West
Virginia's voting experiment stirs security fears
West Virginia is about to take a leap of faith in
voting technology — but it could put people's ballots at risk.
Next month, it will become the first state to
deploy a smartphone app in a general election, allowing hundreds of
overseas residents and members of the military stationed abroad to
cast their ballots remotely. And the app will rely on blockchain,
the same buzzy technology that underpins bitcoin, in yet another
Election Day first.
… But cybersecurity and election integrity
advocates say West Virginia is setting an example of all the things
states shouldn’t do when it comes to securing their elections, an
already fraught topic given fears that Russian operatives are trying
again to tamper with U.S. democracy.
… Voting integrity advocates are in overall
agreement about the best way to secure elections, and they have
pressed states to stick with technology that includes auditable paper
trails — even suing Georgia over that issue. They’ve urged the
Department of Homeland Security to advise states against having
modems in voting machines. And they have pressed the government to
warn state election officials against any kind of online voting.
… “Why is blockchain voting a dumb idea?”
University of Pennsylvania cybersecurity expert Matt Blaze tweeted
in August. “Glad you asked. For starters: - It doesn't solve any
problems civil elections actually have. - It's basically incompatible
with ‘software independence’, considered an essential property -
It can make ballot secrecy difficult or impossible.”
Propaganda
based on facts, not promises?
New Method,
Same Strategy: Russia Has Long Exploited U.S. Racial Divisions
As the country prepares for the first national
election since evidence emerged of the Russian government’s
interference in the presidential race two years ago, it is worth
recalling that the 2016 election was not the first time that Russia
intervened in U.S. politics. Recent Russian operations used American
racism to stoke divisions in our society. More
than half of the Facebook advertisements created by the
Kremlin-backed Internet Research Agency (IRA) to influence Americans
around the 2016 presidential election referenced race. While the use
of social media is new, Russia has a long history of highlighting the
conflict between American ideals of equality and the reality of
racial injustice in this country. This history provides important
context as the U.S. grapples with how to respond to the continued
threat of Russian government interference in our democracy.
A state-sponsored bot net? Easy to implement.
Why didn’t Facebook block this? New techniques to avoid
detection...
Exclusive:
Twitter pulls down bot network that pushed pro-Saudi talking points
about disappeared journalist
Twitter suspended a network of suspected Twitter
bots on Thursday that pushed pro-Saudi Arabia talking points about
the disappearance of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the past week.
Twitter became aware of some of the bots on
Thursday when NBC News presented the company with a spreadsheet of
hundreds of accounts that tweeted and retweeted the same pro-Saudi
government tweets at the same time.
… Saudi Arabia has widely embraced social
media. A study by Crowd Analyzer, an Arabic-focused social media
analysis firm, found that there were 11 million active Twitter users
in the country.
The bot accounts pushed messages over the weekend
imploring users to express doubt about news stories reporting that
Khashoggi was killed at the Saudi consulate in Turkey on Oct. 2 at
the order of the Saudi government, as Turkish officials have alleged.
… Russell found the accounts by analyzing a
trove of Twitter data and finding accounts that were created on the
same date and had similar numbers of followers, tweets and likes.
From there, he compiled a list of hundreds of accounts that tweeted
identical tweets at the same time.
He called the influence operation a “standard”
bot network, but was surprised at how old some of these accounts are.
“There were some that were from 2011, some from
2014,” he said. “For a bot to sit out there on Twitter for that
long is kind of shocking.”
(Related)
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/oct/18/facebook-war-room-social-media-fake-news-politics
Facebook
has a fake news 'war room' – but is it really working?
… One study, however, found that out of 50 of
the most widely shared political images on WhatsApp in the lead-up to
the election in Brazil, only 8%
were considered fully truthful, and many were false, misleading
or unsubstantiated. There has also been a growing problem of fake
news videos, which don’t face the same scrutiny as articles.
… The new political ad moderation system has
also had major hiccups. Hours after the briefing, USA Today
published
a report showing that Facebook had removed ads after incorrectly
labeling them “political”, simply because they used descriptions
like “African-American” and “Mexican” or were written in
Spanish.
Not
bad! Some very simple and clear definitions.
FPF
Release: The Privacy Expert’s Guide to AI And Machine Learning
Today, FPF announces the release of The
Privacy Expert’s Guide to AI and Machine Learning. This guide
explains the technological basics of AI and ML systems at a level of
understanding useful for non-programmers, and addresses certain
privacy challenges associated with the implementation of new and
existing ML-based products and services.
No comments:
Post a Comment