Defending Politically Vulnerable Organizations Online


Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity (CLTC): “A new report …details how media outlets, human rights groups, NGOs, and other politically vulnerable organizations face significant cybersecurity threats—often at the hands of powerful governments—but have limited resources to protect themselves. The paper, “Defending Politically Vulnerable Organizations Online,” by CLTC Research Fellow Sean Brooks, provides an overview of cybersecurity threats to civil society organizations targeted for political purposes, and explores the ecosystem of resources available to help these organizations improve their cybersecurity.

“From mass surveillance of political dissidents in Thailand to spyware attacks on journalists in Mexico, cyberattacks against civil society organizations have become a persistent problem in recent years,” says Steve Weber, Faculty Director of CLTC. “While journalists, activists, and others take steps to protect themselves, such as installing firewalls and anti-virus software, they often lack the technical ability or capital to establish protections better suited to the threats they face, including phishing. Too few organizations and resources are available help them expand their cybersecurity capabilities.”

To compile their report, Brooks and his colleagues at CLTC undertook an extensive open-source review of more than 100 organizations supporting politically vulnerable organizations, and conducted more than 30 interviews with activists, threat researchers, and cybersecurity professionals. The report details the wide range of threats that politically vulnerable organizations face—from phishing emails, troll campaigns, and government-sanctioned censorship to sophisticated “zero-day” attacks—and it exposes the significant resource constraints that limit these organizations’ access to expertise and technology….(More)”.

The Data Transfer Project


About: “The Data Transfer Project was formed in 2017 to create an open-source, service-to-service data portability platform so that all individuals across the web could easily move their data between online service providers whenever they want.

The contributors to the Data Transfer Project believe portability and interoperability are central to innovation. Making it easier for individuals to choose among services facilitates competition, empowers individuals to try new services and enables them to choose the offering that best suits their needs.

Current contributors include Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter.

Individuals have many reasons to transfer data, but we want to highlight a few examples that demonstrate the additional value of service-to-service portability.

  • A user discovers a new photo printing service offering beautiful and innovative photo book formats, but their photos are stored in their social media account. With the Data Transfer Project, they could visit a website or app offered by the photo printing service and initiate a transfer directly from their social media platform to the photo book service.
  • A user doesn’t agree with the privacy policy of their music service. They want to stop using it immediately, but don’t want to lose the playlists they have created. Using this open-source software, they could use the export functionality of the original Provider to save a copy of their playlists to the cloud. This enables them to import the lists to a new Provider, or multiple Providers, once they decide on a new service.
  • A large company is getting requests from customers who would like to import data from a legacy Provider that is going out of business. The legacy Provider has limited options for letting customers move their data. The large company writes an Adapter for the legacy Provider’s Application Program Interfaces (APIs) that permits users to transfer data to their service, also benefiting other Providers that handle the same data type.
  • A user in a low bandwidth area has been working with an architect on drawings and graphics for a new house. At the end of the project, they both want to transfer all the files from a shared storage system to the user’s cloud storage drive. They go to the cloud storage Data Transfer Project User Interface (UI) and move hundreds of large files directly, without straining their bandwidth.
  • An industry association for supermarkets wants to allow customers to transfer their loyalty card data from one member grocer to another, so they can get coupons based on buying habits between stores. The Association would do this by hosting an industry-specific Host Platform of DTP.

The innovation in each of these examples lies behind the scenes: Data Transfer Project makes it easy for Providers to allow their customers to interact with their data in ways their customers would expect. In most cases, the direct-data transfer experience will be branded and managed by the receiving Provider, and the customer wouldn’t need to see DTP branding or infrastructure at all….

To get a more in-depth understanding of the project, its fundamentals and the details involved, please download “Data Transfer Project Overview and Fundamentals”….(More)”.

Let’s make private data into a public good


Article by Mariana Mazzucato: “The internet giants depend on our data. A new relationship between us and them could deliver real value to society….We should ask how the value of these companies has been created, how that value has been measured, and who benefits from it. If we go by national accounts, the contribution of internet platforms to national income (as measured, for example, by GDP) is represented by the advertisement-related services they sell. But does that make sense? It’s not clear that ads really contribute to the national product, let alone to social well-being—which should be the aim of economic activity. Measuring the value of a company like Google or Facebook by the number of ads it sells is consistent with standard neoclassical economics, which interprets any market-based transaction as signaling the production of some kind of output—in other words, no matter what the thing is, as long as a price is received, it must be valuable. But in the case of these internet companies, that’s misleading: if online giants contribute to social well-being, they do it through the services they provide to users, not through the accompanying advertisements.

This way we have of ascribing value to what the internet giants produce is completely confusing, and it’s generating a paradoxical result: their advertising activities are counted as a net contribution to national income, while the more valuable services they provide to users are not.

Let’s not forget that a large part of the technology and necessary data was created by all of us, and should thus belong to all of us. The underlying infrastructure that all these companies rely on was created collectively (via the tax dollars that built the internet), and it also feeds off network effects that are produced collectively. There is indeed no reason why the public’s data should not be owned by a public repository that sells the data to the tech giants, rather than vice versa. But the key issue here is not just sending a portion of the profits from data back to citizens but also allowing them to shape the digital economy in a way that satisfies public needs. Using big data and AI to improve the services provided by the welfare state—from health care to social housing—is just one example.

Only by thinking about digital platforms as collective creations can we construct a new model that offers something of real value, driven by public purpose. We’re never far from a media story that stirs up a debate about the need to regulate tech companies, which creates a sense that there’s a war between their interests and those of national governments. We need to move beyond this narrative. The digital economy must be subject to the needs of all sides; it’s a partnership of equals where regulators should have the confidence to be market shapers and value creators….(More)”.

Health Insurers Are Vacuuming Up Details About You — And It Could Raise Your Rates


Marshall Allen at ProPublica: “With little public scrutiny, the health insurance industry has joined forces with data brokers to vacuum up personal details about hundreds of millions of Americans, including, odds are, many readers of this story. The companies are tracking your race, education level, TV habits, marital status, net worth. They’re collecting what you post on social media, whether you’re behind on your bills, what you order online. Then they feed this information into complicated computer algorithms that spit out predictions about how much your health care could cost them.

Are you a woman who recently changed your name? You could be newly married and have a pricey pregnancy pending. Or maybe you’re stressed and anxious from a recent divorce. That, too, the computer models predict, may run up your medical bills.

Are you a woman who’s purchased plus-size clothing? You’re considered at risk of depression. Mental health care can be expensive.

Low-income and a minority? That means, the data brokers say, you are more likely to live in a dilapidated and dangerous neighborhood, increasing your health risks.

“We sit on oceans of data,” said Eric McCulley, director of strategic solutions for LexisNexis Risk Solutions, during a conversation at the data firm’s booth. And he isn’t apologetic about using it. “The fact is, our data is in the public domain,” he said. “We didn’t put it out there.”

Insurers contend they use the information to spot health issues in their clients — and flag them so they get services they need. And companies like LexisNexis say the data shouldn’t be used to set prices. But as a research scientist from one company told me: “I can’t say it hasn’t happened.”

At a time when every week brings a new privacy scandal and worries abound about the misuse of personal information, patient advocates and privacy scholars say the insurance industry’s data gathering runs counter to its touted, and federally required, allegiance to patients’ medical privacy. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, only protects medical information.

“We have a health privacy machine that’s in crisis,” said Frank Pasquale, a professor at the University of Maryland Carey School of Law who specializes in issues related to machine learning and algorithms. “We have a law that only covers one source of health information. They are rapidly developing another source.”…(More)”.

Activism in the Social Media Age


PewInternet: “This month marks the fifth anniversary of the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag, which was first coined following the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin. In the course of those five years, #BlackLivesMatter has become an archetypal example of modern protests and political engagement on social media: A new Pew Research Center analysis of public tweets finds the hashtag has been used nearly 30 million times on Twitter – an average of 17,002 times per day – as of May 1, 2018.

Use of the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag on Twitter periodically spikes in response to major news events

The conversations surrounding this hashtag often center on issues related to race, violence and law enforcement, and its usage periodically surges surrounding real-world events – most prominently, during the police-related deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile and the subsequent shooting of police officers in Dallas, Texas, and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in July 2016.1

The rise of the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag – along with others like #MeToo and #MAGA (Make America Great Again) – has sparked a broader discussion about the effectiveness and viability of using social media for political engagement and social activism. To that end, a new survey by the Center finds that majorities of Americans do believe these sites are very or somewhat important for accomplishing a range of political goals, such as getting politicians to pay attention to issues (69% of Americans feel these platforms are important for this purpose) or creating sustained movements for social change (67%).

Certain groups of social media users – most notably, those who are black or Hispanic – view these platforms as an especially important tool for their own political engagement. For example, roughly half of black social media users say these platforms are at least somewhat personally important to them as a venue for expressing their political views or for getting involved with issues that are important to them. Those shares fall to around a third among white social media users.2

At the same time, the public as a whole expresses mixed views about the potential broader impact these sites might be having on political discourse and the nature of political activism. Some 64% of Americans feel that the statement “social media help give a voice to underrepresented groups” describes these sites very or somewhat well. But a larger share say social networking sites distract people from issues that are truly important (77% feel this way), and 71% agree with the assertion that “social media makes people believe they’re making a difference when they really aren’t.” Blacks and whites alike offer somewhat mixed assessments of the benefits and costs of activism on social media. But larger majorities of black Americans say these sites promote important issues or give voice to underrepresented groups, while smaller shares of blacks feel that political engagement on social media produces significant downsides in the form of a distracted public or “slacktivism.”…(More)”.

What if people were paid for their data?


The Economist: “Data Slavery” Jennifer Lyn Morone, an American artist, thinks this is the state in which most people now live. To get free online services, she laments, they hand over intimate information to technology firms. “Personal data are much more valuable than you think,” she says. To highlight this sorry state of affairs, Ms Morone has resorted to what she calls “extreme capitalism”: she registered herself as a company in Delaware in an effort to exploit her personal data for financial gain. She created dossiers containing different subsets of data, which she displayed in a London gallery in 2016 and offered for sale, starting at £100 ($135). The entire collection, including her health data and social-security number, can be had for £7,000.

Only a few buyers have taken her up on this offer and she finds “the whole thing really absurd”. ..Given the current state of digital affairs, in which the collection and exploitation of personal data is dominated by big tech firms, Ms Morone’s approach, in which individuals offer their data for sale, seems unlikely to catch on. But what if people really controlled their data—and the tech giants were required to pay for access? What would such a data economy look like?…

Labour, like data, is a resource that is hard to pin down. Workers were not properly compensated for labour for most of human history. Even once people were free to sell their labour, it took decades for wages to reach liveable levels on average. History won’t repeat itself, but chances are that it will rhyme, Mr Weyl predicts in “Radical Markets”, a provocative new book he has co-written with Eric Posner of the University of Chicago. He argues that in the age of artificial intelligence, it makes sense to treat data as a form of labour.

To understand why, it helps to keep in mind that “artificial intelligence” is something of a misnomer. Messrs Weyl and Posner call it “collective intelligence”: most AI algorithms need to be trained using reams of human-generated examples, in a process called machine learning. Unless they know what the right answers (provided by humans) are meant to be, algorithms cannot translate languages, understand speech or recognise objects in images. Data provided by humans can thus be seen as a form of labour which powers AI. As the data economy grows up, such data work will take many forms. Much of it will be passive, as people engage in all kinds of activities—liking social-media posts, listening to music, recommending restaurants—that generate the data needed to power new services. But some people’s data work will be more active, as they make decisions (such as labelling images or steering a car through a busy city) that can be used as the basis for training AI systems….

But much still needs to happen for personal data to be widely considered as labour, and paid for as such. For one thing, the right legal framework will be needed to encourage the emergence of a new data economy. The European Union’s new General Data Protection Regulation, which came into effect in May, already gives people extensive rights to check, download and even delete personal data held by companies. Second, the technology to keep track of data flows needs to become much more capable. Research to calculate the value of particular data to an AI service is in its infancy.

Third, and most important, people will have to develop a “class consciousness” as data workers. Most people say they want their personal information to be protected, but then trade it away for nearly nothing, something known as the “privacy paradox”. Yet things may be changing: more than 90% of Americans think being in control of who can get data on them is important, according to the Pew Research Centre, a think-tank….(More)”.

Sentiment Analysis of Big Data: Methods, Applications, and Open Challenges


Paper by Shahid Shayaa et al at IEEE: “The development of IoT technologies and the massive admiration and acceptance of social media tools and applications, new doors of opportunity have been opened for using data analytics in gaining meaningful insights from unstructured information. The application of opinion mining and sentiment analysis (OMSA) in the era of big data have been used a useful way in categorize the opinion into different sentiment and in general evaluating the mood of the public. Moreover, different techniques of OMSA have been developed over the years in different datasets and applied to various experimental settings. In this regard, this study presents a comprehensive systematic literature review, aims to discuss both technical aspect of OMSA (techniques, types) and non-technical aspect in the form of application areas are discussed. Furthermore, the study also highlighted both technical aspect of OMSA in the form of challenges in the development of its technique and non-technical challenges mainly based on its application. These challenges are presented as a future direction for research….(More)”.

Social, Mobile, and Emerging Media around the World


Book edited by Alexander V. Laskin: “…edited collection of cutting edge research on the practical applications of diverse types of emerging media technologies in a variety of industries and in many different regions of the world. In recent years, emergent social media have initiated a revolution comparable in impact to the industrial revolution or the invention of the Internet. Today, social media’s usage statistics are mind-boggling: almost two billion people are Facebook users, over one billion people communicate via What’sApp, over forty billion pictures are posted on Instagram, and over one million snaps are sent on Snapchat daily. This edited collection analyzes the influence of emerging media technologies on governments, global organizations, non-profits, corporations, museums, restaurants, first responders, sports, medicine, television, and free speech. It studies such new media phenomena as brandjacking, crowd-funding, crowd-mapping, augmented reality, mHealth, and transmedia, focusing specifically on new media platforms like Facebook and Facebook Live, Twitter, Sina Weibo, Yelp, and other mobile apps….(More)”.

What Democracy Needs Now


The RSA Chief Executive’s Lecture 2018 by Matthew Taylor: “In 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall still echoing, Francis Fukuyama prophesied the global triumph of liberal democracy and the end of history. Thirty years on it is not history in jeopardy but liberal democracy itself.

China – the rising global power – is thriving with a system which combines economic freedom with political autocracy. There is the growth of what Yascha Mounk calls illiberal democracies – countries with notionally free elections but without the liberal foundations of accountability, civil liberties and cultural openness. The issue with nations like Russia, Hungary and Turkey, and with those exhibiting a backlash against liberalism like America and Italy, is not just how they operate but the tendency for populism – when given the excuse or opportunity – to drift towards authoritarianism.

While the alternatives to the liberal democratic system grow more confident the citizens living in those systems become more restless. Politicians and political institutions in countries are viewed with dismay and contempt. We don’t like them, we don’t trust them, we don’t think they can solve the problems that most matter to us. The evidence, particularly from the US, is starting to suggest that disillusionment with politics is now becoming indifference towards democracy itself.

Will liberal democracy come back into fashion – is this a cycle or is it a trend? Behind the global patterns each country is different, but think of what is driving anger and disillusionment in our own.

Living standards flat-lining for longer than at any time since the industrial revolution. A decade of austerity leaving our public services threadbare and in a mode of continual crisis management. From social care to gangs, from cybercrime to mental health, how many of us think Government is facing up to the problems let alone developing solutions?

Inequality, having risen precipitously in the 1980s, remains stubbornly high, fuelling anger about elites and making not just the economic divide but all divisions worse.

Social media – where increasingly people get their information and engage in political discourse – has the seemingly in-built tendency to confirm prejudice and polarise opinion.

The great intertwined forces shaping the future – globalisation, unprecedented corporate power, technological change – continue to reinforce a sense in people, places and nations that they have no agency. Yet the hunger to take back control which started as tragedy is rapidly becoming a farce.

If this is the warm climate in which disillusionment has taken root and grown it shows few signs of cooling.

For all its many failings, I have always believed that over the long term liberal democracy would carry on making lives better for most people most of the time. As a progressive my guiding star is what Roberto Unger has called ‘the larger life for all’. But for the first time, I view the future with more fear than hope.

There are those who disparage pessimism. To them the backlash against liberalism, the signs of a declining faith in democracy, are passing responses to failure and misfortune. Populism will give the system the wake-up call it needs. In time a new generation of leaders will renew the system. Populism need neither be extreme nor beget authoritarianism – look at Macron.

This underestimates the dangers that face us. It is too reminiscent of those who believed, until the results came in, that the British people would not take the risk of Brexit or that the Americans would reject the madness of Trump. It underestimates too how the turn against liberal democracy in one country can beget it in another. Paradoxically, today nationalists seem more able to collaborate with each other than countries ostensibly committed to internationalism. Chaos spreads more quickly than order. Global treaties and institutions take years to agree, they can breakdown overnight.

Of course, liberal democracy has failed over and again to live up to its own promise. But the fact that things need to change doesn’t mean they can’t get a whole lot worse.

We are also in danger of underestimating the coherence and confidence of liberalism’s critics. Last month Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban made a powerful speech defending his brand of nationalist populism and boasting of his growing alliances across Europe. He appealed to the continent’s centre-right to recognise that it has more in common with conservative nationalism than the EU’s liberal establishment. There are aspects of Orban’s analysis which have an understandable appeal to the mainstream, but remember this is also a man who is unashamedly hostile to Islam, contemptuous of humanitarianism, and who is playing fast and loose with democratic safeguards in his own country.

We may disagree about how malign or dangerous are figures like Orban or Erdogan, or Trump or Salvini, but surely we can agree that those who want to defend the open, pluralistic, inclusive values of liberal democracy must try to make a better case for what we believe?

In part this involves defending the record of liberal societies in improving lives, creating opportunities and keeping the peace, at least between themselves. But it also means facing up to what is going wrong and what must change.

Complex problems are rarely addressed with a single solution. To ever again achieve the remarkable and unprecedented economic and social advances of the three decades after the Second World War, liberal democracy needs profound renewal. But change must start some place. This evening I want to argue that place should be the way we do democracy itself…(More) (Video)”.

Migration Data using Social Media


European Commission JRC Technical Report: “Migration is a top political priority for the European Union (EU). Data on international migrant stocks and flows are essential for effective migration management. In this report, we estimated the number of expatriates in 17 EU countries based on the number of Facebook Network users who are classified by Facebook as “expats”. To this end, we proposed a method for correcting the over- or under-representativeness of Facebook Network users compared to countries’ actual population.

This method uses Facebook penetration rates by age group and gender in the country of previous residence and country of destination of a Facebook expat. The purpose of Facebook Network expat estimations is not to reproduce migration statistics, but rather to generate separate estimates of expatriates, since migration statistics and Facebook Network expats estimates do not measure the same quantities of interest.

Estimates of social media application users who are classified as expats can be a timely, low-cost, and almost globally available source of information for estimating stocks of international migrants. Our methodology allowed for the timely capture of the increase of Venezuelan migrants in Spain. However, there are important methodological and data integrity issues with using social media data sources for studying migration-related phenomena. For example, our methodology led us to significantly overestimate the number of expats from Philippines in Spain and in Italy and there is no evidence that this overestimation may be valid. While research on the use of big data sources for migration is in its infancy, and the diffusion of internet technologies in less developed countries is still limited, the use of big data sources can unveil useful insights on quantitative and qualitative characteristics of migration….(More)”.