The U.S. Supreme Court is set to weigh in on a case that could open the floodgates for Americans to sue law enforcement, including the FBI, for mistakes made by officers. The case against the FBI is specifically based on a wrongful raid on a home in 2017, but experts say it strikes at the heart of law enforcement issues across the U.S.

What is the crux of the case? 
In October 2017, FBI and SWAT agents "armed with rifles battered down the door of an Atlanta home, detonated a stun grenade and rushed inside in search of a gang member," said The Washington Post. But the agents had broken into the wrong home.

The occupants were allegedly handcuffed and had guns pointed at them. The home "sustained $5,000 of damage," and the "emotional trauma is harder to quantify," said ABC News. 

The homeowners sued the government for negligence, emotional distress, trespass, false imprisonment, and assault and battery, but lower courts dismissed the case. The homeowners are now "urging the Supreme Court to reverse the lower court rulings," said the Post. 

What are the implications?
The FBI and the federal government have generally been shielded from lawsuits due to "sovereign immunity," but the family is attempting to circumvent this by suing under the Federal Tort Claims Act. This removes legal immunity from federal law enforcement officers who engage in "assault, battery, false imprisonment, false arrest, abuse of process or malicious prosecution," according to the statute. 

The act was "amended in 1974, partly in response to two high-profile wrong-house FBI raids," said NPR. Now, the main question before the Supreme Court is whether the "statute, as amended, now allows victims to sue, period," or if they can "sue only if the perpetrators of the raid were following government orders — here, orders from the FBI."

The White House is standing behind the FBI, as are many police officers. Cops are "human and they make mistakes," said Anthony Riccio, a former First Deputy Superintendent of the Chicago Police Department, to ABC. 

Those mistakes often arise because "there's not enough due diligence." Civil rights groups from "across the ideological spectrum" have "urged the court to clear the way for the lawsuit," said the Post. 

Reddit responded yesterday to news that a group of researchers had conducted a covert experiment using artificial intelligence chatbots in one of its most popular subreddit forums. The actions of those involved raise questions about whether deception is ever justified when conducting research on human subjects.

AI infiltration
A team of researchers at the University of Zurich conducted an unauthorized, monthslong experiment on Reddit users in the r/changemyview, or CMV, subreddit. They deployed dozens of AI bots powered by Large Language Models, or LLMs, to engage in debates on controversial issues. 

In some instances, the bots claimed they were "rape survivors, worked with trauma patients or were Black people who were opposed to the Black Lives Matter movement," said 404 Media. And the researchers used another AI data scraper to analyze people's posting history and identify personal information that would enhance the effectiveness of the bots' responses to them.

None of the Reddit users who were experimented on were informed of the experiment or asked for their consent. The researchers also failed to notify the subreddit's moderators, despite the forum's rules requiring disclosure of AI-generated posts. 

In March, Reddit moderators received a message from the researchers disclosing the experiment. In response, the moderators filed an ethics complaint with the University of Zurich "requesting that the research not be published, that the researchers face disciplinary action and that a public apology be issued," said Mashable. 

Academics respond 
Many people in academia had ethical concerns about the research actions taken. The experiment is "one of the worst violations of research ethics I have ever seen," Casey Fiesler, an information scientist at the University of Colorado, said on Bluesky. 

The experiment damaged the integrity of the CMV forum, said Sarah Gilbert, the research director of the Citizens and Technology Lab at Cornell University. The subreddit is an "important public sphere for people to engage in debate, learn new things, have their assumptions challenged and maybe even their minds changed," she said on Bluesky. "Are people going to trust that they aren't engaging with bots?"