Big Brother News Watch
Facebook-Backed Diem Aims to Launch Digital Currency Pilot + More
Facebook-Backed Diem Aims to Launch Digital Currency Pilot Later This Year
Facebook wanted to revolutionize finance with a global digital currency — then came the regulators.
First proposed in June 2019 with the name libra, the token was initially intended to be a universal currency tied to a basket of sovereign currencies such as the U.S. dollar and the euro.
But after facing strong opposition from regulators around the world, the organization overseeing the project lost major backers including Visa and Mastercard. The group eventually watered down its plans, opting for multiple “stablecoins” backed one-to-one by different government-backed currencies, as well as one multi-currency coin.
Big Brother Watches as EU Unveils Plan to Control Use of Artificial Intelligence
The EU is hoping to catch up with the U.S. and China in a sector that includes fields such as voice recognition, health insurance and law enforcement.
The bloc is trying to learn the lessons after missing out on the internet revolution and failing to produce any major competitors to match the giants of Silicon Valley or their Chinese counterparts.
But there have been competing concerns over the plans, with both big tech and civil liberties groups arguing that the EU is either overreaching or is not going far enough.
This Has Just Become a Big Week for AI Regulation
MIT Technology Review reported:
Today the EU released its long-awaited set of AI regulations, an early draft of which leaked last week. The regulations are wide ranging, with restrictions on mass surveillance and the use of AI to manipulate people.
But a statement of intent from the US Federal Trade Commission, outlined in a short blog post by staff lawyer Elisa Jillson on April 19, may have more teeth in the immediate future. According to the post, the FTC plans to go after companies using and selling biased algorithms.
A number of companies will be running scared right now, says Ryan Calo, a professor at the University of Washington, who works on technology and law. “It’s not really just this one blog post,” he says. “This one blog post is a very stark example of what looks to be a sea change.”
Surveillance Helped These Countries Fight COVID. A New Realm of Risks Await.
During the chaotic first months of the pandemic, countries like Taiwan and South Korean were held up as models for rolling out aggressive tracking to identify everyone who came into contact with infected people to contain coronavirus spread and prevent health systems from being overwhelmed.
The test-trace-isolate protocol worked. But a year later, many human rights activists and lawyers worry the high-tech intervention set a bad precedent. Governments rushed to gather and examine vast data stores without proper consultation, exposing sensitive, private information to the public in the process.
Lessons learned (or not learned) from the contact-tracing efforts may shape the next big health-tech privacy challenge: vaccine passports.
Coronapas: The Passport Helping Denmark Open Up After COVID
Digital certificates are seen as Europe’s route out of lockdown, and the EU wants to have its scheme in place across all 27 member states by the end of June.
… Zoos and theme parks were the first to handle Denmark’s corona passports. Copenhagen Zoo is already bustling with families, and you could almost forget there is still a pandemic.
I watched as a long queue formed outside and entrance staff checked the phones of visitors. “We had to establish these new checkpoints,” says spokesman Jacob Munkholm Hoeck. “We’ve put a lot of resources into this. That’s the downside. But it is running smoothly.”
“It makes you feel more safe,” one parent in the queue told me.
Cryptocurrencies Are Next Frontier for Surveillance State + More
Cryptocurrencies Are the Next Frontier for the Surveillance State
At first, it might have sounded like manna from heaven. Chinese authorities announced they would be distributing more than $1 million to a select number of citizens, as part of a test of its new currency: a digital yuan that could be easily spent almost anywhere. Reports out of China showed happy recipients using “digital wallets” to buy groceries with their free money and marveling at how “smooth and fast” the system worked.
But there was a hitch or two, pointing to the thorny complexities of this new foray into digital monetary policy. First, recipients of the digital yuan had only a couple of weeks to spend their money; otherwise, it would disappear as mysteriously as it had arrived. (The encouragement to spend is considered a way of ensuring the currency quickly enters the market.) And second, the experiment signaled a new advance in digital surveillance, in which the state could potentially track all financial transactions. Recipients got free money, but with a new degree of control attached.
Amy Klobuchar Takes Aim at 12 Vaccine Misinformation Influencers
“For too long, social media platforms have failed to adequately protect Americans by not taking sufficient action to prevent the spread of vaccine disinformation online,” wrote Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Ben Ray Luján (D-NM) in a Friday letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, which was viewed by Recode. “Despite your policies intended to prevent vaccine disinformation, many of these accounts continue to post content that reach millions of users, repeatedly violating your policies with impunity.”
In particular, the senators urged the companies to take action against 12 anti-vaccine influencers — 11 individuals and one couple — who spread anti-vaccine content on the internet. These accounts include Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has pushed distrust in vaccines, and Joseph Mercola, an online alternative medicine proponent who was recently flagged by the Food and Drug Administration for promoting fake Covid-19 cures, including through his still-active Twitter account.
CBP Releases Video From Predator Drone Deployed Over George Floyd Protests
Shortly after the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd last year, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) flew a Predator drone over the city in an effort to surveil the ongoing protests against police brutality occurring there. The drone, which took off from Grand Forks Air Force Base in North Dakota and flew in a holding pattern over protests for approximately 90 minutes, recorded video from a height of 20,000 feet. Now, thanks to a recent Freedom of Information Request, you can watch that video.
The video, which CBP published online Monday, was initially requested by Emily Crose, a network security professional. Crose told Gizmodo that she filed the FOIA request because “there needs to be attention paid to the ways local policing is being handled” and that she felt the public needed to be aware of the degree to which surveillance was being used on everyday Americans.
A Global Tipping Point for Reining In Tech Has Arrived
China fined the internet giant Alibaba a record $2.8 billion this month for anticompetitive practices, ordered an overhaul of its sister financial company and warned other technology firms to obey Beijing’s rules.
Now the European Commission plans to unveil far-reaching regulations to limit technologies powered by artificial intelligence.
And in the United States, President Biden has stacked his administration with trustbusters who have taken aim at Amazon, Facebook and Google.
Around the world, governments are moving simultaneously to limit the power of tech companies with an urgency and breadth that no single industry had experienced before. Their motivation varies. In the United States and Europe, it is concern that tech companies are stifling competition, spreading misinformation and eroding privacy; in Russia and elsewhere, it is to silence protest movements and tighten political control; in China, it is some of both.
New Law to Force Masks While Swimming
Just days after releasing the new rules that would require masks to be worn at the beach, the Spanish Ministry of Health proposed revisions that would allow people to forgo a mask at the beach if they are swimming, playing a sport or resting in a fixed spot, and maintaining a distance of 1.5 meters from other people.
A number of regional governments had already suggested that they would defy the initial orders, including the Balearic Islands, which stated masks would not be mandatory at area beaches and swimming pools. According to EL PAÍS:
“… [I]n Andalusia the tension was palpable. Juan Marín, the deputy premier of the southern region, said he did not understand ‘this type of decisions that get made without consulting with the regions.’ And sources in the governments of Catalonia and the Canary Islands said that their legal services are already analyzing the law to determine their next steps.”
Yet, the back-and-forth passage of arbitrary health rules as policy is becoming so common that it’s hard to know what’s “allowed” from one day to the next. So, wearing a mask while walking along the shoreline of a beach in Spain is necessary for public health, but if you’re playing a sport it’s not?
Tech Giants are Happy to Do Modi’s Bidding in Return for Access to the Indian Market
All of which impales American tech giants, especially Amazon, Facebook, Google and Netflix, on the horns of an ethical dilemma. For them, India represents a huge market – bigger than China, in a way, because of the firm grip that the Communist party has on the operations of tech companies in its jurisdiction. The Indian market, being less centrally controlled, has enormous potential for growth. But in order to thrive there the companies must reach an accommodation with an authoritarian government that doesn’t brook criticism, never mind opposition.
