If you haven’t seen the amusing and disturbing piece in the Wall Street Journal this week about Black Cube, the band of former Mossad (Israeli secret service) agents, it’s worth a look. The article explains that Black Cube’s people run around the world pretending to be people they are not, in order to investigate private, commercial or legal matters for high-paying clients. It recounts a series of foul-ups, blown cover identities, arrests and other problems…

Get ready for college admissions scandals phase II, and maybe III, IV and V. The reason I think so? Because of the way it was discovered. Prosecutors didn’t break up the ring of bribing college coaches and exam proctors by using vast computing power, databases and algorithms, but by interviewing somebody. According to multiple reports, a suspect in a securities fraud case had heard about the admissions scamming going on and used it to bargain…

Get ready for college admissions scandals phase II, and maybe III, IV and V. The reason I think so? Because of the way it was discovered. Prosecutors didn’t break up the ring of bribing college coaches and exam proctors by using vast computing power, databases and algorithms, but by interviewing somebody. According to multiple reports, a suspect in a securities fraud case had heard about the admissions scamming going on and used it to bargain…

Have you ever noticed that artificial intelligence always seems much more frightening when people write about what it will become, but then how it can seem like imperfect, bumbling software when writing about AI in the present tense? You get one of each in this morning’s Wall Street Journal. The paper paints a horrific picture of what the ruthless secret police of the world’s dictatorships will be able to do with AI in The Autocrat’s …

Great work by the Atlanta Journal Constitution on an issue that’s bugged me for years: the brazen violation of federal law by investigators and the lawyers who hire them. At issue is the Gramm Leach Bliley Act, meant to protect the confidentiality of banking records. You are not allowed to pretend to be someone else in order to trick the bank into handing over account information, and with a few narrow exceptions, you need…

The non-legal press doesn’t usually get very deep into questions of legal ethics, but New York Magazine did a reasonable job of it in its hard-hitting piece this week on “The Bad, Good Lawyer” David Boies. The article asks whether Boies has crossed an ethical line, principally in his work on behalf of Harvey Weinstein (This blog argued before that he did, in The Weinstein Saga: Now Featuring Lying Investigators, Duplicitous Journalists, Sloppy Lawyers.)…

Artificial intelligence doesn’t equal artificial perfection. I have argued for a while now both on this blog and in a forthcoming law review article here that lawyers (and the investigators who work for them) have little to fear and much to gain as artificial intelligence gets smarter. Computers may be able to do a lot more than they used to, but there is so much more information for them to sort through that humans will…