The Capitol Forum

Today on Second Request, Executive Editor Teddy Downey sits down with Carter Dougherty, senior fellow for anti-monopoly and finance at Demand Progress, who argues that Visa and Mastercard enable banks to coordinate pricing without ever explicitly agreeing to it — and makes the case for how the Credit Card Competition Act, ongoing antitrust litigation, and a more aggressive enforcement posture could finally break the duopoly's grip on the payments market.

Twelve states just sued to block Paramount's $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, arguing the deal would leave viewers with fewer choices and higher prices.
Today on Second Request, Executive Editor Teddy Downey sits down with The Entertainment Strategy Guy, who writes one of Hollywood's leading newsletters about the streaming and entertainment industry.
Read The Entertainment Strategy Guy's Substack here: https://entertainment.substack.com/

What happens if an AI chatbot tells someone to kill someone else? 
Tragically, this situation unfolded at a Florida school when a shooter asked ChatGPT for advice on how to conduct a school shooting. But do the creators of ChatGPT bear any responsibility? That's what Erie Meyer, former chief technology officer of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, thinks, and in this episode of Second Request she sits down with Arjun Singh to explain why.

In the second episode of The Surveillance Economy, a mini-series from The Capitol Forum Investigates, Arjun Singh sits down with Andrew G. Ferguson, a law professor and expert in policing and technology, to discuss his new book Your Data, Will Be Used Against You: Policing in the Age of Self-Surveillance.
Together, the two discuss how law enforcement agencies use personal data from data brokers to create predictive policing programs, and the potential pitfalls of consumer data being handed over to law enforcement.

Corporations are spying on you — and you've given them permission to do it.
Every time we log on to a browser, open an app or share information with a business, that data is packaged and sold. This lucrative business, however, has turned consumer technology into a surveillance apparatus, and that information is being sold to governments around the world. In the first episode of a special two-part investigation on "The Capitol Forum Investigates," reporter Ethan Ehrenhaft tells the story of how a former cocaine smuggler taught the government how to surveil the public, and how states, including California, are trying to clamp down on the unchecked proliferation of personal data.