Broadband satellite service provider Starlink is now being used in the Pacific but not always legally, for now.
In Vanuatu, border workers are confiscating equipment.
Telecom regulator Brian Winji said people using the service had signed up overseas — likely in Australia and New Zealand — and have brought the equipment into the country.
“They smuggle it into Vanuatu without customs knowing,” Winiji said.
“[Starlink] is not allowed to operate inside Vanuatu without getting a proper licence.”
Starlink was given a temporary restricted licence to operate after severe back-to-back cyclones battered the country. But this was only 20 units given to the National Disaster Management Office and it lapses by the end of April.
Anyone else using Starlink is breaking the rules.
Winji said Starlink had not fully applied to operate in Vanuatu and he does not know when they will be operational.
‘Future competitive environment’ Cook Islands telecommunications regulator chair Bernard Hill said regulators who were banning the use of Starlink might have an “overinflated view” of their importance.
“They feel slightly offended by the fact that this happens without their, ‘oh, you’re allowed to do that’. In deregulated markets, like Cook Islands, like New Zealand, the rule is we let you do it until there’s a good reason to say no,” he said.
“They approached me about a licence 18 months ago, they still haven’t resolved on their local structure but unlike the other regulators, I have authorised the roaming of devices purchased in New Zealand and Australia.”
Hill said he did not know the exact number of people using the service, but it has been enough to have a competitive influence on Vodafone Cook Islands — the nation’s biggest broadband provider.
“I can’t say Vodafone is happy about it but they are at least realistic about this being part of the future competitive environment and I believe they’re doing the best to cope with the challenge that presents them.”
In Fiji, Starlink has already been given a licence to operate but it has not yet set up the service locally.
The Telecommunications Authority chairperson David Eyre said it could be operational by the middle of this month.
He said people who had already brought Starlink equipment into the country would need to switch over to the local service when it was running.
“Starlink is in the process of finalising the operational procedures, processes and what not in preparation for launch, we are encouraged that they’re probably going to launch soon and when I say soon, probably early quarter two,” Eyre said.
A Starlink satellite dish, an internet constellation operated by SpaceX, is installed on the wall of an apartment building. Image: RNZ/123rf
Delivering high-speed internet The company, owned by tech billionaire Elon Musk, promises to deliver high-speed internet to the remotest regions by using thousands of satellites orbiting close to the planet.
Hill said Starlink and other low earth orbit satellite companies should be a good fit for the Cook Islands Pa Enua (outer islands) that struggle with poor communications infrastructure.
Eyre said remote connectivity in Fiji was a consideration for giving the licence.
“Coverage in those areas is probably one of the main reasons why we have licensed Starlink here in Fiji, to serve the remotest of the remote.”
In other Pacific nations, Starlink has become or is becoming available.
Papua New Guinea gave the service an operation licence at the beginning of this year and last month Samoa’s cabinet did the same.
Hill said he did not think Starlink and similar companies would make other forms of receiving internet irrelevant.
He said countries needed back up options in case something goes wrong — like the Hunga-Tonga-Hunga-Haa’pai volcano eruption that destroyed Tonga’s internet cable.
Hill said as more Pacific economies rely on internet services, being cut off could be disastrous.
“From the point of view of redundancy and resilience having access to services from overhead as well as undersea is pretty important.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
The TikTok logo displayed on a laptop screen with a glowing keyboard in Krakow, Poland, on March 3, 2024.Photo: Klaudia Radecka/NurPhoto via Getty Images
As far as I know, there are no laws against eating broken glass. You’re free to doomscroll through your cabinets, smash your favorite water cup, then scarf down the shards.
A ban on eating broken glass would be overwhelmingly irrelevant, since most people just don’t do it, and for good reason. Unfortunately, you can’t say the same about another dangerous habit: TikTok.
As a security researcher, I can’t help but hate TikTok, just like I hate all social media, for creating unnecessary personal exposure.
As a security researcher working in journalism, one group of the video-sharing app’s many, many users give me heartburn. These users strike a particular fear into my heart. This group of users is — you guessed it — my beloved colleagues, the journalists.
TikTok, of course, isn’t the only app that poses risks for journalists, but it’s been bizarre to watch reporters with sources to protect express concern about a TikTok ban when they shouldn’t be using the platform in the first place. TikTok officials, after all, have explicitly targeted reporters in attempts to reveal their sources.
My colleagues seem to nonetheless be dressing up as bullseyes.
Ignoring TikTok’s Record
Impassioned pleas by reporters to not ban TikTok curiously omit TikTok’s most egregious attacks on reporters.
In his defense of TikTok, the Daily Beast’s Brad Polumbo offers a disclaimer in the first half of the headline — “TikTok Is Bad. Banning It Would Be Much Worse” — but never expands upon why. Instead, the bulk of the piece offers an apologia for TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance.
Meanwhile, Vox’s A.W. Ohlheiser expatiates on the “both/and” of TikTok, highlighting its many perceived benefits and ills. And yet, the one specific ill, which could have the most impact on Ohlheiser and other reporters, is absent from the laundry list of downsides.
The record is well established. In an attempt to identify reporters’ sources, ByteDance accessed IP addresses and other user data of several journalists, according to a Forbes investigation. The intention seems to have been to track the location of the reporters to see if they were in the same locations as TikTok employees who may have been sources for stories about TikTok’s links to China.
Not only did TikTok surveil reporters in attempts to identify their sources, but the company also proceeded to publicly deny having done so.
“TikTok does not collect precise GPS location information from US users, meaning TikTok could not monitor US users in the way the article suggested,” the TikTok communication team’s account posted on X in response to Forbes’s initial reporting. “TikTok has never been used to ‘target’ any members of the U.S. government, activists, public figures or journalists.”
Forbes kept digging, and its subsequent investigation found that an internal email “acknowledged that TikTok had been used in exactly this way,” as reporter Emily Baker-White put it.
TikTok did various probes into the company’s accessing of U.S. user data; officials were fired and at least one resigned, according to Forbes. That doesn’t change the basic facts: Not only did TikTok surveil reporters in attempts to identify their sources, but the company also proceeded to publicly deny having done so.
And Now, Service Journalism for Journalists
For my journalism colleagues, there may well be times when you need to check TikTok, for instance when researching a story. If this is the case, you should follow the operational security best practice of compartmentalization: keeping various items separated from one another.
In other words, put TikTok on a separate “burner” device, which doesn’t have anything sensitive on it, like your sources saved in its contacts. There’s no evidence TikTok can see, for example, your chat histories, but it can, according to the security research firm Proofpoint, access your device’s location data, contacts list, as well as camera and microphone. And, as as a security researcher, I like to be as safe as possible.
And keep the burner device in a separate location from your regular phone. Don’t walk around with both phones turned on and connected to a cellular or Wi-Fi network and, for the love of everything holy, don’t take the burner to sensitive source meetings.
You can also limit the permissions that your device gives to TikTok — so that you’re not handing the app your aforementioned location data, contacts list, and camera access — and you should. Only allow the app to do things that are required for the app to run, and only run enough to do your research.
And don’t forget, this is all for your research. When you’re done looking up whatever in our hellscape tech dystopia has brought you to this tremendous time suck, the burner device should be wiped and restored to factory defaults.
The security and disinformation risks posed to journalists are, of course, not unique to TikTok. They permeate, one way or another, every single social media platform.
That doesn’t explain journalists’ inscrutable defense of a medium that is actively working against them. It’s as clear as your favorite water cup.
Editor’s note: You can follow The Intercept on TikTok here.
The Israeli military has reportedly implemented a facial recognition dragnet across the Gaza Strip, scanning ordinary Palestinians as they move throughout the ravaged territory, attempting to flee the ongoing bombardment and seeking sustenance for their families.
The program relies on two different facial recognition tools, according to the New York Times: one made by the Israeli contractor Corsight, and the other built into the popular consumer image organization platform offered through Google Photos. An anonymous Israeli official told the Times that Google Photos worked better than any of the alternative facial recognition tech, helping the Israelis make a “hit list” of alleged Hamas fighters who participated in the October 7 attack.
The mass surveillance of Palestinian faces resulting from Israel’s efforts to identify Hamas members has caught up thousands of Gaza residents since the October 7 attack. Many of those arrested or imprisoned, often with little or no evidence, later said they had been brutally interrogated or tortured. In its facial recognition story, the Times pointed to Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha, whose arrest and beating at the hands of the Israeli military began with its use of facial recognition. Abu Toha, later released without being charged with any crime, told the paper that Israeli soldiers told him his facial recognition-enabled arrest had been a “mistake.”
Putting aside questions of accuracy — facial recognition systems are notorious less accurate on nonwhite faces — the use of Google Photos’s machine learning-powered analysis features to place civilians under military scrutiny, or worse, is at odds with the company’s clearly stated rules. Under the header “Dangerous and Illegal Activities,” Google warns that Google Photos cannot be used “to promote activities, goods, services, or information that cause serious and immediate harm to people.”
“Facial recognition surveillance of this type undermines rights enshrined in international human rights law.”
Asked how a prohibition against using Google Photos to harm people was compatible with the Israel military’s use of Google Photos to create a “hit list,” company spokesperson Joshua Cruz declined to answer, stating only that “Google Photos is a free product which is widely available to the public that helps you organize photos by grouping similar faces, so you can label people to easily find old photos. It does not provide identities for unknown people in photographs.” (Cruz did not respond to repeated subsequent attempts to clarify Google’s position.)
It’s unclear how such prohibitions — or the company’s long-standing public commitments to human rights — are being applied to Israel’s military.
“It depends how Google interprets ‘serious and immediate harm’ and ‘illegal activity’, but facial recognition surveillance of this type undermines rights enshrined in international human rights law — privacy, non-discrimination, expression, assembly rights, and more,” said Anna Bacciarelli, the associate tech director at Human Rights Watch. “Given the context in which this technology is being used by Israeli forces, amid widespread, ongoing, and systematic denial of the human rights of people in Gaza, I would hope that Google would take appropriate action.”
Doing Good or Doing Google?
In addition to its terms of service ban against using Google Photos to cause harm to people, the company has for many years claimed to embrace various global human rights standards.
“Since Google’s founding, we’ve believed in harnessing the power of technology to advance human rights,” wrote Alexandria Walden, the company’s global head of human rights, in a 2022 blog post. “That’s why our products, business operations, and decision-making around emerging technologies are all informed by our Human Rights Program and deep commitment to increase access to information and create new opportunities for people around the world.”
This deep commitment includes, according to the company, upholding the Universal Declaration of Human Rights — which forbids torture — and the U.N. Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, which notes that conflicts over territory produce some of the worst rights abuses.
The Israeli military’s use of a free, publicly available Google product like Photos raises questions about these corporate human rights commitments, and the extent to which the company is willing to actually act upon them. Google says that it endorses and subscribes to the U.N. Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, a framework that calls on corporations to “to prevent or mitigate adverse human rights impacts that are directly linked to their operations, products or services by their business relationships, even if they have not contributed to those impacts.”
Walden also said Google supports the Conflict-Sensitive Human Rights Due Diligence for ICT Companies, a voluntary framework that helps tech companies avoid the misuse of their products and services in war zones. Among the document’s many recommendations are for companies like Google to consider “Use of products and services for government surveillance in violation of international human rights law norms causing immediate privacy and bodily security impacts (i.e., to locate, arrest, and imprison someone).” (Neither JustPeace Labs nor Business for Social Responsibility, which co-authored the due-diligence framework, replied to a request for comment.)
“Google and Corsight both have a responsibility to ensure that their products and services do not cause or contribute to human rights abuses,” said Bacciarelli. “I’d expect Google to take immediate action to end the use of Google Photos in this system, based on this news.”
Google employees taking part in the No Tech for Apartheid campaign, a worker-led protest movement against Project Nimbus, called their employer to prevent the Israeli military from using Photos’s facial recognition to prosecute the war in Gaza.
“That the Israeli military is even weaponizing consumer technology like Google Photos, using the included facial recognition to identify Palestinians as part of their surveillance apparatus, indicates that the Israeli military will use any technology made available to them — unless Google takes steps to ensure their products don’t contribute to ethnic cleansing, occupation, and genocide,” the group said in a statement shared with The Intercept. “As Google workers, we demand that the company drop Project Nimbus immediately, and cease all activity that supports the Israeli government and military’s genocidal agenda to decimate Gaza.”
Project Nimbus
This would not be the first time Google’s purported human rights principles contradict its business practices — even just in Israel. Since 2021, Google has sold the Israeli military advanced cloud computing and machine learning-tools through its controversial “Project Nimbus” contract.
Unlike Google Photos, a free consumer product available to anyone, Project Nimbus is a bespoke software project tailored to the needs of the Israeli state. Both Nimbus and Google Photos’s face-matching prowess, however, are products of the company’s immense machine-learning resources.
The sale of these sophisticated tools to a government so regularly accused of committing human rights abuses and war crimes stands in opposition to Google’s AI Principles. The guidelines forbid AI uses that are likely to cause “harm,” including any application “whose purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and human rights.”
Google has previously suggested its “principles” are in fact far narrower than they appear, applying only to “custom AI work” and not the general use of its products by third parties. “It means that our technology can be used fairly broadly by the military,” a company spokesperson told Defense One in 2022.
How, or if, Google ever turns its executive-blogged assurances into real-world consequences remains unclear. Ariel Koren, a former Google employee who said she was forced out of her job in 2022 after protesting Project Nimbus, placed Google’s silence on the Photos issue in a broader pattern of avoiding responsibility for how its technology is used.
“It is an understatement to say that aiding and abetting a genocide constitutes a violation of Google’s AI principles and terms of service,” Koren, now an organizer with No Tech for Apartheid, told The Intercept. “Even in the absence of public comment, Google’s actions have made it clear that the company’s public AI ethics principles hold no bearing or weight in Google Cloud’s business decisions, and that even complicity in genocide is not a barrier to the company’s ruthless pursuit of profit at any cost.”
On March 29, Microsoft software developer Andres Freund was trying to optimize the performance of his computer when he noticed that one program was using an unexpected amount of processing power. Freund dove in to troubleshoot and “got suspicious.”
Eventually, Freund found the source of the problem, which he subsequently posted to a security mailing list: He had discovered a backdoor in XZ Utils, a data compression utility used by a wide array of various Linux-based computer applications — a constellation of open-source software that, while often not consumer-facing, undergirds key computing and internet functions like secure communications between machines.
By inadvertently spotting the backdoor, which was buried deep in the code in binary test files, Freund averted a large-scale security catastrophe. Any machine running an operating system that included the backdoored utility and met the specifications laid out in the malicious code would have been vulnerable to compromise, allowing an attacker to potentially take control of the system.
The XZ backdoor was introduced by way of what is known as a software supply chain attack, which the National Counterintelligence and Security Center defines as “deliberate acts directed against the supply chains of software products themselves.” The attacks often employ complex ways of changing the source code of the programs, such as gaining unauthorized access to a developer’s system or through a malicious insider with legitimate access.
The malicious code in XZ Utils was introduced by a user calling themself Jia Tan, employing the handle JiaT75, according to Ars Technica and Wired. Tan had been a contributor to the XZ project since at least late 2021 and built trust with the community of developers working on it. Eventually, though the exact timeline is unclear, Tan ascended to being co-maintainer of the project, alongside the founder, Lasse Collin, allowing Tan to add code without needing the contributions to be approved. (Neither Tan nor Collin responded to requests for comment.)
The XZ backdoor betrays a sophisticated, meticulous operation. First, whoever led the attack identified a piece of software that would be embedded in a vast array of Linux operating systems. The development of this widely used technical utility was understaffed, with a single, core maintainer, Collin, who later conceded he was unable to maintain XZ, providing the opportunity for another developer to step in. Then, after cultivating Collin’s trust over a period of years, Tan injected a backdoor into the utility. All these moves were underlaid by a technical proficiency that ushered the creation and embedding of the actual backdoor code — a code sophisticated enough that analysis of its precise functionality and capability is still ongoing.
“The care taken to hide the exploits in binary test files as well as the sheer time taken to gain a reputation in the open-source project to later exploit it are abnormally sophisticated,” said Molly, a system administrator at Electronic Frontier Foundation who goes by a mononym. “However, there isn’t any indication yet whether this was state sponsored, a hacking group, a rogue developer, or any combination of the above.”
Tan’s elevation to being a co-maintainer mostly played out on an email group where code developers — in the open-source, collaborative spirit of the Linux family of operating systems — exchange ideas and strategize to build applications.
On one email list, Collin faced a raft of complaints. A group of users, relatively new to the project, had protested that Collin was falling behind and not making updates to the software quickly enough. He should, some of these users said, hand over control of the project; some explicitly called for the addition of another maintainer. Conceding that he could no longer devote enough attention to the project, Collin made Tan a co-maintainer.
The users involved in the complaints seemed to materialize from nowhere — posting their messages from what appear to be recently created Proton Mail accounts, then disappearing. Their entire online presence is related to these brief interactions on the mailing list dedicated to XZ; their only recorded interest is in quickly ushering along updates to the software.
Various U.S. intelligence agencies have recently expressed interest in addressing software supply chain attacks. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency jumped into action after Freund’s discovery, publishing an alert about the XZ backdoor on March 29, the same day Freund publicly posted about it.
Open-Source Players
In the open-source world of Linux programming — and in the development of XZ Utils — collaboration is carried out through email groups and code repositories. Tan posted on the listserv, chatted to Collin, and contributed code changes on the code repository Github, which is owned by Microsoft. GitHub has since disabled access to the XZ repository and disabled Tan’s account. (In February, The Intercept and other digital news firms sued Microsoft and its partner OpenAI for using their journalism without permission or credit.)
Several other figures on the email list participated in efforts — appearing to be diffuse but coinciding in their aims and timing — to install the new co-maintainer, sometimes particularly pushing for Tan.
Later, on a listserv dedicated to Debian, one of the more popular of the Linux family of operating systems, another group of users advocated for the backdoored version of XZ Utils to be included in the operating system’s distribution.
These dedicated groups played discrete roles: In one case, complaining about the lack of progress on XZ Utils and pushing for speedier updates by installing a new co-maintainer; and, in the other case, pushing for updated versions to be quickly and widely distributed.
“I think the multiple green accounts seeming to coordinate on specific goals at key times fits the pattern of using networks of sock accounts for social engineering that we’ve seen all over social media,” said Molly, the EFF system administrator. “It’s very possible that the rogue dev, hacking group, or state sponsor employed this tactic as part of their plan to introduce the back door. Of course, it’s also possible these are just coincidences.”
The pattern seems to fit what’s known in intelligence parlance as “persona management,” the practice of creating and subsequently maintaining multiple fictitious identities. A leaked document from the defense contractor HBGary Federal outlines the meticulousness that may go into maintaining these fictive personas, including creating an elaborate online footprint — something which was decidedly missing from the accounts involved in the XZ timeline.
While these other users employed different emails, in some cases they used providers that give clues as to when their accounts were created. When they used Proton Mail accounts, for instance, the encryption keys associated with these accounts were created on the same day, or mere days before, the users’ first posts to the email group. (Users, however, can also generate new keys, meaning the email addresses may have been older than their current keys.)
One of the earliest of these users on the list used the name Jigar Kumar. Kumar appears on the XZ development mailing list in April 2022, complaining that some features of the tool are confusing. Tan promptly responded to the comment. (Kumar did not respond to a request for comment.)
Kumar repeatedly popped up with subsequent complaints, sometimes building off others’ discontent. After Dennis Ens appeared on the same mailing list, Ens also complained about the lack of response to one of his messages. Collin acknowledged things were piling up and mentioned Tan had been helping him off list; he might soon have “a bigger role with XZ Utils.” (Ens did not respond to a request for comment.)
After another complaint from Kumar calling for a new maintainer, Collin responded: “I haven’t lost interest but my ability to care has been fairly limited mostly due to longterm mental health issues but also due to some other things. Recently I’ve worked off-list a bit with Jia Tan on XZ Utils and perhaps he will have a bigger role in the future, we’ll see.”
The pressure kept coming. “As I have hinted in earlier emails, Jia Tan may have a bigger role in the project in the future,” Collin responded after Ens suggested he hand off some responsibilities. “He has been helping a lot off-list and is practically a co-maintainer already. :-)”
Ens then went quiet for two years — reemerging around the time the bulk of the malicious backdoor code was installed in the XZ software. Ens kept urging ever quicker updates.
After Collin eventually made Tan a co-maintainer, there was a subsequent push to get XZ Utils — which by now had the backdoor — distributed widely. After first showing up on the XZ GitHub repository in June 2023, another figure calling themselves Hans Jansen went on this March to push for the new version of XZ to be included in Debian Linux. (Jansen did not respond to a request for comment.)
An employee at Red Hat, a software firm owned by IBM, which sponsors and helps maintain Fedora, another popular Linux operating system, described Tan trying to convince him to help add the compromised XZ Utils to Fedora.
These popular Linux operating systems account for millions of computer users — meaning that huge numbers of users would have been open to compromise if Freund, the developer, had not discovered the backdoor.
“While the possibility of socially engineering backdoors in critical software seems like an indictment of open-source projects, it’s not exclusive to open source and could happen anywhere,” said Molly. “In fact, the ability for the engineer to discover this backdoor before it was shipped was only possible due to the open nature of the project.”
Hardware that breaks into your phone; software that monitors you on the internet; systems that can recognize your face and track your car: The New York State Police are drowning in surveillance tech.
Last year alone, the Troopers signed at least $15 million in contracts for powerful new surveillance tools, according to a New York Focus and Intercept review of state data. While expansive, the State Police’s acquisitions aren’t unique among state and local law enforcement. Departments across the country are buying tools to gobble up civilians’ personal data, plus increasingly accessible technology to synthesize it.
“It’s a wild west,” said Sean Vitka, a privacy advocate and policy counsel for Demand Progress. “We’re seeing an industry increasingly tailor itself toward enabling mass warrantless surveillance.”
So far, local officials haven’t done much about it. Surveillance technology has far outpaced traditional privacy laws, and legislators have largely failed to catch up. In New York, lawmakers launched a years-in-the-making legislative campaign last year to rein in police intrusion — but with Gov. Kathy Hochul pushing for tough-on-crime policies instead, none of their bills have made it out of committee.
So New York privacy proponents are turning to Congress. A heated congressional debate over the future of a spying law offers an opportunity to severely curtail state and local police surveillance through federal regulation.
At issue is Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, which expires on April 19. The law is notorious for a provision that allows the feds to access Americans’ communications swept up in intelligence agencies’ international spying. As some members of Congress work to close that “backdoor,” they’re also pushing to ban a so-called data broker loophole that allows law enforcement to buy civilians’ personal data from private vendors without a warrant. Closing that loophole would likely make much of the New York State Police’s recently purchased surveillance tech illegal.
Members of the House and Senate judiciary committees, who have introduced bills to close the loopholes, are leading the latest bipartisan charge for reform. Members of the House and Senate intelligence committees, meanwhile, are pushing to keep the warrant workarounds in place. The Democratic leaders of both chambers — House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, both from New York — have so far kept quiet on the spying debate. As Section 702’s expiration date nears, local advocates are trying to get them on board.
On Tuesday, a group of 33 organizations, many from New York, sent a letter to Jeffries and Schumer urging them to close the loopholes. More than 100 grassroots and civil rights groups from across the country sent the lawmakers a similar petition this week.
“These products are deeply invasive, discriminatory, and ripe for abuse.”
“These products are deeply invasive, discriminatory, and ripe for abuse,” said Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, which signed both letters. They reach “into nearly every aspect of our digital and physical lives.”
Jeffries’s office declined to comment. Schumer’s office did not respond to a request for comment before publication.
Both letters cited a Wired report from last month, which revealed that Republican Rep. Mike Turner of Ohio, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, pointed to New York City protests against Israel’s war on Gaza to argue against the spying law’s reform. Sources told Wired that in a presentation to fellow House Republicans, Turner implied that protesters in New York had ties to Hamas — and therefore should remain subject to Section 702’s warrantless surveillance backdoor. An intelligence committee spokesperson disputed the characterization of Turner’s remarks, but said that the protests had “responded to what appears to be a Hamas solicitation.”
“The real-world impact of such surveillance on protest and dissent is profound and undeniable,” read the New York letter, spearheaded by Empire State Indivisible and NYU Law School’s Brennan Center for Justice. “With Rep. Turner having placed your own constituents in the crosshairs, your leadership is urgently needed.”
Police surveillance today looks much different than it did 10, five, or even three years ago. A report from the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence, declassified last year, put it succinctly: “The government would never have been permitted to compel billions of people to carry location tracking devices on their persons at all times, to log and track most of their social interactions, or to keep flawless records of all their reading habits.”
That report called specific attention to the “data broker loophole”: law enforcement’s practice of obtaining data for which they’d otherwise have to obtain a warrant by buying it from brokers. The New York State Police have taken greater and greater advantage of the loophole in recent years, buying up seemingly as much tech and data as they can get their hands on.
In 2021, the State Police purchased a subscription to ShadowDragon, which is designed to scan websites for clues about targeted individuals, then synthesize it into in-depth profiles.
“I want to know everything about the suspect: Where do they get their coffee? Where do they get their gas? Where’s their electric bill? Who’s their mom? Who’s their dad?” ShadowDragon’s founder said in an interview unearthed by The Intercept in 2021. The company claims that its software can anticipate crime and violence — a practice, trendy among law enforcement tech companies, known as “predictive policing,” which ethicists and watchdogs warn can be inaccurate and biased.
The State Police renewed their ShadowDragon subscription in January of last year, shelling out $308,000 for a three-year contract. That was one of at least nine web surveillance tools State Police signed contracts for last year, worth at least $2.1 million in total.
Among the other firms the Troopers contracted with are Cognyte ($310,000 for a three-year contract); Whooster ($110,000 over three years); Skopenow ($280,000); Griffeye ($209,000); the credit reporting agency TransUnion ($159,000); and Echosec ($262,000 over two years), which specializes in using “global social media, discussions, and defense forums” to geolocate people. They also bought Cobwebs software, a mass web surveillance tool created by former Israeli military and intelligence officials — part of that country’s multibillion-dollar surveillance tech industry, which often tests its products on Palestinians.
That’s likely not the full extent of the State Police’s third party-brokered surveillance arsenal. As New York Focus revealed last year, the State Police have for years been shopping around for programs that take in mass quantities of data from social media, sift through them, and then feed insights — including users’ real-time location information — to law enforcement. Those contracts don’t show up in the state contract data, suggesting that the public disclosures are incomplete. Depending on how the programs obtain their data, closing the data broker loophole could bar their sale to law enforcement.
The State Police refused to answer questions about how its officers use surveillance tools.
“We do not discuss specific strategies or technologies as it provides a blueprint to criminals which puts our members and the public at risk,” State Police spokesperson Deanna Cohen said in an email.
Closing the data broker loophole wouldn’t entirely curtail the police surveillance tech boom. The New York State Police have also been deepening their investments in tech the FISA reforms wouldn’t touch, like aerial drones and automatic license plate readers, which store data from billions of scans to create searchable vehicle location databases.
They’ve also spent millions on mobile device forensic tools, or MDFTs, powerful hacking hardware and software that allow users to download full, searchable copies of a cellphone’s data, including social media messages, emails, web and search histories, and minute-by-minute location information.
Watchdogs warn of potential abuses accompanying the proliferation of MDFTs. The Israeli MDFT company Cellebrite has serviced repressive authorities around the globe, including police in Botswana, who used it to access a journalist’s list of sources, and Hong Kong, where the cops deployed it against leaders of the pro-democracy protest movement there.
In the United States, law enforcement officials argue that more expansive civil liberties protections prevent them from misusing the tech. But according to the technology advocacy organization Upturn, around half of police departments that have used MDFTs have done so with no internal policies in place. Meanwhile, cops have manipulated people into consenting to having their phones cracked without a warrant — for instance, by having them sign generic consent forms that don’t explain that the police will be able to access the entirety of their phone’s data.
In October 2020, New York police departments known to use MDFTs had spent less than $2.2 million on them, and no known MDFT-using department in the country had hit the million-dollar mark, according to a report by Upturn.
Between September 2022 and November 2023, however, the State Police signed more than $12.1 million in contracts for MDFT products and training, New York Focus and The Intercept found. They signed a five-year, $4 million agreement with Cellebrite, while other contracts went to MDFT firms Magnet Forensics andTeel Technologies. The various products attack phones in different ways, and thus have different strengths and weaknesses depending on the type of phone, according to Emma Weil, senior policy analyst at Upturn.
Cellebrite’s tech initially costs around $10,000–$30,000 for an official license, then tens or low hundreds of thousands of dollars for the ability to hack into a set number of phones. According to Weil, the State Police’s inflated bill could mean either that Cellebrite has dramatically increased its pricing, or that the Troopers are “getting more intensive support to unlock more difficult phones.”
If Congress passes the Section 702 renewal without addressing its warrant workarounds, state and local legislation will become the main battleground in the fight against the data broker loophole. In New York, state lawmakers have introduced at least 14 bills as part of their campaign to rein in police surveillance, but none have gotten off the ground.
If the legislature passes some of the surveillance bills, they may well face opposition when they hit the governor’s desk. Hochul has extolled the virtues of police surveillance technology, and committed to expanding law enforcement’s ability to disseminate the information gathered by it. Every year since entering the governor’s mansion, she has proposed roughly doubling funding to New York’s Crime Analysis Center Network, a series of police intelligence hubs that distribute information to local and federal law enforcement, and she’s repeatedly boosted funding to the State Police’s social media surveillance teams.
The State Police has “ramped up its monitoring,” she said in November. “All this is in response to our desire, our strong commitment, to ensure that not only do New Yorkers be safe — but they also feel safe.”
This story was published in partnership with New York Focus, a nonprofit news site investigating how power works in New York state. Sign up for their newsletter here.
With the 2024 Lok Sabha elections barely a few weeks away, political campaigns have reached a fever pitch both on the ground and virtually. With India ranking very high on the list of countries with the largest number of Internet users in the world, parties have recognized the power of social media and are investing significant sums into their digital campaigns. Consequently, social media advertisements have come up as a crucial means for parties to communicate with the electorate.
Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and others provide advertisers with enough information to run targeted advertisements reaching millions of voters. These targeted advertisements are based on factors such as location, demographics, interests, language, and behaviour, to achieve maximum impact.
Methodology
Alt News filtered data from the top 100 pages that spent the most on political advertisements in the last 90 days, as published by the Meta Ad Library on March 19 of this year. Advertisements run by leaders in their personal capacity were excluded from this data. Rahul Gandhi’s page is included in this data because the disclaimer in the advertisements run by him mentions the name of the Congress party.
Political advertisements on Facebook pages are of two types: official party pages, which share posts and propaganda according to party lines, and other pages that support a particular party through all posts and advertisements but do not have any official affiliation with the party. The expenditures on advertisements by these pages are not accounted for by the Election Commission. We have categorized such pages as proxy pages.
Analysis of this data revealed that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has spent the most on political advertisements, but the expenditure on advertisements by BJP’s proxy pages exceeded that on their official advertisements.
Party and Government Advertisement Expenditure
BJP (including official and proxy pages)
The Bharatiya Janata Party has spent Rs. 74,407,939 on 10,884 advertisements through official pages and Rs. 84,175,893 through proxy pages.
Page ID
Page name
Disclaimer
Amount spent (INR)
Number of ads
121439954563203
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)
61670515
2710
174425559078659
Ulta Chashma – उल्टा चस्मा
Ulta Chashmaa
20333950
428
574079826086251
Phir Ek Baar Modi Sarkar
phirekbaarmodisarkar.com
18714772
2498
192548643939288
MemeXpress
Memes Xpress
6835584
183
206212622563937
Political X-Ray
Political X Ray
6107215
161
192548643939288
MemeXpress
Ulta Chashmaa
4705068
105
1987488401557504
Mahathugbandhan – महाठगबंधन
Mahathugbandhan – महाठगबंधन
4031860
1092
206212622563937
Political X-Ray
Ulta Chashmaa
3903094
60
108923581963430
Nirmamata
Nirmamata
3892330
1023
1400615623488784
BJP Odisha
BJP Odisha
3834648
742
113730508499849
Mudde ki Baat – मुद्दे की बात
Mudde Ki Baat
3380826
58
1563310070576778
BJP Andhra Pradesh
BJP Andhra Pradesh
2440155
479
107026039151450
మన మోదీ
manamodi.com
1926026
843
118554107945158
Badlenge Sarkar, Badlenge Bihar
badlengesarkarbadlengebihar.com
1736517
720
162311940465517
BJYM
Bharatiya Janata Party
1563415
335
721713357902229
Mahila Morcha BJP
Bharatiya Janata Party
1429489
567
100198806388306
The Nation Vibes
The Nation Vibes
1307936
717
180161138515248
କେତେଦିନ ସହିବା? / Ketedina Sahibaa?
କେତେଦିନ ସହିବା? / Ketedina Sahibaa?
1248691
660
1464414077034071
BJP ST Morcha
Bharatiya Janata Party
1112712
336
104136199047870
Bharat Todo Gang – भारत तोड़ो गैंग
Bharat Todo Gang – भारत तोड़ो गैंग
1096140
1104
180005665207295
Kannada Sangamam – ಕನ್ನಡ ಸಂಗಮ
Ulta Chashmaa
1080219
58
179670408573941
Tamilakam – தமிழகம்
Ulta Chashmaa
1035065
60
262572220917547
भाजपा राष्ट्रीय अनुसूचित जाति मोर्चा – BJP SC Morcha
Bharatiya Janata Party
617101
375
1542743585786974
Phir Ek Baar Modi Sarkar – Gujarat
Phir Ek Baar Modi Sarkar – Gujarat
613048
54
114233898263244
Indian Compass Videos
theindiancompass.com
578166
824
283350415665978
Ek Akela Sab Par Bhari
Ek Akela Sab Par Bhari
545109
251
244801258708580
Telangana Central – తెలంగాణ సెంట్రల్
Ulta Chashmaa
496639
8
239720143296109
BJP OBC Morcha
Bharatiya Janata Party
491213
42
107848055262209
Paltu Paltan – पलटू पलटन
Paltu Paltan – पलटू पलटन
482186
290
115529624796206
Hokage Modi Sama
Hokage Modi Sama
473771
296
249708958217278
Malabar Central – മലബാർ സെൻട്രൽ
Ulta Chashmaa
461084
36
247944825069932
Amaar Sonar Bangla – অমর সোনার বাংলা
Ulta Chashmaa
439288
15
Total
158583832
17130
Congress:
The Congress party has spent Rs. 4,298,268 on 614 advertisements.
Page ID
Page name
Disclaimer
Amount spent (INR)
Number of ads
294493857651676
Rahul Gandhi
Indian National Congress
3585788
158
351616078284404
Indian National Congress
Indian National Congress
712480
456
Total
4298268
614
TMC:
The Trinamool Congress, led by Mamata Banerjee, has spent Rs. 6,373,293 on 423 advertisements.
Page ID
Page name
Disclaimer
Amount spent (INR)
Number of ads
218904931482352
All India Trinamool Congress
All India Trinamool Congress
4758354
310
108777655527686
Trinamoole Nabo Jowar
Trinamoole Nabo Jowar
1614939
113
Total
6373293
423
YSRCP:
The Yuvajana Sramika Rythu Congress Party led by Andhra Pradesh chief minister Jagan Mohan Reddy has spent Rs. 16,999,080 on 566 advertisements.
Page ID
Page name
Disclaimer
Amount spent (INR)
Number of ads
104211439033799
Jagane Kavali
Jagane Kavali
4185707
200
111986798594822
Jagananna Suraksha
Jagane Kavali
4017803
95
327120054405346
Jagananna ki Thoduga
Jagan Anna ki Thoduga
3087881
139
213811765155120
Memu Siddham Maa Booth Siddham
Jaganna Tho Siddham
1857632
24
175139949013002
Jagan: The Juggernaut
Team Jagananna
1319338
40
229008700302978
Praja Theerpu
Jagananna Tho Siddham
736761
17
105209472211637
Voice of Andhra
Voice of Andhra
696989
18
204792022725505
Memantha Siddham
Jaganannatho Siddham
657413
21
205049862700772
Jagananna Kosam Siddham
Jagananna Tho Siddham
439556
12
Total
16999080
566
Government Advertisements:
During these 90 days, the central government and various state governments collectively spent Rs. 46,140,328 on 1,223 advertisements.
Page ID
Page name
Disclaimer
Amount spent (INR)
Number of ads
192856493908290
Ama Odisha Nabin Odisha
Ama Odisha Nabin Odisha
18670367
357
775974615850063
MyGovIndia
MyGovIndia
14202725
67
418662318473847
Health & Family Welfare Department, Government of Odisha
Health & Family Welfare Department, Government of Odisha
3255261
35
138622632667217
Laxmi/ଲକ୍ଷ୍ମୀ
Laxmi/ଲକ୍ଷ୍ମୀ
2196960
19
114035533329593
Mo Sarkar 5T
MoSarkar 5T
1603172
37
106966414891832
DIPR TN
DIPR TN
1275814
93
220329711159719
Other Backward Bahujan Welfare Department, Maharashtra
Olio Global AdTech
787092
172
319693278479184
Finance Department, Government of Odisha
Finance Department, Government of Odisha
781383
20
179243868596011
ନୂଆ-ଓ
ନୂଆ-ଓ
742899
157
1195267553857448
Panchayati Raj & Drinking Water Department, Government of Odisha
Panchayati Raj & Drinking Water Department, Government of Odisha
684839
7
113373710385095
कृषी विभाग महाराष्ट्र शासन
कृषी विभाग महाराष्ट्र शासन
511328
78
269612676227090
सामान्य प्रशासन विभाग – सामाजिक विकास समन्वय, महाराष्ट्र शासन
Olio Global AdTech
504179
24
314832518976952
Fisheries & ARD Department
Fisheries & ARD Department
478860
16
102379519139483
जल जीवन मिशन महाराष्ट्र
जल जीवन मिशन महाराष्ट्र
445449
141
Total
46140328
1223
Proxy Pages:
Apart from official pages of political parties, a whole bunch of controversial proxy and meme pages have emerged as key players as far as running divisive advertisements is concerned. These pages not only target opposition parties but often amplify contentious narratives. By concealing their true identities, they work on behalf of political parties and publish ads that cannot be run through official channels. These advertisements often use humour, satire, and sarcasm to mock opposition parties and their leaders, and frequently allude to communal angles.
Several pages in this list attack the Opposition and bolster the BJP’s propaganda, with higher expenditures on advertisements compared to BJP’s official pages. Alt News had previously exposed some of these pages in an investigation in April 2023, revealing their direct connections with the BJP.
Page ID
Page name
Disclaimer
Amount spent (INR)
Number of ads
174425559078659
Ulta Chashma – उल्टा चस्मा
Ulta Chashmaa
20333950
428
574079826086251
Phir Ek Baar Modi Sarkar
phirekbaarmodisarkar.com
18714772
2498
192548643939288
MemeXpress
Memes Xpress
6835584
183
206212622563937
Political X-Ray
Political X Ray
6107215
161
192548643939288
MemeXpress
Ulta Chashmaa
4705068
105
1987488401557500
Mahathugbandhan – महाठगबंधन
Mahathugbandhan – महाठगबंधन
4031860
1092
206212622563937
Political X-Ray
Ulta Chashmaa
3903094
60
108923581963430
Nirmamata
Nirmamata
3892330
1023
113730508499849
Mudde ki Baat – मुद्दे की बात
Mudde Ki Baat
3380826
58
107026039151450
మన మోదీ
manamodi.com
1926026
843
118554107945158
Badlenge Sarkar, Badlenge Bihar
badlengesarkarbadlengebihar.com
1736517
720
100198806388306
The Nation Vibes
The Nation Vibes
1307936
717
104136199047870
Bharat Todo Gang – भारत तोड़ो गैंग
Bharat Todo Gang – भारत तोड़ो गैंग
1096140
1104
180005665207295
Kannada Sangamam – ಕನ್ನಡ ಸಂಗಮ
Ulta Chashmaa
1080219
58
179670408573941
Tamilakam – தமிழகம்
Ulta Chashmaa
1035065
60
1542743585786970
Phir Ek Baar Modi Sarkar – Gujarat
Phir Ek Baar Modi Sarkar – Gujarat
613048
54
114233898263244
Indian Compass Videos
theindiancompass.com
578166
824
283350415665978
Ek Akela Sab Par Bhari
Ek Akela Sab Par Bhari
545109
251
244801258708580
Telangana Central – తెలంగాణ సెంట్రల్
Ulta Chashmaa
496639
8
107848055262209
Paltu Paltan – पलटू पलटन
Paltu Paltan – पलटू पलटन
482186
290
115529624796206
Hokage Modi Sama
Hokage Modi Sama
473771
296
249708958217278
Malabar Central – മലബാർ സെൻട്രൽ
Ulta Chashmaa
461084
36
247944825069932
Amaar Sonar Bangla – অমর সোনার বাংলা
Ulta Chashmaa
439288
15
Total
84175893
10884
Sensitive Advertisements:
Some advertisements run by these pages are so inflammatory and sensitive that political parties refrain from posting them on their official pages. Advertisements run through proxy pages often touch upon divisive issues and exploit prejudices. Alt News reported last month about a political advertisement depicting live murder, which had been viewed more than 30 million times. Upon informing Meta, they acknowledged the violation of their standards and took action against it.
Several advertisements have displayed violence and targeted political adversaries. Examples of some such advertisements are provided below. Meta took action against many of these advertisements later, although by then they had already garnered lakhs of views collectively.
Here we have listed pages with identical disclaimers. The disclaimer on all of these pages reads “Ulta Chashmaa.” Upon checking the details of these disclaimers, it is evident that these pages, which target the Opposition and propagate BJP’s agenda, are operated by the same admin. All these pages are included in the list of BJP’s proxy pages. One such page is ‘सीधा चश्मा’ (Straight Glasses), which was created on March 5 and has spent over Rs. 15 Lakh on advertisements so far.
The disclaimer of this page also contains details associated with ‘उल्टा चश्मा’ (Ulta Chashma), meaning this page is also a part of BJP’s proxy pages. One page, ‘Sonar Bangla – সোনার বাংলা,’ has now been deleted. Between March 5 and 7, this page spent Rs. 3,27,000 running nine advertisements on Facebook and Instagram. However, it is noteworthy that when the data of this page is searched in the Meta Ad Library according to date range, only four advertisements are shown. However, upon further inspection, it is revealed that nine advertisements were indeed run by this page. This raises questions about the data released by Meta.
Page name
Disclaimer
Ulta Chashma – उल्टा चस्मा
Ulta Chashmaa
Political X-Ray
Ulta Chashmaa
MemeXpress
Ulta Chashmaa
Tamilakam – தமிழகம்
Ulta Chashmaa
Sidha Chashma – सीधा चश्मा
Sidha Chashma – सीधा चश्मा
Amaar Sonar Bangla – অমর সোনার বাংলা
Ulta Chashmaa
Kannada Sangamam – ಕನ್ನಡ ಸಂಗಮ
Ulta Chashmaa
Telangana Central – తెలంగాణ సెంట్రల్
Ulta Chashmaa
Malabar Central – മലബാർ സെൻട്രൽ
Ulta Chashmaa
Sonar Bangla – সোনার বাংলা (This Page has been deleted.)
Ulta Chashmaa
Political parties are spending large sums on online advertisements, including via proxy pages. This also raises the question of whether parties maintain accounts for advertisements run through proxy pages. This expenditure raises questions about electoral transparency. As the general elections in India draw closer, all parties are increasingly focusing on digital advertisements, with the role of proxy pages also gaining prominence. The lack of transparency and accountability regarding expenditure and content of political advertisements on social media will continue to be a subject of scrutiny in the near future.
In recent months, a number of novelists, artists and newspapers have sued generative artificial intelligence (AI) companies for taking a “free ride” on their content. These suits allege that the companies, which use that content to train their machine learning models, may be breaking copyright laws. From the tech industry’s perspective, this content mining is necessary in order to build the AI…
The signing of a “nickel pact” to salvage New Caledonia’s embattled industry has not been signed by the end of March, as initially announced by French Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire.
Le Maire had hinted at the date of March 25 last week, but New Caledonia’s territorial government President Louis Mapou wants to have his Congress endorse the pact before he signs anything.
The Congress is scheduled to put the French pact (worth hundreds of millions of euro) to the debate this Wednesday.
The pact is supposed to bail out New Caledonia’s nickel industry players from a grave crisis, caused by the current state of the world nickel prices and the market dominance of Indonesia which produces much cheaper nickel in large quantities.
The proposed aid agreement, however, has strings attached: in return, New Caledonia’s nickel industry must undertake a far-reaching reform plan to increase its attraction and decrease its production costs.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
A New Zealand investigative journalist and author says the US spy system hosted by the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) appears to be a controversial intelligence system used in global capture-kill operations.
“The IGIS report said the GCSB decision to host a foreign system from 2012-2020 was ‘improper’ and that the GCSB ‘could not be sure the tasking of the capability was always in accordance with… New Zealand law’,” he wrote.
“The Inspector-General said: ‘I have found some of the GCSB’s explanations about how the capability operated and was tasked to be incongruous with information in GCSB records at the time’,” Hager wrote.
But the Inspector-General could not reveal details of the system to the public because they were “highly classified”.
“The name and function of the foreign spy spying equipment, the identity of the ‘foreign partner agency’ and the location of the ‘GCSB facility’ where foreign equipment was hosted all remained secret,” Hager wrote.
Hager argued that the mystery spy equipment appeared strongly to be a top secret US surveillance system that had been installed at the GCSB’s Waihopai base at the same time as the equipment in the IGIS investigation was installed at a “GCSB facility”.
25 years of investigations
Hager has worked as an investigative journalist for the past 25 years, and has been a New Zealand member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists for 20 of those years.
In 2018, he was part of a reference group established by the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security.
Hager wrote that the top secret NSA spy equipment had the ghostly codename “APPARITION” and fitted with all the details presented in the IGIS report.
“APPARITION was owned by and controlled by the US National Security Agency — the world’s largest intelligence gathering agency and head of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance that includes the GCSB,” he wrote.
According to Hager, the NSA internal report, written after the launch of the APPARITION system in 2008, said that it “builds on the success of the GHOSTHUNTER prototype . . . a tool that enabled a significant number of capture-kill operations against terrorists”.
“Capture-kill operations involve lethal attacks on targeted people using drones, bombs and special forces raids,” wrote Hager.
“Human rights organisations have documented numerous deaths of civilians during capture-kill operations — many of them ‘algorithmically targeted’ by electronic surveillance systems such as APPARITION.
‘Extra-judicial killings’
“They are also criticised as being ‘extra-judicial killings’.”
For decades, protesters had been calling for the GCSB’s iconic radomes at Waihopai Valley spy base in rural Marlborough to be dismantled, saying that when that intelligence was shared with Five Eyes partners — the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia — it made New Zealand complicit in the military campaigns of those countries, among other criticisms.
However, Anti-Bases Campaign (ABC) organiser Murray Horton said at the time of news of the domes’ redundancy in 2021 was nothing to celebrate, since the base itself would continue to operate at the site, “albeit without its most conspicuous physical features that stick out like dogs’ balls”.
Citing the company’s “failure to provide answers to important questions,” Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., are pressing Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, to respond to reports of disproportionate censorship around the Israeli war on Gaza.
“Meta insists that there’s been no discrimination against Palestinian-related content on their platforms, but at the same time, is refusing to provide us with any evidence or data to support that claim,” Warren told The Intercept. “If its ad-hoc changes and removal of millions of posts didn’t discriminate against Palestinian-related content, then what’s Meta hiding?”
In a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg sent last December, first reported by The Intercept, Warren presented the company with dozens of specific questions about the company’s Gaza-related content moderation efforts. Warren asked about the exact numbers of posts about the war, broken down by Hebrew or Arabic, that have been deleted or otherwise suppressed.
A month later, Meta replied to Warren’s office with a six-page letter, obtained by The Intercept, that provided an overview of its moderation response to the war but little in the way of specifics or new information.
Meta’s reply disclosed some censorship: “In the nine days following October 7, we removed or marked as disturbing more than 2,200,000 pieces of content in Hebrew and Arabic for violating our policies.” The company declined, however, to provide a breakdown of deletions by language or market, making it impossible to tell whether that figure reflects discriminatory moderation practices.
Now, a second letter from Warren to Meta, joined this time by Sanders, says this isn’t enough. “Meta’s response, dated January 29, 2024, did not provide any of the requested information necessary to understand Meta’s treatment of Arabic language or Palestine-related content versus other forms of content,” the senators wrote.
Both senators are asking Meta to again answer Warren’s specific questions about the extent to which Arabic and Hebrew posts about the war have been treated differently, how often censored posts are reinstated, Meta’s use of automated machine learning-based censorship tools, and more.
Accusations of systemic moderation bias against Palestinians have been borne out by research from rights groups.
“Since October 7, Human Rights Watch has documented over 1,000 cases of unjustified takedowns and other suppression of content on Instagram and Facebook related to Palestine and Palestinians, including about human rights abuses,” Human Rights Watch said in a late December report. “The censorship of content related to Palestine on Instagram and Facebook is systemic, global, and a product of the company’s failure to meet its human rights due diligence responsibilities.”
A February report by AccessNow said Meta “suspended or restricted the accounts of Palestinian journalists and activists both in and outside of Gaza, and arbitrarily deleted a considerable amount of content, including documentation of atrocities and human rights abuses.”
A third-party audit commissioned by Meta itself previously concluded it had given the short shrift to Palestinian rights during a May 2021 flare-up of violence between Israel and Hamas, the militant group that controls the Gaza Strip. “Meta’s actions in May 2021 appear to have had an adverse human rights impact … on the rights of Palestinian users to freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, political participation, and non-discrimination, and therefore on the ability of Palestinians to share information and insights about their experiences as they occurred,” said the auditor’s report.
In response to this audit, Meta pledged an array of reforms, which free expression and digital rights advocates say have yet to produce a material improvement.
In its December report, Human Rights Watch noted, “More than two years after committing to publishing data around government requests for taking down content that is not necessarily illegal, Meta has failed to increase transparency in this area.”
Ten years ago, the internet platform X, then known as Twitter, filed a lawsuit against the government it hoped would force transparency around abuse-prone surveillance of social media users. X’s court battle, though, clashes with an uncomfortable fact: The company is itself in the business of government surveillance of social media.
Under the new ownership of Elon Musk, X had continued the litigation, until its defeat in January. The suit was aimed at overturning a governmental ban on disclosing the receipt of requests, known as national security letters, that compel companies to turn over everything from user metadata to private direct messages. Companies that receive these requests are typically legally bound to keep the request secret and can usually only disclose the number they’ve received in a given year in vague numerical ranges.
In its petition to the Supreme Court last September, X’s attorneys took up the banner of communications privacy: “History demonstrates that the surveillance of electronic communications is both a fertile ground for government abuse and a lightning-rod political topic of intense concern to the public.” After the court declined to take up the case in January, Musk responded tweeting, “Disappointing that the Supreme Court declined to hear this matter.”
The court’s refusal to take the case on ended X’s legal bid, but the company and Musk had positioned themselves at the forefront of a battle on behalf of internet users for greater transparency about government surveillance.
However, emails between the U.S. Secret Service and the surveillance firm Dataminr, obtained by The Intercept from a Freedom of Information Act request, show X is in an awkward position, profiting from the sale of user data for government surveillance purposes at the same time as it was fighting secrecy around another flavor of state surveillance in court.
While national security letters allow the government to make targeted demands for non-public data on an individual basis, companies like Dataminr continuously monitor public activity on social media and other internet platforms. Dataminr provides its customers with customized real-time “alerts” on desired topics, giving clients like police departments a form of social media omniscience. The alerts allow police to, for instance, automatically track a protest as it moves from its planning stages into the streets, without requiring police officials to do any time-intensive searches.
Although Dataminr defends First Alert, its governmental surveillance platform, as a public safety tool that helps first responders react quickly to sudden crises, the tool has been repeatedly shown to be used by police to monitor First Amendment-protected online political speech and real-world protests.
“The Whole Point”
Dataminr has long touted its special relationship with X as integral to First Alert. (Twitter previously owned a stake in Dataminr, though divested before Musk’s purchase.) Unlike other platforms it surveils by scraping user content, Dataminr pays for privileged access to X through the company’s “firehose”: a direct, unfiltered feed of every single piece of user content ever shared publicly to the platform.
Watching everything that happens on X in real time is key to Dataminr’s pitch to the government. The company essentially leases indirect access to this massive spray of information, with Dataminr acting as an intermediary between X’s servers and a multitude of police, intelligence, and military agencies.
While it was unclear whether, under Musk, X would continue leasing access to its users to Dataminr — and by extension, the government — the emails from the Secret Service confirm that, as of last summer, the social media platform was still very much in the government surveillance business.
“Dataminr has a unique contractual relationship with Twitter, whereby we have real-time access to the full stream of all publicly available Tweets,” a representative of the surveillance company wrote to the Secret Service in a July 2023 message about the terms of the law enforcement agency’s surveillance subscription. “In addition all of Dataminr’s public sector customers today have agreed to these terms including dozens who are responsible for law enforcement whether at the local, state or federal level.” (The terms are not mentioned in the emails.)
According to an email from the Secret Service in the same thread, the agency’s interest in Dataminr was unambiguous: “The whole point of this contract is to use the information for law enforcement purposes.”
Privacy advocates told The Intercept that X’s Musk-era warnings of government surveillance abuses are contradictory to the company’s continued sale of user data for the purpose of government surveillance. (Neither X nor Dataminr responded to a request for comment.)
“X’s legal briefs acknowledge that communications surveillance is ripe for government abuse, and that we can’t depend on the police to police themselves,” said Jennifer Granick, the surveillance and cybersecurity counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. “But then X turns around and sells Dataminr fire-hose access to users’ posts, which Dataminr then passes through to the government in the form of unregulated disclosures and speculative predictions that can falsely ensnare the innocent.”
“Social media platforms should protect the privacy of their users.”
“Social media platforms should protect the privacy of their users,” Adam Schwartz, the privacy litigation director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed an amicus brief in support of X’s Supreme Court petition. “For example, platforms must not provide special services, like real-time access to the full stream of public-facing posts, to surveillance vendors who share this information with police departments. If X is providing such access to Dataminr, that would be disappointing.”
“Glaringly at Odds”
Following a 2016 investigation into the use of Twitter data for police surveillance by the ACLU, the company went so far as to expressly ban third parties from “conducting or providing surveillance or gathering intelligence” and “monitoring sensitive events (including but not limited to protests, rallies, or community organizing meetings)” using firehose data. The new policy went so far as to ban the use of firehose data for purposes pertaining to “any alleged or actual commission of a crime” — ostensibly a problem for Dataminr’s crime-fighting clientele.
These assurances have done nothing to stop Dataminr from using the data it buys from X to do exactly these things. Prior reporting from The Intercept has shown the company has, in recent years, helped federal and local police surveil entirely peaceful Black Lives Matter protests and abortion rights rallies in recent years.
Neither X nor Dataminr have responded to repeated requests to explain how a tool that allows for the real-time monitoring of protests is permitted under a policy that expressly bans the monitoring of protests. In the past, both Dataminr and X have denied that monitoring the real-time communications of people on the internet and relaying that information to the police is a form of surveillance because the posts in question are public.
Twitter later softened this prohibition by noting surveillance applications were banned “Unless explicitly approved by X in writing.” Dataminr, for its part, remains listed as an “official partner” of X.
Though the means differ, national security scholars told The Intercept that the ends of national security letters and fire-hose monitoring are the same: widespread government surveillance with little to no meaningful oversight. Neither the national security letters nor dragnet social media surveillance require a sign-off from a judge and, in both cases, those affected are left unaware they’ve fallen under governmental scrutiny.
“While I appreciate that there may be some symbolic difference between giving the government granular data directly and making them sift through what they buy from data brokers, the end result is still that user data ends up in the hands of law enforcement, and this time without any legal process,” said David Greene, civil liberties director at EFF.
“The end result is still that user data ends up in the hands of law enforcement, and this time without any legal process.”
“While X’s efforts to bring more transparency to the National Security Letter process are commendable, its objection to government surveillance of communications in that context is glaringly at odds with its decision to support similar surveillance measures through its partnership with Dataminr,” said Mary Pat Dwyer, director of Georgetown University’s Law Institute for Technology Law and Policy. “Scholars and advocates have long argued the Dataminr partnership is squarely inconsistent with the platform’s policy forbidding use of its data for surveillance, and X’s continued failure to end the relationship prevents the company from credibly portraying itself as an advocate for its users’ privacy.”
As India gears up for the general elections 2024, the polling for which is to be held in seven phases from April 19 to June 1, Meta-owned social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram have become a battlefield for political advertisements. Consequently, the focus has also increasingly shifted to the policies of these platforms and their subsequent enforcement.
Political parties in India are known to invest significant financial resources in online advertising in their efforts to capture the voters’ attention. In just the last three months, the expenditure on political advertising has reportedly reached Rs 102.7 crores with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leading in this expenditure, having officially spent over Rs 37 crore in online advertisements alone. This figure is 300 times more than what the main opposition party spent.
Amidst this extensive digital campaign, we found that a Facebook page named “MemeXpress“ has invested over Rs 1 crore in political advertisements, mainly targeting opposition parties while promoting the BJP. According to the Meta Ad Library, the page was created on 12 December 2023 and has already published more than 310 political advertisements so far. Furthermore, our investigation found that four of these ads contain the video of the murder of Atiq Ahmed, a former one-time MP, five-time MLA and accused in multiple cases, which clearly violate Meta’s advertising standards against sensational and excessively violent content.
Note: Due to the excessive violence depicted in the content, we have blurred part of the video
The advertisements are captioned, “Just one bulldozer is needed in Bengal; all the stubborn Shahjahans will fall in line.” The upper half of the ad displays a video of the attack on Atiq Ahmed which caused his death, with the text “Criminals in UP” superimposed. Meanwhile, the lower half features a video of Shahjahan Sheikh, the primary accused in the violence in Sandeshkhali, West Bengal, being arrested and brought to Basirhat Court. The text in the lower segment reads “Criminals in West Bengal”. Needless to say, the advertisement glorifies and exalts extrajudicial violence, implying that Sheikh Shahjahan should receive the same treatment as Atiq Ahmed.
Meta’s policies explicitly prohibit content that glorifies violence. Their advertising standards state that advertisements should not contain shocking, sensational or excessively violent content, which also includes graphic crime scenes. Despite this, the ads in question are not only extremely violent but also extols murder. On Facebook, two versions of this advertisement ran uninterrupted from March 8 to March 15, garnering over 20 lakh views
Upon checking the Meta Ad Library, we found that one of these advertisements running on Instagram was flagged and removed on March 9 for not complying with Meta’s advertising standards. On the other hand, another version of the same advertisement continued to run on Instagram till March 16, with a total of more than 10 lakh 45 thousand views.
This ad raises serious questions about Meta’s ability to effectively enforce its policies. With over 3 million views, the continued presence of these controversial ads on the platform highlights the disparity between Meta’s policy and practice, exemplifying their failure during this sensitive, high-stakes election period.
Meta’s negligence in implementing its policies reaffirms the importance of vigilance and accountability by platforms. With the elections fast approaching, the role of digital governance is becoming increasingly important. It is pertinent for platforms like Meta to show their commitment towards ensuring a responsible and safe online space by taking prompt action against content that violates their community standards.
In an email to Meta, we inquired why their moderation system failed in this case. Furthermore, we asked them how they plan to thwart attempts to weaponize their platforms during this election season and what actions would be taken against pages that clearly violate Meta platform rules.
In response to our inquiries, a Meta spokesperson informed us that they reviewed the content flagged by Alt News and found it to be in violation of Meta’s standards, and took action accordingly. However, they did not clarify the nature of the action they had taken.
As political parties start to rely on social media for election campaigning, the necessity for a transparent mandate for policy implementation by the platforms is becoming increasingly evident. The effectiveness of Meta’s policies will be closely scrutinized not only by Indian voters but also by individuals who uphold democratic processes on the global stage.
As India gears up for the general elections 2024, the polling for which is to be held in seven phases from April 19 to June 1, Meta-owned social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram have become a battlefield for political advertisements. Consequently, the focus has also increasingly shifted to the policies of these platforms and their subsequent enforcement.
Political parties in India are known to invest significant financial resources in online advertising in their efforts to capture the voters’ attention. In just the last three months, the expenditure on political advertising has reportedly reached Rs 102.7 crores with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leading in this expenditure, having officially spent over Rs 37 crore in online advertisements alone. This figure is 300 times more than what the main opposition party spent.
Amidst this extensive digital campaign, we found that a Facebook page named “MemeXpress“ has invested over Rs 1 crore in political advertisements, mainly targeting opposition parties while promoting the BJP. According to the Meta Ad Library, the page was created on 12 December 2023 and has already published more than 310 political advertisements so far. Furthermore, our investigation found that four of these ads contain the video of the murder of Atiq Ahmed, a former one-time MP, five-time MLA and accused in multiple cases, which clearly violate Meta’s advertising standards against sensational and excessively violent content.
Note: Due to the excessive violence depicted in the content, we have blurred part of the video
The advertisements are captioned, “Just one bulldozer is needed in Bengal; all the stubborn Shahjahans will fall in line.” The upper half of the ad displays a video of the attack on Atiq Ahmed which caused his death, with the text “Criminals in UP” superimposed. Meanwhile, the lower half features a video of Shahjahan Sheikh, the primary accused in the violence in Sandeshkhali, West Bengal, being arrested and brought to Basirhat Court. The text in the lower segment reads “Criminals in West Bengal”. Needless to say, the advertisement glorifies and exalts extrajudicial violence, implying that Sheikh Shahjahan should receive the same treatment as Atiq Ahmed.
Meta’s policies explicitly prohibit content that glorifies violence. Their advertising standards state that advertisements should not contain shocking, sensational or excessively violent content, which also includes graphic crime scenes. Despite this, the ads in question are not only extremely violent but also extols murder. On Facebook, two versions of this advertisement ran uninterrupted from March 8 to March 15, garnering over 20 lakh views
Upon checking the Meta Ad Library, we found that one of these advertisements running on Instagram was flagged and removed on March 9 for not complying with Meta’s advertising standards. On the other hand, another version of the same advertisement continued to run on Instagram till March 16, with a total of more than 10 lakh 45 thousand views.
This ad raises serious questions about Meta’s ability to effectively enforce its policies. With over 3 million views, the continued presence of these controversial ads on the platform highlights the disparity between Meta’s policy and practice, exemplifying their failure during this sensitive, high-stakes election period.
Meta’s negligence in implementing its policies reaffirms the importance of vigilance and accountability by platforms. With the elections fast approaching, the role of digital governance is becoming increasingly important. It is pertinent for platforms like Meta to show their commitment towards ensuring a responsible and safe online space by taking prompt action against content that violates their community standards.
In an email to Meta, we inquired why their moderation system failed in this case. Furthermore, we asked them how they plan to thwart attempts to weaponize their platforms during this election season and what actions would be taken against pages that clearly violate Meta platform rules.
In response to our inquiries, a Meta spokesperson informed us that they reviewed the content flagged by Alt News and found it to be in violation of Meta’s standards, and took action accordingly. However, they did not clarify the nature of the action they had taken.
As political parties start to rely on social media for election campaigning, the necessity for a transparent mandate for policy implementation by the platforms is becoming increasingly evident. The effectiveness of Meta’s policies will be closely scrutinized not only by Indian voters but also by individuals who uphold democratic processes on the global stage.
French regulators said on Wednesday 20 March they were fining Google €250m for breaching commitments on paying media companies for reproducing their content online and for using their material for its AI chatbot – without telling them.
Google: pay up, say journalists – and the regulator agrees
Google had made commitments in 2022 to negotiate fairly with news organisations in France. This was a year after the Competition Authority hit the UStechnology giant with a €500m fine over the long-running dispute.
Organisations representing French magazines and newspapers – as well as Agence France-Presse (AFP) – had lodged a case with the regulator in 2019.
Under its commitments, the US tech giant has to provide news groups with a transparent offer of payment within three months of receiving a copyright complaint. However, the regulator said on 20 March it was imposing the new fine on Google for “failing to respect commitments made in 2022” and not negotiating in “good faith” with news publishers.
US tech giant says ‘blah, blah, blah’
The regulator said Google also used content from press agencies to train its AI platform Bard (now known as Gemini), without notifying them or the authority. It also failed to provide publishers and news agencies a technical solution allowing them to object to the use of their content. The French regulator said this ended up “hindering” their ability to negotiate remuneration.
It said Google had agreed to “not dispute the facts” as part of the settlement process. The US tech giant also proposed “a series of corrective measures” in response to the failings identified by the authority.
In a statement, Google said the fine was disproportionate and did not:
sufficiently take into account the efforts we have made to answer and resolve the concerns raised – in an environment where it’s very hard to set a course because we can’t predict which way the wind will blow next.
We’ve settled because it’s time to move on.
Google: plagiarising across Europe
The EU created in 2019 a form of copyright called “neighbouring rights” that allows print media to demand compensation for using their content.
France has been a test case for the rules. After initial resistance Google and Facebook both agreed to pay some French media for articles shown in web searches.
Other EU countries have also challenged Google over news content.
Spain’s competition watchdog launched an investigation into Google last year for alleged anti-competitive practices affecting news agencies and press publications.
But in 2022, Germany’s antitrust regulator shelved an investigation into Google’s News Showcase service, after the tech giant made “important adjustments” to ease competition concerns.
Among the many hawks on Capitol Hill, few have as effectively frightened lawmakers over Chinese control of TikTok as Jacob Helberg, a member of the U.S.–China Economic and Security Review Commission. Helberg’s day job at the military contractor Palantir, however, means he stands to benefit from ever-frostier relations between the two countries.
Helberg has been instrumental in the renewed legislative fight against TikTok, according to the Wall Street Journal. “Spearheading the effort to create the bipartisan, bicoastal alliance of China hawks is Jacob Helberg,” the Journal reported in March 2023. The paper noted collaboration between Helberg, previously a policy adviser at Google, and investor and fellow outspoken China hawk Peter Thiel, as well as others in Thiel’s circle. The anti-China coalition, the Journal reported this past week, has been hammering away at a TikTok ban, and Helberg said he has spoken to over 100 members of Congress about the video-sharing social media app.
From his position on the U.S.–China commission — founded by Congress to advise it on national security threats represented by China — Helberg’s rhetoric around TikTok has been as jingoistic as any politician. “TikTok is a scourge attacking our children and our social fabric, a threat to our national security, and likely the most extensive intelligence operation a foreign power has ever conducted against the United States,” he said in a February hearing held by the commission.
Unlike those in government he’s supposed to be advising, however, Helberg has another gig: He is a policy adviser to Alex Karp, CEO of the defense and intelligence contractor Palantir. And Palantir, like its industry peers, could stand to profit from increased hostility between China and the United States. The issue has been noted by publications like Fortune, which noted in September 2023 that Palantir relies heavily on government contracts for AI work — a business that would grow in a tech arms race with China. (Neither the U.S.–China commission nor Palantir responded to requests for comment.)
“It is a clear conflict-of-interest to have an advisor to Palantir serve on a commission that is making sensitive recommendations.”
Experts told The Intercept that there didn’t appear to be a legal conflict that would exclude Helberg from the commission, but the participation of tech company officials could nonetheless create competing interests between sound policymaking and corporate profits.
“It is a clear conflict-of-interest to have an advisor to Palantir serve on a commission that is making sensitive recommendations about economic and security relations between the U.S. and China,” said Bill Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and scholar of the U.S. defense industry. “From their perspective, China is a mortal adversary and the only way to ‘beat’ them is to further subsidize the tech sector so we can rapidly build next generation systems that can overwhelm China in a potential conflict — to the financial benefit of Palantir and its Silicon Valley allies.”
Big Tech’s China Hawks
Helberg’s activities are part of a much broader constellation of anti-China advocacy orbiting around Peter Thiel, who co-founded Palantir in 2003 and is still invested in the company. (Helberg’s husband, the venture capitalist Keith Rabois, spent five years as a partner at Thiel’s Founders Fund). Thiel, also an early investor in Pentagon aerospace contractor SpaceX and weaponsmaker Anduril, has for years blasted the Chinese tech sector as inherently malignant — claims, like Helberg’s, made with more than trace amounts of paranoia and xenophobia.
Thiel’s remarks on China are characteristically outlandish. Speaking at the MAGA-leaning National Conservatism Conference in 2019, Thiel suggested, without evidence, that Google had been “infiltrated by Chinese intelligence” — and urged a joint CIA–FBI investigation. In 2021, at a virtual event held by the Richard Nixon Foundation, Thiel said, “I do wonder whether at this point, bitcoin should also be thought [of] in part as a Chinese financial weapon against the U.S.”
For Thiel’s camp, conflict with China is both inevitable and necessary. U.S.–China research cooperation on artificial intelligence, he says, is treacherous, and Chinese technology, generally, is anathema to national security. As he inveighs against Chinese tech, Thiel’s portfolio companies stand by with handy solutions. Palantir, for instance, began ramping up its own Made-in-the-USA militarized AI offerings last year. Anduril executives engage in routine fearmongering over China, all the while pitching their company’s weapons as just the thing to thwart an invasion of Taiwan. “Everything that we’re doing, what the [Department of Defense] is doing, is preparing for a conflict with a great power like China in the Pacific,” Anduril CEO Palmer Luckey told Bloomberg TV last year.
Palantir is making a similar pitch. In a 2023 quarterly earnings call, Palantir Chief Operations Officer Shyam Sankar told investors that the company had China in mind as it continues to grow its reach into the Western Pacific. On another Palantir earnings call, Karp, the company’s CEO and Helberg’s boss, told investors the more dangerous and real the Chinese threat gets, “the more battle-tested and real your software has to be. I believe it’s about to get very real. Why? Because our GDP growth is significantly better than China’s.” Even marketing images distributed by Palantir show the company’s software being used to track Chinese naval maneuvers in the South China Sea.
Thiel is not alone among Silicon Valley brass. At a February 2023 panel event, a representative of America’s Frontier Fund, a national security-oriented technology investment fund that pools private capital and federal dollars, said that a war between China and Taiwan would boost the firm’s profits by an order of magnitude. Private sector contributors to America’s Frontier Fund include both Thiel and former Google chair Eric Schmidt, whose China alarmism and defense-spending boosterism rivals Thiel’s — and who similarly stands to personally profit from escalations with China.
TikTok, Bad! China, Bad!
Repeated often enough, anti-TikTok rhetoric from tech luminaries serves to reinforce the notion that China is the enemy of the U.S. and that countering this enemy is worth the industry’s price tags — even if the app’s national security threat remains entirely hypothetical.
“Just like tech had to convince people that crypto and NFTs had intrinsic value, they also have to convince the Pentagon that the forms of warfare that their technologies make possible are intrinsically superior or fill a gap,” Shana Marshall, an arms industry scholar at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs, told The Intercept.
Marshall said bodies like the U.S.–China Economic and Security Review Commission can contribute to such conflicts because advisory boards that encourage revolving-door moves between private firms and government help embed corporate interests in policymaking. “In other words,” she said, “it’s not a flaw in the program, it’s an intentional design element.”
“The tensions with China/Taiwan are tailor made for this argumentation,” Marshall added. “You couldn’t get better cases — or better timing — so grifters and warmongers like Helberg and Schmidt are going to be increasingly integrated into Pentagon planning and all aspects of regulation.”
Forcing divestiture or banning TikTok outright would not trigger armed conflict between the U.S. and China on its own, but the pending legislation to effectively ban the app is already dialing up hostility between the two countries. After the House’s overwhelming support last week of the bill to force the sale of the app from Chinese hands, the Financial Times reported that Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin accused the U.S. of displaying a “robber’s logic” through legislative expropriation. An editorial in the Chinese government mouthpiece Global Times decried the bill as little more than illegal “commercial plunder” and urged TikTok parent company ByteDance to not back down.
“There are a lot of defense contractors that are discussing the China threat with an eye out on their bottom line.”
Of course, self-interest is hardly a deviation from the norm in the military-industrial complex. “This is the way Washington works,” said Scott Amey, general counsel at the Project on Government Oversight, a watchdog group. “There are a lot of defense contractors that are discussing the China threat with an eye out on their bottom line.”
Although it’s common for governmental advisory boards like Helberg’s U.S.–China commission to enthusiastically court the private sector, Amey said it would be important for Helberg to make clear when making policy recommendations whether he’s speaking as an adviser to Palantir’s CEO or to Congress, though the disclosure wouldn’t negate Helberg’s personal interest in a second Cold War. Such disclosures have been uneven: While Helberg’s U.S.–China commission bio leads with his Palantir job, the company went unmentioned in the February hearing. Given the ongoing campaign to pass the TikTok bill, Helberg’s lobbying “certainly raises some red flags,” Amey said.
He said, “The industry is hawkish on China but has a financial interest in the decisions that the executive branch or Congress make.”
More than $20 million in grants for green technology projects with “high public value” are up for grabs in Western Australia under the latest round of the state government’s Clean Energy Future Fund. Projects that deploy technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from energy generation can receive up to $4 million in the program’s third round,…
Industry and research representative group Science and Technology Australia has found its new chief executive in Ryan Winn, the current head of the Australian College of Learned Academies. Announced on Wednesday, Mr Winn will begin in the role in May, ending a more than four-and-a-half-year stint as the chief executive of the Australian College of…
Any R&D strategy developed by the federal government should focus on supporting intellectual property that can be licensed to overseas manufacturers rather than creating local mass production, according to Science and Technology Australia president Sharath Sriram. Following an address at the National Press Club on Wednesday, Professor Sriram said there was a need for a…
One year since Prime Minister Anthony Albanese went to San Diego to unveil the AUKUS deal the news came that the first of three second-hand Virginia class nuclear-powered submarines supposed to arrive in 2032 may not happen.
Former coalition prime minister Scott Morrison announced AUKUS in September 2021 and Albanese continued to champion the pact between the US, Britain and Australia.
Phase one involves Australia acquiring eight nuclear-powered submarines as tensions in the Indo-Pacific are growing.
Concerns about the submarines ever materialising are not new, despite the US passing its National Defence Bill 2024 which facilitates the transfer of the nuclear-powered warships.
However, the Pentagon’s 2025 fiscal year budget only set aside funding to build one Virginia submarine. This affects the AUKUS deal as the US had promised to lift production from around 1.3 submarines a year to 2.3 to meet all requirements.
Australia’s acquisition of the first of three second-hand SSNs were to bridge the submarine gap, as talk about a US-led war on China continues.
US Democratic congressperson Joe Courtney told The Sydney Morning Herald on March 12 the US was struggling with its own shipbuilding capacity, meaning promises to Australia were being deprioritised.
Production downturn
Courtney said that the downturn in production “will remove one more attack submarine from a fleet that is already 17 submarines below the navy’s long-stated requirement of 66”.
The US needs to produce 18 more submarines by 2032 to be able to pass one on to Australia.
After passing laws permitting the transfer of nuclear technology, the deal is running a year at least behind schedule.
Greens Senator David Shoebridge said on X that “When the US passed the law to set up AUKUS they put in kill switches, one of which allowed the US to decide not [to] transfer the submarines if doing so would ‘degrade the US undersea capabilities’”.
Pat Conroy, Labor’s Defence Industry Minister, retorted that the government was confident the submarines would appear.
The White House seems unfazed; it would have been aware of the problems for some time.
Meanwhile the USS Annapolis, a US nuclear-powered submarine (SSN) has docked in Boorloo/Perth.
AUKUS still under way
Regardless of whether Australia acquires any nuclear-powered vessels, the rest of the AUKUS deal, including interoperability with the US, is already underway.
Andrew Hastie, Liberal Party spokesperson, confirmed that construction at HMAS Stirling will start next year for “Submarine Rotational Force-West (SRF-West)”, the permanent US-British nuclear-powered submarine base in WA, which is due to be completed in 2027.
SRF-West includes 700 US army personnel and their families being stationed in WA. If the second-hand nuclear submarines do not materialise, the US submarines will be on hand.
SRF-West may also serve as an alternative to the five British-designed AUKUS SSNs, slated to be built in Kaurna Yerta/Adelaide over coming decades.
Australia respects the Pentagon’s warhead ambiguity policy, meaning that any US military equipment stationed here could be carrying nuclear weapons: we will never know.
Shoebridge said on March 13 he was entering a hearing to decide where the AUKUS powers can dump their nuclear waste. Local waste dumps are being considered, as the US and Britain do not have permanent radioactive waste dumps.
The waste to be dumped is said to have a low-level radioactivity. However, as former Senator Rex Patrick pointed out, SSNs produce high-level radioactive waste at the end of their shelf lives that will need to be stored somewhere, underground, forever.
‘Radioactive waste management’ The Australian Naval Nuclear Power Safety Bill 2023, tabled last November, allows for the AUKUS SSNs to be constructed and also provides for “a radioactive waste management facility”.
The Australian public is spending US$3 billion on helping the US submarine industrial base expand capacity. An initial US$2 billion will be spent next year, followed by $100 million annually from 2026 through to 2033.
The Pentagon has budgeted US$4 billion for its submarine industry next year, with an extra US$11 billion over the following five years.
The removal of the Virginia subs, and even the AUKUS submarines from the agreement, would be in keeping with the terms of the 2014 Force Posture Agreement, signed off by then prime minister Tony Abbott.
As part of the Barack Obama administration’s 2011 “pivot to Asia”, the US-Australia Force Posture Agreement allows for 2500 Marines to be stationed in the Northern Territory.
It sets up increasing interoperability between both countries’ air forces and allows the US unimpeded access to dozens of “agreed-to facilities and areas”.
These agreed bases remain classified.
US takes full control
However, as the recent US overhaul of RAAF Base Tindall in the NT reveals, when the US decides to do that it takes full control.
Tindall has been upgraded to allow for six US B-52 bombers that may be carrying nuclear warheads.
US laws that facilitate the transfer of Virginia-class submarines also make clear that as Australia is now classified as a US domestic military source this allows the US privileged access to critical minerals, such as lithium.
Paul Gregoire writes for Sydney Criminal Lawyers where a version of this article was first published. The article has also been published at Green Left magazine and is republished with permission.
One year since Prime Minister Anthony Albanese went to San Diego to unveil the AUKUS deal the news came that the first of three second-hand Virginia class nuclear-powered submarines supposed to arrive in 2032 may not happen.
Former coalition prime minister Scott Morrison announced AUKUS in September 2021 and Albanese continued to champion the pact between the US, Britain and Australia.
Phase one involves Australia acquiring eight nuclear-powered submarines as tensions in the Indo-Pacific are growing.
Concerns about the submarines ever materialising are not new, despite the US passing its National Defence Bill 2024 which facilitates the transfer of the nuclear-powered warships.
However, the Pentagon’s 2025 fiscal year budget only set aside funding to build one Virginia submarine. This affects the AUKUS deal as the US had promised to lift production from around 1.3 submarines a year to 2.3 to meet all requirements.
Australia’s acquisition of the first of three second-hand SSNs were to bridge the submarine gap, as talk about a US-led war on China continues.
US Democratic congressperson Joe Courtney told The Sydney Morning Herald on March 12 the US was struggling with its own shipbuilding capacity, meaning promises to Australia were being deprioritised.
Production downturn
Courtney said that the downturn in production “will remove one more attack submarine from a fleet that is already 17 submarines below the navy’s long-stated requirement of 66”.
The US needs to produce 18 more submarines by 2032 to be able to pass one on to Australia.
After passing laws permitting the transfer of nuclear technology, the deal is running a year at least behind schedule.
Greens Senator David Shoebridge said on X that “When the US passed the law to set up AUKUS they put in kill switches, one of which allowed the US to decide not [to] transfer the submarines if doing so would ‘degrade the US undersea capabilities’”.
Pat Conroy, Labor’s Defence Industry Minister, retorted that the government was confident the submarines would appear.
The White House seems unfazed; it would have been aware of the problems for some time.
Meanwhile the USS Annapolis, a US nuclear-powered submarine (SSN) has docked in Boorloo/Perth.
AUKUS still under way
Regardless of whether Australia acquires any nuclear-powered vessels, the rest of the AUKUS deal, including interoperability with the US, is already underway.
Andrew Hastie, Liberal Party spokesperson, confirmed that construction at HMAS Stirling will start next year for “Submarine Rotational Force-West (SRF-West)”, the permanent US-British nuclear-powered submarine base in WA, which is due to be completed in 2027.
SRF-West includes 700 US army personnel and their families being stationed in WA. If the second-hand nuclear submarines do not materialise, the US submarines will be on hand.
SRF-West may also serve as an alternative to the five British-designed AUKUS SSNs, slated to be built in Kaurna Yerta/Adelaide over coming decades.
Australia respects the Pentagon’s warhead ambiguity policy, meaning that any US military equipment stationed here could be carrying nuclear weapons: we will never know.
Shoebridge said on March 13 he was entering a hearing to decide where the AUKUS powers can dump their nuclear waste. Local waste dumps are being considered, as the US and Britain do not have permanent radioactive waste dumps.
The waste to be dumped is said to have a low-level radioactivity. However, as former Senator Rex Patrick pointed out, SSNs produce high-level radioactive waste at the end of their shelf lives that will need to be stored somewhere, underground, forever.
‘Radioactive waste management’ The Australian Naval Nuclear Power Safety Bill 2023, tabled last November, allows for the AUKUS SSNs to be constructed and also provides for “a radioactive waste management facility”.
The Australian public is spending US$3 billion on helping the US submarine industrial base expand capacity. An initial US$2 billion will be spent next year, followed by $100 million annually from 2026 through to 2033.
The Pentagon has budgeted US$4 billion for its submarine industry next year, with an extra US$11 billion over the following five years.
The removal of the Virginia subs, and even the AUKUS submarines from the agreement, would be in keeping with the terms of the 2014 Force Posture Agreement, signed off by then prime minister Tony Abbott.
As part of the Barack Obama administration’s 2011 “pivot to Asia”, the US-Australia Force Posture Agreement allows for 2500 Marines to be stationed in the Northern Territory.
It sets up increasing interoperability between both countries’ air forces and allows the US unimpeded access to dozens of “agreed-to facilities and areas”.
These agreed bases remain classified.
US takes full control
However, as the recent US overhaul of RAAF Base Tindall in the NT reveals, when the US decides to do that it takes full control.
Tindall has been upgraded to allow for six US B-52 bombers that may be carrying nuclear warheads.
US laws that facilitate the transfer of Virginia-class submarines also make clear that as Australia is now classified as a US domestic military source this allows the US privileged access to critical minerals, such as lithium.
Paul Gregoire writes for Sydney Criminal Lawyers where a version of this article was first published. The article has also been published at Green Left magazine and is republished with permission.
One year since Prime Minister Anthony Albanese went to San Diego to unveil the AUKUS deal the news came that the first of three second-hand Virginia class nuclear-powered submarines supposed to arrive in 2032 may not happen.
Former coalition prime minister Scott Morrison announced AUKUS in September 2021 and Albanese continued to champion the pact between the US, Britain and Australia.
Phase one involves Australia acquiring eight nuclear-powered submarines as tensions in the Indo-Pacific are growing.
Concerns about the submarines ever materialising are not new, despite the US passing its National Defence Bill 2024 which facilitates the transfer of the nuclear-powered warships.
However, the Pentagon’s 2025 fiscal year budget only set aside funding to build one Virginia submarine. This affects the AUKUS deal as the US had promised to lift production from around 1.3 submarines a year to 2.3 to meet all requirements.
Australia’s acquisition of the first of three second-hand SSNs were to bridge the submarine gap, as talk about a US-led war on China continues.
US Democratic congressperson Joe Courtney told The Sydney Morning Herald on March 12 the US was struggling with its own shipbuilding capacity, meaning promises to Australia were being deprioritised.
Production downturn
Courtney said that the downturn in production “will remove one more attack submarine from a fleet that is already 17 submarines below the navy’s long-stated requirement of 66”.
The US needs to produce 18 more submarines by 2032 to be able to pass one on to Australia.
After passing laws permitting the transfer of nuclear technology, the deal is running a year at least behind schedule.
Greens Senator David Shoebridge said on X that “When the US passed the law to set up AUKUS they put in kill switches, one of which allowed the US to decide not [to] transfer the submarines if doing so would ‘degrade the US undersea capabilities’”.
Pat Conroy, Labor’s Defence Industry Minister, retorted that the government was confident the submarines would appear.
The White House seems unfazed; it would have been aware of the problems for some time.
Meanwhile the USS Annapolis, a US nuclear-powered submarine (SSN) has docked in Boorloo/Perth.
AUKUS still under way
Regardless of whether Australia acquires any nuclear-powered vessels, the rest of the AUKUS deal, including interoperability with the US, is already underway.
Andrew Hastie, Liberal Party spokesperson, confirmed that construction at HMAS Stirling will start next year for “Submarine Rotational Force-West (SRF-West)”, the permanent US-British nuclear-powered submarine base in WA, which is due to be completed in 2027.
SRF-West includes 700 US army personnel and their families being stationed in WA. If the second-hand nuclear submarines do not materialise, the US submarines will be on hand.
SRF-West may also serve as an alternative to the five British-designed AUKUS SSNs, slated to be built in Kaurna Yerta/Adelaide over coming decades.
Australia respects the Pentagon’s warhead ambiguity policy, meaning that any US military equipment stationed here could be carrying nuclear weapons: we will never know.
Shoebridge said on March 13 he was entering a hearing to decide where the AUKUS powers can dump their nuclear waste. Local waste dumps are being considered, as the US and Britain do not have permanent radioactive waste dumps.
The waste to be dumped is said to have a low-level radioactivity. However, as former Senator Rex Patrick pointed out, SSNs produce high-level radioactive waste at the end of their shelf lives that will need to be stored somewhere, underground, forever.
‘Radioactive waste management’ The Australian Naval Nuclear Power Safety Bill 2023, tabled last November, allows for the AUKUS SSNs to be constructed and also provides for “a radioactive waste management facility”.
The Australian public is spending US$3 billion on helping the US submarine industrial base expand capacity. An initial US$2 billion will be spent next year, followed by $100 million annually from 2026 through to 2033.
The Pentagon has budgeted US$4 billion for its submarine industry next year, with an extra US$11 billion over the following five years.
The removal of the Virginia subs, and even the AUKUS submarines from the agreement, would be in keeping with the terms of the 2014 Force Posture Agreement, signed off by then prime minister Tony Abbott.
As part of the Barack Obama administration’s 2011 “pivot to Asia”, the US-Australia Force Posture Agreement allows for 2500 Marines to be stationed in the Northern Territory.
It sets up increasing interoperability between both countries’ air forces and allows the US unimpeded access to dozens of “agreed-to facilities and areas”.
These agreed bases remain classified.
US takes full control
However, as the recent US overhaul of RAAF Base Tindall in the NT reveals, when the US decides to do that it takes full control.
Tindall has been upgraded to allow for six US B-52 bombers that may be carrying nuclear warheads.
US laws that facilitate the transfer of Virginia-class submarines also make clear that as Australia is now classified as a US domestic military source this allows the US privileged access to critical minerals, such as lithium.
Paul Gregoire writes for Sydney Criminal Lawyers where a version of this article was first published. The article has also been published at Green Left magazine and is republished with permission.
The future of Aotearoa New Zealand television news and current affairs is in the balance at the two biggest TV broadcasters — both desperate to cut costs as their revenue falls.
The government says it is now preparing policy to modernise the media, but they do not want to talk about what that might be — or when it might happen.
On Monday, TVNZ’s 1News was reporting — again — on the crisis of cuts to news and current affairs in its own newsroom.
In fact, it rocked the entire media industry because only one week earlier the US-based owners of Newshub had announced a plan to close that completely by mid year.
No-one was completely shocked by either development given the financial strife the local industry is known to be in.
But it seems no-one had foreseen that within weeks only Television New Zealand and Whakaata Māori would be offering national news to hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders who still tune in at 6pm or later on demand.
Likewise the prospect of no TV current affairs shows (save for those on Whakaata Māori) and no consumer affairs watchdog programme Fair Go, three years shy of a half century as one of NZ most popular local TV shows of all time.
Yvonne Tahana’s report for 1News on Monday pointed out Fair Go staff were actually working on the next episode when that staff meeting was held on Monday.
All this raised the question — what is a “fair go” according to the government, given TVNZ is state-owned?
Media-shy media minister? After the shock announcements last week and the week before, Minister of Media and Communications Melissa Lee seemed not keen to talk to the media about it.
The minister did give some brief comments to political reporters confronting her in the corridors in Parliament after the Newshub news broke. But a week went by before she spoke to RNZ’s Checkpoint about it — and revealed that in spite of a 24-hour heads-up from Newhub’s offshore owner — Warner Bros Discovery — Lee did not know they were planning to shut the whole thing.
By the time the media minister was on NewstalkZB’s Drive show just one hour later that same day, the news was out that TVNZ news staff had been told to “watch their inboxes” the next morning.
In spite of the ‘no surprises’ convention, the minister said she was out of the loop on that too.
After that, it was TV and radio silence again from the minister in the days that followed.
“National didn’t have a broadcasting policy. We’re still not sure what they’re looking at. She needs to basically scrub up on what she’s going to be saying on any given day and get her head around her own portfolio, because at the moment she’s not looking that great,” The New Zealand Herald’s political editor Claire Trevett told RNZ’s Morning Report at the end of the week.
By then the minister’s office had told Mediawatch she would speak with us on Thursday. Good news — at the time.
Lee has long been the National Party’s spokesperson on media and broadcasting and Mediawatch has been asking for a chat since last December.
Last Sunday, TVNZ’s Q+A show told viewers Lee had declined to be interviewed for three weeks running.
Frustration on social media
At Newshub — where staff have the threat of closure hanging over them — The AM Show host Lloyd Burr took to social media with his frustration.
“There’s a broadcasting industry crisis and the broadcasting minister is MIA. We’ve tried for 10 days to get her on the show to talk about the state of it, and she’s either refused or not responded. She doesn’t even have a press secretary. What a shambles . . . ”
A switch of acting press secretaries mid-crisis did seem to be a part of the problem.
But one was in place by last Monday, who got in touch in the morning to arrange Mediawatch’s interview later in the week.
But by 6pm that day, they had changed their minds, because “the minister will soon be taking a paper to cabinet on her plan for the media portfolio”.
“We feel it would better serve your listeners if the minister came on at a time when she could discuss in depth about the details of her plan for the future of media, as opposed to the limited information she will be able to provide this Thursday,” the statement said.
“When the cabinet process has been completed, the minister is able to say more. That time is not now.”
The minister’s office also pointed out Lee had done TV and broadcast interviews over the past week in which she had “essentially traversed as much ground as possible right now”.
What clues can we glean from those?
Hints of policy plans Even though this government is breaking records for changes made under urgency, it seems nothing will happen in a hurry for the media.
“I have been working with my officials to understand and bring the concerns from the sector forward, to have a discussion with my officials to work with me to understand what the levers are that the government can pull to help the sector,” Lee told TVNZ Breakfast last Monday.
Communication and Media Minister Melissa Lee on plans for the ailing industry. Video: 1News
A slump in commercial revenue is a big part of broadcasters’ problems. TVNZ’s Anna Burns Francis asked the minister if the government might make TVNZ — or some of its channels — commercial-free.
“I think we are working through many options as to what could potentially help the sector rather than specifically TVNZ,” Lee replied.
One detail Lee did reveal was that the Broadcasting Act 1989 was in play — something the previous government also said was on its to do list but did not get around to between 2017 and 2023.
It is a pretty broad piece of legislation which sets out the broadcasting standards regime and complaints processes, electoral broadcasting and the remit of the government broadcasting funding agency NZ On Air.
But it is not obvious what reform of that Act could really do for news media sustainability.
Longstanding prohibitions
The minister also referred to longstanding prohibitions on TV advertising on Sunday mornings and two public holidays. Commercial broadcasters have long called for these to be dumped.
But a few more slots for whiteware and road safety ads is not going to save news and current affairs, especially in this economy.
That issue also came up in a 22-minute-long chat with The Platform, which the minister did have time for on Wednesday.
In it, host Sean Plunket urged the minister not to do much to ease the financial pain of the mainstream media, which he said were acting out of self-interest.
He was alarmed when Lee told him the playing field needed to be leveled by extending regulation applied to TV and radio to online streamers as well — possibly through Labour’s Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill.
“Are you seriously considering the government imposing tax on certain large companies and paying that money directly to your chosen media companies that are asking for it?” Plunket asked.
“I have actually said that I oppose the bill but what you have to do as the minister is listen to the sector. They might have some good ideas.”
When Plunket suggested Lee should let the market forces play out, Lee said that was not desirable.
Some of The Platform’s listeners were not keen on that, getting in touch to say they feared Lee would bail the media out because she had “gone woke”.
That made the minister laugh out loud.
“I’m so far from woke,” she assured Sean Plunket.
A free-to-air and free-to-all future? At the moment, TVNZ is obliged to provide easily accessible services for free to New Zealanders.
TVNZ’s Breakfast show asked if that could change to allow TVNZ to charge for its most popular or premium stuff?
The response was confusing:
“Well ready accessibility would actually mean that it is free, right? Or it could be behind a paywall — but it could still be available because they have connectivity,” Lee replied.
“A paywall would imply that you have to pay for it — so that wouldn’t be accessible to all New Zealanders, would it?” TVNZ’s Anna Burns-Francis asked.
“For a majority, yes — but free to air is something I support.”
When Lee fronted up on The AM Show for 10 minutes she said she was unaware they had been chasing a chat with her for 10 days.
Host Melissa Chan-Green bridled when the minister referred to the long-term decline of linear real time TV broadcast as a reason for the cuts now being proposed.
“To think that Newshub is a linear TV business is to misunderstand what Newshub is, because we have a website, we have an app, we have streaming services, we’ve done radio, we’ve done podcasts — so how much more multimedia do you think businesses need to be to survive?
“I’m not just talking about that but there are elements of the Broadcasting Act which are not a fair playing field for everyone. For example, there are advertising restrictions on broadcasters where there are none on streamers,” she said.
Where will the public’s money go? On both Breakfast and The AM Show, Lee repeated the point that the effectiveness of hundreds of millions of dollars of public money for broadcasting is at stake — and at risk if the broadcasters that carry the content are cut back to just a commercial core.
“The government actually puts in close to I think $300 million a year,” Lee said.
“Should that funding be extended to include the client of current affairs programs are getting cut?” TVNZ’s Anna Burns-Francis asked her.
“I have my own views as to what could be done but even NZ on Air operates at arm’s length from me as Minister of Media and Communications,” she replied.
It is only in recent years that NZ On Air has been in the business of allocating public money to news and journalism on a contestable basis.
When the system was set up in 35 years ago that was out of bounds for the organisation, because broadcasters becoming dependent on the public purse was thought to be something to avoid — because of the potential for political interference through either editorial meddling or turning off the tap.
That began to break down when TV broadcasters stopped funding programs about politics which did not pull a commercial crowd — and NZ started picking up the tab from a fund for so-called special interest shows which would not be made or screened in a wholly-commercial environment.
Online projects with a public interest purpose have also been funded by in recent years in addition to programmes for established broadcasters — as NZ on Air declared itself “platform agnostic”.
Public Interest Journalism Fund
In 2020, NZ on Air was given the job of handing out $55 million over three years right across the media from the Public Interest Journalism Fund.
That was done at arm’s length from government, but in opposition National aggressively opposed the fund set up by the previous Labour government.
Senior MPs — including Lee — claimed the money might make the media compliant — and even silent — on anything that might make the then-Labour government look bad.
It would be a big surprise if Lee’s policy plan for cabinet includes direct funding for the news and current affairs programmes which could vanish from our TV screens and on-demand apps within weeks.
This week, NZ on Air chief executive Cameron Harland responded to the crisis with a statement.
“We are in active discussions with the broadcasters and the wider sector to understand what the implications of their cost cutting might be.
“This is a complex and developing situation and whilst we acknowledge the uncertainty, we will be doing what we can to ensure our funding is utilised in the best possible ways to serve local audiences.“
They too are in a holding pattern waiting for the government to reveal its plans.
But as the minister herself said this week, the annual public funding for media was substantial — and getting bigger all the time as the revenues of commercial media companies shrivelled.
And whatever levers the minister and her officials are thinking of pulling, they need to do decisively — and soon.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
It will come as little surprise that colossal Apple has been favouring its own music streaming service in snuffing and stuffing competitors. The company, it has been alleged, has prevented app developers from informing users of less expensive methods to purchase subscriptions outside the scope of Apple’s own services. Its cosmos was all.
Central to these claims is the ongoing battle between Apple and the Swedish music streaming service, Spotify, a largely amoral gladiatorial encounter of drain, pinch and seizure that saw the latter draw customers away from Apple’s iTunes. Territorial skirmishes have ensued over the years, with gains and losses evident on both sides. In 2015, Apple’s release of its own streaming service, Apple Music, enraged Spotify as an anticompetitive move. The tech behemoth, so the charge went, was able to undercut the prices of competitors as it could avoid paying the same App Store fees as others.
Not to worry. Spotify initiated its own assault in 2019, marked by disbursing US$500 billion worth of funds at podcast start-ups, in the process acquiring such outfits as Gimlet and Anchor. And as this was happening, a façade of decency was erected, keeping the battle between the two companies in boardrooms and backrooms.
Then came the tidal turn. Apple, along with the other apocalyptic agents of Big Tech, started becoming the source of much ire for politicians in the EU. The latest success by Spotify to convince the European Commission that Apple’s restrictions and fees imposed on developers wishing to list their apps in the App Store were too onerous, is merely one example of European disgruntlement.
Spotify’s 2019 filing with the European Commission against Apple’s practices was described by the company’s CEO and founder, Daniel Ek, as necessary so “that companies such as ours [can] operate in an ecosystem in which fair competition is not only encouraged, but guaranteed.” In his view, Apple’s introduction of various rules to the App Store had “purposely” limited choice and stifled innovation “at the expense of the user experience – essentially acting as both a player and referee to deliberately advantage other app developers.”
In its response at the time, Apple self-glorified, praising its own contribution to technological civilisation. Monopoly masquerading as benign, technological diversity is a form of reasoning familiar to all monopolists who tolerate competition on their terms. But for the company, Spotify had been less than clean on its dealings, “keeping all the benefits of the App Store ecosystem – including the substantial revenue that they draw from the App Store’s customers – without making any contributions to that marketplace.”
The European Commission was not to be convinced. The fine of 1.84 billion euros was imposed on Apple for its ban on developers from “fully informing iOS users about alternative and cheaper music subscription services outside of the app”. In a statement from the EU’s competition chief Margrethe Vestager, the company was said to have “abused its dominant position in the market for the distribution of music streaming apps through the App Store.” This was achieved “by restricting developers from informing consumers about alternative, cheaper music services outside the Apple ecosystem.”
Ek was delighted, suggesting that an industrious punter had gotten exactly what he wanted. Apple, in no uncertain terms, had “decided that they want to close down the internet and make it theirs, and they view every single person using an iPhone to be their user and they should be able to dictate what that user experience should be”. In this modern game of tech robber barons and conquistadores, mumbling about human experience is hardly convincing. The feeling here is that Spotify and Apple treat their user base as mice chasing cheese in a maze. Apple lacks the glint and shine of virtue, but Ek is not exactly a knight in brilliant, shining armour.
In a statement responding to the Commission finding, the crew at Apple were combative, surly and resentful. “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.” Despite eight years of investigating Apple’s corporate conduct, no “viable theory” had been “yielded” on “explaining why Apple has thwarted competition in a market that is so clearly thriving.”
There were also barbed words reserved for Spotify, a company with “the largest music streaming app in the world”, and one engaged in “more than 65” meetings with the Commission “during this investigation.” While Apple’s treatment is hardly bound to exercise the tear ducts, there is something smelly about conduct verging on connivance on the European side of the bargain – in this case, of a patriotic, underhanded sort.
Apple also suggested that Spotify had been an App Store triumph, something they were always bound to say. “They have a more than 50 percent share of the European market, and on iOS, Spotify has an even higher share than they do on Android.” The European Commission, it was felt, had intended this as an effort to enforce the Digital Markets Act (DMA) ahead of it coming into force.
Other questions have also been asked. If one is really looking at an open internet concept (such an idea has always been a glorious fancy and a deceiving fluff), the feeling that Spotify has been aided by a regulator in terms of its own market arrangements is hard to dispel. “Ironically, in the name of competition,” claims Apple, the “decision just cements the dominant position of a successful European company that is the digital music market’s runaway leader.” The mask of digital patriotism has been unmasked, and we await where the next blow will come from.
Activists in Goma denounce state and international inaction after savage attacks by a Rwandan-backed militia. Photo: LuchaCongo.org
“Inside every phone is the blood of a Congolese person.” These words from Pascal Mirindi, a student and activist in Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), encapsulate the deadly links between war, the plunder of resources, and climate breakdown.
Nowhere is this more devastatingly clear than in the DRC, where M23 militias financed by the Rwandan government, which is in turn funded by the UK, USA, and many more, are committing mass murder and ecological destruction as they surge into the east of the country.
On the rare occasion that the mainstream media covers the DRC, it is portrayed as a poor nation with a “complicated” conflict-riven backstory. But this framing omits the catalyst for the region’s violence since its colonization – resource robbery.
“The conflict, which has persisted in the east of the DRC for almost 30 years, and is the deadliest since the Second World War, is mainly economic,” explains Nobel Laureate Dr. Denis Mukwege. Since 1996, more than 10 million people have been killed, with countless more being displaced, raped, or forcibly recruited (even as children) into armed groups. “The link between exploitation and the illegal trade in minerals is recognized as a root cause.”
On International Women’s Day, Congolese activists in the city of Beni demand justice for the women suffering violence in DRC. Photo: @luchaRDC
Rich nation, poor nation
The current fighting has now displaced more than 10 million people, triggering another wave of indiscriminate killings, mass rape, and disease, while militia armies ransack the country’s rainforests with illegal logging and poaching.
Though the Congolese people have long been vampirized by extractivism, with over 70% living on less than $1.90/day, the DRC is not a poor nation – it is a robbed nation. In fact, the DRC is considered the world’s richest country in terms of wealth in natural resources.
DRC’s fossil fuels have been profitably exploited by foreign corporations and co-opted local elites for decades, leaving communities like Muanda, which is uncoincidentally both the original site of fossil fuel extraction and the poorest city in the country, scarred by dispossession, disease, and environmental degradation.
After the deadly Kalehe flood in South Kivu province last May, which killed hundreds and affected another 50,000 people in the flood zone, student activists from Extinction Rebellion Goma University launched the Pétrole Non Merci campaign in order to highlight that the DRC is already suffering the effects of climate catastrophes and that this suffering will only increase if the fossil fuel industry’s expansion is not stopped.
The students traveled thousands of miles across the width of the country, mobilizing communities to oppose the sale of 30 new oil and gas blocks, most of which overlap protected areas and would be transported by the ecocidal EACOP pipeline. A major focus of their efforts has been to facilitate ongoing educational exchanges on how to claim their rights through nonviolence and to hold officials and corporations accountable to local communities.
The continued work of building grassroots power to counter resource and human exploitation is now facing crucible conditions. Goma activists are spending long hours caring for the massive influx of internally displaced people amid food shortages and cholera outbreaks. Others in their networks have been displaced and suffered violence and even death. “This crisis only reinforces that the struggle for environmental justice is inextricably linked to the struggle against the cycles of violence that we continue to experience,” explains an activist with LUCHA, a non-violent and non-partisan youth civil society movement in Goma.
Green growth, red trail
As global finance gears up for “green growth”, the DRC’s resource wealth has again brought violence, robbery, and ecological destruction. The world’s largest coltan reserves, vast caches of copper, diamonds, tin, gold, and more than 63% of global cobalt are prized by armed gangs who sell them to corporations and wealthy states wanting to manufacture phones, computers, batteries and increasingly, renewable energy technologies.
In the chaos orchestrated by the militias, minerals are more easily siphoned to Rwanda, where they are exported and bought by multinational firms like Glencore. Nicolas Kazadi, DRC’s finance minister, claims that Rwandan mineral smuggling costs the DRC $1bn per year. The US Treasury estimated that last year more than 90% of DRC’s gold was smuggled to countries including Rwanda and Uganda, where it is refined and exported, mainly to the United Arab Emirates. Rwanda is also somehow the world’s primary exporter of coltan, despite being one of the lowest mineral producers in Africa. Without conflict minerals, the numbers just don’t add up.
Efforts to regulate conflict minerals and ensure responsible supply chains have been laughable in their inadequacy, and typical in their market-oriented approach that prioritizes profits while ignoring Congolese perspectives and outcomes. “The case of conflict minerals poses questions about how global supply chain capitalism, conflict resolution, and consumer ethics intersect with postcolonial friction and violence,” writes Josaphat Musamba and Christoph Vogel in Dissent Magazine. “Both international and Congolese interveners and elites have contributed to simplistic and misleading imageries of the problem and its solution, in a quest for a quick and seemingly hands-on, human rights–inspired PR operation.”
Until a decolonized approach that centers communities and ecology is adopted, extraction will inevitably lead to conflict. It is not possible to clean up a supply chain that begins with dirty motives, just as it is not possible to build regional stability and heal generations of trauma in the context of manipulation and structural inequity, better known as ‘development and aid’.
A rally in Nairobi, Kenya calls out Rwandan aggression in DRC. Photo: @luchaRDC
Donor darling, donor orphan
Though this long regional conflict is often portrayed as Rwandans vs Congolese, Hutu vs Tutsi, or even Muslim vs Christian, the primary generator of endless suffering is a more universal clash – power and profit vs people and planet. Colonialism never really ended, it simply now works remotely via economic imperialism. A look at the history of foreign intervention in the region clearly shows that the sources of underlying tensions, that have so far been inescapable, are not due to some inherent failing of Congolese or Rwandan people – it’s structural.
“Several studies point to the erroneous perceptions of outsiders to explain why their interventions have been unable to address the root causes of conflict in the African Great Lakes region. However, few authors focus on the impact of UN and donor activities on regional fragility,” says policy analyst Léopold Ghins at the Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa. “It is chiefly through these activities that outsiders have become part of the problem they [supposedly] seek to resolve.”
One way in which the imperial core exacerbates regional fragility is through unbalanced aid allocations. From 2003-16, Rwanda received about 130% and 50% more aid in per capita terms than the DRC and Burundi respectively. Rwanda was dubbed a ‘donor darling’, while the DRC and Burundi were considered ‘donor orphans’.
Donors now see Rwanda as a useful regional hegemon through which to carry on with the plunder of African resources. Its economy is growing, its infrastructure is developing at speed, and yet this celebrated growth has only benefitted a tiny elite.
It’s necessary to look up from the accounting books, step out of the board room and into the streets to take notice, but if Rwandans are so happy with their “development success”, why is there a black-clad, machine-gun toting policeman on every second street corner in Kigali? Over the last 24 years under President Kagame, the government has become unashamedly authoritarian with mounting human rights abuses.
Unhoused Rwandans and those caught begging have been forcibly exiled to a “rehabilitation island” in the middle of Lake Kivu, also known as Rwanda’s Alcatraz. Dozens of journalists have been banned from the country, arrested, and killed. Opposition politicians are routinely locked up, while civil society groups are not allowed to operate independently. Rwanda’s involvement in the destabilization of the DRC, the plundering of its resources, and the commission of the most serious crimes, including the use of sexual violence as a method of war and as a strategy of terror, is widely documented, notably by the United Nations.
Yet this outcome is touted a development success as the EU and other international institutions cozy up to Kigali for more business as usual, even striking a high-profile advertising deal with FC Arsenal where players wear a “Visit Rwanda” slogan on their jerseys. Sure, visit Rwanda – but only if you don’t plan on asking too many questions and steer clear of the military’s infamous detention and torture camps (whose existence is denied by the government). They will really ruin your holiday.
Again, activists seem to be doing better investigative journalism than the mainstream media, and are not fooled by spectacle. In a recent solidarity action both outside and inside the UK’s Parliament, activists from Extinction Rebellion UK denounced their government for giving Rwanda vast sums to service its extreme asylum policies, and therefore indirectly enabling mass violence and the theft of $24 trillion in natural resources from the DRC.
XR activists outside the UK Parliament protest the financing of violence in the DRC. The hand gesture, used by Congolese protesters to call out inaction of international and regional powers, represents being silenced with a gun to your head. Photo: @XRebellionUK
Zoom in, zoom out
The closer you look, the more you see when it comes to the ripple effects of foreign intervention – but out of the complexity, a clear pattern of disregard and disrespect emerges to untangle the mess.
For example, a second by-product of donor policies is the core-periphery structure that has emerged in the Great Lakes. At the core is the Kigali-Kampala axis, with eastern DRC, Burundi, and North-Western Uganda together forming the periphery. Mirroring global relations, people living in the regional core face lower security risks and have higher incomes in comparison to those in the periphery. “This situation has entrenched the notion that areas in the periphery are ‘lagging behind’, and reinforces perceptions of the DRC as ‘an inscrutable and unimprovable mess’,” explains Ghins.
If we turn from development to peacekeeping, the effects of MONUSCO (Mission des Nations Unies pour la Stabilisation en République démocratique du Congo) were yet another channel through which outsiders aggravated regional fragility. With a budget of $1.5bn a year, and employing 20,000 uniformed staff, the UN peacekeeping force was the largest mission in the organization’s history. Yet, over its 14+ years in the DRC, it was infamous for protection failures and struggled for credibility.
Of course, 20,000 staff can’t exist in a vacuum. The presence of large numbers of UN personnel in cities like Goma created dual labor markets for service sector jobs like cooks, cleaners and drivers. High expatriate salaries led real estate prices to soar. Yes, billions of dollars were spent on “peacekeeping”, but it was not guided by affected communities and could not be responsive to their needs. Ghins describes the outcome: “Not only did MONUSCO divert resources away from productive foreign investments in the Congolese economy, but it distorted local markets and may have impeded on the kinds of ‘autonomous recovery’ processes that conflicts are sometimes found to induce.”
Today, we are witnessing the eruptions that have been kept simmering, waiting for ignition, in no small part by a paradigm of imposed peacekeeping which is ineffective at community-driven peacebuilding. Relying on MONUSCO, Kinshasa had limited incentives to expand its own military capacity in the east. By protecting the main urban centers, MONUSCO bases mostly prevented any armed group from overpowering others. “Even if the UN mission played an essential role in civilian protection, it also ‘condemned’ myriad rebel formations to coexist indefinitely,” says Ghins. A 2019 independent strategic review of MONUSCO agreed that the military aspect of the peacekeeping mission had come to overshadow its civilian and political components. The political process to demobilize and negotiate with armed groups had, in actuality, been stuck for several years.
As MONUSCO’s presence has come to a close, it is this lack of community focused peacebuilding which is being exploited for profit by President Kagame and other local elites who use a combination of hate speech, scarcity, and fear to ignite passions on their behalf. The international community, or more specifically the imperial core, seems to find the situation amenable to an easy flow of cheap and minimally regulated resources. A united region that could leverage its own collective power over the largest trove of natural resources on the planet, would be far less convenient.
Over thousands of pages, a complex and detailed analysis of policy would reveal something fundamentally wrong with a development model that benefits a tiny few at the expense of most, while ravaging ecosystems. But, this structural error is equally apparent via a handful of case studies – and perhaps is less likely to get lost in the details. Over the decades, a series of top-down imposed “solutions”, whether in the name of peace or development, were consistently unaccountable to and unrepresentative of the actual communities at which they were aimed. They never failed to do more harm than good.
First justice, justice first
Whether a political economy of war was intentionally arranged, a result of good intentions but ill-conceived policy, or a combination of both – it clearly exposes a structure that has driven endless conflict. Underlying racism and the blanket pursuit of growth to fuel profits, regardless of social and ecological costs, created this context and continues its reproduction.
“We see the height of cynicism in terms of geostrategy and a policy of double standards,” says Mirindi in Goma. “We see what is happening in Ukraine, what is happening in Gaza. Why not, what is happening in the DRC? Why aren’t there sanctions against Rwanda which officially, visibly, supports these militias?”
The security and humanitarian situation is becoming more and more dire each day.
Clashes have intensified in recent days between M23 and Congolese government forces in the territories surrounding Goma, the regional capital home to over a million people. Goma airport was bombed twice. Internally displaced people continue to arrive in droves.
On his way back to one of the crowded refugee camps on the outskirts of the city, Mirindi describes an outbreak of a skin infection that is spreading like wildfire among the displaced children. He is seeking a way to organize medical aid, though he is not a doctor. Out of a resilience born both of necessity and of vision, he and fellow activists, artists, students, and friends are experienced in organizing as a practice of strategy as well as care, yet stress is taking its toll.
In between patient explanations of history, context, corruption, and atrocities, snippets of existential concern very near at hand slip into focus: “Last night and again today it has become more complicated with the security situation.” And, “The price of food has almost tripled in Goma. We fear that this will continue because all of the surrounding territories and villages that produce food for the city are under M23 control and the population has fled.” Heartwrenchingly, “Young children are dying of dehydration from cholera.” Yet in every conversation, we inevitably return to ordinary people aiding one another in extraordinary ways – the makings of a paradise built in hell.
Speak truth, act now
From this brutal context, activists in the DRC are calling for the international community to immediately stop funding Rwanda’s aggression and to hold all who are complicit accountable. Refusing to abandon their right to a future, they are urgently calling for a green transition that puts justice first, not new revenue streams, and that dismantles colonial exploitation once and for all. “Otherwise,” warns Dr. Mukwege, “the so-called green energy transition will remain red with the blood of Congolese men, women, and children” – collateral damage to enrich the same old racist elites.
Democratic Republic of Congo players silently protested before their AFCON semi-final match against Ivory Coast. Photo: @fecofootcg
In a silent protest in February, DRC soccer players stood before their Africa Cup of Nations semi-final match against Ivory Coast. They chose not to sing their national anthem, opting instead to cover their mouths with their hands and place two fingers from their left hands to their temples, a display of unity and solidarity with all Congolese people – silenced, with a gun to their heads.
This hand gesture is not a resignation, it is condemnation and a challenge. The DRC will no longer be silenced. When asked for the first step towards solidarity, Mirindi urges that, “It is really essential that we talk about this situation again and again, to attract the attention of the international community, organizations, public figures and to have more mobilization. If we can continue like this… that way, it will be better.”
[Goma Actif is organizing a fund drive ‘SOS Congo’ to help support displaced people.]
This powerful music video by members of Goma Slam Session, a collective of young poets and rappers from the DRC, is part of a campaign to seek justice for the crimes committed in the country from 1993 to date, including those documented in the UN Congo Mapping Project report. Bosembo translates as: justice, truth, peace, right, impartiality, fairness, objectivity, honesty, serenity, tranquility, and goodness.
Goma’s youth continues to be a powerhouse of creativity and resilience, proving that art can be one of the viable alternative strategies that activists can use to organize, communicate, mobilize and influence.
The author would like to recognize activists from XR Goma University, LUCHA RDC, and XR Global Support for their contributions to this article and for their struggle for environmental and social justice.
Original quotations were translated from French by the author.
Pro-Israel lobbyist director Jonathan Greenblatt said in a leaked phone call “We really have a TikTok problem” in the US.
The Anti Defamation League (ADL) CEO was speaking about the difficulty the colonialists face in controlling the narrative for young people. Greenblatt suggested that the warmongers had been wrongly focusing on left-wingers who sympathise with Palestine:
Cause again like we’ve been chasing this left/ right divide. It’s the wrong game. The real game is the next generation.
Polling shows US youth are particularly dissatisfied with the nation’s approach to Israel.
TikTok: see the “raw news”
Some US lawmakers have been pushing anti-TikTok sentiment for awhile. But the recent bill potentially banning TikTok in the US, which passed the House, seems to be a pressing issue because of Israel and Palestine.
President Joe Biden is under increasing pressure over covering for the genocide of Palestinians, where Israel has killed over 11,000 children. The difficulty in pretending children are terrorists has put the US in a tricky spot.
This is especially so when the US provides Israel with $3.3 billion in annual funds and continues to sell the state weapons. That’s while the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has found it’s “plausible” Israel is committing genocide.
In November, 25 Republicans signed a letter denouncing what they called a “deluge of pro-Hamas content” on TikTok. Republican senator Josh Hawley, meanwhile, said there’s “ubiquity of anti-Israel content on TikTok”.
Another Republican representative complained about the “raw news” young people were getting on the platform. Republicans control the house with a slim majority. And Biden has said he will sign the bill if it reaches him.
Under the bill, TikTok can only remain legal in the US if the app’s Chinese owner ByteDance sells it. The legislation will now face the senate.
ADL’s long-term silencing of critics of Israel
The ADL has long attempted to shutdown critics of Israel. Professor Noam Chomsky wrote in 1983 that the ADL:
specializes in trying to prevent critical discussion of policies of Israel by such techniques as maligning critics, including Israelis who do not pass its test of loyalty, distributing alleged ‘information’ that is often circulated in unsigned pamphlets, and so on.
In Israel, the ADL is casually described as ‘one of the main pillars’ of Israeli propaganda in the United States.
Meta’s “systemic censorship” of pro-Palestine content
A reason the pro-Israel lobby has called out TikTok could be the attitude of its competitors. Human Rights Watch has documented Facebook and Instagram censoring Palestinians and their supporters.
The organisation captured a snapshot of the pro-Israel censorship on these sites when it asked people to report their experience. It found 1049 cases of Facebook and Instagram taking down or suppressing peaceful pro-Palestinian content.
Meta, owner of Facebook and Instagram, has also banned anti-colonial accounts with up to and over 5 million followers.
TikTok, meanwhile, stands accused of pro-Palestine content. But the app insists it’s not the algorithm, pointing to data that shows young people have long sympathised with Palestine.
It seems the US and Israel are finding it difficult to control the narrative. So the US is simply planning to ban TikTok. That’s an assault on people’s freedom of speech and expression, as well as an attack on a multipolar internet.
On 12 March 2024 the U.S. and European Union issued new joint guidance on Monday for online platforms to help mitigate virtual attacks targeting human rights defenders, reports Alexandra Kelley, Staff Correspondent, Nextgov/FCW.
Outlined in 10 steps, the guidance was formed following stakeholder consulting from January 2023 to February 2024. Entities including nongovernmental organizations, trade unionists, journalists, lawyers, environmental and land activists advised both governments on how to protect human rights defenders on the internet.
Recommendations within the guidance include: committing to an HRD [human rights defender] protection policy; identifying risks to HRDs; sharing information with peers and select stakeholders; creating policy to monitoring performance metric base marks; resource staff adequately; build a capacity to address local risks; offer safety tools education; create an incident reporting channel; provide access to help for HRDs; and incorporate a strong transparent infrastructure.
Digital threats HRDs face include target Internet shutdowns, censorship, malicious cyber activity, unlawful surveillance, and doxxing. Given the severity and reported increase of digital attacks against HRDs, the guidance calls upon online platforms to take mitigating measures.
“The United States and the European Union encourage online platforms to use these recommendations to determine and implement concrete steps to identify and mitigate risks to HRDs on or through their services or products,” the guidance reads.
The ten guiding points laid out in the document reflect existing transatlantic policy commitments, including the Declaration for the Future of the Internet. Like other digital guidance, however, these actions are voluntary.
“These recommendations may be followed by further actions taken by the United States or the European Union to promote rights-respecting approaches by online platforms to address the needs of HRDs,” the document said
In November 2020, Los Angeles voters moved to radically transform the way the county handled incarceration. That year, Angelenos filled the streets, joining worldwide protests after the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. The mood was ripe for change, and a ballot initiative known as Measure J passed with 57 percent support, amending the LA County charter so that jailing people before trial would be treated as a last resort. Ten percent of the county’s general fund would be allocated to community-led alternatives to incarceration that prioritized diversion, job training, and health programs.
But years later, as Measure J finally, slowly, gets implemented, advocates say that changes meant to divert money from law enforcement might instead just funnel it back to them.
Case in point: In June, LA County signed over the handling of changes to pretrial detention under Measure J to the consulting firm Accenture, a behemoth in the world of biometric databases and predictive policing. Accenture has led the development of “intelligent public safety” platforms and tech-enabled risk assessment tools for national security and law enforcement agencies in the United States and around the world, including in Israel and India.An Accenture advisory panel working on the Measure J implementation includes former federal and local law enforcement agents.
Accenture’s role was further publicized Monday after Civil Rights Corps, a nonprofit focused on injustice in the legal system, sent a letter to the LA County Board of Supervisors calling on them to immediately cancel the company’s contract. The contract takes the county away from its stated vision for a “care first, jails last” approach and toward carceral policies, CRC wrote in the letter. “Already, Accenture has concluded that electronic monitoring is a ‘favorable alternative’ to incarceration, ignoring the reality that electronic monitoring is expensive, unsupported by social science, and demonstrably racially biased as applied in Los Angeles,” the letter adds. “This is unsurprising: the consultants working on the Contract have deep ties to police departments and prisons.”
Measure J was one of at least 20 local criminal justice reform efforts that passed nationwide in the six months after Floyd’s murder. It was also part of a string of major wins by advocates in Los Angeles, who had been pushing alternatives to incarceration and investment in social services long before 2020.
Measure J ran into predictable opposition: A group including the union for Los Angeles sheriff’s deputies sued to block the measure and delayed it from going into effect in 2021, but it was put back on track after a judge upheld it on appeal last year. Nationally, despite widespread support, the criminal justice reform wave was met by a well-funded and bipartisan opposition led by police, sheriffs, and conservative Republicans and Democrats who fearmongered about rising crime. In the years since the 2020 uprisings, efforts to reallocate police funding, implement federal and local police reforms, and invest in social services have been undone or derailed. Many of those who cheered the reform movement are frustrated that they haven’t seen the impact of so many policy wins. Accenture’s contract for Measure J shows another reason why.
Criminal justice reforms are “being cannibalized,” said Matyos Kidane, an organizer with the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, an abolitionist community group based in Skid Row. Kidane said the group sometimes organizes against reforms they might otherwise support because of the way corporations and law enforcement groups exploit and defang such initiatives. He pointed to Axon, which has profited massively from the push to get police equipped with body cameras.
“It’s a golden opportunity for them,” Kidane said. When Measure J passed, “Accenture was ready to go once this opportunity presented itself.”
Accenture has not publicly announced the contract with Los Angeles County, which was signed in June 2023 without a competitive bidding process for a total of $8.6 million over two and a half years. The contract exceeded the $200,000 limit in state law and county charter for a sole-source contract, and the board of supervisors created a motion to allow the requirement to be skirted in order to implement Measure J. But that motion allowed for a contract of up to $3 million, far less than the final signing price. The county told The Intercept it had paid $2 million to Accenture so far. (The supervisors who signed the motion did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
“Even if it were entered into legally — which it was not — the Contract is duplicative, wasteful, and harmful to Los Angeles and should be canceled on policy grounds alone,” the Civil Rights Corp letter states.
In presentations made in August to the Los Angeles Justice, Care, and Opportunities Department, which is administering the contract (published in September by the accountability group Expose Accenture) the firm gave an overview of its project timeline and plans to engage stakeholders in focus groups, interviews, workshops, and site visits. The firm highlighted targets for “quick wins” by October 1, 2023, such as creating a county website and launching marketing and communications for “Justice Involved Individuals” (i.e., people who have been arrested) and summarized top lines of conversations with 50 such people, including the observation that there was wide support for electronic monitoring as an alternative to custody.
A spokesperson for the county CEO, which controls county budget decisions, directed questions about the CRC letter to JCOD, as did Accenture. Department spokesperson Avi Bernard did not answer specific questions about how the county raised the limit for the contract but told The Intercept that JCOD had used approved county procedures and consulted with county counsel throughout the contract process. Bernard said CRC had previously raised similar concerns. “County Counsel and Board reviewed these concerns and found no issues with continuing the contract,” Bernard said. He added that there had been “no conversations with Accenture” and JCOD related to the use of electronic monitoring.
Bernard said that so far, Accenture had designed an independent pretrial services agency for the county, incorporated input from stakeholders, and supported a hotline, website, and marketing campaign. Bernard said the firm has now deployed a three-person implementation team to launch the independent pretrial services agency and is helping JCOD develop a case management IT system.
“It’s talking left while running off with the profiteers of mass surveillance and detention.”
The fact that Accenture was even an option for implementing Measure J came as a shock to many of its supporters, who had watched the county meet with community partners interested in helping carry out its implementation. The contract was also news to some county supervisors, according to advocates with knowledge of the contract process.
“It’s worse than talk left, walk right politics,” said Nika Soon-Shiong, founder and executive director at the Fund for Guaranteed Income and a Ph.D. researcher on digital identification systems. “It’s talking left while running off with the profiteers of mass surveillance and detention.”
Accenture has pushed counterterror and policing strategies around the globe: The company built the world’s biggest biometric identification system in India, which has used similar technologies to surveil protesters and conduct crowd control as part of efforts by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party to investigate the citizenship of Muslim residents. And in Israel, Accenture acquired the cybersecurity firm Maglan in 2016 and has worked to facilitate collaboration between India and Israel aimed at “fostering inclusive economic growth and maximizing human potential.”
Accenture ballooned into a giant in federal consulting over the course of the “war on terror,” winning hundreds of millions of dollars in lucrative contracts from federal agencies like the Department of Homeland Security for projects from a “virtual border” to recruiting and hiring Customs and Border Protection and Border Patrol agents. In 2006, Accenture won a $10 million contract for a DHS biometric ID program, the world’s second biggest, to collect and share biometric data on foreign nationals entering or leaving the U.S. The company has also worked with police departments in Seattle and in the United Kingdom. Jimmy Etheredge, Accenture’s former CEO for North America, sits on the board of the Atlanta Police Foundation.
Asked about Accenture’s international work on biometric identification, predictive policing, and national security, Bernard, the JCOD spokesperson, said the firm was involved in many different kinds of work. “Accenture is a large, international consulting firm with many lines of business. The specific consultants assigned to this project are part of a team in Accenture dedicated to the public sector. Their team comes from a variety of backgrounds, primarily in the health and human services industry.”
But several LA-based advocates told The Intercept that the contract is yet another development that calls into question the county’s commitment to real criminal justice reform. The county has missed all of its deadlines for a plan to close the notoriously inhumane Men’s Central Jail, even as deaths in custody continue apace. In August, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department issued a Request for Information for a biometric identification system.
“I’m genuinely confused about how we ended up with this Accenture contract, especially as someone who participated in the development of the Care First, Jails Last (ATI) report,” said Danielle Dupuy-Watson, CEO of CRC, referring to an “Alternatives to Incarceration” working group commissioned by the county. “We hoped for transparency and accountability but instead we were gaslit.”
Behind-the-scenes deals like the one with Accenture are one reason that popular reforms haven’t come to fruition, said Lex Steppling, an organizer with Los Angeles Community Action Network.
“There’s the performance of democracy on the front end where a policy gets pressured into place, and on the back end there’s no governance.”
“People vote in that direction, and then it doesn’t happen. And they chalk it up to, ‘Well, politicians ain’t shit,’” Steppling said. People assume, he added, that when policy is passed, bureaucrats work out its implementation. “What we’re learning is there’s the performance of democracy on the front end where a policy gets pressured into place, and on the back end there’s no governance. It just simply gets procured and contracted away to these consulting firms.”
That the county took a historic progressive reform and contracted it out to a firm that put the community’s plans back into the hands of law enforcement is a perfect expression of the problem, Steppling said. “There’s no democracy there. There’s no transparency there. Nobody even knows it’s happening.”
The food transition, the energy transition, net-zero ideology, programmable central bank digital currencies, the censorship of free speech and clampdowns on protest. What’s it all about? To understand these processes, we need to first locate what is essentially a social and economic reset within the context of a collapsing financial system.
Writer Ted Reece notes that the general rate of profit has trended downwards from an estimated 43% in the 1870s to 17% in the 2000s. By late 2019, many companies could not generate enough profit. Falling turnover, squeezed margins, limited cash flows and highly leveraged balance sheets were prevalent.
Professor Fabio Vighi of Cardiff University has described how closing down the global economy in early 2020 under the guise of fighting a supposedly new and novel pathogen allowed the US Federal Reserve to flood collapsing financial markets (COVID relief) with freshly printed money without causing hyperinflation. Lockdowns curtailed economic activity, thereby removing demand for the newly printed money (credit) in the physical economy and preventing ‘contagion’.
According to investigative journalist Michael Byrant, €1.5 trillion was needed to deal with the crisis in Europe alone. The financial collapse staring European central bankers in the face came to a head in 2019. The appearance of a ‘novel virus’ provided a convenient cover story.
The European Central Bank agreed to a €1.31 trillion bailout of banks followed by the EU agreeing to a €750 billion recovery fund for European states and corporations. This package of long-term, ultra-cheap credit to hundreds of banks was sold to the public as a necessary programme to cushion the impact of the pandemic on businesses and workers.
In response to a collapsing neoliberalism, we are now seeing the rollout of an authoritarian great reset — an agenda that intends to reshape the economy and change how we live.
Shift to authoritarianism
The new economy is to be dominated by a handful of tech giants, global conglomerates and e-commerce platforms, and new markets will also be created through the financialisation of nature, which is to be colonised, commodified and traded under the notion of protecting the environment.
In recent years, we have witnessed an overaccumulation of capital, and the creation of such markets will provide fresh investment opportunities (including dodgy carbon offsetting Ponzi schemes) for the super-rich to park their wealth and prosper.
This great reset envisages a transformation of Western societies, resulting in permanent restrictions on fundamental liberties and mass surveillance. Being rolled out under the benign term of a ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’, the World Economic Forum (WEF) says the public will eventually ‘rent’ everything they require (remember the WEF video ‘you will own nothing and be happy’?): stripping the right of ownership under the guise of a ‘green economy’ and underpinned by the rhetoric of ‘sustainable consumption’ and ‘climate emergency’.
Climate alarmism and the mantra of sustainability are about promoting money-making schemes. But they also serve another purpose: social control.
Neoliberalism has run its course, resulting in the impoverishment of large sections of the population. But to dampen dissent and lower expectations, the levels of personal freedom we have been used to will not be tolerated. This means that the wider population will be subjected to the discipline of an emerging surveillance state.
To push back against any dissent, ordinary people are being told that they must sacrifice personal liberty in order to protect public health, societal security (those terrible Russians, Islamic extremists or that Sunak-designated bogeyman George Galloway) or the climate. Unlike in the old normal of neoliberalism, an ideological shift is occurring whereby personal freedoms are increasingly depicted as being dangerous because they run counter to the collective good.
The real reason for this ideological shift is to ensure that the masses get used to lower living standards and accept them. Consider, for instance, the Bank of England’s chief economist Huw Pill saying that people should ‘accept’ being poorer. And then there is Rob Kapito of the world’s biggest asset management firm BlackRock, who says that a “very entitled” generation must deal with scarcity for the first time in their lives.
At the same time, to muddy the waters, the message is that lower living standards are the result of the conflict in Ukraine and supply shocks that both the war and ‘the virus’ have caused.
The net-zero carbon emissions agenda will help legitimise lower living standards (reducing your carbon footprint) while reinforcing the notion that our rights must be sacrificed for the greater good. You will own nothing, not because the rich and their neoliberal agenda made you poor but because you will be instructed to stop being irresponsible and must act to protect the planet.
Net-zero agenda
But what of this shift towards net-zero greenhouse gas emissions and the plan to slash our carbon footprints? Is it even feasible or necessary?
Gordon Hughes, a former World Bank economist and current professor of economics at the University of Edinburgh, says in a new report that current UK and European net-zero policies will likely lead to further economic ruin.
Apparently, the only viable way to raise the cash for sufficient new capital expenditure (on wind and solar infrastructure) would be a two decades-long reduction in private consumption of up to 10 per cent. Such a shock has never occurred in the last century outside war; even then, never for more than a decade.
But this agenda will also cause serious environmental degradation. So says Andrew Nikiforuk in the article The Rising Chorus of Renewable Energy Skeptics, which outlines how the green techno-dream is vastly destructive.
He lists the devastating environmental impacts of an even more mineral-intensive system based on renewables and warns:
The whole process of replacing a declining system with a more complex mining-based enterprise is now supposed to take place with a fragile banking system, dysfunctional democracies, broken supply chains, critical mineral shortages and hostile geopolitics.
All of this assumes that global warming is real and anthropogenic. Not everyone agrees. In the article Global warming and the confrontation between the West and the rest of the world, journalist Thierry Meyssan argues that net zero is based on political ideology rather than science. But to state such things has become heresy in the Western countries and shouted down with accusations of ‘climate science denial’.
Regardless of such concerns, the march towards net zero continues, and key to this is the United Nations Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development Goals.
Today, almost every business or corporate report, website or brochure includes a multitude of references to ‘carbon footprints’, ‘sustainability’, ‘net zero’ or ‘climate neutrality’ and how a company or organisation intends to achieve its sustainability targets. Green profiling, green bonds and green investments go hand in hand with displaying ‘green’ credentials and ambitions wherever and whenever possible.
It seems anyone and everyone in business is planting their corporate flag on the summit of sustainability. Take Sainsbury’s, for instance. It is one of the ‘big six’ food retail supermarkets in the UK and has a vision for the future of food that it published in 2019.
Here’s a quote from it:
Personalised Optimisation is a trend that could see people chipped and connected like never before. A significant step on from wearable tech used today, the advent of personal microchips and neural laces has the potential to see all of our genetic, health and situational data recorded, stored and analysed by algorithms which could work out exactly what we need to support us at a particular time in our life. Retailers, such as Sainsbury’s could play a critical role to support this, arranging delivery of the needed food within thirty minutes — perhaps by drone.
Tracked, traced and chipped — for your own benefit. Corporations accessing all of our personal data, right down to our DNA. The report is littered with references to sustainability and the climate or environment, and it is difficult not to get the impression that it is written so as to leave the reader awestruck by the technological possibilities.
However, the promotion of a brave new world of technological innovation that has nothing to say about power — who determines policies that have led to massive inequalities, poverty, malnutrition, food insecurity and hunger and who is responsible for the degradation of the environment in the first place — is nothing new.
The essence of power is conveniently glossed over, not least because those behind the prevailing food regime are also shaping the techno-utopian fairytale where everyone lives happily ever after eating bugs and synthetic food while living in a digital panopticon.
Fake green
The type of ‘green’ agenda being pushed is a multi-trillion market opportunity for lining the pockets of rich investors and subsidy-sucking green infrastructure firms and also part of a strategy required to secure compliance required for the ‘new normal’.
It is, furthermore, a type of green that plans to cover much of the countryside with wind farms and solar panels with most farmers no longer farming. A recipe for food insecurity.
Those investing in the ‘green’ agenda care first and foremost about profit. The supremely influential BlackRock invests in the current food system that is responsible for polluted waterways, degraded soils, the displacement of smallholder farmers, a spiralling public health crisis, malnutrition and much more.
It also invests in healthcare — an industry that thrives on the illnesses and conditions created by eating the substandard food that the current system produces. Did Larry Fink, the top man at BlackRock, suddenly develop a conscience and become an environmentalist who cares about the planet and ordinary people? Of course not.
Any serious deliberations on the future of food would surely consider issues like food sovereignty, the role of agroecology and the strengthening of family farms — the backbone of current global food production.
The aforementioned article by Andrew Nikiforuk concludes that, if we are really serious about our impacts on the environment, we must scale back our needs and simplify society.
In terms of food, the solution rests on a low-input approach that strengthens rural communities and local markets and prioritises smallholder farms and small independent enterprises and retailers, localised democratic food systems and a concept of food sovereignty based on self-sufficiency, agroecological principles and regenerative agriculture.
It would involve facilitating the right to culturally appropriate food that is nutritionally dense due to diverse cropping patterns and free from toxic chemicals while ensuring local ownership and stewardship of common resources like land, water, soil and seeds.
That’s where genuine environmentalism and the future of food begins.
• The author writes on food, agriculture and development. For further insight into the issues discussed above, you can access his two free books on the food system at Academia.edu or the e-book section on the Centre for Research on Globalization homepage.
The food transition, the energy transition, net-zero ideology, programmable central bank digital currencies, the censorship of free speech and clampdowns on protest. What’s it all about? To understand these processes, we need to first locate what is essentially a social and economic reset within the context of a collapsing financial system.
Writer Ted Reece notes that the general rate of profit has trended downwards from an estimated 43% in the 1870s to 17% in the 2000s. By late 2019, many companies could not generate enough profit. Falling turnover, squeezed margins, limited cash flows and highly leveraged balance sheets were prevalent.
Professor Fabio Vighi of Cardiff University has described how closing down the global economy in early 2020 under the guise of fighting a supposedly new and novel pathogen allowed the US Federal Reserve to flood collapsing financial markets (COVID relief) with freshly printed money without causing hyperinflation. Lockdowns curtailed economic activity, thereby removing demand for the newly printed money (credit) in the physical economy and preventing ‘contagion’.
According to investigative journalist Michael Byrant, €1.5 trillion was needed to deal with the crisis in Europe alone. The financial collapse staring European central bankers in the face came to a head in 2019. The appearance of a ‘novel virus’ provided a convenient cover story.
The European Central Bank agreed to a €1.31 trillion bailout of banks followed by the EU agreeing to a €750 billion recovery fund for European states and corporations. This package of long-term, ultra-cheap credit to hundreds of banks was sold to the public as a necessary programme to cushion the impact of the pandemic on businesses and workers.
In response to a collapsing neoliberalism, we are now seeing the rollout of an authoritarian great reset — an agenda that intends to reshape the economy and change how we live.
Shift to authoritarianism
The new economy is to be dominated by a handful of tech giants, global conglomerates and e-commerce platforms, and new markets will also be created through the financialisation of nature, which is to be colonised, commodified and traded under the notion of protecting the environment.
In recent years, we have witnessed an overaccumulation of capital, and the creation of such markets will provide fresh investment opportunities (including dodgy carbon offsetting Ponzi schemes) for the super-rich to park their wealth and prosper.
This great reset envisages a transformation of Western societies, resulting in permanent restrictions on fundamental liberties and mass surveillance. Being rolled out under the benign term of a ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’, the World Economic Forum (WEF) says the public will eventually ‘rent’ everything they require (remember the WEF video ‘you will own nothing and be happy’?): stripping the right of ownership under the guise of a ‘green economy’ and underpinned by the rhetoric of ‘sustainable consumption’ and ‘climate emergency’.
Climate alarmism and the mantra of sustainability are about promoting money-making schemes. But they also serve another purpose: social control.
Neoliberalism has run its course, resulting in the impoverishment of large sections of the population. But to dampen dissent and lower expectations, the levels of personal freedom we have been used to will not be tolerated. This means that the wider population will be subjected to the discipline of an emerging surveillance state.
To push back against any dissent, ordinary people are being told that they must sacrifice personal liberty in order to protect public health, societal security (those terrible Russians, Islamic extremists or that Sunak-designated bogeyman George Galloway) or the climate. Unlike in the old normal of neoliberalism, an ideological shift is occurring whereby personal freedoms are increasingly depicted as being dangerous because they run counter to the collective good.
The real reason for this ideological shift is to ensure that the masses get used to lower living standards and accept them. Consider, for instance, the Bank of England’s chief economist Huw Pill saying that people should ‘accept’ being poorer. And then there is Rob Kapito of the world’s biggest asset management firm BlackRock, who says that a “very entitled” generation must deal with scarcity for the first time in their lives.
At the same time, to muddy the waters, the message is that lower living standards are the result of the conflict in Ukraine and supply shocks that both the war and ‘the virus’ have caused.
The net-zero carbon emissions agenda will help legitimise lower living standards (reducing your carbon footprint) while reinforcing the notion that our rights must be sacrificed for the greater good. You will own nothing, not because the rich and their neoliberal agenda made you poor but because you will be instructed to stop being irresponsible and must act to protect the planet.
Net-zero agenda
But what of this shift towards net-zero greenhouse gas emissions and the plan to slash our carbon footprints? Is it even feasible or necessary?
Gordon Hughes, a former World Bank economist and current professor of economics at the University of Edinburgh, says in a new report that current UK and European net-zero policies will likely lead to further economic ruin.
Apparently, the only viable way to raise the cash for sufficient new capital expenditure (on wind and solar infrastructure) would be a two decades-long reduction in private consumption of up to 10 per cent. Such a shock has never occurred in the last century outside war; even then, never for more than a decade.
But this agenda will also cause serious environmental degradation. So says Andrew Nikiforuk in the article The Rising Chorus of Renewable Energy Skeptics, which outlines how the green techno-dream is vastly destructive.
He lists the devastating environmental impacts of an even more mineral-intensive system based on renewables and warns:
The whole process of replacing a declining system with a more complex mining-based enterprise is now supposed to take place with a fragile banking system, dysfunctional democracies, broken supply chains, critical mineral shortages and hostile geopolitics.
All of this assumes that global warming is real and anthropogenic. Not everyone agrees. In the article Global warming and the confrontation between the West and the rest of the world, journalist Thierry Meyssan argues that net zero is based on political ideology rather than science. But to state such things has become heresy in the Western countries and shouted down with accusations of ‘climate science denial’.
Regardless of such concerns, the march towards net zero continues, and key to this is the United Nations Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development Goals.
Today, almost every business or corporate report, website or brochure includes a multitude of references to ‘carbon footprints’, ‘sustainability’, ‘net zero’ or ‘climate neutrality’ and how a company or organisation intends to achieve its sustainability targets. Green profiling, green bonds and green investments go hand in hand with displaying ‘green’ credentials and ambitions wherever and whenever possible.
It seems anyone and everyone in business is planting their corporate flag on the summit of sustainability. Take Sainsbury’s, for instance. It is one of the ‘big six’ food retail supermarkets in the UK and has a vision for the future of food that it published in 2019.
Here’s a quote from it:
Personalised Optimisation is a trend that could see people chipped and connected like never before. A significant step on from wearable tech used today, the advent of personal microchips and neural laces has the potential to see all of our genetic, health and situational data recorded, stored and analysed by algorithms which could work out exactly what we need to support us at a particular time in our life. Retailers, such as Sainsbury’s could play a critical role to support this, arranging delivery of the needed food within thirty minutes — perhaps by drone.
Tracked, traced and chipped — for your own benefit. Corporations accessing all of our personal data, right down to our DNA. The report is littered with references to sustainability and the climate or environment, and it is difficult not to get the impression that it is written so as to leave the reader awestruck by the technological possibilities.
However, the promotion of a brave new world of technological innovation that has nothing to say about power — who determines policies that have led to massive inequalities, poverty, malnutrition, food insecurity and hunger and who is responsible for the degradation of the environment in the first place — is nothing new.
The essence of power is conveniently glossed over, not least because those behind the prevailing food regime are also shaping the techno-utopian fairytale where everyone lives happily ever after eating bugs and synthetic food while living in a digital panopticon.
Fake green
The type of ‘green’ agenda being pushed is a multi-trillion market opportunity for lining the pockets of rich investors and subsidy-sucking green infrastructure firms and also part of a strategy required to secure compliance required for the ‘new normal’.
It is, furthermore, a type of green that plans to cover much of the countryside with wind farms and solar panels with most farmers no longer farming. A recipe for food insecurity.
Those investing in the ‘green’ agenda care first and foremost about profit. The supremely influential BlackRock invests in the current food system that is responsible for polluted waterways, degraded soils, the displacement of smallholder farmers, a spiralling public health crisis, malnutrition and much more.
It also invests in healthcare — an industry that thrives on the illnesses and conditions created by eating the substandard food that the current system produces. Did Larry Fink, the top man at BlackRock, suddenly develop a conscience and become an environmentalist who cares about the planet and ordinary people? Of course not.
Any serious deliberations on the future of food would surely consider issues like food sovereignty, the role of agroecology and the strengthening of family farms — the backbone of current global food production.
The aforementioned article by Andrew Nikiforuk concludes that, if we are really serious about our impacts on the environment, we must scale back our needs and simplify society.
In terms of food, the solution rests on a low-input approach that strengthens rural communities and local markets and prioritises smallholder farms and small independent enterprises and retailers, localised democratic food systems and a concept of food sovereignty based on self-sufficiency, agroecological principles and regenerative agriculture.
It would involve facilitating the right to culturally appropriate food that is nutritionally dense due to diverse cropping patterns and free from toxic chemicals while ensuring local ownership and stewardship of common resources like land, water, soil and seeds.
That’s where genuine environmentalism and the future of food begins.
• The author writes on food, agriculture and development. For further insight into the issues discussed above, you can access his two free books on the food system at Academia.edu or the e-book section on the Centre for Research on Globalization homepage.
