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The Department of Homeland Security is facing a lawsuit over alleged free-speech violations against protesters — but here's the twist: the agency is using that very lawsuit as a vehicle to demand access to the plaintiffs' encrypted Signal group chats. It's a legal maneuver that raises serious questions about how government agencies can leverage civil litigation to reach communications that would otherwise require a warrant.
Shifting to the courts in a different corner of tech, Perplexity has won an appeals court ruling against Amazon in a case that carries real weight for the AI industry. A federal appellate panel found Amazon is unlikely to prove Perplexity violated federal hacking law when its AI agent acted on a user's behalf online. It's the first appellate decision of its kind, and it could shape the legal ground rules for autonomous AI agents for years to come.
And Disney is making a notable pivot on the content front. The company has struck a new deal with TikTok to bring creator-made vertical videos onto Disney Plus — a deliberate step back from its earlier partnership with OpenAI's Sora, which would have populated the platform with AI-generated content. The message from Disney seems clear: for now, real human creators still win the room.
That's your Tech Beat for today. Keep surfing. Tech Beat out.
