities, which is receiving criticism from outside AND INSIDE the U.S. Government?
First, the signatories include President Trump, Google’s Sundar Pichai, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI’s Greg Brockman, XAI’s Elon Musk, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei. We’ve talked about Anthropic before. We’ll return to Anthropic later.
Second, the “commitment” (also known as the “White House Accord on Super Intelligence”) touts “robust internal processes and controls,” promotes empowering “an internal team” to monitor safety, calls for independent external auditors/evaluators, and also discusses setting up an independent committee of each company’s board of directors to oversee things. The document also discusses future meetings of the participants and possible legislation.
Well, I guess we got super intelligence out of the deal. Yes. Sí.
“Critics contend those measures are inadequate given the commercial and geopolitical pressure on companies to build capable models…
“Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the administration has ‘resisted meaningful safeguards without offering a serious alternative’ and questioned whether the task force will establish safety standards or review advanced models….”
And no federal commitment either
Of course you could argue that this was all the art of the deal (perhaps you’ve heard the phrase before). The techies give President Trump a platform and use his preferred phrase “super intelligence” instead of “artificial intelligence.” In return, the President gives the techies lots of money and doesn’t put roadblocks in their way. Tit-for-tat, as it were.
Except that Trump’s own Department of Defense—I mean, Department of War (check the brand guide), refuses to play along. Remember how one of the signatories on the Joint Commitment was Anthropic? Well…
“A US Department of Defence official has told the BBC the Pentagon ‘has ceased the use of Anthropic products,’ months after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth designated the AI company a ‘national security supply-chain risk’ and set a six-month phase-out.
“The February designation followed Anthropic’s refusal to lift safety guardrails on autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance. “
So let’s follow along. One of the participants in the government’s Super Intelligence event, touting how wonderful Sí is, is BANNED from use by a major government department because it is a “risk.”
So apparently the Joint Commitment DOES have teeth. Specifically, to let the federal government use AI—whoops, Sí—in any way it sees fit. And those who don’t agree get punished, even if they appear in the photo op.
It’s October 6, and this supposedly historic commitment is dead on arrival.
If you’er an individual who is a victim of an impersonation scam, turn somewhere other than the FTC. Although individuals perform “trade,” they don’t perform as much as governments and businesses.
And governments and businesses definitely have a problem, according to Christopher Mufarrige, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection.
“Free markets depend on trust, transparency and consumers’ ability to make informed choices. Impersonation scams—especially when amplified by digital platforms that profit from them—do more than rob Americans of their hard-earned money. They erode the very foundation that allows competitive markets to function. Today’s impersonation scams are no longer the work of isolated con artists; they are sophisticated, highly engineered operations powered by the same advertising and targeting tools that platforms sell to legitimate businesses. Consumers reported nearly $3.5 billion in losses to impersonation fraud last year, and the true cost is likely far higher.”
Let’s look at four key words in Mufarrige’s statement: “digital platforms that profit.”
We see this all the time, and in all sorts of circumstances. Someone allows someone else to do bad things, and when the authorities catch the second person, the first person says, “Not my problem.”
We can argue about whether the enabler is responsible. The gun dealer that sells the gun that kills the kid. The bank that processes the funds from terrorism. The third party that allows a hack of a first party’s data. Or (in this case) the platform that enables the impersonation scam to take place.
Well, the FTC is definitely going after the platforms that profit from the funds provided by the impersonators. Oh, and these platforms are an oligopoly, and in this case the Administration doesnt’ like oligopolies.
“Increasingly, consumers rely on a small number of dominant digital platforms for everyday transactions—from shopping, banking and travel bookings to accessing government services. Yet these platforms are the very places fraudsters seek out consumers, exploiting their trust while platforms profit from optimizing and disseminating scam ads.”
And you know how this is going to turn out. Marky Mark and the like are going to majestically pronounce about freedom of speech and how it’s inappropriate for them to be the ones to restrict the speech of their users.
The truth is that the platforms already try to police what’s happening, but they are terrified of false positives, where someone is accused of being a scammer when they’re not. How would YOU feel if you received a message from your favorite social media platform saying “To comply with FTC guidelines, we are removing your post because it sounds like a scam.” The post: “I love Dolly Parton.”
Are platforms responsible for entity impersonation? Google Gemini.
Anyway, get our your Jiffy Pop and pop some popcorn. The fight is about to begin.
And if you want to get your technology company’s views heard during the fight, enlist some help from Bredemarket. I have the expertise to assist your company. See https://bredemarket.com/watch-book/.
“The people in question here are Google’s Sundar Pichai, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI’s Greg Brockman, XAI’s Elon Musk, and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang. These tech leaders have signed the Joint Commitment on Frontier Responsibilities: a “morally binding” safety pledge that requires their companies to self-regulate their own AI technology with common sense guidelines and, seemingly, no ramifications for violating the agreement.”
The Joint Commitment itself (also known as the “White House Accord on Super Intelligence”) touts “robust internal processes and controls,” promotes empowering “an internal team” to monitor safety, calls for independent external auditors/evaluators, and also discusses setting up an independent committee of each company’s board of directors to oversee things. The document also discusses future meetings of the participants and possible legislation.
Anthropic’s Amodei, who recently issued warning bells, is still not convinced that things are great:
“But I think the technology has very real risks and the mechanism how we address those risks is still under discussion. But we all need to work together to make sure that we can win, and we can win safely. If we do this right, we work with the President and everyone here, we can win safely.”
In other words, more work is needed. Specifically, the internal and external controls could be robust, or they could be self serving PR. More importantly, the agreement only covers a small sliver of AI companies, and is not the worldwide agreement with every nation and robust enforcement that Bredebot recommended.
“Until every nation signs onto an international framework with actual teeth, stopping dangerous AI globally remains nearly impossible.”
So this started when I wrote “Frontier AI: Scary or Successful?” Some AI leaders want to rein in the technology, some politicians want to rein in the AI leaders, and other politicians say everything is just fine.
Then Bredebot weighed in. For those who don’t know, Bredebot is a generative AI creation. So bear that in mind when considering his words.
Bredebot and friends. Google Gemini (the image AND the bot)
Bredebot on the Scariness or Success of Frontier AI
In this post, Bredebot says that self-policing isn’t enough.
“Right now, watching the industry try to police itself feels like hiring a herd of wildebeests as marketing consultants and expecting them to give unbiased advice to their primary clients—a room full of wombats. The consultants are going to say whatever keeps the grass growing, while the wombats just hope they don’t get trampled!”
Then Bredebot goes off on a tangent about identity verification, but don’t we all? Well…I do.
So do we need Attorneys General? Or someone else?
You will recall from my original post that one politician didn’t care what the tech leaders said or signed about frontier AI restrictions. Specifically, the Attorney General of the State of Florida (James Uthmeier) is bound and determined to stop OpenAI from pursuing frontier AI.
But it is questionable whether Attorney General Uthmeier has any real sway outside Florida. What if OpenAI pulls a PornHub-like move, prohibits Floridians from accessing OpenAI, and does what it wants elsewhere?
And the case against OpenAI currently has no effect on Anthropic, xAI, Google, Meta, or any other U.S. generative AI provider.
Is frontier AI scary or successful? Technologists and politicians alike are weighing in on the issue, as this post documents.
In our last episode
As I noted in mid September, there have been two efforts by the generative AI industry itself to self-regulate frontier AI. (We’ll get to self regulation later.)
The earlier effort occurred in March 2023, when Elon Musk and others championed an effort to pause giant AI experiments.
“Therefore, we call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4. This pause should be public and verifiable, and include all key actors. If such a pause cannot be enacted quickly, governments should step in and institute a moratorium.”
More recently, a single company, Anthropic, and its head, Dario Amodei, issued a statement of its own.
“Dario Amodei wrote in an online essay that developing AI was not in question, but that the risks associated with it were “serious” and that companies and governments must be given time to address them.”
Musk agreed with this statement, as did OpenAI head Sam Altman.
But that didn’t stop Florida from taking legal action against Altman.
“Defendants admit that they provide a service without fully knowing how it works. This is not just any service. It is one that Defendants themselves concede poses an existential risk to the continued survival of humankind.”
Sounds apocalyptically dangerous.
But one Florida resident is not particularly impressed. Especially since PYMNT’s coverage of this motion includes a picture of a map showing the Gulf of Mexico.
Let’s move on.
Hey doomer
The aforementioned cautions by Anthropic’s Dario Amodei are not sitting well with allies of President Donald Trump (R-Mar a Lago).
“President Trump’s allies are targeting Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei as the face of AI doomerism’ and a founding father of the effective altruism movement that’s come under increasing political fire.”
It helps to define effective altruism, and luckily a website with that name does just that. The goal of effective altruism is to find ways to help others, and then to help them…efficiently. Because technologists know how best to do things.
But what does this have to do with modern technologies that let us generate nude deepfakes…I mean perform tasks much faster than a human could ever perform them?
Because the founders of generative AI companies are in essence effective altruists. They assert that generative AI will better the human condition. However, generative AI requires human values to ensure that the technology does not go rogue and bring Attorney General Uthmeier’s greatest fears to fruition.
Trump’s allies and Trump himself reject this assertion, as we shall see.
The smartest person in the world, and other people
President Trump hosted a meeting in Washington with leading technologists, whom he characterized as “the smartest people in the world.” Leo Hohmann wasn’t so sure.
“Among the nearly 40 tech titans invited to meet with Trump Wednesday were Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Elon Musk of X, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei.”
Hmm…Amodei? I’m sure that was interesting behind closed doors. Sam Altman did not attend.
“Trump said a ‘who’s who’ of ‘the biggest people in the world’ signed a voluntary safety pact. Trump said, ‘They almost viewed it as a separate kind of Constitution…And the biggest people in the world signed that, and I signed it as president. And it really is a form of protection.'”
Not sure how this “safety pact” jibes with other comments. Sounds like “doomerism” to me.
But returning to the issue:
“AI will be controlled by ‘self regulation.’ That means the very same corporate hierarchy that stands to gain from unleashing AI will be tasked with policing AI. As AI advances, people want to know who will watch the watchers? They stood there with straight faces and told us the answer: It will be the watchers themselves who will watch and guide and protect everything…”
Unless people like Attorney General Uthmeier stop them.
I try to fill the biometric news FOMO gaps for you at Bredemarket. Not just with breaking stories, but items that will be stories in the future.
A huge biometric bid. A not-so-huge biometric book. Changes in bank identification. Changes (maybe) in New Jersey courts. Tyranny trees. Identity Day.
Did you miss any of these stories? Read on.
Conquer biomertric news FOMO. Google Gemini.
Biometric bid due date FOMO
Take the Department of Homeland Security biometric capture device procurement (70RDA126R00000001): $440 million for finger, face, iris, palm, and multi-modal devices. So potentially up to five proposals, two volumes per proposal, two tabs per volume. That’s a lot of tabs.
Google Gemini.
Originally released Thursday September 10, the published due date was Friday, September 18 at 7:00 am Pacific. All the bidders waited for an extension announcement, which finally arrived less than half an hour before proposals were initially due. As I write this, bidders don’t have the real due date yet, other than it wasn’t due last Friday after all.
Biometric book FOMO
That last story was covered by Biometric Update. This next one understandably wasn’t.
Because Biometric Update concentrates on the biometric factor of identity verification and authentication. It occasionally touches on other factors, but not all six.
My book.
I do, which is why I plugged my book again. “Proving Humanity: The Six Factors of Identity Verification and Authentication” is for sale.
Banking digital identity FOMO
For a variety of reasons, ranging from detecting fraud to detecting terrorism, your bank or financial institution often asks you for your government identification. For example, your driver’s license.
Yes, banks can now accept mobile driver’s licenses, making things easier for banking customers. After all, we may leave our wallets at home, but we tend to keep our smartphones with us.
New Jersey court fingerprint acceptance FOMO
Unlike the stories above, there were NOT any updates on Judge Carmen Messano’s forthcoming evidentiary hearing. This hearing, when held, regards the acceptability of fingerprints as evidence in New Jersey courts. It was mandated as part of State v. French G. Lee.
Google Gemini.
Nothing yet; Messano just officially started this month. But something will happen, so I’m tracking it.
Tyranny trees FOMO
If you haven’t noticed, Flock Safety cameras are unpopular. So unpopular that people are bringing them down. Take Jevon Martinez, who brought some “tyranny trees” (his term for automated license plate recognition cameras) down and helpfully returned them to the sheriff.
Google Gemini.
And was arrested. Two words: dumb crime.
Lacking identity FOMO
Then on (as the Africans say) 16/9 ID4Africa and many others observed Identity Day 2026. 16/9 isn’t just a date; it’s a reference to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal Target 16.9 to “[p]rovide legal identity for all, including birth registration, by 2030.”
Identity Day 2026.
Avoiding biometric news FOMO
And there’s more, but rather than going back an entire week, I stopped at Wednesday.
But how can you conquer your fear of missing out on biometric news?
