Archives for September 2021

BEIJING (AP) — Chinese prosecutors have dropped a case against a former Alibaba manager accused by a female colleague of sexual assault, weeks after the case caused a backlash against the e-commerce firm over how it handles sexual misconduct allegations.

Police detained the former manager, whose last name is Wang, in August after a female Alibaba employee accused him of sexual assault while they were on a business trip to the northern Chinese city of Jinan.

The woman accused Wang of turning a blind eye when she was plied with alcohol and molested during a dinner with a client. She said Wang later entered her hotel room and then sexually assaulted her while she was drunk.

Prosecutors in Jinan did not approve Wang’s arrest and he received a 15-day detention instead, according to a statement posted on the social media site Weibo by Jinan police late Monday night.

The move drew widespread criticism online, with many lamenting the lack of protection for women in sexual assault cases. Some said Wang’s 15-day detention suggested he was not entirely innocent.

On Weibo, Wang’s wife thanked his team of lawyers in a post early Tuesday. She previously accused the female employee of framing her husband for sexual misconduct. Wang was not reachable for comment.

Wang was fired from his job after the woman posted an 8,000-word essay with the accusations in an internal post on the company’s intranet and said Alibaba’s human resources department ignored her complaints.

Alibaba also asked two senior executives to resign over their handling of the case. Alibaba CEO Daniel Zhang pledged to establish an anti-sexual harassment policy with “zero tolerance” for sexual misconduct.

“Alibaba Group has a zero-tolerance policy against sexual misconduct, and ensuring a safe workplace for all our employees is Alibaba’s top priority,” the company said in a statement Tuesday.

The global #MeToo movement against sexual harassment has gained prominence in China in recent years, with accusations made against several academics, a TV anchor and celebrities. But convictions are few and far between.

In a recent high-profile case, celebrity Kris Wu was arrested in Beijing on suspicion of rape after a Chinese influencer accused him of forcing girls to drink alcohol and then sexually assaulting them.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — As the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks approaches, Americans increasingly balk at intrusive government surveillance in the name of national security, and only about a third believe that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were worth fighting, according to a new poll.

More Americans also regard the threat from domestic extremism as more worrisome than that of extremism abroad, the poll found.

The poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research shows that support for surveillance tools aimed at monitoring conversations taking place outside the country, once seen as vital in the fight against attacks, has dipped in the last decade. That’s even though international threats are again generating headlines following the chaotic end to the 20-year war in Afghanistan.

In particular, 46% of Americans say they oppose the U.S. government responding to threats against the nation by reading emails sent between people outside of the U.S. without a warrant, as permitted under law for purposes of foreign intelligence collection. That’s compared to just 27% who are in favor. In an AP-NORC poll conducted one decade ago, more favored than opposed the practice, 47% to 30%.

The new poll was conducted Aug. 12-16 as the Taliban were marching toward their rapid takeover of the country. Since then, Afghanistan’s Islamic State affiliate launched a suicide bombing that killed at least 169 Afghans and 13 U.S. service members, and experts have warned about the possibility of foreign militant groups rebuilding in strength with the U.S. presence gone.

In a marked turnabout from the first years after Sept. 11, when Americans were more likely to tolerate the government’s monitoring of communications in the name of defending the homeland, the poll found bipartisan concerns about the scope of surveillance and the expansive intelligence collection tools that U.S. authorities have at their disposal.

The expansion in government eavesdropping powers over the last 20 years has coincided with a similar growth in surveillance technology across all corners of American society, including traffic cameras, smart TVs and other devices that contribute to a near-universal sense of being watched.

Gary Kieffer, a retired 80-year-old New Yorker, said he is anxious about the government’s powers.

“At what point does this work against the population in general rather than try to weed out potential saboteurs or whatever?” asked Kieffer, who is a registered Democrat. “At what point is it going to be a danger to the public rather saving them or keeping them more secure?”

“I feel like you might need it to an extent,” Kieffer said. But he added: “Who’s going to decide just how far you go to keep the country safe?”

Eric McWilliams, a 59-year-old Democrat from Whitehall, Pennsylvania, said he saw surveillance as important to keeping Americans safe.

“I wasn’t for the torture stuff, which is why they did it outside the country. I wasn’t for that,” McWilliams said, referring to the harsh interrogation techniques used by the CIA to question suspects. “But as far as the surveillance is concerned, you gotta watch them — or else we’re gonna die.”

Americans are also more likely to oppose government eavesdropping on calls outside the U.S. without a warrant, 44% to 28%. Another 27% hold neither opinion.

About two-thirds of Americans continue to be opposed to the possibility of warrantless U.S. government monitoring of telephone calls, emails and text messages made within the U.S. Though the National Security Agency is focused on surveillance abroad, it does have the ability to collect the communications of Americans as they’re in touch with someone outside the country who is a target of government surveillance.

About half are opposed to government monitoring of internet searches, including those by U.S. citizens, without a warrant. About a quarter are in favor and 2 in 10 hold neither opinion. Roughly half supported the practice a decade ago.

The ambivalence over government surveillance practices was laid bare last year when the Senate came one vote short of approving a proposal to prevent federal law enforcement from obtaining internet browsing information or search history without seeking a warrant. Also last year, Democrats pulled from the House floor legislation to extend certain surveillance authorities after then-President Donald Trump and Republicans turned against the measure and ensured its defeat.

Despite general surveillance concerns, six in 10 Americans support the installation of surveillance cameras in public places to monitor potentially suspicious activity — although somewhat fewer support random searches like full-body scans for people boarding commercial flights in the U.S. Just 15% support racial and ethnic profiling to decide who should get tougher screening at airports, where security was fortified following the Sept. 11 attacks.

About 7 in 10 Black Americans and Asian Americans oppose racial profiling at airports, compared with about 6 in 10 white Americans.

As the U.S. this summer was ending the two-decade war in Afghanistan, most Americans, about 6 in 10, say that conflict — along with the war in Iraq — was not worth fighting. Republicans are somewhat more likely to say the wars were worth fighting.

When it comes to threats to the homeland, Americans are more concerned about U.S.-based extremists than they are international groups. FBI Director Chris Wray has said domestic terrorism, on display during the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, is “metastasizing” and that the number of arrests of racially motivated extremists has skyrocketed.

According to the poll, about two-thirds of Americans say they are extremely or very concerned about the threat from extremist groups inside the U.S. By contrast, about one-half say they are extremely or very concerned about the threat from foreign-based militants.

While Republicans and Democrats are generally aligned in their concerns about international extremism, the poll shows Democrats are more likely to be concerned than Republicans about the homegrown threat, 75% to 57%.

On other top national security matters, about half of Republicans and Democrats are concerned by North Korea’s nuclear program, and about 7 in 10 say the same about the threat of cyberattacks. Majorities of Republicans and Democrats also believe that the spread of misinformation is an extremely or very concerning threat to the U.S, though Democrats are slightly more likely to say so.

But there’s a much greater partisan divide on other issues. Democrats, for instance, are far more concerned than Republicans about climate change, 83% vs. 21%. But Republicans are much more strongly concerned about illegal immigration than Democrats, by a margin of 73% to 21%.

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Follow Eric Tucker on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/etuckerAP

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The AP-NORC poll of 1,729 adults was conducted Aug. 12-16 using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 3.2 percentage points.

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Top Paid iPhone Apps:

1. Minecraft, Mojang

2. Bloons TD 6, Ninja Kiwi

3. True Skate, True Axis

4. Heads Up!, Warner Bros.

5. HotSchedules, HotSchedules

6. Geometry Dash, RobTop Games AB

7. Procreate Pocket, Savage Interactive Pty Ltd

8. Bloons TD 5, Ninja Kiwi

9. Plague Inc., Ndemic Creations

10. Monopoly, Marmalade Game Studio

Top Free iPhone Apps:

1. TikTok, TikTok Pte. Ltd.

2. YouTube: Watch, Listen, Stream, Google LLC

3. Instagram, Instagram, Inc.

4. Snapchat, Snap, Inc.

5. Facebook, Facebook, Inc.

6. Google Maps, Google LLC

7. Gmail – Email by Google, Google LLC

8. Messenger, Facebook, Inc.

9. WhatsApp Messenger, WhatsApp Inc.

10. Amazon Shopping, AMZN Mobile LLC

Top Paid iPad Apps:

1. GoodNotes 5, Time Base Technology Limited

2. Procreate, Savage Interactive Pty Ltd

3. Notability, Ginger Labs

4. Minecraft, Mojang

5. Bloons TD 6, Ninja Kiwi

6. Geometry Dash, RobTop Games AB

7. Fantasy Football Draft Kit ’21, Roto Sports, Inc.

8. Toca Life: Hospital, Toca Boca AB

9. Toca Kitchen 2, Toca Boca AB

10. True Skate, True Axis

Top Free iPad Apps:

1. Destiny Run, Voodoo

2. Make ’Em, SUPERSONIC STUDIOS LTD

3. YouTube: Watch, Listen, Stream, Google LLC

4. Netflix, Netflix, Inc.

5. Disney+, Disney

6. ZOOM Cloud Meetings, Zoom

7. Pancake Run, Voodoo

8. Google Chrome, Google LLC

9. Roblox, Roblox Corporation

10. Hulu: Stream movies & TV shows, Hulu, LLC

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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — NASA’s newest Mars rover has completed its first sample grab, tucking away the tube of rock for return to Earth.

The Perseverance rover team confirmed last week’s successful drilling and collection, after reviewing photos of the core sample. NASA wanted to be certain the sample was safe inside the titanium tube, before sharing the news Monday.

During Perseverance’s first sampling attempt in early August, the unexpectedly soft rock crumbled. Flight controllers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, sought out harder rock for the second try.

Perseverance arrived in February at Mars’ Jezero Crater — a former lakebed and river delta — in search of rocks that could contain evidence of past Martian life. Future spacecraft will collect the specimens and deliver them to Earth a decade from now. The rover has more than 40 sample tubes.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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BOSTON (AP) — Over two decades, the United States and its allies spent hundreds of millions of dollars building databases for the Afghan people. The nobly stated goal: Promote law and order and government accountability and modernize a war-ravaged land.

But in the Taliban’s lightning seizure of power, most of that digital apparatus — including biometrics for verifying identities — apparently fell into Taliban hands. Built with few data-protection safeguards, it risks becoming the high-tech jackboots of a surveillance state. As the Taliban get their governing feet, there are worries it will be used for social control and to punish perceived foes.

Putting such data to work constructively — boosting education, empowering women, battling corruption — requires democratic stability, and these systems were not architected for the prospect of defeat.

“It is a terrible irony,” said Frank Pasquale, Brooklyn Law School scholar of surveillance technologies. “It’s a real object lesson in ‘The road to hell is paved with good intentions.’”

Since Kabul fell Aug. 15, indications have emerged that government data may have been used in Taliban efforts to identify and intimidate Afghans who worked with the U.S. forces.

People are getting ominous and threatening phone calls, texts and WhatsApp messages, said Neesha Suarez, constituent services director for Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., an Iraq War veteran whose office is trying to help stranded Afghans who worked with the U.S. find a way out.

A 27-year-old U.S. contractor in Kabul told The Associated Press he and co-workers who developed a U.S.-funded database used to manage army and police payrolls got phone calls summoning them to the Defense Ministry. He is in hiding, changing his location daily, he said, asking not to be identified for his safety.

In victory, the Taliban’s leaders say they are not interested in retribution. Restoring international aid and getting foreign-held assets unfrozen are a priority. There are few signs of the draconian restrictions – especially on women – they imposed when they ruled from 1996 to 2001. There are also no indications that Afghans who worked with Americans have been systematically persecuted.

Ali Karimi, a University of Pennsylvania scholar, is among Afghans unready to trust the Taliban. He worries the databases will give rigid fundamentalist theocrats, known during their insurgency for ruthlessly killing enemy collaborators, “the same capability as an average U.S. government agency when it comes to surveillance and interception.”

The Taliban are on notice that the world will be watching how they wield the data.

All Afghans — and their international partners — have an obligation together to ensure sensitive government data only be used for “development purposes” and not for policing or social control by the Taliban or to serve other governments in the region, said Nader Nadery, a peace negotiator and head of the civil service commission in the former government.

Uncertain for the moment is the fate of one of the most sensitive databases, the one used to pay soldiers and police.

The Afghan Personnel and Pay System has data on more than 700,000 security forces members dating back 40 years, said a senior security official from the fallen government. Its more than 40 data fields include birth dates, phone numbers, fathers’ and grandfathers’ names and could query fingerprints and iris and face scans stored in a different database with which it was integrated, said two Afghan contractors who worked on it, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

Only authorized users can access that system, so if the Taliban can’t find one, they can be expected to try to hack it, said the former official, who asked not to be identified for fear of the safety of relatives in Kabul. He expected Pakistan’s ISI intelligence service, long the Taliban’s patron, to render technical assistance. U.S. analysts expect Chinese, Russian and Iranian intelligence also to offer such services.

Originally conceived to fight payroll fraud, that system was supposed to interface eventually with a powerful database at the Defense and Interior ministries modeled on one the Pentagon created in 2004 to achieve “identity dominance” by collecting fingerprints and iris and face scans in combat areas.

But the homegrown Afghanistan Automated Biometric Identification Database grew from a tool to vet army and police recruits for loyalty to contain 8.5 million records, including on government foes and the civilian population. When Kabul fell it was being upgraded, along with a similar database in Iraq, under a $75 million contract signed in 2018.

U.S. officials say it was secured before the Taliban could access it.

Before the U.S. pullout, the entire database was erased with military-grade data-wiping software, said William Graves, chief engineer at the Pentagon’s biometrics project management office. Similarly, 20 years of data collected from telecommunications and internet intercepts since 2001 by Afghanistan’s intelligence agency were wiped clean, said the former Afghan security official.

Among crucial databases that remained are the Afghanistan Financial Management Information System, which held extensive details on foreign contractors, and an Economy Ministry database that compiled all international development and aid agency funding sources, the former security official said.

Then there is the data — with iris scans and fingerprints for about 9 million Afghans — controlled by the National Statistics and Information Agency. A biometric scan has been required in recent years to obtain a passport or a driver’s license and to take a civil service or university entrance exam.

Western aid organizations led by the World Bank, one of the funders, praised the data’s utility for empowering women, especially in registering land ownership and obtaining bank loans. The agency was working to create electronic national IDs, known as e-Tazkira, in an unfinished project somewhat modeled on India’s biometrically enabled Aadhaar national ID.

“That’s the treasure chest,” said a Western election assistance official, speaking on condition of anonymity so as not to jeopardize future missions.

It is unclear whether voter registration databases — records on more than 8 million Afghans — are in Taliban hands, the official said. Full printouts were made during the 2019 presidential elections, though the biometric records used then for anti-fraud voter verification were retained by the German technology provider. After 2018 parliamentary elections, 5,000 portable biometric handhelds used for verification went inexplicably missing.

Yet another database the Taliban inherit contains iris and face scans and fingerprints on 420,000 government employees — another anti-fraud measure — which Nadery oversaw as civil service commissioner. It was eventually to have been merged with the e-Tazkira database, he said.

On Aug. 3, a government website touted the digital accomplishments of President Ashraf Ghani, who would soon flee into exile, saying biometric information on “all civil servants, from every corner of the country” would allow them to them to be linked “under one umbrella” with banks and cellphone carriers for electronic payment. U.N. agencies have also collected biometrics on Afghans for food distribution and refugee tracking.

The central agglomeration of such personal data is exactly what worries the 37 digital civil liberties groups who signed an Aug. 25 letter calling for the urgent shutdown and erasure, where possible, of Afghanistan’s “digital identity tool,” among other measures. The letter said authoritarian regimes have exploited such data “to target vulnerable people” and digitized, searchable databases amplify the risks. Disputes over including ethnicity and religion in the e-Tazkira database — for fear it could put digital bullseyes on minorities, as China has done in repressing its ethnic Uyghurs — delayed its creation for most of a decade.

John Woodward, a Boston University professor and former CIA officer who pioneered the Pentagon’s biometric collection, is worried about intelligence agencies hostile to the United States getting access to the data troves.

“ISI (Pakistani intelligence) would be interested to know who worked for the Americans,” said Woodward, and China, Russia and Iran have their own agendas. Their agents certainly have the technical chops to break into password-protected databases.

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The story clarifies that the Afghan Personnel and Pay system did not include biometric data but rather could query such information in a different database with which it was integrated.

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