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Riana

@riana.bsky.social

9.6K followers 1.4K following 3.1K posts

Tech policy researcher at Stanford. Former litigator. Anger is an energy. Dum spiro spero. she/her

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Riana

@riana.bsky.social

a picture of a microscopic tardigrade playing the world's smallest violin

November 20, 2025 at 11:56 PM

Riana

@riana.bsky.social

In the Epstein Administration, tanking child sexual exploitation & adult sex trafficking investigations is a bug, not a feature.

From February through April of this year, H.S.I. agents nationwide worked the fewest hours on child exploitation that they have during that period in more than a decade, according to The Times’s data analysis.

During that same period, H.S.I. agents spent at least five times as many hours working immigration cases as they did on average during Mr. Trump’s first term. More recent data was not available because of the government shutdown.

The pressure to ramp up low-level immigration enforcement has had negative impacts on more complex human smuggling and sex and labor trafficking cases, according to federal officials.

One federal prosecutor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that such cases were stagnating as H.S.I. investigators were sidetracked with immigration roundups. Agents from H.S.I.’s Center for Countering Human Trafficking, which assists trafficking investigations, have been reassigned to Mr. Trump’s anti-crime crackdown in Washington, according to a federal law enforcement official.

November 17, 2025 at 1:26 AM

Riana

@riana.bsky.social

on the road today, I saw a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac

www.nytimes.com/2025/11/08/r...

On Oct. 29, as Hurricane Melissa bore down on the Caribbean, more than 100,000 people flocked to Fort Lauderdale to look at the 1,300 vessels on display. More than 200 of them were classified as superyachts, meaning they were at least 24 meters long (78.7 feet), or about the length of a tennis court. On the opening day, as rain pelted the docks, crews mopped the decks and leaned over the hulls to wipe the fiberglass dry. A squad of cheerleaders in blue and white uniforms, clutching their pompoms, practiced a routine to Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us” amid the crowd.

November 8, 2025 at 11:02 PM

Riana

@riana.bsky.social

INFORMATION GLADLY GIVEN BUT SAFETY REQUIRES AVOIDING UNNECESSARY CONVERSATION

November 8, 2025 at 8:46 PM

Riana

@riana.bsky.social

did Alito say anything similar to him during oral arg in that child slave labor case or nah

"...Justice Samuel Alito was characteristically dyspeptic with Neal Katyal, who represented the private plaintiffs, viciously and needlessly accusing him of betraying his personal principles to win this case for his clients...."

November 5, 2025 at 10:44 PM

Riana

@riana.bsky.social

That sound you hear is the screaming of platforms' discovery counsel who'd have to manage a barrage of 3rd-party subpoenas from users whose content/accounts get actioned under TOS, sue the govt, then go trawling for discovery to look for any govt link to the actioning.

rollcall.com/2025/10/29/t...

Cruz said his upcoming legislation will be “designed to provide transparency for when the federal government is urging tech platforms and other companies to censor and to provide for a cause of action to sue the government if and when somebody is censored.”

He pressed the executives, Google’s Vice President for Government Affairs and Public Policy Markham Erickson and Meta’s Vice President for Public Policy Neil Potts, if they would broadly support that kind of legislation, which they said they would, depending on the specific statutory text.

October 30, 2025 at 9:44 PM

Riana

@riana.bsky.social

This time the DOJ's "whetting the appetite" argument was tied to the *photorealism* of the images, but if they're also making the same argument about text or drawings in other cases, then it's just a stock argument.

Excerpt from my notes on what DOJ said: "but Osborne makes clear that language doesn’t reach as far as JB makes it sound. Osborne said Stanley doesn’t reach actual CSAM because of the harms to children, real children. That’s what makes this case more like Osborne than Stanley. The prosecution concerns that were in play in FSC are ever more pronounced today and so I urge the court to look no further than the images here, where the images are totally indistinguishable of actual real children being actually really sexually abused. That indistinguishability, that technological advancement, puts that concern ever more starkly in relief in this case and puts the prosecution rationale front and center with regard to the other child protection interests that are deeply at stake in this case and which Congress targeted when enacting 1466A. I urge the court to reverse."

October 30, 2025 at 5:46 PM

Riana

@riana.bsky.social

This is, of course, all just as I predicted nearly two years ago. www.lawfaremedia.org/article/addr...

Excerpt from my Lawfare paper: "What’s more, where CG-CSAM creators keep their material to themselves and never share it, they might
be protected by the constitutional right to privately possess obscene matter.102 That right applies only to
obscenity, not (photographic) CSAM, given the state’s interest in child protection.103 And it doesn’t
cover obscene materials that have moved in interstate commerce, like internet downloads.104 But it
means not all private CG-CSAM possession could be banned. Abuse-trained CG-CSAM surely can be,
as can obscene CG-CSAM that was downloaded from the internet or generated on third-party servers.105
But for morphed-image CG-CSAM, the “harm to child victims” rationale carries less force if the image
is never shared and the child depicted is unaware of it.106 And the closest question involves obscene, ..."

(Lawfare excerpt continues) "...wholly virtual CG-CSAM generated at home using equipment that had moved in commerce.107 Section
1466A’s current Commerce Clause language falls short of “the outer limits of [Congress’s]
authority.”108 But there must be some limit; otherwise, stretched far enough, the interstate-commerce
hook would swallow the right to privately possess obscenity. At any rate, enforcing a ban on generating
and possessing CG-CSAM for purely private, personal use is infeasible as a practical matter in a free
society."

October 30, 2025 at 5:28 PM

Riana

@riana.bsky.social

2x, a member of the panel asked a technical Q - 1 to the govt (Ross Goldman of DOJ CEOS), 1 to defense (Joe Bugni). Depending how this case comes out, the future might hold a lot of fact-specific cases where the 1466A possession charge turns on how the particular AI software used, actually works.

Court: Can I ask you about Stable Diffusion? Some technological Qs? In FSC, Kennedy mentioned morphed images. He said we’re not dealing with morphed images. That was before “this whole AI thing” came about. AI images are the ultimate morphed images. Is there any way to disaggregate an AI image? If SD takes all these real images and combines them, is there - from the literature - it seems that sometimes the person it creates is unrecognizable from any real person and other times you can tell who that person is and it’s a direct correlation to the images out there on the Internet. Is there any way to determine the source of an image that SD creates, to your knowledge?

Goldman: I think part of what’s tricky is the terminology point. AI-generated imagery, think of it in two separate buckets. One is a morphed image, using AI to manipulate an image of a person. And then, for lack of a better word, a “pure” AI generated image, not depicting a real minor. That’s what this case is about, the defendant using SD, entering prompts, “create a picture of this child doing XYZ.” And the image is photorealistic. But we know in many ways indistinguishable from an actual child, but from discovery we know it’s not an actual child.

Court: Would you concede that if the AI generated data isn’t produced on that computer but goes off to some website, AWS or whatever that’s housing something, and then comes back to the computer, then it’s transported? Not just produced in someone’s house? I’m no tech expert but are you conceding the govt could prove the charge that way and not run afoul of FSC and Stanley? If the computer didn’t do everything necessary for that image?

JB: That gets us into the receipt category which you commonly see with CP downloads. But I wouldn’t give that away. The allegation is that it was created on the computer. How that happens exactly, does it go out to AWS, I don’t know that yet so I wouldn’t give that away.

October 30, 2025 at 5:24 PM

Riana

@riana.bsky.social

trying to keep track of Internet law case updates in 2025

Sandra Bullock in the car with Sylvester Stallone in Demolition Man; she's saying "so now all lawsuits are NetChoice v. Bonta"

October 29, 2025 at 8:07 PM

Riana

@riana.bsky.social

this is now the entire homepage of the demolition company destroying the White House, I am dying acecoworld.com

this is what the homepage *used* to look like: web.archive.org/web/20250808...

it's a graphic that says ACECO: REDEFINING DEMOTION (in all capital letters) over a text that says "THIS SITE IS UNDER CONSTRUCTION" in all white capital letters on a black background. that's the entire website

October 21, 2025 at 10:39 PM

Riana

@riana.bsky.social

counting up which of these are topics I've researched or given presentations about, feeling pretty good about the relevance of my work

(I am currently at UW-Seattle where I gave a talk last night about AI-CSAM and will give a talk about deepfake evidence in court cases momentarily)

From the satirical site replacement.ai:
Anti-Misuse Voluntary Agreement
We don't actually know how to remove dangerous capabilities from our systems, and can't reallllly prevent you from using our products to hurt people. So we simply ask that all users please tick the box below to PINKY PROMISE that you won’t use our AI to:

Hack into the power grid
Build a bioweapon
Make nonconsensual deepfakes
Scam the elderly
Break into nuclear command and control systems
Create fake evidence for court cases
Manipulate elections
Create and/or disseminate misinformation
Orchestrate coordinated disinformation campaigns
Create child sexual abuse material
Anything else too unseemly - we're trusting you!

I agree to the Anti-Misuse Voluntary Agreement

October 21, 2025 at 6:45 PM

Riana

@riana.bsky.social

how I am getting around while commercial air travel is affected by the shutdown

A framed painting against a pink wall, by Henry Singleton, depicting Ariel (the spirit from The Tempest) riding a bat through the night sky. The painting is about 205 years old. Seen at the William Blake exhibit at the National Gallery, Budapest. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/singleton-ariel-on-a-bats-back-n01027

October 7, 2025 at 2:41 AM

Riana

@riana.bsky.social

And, now we finally know what Wang's being investigated for: false statements to the government & wire fraud - two workhorses of federal criminal law - plus federal program fraud. Sounds like it's related to the funding issue described in news reports from April: www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

October 4, 2025 at 7:25 PM

Riana

@riana.bsky.social

Here's the most important part: Grand jury proceedings are super-duper-secret. I excluded GJ stuff from my request & asked it to be redacted. But DOJ tried to twist the GJ secrecy rule. They argued that anything they MIGHT SOMEDAY present to a GJ should also stay sealed forever. The court says: Nah.

The Government cites to EyeCare Physicians to argue that it would be improper to
unseal any materials that may be presented to a grand jury because it would violate the secrecy
of grand jury proceedings. (Dkt. 9 at 4). The Court is not persuaded. In EyeCare Physicians,
the sealed documents contained references to grand jury proceedings. And, as previously
discussed, the Movant does not seek to unseal any information about grand jury proceedings.
The secrecy of any grand jury proceedings would not be compromised by unsealing warrants
and supporting materials that a grand jury may review. The mandate to keep grand jury
proceedings secret can be fulfilled by redacting all references to just proceedings. It does not
require that all materials that may be reviewed by a grand jury be kept secret. In addition, as the
Movant points out in her notice of supplemental authority, the Government has recently argued
in favor of unsealing redacted grand jury transcripts in United States v. Epstein, No. 19-cr-490
(S.D.N.Y. motion filed July 18, 2025). (Dkt. 19).

October 4, 2025 at 6:36 PM

Riana

@riana.bsky.social

Long Live Los Angeles // become so ungovernable you are not even in the fossil record

A photo of small painted signs hanging on a wire fence outside a gallery near LACMA saying "ICE OUT OF LA," "LONG LIVE LA," "WE <3 LA," etc

A photo of a church on Franklin Avenue in Hollywood with a red AIDS banner on the building and a sign outside it saying "Jesus was a refugee" in English and Spanish

A poster by artist Mark Dion at the La Brea Tar Pits. It's showing a skeleton of an ancient (extinct) American camel, but instead of being the names of bones, the labels pointing to various bones are the names of various musical acts from L.A., from X to Digable Planets to 30 Seconds to Mars.

A sign from an exhibit at the La Brea Tar Pits that reads, "These and other factors affect our sample of past life. For example, several water birds known to have lived in Southern California are missing because there were no suitable lakes nearby. Animals active at night were not often trapped because cool evening temperatures cause the asphalt to solidify. Why raccoons are missing from the record here is still a mystery."

September 28, 2025 at 4:37 AM

Riana

@riana.bsky.social

The Center for the Alignment of AI Alignment Centers is mercilessly savage in this regard. alignmentalignment.ai/caaac/blog/p...

We're pivoting to reportless reporting
Our latest research finds that no one reads our research, including the research about no one reading our research. So we're pivoting to a new model of reportless reporting

October 11, 2025
We're committed to continuous assessment of our own research practices to ensure we're efficiently burning through large piles of money.

With this in mind, we recently published a research report which found that no one reads our research reports — including our research into no one reading our reports.

September 19, 2025 at 6:46 PM

Riana

@riana.bsky.social

I published this *two days* before l'affaire Kimmel began.

www.techdirt.com/2025/09/15/t...

Excerpt from a Techdirt guest blog post I published on Monday, which reads: The FTC got its nose in the tent with consent orders. Consent orders aren’t an inevitable conclusion to an FTC investigation; they’re just the more popular option than litigating. Aylo (and NGL before it) decided to go along to get along. But that’s not how bullies work. Aylo’s deluding itself if it believes this settlement is going to satisfy agency commissioners who think pornography should be illegal, its producers should be imprisoned, and sites carrying it should be shuttered. Their ultimate goal is scorched earth, not a slap on the wrist. This is an agency that’s openly declared war on tech platforms and their supposed “censorship.” Whichever UGC platform gets targeted next had better understand the existential stakes and make a decision: do they want to be the next Media Matters, or the next CBS? Whether it’s the FTC or any other part of this government, appeasement is not the answer.

September 18, 2025 at 11:25 PM

Riana

@riana.bsky.social

Pink Post-It note from Bowie’s notes for a planned musical(!), the Post-It has a handwritten note in pen that just says “many sex scenes”

September 18, 2025 at 5:38 AM

Riana

@riana.bsky.social

NCMEC itself was specifically encouraged IN THAT SAME FEDERAL LAW to write guidelines for platforms on how to search for the enticement and child sex trafficking offenses that NCMEC is now saying saw a spike in reports!