dChan
Anonymous ID: 5c4678 Sept. 19, 2020, 7:59 p.m. No.10716331   🗄️.is 🔗kun   >>6456 >>6814 >>6861 >>6948

TikTok data gives Beijing 'shapes and styles of faces' China 'can't get in the mainland'

 

China is using images of TikTok users to improve its facial recognition capacities, according to American lawmakers and analysts monitoring the unfolding dispute over the social media giant’s U.S. operations. “TikTok is a massive repository of data,” Foundation for Defense of Democracies analyst Emily de la Bruyere, an expert in the links between China’s military apparatus and commercial entities, said of the social media platform. “Facial recognition … is a big part of it.” That concern has contributed to the U.S. hostility to TikTok, which will be expelled from American app stores next week pursuant to a Commerce Department order unveiled Friday. The app, widely popular as a platform for short videos, has the ability to collect precious bulk data to power technological developments with both national security and economic ramifications. “It’s a lot of data that is tagged on shapes and styles of faces that the Chinese government can’t get in the mainland,” Texas Rep. Will Hurd, a Republican member of the House Intelligence Committee, told the Center for Strategic and International Studies in a conversation recorded last week and aired Thursday. “So, all these things are connected.” Such a cache of facial data could have economic and geopolitical value, as Chinese entities could learn to profile populations and socioeconomic groups. “They're figuring out what people who look a certain way want to do with their app, and then, they can improve their pitch to you,” the American Enterprise Institute’s Derek Scissors explained. “‘We have a pattern between your facial structure — which, of course, includes your age, your gender, so on — and what you like to look at, and that's going to help us give you the videos you want to look at, which makes us more competitive.’”

 

That’s a competition that companies and governments in democratic societies can ill-afford to lose, given that “data will be the fuel of tomorrow,” as a top NATO commander put it earlier this year, powering the development of cutting-edge technologies made possible by the advent of ultra-high-speed, next-generation wireless technology and artificial intelligence. “TikTok is also collecting data on how humans interact with information with visual stimuli, how faces respond to that,” de la Bruyere said. “What sort of things are captivating to like the human imagination or interest, and what's going to keep your attention? So it's not just the facial recognition for us. It's also immense collection of data on human behavior and potential.” The ability to profile such large population groups could create significant opportunities for Chinese propaganda campaigns and influence operations, even election interference. “And Chinese intelligence is certainly sophisticated enough to say, 'I want to target middle-aged white people in swing-state Wisconsin,” Scissors said. The availability of American data to Chinese entities is all the more troublesome given that Beijing already has greater access to data than Western companies do because the authoritarian regime lacks the privacy protections that exist in democratic societies. “It's basically taking something valuable from the United States, commoditizing it, and selling it,” Scissors said. President Trump issued an order requiring TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, to sell its U.S. operations to an American entity by Sunday. The company has resisted that proposal, in part to protect from U.S. custody the algorithms developed and improved with the assistance of the data provided by the roughly 100 million American users of the app, and countered by offering to partner with an American company as a “trusted technology provider” while retaining a majority-Chinese ownership, but that proposal has drawn skepticism from Trump and China hawks. “If we hold American firms to a certain standard on data extraction, and the Chinese can just ignore that, we’re saying to China, ‘Why don't you start three steps up the ladder? And we’ll try to catch you,’” Scissors said.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/defense-national-security/tiktok-data-gives-beijing-shapes-and-styles-of-faces-china-cant-get-in-the-mainland

Anonymous ID: 5c4678 Sept. 19, 2020, 8:25 p.m. No.10716521   🗄️.is 🔗kun

>>10716306

 

The Hiway Theater

 

https://hiwaytheater.org/

 

Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President

If it hadn’t been for a bottle of scotch and a late-night visit from musician Gregg Allman, Jimmy Carter might never have been elected the 39th President of the United States. The documentary charts the mostly forgotten story of how Carter, a lover of all types of music, forged a tight bond with musicians Willie Nelson, the Allman Brothers, Bob Dylan and others. Low on campaign funds and lacking in name recognition, Carter relied on support from these artists to give him a crucial boost in the Democratic primaries. Once Carter was elected, the musicians became frequent guests in the White House. The surprisingly significant role that music played throughout Carter’s life and in his work becomes a thread in this engaging portrait of one of the most enigmatic Presidents in American history.

Anonymous ID: 5c4678 Sept. 19, 2020, 8:53 p.m. No.10716785   🗄️.is 🔗kun   >>6934 >>6948 >>6978

Joe Biden spent decades warning of voter fraud — now called a myth by Dems

 

The Democratic Party line treats voter fraud as little more than a GOP fever dream — yet the party’s presidential candidate Joe Biden spent decades of his career sounding the alarm about it. Biden, the Democratic standard bearer, consistently shared GOP concerns about voter fraud during his 36 years as a United States senator from Delaware. “Should Voters Be Allowed To Register On Election Day? No,” Biden wrote in an op-ed to a now-defunct Wilmington, Del. newspaper in 1977. He even chided President Carter for proposing it. A “reservation I have and one that is apparently shared by some of the top officials within the Department of Justice is that the president’s proposal could lead to a serious increase in vote fraud,” Biden wrote. He has since reversed course. In an internet conversation with 2020 running mate Sen. Kamala Harris this month, Biden said, “When you and I get elected, God willing, we’re going to push hard to make voting, Election Day, a national holiday so people don’t have to take off work. There should be same-day registration.”

 

Voter fraud has become an increasingly partisan issue in recent years. Republicans have warned that mail-in ballots, same-day registration and lack of voter ID laws create ripe opportunities for liberal mischief. Democrats counter that efforts to curb those things are part of a larger plot by the GOP to suppress voting from poor and minority communities, core Democratic constituencies. “Voter fraud is, by and large, a myth,” said Georgia Democrat and one-time veep candidate Stacey Abrams in April. Sen. Bernie Sanders has called President Trump’s warnings of coming fraud “delusional.” DNC boss Tom Perez has mocked that “you have a better chance of getting struck by lightning” than finding it. Biden has derided White House fears of mail-in ballot fraud as “unfounded,” despite evidence of how easily mailed votes can be tampered with. “He’s already trying to undermine the election with false claims of voter fraud and threatening to block essential COVID assistance if any extra funds go to the U.S. Postal Service,” the former vice president claimed about Trump during an April online fundraiser. “What in God’s name was that about other than trying to … make it very hard for people to vote.”

 

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Biden worked closely with now-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to stiffen penalties for voter fraud. In 1988 — the same year his son’s drug record was being expunged — Biden introduced the “Anti-Corruption Act,” which McConnell co-sponsored. The bill would have enacted penalties for anyone who deprived anyone of “a fair and impartially conducted election process through the use of fraudulent ballots or voter registration forms or the filing of fraudulent campaign reports.” Biden and McConnell tried again in 1989. Sen. Strom Thurmond was also a co-sponsor of the bill. “Current law does not permit prosecution of election fraud … This bill makes it a federal offense to corrupt any state or local election process,” Biden argued on the Senate floor. McConnell noted in his own floor assessment that it would “raise the maximum penalty for both election fraud and public corruption to 10 years in federal prison and a $10,000 fine.” The 1989 version also died as a standalone bill. Undeterred, Biden tried to shoehorn the voter fraud elements into the Federal Crime Control Act, in 1989 and the National Drug Control Strategy Act of 1990 — they went nowhere. When Biden introduced the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1993, McConnell — his faithful partner on the effort — snuck in voter fraud provisions as an amendment. But the bill died. McConnell introduced the act on his own in 1995 without Biden’s participation — it died again. By the time he served as vice president to Barack Obama, Biden had fully, and publicly, abandoned his former views. “Why, without any proof of voter fraud, have 81 bills been introduced in state legislative bodies … to make it harder for people to vote,” Biden asked an audience at South Carolina’s Allen University in 2014.

https://nypost.com/2020/09/19/biden-spent-years-warning-of-voter-fraud-now-call-a-myth/