The Weekly Weird #56
Britain bites Apple, the long arm of bogus law, deepfakes in the UK, FBI finds secret JFK files, Georgia FaRTs on protesters, Cameroon launches new digital ID
Welcome back to your Weekly Weird, where we comment on the careening clown car of catastrophe clunking clumsily into Commiseration Station!
Before we kick off, some up-fronts:
Georgia FaRTs On Protesters: Georgia (the country, not the state) has been dealing with months of protests against the
regimegovernment, and the police response would make Putin proud, involving violence, torture, titushky, and “discriminatory surveillance” (i.e. the use of facial recognition technology, or FaRT, in prosecutions). From Biometric Update: “The Georgian Young Lawyers’ Association (GYLA) claims the country’s Ministry of Internal Affairs is frequently using facial recognition cameras against protestors in criminal cases. The GYLA says that the practice is “especially noticeable” in criminal cases initiated when protesters are blocking the road, and that the “only” evidence in such cases are photographs taken from facial recognition cameras.” So after pulling the protesters into vans and beating them with truncheons, the police are running their faces through a database and taking them to court. Charming.
Our guest in the next episode of the podcast, out Sunday 16 February, is Marika Mikiashvili, a Georgian academic and activist who explains the genesis and background of the protests, and describes her experience of living in a democracy as it turns authoritarian. Tune in!
Fogel Goes Free: Marc Fogel, an American teacher and former diplomat, is back in the United States after being freed by Russia, where he had been imprisoned since 2022. Appearing at a press conference beside President Trump, draped in the Stars and Stripes and holding what looks like a well-deserved beer, Fogel said “I feel like the luckiest man on Earth right now.”
FBI Finds Secret JFK Files: Axios reported this week that the FBI “just discovered about 2,400 records tied to President Kennedy's assassination that were never provided to a board tasked with reviewing and disclosing the documents.” President Trump’s executive order mandating the release of all information on what might just be America’s oldest conspiracy theory apparently prompted the FBI to do some double-checking, during which they “just discovered” the trove of “still-secret records” on the 62-year-old event of national significance and global interest, presumably down the back of a couch or under a long-abandoned box of donuts. Coincidence?
Cameroon Launches New Digital ID: According to Biometric Update, “[t]he Delegate General for National Security (DGSN) – the head of Cameroon’s Police – Martin Mbarga Nguele, has announced that the country’s new secure identification system will go operational in two weeks’ time.” The new system is provided by Augentic, a Munich-based tech company specialising in biometric technology and digital currency. Rolling out a biometric digital identity database in a country where corruption is “endemic” and “rampant”, and in which “91% of the Cameroonian population report that police officers...are involved in corruption” is totally a great idea and won’t have any serious consequences for citizens. Transparency International’s 2023 Corruption Index recorded that “the police are seen by Cameroonians as the most corrupt institution in the country,” and Martin Mbarga Nguele, quoted above, is accused of ignoring police misconduct and failing to take action on documented police atrocities. Just the man to be overseeing Cameroon’s One File, right?
The Long Arm Of Bogus Law: Freedom House reported this week on a decade of “physical incidents of transnational repression”, “a total of 1,219 direct, physical incidents of transnational repression committed by 48 governments who have reached across the borders of 103 countries that are hosting exiled dissidents and diaspora communities.” The data shows that “China, Turkey, and Tajikistan rank as the most prolific perpetrators of transnational repression overall since 2014.” In 2024 alone, “[g]overnments perpetrated 160 total incidents of physical transnational repression across 34 countries…including assassinations, abductions, assaults, detentions, and unlawful deportations.” The “top perpetrators” were Uganda, Cambodia, Russia, Iran, and China. Chillingly, considering its military power and global influence, “[t]he Chinese Communist Party remains the world’s leading perpetrator of transnational repression and is responsible for 272 recorded physical incidents since 2014.”
Wow Much Cuts How Money So Government: No commentary can exceed in satirical force and weirdness this week’s press conference given by President Trump and Elon Musk, in which “billions and billions of dollars in waste, fraud, and abuse” are announced as having been uncovered by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a newly-minted money militia that emerged from the MAGA mind-meld and was named after Elon’s favourite cryptocurrency, which itself is based on a meme featuring a Japanese dog.
“It seems hard to believe a judge would say ‘we don’t want you to do that’,” said the President, before handing over to the world’s most famous shitposter, who then presented his case while accompanied by his young son X, commenting at one point that “gravitas is difficult” while trying to quiet his child. Is it actually legal and/or constitutional for the president to create a team that then basically shuts down parts of the federal government without legislative oversight or judicial intervention? Probably not, but time will tell. Is the American public so fed up with ‘business as usual’ that they seem willing to accept this kind of unilateral chainsaw-wielding as a good thing, even while it represents a clear break with due process in favour of executive fiat and could potentially damage the country’s hidden, murky, often nonsensical but at least occasionally necessary plumbing? So far, yes. Chalk one up to absolute disillusionment.
JD, AI VP: Vice President JD Vance appeared at the Paris AI summit to deliver a keynote speech about how AI is the future, is totally awesome, and shouldn’t be impeded. He cautioned the gathered Europeans against killing AI with regulation, and declared that the Trump administration would pursue a “pro-worker growth path” for AI in the United States. Vance claimed that AI “will never replace human beings,” and will in fact “make us more productive, more prosperous, and more free.” For a cinematic summation of why I for one would prefer that AI not “make us” do anything, click here. You can watch JD’s entire speech (obviously written by ChatGPT) below:
Also…
Britain Bites Apple
The British government, flying high on a wave of positive sentiment, public trust, and objectively measurable success1, issued tech giant Apple with a “secret order” demanding “that Apple create a back door allowing them to retrieve all the content any Apple user worldwide has uploaded to the cloud,” according to the Washington Post.
The British government’s undisclosed order, issued last month, requires blanket capability to view fully encrypted material, not merely assistance in cracking a specific account, and has no known precedent in major democracies.
The ubiquitous “people familiar with the matter” also told the WP that acting on the order would be “a significant defeat for tech companies in their decades-long battle to avoid being wielded as government tools against their users.”
The office of the Home Secretary has served Apple with a document called a technical capability notice, ordering it to provide access under the sweeping U.K. Investigatory Powers Act of 2016, which authorizes law enforcement to compel assistance from companies when needed to collect evidence, the people said.
The law, known by critics as the Snoopers’ Charter, makes it a criminal offense to reveal that the government has even made such a demand. An Apple spokesman declined to comment.
Apple can appeal the U.K. capability notice to a secret technical panel, which would consider arguments about the expense of the requirement, and to a judge who would weigh whether the request was in proportion to the government’s needs. But the law does not permit Apple to delay complying during an appeal.
As a result of the notice, “Apple is likely to stop offering encrypted storage in the U.K.”
Preston Byrne, a British lawyer and Senior Fellow at the Adam Smith Institute, contextualised what might seem like government overreach to, well, any normal person.
Those of us with an English law education will recall Sir Ivor Jennings’ famous quip – “if Parliament enacts that smoking in the streets of Paris is an offence, then it is an offence” – as an illustration of the theoretically absolute power of the King-in-Parliament.
Other tech companies offering end-to-end encryption are doubtlessly watching the situation closely. Signal’s president Meredith Whittaker told the BBC in 2023 that they “would absolutely, 100% walk away” from the UK if the British government used the Snooper’s Charter to force companies to violate security and encryption.
More from Whittaker this week via the Washington Post:
Meredith Whittaker, president of the nonprofit encrypted messenger Signal, said: “Using Technical Capability Notices to weaken encryption around the globe is a shocking move that will position the UK as a tech pariah, rather than a tech leader. If implemented, the directive will create a dangerous cybersecurity vulnerability in the nervous system of our global economy.”
At the time, the Home Office gave a statement that said:
The Online Safety Bill does not represent a ban on end-to-end encryption but makes clear that technological changes should not be implemented in a way that diminishes public safety - especially the safety of children online.
It is not a choice between privacy or child safety - we can and we must have both.
Almost two years on from that statement, the British government has become embroiled in a scandal over the ignoring, covering up, and failure to effectively prosecute the mass rape of potentially thousands of children, which slightly undermines their claim that ending cloud security and encryption is all about the kids. If the government cared so much about “the safety of children”, they might consider stopping organised gangs from raping them en masse and getting away with it, perhaps beginning with a national inquiry. Instead, the government has painted concerns about the mass rape scandal as far-right extremism and refused to engage in a national effort to get to the bottom of what might be the most horrific criminal scandal in the country’s history. Labour and Conservative governments and local councils alike failed to act on the well-documented suffering of children, and also supported the Snooper’s Charter.
Professor Ross Anderson, who literally wrote the book on security engineering, published a paper called Chat Control or Child Protection? in which he concluded that, in short, “the data do not support claims of large-scale growing harm that is initiated online and that is preventable by image scanning.” Anderson goes on to point out that “[t]he police have since acknowledged that too much effort has been put into indecent images and not enough into preventing actual abuse of minors.”
With that in mind, the phrase the Home Office used - “the safety of children online” - clangs even harder. Not only is the government laser-focused on getting into every corner of personal cyberspace by claiming to be on a crusade to protect children, they’re doing it in the full knowledge that most actual abuse takes place in the real world and predominantly, unfortunately, in the family context, at the hands of the mother’s partner.
Anderson quotes figures from a 2017 analysis in Canada, of 150 victims (emphasis mine):
Notable facts include that most victims were female (85%); abuse started for most victims (87%) before the age of 12; and where there were multiple offenders, the primary abuser was predominantly a family member (82%), with the abuse taking place in the family home. Where there was a single offender, he was still a family member half the time, while other offenders were typically local and in a position of trust, such as clergy, police, doctors or teachers.
Remember when “[d]ozens of Pentagon staff and contractors with high-level security clearance” got busted for downloading child pornography, and “the Pentagon…checked only 3,500 out of 5,200 people who were suspected of downloading child pornography”? How about when “[a]n employee of the Social Security Office of Disability Adjudication and Review was arrested…on a criminal complaint charging him with accessing child pornography”? Or when the NSA’s director of security said “he sees child pornography on NSA IT systems”, and the director of the Pentagon's Defense Security Service said that “the amount of child porn I see [on government devices] is just unbelievable”?
I know this ended up in a pretty dark place, but a supposedly liberal democracy ending online privacy using legally mandated secrecy to hide it from the public is pretty dark.
Is it really wise to write a blank surveillance cheque to any government for “the safety of children online” when the police and security services regularly get busted violating that “safety”? Even if the authorities were squeaky clean themselves, it should be a non-starter, but with the track record as it exists, it seems unthinkable.
But it’s happening.
Here’s some light relief before we go on…
Deepfakes In The UK
I recently watched the excellent two-series show The Capture, which I heartily recommend if you want to while away some hours feeling queasy about surveillance. You’ll never look at a CCTV camera the same way again.
Apparently the British government saw it too, because they just published a case study on deepfakes, which they have judged to be a “growing threat” and “an urgent national priority.”
It opens hard:
The rise in deepfakes generated by artificial intelligence (AI) has been scarily rapid – a projected eight million will be shared in 2025, up from 500,000 in 2023. This sheer scale combined with greater sophistication and convincingness means finding ways to quickly detect and mitigate this ever-growing threat is an increasingly urgent priority.
Concerns over criminal manipulation of digital text, images and video are not new, but the proliferation in recent months of generative AI tools that enable anyone, anywhere to quickly, easily and cheaply create deepfake images has significantly changed the game.
The case study describes a Home Office led event called the Deepfake Detection Challenge Showcase:
Eight weeks were spent developing innovative ideas and solutions on a specially created platform, which hosted approximately two million assets made up of both real and synthetic data for training and testing. Following this, 17 submissions were received, and six teams from our community - Frazer-Nash Consulting, IBM, Oxford Wave Research, Open Origins, Safe and Sound from the University of Southampton, and Naimuri - were selected to demonstrate their ideas in front of more than 200 stakeholders.
Solutions from Frazer-Nash, Oxford Wave, the University of Southampton and Naimuri, a combination of existing products that have been identified as potentially showing operational value as well as early-stage proof of concepts being developed against specific use cases including CSEA, disinformation and audio, are now going through benchmark testing and user trials.
Deepfakes are so easy to make that even President Emmanuel Macron of France took a break from being despised by his electorate to drop a selection of tongue-in-cheek videos showcasing the technology in advance of the Paris AI Summit.
Meanwhile, the inexplicably-on-the-air breakfast show Good Morning Britain featured a discussion of a new law cracking down on deepfake pornography, featuring two women who had been involuntarily denuded by pervy nerds nerdy pervs.
Note that one of the hosts of GMB is Ed Balls, a former Labour politician and cabinet minister whose wife, Yvette Cooper, is the current Home Secretary. Last month, when the mass rape scandal ‘grooming gang scandal’ was at a full boil, viewers noticed that he got quite heated while defending the Labour government’s response to allegations of a cover-up, which led to accusations that (shocker) he might be biased in favour of the party he spent so much of his adult life representing and the woman he has been married to since 1998. A few months before that, just after the horrific Southport murders and the ensuing protests, Balls interviewed his own wife in her capacity as Home Secretary, without any clear on-screen disclosure of their relationship, leading to the regulator Ofcom receiving 8,200 complaints about the episode.
Thankfully there are efforts being made by the civil service and government to figure out how to discern deepfakes from regular audiovisual media, to prevent the public being deceived or misled. Obviously, a former Labour cabinet minister hosting a major network breakfast show that regularly debates politics while his wife is a cabinet minister in a sitting Labour government is totally not something that would raise any questions of honesty, bias, or omission. Let’s focus on the magical pistachio instead.
Say what you want about deepfakes, but at least we know what it would have looked like if Jerry Seinfeld had been in Pulp Fiction.
That’s it for this week’s Weird, everyone. I hope you enjoyed it!
Outro music is The Lonely Island with this charming ode to the joys of informing.
Stay sane, friends.
sarcasm (noun): the use of irony to mock or convey contempt
Yes, it's quite striking how much the government cares about safety when it involves surveillance, and how little when it involves meaningful transparency and transcending politics. It's almost enough to turn one cynical.
Remember in the old days when British spies were still analogue? They had to put in a decent shift to do their spying even occasionally risking radiation poisoning from a Russian colleague - spies nowadays eh? They want to do it from the sofa!