Tag Archive for: Politico

Musk leaks Twitter’s Hunter Biden files – POLITICO

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Elon Musk is stoking controversy on a new front, this time revealing sensitive internal deliberations at Twitter around Hunter Biden’s personal computer files in the fall of 2020.

On Friday evening, Twitter’s new owner promoted a leak of documents on his personal account, just the latest sign that the tech billionaire continues to steer the platform in a direction more favorable to conservatives and libertarians. Ahead of the midterm elections, Musk urged his followers to vote Republican. Last month, he reinstated former President Donald Trump’s Twitter account after taking an informal online poll.

The internal company discussions, which predate Musk’s ownership, offer insight on the dissent and confusion inside Twitter as it responded to the New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s files in the closing weeks of the last presidential campaign.

POLITICO has not independently verified the communications, which were given to Substack writer Matt Taibbi, a longtime critic of online censorship and mainstream media outlets. Taibbi unspooled portions of the leak in a lengthy Twitter thread on Friday night.

Musk teased the event hours before it began to spill out in Taibbi’s tweets, promising, “This will be awesome,” and suggested he was personally involved in its preparation.

“We’re double-checking some facts, so probably start live tweeting in about 40 mins,” Musk tweeted as users waited for the promised disclosures. His latest controversial move came before the dust had settled from his last one, which saw Musk block Ye’s account after the rapper tweeted, “I like Hitler.”

Within the current contours of the culture wars, the right has taken up the mantle of free speech, while the center and left have cited concerns about disinformation and hate speech to argue for greater limits in online expression. Since taking the reins of Twitter in October, Musk has endeared himself to the right and incensed the left with his laissez-faire approach to moderation.

Last week, the mogul hinted that he would release information about Twitter’s role in suppressing the New York Post’s reports, tweeting,…

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The Commission’s gross violation of privacy — endangering encryption – POLITICO

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Markéta Gregorová is a member of the European Parliament from the European Pirate Party.

Strong end-to-end encryption is an essential part of a secure and trustworthy Internet. It protects us every time we make an online transaction, when we share medical information or when we interact with friends and family.

Strong encryption also protects children — it allows them to communicate with trusted friends and family members in confidence, and allows others to report online abuse and harassment confidentially. It keeps our personal data personal, and our private conversations private. 

But now that fundamental technology is being threatened by the European Commission.

The European Union’s new regulation intending to fight child sexual abuse online will require Internet platforms — including end-to-end encrypted messaging apps like Signal and WhatsApp — to “detect, report and remove” images of child sexual abuse shared on their platforms. In order to do this, however, platforms would have to automatically scan every single message — a process known as “client-side scanning.”

But not only is this a gross violation of privacy, there’s no evidence that the technology exists to do this effectively and safely, without undermining the security provided by end-to-end encryption. And while the proposed regulation is well-intentioned, it will result in weakening encryption and making the Internet less secure.

Only two months ago, the New York Times reported that Google had flagged medical images that a man in San Francisco had taken of his son’s groin as child sexual abuse material. He had sent the images to his doctor seeking medical advice for his child, only to have his account shut down and become the subject of a police investigation. 

The current regulations would create such mandatory measures for platforms, enforcing them with significant fines of up to 6 percent of an offender’s global turnover — meaning tech companies would be forced to be overzealous for fear of falling foul of the rules. This greatly increases the possibility of such false-positives…

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Biden to look beyond Khashoggi in Saudi Arabia- POLITICO

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With help from Christopher Miller and Daniel Lippman

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A note to all students of international relations: If you want to see “realpolitik” in action, make sure to watch two minutes of President JOE BIDEN’s news conference in Israel today.

Alex was in attendance for the event, which followed Biden’s bilateral with Israeli Prime Minister YAIR LAPID. Reporters had to be at the Waldorf Astoria two hours early, giving us time to wash down sandwiches with warm water while chatting up administration officials. All those conversations were off the record, but it’s safe to say something on all of our minds, amid the glitz and glamor of the moment, was if Biden planned to address the murder of journalist and dissident JAMAL KHASHOGGI while in Saudi Arabia.

After all, he’s headed to Jeddah on Friday, and the press hadn’t had much of a chance to speak with the president directly since he arrived on Wednesday. Plus, the slain U.S. resident’s wife, HANAN ELATR KHASHOGGI, told Fox News that the White House promised her husband’s killing would be mentioned.

Reuters’ STEVE HOLLAND, seated right behind Alex at the presser, forced the issue when he asked Biden if he would bring up Khashoggi’s killing and other human rights abuses directly with Saudi leaders, namely Crown Prince MOHAMMED BIN SALMAN.

The president dodged.

“My views on Khashoggi have been absolutely, positively clear, and I have never been quiet about talking about human rights,” but “the reason I’m going to Saudi Arabia, though, is much broader. It’s to promote U.S. interests,” Biden said. “We have an opportunity to reassert what I think we made a mistake of walking away from: our influence in the Middle East.”

When Holland pressed that Biden, therefore, didn’t expect to bring up Khashoggi with MBS, the president asserted that his position on the matter is “so clear. If anyone doesn’t…

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Four new defenses against quantum codebreakers- POLITICO

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With help from Derek Robertson

The ability to pay for something with a credit card online is something we now take for granted, but in the not-too-distant future, quantum computers might be able to crack the encryption that protects these payments from spies and cyber criminals.

The encryption-breaking power of these quantum computers, while likely still decades away, already has the National Security Agency worried about the United States’ enemies accessing classified secrets.

As we’ve reported in this newsletter, multiple arms of the federal government are trying to find fixes.

The House of Representatives today passed a bill aimed at accelerating the government’s use of encryption algorithms that quantum computers would struggle to break with currently known methods, in part out of fear that an adversary might “steal sensitive encrypted data today using classical computers, and wait until sufficiently powerful quantum systems are available to decrypt it.”

In May, President Joe Biden issued a national security memorandum declaring that a powerful quantum computer would “jeopardize civilian and military communications, undermine supervisory and control systems for critical infrastructure, and defeat security protocols for most Internet-based financial transactions.”

Nobody knows for sure if such a quantum computer is five years away, 20 years away or a dream that will never be realized. But the National Institute of Standards and Technology is coordinating efforts to develop new encryption algorithms so that the government will be ready. On July 5, NIST announced the selection of the first four of those algorithms.

“We’re not waiting for something to be broken,” Matthew Scholl, the chief of NIST’s Computer Security Division, told me in an interview a few days before the announcement.

Quantum computers aren’t superior to classical ones in any general sense, but they can (in theory) quickly solve particular types of problems, including breaking large numbers into their prime factors. (It’s a lot easier…

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