Month: February 2023

A top U.S. law enforcement official on Thursday unveiled a new “disruptive technology strike force” tasked with safeguarding American technology from foreign adversaries and other national security threats.

Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, the No. 2 U.S. Justice Department official, made the announcement at a speech in London at Chatham House. The initiative, Monaco said, will be a joint effort between her department and the U.S. Commerce Department, with a goal of blocking adversaries from “trying to siphon our best technology.”

Monaco also addressed concerns about Chinese-owned video sharing app TikTok.

The U.S. government’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, a powerful national security body, in 2020 ordered Chinese company ByteDance to divest TikTok because of fears that user data could be passed on to China’s government. The divestment has not taken place.

The committee and TikTok have been in talks for more than two years aiming to reach a national security agreement.

“I will note I don’t use TikTok, and I would not advise anybody to do so because of these concerns. The bottom line is China has been quite clear that they are trying to mold and put forward the use and norms around technologies that advance their privileges, their interests,” Monaco said.

The Justice Department in recent years has increasingly focused its efforts on bringing criminal cases to protect corporate intellectual property, U.S. supply chains and private data about Americans from foreign adversaries, either through cyberattacks, theft or sanctions evasion.

U.S. law enforcement officials have said that China by far remains the biggest threat to America’s technological innovation and economic security, a view that Monaco reiterated on Thursday.

“China’s doctrine of ‘civil-military fusion’ means that any advance by a Chinese company with military application must be shared with the state,” Monaco said. “So if a company operating in China collects your data, it is a good bet that the Chinese government is accessing it.”

Under former President Donald Trump’s administration, the Justice Department created a China initiative tasked with combating Chinese espionage and intellectual property theft.

President Joe Biden’s Justice Department later scrapped the name and re-focused the initiative amid criticism it was fueling racism by targeting professors at U.S. universities over whether they disclosed financial ties to China.

The department did not back away from continuing to pursue national security cases involving China and its alleged efforts to steal intellectual property or other American data.

The Commerce Department last year imposed new export controls on advanced computing and semiconductor components in a maneuver designed to prevent China from acquiring certain chips.

Monaco said on Thursday that the United States “must also pay attention to how our adversaries can use private investments in their companies to develop the most sensitive technologies, to fuel their drive for a military and national security edge.”

She noted that the Biden administration is “exploring how to monitor the flow of private capital in critical sectors” to ensure it “doesn’t provide our adversaries with a national security advantage.”

A bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers last year called on Biden to issue an executive order to boost oversight of investments by U.S. companies and individuals in China and other countries.
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Imagine if your dog or cat could use words to let you know when they’re angry, lonely or in pain. Well now they can, thanks to an innovative communication tool that’s helping them express themselves more effectively. VOA’s Julie Taboh has more.

Camera: Adam Greenbaum           

Produced by: Julie Taboh, Adam Greenbaum  
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The United States Justice Department has in recent months escalated its antitrust probe on Apple Inc., The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday citing people familiar with the matter.  

Reuters had previously reported the Justice Department opened an antitrust probe into Apple in 2019. 

The Wall Street Journal report said more litigators have now been assigned, while new requests for documents and consultations have been made with all the companies involved. 

The probe will also look at whether Apple’s mobile operating system, iOS, is anti-competitive, favoring its own products over those of outside developers, the report added. 

The Justice Department declined to comment, while Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 
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Billionaire Elon Musk said Wednesday that he anticipates finding a CEO for Twitter “probably toward the end of this year.”

Speaking via a video call to the World Government Summit in Dubai, Musk said making sure the platform can function remained the most important thing for him.

“I think I need to stabilize the organization and just make sure it’s in a financial healthy place,” Musk said when asked about when he’d name a CEO. “I’m guessing probably toward the end of this year would be good timing to find someone else to run the company.”

Musk, 51, made his wealth initially on the finance website PayPal, then created the spacecraft company SpaceX and invested in the electric car company Tesla. In recent months, however, more attention has been focused on the chaos surrounding his $44 billion purchase of the microblogging site Twitter.

Meanwhile, the Ukrainian military’s use of Musk’s satellite internet service Starlink as it defends itself against Russia’s ongoing invasion has put Musk off and on at the center of the war.

Musk offered a wide-ranging 35-minute discussion that touched on the billionaire’s fears about artificial intelligence, the collapse of civilization and the possibility of space aliens. But questions about Twitter kept coming back up as Musk described both Tesla and SpaceX as able to function without his direct, day-to-day involvement.

“Twitter is still somewhat a startup in reverse,” he said. “There’s work required here to get Twitter to sort of a stable position and to really build the engine of software engineering.” 

Musk also sought to portray his takeover of San Francisco-based Twitter as a cultural correction. 

“I think that the general idea is just to reflect the values of the people as opposed to imposing the values of essentially San Francisco and Berkeley, which are so somewhat of a niche ideology as compared to the rest of the world,” he said. “And, you know, Twitter was, I think, doing a little too much to impose a niche.”

Musk’s takeover at Twitter has seen mass firings and other cost-cutting measures. Musk, who is on the hook for about $1 billion in yearly interest payments for his purchase, has been trying to find way to maximize profits at the company.

However, some of Musk’s decisions have conflicted with the reasons that journalists, governments and others rely on Twitter as an information-sharing platform.

Musk on Wednesday described the need for users to rely on Twitter for trusted information from verified accounts. However, a confused rollout to a paid verified account system saw some impersonate famous companies, leading to a further withdrawal of needed advertising cash to the site.

“Twitter is certainly quite the rollercoaster,” he acknowledged.

Forbes estimates Musk’s wealth at just under $200 billion. The Forbes analysis ranks Musk as the second-wealthiest person on Earth, just behind French luxury brand magnate Bernard Arnault. 

But Musk also has become a thought leader for some as well, albeit an oracle that is trying to get six hours of sleep a night despite the challenges at Twitter.

Musk described his children as being “programmed by Reddit and YouTube.” However, he criticized the Chinese-made social media app TikTok.

“TikTok has a lot of very high usage (but) I often hear people say, ‘Well, I spent two hours on TikTok, but I regret those two hours,’” Musk said. “We don’t want that to be the case with Twitter.”

TikTok, owned by Beijing-based ByteDance, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

Musk warned that artificial intelligence should be regulated “very carefully,” describing it as akin to the promise of nuclear power but the danger of atomic bombs. He also cautioned against having a single civilization or “too much cooperation” on Earth, saying it could “collapse” a society that’s like a “tiny candle in a vast darkness.”

And when asked about the existence of aliens, Musk had a firm response.

“The crazy thing is, I’ve seen no evidence of alien technology or alien life whatsoever. And I think I’d know because of SpaceX,” he said. “I don’t think anybody knows more about space, you know, than me.” 
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On Colorado’s northeastern plains, where the pencil-straight horizon divides golden fields and blue sky, a farmer named Danny Wood scrambles to plant and harvest proso millet, dryland corn and winter wheat in short, seasonal windows. That is until his high-tech Steiger 370 tractor conks out. 

The tractor’s manufacturer doesn’t allow Wood to make certain fixes himself, and last spring his fertilizing operations were stalled for three days before the servicer arrived to add a few lines of missing computer code for $950. 

“That’s where they have us over the barrel, it’s more like we are renting it than buying it,” said Wood, who spent $300,000 on the used tractor. 

Wood’s plight, echoed by farmers across the country, has pushed lawmakers in Colorado and 10 other states to introduce bills that would force manufacturers to provide the tools, software, parts and manuals needed for farmers to do their own repairs — thereby avoiding steep labor costs and delays that imperil profits. 

“The manufacturers and the dealers have a monopoly on that repair market because it’s lucrative,” said Rep. Brianna Titone, a Democrat and one of the bill’s sponsors. “[Farmers] just want to get their machine going again.” 

In Colorado, the legislation is largely being pushed by Democrats, while their Republican colleagues find themselves stuck in a tough spot: torn between right-leaning farming constituents asking to be able to repair their own machines and the manufacturing businesses that oppose the idea. 

The manufacturers argue that changing the current practice with this type of legislation would force companies to expose trade secrets. They also say it would make it easier for farmers to tinker with the software and illegally crank up the horsepower and bypass the emissions controller — risking operators’ safety and the environment. 

Similar arguments around intellectual property have been leveled against the broader campaign called ‘right to repair,’ which has picked up steam across the country — crusading for the right to fix everything from iPhones to hospital ventilators during the pandemic. 

In 2011, Congress tried passing a right to repair law for car owners and independent servicers. That bill did not pass, but a few years later, automotive industry groups agreed to a memorandum of understanding to give owners and independent mechanics — not just authorized dealerships — access to tools and information to fix problems. 

In 2021, the Federal Trade Commission pledged to beef up its right to repair enforcement at the direction of President Joe Biden. And just last year, Titone sponsored and passed Colorado’s first right to repair law, empowering people who use wheelchairs with the tools and information to fix them. 

For the right to repair farm equipment — from thin tractors used between grape vines to behemoth combines for harvesting grain that can cost over half a million dollars — Colorado is joined by 10 states including Florida, Maryland, Missouri, New Jersey, Texas and Vermont. 

Many of the bills are finding bipartisan support, said Nathan Proctor, who leads Public Interest Research Group’s national right to repair campaign. But in Colorado’s House committee on agriculture, Democrats pushed the bill forward in a 9-4 vote along party lines, with Republicans in opposition even though the bill’s second sponsor is Republican Representative Ron Weinberg. 

“That’s really surprising, and that upset me,” said the Republican farmer Wood. 

Wood’s tractor, which flies an American flag reading “Farmers First,” isn’t his only machine to break down. His grain harvesting combine was dropping into idle, but the servicer took five days to arrive on Wood’s farm — a setback that could mean a hail storm decimates a wheat field or the soil temperature moves beyond the Goldilocks zone for planting. 

“Our crop is ready to harvest and we can’t wait five days, but there was nothing else to do,” said Wood. “When it’s broke down you just sit there and wait and that’s not acceptable. You can be losing $85,000 a day.” 

Representative Richard Holtorf, the Republican who represents Wood’s district and is a farmer himself, said he’s being pulled between his constituents and the dealerships in his district covering the largely rural northeast corner of the state. He voted against the measure because he believes it will financially hurt local dealerships in rural areas and could jeopardize trade secrets. 

“I do sympathize with my farmers,” Holtorf said, but he added, “I don’t think it’s the role of government to be forcing the sale of their intellectual property.”  

At the packed hearing last week that spilled into a second room in Colorado’s Capitol, the core concerns raised in testimony were farmers illegally slipping around the emissions control and cranking up the horsepower. 

“I know growers, if they can change horsepower and they can change emissions they are going to do it,” said Russ Ball, sales manager at 21st Century Equipment, a John Deere dealership in Western states. 

The bill’s proponents acknowledged that the legislation could make it easier for operators to modify horsepower and emissions controls but argued that farmers are already able to tinker with their machines and doing so would remain illegal. 

This January, the Farm Bureau and the farm equipment manufacturer John Deere did sign a memorandum of understanding — a right to repair agreement made in the free market and without government intervention. The agreement stipulates that John Deere will share some parts, diagnostic and repair codes and manuals to allow farmers to make their own fixes. 

The Colorado bill’s detractors laud that agreement as a strong middle ground while Titone said it wasn’t enough, evidenced by six of Colorado’s biggest farmworker associations that support the bill. 

Proctor, who is tracking 20 right to repair proposals in a number of industries across the country, said the memorandum of understanding has fallen far short. 

“Farmers are saying no,” Proctor said. “We want the real thing.” 
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ByteDance, the Chinese parent company of social media platform TikTok, has dramatically upped its U.S. lobbying effort since 2020 as U.S.-China relations continue to sour and is now the fourth-largest Internet company in spending on federal lobbying as of last year, according to newly released data.

Publicly available information collected by OpenSecrets, a Washington nonprofit that tracks campaign finance and lobbying data, shows that ByteDance and its subsidiaries, including TikTok, the wildly popular short video app, have spent more than $13 million on U.S. lobbying since 2020. In 2022 alone, Fox News reported, the companies spent $5.4 million on lobbying.

Only Amazon.com ($19.7 million) and the parent companies of Google ($11 million) and Facebook ($19 million) spent more, according to OpenSecrets.

In the fourth quarter of 2022, ByteDance spent $1.2 million on lobbying, according to Fox News.

The lobbyists hired by ByteDance include former U.S. senators Trent Lott and John Breaux; David Urban, a former senior adviser to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign who was also a former chief of staff for the late Senator Arlen Specter; Layth Elhassani, special assistant to President Barack Obama in the White House Office of Legislative Affairs; and Samantha Clark, former deputy staff director of the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee.

In November, TikTok hired Jamal Brown, a deputy press secretary at the Pentagon who was national press secretary for Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, to manage policy communications for the Americas, with a focus on the U.S., according to Politico.

“This is kind of the template for how modern tech lobbying goes,” Dan Auble, a senior researcher at Open Secrets, told Vox. “These companies come on the scene and suddenly start spending substantial amounts of money. And ByteDance has certainly done that.”

U.S. officials have criticized TikTok as a security risk due to ties between ByteDance and the Chinese government. The worry is that user data collected by TikTok could be passed to Beijing, so lawmakers have been trying to regulate or even ban the app in the U.S.

In 2019, TikTok paid a $5.7 million fine as part of a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission over violating children’s privacy rights. The Trump administration attempted unsuccessfully to ban downloads of TikTok from app stores and outlaw transactions between Americans and ByteDance.

As of late December, TikTok has been banned on federally managed devices, and 19 states had at least partially blocked the app from state-managed devices.

The number of federal bills that ByteDance has been lobbying on increased to 14 in 2022 from eight in 2020.

With TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew scheduled to testify before the U.S. House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee on March 23, and a House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee vote in March on a bill that would ban the use of TikTok in the U.S., the company is expected to further expand its U.S. influence campaign.

Erich Andersen, general counsel and head of corporate affairs at ByteDance and TikTok, told the New York Times in January that “it was necessary for us to accelerate our own explanation of what we were prepared to do and the level of commitments on the national security process.”

TikTok has been met with a mixed response to its efforts to prove that its operations in the U.S. are outside of Beijing’s sphere of influence.

Michael Beckerman, who oversees public policy for the Americas at TikTok, met with Mike Gallagher, chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee on China Affairs, on February 1 to explain the company’s U.S. data security plans.

According to Reuters, Gallagher’s spokesperson, Jordan Dunn, said after the meeting that the lawmaker “found their argument unpersuasive.”

Congressman Ken Buck and Senator Josh Hawley on January 25 introduced a bill, No TikTok on United States Devices Act, which will instruct President Joe Biden to use the International Emergency Economic Powers to prohibit downloads of TikTok and ban commercial activity with ByteDance.

Joel Thayer, president of the Digital Progress Institute and a telecom regulation lawyer, told VOA Mandarin that he doubted the Buck-Hawley bill would become law. He said that calls to ban TikTok began during the Trump administration, yet TikTok has remained a visible and influential presence in the U.S.

James Lewis, director of the CSIS Technology and Public Policy Program, told VOA Mandarin, “An outright ban will be difficult because TikTok is speech, which is protected speech. But it [the U.S. government] can ban financial transactions, that’s possible.”

Senators Marco Rubio and Angus King reintroduced bipartisan legislation on February 10 to ban TikTok and other similar apps from operating in the U.S. by “blocking and prohibiting all transactions from any social media company in, or under the influence of, China, Russia, and several other foreign countries of concern unless they fully divest of dangerous foreign ownership.”

The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), an interagency group that reviews transactions involving foreign parties for possible national security threats, ordered ByteDance to divest TikTok in 2020. The two parties have yet to reach an agreement after two years of talks.

Chuck Flint, vice president of strategic relationships at Breitbart News who is also the former chief of staff for Senator Marsha Blackburn, told VOA Mandarin, “I expect that CFIUS will be hesitant to ban TikTok. Anything short of an outright ban will leave China’s TikTok data pipeline in place.”

China experts believe that TikTok wants to reach an agreement with CFIUS rather than being banned from the U.S. or being forced to sell TikTok’s U.S. business to an American company.

Lewis of CSIS said, “Every month that we don’t do CFIUS is a step closer towards some kind of ban.”

Julian Ku, professor of law and faculty director of international programs at Hofstra University, told VOA Mandarin, “The problem is that no matter what they offer, there’s no way to completely shield the data from the Chinese government … as long as there continues to be a shared entity.”

Adrianna Zhang contributed to this report.
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After seeing promising results in Eastern Europe, Google will initiate a new campaign in Germany that aims to make people more resilient to the corrosive effects of online misinformation.

The tech giant plans to release a series of short videos highlighting the techniques common to many misleading claims. The videos will appear as advertisements on platforms like Facebook, YouTube or TikTok in Germany. A similar campaign in India is also in the works.

It’s an approach called prebunking, which involves teaching people how to spot false claims before they encounter them. The strategy is gaining support among researchers and tech companies. 

“There’s a real appetite for solutions,” said Beth Goldberg, head of research and development at Jigsaw, an incubator division of Google that studies emerging social challenges. “Using ads as a vehicle to counter a disinformation technique is pretty novel. And we’re excited about the results.”

While belief in falsehoods and conspiracy theories isn’t new, the speed and reach of the internet has given them a heightened power. When catalyzed by algorithms, misleading claims can discourage people from getting vaccines, spread authoritarian propaganda, foment distrust in democratic institutions and spur violence.

It’s a challenge with few easy solutions. Journalistic fact checks are effective, but they’re labor intensive, aren’t read by everyone, and won’t convince those already distrustful of traditional journalism. Content moderation by tech companies is another response, but it only drives misinformation elsewhere, while prompting cries of censorship and bias.

Prebunking videos, by contrast, are relatively cheap and easy to produce and can be seen by millions when placed on popular platforms. They also avoid the political challenge altogether by focusing not on the topics of false claims, which are often cultural lightning rods, but on the techniques that make viral misinformation so infectious.

Those techniques include fear-mongering, scapegoating, false comparisons, exaggeration and missing context. Whether the subject is COVID-19, mass shootings, immigration, climate change or elections, misleading claims often rely on one or more of these tricks to exploit emotions and short-circuit critical thinking.

Last fall, Google launched the largest test of the theory so far with a prebunking video campaign in Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The videos dissected different techniques seen in false claims about Ukrainian refugees. Many of those claims relied on alarming and unfounded stories about refugees committing crimes or taking jobs away from residents.

The videos were seen 38 million times on Facebook, TikTok, YouTube and Twitter — a number that equates to a majority of the population in the three nations. Researchers found that compared to people who hadn’t seen the videos, those who did watch were more likely to be able to identify misinformation techniques, and less likely to spread false claims to others.

The pilot project was the largest test of prebunking so far and adds to a growing consensus in support of the theory.

“This is a good news story in what has essentially been a bad news business when it comes to misinformation,” said Alex Mahadevan, director of MediaWise, a media literacy initiative of the Poynter Institute that has incorporated prebunking into its own programs in countries including Brazil, Spain, France and the U.S.

Mahadevan called the strategy a “pretty efficient way to address misinformation at scale, because you can reach a lot of people while at the same time address a wide range of misinformation.”

Google’s new campaign in Germany will include a focus on photos and videos, and the ease with which they can be presented of evidence of something false. One example: Last week, following the earthquake in Turkey, some social media users shared video of the massive explosion in Beirut in 2020, claiming it was actually footage of a nuclear explosion triggered by the earthquake. It was not the first time the 2020 explosion had been the subject of misinformation.

Google will announce its new German campaign Monday ahead of next week’s Munich Security Conference. The timing of the announcement, coming before that annual gathering of international security officials, reflects heightened concerns about the impact of misinformation among both tech companies and government officials.

Tech companies like prebunking because it avoids touchy topics that are easily politicized, said Sander van der Linden, a University of Cambridge professor considered a leading expert on the theory. Van der Linden worked with Google on its campaign and is now advising Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, as well.

Meta has incorporated prebunking into many different media literacy and anti-misinformation campaigns in recent years, the company told The Associated Press in an emailed statement.

They include a 2021 program in the U.S. that offered media literacy training about COVID-19 to Black, Latino and Asian American communities. Participants who took the training were later tested and found to be far more resistant to misleading COVID-19 claims.

Prebunking comes with its own challenges. The effects of the videos eventually wears off, requiring the use of periodic “booster” videos. Also, the videos must be crafted well enough to hold the viewer’s attention, and tailored for different languages, cultures and demographics. And like a vaccine, it’s not 100% effective for everyone.

Google found that its campaign in Eastern Europe varied from country to country. While the effect of the videos was highest in Poland, in Slovakia they had “little to no discernible effect,” researchers found. One possible explanation: The videos were dubbed into the Slovak language, and not created specifically for the local audience.

But together with traditional journalism, content moderation and other methods of combating misinformation, prebunking could help communities reach a kind of herd immunity when it comes to misinformation, limiting its spread and impact.

“You can think of misinformation as a virus. It spreads. It lingers. It can make people act in certain ways,” Van der Linden told the AP. “Some people develop symptoms, some do not. So: if it spreads and acts like a virus, then maybe we can figure out how to inoculate people.”
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An uncrewed Russian supply ship docked at the International Space Station has lost cabin pressure, the Russian space corporation reported Saturday, saying the incident doesn’t pose any danger to the station’s crew.

Roscosmos said the hatch between the station and the Progress MS-21 had been locked so the loss of pressure didn’t affect the orbiting outpost.

“The temperature and pressure on board the station are within norms and there is no danger to health and safety of the crew,” it said in a statement.

The space corporation didn’t say what may have caused the cargo ship to lose pressure.

Roscosmos noted that the cargo ship had already been loaded with waste before its scheduled disposal. The craft is set to be undocked from the station and deorbit to burn in the atmosphere Feb. 18.

The announcement came shortly after a new Russian cargo ship docked smoothly at the station Saturday. The Progress MS-22 delivered almost 3 tons of food, water and fuel along with scientific equipment for the crew.

Roscosmos said that the loss of pressure in the Progress MS-21 didn’t affect the docking of the new cargo ship and “will have no impact on the future station program.”

The depressurization of the cargo craft follows an incident in December with the Soyuz crew capsule, which was hit by a tiny meteoroid that left a small hole in the exterior radiator and sent coolant spewing into space.

Russian cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin, and NASA astronaut Frank Rubio were supposed to use the capsule to return to Earth in March, but Russian space officials decided that higher temperatures resulting from the coolant leak could make it dangerous to use.

They decided to launch a new Soyuz capsule February 20 so the crew would have a lifeboat in the event of an emergency. But since it will travel in automatic mode to expedite the launch, a replacement crew will now have to wait until late summer or fall when another capsule is ready. It means that Prokopyev, Petelin and Rubio will have to stay several extra months at the station, possibly pushing their mission to close to a year.

NASA took part in all the discussions and agreed with the plan.

Besides Prokopyev, Petelin and Rubio, the space station is home to NASA astronauts Nicole Mann and Josh Cassada, Russian Anna Kikina, and Japan’s Koichi Wakata. The four rode up on a SpaceX capsule last October.
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