Tag Archive for: Harm

How to quickly reduce Russia’s capacity of harm on the internet – EURACTIV.com

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Technology companies and regulators in the EU and west have the power to disturb the functioning of Russia’s internet and the malicious use of the Internet outside the country without affecting the country’s essential data and infrastructure nor harming the infrastructure of other countries. These digital sanctions can be implemented quickly and removed easily when appropriate.

Andrey Kolodyuk and Jan Thys are co-founders of the Free Ukraine Foundation, a non-profit just created in Belgium to assist Ukrainian people and businesses affected by the war.

Yobie Benjamin, former chief technology officer of Global Transaction Services, Citibank, also contributed to this opinion.

Today, as Russia is bombing Ukraine and threatening the world, one of its most potent weapons — the internet – should not be overlooked.

The aggressor’s cyber warfare capabilities are world-class. Not only are they being used to attack Ukraine: they are ready to strike the world’s critical infrastructures.

The recent past has shown how tangible this threat is. For example, the Russian government is suspected to be behind the 2020 SolarWinds attack, which affected thousands of organisations globally, including multiple parts of the United States federal government. 

Tomorrow, we may witness a complete crash of capital markets or wake up without heat and electricity – unless we’d learn to live without toilet paper, food, medicine, and fuel due to supply chain disruptions. 

Russia has also wielded the Internet as an effective weapon in destabilising governments and institutions, dividing political and civil discourse in the USA, Western Europe and beyond. From the trucker protests in Canada to ethnic tensions and the January 6 insurrection in the United States, Russia has been aggressive in creating active societal unrest to its advantage.

What could be done

In response to the invasion of Ukraine, the west has moved fast to support Ukraine in military terms and to sanction Russia economically and technologically.

A lot could be done in the digital field, too, supported by regulatory action as a crucial component of the west’s answer.

We need to reduce the cyber threat, i.e….

Source…

School surveillance of students via laptops may do more harm than good

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(The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.)

(THE CONVERSATION) Ever since the start of the pandemic, more and more public school students are using laptops, tablets or similar devices issued by their schools.

The percentage of teachers who reported their schools had provided their students with such devices doubled from 43% before the pandemic to 86% during the pandemic, a September 2021 report shows.

In one sense, it might be tempting to celebrate how schools are doing more to keep their students digitally connected during the pandemic. The problem is, schools are not just providing kids with computers to keep up with their schoolwork. Instead – in a trend that could easily be described as Orwellian – the vast majority of schools are also using those devices to keep tabs on what students are doing in their personal lives.

Indeed, 80% of teachers and 77% of high school students reported that their schools had installed artificial intelligence-based surveillance software on these devices to monitor students’ online activities and what is stored in the computer.

This student surveillance is taking place – at taxpayer expense – in cities and school communities throughout the United States.


For instance, in the Minneapolis school district, school officials paid over $355,000 to use tools provided by student surveillance company Gaggle until 2023. Three-quarters of incidents reported – that is, cases where the system flagged students’ online activity – took place outside school hours.

In Baltimore, where the public school system uses the GoGuardian surveillance app, police officers are sent to children’s homes when the system detects students typing keywords related to self-harm.

Safety versus privacy

Vendors claim these tools keep students safe from self-harm or online activities that could lead to trouble. However, privacy groups and news outlets have raised questions about those…

Source…

News Orgs Attack Big Tech For Being Bad For Privacy… While Their Lobbying Against Big Tech That Will Harm Privacy

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It’s kind of difficult to take “privacy advocates” seriously if they’re supportive of the EARN IT Act and its structure that would effectively enable the Attorney General to ban real encryption. That’s why it was so ridiculous that vocal privacy advocate non-profit EPIC (in the midst of a truly horrifying scandal in which its President exposed employees to COVID-19 without telling them) came out in favor of the EARN IT Act. As with so much that EPIC does, the issue was more that they saw EARN IT as “anti-big tech companies” and to hell with how it actually impacts privacy and encryption.

This is an ongoing problem. Many people who (whether for good reasons or not) dislike big internet companies seem way too willing to embrace bills that appear aimed against them as a sort of “stick it to them” attack, rather than recognizing the long term impact of those bills. We’ve seen that in the past with bills from the EU’s Copyright Directive, the GDPR, and the California Consumer Protection Act (CCPA), all of which some groups supported solely because it would “be bad” for Google, Facebook and other internet giants, without recognizing the wider impact.

Apparently we can add big news publishers to this list as well. While papers like the NY Times and the Washington Post have run a bunch of stories about how “big tech” is bad about privacy, it’s difficult to take them seriously when their lobbyists are out there lobbying in favor of a bill that would ban encryption. And yet, there is the News Media Alliance, formerly the Newspaper Association of America, cheerfully attacking Section 230 of the CDA (which, someone should remind them, all of their websites rely on…) at the DOJ’s hearing back in February. Because the EARN IT Act is structured in a way to try to play Section 230 and encryption off of one another, the News Media Alliance’s support of attacking 230 gives cover to the EARN IT Act’s effective chipping away at encryption.

And that should greatly concern all of the journalists who work for these newspapers, like the NY Times and the Washington Post among others. Reporters at those newspapers rely heavily on encryption as they cultivate sources. And the newspapers themselves rely strongly on Section 230 to protect them against bogus SLAPP suits, even as they pretend that Section 230 is a “special favor” for large tech companies.

The end result, as with EPIC, is that it seems that the focus on “big internet companies are the problem” means that they’re compromising on their own principles in order to “punish” the big internet companies. Suggesting Section 230 should be amended gives cover to the plan to trade Section 230 protections for undermining encryption — thereby undermining both. And that’s really dangerous, given that news reporters and news sites rely on both strong encryption and on Section 230.

The News Media Alliance is playing a dangerous game, while being blinded by its dislike of big internet companies.

Techdirt.