Once used mainly by law enforcement, ordinary citizens now have access to smaller, cheaper versions of body cameras to help them feel safe in dangerous situations. Julie Taboh shows us how in this week’s episode of LogOn.
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NEW YORK — Former President Donald Trump said Monday that he still believes TikTok poses a national security risk but is opposed to banning the hugely popular app because doing so would help its rival, Facebook, which he continues to lambast over his 2020 election loss.
Trump, in a call-in interview with CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” was asked about his comments last week that seemed to voice opposition to a bill being advanced by Congress that would effectively ban TikTok and other ByteDance apps from the Apple and Google app stores as well as U.S. web hosting services.
“Frankly, there are a lot of people on TikTok that love it. There are a lot of young kids on TikTok who will go crazy without it,” Trump told the hosts. “There’s a lot of good and there’s a lot of bad with TikTok. But the thing I don’t like is that without TikTok you’re going to make Facebook bigger, and I consider Facebook to be an enemy of the people, along with a lot of the media.”
“When I look at it, I’m not looking to make Facebook double the size,” he added. “I think Facebook has been very bad for our country, especially when it comes to elections.”
Trump has repeatedly complained about Facebook’s role during the 2020 election, which he still refuses to concede he lost to President Joe Biden. That includes at least $400 million that its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, and his wife donated to two nonprofit organizations that distributed grants to state and local governments to help them conduct the 2020 election at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The donations — which were fully permitted under campaign finance law — went to pay for things like equipment to process mail ballots and drive-thru voting locations.
TikTok, a video-sharing app, has emerged as a major issue in the 2024 presidential campaign. The platform has about 170 million users in the U.S., most of whom skew younger — a demographic that both parties are desperately trying to court ahead of November’s general election. Younger voters have become especially hard for campaigns to reach as they gravitate away from traditional platforms like cable television.
Biden’s 2024 campaign officially joined TikTok last month, even though he has expressed his own national security concerns over the platform, banned it on federal devices and on Friday endorsed the legislation that could lead to its ban.
The bill passed unanimously by the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee calls on China’s ByteDance to divest its ownership of TikTok or effectively face a U.S. ban. Top Republicans, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, support the bill. Johnson has indicated it will soon come up for a full vote in the House.
As president, Trump attempted to ban TikTok through an executive order that called “the spread in the United States of mobile applications developed and owned by companies in the People’s Republic of China (China)” a threat to “the national security, foreign policy and economy of the United States.” The courts, however, blocked the action after TikTok sued, arguing such actions would violate free speech and due process rights.
Pressed on whether he still believed the app posed a national security risk, Trump said Monday: “I do believe it. And we have to very much go into privacy and make sure that we are protecting the American people’s privacy and data rights.”
“But,” he went on to say, “you have that problem with Facebook and lots of other companies, too.” Some American companies, he charged, are “not so American. They deal in China. And if China wants anything from them they will give it. So that’s a national security risk also.”
Biden in 2022 banned the use of TikTok by the federal government’s nearly 4 million employees on devices owned by its agencies, with limited exceptions for law enforcement, national security and security research purposes.
He also recently signed an executive order that allows the Department of Justice and other federal agencies to take steps to prevent the large-scale transfer of Americans’ personal data to what the White House calls “countries of concern,” including China.
Both the FBI and the Federal Communications Commission have warned that TikTok owner ByteDance could share user data — such as browsing history, location and biometric identifiers — with China’s authoritarian government. TikTok said it has never done that and wouldn’t do so if asked. The U.S. government also hasn’t provided evidence of that happening.
Trump had first voiced support for the app in a post on his Truth Social site last week. “If you get rid of TikTok, Facebook and Zuckerschmuck will double their business. I don’t want Facebook, who cheated in the last Election, doing better,” he wrote. “They are a true Enemy of the People!”
Trump, in the interview, said he had not discussed the company with Jeff Yass, a TikTok investor and a major GOP donor. Trump said the two had recently met “very briefly” but that Yass “never mentioned TikTok.”
Trump also confirmed he met last week with Elon Musk, the billionaire CEO of Tesla and SpaceX who has increasingly aligned himself with conservative politics. Trump said he didn’t know whether Musk would end up supporting his campaign, noting they “obviously have opposing views on a minor subject called electric cars,” which Trump has railed against.
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Beijing, China — China has intensified efforts to block software that enables internet users to access banned websites during a top political meeting this week, a leading provider of firewall-leaping software told AFP.
Beijing operates some of the world’s most extensive censorship over the internet, with web users in mainland China unable to access everything from Google to news websites without using a virtual private network (VPN).
And as thousands of delegates gather in Beijing this week for the annual “Two Sessions” meeting, VPN software has increasingly struggled to circumvent the censorship while outages have become much more frequent, even when compared to previous sensitive political events.
“Currently, there is increased censorship due to political meetings in China,” a representative of the Liechtenstein-based service Astrill — one of the most popular VPN services for foreigners in China — confirmed to AFP.
“Unfortunately, not all VPN protocols are functioning at this time,” they said. “We are working intensively on bringing all services back to normal, but currently have no ETA.”
The use of a VPN without government authorization is illegal in China, as is using the software to access blocked websites.
State media workers and diplomats, however, are allowed to access prohibited websites such as X, formerly Twitter.
Security has tightened across Beijing throughout the Two Sessions, with security officers patrolling streets with sniffer dogs and elderly volunteers in red armbands monitoring pedestrians for suspicious behavior.
Chinese social media giant Weibo has also been quick to block sensitive topics.
All hashtags discussing Beijing’s decision to call off a traditional news conference by the country’s premier were quickly removed from search results.
And another, a reference to China’s economic woes declaring “middle class children have no future” was also removed.
China’s domestic media is state-controlled and widespread censorship of social media is often used to suppress negative stories or critical coverage.
Regulators have previously urged investors to avoid reading foreign news reports about China.
In a speech last year, President Xi Jinping said the ruling Communist Party’s control of the internet had been “strengthened,” and that it was crucial that the state “govern cyberspace.”
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BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS — Microsoft said Friday it’s still trying to evict the elite Russian government hackers who broke into the email accounts of senior company executives in November and who it said have been trying to breach customer networks with stolen access data.
The hackers from Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence service used data obtained in the intrusion, which Microsoft disclosed in mid-January, to compromise some source-code repositories and internal systems, the software giant said in a blog and a regulatory filing.
A company spokesperson would not characterize what source code was accessed and what capability the hackers gained to further compromise customer and Microsoft systems. Microsoft said Friday that the hackers stole “secrets” from email communications between the company and unspecified customers — cryptographic secrets such as passwords, certificates and authentication keys — and that it was reaching out to them “to assist in taking mitigating measures.”
Cloud-computing company Hewlett Packard Enterprise disclosed on January 24 that it, too, was an SVR hacking victim and that it had been informed of the breach — by whom it would not say — two weeks earlier, coinciding with Microsoft’s discovery it had been hacked.
“The threat actor’s ongoing attack is characterized by a sustained, significant commitment of the threat actor’s resources, coordination and focus,” Microsoft said Friday, adding that it could be using obtained data “to accumulate a picture of areas to attack and enhance its ability to do so.”
Cybersecurity experts said Microsoft’s admission that the SVR hack had not been contained exposes the perils of the heavy reliance by government and business on the Redmond, Washington, company’s software monoculture — and the fact that so many of its customers are linked through its global cloud network.
“This has tremendous national security implications,” said Tom Kellermann of the cybersecurity firm Contrast Security. “The Russians can now leverage supply chain attacks against Microsoft’s customers.”
Amit Yoran, the CEO of Tenable, also issued a statement, expressing alarm and dismay. He is among security professionals who find Microsoft overly secretive about its vulnerabilities and how it handles hacks.
“We should all be furious that this keeps happening,” Yoran said. “These breaches aren’t isolated from each other, and Microsoft’s shady security practices and misleading statements purposely obfuscate the whole truth.”
Microsoft said it had not yet determined whether the incident is likely to materially affect its finances. It also said the intrusion’s stubbornness “reflects what has become more broadly an unprecedented global threat landscape, especially in terms of sophisticated nation-state attacks.”
The hackers, known as Cozy Bear, are the same hacking team behind the SolarWinds breach.
When it initially announced the hack, Microsoft said the SVR unit broke into its corporate email system and accessed accounts of some senior executives as well as employees on its cybersecurity and legal teams. It would not say how many accounts were compromised.
At the time, Microsoft said it was able to remove the hackers’ access from the compromised accounts on or about January 13. But by then, they clearly had a foothold.
It said they got in by compromising credentials on a “legacy” test account but never elaborated.
Microsoft’s latest disclosure comes three months after a new U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission rule took effect that compels publicly traded companies to disclose breaches that could negatively affect their business.
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Although NASA has delayed the launch of a crewed mission to orbit the moon until 2025 at the earliest, four selected astronauts are training in preparation for the first such journey in more than 50 years. VOA’s Kane Farabaugh caught up with the crew of Artemis II during training and has more from San Diego.
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LONDON — Europeans scrolling their phones and computers this week will get new choices for default browsers and search engines, where to download iPhone apps and how their personal online data is used.
They’re part of changes required under the Digital Markets Act, a set of European Union regulations that six tech companies classed as “gatekeepers” — Amazon, Apple, Google parent Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft and TikTok owner ByteDance — will have to start following by midnight Wednesday.
The DMA is the latest in a series of regulations that Europe has passed as a global leader in reining in the dominance of large tech companies. Tech giants have responded by changing some of their long-held ways of doing business — such as Apple allowing people to install smartphone apps outside of its App Store.
The new rules have broad but vague goals of making digital markets “fairer” and “more contestable.” They are kicking in as efforts around the world to crack down on the tech industry are picking up pace.
Here’s a look at how the Digital Markets Act will work:
What companies have to follow the rules?
Some 22 services, from operating systems to messenger apps and social media platforms, will be in the DMA’s crosshairs.
They include Google services like Maps, YouTube, the Chrome browser and Android operating system, plus Amazon’s Marketplace and Apple’s Safari Browser and iOS.
Meta’s Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are included as well as Microsoft’s Windows and LinkedIn.
The companies face the threat of hefty fines worth up to 20% of their annual global revenue for repeated violations — which could amount to billions of dollars — or even a breakup of their businesses for “systematic infringements.”
What effect will the rules have globally?
The Digital Markets Act is a fresh milestone for the 27-nation European Union in its longstanding role as a worldwide trendsetter in clamping down on the tech industry.
The bloc has previously hit Google with whopping fines in antitrust cases, rolled out tough rules to clean up social media and is bringing in world-first artificial intelligence regulations.
Now, places like Japan, Britain, Mexico, South Korea, Australia, Brazil and India are drawing up their own versions of DMA-like rules aimed at preventing tech companies from dominating digital markets.
“We’re seeing copycats around the world already,” said Bill Echikson, senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis, a Washington-based think tank. The DMA “will become the defacto standard” for digital regulation in the democratic world, he said.
Officials will be looking to Brussels for guidance, said Zach Meyers, assistant director at the Center for European Reform, a think tank in London.
“If it works, many Western countries will probably try to follow the DMA to avoid fragmentation and the risk of taking a different approach that fails,” he said.
How will downloading apps change?
In one of the biggest changes, Apple has said it will let European iPhone users download apps outside its App Store, which comes installed on its mobile devices.
The company has long resisted such a move, with a big chunk of its revenue coming from the 30% fee it charges for payments — such as for Disney+ subscriptions — made through iOS apps. Apple has warned that “sideloading” apps will come with added security risks.
Now, Apple is cutting those fees it collects from app developers in Europe that opt to stay within the company’s payment-processing system. But it’s adding a 50-euro cent fee for each iOS app installed through third-party app stores, which critics say will deter the many existing free apps — whose developers currently don’t pay any fee — from jumping ship.
“Why would they possibly opt into a world where they have to pay a 50-cent per-user fee?” said Avery Gardiner, Spotify’s global director of competition policy. “So those alternative app stores will never get traction, because they’ll be missing this huge chunk of apps that would need to be there in order for customers to find the store attractive.”
“That is utterly at odds with the very purpose of the DMA,” Gardiner added.
Brussels will be closely scrutinizing whether tech companies are complying.
EU competition chief Margrethe Vestager said this week that after 10 years on the job, “I have seen quite a number of antitrust cases and quite a lot of creativity built into how to work around the rules that we have.”
How will people get more options online?
Consumers won’t be forced into default choices for key services.
Android users can pick which search engine to use by default, while iPhone users will get to choose which browser will be their go-to. Europeans will see choice screens on their devices. Microsoft, meanwhile, will stop forcing people to use its Edge browser.
The idea is to stop people from being nudged into using Apple’s Safari browser or Google’s Search app. But smaller players still worry that they might end up worse off than before.
Users might just stick with what they recognize because they don’t know anything about the other options, said Christian Kroll, CEO of Berlin-based search engine Ecosia.
Ecosia has been pushing for Apple and Google to include more information about rival services in the choice screens.
“If people don’t know what the alternatives are, it’s rather unlikely that many of them will select an alternative,” Kroll said. “I’m a big fan of the DMA. I am not sure yet if it will have the results that we’re hoping for.”
How will internet searches change?
Some Google search results will show up differently, because the DMA bans companies from giving preference to their own services.
So, for example, searches for hotels will now display an extra “carousel” of booking sites like Expedia. Meanwhile, the Google Flights button on the search result display will be removed and the site will be listed among the blue links on search result pages.
Users also will have options to stop being profiled for targeted advertising based on their online activity.
Google users are getting the choice to stop data from being shared across the company’s services to help better target them with ads.
Meta is allowing users to separate their Facebook and Instagram accounts so their personal information can’t be combined for ad targeting.
The DMA also requires messaging systems to be able to work with each other. Meta, which owns the only two chat apps that fall under the rules, is expected to come up with a proposal on how Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp users can exchange text messages, videos and images.
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Washington — Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram were back up on Tuesday after a more than two-hour outage that was caused by a technical issue and impacted hundreds of thousands of users globally.
The disruptions started at around 10:00 a.m. ET (1500 GMT), with many users saying on rival social media platform X they had been booted out of Facebook and Instagram and were unable to log in.
“We are aware of the incident and at this time, we are not aware of any specific malicious cyber activity at this time,” a spokesperson for the White House National Security Council said.
At the peak of the outage, there were more than 550,000 reports of disruptions for Facebook and about 92,000 for Instagram, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com.
“Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services. We resolved the issue … for everyone who was impacted,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a post on X.
Meta Platforms, shares of which were down 1.2% in afternoon trading, has about 3.19 billion daily active users across its family of apps, which also include WhatsApp and Threads.
Its status dashboard had earlier showed the application programming interface for WhatsApp Business was also facing issues.
Though the outage for WhatsApp and Threads was much smaller, according to Downdetector, which tracks outages by collating status reports from several sources including users.
Several employees of Meta said on anonymous messaging app Blind that they were unable to log in to their internal work systems, which left them wondering if they were laid off, according to posts seen by Reuters.
The outage was among the top trending topics on X, formerly Twitter, with the platform’s owner Elon Musk taking a shot at Meta with a post that said: “If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working.”
X itself has faced several disruptions to its service after Musk’s $44 billion purchase of the social media platform in October 2022, with an outage in December causing issues for more than 77,000 users in countries from the U.S. to France.
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The World Bank says digital entrepreneurship is paving the way for economic empowerment across Nigeria and reducing poverty through internet access. In a January report, the Bank says internet access reduced extreme poverty by 7% in the West African country. But it noted a digital gender gap where women are less likely than men to have internet access. Gibson Emeka reports from Abuja in this report narrated by Mary Alice Salinas.
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London — The European Union leveled its first antitrust penalty against Apple on Monday, fining the U.S. tech giant nearly $2 billion for breaking the bloc’s competition laws by unfairly favoring its own music streaming service over rivals.
Apple banned app developers from “fully informing iOS users about alternative and cheaper music subscription services outside of the app,” said the European Commission, the 27-nation bloc’s executive arm and top antitrust enforcer.
“This is illegal, and it has impacted millions of European consumers,” Margrethe Vestager, the EU’s competition commissioner, said at a news conference.
Apple behaved this way for almost a decade, which meant many users paid “significantly higher prices for music streaming subscriptions,” the commission said.
The 1.8 billion-euro fine follows a long-running investigation triggered by a complaint from Swedish streaming service Spotify five years ago.
The EU has led global efforts to crack down on Big Tech companies, including a series of multbillion-dollar fines for Google and charging Meta with distorting the online classified ad market. The commission also has opened a separate antitrust investigation into Apple’s mobile payments service.
Apple hit back at both the commission and Spotify, saying it would appeal the penalty.
“The decision was reached despite the Commission’s failure to uncover any credible evidence of consumer harm, and ignores the realities of a market that is thriving, competitive, and growing fast,” the company said in a statement.
It said Spotify stood to benefit from the decision, asserting that the Swedish streaming service that holds a 56% share of Europe’s music streaming market and doesn’t pay Apple for using its App Store met 65 times with the commission over eight years.
“Ironically, in the name of competition, today’s decision just cements the dominant position of a successful European company that is the digital music market’s runaway leader,” Apple said.
The commission’s investigation initially centered on two concerns. One was the iPhone maker’s practice of forcing app developers that are selling digital content to use its in-house payment system, which charges a 30% commission on all subscriptions.
But the EU later dropped that to focus on how Apple prevents app makers from telling their users about cheaper ways to pay for subscriptions that don’t involve going through an app.
The investigation found that Apple banned streaming services from telling users about how much subscription offers cost outside of their apps, including links in their apps to pay for alternative subscriptions or even emailing users to tell them about different pricing options.
The fine comes the same week that new EU rules are set to kick in that are aimed at preventing tech companies from dominating digital markets.
The Digital Markets Act, due to take effect Thursday, imposes a set of do’s and don’ts on “gatekeeper” companies including Apple, Meta, Google parent Alphabet, and TikTok parent ByteDance — under threat of hefty fines.
The DMA’s provisions are designed to prevent tech giants from the sort of behavior that’s at the heart of the Apple investigation. Apple has already revealed how it will comply, including allowing iPhone users in Europe to use app stores other than its own and enabling developers to offer alternative payment systems.
The commission also has opened a separate antitrust investigation into Apple’s mobile payments service, and the company has promised to open up its tap-and-go mobile payment system to rivals in order to resolve it.
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washington — Speaking Mandarin and promoting love for China, countless videos of foreign-looking women made with artificial intelligence started popping up on Chinese social media platforms around the Lunar New Year earlier this month.
The avatars in the videos are created with online images that are stolen, reproduced and repurposed so that even the women in real life recognize themselves in the videos.
Olga Loiek is one of those women. She’s a 20-year-old Ukrainian who studies cognitive science at the University of Pennsylvania. A couple of months ago, Loiek started a YouTube channel where she talks about mental health and shares her philosophies about life.
However, shortly after that, she started receiving messages from followers telling her that they had seen her on Chinese social media. There, she’s not Olga Loiek but a Russian woman who speaks Mandarin, loves China and wants to marry a Chinese man. Her name is Natasha, or Anna, or Grace, depending on the social media platform you find her on in China.
“I started translating the videos with Google Translate, and I realized that most of these accounts are talking about things like China, Russia, how good the relationship between China and Russia is,” she told VOA. “This feels very violating.”
In some videos, the avatars talk about how much they value Russia and China’s close ties. In other videos, they praise Chinese history and culture or talk about how much Russian women want to marry Chinese.
“If you marry Russian women, we will wash clothes, cook, and wash dishes for you every day,” an avatar said. “We will also give you foreign babies, as many as you want.”
Several dozen videos of Loiek’s avatar speaking Mandarin have been found on video sites Douyin and Bilibili. Most of these accounts would ask viewers to visit their online stores to buy what they say are authentic Russian goods.
Douyin, China’s version of TikTok, has labeled some of these videos as potentially AI-generated. But comments show that many believed they were looking at a real woman. One netizen wrote, “Russian beauty, Chinese people welcome you.”
Loiek said she would never say things like that, obviously, given that she’s from Ukraine, which has been at war with Russia since 2022.
She said, “This is probably used to make people, maybe people in China, feel that foreigners feel that their country is superior.”
On Bilibili, China’s biggest video site, some AI videos using Loiek’s face are marked with the logo of HeyGen, indicating that the video was generated on the company’s website.
In one tutorial on Bilibili, the demonstrator even shows how to make a short video on HeyGen with a clip of Loiek talking.
HeyGen is an AI company headquartered in Los Angeles that was launched in China in 2020. It specializes in realistic digital avatars, voice generation and video translating.
The technology developed by HeyGen was used in AI videos of Donald Trump and Taylor Swift speaking perfect Mandarin that went viral on Chinese social media in October 2023. According to Forbes, the company is now valued at $75 million.
HeyGen’s moderation policy states that users cannot generate avatars that “represent real individuals, including celebrities or public figures, without explicit consent.” The company’s official tutorial video on avatar making shows that users must submit a video of people giving consent to the use of their likeness. It’s unclear how some in China could circumvent the requirement to make videos of Loiek.
Loiek said that since she and her YouTube subscribers have sent complaints to Chinese social media companies, about a dozen of the accounts imitating her have been taken down.
VOA reached out to HeyGen and Douyin’s parent company, ByteDance, for comments but has not received a response.
The Chinese government rolled out provisions to regulate deepfakes and other “deep synthesis services” in early 2023. The law prohibits generating deepfakes without the consent of the people whose image or other information is used.
Loiek posted her story on YouTube, and it has been shared on Chinese social media. Netizens across platforms sympathized with her and called for tougher regulations on AI.
Chinese tech giants such as Baidu and Tencent are investing heavily in AI technology. One of the most hyped-up services powered by AI is digital humans.
Tencent and Xiaoice, a Chinese AI studio spun off from Microsoft, offer digital human services that can clone people and turn them into AI avatars for as little as $145.
AI avatars have also been found in online disinformation campaigns that spread pro-China and anti-U.S. narratives. In February 2023, research firm Graphika found a social media campaign promoting Beijing’s interests using realistic-looking computer-generated people in videos.
In September 2023, the U.S. State Department warned in a report, “Access to global data combined with the latest developments in artificial intelligence technology would enable the PRC [People’s Republic of China] to surgically target foreign audiences and thereby perhaps influence economic and security decisions in its favor.
As for Loiek, she does not plan to quit YouTube or stop posting.
“We need some sort of regulatory frameworks, so we can understand and we can prevent these things from happening,” she said.
Adrianna Zhang contributed to this report.
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WASHINGTON — U.S. security officials are bracing for an onslaught of fast-paced influence operations, from a wide range of adversaries, aimed at impacting the country’s coming presidential election.
FBI Director Christopher Wray issued the latest warning about attempts to meddle with American voters as they decide whom to support when they go to the polls come November, telling a meeting of security professional Thursday that technologies such as artificial intelligence are already altering the threat landscape.
“This election cycle, the U.S. will face more adversaries moving at a faster pace and enabled by new technology,” Wray said.
“Advances in generative AI [artificial intelligence], for instance, are lowering the barrier to entry, making it easier for both more and less sophisticated foreign adversaries to engage in malign influence while making foreign influence efforts by players both old and new, more realistic and more difficult to detect,” he said.
The warning echoes concerns raised earlier in the week by a top lawmaker and by the White House, both singling out Russia.
“I worry that we are less prepared for foreign intervention in our elections in 2024 than we were in 2020,” said Mark Warner, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, during a cybersecurity conference on Tuesday.
On Sunday, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan told NBC’s “Meet the Press” there is “plenty of reason to be concerned.”
“There is a history here in presidential elections by the Russian Federation, by its intelligence services,” Sullivan said.
U.S. intelligence agencies concluded Russia sought to interfere in both the 2016 and 2020 elections.
But Russia has not been alone.
A declassified intelligence assessment looking at the 2022 midterm elections concluded with high to moderate confidence that Russia was joined by China and Iran in seeking to sway the outcome.
“China tacitly approved efforts to try to influence a handful of midterm races involving members of both U.S. political parties,” the report said.
“Tehran relied primarily on its intelligence services and Iran-based online influencers to conduct its covert operations,” it said. “Iran’s influence activities reflected its intent to exploit perceived social divisions and undermine confidence in U.S. democratic institutions during this election cycle.”
The United States has also alleged other adversaries, such as Cuba, Venezuela and Lebanese Hezbollah, have sought to influence elections, as have allies, such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia.
The warnings from Wray and others are encountering pushback from some lawmakers and conservative commentators who view such statements as an attempt to resurrect what they call the “Russia hoax” — saying the narrative that Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election to help former President Donald Trump win is without merit.
Warner, however, dismissed that view in response to a question from VOA on the sidelines of Tuesday’s security conference. “Anyone who doesn’t think the Russian intel services have and will continue to interfere in our elections … I wonder where they’re getting their information to start with,” he said.
Wray on Thursday suggested the list of countries and other foreign groups seeking to influence U.S. voters is set to expand. “AI is most useful for what I would call kind of mediocre bad guys and making them kind of like intermediate,” he said.
“The really sophisticated adversaries are using AI more just to increase the speed and scale of their efforts,” he said. “But we are coming towards a day very soon where what I would call the experts, the most sophisticated adversaries, are going to find ways to use AI to be even more elite.”
Some private cybersecurity firms also see the danger growing.
This past September, Microsoft warned that Beijing has developed a new artificial intelligence capability that can produce “eye-catching content” more likely to go viral compared to previous Chinese influence operations.
Others agree.
“Whether it’s robocalls, whether it’s fake videos — all those things really even back to 2022, weren’t as prevalent,” Trellix CEO Bryan Palma told VOA. “You weren’t going to get any high-quality type of deepfake video.
“I think you’re going to see more and more of that as we get closer to the election,” he said.
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washington — Rights advocates are urging international social media platforms to do more to prevent Chinese authorities from obtaining the personal information of users. The call comes after two popular Chinese social media influencers alleged on X and YouTube that police in China were investigating their followers and had called some in for questioning.
Social media platforms such as X and YouTube and thousands of websites — from The New York Times to the BBC and VOA — are blocked in China by the country’s Great Firewall. But increasingly, even as social controls tighten under the leadership of Xi Jinping, many in China are using virtual private networks to access X, YouTube and other sites for news, information and opinions not available in China.
Li Ying, who is also known online as Teacher Li, is one of the social media influencers who issued the warning on Sunday. Li came to prominence as a source of news and information following a rare display of public dissent in 2022 in China, protesting the government’s draconian zero-COVID policy. His account on X has now become a hub for news and videos provided by netizens that the Chinese government considers sensitive and censors online.
In a post on Sunday, Teacher Li said, “Currently, the public security bureau is checking my 1.6 million followers and people in the comments, one by one.”
He shared screenshots of private messages he received from followers over the past few months, some of which claimed that police had interrogated individuals, even causing one person to lose their job.
VOA could not independently verify the authenticity of the claims, but court records in China and reports by rights groups have previously documented the country’s increasing use of social media platforms banned in China to detain, prosecute and sentence individuals over comments made online.
The Chinese Embassy spokesperson in Washington, Liu Pengyu, said he was not aware of the specifics regarding the social media influencers.
“As a principle, the Chinese government manages internet-related affairs according to law and regulation,” Liu said.
Influencers warn followers
News of the crackdown on followers of social influencers comes amid a flurry of reports about China’s hacking capabilities. Last week, FBI Director Christopher Wray warned that cyberattacks on U.S. infrastructure were “at a scale greater than we’d seen before.”
A recent document dump detailed how private companies are helping China to hack foreign governments across Southeast Asia and to unmask users of foreign social media accounts.
Wang Zhi’an, a former journalist at China’s state broadcaster CCTV who has a million subscribers on X and 1.2 million followers on YouTube, says his followers have reported similar problems.
In response, both Wang and Teacher Li have urged their followers to take precautions, suggesting they unfollow their accounts, change their usernames, avoid Chinese-made phones and prepare to be questioned.
As of Tuesday afternoon, Li’s followers on X had dropped to 1.4 million. VOA reached out to Li for comment but did not receive a response as of publication.
Authorities reportedly tracking followers
Maya Wang, acting China director at Human Rights Watch, said China is putting more effort into policing platforms based outside of the country as more Chinese people move to the platforms to speak out.
She said the recent reports of authorities tracking down followers is just a part of China’s long-standing effort to restrict freedom of expression.
“I think the Chinese government is also increasingly worried about the information that is being propagated, transmitted or distributed on these foreign platforms because they have been, thanks to these individuals, very influential,” Wang said.
A recent leak of documents from I-Soon, a private contractor linked to China’s top policing agency and other parts of its government, described tools used by Chinese police to curb dissent on overseas social media, including one tool specifically created to surveil users on X.
Hackers also created tools for police to hack email inboxes and unmask anonymous users of X, the documents show. The leak revealed that officers sometimes sent requests to surveil specific individuals to I-Soon.
Wang said it is incumbent on social media companies to make sure their users stay safe.
“I would want to direct these questions to Twitter [X] to ask — are they adopting heightened measures to protect PRC [People’s Republic of China]-based users?” she said. “I think Twitter [X] needs to investigate just how exactly this kind of information is being obtained and whether or not they need to plug some loopholes.”
Yaqiu Wang, research director for China, Hong Kong and Taiwan at Freedom House, said that besides better protecting their users’ privacy, the companies should also put in more effort to combat China’s clampdown on freedom of speech.
“They should have steps actually helping out activists to protect their freedom of speech,” she said. “Big social media companies should widely disseminate information to their users, like a manual or instructions of how to protect their account.
“They need to be more transparent, so users and the public know whether government-sponsored hacking activities are going on,” she added.
VOA reached out to X, formerly known as Twitter, several times for comment but did not receive any response by the time of publication.
Xiao Yu contributed to this report.
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STATE DEPARTMENT — With a science and technology agreement between the United States and People’s Republic of China due to expire Tuesday, the State Department said it is negotiating to “amend, extend, and strengthen protections within” the agreement but declined to specify if the U.S. would extend the deal.
“We are not able to provide information at this time on specific U.S. negotiating positions or on whether the agreement will be extended past its current expiration date,” a State Department spokesperson told VOA.
The Science and Technology Cooperation Agreement is a framework for U.S. governmental collaborations with China in science and technology.
U.S. officials have said the STA provides consistent standards for government-to-government scientific cooperation between the U.S. and China.
While the agreement supports scientific collaboration in areas that benefit the United States, U.S. officials acknowledge the challenges posed by China’s national science and technology strategies and its domestic legal framework.
Critics, including U.S. lawmakers, point out China’s restrictions on data and a lack of transparency in sharing scientific findings. Washington is also concerned about personal safety of American scientists who travel to China, as well as Beijing’s potential military application of shared research.
A report by Congressional Research Service said China’s cooperation under the agreement has not been consistent. For example, “China reportedly withheld avian influenza strains required for U.S. vaccines and in 2019, cut off U.S. access to coronavirus research, including U.S.-funded work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” said the CRS.
Advocates for renewing the agreement want to maintain some level of official and unofficial contacts amid strained relationship between the two countries.
During a recent discussion hosted by the Washington-based Institute for China-America Studies (ICAS), panelists said the STA is “important symbolically” and gives confidence to researchers on both sides to deepen their engagement with counterparts.
“In the event of the agreement’s non-renewal, the mutual confidence that sustains and underpins collaboration is bound to suffer,” said ICAS in its post-event summary.
Dean Cheng, a senior advisor to the China program at the U.S. Institute of Peace, said the American system is far more open, so China will typically be able to gather information regardless of whether there is an agreement.
“The STA is no guarantee that American scientists will, in fact, be able to access Chinese research, information, or scholars, whereas the Chinese side will use the STA as a means of establishing an even greater presence in the U.S.,” Cheng told VOA, adding the “strategic advantage” under the deal will likely be with the PRC.
The STA was originally signed in 1979 by then-U.S. President Jimmy Carter and then-PRC leader Deng Xiaoping. Under the agreement, the two countries cooperate in fields including agriculture, energy, space, health, environment, earth sciences and engineering, as well as educational and scholarly exchanges.
U.S.-China science and technology activity increased in November 2009 with new agreements on joint projects in electric vehicles, or EVs, renewable energy, and the creation of the U.S.-China Clean Energy Research Center, or CERC, a 10-year research effort between the U.S. Department of Energy and China’s Ministry of Science and Technology.
The agreement has been renewed approximately every five years since its inception, with the most recent five-year extension occurring in 2018. Last August, it received a six-month extension as officials from the two countries undertook negotiations to amend and strengthen the terms.
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SHANGHAI — Two prominent Chinese bloggers in exile said that police were investigating their millions of followers on international social media platforms, in an escalation of Beijing’s attempts to clamp down on critical speech even outside of the country’s borders.
Former state broadcaster CCTV journalist Wang Zhi’an and artist-turned-dissident Li Ying, both Chinese citizens known for posting uncensored Chinese news, said in separate posts Sunday that police were interrogating people who followed them on social media, and urged followers to take precautions such as unfollowing their accounts, changing their usernames, avoiding Chinese-made phones and preparing to be questioned.
Li Ying, known as Teacher Li, came to prominence as a source of news about the White Paper protests, a rare moment of anti-government protests in mainland China in 2022. Teacher Li’s account on X, formerly known as Twitter, @whyyoutouzhele now posts news and videos submitted by users, which cover everything from local protests to viral videos of real-life incidents that are censored on the Chinese internet.
In a post Sunday evening, Teacher Li suggested people unfollow his account. “Currently, the public security bureau is checking my 1.6 million followers and people in the comments, one by one.”
Li shared screenshots of private messages he received from followers over the past few months, which claimed that police had interrogated individuals, and that one person had even lost their job.
As of Monday afternoon, Li had dropped down to 1.4 million followers on X.
International social media platforms like X and YouTube are blocked in China but can still be accessed with software that circumvents the country’s censorship systems.
Wang, who has a million subscribers on X and 1.2 million followers on YouTube, also told his fans to unsubscribe.
Li, Wang and the Chinese foreign ministry did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Over the past decade, Beijing has cracked down on dissent on Chinese social media, with thousands of censors employed both at private companies and with the Chinese state.
Chinese users expressing critical opinions online have reported being called, harassed or interrogated by police, with some called in for questioning and ordered to take down certain posts or delete their accounts. In some cases, users have been detained, with some spending up to two weeks in jail and a small number sentenced to years in prison.
More recently, Beijing has extended its reach to tracking non-Chinese platforms such as Facebook, Telegram and X. A recent leak of documents from I-Soon, a private contractor linked to China’s top policing agency and other parts of its government, described tools used by Chinese police to curb dissent on overseas social media, including one tool specifically created to surveil users on X.
Hackers also created tools for police to hack email inboxes and unmask anonymous users of X, the documents show. Sometimes, officers sent requests to surveil specific individuals to I-Soon, the leak revealed.
Li said he would not stop posting even if people unfollowed, but he urged his followers to take basic digital safety precautions.
“I don’t want your life to be impacted just because you wanted to understand the real news in China,” Li said, in an additional post. “You only want to understand what’s happening, but the price is quite high
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