NEW ASPI ICPC REPORT: Engineering global consent | 5G and cyber security | How safe is Apple’s Safe Browsing?
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A new ASPI ICPC report explains how the party-state’s tech-enhanced authoritarianism is expanding globally. The effort doesn’t always involve distinctly coercive and overtly invasive technology, such as surveillance cameras. In fact, it often relies on technologies that provide useful services. ASPI
The rollout of fifth-generation mobile networks, which offer the potential for downloads speeds of up to 10 times faster than today’s — will change how we communicate, work and stream video. However, faster speeds are also likely to present an opportunity for hackers to target more devices and launch bigger cyber attacks. FT
It appears that, at least on iOS 13, Apple is sharing some portion of your web browsing history with the Chinese conglomerate Tencent. This is being done as part of Apple’s “Fraudulent Website Warning”, which uses the Google-developed Safe Browsing technology as the back end. This feature appears to be “on” by default in iOS Safari, meaning that millions of users could potentially be affected. Crypto Engineering
ASPI ICPC
Engineering global consent: the Chinese Communist Party’s data-driven power expansion
ASPI ICPC
@He_Shumei
The Chinese party-state engages in data collection on a massive scale as a means of generating information to enhance state security—and, crucially, the political security of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)—across multiple domains. The party-state intends to shape, manage and control its global operating environment so that public sentiment is favourable to its own interests. This report explains how the party-state’s tech-enhanced authoritarianism is expanding globally. The effort doesn’t always involve distinctly coercive and overtly invasive technology, such as surveillance cameras. In fact, it often relies on technologies that provide useful services.
Read Dr Samantha Hoffman’s accompanying article in The Strategist: Engineering global consent: the Chinese Communist Party’s data-driven power expansion
Are Australian universities putting our national security at risk by working with China?
ABC News
@He_Shumei
Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) analyst Samantha Hoffman has spent months uncovering GTCOM's global and Australian connections. She said the company's intent was to support the Chinese Communist Party's security interests. “Whether it contributes to a state security product or propaganda or military intelligence, all of the data they're collecting can then be turned into information that supports those objectives," said Dr Hoffman, who is releasing a major report on GTCOM tonight.
(ASPI Researcher Vicky Xu and Analysts Dr Samantha Hoffmann and Alex Joske on ABC 4Corners )
New Cold War': Kim Carr hits out at national security establishment
SMH
@fergushunter
Labor senator Kim Carr has lashed out at Australia's national security establishment, claiming that a "creeping authoritarianism" in Canberra and hawkish opposition to research collaboration with China risk the nation's future prosperity. Alex Joske, an analyst with the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said Dr Thom's review identified important gaps in the legislation and there was "no good excuse" for handing sensitive technology to organisations that might use it in ways that were contrary to Australia's interests and values.
China Broadens Data Collection Through Propaganda App and Translation Service
WSJ
@ByShanLi @philipwen11
Samantha Hoffman, author of the Australian report, cited the mining of Facebook data by U.K.-based consulting company Cambridge Analytica around the time of the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the subsequent advances in data collection and analytics as “transforming how public sentiment is monitored, analyzed and manipulated.”..Ms. Hoffman, the Australian report’s author, said the emergence of companies like GTCOM highlights how innocuous devices and services can serve as tools for the Chinese party-state’s “tech-enhanced authoritarianism” ambitions. “While there’s an important focus on technologies such as 5G, surveillance or cyber-enabled espionage, this narrow focus misses the bigger picture,” she said.
China has built 'massive global data-collection ecosystem' to boost its interests
The Guardian
“This expansion isn’t always distinctly coercive or overtly invasive,” Hoffman argues. “While there’s an important focus on technologies such as 5G, surveillance and cyber-enabled espionage, this narrow focus misses the bigger picture.
(ASPI ICPC Researcher Vicky Xu on ABC’s Q&A)
Bots 'skewing the narrative' on Papua unrest
BBC
@BenDoBrown @cyapila @elisethoma5
Joint BBC-ASPI International Cyber Policy Centre investigation looking at the well-funded social media campaign using Facebook & Twitter bots to promote a pro-government agenda in West Papua.
Read the Bellingcat Investigation- Investigating Information Operations in West Papua: A Digital Forensic Case Study of Cross-Platform Network Analysis
The World
Digital dystopia: how algorithms punish the poor
The Guardian
In an exclusive global series, the Guardian lays bare the tech revolution transforming the welfare system worldwide – while penalising the most vulnerable.
Australia
BGH Capital backs major new cyber security player
Financial Review
Former national cyber security adviser Alastair MacGibbon and former Optus Business managing director John Paitaridis joined forces to create the country's largest pure cyber security company, with 400 staff and backing from private equity firm BGH Capital.
A hacker’s paradise? 5G and cyber security
FT
@nickahuber
The rollout of fifth-generation mobile networks, which offer the potential for downloads speeds of up to 10 times faster than today’s — will change how we communicate, work and stream video. However, the faster speeds are also likely to present an opportunity for hackers to target more devices and launch bigger cyber attacks,
Affordability of basic NBN products to be examined
ACCC
The ACCC will consider whether Australians are able to access basic broadband plans at fair and affordable prices, as part of an inquiry into NBN wholesale charges launched today. The inquiry will examine wholesale prices paid by retail service providers (RSPs), which use the NBN to supply residential-grade broadband services.
China
How safe is Apple’s Safe Browsing?
Crypto Engineering
@matthew_d_green
It appears that, at least on iOS 13, Apple is sharing some portion of your web browsing history with the Chinese conglomerate Tencent. This is being done as part of Apple’s “Fraudulent Website Warning”, which uses the Google-developed Safe Browsing technology as the back end. This feature appears to be “on” by default in iOS Safari, meaning that millions of users could potentially be affected.
Trump wants China to help him win. China wants nothing to do with him.
Washington Post
The Chinese watched with curiosity and admiration as Moscow sowed chaos in Washington with its interference in the 2016 presidential election and its other online efforts. (One Chinese official told me in a moment of candour that Russia’s success prompted them to take a fresh look at what tools they could use to infiltrate politics in places like the Philippines and Taiwan, either to tip the scale in favour of a preferred candidate or to undermine and discredit the democratic process.
Megvii CEO says US ban will hit its supply of servers and could disturb IPO but it is ‘ready for the fight’
SCMP
@CocoF1026
Megvii was among 28 Chinese public security bureaus and companies put on a US trade blacklist last week over alleged human rights violations
TikTok risks becoming new front in China's information war
Nikkei
Beijing wants social media to tell stories which support its narrative.
“We feel like cyber-refugees”: The decline of the last online sanctuary for China’s liberals
Quartz
@Jane_Li911
It’s not easy to be a liberal on China’s internet, but for years alternative thinkers found refuge on a platform dedicated to film and book reviews that appeared to pass under the radar because of its relatively small size. Now its users fear its days are numbered.
Apple Told Some Apple TV+ Show Developers Not To Anger China
BuzzFeed
We thought a trade would bring Western values to China. Instead, it brought Chinese values to Apple.
Building China's Comac C919 aeroplane involved a lot of hacking
ZDNet
@campuscodi
One of China's most brazen hacking sprees involved intelligence officers, hackers, security researchers, and company insiders.
Dahua Celebrates PRC 70th Wearing Communist Party Hammer and Sickle
IPVM
Dahua celebrated the PRC's 70th anniversary with a video of various Dahua employees wearing China Communist Party hammer and sickle pins.
(Dahua celebrated the PRC's 70th anniversary with a video, showing a group of unnamed employees singing a hit 1985 song that was repurposed this year into a nationalistic film with the same title to celebrate the PRC 70 anniversary.)
USA
How Instagram Became A Hotspot For Vile Conspiracies And 2020 Disinformation
Huffington Post
@JessReports
Instagram is poised to be one of the worst breeding grounds for political fake news ahead of the 2020 election, and hardly anyone is paying attention. The platform's latest influencers are election hoaxers and conspiracy theorists. However, the Facebook-owned platform has largely escaped the leery eye cast upon its parent company and Twitter, which have taken most of the blame for housing foreign disinformation campaigns in 2016.
Study links Russian tweets to release of hacked emails
Washington Post
Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. election has generally been seen as two separate, unrelated tracks: hacking Democratic emails and sending provocative tweets. But a new study suggests the tactics were likely intertwined.
Inside Mark Zuckerberg's private meetings with conservative pundits
Politico
@NatashaBertrand
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been hosting informal talks and small, off-the-record dinners with conservative journalists, commentators and at least one Republican lawmaker in recent months to discuss issues like free speech and discuss partnerships.
UK
UK financial services firms leading the way on automation
City AM
@annafmenin
While 37 per cent of UK financial services firms surveyed have implemented robotic processing automation (RPA) – a technology used to automate human activities – only 28 per cent of global firms have adopted the technology, according to a report published today by PwC.
Fight fake news by tracking political parties' social media, says Oxford study
Yahoo
Political parties that spread fake news online should be punished with bigger fines and restrictions on their use of data, according to a University of Oxford report. The report, released today, also recommends that the Electoral Commission should keep a database of political campaigners’ social media accounts to keep track of the material they are posting.
Europe
Clash Over Surveillance Software Turns Personal in Germany
Bloomberg
@rj_gallagher
Markus Beckedahl was visiting Detroit when a legal threat arrived in his email inbox from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean: a cease-and-desist letter from lawyers representing FinFisher, a German company that sells surveillance technology that it says helps law enforcement stamp out crime.
Americas
Chinese social media giant flouting Canadian election law
CBC
@LizT1
Chinese social media giant WeChat is flouting Canada's new elections rules, allowing election ads to run without setting up a digital ad registry as required by law, CBC News has learned. The platform's owner, Tencent, says election ads aren't running on its popular WeChat social media site and it has not set up an ad registry in Canada… CBC News has obtained a copy of a Conservative Party attack ad that ran on WeChat last week in Chinese and English, claiming that a re-elected Liberal government under Justin Trudeau would legalize "hard drugs".
Middle East
Preventing Electoral Interference – The Next Frontier For The National Cyber Directorate?
The Jerusalem Post
@tamirlibel
Although Israeli decision-makers are demonstrating a growing awareness of this threat, they have yet to agree on the agency to which this responsibility should be assigned.
Misc
WiFi signals can now be used to identify people through walls
Digital Information World
The research indicated that WiFi signals could be used to locate people through hard walls, something that has been developing for quite some time now. Basically the WiFi signals will be used to analyze someone’s walking gait, and if the gait matches what is on record then this would be a successful identification which would make it possible to locate that person time and time again. WiFi signals have been used previously to 3D map a room through a hard wall, though this is the first time that people have been successfully identified using nothing but the WiFi signals that are in their rooms. The technique is referred to as Cross-Modal Identification, and it has a lot of potential uses particularly in the field of law enforcement.
Research
Studying “Study The Great Nation”
OTF
“Study the Great Nation,” or Xuexi Qiangguo (学习强国 in Chinese) is an app billed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as an educational tool. Earlier this year, it became the most downloaded app on the Chinese App Store and the Chinese government claims that it now has over 100 million users. The numbers are sky-high, with the Huawei store reporting 300 million downloads, and Wadoujia 195 million downloads. ‘Study the Great Nation’ features content like news articles and quizzes alongside a leaderboard where users’ scores can be viewed alongside those of their coworkers.
Jobs
Disinformation Staff Fellow
Harvard
The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University seeks two extraordinary full-time, salaried employee fellows to join the Assembly: Disinformation Program. The fellows will coordinate and work closely with a group of experts in the field, including Berkman Klein Center faculty and fellows, senior staff, and outside specialists from industry, academia, and civil society to tackle disinformation in the digital public sphere from a cybersecurity perspective. To apply, email apply@cyber.harvard.edu
Want to be The World’s first Tech Ambassador?
Techamb
Chatham House & The Office of the Tech Ambassador of Denmark offer university students around the world a unique opportunity to take the seat of the world’s first Tech Ambassador for a day. If you are interested in diplomacy and themes such as emerging tech & geopolitics, cybersecurity & disinformation, data privacy or the digital divide, then this essay competition is right for you! To apply Follow @DKTechAmb on Twitter and send your essay to techamb@um.dk no later than December 20th 2019 with the subject: ‘#TechAmbassador1Day’.
Events
Cyber Security Hypothetical – Panel
UNSW
We invite you to join us on 22 October, in challenging paradigms and provoking discussion around this important topic that impacts and targets us all. Cyber Security Hypothetical will be led and moderated by Mr Steve Wilson and panellists will include MAJGEN Marcus Thompson, Professor Michael Frater, Mr Alastair MacGibbon, Ms Kate Carruthers and Mr Justin Warren.
The rise of information warfare: in-conversation with Peter W. Singer
ASPI ICPC
This event for 29 October is SOLD OUT but you can watch a livestream on the ASPI facebook page - ASPI's International Cyber Policy Centre invites you to an in-conversation with Peter W. Singer and Danielle Cave to consider the rise of information warfare. Peter Warren Singer is strategist and senior fellow at New America. He has been named by the Smithsonian as one of the nation’s 100 leading innovators, by Defense News as one of the 100 most influential people in defense issues, by Foreign Policy to their Top 100 Global Thinkers List, and as an official “Mad Scientist” for the U.S. Army’s Training and Doctrine Command. A drinks and canapes reception will conclude the event. This event is kindly supported by Microsoft.