The Department of Justice unsealed indictments against four officers of China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA), charging them with carrying out the 2017 hack against consumer credit bureau Equifax. The indictments allege that the officers, who were members of the PLA’s 54th Research Institute, “conspired with each other to hack into Equifax’s computer networks, maintain unauthorized access to those computers, and steal sensitive, personally identifiable information of approximately 145 million American victims.”
Kashmir Hill, a technology reporter for the New York Times, conducted an interview with Hoan Ton-That, the founder of Clearview AI, a technology company providing law enforcement agencies with facial recognition software. Ton-That discussed the company’s policy regarding selling the software, claiming that “[Clearview AI’s] philosophy is basically, if it’s a U.S. based — or like a democracy or an ally of the U.S. — we will consider it. But like, no China, no Russia or anything that wouldn’t be good. So if it’s a country where it’s just governed terribly or whatever, I don’t know if we’d feel comfortable selling to certain countries.” Additionally, he claimed that at this stage Clearview AI is not looking to offer the software on the consumer market.Relatedly, CNN tested Clearview AI software in a piece featuring PRG member Jake Goldenfein.
Researchers affiliated with Roboflow discovered widespread problems with the labeling (and mislabeling) of cars, pedestrians and cyclists in a popular dataset used to build autonomous cars.
The Washington Post reported that Crypto AG, an encryption company based in Switzerland, has been owned and controlled for decades by the CIA and German intelligence.
US government officials have reportedly told the Wall Street Journal that Huawei built backdoors into mobile phone networks it maintains and sells. These new disclosures come after Britain approved a plan allowing Huawei to build the country’s 5G network, despite urging by the US to the contrary.
The New York Times reported on the many organizational problems which plagued the Iowa Democratic caucuses beyond the Shadow Inc. reporting app.
The Federal Trade Commission ordered five major tech companies (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft) to provide information about their acquisitions in the past 10 years which were not previously reported to antitrust agencies.
The British government introduced a plan which would give Ofcom, the country’s media regulator, new powers to regulate internet content. Although the details of the proposal have not been released, the aim appears to be to combat “harmful content such as violence, terrorism, cyber-bullying and child abuse.” (BBC/NYT)
The Scottish Parliament’s Justice Sub-Committee on Policing released a report concluding that “current live facial recognition technology is not fit for use by Police Scotland.” Among other things, the report cites biases against women and ethnic minorities as causes for concern. (BBC)
Israel’s Ministry of Justice has begun to investigate the massive leak of voters’ data via an election campaign app used by the Likud party. The data includes the names, ID numbers and addresses of all Israeli voters. (JP/Haaretz/NYT)
Compiled by Student Fellow Stav Zeitouni.