Quartz

Google's Jigsaw launched earlier in 2016, in conjunction with the company’s reorganization into Alphabet, with the goal of tackling “geopolitical challenges.” So the world’s second-most valuable corporation is openly trying to influence international affairs. That’s interesting. As a follower of Jigsaw (and one of the approximately five people who finished Julian Assange’s 224-page manifesto on the incubator), I’ve read plenty of conspiracy theories about empire-building—not to mention endless Google press releases regurgitated into puff pieces. But Jigsaw is still not very well understood, and neither are its politics.

And so I went to visit the company’s New York office in Chelsea this summer, featuring, among other things, the largest collection of sparkling waters in human history. I was there to learn more about what Jigsaw is really about. Even more than its specific products, I wanted to get a handle on how the Alphabet incubator sees its own role at a time of great technological and social change—and understand the political philosophy behind its choices.

From music to movies, from banking to buying food, mobile phones have revolutionized the way we access the world today. But for low-income consumers in emerging markets, the full potential of mobile financial services is yet to be unlocked, a new report suggests. Despite the growth in smartphone adoption and mobile payment systems in many countries, telecom operators and regulators were yet to invest in products and distribution models that would cater for largely underserved or unbanked consumers.

The report from Swedish insurance technology company BIMA surveyed 4,000 low-income respondents in 10 countries across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. BIMA notes that the lack of synergy between regulators and operators in emerging markets has also undermined the development of mobile solutions for complex services such as healthcare, insurance, and savings. In emerging markets, formal banking reaches about 37% of the population, compared with a 50% penetration rate for mobile phones financial systems, according to global management consultancy McKinsey. This constitutes 2.2 billion adults who don’t use banks or micro-financial institutions in the world—more than 326 million of whom live in Sub-Saharan Africa. If companies are able to successfully tap into these unbanked consumers, that will constitute a “second wave” of mobile financial services, where customers move beyond using mobile as a channel for just payments.

The head of the US’s National Security Agency, Michael Rogers, said Nov 15 that a “nation-state” consciously targeted presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, in order to affect the US election. In response to a question, Michael Rogers, a Naval officer and NSA director since 2014, said that Wikileaks was furthering a nation-state’s goals by publishing hacked e-mails from the Democratic National Committee and Clinton’s presidential campaign weeks ahead of the election. “There shouldn’t be any doubt in anybody’s minds, this was not something that was done casually, this was not something that was done by chance, this was not a target that was selected purely arbitrarily. This was a conscious effort by a nation-state to attempt to achieve a specific effect,” he said.

“I met with Eric Schmidt tonight,” John Podesta, the longtime Hillary Clinton adviser, told campaign manager-in-waiting Robby Mook in April 2014, more than a year before Clinton announced her candidacy for president. The e-mail, stolen by Russian hackers and published by Wikileaks, details the billionaire Alphabet chairman’s interest in backing Hillary Clinton’s nascent presidential run: “He’s ready to fund, advise recruit talent, etc. He was more deferential on structure than I expected. Wasn’t pushing to run through one of his existing firms. Clearly wants to be head outside advisor, but didn’t seem like he wanted to push others out. Clearly wants to get going. He’s still in DC tomorrow and would like to meet with you if you are in DC in the afternoon. I think it’s worth doing.” What did the meeting lead to? As of this week, Schmidt hasn’t bothered to donate a cent directly to Clinton’s campaign. Instead, he has leveraged his Silicon Valley acumen to generate a new source of influence.

Here’s what we know: Every time you tag a friend in a Facebook photo, Facebook stores their image in its database. And here’s what we’re about to find out: whether that’s an illegal violation of users’ privacy.

On Oct 27, a class-action lawsuit alleging that the world’s largest social network is violating its users’ privacy will enter phase two. Specifically, a San Francisco court will assess whether Facebook is breaking the law by using its facial-recognition tool, to identify faces in photographs uploaded by users, or by collecting those photographs into a central database. In use since 2010, Facebook claims its facial-recognition tool is now 97.35% accurate, which is great news if you’re trying to tag overcrowded party pictures, but less so if you’re worried about privacy. Plaintiffs in the case are concerned on a number of fronts: Facebook could be selling identifying information to retailers or other third parties. More importantly, they worry that biometric data is just as susceptible to theft, hacking, and the long and invasive arm of law enforcement as other types of data. It also alleges that Facebook failed to acquire consent before collecting “faceprints.”

The class-action suit hinges on a unique Illinois law passed in 2008, called the Biometric Information Privacy Act. It states that if companies fail to get consent from users before storing biometric information, they can be subject to a $5,000 fine, plus $1,000 in damages if the violation shows negligence. That’s per violation. For a company with 7 million users in Illinois, that could mean fines as high as $35 million. So far, Facebook and Google have insisted that gathering data on what you look like isn’t against the law, even if it’s done without your explicit permission. Facebook says the current class-action lawsuit should be dismissed because there is no proof of actual damage, such as someone losing their job or a relationship being harmed because of embarrassing or compromising photos getting out. Still, a judge in May allowed the case to proceed.

One of the more notable aspects of 2016’s US presidential race is the sheer amount of attention given to Hillary Clinton’s use of e-mail while she served as secretary of state from 2009, with Republicans questioning whether she used proper security procedures. But what about the email habits of her predecessors in that role?

Democratic Congressman Elijah Cummings has made public an exchange between Clinton and Republican Colin Powell, who served as secretary of state during the first term of president George W. Bush. In it, Powell answers two questions from Clinton as she prepares for her new role in January 2009: “What were the restrictions on your use of your blackberry?” and “Did you use it in your personal office?” Notably in the exchange, Powell says, "I didn’t have a BlackBerry. What I did do was have a personal computer that was hooked up to a private phone line (sounds ancient.) So I could communicate with a wide range of friends directly without going through the State Department servers. I even used it to do business with some foreign leaders and some of the senior folks in the Department on their personal email accounts. I did the same thing on the road in hotels."

Since 2010, a secret cyber-attack campaign, possibly state-sponsored, has been directed at several Latin American intelligence services, military, embassies and other government institutions.

The Moscow-based cyber-security firm Kaspersky Lab, which claims to have unearthed the campaign, has given it a name: El Machete. Most of the attacks’ victims are located in countries like Venezuela, Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Cuba, and Spain.

The malware that El Machete contains is capable of logging keystrokes; capturing audio from the computer’s microphone; capturing screenshots and geolocation data; taking photos from the computer’s web camera; copying files to a remote server or special USB device; and hijacking the clipboard and capturing information from the target machine.

One of the promises of the “Internet of things” is that it will connect the real-world with the virtual. Low-energy Bluetooth beacons are emerging as one of its stronger early technologies.

Estimote, one of the leading beacon startups, just launched new, tiny beacon “stickers,” which it will start selling to developers and hobbyists. Basically a battery and a tiny, low-energy computer, beacons send unique Bluetooth radio pulses, which a mobile device can recognize.

It’s important to note that beacons don’t receive information, so they aren’t actually watching you themselves. To be monitored -- at least how things stand today -- you will first need to install a specific app and give it permission to track your location.

Yale computer scientists Aaron Segal, Bryan Ford, and Joan Feigenbaum paint an idyllic picture of a potential surveillance environment that’s heavy on reach and light on breach.

The paper, “Catching Bandits and Only Bandits: Privacy-Preserving Intersection Warrants for Lawful Surveillance,” proposes combining a system of checks and balances with cryptographic techniques to let investigators identify records of interest without exposing anyone else’s data.

C-SPAN will soon require a pay television subscription to watch its flagship channels on the Internet. Starting in late sumemr, you will have to prove that you pay for television before watching C-SPAN, C-SPAN 2, or C-SPAN 3 on the web. Live streams of the House and Senate chambers will still be available for free.