Global Headlines Express | A Russian Journalist Rises From the Dead, and Wired on How State and Corporate Collection of Personal Data Differ

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What the Agenda-Setters Are Talking About

Wired: How the Tech Giants Pulled Off What DARPA Couldn't

The New York Times once put it this way in a column: every time you swipe a card, subscribe to a magazine, or fill a prescription, that transaction record goes into one virtual, centralized database. If you assume the column is about Facebook and its leaked user records, or some other company sitting on user data, you are wrong. The piece ran in 2002. Facebook was founded two years later.

Its target was a program called Total Information Awareness, or TIA, launched by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The goal was to collect data on Americans, spot potential crimes before they happened, and stop them. The database belonged to the Department of Defense.

TIA could do information analysis, language translation, data mining, and pattern recognition. Put together, that would yield a full picture of people and their behavior, and so prevent terrorist attacks. It was the answer to a government that had failed to read the clues before 9/11.

Opposition came from every direction. The libertarian think tank Cato Institute warned that surveillance would become inescapable, in violation of the Fourth Amendment, which bars unreasonable search and seizure. The American Civil Liberties Union called it a Skynet that would hoover up every kind of personal record. The Senate voted unanimously to deny the program funding.

But more than a decade after TIA collapsed in Washington, something much like it grew up in Silicon Valley. This time people seemed to hand their personal data to companies such as Facebook and Google willingly, in exchange for convenience. The Times description still holds: your purchases and your data are still being collected. They are simply not used to predict crime. They are used to predict which ad you will click.

For private companies this became a popular business model, and hardly a secret one. The tech giants built products people liked, and users uploaded their data gladly. Buying up startups made the data more complete.

At a congressional hearing last month, a lawmaker raised the resemblance between TIA and Facebook. She asked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg whether he was familiar with TIA. He said he was not.

That is no surprise: when TIA was proposed, Zuckerberg was in high school. But the questions are worth asking. Why can private companies pile up this data today when the Defense Department was fought off for trying? What follows from such a tool existing beyond public view? And where does it take us next?

A state program and a platform run by a social media giant do differ in kind. Social media users upload their data themselves, after being shown the terms; the government can arrest you, and Facebook and Google cannot.

Yet the back end of these companies looks eerily like TIA, and the worries people had about state data collection apply to corporations as well. When a government makes use of the companies, the results can be dangerous — Russia's alleged use of social networks to interfere in the U.S. election, for instance.

Unlike TIA, companies that collect data are under no obligation to put it in the service of national security, and some civil rights groups argue they should not. What is alarming is that the social platforms seem to be running the other way, sharpening extremists. Tech companies could identify radicals; instead their recommendation systems and search engines have carried radical feeling further: a New York Times reporter watched some of Donald Trump's videos on YouTube during the election, to understand him. Soon after, she found YouTube recommending her videos by white supremacists and Holocaust deniers.

So what should be done? Wired's answer is twofold. We need watchdogs willing to comb through the companies the way they once combed through the government. And part of the responsibility falls on users themselves. People do not trust the government, but they have not noticed that they hand over every personal record they have to the giant companies, without a second thought.

The 24-Hour News Makers

Babchenko, the "Murdered" Russian Opposition Journalist, Comes Back to Life

On May 30, news outlets reported that the Russian opposition journalist Arkady Babchenko had been shot dead in Kyiv. After word of his "death" spread, Ukraine said Russia was to blame for the "killing." Russia denied any connection to the murder.

Then the story turned over: Babchenko was not dead. He walked into a press conference to faint applause and gasps. He said he had been told a month earlier that he was marked for assassination. Earlier reports had said his wife found him collapsed at the door of their home, shot several times in the back, and that he died in the ambulance on the way to hospital.

At the press conference Babchenko apologized to his wife and to everyone who had believed him dead: "I have buried many friends and colleagues with my own hands, so I know what that feels like. I am sorry to have put you through it, but I had no other choice."

The head of Ukraine's security service said Russia had recruited a Ukrainian resident to find a gunman. The man approached several candidates and offered $30,000 for the killing. One of them told Ukraine about the plot. By Babchenko's account, the plan had been two months in preparation. Ukraine has detained one suspect.

Russia's foreign ministry said in a statement that it was glad Babchenko was alive, while claiming the killing was a piece of theater staged by Ukraine for propaganda.

Babchenko, 41, has criticized Putin publicly many times. He condemned Putin's annexation of Crimea and backed southeastern Ukraine's push to break free of Russian control and win independence. After receiving death threats, he left Russia last year for exile in Ukraine. A few hours after word of his resurrection got out, he tweeted that he would "die at 96" — "after dancing on Putin's grave."

Christophe Deloire, secretary-general of Reporters Without Borders, said of the episode: "It is pathetic and regrettable that the Ukrainian police played with the truth, whatever their motive."

What Else Happened in the World

The State Council: import tariffs on everyday consumer goods will be cut broadly from July. Starting July 1 this year, the average import tariff on clothing, footwear and headwear, kitchenware and sports and fitness goods drops from 15.9% to 7.1%; on household appliances such as washing machines and refrigerators, from 20.5% to 8%; on processed foods such as farmed and wild-caught seafood and mineral water, from 15.2% to 6.9%; and on detergents, cosmetics such as skincare and hair-care products, and some medical and health products, from 8.4% to 2.9%.

North Korea and the U.S. hold high-level talks in New York to settle the agenda for the Trump-Kim summit. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Kim Yong Chol, vice chairman of the Central Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea and head of its United Front Department, attended a working dinner in New York at 7 p.m. local time on the 30th, and will hold high-level talks on the 31st to finalize the agenda for the summit, including denuclearization.

Italy's deadlock over forming a government may be breaking. Italy's interim prime minister, Carlo Cottarelli, said after a brief meeting with President Sergio Mattarella that new possibilities had opened up for forming a government. Cottarelli said a government based on the results of March's election might still be possible. The far-right Five Star Movement, which had led the earlier attempt, also let it be known that it would propose another candidate for economy minister to the president and try again.

Brazil's strikes spread. Brazil's oil workers' federation announced a 72-hour strike beginning at midnight local time on May 30, in solidarity with truckers who have been on strike for 10 days. The strikers demand that the government and the state oil company Petrobras act to bring fuel prices down. The country's highest labor court has ruled the federation's strike plan illegal.

British press reports that staff at 15 aid organizations sexually exploited African children. A British member of parliament obtained a 2001 United Nations report on an investigation into the sexual exploitation of children in Africa by aid workers. The Times, citing the report, said that on the testimony of children, 67 staff members from more than 40 aid organizations, 15 of them international, "had exploitative sexual relationships with refugee children."

Paraguay is about to get its first woman president. Paraguayan President Horacio Cartes announced his resignation on the 28th. Once Congress approves it, Vice President Alicia Pucheta, from the same governing Colorado Party, will serve out the rest of his term and become Paraguay's first woman president. Her time in office may last only a little more than two months: in the presidential election in April, the Colorado Party's Mario Abdo Benítez won the most votes and is due to take office on August 15. Congress votes on the 30th on whether to accept Cartes's resignation and let Pucheta take over, and approval is likely.

People Are Saying

"Mexico will not pay for the border wall. Not now, not ever."

At a rally, U.S. President Donald Trump attacked Mexico for doing nothing to stop illegal immigrants pouring into the United States, and said he would keep his campaign promise to make Mexico pay for the wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.

Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto answered on Twitter: "Mexico will not pay for the border wall. Not now, not ever."

Trump's remarks could affect trade talks with Mexico. He plans to rewrite the North American Free Trade Agreement this year, but the United States, Mexico and Canada have yet to agree.

Things You Might Also Find Interesting

Charities Fear Russia Will Cull Stray Dogs Cruelly Before the World Cup

Russia's deputy prime minister has met animal welfare campaigners and called for stray dogs not to be cleared away by cruel means. Given what happened before the Sochi Winter Olympics, people remain deeply worried about the dogs.

Russia killed strays by cruel methods ahead of the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. In protest, some athletes adopted stray dogs and took them home to their own countries.

An estimated 2 million stray dogs live in the 11 Russian cities hosting the World Cup. Local authorities are expected to spend £119 million on housing the animals. Even so, people fear that officials worried about their cities' image will take extreme measures to deal with the strays before players and fans arrive.

Earlier this year, a Russian parliamentary official who inspected an animal shelter in Yekaterinburg said conditions there were unsatisfactory: the shelter was not even run by animal experts.

Singapore Airlines Will Restore the World's Longest Nonstop Flight, to New York

Singapore Airlines will resume its nonstop service to New York in October, flown by the newest version of the A350. The route runs 9,500 miles (15,288 kilometers) and takes 18 hours and 45 minutes. The airline dropped it in 2013.

Qatar Airways now operates the world's longest nonstop route, Auckland to Doha, at 9,025 miles (14,524 kilometers).

Singapore Airlines will fly the A350-900ULR, an ultra-long-range aircraft fitted with business class and premium economy. The twin-engine plane burns less fuel than the one used in 2013. The airline closed the route back then because it did not pay; the aircraft flying it had four engines.

On This Day

May 31, 1819: The American poet Walt Whitman, author of Leaves of Grass, was born.

May 31, 1921: China's first domestically made automobile was built.

May 31, 1961: South Africa left the Commonwealth and became the Republic of South Africa.

May 31, 2002: The 17th FIFA World Cup, jointly hosted by South Korea and Japan, opened in Seoul — the first World Cup ever staged by two countries together.

May 31, 2005: "Deep Throat," the source in the Watergate scandal, was revealed to be Mark Felt, former associate director of the FBI.

Cover image from: Wiki Commons