Stories from Abroad

[Commentary] Democratic governments concerned about new digital threats need to find better algorithms to defend democratic values in the global digital ecosystem. Democracy has always been hard. It requires an exquisite balance between freedom, security and democratic accountability. This is the profound challenge that confronts the world’s liberal democracies as they grapple with foreign disinformation operations, as well as home-grown hate speech, extremism, and fake news. Fear and conceptual confusion do not justify walking away from liberal values, which are a source of security and stability in democratic society. Private sector and government actors must design algorithms for democracy that simultaneously optimize for freedom, security, and democratic accountability in our digital world.

[Eileen Donahoe is Executive Director of the Global Digital Policy Incubator at Stanford University, and former U.S. ambassador to the UN Human Rights Council]

I live in the only country in the world where the internet gets worse every year — at least if you’re trying to look at YouTube or Twitter or Google or virtually any other large non-Chinese site. For years, the only way to get to such services has been with a virtual private network (VPN), a tool that slips past China’s “Great Firewall” into the freedom of the outside world. Even as the Chinese internet has gotten better, access to the outside has gotten worse. And now it might be cut off entirely, as orders from the government reportedly seek to shut down VPNs altogether, severing even this thin lifeline.

These increased measures aren’t about control of information. They’re about preventing mobilization — about stopping angry Chinese from using the methods practiced at Tahrir Square in Egypt and the Maidan in Ukraine. Match that with an ever more sprawling security state and growing top-down xenophobia, and measures that would have seemed implausibly harsh four years ago now seem highly likely. But these paranoid demands could end up hamstringing the country’s economic and technological ambitions, leaving it stuck in a pit of its own making.

China announced Aug 11 that it's investigating its own tech companies, like Tencent and Baidu, for giving users an avenue to spread violence and terror. The announcement follows government campaigns earlier this year in the United Kingdom, France and Germany that intend to place legal liability on tech companies for failing to control the presence of terrorist-related content on their platforms.

U.S. regulators have largely remained silent when it comes to policing the role of tech giants in distributing terrorist content, leaving the companies to police themselves in accordance to their own standards. In the past, tech companies have reacted to crises in a uniform fashion, but the attack in Charlottesville shows a a split. Some sites, like Google and GoDaddy, announced Monday that they would cut ties to a white nationalist website, while others have yet to comment. Neither Facebook nor Twitter updated their policies in response to the attack, although both groups do already have policies about violence.

Three days after Donald Trump named his campaign foreign policy team in March 2016, the youngest of the new advisers sent an e-mail to seven campaign officials with the subject line: “Meeting with Russian Leadership - Including Putin.” The adviser, George Papadopoulos, offered to set up “a meeting between us and the Russian leadership to discuss US-Russia ties under President Trump,” telling them his Russian contacts welcomed the opportunity, according to internal campaign e-mails read to The Washington Post. The proposal sent a ripple of concern through campaign headquarters in Trump Tower. Campaign co-chairman Sam Clovis wrote that he thought NATO allies should be consulted before any plans were made. Another Trump adviser, retired Navy Rear Adm. Charles Kubic, cited legal concerns, including a possible violation of U.S. sanctions against Russia and of the Logan Act, which prohibits U.S. citizens from unauthorized negotiation with foreign governments.

But Papadopoulos, a campaign volunteer with scant foreign policy experience, persisted. Between March and September, the self-described energy consultant sent at least a half-dozen requests for Trump, as he turned from primary candidate to party nominee, or for members of his team to meet with Russian officials. Among those to express concern about the effort was then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who rejected in May 2016 a proposal from Papadopoulos for Trump to do so. The exchanges are among more than 20,000 pages of documents the Trump campaign turned over to congressional committees this month after review by White House and defense lawyers.

[Commentary] Today, US technology companies adhere to a wide array of requirements from repressive governments that undermine Internet freedom and privacy. These demands violate international law, including the right to freedom of expression. But the enormous benefits of market access outweigh the relatively low costs associated with accepting repressive governments’ demands.

Undoubtedly, there are circumstances in which requests for information or access to accounts are reasonable, such as when investigating terrorism and major crimes. But the misuse and abuse of this power by authoritarian governments are routine. Unless the U.S. government stands in support of companies that refuse to comply with wrongful requirements, authoritarian regimes will feel emboldened to make ever-increasing and unreasonable demands. And while U.S. technology companies should be able to invest in Internet-restricting countries, if their choices directly facilitate the persecution of these governments’ political opponents, then they should bear the costs.

[Jared Genser is an international human rights lawyer based in Washington.]

Speedtest has long been the go-to for measuring internet speed, and now it’s launched the Speedtest Global Index, a monthly global ranking that allows you to see how your country stacks up when it comes to internet speed. The Global Index compiles data from the billions of tests consumers run on the service, and shows both mobile and fixed broadband speeds from around the world. Set to be updated monthly, each country’s ranking shows both its average download speed, as well as any difference in rank from the previous month. Click through on an individual country, and view both its average download and upload speed.

A watchdog group will file a complaint with the Federal Election Commission Aug 9 alleging that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) violated federal law by soliciting opposition research on the Trump campaign from a foreign government. The conservative group Foundation for Accountability & Civic Trust (FACT), launched in 2014 by former U.S. attorney Matthew Whitaker, will allege that political operative Alexandra Chalupa, in her capacity as a DNC consultant, improperly sought intelligence on President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, from Ukrainian officials.

“Federal law and Commission regulations prohibit any person from knowingly soliciting, accepting or receiving contributions or donations of money or other things of value from a foreign national,” the complaint reads. FACT alleges that Chalupa violated the ban by “knowingly soliciting” a “valuable in-kind contribution in the form of opposition research and information on a Trump campaign official from a foreign national on behalf of the Democratic National Committee.”

FBI agents raided the Alexandria (VA) home of President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman late in July, using a search warrant to seize documents and other materials, according to people familiar with the special counsel investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election. Federal agents appeared at Paul Manafort’s home without advance warning in the predawn hours of July 26, the day after he met voluntarily with the staff for the Senate Intelligence Committee.

The search warrant was wide-ranging and FBI agents working with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III departed the home with various records. Jason Maloni, a spokesman for Manafort, confirmed that agents executed a warrant at one of the political consultant’s homes and that Manafort cooperated with the search. Manafort has been voluntarily producing documents to congressional committees investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election. The search warrant indicates investigators may have argued to a federal judge they had reason to believe Manafort could not be trusted to turn over all records in response to a grand jury subpoena. It could also have been intended to send a message to President Trump’s former campaign chairman that he should not expect gentle treatment or legal courtesies from Mueller’s team.

The US residential median broadband price was $80 per month during the second quarter of 2017, according to research from Point Topic. Globally, the average residential download speed was 135 Mbps and the average monthly charge was $105. The best value was provided by fiber (208 Mbps for $94) and the worst by copper (14 Mbps for $68).

The range between high and low prices for broadband service tend to be more extreme in some countries than in others, according to Point Topic’s data. India (a high/low range of about $120/$5), Brazil (about $115/$20) and Turkey (about $118/$20) have a higher range, while Germany (about $50/$22), Japan (about $35/$3), South Korea (about $55/$30) and Russia (about $30/$5) tend to have less of a gap between high and low broadband speeds. The midrange seems to be comprised of China (about $60/$5), the United States (about $85/$15), France (about $55/$10) and the UK (about $55/$5).

The internet’s global expansion is entering a new phase, and it looks decidedly unlike the last one. Instead of typing searches and e-mails, a wave of newcomers—“the next billion,” the tech industry calls them—is avoiding text, using voice activation and communicating with images. They are a swath of the world’s less-educated, online for the first time thanks to low-end smartphones, cheap data plans and intuitive apps that let them navigate despite poor literacy. Incumbent tech companies are finding they must rethink their products for these newcomers and face local competitors that have been quicker to figure them out.

Mr. Singh, 36, balances suitcases on his head in New Delhi, earning less than $8 a day as a porter in one of India’s biggest railway stations. He isn’t comfortable reading or using a keyboard. That doesn’t stop him from checking train schedules, messaging family and downloading movies. “We don’t know anything about e-mails or even how to send one,” said Mr. Singh, who went online only in the past year. “But we are enjoying the internet to the fullest.”