San Diego is joining the ranks of cities clamping down on surveillance technology. The San Diego Union-Tribunereports the City Council has given a final greenlight to an ordinance requiring approval for tech that can identify and track individuals, such as body and streetlight cameras. Municipal government workers will have to outline the intended uses of a surveillance system, while a new privacy advisory board and residents will be asked for input. Councillors will also conduct yearly reviews of in-use systems.

The city has a year-long grace period to both form the advisory board and give departments a chance to examine their surveillance tech inventories. Organizations that already use these systems will need authorization to continue use. An exception will allow police on federal task forces to use surveillance, however. San Diego Police Department Chief David Nisleit requested the carve-out over concerns that local officers couldn't participate in federal operations that bar disclosure of surveillance tech.

The council first approved the ordinance in November 2020. The late approval comes after multiple employee groups exercised their right to review the new rules. That process alone took about 18 months, The Union-Tribune said.

San Diego is relatively late to such regulations. San Francisco and other cities have banned facial recognition, for instance. Even so, its approval might increase pressure on other local governments to either restrict surveillance hardware or offer more transparency regarding their monitoring tools.

The Attorneys General of all 50 states have joined forces in hopes of giving teeth to the seemingly never-ending fight against robocalls. North Carolina AG Josh Stein, Indiana AG Todd Rokita and Ohio AG Dave Yost are leading the formation of the new Anti-Robocall Litigation Task Force. In Stein's announcement, he said the group will focus on taking legal action against telecoms, particularly gateway providers, allowing or turning a blind eye to foreign robocalls made to US numbers.

He explained that gateway providers routing foreign phone calls into the US telephone network have the responsibility under the law to ensure the traffic they're bringing in is legal. Stein said that they mostly aren't taking any action to keep robocalls out of the US phone network, though, and they're even intentionally allowing robocall traffic through in return for steady revenue in many cases. 

Stein said in a statement:

"We're... going to take action against phone companies that violate state and federal laws. I’m proud to create this nationwide task force to hold companies accountable when they turn a blind eye to the robocallers they’re letting on to their networks so they can make more money. I’ve already brought one pathbreaking lawsuit against an out-of-state gateway provider, and I won’t hesitate to take legal action against others who break our laws and bombard North Carolinians with these harmful, unlawful calls."

The Attorney General referenced data from the National Consumer Law Center, which previously reported that American phone numbers get more than 33 million scam robocalls a day. Those include Social Security scams targeting seniors and gift card scams, wherein bad actors pretend they're from the IRS. In that report, the center warned that consumers will keep on getting robocalls as long as phone providers are earning from them. 

Stein already has experience sparring with shady gateway providers. Back in January, he sued Articul8 for routing more than 65 million calls to phone numbers in North Carolina and inundating residents with up to 200 fraudulent telemarketing calls every single day. He previously urged the FCC to implement measures designed to put a stop to illegal foreign calls made through providers like Articul8, as well. And in 2019, Stein became instrumental in the development of an agreement between the US Attorneys General and 12 carriers in the country to use the STIR/SHAKEN call-blocking technology.

In the latest in what seems to be a string of challenges the company has to grapple with, Robinhood's crypto division has been slapped with a $30 million fine by the New York State Department of Financial Services. It's the first crypto-focused enforcement action by the regulator, which has issued the multimillion dollar penalty against Robinhood for what it says are violations against the state's anti-money laundering and cybersecurity regulations. In its announcement, the Financial Services Department said it found significant deficiencies in the company's compliance programs following a supervisory examination.

Apparently, there weren't enough people working in Robinhood's money laundering compliance program. The company also failed to transition from a manual monitoring system, which is no longer sufficient now that it's much larger than when it started. In addition, the department found that policies within Robinhood's cybersecurity program aren't in full compliance with official cybersecurity and virtual currency regulations. 

The New York regulator also mentioned that Robinhood improperly certified compliance with the Department's Transaction Monitoring Regulation and Cybersecurity Regulation. Since it wasn't fully compliant with the state's cybersecurity rules, Robinhood violated the law by claiming compliance. Finally, the regulator said Robinhood failed to adhere to consumer protection requirements by not maintaining a separate phone number (and displaying it on its website) specifically for consumer complaints. 

Superintendent of Financial Services, Adrienne A. Harris, said in a statement:

"As its business grew, Robinhood Crypto failed to invest the proper resources and attention to develop and maintain a culture of compliance—a failure that resulted in significant violations of the Department’s anti-money laundering and cybersecurity regulations. All virtual currency companies licensed in New York State are subject to the same anti-money laundering, consumer protection, and cybersecurity regulations as traditional financial services companies. DFS will continue to investigate and take action when any licensee violates the law or the Department’s regulations, which are critical to protecting consumers and ensuring the safety and soundness of the institutions."

Aside from having to pay $30 million, Robinhood must retain an independent consultant who will evaluate if it has taken the appropriate actions to address its violations and deficiencies under the settlement.

Robinhood also recently announced that it's laying off 23 percent of its workforce due to record inflation and the cryptocurrency crash. It's the company's second round of job cuts this year and will affect employees across divisions. That revelation came after Robinhood published its earnings for the second quarter of 2022, wherein it posted a net loss of $295 million and announced a decrease of 1.9 million in monthly active users. 

As more than 300,000 people anxiously watched the flight path of SPAR19, the US Air Force plane carrying Nancy Pelosi on her tour of Asia, Taiwan’s presidential website went down to an apparent cyberattack, reports Reuters. In a Facebook post spotted by Gizmodo, Taiwanese presidential spokesperson Chang Tun-Han said a distributed denial-of-service attack took down the website early Tuesday evening.

According to Tun-Han, the attack originated outside of Taiwan and saw the website bombarded with more than 200 times the amount of traffic it normally sees. They claim the website was back to normal operation “within 20 minutes.” However, when Engadget went to visit, there was only a single line to be seen stating, “OK.”

Pelosi’s plane landed in Taiwan late Tuesday evening Taipei Standard Time, reports The Associated Press. According to local news outlets, she is expected to stay the night. As Speaker of the House, Pelosi is the highest-ranking US official to visit Taiwan in 25 years. Ahead of Tuesday’s visit, China warned there would be “resolute and strong measures” if Pelosi went ahead with the trip.

“There is but one China in the world, Taiwan is an inalienable part of China’s territory, and the Government of the People’s Republic of China is the sole legal government representing the whole of China,” China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on Tuesday. “The one-China principle is a universal consensus of the international community and a basic norm in international relations.”

The US maintains a so-called policy of “strategic ambiguity” when it comes to Taiwan. In 1972, former President Richard Nixon visited mainland China. During Nixon’s visit, the US agreed “that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is part of China.” China views visits by foreign government officials to Taiwan as recognition of its sovereignty – though members of Congress have routinely traveled to the self-governing island over the years.

“America’s solidarity with the 23 million people of Taiwan is more important today than ever, as the world faces a choice between autocracy and democracy,” Pelosi said on Twitter. “Our visit is one of several Congressional delegations to Taiwan – and it in no way contradicts longstanding United States policy, guided by the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, US-China Joint Communiques and the Six Assurances.”

The US network that matches donated kidneys, livers and hearts with desperate patients has serious issues and "needs to be vastly restructured," according to a government review seen by The Washington Post. It reportedly relies on out-of-date technology, has crashed for hours at a time and has never been audited by federal for security or other flaws by federal officials.  

The current system has been administered by the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) for 36 years. That non-profit is overseen by the Health Resources and Services Administration. Around 106,000 people are on a waiting list for organs, with most seeking kidneys. Over 41,000 organs were transplanted last year, setting a record, but 22 people die each day waiting, according to the article. 

In its review completed 18 months ago, the White House's US Digital Service recommended that the government "break up the current monopoly" held by UNOS. "In order to properly and equitably support the critical needs of these patients, the ecosystem needs to be vastly restructured." A big sticking point is that the government has never been allowed to inspect the computer code behind the system, because UNOS hasn't allowed it. "The code is extremely large," said UNOS chief executive Brian Shepherd. "They can come in and ask for specific pieces."

The Washington Post obtained the review in draft form as it has yet to be finalized. Leaders of the Senate Finance Committee who saw the report reportedly warned DHS officials that they had "no confidence" in the security of the network, asking the White House to step in to protect it from attacks. "We request you take immediate steps to secure the national Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network system from cyber-attacks," wrote committee chair Sen. Ron Wyden and Sen. Charles E. Grassley. 

The other main issue is the requirement for manual input that can lead to mistakes or create timing issues for organ matches. "When nearly 100 percent of hospitals use electronic records, the notion that we rely on human beings to enter data into databases is crazy. It should be 85 to 95 percent automatic," a former chair of the UNOS liver transplant policy committee told The Post.

The transplant results are the most disconcerting part of the report. In the US in 2020, 21.3 percent of donated kidneys weren't transplanted, according to a report. That compares to 9.1 percent in France, 10 to 12 percent in the UK and eight percent in the Eurotransplant consortium of eight EU countries including Germany. "You would be hard pressed to think you couldn’t at least get 5 percent better [in the US], which would be thousands of transplants," a former HHS official told The Post. For more, check out the article here. 

Last week, more than 400 TV showrunners, writers and producers called on streaming giants and traditional Hollywood studios to offer improved protections for workers in states where abortions are banned or limited. Now, 594 other industry figures (many, if not all of whom are male) have pledged their support, as Variety reports. They include Jordan Peele, Taika Waititi, Jason Sudekis, Ryan Murphy, Donald Glover and JJ Abrams.

The signatories said they were standing in solidarity with their “female, trans and non-binary showrunner colleagues [...] in demanding a coordinated and timely response from our employers regarding the imminent workplace-safety crisis created by the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Abortion access doesn’t only affect people who can become pregnant. It affects us all."

In late June, the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, a ruling that conferred a nationwide right to abortion for almost half a century. Numerous states banned or severely restricted abortion access after the decision.

The initial letter was signed by the likes of Issa Rae, Lilly Wachowski, Lena Waithe, Amy Schumer, Shonda Rhimes, Mindy Kaling and Ava DuVernay. It was sent to Disney, Netflix, Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount, Apple, NBC Universal, Amazon, Lionsgate and AMC.

The more than 1,000 industry figures who sent the letters are calling for details about studios' abortion travel subsidies, care policies for “ectopic pregnancies and other pregnancy complications” that occur during a production and legal safeguards for those who help a production worker get an abortion. The signatories also demanded that studios “discontinue all political donations to anti-abortion candidates and political action committees immediately.”

Those who signed the letters want the studios to respond by August 10th. The letters did not detail what may happen if the companies don't reply by then. Studios have previously said they would reimburse travel expenses for those who had to leave a state to get an abortion.

Thanks to its generous tax incentives for film and TV productions, Georgia has become a powerhouse in the entertainment industry, which is worth billions of dollars to the local economy. In 2019, several studios, including Netflix, said they'd reconsider setting up projects in the state if a so-called heartbeat law came into effect (the legislation bans abortions after a fetal heartbeat can be detected). A federal appeals court allowed the law to take effect last month.

Indonesia is blocking residents from accessing various online platforms after those services failed to comply with a July 29th regulatory deadline, reports Reuters (via The Verge). Among the affected platforms are PayPal, Steam and Yahoo (owned by Engadget’s parent company Apollo Management).

Under the country’s 2020 MR5 law, companies labeled as “Private Electronic System Providers” had until this week to register with a government database or face an outright ban. Similar to India’s restrictive 2021 IT law, MR5 gives Indonesia the power to force online platforms to take down content the government deems unlawful or a threat to public order. In instances involving “urgent” requests, services have four hours to take action.

According to Reuters, a handful of tech companies, including Google, Meta and Amazon, rushed in recent days to meet Friday’s deadline. Indonesia may restore access to some of the online services that are currently blocked in the country, provided they register with the government.

PayPal and Valve did not immediately respond to Engadget’s request for comment. Semuel Abrijani Pangerapan, the general director of Indonesia’s Ministry of Communication and Information, told a local news network that the government could temporarily lift restrictions on PayPal to allow users to withdraw their money.

Organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Human Rights Watch have criticized Indonesia’s new content moderation rules. “[MR5] is a tool for censorship that imposes unrealistic burdens on the many digital services and platforms that are used in Indonesia,” said Linda Lakhdhir, Asia legal advisor at Human Rights Watch. “It poses serious risks to the privacy, freedom of speech, and access to information of Indonesian internet users.”

Many Indonesians have also come out against the law, using hashtags like “BlokirKominfo” to voice their opposition to the government’s actions. On Saturday, Pangerapan dismissed those criticisms, saying the measure would help protect the country's internet users.

Kenya's National Cohesion and Integration Commission (NCIC), a government agency that aims to eradicate ethnic or racial discrimination among the country's 45 tribes, has given Facebook seven days to tackle hate speech related to next month's election on its platform. If the social media fails to do so, it faces suspension in the country. The agency's warning comes shortly after international NGO Global Witness and legal non-profit Foxglove released a report detailing how Facebook approved ads written to instigate ethnic violence in both English and Swahili.

The organizations joined forces to conduct a study testing Facebook's ability to detect hate speech and calls for ethnic-based violence ahead of the Kenyan elections. As Global Witness explained in its report, the country's politics are polarized and ethnically driven — after the 2007 elections, for instance, 1,300 people were killed and hundreds of thousands more had to flee their homes. A lot more people use social media today compared to 2007, and over 20 percent of the Kenyan population is on Facebook, where hate speech and misinformation are major issues.

The groups decided not to publish the exact ads they submitted for the test because they were highly offensive, but they used real-life examples of hate speech commonly used in Kenya. They include comparisons of specific tribal groups to animals and calls for their members' rape, slaughter and beheading. "Much to our surprise and concern," Global Witness reported, "all hate speech examples in both [English and Swahili] were approved." The NCIC said the NGOs' report corroborates its own findings. 

After the organizations asked Facebook for a comment regarding what it had discovered and hence made it aware of the study, Meta published a post that details how it is preparing for Kenya's election. In it, the company said it has built a more advanced content detection technology and has hired dedicated teams of Swahili speakers to help it "remove harmful content quickly and at scale." To see if Facebook truly has implemented changes that has improved its detection system, the organizations resubmitted its test ads. They were approved yet again. 

In a statement sent to both Global Witness and Gizmodo, Meta said it has taken "extensive steps" to "catch hate speech and inflammatory content in Kenya" and that the company is "intensifying these efforts ahead of the election." It also said, however, that there will be instances where it misses things " as both machines and people make mistakes."

Global Witness said its study's findings follow a similar pattern it previously uncovered in Myanmar, where Facebook played a role in enabling calls for ethnic cleansing against Rohingya Muslims. It also follows a similar pattern the organization unearthed in Ethiopia wherein bad actors used the Facebook to incite violence. The organizations and Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen are now calling on Facebook to implement the "Break the Glass” package of emergency measures it took after the January 6th, 2021 attack on the US Capitol. They's also asking the social network to suspend paid digital advertisements in Kenya until the end of the elections on August 9th. 

Politicians are making another attempt to restore net neutrality rules. Democrat Senators Ed Markey and Ron Wyden have introduced a Net Neutrality and Broadband Justice Act that would classify broadband internet as a telecom service under Title II of the Communications Act. The move would let the FCC restore net neutrality protections repealed by the Ajit Pai-era Commission in December 2017, including safeguards against blocking, throttling and paid prioritization for data traffic.

The bill would also help the FCC institute policies that improve accessibility, safety and "close the digital divide," according to Markey's statement. Another 28 senators, including independent Bernie Sanders and prominent Democrats like Cory Booker and Elizabeth Warren, are co-sponsors. California Representative Doris Matsui is sponsoring an equivalent bill in the house. The measure has the endorsement of civil rights and activist groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Democrats have tried to revive net neutrality before with efforts like 2019's Save the Internet Act. As Markey explained to The Register, though, they're trying a different strategy. The new bill is purposefully short at just two pages long — that brevity gives the FCC the regulatory power to adapt to the "changing nature of the internet," the senator said. Previous attempts tried to enshrine specific rules in law.

The Act's survival is far from certain, though. It needs to advance beyond a Senate committee, and Congress will go into recess during August. A Senate vote might not succeed unless Democrats can pass the 60-vote threshold needed to avoid a filibuster, and the House bill isn't guaranteed to pass if it comes up for a vote after the November midterm elections.

The FCC isn't guaranteed to resurrect net neutrality even if the bill becomes law, for that matter. The Commission is currently deadlocked with two Democrats and two Republicans. Nominee Gigi Sohn still hasn't been confirmed. An FCC vote on neutrality-related policy changes could easily fail, even though the agency would have the authority (and effectively the obligation) to reinstitute consumer protections.

The US federal courts' document filing system was attacked by three hostile foreign actors, House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerrold Nadler has told fellow lawmakers. According to Politico, Nadler made the first public disclosure of the cyberattack at a committee hearing on oversight of the Justice Department’s National Security Division (NSD). The attack happened as part of a bigger security breach that led to a "system security failure" way back in 2020. Nadler has admitted during the hearing, however, that the committee only learned about the "startling breadth and scope" of the breach this March. 

Matthew Olsen, the Assistant Attorney General for National Security, has testified at the hearing and said his division is "working very closely with the judicial conference and judges around the country to address this issue." As you can guess, lawmakers are worried about how many cases were impacted by the breach and how exactly the issue had affected them. "[T]his is a dangerous set of circumstances that has now been publicly announced, and we need to know how many…were dismissed," committee member Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee told Olsen. When asked if the breach had affected any of the cases the NSD had handled, Olsen said he couldn't think of any in particular. 

There's still a lot of information about the breach that's kept under wraps — Senator Ron Wyden even wrote to the Administrative Office of the US Courts to express concerns about the fact that "the federal judiciary has yet to publicly explain what happened and has refused multiple requests to provide unclassified briefings to Congress." As Politico notes, though, the US Courts admitted in January 2021 that its Case Management/Electronic Case Files system was breached and even changed its filing procedures for sensitive documents. The publication also points out that this breach wasn't a part of the massive SolarWinds hacks, which are being blamed on a Russian state-sponsored group known as Nobelium.

Olsen said the Justice Department's investigators will keep the committee updated about any new developments, so we'll likely hear more information about the data breach in the future.