EFF Sues for Answers About Medicare's AI Experiment

4 hours 18 minutes ago
Little Is Known About AI That Could Affect Millions of Seniors' Care

SAN FRANCISCO – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) seeking records about a multi-state program that is using AI to evaluate requests for medical care.

"Tasking an algorithm with making determinations about treatment can create unwarranted—and even discriminatory—delays or denials of necessary medical care," said Kit Walsh, EFF’s Director of AI and Access-to-Knowledge Legal Projects. "Given these serious risks, the public requires transparency that it hasn't gotten. We're suing to get badly needed answers about how Medicare's AI experiment works."

Announced by CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz last year, the pilot program known as WISeR (Wasteful and Inappropriate Service Reduction) uses AI to assess prior authorization requests from Medicare beneficiaries. Previously rare in original Medicare, prior authorization requires medical providers to obtain advance approval from a patient’s health insurer before delivering certain treatments or services as a condition of coverage.

Unfortunately, there is little information about how the AI algorithms used in WISeR work, including what training data they rely on. It remains unclear whether WISeR has any safeguards against systemic flaws such as algorithmic bias, privacy violations, and wrongful denials of care.

Healthcare experts, care providers, and lawmakers have all raised alarms that WISeR may cause serious harm to patients by relying on AI unless it has the necessary safeguards. Despite this widespread criticism, WISeR was rolled out in six states in January, potentially affecting as many as 6.4 million Medicare beneficiaries, according to one estimate.

By design, WISeR incentivizes contracted companies to deny prior approval against the best interests of patients. Vendors are compensated, in part, on the volume of healthcare services they deny and are entitled to as much as 20 percent of the associated savings. Just weeks after WISeR's launch, hospitals and other health care providers started reporting delays in care approval, communication gaps, and administrative strain.

Earlier this year, EFF submitted a FOIA request to CMS asking for records related to WISeR. Among other records, the request sought agreements with software vendors participating in WISeR; records related to any tests for accuracy, bias, or hallucinations in vendors' technology; and records related to any audits, monitoring, or evaluation of WISeR and participating vendors. To date, CMS has not provided any of these records to EFF. EFF's FOIA lawsuit asks for their immediate processing and release.

"The public has a right to know more about the algorithms driving decisions around their healthcare," said Tori Noble, Staff Attorney at EFF. "Without greater transparency, patients, providers, and policymakers will continue to be left in the dark.”

EFF thanks Stanford Law School's Juelsgaard Intellectual Property & Innovation Clinic for their help in preparing this lawsuit.

For the complaint: https://www.eff.org/document/complaint-eff-v-cms-medicare-wiser-foia

Tags: transparencyartificial intelligence and machine learningautomated decision-makingContact:  ToriNobleStaff Attorneytori@eff.org
Hudson Hongo

【おすすめ本】鶴見太郎『シオニズム イスラエルと現代世界』━ナショナリズムと植民地主義が複雑に絡み合った動きを辿る=大治朋子(毎日新聞専門編集委員)

4 hours 38 minutes ago
 イスラエル・パレスチナ紛争の発端であり、その主因のひとつともいわれるシオニズムを、「等身大で精緻に」描写したという本書は、国際社会が直面する課題を浮かび上がらせる一冊だ。 ちまたにはびこる「粗雑な」歴史認識を排し、 語られるべき問題や責任を次々と照らし出す。 13万部の大ベストセラーとなった『ユダヤ人の歴史』(中公新書)の著者である、東京大学大学院准教授・鶴見太郎氏による最新刊である。 著者によると、シオニズムは19世紀終盤のロシア帝国領で生まれた「ユダヤ人の民族的拠点をパ..
JCJ

👓 Who's Really Watching What Smartglasses See? | EFFector 38.6

5 hours 59 minutes ago

After years of tech industry experiments, smartglasses with embedded cameras and microphones have finally gone mainstream. And, disturbingly, sometimes it's not just their owners who are watching what these devices record. In this week's EFFector newsletter, we're taking a closer look at the privacy implications of Meta Ray-Bans, and sharing all the latest in the fight for privacy and free speech online.

JOIN OUR NEWSLETTER

For over 35 years, EFFector has been your guide to understanding the intersection of technology, civil liberties, and the law. This week's issue covers EFF's new executive director; how publishers blocking the Internet Archive threaten the web's historical record; and why you should think twice before buying or using Meta’s Ray-Bans.

Prefer to listen in? EFFector is now available on all major podcast platforms. This week, we're chatting with EFF Security and Privacy Activist Thorin Klosowski about smartglasses and privacy. And don't miss the EFFector news quiz. You can find the episode and subscribe on your podcast platform of choice

%3Ciframe%20height%3D%22200px%22%20width%3D%22100%25%22%20frameborder%3D%22no%22%20scrolling%3D%22no%22%20seamless%3D%22%22%20src%3D%22https%3A%2F%2Fplayer.simplecast.com%2Fc139744a-aad2-4d31-8b5e-84764a13bf2f%3Fdark%3Dfalse%22%20allow%3D%22autoplay%22%3E%3C%2Fiframe%3E Privacy info. This embed will serve content from simplecast.com

   

Want to stay in the fight for privacy and free speech online? Sign up for EFF's EFFector newsletter for updates, ways to take action, and new merch drops. You can also fuel the fight against online surveillance when you support EFF today!

Hudson Hongo

Digital Hopes, Real Power: Reflecting on the Legacy of the Arab Spring

10 hours 30 minutes ago

This is the first installment of a blog series reflecting on the global digital legacy of the 2011 Arab uprisings.

A new generation of protesters, raised on social media and often fluent in the tools of digital dissent, has taken to the streets in recent months and years. In Bangladesh, Iran, Togo, France, Uganda, Nepal, and more than a dozen other countries, young people have harnessed digital tools to mobilize at scale, shape political narratives, and sustain movements that might once have been easier to ignore or suppress.

The tools at their disposal are vast, allowing them to coordinate quickly and turn local grievances into visible, transnational moments of dissent. But each new tactic is met in turn: governments now implement draconian regulations and deploy sophisticated surveillance systems, content manipulation, and automated censorship to pre-empt, predict, and punish collective action. 

This cycle of digital empowerment and repression is not new. In many ways, its roots can be traced to the 2011 uprisings that rippled across the Middle East and North Africa. Often referred to as the “Arab Spring,” these movements didn’t just reshape politics…they transformed how we talk about the internet, and how governments respond in times of protest, crisis, and conflict. Fifteen years later, the legacy of that moment still defines the terms of resistance and control in the digital age.

At the time, we were sold the comforting narrative that the internet would help bring about democracy, that connectivity itself was revolutionary, and that Silicon Valley’s products—particularly social media platforms—were aligned with the people. It was a narrative that tech executives were sometimes happy to amplify and certain Western governments were happy to believe. 

But the same networks that helped protesters to organize and broadcast their demands beyond their own borders laid the groundwork for new forms of repression. Over the years, the same tools that were once celebrated as tools of dissent have become instruments for tracking, harassing, and prosecuting dissenters.

This series examines the digital legacy of the 2011 uprisings that shook the region: how governments refined censorship and surveillance after 2011, how platforms alternately resisted and enabled those efforts, and how a new generation of civil society has pushed back.

"Over the years, the same tools that were once celebrated as tools of dissent have become instruments for tracking, harassing, and prosecuting dissenters."

When Tunisian fruit vendor Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire on December 17, 2010, after repeated harassment by local officials, he could not have known the chain reaction his act would spark. After nearly twenty-three years in power, President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali faced a public fed up with repression. Protests spread across Tunisia, ultimately forcing him to flee.

In his final speech, Ben Ali promised reforms: a freer press and fewer internet restrictions. He left before either materialized. For Tunisians, who had lived for years under normalized censorship both online and off, the promises rang hollow.

At the time, Tunisia’s internet controls were among the most restrictive in the world. Reporting by the exiled outlet Nawaat documented a sophisticated filtering regime: DNS tampering, URL blocking, IP filtering, keyword censorship. Yet despite that machinery, Tunisians built a resilient blogging culture, often relying on circumvention tools to push information beyond their borders. When protests began—and before international media caught up—they were ready.

Eleven days after Ben Ali fled, Egyptians took to the streets. International headlines rushed to label it a “Twitter revolution,” mistaking a tool for a movement. Egypt’s government drew a similar conclusion. On January 26, authorities blocked Twitter and Facebook. The next day, they shut down the internet almost entirely, a foreshadowing of what we’d see fifteen years later in Iran.

As Egyptians fought to free their country from President Hosni Mubarak’s autocratic rule, protests swept across the region to Bahrain, where demonstrators gathered at the Pearl Roundabout before facing a brutal crackdown; to Syria, where early calls for reform spiraled into one of the most devastating conflicts of the century; to Morocco, where the February 20 Movement pushed for constitutional change. Outside of the region, movements took shape in Spain, Greece, Portugal, Iceland, the United States, and beyond.

In each context, digital platforms helped circulate images, testimonies, and tactics across borders. They created visibility—and, in turn, inspired a playbook. Governments watched not only their own populations but one another, quickly learning how to disrupt networks, identify organizers, and seize back control of the narrative.

Cause and Effect

To be clear, the internet didn’t create these movements. Decades of repression, corruption, labor organizing, and grassroots activism did. Later research confirmed what many in the region already understood: digital tools helped people share information and coordinate action, but they were neither the spark nor the engine of revolt.

But regardless, the myth of the “Twitter revolution” had consequences. The breathless coverage, and rapid policy reactions that followed shaped state strategy around the world. Governments across the region and well beyond invested heavily in surveillance technologies, developed new legal mechanisms, increased their own social media presence, and found ways to influence platforms. Internet blackouts, once rare, became a normalized tool of crisis response. And companies were forced into increasingly public decisions about whether to resist state pressure or comply.

When it comes to the internet, the legacy of the 2011 uprisings that swept the region and beyond is a story about power: how states moved to consolidate control online, how platforms—often under pressure—have narrowed the space for dissent, and how civil society has been forced to evolve to defend it.

This five-part series will take a deeper look at how the internet as a space for dissent and for hope has changed over the past fifteen years throughout the region and well beyond.  

Jillian C. York

Weekly Report: Google Chromeに境界外書き込みの脆弱性

21 hours 31 minutes ago
Google Chromeには、境界外書き込みの脆弱性があります。開発者は今回修正された脆弱性の悪用を確認しているとのことです。この問題は、当該製品を修正済みのバージョンに更新することで解決します。詳細は、開発者が提供する情報を参照してください。