Stories from Abroad

After a presidential campaign scarred by Russian meddling, local, state and federal agencies have conducted little of the type of digital forensic investigation required to assess the impact, if any, on voting in at least 21 states whose election systems were targeted by Russian hackers, according to interviews with nearly two dozen national security and state officials and election technology specialists.

The assaults on the vast back-end election apparatus — voter-registration operations, state and local election databases, e-poll books and other equipment — have received far less attention than other aspects of the Russian interference, such as the hacking of Democratic e-mails and spreading of false or damaging information about Hillary Clinton. Yet the hacking of electoral systems was more extensive than previously disclosed. Beyond VR Systems, hackers breached at least two other providers of critical election services well ahead of the 2016 voting, said current and former intelligence officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because the information is classified. The officials would not disclose the names of the companies.

The United Nations human rights chief said Aug 30 that President Donald Trump’s repeated denunciations of some media outlets as “fake news” could amount to incitement to violence and had potentially dangerous consequences outside the United States.

The rebuke by Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, the high commissioner for human rights, at a news conference in Geneva was an unusually forceful criticism of a head of state by a United Nations official. al-Hussein was reacting to President Trump’s recent comments at a rally in Phoenix (AZ) during which he spoke of “crooked media deceptions” in reports of the violent clashes at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville (VA) that resulted in the death of a counterprotester. In Phoenix, the president’s words also appeared to whip up audience hostility toward journalists. “It’s really quite amazing when you think that freedom of the press, not only a cornerstone of the Constitution but very much something the United States defended over the years, is now itself under attack from the president himself,” al-Hussein said. “It’s a stunning turnaround.”

Google will comply with Europe’s demands to change the way it runs its shopping search service, a rare instance of the internet giant bowing to regulatory pressure to avoid more fines. The Alphabet Inc unit faced an Aug 29 deadline to tell the European Union how it planned to follow an order to stop discriminating against rival shopping search services in the region.

The EU fined Google a record 2.4 billion euros ($2.7 billion) in late June for breaking antitrust rules by skewing its general search results to unfairly favor its own shopping service over rival sites. The company had 60 days to propose how it would "stop its illegal content" and 90 days to make changes to how the company displays shopping results when users search for a product. Those changes need to be put in place by Sept. 28 to stave off a risk that the EU could fine the company 5 percent of daily revenue for each day it fails to comply. "The obligation to comply is fully Google’s responsibility," the European Commission said. The onus is on Google to find a solution that satisfies regulators, who’ve learned from past battles with Microsoft and Intel.

A top executive from Donald Trump’s real estate company e-mailed Vladi­mir Putin’s personal spokesman during the US presidential campaign in 2016 to ask for help advancing a stalled Trump Tower development project in Moscow, according to documents submitted to Congress Aug 28. Michael Cohen, a Trump attorney and executive vice president for the Trump Organization, sent the e-mail in January 2016 to Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin’s top press aide.

“Over the past few months I have been working with a company based in Russia regarding the development of a Trump Tower - Moscow project in Moscow City,” Cohen wrote Peskov, according to a person familiar with the e-mail. “Without getting into lengthy specifics the communication between our two sides has stalled.” “As this project is too important, I am hereby requesting your assistance. I respectfully request someone, preferably you, contact me so that I might discuss the specifics as well as arranging meetings with the appropriate individuals. I thank you in advance for your assistance and look forward to hearing from you soon,” Cohen wrote. Cohen’s e-mail marks the most direct interaction yet documented of a top Trump aide and a similarly senior member of Putin’s government.

[Commentary] Democratic governments concerned about new digital threats need to find better algorithms to defend democratic values in the global digital ecosystem. Democracy has always been hard. It requires an exquisite balance between freedom, security and democratic accountability. This is the profound challenge that confronts the world’s liberal democracies as they grapple with foreign disinformation operations, as well as home-grown hate speech, extremism, and fake news. Fear and conceptual confusion do not justify walking away from liberal values, which are a source of security and stability in democratic society. Private sector and government actors must design algorithms for democracy that simultaneously optimize for freedom, security, and democratic accountability in our digital world.

[Eileen Donahoe is Executive Director of the Global Digital Policy Incubator at Stanford University, and former U.S. ambassador to the UN Human Rights Council]

I live in the only country in the world where the internet gets worse every year — at least if you’re trying to look at YouTube or Twitter or Google or virtually any other large non-Chinese site. For years, the only way to get to such services has been with a virtual private network (VPN), a tool that slips past China’s “Great Firewall” into the freedom of the outside world. Even as the Chinese internet has gotten better, access to the outside has gotten worse. And now it might be cut off entirely, as orders from the government reportedly seek to shut down VPNs altogether, severing even this thin lifeline.

These increased measures aren’t about control of information. They’re about preventing mobilization — about stopping angry Chinese from using the methods practiced at Tahrir Square in Egypt and the Maidan in Ukraine. Match that with an ever more sprawling security state and growing top-down xenophobia, and measures that would have seemed implausibly harsh four years ago now seem highly likely. But these paranoid demands could end up hamstringing the country’s economic and technological ambitions, leaving it stuck in a pit of its own making.

China announced Aug 11 that it's investigating its own tech companies, like Tencent and Baidu, for giving users an avenue to spread violence and terror. The announcement follows government campaigns earlier this year in the United Kingdom, France and Germany that intend to place legal liability on tech companies for failing to control the presence of terrorist-related content on their platforms.

U.S. regulators have largely remained silent when it comes to policing the role of tech giants in distributing terrorist content, leaving the companies to police themselves in accordance to their own standards. In the past, tech companies have reacted to crises in a uniform fashion, but the attack in Charlottesville shows a a split. Some sites, like Google and GoDaddy, announced Monday that they would cut ties to a white nationalist website, while others have yet to comment. Neither Facebook nor Twitter updated their policies in response to the attack, although both groups do already have policies about violence.

Three days after Donald Trump named his campaign foreign policy team in March 2016, the youngest of the new advisers sent an e-mail to seven campaign officials with the subject line: “Meeting with Russian Leadership - Including Putin.” The adviser, George Papadopoulos, offered to set up “a meeting between us and the Russian leadership to discuss US-Russia ties under President Trump,” telling them his Russian contacts welcomed the opportunity, according to internal campaign e-mails read to The Washington Post. The proposal sent a ripple of concern through campaign headquarters in Trump Tower. Campaign co-chairman Sam Clovis wrote that he thought NATO allies should be consulted before any plans were made. Another Trump adviser, retired Navy Rear Adm. Charles Kubic, cited legal concerns, including a possible violation of U.S. sanctions against Russia and of the Logan Act, which prohibits U.S. citizens from unauthorized negotiation with foreign governments.

But Papadopoulos, a campaign volunteer with scant foreign policy experience, persisted. Between March and September, the self-described energy consultant sent at least a half-dozen requests for Trump, as he turned from primary candidate to party nominee, or for members of his team to meet with Russian officials. Among those to express concern about the effort was then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who rejected in May 2016 a proposal from Papadopoulos for Trump to do so. The exchanges are among more than 20,000 pages of documents the Trump campaign turned over to congressional committees this month after review by White House and defense lawyers.

[Commentary] Today, US technology companies adhere to a wide array of requirements from repressive governments that undermine Internet freedom and privacy. These demands violate international law, including the right to freedom of expression. But the enormous benefits of market access outweigh the relatively low costs associated with accepting repressive governments’ demands.

Undoubtedly, there are circumstances in which requests for information or access to accounts are reasonable, such as when investigating terrorism and major crimes. But the misuse and abuse of this power by authoritarian governments are routine. Unless the U.S. government stands in support of companies that refuse to comply with wrongful requirements, authoritarian regimes will feel emboldened to make ever-increasing and unreasonable demands. And while U.S. technology companies should be able to invest in Internet-restricting countries, if their choices directly facilitate the persecution of these governments’ political opponents, then they should bear the costs.

[Jared Genser is an international human rights lawyer based in Washington.]

Speedtest has long been the go-to for measuring internet speed, and now it’s launched the Speedtest Global Index, a monthly global ranking that allows you to see how your country stacks up when it comes to internet speed. The Global Index compiles data from the billions of tests consumers run on the service, and shows both mobile and fixed broadband speeds from around the world. Set to be updated monthly, each country’s ranking shows both its average download speed, as well as any difference in rank from the previous month. Click through on an individual country, and view both its average download and upload speed.