Hundreds arrested as UK organised crime network cracked / Silicon Valley elite think journalists have too much power / Chinese military has links to supplier of 5G equipment in Australia

Jul 3, 2020

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British law enforcement officials say they have made their biggest ever breakthrough against organised crime after hacking into an encrypted communications system used to plan drug deals and murder plots. The Guardian
Silicon Valley elites have been using a private app to chat about how journalists have too much power to "cancel" people and wondering what they, the titans of Silicon Valley, could do about it. VICE
Equipment underpinning Australia's telecommunications network, including the rollout of 5G, comes from a company the US Defence Department has named as being "owned by, controlled by or affiliated with China's government, military or defence industries". The Sydney Morning Herald

ASPI ICPC

James Leibold @jleibold

@BitterWinterMag finds new evidence of the compulsory DNA collection program exposed in our recent @ASPI_ICPC report "Genomic Surveillance," including blood collection from children during the covid-19 epidemic @emiledirks tinyurl.com/y8rv555f & tinyurl.com/y8beyqr9

Women in Future Operations @WomenFutureOps

A massive thanks to @sekreps @svpercy @Marina_Miron for sharing your research into unconventional warfare during the Women in Future Ops Working Group, in proud partnership with @ASPI_org. Your insights set the WG up to face a challenging task: curate your future team! #FutureOps

World

Hacker ransoms 23k MongoDB databases and threatens to contact GDPR authorities
ZDNet
@campuscodi
The hacker has attempted to ransom nearly 47% of all MongoDB databases left exposed online.

Australia

Chinese military has links to supplier of 5G equipment in Australia
The Sydney Morning Herald
Richard Baker
Equipment underpinning Australia's telecommunications network, including the rollout of 5G, comes from a company the US Defence Department has named as being "owned by, controlled by or affiliated with China's government, military or defence industries".

Cyber Security: why it matters to not just 'state actors' but you and me
ABC Radio
The Morrison government has committed more than a billion dollars and 500 new jobs over the next ten years to fighting the war against breaches of our data security. Cyber attacks on essential services are now commonplace, and terms like state actors, denial of service and firewall breaches are sadly all part of how competing interests do their work. But what can individuals do to improve their own personal cyber security?

Indigenous Australians face sexual racism on dating apps: 'The second he found out about my heritage, he was gone'
ABC
@cameronwilson
Three or four years ago, Fallon Gregory downloaded Tinder and matched with someone who was very complimentary — at first. Ms Gregory is a Perth-based First Nations woman from the Gija/Bardi and Nyul Nyul tribes in the Kimberley, who'd never used an online dating app on her smartphone before. While she was chatting with her match, she became a bit uneasy about how much he kept commenting on her appearance. "When he first matched, he was like 'oh my God, you're so pretty, you look exotic', going on and on about my beauty," she said. "And then he asked 'I don't mean to be rude, but are you Indigenous?' I said yes. Then, he thanked me, told me good luck with everything, and unmatched me," she said.

China

Connection discovered between Chinese hacker group APT15 and defense contractor
ZDNet
@campuscodi
Lookout said it linked APT15 malware to Xi'an Tianhe Defense Technology, a Chinese defense contractor.

ByteDance takes stake in e-book operator amid content war with Tencent
South China Morning Post
@CocoF1026
TikTok owner ByteDance has acquired a stake in Beijing Dingtian Culture Entertainment, which runs multiple online reading platforms competing with Tencent-backed market leader China Literature.

USA

Zuckerberg Tells Facebook Staff He Expects Advertisers to Return ‘Soon Enough’
The Information
@alexeheath
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told employees he was reluctant to bow to the threats of a growing ad boycott, saying in private remarks that “my guess is that all these advertisers will be back on the platform soon enough.”

Facebook Boycott Organizers Want a Civil Rights Expert in the Company’s Executive Suite The Wall Street Journal
Facebook says 5,000 app developers got user data after cutoff date ZDNet
The hate Facebook fosters destroys lives. Here’s what it did to me The Guardian

Silicon Valley Elite Discuss Journalists Having Too Much Power in Private App
VICE
@annamerlan @josephfcox @jason_koebler
During a conversation held Wednesday night on the invite-only Clubhouse app—an audio social network popular with venture capitalists and celebrities—entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan, several Andreessen Horowitz venture capitalists, and, for some reason, television personality Roland Martin spent at least an hour talking about how journalists have too much power to "cancel" people and wondering what they, the titans of Silicon Valley, could do about it.

Tech Tycoon Peter Thiel Shies From Trump Re-Election Campaign
The Wall Street Journal
President Trump’s most prominent Silicon Valley supporter, billionaire Peter Thiel, has told friends and associates that he plans to sit out this year’s presidential campaign because he thinks re-election is increasingly a long shot, people familiar with the matter say.

Inside the Plot to Kill the Open Technology Fund
VICE
@daithaigilbert
This U.S. program provides encryption technologies to journalists and activists living under repressive regimes. But a Trump appointee wants to tear it all down.

Southeast Asia

Philippines / Isn't it ironic? Poor connection forces suspension of Senate hearing on internet
Rappler
@reyaika
Telco representatives are not spared from bad internet connection.

South and Central Asia

After Chinese App Ban, Govt to Start Hearing Clarifications From Firms on Data Sharing Practices
The Wire
An inter-ministerial government panel will soon start hearing submissions and clarifications made by the Chinese companies whose apps were banned by an IT ministry order earlier this week.

PM Modi quits popular Chinese microblogging site Weibo following ban on Chinese apps
The Economic Times
PM Narendra Modi decided to quit the Chinese microblogging site Weibo following the ban on 59 Chinese apps by the Indian government. All his posts have been deleted.

False and misleading reports have surged in the country during the coronavirus pandemic.
BBC News
@shrutimenon10
Fake or misleading news can have a real impact on those who find themselves the targets. This has been a particular problem in India during the coronavirus pandemic, where reliable sources of news are frequently drowned out by unverified information online.

UK

Hundreds arrested as UK organised crime network is cracked
The Guardian
@VikramDodd
British law enforcement officials say they have made their biggest ever breakthrough against organised crime after hacking into an encrypted communications system used to plan drug deals and murder plots.

Joseph Cox @josephfcox

New: leaked documents and sources from in and around the criminal world detail an extraordinary operation. Police infiltrated an encrypted phone network, and for months read millions of messages. It's hard to overstate how big this is for organized crime vice.com/en_us/article/…?

VICE - How Police Secretly Took Over a Global Phone Network for Organized CrimePolice monitored a hundred million encrypted messages sent through Encrochat, a network used by career criminals to discuss drug deals, murders, and extortion plots.vice.com

Bart Hoogeveen @BartHoogeveen

Today, police and prosecutors from NL and FR together with Europol and Eurojust presented the results of a coordinated long-term operation against the criminal use of encrypted communication service provider Encrochat. europol.europa.eu/newsroom/news/…

UK competition watchdog ignores calls for online ad sector probe
The Financial Times
The UK’s competition watchdog has shied away from a full market investigation into the online advertising industry dominated by Facebook and Google, citing Covid-19 as one of the reasons for the decision.

Europe

Nokia and Ericsson remain vulnerable in geopolitical 5G tussle
The Financial Times
@rmilnenordic
But most fascinating of all could be the American intrigue over Nokia and Ericsson. 5G telecoms networks are one of the very few areas in technology where the US is almost entirely absent and it obviously hurts. Attorney-general William Barr said in February that the country should consider taking stakes in the Finnish and Swedish telecoms equipment makers either directly or through US companies.

Charles Rollet @CharlesRollet1

.@SKjeldtoft reports for @politiken that Danish professors helped develop an algorithm with Hikvision which can track "how attitudes spread over time on social media and other networks". The profs now regret this due to the algo's repressive potential

Aalborg Universitet har hjulpet omstridt kinesisk firma, der bidrager til forfølgelse og overvågning af millionerFirmaet Hikvision har sammen med forskere på Aalborg Universitet udviklet en algoritme, som kan benyttes til masseovervågning. Det er stærkt kritisabelt, siger eksperter, fordi Hikvision bidrager til masseovervågning og forfølgelse i Kina.politiken.dk

Misc

Goodbye to the Wild Wild Web
The New York Times
@kevinroose
The internet is changing, and the freewheeling, anything-goes culture of social media is being replaced by something more accountable.