Twitter has reportedly given the billionaire access to its full stream of tweets and related user data. Is your privacy in jeopardy?

Elon Musk’s never-ending attempt to take over Twitter has taken yet another weird turn as the social media platform appears to have acceded to the entrepreneur’s request to gain access to a “fire hose of” internal data held by the company.

For weeks, Musk has pressed Twitter to provide data that would allow the South African entrepreneur to test whether a significant share of the platform’s users are fake bot accounts—something he believes would cheapen the price he’d be willing to pay for the company. Musk contends that bot accounts make up more than 5 percent of Twitter’s user base—something even Musk’s critics believe is true—and wants the company to disprove that.

Twitter has reported lower numbers of inauthentic accounts in its financial results, and according to _The Washington Post_, it is willing to give Musk access to every tweet posted daily, alongside granular user information, in order to allow him to look for inauthentic behavior. (Informally, this data is called the "fire hose.” Twitter declined WIRED's request to confirm or deny the _Post_ report.) Twitter’s apparent willingness to grant Musk access to the datastream comes days after the suitor’s lawyers sent a letter to the company saying it was “actively resisting and thwarting \[Musk’s\] information rights,” and threatening to pull out of the deal.

The reported shift to grant Musk access to the data is significant, and it raises two key questions: One, will Musk get what he wants from the data he’s been given? And two: What does him gaining access mean for everyday users’ privacy and security?

For Axel Bruns, professor at Queensland University of Technology, the move is Twitter calling Musk’s bluff. “By giving him access to the fire hose, Twitter can presumably say, ‘Prove your claims about the abundance of bots, then,’” he says. Bruns believes that Musk and whoever he employs to track down bots would have a difficult time. But even for someone with the requisite skills to handle that level of data, it’s unlikely to be the right method to answer the question. It’s uncertain whether access to the fire hose of 500 million tweets posted to the social media platform every day will actually help Musk answer the key question he claims is holding up his purchase of Twitter: The proportion of users who are bots. “It seems a bit performative,” says Paddy Leerssen, a researcher in information law at the University of Amsterdam. “My sense is that this data isn’t the data you need to figure out who’s a bot or not.”

Being able to pinpoint what makes a bot a bot has been a hotly debated subject in the field of academia, one that experts have devoted much of their working lives to—which is why they’re skeptical that access to all the tweets posted to Twitter will answer the bot question definitively enough to convince Musk to go ahead with the purchase. “My impression is that people tend to overestimate how easy it is to detect bots,” says Leerssen. “A tool like this \[the fire hose\] isn’t going to enable you to do that, unless you combine it with all sorts of other research methods. I don’t think that’s something that in a timeline like this, Elon Musk is going to have time for.” The man who could answer how that data would help him identify bots, Musk himself, did not respond to an emailed request for comment.

Giving Musk access to the fire hose of tweets is a relatively innocuous move, says Christopher Bouzy, the founder of Bot Sentinel, a service that tracks inauthentic behavior on Twitter. “It doesn’t expose users’ private data,” he says. “It’s just a stream of tweets.” From that stream, Musk could analyze the data to see whether accounts spammed the same message, or whether a small number of accounts were responsible for the majority of tweets on the platform—both of which would be potential warning signals for bot behavior. Asked whether we should be concerned about Musk gaining access to the fire-hose data, Bouzy said no. “It’s just a massive number of tweets,” he says. And it’s also an unmanageable number of tweets for pretty much everyone outside Twitter: Bruns points out that the US Library of Congress once had fire hose access in an attempt to archive every tweet ever posted and gave up on the endeavor.

Musk’s interest in the fire hose data is ironic, given that he reportedly declined an offer to look at Twitter’s data room—a collection of information and documents that are collated by companies when touting their businesses to potential buyers—back when his initial takeover bid was launched in April. Twitter spokesperson Jasmine Basi declined to respond to questions, including whether Musk previously asked for access to the data room. Basi also refused to answer direct questions about how many people outside of Twitter, other than Musk, have access to the fire hose data, and whether Musk would have to sign a nondisclosure or usage agreement in order to access it. That gives some cause for concern. “While I understand what Twitter is doing here, it is nonetheless also highly unusual,” says Bruns, who equates it to “giving away the crown jewels”.

The crown jewels are, however, up for sale: Around two dozen companies already have access to the fire hose of data to which Twitter has granted Musk access. Twitter’s Basi declined to name those companies, but their handling of the data has so far seemingly not caused any known issues among those dozen firms. Previously, Twitter has given broader fire hose access, with issues: The company recognized it was leaving money on the table by giving third-party data resellers access, while spy agencies previously gained access to user data through Dataminr, a company that had bought fire hose access. Google and researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have previously had access to the same data Musk is now being granted access to. “The sharing of sensitive information is a key part of acquisition procedures,” says Leerssen, who prior to his career in academia worked on data protection issues around data rooms for due diligence. “When you go through the process of acquiring a company, you need to look under the hood,” he says.

Yet the big unknown is Musk himself—someone who has already shown during the course of his attempted acquisition that he’s willing to ignore legal agreements. Many also see his ostensible concern about the number of bot accounts as a pretext in order to back out of the deal, despite the terms of the agreement he came to with Twitter precluding that from happening without massive, punitive fines.

“It basically becomes more about trying to psychoanalyze Elon Musk than about the Twitter data, almost,” says Midas Nouwens, assistant professor in digital rights at Aarhus University. Nouwens has long had concerns about the scale of information available to employees at Twitter—a single tech company in a single jurisdiction in the world. “I find it a bit difficult to separate the way that social media platforms like Twitter operate, and then the rogue element of Elon Musk in there,” he says. “It very quickly becomes trying to figure out what Elon Musk would do, and his behavior is quite erratic sometimes.”

Nouwens is one of those who has access to Twitter data through an API available to researchers that allows him to query 10 million tweets a month. Gaining access to the datastream, he says, was easier than expected given the volume of data he had access to. He had to write a description of the project he intended to use the data for, alongside providing proof he was an active academic. “Whether it was Elon Musk or some other actor, I would always have concerns,” Nouwens says. “Now for him, the added element is his past behavior, sure, but also his commercial interests.” The fear is that even if Musk does pull out of the deal to buy Twitter, the information he’s been granted access to by getting free visibility over Twitter’s fire hose of tweets could be used by him or his companies in the future. Bruns says the fire-hose data set could generate new insights into who uses Twitter and why, how usage patterns change over the long term, and what problematic behaviors users engage in—alongside generating detailed profiles of users' interests and networks. “Unless there's anything in the reporting that I've missed about how long Musk gets access to the fire hose for, I'm assuming Twitter is gambling on him and his team giving up on it fairly quickly,” says Bruns. “Especially if he had the fire hose for months or longer, this really becomes a user privacy and ethics concern too.”

Regardless of whether Musk gains access to the data or not, it’s unlikely to help him overcome the main hurdle he has for his purchase of Twitter. “I don’t know if there’s an answer to the question he is posing to Twitter,” says Nouwens. “Perhaps Twitter knows more than external researchers do at the moment or can do. But it’s a really tricky question.”

The Tricky Business of Elon Musk Getting Twitter Fire-Hose Access

The House committee's televised hearings interrogate the Capitol attack with damning new evidence. Whether it's enough to prevent another one is uncertain.

It’s hard to tell which fact should shock us most out of the first, surprisingly compelling public hearing of the congressional committee investigating the insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6.

Jared Kushner brushing aside as mere “whining” the repeated resignation threats from White House counsel and its top lawyers in the face of Donald Trump’s ongoing push to overturn the election?

The fact that even as rioters surged through the Capitol and members of Congress fled in terror, Donald Trump, the president of the United States, never once spoke to any corner of the US government to ask for help—never once called the Justice Department, Homeland Security, or the Pentagon?

The committee’s allegations that members of Congress sought presidential pardons for their own roles in the January 6 events?  

Or the simple power of a brave police officer talking about our nation’s most sacred democratic space as a “war zone” and how—repeatedly injured by the rioters that the GOP has sought in the last 18 months to reframe as “normal tourists” engaged in “legitimate political discourse”—she slipped on others’ blood spread across the steps of the US Capitol? 

After months of behind-the-scenes investigation, wide-ranging subpoenas, witness depositions, document reviews, countless hours of reviewing video footage, and delicate internal political machinations, the public portion of the House’s January 6 select committee kicked off Thursday night with a two-hour blockbuster that immediately established the stakes of the work—the former president of the United States attempted nothing less than a coup to remain in power—and recentered its work as one of the most important political investigations in our lifetime.

Committee vice-chair Rep. Liz Cheney, a Wyoming Republican who has been excoriated by her own party for agreeing to participate in the investigation alongside Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, provided a captivating introduction and overview of the events of January 6, 2021. She also highlighted what the committee will explore over the course of roughly a half-dozen hearings this month and immediately gave the lie to GOP dismissals of the investigation as nothing more than a political witch hunt.

The skillful—and politically courageous—presentation by Cheney, followed up by multiple video segments produced by the committee, highlights the coordination among armed, white nationalist militia groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, as well as the singular role Donald Trump played in stoking lies that the election had been stolen and then inviting his supporters to come to Washington on January 6 to protest—protests that quickly escalated into a brutal, violent assault on the Capitol that had lawmakers fleeing for their lives. One of the most powerful video clips showed staffers of Republican leader Kevin McCarthy—who has long downplayed the Capitol assault—evacuating their House offices in terror. Other clips showed the crowd chanting, “Hang Mike Pence” and insurrectionists screaming in the face of police to demand that they hand over House speaker Nancy Pelosi. Cheney closed her poised and pointed presentation with a warning to the hundreds of her GOP colleagues who have excused the events of 1/6: “There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.”

Committee chair Rep. Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, outlined how future hearings would focus on the particulars of the conspiracy and the careful construction of Trump’s knowing lies—committee members explained that they saw in Trump’s behavior a “sophisticated” seven-step plan for overturning the election—but Thursday’s hearing mostly focused on reminding Americans of the stakes involved. This was no ordinary political protest. This was no ordinary election loss. The actions of Donald Trump before, during, and after the January 6 Capitol assault instead marked an end to America’s 240-year tradition of peaceful transitions of presidential power.

Instead, Donald Trump embarked on a concerted effort to use the tools of the presidency and the US government to overturn the legitimate, authentic election results—even though his own staff told him, according to their depositions aired Thursday in the hearing, that “there was no there there.”

First Trump lied to the public. Then he tried to weaponize the Justice Department to back his lies. He pressured state election officials and legislators to embrace far-fetched legal theories and change their states’ election results. His team worked to invent and send to Washington invalid slates of electors, in the hopes that Congress would recognize them and allow him to overturn his loss. He summoned supporters and encouraged armed groups to join him in DC on January 6, promising in a tweet that it “will be wild.” Then he pressured Vice President Mike Pence to violate his constitutional oath and refuse to certify the valid election results ahead of January 6. And lastly, he seemingly refused to lift a finger—either to place a telephone call or send a tweet—to summon federal aid as the Capitol and legislative branch remained under violent assault for hours. Instead, according to the committee, only Vice President Pence—himself hiding at a secure loading dock inside the Capitol complex after being hastily evacuated from the Senate chamber above—contacted the military and ordered them to respond and secure the Capitol.

Taken together, it is the most audacious, calculated, and unconstitutional plot America has faced in its history—one that came far closer to success than anyone imagined.

Over the course of those two hours, the committee succeeded in reframing the national conversation and focused on the true horror of January 6. In doing so, it surely raised the pressure on the Justice Department, which is conducting a seemingly slow-moving parallel investigation that has seen hundreds of low-level indictments and charges against January 6 rioters—including the arrest just yesterday of a GOP gubernatorial candidate in Michigan—and a number of more serious “seditious conspiracy” indictments against Oath Keepers and Proud Boys leaders. Thus far, it has stopped short of penetrating Donald Trump’s motley collection of enablers, grifters, and hangers-on.

Despite the shocking clarity of the committee’s opening presentation, it remains uncertain at best whether it will be able to break through America’s political polarization and its increasingly separate-and-unequal media ecosystems. Fox News, alone among the major networks, refused to air the hearings live and instead allowed its host Tucker Carlson, who increasingly features openly white nationalist positions, to spew venom to his millions of prime-time viewers during an hour-long show, unusually uninterrupted by commercials.

In many ways, Fox’s decision to double down on Tucker Carlson’s lies Thursday night is unsurprising. The network’s decision in the weeks after the 2020 election—as Donald Trump built up the Big Lie and set the kindling for January 6—to embrace Trump’s lies and undermine the legitimacy of then-President-elect Joe Biden’s victory makes it all but an unindicted co-conspirator in the violence on Capitol Hill.

The challenge America now faces, heading into next week’s follow-up hearings, is that none of us know what part of Donald Trump’s story we’re living in—the beginning, the middle, or the end? The committee’s work ahead is to convince America to view January 6 as a turning point, not a warning that we will later say went ignored.

There’s a saying, after all, that there’s no such thing as an unsuccessful coup. An unsuccessful coup is just practice.

The January 6 Hearing Was a Warning

A researcher found that a recent update lets anyone enroll their own key during the 130-second interval after the car is unlocked with an NFC card.

Last year, Tesla issued an update that made its vehicles easier to start after being unlocked with their NFC key cards. Now, a researcher has shown how the feature can be exploited to steal cars.

For years, drivers who used their Tesla NFC key card to unlock their cars had to place the card on the center console to begin driving. Following the update, which was reported here last August, drivers could operate their cars immediately after unlocking them with the card. The NFC card is one of three means for unlocking a Tesla; a key fob and a phone app are the other two.

Enrolling Your Own Key

Martin Herfurt, a security researcher in Austria, quickly noticed something odd about the new feature: Not only did it allow the car to automatically start within 130 seconds of being unlocked with the NFC card, but it also put the car in a state to accept entirely new keys—with no authentication required and zero indication given by the in-car display.

"The authorization given in the 130-second interval is too general … it's not only for drive," Herfurt said in an online interview. "This timer has been introduced by Tesla … in order to make the use of the NFC card as a primary means of using the car more convenient. What should happen is that the car can be started and driven without the user having to use the key card a second time. The problem: Within the 130-second period, not only the driving of the car is authorized, but also the enrolling of a new key."

The official Tesla phone app doesn't permit keys to be enrolled unless it's connected to the owner's account, but despite this, Herfurt found that the vehicle gladly exchanges messages with any Bluetooth Low Energy, or BLE, device that's nearby. So the researcher built his own app, named Teslakee, that speaks VCSec, the same language that the official Tesla app uses to communicate with Tesla cars.

A malicious version of Teslakee that Herfurt designed for proof-of-concept purposes shows how easy it is for thieves to surreptitiously enroll their own key during the 130-second interval. (The researcher plans to release a benign version of Teslakee eventually that will make such attacks harder to carry out.) The attacker then uses the Teslakee app to exchange VCSec messages that enroll the new key.

All that's required is to be within range of the car during the crucial 130-second window of it being unlocked with an NFC card. If a vehicle owner normally uses the phone app to unlock the car—by far the most common unlocking method for Teslas—the attacker can force the use of the NFC card by using a signal jammer to block the BLE frequency used by Tesla's phone-as-a-key app.

This video demonstrates the attack in action:

As the driver enters the car after unlocking it with an NFC card, the thief begins exchanging messages between the weaponized Teslakee and the car. Before the driver has even driven away, the messages enroll a key of the thief's choice with the car. From then on, the thief can use the key to unlock, start, and turn off the car. There is no indication from the in-car display or the legitimate Tesla app that anything is amiss.

Herfurt has successfully used the attack on Tesla Models 3 and Y. He hasn't tested the method on new 2021+ facelift models of the S and X, but he presumes they are also vulnerable because they use the same native support for phone-as-a-key with BLE.

Tesla didn't respond to an email seeking comment for this post.

Parlez-Vous VCSec?

The vulnerability is the result of the dual roles played by the NFC card. It not only opens a locked car and starts it; it's also used to authorize key management.

Herfurt said:

_The attack exploits Tesla's way of handling the unlock process via NFC card. This works because Tesla's authorization method is broken. There is no connection between the online account world and the offline BLE world. Any attacker who can see the Bluetooth LE advertisements of a vehicle may send VCSEC messages to it. This would not work with the official app, but an app that is also able to speak the Tesla-specific BLE protocol … allows attackers to enroll keys for arbitrary vehicles. Teslakee will communicate with any vehicle if it is told to._

Herfurt created Teslakee as part of Project Tempa, which “provides tools and information about the VCSEC protocol used by Tesla accessories and the Tesla app in order to control vehicles via Bluetooth LE.” Herfurt is a member of Trifinite Group, a research and hacker collective that focuses on BLE.

The attack is easy enough in technical aspects to carry out, but the mechanics of staking out an unattended vehicle, waiting for or forcing the owner to unlock it with an NFC card, and later catching up with the car and stealing it can be cumbersome. This method isn't likely to be practical in many theft scenarios, but for some, it seems viable.

With Tesla maintaining radio silence on this weakness, there's only so much that concerned owners can do. One countermeasure is to set up Pin2Drive to prevent thieves who use this method from starting a vehicle, but it will do nothing to prevent the thief from being able to enter the car when it's locked. Another protection is to regularly check the list of keys authorized to unlock and start the car through a process Tesla calls "whitelisting." Tesla owners may want to perform this check after giving an NFC card to an untrusted mechanic or valet parking attendant.

Based on the lack of response Herfurt said he received from Tesla regarding vulnerabilities he uncovered in 2019 and again last year, he's not holding his breath that the company will address the issue.

"My impression was that they always already knew and would not really change stuff," he said. "This time, there is no way that Tesla does not know about that poor implementation. So for me, there was no point in talking to Tesla beforehand."

_This story originally appeared on_ _Ars Technica__._

Hackers Can Steal Your Tesla by Creating Their Own Personal Keys

Using a custom encryption scheme within music notation, Merryl Goldberg and three other US musicians slipped information to Soviet performers and activists known as the Phantom Orchestra.

In 1985, saxophonist Merryl Goldberg found herself on a plane to Moscow with three fellow musicians from the Boston Klezmer Conservatory Band. She had carefully packed sheet music, reeds, and other woodwind supplies, along with a soprano saxophone, to bring into the USSR. But one of her spiral-bound notebooks, lined with staves for hand-notating music, contained hidden information.

Courtesy of Merryl Goldberg

Courtesy of Merryl Goldberg

Using a code she had developed herself, Goldberg had obscured names, addresses, and other details the group would need for their trip in handwritten compositions that looked, to an untrained eye, like the real melodies she’d written on other pages of the book. Goldberg and her colleagues didn’t want to give Soviet officials details of who they planned to see and what they planned to do on their trip. They were going to meet the Phantom Orchestra.

The group was a dissident ensemble that Goldberg describes as an amalgamation of Jewish refuseniks (Jews who were barred from emigrating out of the USSR), Christian activists, and Helsinki monitors—watchdogs who tracked Soviet compliance with the 1975 Helsinki Accords. The Americans’ trip was funded and coordinated by the nonprofit Action for Soviet Jewry (now Action for Post-Soviet Jewry), which works on humanitarian relief in the former Soviet Union and was focused on helping Soviet Jews emigrate to Israel and the United States. 

The trip was a rare and special opportunity for American and Soviet players to meet in the USSR and make music together. It was also an opportunity for the American musicians to smuggle information about aid efforts and plans to the Phantom Orchestra, and for the ensemble to send updates out, including details about individuals looking to escape the Soviet Union.

Courtesy of Merryl Goldberg

Goldberg and her colleagues, all of whom are Jewish, traveled to Moscow separately in two pairs to make it less likely that they would arouse suspicion as a group. They had received training on how to react to questioning and been told to expect surveillance, even run-ins with Soviet officials, throughout their trip. But first Goldberg needed to get her notebook past border control. 

“When we arrived, we were immediately pulled aside, and they went through everything in our luggage, to the point of unwrapping Tampax. It was crazy,” says Goldberg, who is presenting about the experience and her musical code at the RSA security conference in San Francisco today. “With my music, they opened it up and there were some real tunes in there. If you’re not a musician, you wouldn’t know what’s what. They went page by page through everything—and then they handed it back.”

Goldberg says that while the code worked and Soviet officials didn’t confiscate their music, they did interrogate all four travelers about what they planned to do while in the USSR. “We were brought into a room with a big burly guy who banged on the table and yelled at us,” remembers Goldberg, now a music education professor at California State University, San Marcos.

Musical note names span the letters A to G, so they don’t provide a full alphabet of options on their own. To create the code, Goldberg assigned letters of the alphabet to notes in the chromatic scale, a 12-tone scale that includes semi-tones (sharps and flats) to expand the possibilities. In some examples, Goldberg wrote only in one musical range, known as treble clef. In others, she expanded the register to be able to encode more letters and added a bass clef to extend the range of the musical scale. These details and variations also added verisimilitude to her encoded music. 

For numbers, Goldberg would simply write them between the staves, where sometimes you might see chord symbols. She also added other characteristics of composition, like rhythms (half notes, quarter notes, eighth notes, whole notes), key signatures, tempo markings, and articulation indicators like slurs and ties. Most of these were there to make the music look more legitimate, but some doubled as coded supplements to the letters hidden in the music notes. She even occasionally drew tiny diagrams that could be mistaken for charts to remind herself of where a meeting place was located or how to deliver something. 

While someone could technically have played the code as music, it would have sounded less like a tune and more like a cat walking across piano keys.

“I picked a note to start, and then I created the alphabet from there. Once you know it, it ends up being pretty easy to write things. I taught my friends on the trip the code, too,” Goldberg says. “We used it in order to take in people’s addresses and other information we would need to find them. And we coded things while we were there so we would be able to take out some information about people and their efforts to emigrate, as well as details we hoped could help other people ask to leave.”

The US musicians got their bearings in Moscow before heading to Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia. There and on their next stop in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, they successfully met members of the Phantom Orchestra, many of whom spoke some English, and spent time getting to know each other, playing music together, and even staging small, impromptu concerts.

During eight days of travel, the musicians were tailed constantly by Soviet agents and were repeatedly stopped for questioning. Goldberg says that members of the Phantom Orchestra, all of whom faced similar treatment in their daily lives, gave her and her colleagues advice and encouragement. When the Americans would express concerns that their presence was endangering the activists, Goldberg says the Phantom Orchestra members were resolute about the importance of spending time together. She adds, though, that some of the activists were later arrested and even beaten, because of the interactions.

“On the second night, we were playing together and the KGB came in and everything got shut down. The electricity was turned off; it was a scary situation,” Goldberg says. “And yet, when we’re playing music no one can take away that sense of freedom and empowerment. Playing together and communicating with people through music is like nothing else. I was amazed by the strength it brought the people there. Music can be very comforting, but it also conveys a sense of feeling powerful.”

After their time in Yerevan, the American musicians had planned to go to Riga, the capital of Latvia, and then to Leningrad, now St. Petersburg in Russia. Finally, they were set to stop in Paris before returning to the United States. Instead, they were stopped and questioned again. The musicians were supposed to be placed under house arrest in Yerevan, but Goldberg says that Armenian officials bristled at the KGB intrusion and let them continue their trip. Eventually, though, the musicians were picked up and escorted back to Moscow, where Soviet agents confiscated their passports. Goldberg says the group was driven around Moscow for several hours, perhaps as a scare tactic, before finally being allowed to stay together in a dormitory room guarded by young Soviet men with machine guns.

Courtesy of Merryl Goldberg

“At that point, you’re thinking they’re going to take us to Siberia or something,” she says. “We were super freaked out. So we kept playing music for each other that night. And we played a beloved Russian folk tune, but out of tune, to annoy the young soldier outside our door. It gave us a sense of humor and empowerment.”

Finally, officials said the group would be deported to Sweden. They were heavily guarded and brought to a plane that had come from Sweden and was going to return without passengers. While officials searched their possessions again before letting them on the plane, no one ever flagged the sheet music. Goldberg points out that she even got the film from her camera back, perhaps thanks to a sympathizer.

“They were given no reason for their expulsion, and US officials are still waiting for information from the Soviet Foreign Ministry,” Reuters reported in a wire about the situation on May 31, 1985. “The spokesman said the expulsion appeared to be linked to their meeting with … Georgian dissidents.”

Goldberg says that while she later learned that some of the Soviet activists faced consequences for the visit, some of the people the musicians met on the trip were eventually able to permanently leave the USSR. She notes that while her musical code wouldn’t have been very difficult to crack if someone were focused on it, the obfuscation served its purpose, making it both an elegant and harmonious encryption scheme.

How a Saxophonist Tricked the KGB by Encrypting Secrets in Music

Mozilla researchers identified accounts with millions of view spreading hate speech and disinformation

Last August the TikTok account @aironixon shared a video intercutting scenes from Netflix’s docuseries _How to Become a Tyrant_ with videos and screenshots of Kenyan deputy president and presidential candidate William Ruto. An added caption read, “Is Ruto a tyrant?”

The video is one of 130 identified by Mozilla Foundation fellow Odanga Madung, who has detailed his findings in a new report. Altogether, Madung found hate speech and disinformation in videos that accrued over 4 million views after being shared by 33 TikTok accounts. All of them appear to violate the company’s terms of service, and target Kenya’s upcoming August 9 elections.

“What we noticed is that there are very many cases where a certain page, for example, might have 5,000 followers, but the kind of the content that it posts ends up getting \[more than\] 500,000 views, because it has been supercharged by the platform itself,” says Madung.

Though Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram remain the most popular platforms in Kenya, TikTok’s popularity has risen steadily over the past two years, and it is among the most-downloaded social apps in the country.

For Kenyans heading into an election season, disinformation is hardly new, especially as millions of its citizens have come online over the past decade. Madung worries that the country’s history of electoral violence makes it particularly combustible. In 2007, a contested presidential election between Raila Odinga and Mwai Kibaki led to widespread violence that left more than 1,000 people dead and 600,000 displaced. The country’s current president, Uhuru Kenyatta, was accused of helping to incite the violence by charging armed groups of Kikuyus, the ethnic group to which he and Kibaki both belong, to target Luos, Odinga’s ethnic group.

Kenyatta ascended to the presidency in 2013. His reelection in 2017 also sparked protests that were met with swift police crackdowns. Human Rights Watch documented at least 42 people killed by police, though it estimated the real number to be higher.

Earlier this year, the country’s National Cohesion and Integration Commission, which was formed after the 2007 violence to ensure peaceful elections, warned of the “misuse of social media platforms to perpetuate ethnic hate speech and incitement to violence,” saying that in 2022 hate speech on social platforms had increased 20 percent. The commission also cited increasing communal conflict and personal attacks on politicians, in addition to other conditions that could make this year’s elections particularly tumultuous.

A TikTok video of a speech given by Ruto included the caption, “Ruto hates Kikuyus and wants to take revenge come 2022.” It has garnered more than 400,000 views.

“There's a very clear attempt to try and use the ghosts of 2007 to move voters one way or the other, to take advantage of or glorify past violence,” says Madung. “That’s something that is completely not taken into account in TikTok’s own hate speech content guidelines.”

Unlike Facebook or Twitter, TikTok serves users content based not on who they follow but what the platform believes their interests are. This can make it hard for researchers like Madung to map out how content spreads and to whom. “There's no tool like Crowdtangle for TikTok,” he says. “Doing research on TikTok is tiresome, sometimes gruesome, because I had to watch all the videos all the way through to perform content analysis.”

By its very nature, TikTok is harder to moderate than many other social media platforms, according to Cameron Hickey, project director at the Algorithmic Transparency Institute. The brevity of the videos, and the fact that many can include audio, visual, and text elements makes human discernment even more necessary when deciding whether something violates platform rules. Even advanced artificial intelligence tools, like using speech-to-text to quickly identify problematic words, is more difficult “when the audio that you're dealing with also has music behind it,” says Hickey. “The default mode for people creating content on TikTok is to also embed music.”

That becomes even more difficult in languages other than English.

“What we know generally is that platforms do best at the work of addressing problematic content in the places where they are based or within the languages in which the people who created them speak,” says Hickey. “And there are more people making bad stuff than there are people at these companies trying to get rid of the bad stuff.”

Many pieces of disinformation Madung found were “synthetic content,” videos created to look like they might be from an old news broadcast, or they use screenshots that appear to be from legitimate news outlets.

“Since 2017, we’ve noticed that there was a burgeoning trend at the time to appropriate the identities of mainstream media brands,” says Madung. “We are seeing rampant usage of this tactic on the platform, and it seems to do exceptionally well.”

Madung also spoke with former TikTok content moderator Gadear Ayed to get a better understanding of the company’s moderation efforts more broadly. Although Ayed did not moderate TikToks from Kenya, she told Madung that she was often asked to moderate content in languages or contexts she was not familiar with, and would not have had the context to tell whether a piece of media had been manipulated.

“It's common to find moderators being asked to moderate videos that were in languages and contexts that were different from what they understood,” Ayed told Madung. “For example, I at one time had to moderate videos that were in Hebrew despite me not knowing the language or the context. All I could rely on was the visual image of what I could see but anything written I couldn't moderate.”

A TikTok spokesperson told WIRED that the company prohibits election misinformation and the promotion of violence and is “committed to protecting the integrity of \[its\] platform and have a dedicated team working to safeguard TikTok during the Kenyan elections.” The spokesperson also said that it works with fact-checking organizations, including Agence France-Presse in Kenya, and plans to roll out features to connect its “community with authoritative information about the Kenyan elections in our app."

But even if TikTok removes the offending content, Hickey says that may not be enough. “One person can remix, duet, reshare someone else's content,” says Hickey. That means that even if the original video is removed, other versions can live on, undetected. TikTok videos can also be downloaded and shared on other platforms, like Facebook and Twitter, which is how Madung first encountered some of them.

Several of the videos flagged in the Mozilla Foundation report have since been removed, but TikTok did not respond to questions about whether it has removed other videos or whether the videos themselves were part of a coordinated effort.

But Madung suspects that they might be. “Some of the most egregious hashtags were things I would find researching coordinated campaigns on Twitter, and then I would think, what if I searched for this on TikTok?”

Disinfo and Hate Speech Flood TikTok Ahead of Kenya’s Elections

Apple’s iOS 16 and macOS Ventura will introduce passwordless login for apps and websites. It’s only the beginning.

Your passwords are terrible. Year after year, the most popular passwords leaked in data breaches are 123456, 123456789, and 12345—‘qwerty’ and ‘password’ come close behind—and using these weak passwords leaves you vulnerable to all sorts of hacking. Weak and repeated passwords are one of the most significant risks to your online life.

For years, we’ve been promised a more secure, password-free future, but it seems like 2022 will _actually_ be the year that millions of people start to move away from passwords. At Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference yesterday, the company announced it will launch passwordless logins across Macs, iPhones, iPads, and Apple TVs around September of this year. Instead of using passwords, you will be able to log in to websites and apps using “Passkeys” with iOS 16 and macOS Ventura. It’s the first major real-world shift to password elimination.

So how does it work? Passkeys replace your tired old passwords by creating new digital keys using Touch ID or Face ID, Apple’s vice president of internet technologies, Darin Adler, explained at WWDC. When you are creating an online account with a website, you can use a Passkey instead of a password. “To create a Passkey, just use Touch ID or Face ID to authenticate, and you’re done,” Adler said.

When you go to log in to that website again, Passkeys allow you to prove who you are by using your biometrics rather than typing in a passphrase (or having your password manager enter it for you). When signing in to a website on a Mac, a prompt will appear on your iPhone or iPad to verify your identity. Apple says its Passkeys will sync across your devices using iCloud’s Keychain, and the Passkeys are stored on your devices rather than on servers. (The use of iCloud Keychain should also solve the problem of losing or breaking your linked devices.) Under the hood, Apple’s Passkeys are based on the Web Authentication API (WebAuthn) and are end-to-end encrypted so nobody can read them, including Apple. The system for creating Passkeys uses public-private key authentication to prove you are who you say you are.

A passwordless system would be a significant step forward for most people’s online security. As well as eliminating guessable passwords, removing passwords reduces the likelihood of successful phishing attacks. And passwords can’t be stolen in data breaches if they don't exist in the first place. (Some apps and websites already allow people to log in using their fingerprints or using face recognition, but these usually require you to first create an account with a password.)

Apple’s Passkeys aren’t entirely new—the company first detailed them at 2021’s WWDC and started testing them shortly after—and Apple isn’t the only one that wants to eliminate passwords. The FIDO Alliance, a tech industry group, has been working on the underlying standards needed to ditch passwords for almost a decade, and Apple’s Passkeys are the company’s implementation of these standards.

In recent months, FIDO has taken a series of important steps to bring the password’s demise closer to reality. In March, FIDO announced it has figured out a way to store the cryptographic keys that sync between people’s devices, calling them “multi-device FIDO credentials” or “passkeys.”

This was followed in May by Apple, Microsoft, and Google declaring their support for the FIDO standards. Jen Easterly, the director of the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said adoption of the standards would keep more people safe online. At the time, the three tech giants said they would start rolling out the technology “over the course of the coming year.” Microsoft account owners have been able to ditch their passwords since September of last year, and Google has been working on its passwordless technology since 2008.

When all the tech companies have rolled out their version of passkeys, it should be possible for the system to work across different devices—in theory, you could use your iPhone to log in to a Windows laptop, or an Android tablet to log in to a website in Microsoft’s Edge Browser. “All of FIDO’s specs have been developed collaboratively, with inputs from hundreds of companies,” says Andrew Shikiar, the executive director of the FIDO Alliance. Shikiar confirms that Apple is the first company to start rolling out passkey-style technology and says this shows “how tangible this approach will soon be for consumers worldwide.”

Any success for a passwordless future depends on how it works in reality. At the moment, there are unanswered questions about what happens to your Passkeys if you want to ditch Apple’s ecosystem for Android or another platform. (Apple hasn’t yet responded to our request for comment.) And developers still need to implement changes to their apps and websites to work with Passkey. Plus, to gain trust in any system, people need to be educated about how it works. “Any viable solution must be safer, easier, and faster than the passwords and legacy multi-factor authentication methods used today,” ​​Alex Simons, the head of Microsoft’s identity management efforts, said in May. In short: If cross-device systems are clunky or a pain to use, people may shun them in favor of weak but convenient passwords.

While Apple’s Passkey and Google and Microsoft’s equivalents are still some months away (at the very least), that doesn’t mean you should idly keep using your weak or repeated passwords. Every password you use—whether it’s for a one-time account used to buy DIY supplies or your Facebook account—should be strong and unique. Don’t use common phrases, names of friends or pets, or personal information linked to you in your passwords.

Instead, your passwords should be long and strong. The best way to achieve this is by using a password manager, which can help you create and store better passwords. You can find our pick of the best password managers here. And while you’re thinking about your security, turn on multi-factor authentication for as many accounts as possible.

Apple Just Killed the Password—for Real This Time

MongoDB claims its new “Queryable Encryption” lets users search their databases while sensitive data stays encrypted. Oh, and its cryptography is open source.

After years of data breaches, leaks, and hacks leaving the world desperate for tools to stem the illicit flow of sensitive personal data, a key advance has appeared on the horizon.

On Tuesday, MongoDB is announcing “Queryable Encryption,” a feature that will allow database users to search their data while it remains encrypted. The tool, which is debuting in preview as part of MongoDB 6.0, attempts to bridge academic cryptography findings and real-world environments so users can adopt the feature without needing advanced theoretical expertise. Crucially, Queryable Encryption is built to work with existing databases rather than requiring users to re-architect their systems before they can take advantage of it.

Institutions from businesses to governments, health care facilities, and critical infrastructure already lean on encryption to render data unintelligible (and therefore not worth stealing) when it's traveling across networks or sitting in storage. But none of that protects data when it's actively being used for legitimate reasons—looking up a patient's medical records, say, or setting up a car rental reservation. That means an attacker—including a rogue employee—could potentially gain access to data the same way a doctor or customer service agent does. This is a nut everyone wants to crack, and the database maker MongoDB has been working on possible solutions for years. Now, the company says, it has one.

“This is exactly the kind of thing that customers are wanting. We work with the biggest banks, pension systems, treasury exchanges, payment networks, pizza chains—and everyone wants better assurances,” says Kenn White, MongoDB's security principal. “And because of some practical engineering breakthroughs, it went from an academic kind of thing to something that actually could work on big databases.”

Queryable Encryption could let a bank agent investigate your account for possible fraud on a range of dates without knowing which dates specifically flagged the system. Or it could allow a customer service rep to type the first few letters of a name and start a claims process while leaving the name encrypted and indecipherable. 

Many of these breakthroughs came from Brown University cryptographer Seny Kamara and his longtime collaborator Tarik Moataz. Several years ago, the pair cofounded a searchable encrypted database startup known as Aroki Systems along with entrepreneur John Partridge. Aroki collaborated with MongoDB on a database security feature, announced in 2019, and Kamara and Moataz continued working on a prototype of a truly searchable encrypted database. In 2021, MongoDB acquired Aroki.

The Queryable Encryption system is built with a combination of established cryptographic protocols and conceptual advances Kamara and Moataz have been working on for years in an area of cryptography known as structured encryption. The approach involves encrypting data with a specific architecture so it can be searched with special tokens specific to each query without data ever being decrypted. Other techniques such as homomorphic encryption allow users to do computations on encrypted data, like adding two columns in an encrypted spreadsheet. But structured encryption is specifically focused on organizing encrypted data so it can be found without exposing the data itself.

“What we focus on is not how to do arithmetic operations on encrypted data, but how to find information fast—like really, really fast,” says Kamara, who is currently on leave from his associate professor role at Brown.

Speed is a challenge in encrypted operations, where every extra key check and computation add complications to basic operations. But MongoDB claims that searches performed with Queryable Encryption are impressively fast and won't cause unreasonable performance losses—a claim that customers will be able to test for themselves with the new preview. MongoDB is also open-sourcing much of the Queryable Encryption system, so users and other researchers can vet its underlying cryptography.

“A lot of the work is very theoretical in nature, algorithms, crypto security definitions, but for me at the end of the day I want to see something come out of it,” Kamara says. “There is a social imperative behind the work that scientists do. Working with a company at the scale of Mongo, this will be available to a huge number of people, a huge number of work loads.”

Moataz and Kamara say the big breakthrough that allowed them to move their concept from the academic world toward the real world was emulation, which enabled them to use the properties of structured encryption with existing databases that have different architectures. Like emulating Super Nintendo games on your PC or emulating Windows on a Mac, the approach creates a liminal space in which structured encryption can run on top of traditional databases.

Still, Kamara and Moataz emphasize that it's been a challenge and a learning process to collaborate with MongoDB engineers and turn the Aroki Systems prototype into something that can actually be deployed at scale around the world.

“Seny and I have been learning a lot about the constraints of real-world deployments that academics know nothing about,” Moataz says. “Models in academia are less restrictive. So we are enjoying being exposed to that and improving our models and our designs with respect to these constraints.”

Though Tuesday's release will be the first time that the public can vet Queryable Encryption in the wild, Aroki Systems had cryptographer JP Aumasson conduct technical due diligence on the cryptographic underpinning of their prototype system. And MongoDB invited University of Chicago cryptographer and searchable encryption researcher David Cash to take an early look as well. Both told WIRED that while they haven't audited the entire system deployment, the underlying cryptography appears sound. And they both emphasize that it's exciting to see a real-world searchable encryption scheme take shape after so long.

“A lot of crypto research since the 1980s has sort of been centered on how do we do this stuff, so this is a long time coming," Cash says. “Everything in cryptography is about trade-offs, and the world is complicated, so it's important to be careful about absolute statements, but that this vision is realized in some form is very exciting. And this is not at all snake oil or security theater. They're going deep on this and thinking about the important stuff carefully.”

Aumasson says that many others have claimed to offer searchable encryption without the technical depth or capability. “There have been other products advertising encrypted search, but academics would really laugh at those,” he says. “What Mongo is doing is something that is academic-compliant, and I’m very happy to see it.”

Source

Wired