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
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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’.
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’
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.