technology
Mustafa Jabbar for tough action against digital criminals
Posts and Telecommunications Minister Mustaf Jabbar has stressed the importance of taking tough action against the digital criminals involved in e-commerce frauds.
Speaking at a webinar titled “E-commerce: Current Situation and Possibilities’’ on Saturday, he said digital criminals should be brought to book at the earliest to curb such crimes.
The minister’s remark came as Nagad, the mobile financial service arm of Bangladesh Post Office, has taken a move recently to suspend some accounts temporarily for suspicious e-commerce transactions and forward the accounts information to law enforcement agencies.
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“The way criminals are using technology for digital crimes we should use superior technology to curb those crimes. To prevent digital crimes, we need digital measures as Nagad did,” the minister said.
“If we cannot tackle the digital criminals, then they’ll grow manifold, and such crimes will increase exponentially,” he added.
Head of Bangladesh Financial Intelligence Unit (BFIU) Abu Hena Mohd Razee Hassan, additional deputy commissioner (ADC) of Counter Terrorism and Transnational Crime (CTTC) Md Towhidul Islam, general secretary of the e-Commerce Association of Bangladesh (e-CAB) Muhammad Abdul Wahed Tomal and Nagad chief operating officer Ashish Chakraborty joined the webinar. Nagad chief public affairs officer Solaiman Shukhon moderated the event.
Mustaf Jabbar said the government wants a digital society which is free from criminal activities. “Nagad is a service of the Postal Department. So, we can assure you from the government side that the law enforcement agencies will get the highest level of support from us in dealing with the digital criminals.”
Under the money-laundering law, Abu Hena Mohammad Razee Hassan said, there is a provision of 4 to 12 years of prison sentence and impose fine up to double of the sum of the money laundered.
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“Under this law, any organisation or individual is bound to provide relevant information like how much money is transferred to where and to whom. The organisations and institutions also have an obligation to provide any suspicious transaction voluntarily. After analysing such transaction patterns, we send those to law enforcement agencies for necessary action,” he said.
Ashish Chakraborty said they can only share the list of the suspicious account details, but the rest of the work will have to be done by the law enforcement agencies.
Under these suspicious accounts, he said, there could be some accounts which might not be involved in any criminal activities. “We’ve suspended those accounts too for now. The law enforcement agencies will decide the matter now.”
“We’re hopeful of taking next steps in accordance with the BFIU and law enforcement agencies. We’re also observing those involved in such crimes and running propaganda against Nagad,” Ashish said.
Towhidul Islam of CTTC said law enforcers can take action against the offenders of such crimes under the section 22 and 23 of the Digital Security Act and the Panel Act, though police were not made a party in the 2018 e-commerce guidelines. “Customers can lodge complaints with police stations and the criminals could face punishment of 2 to 7 years of jail sentence.”
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Abdul Wahed Tomal said it is the right time to take action against those e-commerce firms involved in fraudulent activities and the corrupt businessmen and their collaborators. “We should take a zero-tolerance stance against such criminals.”
Recently, some suspicious transactions were observed on the platform of Bangladesh Post Office’s mobile financial wing Nagad.
Nagad’s AI technology detected those transactions and handed over the information to different law enforcement agencies. At the same time those accounts were suspended temporarily. An official complaint was also lodged with the Counter Terrorism and Transnational Crime (CTTC) in this connection.
Do we need humans for that job? Automation booms after COVID
Ask for a roast beef sandwich at an Arby’s drive-thru east of Los Angeles and you may be talking to Tori — an artificially intelligent voice assistant that will take your order and send it to the line cooks.
“It doesn’t call sick,” says Amir Siddiqi, whose family installed the AI voice at its Arby’s franchise this year in Ontario, California. “It doesn’t get corona. And the reliability of it is great.”
The pandemic didn’t just threaten Americans’ health when it slammed the U.S. in 2020 -- it may also have posed a long-term threat to many of their jobs. Faced with worker shortages and higher labor costs, companies are starting to automate service sector jobs that economists once considered safe, assuming that machines couldn’t easily provide the human contact they believed customers would demand.
Past experience suggests that such automation waves eventually create more jobs than they destroy, but that they also disproportionately wipe out less skilled jobs that many low-income workers depend on. Resulting growing pains for the U.S. economy could be severe.
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If not for the pandemic, Siddiqi probably wouldn’t have bothered investing in new technology that could alienate existing employees and some customers. But it’s gone smoothly, he says: “Basically, there’s less people needed but those folks are now working in the kitchen and other areas.”
Ideally, automation can redeploy workers into better and more interesting work, so long as they can get the appropriate technical training, says Johannes Moenius, an economist at the University of Redlands. But although that’s happening now, it’s not moving quickly enough, he says.
Worse, an entire class of service jobs created when manufacturing began to deploy more automation may now be at risk. “The robots escaped the manufacturing sector and went into the much larger service sector,” he says. “I regarded contact jobs as safe. I was completely taken by surprise.”
Improvements in robot technology allow machines to do many tasks that previously required people -- tossing pizza dough, transporting hospital linens, inspecting gauges, sorting goods. The pandemic accelerated their adoption. Robots, after all, can’t get sick or spread disease. Nor do they request time off to handle unexpected childcare emergencies.
Economists at the International Monetary Fund found that past pandemics had encouraged firms to invest in machines in ways that could boost productivity -- but also kill low-skill jobs. “Our results suggest that the concerns about the rise of the robots amid the COVID-19 pandemic seem justified,” they wrote in a January paper.
The consequences could fall most heavily on the less-educated women who disproportionately occupy the low- and mid-wage jobs most exposed to automation -- and to viral infections. Those jobs include salesclerks, administrative assistants, cashiers and aides in hospitals and those who take care of the sick and elderly.
Employers seem eager to bring on the machines. A survey last year by the nonprofit World Economic Forum found that 43% of companies planned to reduce their workforce as a result of new technology. Since the second quarter of 2020, business investment in equipment has grown 26%, more than twice as fast as the overall economy.
The fastest growth is expected in the roving machines that clean the floors of supermarkets, hospitals and warehouses, according to the International Federation of Robotics, a trade group. The same group also expects an uptick in sales of robots that provide shoppers with information or deliver room service orders in hotels.
Restaurants have been among the most visible robot adopters. In late August, for instance, the salad chain Sweetgreen announced it was buying kitchen robotics startup Spyce, which makes a machine that cooks up vegetables and grains and spouts them into bowls.
It’s not just robots, either -- software and AI-powered services are on the rise as well. Starbucks has been automating the behind-the-scenes work of keeping track of a store’s inventory. More stores have moved to self-checkout.
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Scott Lawton, CEO of the Arlington, Virginia-based restaurant chain Bartaco, was having trouble last fall getting servers to return to his restaurants when they reopened during the pandemic.
So he decided to do without them. With the help of a software firm, his company developed an online ordering and payment system customers could use over their phones. Diners now simply scan a barcode at the center of each table to access a menu and order their food without waiting for a server. Workers bring food and drinks to their tables. And when they’re done eating, customers pay over their phones and leave.
The innovation has shaved the number of staff, but workers aren’t necessarily worse off. Each Bartaco location — there are 21 — now has up to eight assistant managers, roughly double the pre-pandemic total. Many are former servers, and they roam among the tables to make sure everyone has what they need. They are paid annual salaries starting at $55,000 rather than hourly wages.
Tips are now shared among all the other employees, including dishwashers, who now typically earn $20 an hour or more, far higher than their pre-pandemic pay. “We don’t have the labor shortages that you’re reading about on the news,” Lawton says.
The uptick in automation has not stalled a stunning rebound in the U.S. jobs market -- at least so far.
The U.S. economy lost a staggering 22.4 million jobs in March and April 2020, when the pandemic gale hit the U.S. Hiring has since bounced back briskly: Employers have brought back 17 million jobs since April 2020. In June, they posted a record 10.1 million job openings and are complaining that they can’t find enough workers.
Behind the hiring boom is a surge in spending by consumers, many of whom got through the crisis in unexpectedly good shape financially -- thanks to both federal relief checks and, in many cases, savings accumulated by working from home and skipping the daily commute.
Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, expects employers are likely to be scrambling for workers for a long time.
For one thing, many Americans are taking their time returning to work -- some because they’re still worried about COVID-19 health risks and childcare problems, others because of generous federal unemployment benefits, set to expire nationwide Sept. 6.
In addition, large numbers of Baby Boom workers are retiring. “The labor market is going to be very, very tight for the foreseeable future,” Zandi says.
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For now, the short-term benefits of the economic snapback are overwhelming any job losses from automation, whose effects tend to show up gradually over a period of years. That may not last. Last year, researchers at the University of Zurich and University of British Columbia found that the so-called jobless recoveries of the past 35 years, in which economic output rebounded from recessions faster than employment, could be explained by the loss of jobs vulnerable to automation.
Despite strong hiring since the middle of last year, the U.S. economy is still 5.3 million jobs short of what it had in February 2020. And Lydia Boussour, lead U.S. economist at Oxford Economics, calculated last month that 40% of the missing jobs are vulnerable to automation, especially those in food preparation, retail sales and manufacturing.
Some economists worry that automation pushes workers into lower-paid positions. Daron Acemoglu, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Pascual Restrepo of Boston University estimated in June that up to 70% of the stagnation in U.S. wages between 1980 and 2016 could be explained by machines replacing humans doing routine tasks.
“Many of the jobs that get automated were at the middle of the skill distribution,” Acemoglu says. “They don’t exist anymore, and the workers that used to perform them are now doing lower-skill jobs.”
Will we need vaccine passports to do fun things?
Ready to go out on the town before summer ends? In parts of the U.S., you might have to carry your COVID-19 vaccine card or a digital copy to get into restaurants, bars, nightclubs and outdoor music festivals.
After resisting the divisive concept of vaccine passports through most of the pandemic, a fast-growing number of private venues and some local officials are now requiring proof of immunization in public settings to reduce the spread of the highly transmissible delta variant of the coronavirus — and to assuage wary customers.
It’s unlikely the U.S. will adopt a national mandate like the one in France, which on Monday began requiring people to show a QR code proving they have a special virus pass before they can enjoy restaurants and cafes or travel across the country.
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But enough venues are starting to ask for digital passes to worry some privacy advocates, who fear the trend could habituate consumers to constant tracking.
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WHO’S ASKING FOR VACCINE PASSPORTS?
New York City set the tone last week when Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that the city will soon require proof of COVID-19 vaccination for anyone who wants to dine indoors at a restaurant, see a performance or go to the gym.
But a growing number of private venues, from Broadway theaters to music clubs in Minneapolis and Milwaukee, have established their own similar rules for patrons.
“I’m a firm believer in the right for people to choose whether or not they get the vaccine,” said Tami Montgomery, owner of Dru’s Bar in Memphis, Tennessee, which will start asking for paper vaccine cards along with photo identification on Thursday. “But it’s my business and I have to make decisions based on what will protect my staff, business and customers.”
Organizers of the Lollapalooza music festival in Chicago said on its opening day in late July that more than 90% of some 100,000 attendees presented proof of a vaccination, while most of the rest showed they’d recently had a negative COVID-19 test. Hundreds of others were turned away for lack of paperwork.
Only in a handful of states — Texas and Florida are the biggest — are private businesses prohibited from requiring proof of vaccination.
HOW DO THEY WORK?
In some places, venues are simply asking you to bring your vaccination card — the same piece of paper you get from health providers and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Taking a picture of that card at home and then showing the image to the bouncer at the club can also work.
New York City offers a streamlined way of showing a photo through its NYC COVID Safe App, in which people can store images of their vaccine cards and then display them in the app when needed.
Other places are encouraging people to register their credentials using a scannable digital pass like New York’s statewide Excelsior Pass or similar systems adopted by California, Hawaii and Louisiana and private companies like Walmart and the airport security app Clear. Some of the state-sponsored digital passes verify a person’s vaccine credentials through a state or local immunization registry.
Read: Canada begins allowing vaccinated US citizens to visit again
Such passes are designed for convenience and to prevent fraud. But that’s also where the biggest privacy concerns emerge, said Adam Schwartz, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
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WHAT’S WRONG WITH QR CODES?
The barcode known as a QR code was originally designed to help track products in a factory. These days, it’s increasingly being used to track people’s devices.
“Those systems are a giant leap towards tracking people’s location,” Schwartz said. “There’s a very real risk of mission creep once there are scanners at doors and people are showing their scannable token to pass through.”
But the coalition that helped create the Smart Health Card framework used by New York, California and the Canadian province of Quebec say they’ve already set privacy safeguards to guard against misuse of health data.
So long as a venue is using a VCI-compliant scanner, there shouldn’t be anything to worry about, said Dr. Brian Anderson, chief digital health physician at MITRE and co-lead of the Vaccination Credential Initiative, which counts Apple, Microsoft and the Mayo Clinic among its members. “That app won’t store an individual’s data beyond the time that the QR code is scanned,” he said.
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WHY NOT STICK WITH PAPER?
Proponents of digital passports say they’re more convenient for already-overwhelmed restaurants and other venues because workers don’t have to peer at everyone’s vaccine cards before letting them in. Lines move faster, and the digital scan reassures those who don’t want to risk damaging or losing their paper cards. It’s also easy to fake a paper card or a photo of one.
The startup CrowdPass, which generates QR codes so vaccinated people can attend events, said it helped get about 15,000 people swiftly admitted into the recent Newport Folk and Newport Jazz festivals in Rhode Island. The events required attendees to digitally upload proof of full vaccination or a recent negative test.
Demand was slow at first, said Duncan Abdelnour, the startup’s co-founder and president. “But since the delta variant has sprung, we’ve had a huge uptick.” Among its clients are couples planning weddings and organizers of other small events. Abdelnour said the biggest spike in calls came after New York City’s announcement.
Read: Saudi Arabia opens Umrah pilgrimage to vaccinated worshipers from abroad
It’s a crowded market that includes apps made by Clear and Walmart, many of which have now signed onto the VCI’s privacy standards and code of conduct.
But for Schwartz, of the EFF, the best advice for venues that need to see proof of vaccination is to stick to asking for the CDC card or a photo of it.
The process of making vaccination checks should end when the pandemic does, Schwartz said. “Some of the companies that are in this space have a track record of being in the business of monetizing data,” he added. “I’m not going to name names, but they’re the last people that should be involved in developing scanners for proof of vaccination.”
Iranians fear new bill will restrict internet even further
For Ali Hedieloo, a 40-year-old making wooden furniture in Iran’s capital, Instagram is more than just a surfeit of glossy images. Like an estimated 1 million other Iranians, it’s how he finds customers, as the app has exploded into a massive e-commerce service in the sanctions-hit country.
But now, the social media platform has come under threat. Iran moved last week toward further government restrictions on Instagram and other apps, as hard-line lawmakers agreed to discuss a bill that many fear will undermine communication, wipe out livelihoods and open the door to the banning of key social media tools.
“I and the people working here are likely to lose our jobs if this bill becomes effective,” said Hedieloo from his dimly lit workshop in the southern suburbs of Tehran, where he sands bleached wood and snaps photos of adorned desks to advertise.
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The bill has yet to be approved by Iran’s hard-liner dominated parliament, but it is already stirring anxiety among young Iranians, avid social media users, online business owners and entrepreneurs. Iran is a country with some 94 million internet devices in use among its over 80 million people. Nearly 70% of Iran’s population uses smartphones.
Over 900,000 Iranians have signed a petition opposing the bill. The protest comes at a tense time for Iran, with Ebrahim Raisi, the former judiciary chief and hard-line protege of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, assuming the country’s highest civilian position this week. Journalists, civil society advocates and government critics have raised the alarm about the possible increase of social repression once he takes office.
The draft legislation, first proposed this spring by conservative lawmakers, requires major foreign tech giants such as Facebook to register with the Iranian government and be subject to its oversight and data ownership rules.
Companies that host unregistered social media apps in Iran would risk penalties, with authorities empowered to slow down access to the companies’ services as a way to force them to comply. Lawmakers have noted that the crippling U.S. sanctions on Iran make the registration of American tech companies in the country impossible, effectively ensuring their ban.
The law would also criminalize the sale and distribution of virtual private networks and proxies — a critical way Iranians access long-blocked social media platforms like Facebook, Telegram, Twitter and YouTube. It also would bar government officials from running accounts on banned social media platforms, which they now use to communicate with citizens and the press. Even the office of the supreme leader has a Twitter account with over 890,000 followers.
And finally, the bill takes control of the internet away from the civilian government and places it under the armed forces.
The bill’s goal, according to its authors, is to “protect users and their rights.” Hard-liners in the government have long viewed social messaging and media services as part of a “soft war” by the West against the Islamic Republic. Over time, Iran has created what some have called the “halal” internet — the Islamic Republic’s own locally controlled version of the internet aimed at restricting what the public can see.
Supporters of the bill, such as hard-line lawmaker Ali Yazdikhah, have hailed it as a step toward an independent Iranian internet, where “people will start to prefer locally developed services” over foreign companies.
Read: Drone attacks by Iraqi militias reflect Iran’s waning hold
“There is no reason to worry, online businesses will stay, and even we promise that they will expand too,” he said.
Internet advocates, however, fear the measures will tip the country toward an even more tightly controlled model like China, whose “Great Firewall” blocks access to thousands of foreign websites and slows others.
Iran’s outgoing Information Technology Minister Mohammad Javad Azari Jahromi, whom the hard-line judiciary summoned for prosecution earlier this year over his refusal to block Instagram, warned that the bill would curtail access to information and lead to full-blown bans of popular messaging apps. In a letter to Raisi last month, he urged the president-elect to reconsider the bill.
Facebook, which owns Instagram, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Social media is a highly contested space in Iran, where the government retains tight control over newspapers and remains the only entity allowed to broadcast on television and radio. Over recent years, anti-government protesters have used social media as a communication tool to mobilize and spread their message, prompting authorities to cripple internet services.
During the turmoil in the fall of 2019, for instance, the government imposed a near-complete internet blackout. Even scattered demonstrations, such as the recent protests over water shortages in Iran’s southwest, have seen disruptions of mobile internet service.
But many ordinary Iranians, reeling from harsh American sanctions that have severed access to international banking systems and triggered runaway inflation, remain more preoccupied with the bill’s potential financial fallout.
As the coronavirus ravages Iran, a growing number of people like Hedieloo have turned to Instagram to make a living — tutoring and selling homemade goods and art. Over 190,000 businesses moved online over the past year.
Read:US takes down Iran-linked news sites, alleges disinformation
Although much about the bill’s fate remains uncertain, experts say it already has sent a chill through commerce on Instagram, where once-hopeful users now doubt they have a future on the app.
“I and everyone else who is working in cyberspace is worried,” said Milad Nouri, a software developer and technology analyst. “This includes a teenager playing online games, a YouTuber making money from their channel, an influencer, an online shop based on Instagram.”
He added: “Everyone is somehow stressed.”
Daraz ropes in Hasinul as chief corporate affairs officer
E-commerce platform Daraz Bangladesh has appointed AHM Hasinul Quddus as its chief corporate affairs officer.
Hasinul previously served as the government & stakeholder relations director at Banglalink Digital Communications Ltd, the e-commerce platform said in a release.
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"I am a true believer in embracing technology and change for the growth of society and the economy. Additionally, I aspire to empower ordinary people to achieve extraordinary things," Hasinul said.
"I value the trust that millions of sellers and buyers have in Daraz, and we shall continue to provide them with innovative services and unparalleled customer care," he added.
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Syed Mostahidal Hoq, Managing Director, Daraz Bangladesh Limited, added, “AHM Hasinul Quddus brings his extensive knowledge in corporate and regulatory affairs to Daraz and the e-commerce industry as a whole. We are confident that he will deliver great results for us as the chief corporate affairs officer.”
In a career spanning 17 years, Hasinul Quddus also worked with Grameenphone Limited and Huawei Technologies Co. (Bangladesh) Ltd.
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Pentagon cancels disputed JEDI cloud contract with Microsoft
The Pentagon said it canceled a disputed cloud-computing contract with Microsoft that could eventually have been worth $10 billion. It will instead pursue a deal with both Microsoft and Amazon and possibly other cloud service providers.
“With the shifting technology environment, it has become clear that the JEDI Cloud contract, which has long been delayed, no longer meets the requirements to fill the DoD’s capability gaps,” the Pentagon said in a statement Tuesday.
The statement did not directly mention that the Pentagon faced extended legal challenges by Amazon to the original $1 million contract awarded to Microsoft. Amazon argued that the Microsoft award was tainted by politics, particularly then-President Donald Trump’s antagonism toward Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, who stepped down Monday as the company’s chief executive officer. Bezos owns The Washington Post, a newspaper often criticized by Trump.
The Pentagon’s chief information officer, John Sherman, told reporters Tuesday that during the lengthy legal fight with Amazon, “the landscape has evolved” with new possibilities for large-scale cloud computing services. Thus it was decided, he said, to start over and seek multiple vendors.
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Sherman said JEDI will be replaced by a new program called Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability, and that both Amazon and Microsoft “likely” will be awarded parts of the business, although neither is guaranteed. Sherman said the three other large cloud service providers — Google, IBM and Oracle — might qualify, too.
Microsoft said in response to the Pentagon announcement, “We understand the DoD s rationale, and we support them and every military member who needs the mission-critical 21st century technology JEDI would have provided. The DoD faced a difficult choice: Continue with what could be a years-long litigation battle or find another path forward.”
Amazon said it understands and agrees with the Pentagon’s decision. In a statement, the company reiterated its view that the 2019 contract award was not based on the merits of the competing proposals “and instead was the result of outside influence that has no place in government procurement.”
Oracle, which had earlier sought the JEDI contact but didn’t make it to the final round, declined comment Tuesday. In separate statements, IBM said it was evaluating the new Pentagon approach and Google said it looked forward to discussing it with Pentagon officials.
Read: Sanctioned Russian IT firm was partner with Microsoft, IBM
The JEDI project began with the $1 million contract award for Microsoft, meant as an initial step in a 10-year deal that could have reached $10 billion in value. The project that will replace it is a five-year program; Sherman said no exact contract value has been set but that it will be “in the billions.” Sherman said the government will negotiate the amount Microsoft will be paid for having its 2019 deal terminated.
Amazon Web Services, a market leader in providing cloud computing services, had long been considered a leading candidate to run the Pentagon’s Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure project, known as JEDI. The project was meant to store and process vast amounts of classified data, allowing the U.S. military to improve communications with soldiers on the battlefield and use artificial intelligence to speed up its war planning and fighting capabilities.
The JEDI contract became mired in legal challenges almost as soon as it was awarded to Microsoft in October 2019. The losing bidder, Amazon Web Services, went to court arguing that the Pentagon’s process was flawed and unfair, including that it was improperly influenced by politics.
This year the Pentagon had been hinting that it might scrap the contract, saying in May that it felt compelled to reconsider its options after a federal judge in April rejected a Pentagon move to have key parts of Amazon’s lawsuit dismissed.
Read:Microsoft buying speech recognition firm Nuance in $16B deal
The JEDI saga has been unusual for the political dimension linked to Trump. In April 2020, the Defense Department inspector general’s office concluded that the contracting process was in line with legal and government purchasing standards. The inspector general found no evidence of White House interference in the contract award process, but that review also said investigators could not fully review the matter because the White House would not allow unfettered access to witnesses.
Five months later, the Pentagon reaffirmed Microsoft as winner of the contract, but work remained stalled by Amazon’s legal challenge.
In its April 2020 report, the inspector general’s office did not draw a conclusion about whether the Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft Corp. was appropriately declared the winner. Rather, it looked at whether the decision-making process was proper and legal. It also examined allegations of unethical behavior by Pentagon officials involved in the matter and generally determined that any ethical lapses did not influence the outcome.
That review did not find evidence of White House pressure for the Pentagon to favor the Microsoft bid, but it also said it could not definitely determine the full extent of White House interactions with the Pentagon’s decision makers.
No ET, no answers: Intel report is inconclusive about UFOs
A long-awaited U.S. government report on UFOs released Friday makes at least one thing clear: The truth is still out there.
Investigators did not find extraterrestrial links in reviewing 144 sightings of aircraft or other devices apparently flying at mysterious speeds or trajectories. But they drew few other conclusions and instead highlighted the need for better data collection about what’s increasingly seen by Democrats and Republicans as a national security concern. In all but one of the sightings investigated, there was too little information for investigators to even broadly characterize the nature of the incident.
There were 18 cases in which witnesses saw “unusual” patterns of movement or flight characteristics, the report said, adding that more analysis was needed to determine if those sightings represented “breakthrough” technology.
Long the domain of science fiction and so-called ufologists, the subject of UFOs has in recent years drawn serious study from the Pentagon and intelligence agencies. The prospect of an adversary spying with unknown technology has alarmed lawmakers in both parties.
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Congress last year required the creation of the report delivered Friday. While its lack of conclusions has already been made public, the report on what the government calls “unidentified aerial phenomena” still represents a milestone in the study of the issue.
U.S. officials who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity said there were “no clear indications” that the sightings could be linked to alien life. There is also no definitive linkage of sightings to potentially unknown technology of an adversary like Russia or China.
“It’s clear that we need to improve our capacity to further analyze remaining UAP observations, even as we accept that there are some limits to our capacity to characterize and understand some of the observations that we have,” one official said.
The report was published online and delivered to the House and Senate intelligence committees with a classified annex. Lawmakers were given a briefing last week on the investigation. One person who attended the classified briefing and spoke on condition of anonymity said that lawmakers were given little information beyond what’s publicly available and that the only videos shown had already been made public.
The report lists five potential categories, including the possibility of foreign adversaries flying unknown technology to events occurring naturally in the atmosphere.
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But only one instance was categorized as “airborne clutter” and believed to be a large, deflating balloon. The rest are uncategorized because of a lack of information. That includes three instances of potential sightings captured on videos that were declassified and released in recent years.
The Department of Defense will over the next three months develop a new strategy for collecting and tracking information on potential sightings.
Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks said the UAP report highlights the problem of flight hazards on or near military test and training ranges. She ordered the Pentagon’s top intelligence and security official to establish a more formal means of coordinating the collection, reporting and analysis of UAP information. This body also would make recommendations on securing military test and training ranges.
“It is critical that the United States maintain operations security and safety at DoD ranges,” she wrote in a memo released Friday. “To this end, it is equally critical that all U.S. military aircrews or government personnel report whenever aircraft or other devices interfere with military training. This includes the observation and reporting of UAPs.”
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Part of the data collection effort is destigmatizing UAPs and pushing pilots to report what they see, even when what they see is implausible.
“A big problem around UAPs has been the cultural stigma,” said Rep. Andre Carson, an Indiana Democrat and member of the House Intelligence Committee, in an interview last week. “It has largely been relegated to science fiction.”
Sen. Marco Rubio, who as the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee has long pushed for more disclosure about UAPs, called the report “an important first step in cataloging these incidents, but it is just a first step.”
“The Defense Department and Intelligence Community have a lot of work to do before we can actually understand whether these aerial threats present a serious national security concern,” Rubio said in a statement.
States hesitant to adopt digital COVID vaccine verification
Customers wanting to wine, dine and unwind to live music at the City Winery’s flagship restaurant in New York must show proof of a COVID-19 vaccination to get in. But that’s not required at most other dining establishments in the city. And it’s not necessary at other City Winery sites around the U.S.
If City Winery tried doing such a thing at its places in Atlanta and Nashville, “we would have no business, because so many people are basically against it,” said CEO Michael Dorf.
Across the U.S., many hard-hit businesses eager to return to normal have been reluctant to demand proof of vaccination from customers. And the public and the politicians in many places have made it clear they don’t care for the idea.
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In fact, far more states have banned proof-of-vaccination policies than have created smartphone-based programs for people to digitally display their vaccination status.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention still recommends masks when dining or gathering indoors for those who aren’t fully vaccinated. But few states require it, and most businesses rely on voluntary compliance — even in places with low vaccination rates where COVID-19 cases are climbing.
Digital vaccine verification programs could make it easier to enforce safeguards and tamp down new outbreaks.
“But that only works when you have mass adoption, and mass adoption requires trust and actual buy-in with what the state health department is doing, which is not necessarily present in all states,” said Alan Butler, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington-based nonprofit organization.
Hawaii is the only state enforcing some version of a vaccine passport. It requires travelers to upload a photo or PDF of their Hawaii vaccination document or pass a pre-arrival COVID-19 test to avoid having to quarantine for 10 days.
Earlier this month, California became just the third state — behind New York and Louisiana — to offer residents a way to voluntarily display digital proof of their COVID-19 shots. None of those states requires the use of their digital verification systems to access either public or private-sector places.
By contrast, at least 18 states led by Republican governors or legislatures prohibit the creation of so-called vaccine passports or ban public entities from requiring proof of vaccination. Several of those — including Alabama, Florida, Iowa, Montana, North Dakota and Texas — also bar most businesses from denying service to those who aren’t vaccinated.
“Texas is open 100%, and we want to make sure that you have the freedom to go where you want without limits,” Gov. Greg Abbott said in signing a law against vaccine passports.
The prohibition doesn’t apply to the demands employers make on their employees. Earlier this month, a federal judge in Texas threw out a lawsuit from 117 Houston hospital employees who challenged a workplace requirement that they get vaccinated. More than 150 were later fired or resigned for not getting their shots.
In Louisiana, under a Republican-passed bill facing a potential veto from Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards, public facilities would not be allowed to bar unvaccinated people until the COVID-19 vaccines have received full approval from the Food and Drug Administration. The vaccines for now are being dispensed under emergency FDA authorization.
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In May, Louisiana launched a program allowing residents using the state’s digital driver’s license, LA Wallet, to add a record of their COVID-19 vaccination.
But its reach is still limited. About 105,000 people have activated the COVID-19 verification function. That’s about 14% of those with a digital license and less than 4% of Louisiana’s 3.1 million people with valid driver’s licenses.
Democratic state Rep. Ted James, who wrote the bill creating the digital driver’s license, said he has used the feature just once — to show an Uber driver in Nevada that he didn’t need to wear a mask. But James said he has never been asked to show it in Louisiana and doubts he ever will.
“Earlier in the year, I felt that at some point we would be limited in travel, going to certain places, unless we had the vaccine,” James said. Now, “I don’t foresee us ever having some type of requirement.”
As a step in reopening, New York in March launched its Excelsior Pass, the first state system to provide digital proof of COVID-19 vaccination or a recent negative test. As of early June, more than 2 million people had gotten the digital pass — about one-fifth of those who have been vaccinated.
At the City Winery, most customers bypass the Excelsior Pass and instead show their paper CDC vaccination cards to gain entry, according to Dorf, who said patrons at the 1,000-person capacity venue “appreciate going into a bubble of safety, knowing that everyone around them is vaccinated.”
Though larger ticketed events, like concerts at Madison Square Garden, require proof of vaccination, most businesses don’t ask.
“Think of a bar,” said Andrew Rigie, executive director of the New York City Hospitality Alliance. “You have four friends that go in — maybe two of them have it, the other two don’t. You’re going to turn the other two away when small businesses are struggling so much?”
Though most states have shied away from creating digital vaccination verification systems, the technology may soon become widespread nonetheless.
Vaccine providers such as Walmart and major health care systems already have agreed to make digital COVID-19 vaccination records available to customers. Apple also plans to incorporate the vaccination verification function into a software update coming this fall.
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Within months, hundreds of millions of people across the U.S. will be able to access digital copies of their COVID-19 vaccination records, said Brian Anderson, chief digital health physician at the nonprofit MITRE Corp., part of a coalition of health and technology organizations that developed such technology.
People will receive QR codes that can be stored on smartphones or printed on paper to be scanned by anyone seeking vaccine verification. Those who scan the codes won’t retain any of the information — a protection intended to address privacy concerns.
The California Chamber of Commerce said it welcomes the state’s new vaccine verification system as a way for employers to check on their employees. California regulations require most employees who aren’t fully vaccinated to wear masks when dealing with others indoors.
Digital vaccine verification “allows an employer who really wants to make sure the workplace is vaccinated to require that without having the impossible problem of ‘John says he’s vaccinated but he lost his vaccine card. What do we do?’ This solves that issue,” said Rob Moutrie, a policy advocate at the California Chamber of Commerce.
EXPLAINER: The significance of China’s new space station
Adding a crew to China’s new orbiting space station is another major advance for the burgeoning space power.
Here’s a look at key developments:
WHAT’S THE MISSION’S PURPOSE?
The three-member crew is due to stay for three months in the station’s main living module, named Tianhe, or Heavenly Harmony. They will be carrying out science experiments and maintenance, space walks and preparing the facility to receive two additional modules next year.
While China concedes it arrived late at the space station game, it says its facility is cutting-edge. It could also outlast the International Space Station, which is nearing the end of its functional lifespan.
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The launch Thursday also revives China’s crewed space program after a five-year hiatus. With Thursday’s launch, China has now sent 14 astronauts into space since it first achieved the feat in 2003, becoming the third country after the former Soviet Union and the U.S. to do so.
WHY IS CHINA BUILDING THE STATION?
As the Chinese economy was beginning to gather steam in the early 1990s, China formulated a plan for space exploration, which it has carried out at a steady, cautious cadence. While China has been barred from participation in the International Space Station, mainly over U.S. objections to the Chinese program’s secretive nature and close military connections, it’s likely the country would have built its own station anyway as it sought the status of a great space power.
At a news conference Wednesday, China Manned Space Agency Assistant Director Ji Qiming told reporters at the Jiuquan launch center that the construction and operation of the space station will raise China’s technologies and “accumulate experience for all the people.”
The space program is part of an overall drive to put China on track for even more ambitious missions and provide opportunities for cooperation with Russia and other, mostly European, countries along with the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs.
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POLITICS AND SECURITY
China’s space program has been a massive source of national pride, embodying its rise from poverty to the world’s second-largest economy over the past four decades. That has helped shore up the power of the Communist Party, whose authoritarian rule and strict limits on political activity have been tolerated by most Chinese as long as the economy is growing.
President and head of the party Xi Jinping has associated himself closely with that success, and Ji in his remarks cited Xi as setting the updated agenda for China’s rise to prominence in space. The first mission to the station also coincides with the celebration of the party centenary next month, an important political milestone.
At the same time, China is modernizing its military at a rapid pace, raising concerns from neighbors, the U.S. and its NATO allies. While China espouses the peaceful development of space on the basis of equality and mutual respect, many recall that China in January 2007 sent a ballistic missile into space to destroy an inactive weather satellite, creating a debris field that continues to be a threat.
WHO ARE THE ASTRONAUTS?
Mission commander Nie Haisheng, 56, and fellow astronauts Liu Boming, 54, and Tang Hongbo, 45, are former People’s Liberation Army Air Force pilots with graduate degrees and strong scientific backgrounds. All Chinese astronauts so far have been recruited from the military, underscoring its close ties to the space program.
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For Nie, it is his third trip to space, and for Liu, his second following a mission in 2008 that included China’s first space walk. Tang, who was recruited as one of the second batch of candidates in 2010, is flying in space for the first time.
Future missions to the station will include women, according to officials, with stays extended to as long as six months and as many as six astronauts on the station at a time during crew changeovers. With China stepping up international cooperation and exchanges, it’s only a matter of time before foreign astronauts join the Chinese colleagues on missions to the station, Ji told reporters Wednesday.
WHAT ELSE IS CHINA DOING IN SPACE?
Along with its crewed space program, China has been moving boldly into exploration of the solar system with robotic space ships. It landed a probe on Mars last month that carried a rover, the Zhurong, which is conducting a range of surveys, looking particularly for frozen water that could provide clues as to whether the red plant once supported life.
Earlier, China landed a probe and rover on the moon’s less explored far side, joining the Yutu, or Jade Rabbit, rover that was part of an earlier lunar exploration mission. China also brought back the first lunar samples by any country’s space program since the 1970s and officials say they want to send Chinese astronauts to the moon and eventually build a research base there.
Critical entities targeted in suspected Chinese cyber spying
A cyberespionage campaign blamed on China was more sweeping than previously known, with suspected state-backed hackers exploiting a device meant to boost internet security to penetrate the computers of critical U.S. entities.
The hack of Pulse Connect Secure networking devices came to light in April, but its scope is only now starting to become clear. The Associated Press has learned that the hackers targeted telecommunications giant Verizon and the country’s largest water agency. News broke earlier this month that the New York City subway system, the country’s largest, was also breached.
Security researchers say dozens of other high-value entities that have not yet been named were also targeted as part of the breach of Pulse Secure, which is used by many companies and governments for secure remote access to their networks.
It’s unclear what sensitive information, if any, was accessed. Some of the targets said they did not see any evidence of data being stolen. That uncertainty is common in cyberespionage and it can take months to determine data loss, if it is ever discovered. Ivanti, the Utah-based owner of Pulse Connect Secure, declined to comment on which customers were affected.
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But even if sensitive information wasn’t compromised, experts say it is worrisome that hackers managed to gain footholds in networks of critical organizations whose secrets could be of interest to China for commercial and national security reasons.
“The threat actors were able to get access to some really high-profile organizations, some really well-protected ones,” said Charles Carmakal, the chief technology officer of Mandiant, whose company first publicized the hacking campaign in April.
The Pulse Secure hack has largely gone unnoticed while a series of headline-grabbing ransomware attacks have highlighted the cyber vulnerabilities to U.S. critical infrastructure, including one on a major fuels pipeline that prompted widespread shortages at gas stations. The U.S. government is also still investigating the fallout of the SolarWinds hacking campaign launched by Russian cyber spies, which infiltrated dozens of private sector companies and think tanks as well as at least nine U.S. government agencies and went on for most of 2020.
China has a long history of using the internet to spy on the U.S. and presents a “prolific and effective cyber-espionage threat,” the Office of the Director of the National Intelligence said in its most recent annual threat assessment.
Six years ago Chinese hackers stole millions of background check files of federal government employees from the Office of Personnel Management. And last year the Justice Department charged two hackers it said worked with the Chinese government to target firms developing vaccines for the coronavirus and stole hundreds of millions of dollars worth of intellectual property and trade secrets from companies across the world.
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The Chinese government has denied any role in the Pulse hacking campaign and the U.S. government has not made any formal attribution.
In the Pulse campaign, security experts said sophisticated hackers exploited never-before-seen vulnerabilities to break in and were hyper diligent in trying to cover their tracks once inside.
“The capability is very strong and difficult to defend against, and the profile of victims is very significant,” said Adrian Nish, the head of cyber at BAE Systems Applied Intelligence. “This is a very targeted attack against a few dozen networks that all have national significance in one way or another.”
The Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, issued an April alert about the Pulse hack saying it was aware of “compromises affecting a number of U.S. government agencies, critical infrastructure entities, and other private sector organizations.” The agency has since said that at least five federal agencies have identified indications of potential unauthorized access, but not said which ones.
Verizon said it found a Pulse-related compromise in one of its labs but it was quickly isolated from its core networks. The company said no data or customer information was accessed or stolen.
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“We know that bad actors try to compromise our systems,” said Verizon spokesman Rich Young. “That is why internet operators, private companies and all individuals need to be vigilant in this space.”
The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which provides water to 19 million people and operates some of the largest treatment plants in the world, said it found a compromised Pulse Secure appliance after CISA issued its alert in April. Spokeswoman Rebecca Kimitch said the appliance was immediately removed from service and no Metropolitan systems or processes were known to have been affected. She said there was “no known data exfiltration.”
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority in New York also said they’ve not found evidence of valuable data or customer information was stolen. The breach was first reported by The New York Times.
Nish, the BAE security expert, said the hackers could have broken into networks but not stolen data right away for any number of operational reasons. He compared it to a criminal breaking into a house but stopping in the hallway.
“It’s still pretty bad,” Nish said.
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Mandiant said it found signs of data extraction from some of the targets. The company and BAE have identified targets of the hacking campaign in several fields, including financial, technology and defense firms, as well as municipal governments. Some targets were in Europe, but most in the U.S.
At least one major local government has disputed it was a target of the Pulse Secure hack. Montgomery County, Maryland, said it was advised by CISA that its Pulse Secure devices were attacked. But county spokesman Scott Peterson said the county found no evidence of a compromise and told CISA they had a “false report.”
CISA did not directly respond to the county’s statement.
The new details of the Pulse Secure hack come at a time of tension between the U.S. and China. Biden has made checking China’s growth a top priority, and said the country’s ambition of becoming the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world is “not going to happen under my watch.”