The Council of Europe is exploring the need for global laws on artificial intelligence, it said. The human rights organization is taking part in an Internet Governance Forum event this week in Strasbourg during which representatives from governments, international organizations, business, civil society, academia and the IT sector will discuss internet policy issues such risks to human rights from advanced technologies. A CoE ad hoc committee on AI (CAHAI), which includes representatives from the organization's 47 members, met Nov. 18-20 to consider the feasibility of rules on developing, designing and using AI based on CoE standards on human rights, democracy and the rule of law. The implications for human rights and democracy "are manifold and we need to be able to answer the challenges for individuals but also for the whole society," emailed Jan Kleijssen, CoE director-information society, action against crime. The meeting "clearly revealed the high level of interest paid by member States to CAHAI." Participants agreed to a feasibility study that will map work on AI already done within the CoE and other bodies, plus relevant legally binding and soft-law instruments. The exercise is expected to help identify the main risks and opportunities from the development and use of AI, Kleijssen said. Participants will look at what principles should be applied to creating and using AI, and consider what the most suitable legal framework is. They discussed the impact of AI on people and society, plus different AI policies, particularly those of the U.S., France, Germany and Russia. The panel will report to the CoE Committee of Ministers in May on its progress, and will launch a "comprehensive consultation to build a legal framework that answers to the need and expectations of the citizens." Asked whether, given numerous ongoing AI activities, it will be difficult to set any sort of global rules, Kleijssen noted EU common standards on respect for human rights, rule of law and democracy to which all CoE members are committed. The council is part of global efforts to address challenges of using digital technologies, including AI, and cooperates closely with other organizations such as the EU, UN and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
Russia export controls and sanctions
The use of export controls and sanctions on Russia has surged since the country's invasion of Crimea in 2014, and especially its invasion of Ukraine in in February 2022. Similar export controls and sanctions have been imposed by U.S. allies, including the EU, U.K. and Japan. The following is a listing of recent articles in Export Compliance Daily on export controls and sanctions imposed on Russia:
TikTok is collecting enormous amounts of data (see 1911040034), which the Chinese government can legally access through parent company ByteDance, posing a major national security threat, Senate Crime and Terrorism Subcommittee Chairman Josh Hawley, R-Mo., told reporters Tuesday.
The threat to networks is real, Clete Johnson, of Wilkinson Barker, said at a Silicon Flatirons spectrum conference Thursday. The threat comes from intelligence services and their agents in countries including North Korea, China, Iran and Russia, he said. There are “tens of thousands of people” who “go to school, go to work, they provide for their families, they find fulfillment in their daily life by trying to figure out how to get into our networks and devices,” Johnson said. “It’s their job. So it’s not some abstraction. It’s a concrete set of forces who are out there working on this every day.” The more everything is connected “everything is vulnerable” and 5G will pose new threats, he said. The government and industry need to work together, Johnson said: “If everything is connected, then all of the solutions need to be connected.” Monisha Ghosh, engineering professor at the University of Chicago and program director at the National Science Foundation, said the U.S. is researching the security threat. “A lot of the news items that you see of threats being discovered or solutions being proposed are coming from the academic community,” she said: “We need to get that community much better connected to industry as well as federal agencies.” Ghosh said “funding is never adequate” and the joke is “NSF stands for not sufficient funds.” Some of the threats will be revealed only as networks launch, she said. “5G is going to roll out as a production system,” she said: “It’s not being experimented with at the scale at which it’s going to roll out. When it rolls out is when you’re going to find the holes.” Rebecca Dorch, senior spectrum policy analyst at the NTIA Institute for Telecommunication Sciences, oversaw testing of systems in the new 3.5 GHz citizens broadband radio service band. Researchers did their best to identify the unknowns, she said. “My nightmare scenario is, notwithstanding all of the careful analysis, … something unexpected or unanticipated could occur within that entire ecosystem that could actually cause harmful interference,” she said. Dynamic spectrum sharing in general poses risks, Dorch said. “Sharing between very, very different types of communications systems, as that increases, and the density of those devices and systems … that’s where I think that we really haven’t fully tacked for potential for interference at the RF level,” she said: “We’ve got some real vulnerabilities potentially there.” Johnson recalled the financial crisis of 2008, where problems in the subprime mortgage market in the United States developed into a full-blown international banking crisis. “You had a problem in one place that cascaded and took over the entire economy,” Johnson said: “My nightmare is as the speed of innovation increases, or the rate of innovation increases, and we deploy billions and billions of devices” it connects people and companies “that may not be aware or where their data sits or how it can be corrupted or manipulated.” We need to test networks, but we don’t know what the “bugs are” until 5G rolls out on a mass scale, he said. Cooperation is crucial, Johnson said: “We’re all part of this increasingly symbiotic relationship and we don’t know exactly what the effects of that are going to be when something goes wrong.”
Congress should consider legislation to require social media platforms disclose sponsors of political advertisements, the Senate Intelligence Committee reported Tuesday on a two-year investigation on Russia’s 2016 election meddling. The recommendation mirrors the Honest Ads Act (S-1356), from Senate Intelligence Committee ranking member Mark Warner, D-Va.; Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn.; and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. (see 1905080075). The bill would require online political ads have the “same transparency and disclosure requirements as ads sold on TV, radio and satellite.” The report recommended the executive branch “publicly reinforce the danger of attempted foreign interference in the 2020 election,” through an interagency task force to monitor social media and public media literacy initiatives. Social media companies should facilitate more public-private information-sharing, the panel said.
No matter how sophisticated technology for combating deep fakes and disinformation is, it’s useless without buy-in from large tech platforms, which profit from the rise of sensational content, the House Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee heard Thursday. The worry is companies like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are more focused on growth than oversight and user support functions, said Rep. Jennifer Wexton, D-Va. Platforms disclaim responsibility for user content and have a disincentive to purge fake and bot accounts, she said. Wexton cited a July 2018 report on how Twitter’s stock dropped 8.5 percent after it purged 70 million suspicious accounts over two months. Twitter shares increased about 20 percent between January and December 2018.
Rep. Anna Eshoo of California and four other House Democrats urged the FCC to investigate whether WZHF (AM) Capitol Heights, Maryland, is providing sponsorship information that "sufficiently identifies the true identity of the sponsor of its broadcast programming.” Tuesday's push follows a May federal court ruling that RM Broadcasting, which owns WZHF's full airtime through 2020, must register as a foreign agent because it's broadcasting Radio Sputnik content from Russian government-controlled news agency Rossiya Segodnya (see 1905130035). RM argued it merely brokers the sale of airtime and had no part in content decisions. WZHF's “sponsorship identification of its programming is misleading and fails to identify that the Russian government funds all of the programming on its station,” which violates rules requiring announcement of sponsorship identification must “fully and fairly disclose the true identity” of the entity paying for the content's broadcast, Eshoo and the others wrote FCC Chairman Ajit Pai. The station identifies Rossiya Segodnya and RM, but this “does not clearly convey that the true identity of the programming aired” on the station “is the government of the Russian Federation. A reasonable listener of AM radio cannot be expected to know that Rossiya Segodnya is a Russian government-funded propaganda outlet.” The lawmakers emphasized they're “not requesting any press censorship” but “asserting that the American people have a right to know when a foreign government -- especially an adversarial foreign government -- is behind programming aired on American airwaves.” The other signers were: Commerce Committee Vice Chair Yvette Clarke of New York, Jerry McNerney of California, Eleanor Holmes Norton of Washington, D.C., and Norma Torres of California. Eshoo repeatedly pressed the FCC on the broadcast of Russia-backed propaganda. Her Foreign Entities Reform Act (HR-3698) would require broadcasters, cable and satellite providers publish the same information on the source and funding of content originating from foreign agents as is required under Communications Act sponsorship ID rules (see 1907120050). The FCC didn't comment.
Hughes and Facebook are partnering on setting up Wi-Fi hot spots in Colombia employing a Hughes VSAT and Facebook's Express Wi-Fi software platform, Hughes said Wednesday. It said the service is aimed at service providers and integrators wanting to monetize their own hot spots, particularly in unserved or underserved areas. It said its customers have set up more than 32,000 satellite-based community Wi-Fi hot spots in Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico and Russia.
Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., refiled the Foreign Entities Reform Act Thursday. HR-3698 would require broadcasters, cable and satellite providers to publish the same information on the source and funding of content originating from foreign agents who register with DOJ under the Foreign Agents Registration Act as is required under sponsorship ID rules of the Communications Act. Eshoo repeatedly pressed the FCC on the broadcast of Russia-backed propaganda, including a push for the commission to investigate whether Russian government-owned radio network Sputnik broadcast propaganda over U.S. airwaves in a bid to influence elections (see 1805010080). DOJ recently used FARA to successfully fight to require Florida company RM Broadcasting to register as a foreign agent for arranging broadcasts of Sputnik WZHF(AM) Capitol Heights, Maryland (see 1905130035).
The 2017 WannaCry ransomware attack might have been a premature attempt by North Korea to exploit an underdeveloped cyber tool, said FBI Cyber Division Deputy Assistant Director Tonya Ugoretz Wednesday. There was financial motivation, but the ransomware didn’t allow attackers to collect any ransom, she said at an Aspen Institute event.
The House Commerce Committee moved forward with a Wednesday hearing on the Leading Infrastructure for Tomorrow’s (Lift) America Act (HR-2741) despite the simultaneous torpedoing of talks between President Donald Trump and top Capitol Hill Democrats on a plan to pay for additional spending on broadband and other infrastructure projects. HR-2741 would allocate $40 billion for broadband projects, offer $12 billion in grants for implementing next generation-911 technologies and $5 billion for federal funding of a loan and credit program for broadband projects. Democrats first filed the bill in 2017 (see 1706020056).