$4,700,000,000.
It’s more than the combined ticket sales of the last two “Avengers” movies. It’s more than what virtually any professional sports team is worth. And it’s the amount that Google made from the work of news publishers in 2018 via search and Google News, according to a study to be released on Monday by the News Media Alliance.
The journalists who create that content deserve a cut of that $4.7 billion, said David Chavern, the president and chief executive of the alliance, which represents more than 2,000 newspapers across the country, including The New York Times.
“They make money off this arrangement,” Mr. Chavern said, “and there needs to be a better outcome for news publishers.”
That $4.7 billion is nearly as much as the $5.1 billion brought in by the United States news industry as a whole from digital advertising last year — and the News Media Alliance cautioned that its estimate for Google’s income was conservative. For one thing, it does not count the value of the personal data the company collects on consumers every time they click on an article like this one. [Continue reading…]
Google made $4.7 billion from the news industry in 2018, study says
Bellingcat and how open source reinvented investigative journalism
It’s a brief window into a doomed soul. Clinging to his mother’s back, the child looks twice into the camera held by the man about to kill him. The natural curiosity of a child that fear has failed to extinguish. The smartphone captures the casual cruelty with which both mother and child are killed. Nearby, another mother and daughter are executed. One killer continues to pump bullets into the lifeless bodies with a glee that seems excessive even to his accomplices. “That’s enough, Tsanga!” one shouts. “That’s enough.”
In July 2018, when the video of the killings started circulating on social media, it was clear what had happened. The mothers and children were defenseless, they weren’t resisting, and they were killed with intent. Other facts, however, were less clear: Where did this happen, when was the video recorded, who were the killers, and why did they kill? The fact that the killers had filmed the crime suggested that they were confident in their impunity. Only precise answers to journalism’s enduring questions—what, where, when, who, and why—could revoke it.
This is the task that investigators at the BBC’s Africa Eye unit undertook over the next few months—an investigation for which they have just won a Peabody Award. Africa Eye was able to geolocate the site, matching topographical features from the video to satellite maps; establish the time, using shadows as sundials; confirm the killers’ identities, by cross-referencing social media profiles with government records; and establish that the executions were part of Cameroon’s counter-terrorism operations against the extremist group Boko Haram. Africa Eye’s findings led in February 2019 to the US’s withdrawing $17 million in funding for the Cameroonian Army and European Parliament’s passing a strong resolution condemning “torture, forced disappearances, extrajudicial killings perpetrated by governmental forces.”
The investigation was a triumph of journalism. The smartphone that had captured the victims’ last moments had turned from voyeur to witness. [Continue reading…]
A new age of warfare: How Internet mercenaries do battle for authoritarian governments
The man in charge of Saudi Arabia’s ruthless campaign to stifle dissent went searching for ways to spy on people he saw as threats to the kingdom. He knew where to go: a secretive Israeli company offering technology developed by former intelligence operatives.
It was late 2017 and Saud al-Qahtani — then a top adviser to Saudi Arabia’s powerful crown prince — was tracking Saudi dissidents around the world, part of his extensive surveillance efforts that ultimately led to the killing of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi. In messages exchanged with employees from the company, NSO Group, Mr. al-Qahtani spoke of grand plans to use its surveillance tools throughout the Middle East and Europe, like Turkey and Qatar or France and Britain.
The Saudi government’s reliance on a firm from Israel, an adversary for decades, offers a glimpse of a new age of digital warfare governed by few rules and of a growing economy, now valued at $12 billion, of spies for hire.
Today even the smallest countries can buy digital espionage services, enabling them to conduct sophisticated operations like electronic eavesdropping or influence campaigns that were once the preserve of major powers like the United States and Russia. Corporations that want to scrutinize competitors’ secrets, or a wealthy individual with a beef against a rival, can also command intelligence operations for a price, akin to purchasing off-the-shelf elements of the National Security Agency or the Mossad. [Continue reading…]
Without humans, AI can wreak havoc
Katherine Maher, chief executive and executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, writes:
Too often, artificial intelligence is presented as an all-powerful solution to our problems, a scalable replacement for people. Companies are automating nearly every aspect of their social interfaces, from creating to moderating to personalizing content. At its worst, A.I. can put society on autopilot that may not consider our dearest values.
Without humans, A.I. can wreak havoc. A glaring example was Amazon’s A.I.-driven human resources software that was supposed to surface the best job candidates, but ended up being biased against women. Built using past resumes submitted to Amazon, most of which came from men, the program concluded men were preferable to women.
Rather than replacing humans, A.I. is best used to support our capacity for creativity and discernment. Wikipedia is creating A.I. that will flag potentially problematic edits — like a prankster vandalizing a celebrity’s page — to a human who can then step in. The system can also help our volunteer editors evaluate a newly created page or suggest superb pages for featuring. In short, A.I. that is deployed by and for humans can improve the experience of both people consuming information and those producing it. [Continue reading…]
U.S. Cyber Command operation disrupted Internet access of Russian troll factory on day of 2018 midterms
The U.S. military blocked Internet access to an infamous Russian entity seeking to sow discord among Americans during the 2018 midterms, several U.S. officials said, a warning that the Kremlin’s operations against the United States are not cost-free.
The strike on the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg, a company underwritten by an oligarch close to President Vladimir Putin, was part of the first offensive cyber campaign against Russia designed to thwart attempts to interfere with a U.S. election, the officials said.
“They basically took the IRA offline,” according to one individual familiar with the matter who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified information. “They shut them down.”
The operation marked the first muscle-flexing by U.S. Cyber Command, with intelligence from the National Security Agency, under new authorities it was granted by President Trump and Congress last year to bolster offensive capabilities.
Whether the impact of the St. Petersburg action will be long-lasting remains to be seen. Russia’s tactics are evolving, and some analysts were skeptical the strike would deter the Russian troll factory or Putin, who, according to U.S. intelligence officials, ordered an “influence” campaign in 2016 to undermine faith in U.S. democracy. U.S. officials have also assessed that the Internet Research Agency works on behalf of the Kremlin.
“Such an operation would be more of a pinprick that is more annoying than deterring in the long run,” said Thomas Rid, a strategic-studies professor at Johns Hopkins University who was not briefed on the details. [Continue reading…]