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Wednesday April 10, 2019

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Wednesday April 10, 2019

Foreign interference in 2019 election ‘very likely’: report

The 2019 federal election is “very likely” going to be the target of foreign cyber interference, with voters being the most likely targets of this anticipated meddling, a new report from Canada’s electronic spy agency warns.

April 12, 2018

The report is also putting renewed spotlight on the risks of not having more robust cybersecurity and transparency requirements for social media platforms and political parties in place in advance of this year’s campaign, given these two areas are cited as being potential targets for foreign actors.

“An increasing number of foreign adversaries have the cyber tools, the organizational capacity and a sufficiently advanced understanding of Canada’s political landscape to direct cyber interference during the 2019 federal election, should they have the strategic intent,” the report states.

The report is an update to the 2017 Cyber Threats to Canada’s Democratic Process report published by the Communication Security Establishment (CSE).

September 17, 2015

The 2017 report noted that Canada’s electoral process would not be immune from potential interference by outside actors, and that federal candidates, parties, and voters are all at risk. The update notes that the likelihood of online election meddling has increased as the amount of cyber interference in other countries has increased over the last two years.

Now, CSE says that it is “highly likely” that interference in Canada’s democratic process will be done using similar tools that have been implemented in other countries, such as amplifying polarizing political issues, promoting one party over another or discouraging participating in the election altogether.

The document repeatedly cites Russia as an example of a foreign country that has been proven to be conducting this kind of cyber interference, including during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. Though a CSE official speaking to reporters on background said it is not anticipated that interference in the Canadian election will be on the same scale as what Americans experienced.

The intention of cyber interference is to compromise or gain access to information, or to use online means to “covertly manipulate online information” in order to influence voters’ opinions and ultimately the outcome of the election. (Source: CTV News) 

 

Thursday April 12, 2018

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Thursday April 12, 2018

Zuckerberg: regulation of social media firms is ‘inevitable’

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told a House oversight panel Wednesday that he believes it is “inevitable” there will be regulation of the social media industry and also disclosed to lawmakers that his own data was included in the personal information sold to malicious third parties.

March 27, 2018

“The internet is growing in importance around the world in people’s lives and I think that it is inevitable that there will need to be some regulation,” Zuckerberg said during testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. “So my position is not that there should be no regulation but I also think that you have to be careful about regulation you put in place.”

Larger, more dominant companies like Facebook have the resources to comply with government regulation, he said, but “that might be more difficult for a smaller startup to comply with.”

Lawmakers in both parties have floated possible regulation of Facebook and other tech companies amid privacy scandals and Russian intervention on the platform. It’s not clear what that regulation would look like and Zuckerberg didn’t offer any specifics.

March 21, 2018

Zuckerberg was answering a question from Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., when he informed lawmakers about his personal data, a reference to the Cambridge Analytica scandal that has rocked his company over the past several weeks.

His remarks came as he opened the second day of a congressional inquisition in the wake of the worst privacy debacle in his company’s history. A day earlier Zuckerberg batted away often-aggressive questioning from senators who accused him of failing to protect the personal information of millions of Americans from Russians intent on upsetting the U.S. Election.

The stakes are high for both Zuckerberg and his company. Facebook has been reeling from its worst-ever privacy failure following revelations last month that the political data-mining firm Cambridge Analytica, which was affiliated with Trump’s 2016 campaign, improperly scooped up data on about 87 million users. Zuckerberg has been on an apology tour for most of the past two weeks, culminating in his congressional appearances this week.

But what comes next is unclear. (Source: Chicago Tribune) 

Published in the Hamilton Spectator

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Tuesday March 27, 2018

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Tuesday March 27, 2018

Experts call for transparency over political parties and data mining

For years, Megan Boler’s research focused on the power of social media as a democratizing force, giving voice to the voiceless and empowering everyday people to come together and participate more meaningfully in how they are governed.

March 21, 2018

But the University of Toronto social justice professor said that even in the heady days of the Arab Spring and Obama’s social media-aided ascendancy to the White House, there were slivers of concern about how the technology might be abused.

“I would have conversations with colleagues who would say things like, ‘These are the halcyon days of the internet and we’re going to look back and wish we had those days back.’”

That future appears to have arrived, as reports swirl about foreign interference in U.S. elections, the micro-targeting of social media users to sow division and mistrust and, most recently, a data-mining firm facing allegations it scraped private information from tens of millions of Facebook users’ profiles for political gain.

“It’s a very sobering moment,” Boler said.

At the heart of the most recent fallout around Cambridge Analytica, the voter-profiling firm at the heart of the Facebook controversy, is a story about the increasing sophistication and secrecy of the techniques political actors and parties have developed to harvest voters’ information in the quest for power and influence.

While some experts describe Cambridge Analytica as “a bad apple” in how it gathered its data, they say the predictive analytics the company employs are industry standard in politics.

Some experts single out political parties, saying more transparency and oversight is needed to get a better understanding of their data practices, which remain closely guarded secrets. (Source: Toronto Star) 

 

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Wednesday March 21, 2018

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Wednesday March 21, 2018

‘Utterly horrifying’: ex-Facebook insider says covert data harvesting was routine

Hundreds of millions of Facebook users are likely to have had their private information harvested by companies that exploited the same terms as the firm that collected data and passed it on to Cambridge Analytica, according to a new whistleblower.

September 17, 2015

Sandy Parakilas, the platform operations manager at Facebook responsible for policing data breaches by third-party software developers between 2011 and 2012, told the Guardian he warned senior executives at the company that its lax approach to data protection risked a major breach.

Where’s Zuck? Facebook CEO silent as data harvesting scandal unfolds

“My concerns were that all of the data that left Facebook servers to developers could not be monitored by Facebook, so we had no idea what developers were doing with the data,” he said.

Parakilas said Facebook had terms of service and settings that “people didn’t read or understand” and the company did not use its enforcement mechanisms, including audits of external developers, to ensure data was not being misused.

Parakilas, whose job was to investigate data breaches by developers similar to the one later suspected of Global Science Research, which harvested tens of millions of Facebook profiles and provided the data to Cambridge Analytica, said the slew of recent disclosures had left him disappointed with his superiors for not heeding his warnings.

“It has been painful watching,” he said, “because I know that they could have prevented it.” (Source: The Guardian) 

 

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