Tag: internet

Musk to provide Starlink access to Gaza

Tech billionaire Elon Musk has said that he will provide satellite internet access to “internationally recognized aid organizations” in Gaza via his Starlink network. Phone and internet lines went down in the enclave after a heavy Israeli bombardment on Friday.

Musk made his announcement on X (formerly Twitter) on Saturday, stating that SpaceX’s Starlink division would “support connectivity” with the besieged strip.

There are apparently a number of Starlink terminals in Gaza, but in a separate post on Saturday, Musk said that none of these devices had attempted to communicate with the satellite network. “It is not clear who has authority for ground links in Gaza, but do we know that no terminal has requested a connection in that area,” he wrote on X.

Internet and cell phone services stopped working in Gaza on Friday night after a wave of Israeli airstrikes. Gaza’s largest telecommunications operator, Paltel, announced that its infrastructure had been totally destroyed in the bombing, which preceded the deployment of Israeli ground troops to the enclave.

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UK government keeping files on teaching assistants’ and librarians’ internet activity

The government has been monitoring the social media accounts of “dozens” of ordinary teaching staff, including teaching assistants, and is keeping files on posts that criticise education policies, the Observer has learned.

Two weeks ago, this newspaper revealed how the Department for Education is monitoring the social media activity of some of the country’s leading education experts. Now evidence has emerged that the monitoring is much more widespread, covering even the lowest paid members of staff.

Ordinary teaching and support staff said this weekend that they were “gobsmacked” and angry after discovering that the department had files on them. Many outraged educators have rushed to submit subject access requests [SARs] compelling the DfE to release any information it holds under their name, after discovering there were files up to 60 pages long about their tweets and comments challenging government policy or the schools inspectorate, Ofsted.

Nikki Cleveland, a higher-level teaching assistant and primary school librarian, who mainly posts uncontroversial children’s book reviews, discovered from a SAR that the DfE had a file alerting colleagues to tweets from her complaining about lack of funding for school libraries and about Ofsted. She said: “I was gobsmacked that I was even on their radar.”

Cleveland expressed anger that while the department was flagging tweets about schools struggling to balance their budgets, meet the growing needs of pupils without enough staff and deal with unreasonable demands from Ofsted, “nothing has changed”.

“The whole thing makes me even more cynical that no one in the government or the DfE cares about what is happening in schools on a day-to-day basis,” she added.

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US Senator Michael Bennet Invokes EU’s Censorship Demands, Calls For Big Tech to Censor “Misinformation”

Senator Michael Bennet has criticized tech behemoths such as Meta, X, Google, and TikTok, accusing them of having lax policies that seemingly sanction the spread of untruths.

The turbulent situation between Israel and Hamas was recently seized upon by Democratic Senator Michael Bennet as another pretext to launch an offensive against the digital landscape.

Bennet targeted X, Meta, TikTok, and Alphabet in a letter dated October 17, imploring them to “extinguish the proliferation of inaccurate and misleading content” related to the Middle East conflict.

We obtained a copy of the letter for you here.

On the surface, the Senator’s request appears aligned with social responsibility while mitigating harm. However, the true objective surfaced, revealing Bennet’s obsession with enhancing the influence of censorship-prone entities that preside over content veracity.

Bennet’s stance is in alignment with European Union officials who are exerting pressure on these tech giants to aggressively deal with misinformation, via a letter addressed to the executives.

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Internet Censorship, Everywhere All at Once

It used to be a truth universally acknowledged by citizens of democratic nations that freedom of speech was the basis not just of democracy, but of all human rights.

When a person or group can censor the speech of others, there is – by definition – an imbalance of power. Those exercising the power can decide what information and which opinions are allowed, and which should be suppressed. In order to maintain their power, they will naturally suppress information and views that challenge their position.

Free speech is the only peaceful way to hold those in power accountable, challenge potentially harmful policies, and expose corruption. Those of us privileged to live in democracies instinctively understand this nearly sacred value of free speech in maintaining our free and open societies.

Or do we?

Alarmingly, it seems like many people in what we call democratic nations are losing that understanding. And they seem willing to cede their freedom of speech to governments, organizations, and Big Tech companies who, supposedly, need to control the flow of information to keep everyone “safe.”

The locus for the disturbing shift away from free speech is the 21st-century’s global public square: the Internet. And the proclaimed reasons for allowing those in power to diminish our free speech on the Internet are: “disinformation” and “hate speech.”

In this article, I will review the three-step process by which anti-disinformation laws are introduced. Then, I will review some of the laws being rolled out in multiple countries almost simultaneously, and what such laws entail in terms of vastly increasing the potential for censorship of the global flow of information.

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Why Big Tech, Cops, and Spies Were Made for One Another

THE TECHLASH HAS finally reached the courts. Amazon’s in court. Google’s in court. Apple’s under EU investigation. The French authorities just kicked down Nvidia’s doors and went through their files looking for evidence of crimes against competition. People are pissed at tech: about moderation, about monopolization, about price gouging, about labor abuses, and — everywhere and always — about privacy.

From experience, I can tell you that Silicon Valley techies are pretty sanguine about commercial surveillance: “Why should I care if Google wants to show me better ads?” But they are much less cool about government spying: “The NSA? Those are the losers who weren’t smart enough to get an interview at Google.”

And likewise from experience, I can tell you that government employees and contractors are pretty cool with state surveillance: “Why would I worry about the NSA spying on me? I already gave the Office of Personnel Management a comprehensive dossier of all possible kompromat in my past when I got my security clearance.” But they are far less cool with commercial surveillance: “Google? Those creeps would sell their mothers for a nickel. To the Chinese.”

What are they both missing? That American surveillance is a public-private partnership: a symbiosis between a concentrated tech sector that has the means, motive, and opportunity to spy on every person in the world and a state that loves surveillance as much as it hates checks and balances.

Big Tech, cops, and surveillance agencies were made for one another.

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The EU Could Push its Private Message Ban as Early as Next Week

The EU is getting ever closer to pushing through the legislation known among critics as “chat control” – officially, Child Sexual Abuse Regulation, CSAR – and is hoping to reach a deal on this within the bloc as early as next week.

One of those who have been consistently opposed to the controversial upcoming rules, a German member of European Parliament (MEP) and lawyer Patrick Breyer, has reacted by warning once again that regardless of some minor changes if passed, the bill would effectively spell the end of proper encryption and private messaging in the EU.

Instead, the implication is, that CSAR would usher in the era of indiscriminate mass surveillance in this part of the digital space.

Warning that a recent “minor concession” the EU member-states have managed to agree on was a bid to finally come up with a majority and push the plans over the top, Breyer, referring to the proposal as “chat control 2.0,” calls it an “unprecedented” (at least for the EU) example of mass surveillance.

The summary of the regulation is that online services that provide messaging and chat would, going forward, have to implement automatic scanning of all private text and images – looking for potential abusive content, and then let the EU know about it.

There is no shortage of controversy and misgivings here, with two clearly standing out: once in place, what can this infrastructure be used for next (if politicians decide) – and the other, how are online platforms even supposed to make it work accurately and fairly, technically speaking?

Now, we are hearing that the EU Council is looking to “soften the blow,” at least rhetorically, but saying that the scanning would at first only apply to “previously classified CSAM (child sexual abuse material)” – but then later still expand it to everything.

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ISPs Are Still Ripping Off A COVID Broadband Discount Program

During peak pandemic, the FCC launched the Emergency Broadband Benefit (EBB program), giving lower income Americans a $50 ($75 for those in tribal lands) discount off of their broadband bill. Under the program, the government gave money to ISPs, which then doled out discounts to users if they qualified.

But (and I’m sure this will be a surprise to readers) ISPs erected cumbersome barriers to actually getting the service, or worse, actively exploited the sign up process to force struggling low-income applicants on to more expensive plans once the initial contract ended. Very much in character.

The EBB was rebranded the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) as part of the Infrastructure Bill (the payout to the general public was dropped to $30 a month). But late last year, the FCC Inspector General issued a report saying that ISPs and wireless carriers were consistently and artificially inflating the number of qualified users in order to take taxpayer money they didn’t deserve.

A year has gone by, and another FCC Office of the Inspector General (OIG) report has emerged noting that, yes, ISPs and wireless providers are still ripping the program off. When a low-income user stops using a provider’s broadband service, the ISP is supposed to report this back to the FCC so that funding can be repurposed for folks who actually need it.

The OIG found that’s very often… not happening, and that dozens of ISPs were exploiting the FCC’s lack of follow through:

“We made a startling and troubling discovery: dozens of participating mobile
broadband providers de-enrolled few, if any, ACP subscribers for non-usage and, like Provider X, claimed reimbursement for all or nearly all their ACP subscribers (the suspect providers).”

The OIG also found that a large number of ISPs continue to take taxpayer money for users they never actually served in the first place; part of an ongoing investigation they’ll provide more details on down the road.

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Canada Plots to Increase Online Regulation, Target Search and Social Media Algorithms

Canada is taking steps towards potentially intrusive regulation of artificial intelligence as it pertains to its application in search and social media services. The government’s intentions have been revealed, which includes AI application way beyond the realm of generative AI similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Industry giants such as Google and Facebook, who utilize AI for search results, translation provisions, and customer taste recognition respectively, are among the contenders lined up in the regulatory intent with the pro-censorship government intent on having a say on how these algorithms work.

The information comes by way of Minister François-Philippe Champagne of Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED) in a letter submitted to the Industry committee analyzing Bill C-27—the privacy reform and AI regulation bill. Precise amendments remain shielded from scrutiny, however, as the governmental body keeps the proposed changes under wraps.

We obtained a copy of the original bill for you here.

The existing framework in Bill C-27 leaves the identification of AI mechanisms that can be classified into the “high-impact” category to future regulatory proceedings.

Bill C-27, by treating search and social media results as “high-impact” systems, is likely to raise eyebrows as the government’s push towards regulating technology has so far been assertive of greater control over content and therefore speech.

Non-compliance, under this proposal, may invite penalties proportional to 3% of gross global revenues.

The legislation veers into controversial territory by infusing the regulation of content moderation and discoverability prioritization into the matrix, in unexpected ways. It attempts to parallel these issues to bias accusation during recruitment or when used by law enforcement, invoking substantial surprise. Consequently, Canada’s rules, although they claim to align more closely with the EU, seem to set the country apart, leaning more towards censorship and less towards free speech.

The news comes on the back of Canada’s more recent online regulations that have raised alarm.

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Biden Criticizes Online “Misinformation,” Compares The Internet To The Unregulated Printing Press

In an interview with ProPublica, released on Sunday, President Joe Biden touched upon the technological advancements and their pivotal role in shaping societal discourse and information sharing. While discussing Elon Musk’s influence over X and its policies, President Biden seemed to delve into concerns about “misinformation” and its prevalence on online platforms.

When asked by John Harwood about Elon Musk’s impact on X and its potential contribution to misinformation, President Biden responded by exploring the notion of technological evolution and what he sees as its consequences on society.

He said, “Yeah, it does. Look, one of the things that I said to you when I thought I wasn’t going to run, I was going to write a book about the changes taking place. And most of this directed over the years were these fundamental changes in society by changing technology, Gutenberg, printing and the printing press changed the way Europeans could talk to one another, all the way to today.”

Biden’s mention of the Gutenberg printing press highlights its revolutionary impact on communication among Europeans. Drawing parallels between the advent of the printing press and the current digital age, the President seemed to imply that just as the printing press had long-lasting effects on communication and information dissemination, the internet and online platforms have a similar transformative effect on contemporary society.

While the President (this time at least) stopped short of explicitly calling for censorship, his comments could be interpreted as subtly highlighting concerns around the unregulated nature of online information, potentially opening a gateway to discussions on tighter control and regulation of internet content.

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The State against Anonymity

In the last century, states have had great control over channels of media. In most of the West, lobbying groups and cartels working with “liberal” and “democratic” governments regulated who could broadcast while governments, with their endless pools of money and political force, competed alongside private, or foreign, establishments. South Africa banned television entirely, and then after legalizing it in the ’70s, the industry was still controlled by the state.

All media in the Soviet Union was centralized and controlled by the state immediately after the October Revolution—the Bolshevik leaders understood the importance of media control. Every state in the last century has had some grip over the country’s media, propagating favorable narratives and restricting the unfavorable to maintain control over the population.

Traditional media centralization by the state was then rendered obsolete with the popularization of the Internet. As the Internet and its related technology developed, decentralization became more pronounced and widespread. When anyone can start a podcast on a plethora of websites with anyone else in the world who has the technology, or when miniature documentaries and video essays can be produced and uploaded by anyone to anywhere that accepts the format, the state-operated or state-supported media that dominated the last century becomes effectively out of date. The new competition was too dynamic, adaptive, decentralized, and evasive for the old system to outcompete, outproduce, or outright ban.

Traditional media wasn’t the only thing affected by the Internet. Chat boards, forums, and other means of direct communication undermined multiple key legitimizers of the state, specifically academics and journalists. Barring local rules and guidelines, anyone was free to question and discuss any aspect of academia, usually under the freedom afforded by anonymity.

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