It’s not often Silicon Valley gets behind a single cause. Supporting net neutrality was one, reforming government surveillance another. Last week, Big Tech took up its latest: halting any cooperation with Hong Kong police.
Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, and even China-headquartered TikTok said last week they would no longer respond to demands for user data from Hong Kong law enforcement — read: Chinese authorities — citing the new unilaterally imposed Beijing national security law. Critics say the law, ratified on June 30, effectively kills China’s “one country, two systems” policy allowing Hong Kong to maintain its freedoms and some autonomy after the British handed over control of the city-state back to Beijing in 1997.
Noticeably absent from the list of tech giants pulling cooperation was Apple, which said it was still “assessing the new law.” What’s left to assess remains unclear, given the new powers explicitly allow warrantless searches of data, intercept and restrict internet data, and censor information online, things that Apple has historically opposed if not in so many words.
Facebook, Google and Twitter can live without China. They already do — both Facebook and Twitter are banned on the mainland, and Google pulled out after it accused Beijing of cyberattacks. But Apple cannot. China is at the heart of its iPhone and Mac manufacturing pipeline, and accounts for over 16% of its revenue — some $9 billion last quarter alone. Pulling out of China would be catastrophic for Apple’s finances and market position.
The move by Silicon Valley to cut off Hong Kong authorities from their vast pools of data may be a largely symbolic move, given any overseas data demands are first screened by the Justice Department in a laborious and frequently lengthy legal process. But by holding out, Apple is also sending its own message: Its ardent commitment to human rights — privacy and free speech — stops at the border of Hong Kong.
Here’s what else is in this week’s Decrypted.
THE BIG PICTURE
Police used Twitter-backed Dataminr to snoop on protests
Dataminr, a data mining startup with close ties to Twitter, helped law enforcement snoop on protests in the wake of the death of George Floyd in May, according to documents seen by The Intercept, apparently at odds with Twitter’s own policies on conducting surveillance.
The data startup uses artificial intelligence to mine for the most relevant tweets for a user’s interests, like journalists, who frequently pay for subscriptions to access real-time breaking news alerts. Twitter, until recently, invested in Dataminr, and that close cooperation allowed Dataminr access to Twitter’s real-time firehose of tweets.
But law enforcement also has contracts, including the controversial Minneapolis Police Department, which employed the officer who killed Floyd, later charged with his murder. According to The Intercept, police used Dataminr to dig up tweets that referenced peaceful protests. In reports emailed to the department, the protests were marked “peaceful.”
But that puts Dataminr at odds with Twitter’s policies on surveillance, which in 2016 banned intelligence agencies from using the service. A Twitter spokesperson defended the startup, but critics decried Twitter’s hypocrisy.
“Twitter can’t have it both ways, courting Black activists and marketing themselves as the preeminent tool for organizing against injustice, while turning a blind eye to the number of companies that are contracting with them for the clear intent of surveillance,” said Brandi Collins-Dexter, campaign director with the civil rights group Color of Change, told the publication.
Robocall ban stands, says Supreme Court
The Supreme Court has allowed a ban on robocalls to stand, while gutting provisions that handed political consultants and debt collectors exemptions — ironic, since it was the politicos who brought the case to begin with.
The case centered on a 1991 law, the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, which banned robocalls to cell phones. In 2015, the law was amended to include exceptions to allow debt collectors to make automated calls to chase up missed payments. But the political consultants said this wasn’t fair and argued the whole law was unconstitutional because the restrictions, they said, amounted to inhibiting free speech.
In a remarkable conclusion to the case, the Supreme Court agreed that the exception for debt collectors was unconstitutional but the law on the whole wasn’t, meaning that now neither debt collectors nor political consultants can make unsolicited automated calls to Americans’ cell phones.
Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.
MOVERS AND SHAKERS
Huawei is expected to be dealt one of its biggest blows to date, as the U.K. government is likely to announce further restrictions on the Chinese tech giant in the country’s emerging 5G infrastructure, driven by fears of Chinese espionage.
The move will likely see the U.K. government plan to effectively ban Huawei’s equipment from its 5G networks by 2023, a move that will likely slow the country’s 5G rollout efforts and also cause an international outage with China.
The U.K. is stuck in a bind. On one hand you have its closest intelligence partner, the U.S., already threatening to punish its allies by withholding classified information if they use Huawei’s equipment. On the other, China has warned in a nondescript threat that the U.K. will have to “bear the consequences” if it pulls Huawei equipment from its networks.
But it’s far from the only risk that the U.K. faces. One industry leader urged caution at the U.K.’s presumed move, warning that a rapid rip-out of Huawei equipment from the existing network will cause outages — and security risks.
“If you wanted to have no Huawei in the whole telecoms infrastructure across the whole of the U.K., I think that’s impossible to do in under 10 years,” said Philip Jansen, chief executive at BT, the U.K.’s largest phone network.
“Security and safety in the short term could be put at risk,” he said. “This is really critical — because if you’re not able to buy or transact with Huawei, that would mean you wouldn’t be able to get software upgrades if you take it to that specificity.” While Jansen conceded that BT, if pushed, could likely acquiesce to the government’s demands and expel its Huawei gear in five years, the company would “ideally” want more.
It’s not likely a timeframe that BT and other industry partners can argue with. The U.K.’s cybersecurity body told TechCrunch that the “security and resilience of our networks is of paramount importance.”
$ECURITY $TARTUPS
In the security startup world, TechCrunch reported last week that secretive data startup Palantir, co-founded by Peter Thiel, has confidentially filed with U.S. financial regulators to go public.
Because the effort remains under lock and key, we know little about its immediate plans to go public, or when it plans to debut on the stock market — though it’s likely to be later this year. Last month, Palantir said it plans to raise almost $1 billion — about half of which has already been raised.
The company, almost two decades old, is one of the most controversial and secretive firms in Silicon Valley, not least because it supplies its analytics technology to the U.S.. government and intelligence community. That work has drawn ire from privacy and civil liberties groups.
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