CDT Joins Others in Opposing Bill That Could Strip Organizations of Tax Exempt Status Without Due Process
The Center for Democracy & Technology has joined over 120 other NGOs in opposing H.R. 9495, a bill that would grant the Treasury Department the authority to revoke the tax exempt status of an organization without due process and with a substantial risk that revocation decisions would be politically-based. The bill would empower the Secretary of the Treasury Department to designate a domestic non-profit organization as “terrorist supporting organization” and strip it of its tax exemption if they find that the non-profit has provided “material support” to a terrorist organization. The provision of material support to a terrorist organization is already a crime, but the imposition of criminal sanctions is subject to at least some level of due process.
Stripping an organization of its tax-exempt status would be death knell for many non-profits, and the threat of such an action could chill their speech. Proponents of the legislation have cited student groups’ pro-Palestinian advocacy regarding the war in Gaza as a motivator for the legislation. This advocacy is often manifested on social media such as Facebook, TikTok and YouTube.
The bill, captioned the Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act, would also prevent the Internal Revenue Service from imposing tax-related fines and penalties on people who are held hostage abroad. Our joint letter indicates that we do not oppose that portion of the legislation.
Not All Guardrails Are Created Equal: Comparing Content Safety and Copyright Filtering
As courts and policymakers work through questions about chatbot liability, they should be wary of analogies that flatten meaningful technical differences. Copyright filtering and safety intervention share real challenges around ambiguity and evasion, but they diverge in what each control must assess, how each manifests over the course of a conversation, and how much can be verified from the outside.
CDT-led Coalition Calls for Transparency for White House AI Framework
CDT and Americans for Responsible Innovation led a broad, bipartisan coalition of over two dozen civil society groups in calling on the White House to release its Framework for review of frontier AI models.
CDT Amicus Brief Calls on Fourth Circuit to Rein In Geofence Warrants
Earlier this year the Supreme Court ruled in Chatrie v United States that the Fourth Amendment protected all cell phone location information, which CDT lauded as a landmark decision, but sent the case back down to the Fourth Circuit to assess the propriety of the geofence warrant at issue.
CDT and Partners Post Floor Alert Opposing CA SB 1013 Automated License Plate Readers Bill
The best way to ensure that Automated License Plate Readers are not abused is to limit the retention of stored data and to keep loopholes to lawful process closed. CA SB 1013 is a step in the wrong direction, and we urge the California legislature to reject this approach.
