Twitter flags Trump retweet as ‘manipulated media’ / Australia sues Facebook over Cambridge Analytica / Melbourne professor quits after health department pressures her over data breach
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Twitter applied its new “manipulated media” label for the first time on Sunday to a deceptively edited video of former vice president Joe Biden. The video was shared by White House social media director Dan Scavino and retweeted by President Trump. The Washington Post
Social media giant Facebook is being taken to Federal Court over alleged privacy breaches affecting more than 300,000 Australians." ABC News
A prominent university professor has quit after the health department pressured her university to stop her speaking out about the Medicare and PBS history of over 2.5 million Australians being re-identifiable online due to a government bungle. The Guardian
ASPI ICPC
Huawei gives up on Australia in short term but wants probe of 5G competitors
The Sydney Morning Herald
Earlier this year, a former Australian intelligence official went public to detail how the government investigated whether it was "possible to prevent a sophisticated state actor from accessing our networks through a vendor", ultimately concluding it could not be done.
Why Doesn’t the U.S. Have Its Own Huawei?
Politico
@EBKania
The Trump administration has tried one tactic after another to confront the rise of Huawei, the Chinese company that has been fighting to establish a dominant position in 5G. To date, American attempts to browbeat allies and partners into shunning the company’s equipment have proved ineffective. When it comes to countering Huawei’s dominance, White House officials have offered a disorganized assortment of options to respond, and often muddled the messaging.
Australia’s intelligence community needs another independent review
The Interpreter
@DaniellesCave @AlexKOliver
A lack of independent and in-depth investigation over many decades has allowed a community to evolve in which women have not risen to the top at nearly the same rate as their male counterparts, which has produced a community far less diverse than Australian society itself..Progress on diversity is uneven within the Australian community. Our report found that ASD and ASIO were making significant gains. ASD, for example, reported last year that women made up 56% of its senior executive service, the highest proportion in the community (and these gains appear to be continuing). Just last December, the first woman to lead any of Australia’s major intelligence agencies began her new job at ASD..Both the committee [the PJCIS] and the intelligence community itself realise that in a time of increased foreign interference, extremism, and espionage, there is a need to articulate better the security challenges that Australia faces. The days of “just trust us” are long gone, and the agencies must work harder to engage on these challenges and bring the Australian pubic with them.
Fair Labor Association Statement on Sourcing from China and Forced Labor Risk
Fair Labor Association
The Fair Labor Association (FLA) is deeply troubled by credible reports of forced labor and other violations of fundamental human rights in the Xinjiang region of China. We call for an immediate end to these violations and pledge to work collaboratively with governments, civil society, unions, and multilateral organizations to achieve this goal.
The World
A Cyberspace ‘FIFA’ to Set Rules of the Game? UN States Disagree at Second Meeting
Council on Foreign Relations
@joshgold3
Delegates from over seventy countries spoke at the recent OEWG. Some civil society groups made statements too, though as in the first formal OEWG session in September, all non-governmental groups without UN consultative status who sought accreditation for the ostensibly “open and inclusive” forum were denied access. This meant the exclusion of groups like Derechos Digitales, Citizen Lab, and Microsoft.. Russia, Iran, Syria, Cuba, and Egypt—with some support from China—argued that the existing set of voluntary, non-binding norms, as endorsed by all states in the UN General Assembly (UNGA) in 2015, are insufficient to ensure peace and security in cyberspace.
Australia
Facebook sued for alleged 'serious' interferences with privacy over Cambridge Analytica scandal
ABC News
@jacksongs @arielbogle
Social media giant Facebook is being taken to Federal Court over alleged privacy breaches affecting more than 300,000 Australians.
Melbourne professor quits after health department pressures her over data breach
The Guardian
@joshgnosis
A prominent university professor has quit after the health department pressured her university to stop her speaking out about the Medicare and PBS history of over 2.5 million Australians being re-identifiable online due to a government bungle. In 2016, Vanessa Teague, a cryptographer from the University of Melbourne, and two of her colleagues reported on a dataset, published on an open government data website by the federal government, of 2.5 million Australians’ Medicare and PBS payment history dating back to 1984 that had supposedly been de-identified so people were anonymous. Teague and her colleagues reported that the dataset had several samples where people were able to be identified.
Suspected foreign agents ordered to hand over documents as new unit targets China links
The Sydney Morning Herald
@gallo_ways
Chinese government-funded language and culture institutes operating at Australian universities, community groups linked to Beijing’s overseas propaganda arm and organisations looking to harm Australia’s critical infrastructure will be targeted by a new unit set up to enforce the Morrison government’s flagship foreign influence scheme..Mr Porter said another key focus of the new unit would be to crack down on foreign agents looking to secretly trying to influence decisions about Australia’s critical infrastructure.
Why are we concerned about foreign interference through social media?
Australian politics live podcast - The Guardian
@murpharoo
Social media is increasingly being used by foreign actors to spread misinformation and to confuse public debate, both in Australia and overseas. A Senate committee is looking into the risk posed to Australia’s democracy by this foreign interference, chaired by Jenny McAllister. Katharine Murphy chats to McAllister and the shadow minister for cybersecurity, Tim Watts, about the inquiry
Huawei Takes Its Case to the People in Australia
The Wall Street Journal
@RachelPannett @DanStrumpf
Huawei Technologies Co. is bidding to convince citizens in Australia, one of America’s closest allies, that its telecom gear is safe—a grass-roots fight against the government’s decision to exclude the Chinese company from its 5G build-out.
China
The new normal': China's excessive coronavirus public monitoring could be here to stay
The Guardian
@lilkuo
Over the last two months, Chinese citizens have had to adjust to a new level of government intrusion. Getting into one’s apartment compound or workplace requires scanning a QR code, writing down one’s name and ID number, temperature and recent travel history. Telecom operators track people’s movements while social media platforms like WeChat and Weibo have hotlines for people to report others who may be sick. Some cities are offering people rewards for informing on sick neighbours.
Grindr's Chinese owner says to sell social media app for $608 million
CNBC
Chinese gaming company Beijing Kunlun Tech Co Ltd said on Friday that it has agreed to sell Grindr LLC, a popular gay dating app it acquired in 2016, for about $608.5 million. The deal comes after a U.S. government panel set a June 2020 deadline to sell the app. The panel, dubbed the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), has not disclosed its concerns about Kunlun's ownership of Grindr.
USA
Twitter flags video retweeted by President Trump as ‘manipulated media’
The Washington Post
Twitter applied its new “manipulated media” label for the first time on Sunday to a deceptively edited video of former vice president Joe Biden. The video was shared by White House social media director Dan Scavino and retweeted by President Trump. The video was the first test of a new policy the social media company implemented on March 5 to label tweets that contain manipulated or synthetic media, ranging from edited videos to more sophisticated examples known as “deepfakes” that can fabricate events that never happened.
Behind the new rules at social media giants that led to a warning beneath the president’s retweet NBC News
Surge of Virus Misinformation Stumps Facebook and Twitter
The New York Times
@sheeraf @daveyalba @zhonggg
Secret labs. Magic cures. Government plots. Despite efforts by social media companies to stop it, false information about the coronavirus is proliferating around the world.
Stealth political ads flourish on Facebook
Politico
@markscott82
More than half of Facebook pages that displayed U.S. political ads during a recent 13-month period concealed the identities of their backers, according to research reviewed by POLITICO — a tide of deceptive messaging that raises new questions about the social network’s promises of transparency.
State Department blames ‘swarms of online, false personas’ from Russia for wave of coronavirus misinformation online
The Washington Post
@TonyRomm
A top State Department official said Thursday that Russia is behind “swarms of online, false personas” that sought to spread misinformation about coronavirus on social media sites, stressing the “entire ecosystem of Russian disinformation is at play.” The latest warning came from Lea Gabrielle, the coordinator of the government’s Global Engagement Center, in testimony to Congress. Her remarks follow days after an unpublished agency report, unearthed by The Washington Post on Saturday, revealed nearly 2 million tweets over a three-week period pushed coronavirus-related conspiracy theories abroad.
Trial of Programmer Accused in C.I.A. Leak Ends in Hung Jury
The New York Times
@nicole_hong
The judge declared a mistrial on the most serious charges against Joshua Schulte, who was accused of giving secret documents to WikiLeaks.
Cyber Command was worried that WikiLeaks dump would burn Operation Aurora intel, document shows CyberScoop
Canada
U.S. sends top adviser to warn Ottawa against Huawei 5G networks
The Globe and Mail
@RobertFife @stevenchase
U.S. President Donald Trump is dispatching his point man on Huawei Technologies to Ottawa Monday to press the Trudeau government on barring the Chinese telecom giant from next-generation 5G wireless networks in Canada. Robert Blair, White House special representative for international telecommunications, will be laying out U.S. national-security objections over Huawei’s 5G wireless gear in a meeting with Public Safety Minister Bill Blair and senior officials from the departments of Innovation, Foreign Affairs and Defence, Canadian and U.S. sources say.
Southeast Asia
Locsin locked out of Twitter after violent tweet vs Bayan
Rappler
@sofiatomacruz
After one tweet too many, Foreign Secretary Teodoro Locsin Jr was locked out of his official Twitter account on Monday, March 9, as the social media platform said the Philippine official violated its rules.
New Zealand
Action Zealandia member planned terror cell
Newsroom
In leaked Telegram chats obtained by Newsroom, an anonymous member of the far-right Action Zealandia group chatted with American terrorists, discussed purchasing guns from the black market and planned the creation of terror cells in New Zealand.
UK
UK defence committee to probe security of 5G network on Huawei concerns
Reuters
Britain's parliamentary defence committee will investigate the security of the country's 5G mobile network, the group of lawmakers said on Friday, amid continued concerns about the role of Chinese company Huawei.
Porn, gore, and gambling habits aired in Virgin Media breach
Ars Technica
@dangoodin001
Virgin Media, the British telecom and Cable TV provider, has suffered a breach that allowed unauthorized access to customer data, some of which reportedly linked subscribers to porn, gambling, and extreme-violence content.
Misc
Popular VPN And Ad-Blocking Apps Are Secretly Harvesting User Data
BuzzFeed News
@CraigSilverman
Sensor Tower, a popular analytics platform for tech developers and investors, has been secretly collecting data from millions of people who have installed popular VPN and ad-blocking apps for Android and iOS, a BuzzFeed News investigation has found. These apps, which don’t disclose their connection to the company or reveal that they feed user data to Sensor Tower’s products, have more than 35 million downloads.
Yes, You CAN Clean Your iPhone With Disinfecting Wipes
The Wall Street Journal
@JoannaStern
After years of telling us not to use Clorox wipes and other cleaning products on our phones, Apple finally admits that some disinfectants are fine.