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Opinion | The Point: Conversations and insights about the moment. - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/08/27/opinion/thepoint

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Zeynep Tufekci
Aug. 27, 2024, 12:05 p.m. ETAug. 27, 2024

‘Free Speech’ Should Not Shroud Criminal Activity

The detention in France of Pavel Durov, the founder and chief executive of the messaging app Telegram, has sparked a loud outcry about free speech. Elon Musk has portrayed the arrest on his X account as an ominous threat to free speech, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. referred to the app as an “encrypted, uncensored” platform and said “the need to protect free speech has never been more urgent.”

It’s a curious case, and the French government hasn’t helped matters by releasing information in dribs and drabs. While it is possible that there are free speech issues entangled here, some early details suggest the issue may be one of criminal activity.

On Monday, the French prosecutor said in a statement that Durov — who is a citizen of France, Russia, St. Kitts and Nevis and the United Arab Emirates — was being held for questioning in connection with an investigation into criminal activities on the app, including the trading of child sexual abuse material as well as drug trafficking, fraud and money laundering. Notably, Telegram explicitly boasts that it has never disclosed user data to any government, ever.

Questions have long swirled around Telegram. Contrary to widespread belief, Telegram is not encrypted in any meaningful sense. That would be “end to end” encryption, so that even the company couldn’t read users’ messages. Telegram — and anyone it chooses — can read all group chats, and there is no way to fully encrypt them. Those very large groups are the main attraction of the platform.

Private chats on Telegram also lack end-to-end encryption by default. Here, though, users can undergo an onerous process to turn on end-to-end encryption, which then applies only to that conversation. Even the protection provided to private chats is murky: Cryptography experts have long questioned whether Telegram’s limited encryption actually meets security standards.

Durov was born in Russia, where Telegram is used widely. The Kremlin has Durov’s back: It issued a statement that unless more evidence is provided, Durov’s detention may be “a direct attempt to limit freedom of communication.” Russian antiwar activists have long wondered how the Kremlin seems to know so much about their activities on Telegram. (Good question.)

Free speech is an important value, but protecting it does not mean absolving anyone of responsibility for all criminal activity. Ironically, Telegram’s shortage of end-to-end encryption means the company is likely to be more liable simply because it can see the criminal activity happening on its platform. If, for example, Telegram did not cooperate with authorities at all after receiving legal warrants for information about criminal activities, that would mean trouble even in the United States, with its sweeping free speech protections.

#Telegram #Pavel_Durov #Zeynep_Tufekci #Chiffrement

Opinion | Zeynep Tufekci - Wealthy Nations Must Prioritize the Global Fight Against Mpox - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/08/13/opinion/thepoint

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Zeynep Tufekci
Aug. 14, 2024, 2:48 p.m. ETAug. 14, 2024
Wealthy Nations Must Prioritize the Global Fight Against Mpox

The W.H.O. has declared a new global public health emergency for an outbreak of deadly mpox, primarily in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In response, wealthy nations must do everything possible to stop the disease’s spread.

Mpox, formerly known as the monkeypox virus, made the news in 2022 when a global outbreak, including in the United States, prompted a public health emergency. But by May 2023, cases in wealthy nations had receded, largely because of vaccination drives and behavior change among those most at risk of contracting the virus. The W.H.O. ended that mpox emergency.

But the virus hadn’t disappeared, and it’s now back on the rise, potentially with a vengeance.

The mpox virus has two types: a much deadlier Clade I and a less severe Clade II. In 2022, the United States experienced an outbreak of Clade II. But lacking support for eradication efforts, including vaccination drives, Clade II simmered in African countries. Worse, Clade I — estimated to have a 3 percent to 6 percent fatality rate — also spread, though it was confined to the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo. Despite all the global attention heaped on this disease at the time, African countries never received enough vaccines or sufficient support to eradicate the virus.

Now, Clade I cases are sharply on the rise in Congo, where the disease has claimed the lives of more than a thousand people, most of them children. It has reached more urban areas. Cases have begun to pop up in other African countries, including Burundi, Kenya and Uganda.

So far, wealthy nations have failed to send enough vaccines to counter the disease’s quick spread. The African Union’s health agency Africa C.D.C. has said it has only about 200,000 mpox vaccine doses available out of the 10 million needed. The global vaccine alliance GAVI told Reuters it needs $84 million to respond in areas at most risk, but it has raised only $8 million.

But providing vaccines alone is not enough. In Congo, stigma, regulatory obstacles and other crises — including measles and cholera outbreaks — have made a coordinated response difficult. The country finally approved two mpox vaccines just a few weeks ago, Reuters reported, but it has only about 65,000 vaccines available in the short term (for a population of about 100 million people) and vaccination campaigns appear unlikely to begin before October. Comprehensive international support may be the only thing that could beat back the disease.

Will we get it right this time around? If not, the United States and the rest of the world may get an unfortunate shot at a Round 2 of the virus too, perhaps in its much deadlier form.

#Zeynep_Tufekci #Mpox #Epidémiologie #Vaccination

Zeynep Tufekci - The Problem Is Not A.I. It’s the Disbelief Created by Trump. - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/08/07/opinion/thepoint#the-problem-is-not-ai-its-the-disbelief-created-by-trump

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Zeynep Tufekci
Aug. 12, 2024, 1:57 p.m. ETAug. 12, 2024

The Problem Is Not A.I. It’s the Disbelief Created by Trump.

Current artificial intelligence technologies have become surprisingly good at creating realistic images and video, unleashing fears that fake images can be used for political and election manipulation.

Well, yes and no.

Fake A.I. imagery is a challenging problem, and not simply because it looks realistic. The key issue is that these images muddy the waters of credibility for everyone while providing a handy excuse for political operatives willing to lie to their supporters already eager to believe the lie.

Take Donald Trump’s social media post on Sunday in which he accused Kamala Harris’s campaign of manipulating an image to make her crowd seem bigger at a Detroit airplane hangar last week.

“Has anyone noticed that Kamala CHEATED at the airport?” he wrote. “There was nobody at the plane, and she ‘A.I.’d’ it, and showed a massive ‘crowd’ of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST!”

How do we know an image is real in this day and age? An average person can no longer be certain of the authenticity of images or, increasingly, even videos through individual sleuthing. The A.I. is that good and is getting better. (That’s why the classic media literacy advice — do your own research — doesn’t work anymore.)

This makes it difficult to know what to believe, except through a key mechanism: trusting sources and trusting that they have either taken the image or video themselves or carefully vetted it as authentic.

That’s how we know that the crowd waiting for Harris was real, because there are pictures from photo agencies like Getty, as well as images and reports from multiple other news organizations that were on the tarmac, that match the circulating social media photos that caught Trump’s ire. We know that credible news organizations and photo agencies have very strict rules about images and videos. But that, in turn, requires trusting the photo agency or other media source furnishing the image or video.

While this made-up falsity by Trump & other right-wing provocateurs are posted/viewed by millions, here is video taken by @NnamEgwuon of the Michigan rally — not that this needs to be proven true: pic.twitter.com/Ul1IdyJ0RW ▻https://t.co/MhJYG4As9e
— Vaughn Hillyard (@VaughnHillyard) August 11, 2024

It’s no accident that Trump has made it a habit to portray credible news organizations as untrustworthy liars, and many of his supporters seem to have internalized that message they were open to in the first place.

Once trust is lost and all credibility is questioned, the lie doesn’t have to be high quality. It doesn’t have to be supported by highly realistic fake A.I. It doesn’t have to be so easily disprovable. To work, the lie just needs a willing purveyor and an eager audience. The A.I., then, is but a fig leaf.

#Intelligence_artificielle #Images #Crédibilité #Fake_news #Manipulation #Sources_crédibles