A new kind of WMDs – Weapons of Mass Disruption

February 19, 2020 8:59 AM

Digital technologies are changing global politics — and the United States is not ready to compete.
As a first step, U.S. government officials need to understand how authoritarian regimes are using these tools to control their populations and disrupt democratic societies around the world.
1. Finding Our way Out of the Darkness.
2. China is a Challenge but not the only challenge
3. Rolling Back Digital Authoritarianism
posted by adamvasco (3 comments total)

I'm reading Klimburg's The Darkening Web at the moment which dovetails very well with these more easily digestible articles. Hadn't heard of warontherocks before, very useful site thanks adamvasco.

In NZ China has an ever-deeper reach - usefully highlighted by corvid-19. But we don't even have to be propagandized when our very own right-wing (there's nothing right about them at all) is doing secret deals with China. Strange how the so-called Right work so tightly with China and Russia.

Why I loathe American power, at least they are were a known evil and broadly understood by us in the west. I used to be able to say 'well America's as evil as the rest but at least they believe in science and are reasonably rational' - sadly this is no longer the case and China is now the lead bad actor.
posted by unearthed at 8:37 PM on February 19, 2020

Russia's Track-and-Trace System Will Make Consumer Goods More Expensive

Launched in 2018, the Chestny ZNAK system is designed to authenticate merchant transactions by assigning unique IDs to physical goods—sometimes with a QR code, sometimes with a radio-frequency identification (RFID) tag, sometimes both. The code is scanned when the product is purchased, and the transaction is then registered in a government database. If a product is mislabeled, the business owner can be held criminally liable.

Russia isn't the only country with such a system. But the Russian approach stands out in that the government wants it to cover all products eventually, from medicine to tobacco to clothes to groceries. Authorities claim this will combat the distribution of counterfeit products. [Still] the system's ability to trace products from manufacturing to point of sale makes it easier for the state to monitor consumer activity under the guise of promoting market transparency.

Does the ECB Work on a Blockchain-based Digital Euro?

Another critique that is put forth frequently is that a retail CBDC [central bank digital currency] could lead to an orwellian dystopia in which central banks (and the government) can track any transaction and citizens become completely transparent...

In two recent publications, the ECB proposes concepts to address the main threats of retail CBDCs, namely a) how to maintain anonymous payments in a world with CBDC and b) how to maintain financial stability in a world with CBDC. In December 2019, the ECB published a paper about a prototype of a (partially) anonymous retail CBDC based on a distributed ledger technology (DLT) and announced plans to test this prototype. In January 2020, another paper was released, proposing a concrete retail CBDC system that does not disintermediate banks and prevents the threat of bank runs...

We showed that the ECB is actively engaged in analyzing the benefits and risks of a CBDC and described possible design principles and features of a retail CBDC. Since central banks aim for stabilizing the current money and financial system, the question of which technology should be used for the introduction of a CBDC is not necessarily the main focus of their research. Issuing a CBDC does not necessarily imply using DLT, such as blockchain technology, even if this technological choice is often assumed in the public debate. Hence, it is imaginable for a CBDC to be issued either via a centralized database system (probably the case in Sweden) or via a distributed ledger technology (as in China). The retail CBDC prototype of the ECB guaranteeing partly anonymous payments will be set up on the Corda DLT.

Google Backs FedNow Payments System

Google sent a letter to the Federal Reserve, asking the U.S. central bank to consider modeling FedNow[*] after the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) framework used in India, The Economic Times (ET) reported on Sunday (Dec. 15). FedNow is the new interbank real-time gross settlement (RTGS) service that will offer integrated clearing functionality for faster digital payments.

Mark Isakowitz, Google’s head of U.S. government affairs and public policy, said in a letter to the Fed that Google “worked closely” with the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) to build Google Pay for the Indian market. NPCI, the payment regulator governed by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), launched real-time payments in 2016.

“First, UPI is an interbank transfer system. … Second, it is a real-time system. Third, it is ‘open’ — meaning technology companies can build applications that help users directly manage transfers into and out of their accounts held at banks,” Isakowitz wrote, according to ET.

The system in India was quickly and widely adopted, and jumped from 100,000 monthly transactions three years ago to 1.15 billion now...

Google said it can use what it learned from the experience with India to offer the Fed specifics to “support real-time low-value and high-value payments, use standardized messaging protocols with extended metadata, and provide clear standards for an application programming interface (API) layer that enables licensed non-financial institution third parties to access and submit requests into this payment system.”

India's About to Hand People Data Americans Can Only Dream Of

India’s effort is one of a handful of initiatives around the globe to return control of data to consumers, notably with the “open banking” movement in Europe and Australia. India’s approach is unique -- it relies on third parties to mediate the often complicated process of information sharing -- and so is its target population, which is predominantly poor and, as of now, excluded from the formal banking system...

The “account aggregator” system will be offered by banks and licensed by India’s central bank, which will also regulate the data collection and sharing. By logging into authorized apps, users will be able to pull together all kinds of financial data -- spending patterns, bill repayment, tax returns, business transactions -- that they can then choose to share instantly and temporarily in pursuit of loans, investment products or even insurance.

A prospective borrower might, for example, release part of his goods-and-services tax filings to convince a lender of credit-worthiness. A vegetable vendor without collateral to back a loan might share a cash-flow statement or use a mobile phone repayment history to demonstrate reliability.

India’s newly established digital rules and practices lay the groundwork for this kind of system. The central bank now requires financial data to be reported in a standard, machine-readable format, which means it’s easier to automatically slice and share. India also has a history of collecting and protecting massive personal data sets, including biometric and payments information.

India: is Modi's BJP introducing Big Brother?

The surveillance build-up has sparked fears about the future of privacy in India, just as Mr Modi’s government embarks on a dramatic overhaul of how authorities and companies can use the data of the hundreds of millions of Indians rapidly coming online.

At the heart of the development is India’s first personal data protection bill, a comprehensive privacy framework introduced in December that was initially presented as the country’s answer to the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, providing new protections for India’s internet users.

But New Delhi’s proposed law has alarmed many of its original champions by carving out broad exemptions for authorities to access the personal data of its 1.4bn citizens. Now privacy activists fear India will build up surveillance projects with minimal oversight — in effect adopting a model for privacy rights that has more in common with China than with Europe.

The Age of Cooptation: The Cost of Doing Business in Xi's China

The cost of doing business in China today is a high one, and it is paid by any and every company that comes looking to tap into its markets or leverage its workforce. Quite simply, you don’t get to do business in China today without doing exactly what the Chinese government wants you to do...

Huawei is often first in line for taking advantage of what these suppliers have learned from Apple. Sometime around 2015, there were rumors in the Chinese smartphone manufacturing community of something called FaceID (leading up to the launch of the iPhone X)... Huawei went to the government for help... The Chinese Government, which has probably been more aggressive (and intrusive) in collecting data through facial recognition than any government in the world, was offering to turn over a database of faces to a private company to build an AI algorithm for facial recognition... But what did Huawei owe the Chinese government as a result?

Digital tools can be a useful bolster to democracy

One case in point: Taiwan. I recently interviewed the country’s digital minister, Audrey Tang, a free software programmer and self-described “conservative anarchist” who first came to prominence during the 2014 sunflower movement protesting against the growing power of Beijing in the country’s politics and economy.

Ms Tang was one of the “civic hackers” who helped mobilise people online; she’s now using distributed ledgers, quadratic voting and various online open-source platforms to enable greater participatory democracy in Taiwan.

Roughly half the country now participates in digital governance via an online platform that allows the public to weigh in on everything from labour law (should Uber be allowed to operate in Taiwan? Yes. Can it undercut traditional taxi fares? No) to proposing their own legislation, including a ban on plastic straws in takeaway drinks.

Around 10m people are now active on the platform, not only helping to craft law, but fact-checking politicians. Taiwan’s government requires state agencies to rebut any false claims made online or on social media relating to their areas of responsibility within two hours. Users also engage in “presidential hackathons” that aim to generate innovative solutions to public problems. They learn — as part of the public school curriculum — about how to be “data stewards” rather than simply data consumers.

They are serious about transparency: Ms Tang posts all interviews with the press online within days of them occurring. It seems to be going a long way towards building trust in the country’s system of governance.

A report by a Swedish research group called V-Dem found Taiwan was subject to more disinformation than nearly any other country, much of it coming from mainland China. Yet the popularity of pro-independence politicians is growing there, something Ms Tang views as a circular phenomenon. When politicians enable more direct participation, the public begins to have more trust in government. Rather than social media creating “a false sense of us versus them,” she notes, decentralised technologies have “enabled a sense of shared reality” in Taiwan.

posted by kliuless at 9:16 PM on February 19, 2020

How China Uses Artificial Intelligence to Commit Genocide
posted by adamvasco at 7:11 AM on February 22, 2020