Category Archives: Viva!

The Questions Zuckerberg Should Have Answered About Russia

thanks for posting aleksey godin

Over the last two days, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was questioned for more than 10 hours by two different Congressional committees. There was granular focus on privacy definitions and data collection, and quick footwork by Zuckerberg—backed by a phalanx of lawyers, consultants, and coaches—to craft a narrative that users “control” their data. (They don’t.) But the gaping hole at the center of both hearings was the virtual absence of questions on the tactics and purpose of Russian information operations conducted against Americans on Facebook during the 2016 elections.

Here are the five of the biggest questions about Russia that Zuckerberg wasn’t asked or didn’t answer—and why it’s important for Facebook to provide clear information on these issues.

1. What were the tools and tactics used by Russian entities to execute information operations against American citizens, and what were the narratives pursued?

In both hearings, in answering unrelated questions, Zuckerberg began to describe “large networks of fake accounts” established by Russian entities. In both instances, he was cut off. This was a significant missed opportunity to pull back the curtain on the mechanisms of Russian information operations against the American public.

The vast majority of information made available by Facebook—and the focus of questions in response—have been about ads and promoted content from Russian entities like the Internet Research Agency. In fact, this was not the primary means of distributing content, collecting information, identifying potential supporters, and promoting narratives. The main tool for this was fake accounts posting “native” content—plain old Facebook posts—building relationships with real users.

In Wednesday’s hearing before the House Energy & Commerce Committee, for example, Zuckerberg said that tens of thousands of fake accounts were taken down to prevent interference in elections in 2017, implying that this was mostly relating to Russia. But this wholesale removal of accounts obviously went way beyond the 740 accounts that have been identified as buying ads on behalf of the IRA. Zuckerberg focused only on ads bought by Russian accounts, not the regular Facebook posts that were so much more numerous. He testified that the Russian accounts were primarily using “issues ads”—aimed at influencing people’s views on issues rather than promoting specific candidates or political messaging. Asked about the content though, Zuckerberg said he had no specific knowledge.

In the indictment of the IRA, prosecutors highlighted the fact that the agency had used false IDs to verify false personas. So, while Facebook’s announcement that group pages will now require verification with a government ID and a physical address that can be validated, fake IDs and the use of US-registered shell corporations (a point raised by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse) can be used to bypass these security protocols—albeit with a much more significant expenditure of resources.

Zuckerberg said Facebook only identified Russian information operations being conducted on their platform right before the 2016 elections. But in his written testimony, he says they saw and addressed activity relating to Russian intelligence agencies earlier. And from 2014 onward, Facebook was made aware of the aggressive information campaigns being run against Ukraine by Russia.

It wasn’t an accident that Zuckerberg used the term “sophisticated adversaries” in his prepared statement. Facebook, more than anyone, has visibility into what Russia does and why it works. Apparently, no one was interested in hearing what he had to say.

2. What personal data does Facebook make available to the Russian state media monitoring agency Roskomnadzor or other Russian agencies? Is this only from accounts located in or operated from Russia, or does this include Facebook’s global data?

These questions were asked by former fighter pilot and Russia-hawk Rep. Adam Kinzinger—and answered evasively by Zuckerberg, who did not address the fact that the Russian government requires companies like Facebook to store their data in Russia precisely so they can access it (and that the Russians say that Facebook has agreed to comply). Very few companies—including Twitter and YouTube—have provided much transparency on what data they share with the Russian government. This is important because, depending on the scale, Russia doesn’t need to rely on data harvesters if they can just get it themselves. In another instance, a corporate partnership was formed with Uber to force data sharing.

This is also important because Zuckerberg expressed extreme skepticism about sharing data with the US government. Does he feel the same way about foreign entities? When law enforcement or intelligence agencies from more aggressive foreign governments ask for information, does Facebook comply? Is there any instance where they have complied with a foreign government request that they would deny the United States?

In both hearings, Zuckerberg was also asked if Russia or China scrape Facebook data, or used apps like the one used by Aleksandr Kogan, the data scientist who provided Facebook data to Cambridge Analytica. Zuckerberg responded that he didn’t have specific knowledge of that—but, as Rep. Jan Schakowsky pointed out, there were 9 million apps scraping data, so how can they possibly begin to know where the data and all its derivative copies went?

Zuckerberg called Chinese internet companies a “strategic and technological threat”—and whoever asked the question just moved on. This is a huge admission from one of the people best positioned to understand how AI and data tech can be weaponized by adversaries. Next time, maybe let the man talk about what he sees and the threats we are up against?

3. Did Facebook delete data related to Russian information operations conducted against American citizens? Will it agree to make this material available for researchers?

In the House hearing, there was one question relating to data preservation in connection to the Cambridge Analytica case. But not a single member asked if Facebook has preserved all of the data and content connected to Russian information operations conducted against American citizens, or whether that data and content would be made available to researchers or intelligence agencies for evaluation.

Many accounts have been pulled down and deleted, and while some of the advertising clients have been exposed, many of the fake accounts and false identities are not known to the public. It is vital that this information be analyzed by people who understand what the Russians were trying to achieve so we can evaluate how to limit computational propaganda from hostile entities and assess the impact these operations had on our population. Without this kind of analysis, we will never unravel the damage or build realistic defenses against these capabilities.

Zuckerberg got no questions about mitigating the psychological impact of these operations. There were no questions to about Facebook’s own internal research and evaluation of these tools and tactics. And no one asked what Facebook knows about their broader effectiveness or impact on the public.

4. What assistance do Facebook employees embedded with advertising clients provide? Did any Facebook employees provide support to the Internet Research Agency or any other business or agency in Russia targeting content to American citizens?

Facebook dodged a major bullet because this entire line of questioning was left unexplored. There was one question about Facebook employees embedded in 2016 political campaigns; largely Zuckerberg answered sideways. But there are extremely important questions to be raised about the way in which Facebook employees aided and enabled harvesters of data and the targeting of hostile information operations—not only against the American public, but in other countries as well.

If Facebook employees worked with the Russians to define more effective audience targeting, for example, then they had vastly more knowledge than they admit and are vastly more complicit. The same would be true if Facebook embeds were working with third parties like Cambridge Analytica and other companies that help governments and ruling parties target their oppositions and win elections. For example, Cambridge Analytica/SCL’s work in Africa shows how aggressively Facebook was used in elections. Did Facebook know? Were they involved? Do their employees have direct knowledge of or aid “black PR” and coercive psychological operations?

5. Does Facebook have copies of data uploaded to “custom audiences” by any Russian entity?

In many ways, the data will be the fingerprints of the investigations of the Russian operations in the 2016 elections. As part of Facebook’s “custom audiences” feature, you can upload datasets to target Facebook users. If there is overlapping targeting data or instances in which similar data was used by different advertising clients, you can show potential coordination between separate entities—for example, maybe the IRA and the NRA, or the dark money PACs running ads against Clinton. Does Facebook have any known Russian datasets from 2016 that could be compared to Cambridge Analytica and or Trump campaign data?

Senator Amy Klobuchar highlighted the fact that 126 million people saw IRA content and asked if these people overlapped with the 87 million who had their data scraped by Cambridge. Zuckerberg said it was “entirely possible” that they overlapped. If this can be documented, it would make it likely that the Cambridge Analytica data was used by the Russians and by the Trump campaign—and this would mean coordination between the two entities. The question then would be who knew about the shared data?

American privacy is important. But gaining a more expansive understanding of the information operations being targeted against our population by hostile foreign actors like Russia is also critical. In that respect, the Zuckerberg hearings were a huge missed opportunity. We do not have a lot of time to assess and evaluate what happened in 2016 before the 2018 elections are upon us. This is not merely a cybersecurity challenge; it’s not just about protecting voting machines or email servers. There is an information component that is not being addressed, and doing so gets harder when companies like Facebook are erasing and suppressing the data that can help us become more informed and help us develop a new kind of human-led deterrence that will prevent these campaigns from being as effective in the future.

Zuckerberg repeatedly referred to the idea of data “control” that was completely nonsensical to anybody who actually speaks English as a first language. We don’t control our data. Especially not when Facebook is aggressively harvesting data on everyone, not just their 2 billion users, and building internet access globally so they can get even more data. It doesn’t matter that Facebook isn’t “selling data”—an oft-repeated theme. They are using psychographics to profile you and selling advertisers access to the products of those algorithms. This is why there was evasion on questions about predictive profiling—the entire backend of adtech. Facebook knows it works. They use it every day—and they understand exactly how effective it can be for hostile actors like Russia.


Mr. Zuck Goes to Washington


Molly K. McKew (@MollyMcKew) is an expert on information warfare and the narrative architect at New Media Frontier. She advised Georgian President from 2009-2013 and former Moldovan Prime Minister Vlad Filat in 2014-15.

For the first time, a US president has classified the legal justification for taking publicly acknowledged actions

It’s not uncommon for legal opinions from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel to be classified; whenever the President wants to do something nefarious — like authorizing the CIA’s program of torture — he’ll get a memo out of the OLC, and then classify the whole thing: the action and its justification.

But Trump’s memo justifying his decision to bomb Syria is classified, while the bombing, obviously, isn’t.

What’s more, the level of secrecy slapped on the OLC memo explaining how the President could order an act of war when the Constitution explicitly says that Congress alone can authorize this is so secret that even Congress isn’t allowed to see it.

That’s right: the President got a secret memo drafted that explains why he can go to war without Congressional approval, and Congress isn’t allowed to read that memo.

When GW Bush kept his torture-authorizing memos a secret, it was because he wanted to keep the torture a secret, too. But Trump isn’t even keeping up with that pretense of internal consistency. Instead, the justification for taking an action that the President personally announced on his Twitter feed is, “I don’t want you to know.”

So the general outlines of Trump’s legal basis for Friday’s bombing are fairly clear. There also are truly extreme. As Jack Goldsmith, one of the heads of the OLC during the Bush administration, has said, it’s a perspective that “places no limit at all on the president’s ability to use significant military force unilaterally.”

That would be bad enough, of course, if everything were out in the open. But at least then it could be debated on specifics, rather than supposition. Instead, we have allowed the Constitution to be eviscerated to the point that not only does the president have nearly unlimited war powers, we can’t even say exactly why.

Donald Trump Ordered Syria Strike Based on a Secret Legal Justification Even Congress Can’t See [Jon Schwarz/The Intercept]

Trump Now Navigating into Watergate Territory

By Arturo Castañares / Publisher and CEO

he President, feeling growing pressure from the independent Special Counsel, concocted a plan to put an end to the investigation of his administration.

He thought he could simply fire the Special Counsel and save himself from an inquiry that was leading closer and closer to the Oval Office.

So, on a Saturday, the President pressured the Attorney General to fire the Special Counsel, but the AG refused, and the AG resigned instead.

Then the President pressured the Deputy Attorney General to fire the Special Counsel, and he too refused the order and resigned.

That left the Solicitor General of the United States, the country’s lawyer that argues cases before the Supreme Court, as next in line to lead the Justice Department.

The Solicitor General finally fired the Special Counsel. The President thought he was home free, but that soon proved to be wishful thinking.

Within a month, a federal judge ruled the firing of the Special Counsel was illegal, and the Solicitor General was forced to appoint a new Special Counsel, and the investigation continued.

The White House faced subpoenas from the Special Counsel, and the President was accused of obstructing justice. Impeachment seemed imminent, but the President maintained his innocence.

Eventually, though, only 13 months after what would later become known as the Saturday Night Massacre, the President resigned from office.

This, of course, is the story of Richard Nixon, the only American President to ever resign the presidency.

If the story sounds familiar, it’s because a very similar case is unfolding in real-time in Washington, D.C., as Donald Trump finds himself in the center of an ongoing investigation by a special counsel.

As Special Counsel Robert Mueller continues his investigation into Trump and his administration over allegations of collusion with Russia, the President has grown increasingly frustrated and has floated the idea that he may fire Mueller. Ironically, it was Trump’s decision to fire FBI Director James Comey that led to Muller’s appointment in the first place.

This week, after FBI agents raided the home, office, and hotel room of Trump’s attorney, Michael Cohen, Trump seemed to finally lose his cool, and starting tweeting again.

Stories had already surfaced that Trump believes he has the power to fire Mueller, a step that even several high-ranking Congressional Republicans have warned could lead to impeachment, but this week the White House again said Trump believes he can fire Mueller if he wants to.

Trump this week also blasted his Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, and especially Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein, who currently oversees Mueller’s investigation. The White House and Trump’s friends at Fox News have already started their campaigns to undermine Rosenstein and pave the way for his firing. The writing is on the proverbial wall.

But, Trump’s anger this week over the FBI raids is misguided. He claims the investigation is a witch hunt and very biased toward him and his associates. He claims the investigators are partisan, deep state liberals imbedded in our government that are just out to get him, including Comey and Mueller.

The inconvenient truth for Trump, however, is that the search warrants that allowed the FBI to conduct the early morning raids on Monday were approved by Rod Rosenstein and the US Attorney in Manhattan, both men appointed by Trump.

The U.S. Attorney had to convince a federal magistrate (appointed by local judges not a president) that probable cause existed to raid Cohen and seize documents, computers, and even his cellphone from his hand. The Magistrate must have believed that there was enough cause to believe that crimes had been committed, and that Cohen would not have provided the information through a subpoena.

Now Trump is so furious (or worried of what the investigators will find) that he’s again contemplating firing Mueller. That sort of plan didn’t work out well for Nixon, and there’s no reason to believe it will work for Trump, but that may still not deter him from taking action.

Even if he fires Mueller now, or convinces someone at the Justice Department to do it for him, the charges being pursued by the U.S. Attorney in New York won’t go away, and from what’s been reported so far, the allegations don’t seem to be related to the Russia investigation.

It appears that Mueller found evidence of unrelated crimes and forwarded it to the US Attorney. That office in Manhattan is the one that sought the search warrants, and raided Cohen.

Trump’s fear of what the investigators may get from Cohen’s materials, or Cohen himself, must be getting the better of him. He is starting to sound a lot like Nixon’s infamous, “I’m not a crook!”, but he’s not acting like an innocent person.

If Trump is innocent, as he claims nearly everyday, then he should welcome a thorough investigation that would prove his innocence. He currently has an Attorney General, Deputy AG, U.S. Attorney in New York, and a Solicitor General all appointed by him. And don’t forget both the House and Senate are controlled by Republicans, and even Mueller is a life-long registered Republican.

In contrast to Bill Clinton, who faced a Republican-led House and Senate and Republican Special Counsel Kenneth Starr, Trump should be must less worried about being railroaded by a partisan investigation.

In the end, if Trump were to fire Mueller or have him or have fired to end the investigation prematurely, it would fall to Republicans in Congress to decide how to proceed. For now, some Republicans are talking tough about protecting Mueller.

But, given the toothless partisan investigations into the Russian collusion claims conducted by the House and Senate committees, no one believes Republicans would do anything to punish Trump, much less move toward impeachment.

So, another Saturday Night Massacre may be in the making, with new actors playing the parts of their Nixonian predecessors, but this time, the script may end with a president still in office, wounded and bleeding politically, but alive to fight another day.

In any other political drama, this story would spell the certain end of a presidency. In Trump’s world, however, this may just be another bump in the road for the unorthodox presidency of the man some simply call “The Donald.”

let’s turn Gaza’s Return March a Collective March of Freedom…let’s inspire the world

let’s make a difference and fill the skies with kites not rockets and missiles

nadiaharhash

 Somehow the idea is just getting riper in my head. Can we all join forces in making a real difference?
As next week is marking the 70th year of Occupation and Gaza will be in its 4th week of the Symbolic Return Marches, I would like to call all human rights believers and all those among us who believe in freedom as a destination to all humans… let’s support the cause towards freedom with kite-running-flying friday, where we will fill the sky with kites… a resemblance of hope and peace and a call of freedom for a future… let us fill our skies with kites….. and prove to the governments that kites bring freedom not war-planes, rockets and missiles.
( of course I have no idea how to transform this into a campaign.. please spread your wings and let us run the skies with our kites… and share widely …Maybe…

View original post 204 more words

At least the NFL isn’t pretending it’s not blackballing Colin Kaepernick

Seahawks joins anti-Black Lives Matters racists! “As if there were any doubt that the NFL was going to continue its blacklist against Colin Kaepernick, the former Super Bowl starting quarterback was once again denied an opportunity this week. This time, it was in Seattle, and there was none of the hemming and hawing about Kaepernick’s numbers not being good enough or his playstyle not being the right fit for the offense. No, instead, an NFL source told ESPN’s Adam Schefter that Seahawks officials cancelled Kaepernick’s workout after he refused to commit to ending his kneeling protests during the national anthem during the 2018 season.”

5214.jpg?w=300&q=55&auto=format&usm=12&f

Kaepernick and comrade-in-arms Eric Reid have again been denied employment due to their anthem protest, further proof that for the NFL’s owners it’s simply a matter of power

As if there were any doubt that the NFL was going to continue its blacklist against Colin Kaepernick, the former Super Bowl starting quarterback was once again denied an opportunity this week. This time, it was in Seattle, and there was none of the hemming and hawing about Kaepernick’s numbers not being good enough or his playstyle not being the right fit for the offense. No, instead, an NFL source told ESPN’s Adam Schefter that Seahawks officials cancelled Kaepernick’s workout after he refused to commit to ending his kneeling protests during the national anthem during the 2018 season.

Related: Seahawks ‘postpone’ Colin Kaepernick audition over anthem protest stance

Continue reading…