November 2019 Archives

News digest | Open Society Information Program | Week ending November 15, 2019

====================================================
The Information Program NEWS DIGEST, published on the second and fourth Thursdays of each month, aims to update colleagues in the Open Society Foundations and friends further afield about the news, opinions and events the Program team have been watching this fortnight. The views expressed in these stories do not necessarily reflect those of the Information Program or the OSF.  Prepared by Wendy M. Grossman.

Current and former grantees featured in this issue: Citizen Lab, EDRi, EFF, Open Rights Group.


NEWS
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Twitter Employees Charged with Spying for Saudi Arabia
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The US Department of Justice has arrested and charged two Twitter employees with spying for Saudi Arabia by accessing the company's information on dissidents who use the platform, Ellen Nakashima and Greg Bensinger report at the Washington Post. The case is significant both because Twitter is Saudi's de facto public space (according to Human Rights Watch researcher Adam Coogle) and because court papers link at least one of the spies to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. At YCombinator's Hacker News, a Twitter employee who worked with one of the arrestees describes the tools they had available and efforts to fix them.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/former-twitter-employees-charged-with-spying-for-saudi-arabia-by-digging-into-the-accounts-of-kingdom-critics/2019/11/06/2e9593da-00a0-11ea-8bab-0fc209e065a8_story.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21470898

WhatsApp Sues NSO Group
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Facebook's WhatsApp subsidiary has launched a lawsuit in a California court against the Israeli cyber-weapons company NSO Group claiming that the company's technology was used to attack more than 1,400 of its users, Stephanie Kurchgaessner, Nick Hopkins, and Oliver Holmes report at the Guardian. At least 100 of those users were democracy activists, journalists, and academics, whom the company warned privately when it discovered the attacks. At Reuters, Christopher Bing and Raphael Satter report that Citizen Lab, which worked with WhatsApp to identify the hacking targets, found that among them were high-profile government and military officials spread across at least 20 countries on five continents.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/nov/01/whatsapp-hack-is-serious-rights-violation-say-alleged-victims
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-cyber-whatsapp-nsogroup/exclusive-whatsapp-hacked-to-spy-on-top-government-officials-at-u-s-allies-sources-idUSKBN1XA27H

India Commissions Facial Recognition Database to Link to Aadhaar
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The Indian National Crime Records Bureau has published a 172-page document requesting bids from companies to build what is likely to become one of the world's biggest facial recognition databases, Glyn Moody reports at Privacy News Online. The database would be a single, central resource accessible to police in the country's 29 states and seven union territories. At Reuters, Rina Chandran adds that Indian authorities say the country is severely under-policed, and needs facial recognition technology to compensate. At Comparitech, Paul Bischoff reports that its latest survey of the world's top 100 most-surveilled cities, based on the number of CCTV cameras per 1,000 residents, finds that eight of the top ten are Chinese; the others are London (placed sixth) and Atlanta (tenth). Also high-ranked are the Indian cities of Delhi and Chennai. Comparitech finds little correlation between the number of public CCTV cameras and crime or safety.
https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2019/11/beyond-aadhaar-india-wants-to-create-a-giant-centralized-facial-recognition-database/
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-india-tech-facialrecognition-trfn/mass-surveillance-fears-as-india-readies-facial-recognition-system-idUSKBN1XH0S9
https://www.comparitech.com/vpn-privacy/the-worlds-most-surveilled-cities/

Data-Driven Policing Leads to Racial Profiling
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Data-driven policing is leading to racial profiling, the European Network Against Racism finds in a new report. Authors Eric Kind and Patrick Williams find that new technologies such as mobile fingerprinting scanners, crime analytics, social media monitoring, and mobile phone extraction will disproportionately add to the over-policing of minority communities, even though law enforcement agencies present them as race-neutral, unbiased, and objective. The research was supported by the OSF Information Program and Open Justice Initiative,
https://www.enar-eu.org/Data-driven-policing-is-leading-to-racial-profiling

Internet Archive Helps Expand Wikipedia's Sourcing
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A new initiative by the Internet Archive is allowing Wikipedia to improve its reliability by providing a two-page preview of books cited as sources, Klint Finley reports at Wired. The Archive's Wayback Machine has scanned 3.8 million books, with more millions waiting, and is digitizing other analog media; also, its InternetArchiveBot tool scans Wikipedia for broken links and adds links to stored copies in the Wayback Machine. In a blog posting, Archive founder Brewster Kahle says books are critical to informing "a generation of digital learners". In a speech to the Indian Young National Academy of Science, longtime activist Carl Malamud outlines his efforts to grant Indian scientists the scientific literature access they need to conduct text and data mining, and calls the ongoing "colonization of knowledge" a "moral travesty".
https://www.wired.com/story/internet-archive-wikipedia-more-reliable/
https://blog.archive.org/2019/10/29/weaving-books-into-the-web-starting-with-wikipedia/
https://public.resource.org/speech.inyas.20191106.pdf (PDF)

Abuse Drives Female Politicians to Resign
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Women in early political careers make up a disproportionately large number of the 70-plus British MPs who are standing down in the December 12 general election, Frances Perraudin and Simon Murphy report at the Guardian. Many highlight the abuse, threats, and intimidation that have become part of their daily lives as politicians. At the Washington Post, Meagan Flynn reports that in her resignation speech Congresswoman Katie Hill cited the double standards and "misogynistic culture" that led her to resign after her estranged husband gave her nude images to conservative news sites without her consent.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/oct/31/alarm-over-number-female-mps-stepping-down-after-abuse
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/10/28/after-resigning-rep-katie-hill-vows-battle-revenge-porn-which-critics-blame-her-downfall/


FEATURES AND ANALYSIS
====================

EFF Urges Adoption of DNS-over-HTTPS
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In this press release, EFF urges the US Congress to support implementing DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH), a protocol for encrypting domain name system (DNS) requests that Mozilla and Google are incorporating into web browsers, in order to embed encryption more deeply into the internet, thereby improving privacy and impeding governments' ability to track and censor people. At Ars Technica, Timothy B. Lee explains why ISPs are largely opposed: DoH will remove some of their control. An Open Rights Group report released in June welcomes encrypted DNS, but argues that turning it on should always be a user choice. In a net.wars posting, Wendy M. Grossman outlines the UK controversy over implementing DoH: ISPs are opposed to DoH because it will increase centralization and disable some of their security techniques, and others because it will break the workarounds used to block access to child abuse images.
https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-and-partners-urge-us-lawmakers-support-new-doh-protocol-more-secure-internet
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/09/isps-worry-a-new-chrome-feature-will-stop-them-from-spying-on-you/
https://www.openrightsgroup.org/about/reports/dns-security-getting-it-right
https://www.pelicancrossing.net/netwars/2019/05/namesakes_1.html

Active Russian Facebook Influence Operation Targets African Countries
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In this posting, the Stanford Internet Observatory summarizes its new paper documenting the connections between Yevgeny Prigozhin, best known for running the Internet Research Agency troll farm, and an active Facebook influence operation targeting Libya, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Madascar, Mozambique, and Sudan. The operation also leverages public WhatsApp and Telegram groups.
https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/news/prigozhin-africa

Twitter and Facebook Take Opposite Approaches to Political Advertising
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In this Guardian article, Julia Carrie Wong discusses Twitter's decision to ban political advertising as the UK's politicians campaign for re-election and the US 2020 presidential race ramps up, raising the pressure on Facebook to do likewise. Separately, Wong reports Facebook's decision to exempt politicians from third-party fact-checking because it "believes in freedom of expression". In a video clip at CNBC, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) pushes Zuckerberg to explain his company's policies on disseminating false information. In a second clip at C-Span, Joyce Beatty (D-OH) probes Facebook's commitment to diversity. At the New Yorker, Sue Halpern discusses the difficulty of regulating narrowcast political ads and calls Mark Zuckerberg's free speech argument a deceptive use of the word "free". At the New York Times, Siva Vaidhyanathan argues we need legislation to force companies to cease using personal data for microtargeting. Based on his six months as head of global elections integrity for Facebook, Yaël Eisenstat argues in the New York Times that because Facebook's profits depend on amplifying lies and selling targeting tools, tinkering with advertising policies won't work. Finally, in an EDRi blog post summarizing UN Special Rapporteur David Kaye's sixth report on information and communication technology, Ella Jakubowska outlines his specific recommendations to help states and Internet companies comply with the fundamental principles of human rights when designing efforts to control online hate speech.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/oct/30/twitter-ban-political-advertising-us-election
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/oct/10/facebook-trump-politics-technology-zuckerberg
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/23/aoc-grills-zuckerberg-over-facebook-allowing-lies-in-political-ads.html
https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4824601/user-clip-rep-beatty-questions-zuckerberg-diversity-housing-practices-10-23-19
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-problem-of-political-advertising-on-social-media
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/02/opinion/facebook-zuckerberg-political-ads.html
https://edri.org/hate-speech-online-lessons-for-protecting-free-expression/

Browser Fingerprinting Trumps Privacy Choices
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In this article at the Washington Post, Geoffrey A. Fowler explains browser fingerprinting, an increasingly-used form of online tracking that is difficult for internet users to avoid, even if they use a VPN or turn on private browsing mode. Sites even exploit the choice to turn on "Do Not Track" to uniquely identify visitors. Fowler identifies 183 popular sites that use fingerprinting, and asks 30 to explain why.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/10/31/think-youre-anonymous-online-third-popular-websites-are-fingerprinting-you/

Child Abuse Victims Suffer as Their Images Continue to Circulate
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In this article at the New York Times, Michael H. Keller and Gabriel J.X. Dance discuss the case of two sisters who are haunted by the photos and videos of their childhood abuse, which their father posted online ten years ago and which have been found in over 130 child sexual abuse investigations this year alone. Despite the decade-old existence of PhotoDNA, which fingerprints and identifies abuse images, the response from technology companies remains inconsistent, largely unilateral, reactive, and secretive.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/09/us/internet-child-sex-abuse.html

The Loss of the "Good Internet"
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In this article at The Week, Phillip Maciak laments the death of the "good internet", the 2000s era of blogs, new media, and message boards that gave a generation of good, thoughtful writers a chance to start their careers with fresh approaches. Maciak now begins his class on cultural criticism in the digital age with a week of obituaries for sites like Grantland, Gawker, The Awl, and Television without Pity. A Washington Post editorial notes that for the ninth year in a row Freedom House's annual report finds that internet freedom is decreasing worldwide as mass surveillance and government media manipulation continue to rise.
https://theweek.com/articles/875251/good-internet-history
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-internet-gets-less-free--for-the-ninth-year-in-a-row/2019/11/05/ffe3fca0-ff48-11e9-8bab-0fc209e065a8_story.html


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DIARY
==============
If you would like your event listed in this mail, email info.digest@opensocietyfoundations.org.

IGF Global
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November 25-29, 2019
Berlin, Germany
The Internet Governance Forum (IGF) was set up in 2006 as an open discussion platform of the United Nations for key legal, political, social and technical issues relating to the internet. IGF's multi-stakeholder model aims to ensure that all relevant societal groups are equally involved in preparations and implementation: governments, civil society, business, academia, international organizations, and the technical community. This is particularly of note in terms of representatives from developing and newly industrializing countries, which otherwise tend to be under-represented.
https://www.igf2019.berlin/

Munin Conference on Scholarly Publishing
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November 27-29, 2019
Tromsø, Norway
The Munin Conference is an annual conference on scholarly publishing and communication, primarily revolving around open access, open data and open science.
http://site.uit.no/muninconf/

CPDP 2020
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January 22-24, 2020
Brussels, Belgium
The 2020 edition of Computers, Privacy, and Data Protection has issued a call for panels in all areas related to technological privacy and data protection.
https://www.cpdpconferences.org/call-for-panels

FAT* 2020
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January 27-30, 2020
Barcelona, Spain
ACM FAT* is an annual conference dedicated to bringing together a diverse community to investigate and tackle issues in this emerging area. Topics of interest include the theory and practice of fair machine learning, measurement and auditing of deployed systems, users' experience of algorithms, and the ethical, moral, social, and policy implications of big data and ubiquitous intelligent systems.
https://fatconference.org/

Meeting of the Minds Annual Summit
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February 19-21, 2020
Phoenix, Arizona, USA
Attending the Meeting of the Minds Annual Summit is an opportunity for anyone seeking cross-disciplinary strategies and partnerships that deliver scalable, transferable, and equitable solutions to urban neighborhoods.
https://meetingoftheminds.org/events/motm2020

AI@Work
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March 5-6, 2020
Amsterdam, Netherlands
From automating simple tasks to predicting efficiencies, AI has much to offer business. Yet we have also been warned: AI will reinforce biases, hide important decisions, and deplete employment. Are we headed to a smarter workplace, or a dumber future? AI@Work will go beyond siloed debate: computer scientists, ethicists, academics, policy makers, and business leaders will come together to share ambitions, experiences, concerns, and visions.
https://ai.reshapingwork.net/

TICTeC 2020
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March 24-25, 2020
Reykjavik, Iceland
mySociety created TICTeC to bridge the gap between civic tech and research - to bring two different communities together, to emphasize the importance of being able to demonstrate impact, and to share what those impacts are. Because Reykjavik's city Council has pioneered using digital tools to elicit feedback from citizens on council policies, expenditures, and projects, the 2020 conference will provide a special opportunity to learn from Iceland's extensive civic technology and civic engagement experience.
https://www.mysociety.org/2019/09/20/join-us-in-reykjavik-for-tictec-2020/

We Robot 2020
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April 2-4, 2020
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
We Robot is an interdisciplinary conference on the legal and policy questions relating to robots. The increasing sophistication of robots and their widespread deployment everywhere - from the home, to hospitals, to public spaces, and even to the battlefield - disrupts existing legal regimes and requires new thinking on policy issues. The conference fosters conversations between the people designing, building, and deploying robots, and those who design or influence the legal and social structures in which robots will operate.
https://techlaw.uottawa.ca/werobot

Global Privacy Summit
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April 7-8, 2020
Washington, DC, USA
Global Privacy Summit will gather more than 3,600 professionals from around the world for an outstanding program with a truly global focus.
https://10times.com/global-privacy-summit

AI for Good
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May 4-8, 2020
Geneva, Switzerland
The AI for Good Global Summit is the leading United Nations platform for global and inclusive dialogue on AI. The Summit is hosted each year in Geneva by the International Telecommunications Union in partnership with sibling UN agencies, the XPRIZE Foundation, and ACM.
https://aiforgood.itu.int/

re:publica 2020
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May 6-8, 2020
Berlin, Germany
re:publica is Europe's largest internet and digital society conference. More than 19 500 participants from 80 countries came together to discuss current issues of digital society at the three-day festival. Participants represent a cross-section of (digital) society, which include professionals from economics, politics, business, hacker culture, NGOs, media, and marketing, as well as bloggers, activists, artists, and social media experts.
https://re-publica.com/en

Creative Commons Global Summit
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May 14-16, 2020
Lisbon, Portugal
The 2019 CC Summit gathered nearly 400 Creative Commoners from across the globe to attend over 130 sessions and seven keynotes. The Summit, comprising discussion, debate, workshops and planning, talks, and community building, is for anyone who's interested in the global movement for the commons as an activist, advocate, artist, librarian, educator, lawyer, or technologist.
https://creativecommons.org/2019/08/28/cc-global-summit-lisbon-may-14-16/

Privacy Law Scholars
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June 4-5, 2020
Washington, DC, USA
Organized jointly by BCLT and the George Washington University Law School, the Privacy Law Scholars Conference (PLSC) assembles a wide array of privacy law scholars and practitioners from around the world to discuss current issues and foster greater connections between academia and practice. PLSC brings together privacy law scholars, privacy scholars from other disciplines (economics, philosophy, political science, computer science), and practitioners (industry, legal, advocacy, and government).
https://www.law.berkeley.edu/research/bclt/bcltevents/2020-privacy-law-scholars-conference/

Festival of AI and Emerging Technology
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June 8-10, 2020
London, UK
CogX draws together speakers from industry, government, and academia to create "a space to learn, discover, and connect with the people and technologies that are shaping the future of humanity".
https://cogx.co/

RightsCon
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June 9-12, 2020
San José, Costa Rica
Each year, RightsCon, organized by AccessNow, gathers over 1,000 expert speakers from around the world.
https://www.rightscon.org/

Aspen Ideas Festival
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June 27-July 3, 2020
Aspen  Colorado
Presented by the Aspen Institute in partnership with The Atlantic, the Aspen Ideas Festival is a public gathering place for leaders from around the globe and across many disciplines to present and discuss the ideas and issues that both shape our lives and challenge our times. Anyone may purchase a pass to attend.
https://www.aspenideas.org/pages/register

WEIS 2020
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June, 2020 (TBD)
Brussels, Belgium
The annual Workshop on the Economics of Information Security crosses the disciplines of economics, behavioural science, and computer security.
https://weis2020.econinfosec.org/

FTC PrivacyCon
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July 21, 2020
Washington, DC
The US Federal Trade Commission's fifth annual PrivacyCon, which is free and open to the public, will focus in particular on the privacy of health data collected, stored, and transmitted by mobile apps.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/events-calendar/privacycon-2020

Wikimania
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August 2020
Bangkok, Thailand
Wikimania 2020 will be the 16th Wikimania conference, an annual event for the international Wikimedia community.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2020

DEF CON 28
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August 6-9, 2020
Las Vegas, Nevada, USA
DEF CON is one of the oldest and largest continuously running hacker conventions.
https://defcon.org/index.html

Netroots Nation
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August 13-15, 2020
Denver, Colorado, USA
For more than a decade, Netroots Nation, which began as a convention for the most active members of the DailyKos community, has hosted the largest annual conference for progressives and other organizers and advocacy groups, drawing thousands of attendees from around the country and beyond, to develop their work around topics such as sharing data, developing technology talent, and managing digital campaigns.
https://www.netrootsnation.org/

86th World Library and Information Congress
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August 15-21, 2020
Dublin, Ireland
WLIC is the annual conference of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA).
https://2020.ifla.org/


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News digest | Open Society Information Program | Week ending October 25, 2019

====================================================
The Information Program NEWS DIGEST, published on the second and fourth Thursdays of each month, aims to update colleagues in the Open Society Foundations and friends further afield about the news, opinions and events the Program team have been watching this fortnight. The views expressed in these stories do not necessarily reflect those of the Information Program or the OSF.  Prepared by Wendy M. Grossman.

Current and former grantees featured in this issue: EFF, Oxford Internet Institute, Ranking Digital Rights.


NEWS
=====

UN Special Rapporteur warns of "digital welfare dystopia"
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The UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, warns that the world must act quickly to "avoid stumbling, zombie-like, into a digital welfare dystopia", the United Nations Commission on Human Rights reports. Too often, the altruistic claims made for digitizing government benefits services mask the real intention of slashing welfare benefits, installing surveillance, and generating profits for private companies. One of Alston's examples is the Netherlands, whose System Risk Indication system allows central and local government authorities to feed broad categories of previously siloed data about claimants into an undisclosed model to score the likelihood that they will commit benefit fraud. To date, it has been used exclusively in areas with a high proportion of low-income residents, migrants, and ethnic minorities.
https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=25156&LangID=E
https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=25152&LangID=E

Automated Systems Place Poor People at Increased Risk
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Campaigners in India are finding that benefit support is being withdrawn from the country's most vulnerable citizens whenever there is a glitch - such as an unrecognized thumbprint or a failure to link to the Aadhaar numbering system - leaving them to die of starvation, Rebecca Ratcliffe reports at the Guardian. The story is part of the "Automating Poverty" project, which explores the consequences of increased computerization and algorithmic scoring in government services across the world. In Bristol, UK, an algorithm tries to assess the likely futures of 11 and 12-year-olds based on comparisons to current adults when they were the same age.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/oct/16/glitch-india-biometric-welfare-system-starvation
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/oct/15/bristol-algorithm-assess-citizens-risk-harm-guide-frontline-staff
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/series/automating-poverty
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/oct/14/automating-poverty-algorithms-punish-poor

Human Rights Index Adds Indicators for Transparency in Advertising
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Ranking Digital Rights has published draft indicators for transparency and accountability in targeted advertising policies and practices and algorithmic decision making for inclusion in its index, which assesses corporate threats to rights to privacy and freedom of expression, Nathalie Maréchal reports at the RDR's blog. RDR will follow up with a pilot study and welcomes feedback. RDR is also advertising for consultants to undertake a scoping study to inform funding proposals for its new German affiliate.
https://rankingdigitalrights.org/2019/10/18/newindicators/
https://rankingdigitalrights.org/srdrn/rfp-scoping-study/

Hate Speech Detection Systems Display Racial Bias
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In this article at TechCrunch, Devin Coldeway summarizes a research paper that finds widespread racial bias in the training datasets used to develop hate speech detection systems such as Google's Jigsaw algorithm, which flags black American slang as "toxic". In a blog posting at 20 Minutes Into the Future, Daniel Harvey highlights the pattern of using contractors to give technology companies plausible deniability for unsavory practices. His example: to improve the face unlock feature of its Pixel 4, Google increased the diversity of its facial recognition training dataset by sending contractors to US cities and offered $5 certificates in return for scanning faces. In Atlanta, contractors targeted homeless people and low-income students, often without explaining the purpose of the scans or that they worked for Google.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/14/racial-bias-observed-in-hate-speech-detection-algorithm-from-google/
https://www.scribd.com/document/421898931/The-Risk-of-Racial-Bias-in-Hate-Speech-Detection
https://20minutesintothefuture.substack.com/p/google-vs-black-people-scandal-in
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/10/google-allegedly-used-homeless-train-pixel-phone/599668/

Russian Hacking Group Masquerades as Iranian Cyber-Espionage
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The Russian "Turla" hacking group has exploited an Iranian cyber-espionage operation to conduct attacks on government and industry organizations in dozens of countries, primarily in the Middle East but including Britain, Al-Jazeera reports. The practice, known as "fourth party collection", has also been used by US and its Western allies, according to documents released by Edward Snowden. Danny Palmer reports at ZDNet that researchers have found that the sophisticated Russian "Cozy Bear" hacking group, also known as "APT29", which was one of the groups that hacked the Democratic National Committee in the run-up to the 2016 US presidential election, has not, as previously thought, ceased operations but has used four new families of malware to target ministries of foreign affairs in at least three European countries, as well as the US embassy of an EU country in Washington, DC. Both Turla and Cozy Bear are thought to be associated with the Russian intelligence service. At Wired, Andy Greenberg recounts the history of Russian hackers' false flags.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/10/hacking-hackers-russian-group-hijacked-iran-spy-operation-191021041816789.html
https://www.zdnet.com/article/cybersecurity-warning-this-sophisticated-russian-hacking-group-is-back-in-action-again/
https://www.wired.com/story/russian-hackers-false-flags-iran-fancy-bear/

FBI Traces Child Sexual Exploiters via Bitcoin Payments
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The US Department of Justice rescued 23 children in abusive situations in the US, Spain, and the UK, arrested 330 people, and seized 8TB of child sexual exploitation videos by tracing $370,000 in bitcoin payments to the Welcome to Video child sexual exploitation site that it closed down in 2018, Merrit Kennedy reports at NPR. The site was hidden on the Tor network, and, prosecutors said, was one of the first of its kind to monetize child exploitation videos by using bitcoin.
https://www.npr.org/2019/10/16/770628069/one-of-the-worst-forms-of-evil-more-than-330-arrested-in-child-porn-site-bust


FEATURES AND ANALYSIS
====================

Open Access Continues Growth
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In this blog posting summarizing a new study of open access by Heather Piwowar, Jason Priem, and Richard Orr, Our Research finds that green (especially when made available within a year of publication), gold, and hybrid papers receive more views than their closed or bronze counterparts. In 2019, OA articles received 52% of article views, even though only 31% of articles are available as OA. The researchers estimate that by 2025 those numbers will be 70% and 44%.
https://blog.ourresearch.org/future-of-oa/

The Many Ways in Which AI Contributes to Climate Change
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In this posting at Medium, Roel Dobbe and Meredith Whittaker from the AI Now Institute explore the connections between AI and climate change. The technology sector is expected to contribute 3-3.6% of global greenhouse emissions by 2020, roughly equivalent to aviation and larger than the world's fifth biggest polluting country, Japan. Little of these energy demands are filled by renewables; in 2018 OpenAI reported that the amount of computation used in the largest AI training runs has been doubling every 3.5 months. In addition, companies like Google, Microsoft, and Google are all pitching AI services to fossil fuel companies to help optimize and accelerate fossil fuel production and extraction.
https://medium.com/@AINowInstitute/ai-and-climate-change-how-theyre-connected-and-what-we-can-do-about-it-6aa8d0f5b32c

US House Committee Considers How to Build a Healthier Internet
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In this recorded livestream, the US House Committee on Energy & Commerce holds a hearing on fostering a healthier internet to protect consumers, with testimony from Reddit co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman, recent MacArthur award winner and anti-revenge pornography campaigner Danielle Citron, EFF legal director Corynne McSherry, UC Berkeley's Henry Farid, Google's head of intellectual property policy, Katherine Oyama, and Gretchen S. Peters, the executive director for the Alliance to Counter Crime Online. Among the topics discussed are deepfakes, revenge porn, and the difficulties of content moderation.
https://energycommerce.house.gov/committee-activity/hearings/hearing-on-fostering-a-healthier-internet-to-protect-consumers

School Surveillance Rises in US and UK
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In this Guardian article, Lois Beckett examines the rampant growth of school surveillance in the US, where its adoption is being fueled by free offers and the fear of school shootings, and in the UK, where it's being billed as "de-radicalization". A spokesperson for Gaggle, which supplies one of the US systems, argues that school surveillance prepares children for their adult lives of workplace monitoring. At Wired, Tom Simonite examines the growing use of AI-enhanced facial recognition in schools.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/22/school-student-surveillance-bark-gaggle
https://www.wired.com/story/delicate-ethics-facial-recognition-schools/

Women Form Primary Deepfakes Target
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In this blog posting, Giorgio Patrini discusses Deeptrace's work researching the evolving capabilities of and threats posed by deepfakes and synthetic media. The lab's latest work finds that the number of deepfake videos has doubled over the last seven months to 14,678, 96% of them non-consensual deepfake pornography that has attracted 134 million views on the top four websites offering videos targeting female celebrities worldwide. This growth is supported by the increasing commodification of tools and services that enable non-experts to create them, particularly in China and South Korea.
https://deeptracelabs.com/mapping-the-deepfake-landscape/

Tackling Misinformation Requires Collective Action
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In this report from the Oxford Internet Institute, Phil Howard and Lisa-Maria Neudert make four recommendations for tackling the spread of misinformation: governments should verify campaigners and track expenditure, political parties should be more transparent about data sources, social media platforms should create open archives of ads and report on moderation and takedowns, and civil society should act as external auditors. At openDemocracy, Peter Osborne finds that the UK media from the Daily Mail to the BBC are failing to challenge claims made by prime minister Boris Johnson regarding Brexit or to report corrections when they have been proved untrue. Finally, in a WhatsApp-funded study of WhatsApp lynchings in India find that mainstream media act as an accelerant that gives misinformation added credibility, and ideology and prejudice are bigger factors than ignorance or digital illiteracy.
https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news/releases/collective-action-needed-now-to-tackle-spread-of-disinformation-in-public-life-finds-new-report/
https://comprop.oii.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/93/2019/09/CyberTroop-Report19.pdf
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/british-journalists-have-become-part-of-johnsons-fake-news-machine/
https://www.huffingtonpost.in/entry/whatsapp-lynching-fake-news-misinformation-study_in_5da89bc9e4b0b5c9be4b067b


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DIARY
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If you would like your event listed in this mail, email info.digest@opensocietyfoundations.org.

Biometrics Congress
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October 28-30, 2019
London, UK
The Biometrics Institute Congress provides an independent platform where the international biometrics community can gather to conduct off-the-record discussion among the institute's multi-stakeholder community. In 2018, representatives from over 30 nations attended. This year's theme is making the world a safer place through the responsible and ethical use of biometrics in an era where laws and regulations are often unable to stay abreast of technology change and the business models based on it.
https://www.biometricsinstitute.org/event/biometrics-congress-2019/

Web Summit
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November 4-7. 2019
Lisbon, Portugal
The Web Summit gathers the founders and CEOs of technology companies, fast-growing startups, policymakers, and heads of state to ask a simple question: where to next? In 2018, speakers included Margrethe Vestager, Tim Berners-Lee, and Microsoft CEO Brad Smith.
https://websummit.com/

18th Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society
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November 11, 2019
London, UK
The goal of this workshop, held in conjunction with the ACM CCS conference, is to discuss and find solutions to the privacy problems that result from the transformation of society brought by the Information Revolution. One of the major implications of this technological shift has been a massive increase in the collection, sharing, and analysis of personal data. The workshop will include academia, government, and industry, as well as communities such as law and business, who will present novel research on all theoretical and practical aspects of electronic privacy, as well as experimental studies of fielded systems.
http://wpes.tech/

Tech Giants, Monopoly Power, and Public Discourse
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November 14-15, 2019
New York, NY, USA
At this symposium, convened by the Knight First Amendment Institute, leading legal scholars, economists, and technologists will examine the extent and nature of the technology giants' ability to structure, shape, and distort public discourse, and consider whether anti-monopoly tools might usefully be deployed to limit, expose, or counter this power. Speakers include Ellen P. Goodman, Lina Khan, Tim Wu, and Ethan Zuckerman.
https://knightcolumbia.org/content/the-tech-giants-monopoly-power-and-public-discourse

IGF Global
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November 25-29, 2019
Berlin, Germany
The Internet Governance Forum (IGF) was set up in 2006 as an open discussion platform of the United Nations for key legal, political, social and technical issues relating to the internet. IGF's multi-stakeholder model aims to ensure that all relevant societal groups are equally involved in preparations and implementation: governments, civil society, business, academia, international organizations, and the technical community. This is particularly of note in terms of representatives from developing and newly industrializing countries, which otherwise tend to be under-represented.
https://www.igf2019.berlin/

Munin Conference on Scholarly Publishing
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November 27-29, 2019
Tromsø, Norway
The Munin Conference is an annual conference on scholarly publishing and communication, primarily revolving around open access, open data and open science.
http://site.uit.no/muninconf/

CPDP 2020
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January 22-24, 2020
Brussels, Belgium
The 2020 edition of Computers, Privacy, and Data Protection has issued a call for panels in all areas related to technological privacy and data protection.
https://www.cpdpconferences.org/call-for-panels

FAT* 2020
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January 27-30, 2020
Barcelona, Spain
ACM FAT* is an annual conference dedicated to bringing together a diverse community to investigate and tackle issues in this emerging area. Topics of interest include the theory and practice of fair machine learning, measurement and auditing of deployed systems, users' experience of algorithms, and the ethical, moral, social, and policy implications of big data and ubiquitous intelligent systems.
https://fatconference.org/

Meeting of the Minds Annual Summit
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February 19-21, 2020
Phoenix, Arizona, USA
Attending the Meeting of the Minds Annual Summit is an opportunity for anyone seeking cross-disciplinary strategies and partnerships that deliver scalable, transferable, and equitable solutions to urban neighborhoods.
https://meetingoftheminds.org/events/motm2020

TICTeC 2020
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March 24-25, 2020
Reykjavik, Iceland
mySociety created TICTeC to bridge the gap between civic tech and research - to bring two different communities together, to emphasize the importance of being able to demonstrate impact, and to share what those impacts are. Because Reykjavik's city Council has pioneered using digital tools to elicit feedback from citizens on council policies, expenditures, and projects, the 2020 conference will provide a special opportunity to learn from Iceland's extensive civic technology and civic engagement experience.
https://www.mysociety.org/2019/09/20/join-us-in-reykjavik-for-tictec-2020/

We Robot 2020
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April 2-4, 2020
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
We Robot is an interdisciplinary conference on the legal and policy questions relating to robots. The increasing sophistication of robots and their widespread deployment everywhere - from the home, to hospitals, to public spaces, and even to the battlefield - disrupts existing legal regimes and requires new thinking on policy issues. The conference fosters conversations between the people designing, building, and deploying robots, and those who design or influence the legal and social structures in which robots will operate.
https://techlaw.uottawa.ca/werobot

Global Privacy Summit
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April 7-8, 2020
Washington, DC, USA
Global Privacy Summit will gather more than 3,600 professionals from around the world for an outstanding program with a truly global focus.
https://10times.com/global-privacy-summit

AI for Good
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May 4-8, 2020
Geneva, Switzerland
The AI for Good Global Summit is the leading United Nations platform for global and inclusive dialogue on AI. The Summit is hosted each year in Geneva by the International Telecommunications Union in partnership with sibling UN agencies, the XPRIZE Foundation, and ACM.
https://aiforgood.itu.int/

re:publica 2020
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May 6-8, 2020
Berlin, Germany
re:publica is Europe's largest internet and digital society conference. More than 19 500 participants from 80 countries came together to discuss current issues of digital society at the three-day festival. Participants represent a cross-section of (digital) society, which include professionals from economics, politics, business, hacker culture, NGOs, media, and marketing, as well as bloggers, activists, artists, and social media experts.
https://re-publica.com/en

Creative Commons Global Summit
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May 14-16, 2020
Lisbon, Portugal
The 2019 CC Summit gathered nearly 400 Creative Commoners from across the globe to attend over 130 sessions and seven keynotes. The Summit, comprising discussion, debate, workshops and planning, talks, and community building, is for anyone who's interested in the global movement for the commons as an activist, advocate, artist, librarian, educator, lawyer, or technologist.
https://creativecommons.org/2019/08/28/cc-global-summit-lisbon-may-14-16/

Privacy Law Scholars
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June 4-5, 2020
Washington, DC, USA
Organized jointly by BCLT and the George Washington University Law School, the Privacy Law Scholars Conference (PLSC) assembles a wide array of privacy law scholars and practitioners from around the world to discuss current issues and foster greater connections between academia and practice. PLSC brings together privacy law scholars, privacy scholars from other disciplines (economics, philosophy, political science, computer science), and practitioners (industry, legal, advocacy, and government).
https://www.law.berkeley.edu/research/bclt/bcltevents/2020-privacy-law-scholars-conference/

Festival of AI and Emerging Technology
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June 8-10, 2020
London, UK
CogX draws together speakers from industry, government, and academia to create "a space to learn, discover, and connect with the people and technologies that are shaping the future of humanity".
https://cogx.co/

RightsCon
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June 9-12, 2020
San José, Costa Rica
Each year, RightsCon, organized by AccessNow, gathers over 1,000 expert speakers from around the world.
https://www.rightscon.org/

Aspen Ideas Festival
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June 27-July 3, 2020
Aspen  Colorado
Presented by the Aspen Institute in partnership with The Atlantic, the Aspen Ideas Festival is a public gathering place for leaders from around the globe and across many disciplines to present and discuss the ideas and issues that both shape our lives and challenge our times. Anyone may purchase a pass to attend.
https://www.aspenideas.org/pages/register

WEIS 2020
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June, 2020 (TBD)
Brussels, Belgium
The annual Workshop on the Economics of Information Security crosses the disciplines of economics, behavioural science, and computer security.
https://weis2020.econinfosec.org/

DEF CON 28
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August 6-9, 2020
Las Vegas, Nevada, USA
DEF CON is one of the oldest and largest continuously running hacker conventions.
https://defcon.org/index.html

FTC PrivacyCon
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July 21, 2020
Washington, DC
The US Federal Trade Commission's fifth annual PrivacyCon, which is free and open to the public, will focus in particular on the privacy of health data collected, stored, and transmitted by mobile apps.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/events-calendar/privacycon-2020

Wikimania
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August 2020
Bangkok, Thailand
Wikimania 2020 will be the 16th Wikimania conference, an annual event for the international Wikimedia community.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania_2020

86th World Library and Information Congress
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August 15-21, 2020
Dublin, Ireland
WLIC is the annual conference of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA).
https://2020.ifla.org/


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