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Germany Accuses Chinese Intelligence Services Of Using Fake LinkedIn Profiles To Recruit Informants And Extract Sensitive Information

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Over the last year, the scale of Russia's disinformation activities has become clearer. Its Internet Research Agency has deployed an astonishing range of sophisticated techniques, included accounts on Twitter and Facebook, and hiring activists within the US without the latter being aware they were working for the Russian government. We also now know that the same organization has been buying Facebook ads on a large scale that were seen by over a hundred million US citizens. But it would be naïve to think that Russia is the only foreign power engaged in this kind of activity. In fact, it would be surprising if any intelligence agency worth its salt were not carrying out similar activities around the globe. The first detailed information about China's use of fake social media accounts to recruit informants and extract sensitive information has just been published by the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV), Germany's domestic intelligence service. As Reuters reports:

Nine months of research had found that more than 10,000 German citizens had been contacted on the LinkedIn professional networking site by fake profiles disguised as headhunters, consultants, think-tankers or scholars, the BfV said.
Quartz quotes the BfV's president, Hans-Georg Maaßen, as saying:
"We are dealing with a broad attempt to infiltrate parliaments, ministries and administrations," said Maaßen. Chinese intelligence services are using new strategies of attack in the digital space."
An interim report on the analysis that appeared on the BfV site in July (original in German) explains how the Chinese operated. The supposed headhunters, scholars and Chinese officials claimed that there were interested in the specialism of the person being approached. They inquired about a possible exchange of professional views on the topic, and spoke of an "important customer" in China:
the Chinese contact persons ask those involved for a curriculum vitae and offered to pay for a trial project. If this was completed satisfactorily, an invitation is made to go to China to meet with the "important customer", with the costs of the stay being covered by the Chinese side. In fact, however, the "important customer" never appears and is not explicitly named. In due course, the persons involved are usually asked regularly to write reports in return for appropriate remuneration, or to pass on internal, sensitive information from the respective work area.
As part of its report, the BfV published a selection of the fake profies. Reuters explains:
Many of the profile pictures show stylish and visually appealing young men and women. The picture of "Laeticia Chen", a manager at the "China Center of International Politics and Economy" was nicked from an online fashion catalogue, an official said.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang was, of course shocked by the accusations, which he called "baseless":
"We hope the relevant German organizations, particularly government departments, can speak and act more responsibly, and not do things that are not beneficial to the development of bilateral relations," Lu said.
The implicit threat there chimes with two other stories about China that Techdirt published last month. In one of them, the Chinese authorities put pressure on the academic publisher Springer Nature to censor thousands of papers that dealt with topics that showed China in a less than flattering light. Similarly, Allen & Unwin was "persuaded" by the Chinese authorities not to publish a book about China's growing but covert influence in Australia. The row between Australia and China has since escalated further. The latter denounced remarks by Australian politicians as being "full of prejudices against China", and lodged a formal protest. Taken with the latest news of China's attempts to recruit informants using social media, these recent events are evidence of a newly aggressive China on the world scene -- and of what The Economist calls China's "sharp power".Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

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Facebook Transparency Report: Lots Of Government Surveillance, Bad Copyright Takedown Requests

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Facebook, which was a bit late to the party, recently released its latest transparency report. In a break from earlier versions of the report, the social media giant has finally moved beyond only detailing requests for information by the government and its alphabet agencies and is now including intellectual property requests and statistics as well. There is a decent amount of information in both sections of the report, but on matters of both intellectual property requests and government information requests, an analysis of the numbers leads to some troubling conclusions.Let's deal with the IP section first. The headline of much of the media reporting on this has been about the 377,000 or so requests Facebook got to take down content based on IP issues, with well over half of those specifically being about copyright. It's not a small number and some are using it to make the case that Facebook is Mos Eisley when it comes to copyright infringement: a hive of scum and villainy. Tragically for those arguments, the validity of those requests makes this all seem far less impactful.

Aggregate data shows Facebook received about 377,400 complaints from January through June, with many referencing multiple posts. About 60 percent of the reports related to suspected copyright violations on Facebook. A “small fraction” of requests were excluded because they were not sent through an official form, Facebook said.The company removed user uploads in response to 81 percent of filings for counterfeiting, 68 percent for copyrights and 47 percent for trademarks, according to its report. The percentages were roughly similar for Instagram.
By my math, the copyright front shrinks from the 377k number to 150k of copyright content Facebook decided, rightly or wrongly, was valid enough to take down the content. That isn't a small number still, but it's not as daunting a number as it originally appeared, particularly when you factor in that Facebook generally sides with the disputer over the person who's content it is removing. On trademark, the numbers are much worse, with less than half of the requests being valid enough to have the content removed. The overall picture is one in which there is indeed some infringement on a site as massive as Facebook, but there is also an enormous amount of invalid requests to the site as well. Not the best look for those that think intellectual property enforcement on the site should be expanded even further.As for government information requests, you will not be shocked to learn that they've gone up rather sharply as of late.
The ninth Facebook transparency report also showed that government requests for information about users increased 21 percent worldwide compared with the second half of 2016, from 64,279 to 78,890.
As we discuss this on the eve of the federal government looking to renew its domestic surveillance powers, it's well worth noting that any of the voices that hollered about the dangers of government spying over, say, the last eight years or so ought to be screaming at the sky, and possibly their own IoT devices, about what has only been an expansion of surveillance and privacy invasion for the general public. That the government is able to get away with this kind of one-sided action only becomes more mysterious as the actions against the public increase over time.

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