Hillicon Valley: Facebook, Twitter dismantle Russian interference campaign targeting African Americans | YouTube to allow ads on coronavirus videos | Trump signs law banning federal funds for Huawei equipment

by Maggie Miller, Chris Mills Rodrigo, Emily Birnbaum - 03/12/20 7:56 PM ET

Welcome to Hillicon Valley, The Hill’s newsletter detailing all you need to know about the tech and cyber news from Capitol Hill to Silicon Valley. If you don’t already, be sure to sign up for our newsletter with this LINK.

Welcome! Follow the cyber team, Maggie Miller (@magmill95), and the tech team, Emily Birnbaum (@birnbaum_e) and Chris Mills Rodrigo (@chrisismills).

RUSSIANS STILL AT IT: Facebook and Twitter on Thursday announced they have dismantled a Russia-backed online interference campaign targeting African-Americans.

The campaign was based out of Ghana and Nigeria, marking Russia’s latest attempt to obfuscate how it’s working to sow discord on U.S. soil by propping up volunteers and workers from foreign nations.

Russia associated with workers based in the two African nations to spread divisive and polarizing messages, specifically targeted at black social media users in the U.S., according to a CNN investigation published Thursday.

Facebook removed 49 accounts, 69 pages and 85 Instagram accounts for engaging in foreign interference on its platforms, the company announced.

“This network was in the early stages of building an audience and was operated by local nationals — some wittingly and some unwittingly — in Ghana and Nigeria on behalf of individuals in Russia,” Facebook said. “It targeted primarily the United States.”

Twitter suspended 71 accounts “largely Tweeting in English and that presented themselves as based in the United States,” the company said.

Read more here.

RIP IT OUT: President Trump on Thursday signed into law a bill banning the use of federal funds to purchase equipment from telecom companies deemed a national security threat, such as Chinese telecom group Huawei.

The Secure and Trusted Communications Act, which the Senate passed in February and the House approved last year, will also require the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to establish a $1 billion fund to help small telecom groups remove existing equipment that is deemed to be a threat.

“Securing our networks from malicious foreign interference is critical to America’s wireless future, especially as some communications providers rely on equipment from companies like Huawei that pose an immense threat to America’s national and economic security,” the bill’s House sponsors, House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.), ranking member Greg Walden (R-Ore.), and Reps. Doris Matsui (D-Calif.) and Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.), said in a statement.

Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), whose committee has made 5G security a priority, praised Trump for signing the bill into law.

“This legislation lays the foundation to help U.S. firms strip out vulnerable equipment and replace it with secure alternatives,” Wicker said in a statement. “Today marks an important victory for our economy and national security.”

The new law marks a major effort to eject Huawei and another Chinese company, ZTE, from U.S. networks. Both were previously designated national security threats by the FCC in November. The FCC also previously voted unanimously to ban the use of FCC funds by groups deemed to be threats.

A spokesperson for Huawei declined to respond to The Hill’s request for comment. The company has repeatedly pushed back against criticism, and is suing the FCC.

Read more here.

YOUTUBE MOVES: YouTube will soon allow advertisements to run on videos that discuss the new coronavirus, reversing its previous policy that banned users from monetizing any coronavirus-related content.

The backtrack comes after swarms of YouTube creators complained about the policy barring ads on videos with anything more than “a passing mention” of the coronavirus, which they said unfairly kept money out of their hands as the disease becomes an increasingly pressing topic of conversation.

YouTube previously banned ads on videos that mentioned coronavirus due to its “sensitive events” policy, which bars monetization on videos about fast-evolving and delicate situations such as natural disasters and shootings.

But in a blog post on Wednesday, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki said the platform will begin allowing ads on coronavirus-related videos again in order to ensure “news organizations and creators can continue producing quality videos in a sustainable way.”

“It’s becoming clear this issue is now an ongoing and important part of everyday conversation,” she wrote.

But the platform is still taking precautions; it will only allow ads on content discussing coronavirus if it is from particular news organizations or if the creators go through YouTube’s self-certification program.

“In the days ahead, we will enable ads for content discussing the coronavirus on a limited number of channels, including creators who accurately self-certify and a range of news partners,” Wojcicki wrote. “We’re preparing our policies and enforcement processes to expand monetization to more creators and news organizations in the coming weeks.”

Read more here.

ACLU SUES DHS: The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on Thursday sued the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for information on how it has used facial-recognition technology.

The ACLU said it filed the lawsuit in the Southern District Court of New York after DHS and its sub-agencies — Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — failed to respond to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

The ACLU is requesting an injunction requiring the agencies to process its FOIA requests immediately.

“Unlike other ways of verifying a person’s identity, face recognition technology can enable persistent government surveillance on a massive scale,” Ashley Gorski, staff attorney with the ACLU’s National Security Project, said in a statement.

“The public has a right to know when, where, and how the government is using face recognition, and what safeguards, if any, are in place to protect our rights,” Gorski added. “This unregulated surveillance technology threatens to fundamentally alter our free society and is in urgent need of democratic oversight.”

CBP and TSA in recent years have begun to integrate facial-recognition technology, which scans faces for the purpose of identifying individuals, at points of entry to the United States.

CBP has used the technology since 2017 to check travelers coming in and out of the U.S., although U.S. citizens have been allowed to opt out.

In 2019, DHS floated a plan to implement facial-recognition checkpoints for all airline travelers in the U.S., but pulled it back after outcry from lawmakers.

Read more here.

TAKEDOWN: The website for a local Illinois health agency was taken down by a cyberattack this week, creating difficulties in distributing accurate information on the coronavirus outbreak.

The Champaign-Urbana Public Health District announced on Facebook on Tuesday that their website was “down,” giving people in their district a phone number and email address to contact the agency for any coronavirus concerns.

On Thursday, the agency wrote in a separate Facebook post that it was still “working to get our website up and running.” The agency set up a new website to allow for access to information on coronavirus.

According to Mother Jones, the website was taken down by a ransomware attack and will likely be down for the next week or two. These attacks involve hackers accessing the system, encrypting it, and asking for money to give users access again, though often with no guarantee that users will get all their data back.

Julie Pryde, the chief administrator of the health district, told Mother Jones that the cyberattack was “inconvenient,” but that the district had put in place a “robust continuity of action plan.” Pryde did not comment on what data was lost or what data was accessed by hackers.

The Champaign-Urbana Public Health District serves over 200,000 people, including students at the University of Illinois. The university announced Wednesday that it would move to online classes due to coronavirus concerns.

Read more here.

GOP PRIVACY PUSH: When negotiations between the top Democrat and Republican on the Senate Commerce Committee over the country’s first online privacy bill broke down late last year, two other lawmakers on the committee pledged to forge ahead with their own separate effort, reminding their colleagues that any successful privacy legislation will need bipartisan support to gain traction in the Senate.

Now, those talks — between Sens. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) — have fractured, as well, with both senators conceding that their disagreements over the federal privacy bill were insurmountable after months of negotiations.

Moran on Thursday introduced his privacy bill, the Consumer Data Privacy and Security Act, which would create new safeguards around how tech companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter are allowed to collect and use the personal information of their billions of users. And it would require those companies to protect that data from hacks and breaches.

“It is clear that Congress needs to act to provide consumers and companies with a clear federal standard that lays out robust protections for consumers’ personal data,” Moran said in a statement, “and I encourage my colleagues to support the Consumer Data Privacy and Security Act as the federal standard for comprehensive privacy legislation.”

Moran’s bill includes provisions that would protect users’ privacy as well as keep their data secure from intrusion. The legislation would allow people to access, correct and erase the personal data companies have collected about them, and require businesses to take “precautionary steps” to protect that information.

It would also offer the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and state attorneys general new resources to enforce those privacy standards.

A spokesman for Moran told The Hill that Blumenthal and Moran agreed on a “significant portion of the substantive consumer protections that a federal privacy framework would contain,” but they ultimately disagreed over how to enforce those standards.

“There were potentially harmful provisions pertaining to enforcement that the senators could not agree upon,” the spokesman said. “Sen. Moran believes the Consumer Data Privacy and Security Act is a comprehensive bill that should receive support from both sides of the aisle.”

Meanwhile, Blumenthal said the senators “always knew these issues would be tough to solve.”