Russian election interference

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An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination by Sheera Frenkel, Cecilia Kang

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, affirmative action, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, fake news, George Floyd, global pandemic, green new deal, hockey-stick growth, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, information security, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, natural language processing, offshore financial centre, Parler "social media", Peter Thiel, QAnon, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social web, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, TechCrunch disrupt, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, WikiLeaks

The threat was only increasing, the report made clear: “We expect that our challenge with organized disinformation campaigns will only increase in 2017.” No one else spoke as Zuckerberg and Sandberg drilled their chief security officer. Why had they been kept in the dark? How aggressive were the Russians? And why, asked a visibly agitated Sandberg, had she not known that Stamos had put together a special team to look at Russian election interference? Did they need to share what Stamos had found with lawmakers immediately, and did the company have a legal obligation beyond that? Stamos was in a delicate position. Schrage and Stretch, who had been receiving his reports for months, were seated directly across the table, but neither man spoke up, and it didn’t seem wise to blame them, he thought.

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Boz and Cox didn’t like what Stamos had exposed them to, and they were embarrassed by what they didn’t know. But they knew this was big. Schedules were cleared to meet with Zuckerberg and Sandberg the next day. Now, in the Aquarium, Stamos gave a somber assessment of where they stood, admitting that no one at the company knew the full extent of the Russian election interference. Zuckerberg demanded that the executives get him answers, so they promised to devote their top engineering talent and resources to investigate what Russia had done on the platform. But with the Christmas and New Year holidays looming, it would take nearly a month to assemble a team of security experts across the platform.

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While there was little evidence for their claims—repeated studies showed that conservative voices had, in fact, become increasingly popular on Facebook over the years—the allegations were stoking antagonism within the Trump administration. At the close of the meeting, Zuckerberg and Sandberg agreed that Stamos and others should redouble efforts to get to the root of the Russian election interference. The new group formed to investigate if Russia had used Facebook to meddle in the election—which included Stamos and a handful of his security experts, engineers, and advertising employees and was led by one of Facebook’s earliest employees, Naomi Gleit—began to meet in the Menlo Park offices.

Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe by Roger McNamee

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, carbon credits, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, computer age, cross-subsidies, dark pattern, data is the new oil, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, game design, growth hacking, Ian Bogost, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, It's morning again in America, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, laissez-faire capitalism, Lean Startup, light touch regulation, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, messenger bag, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Network effects, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

Chamath had presented Facebook with a teachable moment. They could have said, “Now we get it! We screwed up! We will do everything possible to fix the problems and restore trust.” By failing to exploit Chamath’s regrets as a teachable moment, Facebook signaled a commitment to avoiding responsibility for the Russian election interference and all the other problems that had surfaced. This was bad news. I had been giving Facebook the benefit of the doubt since October 2016, assuming that the company had been a victim. For six months after my original email to Zuck and Sheryl, I had assumed that my delivery was flawed or that I had been the wrong messenger.

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Careless sharing of personal data is terrible, but the story underscored a bigger problem: user data is feeding artificial intelligences whose objective is to manipulate the attention and behavior of users without their knowledge or approval. Facebook’s policy of allowing third-party app vendors to harvest friends lists, its tolerance of hate speech, its willingness to align with authoritarians, and its attempts to cover up its role in the Russian election interference are all symptoms of a business that prioritized growth metrics over all other factors. Was this not just business as usual? Even if the country does not approve of Facebook’s choices, do the offenses rise to a level that requires regulatory intervention? Would regulation cause more harm than good?

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The hard part is in front of us. Internet platforms still enjoyed a massive reservoir of goodwill with policy makers and the public, and they leveraged it where they could. Their challenge was made easier by the wide range of harms. It was hard to keep up. Anecdotes like Cambridge Analytica, Russian election interference, ethnic cleansing in Myanmar, and the rising suicide rate among teens attracted attention, but most users could not understand how products they trusted could possibly have caused so much harm. Understanding how the choices made by internet platforms had caused these things to happen would require more time and effort than most users were willing to commit.

The Hacker and the State: Cyber Attacks and the New Normal of Geopolitics by Ben Buchanan

active measures, air gap, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Brian Krebs, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, fake news, family office, Hacker News, hive mind, information security, Internet Archive, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, kremlinology, Laura Poitras, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Nate Silver, operational security, post-truth, profit motive, RAND corporation, ransomware, risk tolerance, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, subscription business, technoutopianism, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, Wargames Reagan, WikiLeaks, zero day

Again, the case received only a smattering of headlines, having been sidelined by another holiday week and the swirling controversies of the Trump administration’s ongoing transition. The conventional wisdom seemed to have shifted: if the long-anticipated cyber Pearl Harbor had come, it had taken the form of Russian election interference (the subject of Chapter 10), not power grid sabotage related to a territorial dispute in Eastern Europe. With the benefit of hindsight, and thanks to the work of some diligent investigators, the story takes on more importance. Three big lessons have emerged from the blackouts in Ukraine.

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All of this was made possible because the group had somehow, despite the extensive security precautions of the NSA, gotten their hands on a panoply of American secrets and decided to share them with the world. This is that story, one of the deepest mysteries in modern cyber operations. The Shadow Brokers As noted in the Introduction to this book, the Shadow Brokers began with a post online. On August 13, 2016, amidst the drama of the summer election campaign and the slowly unfolding Russian election interference operation, they announced that the NSA’s tools were up for auction. The Shadow Brokers went on to clarify that they were talking not just about the kind of malicious code samples that cybersecurity researchers sometimes share with one another. No, they had access to something much more valuable: the full tools themselves, which they had obtained, they boasted, by watching the NSA’s hacking operations and by hacking the agency.

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The comparative silence was not because journalists chose to ignore the Shadow Brokers out of patriotism, but rather because too much else was going on. If Shadow Brokers wanted attention, they would have to do more. The Escalation of Exposure As 2016 turned to 2017, the United States entered a period of tumult. The Obama administration gave way to the Trump team. Newspapers outdid each other with juicy leaks about Russian election interference, the presidential transition, and other forms of political intrigue. “Fake news” and “post-truth” became household terms; the latter was Oxford English Dictionary’s 2016 word of the year.20 The Shadow Brokers tried to make themselves heard, especially to their target audience at the NSA, over the din.

Facebook: The Inside Story by Steven Levy

active measures, Airbnb, Airbus A320, Amazon Mechanical Turk, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, blockchain, Burning Man, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, company town, computer vision, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, East Village, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, GPS: selective availability, growth hacking, imposter syndrome, indoor plumbing, information security, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lock screen, Lyft, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, Oculus Rift, operational security, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, slashdot, Snapchat, social contagion, social graph, social software, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, techlash, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, you are the product

Abrams, Jonathan, 41–43, 81, 87 Abrash, Michael, 327, 492 Accel venture capital firm, 102–3, 132 Acton, Brian, 317–25, 438, 500–506 advertising and Beacon, 182–83, 186–88, 206, 212 and Bosworth, 294–95 and business model of FB, 170, 178, 199–200 and Cabal group of Bosworth, 294–96 and Cambridge Analytica, 399, 420 Campus Flyers, 178 competition for, 476 and data brokers, 269–70, 475 and data collection on FB, 207 and fake news disseminated on FB, 359 and FTC investigation and sanctions, 274 Hammerbacher on, 217 on Instagram, 477, 490, 508 and Like button, 202 and Lookalike Audiences, 352 and Microsoft partnership, 179–80, 183–85, 198 in mobile apps, 295–98 and News Feed feature, 138 number of engineers working on, 199 and Pages, 182 and Pages You May Like campaign, 295 and Pandemic code name, 181, 185 and personally identifying information (PII), 474, 476 and privacy questions, 475 questionable categories in, 465–66 revenues from, 170, 178, 198, 275, 297, 477 and Russian election interference, 372–76, 377, 378–79 Sandberg’s policies for, 199–200 in sidebars, 181 social advertising, 180–81, 183, 185 success of, 198 targeted ads, 181, 351–53, 399, 465, 475 by Trump campaign, 351–54 and WhatsApp, 320–21, 324–25, 504 Zuckerberg’s perspectives on, 201–2, 295–96, 474–75 by Zynga, 167 African Americans, 343, 353, 374, 403, 469–70 Agarwal, Aditya, 105, 107 algorithms of Facebook amplifying effects of, 142 charges of political bias in, 458 engagement prioritized in, 385 and fake news/misinformation on FB, 9, 11, 361 privileging close relationships, 261, 391 and ranking of posts on News Feed, 127–28, 163, 172, 260–61, 385 and sharing of content, 401 Amazon, 293, 516 America Online (AOL), 28–29, 209 Analog Research Lab, 238, 368 Andreessen, Marc, 288, 327–28, 379 Andreessen Horowitz, 300, 327 Android platform, 172 Anker, Andrew, 357, 388–89 antitrust questions, 514–16 anti-vaccination movement, 346 Apple and antitrust investigations, 516 campus of, 148 and Cook’s criticisms of FB, 481–83 and Facebook app, 276–79 “full friend access” negotiated by, 175 and iPhones, 154, 276–79, 301 and Macintosh computers, 22 and Onavo Protect, 483–85 partnership with FB, 148 and platform for mobile phones, 172 application programming interface (API) Graph API V1 (“the Friend API”), 171–72, 175–76, 271, 409, 412 Graph API V2, 175 initial version, written by Fetterman, 150–51 See also Open Graph Applied Machine Learning (AML) team, 454 Aquila drone, 232–33 Arab Spring movement, 7, 434, 471 Arrington, Michael, 166 artificial intelligence (AI), 33, 452, 453–56 Backstrom, Lars, 223 Badros, Greg, 106, 201 Ballmer, Steve, 201, 239 Bannon, Steve, 411, 420 Barker, Brandee and Beacon, 187 on growth emphasis of company, 235 and News Feed feature, 141–42 and Pandemic launch, 185 on Sandberg critics, 356 and Schrage’s hire, 200 and Zuckerberg’s public speaking, 156 Barry, Ben, 237–39, 241–43, 337 Beacon, 182–83, 186–88, 206, 212 Beck, Glenn, 343 Beluga, 313 Benchmark venture capital firm, 102 Berteau, Stefan, 188 Bickert, Monika, 340, 343, 432–38, 443–44, 448–49, 457–58, 480 Black Lives Matter movement, 342–43 Bloomberg, Michael, 256 Book of Change, 119, 122, 127–28, 144, 205, 527 Bosworth, Andrew and ads engineering team, 294–95 background of, 126 and expectations Clinton would win, 350, 354 and fake news disseminated on FB, 349, 350 on FriendFeed, 203 and Like button, 204 management style of, 294 on “Napalm Girl” image, 457–58 and News Feed feature, 142, 391 recruitment of, 126–27 and solving FB’s problems, 481 on Trending Topics feature, 341–42 and “The Ugly” internal memo, 441–42 as VP of Hardware, 495 and Zuckerberg, 473 Bowles, Erskine, 288, 379, 471 boyd, danah, 67 breastfeeding, 252–53, 254 Breitbart News, 391, 411 Brexit, 422 Breyer, Jim, 102–3, 133 Brin, Sergey, 289 Brown, Campbell, 389–90 Brown, Nat, 159, 164–65, 269 Buchheit, Paul, 203 Buddy Zoo, 43–44, 61 “Building Global Community” (Zuckerberg), 371, 383 Burma (later Myanmar), 11, 435–39, 526 business plan of Facebook and advertising, 170, 178, 199–200 Callahan’s model, 177–78 and Cook’s criticisms of FB, 481, 482–83 and data collection on FB, 207, 524 and diversification, 198–99 and Kendall’s manifesto, 180 and Like button on external websites, 206 and Microsoft partnership, 179–80 and Sandberg, 198, 199–200 Buttigieg, Pete, 381 buyout offers, 131–37 BuzzFeed, 262, 387–88, 390, 440, 442 Cadwalladr, Carole, 422–24 Callahan, Ezra anticipation of FB’s success, 98 and business plan for FB, 177–78 on Cohler’s adult presence, 97 and Cox’s recruitment, 124 and customer support, 246, 247 at La Jennifer house, 96–97 and Open Registration, 144 on redesign, 139 on Sandberg’s management, 197 on status updates inspired by Twitter, 259 Callan, Aela, 436 Cambridge Analytica banned from FB, 425 congressional hearings following, 427–30 and data deletion demanded by FB, 419, 420–21, 422, 424–25 FB’s caution following, 464 and FB’s digital currency bid, 520 FB’s failure to alert users to issue, 421, 478 FB’s response to news of breach, 425–27 FB’s review of problem with, 418–19, 422 and Guardian article, 417–18 investigative journalism on, 422–24, 425 name of, 411 and political ads on FB, 11, 399, 411, 420 and SCL, 411, 415, 417 and Trump campaign, 399, 420, 421, 427 and user data supplied by Kogan, 399, 411–13, 414–19, 420–21, 422, 423–26 Wylie’s role in, 410–15, 420, 422–25 See also Kogan, Aleksandr Campus Flyers, 178 Carlyle Group equity fund, 113 Carmack, John, 326, 329, 491, 495 Casa Facebook (Palo Alto work space), 76–77, 82–84, 90–91, 95 Cathcart, Will, 170, 294, 507 Causes app, 155, 162, 164 Ceglia, Paul, 39 cell-phone numbers shared on FB, 71, 101 censorship, charges of, 457–59.

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s attempt to acquire FB, 137 and Zuckerberg’s staff meetings, 109–10 See also specific names encryption, 438, 488, 500–501, 505, 513, 514 Everson, Carolyn, 201 Facebook, 502–3 board of directors of, 102, 133, 288, 470 and buyout offers, 131–37 co-founders of, 68–70, 96 conceptual predecessor of, 34–35 critics (see critics/criticisms of Facebook) culture (see culture of Facebook) data (see data gathering of Facebook; user data ) design and interface of, 62–63, 91, 113 domains for, 60, 104 early leadership of, 97 employees (see employees of Facebook) features, 110–11 (see also specific features, including News Feed of FB) founder (see Zuckerberg, Mark) friends (see friends and “friending”) growth (see Growth Circle; growth of Facebook) initial programming effort for, 60–61 launch of, at Harvard, 65, 67–68 mission (see mission of Facebook) mobile (see mobile Facebook ) name change from “Thefacebook,” 104 objectionable content (see content arbitration on Facebook) offices (see work spaces of Facebook) origins of, 6, 53 Platform (see Platform of Facebook) positive impact of, 12, 16, 240, 371, 434 privacy practices of (see privacy) redesigns of, 113, 138–39, 259–63, 525 reputation of, 11–12, 398, 484–85, 525 scandals (see specific scandals, including Cambridge Analytica and Russian interference in US presidential election) security (see security measures of Facebook) server space required for, 66, 67, 97–98, 100, 105, 115 Terms of Service agreements, 265, 369, 407, 414 users (see users) values of, 111, 239–41, 289, 459 Facebook Artificial Intelligence Lab (FAIR), 453–54 Facebook Basics, 8 Facebook Connect, 169–71, 173, 268, 297, 408–9 “Facebook Effect,” 9 Facebook Effect, The (Kirkpatrick), 184 Facebook Guy, 62, 113 Facebook Home devices, 287, 297 Facebook Live, 343, 432, 439–41, 443–44, 468, 471 facebook program of Tillery, 34–35, 60 Facebook Research app, 483 facebooks of schools, 34–35, 48, 53, 59–60, 67, 76 Facebook Supreme Court, 460–61 Facebook Watch, 510 Facemash incident, 47–52, 53, 56, 58, 61, 64, 144 Faceweb, 281, 282, 283 fake accounts/users, 376–77, 455 fake news and misinformation algorithms’ amplification of, 9, 11, 361 and anti-Hillary ads, 358–59 and artificial intelligence, 455 data-based perspectives on, 349–50 and digital literacy, 436 and “disputed content” labels, 389 downranking of, 389 fake outlets of, 358 FB’s policies on, 438–39, 519 and FB’s reluctance to arbitrate truth, 337, 346, 357, 361 FB’s response to concerns about, 345–46, 348–49, 357–58, 359, 389 FB’s work to mitigate, 362–63, 370, 463, 484 and freedom of speech/expression, 363, 389 originating in Macedonia, 358–59, 364, 365 people profiteering on, 358–59, 365 and Philippines’ 2016 presidential election, 347–48 post-election reactions to, 361–62 and privacy in Next Facebook, 514 and Project P team, 365–66 spikes in, before election, 9, 358 Stamos’s report on, 363–67 state-sponsored, 435, 438, 454 as threat to democracy, 362 Zuckerberg’s “crazy idea” comment on, 10, 360–61, 370 Zuckerberg’s perspectives on, 523 See also Cambridge Analytica Family collection of apps, 511–12, 513–14 Fanning, Shawn, 79–80 Farmville app, 162–63 Farrakhan, Louis, 459 Faust, Drew, 382 Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and antitrust charges, 515, 516 Consent Decree and sanctions of 2011, 11, 272–74, 478–79 and FB’s acquisition of Instagram, 306–7 and $5 billion fine, 11, 479, 525 formal complaints about FB made to, 265 and WhatsApp, 503 “Feed Me: Motivating Contribution in Social Network Sites,” 221, 224 F8 developers conference, 154, 157–58 Feinstein, Dianne, 396 Ferrante, Danny, 217 Fetterman, Dave, 150–51, 155, 169 financials of Facebook and costs of server space, 97–98, 100 and dilemma on funding choices, 100–104 disconnect between reputation and, 484–85 and first profit (2009), 256 and FTC’s $5 billion fine, 479 initial capital for Thefacebook, 67 and initial public offering (IPO), 288–93, 297–98 and investments in security, 476 and Microsoft’s funding, 185 and mission of FB, 524 and Parker’s fundraising, 85–86, 89 and Pincus and Hoffman, 88 and pitch to venture capitalists, 88–90 and private funding rounds, 288 and public company transition, 287–93 and revenues from advertising, 138, 170, 178, 198, 275, 297, 477 and revenues from platform, 153–54, 168 and revenues from user data, 175 and revenues lost to mobile FB, 290 “seed round” funding from Thiel, 88–89, 90, 100, 101, 178 and stakes of co-founders, 96 and stock prices of Facebook, 291, 293, 297, 426, 477 and venture round with Accel, 102–3, 132, 178 and Washington Post’s investment, 100–102 “Find Friend” program, 215 Fishman, Ivan, 318 Flickr, 12, 114 Flixster third-party app, 161, 169–70 ForAmerica, 418 Forstall, Scott, 278 Foursquare, 309–11 Franklin, Rachel, 492 Free Basics program, 234, 347, 437 freedom of speech/expression and content moderation, 246, 248–49, 459–60 and fake news disseminated on FB, 363, 389 as founding ideal of Facebook, 111, 459 and News Feed feature, 142 and presidential election of 2016, 344, 357, 432 and Russian election interference, 376 Sandberg’s emphasis on, 470–71 standards for, 253–54, 340 Zuckerberg’s emphasis on, 111, 249, 254, 344, 357, 363, 459, 524 FriendFeed, purchase of, 203 friends and “friending” average number of, 223, 416 and Dunbar number, 223, 225, 226 in earliest FB release, 63, 65 and “Find Friend” program, 215–16 friends of friends (FoFs), 223, 268–69, 409, 412–13, 415, 416 and “Friends Only” posts, 273 and People You May Know (PYMK), 220–26 user behavior trends in, 216 and user retention, 220–21, 224–25 Friendster, 41–43, 59, 66, 69, 76, 86, 87, 91, 102 games on Facebook, 161–63 Gates, Bill, 14, 71, 95, 162, 184, 392, 394 Gehry, Frank, 368 Geminder, Katie, 108, 110, 122, 143 “Gesundheit!

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Modeling Contagion through Facebook News Feed,” 262, 405 Gizmodo, 341 Gleit, Naomi, 217–18, 219–20, 235–36, 364–65, 383 Global Science Research (GSR), 412, 413 Goetz, Jim, 321, 325 Goldberg, Dave, 193, 208, 355 Goldman, Rob, 235, 354, 375–76 Goler, Lori, 239, 289 Goodlatte, Bobby, 361 Google and ad deal with FB, 183–84 as advertising competitor, 476 and content moderators, 445 culture of, 243 employees’ migration to FB, 200–201 and Google Plus, 304 proposed acquisition of FB, 132 Sandberg’s time at, 192–93 and Senate Judiciary hearing, 395 and user profiles in search results, 219–20 visibility of users’ details to, 264 and WhatsApp, 322, 323 Gowalla, 311 Graham, Don, 100–104, 171, 193, 288, 289, 524 Graham, Lindsey, 514–15 Graham, Molly, 239–40, 242, 285, 289 Graph API V1 (“the Friend API”), 171–72, 175–76, 271, 409, 412 graphics, messages embedded into, 455 Green, Joe, 45, 48, 50, 51, 52, 66, 155, 164, 196 Green, Joshua, 353 Greenspan, Aaron, 58–59, 60, 64, 75, 76 Grewal, Paul, 424, 426, 428, 430, 494, 505 Grimes, Michael, 288, 290, 322–23 Grossman, Lev, 233 Groups feature of Facebook, 112, 383–84 Growth Circle and aggressive pursuit of goals, 219, 224 and algorithms driving News Feed, 385 and dark profiles, 222 engagement prioritized by, 385 expanded scope of, 234–36 formation of, 218 and internationalization, 226, 229–31, 233, 235 and Internet.org initiative, 347 leadership of (see Olivan, Javier; Palihapitiya, Chamath) and Messenger, 314 and mission of FB, 235 and mobile Facebook effort, 281–82 and Onavo acquisition, 315 and People You May Know (PYMK), 220–21, 225 and privacy defaults, 267 and trust of users in FB, 235 and WhatsApp, 322, 323 See also Data Science team growth of Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, 399 and contact scraping, 215–16 emphasis placed on, 214, 234–35, 399, 524 expansion into high schools, 120–21 expansion to other college campuses, 68, 70–72, 98 and first million users, 94–95 in international markets, 226–34, 235, 320, 323, 435–36 and Internet.org initiative, 4, 231–34 limited by server space, 97–98 and mission of FB, 235, 524 and mobile Facebook effort, 281–82 and Monthly Active User (MAU) metric, 213 and Open Registration, 119–23, 133, 137, 144, 157–58, 215, 250, 251 and Palihapitiya’s proposals, 213–14 and People You May Know (PYMK), 220–26 and poster project of Barry, 242 and privacy defaults, 264, 267 problems that emerged from, 524 and recruitment of computer science engineers, 105–6 slow downs or stalls in, 133, 213, 507 and trust of users in FB, 235 and “The Ugly” internal memo, 441–42 and vulnerability to manipulation, 384 Zuckerberg’s perspectives on, 525 See also connecting the world GRU (Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff), 334, 336, 364, 366 Grudin, Nick, 387 Guccifer, 334 hacker culture, 74, 240, 289–90 Hammerbacher, Jeff, 214–15, 216 Hancock, Jeff, 407 Harris, Tristan, 385–86, 398 Harvard Connection (later ConnectU), 56–57, 60, 72–76 Harvard Facemash, 47–52, 53, 56, 58, 61, 64 Harvard University and Course Match program of Zuckerberg, 46–47, 61 and facebook project of Zuckerberg, 53–54, 60–61, 67–68, 72 and Greenspan’s houseSYSTEM, 58–59, 60, 64 indefinite leaves available to students of, 71, 95 and study group collaboration tool, 54–55, 61 Zuckerberg’s acceptance to, 37–38 and Zuckerberg’s class attendance, 45–46, 60 Zuckerberg’s commencement speech at, 36–37, 72, 382 Zuckerberg’s dropping out of, 71–72, 95–96 Zuckerberg’s honorary degree at, 72 Hastings, Reed, 288 Hatch, Orrin, 429 hate speech/campaigns in advertising categories, 465–66 and artificial intelligence, 454, 455 challenges of moderating, 448–50, 455 and encryption, 514 and Facebook Supreme Court, 460–61 and fake user accounts, 455 FB’s delays in addressing, 434, 438 in Myanmar (previously Burma), 437–38, 526 and Next Facebook, 488 Ressa’s warnings about, 347–48, 435, 486 and scope of moderators’ work, 252 and Trump video on Muslim immigration, 340 Zuckerberg’s perspectives on, 459–60, 523 Hegeman, John, 386, 388 Hemphill, Scott, 515 Hendrix, Allison, 418, 419 Hewitt, Joe, 276–79, 285 high schools, Facebook’s expansion into, 120–21, 133 Hill, Kashmir, 222 Hinton, Geoffrey, 453 Hirsch, Doug, 114, 133 Hoffman, Auren, 269–70 Hoffman, Reid, 85–90, 161, 178, 220, 292 Hold ’Em Poker app, 162 Horowitz, Ben, 462–63 Hotmail, 184, 215–16 Hot or Not website, 48 houseSYSTEM of Greenspan, 58–59, 64 Hughes, Chris and antitrust charges, 515 background of, 45 as co-founder, 69 departure of, 244–45 at Harvard, 45, 50, 72 and News Feed feature, 142 and Obama campaign, 334 role of, in FB, 97 on Wall feature, 111 Hug Me third-party app, 160 idealism, 16, 445, 524 iLike, 158–59, 164–65, 269 India, 233–34 InfoWars, 458–59 initial public offering (IPO), 288–93, 297–98 Instagram advertising on, 477, 490, 508 and antitrust charges, 515, 516 benefits provided by FB, 509–10 and Dorsey, 302, 303, 304–5 Facebook’s acquisition of, 303–7, 309, 508 filters of, 301–2 independence of, 489–90, 509 and Instagram TV, 510 leadership changes in, 512 messaging service of, 509 origins of, 300–303 popularity of, 5, 12, 302–3, 507–8 revenues from, 489, 508 Russian election interference via, 374, 489 Stories feature, 497–99, 507 Instant Articles feature, 387, 388 Instant Messenger as inspiration for later apps, 43 and Saverin’s termination, 99 and Wirehog project, 92 and youths of FB engineers, 28–29 Zuckerberg’s damaging exchanges on, 46, 57, 73, 75, 119 Instant Personalization, 270–72, 409, 424 Integrity team, 448, 477, 485 international markets, 226–34, 235, 320, 323, 435–36 Internet access, 4–7, 14, 231–34 Internet.org initiative, 4, 231–34, 316, 347, 506 Internet Research Agency (IRA; troll farm), 373–76, 395 Internet start-ups, first wave of, 74 Iribe, Brendan, 326–27, 328–29, 493, 495 “Is Connectivity a Human Right?”

The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--And How We Must Adapt by Sinan Aral

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, death of newspapers, deep learning, deepfake, digital divide, digital nomad, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Drosophila, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, George Floyd, global pandemic, hive mind, illegal immigration, income inequality, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lockdown, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, mobile money, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, performance metric, phenotype, recommendation engine, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Russian election interference, Second Machine Age, seminal paper, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, skunkworks, Snapchat, social contagion, social distancing, social graph, social intelligence, social software, social web, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yogi Berra

My Objective My goals in this book are to describe the science of how the Hype Machine works and to explore how it affects our politics, our businesses, and our relationships; to explore the consequences of the Hype Machine for our society, both positive and negative; and to discuss how we can—through company policy, social norms, government regulation, and more advanced software code—achieve its promise while avoiding its peril. I’ll begin by considering fake news and the weaponization of misinformation through the Hype Machine, tracking how the design of platforms like Facebook and Twitter incentivize and enable the spread of misinformation (Chapter 2). Did Russian election interference change the results of the 2016 U.S. presidential election? What should we do to stop the scourge of fake news in the 2020 election and beyond? Stay tuned. Along the way, I’ll examine why the Hype Machine’s rise was so meteoric and why we were so susceptible to it, as individuals and as a society.

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At a Crossroads The last three years have seen front-page stories about Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and the rest of social media’s lack of transparency; their contribution to political polarization; their promotion of hate speech, racism, and the degradation of discourse; their role in the spread of fake news; and their potentially corrosive impact on our democracies and our elections. Lawmakers have advocated regulation. Multiple U.S. congressional committees are investigating the role of Facebook and the rest of the Hype Machine in Russian election interference and the spread of misinformation online. The Cambridge Analytica controversy, in which a political consultancy used stolen Facebook data on 87 million Americans to target political ads, forced Mark Zuckerberg to testify in front of the U.S. Congress and the European Parliament as lawmakers debate what to do about the Hype Machine’s power of mass persuasion, use of personal data, and lack of control over misinformation.

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To assess whether it flipped the U.S. election result, we have to answer two additional questions: Was the reach, scope, and targeting of Russian interference sufficient to change the result? And if so, did it successfully change people’s voting behavior enough to accomplish that goal? The Reach, Scope, and Targeting of Russian Election Interference During the 2016 election, Russian fake news spread to at least 126 million people on Facebook and garnered at least 76 million likes, comments, and other reactions there. It reached at least 20 million people on Instagram and was even more effective there, amassing at least 187 million likes, comments, and other reactions.

Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs by Kerry Howley

air gap, Bernie Sanders, Chelsea Manning, cognitive bias, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Joan Didion, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, Nelson Mandela, operational security, pre–internet, QAnon, Russian election interference, security theater, Shoshana Zuboff, social graph, surveillance capitalism, WikiLeaks

“Experts are telling us that Russian state actors broke into the DNC, took all these emails and now are leaking them out through these websites,” a Clinton campaign manager told George Stephanopoulos. It was an act of espionage, they said, aided and abetted by WikiLeaks. In the summer of 2016, this sounded, to pretty much everyone, like paranoid spy-movie talk. It sounded especially so to the most prominent voices at The Intercept, for whom unsubstantiated accusations of Russian election interference recalled the baseless assumptions on which the Iraq War had been launched. “Any of us who grew up in politics or came of age as an American in the ’60s or ’70s or the ’80s knows that central to American political discourse has always been trying to tie your political opponents to Russia,” Glenn Greenwald said on Democracy Now.

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Trump was elected at a time when Reality Winner was trying and failing to find a position that would take her to Afghanistan, where she could talk rather than merely listen. He assumed office days before she gave up and accepted the work for which the United States had trained her. She was not then thinking about Russia. Her work was with Iran. Her heart with Afghanistan. That Glenn Greenwald had become the Left’s most vociferous skeptic of Russian election interference, increasingly closed off from evidence, remained, through this period, inside baseball. That he was sliding into position as a right-wing media star was the kind of thing you knew if it was your job to know it. If you were a twenty-five-year-old worried about the world, you likely thought of The Intercept as the publication of Snowden and Manning, a friend to Assange, an antagonistic publication that refused to take the administration’s talking points.

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race by Nicole Perlroth

4chan, active measures, activist lawyer, air gap, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boeing 737 MAX, Brexit referendum, Brian Krebs, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commoditize, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Vincenzetti, defense in depth, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Hacker News, index card, information security, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, lockdown, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral hazard, Morris worm, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, NSO Group, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open borders, operational security, Parler "social media", pirate software, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, Seymour Hersh, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, web application, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

“Particularly if any of those operations targeted U.S. allies” or their elections. “Accordingly,” he went on, “this may be an effort to influence the calculus of decision-makers wondering how sharply to respond to the DNC hacks.” In other words, Snowden said, “somebody is sending a message” that retaliating against Russian election interference “could get messy fast.” At Cisco headquarters in Silicon Valley and the company’s satellite offices in Maryland—just ten miles from Fort Meade—threat analysts and security engineers ripped the NSA code apart. This was Day Zero. The zero-days the Shadow Brokers exposed in Cisco’s firewall were the nightmare scenario—not just for Cisco but for millions of their customers around the world.

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The country’s up-and-coming young hackers had more incentive than ever to insulate themselves in the under-the-table, inflation-free cyberarms trade. If it was dictators and despots who wanted their code, so be it. This was all happening under an America First president who was temperamentally uninterested in complexity, who romanticized authoritarianism, and who dismissed any talk of Russian election interference as an elaborate “hoax.” That his trade war with China, his abandonment of the Iran nuclear deal, and his refusal to confront Putin directly might have unintended and dangerous consequences seemed to matter little in the Old Western Trump had written for himself. In his retelling, he was Wyatt Earp restoring law and order, securing the border, and blazing his way to glory.

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McConnell’s beleaguered response to election security is detailed in Steve Benen, “McConnell’s Response to Russian Attack Is Back in the Spotlight,” MSNBC, February 19, 2018. For Trump’s public remarks concerning his doubts Russia meddled in 2016, see Michael D. Shear, “After Election, Trump’s Professed Love for Leaks Quickly Faded,” New York Times, February 15, 2017; Cristiano Lima, “Trump on RT: Russian Election Interference ‘Probably Unlikely,’ ” Politico, September 8, 2016; and First Presidential Debate, CNN, September 26, 2016. For further reading on John Brennan’s warning to Russia to not interfere, see Matt Apuzzo, “Ex-CIA Chief Reveals Mounting Concern over Trump Campaign and Russia,” New York Times, May 23, 2017.

The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power by Jacob Helberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, cable laying ship, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crisis actor, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, digital nomad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, geopolitical risk, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google bus, Google Chrome, GPT-3, green new deal, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, one-China policy, open economy, OpenAI, Parler "social media", Peter Thiel, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, satellite internet, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, Solyndra, South China Sea, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, TSMC, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Valery Gerasimov, vertical integration, Wargames Reagan, Westphalian system, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

“Zuckerberg Apologizes, Promises Reform as Senators Grill Him Over Facebook’s Failings”77 “Facebook Is Now in the Data-Privacy Spotlight. Could Google Be Next?”78 “Facebook and Twitter Plan New Ways to Regulate Political Ads”79 “Top Tech Companies Met with Intelligence Officials to Discuss Midterms”80 “Facebook Identifies New Influence Operations Spanning Globe”81 “How the U.S. Is Fighting Russian Election Interference”82 While some internal resistance to publishing an expanded version of our misrepresentation policy remained, the tide had turned. Bit by bit, Silicon Valley started to awaken to the front-end threat. In 2018 and 2020, the Google Ads team built on these efforts and adopted similar measures to further promote transparency83 and “to prohibit coordinating with other sites or accounts and concealing or misrepresenting your identity.”84 How a Lie Is Laundered Coming up with a foreign interference framework was only the beginning.

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,” Washington Post, April 11, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/04/11/facebook-is-now-in-the-data-privacy-spotlight-could-google-be-next/. 79 Nellie Bowles and Sheera Frenkel, “Facebook and Twitter Plan New Ways to Regulate Political Ads,” New York Times, May 24, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/24/technology/twitter-political-ad-restrictions.html. 80 Sheera Frenkel and Matthew Rosenberg, “Top Tech Companies Met With Intelligence Officials to Discuss Midterms,” New York Times, June 25, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/25/technology/tech-meeting-midterm-elections.html. 81 Sheera Frenkel and Nicholas Fandos, “Facebook Identifies New Influence Operations Spanning Globe,” New York Times, August 21, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/21/technology/facebook-political-influence-midterms.html. 82 Michael Wines and Julian E. Barnes, “How the U.S. Is Fighting Russian Election Interference,” New York Times, August 2, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/02/us/politics/russia-election-interference.html. 83 Kent Walker, “Supporting election integrity through greater advertising transparency,” Google, May 4, 2018, https://blog.google/topics/public-policy/supporting-election-integrity-through-greater-advertising-transparency/. 84 “Update to Misrepresentation policy (September 2020),” Google, July 2020, https://support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/9991401?

The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations by Daniel Yergin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 3D printing, 9 dash line, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, addicted to oil, Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, American energy revolution, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bakken shale, Bernie Sanders, BRICs, British Empire, carbon tax, circular economy, clean tech, commodity super cycle, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, decarbonisation, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, failed state, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hydraulic fracturing, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, LNG terminal, Lyft, Malacca Straits, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Masayoshi Son, Masdar, mass incarceration, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, new economy, off grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, paypal mafia, peak oil, pension reform, power law, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, super pumped, supply-chain management, TED Talk, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ubercab, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, women in the workforce

“Nord Stream II—Energy Union at the Crossroads,” Brussels, April 6, 2016; “Germany to Back Nord Stream 2 Despite Ukraine Tensions,” EURACTIV.com with Reuters, December 4, 2018 (commercial project); Thane Gustafson, The Bridge: Natural Gas in a Redivided Europe, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020), chapter 12. 2. “Sally Yates and James Clapper Testify on Russian Election Interference,” Washington Post, May 8, 2017; Ben Smith’s Blog, “Hillary: Putin ‘Doesn’t Have a Soul,’” Politico, January 6, 2008; Michael Crowley and Julia Ioffe, “Why Putin Hates Hillary,” Politico, July 25, 2016. 3. Polina Nikolskaya, “Russia’s Largest Oil Producer Says New US Sanctions Are Going to Backfire,” Business Insider, August 3, 2017. 4.

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See ride-hailing services and taxis Taxonomy (EU report), 389 TC Energy (Trans Canada), 47 technological advances and Arctic gas reserves, 111 and automobile industry, xviii, 366–73, 415, 427 and autonomous vehicles, 347–57, 368–69, 373 China, 174–75 and container shipping, 161–64 and current geopolitical challenges, 425 and electric vehicles, xviii, 327–46, 368–71, 415, 427, 430 and hydraulic fracturing techniques, 7 and “low-carbon energy,” 418 and oil sands production, 46 and pace of innovation, 429 and sanctions against Russia, 97–98 and U.S. oil production levels, 64 Tengiz field, 122 terrorism, 216, 221–22, 228, 230–31, 241, 249, 253, 261–65, 270, 286–88, 296 Tesla, 330–34, 338–40, 344 Texas, 3–6, 7, 9–10, 20, 23, 24, 29–30, 399 Thatcher, Margaret, 214 3D printing, 404, 425 Three Forks stratum, 19 Three Mile Island nuclear accident, 349 Thrun, Sebastian, 349–51, 352–53, 357 Thucydides Trap, 131, 154, 425 Thunberg, Greta, 384 Tibet, 150 Time, 18, 20 TNK-BP, 76 Tokayev, Kassym-Jomart, 123 Total, 112 Toyoda, Akio, 369 Toyota, 338, 369 trade wars, 26, 130, 171, 174–75, 286 Trans-Pacific Partnership, 134 Treaty of Lausanne, 201 Treaty of Nanking, 139 Truman, Harry, 60, 211 Trump, Donald impeachment, xvi, 110 and influence of U.S., 188 and Iranian nuclear ambitions, 227 and Nord Stream 2 pipeline project, 105–7, 108 and pipeline battles in U.S., 51 and price war among petroleum producers, 317–20 relationship with Russia, 103 and Russian election interference, 78 and Saudi relations, 306 and Syrian civil war, 247 and U.S.–China rivalry, 134, 171–72 and U.S. LNG, 39–40 withdrawal from Paris Agreement, 382 Tunisia, 236 Turkey and Eastern Mediterranean petroleum resources, 257 and global order after First World War, 200–202 and Iraqi oil infrastructure, 232 and ISIS, 269 and Khashoggi affair, 305 and Qatar and Russian gas pipelines, 85, 104 and Saudi Arabia, 306–7 and Syrian civil war, 245 Turkmenistan, 120, 179–80 Turkomans, 202 Tusk, Donald, 102 Twitter, 237, 382 Uber, 358–65, 367, 369, 372 Uchiyamada, Takeshi, 338 Uighurs, 180 Ukraine and collapse of Soviet Union, 73–74 and current geopolitical challenges, 426 and East-West tensions, 90–93 and gas supplies to Europe, 110 and Gazprom, 80–82 and politics of U.S. shale production, 55 and Russian annexation of Crimea, 94–98 and Russian gas exports, 102, 104–5, 107–8, 110, 112, 113 and Russian geopolitical strategy, 78–80 and Russian political isolation, 246 United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Arab Spring protests, 241 and Iranian nuclear ambitions, 225, 228 and price war among petroleum producers, 313 and Saudi Arabia, 300–302, 306 and Yemen conflict, 251–52 United Arab Republic, 243 United Kingdom.

Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World by Joseph Menn

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Andy Rubin, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, commoditize, corporate governance, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Firefox, Gabriella Coleman, Google Chrome, Haight Ashbury, independent contractor, information security, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Naomi Klein, NSO Group, Peter Thiel, pirate software, pre–internet, Ralph Nader, ransomware, Richard Stallman, Robert Mercer, Russian election interference, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, tech worker, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, zero day

See Wheeler, Kevin Symantec, 79, 107, 112, 122, 123, 183 Syria, 133, 169 sysop (system operator), 13, 38, 47, 82 Syverson, Paul, 129 Tacoland, 17 Tailored Access Operations, 176 TAP (“Technological American Party” newsletter), 19, 31, 55 TCP/IP, 38 Tech Solidarity, 4, 193 Ted’s Collision and Body Repair (bar), 94 Telecommunications Act (1996), 89–90 terrorism, 59, 74, 113, 115–117, 210 Tethong, Lhadon, 131 Texas Tech, 14, 17 text files (t-files), 10–20, 33, 44, 47, 123, 141, 148 Blondie Wong interview, 93–100 “Book of Cow,” 14 by Chris Tucker, 19–20 Dateline interview with Luke Benfey, 48–49 disclaimers on bomb-making files, 60–61 “Gerbil Feed Bomb,” 11, 49 numbered cDc files, 18, 32, 59, 98 by Phrack, 25, 43 by Psychedelic Warlord, 15 “Sex with Satan,” 59 Villeneuve interviewing Laird, 131 Won Ton Con, 88 See also bulletin boards Thiel, Peter, 192, 196 Thieme, Richard, 117–118 Third Technical Department, 135 Thompson, Fred, 76 Tiananmen Square massacre, 87, 92, 94–95, 128 Tibet Action Institute, 131 Tibetan exiles, 100–103, 130–136 Time (magazine), 199 Topiary. See Davis, Jake Topletz, Steve, 129–130, 195–196 Tor, 3, 128–133, 139–140, 152–157, 195, 210 Toronto Star (newspaper), 95–96 trolling, 54, 170, 193–194, 195–196, 210 Trump, Donald administrative policies of, 2, 6–7, 202–203, 206–207, 212 Russian election interference, 4–5, 166, 176, 183, 190–191, 199–200, 202 supporters of, 158–159, 191–196 trust amongst hackers, 21, 29, 46, 148, 156–158, 162, 191 of computer programs, 77–78, 82, 139–140, 175, 197–198 TrustyCon, 198 Tucker, Chris (Nightstalker), 18–20, 43, 63–64, 89, 91–92, 195 Turkey, 168–170 Tweety Fish.

Spooked: The Trump Dossier, Black Cube, and the Rise of Private Spies by Barry Meier

Airbnb, business intelligence, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, false flag, forensic accounting, global pandemic, Global Witness, index card, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, Londongrad, medical malpractice, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, WikiLeaks

In 2009, he had pitched Brian Ross and Rhonda Schwartz of ABC News on the idea of doing pieces based on his cases. A decade later, Fusion GPS approached a film company run by Alex Gibney, the well-known documentary filmmaker, with a similar proposal. The company passed. But not long afterward, Alex Gibney and Lowell Bergman, the former 60 Minutes producer, started working on a documentary about Russian election interference. Simpson told Gibney that he was desperate to tell the story of the dossier as part of the film so it would be on tape in case someone tried to harm him. In March 2017, Gibney traveled to what he later described in the documentary as an “undisclosed” location in California to interview Simpson.

Messing With the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians, and Fake News by Clint Watts

4chan, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Climatic Research Unit, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, Filter Bubble, global pandemic, Google Earth, Hacker News, illegal immigration, information security, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, Julian Assange, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, operational security, pre–internet, Russian election interference, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Bannon, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Turing test, University of East Anglia, Valery Gerasimov, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day

In July, eight Republicans visited Moscow—the first congressional delegation to visit the country since Russia annexed Crimea in 2014. Legislative exchanges with the U.S. and other countries are not unusual per se, but reigniting relations with the Kremlin amid two congressional investigations and a Special Counsel investigation into Russian election interference seemed strangely timed. The GOP statements regarding Russia only confirmed the exchange as a bizarre spectacle. “Most countries would meddle and play in our domestic elections if they could,” Republican Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama told the Washington Examiner in June 2018, just before he’d leave for Moscow.

The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth by Jonathan Rauch

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, active measures, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, Black Lives Matter, centre right, classic study, Climategate, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, deplatforming, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, framing effect, hive mind, illegal immigration, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, jimmy wales, Jon Ronson, Louis Pasteur, market bubble, meta-analysis, microaggression, mirror neurons, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer, post-truth, profit motive, QAnon, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Russian election interference, social software, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

“There is intense, unrelenting pressure from Trump and his White House to bend the norms of objectivity and independence that have always been a hallmark of the American government,” Peter Strzok, a former FBI agent, told Lawfare’s Benjamin Wittes in a 2020 interview.12 Under the circumstances, what seems remarkable is how many government professionals have stood their ground. As I wrote this chapter, news broke that a former head of the Department of Homeland Security’s intelligence division had blown the whistle on efforts by political appointees to tone down assessments of Russian election interference.13 “Heroic” is the only adequate word for an official who comes forward to accuse his superiors of turning a blind eye to the country’s enemies. Others in the government, such as Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, fought tooth and nail to resist White House efforts to shade the truth about the COVID-19 pandemic.

Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Biosphere 2, Carl Icahn, centre right, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, forensic accounting, illegal immigration, impulse control, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, obamacare, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steve Bannon, Travis Kalanick, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

(The Kushner position was not helped by the fact that the president had been gleefully telling multiple people that Jared could solve the Middle East problem because the Kushners knew all the best people in Israel.) During the first week of May, the Times and the Washington Post covered the Kushner family’s supposed efforts to attract Chinese investors with the promise of U.S. visas. “The kids”—Jared and Ivanka—exhibited an increasingly panicked sense that the FBI and DOJ were moving beyond Russian election interference and into finances. “Ivanka is terrified,” said a satisfied Bannon. Trump turned to suggesting to his billionaire chorus that he fire FBI director Comey. He had raised this idea many times before, but always, seemingly, at the same time and in the same context that he brought up the possibility of firing everybody.

Targeted: The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower's Inside Story of How Big Data, Trump, and Facebook Broke Democracy and How It Can Happen Again by Brittany Kaiser

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Asian financial crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, centre right, Chelsea Manning, clean water, cognitive dissonance, crony capitalism, dark pattern, data science, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Etonian, fake news, haute couture, illegal immigration, Julian Assange, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Nelson Mandela, off grid, open borders, public intellectual, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Russian election interference, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, statistical model, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, the High Line, the scientific method, WeWork, WikiLeaks, you are the product, young professional

Many similar investigations are still in progress, from the FTC negotiation of a $5 billion fine for Facebook’s negligence and inability to protect consumers, to the criminal investigations of the Brexiteers. And of course, the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees’ hearings on the Mueller investigation into Russian election interference and possible obstruction of justice by President Trump are ongoing at the time of this writing. One morning in March 2019, I woke up to a flood of texts and emails: Congressman Jerry Nadler had tweeted a list of eighty-one people who were to be called as witnesses in his investigation into whether President Trump was fit to serve.

Active Measures by Thomas Rid

1960s counterculture, 4chan, active measures, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, call centre, Charlie Hebdo massacre, Chelsea Manning, continuation of politics by other means, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, East Village, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, guest worker program, information security, Internet Archive, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, Julian Assange, kremlinology, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, operational security, peer-to-peer, Prenzlauer Berg, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, zero day

Forces Headquarters in Europe translator project of IRA transparency activism Treaty of Rome Trémeaud, André Trémeaud, Henriette Tretyakov, Sergei TRIBUNAL operation Tribüne, Die Triunfo, El troll farm, see Internet Research Agency Trotsky, Leon True Blues (Petersen) Trump, Donald Trust, the: CIA study on; Finland and; military goals of; MOTsR and; Poland and; Reilly’s death and; Shulgin and; SVR study on; unraveling of; Yakushev interrogation and TTAPS project Turco, Richard Turkish guest workers TV5/Monde Twitter U UfJ (Untersuchungsausschuss freiheitlicher Juristen) Ukraine: Anonymous Ukraine and; CEC attack in; CERT in; civil war in; Crimea annexation and; EU and; “Euromaidan” protest movement in; NotPetya attack on; Protsyk’s forged emails and; Russian election interference in; Russian-orchestrated digital leaks and Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council/Foreign Representation (ZP/UHVR) Ulbricht, Walter UN (United Nations) Unemployment Day demonstrations of 1930 Unit 26165, GRU Unit 74455, GRU United Nations (UN) United States (U.S.): American Communist Party in; Berlin Airlift and; CyberCaliphate attack against; digital leaks exposing EU and; election interference of 2016 response of; FSB sanctions from; Global War Plan for Clandestine Operations of; guerrilla units of; IRA’s research on; military psychosis theory and; neutron bomb and; NotPetya attack against; Philippines assistance from; Poland monitored by; racial engineering and; Russian interference in 2016 election of; Strategic Air Command of; Vietnam War and; see also Central Intelligence Agency United States Peace Council Untersuchungsausschuss freiheitlicher Juristen (UfJ) U.S., see United States V Valentini, Giovanni Vechernyaya Moskva V for Vendetta vida por la legalidad, Una (Prats) Vietnam War VirusTotal Voice of Russia Volkskrant, De Volkspolizei, Die Von Herz zu Herz newsletter Vosjoli, Philippe de VX W Wachtmeister, Wilhelm Wadsworth, James Wagenbreth, Rolf Wagner, Leo Wagner, Max Wahrheit, Die WannaCry virus Warner, Mark Washington Post, The Wasserman Schultz, Debbie Watergate scandal Wegweiser, Der Weinberger, Caspar Welch, Richard Wendland, Horst Wessel, Gerhard West, Kanye Western Union Whalen, Grover A.

Spies, Lies, and Algorithms by Amy B. Zegart

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, active measures, air gap, airport security, Apollo 13, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, Chelsea Manning, classic study, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, failed state, feminist movement, framing effect, fundamental attribution error, Gene Kranz, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Earth, index card, information asymmetry, information security, Internet of things, job automation, John Markoff, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Nate Silver, Network effects, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, operational security, Parler "social media", post-truth, power law, principal–agent problem, QAnon, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Russian election interference, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, seminal paper, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, uber lyft, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, zero day, zero-sum game

-Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear facilities, 226, 263, 264; variety vs. quantity of, 273. See also Russian interference in 2016 election cyber capabilities, U.S., focus on intelligence over attack in, 273–74 Cyber Command, U.S., 260, 271–72, 274, 296n92 cyberspace, as inherently insecure, 255 cyber warfare: as often subtle and diffuse, 258–59; Russian election interference as, 253, 254; by U.S., 369n52 data: critical importance in modern world, 254–56; cyberattacks’ damage to trust in, 269–70; encryption, as issue, 222–23; fast and accurate analysis, strategic value of, 6; shortages of, as inherent in intelligence analysis, 111–13 data, increasing volume and availability of: and artificial intelligence, value of, 139–41, 235–36; challenges created by, 4–6 dead drop, 143–44, 152, 153, 306n37 deepfake audio and video, 223, 243–46, 267–69 Deep State, as conspiracy theory, 38–39 defectors, false, 161, 162 Defense Department: and Chinese nuclear weapons, 242; and classification of nuclear weapons data, 32; constant cyberattacks on, 262; and covert action, 173, 185, 193; cyber missions, 258–60, 273–74; cyber vulnerability, 262; establishment of, 63; Google’s refusal to work for, 275; intelligence agencies, 71, 72, 73–74, 73f; and Iraq War, 120; and plausible deniability, 181; public affairs office, 26; study of espionage by Americans, 154, 155 Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA): creation of, 66; functions of, 74, 82; as top-tier agency, 74, 311n130 democratic accountability: covert action and, 185; tension between secrecy and, 49–50 devil’s advocates, to test analysis, 133 DIA.

Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth by Elizabeth Williamson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, anti-communist, anti-globalists, Asperger Syndrome, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, Columbine, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, dark triade / dark tetrad, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, estate planning, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, fulfillment center, illegal immigration, index card, Internet Archive, Jon Ronson, Jones Act, Kevin Roose, Mark Zuckerberg, medical malpractice, messenger bag, multilevel marketing, obamacare, Oklahoma City bombing, Parler "social media", post-truth, QAnon, Robert Mercer, Russian election interference, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, source of truth, Steve Bannon, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, TikTok, Timothy McVeigh, traveling salesman, Twitter Arab Spring, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, work culture , Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

The companies have spent billions on lobbying and marketing campaigns aimed at preserving their Section 230 immunity. Reminding Congress of 230’s original intent, they rhapsodize about their good deeds. Mark Zuckerberg pivots to the social justice movements and marriages fostered by Facebook when asked about its role in enabling Russian election interference, the neo-Nazis gathering on Facebook groups, and the murders streamed on Facebook Live. While misinformation, menace, and calls to violence circulate among the hundreds of millions of videos viewed each day on Google’s YouTube, the company accepted plaudits for building “global community.”[13] Twitter publicly celebrated its role in linking activists during the pro-democracy Arab Spring protests and the nascent Black Lives Matter movement in the early 2010s while racist and misogynist attacks skyrocketed.