News Burst 16 March 2022 – Get The News! – March 16, 2022

• China is gravely concerned about cyberattacks against other countries that originate from the US and use China as a springboard,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian told reporters at a press briefing on Monday. Zhao was commenting on recent Chinese media reports that hackers, mainly from the US but also from NATO allies Germany and the Netherlands, recently hijacked a Chinese computer network for cyberattacks, 87% of which targeted Russia.

• Roscosmos’ head Dmitry Rogozin has not ruled out that a “hostile” geopolitical situation could force Russia to create a new Russian Orbital Service Station (ROSS) as “militarily applicable.” The Russian space agency’s director confessed that if ROSS, planned for launch in 2025, existed now, he would have already ceased cooperation with Western partners on the International Space Station (ISS). “If we continue to live in this hostile world by the time our orbital service station is deployed and we still have a limited number of allies, then we will make this station militarily applicable,” Rogozin said.

• Facebook parent company Meta has announced a comprehensive package of measures to coach Australian politicians about the spread of “misinformation” ahead of the country’s general election this year. The company will “help train Australian political candidates on aspects of cyber security and coach influencers to stop the spread of misinformation in a bid to boost the integrity of an upcoming election,” according to a Reuters report published on Tuesday. Meta’s Australian chief of public policy, Josh Machin, said the company would “stay vigilant to emerging threats and take additional steps, if necessary, to prevent abuse on our platform while also empowering people in Australia to use their voice by voting.”

• Declassified Documents – The US Central Intelligence Agency used a detainee in Afghanistan as a ‘prop’ to teach interrogators how to torture prisoners, leaving the man with brain damage, newly declassified documents have revealed. According to the 2008 report by the CIA’s inspector general, published by The Guardian, 44-year-old Ammar al-Baluchi was used to teach interrogators how to perform a torture technique called ‘walling’. As explained by the CIA, walling is where an interrogator “pulls the detainee towards him and then quickly slams the detainee against [a] false wall.” The document states that Baluchi was subjected to walling for up to two hours at a time, and a former trainee claimed that “all the interrogation students lined up to ‘wall’ Ammar” so their instructor “could certify them on their ability to use the technique.”

• Controversial Facial Recognition Technology (FRT) allows police to compare CCTV imagery and other sources with traditional photographic records, as well as databases of billions of headshots, some of which are crudely pulled from individuals’ social media profiles without their knowledge or consent. The NYPD is a particularly enthusiastic user of FRT, with 25,500 cameras spanning the city today. FRT has supplanted traditional ‘stop-and-frisk’ operations by law enforcement. Between 2002 and 2019, innocent New Yorkers were searched and questioned in public by law enforcement over five million times. This reached a peak in 2011, a year during which almost 700,000 people were stopped and frisked. While the tactic’s usage has fallen significantly in the years since, the number of FRT-equipped surveillance devices in the city has multiplied significantly in the same period.

• French companies should not quit Russia because they bear responsibility for their employees and customers, the head of the Movement of the Enterprises of France (MEDEF) – the largest French employers federation – Geoffroy Roux de Béziers said.
  “ There are in total 160,000 employees in French companies, they have to nourish themselves and to get paid. And our prior responsibility is to pay our employees,” the MEDEF chief said. He admitted that in current circumstances – amid the sanctions and the fact that some Russian banks are cut off from SWIFT – it is difficult for the enterprises to work in Russia, but it does not mean that they will leave.

• German pharmaceutical giant Bayer is suspending ‘non-essential’ business in Russia, the company said in a statement on Monday. The company noted, however, that it would continue to supply both Russia and Belarus with products in health and agriculture. According to the statement, Bayer will stop all spending in Russia and Belarus, including advertising, promotional activities, investment projects and new-business development. “Withholding essential health and agriculture products from the civilian populations – like cancer or cardiovascular treatments, health products for pregnant women and children as well as seeds to grow food – would only multiply the war’s ongoing toll on human life,” Bayer stated.

• Palmer Luckey, the founder of the Oculus Rift VR start-up who was pushed out of the company in 2016 when it was acquired by Facebook, is now creating cutting-edge military AI technology with his new company Anduril. In a recent interview, he dropped a hint that Anduril may be involved in the ongoing military conflict in Ukraine in some capacity. Since founding Anduril, which is now valued at nearly $5 billion, Luckey has won several billion-dollar Pentagon contracts, including one for the development of a counter-drone system based on the company’s ‘battlefield operating system’ Lattice. A demo video shows how the system, which operates autonomously through “computer vision, machine learning and real-time data,” can be used to either electronically interfere with hostile drones or launch its own to physically disable enemy devices.

• The US State Department has been seeking American allies who have Soviet S-300 air defense systems as it explores various options of supplying Ukraine with heavier arms, CNN reported on Tuesday. “The State Department has been working to identify which countries currently have the Soviet-made S-300 air defense systems and is examining how they could be transferred to Ukraine,” the media outlet reported. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has repeatedly called on western nations to impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine or provide Ukraine with military aircraft and air defense systems.

• While Russia is managing the crisis to support its economy from the impact of Western sanctions, countries around the world are beginning to feel the effect of those sanctions on their own economies. Economists are raising concerns of an upcoming global recession as financial turmoil intensifies.

• Canadian troops were accused by Jewish groups last year of involvement in training neo-Nazi battalions in Ukraine. It was also revealed by media that Canadian officials had met in 2018 with members of the notorious neo-Nazi Azov Battalion.

• Teenage TikTok influencers have already entered the messaging fray after reportedly being enlisted by the Joe Biden administration to coordinate an onslaught blaming Russia’s President Vladimir Putin for globally skyrocketing gas prices.
  On 10 March the White House held a Zoom briefing on Ukraine for 30 of the social media platform’s celebrities, some of whom boast millions of followers, according to a recording of the call obtained by The Washington Post.

• While American pizza restaurant chain Papa John’s International recently announced that it was suspending its operations in Russia, some 190 Papa John’s establishments in the country remain open and continue to serve customers, The New York Times reports. According to the newspaper, this situation stems from the fact that Papa John’s venues in Russia are owned by locals via a franchise agreement with company controlled by Christopher Wynne, a man originally from Colorado who has “lived part time and worked in the country since the early 2000s”. “The best thing I can do as an individual is show compassion for the people, my employees, franchisees and customers without judging them because of the politicians in power,” Wynne said. He also observed that internal credit card payment systems in Russia continue to operate normally amid the sanctions imposed against the country.

• In a tweet posted this weekend, former US House Representative Tulsi Gabbard, argued that the 25 or so such biolabs in Ukraine that would “release & spread deadly pathogens” if breached, and suggested that “US/Russia/Ukraine/NATO/UN/EU must implement a ceasefire now around these labs until they’re secured & pathogens destroyed” in order to avoid a potential disaster. Gabbard said that the matter in question is “not a matter of disagreement or holding a dissenting view” – rather, “this is about facts and this is about the truth. I have said that there are biolabs in Ukraine that have received US support, that contained dangerous pathogens; that if those labs are breached, then we and the world are facing a potential future of pandemics”.

News Burst 16 March 2022