Policy wonk. Torontonian. Photographer. Not necessarily in that order.
Marco Arment has a scathing and altogether too accurate accounting of the USB-C standard. Anyone who is dealing with the headaches of managing different USB-C cables, hubs, and chargers is all to well aware of the problems associated with the standard, but Marco’s post is the best summation of all the problems in a single location.
On Sidney Crosby’s visit with the Penguins to the Trump White House:
Apathetic white people who groan when athletes of colour get political, or who suggest as Crosby did that politics and sports do not mix, are in need of a reminder that for most, political activism isn’t a choice or a hobby. People don’t usually consider it fun or interesting to put their jobs on the line to speak out against a bigger power. The marginalized do not go looking for politics. It seeks them out. In this context, it sought them out when the President of the United States openly flirted with a racist ideology that would very much like to destroy them.
Exactly.
As part of a long-feature for The Guardian:
The techniques these companies use are not always generic: they can be algorithmically tailored to each person. An internal Facebook report leaked this year, for example, revealed that the company can identify when teens feel “insecure”, “worthless” and “need a confidence boost”. Such granular information, Harris adds, is “a perfect model of what buttons you can push in a particular person”.
Tech companies can exploit such vulnerabilities to keep people hooked; manipulating, for example, when people receive “likes” for their posts, ensuring they arrive when an individual is likely to feel vulnerable, or in need of approval, or maybe just bored. And the very same techniques can be sold to the highest bidder. “There’s no ethics,” he says. A company paying Facebook to use its levers of persuasion could be a car business targeting tailored advertisements to different types of users who want a new vehicle. Or it could be a Moscow-based troll farm seeking to turn voters in a swing county in Wisconsin.
Harris believes that tech companies never deliberately set out to make their products addictive. They were responding to the incentives of an advertising economy, experimenting with techniques that might capture people’s attention, even stumbling across highly effective design by accident.
The problems facing many Internet users today are predicated on how companies’ services are paid: by companies doing everything they can to capture and hold your attention regardless of your own interests. If there were alternate models of financing social media companies, such as paying small monthly or yearly fees, imagine how different online communications would be: communities would likely be smaller, yes, but the developers would be motivated to do whatever they could to support the communities instead of advertisers targeting those communities. Silicon Valley has absorbed many of the best minds for the past decade and a half in order to make advertisements better. Imagine what would be different if all that excitement had been channeled towards less socially destructive outputs.
From n+1:
Given that some of the major players involved in Trump’s campaign effort have obsessions with war tactics and strategy, it’s easy to imagine that weaponized targeting may not only be a pre-election phenomenon. Such efforts could be employed as part of an ongoing campaign to weaken any resistance to the Trump Administration and thwart political opposition through ratcheting up in-fighting and splintering. It’s not an overstatement to suggest that the infrastructure of mass consumer surveillance enables new kinds of actors to take up the work of COINTELPRO on a mass scale. Former Cambridge Analytica employees have said the company internally discusses their operations as psychological warfare.
Cambridge Analytica may not be alone in pursuing these types of psychological warfare tactics. In response to the recent revelations of Russian-bought Facebook ads, Senator Mark Warner told the Washington Post that the aim of the ads was “to sow chaos.” Yet, rather than promoting general chaos, some ads may have been specifically designed to fuel infighting among the Trump opposition. Earlier this year, The Intercept showed that TigerSwan, a shady mercenary firm hired by Energy Transfer Partners to combat communities opposing the Dakota Access Pipeline, used knowledge gleaned from surveillance as part of their own strategy to splinter their opponents. A leaked TigerSwan document declared, “Exploitation of ongoing native versus non-native rifts, and tribal rifts between peaceful and violent elements is critical in our effort to delegitimize the anti-DAPL movement.”
What our current digital environment affords are opportunities for efficient, large-scale use of such tactics, which can be refined by data-rich feedback loops. Manipulation campaigns can plug into the commercial surveillance infrastructure and draw on lessons of behavioral science. They can use testing to refine strategies that take account of the personal traits of targets and identify interventions that may be most potent. This might mean identifying marginal participants, let’s say for joining a march or boycott, and zeroing in on interventions to dissuade them from taking action. Even more worrisomely, such targeting could try to push potential allies in different directions. Targets predicted to have more radical inklings could be pushed toward radical tactics and fed stories deriding compromise with liberal allies. Simultaneously, those predicted to have more liberal sympathies may be fed stories that hype fears about radical takeover of the resistance. Such campaigns would likely play off divisions along race, gender, issue-specific priorities, and other lines of identity and affinity.
We’re reaching the pinnacle of what online advertising can do: identify persons of interest, separate specific persons from others to discretely target them, and motivate targets to change their emotional states and act based on those states. It’s bad enough this is done to push products but, now, the same activities are seeping into the political systems and damaging democratic undertakings in the process. Such activity has to be regulated, if not stopped entirely.
The grugq has a useful explainer for the different kinds of threat actors an organization might be mindful for, such as hactivists, criminals, and state actors, and how and why they tend to operate as they do. With regards to state, and private-public, teams:
There is a tendency to want to rank the Services, but this is not especially fruitful. More interesting is the culture of the Services teams, their nature, their agility, the problems that the team are expected to address, whether they have internal capacity or rely on third parties, and so on. More relevant is trying to understand what they exist to accomplish, how capable they are of doing that, how agile they are in term of changing their MO and if and how well they can accomplish other goals.
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This is an inherent problem with hybrid public/private teams — information sharing. While the private component will probably have superior skills and breadth and depth of operational experience, their lack of big picture understanding will prevent them from surfacing ideas, making connections, or otherwise providing insight to help advance the operation. Generally, having the people actually doing the work involved in suggesting improvements is a good way to improve. Similarly, having the people with wide access to botnet victims know what sort of data will get them paid will produce a greater volume of potentially interesting data.
While I tend to think that his analysis of nation-states is good, it under-emphasizes how certain states either have their farm leagues ‘train’ on civil society or, alternately, team with semi-skilled private operators who operate similar to criminals. Whether these behaviours are representative of training exercises, of not wasting the good stuff on civil society, of deliberately being evident to instil caution amongst civil society, or of something else, isn’t entirely clear. Regardless, there is arguably a bit more nuance that could be added to round out some of the characteristics of different threat actors.
Via The Intercept:
At the end of a quick one-day trial, Judge Emma Arbuthnot at Westminster Magistrates Court ruled that Rabbani had willfully obstructed police when he declined to hand over his passwords. Rabbani avoided a possible three-month jail term and was instead handed a 12-month conditional discharge and told he must pay court costs of £620 ($835). This means a Terrorism Act offense will be recorded on his criminal record. But as long as he does not re-offend within the 12-month period, no further action will be taken against him.
…
Rabbani had argued his electronic devices should have been protected under the latter category, as they contained confidential information related to his work. The judge said that Rabbani did not make this clear to the officers who initially interrogated him, but did say so later in a prepared statement following his arrest. She described Rabbani as “of good character,” acknowledged he was “trying to protect confidential material on his devices,” and noted that “the importance of passwords and PIN numbers in the 21st century cannot be overstated.” However, she still concluded that his “decision not to provide the information when requested by the examining officers” amounted to “a wilful obstruction of the lawful examination in the circumstances.”
A lawyer was charged and found guilty of a terrorism offence for refusing to decrypt a device containing sensitive client information. A baseline part of the criminal justice system is that what is said between a client and their lawyer is protected speech, but this protection is under threat in the UK: solicitors who do their duty and uphold the oaths to their clients risk serious convictions that may permanently refigure their lives and liberties. This dismantling of baseline aspects of our legal systems to fight ‘terrorism’ are ludicrous and do more harm to our societies than can be inflicted upon us by violent extremists and criminals.
Having followed Facebook for a long time, I know what really plagues the company is that being open and transparent is not part of its DNA. This combination of secrecy, microtargeting and addiction to growth at any cost is the real challenge. The company’s entire strategy is based on targeting, monetizing and advertising.
Common sense ideas such as being humane, understanding its impact on society and civic infrastructure — well that doesn’t bring any dollars into the coffers. Call me cynical, but reactive apologies are nothing but spin.
So very true.
The evidence on the lack of effectiveness and costs of minimum sentence is clear. In 2016, Wilson-Raybould said that minimum sentences were a priority. After almost a year of inaction, that priority is manifest in a concern about public opinion?
But perhaps this should not be a surprise given that in 2016 The Canadian Press reported that the Liberals were eyeing a “politically viable strategy” to bring changes to minimum sentences.
After a decade of ideological criminal justice policy at the hands of the Harper government, swift and principled action is imperative. Inaction means unjust court results, less safe streets, increased court delays and ballooning costs.
Minimum sentences represent the lowest-hanging fruit for meaningful justice reform. Their counterproductive and negative impacts are well documented.
This is not a matter for debate. The solutions are known and uncomplicated.
All we need now is a justice minister with the principle and conviction to take action. Unfortunately, it seems that piece is still missing.
I heartily agree: these types of sentencing rules must be abolished and discretion returned to the bench.
As one of the many people on iOS 11, but who didn’t enrol in the beta testing, I was very surprised that the Twitter and Facebook share integrations were removed as system settings. As it stands it’s not entirely clear how such sharing is supposed to take place in many apps, where the share sheet still points to the settings in iOS 10. I can only hope that app developers update quickly to return this functionality to their applications.
From the Huffington Post:
Four speakers recounted the ways that their lives have been negatively impacted by the FBI’s designation of Juggalos as a gang.
New Mexico resident Crystal Guerrero said that she lost custody of two children because she went to one Insane Clown Posse show. Laura King of Fredericksburg, Virginia, recounted how she was permanently placed on a gang registry while she was on probation for a DUI offense because she had a tattoo of the hatchet man symbol. Jessica Bonometti was fired from her job as a probation officer in Woodbridge, Virginia, because she liked some Insane Clown Posse-related photographs on Facebook.
Fans of the Insane Clown Posse have been identified as gang members since the FBI designated them as a loosely organized hybrid gang. That designation means that routine things that fans do, such as like images of the band or wear band-related clothes, can lead to profound life consequences. It also raises questions about what kinds of information entertainment providers, like Spotify, Apple Music, and Google’s Play Store can disclose to government agencies upon request. Where those companies have information that a subscriber ‘likes’ an ICP track, would disclosing it lead to serious life impediments as individuals try to cross a border, get a government job, or work with children? What policies are in place to prevent governments from fishing for ICP fans, based on likes?
Though it might seem absurd that liking a particular song could harm your life prospects, the possibility that this could happen reveals how metadata — in this case, information of a persons preferences linked to audio or video content — can be more important than the content itself. Viewing a music video or listening to an album may not be sufficient to reveal a person’s ‘affiliations’ but the positive act of liking the video or album is enough to classify someone as a ‘member’ of the ICP ‘organization’.
What happens when someone liked a video or song or album years ago? How can an agency confirm that the person who owns the account was the person who indicated support for the content? And what recourse do people have when the actions of the far past rise up to detrimentally affect them?
While the former head of the NSA bluntly said that his agency used metadata as part of the equation to kill people abroad, less is said about how law enforcement organizations might use metadata to detrimentally impact the lives of persons living within the continental United States. It’s high time that more attention is paid to domestic authorities’ use of metadata and the domestic consequences of its analysis given how it can be used to ruin people’s life chances.
Excited Pixels