A robocall that used an AI voice resembling President Joe Biden’s to advise New Hampshire voters against voting in the state’s presidential primary has been linked to a pair of Texas-based telecommunications companies, the state’s attorney general announced on Tuesday.
New Hampshire Attorney General John Formella, in a news conference on Tuesday, said the source of the calls were linked to two businesses: Life Corporation and Lingo Telecom. Formella identified Walter Monk as the owner of Life Corporation.
Formella said the investigation is ongoing and suggested it involves additional entities other than Life Corporation and Lingo Telecom. He did not say who, or what entity, was ultimately behind the disinformation campaign and the creation of the AI audio. No charges have been filed, Formella said.
“We have issued a cease-and-desist letter to Life Corporation that orders the company to immediately desist violating New Hampshire election laws. We have also opened a criminal investigation, and we are taking next steps in that investigation, sending document preservation notices and subpoenas to Life Corporation, Lingo Telecom, and any other individual or entity,” Formella said.
Formella said that the robocalls numbered in the “thousands,” though he offered a wide range of 5,000 to 25,000.
The calls were made ahead of New Hampshire’s presidential primary in January, urging New Hampshire voters not to vote in the contest and instead “save” their vote for the November election.
“Republicans have been trying to push nonpartisan and Democratic voters to participate in their primary. What a bunch of malarkey,” says the digitally altered Biden voice in the call. “We know the value of voting Democratic when our votes count. It’s important that you save your vote for the November election. We’ll need your help in electing Democrats up and down the ticket. Voting this Tuesday only enables the Republicans in their quest to elect Donald Trump again.”
Biden’s campaign at the time said it had been referred to the attorney general, and slammed the call as disinformation.
“I think this case is unique in that it is providing us a real-life example of an attempt to use AI to interfere with an election,” Formella said on Tuesday. “That’s been something that we’ve been concerned about in the law enforcement for a while, and it’s certainly something that state attorneys general have talked about. But we had not seen as concrete of an example as this, days before a primary, an attempt to use AI to interfere with an election or to mislead voters.”
Formella also said that other unnamed entities potentially had relevant information about the robocalls, though he declined to share specifics.
“I’m not going to give you an exact number but I can say it’s beyond the two – it’s beyond Texas Life Corporation, Walter Monk, and Lingo Telecom. There are other entities that we think have relevant information, and I would not be surprised if we discover additional entities or individuals beyond those that we have discovered up to this point,” he said.
Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez commended Formella in a statement on Tuesday.
“Disinformation aimed at suppressing voting and deliberately undermining free and fair elections is an unacceptable threat, and we commend the New Hampshire Attorney General for taking the matter seriously and moving swiftly as a powerful example against further efforts to disrupt democratic elections,” she said.
An AI voice creation tool
The fake audio was created using an AI voice creation tool named ElevenLabs, according to two separate analyses by the security company Pindrop and by digital forensic experts at University of California, Berkeley.
ElevenLabs told CNN in a statement that it is “dedicated to preventing the misuse of audio AI tools” and that it takes appropriate action in response to reports by authorities, but declined to comment on the specific Biden deepfake call.
Monk has had run-ins with US robocall regulations before, said Formella and the Federal Communications Commission. On Monday, the FCC issued a cease-and-desist letter to Lingo Telecom and said both Lingo and Monk’s company, Life Corporation, have previously been warned about apparent illegal robocall violations.
In July of 2003, the FCC issued a citation to Life Corporation for delivering “one or more prerecorded unsolicited advertisements to residential telephone lines.”
In the citation, the FCC said Monk’s company delivered the prerecorded advertisement calls to telephone subscribers who did not have a business relationship with the company and did not authorize the calls.
The FCC’s citation found that Life Corporation did not disclose required information in the prerecorded calls – including the name of the caller, who the call is made on behalf of, and an address or telephone number.
The citation — which is addressed to Life Corporation along with 16 other business aliases for the company — notes that the unsolicited advertisement calls were in violation of the Communications Act of 1934, as well as the FCC’s rules regarding telephone solicitation.
Included in the citation is a warning that subsequent violations would result in financial penalties of up $11,000 for each such violation or each day of a continuing violation.
Telecom companies that persistently facilitate illegal robocalls can and have been forcibly disconnected from the US telephone network by FCC order, as part of a wider crackdown on illegal robocalls by state and federal officials.
More than 50 attorneys general from both political parties wrote to Life Corporation on Tuesday about the AI-generated robocall, as part of a task force focused on anti-robocall litigation.
The attorneys general expressed concerns that Life Corporation or others “may seek to replicate in each of our respective states” the type of deepfake calls that hit New Hampshire. The letter told Life Corporation “that it should cease originating any illegal call traffic immediately,” adding that the calls risked violating numerous laws.
In social media profiles reviewed by CNN, Monk describes himself as a serial entrepreneur and, in an interview with Dallas Magazine in 2016, discussed many of his business ventures that failed. The list included a company marketing “upscale survival gear” to women, which Monk reportedly spent more than $1 million of his own money on but that Dallas Magazine wrote was a “failure of epic proportions.”
One of Monk’s ventures, a company known as Voice Broadcasting, has been paid to send political robocalls and advertises the ability to send 8 million calls per day on behalf of clients. When CNN attempted to contact Voice Broadcasting, a person who answered the phone said Monk was “very busy” and that the company is “undecided” on whether to issue a statement.
Little is known about Monk’s own political history. According to Federal Election Commission filings reviewed by CNN, Monk and his ex-wife each donated $5,000 in 2008 to PLR PAC, a Kansas-based political action committee that has spent most of its receipts on advertisements airing on Spanish-language broadcast channels.
Senior US law enforcement officials have been closely monitoring the New Hampshire robocall incident to determine if a federal crime was committed, a senior US official familiar with the matter told CNN.
The official declined to discuss the status of any investigation into the robocalls, but said that the Justice Department has brought at least one recent case against a defendant accused of suppressing votes by spreading false information. That case was against Douglass Mackey, a social media influencer accused of targeting Black voters on Twitter with false messages claiming they could vote for Hillary Clinton via text message in the 2016 election. Mackey was sentenced to seven months in prison in October.
CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, Allison Gordon, Sean Lyngaas, Evan Perez and Andrew Kaczynski contributed to this report.
is this what a civilized nation does? Other advanced countries have done away with the death penalty. It is proven not to be a deterrent for others committing crime, it is often carried out on the wrong people, and it is the state sanctioning murder done in the most painful way. It is revenge and vengeance only. Also, with so many overdose deaths, why not give him an overdose of fentanyl or morphine? Too humane? Hugs. Scottie
Alabama Death Row inmate Kenneth Eugene Smith on Thursday night became the first prisoner to die using a new untested method of execution in the United States—suffocation by nitrogen gas. The 58-year-old was executed at William C. Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore. In announcing the execution had been carried out, Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey stated: “I pray that Elizabeth Sennett’s family can receive closure after all these years dealing with that great loss.”
Smith and his spiritual advisor, the Rev. Jeff Hood, had issued this joint statement prior to the execution: “The eyes of the world are on this impending moral apocalypse. Our prayer is that people will not turn their heads. We simply cannot normalize the suffocation of each other.” Hood said he has witnessed five lethal injection executions over the past year or so. “Lethal injection is preferable every single day,” over nitrogen, he said. “What we saw was minutes of someone struggling for his life,” he said.
Officials said Kenneth Eugene Smith, 58, was pronounced dead at 8:25 p.m. at an Alabama prison after breathing pure nitrogen gas through a face mask to cause oxygen deprivation.
The execution took about 22 minutes from the time between the opening and closing of the curtains to the viewing room. Smith appeared to remain conscious for several minutes.
For at least two minutes, he appeared to shake and writhe on the gurney, sometimes pulling against the restraints. That was followed by several minutes of heavy breathing, until breathing was no longer perceptible.
#USA: UN Human Rights Chief @volker_turk deeply regrets the execution of Kenneth Eugene Smith in Alabama despite serious concerns this novel & untested method of suffocation by nitrogen gas may amount to torture, or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. pic.twitter.com/NPfjXwyOmh
Alabama has executed a man who was hired by a church minister to assassinate his wife. Using an untried execution method that took 22 minutes for him to die. This is why fundamentalist Christians should never be in charge of anything. pic.twitter.com/Tj3C2amgs5
What’s disturbing to me is that there are people out there who are not satisfied that he is being put to death. They also anticipate and crave his suffering.
They were bound and determined to kill him. This was extra cruel. DOn’t tell me they couldn’t find enough Fentanyl floating around Alabama to use instead. Just make him go to sleep. Probably too peaceful for them. It’s like they wanted him to go through all of the extra suffering.
Use my code LEEJA to get 20% off for all consumer plans: https://joindeleteme.com/Leeja | Christmas swatting targeted the homes of Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jack Smith, and others. Election workers are quitting in droves because of ongoing threats to their safety. More and more people are willing to embrace violence to get their way. And this all has dire consequences for democracy.
This is the most critical thing in Utah for the elected officials to get to. What are there, 10 or 15 trans people in the state? So rather than fix kids going hungry in the summer when school is out, rather than fix medical care for poor people, rather than tackle homelessness, they are worried about who is peeing in what bathroom. Something that doesn’t matter. When you go into a public restroom it is not for a social gathering! If you are trying to see or determine what is someone else’s pants, you are a pervert and you are wrong. If you buy into the garbage that a trans person in a bathroom is just there to attack a cis female, weird they never seem concerned about trans boys attacking cis boys in bathrooms, but if that is your worry, don’t. It doesn’t happen! Facts are pesky things, the people being assaulted in bathrooms are trans people and cis women accused of being trans people. The ones doing the attacking … yes bigots, vigilante cis people thinking they have a right to police who gets to use the bathroom. This is a created panic issue by right wing religious haters who can not stand that trans people, people who are different, exist. This is all about enforcing homogeneous, forcing people to fit the right mold, to have only the correct people in society / public. About rejecting the modern age to force everyone to return to what was acceptable in the distant past. It is no different than the Amish demanding that everyone act just like them. Hugs. Scottie
The Senate spent days deciding just how anti-trans they wanted the law to be.
Utah’s Republican-dominated Senate approved a revised version of an anti-trans bathroom bill Thursday, following days of flip-flopping over just how anti-trans they wanted it to be. The state House must now sign the revised version before heading to the governor’s desk to become law.
The initial version of H.B. 257, passed by the Utah State House last week, included a provision banning transgender people from entering bathrooms and other “sex-designated privacy spaces” that align with their gender identity in “publicly funded and publicly owned” buildings unless they have updated their birth certificates and can prove that they have undergone gender confirmation surgery. Violations of the law would have been punishable by up to six months in jail.
The dangerous measure fits with the state’s long history of policing private matters.
As journalist Erin Reed noted, that version of the law would have applied to airports, convention centers, park buildings, recreational centers, public administration buildings, colleges, universities, and public schools.
On Wednesday, Utah state Sen. Dan McCay (R) introduced an amended version of the bill in the state Senate. As KUER reported, that version only applied to “government-owned and operated” buildings, like public schools, universities, and government buildings.
McCay’s version retained the original bill’s ban on transgender locker and changing room access as well as the ban on bathroom access in K–12 schools, but did away with restrictions on who can enter sex-designated bathrooms in other government buildings. McCay said the amended bill focused instead on “the actions of those who commit lewd and offensive behavior in a privacy space” and was “no longer related to gender or identity.”
But McCay reversed course on Thursday, introducing a new draft of the bill minutes before the Senate began its final discussion of HB 257, KSL.com reported.
The latest version restores the original’s prohibition on trans people entering bathrooms that align with their gender identity in government-owned buildings, while also narrowly defining “male” and “female” in state code according to biological sex assigned at birth.
While the bill does not include any enforcement mechanism or criminal penalties for violations of the bathroom ban, it does include enhanced criminal penalties for anyone who commits multiple crimes in a restroom as well as additional criminal penalties for anyone who commits crimes in a bathroom that does not align with their biological sex.
“Instead of making this about enforcement, we define what bathrooms are and we define who belongs in what bathroom and how to, I guess, qualify to be in one bathroom or another,” McCay said. “And I think that definition makes it very clear.”
The Senate approved H.B. 257 Thursday by a 21–8 vote, with only two Republicans joining Democrats in voting against it.
As the Senate voted, around 100 people gathered on the Utah Capitol steps to voice their opposition to the bill, urging Gov. Spencer Cox (R) to veto it.
H.B. 257 will return to the House for approval before reaching Cox’s desk. But as KSL.com noted, both critics and supporters expect the bill to face legal challenges.
Again look at the date. A year after the last video of a boy abused by Israeli authorities, and they blinded another boy. If you were his parents, wouldn’t you want justice? The Israelis kept him in a prison and denied him needed medical care. Even his doctor couldn’t convince them to help the boy. They let him go blind, they wanted to hurt him as an example of what happens if you don’t obey your masters. I am angry! I have lost online “friends” after saying that Gaza was an open air prison. So-called critical thinkers couldn’t see that constant mistreatment will drive people to lash out any way possible. Hugs. Scottie
23,973 views Jul 19, 2018
Israeli prison authorities denied Hassan Tamimi his medication, which made him fall into a coma and lose his eyesight.
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