National

Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz's testimony on Capitol Hill today painted a vivid illustration of how political actors frequently cherry-pick facts for their own partisan gain.

Why it matters: The dueling narratives aren't mutually exclusive, but it takes some nuance to sort through the partisan hyperbole.

For Republicans, Horowitz's investigation into the origins of the 2016 Russia probe provided a bombshell account of how an out-of-control FBI lied to a surveillance court in order to spy on a presidential campaign.

For Democrats, the report debunked the conspiracy that President Trump and his allies have promoted for years — that the Russia investigation was a "deep state" hoax designed to take down his presidency.

The big picture: Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz made clear in testimony today that both sides have a point, within limits.

Horowitz determined the FBI was justified in opening a counterintelligence investigation after receiving a tip that Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos had told Australian diplomats that Russia had Hillary Clinton's emails.

Horowitz found no evidence of political bias in the FBI's subsequent scrutiny of Papadopoulos, Carter Page, Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort, and no evidence of a "deep state conspiracy" to take down Trump.

But Horowitz also counted at least 17 errors in Carter Page's FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) application, including the omission of information that may have helped refute allegations that he was an agent of the Russian government.

What he's saying: Horowitz was "surprised" that U.S. Attorney John Durham, tasked by Attorney General Bill Barr with conducting a more expansive investigation into the origins of the Russia probe, issued a statement disputing the conclusion that the opening of the investigation was properly predicated.

The rare intervention has set off concerns that the investigation is being micromanaged by Barr, who attacked the Russia investigation as "a completely bogus narrative" in an interview yesterday with NBC News.

The bottom line: "I think the activities we found here don't vindicate anybody who touched this," Horowitz told the Senate Judiciary Committee, referencing a celebratory James Comey op-ed in the Washington Post.

What to watch: Looking past the short-term political implications of the report, the FISA process — which sees 98% of all surveillance applications approved — could finally face a reckoning.

The other report blowing up D.C.

The testimony painted a vivid illustration of how partisans frequently cherry-pick facts for their own gain.

Politics

Russia investigation

Surveillance

From the Valley to D.C., Big Tech players like Facebook, Google and Amazon are under more scrutiny than ever as new technology develops and privacy and antitrust concerns grow in lockstep with companies’ ambitions.

Technology

Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz said at a hearing Wednesday that the irregularities uncovered in his investigation of surveillance activities during the FBI's Russia probe do not "vindicate" anyone, as former FBI Director James Comey and others claimed upon release of his report.

Msnbc Live With Craig Melvin-11 15 42 Am - 11 18 13 Am-2019-12-11

The big picture: Comey and a number of other former FBI officials have celebrated the fact that Horowitz's report concluded the Russia investigation was adequately predicated and was not tainted by political bias. President Trump and his allies have long claimed that the investigation was an effort by the "deep state" to reverse the results of the 2016 election — a conspiracy for which Horowitz said there is "no evidence."

However, Horowitz argues that the inaccuracies and omissions in the FBI's applications for the surveillance of former Trump campaign aide Carter Page are "deeply concerning."

Horowitz said in his opening statement that the errors reflect "a failure not just by those who prepared the FISA applications, but also by the managers and supervisors in the [investigation's] chain of command, including FBI senior officials who were briefed as the investigation progressed."

Horowitz says he was "surprised" Durham disputed Russia probe findings

Horowitz says he found no evidence of "deep state" bias against Trump

DOJ inspector general: No one who touched FISA process should feel "vindicated"

James Comey and other ex-FBI officials have celebrated the IG's finding that the Russia probe was justified.

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)

Chinese tech companies have ramped up efforts to set technical standards for facial recognition, raising concerns among business competitors, political observers and humanitarian advocates.

Why it matters: China has long made a systematic effort to set international standards on data and hardware compatibility across brands so that the standards reflect how Chinese products already work — giving its domestic industries a leg up in engineering races.

But the nation's push to do so on behalf of facial recognition and surveillance industries that it built to surveil and subjugate the nation's Uighur ethnic minority is casting its standards efforts in a new, harsher light.

Driving the news: Several Chinese firms, including ZTE, Dahua and China Telecom, have sought approval at the International Telecommunication Union, a UN technical standards body, for technical standards allowing different companies' surveillance technology — including facial recognition — to work together.

China's surveillance industry has grown in no small part due to funding research and buying equipment to fuel a high-tech human rights crisis. China has sent more than 1 million Uighurs to re-education camps while developing systems that identify race using facial features. 

To be clear: Technical standards do not commit atrocities.

Facial recognition technology has legitimate uses, from unlocking phones to identifying missing persons, and to use data or software across different brands of products, there needs to be standardized hardware and file formats.

But, but, but: China will likely use the technical standards to claim a UN seal of approval for its use of its products. 

Humanitarian groups worry about a feedback loop, where standards set to create Chinese surveillance industry successes will fund more research into technologies domestically used for oppression, which can then be sold for profit to create new business success.

The big picture: China has tried to use this standards approach to corner entire industries, including telecommunications. Facial recognition techniques represent a particularly thorny part of a broader effort to control artificial intelligence standards. 

By the time complex infrastructure schemes are entrenched in poorer nations, including those in Africa and Asia, they become extremely difficult to alter.

“China offers equipment and funding to modernize those countries on the condition they use these standards, making them even harder to change,” said Tom Duesterberg, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. 

That’s bad for technology. “One thing we don't talk about as much is how China’s rush to entrench its standards precludes other technical standards,” said Kara Frederick, fellow at the Center for a New American Security. “It stops innovation wherever China decides to stop it.” 

Between the lines: Technical standards are conventionally seen as modular schematics for emerging technologies. For instance, they explain how to encode an MP3 file so it will play on any device — not what an MP3 file should be allowed to encode. 

So a technical standards body, at least as we currently envision it, might not be an effective place to address geopolitical or humanitarian issues.

But there aren't too many other battlegrounds for challenging China on the Uighur issue. Several humanitarian groups are taking the human rights fights to the ITU.

There is a second option that some, including Frederick, specifically mention: A U.S. technology policy that funds domestic research and development, so that the U.S. remains in the conversation as China picks future standards fights.

Leaked documents show Chinese businesses are shaping UN facial recognition standards

China's move on face-recognition standards

China will likely use technical standards to claim a UN seal of approval for its use of its products.

Illustration of a person targeted by face-recognition technology

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China is becoming the most formidable rival America has faced, and the risk of confrontation with Russia, North Korea or Iran still looms. Authoritarians are rising, the chaotic Afghanistan exit revealed the limits of U.S. power, and the pandemic, climate change and other critical challenges continue to pose grave threats.

New York City police until recently illegally kept a database of fingerprints from juveniles who'd been taken into custody, AP reports. 

What we know: The Legal Aid Society says the repository contained tens of thousands of youths' fingerprints. Bulletins have also been issued to the Department's 36,000 officers notifying them of the procedural change.

Under New York state law, juvenile fingerprints must be destroyed within local police departments after being sent to a statewide repository with the Division of Criminal Justice Services.

What they're saying: The NYPD says it has wiped the database since the Legal Aid Society's discovery, though it didn't admit any wrongdoing, per Spectrum News NY1.

Of note: Per AP, "Beside the fingerprint database, the Legal Aid Society’s lawyer representing juvenile and adult defendants say they’re also concerned about police use of facial recognition and DNA collection, as well as its database of suspected gang members."

NYC council votes to shut down Rikers Island


Report: NYC police illegally kept log of juveniles' fingerprints

NYPD says it's since wiped the prints from their system.

Photo: Sergi Reboredo/VW PICS/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

U.S. News

New York City

Edward Snowden on what he gave up to become a whistleblower

Former National Security Agency subcontractor Edward Snowden told "Axios on HBO" that "it was a difficult thing to come forward" and release top-secret documents about U.S. intelligence agencies' surveillance of American citizens to journalists in 2013.

Why it matters: The U.S. government does not considered Snowden a whistleblower because he did not raise his concerns through the legal process that had been established. As a result, he has lived in exile in Russia for more than six years.

Snowden's leaks prompted changes to laws and standards for American intelligence agencies and the practices of U.S.-based technology companies.

What he's saying: Snowden said he gave up a well-paying government job "spying on you" to never return home to see his family.

"Today I still live in exile, where I've been for over six years, which is actually getting close to the eight years that I spent working for the government in the intelligence community."

U.S. sues Edward Snowden for profits from new memoir

Edward Snowden tells "Axios on HBO" what he gave up to become a whistleblower

"Today I still live in exile, where I've been for over six years."

Edward Snowden

China touted emotion recognition systems as a means of crime prevention at its 2019 Public Security Expo, Financial Times reports (subscription), although experts say the tech doesn't work as advertised.

Reality check: "The science on emotion recognition is pretty bogus," ACLU senior policy analyst Jay Stanley tells Axios. A July study found that it is not possible to confidently assign emotional states to facial expressions "regardless of context, person, and culture" —  "as much of current technology tries to do."

What's happening: China says it's rolling out the tech in Xinjiang, where Uighur Muslims are kept in mass detainment camps, and in subway stations and airports to "identify criminal suspects," per FT. 

“At present only a few schools and public security bureaus have products that include this type of technology,” Zhen Wenzhuang told FT, adding that emotion recognition has "not been fully developed for commercial use" in China.

Between the lines: Even if the tech doesn't track emotions as advertised, being watched or even thinking you're being watched can still have a psychological effect and encourage people to change their behavior, as seen in workplace polling.

In the U.S., Microsoft claims that its Face API program can identify emotions like contempt, happiness and disgust. Amazon's Reokognition points out that when its API identifies someone's facial expression, it "is not a determination of the person’s internal emotional state."

Go deeper: AI is "awakening" surveillance cameras

China touts dubious emotion recognition tech

China is rolling out the tech in Xinjiang, subway stations and airports.

In this illustration, several security cameras face different directions

Most jobs are still out of reach of robots, which lack the dexterity required on an assembly line or the social grace needed on a customer service call. But in some cases, the humans doing this work are themselves being automated as if they were machines.

What's happening: Even the most vigilant supervisor can only watch over a few workers at one time. But now, increasingly cheap AI systems can monitor every employee in a store, at a call center or on a factory floor, flagging their failures in real time and learning from their triumphs to optimize an entire workforce.

A network of surveillance cameras hooked up to special software can tally the seconds of each worker's bathroom break or time each step of their work.

It can also keep workers safe, automatically detecting the absence of hard hats and gloves, for example, or people straying into the path of dangerous machines.

In some call centers, AI listens into every conversation, cataloging every word, who said it and how, and then scoring each agent.

Why it matters: Companies can use this data to juice workers' productivity and efficiency. Eventually, they could gather enough data from humans to train machines to mimic them."

How often is an employee going out to smoke a cigarette? How long a lunch are they taking? How long are they sitting in the lunchroom?" These are the questions clients want answered with AI software, says Kim Hartman, CEO of Surveillance Secure, a D.C.-area company that installs security systems.

Hartman says his company has put in video analytics for several area retailers and restaurants that wanted to monitor their employees' productivity.

In a handful of factories in the U.S., cameras have been installed over each worker's head in assembly lines as they put together car parts or electronics.

Software developed by Drishti, a Silicon Valley startup, watches these assemblers work, timing each step and checking for mistakes.

The videos let supervisors quickly figure out where something went wrong and teach a worker how to avoid repeating an error, says Drishti CEO Prasad Akella. It can also be used for training new hires.

And since AI is constantly watching the video streams, it can extract valuable data about timing and actions across the entire assembly line, which can inform new ways of assigning work.

"The most programmable machine on the planet today is still the human." 

"Employers and companies attempting to extract more value from its labor force by making that labor more efficient is nothing new," says Jess Kutch, co-founder of Coworker.org, a nonprofit that helps workers organize. A century ago, managers used stopwatches to pursue efficiency under the banner of "scientific management," or Taylorism.

But extreme monitoring enabled by new technologies can be inhumane, Kutch says.

"In low-wage work we're seeing a lot more decisions that were made by a middle manager being outsourced to an algorithm," says Aiha Nguyen of the research organization Data & Society.

"What workers are seeing, and have a fear of, is arbitrarily speeding up workplaces," Nguyen tells Axios.

The creators of AI monitoring tools argue that their software benefits employers and employees.

Drishti provides workers and supervisors with valuable feedback, Akella says. Its software can call out high performers, reward efficiency-improving creativity and even keep workers from hurting themselves.

Akella argues that employees won't be forced to work much faster and harder because turning up the heat would introduce unacceptable errors.

Call center agents monitored by AI software from CallMiner prefer being graded by an "impartial computer" over a human supervisor, says CTO Jeff Gallino.

What's next: Extensive AI-annotated video or audio data about how people work is a potential gold mine for automation developers.

Robots are still too klutzy to take over assembly lines built for humans but could learn how to put together products in a machine-only environment.

Gallino says CallMiner could use information gathered from human agents to automate the "boring" parts of customer service calls.

Go deeper: Automated management for call centers (NYT)

Automating humans with AI

In some cases, humans at work are being optimized as if they were machines.

Binoculars with 0’s and 1’s in the lenses

Future

The United States filed a lawsuit Tuesday against former CIA employee and NSA contractor Edward Snowden alleging his memoir violates non-disclosure disagreements.

The lawsuit argues Snowden did not allow the agencies to review his book before publication, as had been required by a signed agreement. While the lawsuit will not attempt to stop publication of Snowden's book book, Permanent Record, it does seek to recover all proceeds earned by Snowden because of the violation. 

Snowden leaked a series of confidential documents to journalists in 2013 while working as an NSA contractor. The information revealed previously unknown details about the state of citizen surveillance in the U.S.

"The United States’ ability to protect sensitive national security information depends on employees’ and contractors’ compliance... We will not permit individuals to enrich themselves, at the expense of the United States, without complying with their pre-publication review obligations."

Assistant Attorney General Jody Hunt of the Department of Justice’s Civil Division.

The state of play: Snowden has been on a press parade ahead of his memoir's release. In an interview, Snowden told "CBS This Morning" he would agree to return to the U.S. if he could settle on negotiations for a "fair trial."

Go deeper: Snowden says Biden warned countries not to grant him asylum

The lawsuit alleges the book's content violates Snowden's NDAs.

An announcement this week by a major spyware vendor that it aims to embrace human rights is forcing the industry, governments and civil society groups to consider whether the concepts of "human rights" and "spyware" can ever be reconciled.

The big picture: Government-grade spyware has always been abused. In June, David Kaye, the UN special rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression, determined that commercial spyware had become so vast a problem that the world needs a moratorium on it, for companies and governments to figure out how to protect human rights.

Spyware from NSO Group, the Israel-based firm that announced the human rights initiative, was allegedly used by Saudi Arabia to spy on U.S.-based reporter Jamal Khashoggi, who was later killed by Saudi agents. Mexico also used NSO spyware to surveil government employees and researchers who backed a tax on soda. 

But even well before NSO group became a major spyware player, other products — including Gamma's FinFisher and Hacking Team's Da Vinci and Galileo products — have been embroiled in human rights debates. Ethiopia allegedly used spyware to surveil journalists, Uganda allegedly targeted opposition political figures, and Morocco allegedly targeted activists. 

Many other clients of spyware vendors have poor human rights records, including Azerbaijan, Venezuela, Uzbekistan and Sudan. 

Yes, but: It's tough to prevent abuse without oversight. Spyware vendors are loath to surveil their own clients, meaning that reporting about potential human rights abuses either comes from victims lucky enough to figure out they were being watched or from the countries themselves.

"If they don't have a mechanism of looking over governments’ shoulders, I don’t see how this has any teeth," John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab, which has done much of the research on NSO's alleged human rights abuses, told Axios.

Without that oversight, Scott-Railton isn't confident that any spyware could be safe for human rights. "If the question is, 'Is it possible to sell cyber weapons and assure they won’t be used for abuse,' I think it’s a contradiction in terms," he said. 

Amnesty International has been a persistent thorn in NSO's side, even assisting a lawsuit to force Israel to ban NSO from exporting products. But Amnesty deputy program director Danna Ingleton is optimistic that there is a way for spyware companies to align with human rights. 

That doesn't mean NSO's current plan passed Ingleton's muster, yet (see item 2). But through due diligence before making sales to regimes, honest accounting of past actions, export rules that are more transparent and engagement with civil society groups, she believes a company like NSO could get ahead of the human rights issue. 

NSO would have to be more open about its internal capabilities to flag human rights abuses as they happen. And governments would need to take an active role in restricting sales to dangerous countries. 

"The onus is on the companies. If they can't protect human rights, they need to enact safeguards," she said. "And if it's an industry that can never be in line with human rights, it's up to the state to do what it needs to do."

The bottom line: The commercial spyware industry is not going to vanish — it's too ingrained in global intelligence and law enforcement. That might mean the only way to protect human rights is to adopt rules like those NSO has announced and make them work.

Spyware's human rights dilemma

NSO Group's effort to embrace human rights poses bigger challenges for an industry known for violating those rights.

Illustration of a giant security camera watching a small person on their cell phone.

Until now, the vast majority of information collected about us has remained untouched — there was just too much to make sense of it all.

What's happening: Artificial intelligence allows data that might once have gone unnoticed to now be detected, analyzed and logged in real time. It's already started supercharging surveillance at work, in schools and in cities.

Police are experimenting with facial recognition — either to help solve specific cases, or to compare the faces of passersby against a database of suspects. This week, a U.K. court upheld real-time facial recognition there.

In New York City, software can detect crime patterns over time and across boroughs, linking events in a way humans never could.

And in schools, cameras automatically watch for unusual behavior, and microphones listen for "aggressive" sounding voices.

The big picture: Humans have monitored each other as long as we've lived in communities — to punish free riders and troublemakers.

But now, cheap, powerful machines are taking the place of human watchers, disrupting a long-held social contract.

Unlike in China, where high-tech surveillance is a tool of fear and control, systems in the West are not centralized for now, curbing the scope of data gathering.

And tech companies like Facebook and Google have perfected online versions of automated surveillance for profit, in the form of products we can no longer live without.

Details: Software can identify and track faces, skin color, clothing, tattoos, walking gait and various other physical attributes and behaviors. But it's been plagued with bias and inaccuracy problems that primarily harm people of color.

From facial expressions and body movements, AI can extrapolate emotions like happiness and anger — a process built on shaky scientific evidence.

The impact: This quiet shift from passive watching to active surveillance is chipping away at our ability to remain anonymous in physical and virtual spaces.

Blending into the crowd is no longer an option if every face in that crowd is captured, compared against a driver's license photo and logged.

Constant AI surveillance threatens to erode the all-important presumption of innocence, says Clare Garvie, a privacy expert at Georgetown Law.

How AI police surveillance treats people of color

Deep Dive: The end of anonymity

Data that might once have gone unnoticed can now be detected, analyzed and logged in real time.

Illustrated collage of a man being revealed from behind graph paper.

Deep Dive - Surveillance

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Data privacy

President Trump's crackdown on TikTok suggests that the U.S. government is starting to see the internet more like China does — as a network that countries can and should control within their borders.

The big picture: Today's global internet has split into three zones, according to many observers: The EU's privacy-focused network; China's government-dominated network; and the U.S.-led network dominated by a handful of American companies. TikTok's fate suggests China's model has U.S. fans as well.

Why it matters: As the global internet splinters further, the U.S. and China look set to enter a Cold War-style battle for the hearts and minds of global users and developing nations. In this fight, U.S. nationalism may make a weaker case to the world than the ideal of internet freedom and open networks that the U.S. once evangelized.

Driving the news: President Trump's threat to ban TikTok from the U.S. has fast-tracked an effort to force the video-sharing app's Chinese owners to sell it to a U.S. company (Microsoft is in talks).

Be smart: The move puts other foreign-owned companies on notice that the U.S. intends to favor American-owned businesses in the digital world. 

That's a giant break from a long-established bipartisan consensus that American interests are best served by a U.S. marketplace, online and off, managed as a level playing field.

China started this game — it was the first country to self-isolate from the global internet. 

China controls information flows inside its borders, and its "great firewall" keeps most information the government dislikes from entering the country. 

The Chinese government has ensured that its most widely used search and social services are domestically owned, and its laws now require any internet service to share data with the authorities.

Meanwhile, the EU's new privacy rules have created a different kind of internet zone  governed by a stringent set of standards for handling individual user data.

Last month, a major EU ruling struck down the Privacy Shield, an arrangement between the EU and the U.S. that enabled companies to transfer data into and out of EU nations without risk. 

Trump's crackdown on TikTok suggests that the U.S. is now adopting a more China-like perspective on what kinds of actions governments should take toward internet companies, including:

picking winners and losers among companies based on the whims of leaders;

insisting that companies make data available to the government for its needs — as Attorney General William Barr's argument for weak encryption does;

threatening to punish private platforms unless they support political leaders' preferred form of speech regulation.

Yes, but: Concerns over TikTok's willingness to share U.S. user data with the Chinese government are real.

TikTok says it keeps all such data outside of China and the reach of the Chinese government's laws. 

Many security experts view all Chinese-owned businesses as vulnerable to government interference and intelligence demands.

Our thought bubble: During the Cold War, America's reputational advantage over the Soviet Union as a rule-of-law democracy was regularly undercut by U.S. operations to overthrow governments abroad and American failures to guarantee human rights at home. 

The Trump administration's strong-arming of TikTok threatens to similarly squander the U.S.'s high ground as a champion of fair markets and networks.

What's next: Zoom, the videoconferencing service that's become a pandemic staple, could be the next China-linked company to face the White House's wrath. 

Zoom has had its share of security and privacy lapses, but it's a publicly traded U.S. company founded by an American citizen and headquartered in San Jose. 

Its software development operation has been based in China, sparking fears and charges by lawmakers that its code could be somehow compromised.

Go deeper: Dan Primack interviews White House trade adviser Peter Navarro about the TikTok deal on the Axios Re:Cap podcast

The U.S. is now playing by China's internet rules

China believes in nationalist control over digital networks, and increasingly, so does the White House.

Illustration of a computer with an American flag on the screen surrounded by barbed wire. 

TikTok

Axios Finish Line

As companies continue to prepare for the return of their employees to the workplace, they're weighing new types of surveillance in the name of safety.

Why it matters: Just as the coronavirus pandemic has acted as an accelerant for the adoption of remote work, it has also normalized increased surveillance and data collection. In the post-pandemic workplace, our bosses will know a lot more about us than they used to.

What's happening: "We're in this new era of biodata collection," says Amy Webb of the Future Today Institute.

A majority of employers, 51%, have begun or are planning to begin collecting temperature data on employees, according to survey data from Gartner provided to Axios.

60% are collecting self-reported data from employees on symptoms, and another 25% are asking employees to report who they've been in contact with. And 5% of firms say they're going as far as collecting workers' medical histories.

"It is all a form of surveillance," says Brian Kropp, head of Gartner's human resources practice.

"I think most of it doesn’t have nefarious intent," Webb says. "But, that being said, we don’t have clarity on how these data might be accessed by an insurer, for example. There isn't enough regulation or transparency around where data are being stored."

Another form of pandemic-era surveillance that's gaining popularity is the use of temperature-reading infrared cameras to watch over workers and customers.

"When the pandemic took hold, I started seeing more and more companies like Amazon using this technology to help identify sick people in their warehouses. Thermal imaging cameras are beginning to appear in Subway restaurants. Carnival Cruise Lines, whose ships became hot spots for the virus’s spread, said all passengers and crew would be screened when it began sailing again," the New York Times' Jonah Kessel writes.

The coronavirus is ushering in a new era of surveillance at work

The pandemic is normalizing increased surveillance and data collection at work.

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