While Cambridge Analytica has a proven shady history as noted below, Facebook has already admitted guilt and offered apologies when it comes to safeguarding private user information and interactions. So, when it comes to social media Facebook, Google and Twitter hold the power. Instagram and SnapChat are quite popular but do not hold the volume of data in comparison.
Now the FTC comes knocking at the door of Facebook.
***
The stuff you share and the inferences Facebook makes about you are packaged together with similar people’s data, stripped of names and sold to companies. That allows businesses to put ads in front of people they’re certain they can influence.
On Facebook, you are the product. Advertisers are the customer.
Facebook’s not alone. Most advertiser-supported networks sell some of your information to third parties. Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, Amazon, Twitter and Yelp do the same.
Giving up our privacy is the price we pay for getting to use Facebook for free. Most of the time, that tradeoff works: People take advantage of free services by posting, searching and sharing. Most companies that collect our data use it for legitimate purposes and within the bounds that companies like Facebook permit.
That arrangement has turned Facebook (FB) and Google (GOOGL) into online advertising juggernauts. They have built massive audiences of billions of customers, and advertisers flock to them. Facebook and Google control three-quarters of the $83 billion digital advertising market in the United States, according to eMarketer.
But the customer-is-the-product deal doesn’t always work to the user’s advantage. This weekend, the public learned data company Cambridge Analytica improperly accessed 50 million Facebook users’ personal information to influence the 2016 election.
Internet companies have a financial disincentive to give users more control over their data. If people share less, social networks will earn less money. More here.
In part from Bloomberg:
Fake News
Bell Pottinger’s tactics included producing phony television news reports as well as fake terrorist propaganda videos containing computer code that allowed Western intelligence agencies to track anyone who watched, according to a 2016 report from the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, a not-for-profit reporting organization.
The man who awarded Turnbull’s Bell Pottinger unit its first Iraq contract was Ian Tunnicliffe, then a British colonel who was running strategic communications for the U.K. defense ministry. Tunnicliffe, now retired, has been a member of SCL’s advisory board. He didn’t respond to emails seeking comment.
SCL also stoked ethnic tensions in Eastern Europe and sprayed fake graffiti in the Caribbean, according to the firm’s own sales documents. Its defense business claims in pitch documents to have worked for clients as wide-ranging as the Libyan National Transitional Council, NATO and the U.K. Foreign Office. It says it worked in Pakistan for the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. Pacific Command in India on countering radicalization.
SCL recently signed a contract with the U.S. State Department for market research and public-opinion polling, according to a federal procurement database. The one-year contract, signed last week, is worth $496,232, according to the database.
Deep Ties
The firm also has deep ties to the British defense establishment and Conservative Party. Its first chairman was Geoffrey Pattie, a defense minister under Margaret Thatcher. In addition to Tunnicliffe, the advisory board has included retired Rear Admiral John Tolhurst and Ivar Mountbatten, the great-nephew of Louis Mountbatten, the military hero and Queen Elizabeth’s cousin. Jonathan Marland, a former Conservative Party treasurer who served as a minister for business under former Prime Minister David Cameron, is a shareholder.
Marland told the Guardian newspaper he hadn’t had a role in running SCL following his initial investment and had refused requests to introduce the firm to Conservative Party officials.
Roger Gabb, a former British Army officer who later made his fortune as a wine distributor and wholesaler, is also a major SCL shareholder. A founding director who, with his family, still controls about 25 percent of the firm’s shares, Gabb has also been active in the Conservative Party and the campaign for the U.K. to leave the European Union. He donated 500,000 pounds ($705,300) to the party in 2006. In 2016, he was fined 1,000 pounds by the U.K.’s Electoral Commission for failing to disclose that he had helped purchase local newspaper advertisements supporting the leave side in the Brexit referendum. More here.
Category Archives: Google
YouTube’s Trusted Flagger Program, a Sham
The legal complaint is here.
No wonder Dennis Prager (Prager University) is suing YouTube for censorship.
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YouTube Trusted Flagger program
The YouTube Trusted Flagger program was developed by YouTube to help provide robust tools for government agencies and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that are particularly effective at notifying YouTube of content that violates our Community Guidelines.
Individuals who are part of the YouTube Contributors program also frequently report videos that may violate YouTube’s Community Guidelines.
The YouTube Trusted Flagger program includes:
- A bulk-flagging tool that allows for reporting multiple videos at one time
- Private forum support for questions about the policy enforcement process
- Visibility into decisions on flagged content
- Prioritized flag reviews for increased actionability
Program eligibility
Government agencies and NGOs are eligible for participation in the YouTube Trusted Flagger program. Ideal candidates flag frequently and with a high rate of accuracy.
Before becoming deputized for participation, applicants must attend a YouTube training to learn about our Community Guidelines and enforcement processes. These trainings are led by YouTube’s Trust & Safety and Public Policy teams.
YouTube reserves the right to remove individuals from the Trusted Flagger program if they frequently flag content that does not violate YouTube’s Community Guidelines.
Flag review process
Videos flagged by trusted flaggers are reviewed by YouTube content moderators according to YouTube’s Community Guidelines. Content flagged by trusted flaggers is not automatically removed or subject to any differential policy treatment — the same standards apply for flags received from other users. However, because of their high degree of accuracy, flags from trusted flagger are prioritized for review by our teams.
The Trusted Flagger program exists exclusively for the reporting of possible Community Guideline violations. It is not a flow for reporting content that may violate local law. Requests based on local law can be filed through our content removal form.
Google, really?
YouTube Trusted Flaggers help Google fight terrorism online, along with better automated detection, content warnings, and counter-radicalization content
Google and YouTube are working along with Facebook, Microsoft and Twitter to help fight terrorism online.
Google has pledged a four-pronged strategy:
1. Improving automated systems that detect problematic videos.
We will now devote more engineering resources to apply our most advanced machine learning research to train new “content classifiers” to help us more quickly identify and remove extremist and terrorism-related content.
2. Expanding the Trusted Flagger program
Trusted flaggers – both individuals and organizations – flag content correctly more than 90% of the time.
We will expand this programme by adding 50 expert NGOs to the 63 organisations who are already part of the programme, and we will support them with operational grants. This allows us to benefit from the expertise of specialised organisations working on issues like hate speech, self-harm, and terrorism. We will also expand our work with counter-extremist groups to help identify content that may be being used to radicalise and recruit extremists.
3. Making inflammatory content harder to find and endorse
In future [videos that do not clearly violate policy, but contain inflammatory religious or supremecist content] will appear behind an interstitial warning and they will not be monetised, recommended or eligible for comments or user endorsements.
4. Using the “Redirect Method” for counter-radicalization efforts
… we are working with Jigsaw to implement the “Redirect Method” more broadly across Europe. This promising approach harnesses the power of targeted online advertising to reach potential Isis recruits, and redirects them towards anti-terrorist videos that can change their minds about joining. In previous deployments of this system, potential recruits have clicked through on the ads at an unusually high rate, and watched over half a million minutes of video content that debunks terrorist recruiting messages.
*** So…..they use the Southern Poverty Law Center as a trusted flagger?
The Southern Poverty Law Center is assisting YouTube in policing content on their platform, The Daily Caller has learned.
The left-wing nonprofit — which has more recently come under fire for labeling legitimate conservative organizations as “hate groups” — is one of the more than 100 nongovernment organizations (NGOs) and government agencies in YouTube’s “Trusted Flaggers” program, a source with knowledge of the arrangement told TheDC.
The SPLC and other program members help police YouTube for extremist content, ranging from so-called hate speech to terrorist recruiting videos.
All of the groups in the program have confidentiality agreements, a spokesperson for Google, YouTube’s parent company, previously told TheDC. A handful of YouTube’s “Trusted Flaggers,” including the Anti-Defamation League and No Hate Speech — a European organization focused on combatting intolerance — have gone public with their participation in the program. The vast majority of the groups in the program have remained hidden behind their confidentiality agreements.
The SPLC’s close involvement in policing content on YouTube is likely to cause consternation among conservatives who worry that they may not be treated fairly. The left-wing group has consistently labeled pedestrian conservative organizations as “hate groups” and has been directly tied to violence against conservatives in the past. Floyd Lee Corkins, who opened fire at the Family Research Center in 2012, said he chose the FRC for his act of violence because the SPLC listed them as a “hate group.”
It’s unclear when the SPLC joined YouTube’s “Trusted Flaggers” program. The program goes back to 2012 but exploded in size in recent years amid a Google push to increase regulation of the content on its platforms, which followed pressure from advertisers. Fifty of the 113 program members joined in 2017 as YouTube stepped up its content policing, YouTube public policy director Juniper Downs told a Senate committee in January.
Downs said the third-party groups work closely with YouTube’s employees to crack down on extremist content in two ways, both of which a Google spokesperson previously confirmed to TheDC.
First, the flaggers are equipped with digital tools allowing them to mass flag content for review by YouTube personnel. Second, the partner groups act as guides to YouTube’s content monitors and engineers designing the algorithms policing the video platform but may lack the expertise needed to tackle a given subject.
“We work with over 100 organizations as part of our Trusted Flagger program and we value the expertise these organizations bring to flagging content for review. All trusted flaggers attend a YouTube training to learn about our policies and enforcement processes. Videos flagged by trusted flaggers are reviewed by YouTube content moderators according to YouTube’s Community Guidelines. Content flagged by trusted flaggers is not automatically removed or subject to any differential policies than content flagged from other users,” said a YouTube spokesperson, who would not specifically comment on the SPLC’s participation in the program.
The SPLC did not return multiple voicemails and emails seeking comment.
The overwhelming majority of the content policing on Google and YouTube is carried out by algorithms. The algorithms make for an easy rebuttal against charges of political bias: it’s not us, it’s the algorithm. But actual people with actual biases write, test and monitor the algorithms.
As noted above, Google’s anonymous outside partners (such as the SPLC) work closely with the internal experts designing the algorithms. This close collaboration has upsides, Google’s representatives have said, such as in combatting terrorist propaganda on the platform.
But it also provides little transparency, forcing users to take Google’s word that they’re being treated fairly.
The SPLC has faced criticism for its cavalier definitions of “hate group” and “extremist.” The organization stoked controversy in 2015 by labeling Dr. Ben Carson, now the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), an anti-gay “extremist.” After a backlash, the SPLC reversed its ruling and apologized to Carson.
The organization faced a similarly intense backlash in 2016 for labeling Maajid Nawaz, a respected counter-extremism activist, an “anti-Muslim extremist.”(RELATED: SPLC Says Army Bases Are Confederate Monuments That Need To Come Down)
The Washington Examiner’s Emily Jashinsky noted last year that “the SPLC’s claim to objectivity is nothing less than fraudulent, a reality that informed observers of its practices from both the Left and Right accept.”
“The routine of debunking their supposedly objective classifications occurs like clockwork each time a major outlet makes the mistake of turning to them when reporting on the many conservative thinkers and nonprofits the group absurdly designates as hateful.”
The SPLC has faced tough criticisms not just from conservatives but from the mainstream press as well.
“At a time when the line between ‘hate group’ and mainstream politics is getting thinner and the need for productive civil discourse is growing more serious, fanning liberal fears, while a great opportunity for the SPLC, might be a problem for the nation,” Politico Magazine’s Ben Schreckinger wrote last year.
Bloomberg columnist Megan McArdle similarly noted last year that the SPLC commonly lumps in principled conservatives alongside actual racists and extremists and warned of the possibility that tech companies could rely on the SPLC’s misleading definitions.
“Given the increasing tendency of powerful tech companies to flex their muscle against hate groups,” she wrote, “we may see more and more institutions unwittingly turned into critics or censors, not just of Nazi propaganda, but also of fairly mainstream ideas.”
Estimating the Costs of Cyber Attacks Against the U.S., Billions
Cyberattacks cost the United States between $57 billion and $109 billion in 2016
The report published by the White House Council of Economic Advisers examines the cyberattacks cost that malicious cyber activities cause to the U.S. economy.
The report analyzed the impact of malicious cyber activities on public and private entities, including DoS attacks, sabotage, business disruption, and theft of proprietary data, intellectual property, and sensitive financial and strategic information.
Damages and losses caused by a cyber attack may spill over from the initial target to economically linked organizations. More exposed are critical infrastructure sectors, at attack against companies and organization in this industry could have a severe impact on the US economy.
The document warns of nation-state actors such as Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, that are well funded and often conduct sophisticated targeted attacks for both sabotage and cyber espionage.
“Finally, and perhaps most important, if a firm owns a critical infrastructure asset, an attack against this firm could cause major disruption throughout the economy.” reads the report.
“Insufficient cybersecurity investment in these sectors exacerbates the risks of cyberattacks and data breaches. The economic implications of attacks against critical infrastructure assets are described in more detail later in the paper. “
The reports also warn of devastating cyberattacks that would target sectors that are internally interconnected and interdependent with other sectors.
The report offered little in the way of new recommendations on improving cybersecurity, but noted that the situation is hurt by “insufficient data” as well as “underinvestment” in defensive systems by the private sector.
“Cyber connectivity is an important driver of productivity, innovation, and growth for the U.S. economy, but it comes at a cost. Companies, individuals, and the government are vulnerable to malicious cyber activity.” concludes the report. “Effective public and private-sector efforts to combat this malicious activity would contribute to domestic GDP growth. However, the ever-evolving nature and scope of cyber threats suggest that additional and continued efforts are critical, and the cooperation between public and private sectors is key.”
***
The forecast of the cost damage in coming years….
Another Method on How China Spies
There has been so much domestic chatter about the FISA court granting warrants on U.S. citizens or intercepting communications between foreign nationals/diplomats and Americans, but in related reading –> US and Britain refine their ability to tap into airline passenger’s mobile phones while they are in the air.
Meanwhile…. 
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China built and paid for the African Union’s computer network – but inserted a backdoor allowing it access to the continental organisation’s confidential information
In January 2017, the information technology unit at the African Union’s headquarters in Addis Ababa noticed something strange, according to a stunning investigation in French newspaper Le Monde.
Every night, between midnight and 2am, there was a strange peak in data usage – even though the building was almost entirely empty. Upon further investigation, the technicians noticed something even stranger. That data – which included confidential information – was being sent to servers based in Shanghai.
The African Union’s shiny new headquarters was built and paid for by the Chinese government, as a gift to its “African friends”. But when the building was officially opened in 2012, China left a backdoor into the African Union’s computer network, allowing it to access the institution’s secrets at will.
“According to several sources within the institution, all sensitive content could be spied on by China,” wrote Le Monde. “It’s a spectacular leak of data, spread from January 2012 to January 2017.”
The Chinese mission to the AU did not respond to Le Monde’s request for comment.
Once the problem was discovered, African Union officials acted quickly to fix it. The organisation acquired its own servers, and began encrypting its communications. In July 2017, a team of experts from Algeria – a country with a notoriously efficient intelligence community – along with cybersecurity experts from Ethiopia combed the building from top to bottom, looking for hidden microphones and other potential weaknesses.
China would not be the first supposedly friendly superpower to spy on the African Union. A separate investigation in December 2016, conducted by Le Monde and The Intercept, revealed that African Union officials were targeted for surveillance by British intelligence.
*** The CIA and likely the NSA have a handle on all this but does the White House and the Congress, such that there is a cyber policy? Nope…. Just because there is a Chinese network in the Africa Union, does not mean it does not affect connected networks…..
A senior CIA analyst said China is continuing to conduct aggressive cyberespionage operations against the U.S., contrary to claims by security experts who say Beijing curbed cyberattacks in the past few years.
“We know the Chinese are very active in targeting our government, U.S. industry and those of our partners through cyberespionage,” said Michael Collins, deputy assistant CIA director and head of the agency’s East Asia Mission Center.
“It’s a very real, big problem, and we need to do more about it,” Mr. Collins told a recent security conference in Aspen, Colorado.
Mr. Collins said solving the problem of Chinese cyberattacks will require an “all-of-government, all-of-country approach to pushing back against it.”
The comments contradict a number of cybersecurity experts who have said Beijing’s digital spying and information theft decreased sharply as a result of the 2015 agreement between President Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping.
The two leaders announced the cyber deal with great fanfare and said both countries had agreed to curtail cyberespionage against businesses.
IS the U.S. Taking Over the 5G Network?
A 5G network owned by the United States government? It’s not going to happen.
The U.S. government considering its own 5G network is nothing new, frightening, or likely to happen.
Could the Trump White House be pondering a nationalized 5G network? Yes, it’s distinctly possible. But it’s also highly unlikely to happen and the story is being blown dramatically out of proportion.
The latest Twitterverse kerfuffle was kicked up by an Axios report alleging consideration of “an unprecedented federal takeover of a portion of the nation’s mobile network to guard against China”. That’s an alarming claim, no matter what side of the political aisle you’re on. Axios is a relatively new publication, but they’ve made a name for themselves since their 2016 launch with a number high profile exclusives and well-sourced and researched pieces. This 5G report is well-sourced, but also takes a number of alarmist steps that ignore how the U.S. federal government actually functions.
Here’s what Axios is reporting:
We’ve got our hands on a PowerPoint deck and a memo — both produced by a senior National Security Council official — which were presented recently to senior officials at other agencies in the Trump administration. … The documents say America needs a centralized nationwide 5G network within three years.
Axios goes on to describe two options laid out in the report: that the government builds its own 5G network or that the various competing carriers in the US build their own. It’s worth noting that this is a proposal made by a single NSC member. This is how the government is supposed to work. The NSC is just one of many competing interests in the federal government, and its mandate is to advance strategies to maintain and enhance the security of the United States. It would indeed be in the national defense interests of the U.S. military to have a government-controlled high-speed low-latency nation-wide wireless network — rapid and clear communication is vital for successful military operations, and a 5G network would be enormously useful in that.
But… the NSC is still just one of many loud voices in the United States government. The Departments of State and Commerce and Justice would all have competing opinions on the proposal for a federal network, from international trade implications to pushback from the carriers that spend billions on lobbying. Not to mention the cost of such an endeavor.
There is historical precedent for large investments that would support both military operations and civilian needs. The Interstate Highway System was funded by the federal government not just to dramatically improve inter-state travel and commerce — the primary impetus for its creation was the need to be able to quickly deploy military force throughout the United States in the event of a foreign invasion. The constellation of GPS satellites we rely on for navigating the world today is a U.S. Air Force project that was originally built for military purposes (and the government still has a switch to downgrade GPS accuracy for non-U.S. military users if deemed necessary).
Talk of a federally owned communications cellular network has been going on for decades, but it was kicked into high gear after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The strikes on New York City and the Pentagon didn’t just reveal the unpreparedness of the United States for such an unsophisticated attack — it also exposed weaknesses in the civilian-owned and operated cellular networks of the time. On that day the cellular networks in New York and DC were overwhelmed by the sheer number of users trying to access services — and that was well before today’s high-speed wireless internet services.
The biggest pushback would come from cellular network operators. Every U.S. carrier has already invested heavily in 5G, from research to live regional tests to making preparatory upgrades to their transmission infrastructure to handle the eventual roll-out of 5G-capable transceivers and consumer devices. Billions of dollars have already been laid out with the expectation that there will be much more invested in the networks and billions more reaped in profit. You can be certain that Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint have already contacted their lobbying firms to communicate their displeasure.
Specialized equipment has long been a part of the military’s inventory. Just this weekend the story of expensive new refrigerators for Air Force One provoked outrage once the context of what the purchase actually consisted of (five bespoke flight-grade walk-in cooling units to store up to 3,000 meals on what is essentially a flying White House). Equipment like tanks and aircraft carriers and grenades is all exclusively manufactured for the military, to its specification. But the military has long also used off-the-shelf civilian hardware when it meets its needs and costs. Walk into the Pentagon and you’ll find government-issued HP and Dell laptops and officers walking around with issued iPhones running on Verizon and AT&T.
The United States has long had an interplay between the needs of the federal government and the civilian population. Sometimes there are things that only the government could effectively fund, organize, and operate, like the interstate system or GPS satellites. The costs behind those become easier to justify when they’re also available to civilian users. Conversely, there are things the civilian market is far better at — AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile all have enormous expertise in cellular networks, they’ve already made huge investments in their network infrastructure that they’ll be able to leverage in building their 5G networks, and they’re already responsive to the needs of their customers — both civilian and government.
This proposal was dead in the water before it was ever presented. It’s almost amusing, following the Trump administration’s push against Net Neutrality being framed as unleashing the potential of web services and internet providers, to now see a proposal to create a national 5G network that the government would then lease to the carriers.
It’s worth repeating: this is just a proposal from one part of the government. Axios notes that it was already presented to other agencies, where I have no doubt it was met with significant resistance, if not outright derision. After all, the Trump government is supposed to be one that gets out of corporate business (for better or worse), and “we’re going to build a 5G network and you’ll just rent access from us because we’re the federal government” runs 100% counter to that.
There’s much the government could do to promote and accelerate the development and deployment of 5G networks in the United States, though it’d have to come with oversight than the billions of government subsidies paid to Verizon for a fiber network it never built. Grants to ensure deployment into rural areas, subsidies for low income access, regulation clean-up to ease the way for new installations, funding of university and corporate research projects in artificial intelligence and domestic development of these technologies — all of this is already within the wheelhouse of what the federal government can do, and sometimes already does.
Proposals like this are just how the government works. The military side of the equation is going to propose everything they can think of to ensure the most efficient and most effective military they can imagine, while the diplomats will propose their own missions and initiatives to promote their goals, and the economists are going to come with an entirely different set of proposals about trade and monetary policy and financial regulations. These will all be simultaneously complementary and contradictory. This is the nature of government — a dozen departments with competing goals in different arenas jockeying for limited resources. Their proposals are just part of what feeds into the decision-making process of the President and Congress, which are supposed to strike a balance between the needs of the military, business, international partners, civilians, and (of course) politics.
I would be utterly shocked if a government-owned 5G network ever comes to fruition. It’d be massively expensive and inefficient, not to mention well outside the government’s expertise and capability. It’d also see immediate and costly legal challenges, not to mention stand on legally tricky ground when the carriers have already paid billions to the government for the frequency licenses they need to deploy their own 5G networks.
The government would also have to pay for this somehow, and after a $1.5 trillion-dollar tax cut, there’s not a lot of spare cash laying around for GovCell.
Updated 10:33 a.m. Jan. 29: Here’s a statement from FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai, who also says it ain’t gonna happen:
“I oppose any proposal for the federal government to build and operate a nationwide 5G network. The main lesson to draw from the wireless sector’s development over the past three decades—including American leadership in 4G—is that the market, not government, is best positioned to drive innovation and investment. What government can and should do is to push spectrum into the commercial marketplace and set rules that encourage the private sector to develop and deploy next-generation infrastructure. Any federal effort to construct a nationalized 5G network would be a costly and counterproductive distraction from the policies we need to help the United States win the 5G future.”
