Have you heard of mega master hearings? They are spreading.
My name is Alan and I work as part of Never Again Action's Content Team. I witness these hearings as an accompanier with the Boston Immigration Justice Accompaniment Network (BIJAN). There I volunteer as one of many citizens who abhor what is being done in our names. We are silent observers on behalf of people and communities targeted by this war our government is waging on immigrants. People normally have two immigration hearings - a master and an individual. A master hearing is a session in which many peoples' cases are heard one after another. Often these hearings are for detained people trying to get bond. Past interactions with law enforcement frequently provide the government with justification to keep people locked up even when the incident was minor or the charge has been dismissed. An individual hearing comes next. The respondent and their lawyer (if any) are present and may bring witnesses to testify to the person's good character, community and family status, and so on. Circumstances like having US citizen relatives, being a sole provider for children, and similar are considered. These hearings take time and even though the denial rate is very high that's not enough for this regime. They have quotas, you see, and they continue to invent new and terrible ways to meet them. Enter the "mega master." A mega master is a mass session at which dozens of people are ordered to appear in person and rushed through. Often the people called in for mega masters are folks who had appointments for court dates in the future. They have asylum applications in progress and some have already waited years for their applications to be heard because the system is so broken and overloaded. Many receive the notice to appear in a language they don't speak and the date for them to show up is short notice. Many appear with children clinging to them because they have no childcare available. Then they're crammed into a courtroom and - if they're lucky - get a rote recitation in their language of what is going on and when they are next expected to appear. There is no chance to answer any charges or present any evidence. If people don't show up to these mega masters for any reason they are immediately ordered removed. All their pending cases are terminated, again with no opportunity to speak for themselves, or to have a lawyer challenge what is being done to them. Along with the mega masters, the regime has fired dozens of experienced immigration judges and replaced them with compliant political appointees who are expected to cut the corners necessary to hit arbitrary deportation quotas. Some of those fired judges are now - quietly - starting to spread the word about the true agenda. They tell us clearly that the purpose of mega masters is to deport as many community members as possible. People without legal representation are the most vulnerable and most easily expelled. Even those with lawyers face steep barriers in the mega master process. People should receive translations of critical documents, but advocates tell us that is not always happening. The most common excuse made by the regime for dismissing asylum claims is that people didn't file their applications soon enough. Many of the targeted people are children, often separated from their parents, who are expected to understand what is happening to them and follow rules that were never explained. Overall, the denial rate for asylum has reached 93 percent. Advocates and community organizers, using the regular court system, are continuing to push back, exposing how ICE is violating its own rules in pursuit of these unprecedented levels of cruelty. Mega masters are one new piece of a vast system of injustice. I close with a poem. The author is unknown - it is being passed around accompanier circles. I have not personally been present for these child proceedings. The adult ones I witness are heartbreaking enough. But this has finally made the public news so everyone can know that every word of this poem is true. The respondent is two years old. She appears in immigration court without counsel. Without parent. Without language. She is placed at the table alone. The clerk types anyway. I am here to observe procedure. I am here because someone decided my presence satisfies the law. The room smells of disinfectant and paper. The flag watches from the wall, flawless, unmoving. An interpreter is sworn in, then excused. The child responds to no language offered. She speaks only need, only gesture. The judge softens his voice, as if volume were the problem. "Do you understand why you're here?" She touches the microphone. It echoes her breath. She laughs once— surprised by the sound of herself made large. For the record, this is noted as nonresponsive. I write: She believes this is a room where adults will return her to what she knows. A government attorney clears his throat. Time presses onward. Stacks of cases wait. So does lunch. They ask her to point. To choose her future with a finger still soft from sleep. _ Her feet do not reach the floor. They swing— a small metronome of waiting. The judge asks her name. She answers with a sound that could mean thirst or home. She chooses a red crayon. She chooses the microphone's echo. She chooses nothing that can be kept. No one explains removal. No one explains asylum. No one explains mother in a language she understands. I am trained not to intervene. I am not permitted to hold her. I am not permitted to say that this is what abandonment looks like when it is procedural. She cries— the astonished cry of someone who has fallen through expectation. The bailiff looks away. The judge sighs. For the record, the respondent is found removable. She is escorted from the room holding nothing. Later I will sign my name beneath these observations. The transcript will appear clean. Complete. But I will remember her shoes— how they lit up when she moved, small blue flashes across the floor, trying, briefly, to testify. (Via Never Again Action)
My name is Alan and I work as part of Never Again Action's Content Team. I witness these hearings as an accompanier with the Boston Immigration Justice Accompaniment Network (BIJAN). There I volunteer as one of many citizens who abhor what is being done in our names. We are silent observers on behalf of people and communities targeted by this war our government is waging on immigrants. People normally have two immigration hearings - a master and an individual. A master hearing is a session in which many peoples' cases are heard one after another. Often these hearings are for detained people trying to get bond. Past interactions with law enforcement frequently provide the government with justification to keep people locked up even when the incident was minor or the charge has been dismissed. An individual hearing comes next. The respondent and their lawyer (if any) are present and may bring witnesses to testify to the person's good character, community and family status, and so on. Circumstances like having US citizen relatives, being a sole provider for children, and similar are considered. These hearings take time and even though the denial rate is very high that's not enough for this regime. They have quotas, you see, and they continue to invent new and terrible ways to meet them. Enter the "mega master." A mega master is a mass session at which dozens of people are ordered to appear in person and rushed through. Often the people called in for mega masters are folks who had appointments for court dates in the future. They have asylum applications in progress and some have already waited years for their applications to be heard because the system is so broken and overloaded. Many receive the notice to appear in a language they don't speak and the date for them to show up is short notice. Many appear with children clinging to them because they have no childcare available. Then they're crammed into a courtroom and - if they're lucky - get a rote recitation in their language of what is going on and when they are next expected to appear. There is no chance to answer any charges or present any evidence. If people don't show up to these mega masters for any reason they are immediately ordered removed. All their pending cases are terminated, again with no opportunity to speak for themselves, or to have a lawyer challenge what is being done to them. Along with the mega masters, the regime has fired dozens of experienced immigration judges and replaced them with compliant political appointees who are expected to cut the corners necessary to hit arbitrary deportation quotas. Some of those fired judges are now - quietly - starting to spread the word about the true agenda. They tell us clearly that the purpose of mega masters is to deport as many community members as possible. People without legal representation are the most vulnerable and most easily expelled. Even those with lawyers face steep barriers in the mega master process. People should receive translations of critical documents, but advocates tell us that is not always happening. The most common excuse made by the regime for dismissing asylum claims is that people didn't file their applications soon enough. Many of the targeted people are children, often separated from their parents, who are expected to understand what is happening to them and follow rules that were never explained. Overall, the denial rate for asylum has reached 93 percent. Advocates and community organizers, using the regular court system, are continuing to push back, exposing how ICE is violating its own rules in pursuit of these unprecedented levels of cruelty. Mega masters are one new piece of a vast system of injustice. I close with a poem. The author is unknown - it is being passed around accompanier circles. I have not personally been present for these child proceedings. The adult ones I witness are heartbreaking enough. But this has finally made the public news so everyone can know that every word of this poem is true. The respondent is two years old. She appears in immigration court without counsel. Without parent. Without language. She is placed at the table alone. The clerk types anyway. I am here to observe procedure. I am here because someone decided my presence satisfies the law. The room smells of disinfectant and paper. The flag watches from the wall, flawless, unmoving. An interpreter is sworn in, then excused. The child responds to no language offered. She speaks only need, only gesture. The judge softens his voice, as if volume were the problem. "Do you understand why you're here?" She touches the microphone. It echoes her breath. She laughs once— surprised by the sound of herself made large. For the record, this is noted as nonresponsive. I write: She believes this is a room where adults will return her to what she knows. A government attorney clears his throat. Time presses onward. Stacks of cases wait. So does lunch. They ask her to point. To choose her future with a finger still soft from sleep. _ Her feet do not reach the floor. They swing— a small metronome of waiting. The judge asks her name. She answers with a sound that could mean thirst or home. She chooses a red crayon. She chooses the microphone's echo. She chooses nothing that can be kept. No one explains removal. No one explains asylum. No one explains mother in a language she understands. I am trained not to intervene. I am not permitted to hold her. I am not permitted to say that this is what abandonment looks like when it is procedural. She cries— the astonished cry of someone who has fallen through expectation. The bailiff looks away. The judge sighs. For the record, the respondent is found removable. She is escorted from the room holding nothing. Later I will sign my name beneath these observations. The transcript will appear clean. Complete. But I will remember her shoes— how they lit up when she moved, small blue flashes across the floor, trying, briefly, to testify. (Via Never Again Action)
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Neither OpenAI or Anthropic is acting responsibly, warned AI researcher Jacob Coxon when resigning last week from Anthropic. But just hours earlier, OpenAI VP of Research Aidan Clark had posted "For the first time, I am asking myself if things are moving too fast. I'm honestly not sure, but I am sure that it would be good for us to have an answer to 'What would a successful pace look like?'"
CNN noted Wednesday they're just some of the many AI insiders who are now concerned about the speed of research. Coxon even wrote that "The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible — but I hear the same people express fear privately."
In 10 days since, Coxon's post has been viewed more than 170 million times, warning that OpenAI and Anthropic are "racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives." It's part of what CNN now calls "pressure on AI companies and governments to do something about the pace of development and safety," where "much of that pressure is coming from staffers inside the companies."
One staffer at a top AI company told CNN the fears of how AI could hurt humanity keeps them up at night. Another researcher who recently left a different AI company said it's a common subject of conversation at parties and social events in Silicon Valley. "You can't spend more than a few hours in this community without realizing that a very substantial number of people are really pretty worried about these sorts of outcomes," said the researcher. "A majority would say there's some chance of it killing everyone...." Dozens of Coxon's colleagues in the AI industry publicly supported his statements, with some making even more dire predictions... OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and SpaceXAI CEO Elon Musk agreed to Amodei's proposal to embed independent watchdogs at the AI companies...
"I would burn my equity to the ground in a heartbeat for a 1% higher chance we make it out of this situation alive. I expect a great many of my colleagues across the industry would as well," wrote Drake Thomas, who works on AI safety at Anthropic. "I promise you, we are actually just f**king scared, it's not galaxy brained marketing..." AI staffers told CNN that they fear that as AI gets better at training and improving itself, their leverage goes down, prompting today's urgency. "As we get into this recursive self-improvement loop, I think that might substantially reduce staff's bargaining power, because frankly, you'll be able to replace many of the staff with models that can do as good a job," the researcher who recently left a top AI company said.
Coxon posted Tuesday on X that Anthropic "largely initiated" the race to recursively self-improving AI, justifying it with "a belief in its inevitability." And then OpenAI "had to shed a bunch of dead weight like Sora," as he sees it, "because Anthropic was going for the jugular." (In fact, his specific disagreement with Anthropic's leadership was whether China and the U.S. could ever negotiate an alternative to their current race towards self-improving AI...)
In an informal "Ask Me Anything", Coxon responded to a question about when we'd see a Terminator-like malevolent AI by saying that "Skynet could go live in the 2030s if we aren't careful. ai-2027.com is a modern skynet story written a year ago and it's on track so far." Yet while AI development risks an end to humankind, "I do think that if we go slower we can take risk to 0%... But this requires radical action." He acknowledged there was still a possibility that the steady increases to model intelligence could suddenly plateau, but "They haven't so far, and it's just a few more steps up the ladder to hit the finish line."
To avoid stifling innovation, he recommends "prioritizing applications that actually improve people's lives [like healthcare discoveries], rather than immediately going for raw economic value or intelligence." But isn't mass unemployment a more pressing threat? "Things are coming so fast that unemployment would be a brief preliminary to deadly superintelligence."
To people who feel disempowered, Coxon offered his solidarity. "I also feel disempowered. Part of resigning was a feeling of hopelessness about the future. I would say — keep your eyes open as things get crazier and advocate for increased transparency into AI companies."
When asked if he'd start his own company now, Coxon said he had "No idea what I'm doing next."
CNN noted Wednesday they're just some of the many AI insiders who are now concerned about the speed of research. Coxon even wrote that "The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible — but I hear the same people express fear privately."
In 10 days since, Coxon's post has been viewed more than 170 million times, warning that OpenAI and Anthropic are "racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives." It's part of what CNN now calls "pressure on AI companies and governments to do something about the pace of development and safety," where "much of that pressure is coming from staffers inside the companies."
One staffer at a top AI company told CNN the fears of how AI could hurt humanity keeps them up at night. Another researcher who recently left a different AI company said it's a common subject of conversation at parties and social events in Silicon Valley. "You can't spend more than a few hours in this community without realizing that a very substantial number of people are really pretty worried about these sorts of outcomes," said the researcher. "A majority would say there's some chance of it killing everyone...." Dozens of Coxon's colleagues in the AI industry publicly supported his statements, with some making even more dire predictions... OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and SpaceXAI CEO Elon Musk agreed to Amodei's proposal to embed independent watchdogs at the AI companies...
"I would burn my equity to the ground in a heartbeat for a 1% higher chance we make it out of this situation alive. I expect a great many of my colleagues across the industry would as well," wrote Drake Thomas, who works on AI safety at Anthropic. "I promise you, we are actually just f**king scared, it's not galaxy brained marketing..." AI staffers told CNN that they fear that as AI gets better at training and improving itself, their leverage goes down, prompting today's urgency. "As we get into this recursive self-improvement loop, I think that might substantially reduce staff's bargaining power, because frankly, you'll be able to replace many of the staff with models that can do as good a job," the researcher who recently left a top AI company said.
Coxon posted Tuesday on X that Anthropic "largely initiated" the race to recursively self-improving AI, justifying it with "a belief in its inevitability." And then OpenAI "had to shed a bunch of dead weight like Sora," as he sees it, "because Anthropic was going for the jugular." (In fact, his specific disagreement with Anthropic's leadership was whether China and the U.S. could ever negotiate an alternative to their current race towards self-improving AI...)
In an informal "Ask Me Anything", Coxon responded to a question about when we'd see a Terminator-like malevolent AI by saying that "Skynet could go live in the 2030s if we aren't careful. ai-2027.com is a modern skynet story written a year ago and it's on track so far." Yet while AI development risks an end to humankind, "I do think that if we go slower we can take risk to 0%... But this requires radical action." He acknowledged there was still a possibility that the steady increases to model intelligence could suddenly plateau, but "They haven't so far, and it's just a few more steps up the ladder to hit the finish line."
To avoid stifling innovation, he recommends "prioritizing applications that actually improve people's lives [like healthcare discoveries], rather than immediately going for raw economic value or intelligence." But isn't mass unemployment a more pressing threat? "Things are coming so fast that unemployment would be a brief preliminary to deadly superintelligence."
To people who feel disempowered, Coxon offered his solidarity. "I also feel disempowered. Part of resigning was a feeling of hopelessness about the future. I would say — keep your eyes open as things get crazier and advocate for increased transparency into AI companies."
When asked if he'd start his own company now, Coxon said he had "No idea what I'm doing next."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
FR COURONS transforme chaque départ en aventure collective. Une identité épique et rassembleuse, pensée pour faire vivre l'esprit de la course bien au-delà du parcours. ? EN COURONS turns every starting line into a collective adventure. An epic, unifying identity designed to carry the spirit of running far beyond the course.
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MAASTRICHT (ANP) - Op de A2 bij Maastricht is in de nacht van vrijdag op zaterdag een man aangereden die wordt verdacht van brandstichting. De politie meldt in een persbericht dat er rond 01.10 uur een melding kwam van een voertuigbrand op de Kasteel Hillenraadweg in Maastricht. De verdachten van die brandstichting waren volgens omstanders te voet gevlucht in de richting van de A2, die parallel aan de Kasteel Hillenraadweg ligt.
Een van de verdachten werd aangereden door een personenauto, meldt de politie. Hij was aanspreekbaar en is door een ambulance meegenomen. De andere twee verdachten zijn spoorloos.
De A2-tunnel in zuidelijke richting is afgesloten vanwege het politieonderzoek naar het incident.
Disclosure comes after OpenAI and Anthropic hacks amid fears that tech firms unable to control powerful AI models
In a first for Google, the company confirmed that its AI model, Gemini, breached the security of three other companies in May. The hacks occurred during a cybersecurity evaluation by AI-security firm Irregular.
Irregular, an Israel-based startup that scrutinizes the security of advanced AI systems, was also at the center of some of the recent OpenAI and Anthropic hacks of third-party entities, including OpenAI’s breach of AI software company, Hugging Face.
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