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Javier E

Death threat to whistleblower's lawyer points to Trump's depravity - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • “All traitors must die miserable deaths,” a man from Michigan allegedly wrote in an email to Mark Zaid, the lawyer for the whistleblower who got the scandal rolling that ultimately resulted in President Trump’s impeachment. The man added: “We will hunt you down and bleed you out like the pigs you are.”
  • The author of this email has now been charged by federal prosecutors with making a death threat, Politico’s Natasha Bertrand reports. This came after Trump tweeted about the whistleblower many, many times, after Trump suggested the whistleblower should be executed and after Trump ripped into the whistleblower’s lawyer at a rally.
  • despite this, Trump and his allies have kept up the attacks on the whistleblower and have engaged in transparent efforts to place him in danger. House Republicans kept insisting that the whistleblower testify, and even as late as Trump’s trial, Senate Republicans were threatening to haul him in.
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  • Trump himself kept demanding to know where he was, and even retweeted a tweet purportedly outing the whistleblower’s name.Trump and his allies did this despite warnings from experts that such acts could discourage future whistleblowers from revealing wrongdoing. Indeed, they probably saw those warnings as a good reason to keep up the attacks.
  • House Democrats didn’t seek the whistleblower’s testimony for a reason: not just to keep him safe, but also because the case against Trump had been broadly bolstered by a tremendous wealth of evidence on the public record.
  • it adds an additional layer of depravity to the whole affair that the whistleblower’s complaint has been utterly irrelevant to Trump’s legal travails for months. The only conceivable reasons for doing this are to discourage future whistleblowers from exposing wrongdoing and to extract naked revenge against the whistleblower for daring to expose Trump’s corruption in the first place.
  • The larger context here is that Trump has already continued such attacks even when warned that they could have dire consequences. When reporters have personally appealed to Trump’s humanity by telling him they fear his attacks on the media could result in them getting harmed, he has basically shrugged.
  • even after a man was arrested for allegedly threatening mass murder against journalists while repeating Trump’s “enemy of the people” language about the media, Trump kept using the same language.
  • Trump recognizes zero obligation of any kind to temper his rhetoric or conduct, even when — or especially when — he learns it could have the severest of consequences.
Javier E

Opinion | Artificial Intelligence Requires Specific Safety Rules - The New York Times - 0 views

  • For about five years, OpenAI used a system of nondisclosure agreements to stifle public criticism from outgoing employees. Current and former OpenAI staffers were paranoid about talking to the press. In May, one departing employee refused to sign and went public in The Times. The company apologized and scrapped the agreements. Then the floodgates opened. Exiting employees began criticizing OpenAI’s safety practices, and a wave of articles emerged about its broken promises.
  • These stories came from people who were willing to risk their careers to inform the public. How many more are silenced because they’re too scared to speak out? Since existing whistle-blower protections typically cover only the reporting of illegal conduct, they are inadequate here. Artificial intelligence can be dangerous without being illegal
  • A.I. needs stronger protections — like those in place in parts of the public sector, finance and publicly traded companies — that prohibit retaliation and establish anonymous reporting channels.
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  • The company’s chief executive was briefly fired after the nonprofit board lost trust in him.
  • OpenAI has spent the last year mired in scandal
  • Whistle-blowers alleged to the Securities and Exchange Commission that OpenAI’s nondisclosure agreements were illegal.
  • Safety researchers have left the company in droves
  • Now the firm is restructuring its core business as a for-profit, seemingly prompting the departure of more key leaders
  • On Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI rushed testing of a major model in May, attempting to undercut a rival’s publicity; after the release, employees found out the model exceeded the company’s standards for safety. (The company told The Journal the findings were the result of a methodological flaw.)
  • This behavior would be concerning in any industry, but according to OpenAI itself, A.I. poses unique risks. The leaders of the top A.I. firms and leading A.I. researchers have warned that the technology could lead to human extinction.
  • Since more comprehensive national A.I. regulations aren’t coming anytime soon, we need a narrow federal law allowing employees to disclose information to Congress if they reasonably believe that an A.I. model poses a significant safety risk
  • But McKinsey did not hold the majority of employees’ compensation hostage in exchange for signing lifetime nondisparagement agreements, as OpenAI did.
  • People reporting violations of the Atomic Energy Act have more robust whistle-blower protections than those in most fields, while those working in biological toxins for several government departments are protected by proactive, pro-reporting guidance. A.I. workers need similar rules.
  • Many companies maintain a culture of secrecy beyond what is healthy. I once worked at the consulting firm McKinsey on a team that advised Immigration and Customs Enforcement on implementing Donald Trump’s inhumane immigration policies. I was fearful of going public
  • Congress should establish a special inspector general to serve as a point of contact for these whistle-blowers. The law should mandate companies to notify staff about the channels available to them, which they can use without facing retaliation.
  • Earlier this month, OpenAI released a highly advanced new model. For the first time, experts concluded the model could aid in the construction of a bioweapon more effectively than internet research alone could. A third party hired by the company found that the new system demonstrated evidence of “power seeking” and “the basic capabilities needed to do simple in-context scheming
  • penAI decided to publish these results, but the company still chooses what information to share. It is possible the published information paints an incomplete picture of the model’s risks.
  • The A.I. safety researcher Todor Markov — who recently left OpenAI after nearly six years with the firm — suggested one hypothetical scenario. An A.I. company promises to test its models for dangerous capabilities, then cherry-picks results to make the model look safe. A concerned employee wants to notify someone, but doesn’t know who — and can’t point to a specific law being broken. The new model is released, and a terrorist uses it to construct a novel bioweapon. Multiple former OpenAI employees told me this scenario is plausible.
  • The United States’ current arrangement of managing A.I. risks through voluntary commitments places enormous trust in the companies developing this potentially dangerous technology. Unfortunately, the industry in general — and OpenAI in particular — has shown itself to be unworthy of that trust, time and again.
  • The fate of the first attempt to protect A.I. whistle-blowers rests with Governor Gavin Newsom of California. Mr. Newsom has hinted that he will veto a first-of-its-kind A.I. safety bill, called S.B. 1047, which mandates that the largest A.I. companies implement safeguards to prevent catastrophes, features whistle-blower protections, a rare point of agreement between the bill’s supporters and its critics
  • if those legislators are serious in their support for these protections, they should introduce a federal A.I. whistle-blower protection bill. They are well positioned to do so: The letter’s organizer, Representative Zoe Lofgren, is the ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology.
  • Last month, a group of leading A.I. experts warned that as the technology rapidly progresses, “we face growing risks that A.I. could be misused to attack critical infrastructure, develop dangerous weapons or cause other forms of catastrophic harm.” These risks aren’t necessarily criminal, but they are real — and they could prove deadly. If that happens, employees at OpenAI and other companies will be the first to know. But will they tell us?
yehbru

Whistleblowers Allege Improper Hiring At Justice Department During Trump's Last Days : NPR - 0 views

  • Two whistleblowers assert that a Justice Department official improperly injected politics into the hiring process during his waning days in the Trump administration, according to a new filing obtained by NPR.
  • The whistleblowers accuse Jeffrey Bossert Clark of conducting a "sham" process and elevating a person who volunteered to defend a controversial Trump policy on abortion access, even though the person had far less experience than other finalists for the job in the Civil Division, they said in a Wednesday letter to House and Senate lawmakers and the Justice Department's inspector general
  • The whistleblowers said that Clark's participation in the hiring process for an assistant director of the Civil Division was unusual and that he engaged in "perfunctory" 15-minute interviews with two more highly qualified finalists for the post.
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  • "What set the successful appointee apart from the other candidates was that the appointee — unlike the others — had volunteered and was part of the DOJ litigation team defending a controversial Trump administration policy," according to their letter.
  • "Mr. Clark's last-minute politicization of the DOJ hiring process and issuance of policy memoranda — capped by his willingness to participate in what was close to an attempted coup d'état — demands immediate, close and transparent oversight and investigations."
Javier E

Whistleblower: Twitter misled investors, FTC and underplayed spam issues - Washington Post - 0 views

  • Twitter executives deceived federal regulators and the company’s own board of directors about “extreme, egregious deficiencies” in its defenses against hackers, as well as its meager efforts to fight spam, according to an explosive whistleblower complaint from its former security chief.
  • The complaint from former head of security Peiter Zatko, a widely admired hacker known as “Mudge,” depicts Twitter as a chaotic and rudderless company beset by infighting, unable to properly protect its 238 million daily users including government agencies, heads of state and other influential public figures.
  • Among the most serious accusations in the complaint, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post, is that Twitter violated the terms of an 11-year-old settlement with the Federal Trade Commission by falsely claiming that it had a solid security plan. Zatko’s complaint alleges he had warned colleagues that half the company’s servers were running out-of-date and vulnerable software and that executives withheld dire facts about the number of breaches and lack of protection for user data, instead presenting directors with rosy charts measuring unimportant changes.
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  • “Security and privacy have long been top companywide priorities at Twitter,” said Twitter spokeswoman Rebecca Hahn. She said that Zatko’s allegations appeared to be “riddled with inaccuracies” and that Zatko “now appears to be opportunistically seeking to inflict harm on Twitter, its customers, and its shareholders.” Hahn said that Twitter fired Zatko after 15 months “for poor performance and leadership.” Attorneys for Zatko confirmed he was fired but denied it was for performance or leadership.
  • the whistleblower document alleges the company prioritized user growth over reducing spam, though unwanted content made the user experience worse. Executives stood to win individual bonuses of as much as $10 million tied to increases in daily users, the complaint asserts, and nothing explicitly for cutting spam.
  • Chief executive Parag Agrawal was “lying” when he tweeted in May that the company was “strongly incentivized to detect and remove as much spam as we possibly can,” the complaint alleges.
  • Zatko described his decision to go public as an extension of his previous work exposing flaws in specific pieces of software and broader systemic failings in cybersecurity. He was hired at Twitter by former CEO Jack Dorsey in late 2020 after a major hack of the company’s systems.
  • “I felt ethically bound. This is not a light step to take,” said Zatko, who was fired by Agrawal in January. He declined to discuss what happened at Twitter, except to stand by the formal complaint. Under SEC whistleblower rules, he is entitled to legal protection against retaliation, as well as potential monetary rewards.
  • A person familiar with Zatko’s tenure said the company investigated Zatko’s security claims during his time there and concluded they were sensationalistic and without merit. Four people familiar with Twitter’s efforts to fight spam said the company deploys extensive manual and automated tools to both measure the extent of spam across the service and reduce it.
  • In 1998, Zatko had testified to Congress that the internet was so fragile that he and others could take it down with a half-hour of concentrated effort. He later served as the head of cyber grants at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon innovation unit that had backed the internet’s invention.
  • Overall, Zatko wrote in a February analysis for the company attached as an exhibit to the SEC complaint, “Twitter is grossly negligent in several areas of information security. If these problems are not corrected, regulators, media and users of the platform will be shocked when they inevitably learn about Twitter’s severe lack of security basics.”
  • Zatko’s complaint says strong security should have been much more important to Twitter, which holds vast amounts of sensitive personal data about users. Twitter has the email addresses and phone numbers of many public figures, as well as dissidents who communicate over the service at great personal risk.
  • This month, an ex-Twitter employee was convicted of using his position at the company to spy on Saudi dissidents and government critics, passing their information to a close aide of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in exchange for cash and gifts.
  • Zatko’s complaint says he believed the Indian government had forced Twitter to put one of its agents on the payroll, with access to user data at a time of intense protests in the country. The complaint said supporting information for that claim has gone to the National Security Division of the Justice Department and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Another person familiar with the matter agreed that the employee was probably an agent.
  • “Take a tech platform that collects massive amounts of user data, combine it with what appears to be an incredibly weak security infrastructure and infuse it with foreign state actors with an agenda, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster,” Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee,
  • Many government leaders and other trusted voices use Twitter to spread important messages quickly, so a hijacked account could drive panic or violence. In 2013, a captured Associated Press handle falsely tweeted about explosions at the White House, sending the Dow Jones industrial average briefly plunging more than 140 points.
  • After a teenager managed to hijack the verified accounts of Obama, then-candidate Joe Biden, Musk and others in 2020, Twitter’s chief executive at the time, Jack Dorsey, asked Zatko to join him, saying that he could help the world by fixing Twitter’s security and improving the public conversation, Zatko asserts in the complaint.
  • The complaint — filed last month with the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Justice, as well as the FTC — says thousands of employees still had wide-ranging and poorly tracked internal access to core company software, a situation that for years had led to embarrassing hacks, including the commandeering of accounts held by such high-profile users as Elon Musk and former presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump.
  • But at Twitter Zatko encountered problems more widespread than he realized and leadership that didn’t act on his concerns, according to the complaint.
  • Twitter’s difficulties with weak security stretches back more than a decade before Zatko’s arrival at the company in November 2020. In a pair of 2009 incidents, hackers gained administrative control of the social network, allowing them to reset passwords and access user data. In the first, beginning around January of that year, hackers sent tweets from the accounts of high-profile users, including Fox News and Obama.
  • Several months later, a hacker was able to guess an employee’s administrative password after gaining access to similar passwords in their personal email account. That hacker was able to reset at least one user’s password and obtain private information about any Twitter user.
  • Twitter continued to suffer high-profile hacks and security violations, including in 2017, when a contract worker briefly took over Trump’s account, and in the 2020 hack, in which a Florida teen tricked Twitter employees and won access to verified accounts. Twitter then said it put additional safeguards in place.
  • This year, the Justice Department accused Twitter of asking users for their phone numbers in the name of increased security, then using the numbers for marketing. Twitter agreed to pay a $150 million fine for allegedly breaking the 2011 order, which barred the company from making misrepresentations about the security of personal data.
  • After Zatko joined the company, he found it had made little progress since the 2011 settlement, the complaint says. The complaint alleges that he was able to reduce the backlog of safety cases, including harassment and threats, from 1 million to 200,000, add staff and push to measure results.
  • But Zatko saw major gaps in what the company was doing to satisfy its obligations to the FTC, according to the complaint. In Zatko’s interpretation, according to the complaint, the 2011 order required Twitter to implement a Software Development Life Cycle program, a standard process for making sure new code is free of dangerous bugs. The complaint alleges that other employees had been telling the board and the FTC that they were making progress in rolling out that program to Twitter’s systems. But Zatko alleges that he discovered that it had been sent to only a tenth of the company’s projects, and even then treated as optional.
  • “If all of that is true, I don’t think there’s any doubt that there are order violations,” Vladeck, who is now a Georgetown Law professor, said in an interview. “It is possible that the kinds of problems that Twitter faced eleven years ago are still running through the company.”
  • “Agrawal’s Tweets and Twitter’s previous blog posts misleadingly imply that Twitter employs proactive, sophisticated systems to measure and block spam bots,” the complaint says. “The reality: mostly outdated, unmonitored, simple scripts plus overworked, inefficient, understaffed, and reactive human teams.”
  • One current and one former employee recalled that incident, when failures at two Twitter data centers drove concerns that the service could have collapsed for an extended period. “I wondered if the company would exist in a few days,” one of them said.
  • The current and former employees also agreed with the complaint’s assertion that past reports to various privacy regulators were “misleading at best.”
  • For example, they said the company implied that it had destroyed all data on users who asked, but the material had spread so widely inside Twitter’s networks, it was impossible to know for sure
  • As the head of security, Zatko says he also was in charge of a division that investigated users’ complaints about accounts, which meant that he oversaw the removal of some bots, according to the complaint. Spam bots — computer programs that tweet automatically — have long vexed Twitter. Unlike its social media counterparts, Twitter allows users to program bots to be used on its service: For example, the Twitter account @big_ben_clock is programmed to tweet “Bong Bong Bong” every hour in time with Big Ben in London. Twitter also allows people to create accounts without using their real identities, making it harder for the company to distinguish between authentic, duplicate and automated accounts.
  • In the complaint, Zatko alleges he could not get a straight answer when he sought what he viewed as an important data point: the prevalence of spam and bots across all of Twitter, not just among monetizable users.
  • Zatko cites a “sensitive source” who said Twitter was afraid to determine that number because it “would harm the image and valuation of the company.” He says the company’s tools for detecting spam are far less robust than implied in various statements.
  • The complaint also alleges that Zatko warned the board early in his tenure that overlapping outages in the company’s data centers could leave it unable to correctly restart its servers. That could have left the service down for months, or even have caused all of its data to be lost. That came close to happening in 2021, when an “impending catastrophic” crisis threatened the platform’s survival before engineers were able to save the day, the complaint says, without providing further details.
  • The four people familiar with Twitter’s spam and bot efforts said the engineering and integrity teams run software that samples thousands of tweets per day, and 100 accounts are sampled manually.
  • Some employees charged with executing the fight agreed that they had been short of staff. One said top executives showed “apathy” toward the issue.
  • Zatko’s complaint likewise depicts leadership dysfunction, starting with the CEO. Dorsey was largely absent during the pandemic, which made it hard for Zatko to get rulings on who should be in charge of what in areas of overlap and easier for rival executives to avoid collaborating, three current and former employees said.
  • For example, Zatko would encounter disinformation as part of his mandate to handle complaints, according to the complaint. To that end, he commissioned an outside report that found one of the disinformation teams had unfilled positions, yawning language deficiencies, and a lack of technical tools or the engineers to craft them. The authors said Twitter had no effective means of dealing with consistent spreaders of falsehoods.
  • Dorsey made little effort to integrate Zatko at the company, according to the three employees as well as two others familiar with the process who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive dynamics. In 12 months, Zatko could manage only six one-on-one calls, all less than 30 minutes, with his direct boss Dorsey, who also served as CEO of payments company Square, now known as Block, according to the complaint. Zatko allegedly did almost all of the talking, and Dorsey said perhaps 50 words in the entire year to him. “A couple dozen text messages” rounded out their electronic communication, the complaint alleges.
  • Faced with such inertia, Zatko asserts that he was unable to solve some of the most serious issues, according to the complaint.
  • Some 30 percent of company laptops blocked automatic software updates carrying security fixes, and thousands of laptops had complete copies of Twitter’s source code, making them a rich target for hackers, it alleges.
  • A successful hacker takeover of one of those machines would have been able to sabotage the product with relative ease, because the engineers pushed out changes without being forced to test them first in a simulated environment, current and former employees said.
  • “It’s near-incredible that for something of that scale there would not be a development test environment separate from production and there would not be a more controlled source-code management process,” said Tony Sager, former chief operating officer at the cyberdefense wing of the National Security Agency, the Information Assurance divisio
  • Sager is currently senior vice president at the nonprofit Center for Internet Security, where he leads a consensus effort to establish best security practices.
  • The complaint says that about half of Twitter’s roughly 7,000 full-time employees had wide access to the company’s internal software and that access was not closely monitored, giving them the ability to tap into sensitive data and alter how the service worked. Three current and former employees agreed that these were issues.
  • “A best practice is that you should only be authorized to see and access what you need to do your job, and nothing else,” said former U.S. chief information security officer Gregory Touhill. “If half the company has access to and can make configuration changes to the production environment, that exposes the company and its customers to significant risk.”
  • The complaint says Dorsey never encouraged anyone to mislead the board about the shortcomings, but that others deliberately left out bad news.
  • When Dorsey left in November 2021, a difficult situation worsened under Agrawal, who had been responsible for security decisions as chief technology officer before Zatko’s hiring, the complaint says.
  • An unnamed executive had prepared a presentation for the new CEO’s first full board meeting, according to the complaint. Zatko’s complaint calls the presentation deeply misleading.
  • The presentation showed that 92 percent of employee computers had security software installed — without mentioning that those installations determined that a third of the machines were insecure, according to the complaint.
  • Another graphic implied a downward trend in the number of people with overly broad access, based on the small subset of people who had access to the highest administrative powers, known internally as “God mode.” That number was in the hundreds. But the number of people with broad access to core systems, which Zatko had called out as a big problem after joining, had actually grown slightly and remained in the thousands.
  • The presentation included only a subset of serious intrusions or other security incidents, from a total Zatko estimated as one per week, and it said that the uncontrolled internal access to core systems was responsible for just 7 percent of incidents, when Zatko calculated the real proportion as 60 percent.
  • Zatko stopped the material from being presented at the Dec. 9, 2021 meeting, the complaint said. But over his continued objections, Agrawal let it go to the board’s smaller Risk Committee a week later.
  • Agrawal didn’t respond to requests for comment. In an email to employees after publication of this article, obtained by The Post, he said that privacy and security continues to be a top priority for the company, and he added that the narrative is “riddled with inconsistences” and “presented without important context.”
  • On Jan. 4, Zatko reported internally that the Risk Committee meeting might have been fraudulent, which triggered an Audit Committee investigation.
  • Agarwal fired him two weeks later. But Zatko complied with the company’s request to spell out his concerns in writing, even without access to his work email and documents, according to the complaint.
  • Since Zatko’s departure, Twitter has plunged further into chaos with Musk’s takeover, which the two parties agreed to in May. The stock price has fallen, many employees have quit, and Agrawal has dismissed executives and frozen big projects.
  • Zatko said he hoped that by bringing new scrutiny and accountability, he could improve the company from the outside.
  • “I still believe that this is a tremendous platform, and there is huge value and huge risk, and I hope that looking back at this, the world will be a better place, in part because of this.”
liamhudgings

Whistleblowing: A Primer | JSTOR Daily - 0 views

  • In 1778, the Continental Congress decreed that it was “the duty of all persons in the service of the United States … to give the earliest information to Congress or any proper authority of any misconduct, frauds or misdemeanors by any officers or persons in the service of these states.”
  • “the country’s treatment of whistleblowers has been a conflicted one.”
  • the whistleblower is labeled a traitor by those in power,
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  •  Defending his actions in 1971, Daniel Ellsberg said, “I felt that as an American citizen, as a responsible citizen, I could no longer cooperate in concealing this information from the American public.”
katherineharron

House Democrats halt Republican resolution to censure Schiff - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • House Democrats stopped a Republican-led effort to force a floor vote Monday on a resolution to censure Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff, one of the Democrats leading the impeachment investigation, "for certain misleading conduct" in his characterization of a phone call between President Donald Trump and the Ukrainian President.
  • The House voted 218-185 along party lines to table the proposal, effectively killing the resolution in the Democratic-led chamber.
  • It will be said of House Republicans, When they found they lacked the courage to confront the most dangerous and unethical president in American history, They consoled themselves by attacking those who did," Schiff tweeted.
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  • Republicans, including the President, have attacked Schiff for the way he portrayed a rough transcript of the President's call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at a public hearing last month, in which Schiff said that Trump told Zelensky "I want you to make up dirt on my political opponent. Understand? Lots of it, on this and on that."
  • The measure comes following Schiff's clarification earlier this month about comments he made in September that his committee had not spoken directly with a whistleblower -- after his office acknowledged that it had been in contact with the whistleblower before the complaint over Trump's conversation with Zelensky was filed.
  • The President expressed his support for the resolution on Monday morning, tweeting that "Censure (at least) Corrupt Adam Schiff! After what he got caught doing, any pol who does not so vote cannot be honest....are you listening Dems?"
  • Trump on Saturday also threatened to sue Schiff and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as they lead an impeachment inquiry into the President.
anonymous

U.S. House intelligence panel subpoenas top Homeland official over whistleblower compla... - 0 views

  • a whistleblower complaint made by former DHS intelligence chief Brian Murphy, who has alleged that top DHS officials and a White House official sought to skew official intelligence reports.
  • DHS efforts to stall the committee’s investigation into Murphy’s allegations.
  • Murphy said he was pressured to stop providing assessments of the threat of Russian interference in the Nov. 3 U.S. election and to play down white supremacist activity. In addition, he said acting DHS secretary Chad Wolf told him in May to report instead on political interference threats posed by China and Iran and to highlight the involvement of left-wing groups in domestic disorder.
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  • DHS has moved slowly to grant them security clearances
  • denied Murphy pre-deposition access to all but unclassified materials he worked on
woodlu

Facebook flounders in the court of public opinion | The Economist - 2 views

  • “YOU ARE a 21st-century American hero,” gushed Ed Markey, a Democratic senator from Massachusetts. He was not addressing the founder of one of the country’s largest companies, Facebook, but the woman who found fault with it
  • Frances Haugen, who had worked at the social-media giant before becoming a whistleblower, testified in front of a Senate subcommittee for over three hours on October 5th, highlighting Facebook’s “moral bankruptcy” and the firm’s downplaying of its harmful impact, including fanning teenage depression and ethnic violence.
  • Facebook’s own private research, for example, found that its photo-sharing site, Instagram, worsened teens’ suicidal thoughts and eating disorders. Yet it still made a point of sending young users engaging content that stoked their anxiety—while proceeding to develop a version of its site for those under the age of 13.
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  • In 2018 a different whistleblower outed Facebook for its sketchy collaboration with Cambridge Analytica, a research organisation that allowed users’ data to be collected without their consent and used for political profiling by Donald Trump’s campaign. Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, went to Washington, DC to apologise, and in 2019 America’s consumer-protection agency, the Federal Trade Commission, agreed to a $5bn settlement with Facebook. That is the largest fine ever levied against a tech firm.
  • Congress has repeatedly called in tech bosses for angry questioning and public shaming without taking direct action afterwards.
  • Senators, who cannot agree on such uncontroversial things as paying for the government’s expenses, united against a common enemy and promised Ms Haugen that they would hold Facebook to account.
  • Congress could update and strengthen the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which was passed in 1998 and bars the collection of data from children under the age of 13.
  • If Congress does follow through with legislation, it is likely to focus narrowly on protecting children online, as opposed to broader reforms, for which there is still no political consensus.
  • Social media’s harmful effects on children and teenagers is a concern that transcends partisanship and is easier to understand than sneaky data-gathering, viral misinformation and other social-networking sins.
  • Other legislative proposals take aim at manipulative marketing and design features that make social media so addictive for the young.
  • However, Ms Haugen’s most significant impact on big tech may be inspiring others to come forward and blow the whistle on their employers’ malfeasance.
  • “A case like this one opens the floodgates and will trigger hundreds more cases,” predicts Steve Kohn, a lawyer who has represented several high-profile whistleblowers.
  • One is the industry’s culture of flouting rules and a history of non-compliance. Another is a legal framework that makes whistleblowing less threatening and more attractive than it used to be.
  • The Dodd-Frank Act, which was enacted in 2010, gives greater protections to whistleblowers by preventing retaliation from employers and by offering rewards to successful cases of up to 10-30% of the money collected from sanctions against a firm.
  • If the threat of public shaming encourages corporate accountability, that is a good thing. But it could also make tech firms less inclusive and transparent, predicts Matt Perault, a former Facebook executive who is director of the Centre for Technology Policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
  • People may become less willing to share off-the-wall ideas if they worry about public leaks; companies may become less open with their staff; and executives could start including only a handful of trusted senior staff in meetings that might have otherwise been less restricted.
  • Facebook and other big tech firms, which have been criticised for violating people’s privacy online, can no longer count on any privacy either.
Javier E

Revealed: Credit Suisse leak unmasks criminals, fraudsters and corrupt politicians | Cr... - 0 views

  • The huge trove of banking data was leaked by an anonymous whistleblower to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. “I believe that Swiss banking secrecy laws are immoral,” the whistleblower source said in a statement. “The pretext of protecting financial privacy is merely a fig leaf covering the shameful role of Swiss banks as collaborators of tax evaders.”
  • Swiss financial institutions manage about 7.9tn CHF (£6.3tn) in assets, nearly half of which belongs to foreign clients.
  • It identifies the convicts and money launderers who were able to open bank accounts, or keep them open for years after their crimes emerged. And it reveals how Switzerland’s famed banking secrecy laws helped facilitate the looting of countries in the developing world.
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  • his case is one of dozens discovered by reporters appearing to show Credit Suisse opened or maintained accounts for clients who had serious convictions that might be expected to show up in due diligence checks. There are other instances in which Credit Suisse may have taken quick action after red flags emerged, but the case nonetheless shows that dubious clients have been attracted to the bank.
  • Like every other bank in the world, Credit Suisse professes to have stringent control mechanisms to carry out extensive due diligence on its customers to “ensure that the highest standards of conduct are upheld”. In banking parlance, such controls are called know-your-client or KYC checks.
  • A 2017 leaked report commissioned by Switzerland’s financial regulator shed some light on the bank’s internal procedures at that time. Clients would face intensified scrutiny when flagged as a politically exposed person from a high-risk country, or a person involved in a high-risk activity such as gambling, weapons trading, financial services or mining, the report said.
  • Such controls might be expected to prevent a bank from opening accounts for clients such as Rodoljub Radulović, a Serbian securities fraudster indicted in 2001 by the US Securities and Exchange Commission. However, the leaked data identifies him as the co-signatory of two Credit Suisse company accounts. The first was opened in 2005, the year after the SEC had secured a default judgment against Radulović for running a pump-and-dump scheme.
  • One of Radulović’s company accounts held 3.4m CHF (£2.2m) before they closed in 2010. He was recently given a 10-year prison sentence by a court in Belgrade for his role trafficking cocaine from South America for the organised crime boss Darko Šarić.
  • Due diligence is not only for new clients. Banks are required to continually reassess existing customers. The 2017 report said Credit Suisse screened customers at least every three years and as often as once a year for the riskiest clients. Lawyers for Credit Suisse told the Guardian these periodic reviews were introduced “more than 15 years ago”, meaning it was continually running due diligence on existing clients from 2007.
  • The bank might, therefore, have been expected to have discovered that its German client Eduard Seidel was convicted of bribery in 2008. Seidel was an employee of Siemens. As the multinational’s lead in Nigeria, he oversaw a campaign of industrial-scale bribery to secure lucrative contracts for his employer by funnelling cash to corrupt Nigerian politicians.
  • After German authorities raided the Munich headquarters of Siemens in 2006, Seidel immediately confessed his role in the bribery scheme, though he said he had never stolen from the company or appropriated its slush funds. His involvement in the corruption led to his name being entered into the Thomson Reuters World-Check database in 2007.
  • However, the leaked Credit Suisse data shows his accounts were left open until at least well into the last decade. At one point after he left Siemens, one account was worth 54m CHF (£24m). Seidel’s lawyer declined to say whether the accounts were his. He said his client had addressed all outstanding matters relating to his bribery offences and wished to move on with his life.
  • The lawyer did not respond to repeated invitations to explain the source of the 54m CHF. Siemens said it did not know about the money and that its review of its own cashflows shed no light on the account.
  • A representative for Sederholm said Credit Suisse never froze his accounts and did not close them until 2013 when he was unable to provide due diligence material. Asked why Sederholm needed a Swiss account, they said that he was living in Thailand when it was opened, adding: “Can you please tell me if you would prefer to put your money in a Thai or Swiss bank?”
  • One client, Stefan Sederholm, a Swedish computer technician who opened an account with Credit Suisse in 2008, was able to keep it open for two-and-a-half years after his widely reported conviction for human trafficking in the Philippines, for which he was given a life sentence.
  • Swiss banks have cultivated their trusted reputation since as far back as 1713, when the Great Council of Geneva prohibited bankers from revealing details about the fortunes being deposited by European aristocrats. Switzerland soon became a tax haven for many of the world’s elites and its bankers nurtured a “duty of absolute silence” about their clients affairs.
  • The custom was enshrined in statute in 1934 with the introduction of Switzerland’s banking secrecy law, which criminalised the disclosure of client banking information to foreign authorities. Within decades, wealthy clients from all over the world were flocking to Swiss banks. Sometimes, that meant clients with something to hide.
  • One former Credit Suisse employee at the time alleges there was a deeply ingrained culture in Swiss banking of looking the other way when it came to problematic clients. “The bank’s compliance departments [were] masters of plausible deniability,” they told a reporter from the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, one of the coordinators of the Suisse secrets project. “Never write anything down that could expose an account that is non-compliant and never ask a question you do not want to know the answer to.”
  • The 2000s was also a decade in which foreign regulators and tax authorities became increasingly frustrated at their inability to penetrate the Swiss financial system. That changed in 2007, when the UBS banker Bradley Birkenfeld voluntarily approached US authorities with information about how the bank was helping thousands of wealthy Americans evade tax with secret accounts.
  • Birkenfeld was viewed as a traitor in Switzerland, where banking whistleblowers are often held in contempt. However, a wide-ranging US Senate investigation later uncovered the aggressive tactics used by UBS and Credit Suisse, the latter of which was found to have sent bankers to high-end events to recruit clients, courted a potential customer with free gold, and in one case even delivered sensitive bank statements hidden in the pages of a Sports Illustrated magazine.
  • The revelations sent shock waves through Switzerland’s financial sector and enraged the US, which pressured Switzerland into unilaterally disclosing which of its taxpayers had secret Swiss accounts from 2014. That same year, Switzerland reluctantly signed up to the international convention on the automatic exchange of banking Information.
  • By adopting the so-called common reporting standard (CRS) for sharing tax data, Switzerland in effect agreed that its banks would in the future exchange information about their clients with tax authorities in foreign countries. They started doing so in 2018.
  • Membership of the global exchange system is often cited by Switzerland’s banking industry as a turning point. “There is no longer Swiss bank client confidentiality for clients abroad,” the Swiss Bankers Association told the Guardian. “We are transparent, there is nothing to hide in Switzerland.”
  • Switzerland’s almost 90-year-old banking secrecy law, however, remains in force – and was recently broadened. The Tax Justice Network estimates that countries around the world collectively lose $21bn (£15.4bn) each year in tax revenues because of Switzerland. Many of those countries will be poorer nations that have not signed up to the CRS data exchange.
  • More than 90 countries, most of which are in the developing world, remain in the dark when their wealthy taxpayers hide their money in Swiss accounts.
  • This inequity in the system was cited by the whistleblower behind the leaked data, who said the CRS system “imposes a disproportionate financial and infrastructural burden on developing nations, perpetuating their exclusion from the system in the foreseeable future”.
  • “This situation enables corruption and starves developing countries of much-needed tax revenue. These countries are the ones that therefore suffer most from Switzerland’s reverse-Robin-Hood stunt,” they said.
  • “I am aware that having an offshore Swiss bank account does not necessarily imply tax evasion or any other financial crime,” they said. “However, it is likely that a significant number of these accounts were opened with the sole purpose of hiding their holder’s wealth from fiscal institutions and/or avoiding the payment of taxes on capital gains.”
Javier E

This war will be a total failure, FSB whistleblower says | News | The Times - 0 views

  • Spies in Russia’s infamous security apparatus were kept in the dark about President Putin’s plan to invade Ukraine, according to a whistleblower who described the war as a “total failure” that could be compared only to the collapse of Nazi Germany.
  • A report thought to be by an analyst in the FSB, the successor agency to the KGB, said that the Russian dead could already number 10,000. The Russian defence ministry has acknowledged the deaths of only 498 of its soldiers in Ukraine.
  • The report said the FSB was being blamed for the failure of the invasion but had been given no warning of it and was unprepared to deal with the effects of crippling sanctions.
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  • The whistleblower added that no one in the government knew the true figure of the dead because “we have lost contact with major divisions”.
  • FSB officers had been ordered to assess the effects of western sanctions, they said, but were told that it was a hypothetical box-ticking exercise. “You have to write the analysis in a way that makes Russia the victor . . . otherwise you get questioned for not doing good work,” they wrote. “Suddenly it happens and everything comes down to your completely groundless analysis.
  • “[We are] acting intuitively, on emotion . . . our stakes will have to be raised ever higher with the hope that suddenly something might come through for us.
  • “By and large, though, Russia has no way out. There are no options for a possible victory, only defeat.”
  • The letter said that Ramzan Kadyrov, the Chechen leader and an ally of Putin, was on the verge of outright conflict with the Russians after his “hit squad”, sent to kill President Zelensky, was destroyed by Ukrainian forces.
  • Even if Zelensky were killed, the report said, Russia would have no hope of occupying Ukraine. “Even with minimum resistance from the Ukrainians we’d need over 500,000 people, not including supply and logistics workers.”
  • The analyst said that the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence service, was trying to “dig up dirt” to claim that Ukraine had built nuclear weapons, a pretext for a pre-emptive strike.
  • The 2,000-word document was published by Vladimir Osechkin, a Russian human rights activist who runs the anti-corruption website Gulagu.net.
  • Christo Grozev, an expert on the Russian security services, said he had shown the letter to two FSB officers, both of whom had had “no doubt it was written by a colleague”.
  • The war, the writer said, had been given a “provisional deadline” of June because by then the Russian economy will have collapsed. “I have hardly slept at all recently, working all hours, in a brain-fog,” they wrote. “Maybe it’s from overwork, but I feel like I am in a surreal world. Pandora’s Box has been opened.”
  • The author said they could not rule out international conflict and that they were expecting “some f***ing adviser to convince the leadership” to send an ultimatum to the West threatening war if sanctions were not lifted.
  • “What if the West refuses?” they wrote. “In that instance I won’t exclude that we will be pulled into a real international conflict, just like Hitler in 1939.” Elsewhere in the letter they said: “Our position is like Germany in 1943-44 — but that’s our starting position.”
katherineharron

Impeachment watch: The next House impeachment witness is the most important so far - CN... - 0 views

  • Bill Taylor, currently the top official at the US Embassy in Ukraine, will get his moment before congressional investigators Tuesday. Taylor was one of the officials whose text messages were released by House Democrats earlier this month. His explanation for why he said he felt the US was trading foreign aid to Ukraine for political favors to the President could be a key piece of evidence for House investigators.As investigators build their case for impeachment against President Donald Trump, half of Americans now say Trump should be impeached and removed from office, according to a newly released CNN poll. That's a new high in CNN polling on the topic.
  • Kurt Volker handed over the text messages that showed concern about a quid pro quo.Marie Yovanovitch said she was targeted by Rudy Giuliani and stood up for foreign service officers.Fiona Hill said that her boss, former national security adviser John Bolton, compared the shadow diplomacy being done on President Donald Trump's behalf to a "drug deal."George Kent, according to The Washington Post, said Trump soured on Ukraine after talking to Russia's Vladimir Putin and Hungary's Viktor Orban. He also backed up Yovanovitch and said he lit flares in 2015 about Hunter Biden.Gordon Sondland said Trump told him to work with Giuliani on Ukraine.
  • Taylor is expected to be asked about the text messages he sent US Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland in September, before the whistleblower complaint was released.
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  • During a bizarre Q&A with reporters before a meeting with his extremely depleted Cabinet on Monday, Trump questioned whether the whistleblower needs protection.Democrats and the whistleblower's attorneys have raised questions about the individual's safety in potential congressional testimony. Trump took the opportunity of the Cabinet meeting to again attack the whistleblower.
  • "You know, these whistleblowers they have them like they're angels. So do we have to protect somebody that gave a totally false account of my conversation? I don't know. You tell me."
  • The top Democrat in the Senate, Sen. Chuck Schumer, wrote to the Director of National Intelligence and Intelligence Community Inspector General demanding to know how they're going to protect the whistleblower's identity.
  • Losing Republicans is clearly something Trump worries about, which he transmitted Monday as he complained about Democrats, who unlike Republicans, he said, are "vicious and they stick together.""They don't have Mitt Romney in their midst," Trump said, referring to the Utah Senator who has criticized Trump and who we learned today goes by the pseudonym Pierre Delecto on Twitter.
  • One hard deadline is Election Day 2020. The ultimate question for Democrats could end up being whether they need to follow every lead they discover in order to vote that Trump committed high crimes or misdemeanors.
  • The President has invited foreign powers to interfere in the US presidential election.Democrats want to impeach him for it.It is a crossroads for the American system of government as the President tries to change what's acceptable for US politicians. This newsletter will focus on this consequential moment in US history.
Javier E

Mormon Church has misled members on $100 billion tax-exempt investment fund, whistleblo... - 0 views

  • His estimate of $7 billion in annual revenue points to a relatively high rate of contributions from the 15 million members. By comparison, the Catholic church in the United States was reported in 2005 to receive $8 billion in annual tithes from 170 million members.
  • These documents were sent to the IRS whistleblower office in Ogden, Utah, together with a thumb drive containing digital versions of documents and emails that Nielsen collected during his time at Ensign, the complaint says. He also provided information on Ensign’s bank accounts and a list of employees whom officials should contact.
  • The complaint describes an aggressive guarding of information by leaders at Ensign. Ensign employees “are trained to be especially sensitive” about data flowing outside the corporation, the complaint states. “Of course, all corporations need to guard their information, but the lengths that [Ensign] goes to borders on paranoia.”
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  • Only four senior Ensign executives are permitted to see the company’s full financial statements, according to the complaint, and investment staff members may access information only on the Ensign assets relating to their own area of work.
  • The company files abbreviated annual tax returns that report the taxes it paid on the small fraction of its investment activity that is taxable. The returns, which are publicly available, show that in some recent years, the company has reported losses of millions of dollars — a period in which, according to the complaint, a fuller accounting of its operations would have shown billions of dollars in profits.
  • This limited type of tax return requires Ensign to disclose the total value of its holdings, which the complaint asserts, has for years run to tens of billions of dollars. On those returns, Ensign has sometimes stated that it held $1 million, other times “more than $1,000,000,” and it once left this section of the paperwork unfilled.
sarahbalick

Luxleaks whistleblowers trial begins in Luxembourg - BBC News - 0 views

  • Luxleaks whistleblowers trial begins in Luxembourg
  • Three Frenchmen have gone on trial in Luxembourg accused of leaking thousands of confidential documents revealing corporate tax deals.
  • Two ex-employees of accounting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and a journalist are on trial. They could face up to 10 years in jail.
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  • Antoine Deltour, a former auditor at PwC, is accused of passing information on clients to French journalist Edouard Perrin, who first broke the story on French TV in 2012, in collaboration with the BBC's Panorama.
  • Raphael Halet, the other former PwC employee, is suspected of a separate leak and faces the same charges. Mr Perrin is accused of being an accomplice.
  • While Luxembourg has laws protecting whistleblowers, they are confined to exposing illegal practices. Civil rights groups have attacked the case.
  • "Deltour should be protected and commended, not prosecuted. The information he disclosed was in the public interest," said Cobus de Swardt, the Managing Director of Transparency International.
andrespardo

First thing: The Trump administration's coronavirus whistleblower | US news | The Guardian - 0 views

  • Good morning. A top US government doctor has turned whistleblower after he says he was pushed out of his role in the search for a coronavirus vaccine. Rick Bright told the New York Times he believed he was dismissed as director of the US health department’s Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority because he resisted Donald Trump’s push to use an unproven malaria drug, hydroxychloroquine, as a treatment for Covid-19:
  • Contrary to misguided directives, I limited the broad use of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, promoted by the administration as a panacea, but which clearly lack scientific merit.
  • Trump and his cheerleaders at Fox News have recently backed away from promoting the possible benefits of hydroxychloroquine, after a trial of the drug in US veterans hospitals went badly. The president told reporters on Wednesday that he had “never heard of” Bright.
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  • Despite expressing his support for the anti-lockdown movement, Trump said on Wednesday that he “strongly” disagrees with Georgia governor Brian Kemp’s decision to reopen bowling alleys, hair salons and other businesses this weekend. Many of the state’s business owners have also concluded it is “way too early” to return to normal.
  • A tale of two states.
  • Kentucky
  • The pandemic has made it almost impossible to register new voters using traditional methods in states across the US. That could have a huge impact on November’s election, writes Sam Levine.
  • Mainland China reported 55,000 cases of coronavirus in the country’s first wave of infections. But a study by researchers in Hong Kong suggests that number would have been more like 232,000, had the later adopted definition of a Covid-19 case been applied from the outset.
  • …Mexico, at least 21 doctors and nurses have suffered violent attacks, in public, after being wrongly accused of spreading the disease.
  • This California town is testing everyone
  • doctor from Bolinas, California, says her small town north of San Francisco is hoping to become a “model” for the rest of the country, after resolving to test every single member of its community for Covid-19. The town raised $300,000 through GoFundMe to buy testing equipment for its population of 1,600, to help researchers understand how the virus s
  • cats
  • Two cats in New York state have tested positive for the virus, apparently after catching it from humans – the first confirmed cases of US pets catching Covid-19.
  • Catastrophic’ flooding is coming soon. That’s according to new research, which has found that the number of people affected by floods will double to around 147 million annually by the end of the 2020s.
katherineharron

Fact-checking Trump's impeachment debate in the House - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • Only 13 months after the House first impeached President Donald Trump, lawmakers were back on Wednesday voting to impeach Trump an unprecedented second time for a US president. During the debate on the resolution, which charges that Trump incited a violent insurrection against the government on January 6, some of Trump's allies were still using many of the same arguments they did a year ago to criticize Democrats and defend Trump's actions.
  • Rep. Tom McClintock said that Trump's remarks at the Washington, DC, rally that preceded the Capitol insurrection were overly confrontational and sometimes inaccurate
  • "But what did he actually say? His exact words were: 'I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.' That's impeachable? That's called freedom of speech," McClintock said.
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  • Trump, for example, urged Republicans to stop fighting like a boxer "with his hands tied behind his back," saying, "We want to be so respectful of everybody, including bad people. And we're going to have to fight much harder."
  • Trump alleged that there would be dire consequences if his supporters did not take immediate action -- saying that, if Biden took office, "You will have an illegitimate president. That's what you'll have. And we can't let that happen." And he said, "We fight like hell. And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore."
  • In sum: McClintock and other Trump allies are entitled to argue that all of these Trump comments are not impeachable, even that they are not incendiary. But he left a misleading impression when he posed the question, "but what did he actually say?" and did not mention the most contentious things Trump actually said.
  • "And I also want to thank my Democratic colleagues for finally joining Republicans in condemning mob violence after six months of refusing to acknowledge it."
  • Republicans are entitled to argue that Democrats should have issued such condemnations more forcefully or frequently, but it's just inaccurate to say or suggest they didn't issue the condemnations at all.
  • Mueller never said Trump did nothing wrong. In fact, Mueller's final report explains that there was strong evidence that Trump obstructed justice, on several occasions. But Mueller decided not to make a decision on whether to charge Trump, for many reasons, including Department of Justice policy that a president "cannot be charged with a federal crime while he is in office."
  • And according to figures released by the Justice Department, the investigation actually cost $32 million, not $40 million.
  • Jordan also said, as he has as far back as 2019, that the whistleblower who filed the primary 2019 complaint about Trump's dealings with Ukraine "worked for Joe Biden."
  • It's possible the whistleblower interacted with Biden in the course of their job duties in the government, but that's substantially different than working for Biden himself. The whistleblower's lawyers said in 2019 that "our client has spent their entire government career in apolitical, civil servant positions in the Executive Branch" and that "in these positions our client has come into contact with presidential candidates from both parties in their roles as elected officials -- not as candidates."
johnsonel7

Nancy Pelosi on "Face the Nation": Trump has "every opportunity to present his case" in... - 0 views

  • Washington — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi refuted Republicans' claims that President Trump has not had the opportunity for due process in the impeachment inquiry, saying that the president has "every opportunity to present his case."
  • "But it's really a sad thing. I mean, what the president did was so much worse than even what Richard Nixon did, that at some point Richard Nixon cared about the country enough to recognize that this could not continue," Pelosi said. Mr. Nixon resigned before the House could vote on impeachment.
  • Mr. Trump and Republicans have argued that the president should be allowed to confront the whistleblower who wrote the complaint about the call."I will make sure he does not intimidate the whistleblower," Pelosi countered.
katherineharron

Biden transition team announces coronavirus advisers, including whistleblower Rick Brig... - 0 views

  • President-elect Joe Biden urged Americans to wear a face mask Monday, saying that doing so "is not a political statement"
  • In a speech Monday after meeting with the 12-member coronavirus task force advising him during the transition before his January 20 inauguration, Biden implored Americans to stop the politicization of basic public health precautions
  • "The goal is to get back to normal as fast as possible, and masks are critical to doing that. It won't be forever."
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  • Biden's comments come after he defeated President Donald Trump in a race in which mask-wearing became a political topic, with Biden urging Americans to follow public health experts' guidance and Trump refusing to do so -- holding rallies and White House events largely maskless attendees and downplaying their importance.
  • "It doesn't matter who you voted for; where you stood before Election Day," Biden said Monday. "It doesn't matter your party, your point of view. We could save tens of thousands of lives if everyone would just wear a mask for the next few months
  • He called drug-maker Pfizer's Monday announcement that early data shows its coronavirus vaccine is more than 90% effective good news.
  • the pandemic is an "immense and growing" threat and that a "dark winter" is still likely, with the numbers of cases and deaths reaching new peaks in recent days.
  • Biden's transition team earlier Monday morning announced the group of public health experts that will make up his coronavirus advisory board, which includes Rick Bright, a whistleblower from the Trump administration
  • he was met with skepticism by Trump administration officials when he raised concerns in the early throes of the pandemic about critical supplies shortages, is a clear signal of the contrasted direction that Biden intends to take his administration
  • Revealing the members of the pandemic task force is the transition's first major announcement, highlighting how important the President-elect finds combating the deadly virus which has taken more than 230,000 lives in the United States. The announcement also comes as the nation nears 10 million cases, with over 9.9 million reported cases as of Sunday evening, according to Johns Hopkins University data.
  • Both Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris received a briefing from the transition coronavirus advisory board on Monday
  • Biden pledged repeatedly on the campaign trail that he would listen to the advice from scientists and public health experts about the pandemic if elected president and slammed Trump's handling of the virus
  • The first such battle Biden cited was that to control the virus.
  • It's reminiscent of the focus that Biden, and former President Barack Obama, devoted to the economy when they won the White House 12 years ago in the midst of a deep economic crisis.
  • Biden pledging to take the pandemic seriously, while Trump diminished the importance of the virus
Javier E

Facebook Whistleblower's Testimony Builds Momentum for Tougher Tech Laws - WSJ - 0 views

  • “I saw Facebook repeatedly encounter conflicts between its own profit and our safety. Facebook consistently resolved these conflicts in favor of its own profits,” Ms. Haugen told a Senate consumer protection subcommittee. “As long as Facebook is operating in the shadows, hiding its research from public scrutiny, it is unaccountable. Until the incentives change, Facebook will not change.”
  • “There is no one currently holding Mark accountable but himself,” she said. Facebook under Mr. Zuckerberg makes decisions based on how they will affect measurements of user engagement, rather than their potential downsides for the public, she said.
  • “Mark has built an organization that is very metrics-driven,” she said. “The metrics make the decision. Unfortunately that itself is a decision.”
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  • Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D., Conn.), the chairman of the subcommittee conducting Tuesday’s hearing, called on Mr. Zuckerberg to appear before Congress to testify, terming the company “morally bankrupt.”
  • Facebook has said it plans to continue doing internal research and is working on ways to make that work available to others. The company has recently battled with some academic researchers over access to its data, but Facebook says that it works cooperatively with many others.
  • Republican and Democratic lawmakers at the hearing renewed their calls for regulation, such as strengthening privacy and competition laws and special online protections for children, as well as toughening of the platforms’ accountability. One idea that got a particular boost was requiring more visibility into social-media data as well as the algorithms that shape users’ experiences.
  • “The severity of this crisis demands that we break out of previous regulatory frames,” she said. “Tweaks to outdated privacy protections…will not be sufficient.”
  • A good starting point, she added, would be “full access to data for research not directed by Facebook. On this foundation, we can build sensible rules and standards to address consumer harms, illegal content, data protection, anticompetitive practices, algorithmic systems and more.”
  • Ms. Haugen also raised national-security concerns about Facebook, citing foreign surveillance on the platform—for example, Chinese monitoring of Uyghur populations—and what she termed Facebook’s “consistent understaffing” of its counterintelligence teams.
  • Ms. Haugen made the case for policy changes to address her perceived concerns. In products such as cars and cigarettes, she said, independent researchers can evaluate health effects, but “the public cannot do the same with Facebook.”
  • “This inability to see in Facebook’s actual systems and confirm that they work as communicated is like the Department of Transportation regulating cars by only watching them drive down the highway,” she said, arguing for an independent government agency that would employ experts to audit the impact of social media.
  • She said that if Congress moves to change Section 230, a federal accountability law that protects Facebook and other companies from liability for user-generated content, it should distinguish between that kind of content and choices that companies make about what type of content to promote.
  • “Facebook should not get a pass on choices it makes to prioritize virality and growth and reactiveness over public safety,” she said.
  • Ms. Haugen was hired by Facebook two years ago to help protect against election interference on Facebook. She said she acted because she was frustrated by what she viewed as Facebook’s lack of openness about the platform’s potential for harm and its unwillingness to address its flaws.
  • “I would simply say, let’s get to work,” said Sen. John Thune (R., S.D.), who has sponsored several measures on algorithm transparency. “We’ve got some things we can do here.”
  • “There’s always reason for skepticism” about Congress reaching consensus on legislation, Mr. Blumenthal said after the hearing. But he added that “there are times when the dynamic is so powerful that something actually is done…I have rarely, if ever, seen the kind of unanimity on display today.”
sidneybelleroche

Facebook whistleblower '60 Minutes' interview: Frances Haugen says the company prioriti... - 0 views

  • The identity of the Facebook whistleblower who released tens of thousands of pages of internal research and documents — leading to a firestorm for the social media company in recent weeks — was revealed on "60 Minutes" Sunday night as Frances Haugen.
  • The 37-year-old former Facebook product manager who worked on civic integrity issues at the company says the documents show that Facebook knows its platforms are used to spread hate, violence and misinformation
  • Facebook over and over again chose to optimize for its own interests, like making more money," Haugen told "60 Minutes."
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  • Haugen filed at least eight complaints with the Securities and Exchange Commission alleging that the company is hiding research about its shortcomings from investors and the public.
  • Haugen, who started at Facebook in 2019 after previously working for other tech giants like Google (GOOGL GOOGLE) and Pinterest (PINS), is set to testify on Tuesday before the Senate Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Data Security.
  • Facebook has aggressively pushed back against the reports, calling many of the claims "misleading" and arguing that its apps do more good than harm.
  • Lena Pietsch said in a statement to CNN Business immediately following the "60 Minutes" interview. "We continue to make significant improvements to tackle the spread of misinformation and harmful content. To suggest we encourage bad content and do nothing is just not true."
  • Pietsch released a more than 700-word statement laying out what it called "missing facts" from the segment
  • Haugen said she believes Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg "never set out to make a hateful platform, but he has allowed choices to be made where the side effects of those choices are that hateful and polarizing content gets more distribution and more reach."
  • Haugen said she was recruited by Facebook in 2019 and took the job to work on addressing misinformation. But after the company decided to dissolve its civic integrity team shortly after the 2020 Presidential Election, her feelings about the company started to change.
  • The social media company's algorithm that's designed to show users content that they're most likely to engage with is responsible for many of its problems
  • Haugen said that while "no one at Facebook is malevolent ... the incentives are misaligned."
  • the more anger that they get exposed to, the more they interact and the more they consume."
Alex Trudel

Europe Is Spying on You - The New York Times - 0 views

  • STRASBOURG, France — When Edward Snowden disclosed details of America’s huge surveillance program two years ago, many in Europe thought that the response would be increased transparency and stronger oversight of security services. European countries, however, are moving in the opposite direction. Instead of more public scrutiny, we are getting more snooping.
  • France recently adopted a controversial law on surveillance that permits major intrusions, without prior judicial authorization, into the private lives of suspects and those who communicate with them, live or work in the same place or even just happen to be near them.
  • Meanwhile, Austria is set to discuss a draft law that would allow a new security agency to operate with reduced external control and to collect and store communication data for up to six years. The Netherlands is considering legislation allowing dragnet surveillance of all telecommunications, indiscriminate gathering of metadata, decryption and intrusion into the computers of non-suspects. And in Finland, the government is even considering changing the Constitution to weaken privacy protections in order to ease the adoption of a bill granting the military and intelligence services the power to conduct electronic mass surveillance with little oversight.
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  • More recently, as new technologies have offered more avenues to increase surveillance and data collection, the court has reiterated its position in a number of leading cases against several countries, including France, Romania, Russia and Britain, condemned for having infringed the right to private and family life that in the interpretation of the cour
  • unnecessary “wide-ranging and particularly serious interference with the fundamental right to respect for private life” and personal data, this court reaffirmed the outstanding place privacy holds in Europe
  • If European governments and parliaments do not respect fundamental principles and judicial obligations, our lives will become much less private. Our ability to participate effectively in public life is threatened, too, because these measures curtail our freedom of speech and our right to receive information — including that of public interest. Not all whistleblowers have the technical knowledge Mr. Snowden possessed. Many would fear discovery if they communicated with journalists, who in turn would lose valuable sources, jeopardizing their ability to reveal unlawful conduct in both the public and private spheres. Watergates can only happen when whistleblowers feel protected.
  • First, legislation should limit surveillance and the use of data in a way that strictly respects the right to privacy as spelled out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, European data protection standards, the case law of the European Court of Human Rights and that of the European Court of Justice. These norms oblige states to respect human rights when they gather and store information relating to our private lives and to protect individuals from unlawful surveillance, including when carried out by foreign agencies.
  • Third, security agencies must operate under independent scrutiny and judicial review. This will require intrusive oversight powers for parliaments and a judiciary that is involved in the decision-making process to ensure accountability. Countries that have adopted controversial surveillance laws should reconsider or amend them. And those considering new surveillance legislation should do so with great caution.
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