Russia, China Target Deepfakes | Biometrics at the Border | Securing International Mail, and more

Report: CISA Hasn’t Reached Full Operating Capacity Yet  (Dave Nyczepir, Fedscoop)
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency won’t be fully up and running until it implements its third and final phase of organizational changes, according to a new report.
While the CISA Act of 2018 elevated the agency and saw it create a new organization chart and consolidate incident response centers and infrastructure security points of contact, 57 planned tasks were incomplete as of mid-February, the Government Accountability Office reported.

The Danger in Calling the SolarWinds Breach an “Act of War”  (Tarah Wheeler, Brookings)
When news broke late last year that a massive, years-long Russian cyberespionage had penetrated large parts of the U.S. federal government and its information technology systems, policymakers were quick to describe the breach as “an act of war” and that the United States must strike back. But the breach that leveraged weaknesses in software developed by the company SolarWinds was not an act of war. It was an act of espionage. The United States has experienced cycles of outrage over Russian espionage before and mislabeling espionage as an act of war risks leading the United States toward the wrong response.
To understand why the SolarWinds breach was an act of espionage, and not an act of war, it is worth considering the technical details of the breach. 

FBI Alert Warns of Russian, Chinese Use of Deepfake Content  (Shannon Vavra, Cyberscoop)
The FBI warned in an alert Wednesday that malicious actors “almost certainly” will be using deepfakes to advance their influence or cyber-operations in the coming weeks.
The alert notes that foreign actors are already using deepfakes or synthetic media — manipulated digital content like video, audio, images and text — in their influence campaigns.

China watch

Why the Internet Has Not Freed China  (Economist)
How judgmental fans and cowardly advertisers empower Chinese censors.

To Maintain Tech Supremacy the U.S. Must Avoid Copying China’s ‘Military-Civil Fusion’  (John Thornhill, Financial Times)
 While government and business will have to collaborate to an intimate degree, they should never run off together.

A Confident China Seeks to Insulate Itself from the World  (Economist)
Its new five-year plan is vague on growth but clear about self-sufficiency.

Stronger: Adapting America’s China Strategy in an Age of Competitive Interdependence (Brookings)
In a new book, Brookings Senior Fellow Ryan Hass charts a path forward in the U.S. relationship and rivalry with China, one rooted in the relative advantages America already possesses. He argues that while competition will remain the defining trait of the relationship, both countries will continue to be impacted—for good or ill—by their capacity to coordinate on common challenges that neither can solve on its own, such as pandemic disease, global economic recession, climate change, and nuclear nonproliferation.
Stronger: Adapting America’s China Strategy in an Age of Competitive Interdependencemakes the case that the United States will have greater success in outpacing China economically and outshining it in questions of governance if it focuses more on improving its own condition at home than on trying to impede Chinese initiatives. He writes that the task at hand is not to stand in China’s way and turn a rising power into an enemy in the process, but instead to renew America’s advantages in its competition with China.

How Global Tech Executives View U.S.-China Tech Competition  (Christopher A. Thomas and Xander Wu, Brookings)
The global technology industry is hedging its bets. As the United States and China compete for technological supremacy in advanced semiconductor design and manufacturing, software, and other core technologies, global high-tech companies do not plan to pick sides. Rather, they pragmatically aim to compete in both Chinese and U.S. ecosystems regardless of the extra cost and complexity involved. This is the message from 158 senior business executives working for American, Chinese, European, Japanese, Taiwanese, and Korean global high-tech firms whom we polled about the impact of U.S-China tensions on their industry. While these executives regard as inevitable that American and Chinese technological spheres of influence will to some extent separate, they also expect Chinese systems and solutions suppliers to continue to rely on globally sourced (rather than Chinese-developed) technologies. In addition, these executives expect multinational companies of all stripes to double down on their efforts to keep competing in the Chinese market.

Foxconn Set to Make iPhone 12 in India, Shifting from China  (Yu Nakamura, Nikkei)
Apple is shifting some production of iPhones out of China and into India. Taiwanese manufacturing giant Foxconn will move some of its iPhone assembly work to Tamil Nadu, partly in response to rising labor costs in China and partly to diversify the supply chain for a key product of a hugely important client amid growing tensions between the United States and China.