The United States government plan to impose tighter visa restrictions and wider background checks on Chinese nationals studying at American universities, over espionage concerns. The news follows reports earlier this year that the administration of US President Donald Trump considered banning all Chinese nationals from studying at American universities. In October of this year, The Financial Times reported that the White House came close to imposing the ban, after it was allegedly proposed by Stephen Miller, speechwriter and senior advisor to Trump. Miller became known as the main architect of Executive Order 13769 —the travel ban imposed on citizens of several countries, most of them predominantly Muslim. According to The Financial Times, Trump was eventually dissuaded from imposing the Chinese student ban by Terry Branstad, US ambassador to China. Now, however, the Trump administration is reportedly considering the possibility of imposing deeper background checks and additional vetting on all Chinese nationals wishing to study in the US.
Citing “a US official and three congressional and university sources”, Reuters said on Thursday that the measures would apply to all Chinese students wishing to register in undergraduate and graduate academic programs in the US. The news agency quoted a “senior US official” as saying that “no Chinese student who’s coming [to the US] is untethered from the state […. They all have] to go through a party and government approval process”. Reuters reported that the proposed plan includes a comprehensive examination of the applicants’ phone records and their presence on social media platforms. The goal would be to verify that the applicants are not connected with Chinese government agencies. As part of the proposed plan, US law enforcement and intelligence agencies would provide counterintelligence training to university officials. However, the plan has many American universities —including elite Ivy League schools— worried that they may be losing up to $14 billion in tuition and other fees spent annually by more than 350,000 Chinese nationals studying in the US. The fear is that the latter may be looking to study elsewhere, in countries such as Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom. Reuters said that many of America’s top universities are “regularly sharing strategies to thwart” plans by the Trump administration to make it more difficult for Chinese nationals to study in the US. The news agency said it contacted the Chinese ambassador to Washington, who called the White House’s fears of espionage by Chinese students “groundless” and “very indecent”.
Joseph Fitsanakis
https://intelnews.org/2018/11/30/01-2447/
Tesla constantly sends information about the precise location of his cars to the Chinese government. Tesla is not alone. China has called upon all electric vehicle manufacturers in China to make the same kind of reports—potentially adding to the rich kit of surveillance tools available to the Chinese government as President Xi Jinping steps up the use of technology to track Chinese citizens. More than 200 manufacturers, including Tesla, Volkswagen, BMW, Daimler, Ford, General Motors, Nissan, Mitsubishi and U.S.-listed electric vehicle start-up NIO, transmit position information and dozens of other data points to government-backed monitoring centers, The Associated Press has found. Generally, it happens without car owners' knowledge. The automakers say they are merely complying with local laws, which apply only to alternative energy vehicles. Chinese officials say the data is used for analytics to improve public safety, facilitate industrial development and infrastructure planning, and to prevent fraud in subsidy programs. But other countries that are major markets for electronic vehicles—the United States, Japan, across Europe—do not collect this kind of real-time data.
And critics say the information collected in China is beyond what is needed to meet the country's stated goals. It could be used not only to undermine foreign carmakers' competitive position, but also for surveillance—particularly in China, where there are few protections on personal privacy. Under the leadership of Xi Jinping, China has unleashed a war on dissent, marshalling big data and artificial intelligence to create a more perfect kind of policing, capable of predicting and eliminating perceived threats to the stability of the ruling Communist Party. According to specifications published in 2016, every electric vehicle in China transmits data from the car's sensors back to the manufacturer. From there, automakers send 61 data points, including location and details about battery and engine function to local centers like the one Ding oversees in Shanghai.
There is also concern about the precedent these rules set for sharing data from next-generation connected cars, which may soon transmit even more personal information. "You're learning a lot about people's day-to-day activities and that becomes part of what I call ubiquitous surveillance, where pretty much everything that you do is being recorded and saved and potentially can be used in order to affect your life and your freedom," said Michael Chertoff, who served as Secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security under President George W. Bush and recently wrote a book called "Exploding Data." Chertoff said global automakers should be asking themselves tough questions. "If what you're doing is giving a government of a more authoritarian country the tools to have massive surveillance, I think then companies have to ask themselves, 'Is this really something we want to do in terms of our corporate values, even if it means otherwise forgoing that market?'"
The Shanghai Electric Vehicle Public Data Collecting, Monitoring and Research Center sits in a grey tower in suburban Jiading district. One floor up from the cafeteria, a wall-sized screen glows with dots, each representing a single vehicle coursing along Shanghai's roads to create a massive real-time map that could reveal where people live, shop, work, and worship.Click a dot at random, and up pops a window with a number that identifies each individual vehicle, along with its make and model, mileage and battery charge.All told, the screen exhibits data from over 222,000 vehicles in Shanghai, the vast majority of them passenger cars."We can provide a lot of data from consumers to the government to help them improve policy and planning," said Ding Xiaohua, deputy director of the center, a non-profit that is tightly aligned with and funded by the government.
Data also flows to a national monitoring center for new energy vehicles run by the Beijing Institute of Technology, which pulls information from more than 1.1 million vehicles across the country, according to the National Big Data Alliance of New Energy Vehicles. The national monitoring center declined to respond to questions. Those numbers are about to get much bigger. Though electric vehicle sales accounted for just 2.6 percent of the total last year, policymakers have said they'd like new energy vehicles to account for 20 percent of total sales by 2025. Starting next year, all automakers in China must meet production minimums for new energy vehicles, part of Beijing's aggressive effort to reduce dependence on foreign energy sources and place itself at the forefront of a growing global industry.
Last year, authorities in Xinjiang, a restive region in western China that has become a laboratory for China's surveillance state, ordered residents to install GPS devices so their vehicles could be tracked, according to official media. This summer the Ministry of Public Security, a police agency, began to roll out a system to track vehicles using windshield radio frequency chips that can identify cars as they pass roadside reading devices. There is a privacy firewall built into the system. The monitoring center has each car's unique vehicle identification number, but to link that number with the personal details of the car owner, it must go through the automaker—a step it has taken in the past. Chinese law enforcement can also independently link the vehicle identification number with the car owner's personal information.
Many vehicles in the U.S., Europe and Japan transmit position information back to automakers, who feed it to car-tracking apps, maps that pinpoint nearby amenities and emergency services providers. But the data stops there. Government or law enforcement agencies would generally only be able to access personal vehicle data in the context of a specific criminal investigation and in the U.S. would typically need a court order, lawyers said. Automakers initially resisted sharing information with the Shanghai monitoring center; then the government made transmitting data a prerequisite for getting incentives. There was concern that data pulled from electric vehicles might reveal proprietary information about, for example, how hybrids switch between gas and battery power, and eventually set automakers up for commercial competition with a Chinese government entity. As cars become more connected, carmakers are looking to tap new revenue streams built on data—a market McKinsey estimated could be worth $750 billion by 2030.
The Chinese government's ability to grab data as it flows from cars gives its academics and policymakers an edge over competing nations. China tends to view technology development as a key competitive resource. Though global automakers have received billions in incentives and subsidies from U.S., European and Japanese governments, they are contributing data to the Chinese government that ultimately serves Beijing's strategic interests. In 2011, the U.S. Department of Energy's Idaho National Laboratory began a nationwide study of how electric vehicle owners drive and charge their cars. Participants gave explicit written consent to allow the government laboratory to collect their data, and even then it wasn't delivered in real time, said John Smart, who leads the center's advanced vehicles group. Instead, the team got historical data on a weekly basis. Cars were assigned random numbers for the study, so owners remained anonymous.Nothing of its kind has been done since in the U.S., Smart said.
https://techxplore.com/news/2018-11-electric-vehicles-real-time-chinese.html
Τη ματαίωση του προγράμματος Dragonfly της Google, για τη δημιουργία μιας λογοκριμένης έκδοσης της μηχανής αναζήτησης για την Κίνα, ζητούν εκ νέου εργαζόμενοι της εταιρείας, στο πλαίσιο σχετικής έκκλησης της Διεθνούς Αμνηστίας, υποστηρίζοντας πως θα επιτρέπει παρακολούθηση από την κυβέρνηση της χώρας. Σε επιστολή τους οι εργαζόμενοι χαρακτηρίζουν τις προηγούμενες απαντήσεις της ηγεσίας στο θέμα ως «μη ικανοποιητικές» και τονίζουν πως δεν αντιτίθενται στην ίδια την Κίνα, μα στην κατάχρηση της τεχνολογίας για σκοπούς καταπίεσης. Όπως υποστηρίζουν, η κινεζική κυβέρνηση δεν είναι η μόνη πρόθυμη να περιορίζει την ελευθερία έκφρασης και να παρακολουθεί αντιφρονούντες. Ως εκ τούτου, το Dragonfly θα δημιουργούσε επικίνδυνο προηγούμενο, καθώς θα άνοιγε τον δρόμο και σε άλλες χώρες που θα είχαν παρόμοιες απαιτήσεις από τη Google. Όπως αναφέρεται στη επιστολή, η κινεζική κυβέρνηση ήδη είναι σε φάση επέκτασης των δυνατοτήτων παρακολούθησής της, πολλές εκ των οποίων βασίζονται σε προηγμένες τεχνολογίες και περιλαμβάνουν προσωπικά δεδομένα, αρχεία onlibe δραστηριότητας κ.ά.
«Το Dragonfly θα επέτρεπε επίσης λογοκρισία και ελεγχόμενη από την κυβέρνηση παραπληροφόρηση, αποσταθεροποιώντας την πραγματικότητα στη οποία βασίζονται ο δημόσιος διάλογος και ο αντίλογος. Δεδομένων των αναφορών περί καταστολής των φωνών αντιφρονούντων από την κινεζική κυβέρνηση, τέτοια μέσα ελέγχου πιθανότατα θα χρησιμοποιούνταν για να σιωπήσουν περιθωριοποιημένα άτομα και να προωθηθούν πληροφορίες που ευνοούν τα κυβερνητικά συμφέροντα» επισημαίνεται. Παράλληλα, στην επιστολή σημειώνεται ότι πολλοί εκ των εργαζομένων που την υπογράφουν δέχτηκαν να εργαστούν στη Google, έχοντας κατά νου τις αξίες της, περιλαμβανομένης της θέσης της για τη λογοκρισία στην Κίνα και της «αντίληψης πως είναι μια εταιρεία πρόθυμη να βάλει τις αξίες της πάνω από τα κέρδη». Ωστόσο, όπως γράφουν, «μετά από έναν χρόνο απογοητεύσεων... δεν πιστεύουμε πως ισχύει πλέον αυτό. Και για αυτό παίρνουμε θέση». Καταλήγοντας, αναφέρουν πως η Google είναι πολύ ισχυρή για να μην τίθεται ενώπιον των ευθυνών της και τονίζουν πως «μας αξίζει να ξέρουμε τι φτιάχνουμε».
https://www.naftemporiki.gr/story/1419048/google-nea-ekklisi-ergazomenon-tis-gia-mataiosi-tou-programmatos-dragonfly
Citing “a US official and three congressional and university sources”, Reuters said on Thursday that the measures would apply to all Chinese students wishing to register in undergraduate and graduate academic programs in the US. The news agency quoted a “senior US official” as saying that “no Chinese student who’s coming [to the US] is untethered from the state […. They all have] to go through a party and government approval process”. Reuters reported that the proposed plan includes a comprehensive examination of the applicants’ phone records and their presence on social media platforms. The goal would be to verify that the applicants are not connected with Chinese government agencies. As part of the proposed plan, US law enforcement and intelligence agencies would provide counterintelligence training to university officials. However, the plan has many American universities —including elite Ivy League schools— worried that they may be losing up to $14 billion in tuition and other fees spent annually by more than 350,000 Chinese nationals studying in the US. The fear is that the latter may be looking to study elsewhere, in countries such as Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom. Reuters said that many of America’s top universities are “regularly sharing strategies to thwart” plans by the Trump administration to make it more difficult for Chinese nationals to study in the US. The news agency said it contacted the Chinese ambassador to Washington, who called the White House’s fears of espionage by Chinese students “groundless” and “very indecent”.
Joseph Fitsanakis
https://intelnews.org/2018/11/30/01-2447/
Tesla constantly sends information about the precise location of his cars to the Chinese government. Tesla is not alone. China has called upon all electric vehicle manufacturers in China to make the same kind of reports—potentially adding to the rich kit of surveillance tools available to the Chinese government as President Xi Jinping steps up the use of technology to track Chinese citizens. More than 200 manufacturers, including Tesla, Volkswagen, BMW, Daimler, Ford, General Motors, Nissan, Mitsubishi and U.S.-listed electric vehicle start-up NIO, transmit position information and dozens of other data points to government-backed monitoring centers, The Associated Press has found. Generally, it happens without car owners' knowledge. The automakers say they are merely complying with local laws, which apply only to alternative energy vehicles. Chinese officials say the data is used for analytics to improve public safety, facilitate industrial development and infrastructure planning, and to prevent fraud in subsidy programs. But other countries that are major markets for electronic vehicles—the United States, Japan, across Europe—do not collect this kind of real-time data.
And critics say the information collected in China is beyond what is needed to meet the country's stated goals. It could be used not only to undermine foreign carmakers' competitive position, but also for surveillance—particularly in China, where there are few protections on personal privacy. Under the leadership of Xi Jinping, China has unleashed a war on dissent, marshalling big data and artificial intelligence to create a more perfect kind of policing, capable of predicting and eliminating perceived threats to the stability of the ruling Communist Party. According to specifications published in 2016, every electric vehicle in China transmits data from the car's sensors back to the manufacturer. From there, automakers send 61 data points, including location and details about battery and engine function to local centers like the one Ding oversees in Shanghai.
There is also concern about the precedent these rules set for sharing data from next-generation connected cars, which may soon transmit even more personal information. "You're learning a lot about people's day-to-day activities and that becomes part of what I call ubiquitous surveillance, where pretty much everything that you do is being recorded and saved and potentially can be used in order to affect your life and your freedom," said Michael Chertoff, who served as Secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security under President George W. Bush and recently wrote a book called "Exploding Data." Chertoff said global automakers should be asking themselves tough questions. "If what you're doing is giving a government of a more authoritarian country the tools to have massive surveillance, I think then companies have to ask themselves, 'Is this really something we want to do in terms of our corporate values, even if it means otherwise forgoing that market?'"
The Shanghai Electric Vehicle Public Data Collecting, Monitoring and Research Center sits in a grey tower in suburban Jiading district. One floor up from the cafeteria, a wall-sized screen glows with dots, each representing a single vehicle coursing along Shanghai's roads to create a massive real-time map that could reveal where people live, shop, work, and worship.Click a dot at random, and up pops a window with a number that identifies each individual vehicle, along with its make and model, mileage and battery charge.All told, the screen exhibits data from over 222,000 vehicles in Shanghai, the vast majority of them passenger cars."We can provide a lot of data from consumers to the government to help them improve policy and planning," said Ding Xiaohua, deputy director of the center, a non-profit that is tightly aligned with and funded by the government.
Data also flows to a national monitoring center for new energy vehicles run by the Beijing Institute of Technology, which pulls information from more than 1.1 million vehicles across the country, according to the National Big Data Alliance of New Energy Vehicles. The national monitoring center declined to respond to questions. Those numbers are about to get much bigger. Though electric vehicle sales accounted for just 2.6 percent of the total last year, policymakers have said they'd like new energy vehicles to account for 20 percent of total sales by 2025. Starting next year, all automakers in China must meet production minimums for new energy vehicles, part of Beijing's aggressive effort to reduce dependence on foreign energy sources and place itself at the forefront of a growing global industry.
Last year, authorities in Xinjiang, a restive region in western China that has become a laboratory for China's surveillance state, ordered residents to install GPS devices so their vehicles could be tracked, according to official media. This summer the Ministry of Public Security, a police agency, began to roll out a system to track vehicles using windshield radio frequency chips that can identify cars as they pass roadside reading devices. There is a privacy firewall built into the system. The monitoring center has each car's unique vehicle identification number, but to link that number with the personal details of the car owner, it must go through the automaker—a step it has taken in the past. Chinese law enforcement can also independently link the vehicle identification number with the car owner's personal information.
Many vehicles in the U.S., Europe and Japan transmit position information back to automakers, who feed it to car-tracking apps, maps that pinpoint nearby amenities and emergency services providers. But the data stops there. Government or law enforcement agencies would generally only be able to access personal vehicle data in the context of a specific criminal investigation and in the U.S. would typically need a court order, lawyers said. Automakers initially resisted sharing information with the Shanghai monitoring center; then the government made transmitting data a prerequisite for getting incentives. There was concern that data pulled from electric vehicles might reveal proprietary information about, for example, how hybrids switch between gas and battery power, and eventually set automakers up for commercial competition with a Chinese government entity. As cars become more connected, carmakers are looking to tap new revenue streams built on data—a market McKinsey estimated could be worth $750 billion by 2030.
The Chinese government's ability to grab data as it flows from cars gives its academics and policymakers an edge over competing nations. China tends to view technology development as a key competitive resource. Though global automakers have received billions in incentives and subsidies from U.S., European and Japanese governments, they are contributing data to the Chinese government that ultimately serves Beijing's strategic interests. In 2011, the U.S. Department of Energy's Idaho National Laboratory began a nationwide study of how electric vehicle owners drive and charge their cars. Participants gave explicit written consent to allow the government laboratory to collect their data, and even then it wasn't delivered in real time, said John Smart, who leads the center's advanced vehicles group. Instead, the team got historical data on a weekly basis. Cars were assigned random numbers for the study, so owners remained anonymous.Nothing of its kind has been done since in the U.S., Smart said.
https://techxplore.com/news/2018-11-electric-vehicles-real-time-chinese.html
Τη ματαίωση του προγράμματος Dragonfly της Google, για τη δημιουργία μιας λογοκριμένης έκδοσης της μηχανής αναζήτησης για την Κίνα, ζητούν εκ νέου εργαζόμενοι της εταιρείας, στο πλαίσιο σχετικής έκκλησης της Διεθνούς Αμνηστίας, υποστηρίζοντας πως θα επιτρέπει παρακολούθηση από την κυβέρνηση της χώρας. Σε επιστολή τους οι εργαζόμενοι χαρακτηρίζουν τις προηγούμενες απαντήσεις της ηγεσίας στο θέμα ως «μη ικανοποιητικές» και τονίζουν πως δεν αντιτίθενται στην ίδια την Κίνα, μα στην κατάχρηση της τεχνολογίας για σκοπούς καταπίεσης. Όπως υποστηρίζουν, η κινεζική κυβέρνηση δεν είναι η μόνη πρόθυμη να περιορίζει την ελευθερία έκφρασης και να παρακολουθεί αντιφρονούντες. Ως εκ τούτου, το Dragonfly θα δημιουργούσε επικίνδυνο προηγούμενο, καθώς θα άνοιγε τον δρόμο και σε άλλες χώρες που θα είχαν παρόμοιες απαιτήσεις από τη Google. Όπως αναφέρεται στη επιστολή, η κινεζική κυβέρνηση ήδη είναι σε φάση επέκτασης των δυνατοτήτων παρακολούθησής της, πολλές εκ των οποίων βασίζονται σε προηγμένες τεχνολογίες και περιλαμβάνουν προσωπικά δεδομένα, αρχεία onlibe δραστηριότητας κ.ά.
«Το Dragonfly θα επέτρεπε επίσης λογοκρισία και ελεγχόμενη από την κυβέρνηση παραπληροφόρηση, αποσταθεροποιώντας την πραγματικότητα στη οποία βασίζονται ο δημόσιος διάλογος και ο αντίλογος. Δεδομένων των αναφορών περί καταστολής των φωνών αντιφρονούντων από την κινεζική κυβέρνηση, τέτοια μέσα ελέγχου πιθανότατα θα χρησιμοποιούνταν για να σιωπήσουν περιθωριοποιημένα άτομα και να προωθηθούν πληροφορίες που ευνοούν τα κυβερνητικά συμφέροντα» επισημαίνεται. Παράλληλα, στην επιστολή σημειώνεται ότι πολλοί εκ των εργαζομένων που την υπογράφουν δέχτηκαν να εργαστούν στη Google, έχοντας κατά νου τις αξίες της, περιλαμβανομένης της θέσης της για τη λογοκρισία στην Κίνα και της «αντίληψης πως είναι μια εταιρεία πρόθυμη να βάλει τις αξίες της πάνω από τα κέρδη». Ωστόσο, όπως γράφουν, «μετά από έναν χρόνο απογοητεύσεων... δεν πιστεύουμε πως ισχύει πλέον αυτό. Και για αυτό παίρνουμε θέση». Καταλήγοντας, αναφέρουν πως η Google είναι πολύ ισχυρή για να μην τίθεται ενώπιον των ευθυνών της και τονίζουν πως «μας αξίζει να ξέρουμε τι φτιάχνουμε».
https://www.naftemporiki.gr/story/1419048/google-nea-ekklisi-ergazomenon-tis-gia-mataiosi-tou-programmatos-dragonfly
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