• Information and Democracy—A Perilous Relationship

    In the 1997 James Bond film “Tomorrow Never Dies,” the villain is Elliot Carver, head of a media conglomerate who has come to believe that information is a more powerful weapon than military force. He blackmails senior British leaders and ultimately tries to spark a war between China and Britain to bring his ally to power in Beijing. At one point in the film, Carver stands underneath massive television screens in the headquarters of his media empire, addressing Bond: “We’re both men of action,” he tells Bond, “but your era…is passing. Words are the new weapons, satellites the new artillery…Caesar had his legions, Napoleon had his armies. I have my divisions—TV, news, magazines.” Fast-forward twenty years, and this scenario appears to be becoming reality. Using techniques far more advanced than those available to Bond villains in the 1990s, today’s practitioners of what a new RAND report terms “hostile social manipulation” employ targeted social media campaigns, sophisticated forgeries, cyberbullying and harassment of individuals, distribution of rumors and conspiracy theories, and other tools and approaches to cause damage to the target state.

  • How Social Media Should Prepare for Disinformation Campaigns in the 2020 Election

    A new report assesses some of the forms and sources of disinformation likely to play a role on social media during the 2020 presidential election campaign in the U.S. The report explores these risks and analyzes what the major social media companies—Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube (owned by Google)—have done to harden their defenses against disinformation. The report also offers nine recommendations of additional steps social media companies should take to prepare for 2020.

  • Women’s March Votes Out Board Member for Anti-Semitic Tweets

    Zahra Billoo, the executive director of the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, was dismissed from the board of directors of the Women’s March on Wednesday, only two days after she was appointed to the board on Monday. “We found some of her public statements incompatible with the values and mission of the organization,” the board said. Billoo has called herself a “proud anti-Zionist” and said that she does not believe Israel has a right to exist. She also has accused Israel of committing war crimes “as a hobby,” and wrote: “the Israeli Defense Forces, or the IDF, are no better than ISIS. They are both genocidal terrorist organizations,” and that “racist Zionists who support Apartheid Israel” scares her more than “the mentally ill young people the #FBI recruits to join ISIS.”

  • Innovation and Cybersecurity: A Balancing Act

    Companies are working to balance their desire for new innovations with their need for strong cyberdefenses – and it is a delicate balance, a new report says. A survey of 500 U.S. businesses reveals that company executives, business staff and technology professionals have distinctly different views on where their organization stands when it comes to cyber-readiness.

  • Making the Internet Faster, More Secure

    A collaborative effort aims to create a nationwide research infrastructure that will enable the computer science and networking community to develop and test novel architectures that could yield a faster, more secure internet. Dubbed “FABRIC,” the four-year, $20 million project is intended to support exploratory research, at scale, in computer networking, distributed computing systems, and next-generation applications.

  • How Long Will Unbreakable Commercial Encryption Last?

    Most people who follow the debate over unbreakable, end-to-end encryption think that it’s more or less over, and that unbreakable commercial encryption is here to stay. But. this complacent view is almost certainly wrong. Enthusiasm for controlling encryption is growing among governments all around the world and by no means only in authoritarian regimes. Even Western democracies — not only authoritarian regimes — are giving their security agencies authorities that nibble away at the inviolability of commercial encryption. “While the debate over encryption has stalled in the United States, it’s been growing fiercer abroad as other nations edge closer to direct regulation of commercial encryption,” Stewart Baker writes.

  • The Complicated Truth of Countering Disinformation

    Social media’s unprecedented ability to spread disinformation succeeds in part because of vulnerabilities in the way people process and evaluate information. In an information environment characterized by an oversaturation of content and algorithms designed to increase views and shares, narratives (true or not) can quickly go viral by appealing to our biases. This new, decentralized world of content creation and consumption is ripe for exploitation by nefarious actors who seek to spread doubt and untruths. To counter modern disinformation, then, we cannot focus solely on social media platforms or current technologies — we should also understand the psychological factors that underpin our identities and perceptions of the truth.

  • I Researched Uighur Society in China for 8 Years and Watched How Technology Opened New Opportunities – Then Became a Trap

    The Uighurs, a Muslim minority ethnic group of around 12 million in northwest China, are required by the police to carry their smartphones and IDs listing their ethnicity. As they pass through one of the thousands of newly built digital media and face surveillance checkpoints located at jurisdictional boundaries, entrances to religious spaces and transportation hubs, the image on their ID is matched to their face. If they try to pass without these items, a digital device scanner alerts the police. The Chinese state authorities described the intrusive surveillance as a necessary tool against the “extremification” of the Uighur population. Through this surveillance process, around 1.5 million Uighurs and other Muslims were determined “untrustworthy” and have forcibly been sent to detention and reeducation in a massive internment camp system. Since more than 10 percent of the adult population has been removed to these camps, hundreds of thousands of children have been separated from their parents. Many children throughout the region are now held in boarding schools or orphanages which are run by non-Muslim state workers.

  • Determining the Who, Why, and How Behind Manipulated Media

    The threat of manipulated multi-modal media – which includes audio, images, video, and text – is increasing as automated manipulation technologies become more accessible, and social media continues to provide a ripe environment for viral content sharing. The creators of convincing media manipulations are no longer limited to groups with significant resources and expertise. Today, an individual content creator has access to capabilities that could enable the development of an altered media asset that creates a believable, but falsified, interaction or scene. A new program seeks to develop technologies capable of automating the detection, attribution, and characterization of falsified media assets.

  • Countering Coercion in Cyberspace

    What is cyber coercion, and how have states used cyber operations to coerce others? Based on unclassified, open-source material, the authors of a new RAND report explore how four states — Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea — have used cyber operations, and whether that use constitutes cyber coercion.

  • AI Startups to Fight Against Online Disinformation

    On both sides of the Atlantic, governments, foundations, and companies are looking at how to solve the problem of online dis/misinformation. Some emphasize the demand side of the problem, believing it important to focus on consumer behavior and the use of media literacy and fact-checking. Some focus on legal remedies such as platform-liability and hate-speech laws as well as privacy protections. Others try to raise the quality of journalism in the hope that creating more reliable content. There is another kind of fix, offered by small companies in the information ecosystem: Using natural language processing as well as human intelligence to identify and, in some cases, block false or inflammatory content online.

  • Cybersecurity of Connected Autonomous Vehicles

    In the near future connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) are expected to become widely used across the world. Researchers have been working to improve the security, privacy and safety of CAVs by testing four innovations in the IoT-enabled Transport and Mobility Demonstrator. They were able to connect CAVs to other CAVs and roadside infrastructure more securely and privately.CAVs can now connect to each other, roadside infrastructure, and roadside infrastructure to each other more securely.

  • Tests Find 125 Vulnerabilities in 13 Network Attached Storage Devices

    In a new, follow-up cybersecurity study of network attached storage (NAS) systems and routers since 2013, consulting and research firm Independent Security Evaluators (ISE) found 125 vulnerabilities in 13 IoT devices, reaffirming an industrywide problem of a lack of basic security diligence.

  • Sensitive Personal and Financial Data of What’s Likely an Entire Country Leaked Online

    A chilling data leak on an unsecured server in Miami divulged sensitive personal and financial information of what appears to be the entire population of Ecuador. The discovery came from the internet security firm VpnMentor, which discovered the database containing more than 20 million individuals’ data—including as many as 7 million minors—on an exposed Florida-based server belonging to the Ecuadorian data and analytics company Novaestrat.

  • Fearing “Spy Trains,” Congress May Ban a Chinese Maker of Subway Cars

    A Chinese state-owned company called CRRC Corporation, the world’s largest train maker, completed the $100 million facility this year in the hopes of winning contracts to build subway cars and other passenger trains for American cities like Chicago and Washington. But growing fears about China’s economic ambitions and its potential to track and spy on Americans are about to quash those plans. Lawmakers — along with CRRC’s competitors — say they are concerned that subway cars made by a Chinese company might make it easier for Beijing to spy on Americans and could pose a sabotage threat to American infrastructure. Critics of the deal speculate that the Chinese firm could incorporate technology into the cars that would allow CRRC — and the Chinese government — to track the faces, movement, conversations or phone calls of passengers through the train’s cameras or Wi-Fi.