The very obscure, archaic technologies that make cellphone roaming possible also makes it possible to track phone owners across the world, according to a new investigation by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab. The roaming tech is riddled with security oversights that make it a ripe target for those who might want to trace the locations of phone users.
As the report explains, the flexibility that made cellphones so popular in the first place is largely to blame for their near-inescapable vulnerability to unwanted location tracking: When you move away from a cellular tower owned by one company to one owned by another, your connection is handed off seamlessly, preventing any interruption to your phone call or streaming video. To accomplish this handoff, the cellular networks involved need to relay messages about who — and, crucially, precisely where — you are.
“Notably, the methods available to law enforcement and intelligence services are similar to those used by the unlawful actors and enable them to obtain individuals’ geolocation information.”
While most of these network-hopping messages are sent to facilitate legitimate customer roaming, the very same system can be easily manipulated to trick a network into divulging your location to governments, fraudsters, or private sector snoops.
“Foreign intelligence and security services, as well as private intelligence firms, often attempt to obtain location information, as do domestic state actors such as law enforcement,” states the report from Citizen Lab, which researches the internet and tech from the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. “Notably, the methods available to law enforcement and intelligence services are similar to those used by the unlawful actors and enable them to obtain individuals’ geolocation information with high degrees of secrecy.”
The sheer complexity required to allow phones to easily hop from one network to another creates a host of opportunities for intelligence snoops and hackers to poke around for weak spots, Citizen Lab says. Today, there are simply so many companies involved in the cellular ecosystem that opportunities abound for bad actors.
Citizen Lab highlights the IP Exchange, or IPX, a network that helps cellular companies swap data about their customers. “The IPX is used by over 750 mobile networks spanning 195 countries around the world,” the report explains. “There are a variety of companies with connections to the IPX which may be willing to be explicitly complicit with, or turn a blind eye to, surveillance actors taking advantage of networking vulnerabilities and one-to-many interconnection points to facilitate geolocation tracking.”
This network, however, is even more promiscuous than those numbers suggest, as telecom companies can privately sell and resell access to the IPX — “creating further opportunities for a surveillance actor to use an IPX connection while concealing its identity through a number of leases and subleases.” All of this, of course, remains invisible and inscrutable to the person holding the phone.
Citizen Lab was able to document several efforts to exploit this system for surveillance purposes. In many cases, cellular roaming allows for turnkey spying across vast distances: In Vietnam, researchers identified a seven-month location surveillance campaign using the network of the state-owned GTel Mobile to track the movements of African cellular customers. “Given its ownership by the Ministry of Public Security the targeting was either undertaken with the Ministry’s awareness or permission, or was undertaken in spite of the telecommunications operator being owned by the state,” the report concludes.
African telecoms seem to be a particular hotbed of roaming-based location tracking. Gary Miller, a mobile security researcher with Citizen Lab who co-authored the report, told The Intercept that, so far this year, he’d tracked over 11 million geolocation attacks originating from just two telecoms in Chad and the Democratic Republic of the Congo alone.
In another case, Citizen Lab details a “likely state-sponsored activity intended to identify the mobility patterns of Saudi Arabia users who were traveling in the United States,” wherein Saudi phone owners were geolocated roughly every 11 minutes.
The exploitation of the global cellular system is, indeed, truly global: Citizen Lab cites location surveillance efforts originating in India, Iceland, Sweden, Italy, and beyond.
While the report notes a variety of factors, Citizen Lab places particular blame with the laissez-faire nature of global telecommunications, generally lax security standards, and lack of legal and regulatory consequences.
As governments throughout the West have been preoccupied for years with the purported surveillance threats of Chinese technologies, the rest of the world appears to have comparatively avoided scrutiny. “While a great deal of attention has been spent on whether or not to include Huawei networking equipment in telecommunications networks,” the report authors add, “comparatively little has been said about ensuring non-Chinese equipment is well secured and not used to facilitate surveillance activities.”
This coverage is made possible through a partnership with Grist and Interlochen Public Radio in Northern Michigan.
In 2019, the nonprofit Michigan Energy Options had just put up a solar farm in the city of East Lansing — in a dump.
“It was a closed dump,” said John Kinch, the solar company’s executive director. “There was grass and some flowers and weeds growing there. “
As part of the project, Kinch and his colleagues restored the land around the newly installed panels.
“We took all the junky grasses and things that were not native, got rid of it all and planted all native prairie and wildflower species to Michigan,” he said. “It’s a beautiful sight right now.”
But one day, Kinch was out there admiring the work, when a thought entered his mind: “Holy cow, when we’re done with this project, am I going to remove a thousand solar panels from a landfill and go put them underground in a landfill somewhere else?”
The world is seeing a huge push for solar power. But what happens when those panels wear out?
About 12 years ago, a woman named Annick Anctil was working at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. She was researching the environmental impact of solar, and she became interested in making this renewable energy more sustainable.
At her next job, she decided to go further: “The first thing I did when I started in academia after my postdoc was to write a proposal about looking at the end of life of solar modules and the need for recycling and sustainability.”
But, she said, other people weren’t on board.
“The response to that proposal was just, ‘Well, that’s not a problem. And it’s not going to be a problem for a long time. So we’re not going to fund that,’” she recalled.
Anctil submitted another proposal a few years later, and was rejected again.
Around that same time, interest in solar waste was starting to pick up. The country was installing panels at record rates. And in 2016, the International Renewable Energy Agency released a big report, saying that in the next few decades the world could see up to 78 million metric tons of solar waste. To put that in perspective, that’s about 5 million school buses.
That estimate has fluctuated over the years as solar has advanced. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory now estimates waste could reach between 54 and 160 million metric tons.
By 2021, Anctil’s research was finally funded. And she’s been working on that ever since as an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Michigan State University.
“Looking at the waste part, for me, that’s part of the full life cycle of the solar panels,” she said. “As soon as we start thinking about a product, we should think about what’s going to happen to them when we’re done with it.”
Crushed glass from a recycled solar panel, ready for reuse in new products.
SolarCycle
To understand solar recycling, it’s helpful to know where the panels begin.
Most solar panels are made in China. Those blue rectangles that convert sunlight to electricity are covered in big sheets of high-quality glass and plastic polymer. Those rectangles are usually made of silicon, which is basically a pure form of sand. Panels can also contain copper, silver and other metals. An aluminum frame holds it together.
The solar life cycle is intertwined with human rights. There have been charges of abuses in mining and manufacturing for solar that gets shipped to countries including the United States. And a report by the London-based Business and Human Rights Resource Centre said the U.S. is among the countries that have failed to provide environmental and labor safeguards for the workers doing the mining, allegedly leading to a slew of violations, like polluting drinking water.
Last year, Reuters reported that U.S. Customs and Border Patrol had seized solar equipment shipments because of concerns about ties to slave labor in Uyghur detention camps in northern China.
“There’s a lot of illegal mining,” said Anctil, who co-authored a Science Direct report on the carbon footprint of silicon production last year. “There’s also concern that some country might import high quality sand from another country using illegal mining.”
Most solar has been installed in the last decade, and that pace is expected to continue, as it becomes cheaper due to federal incentives, new technology and higher demand. Many of those panels are meant to last for at least 25 to 30 years, and could produce power for much longer. Eventually, that will pile up and we’ll need to dispose of them.
But there are no federal requirements for recycling solar panels, and states have different regulations for what to do with them. Panels can also contain small amounts of heavy metals like lead, which makes getting rid of them more complicated. The vast majority of panels are thrown away in landfills — only about 10 percent are recycled. And people who are recycling are dealing with a patchwork system with a lot of organizations.
Solar recycling companies are part of that configuration. Some are in the Great Lakes region, but panels are also shipped to big facilities thousands of miles away.
Jesse Simons helped found the California recycling company Solarcycle last year, and is the company’s chief commercial officer. He said the first step is sending out a team to determine whether panels can be reused instead of recycled at their facility in Texas.
Once the panels arrive at the facility, they’re put on a machine.
“A robot, essentially, pops the frame off,” Simons said.
Panels are hard to take apart. They’re fused together in a kind of sandwich of glass, silicon, and plastic polymer, built to withstand decades outdoors, and specialized recycling systems are needed to recover valuable materials.
Once the glass is removed, there’s the laminate.
“It really does, at that point, roll up like a yoga mat,” Simons said. “It’s like a very thin piece. But that’s where most of the value is currently. Something like 80 percent of the value of the panel is now in the 8 percent of the weight that is in that yoga mat-like laminate.”
They put the laminate in a shredder, where it’s ground down to the size of sand.
“Then we’ve got another machine that basically uses electromagnetic processes to separate the valuable metals from the remaining plastic and glass,” he said.
At the end of the whole process, they’re left with around five pounds of plastic, which they’re trying to find a way to reuse.
So why isn’t everyone recycling?
Well, it’s still expensive. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimates that it can cost between $15 to $45 to recycle a panel, but just a few dollars to throw it away.
Getting panels to recycling facilities is another factor. The company We Recycle Solar actually has regional warehouses in places like Chicago, where they store panels until there are enough to justify shipping them to their center in Arizona.
The solar recycling industry is expected to grow as technology improves, waste accumulates and demand for materials goes up. And people like John Gilkeson, from Minnesota’s Pollution Control Agency, say this transition can’t be left to the free market and industry alone.
“That’s called wish-cycling,” he said. “Because the market will drive to the cheapest option, which is going to be landfilling. We have had many conversations with larger energy providers who say, ‘We’ll do the right thing.’ And we say, ‘What is the right thing? And when it really happens, will you do it?’ And then we get no response. Because people are not going to do anything that they do not have to do.”
Gilkeson said policy is key to dealing with any kind of waste, including solar. He’d like to see reuse and recycling take-back programs that are funded ahead of time and supported by the industry, along with federal efforts. And he thinks we should start working on that now.
“Deliberate, intentional action is needed to make this happen,” he said. “Otherwise, you’ve got thousands of actors all doing whatever they think is in their own self-interest. And it’s not going to be a coordinated reuse and recycling system.”
There are efforts out there to make reuse and recycling more feasible.
The U.S. Department of Energy announced $20 million for solar sustainability this year. Washington State passed a law requiring company take-back and recycling programs that’s set to take effect in 2025. Some states have included solar in their universal waste programs, which can help streamline collection and recycling. Illinois could ban panels from being thrown away. Some companies, like Michigan Energy Options, have started collecting panels in the Great Lakes to test out reuse and recycling in the region.
One of the best ways to reduce waste is by developing panels that last longer and are more reliable, say researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory or NREL. They also said it’s important to try reusing and repairing panels before recycling them.
Worries about solar power — both the recycling issues and the potential toxins — are influencing efforts to cut carbon emissions, according to a recent article in the journal Nature Physics. There, NREL researchers like Silvana Ovaitt said “unfounded” concerns about waste and toxicity are slowing solar installations.
“There is a need to grow recycling and management practices, but it’s also not the most important thing to do right now,” Ovaitt said. “We are really facing these decarbonization needs; right now what we should really focus on is quick deployment.”
Over its lifetime, solar generally produces far fewer emissions than non-renewable energy — a 2021 NREL assessment found that solar emissions are about 4 percent of coal, 5 percent of oil, and 9 percent of natural gas. And although the projected amount of solar waste internationally may seem like a lot, it’s still much less than the amount of trash we throw out globally every year.
Annick Anctil, the professor at Michigan State, thinks now is actually a great time to figure out how to move forward. She said the main reason to keep working on this is simple.
Solar is great, she said, but what if the industry created a new design that didn’t end up in landfills? Or didn’t need so much mining for materials? Or could end up recycled as new panels?
Instagram and Facebook users attempting to share scenes of devastation from a crowded hospital in Gaza City claim their posts are being suppressed, despite previous company policies protecting the publication of violent, newsworthy scenes of civilian death.
Late Tuesday, amid a 10-day bombing campaign by Israel, the Gaza Strip’s al-Ahli Hospital was rocked by an explosion that left hundreds of civilians killed and wounded. Footage of the flaming exterior of the hospital, as well as dead and wounded civilians, including children, quickly emerged on social media in the aftermath of the attack.
While the Palestinian Ministry of Health in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip blamed the explosion on an Israeli airstrike, the Israeli military later said the blast was caused by an errant rocket misfired by militants from the Gaza-based group Islamic Jihad.
While widespread electrical outages and Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s telecommunications infrastructure have made getting documentation out of the besieged territory difficult, some purported imagery of the hospital attack making its way to the internet appears to be activating the censorship tripwires of Meta, the social media giant that owns Instagram and Facebook.
Since Hamas’s surprise attack against Israel on October 7 and amid the resulting Israeli bombardment of Gaza, groups monitoring regional social media activity say censorship of Palestinian users is at a level not seen since May 2021, when violence flared between Israel and Gaza following Israeli police incursions into Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem.
Two years ago, Meta blamed the abrupt deletion of Instagram posts about Israeli military violence on a technical glitch. On October 15, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone again attributed claims of wartime censorship on a “bug” affecting Instagram. (Meta could not be immediately reached for comment.)
“It’s censorship mayhem like 2021. But it’s more sinister given the internet shutdown in Gaza.”
Since the latest war began, Instagram and Facebook users inside and outside of the Gaza Strip have complained of deleted posts, locked accounts, blocked searches, and other impediments to sharing timely information about the Israeli bombardment and general conditions on the ground. 7amleh, a Palestinian digital rights group that collaborates directly with Meta on speech issues, has documented over hundreds user complaints of censored posts about the war, according to spokesperson Eric Sype, far outpacing deletion levels seen two years ago.
“It’s censorship mayhem like 2021,” Marwa Fatafta, a policy analyst with the digital rights group Access Now, told The Intercept. “But it’s more sinister given the internet shutdown in Gaza.”
In other cases, usershave successfully uploaded graphic imagery from al-Ahli to Instagram, suggesting that takedowns are not due to any formal policy on Meta’s end, but a product of the company’s at times erratic combination of outsourced human moderation and automated image-flagging software.
An Instagram notification shows a story depicting a widely circulated image was removed by the platform on the basis of violating guidelines on nudity or sexual activity. Screenshot: Obtained by The Intercept
Alleged Photo of Gaza Hospital Bombing
One image rapidly circulating social media platforms following the blast depicts what appears to be the flaming exterior of the hospital, where a clothed man is lying beside a pool of blood, his torso bloodied.
According to screenshots shared with The Intercept by Fatafta, Meta platform users who shared this image had their posts removed or were prompted to remove them themselves because the picture violated policies forbidding “nudity or sexual activity.” Mona Shtaya, nonresident fellow at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, confirmed she had also gotten reports of two instances of this same image deleted. (The Intercept could not independently verify that the image was of al-Ahli Hospital.)
One screenshot shows a user notified that Instagram had removed their upload of the photo, noting that the platform forbids “showing someone’s genitals or buttocks” or “implying sexual activity.” The underlying photo does not appear to show anything resembling either category of image.
In another screenshot, a Facebook user who shared the same image was told their post had been uploaded, “but it looks similar to other posts that were removed because they don’t follow our standards on nudity or sexual activity.” The user was prompted to delete the post. The language in the notification suggests the image may have triggered one of the company’s automated, software-based content moderation systems, as opposed to a human review.
Meta has previously distributed internal policy language instructing its moderators to not remove gruesome documentation of Russian airstrikes against Ukrainian civilians, though no such carveout is known to have been provided for Palestinians, whether today or in the past. Last year, a third-party audit commissioned by Meta found that systemic, unwarranted censorship of Palestinian users amounted to a violation of their human rights.
It is part of Massey’s scenic grounds on Auckland’s North Shore, which are shrouded with an air of uncertainty as proposed job cuts hang over this campus.
More than 100 jobs are on the line at Massey, the Tertiary Education Union (TEU) says, including from the schools of natural sciences, and food and advanced technology — programmes that would cease to exist in Auckland.
Only a year ago, a new Innovation Complex opened its doors in Albany, reportedly costing $120 million. The university would not confirm the price.
It was to be called the Innovation and Science Complex, but the science part of the name was quietly dropped, although it remains on some signs in the building.
Professor of behavioural ecology Dianne Brunton . . . Photo: RNZ / Marika Khabazi
Professor Dianne Brunton — a specialist in conservation biology whose job is on the line — showed RNZ what the complex had to offer this week.
Building for the future
“This space — all of these labs, the whole building, really, is a building for the future, a building for the next 20 to 40 years,” she said. “And [for the] students and the staff and the growth we’ll see in the sciences here on the North Shore, where the population is just ballooning.
“It’s not going to stop. It’s just going to keep going.”
Staff and students have until Friday to have their say on Massey’s science proposals as the university deals with an expected shortfall of about $50 million for the year.
“We were in little huts. They were temporary buildings and they were fitted out,” Professor Brunton said of the previous office and lab space.
“They were like Lockwood houses, if you remember that far back. They’re little prefabs, but they worked.
“In fact, some of the best covid work was done on that campus by researchers that were here with us then, and they’ve since gone.”
Professor Brunton said Albany staff were determined to offer solutions to the university, and work with it so they could remain, including on how they pay to use their space.
Floor space rented out
Massey effectively charges rent for floor space to its colleges, and science takes up room.
“There are some solutions to that and one of them is to have biotech companies in. We’ve had a number of biotech companies working in the molecular lab, basically leasing it out,” Professor Brunton said.
“We’ve got lots of ideas about other things, but the instability that we’re seeing at the moment makes that a bit tricky.”
The Innovation Complex is an award-winning building, and a leader in its field.
“It’s not just a science building — make that clear. There’s lots of student space, work space, flexible teaching space, but really state-of-the-art, really efficient labs,” Professor Brunton said.
Among its jewels are a chamber for detecting spider vibrations and a marine wet lab which allows for experiments using live animals thanks to a reticulated salt water system.
In the previous buildings, buckets of salt water sourced from the sea had to suffice.
Massey University’s Innovation Complex opened its doors in Albany in 2022 . . . It houses several disciplines and contains specialised spaces and equipment. Image: RNZ/Marika Khabazi
Specialised spaces
Professor Brunton said she did not know what would happen to specialised spaces or equipment if the Massey proposal went through.
“Some of these pieces of equipment are not the kind a local company could come in and use.”
Staff had to have hope the proposal would not go through, she said.
She also raised concerns about the quality of the financial information made available on which staff and students could make submissions.
Many students are in limbo due to the threat to cut courses from the Albany campus.
Third-year food technology student Cynthia Fan, 21, said those affected were trying to prepare for exams, while worrying about where they would be next year and organising submissions.
Under the proposal, food technology students were among those who might have to continue their studies at Palmerston North, unless Massey decided to stagger the cessation of the courses in Albany.
“The thing that really sucks is I have no idea and we have no idea. The uni has said that they will not speak to students,” Fan said.
Fan would like to see the university focused on helping its students.
“I think in the first week [after the proposal was announced] everyone was hard panicking. I think a lot of people missed lectures because they didn’t have energy.”
‘Financial sustainability is urgent,’ university says In a statement, Professor Ray Geor, pro vice-chancellor for Massey’s College of Sciences, said the university’s financial statements were inspected and approved by Audit NZ.
“During a financial year, it is expected there could be adjustments. Additionally, during the close-inspection focus of the proposal for change processes, we expect there will be refinements of information,” Professor Geor said.
“Organisational finances are never static. However, we are confident that adjustments will be minor and not substantive to the financial drivers for the need for a proposal for change,” he said.
“As we are funded by taxpayers, part of being a financially responsible organisation is exploring revenue streams, as many tertiary education providers are doing within New Zealand.
“Staff can provide avenues for exploration and the College of Sciences will consider all feedback. However, the need to reduce costs and generate income to ensure financial sustainability is urgent for this year and for the near term — 2024-2027.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
The Australian Strategic Capabilities Accelerator will commit an estimated $680 million over the next ten years to the research and development of emerging and disruptive technologies, according to its interim head. Professor Emily Hilder has revealed that 20 per cent of ASCA’s budget, which is currently $3.4 billion over the next decade, will be spent…
A new cross-party forum has been launched in Parliament to drive engagement and understanding on the role of technology and innovation in the future of Australia’s economy. The Parliamentary Friendship Group on Tech and Innovation will be co-chaired by Labor MP Jerome Laxale, Liberal MP Aaron Violi, and Independent MP Allegra Spender. It will provide…
The techlash has finally reached the courts. Amazon’s in court. Google’s in court. Apple’s under EU investigation. The French authorities just kicked down Nvidia’s doors and went through their files looking for evidence of crimes against competition. People are pissed at tech: about moderation, about monopolization, about price gouging, about labor abuses, and — everywhere and always — about privacy.
From experience, I can tell you that Silicon Valley techies are pretty sanguine about commercial surveillance: “Why should I care if Google wants to show me better ads?” But they are much less cool about government spying: “The NSA? Those are the losers who weren’t smart enough to get an interview at Google.”
And likewise from experience, I can tell you that government employees and contractors are pretty cool with state surveillance: “Why would I worry about the NSA spying on me? I already gave the Office of Personnel Management a comprehensive dossier of all possible kompromat in my past when I got my security clearance.” But they are far less cool with commercial surveillance: “Google? Those creeps would sell their mothers for a nickel. To the Chinese.”
What are they both missing? That American surveillance is a public-private partnership: a symbiosis between a concentrated tech sector that has the means, motive, and opportunity to spy on every person in the world and a state that loves surveillance as much as it hates checks and balances.
Big Tech, cops, and surveillance agencies were made for one another.
The Privacy Deficit
America has a privacy law deficit. While U.S. trading rivals like the EU and even China have enacted muscular privacy laws in response to digital commercial surveillance, the U.S. has slept through a quarter-century of increasing corporate spying without any federal legislative action.
It’s really something. America has stronger laws protecting you from video store clerks who gossip about your porn rentals than we do protecting you from digital spies who nonconsensually follow you into an abortion clinic and then sell the data.
In place of democratically accountable privacy laws, we have the imperial fiat of giant tech companies. Apple unilaterally decided that in-app surveillance should be limited to instances in which users explicitly opted in. Unsurprisingly, more than 96 percent of iOS users did not opt into surveillance (presumably the remaining 4 percent were either confused, or Facebook employees, or both).
When Apple finally allowed its users to block Facebook surveillance, they cut off a torrent of valuable data that Facebook had nonconsensually acquired from Apple device owners, without those owners’ permission. But — crucially — it was Apple that decided when consent was and wasn’t needed to spy on it customers. After 96 percent of iOS device owners opted out of Facebook spying, Apple continued to spy on those users, in precisely the same way that Facebook had, without telling them, and when they were caught doing it, they lied about it.
Which raises a question: Why don’t Apple customers simply block Apple’s surveillance? Why don’t they install software that prevents their devices from ratting them out to Apple? Because that would be illegal. Very, very illegal.
One in four web users has installed an ad blocker (which also blocks commercial surveillance). It’s the “biggest boycott in world history.” The reason you can modify your browser to ignore demands from servers to fetch ads — and reveal facts about you in the process — is that the web is an “open platform.” All the major browsers have robust interfaces for aftermarket blockers to plug into, and they’re also all open source, meaning that if a browser vendor restricts those interfaces to make it harder to block ads, other companies can “fork the code” to bypass those restrictions.
By contrast, apps are encrypted, which triggers a quarter-century-old law: the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, whose Section 1201 makes it a felony to provide someone with a tool to bypass an “access control” for a copyrighted work. By encrypting apps and locking the keys away from the device owner, Apple can make it a crime for you to reconfigure your own phone to protect your privacy, with penalties of a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine — for a first offense.
The Rise of Big Tech
An app is best understood as “a webpage wrapped in just enough IP to make it a crime to install an ad blocker” (or anything else the app’s shareholders disapprove of).
DMCA 1201 is only one of a slew of laws that restrict the ability of technology users to modify the tools they own and use to favor their interests over manufacturers’: laws governing cybersecurity, trademarks, patents, contracts, and other legal constructs can be woven together to block the normal activities that the tech giants themselves once pursued.
Yes, there was a time when tech companies waged guerrilla warfare upon one another: reverse-engineering, scraping, and hacking each others’ products so that disgruntled users could switch from one service to another without incurring steep switching costs. For example, Facebook offered departing MySpace users a “bot” that would impersonate them to MySpace, scrape their inboxes, and import the messages to Facebook so users could maintain contact with friends they’d left behind on the older platform.
That all changed as tech consolidated, shrinking the internet to what software developer Tom Eastman calls “five giant websites, filled with screenshots of text from the other four.” This consolidation was not unique to tech. The 40-year drawdown of antitrust has led to mass consolidation across nearly every sector of the global economy, from bottle caps to banking. Tech companies merged, gobbled up hundreds of small startups, and burned billions of investor dollars offering products and services below cost, making it impossible for anyone else to get a foothold.
Tech was the first industry born in the post-antitrust age. The Apple ][+ hit shelves the same year Ronald Reagan hit the campaign trail. When tech hit its first inter-industry squabble, jousting with the much more mature and concentrated entertainment industry during the Napster wars of the early 2000s, it was trounced, losing every court, regulatory, and legislative fight.
By all rights, tech should have won those fights. After all, the tech sector in the go-go early internet years was massive, an order of magnitude larger than the entertainment companies challenging them in the halls of power. But Big Content was well-established, having boiled itself down to seven or so companies (depending on how you count), while tech was still a rabble of hundreds of small and medium-sized companies that couldn’t agree on its legislative priorities. Tech couldn’t even agree on the catering for a meeting where these priorities might be debated. Concentrated sectors find it comparatively easy to come to agreements, including agreements about what to tell Congress and federal judges. And since those concentrated sectors also find it easy to agree on whose turf belongs to whom, they are able to avoid the “wasteful competition” that erodes their profit margins, leaving them with vast war chests with which to pursue their legislative agenda.
As tech consolidated, it began to feel its oats. Narrow interpretations of existing laws were broadened. New, absurd gambits were invented and then accepted by authorities with straight faces.
And, of course, the U.S. never passed a federal privacy law, and the EU struggled to enforce its privacy law.
Slide showing companies participating in the Prism program and the types of data they provide. National Security Agency, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Cops and Spies
Concentrated sectors of large, highly profitable firms inevitably seek to fuse their power with that of the state, securing from government forbearance for their own actions and prohibitions on the activities they disfavor. When it comes to surveillance, the tech sector has powerful allies in government: cops and spies.
It goes without saying that cops and spies love commercial surveillance. The very first Snowden revelation concerned a public-private surveillance partnership called Prism, in which the NSA plundered large internet companies’ data with their knowledge and cooperation. The subsequent revelation about the “Upstream” program revealed that the NSA was also plundering tech giants’ data without their knowledge, and using Prism as a “plausible deniability” fig leaf so that the tech firms didn’t get suspicious when the NSA acted on its stolen intelligence.
No government agency could ever hope to match the efficiency and scale of commercial surveillance. The NSA couldn’t order us to carry pocket location beacons at all times — hell, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention couldn’t even get us to run an exposure notification app in the early days of the Covid pandemic. No government agency could order us to put all our conversations in writing to be captured, stored, and mined. And not even the U.S. government could afford to run the data centers and software development to store and make sense of it all.
Meanwhile, the private sector relies on cops and spies to go to bat for them, lobbying against new privacy laws and for lax enforcement of existing ones. Think of Amazon’s Ring cameras, which have blanketed entire neighborhoods in CCTV surveillance, which Ring shares with law enforcement agencies, sometimes without the consent or knowledge of the cameras’ owners. Ring marketing recruits cops as street teams, showering them with freebies to distribute to local homeowners.
Google, for its part, has managed to play both sides of the culture war with its location surveillance, thanks to the “reverse warrants” that cops have used to identify all the participants at both Black Lives Matter protests and the January 6 coup.
Distinguishing between state and private surveillance is a fool’s errand. Cops and spies need the surveillance industry, and the surveillance industry needs cops and spies. Since the days of the East India Company, monopolists have understood the importance of recruiting powerful state actors to go to bat for commercial interests.
AT&T — the central node in the Snowden revelations — has been playing this game for a century, foiling regulators attempts to break up its monopoly for 69 years before the Department of Justice finally eked out a win in 1982 (whereupon antitrust was promptly neutered, allowing the “Baby Bells” to merge into new monopolies like Verizon).
In the 1950s, AT&T came within a whisker of being broken up, but the Pentagon stepped up to defend Ma Bell, telling the Justice Department that America would lose the Korean War if they didn’t have an intact AT&T to supply and operate their high-tech backend. America lost the Korean War, but AT&T won: It got a 30-year reprieve.
Stumping for his eponymous antitrust law in 1890, Sen. John Sherman thundered, “If we will not endure a King as a political power we should not endure a King over the production, transportation, and sale of the necessaries of life. If we would not submit to an emperor we should not submit to an autocrat of trade.”
Today, as our snoopy tech firms hide in the skirts of our spies and law enforcement agencies, we have to get beyond the idea that this is surveillance capitalism. Truly, it’s more akin to surveillance mercantilism: a fusion of state and commercial power.
Amid a heavy retaliatory air and artillery assault by Israel against the Gaza Strip on October 10, Israel Defense Forces spokesperson Avichay Adraee posted a message on Facebook to residents of the al-Daraj neighborhood, urging them to leave their homes in advance of impending airstrikes.
It’s not clear how most people in al-Daraj were supposed to see the warning: Intense fighting and electrical shortages have strangled Palestinian access to the internet, putting besieged civilians at even greater risk.
Following Hamas’s grisly surprise attack across the Gaza border on October 7, the Israeli counterattack — a widespread and indiscriminate bombardment of the besieged Gaza Strip — left the two million Palestinians who call the area home struggling to connect to the internet at a time when access to current information is crucial and potentially lifesaving.
“Shutting down the internet in armed conflict is putting civilians at risk.”
“Shutting down the internet in armed conflict is putting civilians at risk,” Deborah Brown, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch, told The Intercept. “It could help contribute to injury or death because people communicate around what are safe places and conditions.”
According to companies and research organizations that monitor the global flow of internet traffic, Gazan access to the internet has dramatically dropped since Israeli strikes began, with data service cut entirely for some customers.
“My sense is that very few people in Gaza have internet service,” Doug Madory of the internet monitoring firm Kentik told The Intercept. Madory said he spoke to a contact working with an internet service provider, or ISP, in Gaza who told him that internet access has been reduced by 80 to 90 percent because of a lack of fuel and power, and airstrikes.
As causes of the outages, Marwa Fatafta, a policy analyst with the digital rights group Access Now, cited Israeli strikes against office buildings housing Gazan telecommunications firms, such as the now-demolished Al-Watan Tower, as a major factor, in addition to damage to the electrical grid.
Fatafta told The Intercept, “There is a near complete information blackout from Gaza.”
Most Gaza ISPs Are Gone
With communications infrastructure left in rubble, Gazans now increasingly find themselves in a digital void at a time when data access is most crucial.
“People in Gaza need access to the internet and telecommunications to check on their family and loved ones, seek life-saving information amidst the ongoing Israeli barrage on the strip; it’s crucial to document the war crimes and human rights abuses committed by Israeli forces at a time when disinformation is going haywire on social media,” Fatafta said.
“There is some slight connectivity,” Alp Toker of the internet outage monitoring firm NetBlocks told The Intercept, but “most of the ISPs based inside of Gaza are gone.”
Though it’s difficult to be certain whether these outages are due to electrical shortages, Israeli ordnance, or both, Toker said that, based on reports he has received from Gazan internet providers, the root cause is the Israeli destruction of fiber optic cables connecting Gaza. The ISPs are generally aware of where their infrastructure is damaged or destroyed, Toker said, but ongoing Israeli airstrikes will make sending a crew to patch them too dangerous to attempt. Still, one popular Gazan internet provider, Fusion, wrote in a Facebook post to its customers that efforts to repair damaged infrastructure were ongoing.
That Gazan internet access remains in place at all, Toker said, is probably due to the use of backup generators that could soon run out of fuel in the face of an intensified Israeli military blockade. (Toker also said that, while it’s unclear if it was due to damage from Hamas rockets or a manual blackout, NetBlocks detected an internet service disruption inside Israel at the start of the attack, but that it quickly subsided.)
Amanda Meng, a research scientist at Georgia Tech who works on the university’s Internet Outage Detection and Analysis project, or IODA, estimated Gazan internet connectivity has dropped by around 55 percent in the recent days, meaning over half the networks inside Gaza have gone dark and no longer respond to the outside internet. Meng compared this level of access disruption to what’s been previously observed in Ukraine and Sudan during recent warfare in those countries. In Gaza, Border Gateway Protocol activity, an obscure system that routes data from one computer to another and undergirds the entire internet, has also seen disruptions.
“On the ground, this looks like people not being able to use networked communication devices that rely on the Internet,” Meng explained.
Organizations like NetBlocks and IODA all used varying techniques to measure internet traffic, and their results tend to vary. It’s also nearly impossible to tell from the other side of the world whether a sudden dip in service is due to an explosion or something else. In addition to methodological differences and the fog of war, however, is an added wrinkle: Like almost everything else in Gaza, ISPs connect to the broader internet through Israeli infrastructure.
“By law, Gaza internet connectivity must go through Israeli infrastructure to connect to the outside world, so there is a possibility that the Israelis could leave it up because they are able to intercept communications,” said Madory of Kentik.
Fatafta, the policy analyst, also cited Israel’s power to keep Gaza offline — but both in this war and in general. “Israel’s full control of Palestinian telecommunications infrastructure and long-standing ban on technology upgrades” is an immense impediment, she said. With the wider internet blockaded, she said, “people in Gaza can only access slow and unreliable 2G services” — a cellular standard from 1991.
While Israel is reportedly also using analog means to warn Palestinians, their effectiveness is not always clear: “Palestinian residents of the city of Beit Lahiya in the northern region of the Gaza Strip said Thursday that Israeli planes dropped flyers warning them to evacuate their homes,” according to the Associated Press. “The area had already been heavily struck by the time the flyers were dropped.”
As Israel escalates its bombardment of the Gaza Strip in retaliation for a surprise attack from Hamas, TikTok and Instagram have come after a news site dedicated to providing coverage on Palestine and Israel.
On Tuesday, a Mondoweiss West Bank correspondent’s Instagram account was suspended, while the news outlet’s TikTok account was temporarily taken down on Monday. Other Instagram users have reported restrictions on their accounts after posting about Palestine, including an inability to livestream or to comment on other’s posts. And on Instagram and Facebook (both owned by the same company, Meta), hashtags relating to Hamas and “Al-Aqsa Flood,” the group’s name for its attack on Israel, are being hidden from search. The death toll from the attack continues to rise, with Israeli officials reporting 1,200 deaths as of Wednesday afternoon.
The platforms’ targeting of accounts reporting on Palestine comes as information from people in Gaza is harder to come by amid Israel’s total siege on its 2 million residents and as Israel keeps foreign media out of the coastal enclave. Israel’s indiscriminate bombing campaign has killed more than 1,100 people and injured thousands more, Gaza’s Health Ministry said Wednesday.
My phone and laptop have died. No electricity as we’re running out of fuel for the power generator, after Israel cut electricity and fuel supplies to Gaza.
I will be off until we find alternatives,
This is what Israel wanted, to commit genocide against a silenced people
Periods of Israeli–Palestinian violence have regularly resulted in the corporate suppression of Palestinian social media users. In 2021, for instance, Instagram temporarily censored posts that mentioned Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque, one of Islam’s most revered sites. Social media policy observers have criticized Meta’s censorship policies on the grounds that they unduly affect Palestinian users while granting leeway to civilian populations in other conflict zones.
“The censorship of Palestinian voices, those who support Palestine, and alternative news media who report on the crimes of Israel’s occupation, by social media networks and giants like Meta and TikTok is well documented,” said Yumna Patel, Palestine news director of Mondoweiss, noting that it includes account bans, content removal, and even limiting the reach of posts. “We often see these violations become more frequent during times like this, where there is an uptick in violence and international attention on Palestine. We saw it with the censorship of Palestinian accounts on Instagram during the Sheikh Jarrah protests in 2021, the Israeli army’s deadly raids on Jenin in the West Bank in 2023, and now once again as Israel declares war on Gaza.”
Instagram and TikTok did not respond to requests for comment.
Mondoweiss correspondent Leila Warah, who is based in the West Bank, reported on Tuesday that Instagram suspended her account and gave her 180 days to appeal, with the possibility of permanent suspension. After Mondoweiss publicized the suspension, her account was quickly reinstated. Later in the day, however, Mondoweiss reported that Warah’s account was suspended once again, only to be reinstated on Wednesday.
The news outlet tweeted that the first suspension came “after several Israeli soldiers shared Leila’s account on Facebook pages, asking others to submit fraudulent reports of guideline violations.”
A day earlier, the outlet tweeted that its TikTok account was “permanently banned” amid its “ongoing coverage of the events in Palestine.” Since the outbreak of war on Saturday, the outlet had posted a viral video about Hamas’s attack on Israel and another about Hamas’s abduction of Israeli civilians. Again, within a couple of hours, and after Mondoweiss publicized the ban, the outlet’s account was back up.
“We have consistently reviewed all communication from TikTok regarding the content we publish there and made adjustments if necessary,” the outlet wrote. The magazine’s staff did not believe they violated any TikTok guidelines in their coverage in recent days. “This can only be seen as censorship of news coverage that is critical of the prevailing narratives around the events unfolding in Palestine.”
Even though the account has been reinstated, Mondoweiss’s first viral TikTok about the eruption of violence cannot be viewed in the West Bank and some parts of Europe, according to the outlet. Other West Bank residents independently confirmed to The Intercept that they could not access the video, in which Warah describes Hamas’s attack and Israel’s bombing of Gaza as a result, connecting the assault to Israel’s ongoing 16-year siege of Gaza.TikTok did not respond to The Intercept’s questions about access to the video.
On Instagram, meanwhile, Palestinian creator Adnan Barq reported that the platform blocked him from livestreaming, removed his content, and even prevented his account from being shown to users who don’t follow him. Also on Instagram, hashtags including #alqsaflood and #hamas are being suppressed; Facebook is suppressing Arabic-language hashtags of the operation’s name too. On paper, Meta’s rules prohibit glorifying Hamas’s violence, but they do not bar users from discussing the group in the context of the news, though the distinction is often collapsed in the real world.
Last year, following a spate of Israeli airstrikes against the Gaza Strip, Palestinian users who photographed the destruction on Instagram complained that their posts were being removed for violating Meta’s “community standards,” while Ukrainian users had received a special carve-out to post similar imagery on the grounds it was “newsworthy.”
A September 2022 external audit commissioned by Meta found the company’s rulebook “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.” Similarly, Meta’s Dangerous Organizations and Individuals policy, which maintains a secret blacklist of banned organizations and people, is disproportionately made up of Muslim, Middle Eastern, and South Asian entities, a factor that contributed to over-enforcement against Palestinians.
Big Tech’s content moderation during conflict is increasingly significant as unverified information runs rampant on X, Elon Musk’s information free-for-all diluted version of Twitter, once a crucial source during breaking news events. Musk himself has led his 160 million followers astray, encouraging users on Sunday to follow @WarMonitors and @sentdefender to learn about the war “in real-time.” The former account had posted things like “mind your own business, jew,” while the latter mocked Palestinian civilians trapped from Israel’s siege, writing, “Better find a Boat or get to Swimming lol.” And both have previously circulated fake news, such as false reports of an explosion at the Pentagon in May.
Musk later deleted his post endorsing the accounts.
For now, Musk’s innovative Community Notes fact-checking operation is leaving lies unchallenged for days during a time when decisions and snap judgments are made by the minute. And that says nothing of inflammatory content on X and elsewhere. “In the past few days we have seen open calls for genocide and mass violence against [Palestinians] and Arabs made by official Israeli social media accounts, and parroted by Zionist accounts and pro-Israel bots on platforms like X with absolutely no consequence,” Mondoweiss’s Patel said. “Meanwhile Palestinian journalists & news outlets have had their accounts outright suspended on Instagram and Tiktok simply for reporting the news.”
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Mr. Big had a problem. He needed to move what he called “fraud funds” back to China, but a crackdown was making that difficult. So in August, Mr. Big, who, needless to say, did not list his real name, posted an ad on a Telegram channel. He sought a “group of smuggling teams” to, as he put it, “complete the final conversion” of the stolen money by smuggling gold and precious stones from Myanmar into southern China, in exchange for a 10% cut.
It’s unclear whether Mr. Big ultimately succeeded; his ad has since been deleted, and ProPublica was unable to reach him. But the online forum where he posted his ad says a lot about why Americans and people around the world have found themselves targeted by an unprecedented wave of fraud originating out of Southeast Asia, whose vast scale is now becoming apparent. In a single recent criminal investigation, Singapore police seized more than $2 billion in money laundered from a syndicate with alleged ties to organized crime, including “scams and online gambling.”
The Telegram channel that featured Mr. Big’s plea for assistance was a Chinese-language forum offering access to “white capital” — money that has been laundered — “guaranteed” by a casino operator in Myanmar, Fully Light Group, that purports to ensure that deals struck on the forum go through. Fully Light also operates its own Telegram channels that advertise similar services. One such channel, with 117,000 participants, featured offers to swap cryptocurrency for “pure white” Chinese renminbi or “white capital” Singaporean dollars. (Telegram took down that channel after ProPublica inquired about it. Fully Light did not respond to requests for comment.)
The presence of a casino in facilitating such deals is no coincidence. A growing number of gambling operations across Southeast Asia have become key pillars in a vast underground banking system serving organized criminal groups, according to new research by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. The research has not been published, but the agency shared its findings with ProPublica.
There are now over 340 physical casinos across Southeast Asia (as well as countless online ones), and many of them show accelerating levels of infiltration by organized crime, according to the UNODC. The casinos function as “a shadow banking system that allows people to move money quickly, seamlessly, jurisdiction-to-jurisdiction, with almost no restriction,” Jeremy Douglas, UNODC’s top official in Southeast Asia, told ProPublica in September. That has made money laundering “easier than ever before,” he said, and it’s been “fundamental to the expansion of the transnational criminal economy” in the region — especially cybercrime.
As ProPublica reported in detail last year, Southeast Asia has become a major hub for cryptocurrency investment scams that often start as innocent-sounding “wrong number”-type text messages. The messages frequently originate from seedy casino towns in Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar, where criminal syndicates lure workers with the promise of lucrative jobs, only to force them to work as online scammers. UNODC’s map of known or suspected scam compounds shows a clear overlap with gambling hubs in Laos, Myanmar and Cambodia, where allegations of forced online scam labor have become so widespread that they recently prompted Interpol to issue a global warning about the problem, which the international police agency said was occurring on “an industrial scale.”
Gambling has long attracted organized crime, but never more than in Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos and the Philippines, where loose regulations and endemic corruption allow casinos to operate with little oversight or responsibility to report suspicious transactions. Before the COVID-19 pandemic began, officials in those countries wooed Chinese casino operators in an effort to attract foreign direct investment. Criminal bosses, facing a crackdown in China and sanctions imposed by the U.S., began investing in casinos and cutting deals to run their own special economic zones in Myanmar and elsewhere where they could operate unfettered.
When the pandemic struck in 2020, travel restrictions emptied newly built casinos, hotels and offices of workers and visitors across the region. Criminal syndicates repurposed the facilities to house online fraud operations and turned to human smugglers to staff them up. (For example, when Philippine authorities raided several online gambling operators between May and August, they discovered more than 4,400 laborers, most of them human trafficking victims forced to perpetrate online fraud.)
Online casinos can be easily used for money laundering: They often accept cryptocurrency deposits that can be converted to virtual chips and placed in bets or cashed out in currency, making them seem like proceeds of legitimate gambling. That method of money laundering is becoming increasingly common in Southeast Asia.
Physical casinos have their own attractions for money laundering. They have become a draw for a parallel industry of junket operators, who organize gambling trips for high-rollers. Those junkets also attract organized criminal groups that need to move money across borders and do so using junkets’ gambling accounts, according to recent prosecutions by Chinese authorities. Last year, 36 individuals connected to Suncity Group, once one of the biggest junket operators in the world, were convicted in China of facilitating about $160 million in illegal cross-border payments and transactions. The company’s ex-CEO, Alvin Chau, is in jail for running a criminal syndicate and other charges.
In northeast Myanmar, Fully Light Group has emerged as a “multi-billion-dollar business conglomerate and a key player” in casinos and illegal online gambling, according to research by Jason Tower, Myanmar country director for the United States Institute of Peace. “These are not normal casinos in any way,” Tower said, because they’re located in what he calls “criminal enclaves” that are more under the control of organized crime than any government authority. For instance, Tower found hundreds of criminal convictions by Chinese courts related to illegal casinos, fraud, kidnapping, drugs and weapons charges in the Kokang Special Administrative Zone, near Myanmar’s border with China, where Fully Light is based. In its review, UNODC found Kokang casinos — both those owned by Fully Light and by others — also played a major role in money laundering. They operate Telegram channels that openly advertise money laundering services, including some that link back to official Fully Light channels and offer the company’s guarantee to cross-border exchanges of cryptocurrencies. Some Fully Light-affiliated Telegram channels include solicitations to participate in what are known as money mule “motorcades” that move funds through multiple cryptocurrency wallets or bank accounts.
Billions of dollars more are likely flowing into the region, thanks to online scams that show no signs of abating. Nick Smart of the cryptocurrency analytics firm Crystal Blockchain has been tracing the flows of crypto funds deposited into online platforms that are set up to look like investing sites in order to fleece victims. Following the money trail from just one such website, which he suspects to be linked to criminal organizations in Myanmar, led him to a wallet that also pooled funds from 14 other known crypto scams. The wallet received about $44 million in various cryptocurrencies between December and July, when it ceased activity. With thousands of such websites popping up every day, victims’ losses are easily “in the billions,” said Smart, the director of blockchain intelligence at Crystal.
The global cybercrime spree has prompted countries across the region to take a bolder tack. In June, Thailand cut off electricity to two cyberfraud hot spots across its border with Myanmar (with disappointing results). More recently, Thai officials shut down six illegal cellular towers suspected of providing internet service to scam compounds in Myanmar. Chinese authorities have also arrested thousands of their own citizens in dramatic operations that included a humiliating perp walk of hundreds of suspected cybercriminals across a border crossing from Myanmar to China’s southern Yunnan Province on Sept. 6.
On Sept. 26, UNODC unveiled an agreement with China and the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations to jointly combat organized crime and human trafficking linked with casinos and scams. An action plan accompanying the agreement calls on the countries to “make anti-money laundering and wider anti-corruption efforts a higher priority.”
But the challenge is steep. Even as multiple countries crack down, Laos, one of the poorest nations in the region, is getting ready to allow online gambling operators to set up shop within its borders and target foreigners.
And governments need to broaden their focus. Anti-money-laundering regulations often zero in on bank cash transfers of $10,000 or more. The UNODC’s Douglas said governments will need to turn their attention to casinos and other nontraditional financial players. “Everyone’s been focusing on transactions of $10,000 going through banks and flagging suspicious transactions,” Douglas said, “and these guys are moving millions around the corner through the casino, laughing at the system.”
Bananas, clementines, and string cheese decorated the table, alongside coloring pages and markers. As half a dozen kids took to the snacks and the nearby playpen, parents stuck name tags on their shirts then quickly fell into deep discussions of what they could do about the unsettling global catastrophe that poses a risk to their children’s well-being and kids everywhere: climate change.
It was the first “Climate Papa” playdate, held at the end of September under the high wooden ceiling of Stoup Brewing, uphill from downtown Seattle. The invitation suggested that the conversation, part of Pacific Northwest Climate Week, might cover “heat pumps and parenthood,” “home electrification and nap schedules,” and “batteries and bottles.” It inspired the attendance of about a dozen adults, divided roughly equally between moms and dads. Anyone was welcome to come to the meetup, provided they weren’t turned off by the labels in the invitation — climate grandpa, climate aunt, climate human.
Also present was the Climate Papa himself, otherwise known as Ben Eidelson. He currently advises climate tech startups and is raising money for Stepchange, a venture fund that invests in software products aimed at tackling climate change. His own startups have been acquired by Stripe and Google, and he spent years working as a product manager for both companies. Eidelson had claimed the domain climatepapa.com in May sort of as a joke, inspired by a group of concerned parents called Climate Dads. But his two children, 2 and 5 years old, don’t call him Dad. They call him Papa, a remnant of his wife Anna’s Russian heritage.
Soon enough, what had started in jest revealed itself to be a mission. Eidelson realized that his son and daughter were his real motivation for doing something about global warming. Climate Papa became a home for his newsletter and podcast, venturing from nerdy (methane removal and financial technology) to cutesy (interviewing a 7-year-old about climate change). It had sparked enough interest to merit an in-person playdate.
Eidelson makes the case that parenthood is often missing from how people in the tech world talk about climate change. “These things are not separate,” he told me across the table. “The more we separate them, the more we’re dismissing the inherent motivation people have.”
He pointed to groups such as Mothers Against Drunk Driving, founded in 1980 by Candy Lightner, whose daughter had been killed by a drunk driver. Since then, the group has helped cut the number of drunk driving deaths in half — saving an estimated 400,000 lives — by raising awareness that such “accidents” were avoidable and working to pass roughly 1,000 local and national laws related to driving under the influence, playing a role in getting Congress to raise the national drinking age to 21 in 1981.
Moms have long been seen as a force in the climate movement — not necessarily a surprise, since women still tend to be the primary caregivers in the family, and are more likely to embrace environmental causes than men. While dads have been on board behind-the-scenes for a while, they’ve started getting more attention this year. The advocacy group Climate Dads, founded in 2018 by Ben Block and Jason Sandman in Philadelphia, got a wave of attention after a feature in Bloomberg in August. At least 800 dads around the country have joined. (The signup page says: “Interested in getting involved in our dadvocacy for the planet?”) Earlier this year, a poll from Heatmap News found that fathers were particularly amenable to taking public transportation or trying to eat less beef compared to the rest of the population, though the sample size was admittedly small, at around 1,000 people.
It’s widely known that young people are distressed about climate change — an international poll in 2021 found that 45 percent of teens and young adults say anxiety about the warming planet affects their daily lives and ability to function. Of course such concerns touch their parents too, sometimes prompting a twinge of guilt or fear for what the future holds for their children. They might imagine the prospect of their kids confronting them one day, asking them what they did to quell the climate crisis.
The conversation at Stoup Brewing leaned into the kinds of topics you’d expect from climate dads — heat pumps, e-bikes, artificial intelligence. Some at the meetup had recently been laid off from tech companies and were pondering a career path that included climate action.
Clementines, markers, and a used name tag sit on the table at Seattle’s first Climate Papa meetup, September 27, 2023. Grist / Kate Yoder
Patrick Gold, the director of engineering at the nonprofit Climate Neutral, remarked how rare it was to find a work-related event he could take his daughter to, as his 13-month-old attempted to climb out of his arms and onto the wooden table, perhaps in search of something interesting, like a snack. Everyone here had two things in common, Gold remarked: climate change and babies. For him, that made it worth the drive from Federal Way, half an hour south of Seattle.
Mike Cozart, a father of two from Bainbridge Island, hadn’t thought of himself as a “climate dad” until a few months ago, when he decided to do something about climate change and found Climate Papa online. He thought the idea of the meetup made intuitive sense: Millennials, who have long been lumped into the “younger people who care about climate change” category, are older now, in their 30s and 40s, many with children.
After recently looking around for a new job, Cozart wasn’t finding roles that excited him. Thinking of his kids, he wanted to find something with a mission and a positive impact, but was having trouble figuring out the details of how to make that transition. “I think there are a number of folks that don’t think there’s a role for them,” he said. Climate change felt like a challenge for scientists or mechanical engineers, the producers of climate models and wind turbines, not for someone in software like him.
Part of Cozart’s inspiration was finding a guide to software in climate tech, co-written by Eidelson, which makes the case that software engineers are uniquely positioned to address climate change, even though most of them don’t realize it. The idea is that software touches everything, from transportation to groceries, and that innovations in design tools, accounting tools, and data can contribute to decarbonization.
“[E]very solar engineer needs a tool for designing custom solar systems,” they wrote. “What else is like this? EV charging infrastructure, utility grid design, commercial HVAC systems, battery storage systems, farm management, and so much more!” The guide has been viewed by more than 11,000 people since its publication in June, according to Eidelson.
Eidelson said that he would consider holding another Climate Papa playdate in Seattle — perhaps it could be a quarterly gathering, he suggested — and pondered the idea of trying to get similar meetups started in Portland or the Bay Area, run by his connections in those places.
Looking back at the event, Eidelson marveled at the fact that he got to talk about working on climate change with people at the same time as meeting their 2-year-old and watching their kids play together. “To me, it’s kind of a dream come true, to have people showing up as their full selves,” he said. “Like, you’re distracted by your kids, they need help peeling an orange, but we’re all in that mode all the time.”
New Zealand First leader Winston Peters has been spreading misleading climate information at public meetings during the Aotearoa general election campaign.
Climate change has been topical during the campaign, with extreme weather events like the Hawke’s Bay floods still fresh in people’s minds.
Both major parties have made clear commitments to New Zealand’s climate targets, while Peters has been questioning the science and sharing incorrect climate information at public meetings.
At a gathering in Remuera last month Peters told voters, “Carbon dioxide is 0.04 percent of the Earth’s atmosphere and of that 0.04 percent, human effect is 3 percent.”
Three climate analysts, including NIWA’s principal climate scientist Dr Sam Dean, have told RNZ this figure is incorrect.
“It is not 3 percent. Humans are responsible for 33 percent of the carbon dioxide that is in the atmosphere now,” Dr Dean said.
Peters also told voters New Zealand was a low-emitting country and tried to link tsunamis to climate change.
“We are 0.17 percent of the emissions in this world and China and India and the United States and Russia are not listening . . . The biggest tsunami the world ever had was 1968 in recent times.
“We’ve only been keeping stats for the last 100 years, but you’ve got all these people out there saying these are unique circumstances and they haven’t got the scientific evidence to prove that.”
Winston Peters is also trying to link tsunamis to climate change . . . “We’ve only been keeping stats for the last 100 years.” Image: RNZ/Samuel Rillstone
Dr Dean said New Zealand might have low net emissions compared to other countries but there was no doubt Aotearoa was a “dirty polluter” — and tsunamis had nothing to do with climate change.
“Proportionately on a per person basis, our emissions are very high and we produce more than our fair share of the pollution that is currently in the planet,” he said.
“As far as we know, tsunamis have nothing to do with climate change whatsoever.”
RNZ put some of Peters’ claims to him, asking him where he got the 3 percent figure he cited about the human impact on CO2.
“Oh, we’ve got somebody now that’s arguing about the basic science . . . I get it from experts internationally and if you want me to do all your homework, put me on a payroll,” Peters replied.
Dr Dean who is an international expert is not the only scientist to debunk Peters’ climate claims.
University of Waikato environmental science senior lecturer Dr Luke Harrington . . . “Events of such intensity will become more common and events of such rarity will become more intense as the world continues to warm.” Image: University of Waikato/RNZ News
Waikato University’s Dr Luke Harrington and Canterbury University’s Dr David Frame have both looked at Peters’ comments.
They describe his questions about the link between climate change and extreme weather events as “too cavalier” and “disingenuous”.
“Climate change doesn’t cause extreme flooding events in a vacuum — a whole range of natural ingredients need to come together in just the right way for an individual event to occur,” Dr Harrington said.
“What climate change does is intensify the wind and rain which results when these natural factors combine and an ex-tropical cyclone passes nearby. Events of such intensity will become more common and events of such rarity will become more intense as the world continues to warm.”
Dr Harrington suggested Peters “peruse” the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report if he needed any evidence.
Dr Frame also referred to this report, saying there are strong links between (cumulative) anthropogenic emissions of CO2 and extreme rainfall events.
Dr Dean said inaccuracies aside, Peters’ figures ignore methane emissions, making the problem seem much smaller than it really is.
“That sort of story comes from the climate sceptic community and it’s a common tactic to phrase things in terms of very small numbers and then mix them up to trivialise the subject.”
Other political parties may have vastly different approaches to emissions reduction but they all accept the climate science.
National Party leader Chris Luxon — who may well have to work with Peters — had been clear there was no room for climate scepticism in this election.
“Give it up, I mean we’re in 2023. There’s no doubt about it. You can’t be climate denier or a climate minimalist,” Luxon said.
This may be a big ask if Winston Peters is not on board with the science.
Early voting began yesterday in the general election and polling day is on October 14.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Kia ora koutou. Ko Ngāpuhi tōku iwi. Ko Ngāti Manu toku hapu. Ko Karetu tōku marae. Ko Myles Thomas toku ingoa.
I grew up with David Beatson, on the telly. Back in the 1970s, he read the late news which I watched in bed with my parents. Later, David and I worked together to save TVNZ 7 and also regional TV stations.
The Better Public Media (BPM) trust honours David each year with our memorial address, because his fight for non-commercial TV was an honourable one. He wasn’t doing it for himself.
He wasn’t doing it so he could get a job or because it would benefit him. He fought for public media because he knew it was good for Aotearoa NZ.
Like us at Better Public Media, he recognised the benefits to our country from locally produced public media.
David knew, from a long career in media, including as editor of The Listener and as Jim Bolger’s press secretary, that NZ’s media plays an important role in our nation’s culture, social cohesion, and democracy.
NZ culture is very important. NZ culture is so unique and special, yet it has always been at risk of being swamped by content from overseas. The US especially with its crackpot conspiracies, extreme racial tensions, and extreme tensions about everything to be honest.
Local content the antidote
Local content is the antidote to this. It reflects us, it portrays us, it defines New Zealand, and whether we like it or not, it defines us. But it’s important to remember that what we see reflected back to us comes through a filter.
This speech is coming to you through a filter, called Myles Thomas.
Better Public Media trustee Myles Thomas speaking beside the panel moderator and BPM chair Dr Peter Thompson (seated from left); Jenny Marcroft, NZ First candidate for Kaipara ki Mahurangi; Ricardo Menéndez March, Green Party candidate for Mt Albert; and Willie Jackson, Labour Party list candidate and Minister for Broadcasting and Media. Image: David Robie/APR
Commercial news reflects our world through a filter of sensation and danger to hold our attention. That makes NZ seem more shallow, greedy, fearful and dangerous.
The social media filter makes the world seem more angry, reactive and complaining.
RNZ’s filter is, I don’t know, thoughtful, a bit smug, middle class.
The New Zealand Herald filter makes us think every dairy is being ram-raided every night.
And The Spinoff filter suggests NZ is hip, urban and mildly infatuated with Winston Peters.
These cultural reflections are very important actually because they influence us, how we see NZ and its people.
It is not a commodity
That makes content, cultural content, special. It is not a commodity. It’s not milk powder.
We don’t drink milk and think about flooding in Queenstown, drinking milk doesn’t make us laugh about the Koiwoi accent, we don’t drink milk and identify with a young family living in poverty.
Local content is rich and powerful, and important to our society.
When the government supports the local media production industry it is actually supporting the audiences and our culture. Whether it is Te Mangai Paho, or NZ On Air or the NZ Film Commission, and the screen production rebate, these organisations fund New Zealand’s identity and culture, and success.
Don’t ask Treasury how to fund culture. Accountants don’t understand it, they can’t count it and put it in a spreadsheet, like they can milk solids. Of course they’ll say such subsidies or rebates distort the “market”, that’s the whole point. The market doesn’t work for culture.
Moreover, public funding of films and other content fosters a more stable long-term industry, rather than trashy short-termism that is completely vulnerable to outside pressures, like the US writer’s strike.
We have a celebrated content production industry. Our films, video, audio, games etc. More local content brings stability to this industry, which by the way also brings money into the country and fosters tourism.
BPM trust chair Dr Peter Thompson, senior lecturer in media studies at Victoria University, welcomes the panel and audience for the 2023 media policy debate at Grey Lynn Library Hall in Auckland last night. Image: Del Abcede/Asia Pacific Report
We cannot use quota
New Zealand needs more local content.
And what’s more, it needs to be accessible to audiences, on the platforms that they use.
But in NZ we do have one problem. Unlike Australia, we can’t use a quota because our GATT agreement does not include a carve out for local music or media quotas.
In the 1990s when GATT was being negotiated, the Aussies added an exception to their GATT agreement allowing a quota for Aussie cultural content. So they can require radio stations to play a certain amount of local music. Now they’re able to introduce a Netflix quota for up to 20 percent of all revenue generated in Aussie.
We can’t do that. Why? Because back in the 1990s the Bolger government and MFAT decided against putting the same exception into NZ’s GATT agreement.
But there is another way of doing it, if we take a lead from Denmark and many European states. Which I’ll get to in a minute.
The second important benefit of locally produced public media is social cohesion, how society works, the peace and harmony and respect that we show each other in public, depends heavily on the “public sphere”, of which, media is a big part.
Power of media to polarise
Extensive research in Europe and North America shows the power of media to polarise society, which can lead to misunderstanding, mistrust and hatred.
But media can also strengthen social cohesion, particularly for minority communities, and that same research showed that public media, otherwise known as public service media, is widely regarded to be an important contributor to tolerance in society, promoting social cohesion and integrating all communities and generations.
The third benefit is democracy. Very topical at the moment. I’ve already touched on how newsmedia affect our culture. More directly, our newsmedia influences the public dialogue over issues of the day.
It defines that dialogue. It is that dialogue.
So if our newsmedia is shallow and vacuous ignoring policies and focussing on the polls and the horse-race, then politicians who want to be elected, tailor their messages accordingly.
There’s plenty of examples of this such as National’s bootcamp policy, or Labour’s removing GST on food. As policies, neither is effective. But in the simplified 30 seconds of commercial news and headlines, these policies resonate.
Is that a good thing, that policies that are known to fail are nonetheless followed because our newsmedia cater to our base instincts and short attention spans?
Disaster for democracy
In my view, commercial media is actually disaster for democracy. All over the world.
But of course, we can’t control commercial media. No-one’s suggesting that.
The only rational reaction is to provide stronger locally produced public media.
And unfortunately, NZ lacks public media.
Obviously Australia, the UK, Canada have more public media than us, they have more people, they can afford it. But what about countries our size, Ireland? Smaller population, much more public media.
Denmark, Norway, Finland, all with roughly 5 million people, and all have significantly better public media than us. Even after the recent increases from Willie Jackson, NZ still spends just $44 per person on public media. $44 each year.
When we had a licence fee it was $110. Jim Bolger’s government got rid of that and replaced it with funding from general taxation — which means every year the Minister of Finance, working closely with Treasury, decides how much to spend on public media for that year.
This is what I call the curse of annual funding, because it makes funding public media a very political decision.
National, let us be honest, the National Party hates public media, maybe because they get nicer treatment on commercial news. We see this around the world — the Daily Mail, Sky News Australia, Newstalk ZB . . . most commercial media quite openly favours the right.
Systemic bias
This is a systemic bias. Because right-wing newsmedia gets more clicks.
Right-wing politicians are quite happy about that. Why fund public to get in the way? Even if it it benefits our culture, social cohesion, and democracy.
New Zealand is the same, the last National government froze RNZ funding for nine years.
National Party spokesperson on broadcasting Melissa Lee fought against the ANZPM merger, and now she’s fighting the News Bargaining Bill. As minister she could cut RNZ and NZ On Air’s budget.
But it wouldn’t just be cost-cutting. It would actually be political interference in our newsmedia, an attempt to skew the national conversation in favour of the National Party, by favouring commercial media.
So Aotearoa NZ needs two things. More money to be spent on public media, and less control by the politicians. Sustainable funding basically.
The best way to achieve it is a media levy.
Highly targeted tax
For those who don’t know, a levy is a tax that is highly targeted, and we have a lot of them, like the Telecommunications Development Levy (or TDL) which currently gathers $10 million a year from internet service providers like Spark and 2 Degrees to pay for rural broadband.
We’re all paying for better internet for farmers basically. When first introduced by the previous National government it collected $50 million but it’s dropped down a bit lately.
This is one of many levies that we live with and barely notice. Like the levy we pay on our insurance to cover the Earthquake Commission and the Fire and Emergency Levy. There are maritime levies, energy levies to fund EECA and Waka Kotahi, levies on building consents for MBIE, a levy on advertising pays for the ASA, the BSA is funded by a levy.
Lots of levies and they’re very effective.
So who could the media levy, levy?
ISPs like the TDL? Sure, raise the TDL back up to $50 million or perhaps higher, and it only adds a dollar onto everyone’s internet bill. There’s $50 million.
But the real target should be Big Tech, social media and large streaming services. I’m talking about Facebook, Google, Netflix, YouTube and so on. These are the companies that have really profited from the advent of online media, and at the expense of locally produced public media.
Funding content creation
We need a way to get these companies to make, or at least fund, content creation here in Aotearoa. Denmark recently proposed a solution to this problem with an innovative levy of 2 percent on the revenue of streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime and Disney.
But that 2 percent rises to 5 percent if the streaming company doesn’t spend at least 5 percent of their revenue on making local Danish content. Denmark joins many other European countries already doing this — Germany, Poland, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, France and even Romania are all about to levy the streamers to fund local production.
Australia is planning to do so as well.
But that’s just online streaming companies. There’s also social media and search engines which contribute nothing and take almost all the commercial revenue. The Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill will address that to a degree but it’s not open and we won’t know if the amounts are fair.
Another problem is that it’s only for news publishers — not drama or comedy producers, not on-demand video, not documentary makers or podcasters. Social media and search engines frequently feature and put advertising around these forms of content, and hoover up the digital advertising that would otherwise help fund them, so they should also contribute to them.
A Media Levy can best be seen as a levy on those companies that benefit from media on the internet, but don’t contribute to the public benefits of media — culture, social cohesion and democracy. And that’s why the Media Levy can include internet service providers, and large companies that sell digital advertising and subscriptions.
Note, this would target large companies over a certain size and revenue, and exclude smaller platforms, like most levies do.
Separate from annual budget
The huge benefit of a levy is that it is separate from the annual budget, so it’s fiscally neutral, and politicians can’t get their mits on it. It removes the curse of annual funding.
It creates a funding stream derived from the actual commercial media activities which produce the distribution gaps in the first place, for which public media compensates. That’s why the proceeds would go to the non-commercial platform and the funding agencies — Te Mangai Paho, NZ On Air and the Film Commission.
One final point. This wouldn’t conflict with the new Digital Services Tax proposed by the government because that’s a replacement for Income Tax. A Media Levy, like all levies, sits over and above income tax.
So there we go. I’ve mentioned Jim Bolger three times! I’ve also outlined some quite straight-forward methods to fund public media sustainably, and to fund a significant increase in local content production, video, film, audio and journalism.
None of it needs to be within the grasp of Melissa Lee or Willie Jackson, or David Seymour.
All of it can be used to create local content that improves democracy, social cohesion and Kiwi culture.
Myles Thomas is a trustee of the Better Public Media Trust (BPM). He is a former television producer and director who in 2012 established the Save TVNZ 7 campaign. Thomas is now studying law. This commentary was this year’s David Beatson Memorial Address at a public meeting in Grey Lynn last night on broadcast policy for the NZ election 2023.
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.
The Heat Initiative, a nonprofit child safety advocacy group, was formed earlier this year to campaign against some of the strong privacy protections Apple provides customers. The group says these protections help enable child exploitation, objecting to the fact that pedophiles can encrypt their personal data just like everyone else.
When Apple launched its new iPhone this September, the Heat Initiative seized on the occasion, taking out a full-page New York Times ad, using digital billboard trucks, and even hiring a plane to fly over Apple headquarters with a banner message. The message on the banner appeared simple: “Dear Apple, Detect Child Sexual Abuse in iCloud” — Apple’s cloud storage system, which today employs a range of powerful encryption technologies aimed at preventing hackers, spies, and Tim Cook from knowing anything about your private files.
Something the Heat Initiative has not placed on giant airborne banners is who’s behind it: a controversial billionaire philanthropy network whose influence and tactics have drawn unfavorable comparisons to the right-wing Koch network. Though it does not publicize this fact, the Heat Initiative is a project of the Hopewell Fund, an organization that helps privately and often secretly direct the largesse — and political will — of billionaires. Hopewell is part of a giant, tightly connected web of largely anonymous, Democratic Party-aligned dark-money groups, in an ironic turn, campaigning to undermine the privacy of ordinary people.
“None of these groups are particularly open with me or other people who are tracking dark money about what it is they’re doing.”
For experts on transparency about money in politics, the Hopewell Fund’s place in the wider network of Democratic dark money raises questions that groups in the network are disinclined to answer.
“None of these groups are particularly open with me or other people who are tracking dark money about what it is they’re doing,” said Robert Maguire, of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW. Maguire said the way the network operated called to mind perhaps the most famous right-wing philanthropy and dark-money political network: the constellation of groups run and supported by the billionaire owners of Koch Industries. Of the Hopewell network, Maguire said, “They also take on some of the structural calling cards of the Koch network; it is a convoluted group, sometimes even intentionally so.”
The decadeslong political and technological campaign to diminish encryption for the sake of public safety — known as the “Crypto Wars” — has in recent years pivoted from stoking fears of terrorists chatting in secret to child predators evading police scrutiny. No matter the subject area, the battle is being waged between those who think privacy is an absolute right and those who believe it ought to be limited for expanded oversight from law enforcement and intelligence agencies. The ideological lines pit privacy advocates, computer scientists, and cryptographers against the FBI, the U.S. Congress, the European Union, and other governmental bodies around the world. Apple’s complex 2021 proposal to scan cloud-bound images before they ever left your phone became divisive even within the field of cryptography itself.
While the motives on both sides tend to be clear — there’s little mystery as to why the FBI doesn’t like encryption — the Heat Initiative, as opaque as it is new, introduces the obscured interests of billionaires to a dispute over the rights of ordinary individuals.
“I’m uncomfortable with anonymous rich people with unknown agendas pushing these massive invasions of our privacy,” Matthew Green, a cryptographer at Johns Hopkins University and a critic of the plan to have Apple scan private files on its devices, told The Intercept. “There are huge implications for national security as well as consumer privacy against corporations. Plenty of unsavory reasons for people to push this technology that have nothing to do with protecting children.”
Apple’s Aborted Scanning Scheme
Last month, Wired reported the previously unknown Heat Initiative was pressing Apple to reconsider its highly controversial 2021 proposal to have iPhones constantly scan their owners’ photos as they were uploaded to iCloud, checking to see if they were in possession of child sexual abuse material, known as CSAM. If a scan turned up CSAM, police would be alerted. While most large internet companies check files their users upload and share against a centralized database of known CSAM, Apple’s plan went a step further, proposing to check for illegal files not just on the company’s servers, but directly on its customers’ phones.
“In the hierarchy of human privacy, your private files and photos should be your most important confidential possessions,” Green said. “We even wrote this into the U.S. Constitution.”
Green said that efforts to push Apple to monitor the private files of iPhone owners are part of a broader effort against encryption, whether used to safeguard your photographs or speak privately with others — rights that were taken for granted before the digital revolution. “We have to have some principles about what we’ll give up to fight even heinous crime,” he said. “And these proposals give up everything.”
“We have to have some principles about what we’ll give up to fight even heinous crime. And these proposals give up everything.”
In an unusual move justifying its position, Apple provided Wired with a copy of the letter it sent to the Heat Initiative in reply to its demands. “Scanning every user’s privately stored iCloud data would create new threat vectors for data thieves to find and exploit,” the letter read. “It would also inject the potential for a slippery slope of unintended consequences. Scanning for one type of content, for instance, opens the door for bulk surveillance and could create a desire to search other encrypted messaging systems across content types.”
The strong encryption built into iPhones, which shields sensitive data like your photos and iMessage conversations even from Apple itself, is frequently criticized by police agencies and national security hawks as providing shelter to dangerous criminals. In a 2014 speech, then-FBI Director James Comey singled out Apple’s encryption specifically, warning that “encryption threatens to lead all of us to a very dark place.”
Some cryptographers respond that it’s impossible to filter possible criminal use of encryption without defeating the whole point of encryption in the first place: keeping out prying eyes.
Similarly, any attempt to craft special access for police to use to view encrypted conversations when they claim they need to — a “backdoor” mechanism for law enforcement access — would be impossible to safeguard against abuse, a stance Apple now says it shares.
Sarah Gardner, head of the Heat Initiative, on Sept. 1, 2023, in Los Angeles.
Photo: Jessica Pons for the New York Times
Dark-Money Network
For an organization demanding that Apple scour the private information of its customers, the Heat Initiative discloses extremely little about itself. According to a report in the New York Times, the Heat Initiative is armed with $2 million from donors including the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, an organization founded by British billionaire hedge fund manager and Google activist investor Chris Cohn, and the Oak Foundation, also founded by a British billionaire. The Oak Foundation previously provided $250,000 to a group attempting to weaken end-to-end encryption protections in EU legislation, according to a 2020 annual report.
The Heat Initiative is helmed by Sarah Gardner, who joined from Thorn, an anti-child trafficking organization founded by actor Ashton Kutcher. (Earlier this month, Kutcher stepped down from Thorn following reports that he’d asked a California court for leniency in the sentencing of convicted rapist Danny Masterson.) Thorn has drawn scrutiny for its partnership with Palantir and efforts to provide police with advanced facial recognition software and other sophisticated surveillance tools. Critics say these technologies aren’t just uncovering trafficked children, but ensnaring adults engaging in consensual sex work.
In an interview, Gardner declined to name the Heat Initiative’s funders, but she said the group hadn’t received any money from governmental or law enforcement organizations. “My goal is for child sexual abuse images to not be freely shared on the internet, and I’m here to advocate for the children who cannot make the case for themselves,” Gardner added.
She said she disagreed with “privacy absolutists” — a group now apparently including Apple — who say CSAM-scanning iPhones would have imperiled user safety. “I think data privacy is vital,” she said. “I think there’s a conflation between user privacy and known illegal content.”
Heat Initiative spokesperson Kevin Liao told The Intercept that, while the group does want Apple to re-implement its 2021 plan, it would be open to other approaches to screening everyone’s iCloud storage for CSAM. Since Apple began allowing iCloud users to protect their photos with end-to-end encryption last December, however, this objective is far trickier now than it was back in 2021; to scan iCloud images today would still require the mass-scrutinizing of personal data in some manner. As Apple put it in its response letter, “Scanning every user’s privately stored iCloud content would in our estimation pose serious unintended consequences for our users.”
Both the Oak Foundation and Thorn were cited in a recent report revealing the extent to which law enforcement and private corporate interests have influenced European efforts to weaken encryption in the name of child safety.
Beyond those groups and a handful of names, however, there is vanishingly little information available about what the Heat Initiative is, where it came from, or who exactly is paying its bills and why. Its website, which describes the group only as a “collective effort of concerned child safety experts and advocates” — who go unnamed — contains no information about funding, staff, or leadership.
One crucial detail, however, can be found buried in the “terms of use” section of the Heat Initiative’s website: “THIS WEBSITE IS OWNED AND OPERATED BY Hopewell Fund AND ITS AFFILIATES.” Other than a similarly brief citation in the site’s privacy policy, there is no other mention of the Hopewell Fund or explanation of its role. The omission is significant, given Hopewell’s widely reported role as part of a shadowy cluster of Democratic dark-money groups that funnel billions from anonymous sources into American politics.
Hopewell is part of a labyrinthine billionaire-backed network that receives and distributes philanthropic cash while largely obscuring its origin. The groups in this network include New Venture Fund (which has previously paid salaries at Hopewell), the Sixteen Thirty Fund, and Arabella Advisors, a for-profit company that helps administer these and other Democratic-leaning nonprofits and philanthropies. The groups have poured money into a wide variety of causes ranging from abortion access to opposing Republican tax policy, along the way spending big on elections — about $1.2 billion total in 2020 alone, according to a New York Times investigation.
The deep pockets of this network and mystery surrounding the ultimate source of its donations have drawn comparisons — by Maguire, the Times, and others — to the Koch brothers’ network, whose influence over electoral politics from the right long outraged Democrats. When asked by The Atlantic in 2021 whether she felt good “that you’re the left’s equivalent of the Koch brothers,” Sampriti Ganguli, at the time the CEO of Arabella Advisors, replied in the affirmative.
“Sixteen Thirty Fund is the largest network of liberal politically active nonprofits in the country. We’re talking here about hundreds of millions of dollars.”
“Sixteen Thirty Fund is the largest network of liberal politically active nonprofits in the country,” Maguire of CREW told The Intercept. “We’re talking here about hundreds of millions of dollars.”
Liao told The Intercept that Hopewell serves as the organization’s “fiscal sponsor,” an arrangement that allows tax-deductible donations to pass through a registered nonprofit on its way to an organization without tax-exempt status. Liao declined to provide a list of the Heat Initiative’s funders beyond the two mentioned by the New York Times. Owing to this fiscal sponsorship, Liao continued, “the Hopewell Fund’s board is Heat Initiative’s board.” Hopewell’s board includes New Venture Fund President Lee Bodner and Michael Slaby, a veteran of Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns and former chief technology strategist at an investment fund operated by ex-Google chair Eric Schmidt.
When asked who exactly was leading the Heat Initiative, Liao told The Intercept that “it’s just the CEO Sarah Gardner.” According to LinkedIn, however, Lily Rhodes, also previously with Thorn, now works as Heat Initiative’s director of strategic operations. Liao later said Rhodes and Gardner are the Heat Initiative’s only two employees. When asked to name the “concerned child safety experts and advocates” referred to on the Heat Initiative’s website, Liao declined.
“When you take on a big corporation like Apple,” he said, “you probably don’t want your name out front.”
Hopewell’s Hopes
Given the stakes — nothing less than the question of whether people have an absolute right to communicate in private — the murkiness surrounding a monied pressure campaign against Apple is likely to concern privacy advocates. The Heat Initiative’s efforts also give heart to those aligned with law enforcement interests. Following the campaign’s debut, former Georgia Bureau of Investigations Special Agent in Charge Debbie Garner, who has also previously worked for iPhone-hacking tech firm Grayshift, hailed the Heat Initiative’s launch in a LinkedIn group for Homeland Security alumni, encouraging them to learn more.
The larger Hopewell network’s efforts to influence political discourse have attracted criticism and controversy in the past. In 2021, OpenSecrets, a group that tracks money in politics, reported that New Venture Fund and the Sixteen Thirty Fund were behind a nationwide Facebook ad campaign pushing political messaging from Courier News, a network of websites designed to look like legitimate, independent political news outlets.
Despite its work with ostensibly progressive causes, Hopewell has taken on conservative campaigns: In 2017, Deadspin reported with bemusement an NFL proposal in which the league would donate money into a pool administered by the Hopewell Fund as part of an incentive to get players to stop protesting the national anthem.
Past campaigns connected to Hopewell and its close affiliates have been suffused with Big Tech money. Hopewell is also the fiscal sponsor of the Economic Security Project, an organization that promotes universal basic income founded by Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes. In 2016, SiliconBeat reported that New Venture Fund, which is bankrolled in part by major donations from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, was behind the Google Transparency Project, an organization that publishes unflattering research relating to Google. Arabella has also helped Microsoft channel money to its causes of choice, the report noted. Billionaire eBay founder Pierre Omidyar has also provided large cash gifts to both Hopewell and New Venture Fund, according to the New York Times (Omidyar is a major funder of The Intercept).
According to Riana Pfefferkorn, a research scholar at Stanford University’s Internet Observatory program, the existence of the Heat Initiative is ultimately the result of an “unforced error” by Apple in 2021, when it announced it was exploring using CSAM scanning for its cloud service.
“And now they’re seeing that they can’t put the genie back in the bottle,” Pfefferkorn said. “Whatever measures they take to combat the cloud storage of CSAM, child safety orgs — and repressive governments — will remember that they’d built a tool that snoops on the user at the device level, and they’ll never be satisfied with anything less.”
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You have such a wide and unique array of projects. Where do you come up with your ideas, and how do you decide which projects to pursue and which ideas are worth following through on?
I think an overarching theme for all the things I do tends to be taking ideas in technology or the digital space and translating them into physical form, whether that’s book or print or sculpture. How artists get ideas, that’s a long process. I went to grad school in 2007, and when I started that, I did not have a process for how I came up with ideas. I’m not sure I have a process now, but I feel more comfortable in not having a process and definitely have a better gut sense of when things are interesting to me and when they’re not.
I think I am someone that works through obsession as an underlying theme. I think that resonates with a lot of people. I grew up in the ADD nation and on Ritalin, and back then, I had to be medicated to be able to focus in on an idea. As I grew up, I figured out what I would call “hyper-focus through obsession,” and that’s how I operate now. So as long as I get excited about something, I can just nerd out on it for a long, long, long time.
I think a lot of people don’t feel comfortable talking about that type of disability. For me, it was a real transition. I came off drugs when I was in high school and then in college figured out my own techniques for how to be obsessed with ideas and get a lot of shit done. So in my art practice, when I get super excited about something, I will just deep dive and spend weeks on it, or however long it takes.
Do you always have something that you’re excited about?
It comes and goes, and I think part of being an artist or a creator is being comfortable with letting it go when you don’t have it and coming back to it when you do. I think I’ve been in it long enough to know that it’ll come back. So I’m not that worried about it.
What constitutes success for your work?
I’m old enough now to understand what I consider success in my work. For me, it’s about finding a home for the conversations around it. I think that is what really charges most artists. If you tie it to fame or money, it will in 99% of the time be fleeting. So for me, it’s really about, where’s the home for the conversation? Who do I want to be in dialogue with? First it was the digital media ghetto of the late-mid aughts, and now I’m feeling more affinity with fine press bookmakers. The conversations are great, and the communities are really giving. It’s fun.
I do overlap into the traditional fine art worlds and those gallery spaces. It’s fun to go have a big party and have people walk around and drink beers at an opening and have people geek out on work. But I find the long-term recurring conversations tend to be, for me, in digital media arts worlds and in fine press book nerd worlds. So I’ve been super lucky to find those conversations.
How did you get involved in book arts, and what about it is most fitting for the ideas that you’re exploring?
What’s nice about the fine press book world or book arts world is that the stakes are low. It would be hard to imagine that the rockstars [in this world] are making more than 100 grand a year, selling out baller books, working all year. The spaces [book arts] occupies are really niche. So because the competition is so low, everybody tends to be very giving, and that is super nice.
I came into it because I was in grad school in a very conceptual program, and I wanted to make this book. I ended up working with this guy, John DeMerritt in San Francisco. I don’t want to offend any other book binders, but I think on the West Coast, he’s the person. And Amy Borezo is the person on the East Coast. Anyway, I got this chance to work with John, and we just hit it off. Aside from enjoying making books, I just want to work with John DeMerritt more, so I tend to make books so I can collaborate with him.
The translation from the digital to the physical and vice versa is a theme in a lot of your work. What is lost and what is gained in doing that kind of translation?
A lot of my work for years was about what’s lost as archives become digital. Having a physical thing to hold in front of you, particularly a book form or an object that can be engaged with, is just inherently different from digital forms. I am a digital native all the way, but there’s something about the physical book that lends itself to a processing, a thinking, that’s just different. Maybe it’s just that I’m of a certain age and grew up around books and newspapers. It could be my own perception, but I think it resonates with a lot of people.
Your work engages this idea of using a physical means to alter a digital presence. Resistant Systems specifically comes to mind, which was an exhibition you did around a digital-focused wellness brand you conceptualized, offering analog products to “purify your digital life.” What is your personal relationship to being online like today?
The idea that we can renegotiate our engagement with privacy, security, how we use technology in more of a wellness aesthetic, I think is really important and interesting, because right now everything we learn about technology is in this [geeky, boring] aesthetic, especially around the guts of data backup or passwords.
When I’m not being an artist, I build websites. Right now, I’m a chief technology officer for a media startup, and that’s how I make money, not by making books.
I think that is an important thing to acknowledge as an artist, because I feel like most artists are not making a full living based off of their work. How do you balance those two parts of your life?
For 10 years now, I’ve been fully remote, and I’ve tried to negotiate 30-hour a week full-time work. That leaves me time to be an artist. I’m very lucky that I have enough skills and background that I can get a job where I only have to work 30 hours a week. Obviously, it bleeds over at different times, and it’s a job. But that’s been a sustaining pillar that I hold myself to over the years.
So much of technology and digital security and privacy, that whole space honestly, is really overwhelming to me. I think it’s interesting that you’re trying to make that a little bit more palatable. How do you think about getting people over that complacency or fear?
So all of those things are true across the board for basically everybody. How you get over the overwhelm is to just chip away at it. My dad’s on 1Password now and uses his thumb on his phone to get his passwords. That took a lot of work. My partner, who is not technology-oriented, just needed some basic ground rules set up. A lot of this is just setting up basic systems, and then once you adopt them and adhere to them, it’s easy. But it’s figuring out, what is the system? How do I implement it? Am I doing it right? All those things are just hard.
I wish that personal finance and personal computer hygiene was taught in schools. I really link it directly to personal finance, because no one teaches you how to fill out your taxes in school. That’s the first goddamn thing you have to do as an adult. In the same way, to be online, you need to have passwords and store them safely and back up your shit so you don’t lose it. Literally everybody loses their stuff once in their life. Then they’ve learned, and they’ve had to deal with it. But what if we didn’t have to have that loss in the first place?
I’m always wishing that somebody had taught me more finance stuff, because there’s no baseline education on how to do it. It’s really interesting to see this topic approached via an art book, which is such a precious object and such a labor of care in so many ways, especially contrasted with the infiniteness and carelessness of content on the internet.
I’ve done [crypto therapy sessions] a number of times with LA Crypto Party, this group that I’ve co-run for a while, where people come in and basically just lie on a couch and tell us all their digital problems. Then we write up little digital prescriptions for them of how they’re going to fix this. I’ve also done five-minute cleansings with people where we talk about their passwords, their habits, like, “Do you have any bad passwords? Let’s write it down, burn it, get rid of it, and then generate a new one.” Taking these processes and rituals is a way to have a new engagement with all that messy stuff you don’t feel like dealing with.
While we’re on the topic of technological fears, I have to ask if you’re thinking at all about AI and how that is impacting artists and workers and digital security as well.
The ChatGPT stuff, I think we’ll come up with a model of how it’s integrated as a tool. I liken it to when the web started and search became a thing. We all changed how we engaged with that. We are all really good searchers now with keywords and how we type things in. I think it’ll be the same way with ChatGPT, where we’ve found ways to include it.
I just wrote an article the other day, and I was having trouble with the last paragraph. I was actually writing about ChatGPT. I was like, “Let’s just put it in and see.” I got a couple phrases that I thought were novel that I hadn’t thought of. Not that novel, but it was good enough to get me through my spot where I couldn’t get it farther.
If we go beyond ChatGPT into just large machine learning systems, for sure human labor will continue to be replaced, as it always has, by technology changes. I have a long-term project that’s basically about unionization in the printing industry, the history of it, and then how that can be a lens for unionization contemporarily and the reaction to Amazon. I’m going to be reprinting primary source documents and doing it all by hand as a way to look at this evolution. But interestingly, in the newspaper industry in New York City in the seventies, there were a series of huge strikes as basically all of the Linotype machines went out for making the papers. It basically changed to people on typewriters doing all the copy, and then it would be photo-transferred into lead.
All those people went on strike because they were all in these big unions. The scabs that got hired or moved up were all of the female secretaries that knew how to type. It moved a whole lot of women into the workforce in this technology change, even though all these people that were in the labor and were controlling the newspapers were losing jobs and losing wages. So it’s messy. All these changes are messy, and you never quite know the outcomes and the ramifications in all the different pockets. I think that’s something to just hold onto for us, is all of the Luddite reactions and how evil the change in technology is, there could be these other changes that come out of it that we just aren’t aware of that might be not horrible.
I’ve used a letterpress a number of times. It’s painstaking, and it’s slow. It forces your brain to work in a totally different way in terms of intention and attention. What interests you about that as a medium?
Let me pull out an example that’s right here. This is my first letterpress project, and it’s called Data Transmissions. This is where I laid [out] my manifesto of how I think about letterpress. It’s just redoing cell phone screenshots by hand in metal type. For me, this is a manual process of data processing. So if you think about it, the value of data when it’s digital on a phone is zero, and then if you add your manual labor, as used to happen for producing data or information, the value of it is drastically different. The reprocessing of data by hand I think is an important thing to think about.
There’s a level of satire and humor that’s apparent in some of your work. The Paris meter stands out as an example, in which you track and compare the prevalence of searches and news results for Paris, France versus Paris Hilton. What do you think is the role of that sort of playfulness in your art?
That humor isn’t in all of my work, but certainly a number of my pieces. I think it’s like, “Would you rather look at a boring chart or a fun chart?” It’s the same as when I’m making aesthetic choices in a conceptual piece. I’m going to make aesthetic choices that I like, that I think are nice to look at.
If I’m going to do a Paris Hilton meter, if I just make some boring juxtaposition of terms, it’s not that interesting. But also, with Paris Hilton versus Paris, France, you’re looking at two different versions of culture—of pop and a long-term culture—over time. It’s been running for 12 years. The gauge is slowly going towards Paris, France. It popped back up to Paris Hilton for a little while. She had a little action last year, two years ago.
Is there anything you’d want to say about your work or your process or your creative spirit before we wrap up?
I’ve been very lucky that I’ve figured out a way to make money concurrently with making art. Anybody that’s going back to school or early on in your career, even if you want to make it as a superstar—which is totally cool, valid, great, and it will happen to, I don’t know, 10% of the people that go to grad school or try to do it all—just have something in your back pocket. I’ve been very lucky to have that. It can be related to your art, and don’t be shy about saying so, because I think we do cover it up so much in the art world and it’s only in my later age that I feel comfortable with sharing my whole self.
“If you’ve never tried to organize a movement without the internet, I’m here to tell you, it’s really hard. We need to seize the means of computation, because while the internet isn’t the most important thing that we have to worry about right now, all the things that are more important, gender and racial justice, inequality, the climate emergency, those are struggles that we’re going to win or…
Aluminum isn’t just for soda cans — it’s a critical clean energy material. The metal’s exceptionally light weight and durability make it an essential component of solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicles. As the world scales up these green technologies, demand for aluminum is expected to grow by as much as 40 percent by 2030, compared to a 2020 baseline.
But aluminum production isn’t environmentally benign. As noted in a new report from the nonprofit Environmental Integrity Project, the global aluminum industry causes some 1.2 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions every year — a little less than three times Australia’s annual emissions — as well as widespread air and water contamination.
To ensure that the harms of aluminum expansion don’t outweigh the benefits, the report calls for stricter pollution standards from the U.S. government, an acceleration of of less-polluting smelting technologies, and an increase in aluminum recycling rates — so that less new aluminum needs to be made in the first place.
“Without strong action, the promise of aluminum in attaining a lower-carbon world will prove to be a false one,” said Nadia Steinzor, a policy and research analyst with the Environmental Integrity Project and lead author of the report, in a statement.
Before aluminum becomes foil or a car part, it has to be extracted from bauxite, a kind of ore that contains aluminum in its mineral form. Strip-mining for bauxite requires extensive land-clearing that displaces communities, destroys forests and topsoil, and releases mercury into the air and water. This mining happens all over the world, but some of the largest mines are in Australia, Brazil, Guinea, Indonesia, Jamaica, and Vietnam. According to the Environmental Integrity Project’s estimate, about 7,600 acres of land is cleared globally every year for bauxite mining — an area half the size of Manhattan.
Bauxite mining in western Australia.
Universal Images Group via Getty Images
The complicated industrial process that follows turns bauxite ore into aluminum — but not without creating some nasty byproducts. For example, refining bauxite into alumina powder — aluminum’s precursor — creates a waste residue known as “red mud,” which contains contaminants including arsenic, lead, and the radioactive elements uranium and thorium. Smelting, which turns alumina into aluminum, releases more pollutants into the air and water, most significantly sulfur dioxide but also carbonyl sulfide, hydrogen fluoride, and the human carcinogen benzo(ghi)perylene.
In the U.S., which produces about 1 percent of the world’s new aluminum, the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act are meant to limit the release of these pollutants — but parts of these laws related to alumina refining and smelting have not been revised for decades, and the Environmental Integrity Project says they don’t reflect what’s possible using the most modern pollution-controlling technologies. For instance, sulfur dioxide scrubbers — filtration chambers that can remove sulfur dioxide from the air going out of a facility’s smokestack — could dramatically reduce emissions of the pollutant if installed at smelting facilities, but they aren’t currently required.
Smelting is also where most of the aluminum industry’s climate damages stem from. It takes a lot of energy to reach the 1,800-degree-Fahrenheit temperatures under which alumina can be converted to aluminum, and most smelting facilities get this energy from fossil fuel sources. The carbon-based anodes that conduct electricity for this process also release perfluorocarbons, greenhouse gases that can be thousands of times more potent than CO2 over a 100-year time frame.
To mitigate this climate pollution, the Environmental Integrity Project report says that states should dramatically expand the supply of renewable energy and that companies should commit to decarbonizing their aluminum production. Facilities in Iceland and Canada have already shown that aluminum production is possible using hydropower, and the United Arab Emirates in 2021 announced the world’s first commercial production of aluminum using solar power.
A bauxite factory north of the Guinean capital of Conakry.
Georges Gobet / AFP via Getty Images
Replacing today’s anodes with carbon-free “inert” ones would also reduce aluminum’s climate impact, although inert anode technologies aren’t yet fully developed.
Greeshma Gadikota, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Cornell University, called the report “timely,” since booming demand for aluminum is already causing pollution and energy consumption challenges around the world.. “There is urgency in creating solutions to address this,” she said.
In particular, she praised the report’s recommendation to expand aluminum recycling CK, which uses 95 percent less energy than new aluminum production and preempts the harms of bauxite mining. According to the World Economic Forum, about 73 percent of used aluminum currently gets recycled, but raising that rate to 95 percent would reduce demand for primary aluminum by 15 percent and prevent 250 million metric tons of CO2 emissions every year — about as much climate pollution as Spain produced in 2022.
One priority area identified by the Environmental Integrity Project is increasing the amount of aluminum recycled from used cars, planes, appliances, and products, rather than relying on industrial scrap. In the U.S., less than half of today’s recycled aluminum comes from those non-industrial sources.
Still, Gadikota noted that, in the near term, recycled aluminum may not be able to keep up with rising demand for the material, meaning more primary production will be needed.
The report notes that manufacturers and consumers can also help drive down unnecessary demand for aluminum — for example, by favoring smaller cars. Americans’ taste for big trucks and cars is a “key factor” driving aluminum demand within the automotive industry, the report says, but compact vehicles can contain less than half as much aluminum.
A recent webinar hosted by the Pacific Network on Globalisation (PANG) brought together minds from across the region to delve into the intricate issues of the digital economy and data value.
The webinar’s focus was clear — shed light on who was shaping the rules of the digital landscape and how these rules were taking form.
At the forefront of the discussion was the delicate matter of valuing and protecting indigenous knowledge.
PANG’s deputy coordinator, Adam Wolfenden, emphasised the need for open conversations spanning various sectors.
“It is a call to understand and safeguard the wisdom embedded in Pacific worldviews and indigenous knowledge systems as we venture into the digital world,” he said.
But amid the promise of the digital age, challenges persisted.
Wolfenden said the Pacific’s scattered islands faced the formidable obstacle of connectivity.
“Communities yearn to tap into online technologies, yet structural barriers stand tall. The connectivity challenges and structural barriers that are faced by the Pacific region are substantial and there is no easy, cheap fix,” he said.
He underscored the necessity of regional partnerships, even beyond the Pacific.
“As they sought to build advanced digital infrastructures, they realised that strength lay in unity. The journey towards progress means joining hands with fellow developing nations.
“It is a testament to the shared dream of progress that transcends geographical boundaries.”
The first step, Wolfenden believed, was awareness.
He said the Pacific region needed to be fully informed about ongoing negotiations, what rules were being carved, and how these might affect the region’s autonomy and data sovereignty.
“Often, these negotiations remain hidden from public view, shrouded in secrecy until agreements were reached. This has to change; transparency is vital,” Wolfenden said.
Beyond this, there was a call for broader discussions during the webinar. The digital economy was not just about buyers and sellers in a virtual marketplace.
It was about preserving culture, empowering communities, and ensuring that indigenous knowledge was never left vulnerable to the whims of the digital age.
Ema Ganivatu and Brittany Nawaqatabu are final year journalism students at The University of the South Pacific. They are also senior editors for Wansolwara, USP Journalism’s student training newspaper and online publications. Republished in a collaborative partnership with Asia Pacific Report.
As tech luminaries like Elon Musk issue solemn warnings about artificial intelligence’s threat of “civilizational destruction,” the U.S. military is using it for a decidedly more mundane purpose: understanding its sprawling $816.7 billion budget and figuring out its own policies.
Thanks to its bloat and political wrangling, the annual Department of Defense budget legislation includes hundreds of revisions and limitations telling the Pentagon what it can and cannot do. To make sense of all those provisions, the Pentagon created an AI program, codenamed GAMECHANGER.
“In my comptroller role, I am, of course, the most excited about applying GAMECHANGER to gain better visibility and understanding across our various budget exhibits,” said Gregory Little, the deputy comptroller of the Pentagon, shortly after the program’s creation last year.
“The fact that they have to go to such extraordinary measures to understand what their own policies are is an indictment of how they operate.”
“The fact that they have to go to such extraordinary measures to understand what their own policies are is an indictment of how they operate,” said William Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and expert on the defense budget. “It’s kind of similar to the problem with the budget as a whole: They don’t make tough decisions, they just layer on more policies, more weapons systems, more spending. Between the Pentagon and Congress, they’re not really getting rid of old stuff, they’re just adding more.”
House Republicans reportedly aim to pass their defense budget later this week. They had planned to vote on an $826 billion proposal last week before the far-right Freedom Caucus blocked the proposal, demanding cuts to non-defense spending.
“The fact that the Pentagon developed an AI program to navigate its own policies should be a stark wake-up call for lawmakers who throw more money at the department than it even asks for nearly every year,” said Julia Gledhill, an analyst at the Project on Government Oversight’s Center for Defense Information. “It’s unsurprising, though: The DOD couldn’t adequately account for 61 percent of its $3.5 trillion in assets in the most recent audit, and those are physical!”
The Pentagon did not respond to a request for comment.
Military brass use GAMECHANGER to help them navigate what the Defense Department itself points to as an absurd amount of “tedious” policies. The program contains over 15,000 policy documents governing how the Pentagon operates, according to its GitHub entry.
“Did you know that if you read all the Department of Defense’s policies, it would be the equivalent of reading through ‘War and Peace’ more than 100 times?” a press release about GAMECHANGER from the Defense Intelligence Agency, the military’s spy wing, says. “For most people, policy is a tedious and [elusive] concept, making the idea of understanding and synthesizing tens of thousands of policy requirements a daunting task. But in the midst of the chaos that is the policy world, one DIA officer and a team at the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence & Security saw an opportunity.”
The press release went on to decry the Pentagon’s “mountain of policies and requirements.”
As unusual as it is for the military to publicly air its contempt for its own sprawling bureaucracy, members of Congress have been similarly harsh. In its portrayal of U.S. military policy — which it also had a hand in creating — the Senate Armed Services Committee called rules governing the department “byzantine” and “labyrinthine.”
“The committee notes that the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center developed an artificial intelligence-enabled tool, GAMECHANGER, to make sense of the byzantine and labyrinthine ecosystem of Department guidance,” the committee said in a report for National Defense Authorization Act — the law that appropriates cash for the Pentagon budget — for fiscal year 2023. (Amid the critique of the Pentagon’s bloated bureaucracy, the NDAA would later become law, authorizing $802.4 billion in funding for the defense budget.)
Though announced in February of last year, GAMECHANGER has received scant media attention. The military’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, a subdivision of the U.S. Air Force created in 2018, developed the program. Upon its completion, the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center transferred ownership of it to the office of the Defense Department comptroller, which handles budgetary and fiscal matters for the Pentagon.
Shortly after its release, GAMECHANGER was already used by over 6,000 Defense Department users conducting over 100,000 queries, according to the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Described as a natural language processing application — a broad term in computer science generally referring the use of machine learning to allow computers to interpret human speech and writing — GAMECHANGER is just one of a vast suite of AI programs bankrolled by the Pentagon in recent months.
The Pentagon is currently funding 686 such AI projects, according to the National Academy of Sciences, a nonprofit that frequently conducts research into the government. The figure does not include the Department of Defense’s classified efforts.
Before it was formally released, GAMECHANGER was granted an award by the Office of Personnel Management, the federal government’s human resources agency for civil servants.
“GAMECHANGER is an ironic name: They’re patting themselves on the back for, in the best case, figuring out what they’ve said in the past, which is pretty modest,” said Hartung, the Quincy Institute defense budget expert. “It’s more a problem of how they make policy and not a problem of how to surf through it.”
Distributed Denial of Secrets — the nonprofit transparency collective that hosts an ever-growing public library of leaked and hacked datasets for journalists and researchers to investigate — has been a major source of news for organizations like the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, BBC News, Al Jazeera, the Associated Press, Reuters, and Fox News, among others.
It has published datasets that shed light on law enforcement fusion centers spying on Black Lives Matter activists, revealed Oath Keepers supporters among law enforcement and elected officials, and exposed thousands of videos from January 6 rioters, including many that were used as evidence in Donald Trump’s second impeachment inquiry. (Disclosure: I’m an adviser to DDoSecrets.)
But not everyone is a fan. DDoSecrets has powerful enemies and has found itself censored by some of the world’s biggest tech companies, including X (formerly Twitter) and Reddit. The governments of Russia and Indonesia are also censoring access to its website.
X Blocks DDoSecrets Links
Shortly before the 2020 election, Twitter prevented users from posting links to a New York Post article based on documents stolen from Hunter Biden’s laptop, citing a violation of the company’s hacked materials policy. After intense pressure from Republicans, Twitter reversed course two days later. This was widely covered in the media and even led to congressional hearings.
What’s less well known is that earlier in 2020, in the midst of the Black Lives Matter uprising, Twitter used the same hacked materials policy to not only permanently ban the @DDoSecrets account, but also prevent users from posting any links to ddosecrets.com. This was in response to the collective publishing the BlueLeaks dataset, a collection of 270GB of documents from over 200 law enforcement agencies. (German authorities also seized a DDoSecrets server after the release of BlueLeaks, bringing the collective’s data server temporarily offline.)
When Elon Musk bought Twitter, which he has since renamed X, he promised that he would restore “free speech” to the platform. But Musk’s company is still censoring DDoSecrets; links to the website have been blocked on the platform for over three years. Lorax Horne, an editor at DDoSecrets, told The Intercept that they are “not surprised” that Musk isn’t interested in ending the censorship. “We afflict the comfortable, and we include a lot of trans people,” they said. “Transparency is not comforting to the richest people in the world.”
X prevents users from posting links to the DDoSecrets website.
Screenshot: The Intercept
If you try to post a DDoSecrets link to X, you’ll receive an error message stating, “We can’t complete this request because this link has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially harmful.” The same thing happens if you try sending a DDoSecrets link in a direct message. X did not respond to a request for comment.
“There’s no doubt that ddosecrets.com being blocked on Twitter impacts our ability to connect with journalists,” Horne told The Intercept. “In the last week, I’ve had to explain to new reporters why they can’t post our link.”
Reddit Shadow-Bans DDoSecrets
X isn’t the only company that has been censoring DDoSecrets since it published BlueLeaks in 2020. The popular social news aggregator Reddit has been doing the same, only more subtly.
As an example, I posted a link to the DDoSecrets website in the r/journalism subreddit. I also posted two comments on that post, one that included a link to the DDoSecrets BlueLeaks page and another that didn’t. While logged in to my Reddit account, I can see my post in the subreddit, and I can view both comments.
Users can see their own Reddit posts with links to the DDoSecrets website.
Screenshot: The Intercept
However, when I view the r/journalism subreddit while logged in to a different Reddit account, or while not logged in at all, my post isn’t displayed. If I load the post link directly, I can see it, but the link to ddosecrets.com isn’t there, and the comment that included the link to BlueLeaks is hidden.
Other Reddit users are prevented from seeing links to the DDoSecrets website.
Screenshot: The Intercept
“People can link to news articles that use our documents but can’t link to the source,” Horne said when asked about Reddit’s censorship, which “impedes people finding verified links to our archive” and “inevitably will stop some people from finding us.”
In October 2020, while I was in the midst of reporting on BlueLeaks, I did a Reddit “ask me anything,” an open conversation for members of the r/privacy community to ask about my work. At the time, we had trouble getting the AMA started because of Reddit’s censorship of DDoSecrets. Eventually, we had to start the AMA over with a new post that did not include any DDoSecrets links in the description, and I had to refrain from posting links in the comments.
“Reddit’s sitewide policies strictly prohibit posting someone’s personal information,” a Reddit spokesperson told The Intercept. “Our dedicated internal Safety teams enforce these policies through a combination of automated tooling and human review. This includes blocking links to offsite domains that break our policies.”
Like X, Reddit is inconsistent in enforcing its policy. After receiving Reddit’s statement, I posted a link in the r/journalism subreddit to the WikiLeaks website. Unlike DDoSecrets, which distributes most datasets that contain people’s private information only to journalists and researchers who request access, WikiLeaks published everything for anyone to download. In 2016, for example, the group published a dataset that included private information, including addresses and cellphone numbers, for 20 million female voters in Turkey.
But Reddit doesn’t censor links to WikiLeaks like it does with DDoSecrets; if I view the r/journalism subreddit while not logged in to a Reddit account, my post with the link shows up.
Reddit users can freely post links to the WikiLeaks website.
Screenshot: The Intercept
Russia and Indonesia Bar Access
After Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, hackers, most claiming to be hacktivists, compromised dozens of Russian organizations, including government agencies, oil and gas companies, and financial institutions. They flooded DDoSecrets with terabytes of Russian data, which the collective published.
One of the hacked organizations was Roskomnadzor, the Russian government agency responsible for spying on and censoring the internet and other mass media in Russia. The most recent leak of data from this agency (DDoSecrets hosts threeseparateleaks) includes information about Russia censoring DDoSecrets itself.
“Colleagues, good morning! Please include links in the register of violators,” a Russian censor wrote in an August 2022 email buried in a collection of 335GB of data from the General Radio Frequency Center of Roskomnadzor. A scanned court document adding ddosecrets.com to Russia’s censorship list was attached to the email.
“It was only a matter of time,” Horne said of Russia blocking access to DDoSecrets. “Our partners like IStories, OCCRP, and Meduza have it worse and have been placed on the undesirable organizations list. We are lucky that we have no staff in Russia and haven’t had to move anyone out of the country.”
Roskomnadzor did not respond to a request for comment.
Indonesia has also blocked access to the DDoSecrets website since July 21, 2023, according to data collected by the Open Observatory of Network Interference, a project that monitors internet censorship by analyzing data from probes located around the world.
Indonesia’s Ministry of Communication and Informatics, the government agency responsible for internet censorship, did not respond to a request for comment.
On July 18, three days before the block went into effect, DDoSecrets published over half a million emails from the Jhonlin Group, a coal mining and palm oil conglomerate that has been criticized by Reporters Without Borders and Human Rights Watch for using police to jail journalists.
Egypt, Vietnam and Indonesia among countries sending delegations to four-day DSEI at ExCeL
Europe’s biggest ever arms fair got under way in London on Tuesday with record numbers expected to attend, boosted by interest from countries with controversial human rights records.
Authoritarian Egypt and Vietnam are among those sending delegations, defence sources said, as well as Indonesia and India – all countries whose arms-buying strategies have been affected by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
An interview with Evgeny Morozov on The Santiago Boys, a podcast about a project inside the Allende government that tried to use cybernetics to manage an economy under assault.
New Zealand’s Stuff media group has joined other leading news organisations around the world in restricting Open AI from using its content to power artificial intelligence tool Chat GPT.
A growing number of media companies globally have taken action to block access to Open AI bots from crawling and scraping content from their news sites.
Open AI is behind the most well-known and fastest-growing artificial intelligence chatbots, Chat GPT, released late 2022.
“The scraping of any content from Stuff or its news masthead sites for commercial gain has always been against our policy,” says Stuff CEO Laura Maxwell. “But it is important in this new era of Generative AI that we take further steps to protect our intellectual property.”
Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI) is the name given to technologies that use vast amounts of information scraped from the internet to train large language models (LLMs).
This enables them to generate seemingly original answers — in text, visuals or other media — to queries based on mathematically predicting the most likely right answer to a prompt or dialogue.
Some of the most well-known Gen AI tools include Open AI’s ChatGPT and Dall-E, and Google’s Bard.
Surge of unease
There has been a surge of unease from news organisations, artists, writers and other creators of original content that their work has already been harvested without permission, knowledge or compensation by Open AI or other tech companies seeking to build new commercial products through Gen AI technology.
“High quality, accurate and credible journalism is of great value to these businesses, yet the business model of journalism has been significantly weakened as a result of their growth off the back of that work,” said Maxwell.
“The news industry must learn from the mistakes of the past, namely what happened in the era of search engines and social media, where global tech giants were able to build businesses of previously unimaginable scale and influence off the back of the original work of others.
“We recognise the value of our work to Open AI and others, and also the huge risk that these new tools pose to our existence if we do not protect our IP now.”
There is also increasing concern these tools will exacerbate the spread of disinformation and misinformation globally.
“Content produced by journalists here and around the world is the cornerstone of what makes these Gen AI tools valuable to the user,” Maxwell said.
“Without it, the models would be left to train on a sea of dross, misinformation and unverified information on the internet — and increasingly that will become the information that has itself been already generated by AI.
Risk of ‘eating itself’
“There is a risk the whole thing will end up eating itself.”
Stuff and other news companies have been able to block Open AI’s access to their content because its web crawler, GPTBot, is identifiable.
But not all crawlers are clearly labelled.
Stuff has also updated its site terms and conditions to expressly bar the use of its content to train AI models owned by any other company, as well as any other unauthorised use of its content for commercial use.
OpenAI has entered into negotiations with some news organisations in the United States, notably Associated Press, to license their content to train ChatGPT.
So far these agreements have not been widespread although a number of news companies globally are seeking licensing arrangements.
Maxwell said Stuff was looking forward to holding conversations around licensing its content in due course.
In the past, Vice has documented the history of censorship on YouTube. More recently, since the company’s near implosion, it became an active participant in making things disappear.
In June, six months after announcing a partnership deal with a Saudi Arabian government-owned media company, Vice uploaded but then quickly removed a documentary critical of the Persian Gulf monarchy’s notorious dictator, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, or MBS.
The nearly nine-minute film, titled “Inside Saudi Crown Prince’s Ruthless Quest for Power,” was uploaded to the Vice News YouTube channel on June 19, 2023. It garnered more than three-quarters of a million views before being set to “private” within four days of being posted. It can no longer be seen at its original link on Vice’s YouTube channel; visitors see a message that says “video unavailable.” Vice did not respond to a request for comment on why the video was published and then made private or if there are any plans to make the video public again.
The Guardian first reported that a “film in the Vice world news Investigators series about Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman was deleted from the internet after being uploaded.” Though Vice did remove the film from its public YouTube channel, it is, in fact, not “deleted from the internet” and presently remains publicly accessible via web archival services.
Vice’s description of the video, now also unavailable on YouTube, previously stated that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed “orchestrates The Ritz Purge, kidnaps Saudi’s elites and royal relatives with allegations of torture inside, and his own men linked to the brutal hacking of Journalist Khashoggi – a murder that stunned the world.” The description goes on to state that Wall Street Journal reporters Bradley Hope and Justin Scheck “attempt to unfold the motivations of the prince’s most reckless decision-making.” Hope and Scheck are the co-authors of the 2020 book “Blood and Oil: Mohammed bin Salman’s Ruthless Quest for Global Power.”
A screenshot from the documentary “Inside Saudi Crown Prince’s Ruthless Quest for Power,” which Vice News deleted from its YouTube channel.
Image: The Intercept; Source: Vice News
In the documentary, Hope states that Crown Prince Mohammed is “disgraced internationally” owing to the Jamal Khashoggi murder, a topic which Vice critically covered at length in the past. More recently, however, Vice has shifted its coverage of Saudi Arabia, apparently due to the growth of its commercial relationship with the kingdom. The relationship appears to have begun in 2017, owing to MBS’s younger brother, Khalid bin Salman, being infatuated with the brand; bin Salman reportedly set up a meeting between Vice co-founder Shane Smith and MBS.
By the end of 2018, Vice had worked with the Saudi Research and Media Group to produce promotional videos for Saudi Arabia. A few days after the Guardian piece detailing the deal came out, an “industry source” told Variety (whose parent company, Penske Media Corporation, received $200 million from the Saudi sovereign wealth fund earlier that year) that Vice was “reviewing” its contract with SRMG.
A subsequent Guardian investigation revealed that in 2020, Vice helped organize a Saudi music festival subsidized by the Saudi government. Vice’s name was not listed on publicity materials for the event, and contractors working on the event were presented with nondisclosure agreements.
In 2021, Vice opened an office in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The media company has gone from being “banned from filming in Riyadh” in 2018 to now actively recruiting for a producer “responsible for developing and assisting the producing of video content from short form content to long-form for our new media brand, headquartered in Riyadh.” The company lists 11 other Riyadh-based openings.
Commenting on the opening of the Riyadh office, a Vice spokesperson told the Guardian that “our editorial voice has and always will report with complete autonomy and independence.” In response to the Guardian recently asking about the rationale for the removal of the film, a Vice source stated that this was partially owing to concerns about the safety of Saudi-based staff.
In September 2022, the New York Times reported that Vice was considering engaging in a deal with the Saudi media company MBC. The deal was officially announced at the start of 2023. Most recently, the Guardian reported that Vice shelved a story which stated that the “Saudi state is helping families to harass and threaten transgender Saudis based overseas.” In response to this latest instance of apparent capitulation to advancing Saudi interests, the Vice Union issued a statement saying that it was “horrified but not shocked.” It added, “We know the company is financially bankrupt, but it shouldn’t be morally bankrupt too.”
Meanwhile, a map of Saudi Arabia reportedly hangs on a wall in Vice’s London office.
Lawyers for family say Saudi government took brother’s data in breach and ‘arrested, tortured, and imprisoned’ him and others
The company formerly known as Twitter is “unfit” to hold banking licenses because of its alleged “intentional complicity” with human rights violations in Saudi Arabia and treatment of users’ personal data, according to an open letter sent to federal and state banking regulators that was signed by a law firm representing a Saudi victim’s family.
The allegations by lawyers representing Areej al-Sadhan, whose brother Abdulrahman was one of thousands of Saudis whose confidential personal information was obtained by Saudi agents posing as Twitter employees in 2014-15, comes as Twitter Payments LLC, a subsidiary of X (the company formerly known as Twitter), is in the process of applying for money-transmitter licenses across the US.
The Trades Union Congress (TUC) has launched an artificial intelligence (AI) taskforce to address the threat of new technology to workers in the UK. It will bring together leading specialists in law, technology, politics, HR, and the voluntary sector. The taskforce’s chief mission will be to fill the current gaps in UK employment law. It will draft new legal protections to ensure AI is regulated fairly at work for the benefit of employees and employers.
The TUC aims to publish an expert-drafted ‘AI and Employment Bill’ early in 2024. It will then lobby the government to incorporate it into UK law.
TUC: wide-ranging coalition on AI
The work of the taskforce will be led by the TUC and assisted by a special advisory committee. Members of that committee will include:
In addition, David Davis MP, Darren Jones MP, Mick Whitley MP, and Chris Stephens MP will also sit on the committee.
The Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy will provide the secretariat for the taskforce, and the committee will be jointly chaired by:
Kate Bell – TUC assistant general secretary.
Gina Neff – executive director of the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy at the University of Cambridge.
The ‘AI and Employment Bill’ will be drafted by leading employment lawyers Robin Allen KC and Dee Masters from the AI Law Consultancy.
Tories: ‘way behind the curve’
The taskforce is being launched as experts warn that the UK is “way behind the curve” on the regulation of AI. UK employment law has failed to keep pace with the development of new technologies. Employers are also uncertain of how to fairly take advantage of new technologies.
The taskforce says AI is already making “high-risk, life changing” decisions about workers’ lives. These include line-managing, and hiring and firing staff. For example, AI is being used to analyse facial expressions, tone of voice, and accents to assess candidates’ suitability for roles.
Left unchecked, this could lead to greater discrimination, unfairness, and exploitation at work across the economy. Meanwhile employers are purchasing and using systems without full knowledge of the implications, such as whether they reinforce biases.
UK at risk of being an ‘International outlier’
The TUC says the UK risks becoming an “international outlier” on the regulation of AI. The EU and other countries have already drafted specific legislation to properly regulate AI at work. However, at present the UK’s government’s stated position is a ‘light touch’ approach.
Experts say ministers have yet to put in place the necessary “guardrails” to protect workers’ rights. Moreover, March’s AI White Paper proposed only a principles-based approach that lacks statutory force.
TUC assistant general secretary Kate Bell said:
We urgently need new employment legislation, so workers and employers know where they stand. Without proper regulation of AI, our labour market risks turning into a wild west. We all have a shared interest in getting this right.
AI summit
This autumn, prime minister Rishi Sunak will host a global summit on AI. However, the taskforce says it is vital that workers’ groups and the wider voluntary sector are invited to attend alongside business groups and employers.
Executive director of the Minderoo Centre Gina Neff said:
Responsible and trustworthy AI can power huge benefits. But laws must be fit for purpose and ensure that AI works for all.
AI safety isn’t just a challenge for the future and it isn’t just a technical problem. These are issues that both employers and workers are facing now, and they need the help from researchers, policy makers and civil society to build the capacity to get this right for society.
So, the TUC is calling on the Tories to enshrine a number of protections into law. These include:
A legal duty for employers to consult trade unions on the use of ‘high risk’ and intrusive forms of AI in the workplace.
A legal right for all workers to have a human review of decisions made by AI systems so they can challenge decisions that are unfair and discriminatory.
A set of amendments to the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR) and Equality Act to guard against discriminatory algorithms.
The future of wearable technology, beyond now-standard accessories like smartwatches and fitness tracking rings, is ePANTS, according to the intelligence community.
The federal government has shelled out at least $22 million in an effort to develop “smart” clothing that spies on the wearer and its surroundings. Similar to previous moonshot projects funded by military and intelligence agencies, the inspiration may have come from science fiction and superpowers, but the basic applications are on brand for the government: surveillance and data collection.
Billed as the “largest single investment to develop Active Smart Textiles,” the SMART ePANTS — Smart Electrically Powered and Networked Textile Systems — program aims to develop clothing capable of recording audio, video, and geolocation data, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence announced in an August 22 press release. Garments slated for production include shirts, pants, socks, and underwear, all of which are intended to be washable.
The project is being undertaken by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, the intelligence community’s secretive counterpart to the military’s better-known Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. IARPA’s website says it “invests federal funding into high-risk, high reward projects to address challenges facing the intelligence community.” Its tolerance for risk has led to both impressive achievements, like a Nobel Prize awarded to physicist David Wineland for his research on quantum computing funded by IARPA, as well as costly failures.
“A lot of the IARPA and DARPA programs are like throwing spaghetti against the refrigerator,” Annie Jacobsen, author of a book about DARPA, “The Pentagon’s Brain,” told The Intercept. “It may or may not stick.”
According to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s press release, “This eTextile technology could also assist personnel and first responders in dangerous, high-stress environments, such as crime scenes and arms control inspections without impeding their ability to swiftly and safely operate.”
IARPA contracts for the SMART ePANTS program have gone to five entities. As the Pentagon disclosed this month along with other contracts it routinely announces, IARPA has awarded $11.6 million and $10.6 million to defense contractors Nautilus Defense and Leidos, respectively. The Pentagon did not disclose the value of the contracts with the other three: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, SRI International, and Areté. “IARPA does not publicly disclose our funding numbers,” IARPA spokesperson Nicole de Haay told The Intercept.
Dawson Cagle, a former Booz Allen Hamilton associate, serves as the IARPA program manager leading SMART ePANTS. Cagle invoked his time serving as a United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq between 2002 and 2006 as important experience for his current role.
“As a former weapons inspector myself, I know how much hand-carried electronics can interfere with my situational awareness at inspection sites,” Cagle recently told Homeland Security Today. “In unknown environments, I’d rather have my hands free to grab ladders and handrails more firmly and keep from hitting my head than holding some device.”
SMART ePANTS is not the national security community’s first foray into high-tech wearables. In 2013, Adm. William McRaven, then-commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, presented the Tactical Assault Light Operator Suit. Called TALOS for short, the proposal sought to develop a powered exoskeleton “supersuit” similar to that worn by Matt Damon’s character in “Elysium,” a sci-fi action movie released that year. The proposal also drew comparisons to the suit worn by Iron Man, played by Robert Downey Jr., in a string of blockbuster films released in the run-up to TALOS’s formation.
“Science fiction has always played a role in DARPA,” Jacobsen said.
The TALOS project ended in 2019 without a demonstrable prototype, but not before racking up $80 million in costs.
As IARPA works to develop SMART ePANTS over the next three and a half years, Jacobsen stressed that the advent of smart wearables could usher in troubling new forms of government biometric surveillance.
“They’re now in a position of serious authority over you. In TSA, they can swab your hands for explosives,” Jacobsen said. “Now suppose SMART ePANTS detects a chemical on your skin — imagine where that can lead.” With consumer wearables already capable of monitoring your heartbeat, further breakthroughs could give rise to more invasive biometrics.
“IARPA programs are designed and executed in accordance with, and adhere to, strict civil liberties and privacy protection protocols. Further, IARPA performs civil liberties and privacy protection compliance reviews throughout our research efforts,” de Haay, the spokesperson, said.
There is already evidence that private industry outside of the national security community are interested in smart clothing. Meta, Facebook’s parent company, is looking to hire a researcher “with broad knowledge in smart textiles and garment construction, integration of electronics into soft and flexible systems, and who can work with a team of researchers working in haptics, sensing, tracking, and materials science.”
The spy world is no stranger to lavish investments in moonshot technology. The CIA’s venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel, recently invested in Colossal Biosciences, a wooly mammoth resurrection startup, as The Intercept reported last year.
If SMART ePANTS succeeds, it’s likely to become a tool in IARPA’s arsenal to “create the vast intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance systems of the future,” said Jacobsen. “They want to know more about you than you.”
The social media giant Meta recently updated the rulebook it uses to censor online discussion of people and groups it deems “dangerous,” according to internal materials obtained by The Intercept. The policy had come under fire in the past for casting an overly wide net that ended up removing legitimate, nonviolent content.
The goal of the change is to remove less of this material. In updating the policy, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, also made an internal admission that the policy has censored speech beyond what the company intended.
Meta’s “Dangerous Organizations and Individuals,” or DOI, policy is based around a secret blacklist of thousands of people and groups, spanning everything from terrorists and drug cartels to rebel armies and musical acts. For years, the policy prohibited the more than one billion people using Facebook and Instagram from engaging in “praise, support or representation” of anyone on the list.
Now, Meta will provide a greater allowance for discussion of these banned people and groups — so long as it takes place in the context of “social and political discourse,” according to the updated policy, which also replaces the blanket prohibition against “praise” of blacklisted entities with a new ban on “glorification” of them.
The updated policy language has been distributed internally, but Meta has yet to disclose it publicly beyond a mention of the “social and political discourse” exception on the community standards page. Blacklisted people and organizations are still banned from having an official presence on Meta’s platforms.
The revision follows years of criticism of the policy. Last year, a third-party audit commissioned by Meta found the company’s censorship rules systematically violated the human rights of Palestinians by stifling political speech, and singled out the DOI policy. The new changes, however, leave major problems unresolved, experts told The Intercept. The “glorification” adjustment, for instance, is well intentioned but likely to suffer from the same ambiguity that created issues with the “praise” standard.
“Changing the DOI policy is a step in the right direction, one that digital rights defenders and civil society globally have been requesting for a long time,” Mona Shtaya, nonresident fellow at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, told The Intercept.
“The recent edits illustrate that Meta acknowledges the participation of certain DOI members in elections,” Shtaya said. “However, it still bars them from its platforms, which can significantly impact political discourse in these countries and potentially hinder citizens’ equal and free interaction with various political campaigns.”
Acknowledged Failings
Meta has long maintained the original DOI policy is intended to curtail the ability of terrorists and other violent extremists from causing real-world harm. Content moderation scholars and free expression advocates, however, maintain that the way the policy operates in practice creates a tendency to indiscriminately swallow up and delete entirely nonviolent speech. (Meta declined to comment for this story.)
In the new internal language, Meta acknowledged the failings of its rigid approach and said the company is attempting to improve the rule. “A catch-all policy approach helped us remove any praise of designated entities and individuals on the platform,” read an internal memo announcing the change. “However, this approach also removes social and political discourse and causes enforcement challenges.”
Meta’s proposed solution is “recategorizing the definition of ‘Praise’ into two areas: ‘References to a DOI,’ and ‘Glorification of DOIs.’ These fundamentally different types of content should be treated differently.” Mere “references” to a terrorist group or cartel kingpin will be permitted so long as they fall into one of 11 new categories of discourse Meta deems acceptable:
Elections, Parliamentary and executive functions, Peace and Conflict Resolution (truce/ceasefire/peace agreements), International agreements or treaties, Disaster response and humanitarian relief, Human Rights and humanitarian discourse, Local community services, Neutral and informative descriptions of DOI activity or behavior, News reporting, Condemnation and criticism, Satire and humor.
Posters will still face strict requirements to avoid running afoul of the policy, even if they’re attempting to participate in one of the above categories. To stay online, any Facebook or Instagram posts mentioning banned groups and people must “explicitly mention” one of the permissible contexts or face deletion. The memo says “the onus is on the user to prove” that they’re fitting into one of the 11 acceptable categories.
According to Shtaya, the Tahrir Institute fellow, the revised approach continues to put Meta’s users at the mercy of a deeply flawed system. She said, “Meta’s approach places the burden of content moderation on its users, who are neither language experts nor historians.”
Unclear Guidance
Instagram and Facebook users will still have to hope their words aren’t interpreted by Meta’s outsourced legion of overworked, poorly paid moderators as “glorification.” The term is defined internally in almost exactly the same language as its predecessor, “praise”: “Legitimizing or defending violent or hateful acts by claiming that those acts or any type of harm resulting from them have a moral, political, logical, or other justification that makes them appear acceptable or reasonable.” Another section defines glorification as any content that “justifies or amplifies” the “hateful or violent” beliefs or actions of a banned entity, or describes them as “effective, legitimate or defensible.”
Though Meta intends this language to be universal, equitably and accurately applying labels as subjective as “legitimate” or “hateful” to the entirety of global online discourse has proven impossible to date.
“Replacing ‘praise’ with ‘glorification’ does little to change the vagueness inherent to each term,” according to Ángel Díaz, a professor at University of Southern California’s Gould School of Law and a scholar of social media content policy. “The policy still overburdens legitimate discourse.”
“Replacing ‘praise’ with ‘glorification’ does little to change the vagueness inherent to each term. The policy still overburdens legitimate discourse.”
The notions of “legitimization” or “justification” are deeply complex, philosophical matters that would be difficult to address by anyone, let alone a contractor responsible for making hundreds of judgments each day.
The revision does little to address the heavily racialized way in which Meta assesses and attempts to thwart dangerous groups, Díaz added. While the company still refuses to disclose the blacklist or how entries are added to it, The Intercept published a full copy in 2021. The document revealed that the overwhelming majority of the “Tier 1” dangerous people and groups — who are still subject to the harshest speech restrictions under the new policy — are Muslim, Arab, or South Asian. White, American militant groups, meanwhile, are overrepresented in the far more lenient “Tier 3” category.
Díaz said, “Tier 3 groups, which appear to be largely made up of right-wing militia groups or conspiracy networks like QAnon, are not subject to bans on glorification.”
Meta’s own internal rulebook seems unclear about how enforcement is supposed to work, seemingly still dogged by the same inconsistencies and self-contradictions that have muddled its implementation for years.
For instance, the rule permits “analysis and commentary” about a banned group, but a hypothetical post arguing that the September 11 attacks would not have happened absent U.S. aggression abroad is considered a form of glorification, presumably of Al Qaeda, and should be deleted, according to one example provided in the policy materials. Though one might vehemently disagree with that premise, it’s difficult to claim it’s not a form of analysis and commentary.
Another hypothetical post in the internal language says, in response to Taliban territorial gains in the Afghanistan war, “I think it’s time the U.S. government started reassessing their strategy in Afghanistan.” The post, the rule says, should be labeled as nonviolating, despite what appears to be a clear-cut characterization of the banned group’s actions as “effective.”
David Greene, civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told The Intercept these examples illustrate how difficult it will be to consistently enforce the new policy. “They run through a ton of scenarios,” Greene said, “but for me it’s hard to see a through-line in them that indicates generally applicable principles.”
One of Fiji’s three deputy prime ministers, Viliame Gavoka, has appealed to the country’s prime minister to review his stance on Japan’s disposal of treated nuclear wastewater into the Pacific Ocean.
Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka supports Japan’s compliance with safety protocols outlined by the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency.
However, Rabuka also spoke about the need for an independent scientific assessment.
He has also signed off on the Melanesian Spearhead Group’s Udaune Declaration on Climate Change, in which his fellow prime ministers of Papua New Guinea, Solomon Oslands and Vanuatu, and spokersperson of FLNKS of New Caledonia, “strongly urged Japan “not to discharge the treated water into the Pacific Ocean until and unless the treated water is incontrovertibly proven scientifically to be safe to do so and seriously consider other options like use in concrete”.
Japan has, however, already begun the release of the treated nuclear wastewater in spite of strong condemnation from the region and across the world.
Gavoka, who is also leader of the Social Democratic Liberal Party (SODELPA), further highlighted the concerns of his party’s Youth section which also implored Rabuka to reconsider his position.
Fiji Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka (sitting middle, flanked by host Vanuatu PM Ishmael Kalsakau, left, and Solomon Islands PM Manasseh Sogavare) signs up to the Udaune Declaration on Climate Change and the Efate Declaration on Security at the 22nd Melanesian Spearhead Group Leader’s Summit in Port Vila. last week. Image: RNZ Pacific/Kelvin Anthony
The SODELPA leader acknowledged the diversity of opinions within the coalition government and the allowance for conscience votes, underlining the dynamics of political relationships.
SODELPA general-secretary Viliame Takayawa is also concerned, particularly noting the view that Rabuka has taken on the role of a national leader.
He confirmed that the party intends to communicate directly with the prime minister on Tuesday to raise this pressing issue.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
