China Decrees That All News On Websites Must Funnel Through Government Approval

from the flailing dept

Fake news and hoax news stories are annoying, to be sure. I've been fooled a few times by hoax stories, as I imagine most other folks who do what we do have been. And, while the strategies taken by folks like Facebook haven't resulted in ending the scourge of fake news, I can understand the intent. There are probably better strategies out there, though they are harder to achieve. Strategies like educating the public on how to verify internet stories they see. Or instilling in people a healthy amount of skepticism starting at a young age so that they don't fall victim to every hoax out there. Or just sending around Snopes.com to all of our family members and demanding that they run any outrage through that filter first before bringing it to the dinner table.

The point is that there are good ways to combat fake news. Here with an example of a terrible way to do so is China, which is happily riding the annoyance at hoax news to the happy conclusion of further centralizing control of the internet through its government.

China’s powerful internet censorship body has further tightened its grip on online news reports by warning all news or social network websites against publishing news without proper verification, state media reports. The instruction, issued by the Cyberspace Administration of China, came only a few days after Xu Lin, formerly the deputy head of the organisation, replaced his boss, Lu Wei, as the top gatekeeper of Chinese internet affairs. The central internet censorship organ ordered its regional subordinates to fully fulfil their duties on the basis of content management, strengthen supervision and inspection, and severely punish fake news or news that deviated from the facts.

“All websites should bear the key responsibility to further streamline the course of reporting and publishing of news, and set up a sound internal monitoring mechanism among all mobile news portals [and the social media chat websites] Weibo or WeChat,” Xinhua reported the directive as saying. “It is forbidden to use hearsay to create news or use conjecture and imagination to distort the facts,” it said.

The facts as the Chinese government sees them, it should be said. And that's really the point of all of this. This isn't about hoax news stories; it's about the reporting of anything at all that would embarrass the Chinese government. This kind of censorship funnel would be horrific under any scenario and under any governing body, but given that the Chinese government lost its collective mind and went censor-crazy just because Lady Gaga met with the Dalai Lama, this law is like giving a life-eraser to an eight-year-old with a bad attitude.

In addition to the censorship by government clearly embedded in this new law, so too is there an attempt to chill anyone from actually speaking to reporters within the country.

“No website is allowed to report public news without specifying the sources, or report news that quotes untrue origins,” the circular warned, adding that the fabrication of news or distortion of the facts were also strictly prohibited.

And, just like that, you chill the water for anyone that might talk to a reporter, because that reporter is required to name his or her sources. It's a subtle bit of tyranny that's impressive for a government typically more ham-fisted than that.

Oh, and you'll never guess what excuse the Chinese government is trotting out to excuse this kind of massive censorship.

Officials say internet restrictions, including the blocking of popular foreign websites such as Google and Facebook, are needed to ensure security in the face of rising threats, such as terrorism, and also to stop the spread of damaging rumours.

Terrorism...and the spread of damaging rumors. I can assure you this law has only to do with one of those threats, and it isn't terrorism, and it isn't "rumors" the Chinese government is worried about.

Filed Under: china, free press, free speech, journalism, news, rumors, social media, speculation

Wall Street Journal Suggests Snowden Gave China Its 'Great Cannon' Software... Based On Pure Random Speculation

from the journalism! dept

There's been lots of talk lately about China's "Great Cannon" -- the DDoS tool that China used to launch a massive attack on GitHub a few weeks ago. Much of the research on this tool was provided by Citizen Lab. That report is great and interesting. And then, the Wall Street Journal -- still a respected news source -- jumps in to speculate wildly based on nothing in particular, that Ed Snowden gave China NSA source code to build the Great Cannon.

Edward Snowden sabotaged the intelligence capabilities of the U.S. and its allies, and now we learn he may have given the Chinese regime a weapon to spread Internet censorship across the planet. The Great Firewall, the unofficial name for a suite of blocking tools, stops Chinese citizens from accessing outside information. In the past few weeks Beijing has deployed a new offensive capability, dubbed the Great Cannon.

First of all, Snowden didn't "sabotage" any intelligence capabilities at all. He revealed to journalists how the NSA and its partners were abusing certain powers, likely breaking the law. That's not "sabotage." Second, the "we learn" is not based on anything the WSJ's nameless author of the opinion piece actually "learned." It's based on wild speculation by stringing some misleading and unrelated ideas together. So we're already off to an inauspicious start to the piece.

According to a report from the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, the Great Cannon is similar to Quantum, a tool developed by the U.S. to track potential terrorists and criminals abroad. Snowden, a former system administrator for the U.S. National Security Agency, revealed the existence of Quantum for the first time in 2013 when he fled to Hong Kong and then Moscow.

Loose connection #1.

Did Snowden give the Chinese the code for the Great Cannon? He denies sharing anything with foreign governments. But then he’s an admitted liar, and we don’t know what the Chinese and Russian spy services have been able to copy from what he stole. In any event he alerted them to a weakness that could be exploited.

Wait, what? How is he "an admitted liar?" That seems like a stretch already, and seems like the kind of line you'd find in a conspiracy website, not the pages of the Wall Street Journal. Second, the idea that the Chinese didn't already recognize how to do online attacks via such methods until Snowden revealed it seems especially questionable. Among the other things that Snowden revealed: the NSA knows that the Chinese are among the most sophisticated in building tools for mounting online attacks. The idea that they would be totally ignorant of methods like these until Snowden's revelations came out seems difficult to believe.

A South China Morning Post report that the Great Cannon has been under development for about a year is suggestive. This means China’s hacking bureaucracy geared up to produce this new product soon after the Snowden leaks.

Loose connection #2. Also, notice that the WSJ doesn't actually link to the SCMP story, so we'll do that for you. It actually doesn't say it was in development for a year. It says that it's "been in operation for about one year." I guess the timing still sorta works if you're making loose connections, but it seems like a pretty big leap to argue that's somehow evidence that Snowden gave the info to the Chinese during his brief stay in Hong Kong.

It also means that in the name of “transparency,” Snowden and his media accomplices may have empowered one of the world’s worst censors.

Uh, no, it doesn't. If the WSJ's editorial board knew the first thing about technology, they'd know that it didn't require Ed Snowden to teach the Chinese how to build a giant DDoS machine.

This is another example of how the Western left fails to distinguish between the secrecy and surveillance required by democracies to preserve freedom and that used by dictators to quash it.

Huh? That sentence doesn't even make sense.

Either way, as one commenter noted, you'd think that the WSJ might realize that even if China modeled the Great Cannon on the NSA's Quantum, it really says something that we're building tools that can be used to censor the internet. And they should realize that's a problem. Instead, they try to blame the whole thing on Snowden, because... well, actually not for any actual reason that I can see -- just pure speculation. That's the kind of thing we'd expect to see on conspiracy theory websites. Not the Wall Street Journal.

Filed Under: china, ddos, ed snowden, great cannon, nsa, quantum, rumors, speculation
Companies: wall street journal

CyberNadir: Former Pilot Randomly Speculates (Incorrectly) That Recent Airbus Crash Could Be The Work Of Hackers

from the all-the-'news'-that's-fit-to-cram-into-a-24-hour-sprawl dept

CNN and Fox had the market cornered on ridiculous airplane crash theories, up until recently. When Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 just up and vanished, CNN produced wall-to-wall coverage seemingly cribbed from low-rent conspiracy theory sites. UFO? Black hole? Any and all theories were entertained.

Fox News hasn't exactly been the epitome of restraint, either. While it managed to avoid following CNN down these plane crash rabbit holes, it too has entertained some theories better left to operations that don't claim "news" to be a major part of their offerings. Fox News host Anna Kooiman suggested the metric system was to blame, what with kilometers being different than miles and Celsius and Fahrenheit not seeing eye-to-eye, potentially leading to some sort of in-flight calculation error.

MSNBC has decided it won't let its competition be the only "news" agencies spouting ridiculous theories. In an effort to get out ahead of the facts -- black box recordings indicated the co-pilot of the aircraft deliberately crashed the plane after locking the commanding pilot out of the cockpit -- MSNBC allowed the following theory to be presented -- completely unchallenged -- by one of its guests.

“There’s one possibility that no one has brought up, and I wonder could this be a hacking incident?” former commercial pilot Jay Rollins told MSNBC’s Diaz-Balart. “This is very similar in my mind to what happened when the U.S. lost that drone over Iran. The same thing, suddenly the aircraft was responding to outside forces…"

Rollins said that the plane’s descent was “worrisome” because “it makes me think about hacking, some sort of interference into the computer system.”

Now, hacking a plane isn't impossible. At 2013's Hack in the Box conference, German security consultant Hugo Teso used his own app -- PlaneSploit -- to demonstrate that an Android phone could be used to reroute a plane, send it diving towards the ground or to set off every alarm in the aircraft.

Or not. Teso's demonstration involved sending flight information to airborne planes with these instructions (in a simulated environment, of course) via ACARS (Aircraft Communications and Response Addressing System) to the FMS (Flight Management System). But there were multiple problems with his plan. First of all, the flight computer has to accept the new instructions and, secondly, pilots would have to be unable to override bad instructions. Neither of which are a distinct possibility.

Patrick Smith, another commercial airline pilot, albeit one far less likely to openly speculate on "hacked" planes than Jay Rollins, pointed out the flaws in Teso's hack.

The problem is, the FMS — and certainly not ACARS — does not directly control an airplane the way people think it does, and the way, with respect to this story, media reports are implying. Neither the FMS nor the autopilot flies the plane. The crew flies the plane through these components. We tell it what to do, when to do it, and how to do it. Whatever data finds its way into the FMS, and regardless of where it’s coming from, it still needs to make sense to the crew. If it doesn’t, we’re not going to allow the plane, or ourselves, to follow it.

The sorts of disruptions that might arise aren’t anything a crew couldn’t notice and easily override. The FMS cannot say to the plane, “descend toward the ground now!” or “Slow to stall speed now!” or “Turn left and fly into that building!” It doesn’t work that way. What you might see would be something like an en route waypoint that would, if followed, carry you astray of course, or an altitude that’s out of whack with what ATC or the charts tells you it ought to be. That sort of thing. Anything weird or unsafe — an incorrect course or altitude — would be corrected very quickly by the pilots.

So, the problem isn't that hacking is impossible. It's just very, very unlikely. And in this case, hacking had nothing to do with the plane crash.

No, the problem is that news agencies looking to wring every bit of ratings possible from a tragedy are willing to make viewers stupider under the guise of "news." When facts just aren't available, 24-hour news teams lean heavily on whatever theory will provide the most entertainment (for lack of a better word). Former pilot Jay Rollins may have three decades of experience, but his speculation draws on none of it. Instead, it just takes a bit of what's selling right now (anything "cyber") and what has always sold (fear) and leaves the viewers with less information than they would have obtained by skipping the coverage completely. The truth, however, is simultaneously more horrific (in that there's little that can be done to thwart a pilot determined to crash a plane) than the "hacked plane" theory and more mundane -- at least in terms of "exciting" news coverage.

Filed Under: cable news, hackers, jay rollins, msnbc, plane crash, speculation

Major Media's Fine Job Of Confusing Everyone About Boston Suspects

from the facts-of-the-matter dept

The death of journalism and fact-checking has long been the mantra of the major media in response to so-called internet journalism (which should just be called journalism, by the way). This, despite the fails of major media and the wins by journalistic websites, reveals a sort of paternal arrogance on the part of the still-major players in traditional reporting. It's always interesting when the roles are massively reversed, which was on full display in the Boston Marathon bombing aftermath.

Deadspin notes, with a hysterically cut up video montage, the full failure of major media reporting on possible suspects in the aftermath.

We thought we'd condense today's mess of media reporting into something easily consumable for the crowd that may have been working and thus wasn't privy to the disaster taking place on television airwaves. Here, then, are your trusted news sources reporting, misreporting, backtracking, and scapegoating their way through the day.

You have to see the video for yourself, which I frustratingly can't seem to find an embed for, to have the magnitude of mistakes and misreporting fully hit home. In a matter of hours, major news sources reported that a suspect was about to be arrested, had been arrested, was of brown-skin, white-skin, was taken by U.S. Marshals, then wasn't arrested, then was re-arrested and was on his way to the courthouse, was then again un-arrested, culminating with the reporting that no suspect was even known by name, let alone arrested. In fact, there are times when the supposed fact-checking media can go even further and splash the pictures of people they claim are suspects on their front page, who definitely are not, for no apparent reason beyond that which seems to be they are brown-skinned. It's enough to take one's breath away.

Now, it should be noted that this isn't to suggest that news sources on the internet aren't capable of misreporting as well. Media, in general, is subject to a drive to draw attention by having the latest information, which often results in a rush to report what hasn't been verified. But that is a characteristic of media, not traditional media or internet media. Just media. On the other hand, if you want the most extensive available investigation into the matter, your best choice isn't the television or the papers, but Reddit, which has organized their own crowd-sourced investigation. That's the power of the internet.

Filed Under: boston marathon bombing, journalism, reporting, speculation

Rep. Steve King: Because Boston Bombing May Have Been Done By An Immigrant, We Should Block Immigration Reform

from the or,-you-know,-a-native-born-person dept

In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings, it's no surprise that various politicians are using it to booster their own political passions. Rep. Steve King is not a fan of immigration. Despite the fact that the country is in desperate need of massive immigration reform, King is now using the Boston Marathon bombings as an excuse to stall immigration reform efforts that finally looked like they had a chance of moving forward. What does one thing have to do with another? Well, he claims that since the bombings might have been done by an immigrant, that should make us put the brakes on reform.

"Some of the speculation that has come out is that, yes, it was a foreign national and, speculating here, that it was potentially a person on a student visa," King said to the National Review's Robert Costa. "If that's the case, then we need to take a look at the big picture."

You know what, some speculation has come out (by me) that it was really someone with the last name "King." And, you know, if that's the case, we really need to take a look at the big picture, and whether or not we should allow people with the last name King to be here, or to serve in Congress.

How is it that we elect people like this to represent us?

Filed Under: bombing, boston, boston marathon bombing, immigration, immigration reform, politics, speculation, steve king

Palin Threats To News Organizations Seem Misguided

from the why-would-you-do-that dept

I'm hoping the comments here don't turn into a political snowball fight that does no one any good. Personally, I don't care much about "politics" or political parties, and there are few things I could care less about than why Sarah Palin resigned from her job as Governor of Alaska. However, what does interest me is the news that apparently her lawyers sent a letter threatening to sue the press for writing anything defamatory about Palin, specifically mentioning some of the speculation found on various blogs about why she suddenly quit. It's difficult to understand the thinking behind sending such a letter. People will speculate -- it's what they do, and it's perfectly legal. Defamation is declaring something that's patently false as fact, and I don't see any mainstream news sources doing that. But, speculating on the reasons why it might have happened isn't defamation. Even worse, as Jay Rosen notes, in sending such a threatening letter, Palin's lawyers have just "legitimized the story." Now the press has even more to cover, in that they can simply report on the legal threat, and explain the "speculative" stories behind it. Pre-threatening the press not to report on some speculation found on blogs seems like a sure-fire way to get coverage of that story you're trying to suppress.

Filed Under: defamation, free press, sarah palin, speculation, threats