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Governments Spying on Apple, Google Users Through Push Notifications — U.S. Senator
Unidentified governments are surveilling smartphone users via their apps’ push notifications, a U.S. senator warned on Wednesday.
In a letter to the Department of Justice, Senator Ron Wyden said foreign officials were demanding the data from Alphabet’s (GOOGL.O) Google and Apple (AAPL.O). Although details were sparse, the letter lays out yet another path by which governments can track smartphones.
Apps of all kinds rely on push notifications to alert smartphone users to incoming messages, breaking news, and other updates. These are the audible “dings” or visual indicators users get when they receive an email or their sports team wins a game. What users often do not realize is that almost all such notifications travel over Google and Apple’s servers.
That gives the two companies unique insight into the traffic flowing from those apps to their users, and in turn, puts them “in a unique position to facilitate government surveillance of how users are using particular apps,” Wyden said. He asked the Department of Justice to “repeal or modify any policies” that hindered public discussions of push notification spying.
In a statement, Apple said that Wyden’s letter gave them the opening they needed to share more details with the public about how governments monitored push notifications.
Facebook and Instagram Accused of Creating a ‘Marketplace’ for Child Predators in New Lawsuit
Meta and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, allowed Facebook and Instagram to become a “marketplace for predators in search of children,” a new lawsuit from the New Mexico attorney general alleges, as first reported by The Wall Street Journal. The lawsuit, filed in state court on Tuesday, also claims Meta’s algorithms recommend sexual content to children.
As outlined in the complaint, the New Mexico attorney general’s office conducted an investigation that involved creating test profiles on Facebook and Instagram that appeared to be teenagers or preteens. Not only did the office find inappropriate recommendations for each of the decoys, such as an account that openly posted adult pornography, but it also found that they attracted predators as well.
“Meta’s platforms Facebook and Instagram are a breeding ground for predators who target children for human trafficking, the distribution of sexual images, grooming, and solicitation,” the lawsuit states. “Teens and preteens can easily register for unrestricted accounts because of a lack of age verification. When they do, Meta directs harmful and inappropriate material at them.”
The Journal has published a series of reports over the past several months that found disturbing patterns on Facebook and Instagram. Most recently, the outlet published an investigation into how Facebook appears to enable and promote groups dedicated to sharing child sexual abuse material. Meta responded by expanding the child safety-related terms, phrases, and emoji it uses to find predatory networks. It also stopped recommending groups with members that “exhibit potentially suspicious behavior.”
GOP Sens. Marshall and Braun Introduce Bill to Rehire Pilots Fired for Refusing COVID Jab: ‘Dark Time in American History’
Republican Sens. Roger Marshall and Mike Braun are teaming up on legislation to reinstate pilots who were let go for refusing to take the COVID-19 vaccine. Under the bill announced Wednesday, the Federal Aviation Administration will be required to compel airline companies to rehire those pilots within 30 days of enactment.
“The Biden administration’s ‘jab or job’ vaccine mandates will go down as a dark time in American history,” Marshall, of Kansas, said in a statement.
Multiple top airline companies took action to terminate non-compliant pilots in response. United Airlines, for example, reported firing six employees. By May 2023, the Biden administration formally scrapped the policy. It’s not fully clear how many pilots fired over the vaccine remain out of work as a result.
“No one should have lost their job because they didn’t want to take the COVID vaccine,” Braun, of Indiana, said in a statement.
Texas, The Daily Wire, & The Federalist Sue U.S. State Dept for Conspiring With Newsguard to Censor American Media Companies
Following bombshell censorship revelations exposed over the last year, beginning with the Twitter Files, the state of Texas, The Daily Wire, and The Federalist have filed a lawsuit against the U.S. State Department on Tuesday, alleging that the government agency funded censorship technology designed to bankrupt domestic media outlets which have disfavored political opinions. Read the 67-page complaint here.
According to the Daily Wire‘s Luke Rosiak: The State Department is tasked with foreign relations and has no authority over domestic affairs, yet it took a government office designed for countering foreign terrorist propaganda, the Global Engagement Center (GEC), and unleashed it against Americans engaged in what it claimed was “disinformation,” according to the lawsuit, filed in federal court in the Eastern District of Texas on Tuesday night by the New Civil Liberties Alliance.
It was “one of the most audacious, manipulative, secretive, and gravest abuses of power and infringements of First Amendment rights by the federal government in American history,” said the suit, which also names Secretary of State Antony Blinken and five other officials as defendants.
The outlets are being represented by The New Civil Liberties Alliance’s Mark Chenoweth, who said that “the federal government cannot do indirectly what the First Amendment forbids it from doing directly.”
The Untold Story of a Massive Hack at HHS in COVID’s Early Days
On March 15, 2020, just days after the U.S. declared a national emergency because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the computer network for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services briefly vanished from the internet. In public remarks the following day, HHS Secretary Alex Azar attributed the 10-minute outage to a cyberattack but downplayed its severity, telling reporters that “there was no data breach or no degradation in terms of our ability to function and serve our important mission here.”
With a historic crisis sweeping the country, the episode seemed unremarkable and immediately receded from public view. But the department knew at the time that the attack represented a serious and unusual cyber threat, according to two officials involved in the response: former Chief Information Officer Jose Arrieta and former Chief Information Security Officer Janet Vogel.
Arrieta and Vogel say they decided to speak on the record because they believe public discussion of the attack will help the government prepare for cybersecurity threats. Five other current or former U.S. officials involved in the government’s response provided additional details but asked not to be identified to avoid professional repercussions. Bloomberg Businessweek has also viewed internal HHS documents related to the investigation.
The duration and scale of the activity led Arrieta, Vogel and others within the government to believe the hacking campaign was a smokescreen for a state-sponsored probe of computer networks associated with the U.S.’s pandemic response, possibly to set the stage for future incursions. “It was clear that our network had been mapped and that there was an understanding of different areas within our network,” says Arrieta. “They understood where large data repositories were, and they were actively seeking to gain some type of information from those environments.”
Arrieta, Vogel and two of the officials believe the scope, complexity and timing of the attacks point to China. “I am confident and believe that this attack was a nation-state effort that was perpetrated by the CCP,” says Arrieta, referring to the Chinese Communist Party.
How Tech Giants Use Money, Access to Steer Academic Research
Tech giants including Google and Facebook parent Meta have dramatically ramped up charitable giving to university campuses over the past several years — giving them influence over academics studying such critical topics as artificial intelligence, social media and disinformation.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg alone has donated money to more than 100 university campuses, either through Meta or his personal philanthropy arm, according to new research by the Tech Transparency Project, a nonprofit watchdog group studying the technology industry. Other firms are helping fund academic centers, doling out grants to professors and sitting on advisory boards reserved for donors, researchers told The Post.
Silicon Valley’s influence is most apparent among computer science professors at such top-tier schools as Berkeley, University of Toronto, Stanford and MIT. According to a 2021 paper by University of Toronto and Harvard researchers, most tenure-track professors in computer science at those schools whose funding sources could be determined had taken money from the technology industry, including nearly 6 of 10 scholars of AI.
The proportion rose further in certain controversial subjects, the study found. Of 33 professors whose funding could be traced who wrote on AI ethics for the top journals Nature and Science, for example, all but one had taken grant money from the tech giants or had worked as their employees or contractors.
Key Moments From Former U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s COVID Inquiry Evidence
The U.K.’s COVID-19 Inquiry into the government’s response to the pandemic picked up again on Wednesday morning. The hearings for the initial stage of the investigation were heard in London in June.
Today, former U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who served as the nation’s leader from 2019 to 2022, was sworn in to give evidence in front of the panel. Shortly into his opening statement, he said that he was sorry for the suffering experienced by COVID victims and their families.
The inquiry was created to help examine the government’s response to the pandemic and identify potential lessons for the future. The panel will not bestow criminal blame on those involved in the decision-making process.
Johnson’s voice quivered during the hearing, causing speculation that he was on the verge of tears. This came after he was asked to what extent his decision-making was influenced by fear of imposing interventions too early and causing behavioral fatigue in the population. “We have to be realistic about 2020. That whole year. That whole tragic, tragic year,” he said before pausing as his voice seemed to break. “We did lockdown. But then it bounced back.”
