Intel officials urged Trump spy chief not to disclose Russian claims about Clinton | China preparing antitrust investigation into Google | US House committee says spy agencies failing China challenge

Oct 1, 2020

Follow us on Twitter. The Daily Cyber Digest focuses on the topics we work on, including cyber, critical technologies & strategic issues like foreign interference.

Officials at the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency feared that sharing the information with Congress would give credence to unsubstantiated Kremlin-backed material. The Wall Street Journal
China is preparing to launch an antitrust probe into Alphabet Inc's Google, looking into allegations it has leveraged the dominance of its Android mobile operating system to stifle competition, two people familiar with the matter said. Reuters
A House Intelligence Committee report concludes that U.S. spy agencies are failing to meet the multipronged challenge posed by China and calls for changes to focus on pandemics, trade and other issues often given less attention by intelligence professionals. The Wall Street Journal

ASPI ICPC

China’s Leaders Can’t Be Trusted
Project Syndicate
Chris Patten — former British governor of Hong Kong & Chancellor of the University of Oxford.
A recent Australian Strategic Policy Institute study based on satellite images indicates that China has built 380 internment camps in Xinjiang, including 14 still under construction. Having initially denied that these camps even existed, some Chinese officials now claim that most people detained in them have already been returned to their own communities. Clearly, this is far from the truth.

Explore ‘The Xinjiang Data Project’.
Read Nathan Ruser, Dr James Leibold, Kelsey Munro & Tilla Hoja’s paper ‘Cultural erasure’.

Vicky Xiuzhong Xu @xu_xiuzhong

US House has just passed the Uyghur Forced Labor Disclosure Act. The bill requires US publicly listed companies to review and actively audit supply chains for forced labor. Drafting of the bill referenced @ASPI_ICPC report “Uyghurs for Sale” 1/

China is leveraging Donald Trump’s response to COVID-19 in online war: Report
The New Daily
@cait__kelly
US President Donald Trump’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic is being leveraged by pro-Chinese actors, who are waging a large propaganda campaign on Facebook, a report has revealed. Although Facebook will not publicly confirm the accounts are directly linked to the Chinese Communist Party, they follow the same patterns as the tens of thousands of accounts operated by the CCP that were removed by Twitter in June, the report from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute showed.

Fake Facebook, YouTube videos appear with Chinese Communist Party lines The Daily Telegraph
Read Elise Thomas, Albert Zhang and Dr Jake Wallis’ latest Covid-19 Disinformation paper ‘Viral videos: Covid-19, China and inauthentic influence on Facebook’

Danielle Cave @DaniellesCave

.@ASPI_ICPC is embarking on a new multi-yr project which will look at strategies to provide more STEM career pathways to the Indigenous Australian community in North Aust. Please contact @DarkiesDesign & @HuonCurtis to find out more. Details here aspi.org.au/news/stem-care… @ASPI_org

STEM career pathways for the Indigenous Australian communityThe Australian Strategic Policy Institute has been awarded a competitive grant from the Department of Defence to support a project which will look at strategies to provide more STEM career pathways to the Indigenous Australian community in Northern Australia.aspi.org.au

Australia

Data breach: Dfat reveals email addresses of vulnerable Australians stranded overseas
The Guardian
@MargaretSimons
The email addresses belonging to hundreds of Australian citizens were accidentally disclosed in a message about interest-free loans.

FBI training Australian police officers to catch out foreign spies
The Sydney Morning Herald
The FBI has been training Australian Federal Police officers in how to catch foreign spies as a specialist unit set up to counter foreign interference and espionage becomes due for expansion. AFP Commissioner Reece Kershaw revealed he had asked FBI director Chris Wray for help in training officers in the new unit, which has 65 officers.

China

China preparing an antitrust investigation into Google - sources
Reuters
@chenglengtr @QiZHAI @davidkirton_
China is preparing to launch an antitrust probe into Alphabet Inc's Google, looking into allegations it has leveraged the dominance of its Android mobile operating system to stifle competition, two people familiar with the matter said.

Big tech firms may be handing Hong Kong user data to China
The Guardian
@skirchy
Big technology companies may already be complying with secret Chinese requests for user information held in Hong Kong and ought to “come clean” about the vulnerability of the data they hold there, a senior US state department official has said.

Chinese internet companies Sina and Sogou quit Wall Street as tensions rise
SupChina
@LucasNiew
Sina, the owner of social media site Weibo, and web search firm Sogou are the latest Chinese companies joining an exodus from Wall Street.

USA

Intelligence Officials Urged Trump Spy Chief Not to Disclose Unverified Russian Claims About Clinton
The Wall Street Journal
@dnvolz @wstrobel
Officials at the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency feared that sharing the information with Congress would give credence to unsubstantiated Kremlin-backed material.

Tuesday’s Debate Made Clear the Gravest Threat to the Election: The President Himself
The New York Times
@SangerNYT
President Trump’s unwillingness to say he would abide by the result and his disinformation campaign about election fraud went beyond anything President Vladimir V. Putin could have imagined.

Trump and the Limits of Content Moderation
WIRED
@GiladEdelman
The president’s televised encouragement of white supremacy and political violence was a reminder that social media didn’t create these problems.

House Committee Says U.S. Spy Agencies Are Failing China Challenge
The Wall Street Journal
@wstrobel @Kate_OKeeffe
A House Intelligence Committee report concludes that U.S. spy agencies are failing to meet the multipronged challenge posed by China and calls for changes to focus on pandemics, trade and other issues often given less attention by intelligence professionals. The report, most of which is classified, portrays the $85 billion-a-year U.S. intelligence community as overly focused on traditional targets such as terrorism and adversaries’ militaries.

The U.S. Intelligence Community Is Not Prepared for the China Threat
Foreign Affairs
@RepAdamSchiff
We are witnessing the resurgence of authoritarianism across the globe, and it poses a growing challenge to the very idea of liberal democracy. China, with its expanding economic, military, and diplomatic might, is at the forefront of this neoauthoritarian challenge. Beijing seeks to build a world in which its ambitions are unchallenged and individual freedoms give way to the needs of the state. The United States must rise to meet this challenge—and that task begins with understanding China’s intentions and capabilities.

Pentagon Is Clinging to Aging Technologies, House Panel Warns
The New York Times
@SangerNYT
Despite the Pentagon’s talk of embracing quantum computing and artificial intelligence, the politics of killing off old weapons systems is so forbidding that the efforts often falter.

Paul Scharre @paul_scharre

Very excited to see the new State Department's guidance on end use for surveillance capabilities to prevent enabling human rights abuses is finally out (h/t @karaafrederick)

Due Diligence Guidance - United States Department of StateThis guidance is a first-of-its-kind tool intended to provide practical and accessible human rights guidance to U.S. businesses seeking to prevent their products or services with surveillance capabilities from being misused by government end-users to commit human rights abuses. It is meant to be an …state.gov

TikTok was just the beginning: Trump administration is stepping up scrutiny of past Chinese tech investments
The Washington Post
@JeanneWhalen
The federal government is stepping up its scrutiny of past Chinese investments in U.S. tech start-ups, sending a flurry of inquiries about deals that are at times years old. The emailed requests for information are being sent by a new enforcement arm of a government committee that monitors foreign investment for national-security risks, according to lawyers and a redacted copy of one email reviewed by The Washington Post. After the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) gathers details from the companies, it can decide whether to probe the matter further and even push the foreign investor to divest, as it did in the case of TikTok.

Lack of oversight and transparency leave Amazon employees in the dark on Covid-19
NBC News
@oliviasolon @cfarivar @ezranbc @adielkaplan
Some of Amazon's 500,000 warehouse workers are attempting to fill the information gap by compiling data on outbreaks at facilities across the U.S.

Emma Llanso @ellanso

S.4632, Senator Graham's "Online Content Policy Modernization Act" going to markup Thurs., aims to discourage social media services from fact-checking & removing election misinformation. Congress shouldn't make it harder to fight online voter suppression

CDT Leads Coalition in Opposition to The Online Content Policy Modernization Act, S.4632 - Center for Democracy and TechnologyDear Chairman Graham and Ranking Member Feinstein: The undersigned organizations urge you to OPPOSE S.4632, the “Online Content Policy Modernization Act.” This bill would deter platforms from fact checking misleading information about voting and would interfere with social media services’ ability to…cdt.org

North-East Asia

North Korea has tried to hack 11 officials of the UN Security Council
ZDNet
@campuscodi
A hacker group previously associated with the North Korean regime has been spotted launching spear-phishing attacks to compromise officials part of the United Nations Security Council. The attacks, disclosed in a UN report last month, have taken place this year and have targeted at least 28 UN officials, including at least 11 individuals representing six countries of the UN Security Council.

New Zealand

Click, like, share, vote: who's spending and who’s winning on social media ahead of New Zealand's election
The Conversation
@sommerkapitan @mrpvanesch
If social media engagement rates determined which parties form the next government, New Zealand’s parliament would soon look a lot different. With its daily social media interactions commanding an average 7.7% engagement rate, Advance NZ (incorporating the NZ Public Party) would be streets ahead of Labour and National.

UK

Nokia clinches 5G deal with BT to phase out Huawei's kit in EE network
BBC News
@leokelion @ruskin147
Nokia is set to become a major beneficiary of Huawei being blocked from the UK's 5G networks. The Finnish telecoms firm has struck a deal to become the largest equipment provider to BT.

Alex Younger: ‘The Russians did not create the things that divide us — we did that’
Financial Times
Younger’s mission has been to ensure that MI6 emerges a winner in the intelligence tech race. The Q character (in real life a whole department) who made magnet watches and pen grenades in the James Bond films no longer has a monopoly on tech expertise. Under Younger, in 2018 the service backed an £85m venture capital fund to encourage American-style collaboration between the intelligence community and the private sector..No amount of data or tech, however, prepared Britain or its allies for the onslaught of a coronavirus pandemic that has upended everything from geopolitics to business and intelligence gathering. Younger laments the disruption of his plans to visit SIS stations around the world before his October 1 departure. The pandemic-induced paralysis across countries makes for a safer world, in some ways, but it also dangerously disrupts sensitive, human-to-human communication.

Read Danielle Cave's Australian Foreign Affairs essay Data-driven: How Covid-19 and cyberspace are changing spycraft.

Europe

French ministers in spotlight over poor take-up of 'centralised' Covid app
The Guardian
@kimwillsher1
France is looking across the Channel with rare admiration after the NHS Covid-19 test-and-trace app was downloaded 12.4m times in four days – a much greater take-up than its French equivalent. An estimated 3 million people have downloaded the French app, called StopCovid, since its launch in June. In August it was revealed that the app had sent only 72 alerts.

Noah Barkin @noahbarkin

Germany heading for de facto ban of #Huawei @handelsblatt reports: „The entire approval process will be so protracted and the end result so uncertain that network operators can only be sure of their investments if they use other suppliers" @MoritzKoch78

5G-Mobilfunknetz: Hohe Hürden für Huawei – „Das Verfahren kommt einem Ausschluss gleich“Die Bundesregierung hat entschieden: Der chinesische Konzern wird beim Aufbau neuer Netze nicht pauschal ausgeschlossen, dürfte aber kaum noch zum Zuge kommen.handelsblatt.com

NATO and the 5G challenge
NATO Review
The 5G controversy came to a head in early 2019. Many Allies became concerned about the security of future intra-Alliance commercial and military communications, primarily – but not only – because of risks posed by non-Allied suppliers. After months of discussion and debate, NATO leaders meeting in London in December 2019 stressed the importance of “the security of communications, including 5G” and recognised “the need to rely on secure and resilient systems”.

Laurent Gisel @LGiselICRC

Believe it or not: my first tweet! Delighted to announce the publication of a landmark #IRRC article on #cyber operations, #IHL, and the protection of civilians: bit.ly/36cRxmK ‘20 years on’ examines the most important debates on cyber ops during armed conflictsTwenty years on: International humanitarian law and the protection of civilians against the effects of cyber operations during armed confli…Laurent Gisel is Head of the Arms and Conduct of Hostilities Unit at the Legal Division of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Geneva. Between 2013 and 2020, he was the ICRC’s Senior Legal Adviser, Cyber Team Leader and file holder for the rules governing the conduct of hostilitie…bit.ly

Gender and Women in Cyber

Women Founders of AI Startups Take Aim at Gender Bias
The Wall Street Journal
@tepingchen
They see gender diversity in their companies as crucial in making sure the technology doesn’t penalize the underrepresented

Research

Foreign Interference Attribution Tracker
DFRLab
The DFRLab's Foreign Interference Attribution Tracker (FIAT) is an interactive, open-source database that captures allegations of foreign interference relevant to the 2020 election. This tool assesses the credibility, bias, evidence, transparency, and impact of each claim. Explore by scrolling through the timeline and map below. Hover over a circle to see details about a particular case.

Dangers of an AI Race
CNAS
Recent years have seen rapid growth in artificial intelligence (AI), which militaries around the world are adopting into their forces.

Jobs

Senior Researcher / Project Lead
ASPI ICPC
ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre (ICPC) has an outstanding opportunity for a senior researcher to lead a one-year project looking at leadership networks across Asia. Interviews will start immediately.