Stories from Abroad

Russia has opened a new battlefront with North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), according to Western military officials, by exploiting a point of vulnerability for almost all allied soldiers: their personal smartphones. Troops, officers and government officials of NATO member countries said Russia has carried out a campaign to compromise soldiers’ smartphones.

The aim, they say, is to gain operational information, gauge troop strength and intimidate soldiers. Russian officials deny that Moscow stages such attacks. US and other Western officials said they have no doubt Russia is behind the campaign. They said its nature suggests state-level coordination, and added that the equipment used, such as sophisticated drones equipped with surveillance electronics, is beyond the reach of most civilians.

[Commentary] Italy’s antitrust chief Giovanni Pitruzzella feels so overwhelmed by the amount of information on the internet that he has called for government regulation to fight fake news. Pitruzzella builds his case by contrasting the First Amendment with the European Convention on Human Rights, which he argues provides no constitutional protection of “fake news.” This is due to an interpretation of the limits of protected speech that says that the distribution of “fake news,” in Pitruzzella’s words, violates Europeans’ “right to be pluralistically informed.” Yes, our digital era and the explosion of speech and communication on social media are unique.

But the introduction of the printing press in the 15th century and its impact on the world in the ensuing centuries may serve as an instructive analogy from which Pitruzzella may take a lesson or two. In the 16th and 17th century, access to the press triggered waves of fake news and dissemination of wild conspiracy theories about witches and millenarian crazes. Religious fanaticism was printed side-by-side with scientific discoveries. During the first century after Gutenberg, print did as much to spread lies and false information as enlightened truth.

[Flemming Rose is a WorldPost contributor and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. Jacob Mchangama is director of the Copenhagen-based think tank Justitia.]

The European Union will order Amazon to pay several hundred million euros in back taxes on Oct 4. The EU’s enforcement arm, the European Commission, opened up an investigation three years ago into a partnership between Amazon and Luxembourg that allowed the e-commerce giant to shield some of its assets from taxation. The fine would be the latest action Europe has taken to try to rein in American tech giants. In a similar move in 2016, the EU ordered Apple to pay 13 billion euros in back taxes. The company allegedly benefited improperly from tax laws in Ireland.

Russian operatives set up an array of misleading Web sites and social media pages to identify American voters susceptible to propaganda, then used a powerful Facebook tool to repeatedly send them messages designed to influence their political behavior, apparently. The tactic resembles what American businesses and political campaigns have been doing in recent years to deliver messages to potentially interested people online.

The Russians exploited this system by creating English-language sites and Facebook pages that closely mimicked those created by US political activists. The Web sites and Facebook pages displayed ads or other messages focused on such hot-button issues as illegal immigration, African American political activism and the rising prominence of Muslims in the United States. The Russian operatives then used a Facebook “retargeting” tool, called Custom Audiences, to send specific ads and messages to voters who had visited those sites, apparently. People caught up in this web of tracking and disinformation would have had no indication that they had been singled out or that the ads came from Russians.

The European Union courts will hear a case with a massive impact on Facebook and other American internet service companies. The case, which an Irish court on Oct 3 referred to the Court of Justice of the European Union, revolves around where companies can store personal information.

Max Schrems is suing Facebook under the claim that, so long as the United States allows bulk surveillance programs, the US cannot guarantee that data stored on servers located on its shores abides by the EU’s stringent personal data protections laws. Currently, Facebook and other companies use what are known as “standard contractual clauses” to assure European users that their personal information is being protected. Schrems launched a similar case against an earlier treaty between the United States and European Union to cover cross-boarder data storage known as Safe Harbor, which the European courts eventually nixed. Safe Harbor was replaced by a new treaty, Privacy Shield, which is undergoing similar challenges. If courts continue to find US protections for European Citizens data insufficient, it could result in US internet service companies being unable to do business with Europe without setting up specialized servers there.

Apparently, associates of President Donald Trump and his company have turned over documents to federal investigators that reveal two previously unreported contacts from Russia during the 2016 campaign. In one case, Trump’s personal attorney and a business associate exchanged emails weeks before the Republican National Convention about the lawyer possibly traveling to an economic conference in Russia that would be attended by top Russian financial and government leaders, including President Vladi­mir Putin, according to people familiar with the correspondence. In the other case, the same Trump attorney, Michael Cohen, received a proposal in late 2015 for a Moscow residential project from a company founded by a billionaire who once served in the upper house of the Russian parliament, these people said.

The previously unreported inquiry marks the second proposal for a Trump-branded Moscow project that was delivered to the company during the presidential campaign and has since come to light. Cohen declined the invitation to the economic conference, citing the difficulty of attending so close to the GOP convention, according to people familiar with the matter. And Cohen rejected the Moscow building plan.

Rep Adam Schiff (D-CA), who is probing Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, wants Facebook to release at least some of the controversial political ads purchased by Kremlin-backed sources.

Facebook turned over those ads — roughly 3,000 of them in total, valued at more than $100,000 — to investigators on the House and Senate Intelligence Committees earlier Oct 2. Some of the posts specifically sought to stoke racial, religious or other social tensions by stirring conflict around issues like Black Lives Matter, gun control and gay rights. Rep Schiff, the senior Democrat on the House’s panel, said he planned to work with Facebook to release “a representative sampling” of the ads to the public — just in time for a hearing slated for October on the extent to which Russia spread misinformation through social networks. The goal, Schiff said, is to “inoculate the public against future Russian interference in our elections.”

The Russians who posed as Americans on Facebook in 2016 tried on quite an array of disguises. There was “Defend the 2nd,” a Facebook page for gun-rights supporters, festooned with firearms and tough rhetoric. There was a rainbow-hued page for gay rights activists, “LGBT United.” There was even a Facebook group for animal lovers with memes of adorable puppies that spread across the site with the help of paid ads.

Federal investigators and officials at Facebook now believe these groups and their pages were part of a highly coordinated disinformation campaign linked to the Internet Research Agency, a secretive company in St. Petersburg, Russia, known for spreading Kremlin-linked propaganda and fake news across the web. Under intensifying pressure from Congress and growing public outcry, Facebook on Oct 2 turned over more than 3,000 of the Russia-linked advertisements from its site over to the Senate and House intelligence committees. The material is part of an attempt to learn the depth of what investigators now believe was a sprawling foreign effort spanning years to interfere with the 2016 United States presidential election.

The Information Technology Industry Council (ITI), a major Washington (DC) technology trade association which represents the likes of Amazon, Google and Apple, is ramping up its focus in Europe as the continent increases its grip on technology companies. The ITI will announce its hiring of Guido Lobrano to launch a permanent European policy outpost. Lobrano will serve as the trade association’s senior director of global policy in Europe.

Lobrano will be based in Brussels, the unofficial capital of the European Union. Though the EU has no official capital Brussels holds the seats of European Commission, Council of the European Union, and European Council, as well as one of the most important seats in the European Parliament. “The reason for the hire is reflective for broader changes that are taking place. The world is becoming increasingly horizontal,” says ITI President and CEO Dean Garfield. “It is becoming more global and integrated, in spite of what you hear in the political domain in the US.”

Mobile-only users are usually perceived as a consequence of fixed-mobile substitution. This study uses a unique dataset based on a survey in France, combined with interviewee's telecommunications billing data, to reveal heterogeneous consumer preferences for fixed services.

With the same mixed logit model we estimate the willingness to pay (WTP) for fixed communications services and fixed-mobile relationship. Results show a very large heterogeneity of WTP for fixed services among consumers. In addition, we show that fixed and mobile data are complement for all consumers. Mobile-only consumers have a much lower but non-zero WTP, and higher price sensitivity compared to fixed-mobile consumers. Consequently, an increase in the fixed offer price would reduce the demand for fixed service. Heterogeneous preferences for fixed services constitute an alternative explanation for the existence of mobile-only users, despite the complementary nature of fixed and mobile broadband. Counter-factual simulations show that the share of mobile-only could also be driven by the way to subsidize mobile handset. For instance, making the handset subsidy only available to fixed-mobile quadruple play subscribers could reduce the share of mobile-only by half.