Further Reading, Other Developments, and Coming Events (8 October)

Coming Events

• The European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA), Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre (EC3) and the Computer Emergency Response Team for the EU Institutions, Bodies and Agencies (CERT-EU) will hold the 4th annual IoT Security Conference series “to raise awareness on the security challenges facing the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem across the European Union:”
  • Artificial Intelligence – 14 October at 15:00 to 16:30 CET
  • Supply Chain for IoT – 21 October at 15:00 to 16:30 CET
• The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will hold an open commission meeting on 27 October, and the agency has released a tentative agenda:
  • Restoring Internet Freedom Order Remand – The Commission will consider an Order on Remand that would respond to the remand from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and conclude that the Restoring Internet Freedom Order promotes public safety, facilitates broadband infrastructure deployment, and allows the Commission to continue to provide Lifeline support for broadband Internet access service. (WC Docket Nos. 17-108, 17-287, 11- 42)
  • Establishing a 5G Fund for Rural America – The Commission will consider a Report and Order that would establish the 5G Fund for Rural America to ensure that all Americans have access to the next generation of wireless connectivity. (GN Docket No. 20-32)
  • Increasing Unlicensed Wireless Opportunities in TV White Spaces – The Commission will consider a Report and Order that would increase opportunities for unlicensed white space devices to operate on broadcast television channels 2-35 and expand wireless broadband connectivity in rural and underserved areas. (ET Docket No. 20-36)
  • Streamlining State and Local Approval of Certain Wireless Structure Modifications –
  • The Commission will consider a Report and Order that would further accelerate the deployment of 5G by providing that modifications to existing towers involving limited ground excavation or deployment would be subject to streamlined state and local review pursuant to section 6409(a) of the Spectrum Act of 2012. (WT Docket No. 19-250; RM-11849)
  • Revitalizing AM Radio Service with All-Digital Broadcast Option – The Commission will consider a Report and Order that would authorize AM stations to transition to an all-digital signal on a voluntary basis and would also adopt technical specifications for such stations. (MB Docket Nos. 13-249, 19-311)
  • Expanding Audio Description of Video Content to More TV Markets – The Commission will consider a Report and Order that would expand audio description requirements to 40 additional television markets over the next four years in order to increase the amount of video programming that is accessible to blind and visually impaired Americans. (MB Docket No. 11-43)
  • Modernizing Unbundling and Resale Requirements – The Commission will consider a Report and Order to modernize the Commission’s unbundling and resale regulations, eliminating requirements where they stifle broadband deployment and the transition to next- generation networks, but preserving them where they are still necessary to promote robust intermodal competition. (WC Docket No. 19-308)
  • Enforcement Bureau Action – The Commission will consider an enforcement action.
• On October 29, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) will hold a seminar titled “Green Lights & Red Flags: FTC Rules of the Road for Business workshop” that “will bring together Ohio business owners and marketing executives with national and state legal experts to provide practical insights to business and legal professionals about how established consumer protection principles apply in today’s fast-paced marketplace.”

Other Developments

• Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society published a study, “Mail-In Voter Fraud: Anatomy of a Disinformation Campaign,” which found a concerted, almost certainly coordinated campaign led by President Donald Trump, the Republican Party, and conservative media outlets to claim against all evidence that mail voting is rife with fraud. The study points to structural issues in the United States (U.S.) and the broader media that allow parties to disseminate disinformation and propaganda. The authors found the traditional print and television media more effective and complicit in spreading lies and disinformation than social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. The Berkman Klein Center explained:
  • The claim that election fraud is a major concern with mail-in ballots has become the central threat to election participation during the Covid-19 pandemic and to the legitimacy of the outcome of the election across the political spectrum. President Trump has repeatedly cited his concerns over voter fraud associated with mail-in ballots as a reason that he may not abide by an adverse electoral outcome. Polling conducted in September 2020 suggests that nearly half of Republicans agree with the president that election fraud is a major concern associated with expanded mail-in voting during the pandemic. Few Democrats share that belief. Despite the consensus among independent academic and journalistic investigations that voter fraud is rare and extremely unlikely to determine a national election, tens of millions of Americans believe the opposite. This is a study of the disinformation campaign that led to widespread acceptance of this apparently false belief and to its partisan distribution pattern. Contrary to the focus of most contemporary work on disinformation, our findings suggest that this highly effective disinformation campaign, with potentially profound effects for both participation in and the legitimacy of the 2020 election, was an elite-driven, mass-media led process. Social media played only a secondary and supportive role.
  • Our results are based on analyzing over fifty-five thousand online media stories, five million tweets, and seventy-five thousand posts on public Facebook pages garnering millions of engagements. They are consistent with our findings about the American political media ecosystem from 2015-2018, published in  Network Propaganda , in which we found that Fox News and Donald Trump’s own campaign were far more influential in spreading false beliefs than Russian trolls or Facebook clickbait artists. This dynamic appears to be even more pronounced in this election cycle, likely because Donald Trump’s position as president and his leadership of the Republican Party allow him to operate directly through political and media elites, rather than relying on online media as he did when he sought to advance his then-still-insurgent positions in 2015 and the first half of 2016.
  • Our findings here suggest that Donald Trump has perfected the art of harnessing mass media to disseminate and at times reinforce his disinformation campaign by using three core standard practices of professional journalism. These three are: elite institutional focus (if the President says it, it’s news); headline seeking (if it bleeds, it leads); and  balance , neutrality, or the avoidance of the appearance of taking a side. He uses the first two in combination to summon coverage at will, and has used them continuously to set the agenda surrounding mail-in voting through a combination of tweets, press conferences, and television interviews on Fox News. He relies on the latter professional practice to keep audiences that are not politically pre-committed and have relatively low political knowledge confused, because it limits the degree to which professional journalists in mass media organizations are willing or able to directly call the voter fraud frame disinformation. The president is, however, not acting alone. Throughout the first six months of the disinformation campaign, the Republican National Committee (RNC) and staff from the Trump campaign appear repeatedly and consistently on message at the same moments, suggesting an institutionalized rather than individual disinformation campaign. The efforts of the president and the Republican Party are supported by the right-wing media ecosystem, primarily Fox News and talk radio functioning in effect as a party press. These reinforce the message, provide the president a platform, and marginalize or attack those Republican leaders or any conservative media personalities who insist that there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud associated with mail-in voting.
  • The primary cure for the elite-driven, mass media communicated information disorder we observe here is unlikely to be more fact checking on Facebook. Instead, it is likely to require more aggressive policing by traditional professional media, the Associated Press, the television networks, and local TV news editors of whether and how they cover Trump’s propaganda efforts, and how they educate their audiences about the disinformation campaign the president and the Republican Party have waged.
• The Senate Minority Leader and the top Democrats on three committees sent a letter to the acting Secretary of Homeland Security asking him to “release a document that shows President Donald Trump’s attacks on American Elections are consistent with a foreign influence campaign.” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Senate Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Mark Warner (D-VA), Senate Rules Committee Ranking Member Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Ranking Member Gary Peters (D-MI), and Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) wrote to acting Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf:
  • We write to urge you to immediately release to the public a September 3, 2020, analysis produced by the Department’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis.  This document demonstrates that a foreign actor is attempting to undermine faith in the US electoral system, particularly vote-by-mail systems, in a manner that is consistent with the rhetoric being used by President Trump, Attorney General Barr, and others.
  • The document has been marked ‘Unclassified/For Official Use Only,’ meaning that its release would not pose a risk to sources and methods and that it has already been widely distributed around the country through unclassified channels. It is now critical and urgent that the American people have access to this document so that they can understand the context of Trump’s statements and actions.
• Representatives Abigail Spanberger (D-VA) and John Katko (R-NY) introduced the “Foreign Agent Disclaimer Enhancement (FADE) Act” “to protect against the influence of foreign nations that seek to weaken the U.S. electoral system and sow division through online disinformation campaigns.” This bill would close a loophole in the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) that does not require foreign agents to disclose social media posts intended to persuade Americans as they must for other forms of communication. They provided the context for the legislation:
  • This week, the Federal Bureau of Investigation alerted Twitter that accounts likely based in Iran attempted to spread disinformation during the U.S. presidential debate.
  • An April 2020 State Department report warned that China, Iran, and Russia are using the COVID-19 crisis to launch a propaganda and disinformation onslaught against the United States.
  • Spanberger and Katko summarized the bill in their press release:
    • The Foreign Agent Disclaimer Enhancement (FADE) Act would increase transparency by requiring disclaimers attributing political content to a foreign principal be embedded on the face of a social media post itself. With this new requirement, disclaimers would remain with a post whenever the post is subsequently shared. The FADE Act would also clarify that these disclaimer requirements apply to the internet and apply to any political communications directed at the United States — regardless of the foreign agent’s location around the world.
    • To ensure enforcement of these new transparency measures, the FADE Act would requirethe Department of Justice (DOJ) to notify online platforms if a foreign agent does not meet disclaimer requirements for posts on their platforms, and in these cases, require the platform to remove the materials and use reasonable efforts to inform recipients of the materials that the information they saw was disseminated by a foreign agent. Additionally, the bipartisan bill would requireDOJ to prepare a report to Congress on enforcement challenges.
• Europol issued its annual “Internet Organised Crime Threat Assessment (IOCTA) 2020” that “provides a unique law enforcement- focused assessment of emerging challenges and key developments in the area of cybercrime” in the European Union (EU).
• Europol highlighted its findings:
  • Cross-Cutting Crime Facilitators And Challenges To Criminal Investigations
    • Social engineering remains a top threat to facilitate other types of cybercrime.
    • Cryptocurrencies continue to facilitate payments for various forms of cybercrime, as developments evolve with respect to privacy- oriented crypto coins and services.
    • Challenges with reporting hinder the ability to create an accurate overview of crime prevalence across the EU.
  • Cyber-Dependent Crime
    • Ransomware remains the most dominant threat as criminals increase pressure by threatening publication of data if victims do not pay.
    • Ransomware on third-party providers also creates potential significant damage for other organisations in the supply chain and critical infrastructure.
    • Emotet is omnipresent given its versatile use and leads the way as the benchmark of modern malware.
    • The threat potential of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks is higher than its current impact in the EU.
  • Child Sexual Exploitation Online
    • The amount of online Child sexual abuse material (CSAM) detected continues to increase, further exacerbated by the COVID-19 crisis, which has serious consequences for the capacity of law enforcement authorities.
    • The use of encrypted chat apps and industry proposals to expand this market pose a substantial risk for abuse and make it more difficult for law enforcement to detect and investigate online Child sexual exploitation (CSE) activities.
    • Online offender communities exhibit considerable resilience and are continuously evolving.
    • Livestreaming of child sexual abuse continues to increase and became even more prevalent during the COVID-19 crisis.
    • The commercialisation of online CSE is becoming a more widespread issue, with individuals uploading material to hosting sites and subsequently acquiring credit on the basis of the number of downloads.
  • Payment Fraud
    • SIM swapping is a key trend that allows perpetrators to take over accounts and has demonstrated a steep rise over the last year.
    • Business email compromise (BEC) remains an area of concern as it has increased, grown in sophistication, and become more targeted.
    • Online investment fraud is one of the fastest growing crimes, generating millions in losses and affecting thousands of victims.
    • Card-not-present (CNP) fraud continues to increase as criminals diversify in terms of target sectors and electronic skimming (e-skimming) modi operandi.
  • The Criminal Abuse Of The Darkweb
    • The Darkweb environment has remained volatile, lifecycles of Darkweb market places have shortened, and no clear dominant market has risen over the past year compared to previous years to fill the vacuum left by the takedowns in 2019.
    • The nature of the Darkweb community at administrator-level shows how adaptive it is under challenging times, including more effective cooperation in the search for better security solutions and safe Darkweb interaction.
    • There has been an increase in the use of privacy- enhanced cryptocurrencies and an emergence of privacy-enhanced coinjoin concepts, such as Wasabi and Samurai.
    • Surface web e-commerce sites and encrypted communication platforms offer an additional dimension to Darkweb trading to enhance the overall business model.
• “43 center-right organizations, think tanks, and policy experts” wrote Senate Majority Whip John Thune (R-SD) “for his leadership and support for the American competitive approach to 5G deployment.” Last week, Thune and 18 Republican colleagues sent President Donald Trump a letter “to express our concerns about a Request For Information (RFI) released by the Department of Defense (DOD) that contradicts the successful free-market strategy you have embraced for 5G.” Late last month, the United States Department of Defense (DOD) released a  RFI on the possibility of the agency sharing its prized portions of electromagnetic spectrum with commercial providers to speed the development and adoption of 5G in the United States.
  • The 43 groups argued:
    • We too are concerned with the Department of Defense Request for Information on a government-managed process for 5G development and are alarmed with how quickly it is proceeding.  Even more disturbing are the rumors that the RFI was only for show and that the DoD already has an RFP it plans to greenlight. 
    • A government-run 5G backbone, wholesale network, or whatever name it goes by, is nationalization of private business. Spectrum sharing is something that must be considered as the nation moves forward with private networks, but it is not a reason for a government takeover. For a government-run network to happen, the federal government would have to either renege on licenses granted to private users or hoard spectrum at the expense of private industry. Either approach would upend well-established licensure policies at the FCC that establish certainty in operating and maintaining complex networks and create massive unnecessary delays to launching 5G networks. Moreover, the government should not be in the business of “competing” with private industry. That’s the business model of China and Russia, not the United States. 
• The top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee wrote Facebook, Twitter, and Google, urging the companies “to implement robust accountability and transparency standards ahead of the November election, including requirements outlined in the Honest Ads Act…to help prevent foreign interference in elections and improve the transparency of online political advertisements” according to his press release. Senator Mark Warner   (D-VA) asserted that “[i]n individual letters to Facebook, Google, and Twitter, [he] detailed the various ways in which each company continues to contribute to the spread of disinformation, viral misinformation, and voter suppression efforts.” Warner “also warned about the imminent risk of bad actors once again weaponizing American-bred social media tools to undermine democracy ahead of the November election, and urged each company to take proactive measures to safeguard against these efforts.” Warner specified:
  • In his letter to Facebook, [he] criticized the platform’s efforts to label manipulated or synthetic content, describing these as “wholly inadequate.” He also raised alarm with instances of Facebook’s amplification of harmful content.
  • Similarly, in a letter to Google, [he] raised concern with the company’s efforts to combat harmful misinformation – particularly disinformation about voting, spread by right-leaning YouTube channels. He also criticized the comprehensiveness of Google’s ad archive, which presently excludes issue ads.
  • In his letter to Twitter, which has banned paid political content and placed restrictions on cause-based advertising, [he] noted that doctored political content continues to spread organically without adequate labeling that slows its spread or contextualizes it for users.
• Representative Lauren Underwood (D-IL), the new Chair of the House Homeland Security Committee’s Cybersecurity, Infrastructure Protection, and Innovation Subcommittee, wrote Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, urging them “to address ongoing reports of election-related disinformation targeting Black voters on their platforms” per her press release. She argued “[d]uring the 2016 election, social media platforms were used by malicious actors attempting to silence Black voters and sow racial division…[and] [f]our years later, social media companies have made too little progress toward containing this growing threat.” Underwood “requested information on the steps the companies are taking to prevent voter suppression, interference, and disinformation targeting Black voters.”

Further Reading

• “Judge Orders Twitter To Unmask FBI Impersonator Who Set Off Seth Rich Conspiracy” By Bobby Allyn — NPR. A magistrate judge in California denied Twitter’s motion to quash a subpoena in order to not reveal the account information of an anonymous user who spread lies about deceased Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich and his family regarding the Russian Federation’s interference in the 2016 election.
• “Justices wary of upending tech industry in Google v. Oracle Supreme Court fight” By Tucker Higgins — CNBC. This week, the Supreme Court of the United States heard oral arguments in the decade long legal war between Google and Oracle arising from the latter’s claim that the former infringed its ownership rights by using roughly 11,500 lines of code to create its Android operating system from an application programming interface developed by Sun Microsystems, a company bought by Oracle. This case could have huge ramifications for the technology industry if Oracle wins because it could make the development of new products and services much harder.
• “Facebook to temporarily halt political ads in U.S. after polls close Nov. 3, broadening earlier restrictions” By Elizabeth Dwoskin — The Washington Post. In its newest announcement, Facebook announced it will not accept political or issues advertising in the week after election day. This effort is the latest measure the platform has announced to address misinformation and disinformation. Facebook will also label efforts of candidates to claim an election has been decided if it, in fact, has not been. The platform will also remove posts that aim to intimidate voters or suppress the voting turnout.
• “Leaked: Confidential Amazon memo reveals new software to track unions” By Jason Del Rey and Shirin Ghaffary — recode. The tech giant is turning its data collection and analysis capabilities on its workforce in an effort to prevent unionizing at the United States’ (U.S.) second largest employer.
• “QAnon High Priest Was Just Trolling Away as a Citigroup Tech Executive” By William Turton and Joshua Brustein — Bloomberg. The fascinating if not horrifying story of how a seemingly, well-to-do mild-mannered tech specialist became one of the key figures in the QAnon conspiracy.

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