• Tech Fight against Online Extremism Gets Overhaul

    Facebook fulfilled a long-standing demand from policymakers and advocacy groups this week when Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg announced that a coalition of the country’s most powerful tech corporations will be formalizing its counterterrorism efforts into an independent organization with a dedicated staff. As the companies face ramped-up criticism from regulators and lawmakers worldwide, they are expanding the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT), which they originally formed to deal with Islamic terrorism online in 2017. The founding members were Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Microsoft.

  • What Data Hackers Can Get about You from Hospitals

    When hospitals are hacked, the public hears about the number of victims – but not what information the cybercriminals stole. New research uncovers the specific data leaked through hospital breaches, sounding alarm bells for nearly 170 million people.

  • Innocent Users Have the Most to Lose in the Rush to Address Extremist Speech Online

    Big online platforms tend to brag about their ability to filter out violent and extremist content at scale, but those same platforms refuse to provide even basic information about the substance of those removals. How do these platforms define terrorist content? What safeguards do they put in place to ensure that they don’t over-censor innocent people in the process? Again and again, social media companies are unable or unwilling to answer the questions. Facebook Head of Global Policy Management Monika Bickert claimed that more than 99 percent of terrorist content posted on Facebook is deleted by the platform’s automated tools, but the company has consistently failed to say how it determines what constitutes a terrorist⁠—or what types of speech constitute terrorist speech.

  • Science Fiction Has Become Dystopian Fact

    So which dystopia are we living in? Most educated people have read George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. So influential have these books been that we are inclined to view all disconcerting new phenomena as either “Orwellian” or “Huxleyan”. If you suspect we shall lose our freedom to a brutally repressive state, grinding its boot into our faces, you think of George. If you think we shall lose it to a hedonistic consumer culture, complete with test-tube designer babies, you quote Aldous. “My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power,” Huxley wrote in a letter to Orwell in 1949. Niall Ferguson agrees: “As I reflect on the world in 2019, I am struck by the wisdom of [Huxley’s] words. In Xi Jinping’s China, we see Totalitarianism 2.0. The boot on the face remains a possibility, of course, but it is needed less and less as the system of social credit expands, aggregating and analyzing all the digital data that Chinese citizens generate.”

  • The Urgent Search for a Cyber Silver Bullet Against Iran

    After spending billions of dollars to assemble the world’s most potent arsenal of cyberweapons and plant them in networks around the world, United States Cyber Command — and the new era of warfighting it has come to represent — may face a critical test in the coming weeks. To punish Iran for its last month’s attack on Saudi oil facilities, a second U.S. cyberstrike — after one launched against Iran just three months ago — has emerged as the most appealing course of action for President Donald Trump. “The question circulating now through the White House, the Pentagon and Cyber Command’s operations room is whether it is possible to send a strong message of deterrence with a cyberattack without doing so much damage that it would prompt an even larger Iranian counterstrike,” David Sanger and Julian Barnes write, noting that in the past decade, the United States has launched at least three major cyberattacks against Iran. “In each case, the damage to Iranian systems could be repaired over time. And in each case, the effort to deter Iran was at best only partly successful,” they write.

  • 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.