Wednesday, January 19, 2022

Possible roadmap for cyberwar?

https://www.csoonline.com/article/3647072/a-timeline-of-russian-linked-cyberattacks-on-ukraine.html#tk.rss_all

Russia-linked cyberattacks on Ukraine: A timeline

Cyber incidents are playing a central role in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Here's how events are unfolding along with unanswered questions.



Perspective. Think globally, act locally.

https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2022/01/china-watching-ukraine-lot-interest/360774/

China Is Watching Ukraine With a Lot of Interest

Biden’s handling of Putin may tell Xi Jinping how resolutely the U.S. would defend Taiwan.



Ready or not, plug me in!

https://fpf.org/blog/brain-computer-interfaces-data-protection-understanding-the-technology-and-data-flows/

BRAIN-COMPUTER INTERFACES & DATA PROTECTION: UNDERSTANDING THE TECHNOLOGY AND DATA FLOWS

This post is the first in a four-part series on Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs), providing an overview of the technology, use cases, privacy risks, and proposed recommendations for promoting privacy and mitigating risks associated with BCIs.

Click here for FPF and IBM’s full report: Privacy and the Connected Mind. Additionally, FPF-curated resources, including policy & regulatory documents, academic papers, thought pieces, and technical analyses regarding brain-computer interfaces are here.

Today, Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) are primarily used in the health-care context for purposes including rehabilitation, diagnosis, symptom management, and accessibility. While BCI technologies are not yet widely adopted in the consumer space, there is increasing interest and proliferation of new direct-to-consumer neurotechnologies from gaming to education. It is important to understand how these technologies use data to provide services to individuals and institutions, as well as how the emergence of such technologies across sectors can create privacy risks. As organizations work to build BCIs while mitigating privacy risks, it is paramount for policymakers, consumers, and other stakeholders to understand the state of the technology today and associated neurodata and its flows.



Should also work for your organization.

https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2022/01/new-report-offers-glimpse-how-ai-will-remake-spywork/360872/

New Report Offers Glimpse Of How AI Will Remake Spywork

Unless the intelligence community changes the way it defines intelligence and adopts cloud computing, it will wind up behind adversaries, private interests, and even the public in knowing what might happen, according to a new report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Intelligence collection to predict broad geopolitical and military events has historically been the job of well-funded and expertly staffed government agencies like the CIA or the NSA. But, the report argues, the same institutional elements that allowed the government to create those agencies are now slowing them down in a time of large publicly-available datasets and enterprise cloud capabilities.

The report, scheduled to be released Wednesday, looks at a hypothetical “open-source, cloud-based, AI-enabled reporting,” or OSCAR, tool for the intelligence community, a tool that could help the community much more rapidly detect and act on clues about major geopolitical or security events. The report lists the various procedural, bureaucratic, and cultural barriers within the intelligence community that block its development and use by U.S. spy agencies.



The results are too addictive to ignore…

https://breachmedia.ca/canadian-police-expanding-surveillance-powers-via-new-digital-operations-centres/

Canadian police expanding surveillance powers via new digital “operations centres”

Canadian police have been establishing municipal surveillance centres to support law enforcement, deploying digital technologies that expand surveillance powers with the help of major US corporations, according to government documents seen by The Breach.

Working around-the-clock in special rooms or wings of police stations, these so-called “real-time operations centres” are the cornerstone of a shift to confront what police call the “new challenges” of a digital age.

They are intended to provide “virtual backup” for police officers in any situation, supplying them with information drawn from deep social media monitoring, private and public closed-circuit televisions (CCTV), open-ended data collection, and algorithmic mining.

According to government documents, the centres are modeled after fusion centres created by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security post-9/11. The U.S. fusion centres, which began with a focus on combatting terrorism but later expanded to criminal and political activity, have been criticizedfor indiscriminate surveillance and civil rights violations.



How do I surveil thee, let me count the ways…

https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-todays-technologies-become-weapons-in-modern-domestic-abuse/#ftag=RSSbaffb68

How tech is a weapon in modern domestic abuse -- and how to protect yourself

Through technology, it is possible to stalk someone with little effort. This can involve anything from sleuthing to find out information about your Tinder date to checking a potential work candidate's social profiles to planting spyware on your partner's phone.

In short, technology has provided new avenues for stalking to take place.


(Related)

https://www.pogowasright.org/california-and-florida-contribute-to-web-of-state-genetic-privacy-protections/

California and Florida contribute to web of state genetic privacy protections

Melissa Bianchi, Scott Loughlin, Melissa Levine, and Fleur Oke of Hogan Lovells write:

California’s Genetic Information Privacy Act (“GIPA”), which came into effect on January 1, 2022, imposes obligations on direct-to-consumer (“DTC”) genetic testing companies and others that collect and process genetic information. These new obligations, combined with the many differing obligations in other states, may require all organizations processing genetic information to reevaluate their genetic information policies and practices.
[…]
Florida’s Protecting DNA Privacy Act, which came into effect in October, amends its previous genetic privacy law and regulates the use, retention, disclosure, or transfer of a person’s DNA samples or analysis results. Under the law as revised, it is unlawful to collect, retain, submit for analysis, analyze, sell or transfer a person’s DNA sample, or sell or transfer a person’s DNA analysis results without that person’s express consent. Florida’s law is unique in that it imposes criminal penalties when a person engages in any of the following activities without obtaining the express consent of the individual….

Read more about the two state laws at Engage.



Perspective. If this keeps improving, eventually AI might explain science to politicians! (Or summarizing the law for juries?)

https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/18/22889180/ai-language-summary-scientific-research-tldr-papers

A NEW USE FOR AI: SUMMARIZING SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH FOR SEVEN-YEAR-OLDS

Academic writing often has a reputation for being hard to follow, but what if you could use machine learning to summarize arguments in scientific papers so that even a seven-year-old could understand them? That’s the idea behind tl;dr papers — a project that leverages recent advances in AI language processing to simplify science.

Work on the site began two years ago by university friends Yash Dani and Cindy Wu as a way to “learn more about software development,” Dani tells The Verge, but the service went viral on Twitter over the weekend when academics started sharing AI summaries of their research. The AI-generated results are sometimes inaccurate or simplified to the point of idiocy. But just as often, they are satisfyingly and surprisingly concise, cutting through academic jargon to deliver what could be mistaken for child-like wisdom.


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