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Facebook Vigilantism Is a Scary Thing

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by KAVEH WADDELL theatlantic.com-- In early December, a shocking video recorded in the lobby of an apartment building on the outskirts of Beirut surfaced on the internet. The video, posted to an unusual Facebook page called Weynieh el Dawleh—or “Where is the state?”—showed two young men grabbing another man and leading him away at gunpoint. A caption claimed that the men were involved in a drug-related dispute and requested the public’s help in uncovering their identities. Less than a week after the video appeared, a follow-up video was published to Weynieh el Dawleh. It was the same footage from the lobby, but with some notable modifications, including captions noting the full names and addresses of both the perpetrators and the abductee. For dramatic effect, it had an action-movie-style soundtrack, and opened with a message in Arabic: “We asked you for help identifying them,” referring to the men in the video. “And after 48 hours, they have fallen into our grasp.” The accompanying post called on the police to arrest the attackers. The video of the armed assault demonstrated how Weynieh el Dawleh works. Several times a day, the administrator of the page posts photos or videos privately shared with him by the page’s followers, a number that has been as high as 250,000. The posts often depict a crime or some other alleged wrongdoing: a drug deal, an armed assault, a rollicking brawl. One even showed a shopkeeper tying up and beating the bare feet of a child after he caught him stealing. After watching a video, viewers use Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp to send in tips to the administrator on the identities of those who appear. Once the administrator receives the details and attempts to confirm them, he posts what is essentially a digital wanted poster to the page, complete with subjects’ names, photos, and addresses.

The page has become an unofficial, crowdsourced investigative service for citizens who feel the state has failed to respond to their needs. “I wish our state worked like you do,” one follower posted on the page. “I have more trust in the Weynieh el Dawleh page than in the government,” another wrote. But legal and privacy advocates have told me that some of Weynieh el Dawleh’s posts have violated their subjects’ constitutional rights, and that the page erodes the rule of law in the country. The government, apparently content to benefit from the page’s unofficial investigations, doesn’t intervene. This means that Facebook itself is the only check on the page’s activities. But it interferes with Weynieh el Dawleh only sporadically, leaving it generally free to post what it pleases. Why would the Lebanese state invite the help of a community of Facebook vigilantes? For one thing, it’s because the government is relatively weak, thanks in part to a complex power-sharing agreement designed to keep the peace among Lebanon’s various religious groups and sects. In the absence of a strong state, NGOs, private companies, and sectarian political parties acting outside the government have stepped in to provide basic services, including electricity, water, and education. Lebanon’s residents generally pay at least twice for power and water: one bill for each service to the state, plus one to the private owners of the generators that keep the lights on during the country’s daily power outages, and another to the water-delivery companies that keep taps flowing when government-provided water runs out. Some of the factors that keep Lebanon’s government weak have also contributed to the fracturing of its security sector, which includes government agencies like the army, a police force, and multiple intelligence agencies. Political parties like Hezbollah, influential families and clans, and even loosely organized bands of young men act as informal security agencies. For many of the same reasons, some people just don’t trust the official security sector. In a national survey conducted in 2013 by International Alert, an NGO focused on conflict resolution, a quarter of respondents said they would not choose to first rely on the government if they were a victim of a crime. Instead, they preferred the help of, say, a political party or powerful family. “If [the police] can help solve an issue, that’s great; if there’s another way of doing things, that also works,” Carmen Geha, a professor of public administration at the American University of Beirut who analyzed the survey results in a 2015 report, said.

The Weynieh el Dawleh Facebook page is one such way. “[The police] wouldn’t move if I didn’t make them uncomfortable,” the page’s administrator, a man who goes by the pseudonym Sami Beiruti, told me. Beiruti said his page exists not just to out suspected criminals; it’s also designed to embarrass Lebanon's security forces into arresting them. “I press the government and say, ‘Come take action,’” Beiruti said. His posts also offer an unflinching critique of the government, focusing on infractions small—like police officers breaking traffic laws—and large. Behind the scenes, however, Beiruti is in regular contact with the Internal Security Forces (ISF), Lebanon’s main police force, which has followed up on some of the leads he has posted to the Facebook page. Beiruti said his investigations have helped the ISF with hundreds of cases over the years, but that the ISF only arrests a fraction of the suspects he identifies. (The ISF said the page helped with “many” cases but declined to supply a specific number.) Beiruti said he speaks to the ISF about once a week, usually when it has a complaint with one of his posts. Otherwise, he said, the authorities don’t want anything to do with him. “I think sometimes that they don't want me to exist,” he said. “They wish that my page is closed. And I feel that I may be considered an embarrassment to them, because I solve crimes that [they can't].”

Joseph Moussallem, an ISF spokesperson, said the force treats information from the page just like a lead from any other media source, and that it conducts independent investigations to confirm the tips. He said that the ISF is not allowed to go about its work the way Beiruti does—posting photos and videos of suspects, crowdsourcing an investigation, and publishing the results, all without a warrant or official permission—but that it has been helped by the page’s results. He characterized the ISF’s cooperation with Beiruti as limited, saying the force generally reaches out to him only to correct misinformation and false accusations against its officers. Beiruti told me that he’s a Lebanese man in his 40s who runs the page in addition to—and often during—his day job as an office worker. Beiruti said he started the first version of Weynieh el Dawleh in 2013 in an effort to fill gaps he perceived in local reporting. He claimed to have only begun publicly identifying suspected criminals about two years later, when he said his followers began sending in videos and photos. (These claims are difficult to confirm: Facebook has taken down older versions of Beiruti’s pages. And while I could not confirm the details on his personal background, which he said he guards to protect himself from retaliation, I am convinced that he is the page’s administrator. Over the course of several months, we corresponded via the phone number included on nearly every post on the Facebook page; when I asked Beiruti over the phone to prove he was also in control of the page, he quickly sent me a Facebook message from Weynieh el Dawleh with a specific phrase I asked him to include, and shared a screenshot of the page’s administration panel. He also gave me the name of his contact at the ISF, who confirmed that he had spoken with the page’s administrator.)

Legal and digital-rights advocates told me that they began having concerns with the page over the past year. They said that the administrator could conceivably misidentify suspects, and that those doxxed on the page could be vulnerable to vigilante violence. Beiruti said he’s only misidentified a suspect once, and that no one he has outed has ever suffered violent retribution. It's unclear how he would be able to make either claim. Another worry is that Beiruti’s page could push the ISF to focus on the types of crimes he highlights. Genwa Samhat, the executive director of helem, a Lebanese LGBT-rights organization, told me that she has seen an uptick in posts over the past year encouraging homophobia and transphobia, and a complementary rise in arrests of LGBT people in Lebanon. A video published on the page last September showed a woman leading a man around on a leash in Jounieh, a city just north of Beirut. The two were in a consensual BDSM relationship—in this case, a relationship between a dominant and a submissive partner—Samhat said. Many Lebanese news outlets reposted the video, which Beiruti had described as a display of “moral decline and sexual deviance.” He soon followed up with a post that identified both people, outing the woman as transgender and publishing her birth name. The pair was soon arrested.

Ghida Frangieh, a lawyer with the Lebanese NGO Legal Agenda, said the public outcry that erupted around the video may have forced the government’s hand to act against the couple. “If the page had not published this video, maybe nobody would have prosecuted them,” she said. “This kind of influence is particularly worrisome when it comes to prosecuting non-normative behavior, as opposed to more violent crimes.” Beiruti claimed that video was the only post he’s ever published that targeted LGBT people. (In the five months I’ve periodically checked up on his page, I did not find other examples of anti-LGBT posts.) Beiruti’s mentality isn’t that “of a citizen assisting law enforcement in fighting criminality,” Frangieh said. “The page feels that [it is] law enforcement. And that’s a problem.” Some of the other photos and videos Beiruti has posted clearly cross lines. In November, he published a photo of a man whose head was severed in a motorcycle accident. (His face was obscured by the page’s logo.) He included information about the man’s identity. “It was very shocking, so that’s why I posted it. … This page tells the story, even if it’s tough,” Beiruti said when I asked him why he publishes victims’ identities. “It tells the full truth.” In December, Beiruti posted an image of a woman’s body lying on the ground with what appeared to be a black cord wrapped around her neck. The text on the post said that she had been raped and murdered. “Help us identify this victim who was killed in cold blood,” it read. Beiruti said he published the photo to help the ISF, but took it down within 24 hours, after he got a wave of criticism on the page. The details in the photo and the post matched information in press reports about the death of Rebecca Dykes, a British diplomat.

Ali Mourad, a law professor at Beirut Arab University, said that this blasé attitude towards privacy dismissed individuals’ rights to presumed innocence, a right affirmed by the Lebanese constitution. But when Weynieh el Dawleh publicly identifies a suspect, the page effectively skips due process to arrive at what amounts to a conviction, backed up by the authority of collective censure rather than the law. “This is a threat to the judiciary system,” Mohamad Najem, the co-director of SMEX, a Lebanese digital-rights advocacy organization, told me. “They’re turning suspects into criminals in one click.” None of this—the calls for information, the public shaming, the cooperation with the police—would be possible without Facebook. But Facebook is a fickle host. The company has shut down Beiruti’s page five times, most recently in response to a request for comment for this article. Many of the pages’ posts appear to violate Facebook’s community standards, which don’t allow pages to “identify and shame private individuals.” Facebook said it shut down the page in February because it was publishing information about other people without their consent, which also violates the platform’s community standards. But within three days, it was up again, under the same name but a different URL. When his page is taken down, Beiruti loses all his followers, resetting a metric that’s very important to him. Before it was shut down in September, the third iteration of the page had more than 250,000 likes, a significant number for a page that focuses on hyper-local news in a country of about six million. As of today, it has close to 38,000. (By comparison, ISF’s official Facebook page has just over 160,000 likes.)

Since the government leaves Beiruti to his own devices, and lawsuits and threats don’t seem to slow him down, Facebook may be the only mechanism that can actually keep the page in check. But it does so only rarely: Activists say it requires a coordinated flood of reports aimed at a particular post to get the page taken down. “Facebook’s moderation is driven by user complaints, so it’s more likely for a page to be taken down if there’s a particular group that has an interest in having it taken down,” said Danny O’Brien, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s international director. “So minority or controversial pages are going to be more likely to be removed than other pages that still break the rules.” What’s more, O’Brien said, Facebook’s local moderators might make decisions under the influence of their own prejudices and biases, and the checks designed to prevent one-sided moderating are weaker in the developing world than they would be in a place like the United States. (UN human-rights experts said last week that Facebook played a “determining role” in spreading hate speech in Myanmar, where the UN is investigating whether or not a genocide is taking place.) When Facebook does shut down Beiruti’s page, it doesn’t stay offline for long. “We do disable the accounts of repeat infringers in some circumstances,” a Facebook spokesperson told me. This doesn’t appear to have happened in Beiruti’s case, since he has always been able to start a new Weynieh el Dawleh page shortly after the last one is shut down. “It’s good that Facebook has reacted to Lebanese society reporting these kind of pages,” said Najem, the digital-rights advocate. Facebook should do more to defend its Middle Eastern users’ privacy, Najem said, but it’s also the government’s responsibility to step in and protect its citizens from online threats.

Why CEOs Like Rex Tillerson Fail in Washington

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by JOHN PAUL ROLLERT - theatlantic.com -- Rex Tillerson is hardly the first person to be targeted in a tweet from Donald Trump, but on Tuesday morning, he became the first Cabinet official to be fired by one. It was an ignominious end to Tillerson’s 13-month stint as secretary of state, a tenure that would have been undistinguished if it weren’t so entirely destructive. Compared with expectations for other members of Trump’s Cabinet, the disastrous results of Tillerson’s time in office are somewhat surprising. Unlike the EPA’s Scott Pruitt, Tillerson did not have obvious antipathy for the department he headed; unlike HUD’s Ben Carson, he had professional experience that was relevant to the job; and unlike Education’s Betsy DeVos, his confirmation hearing wasn't a disaster. The fact that Tillerson publicly clashed with Trump over everything from North Korea policy to relative IQ did nothing to make his job any easier, but his sorry legacy as secretary of state was sealed by a complete misunderstanding of the job before him. Rather than the nation’s top diplomat and an embodiment abroad of American values, Tillerson appeared to regard his mandate as little more than an exercise in cost-cutting and corporate reorganization. His time at the State Department seemed to test beliefs that are popular among many private sector professionals: skills that business executives bring to Washington can outweigh government experience, and almost every problem can be reduced to a matter of efficiency. That Tillerson should succumb to these beliefs is not altogether surprising given the benefits and blind spots of his experience in business.

Just a few weeks before he became the nation’s highest diplomat, Tillerson was CEO of ExxonMobil, one of the largest companies on Earth. It was a position he had held for more than a decade, one that required him to supervise a highly complex organization with nearly 70,000 employees and an annual budget that routinely topped $40 billion, all while successfully conducting business the world over. In other words, by the time he accepted the offer to join the Trump Administration, the Fortune 10 CEO had already enjoyed a long and distinguished career in the private sector, a track record that had endowed him with the experience, expertise, and administrative excellence that one could assume would make him a highly capable, even accomplished, secretary of state. Tillerson certainly seemed to think so, notwithstanding the fact that he hadn’t spent any time in diplomacy or, for that matter, government affairs. He had barely introduced himself to the career civil servants at Foggy Bottom before he concluded that the agency they staffed was a portrait of bureaucratic mismanagement. “We had very long-standing disciplined processes and decision-making, I mean highly structured, that allows you to accomplish a lot,” he told reporters in July of his time at ExxonMobil. “Those are not the characteristics of the United States government.”

Initially, career diplomats were not unreceptive to the idea that a successful CEO might draw on his experience in the private sector to help renovate the bureaucracy at State. “To a person, we felt the department was in need of reform,” Linda Thomas-Greenfield, a 35-year veteran diplomat and former assistant secretary of state for African affairs, told Bloomberg in the fall. They withdrew their welcome, however, when, in Thomas-Greenfield’s words, they came to “understand” that the goal of the new secretary of state “was not to improve the organization but to deconstruct it.” Or “redesign” it, the term Tillerson favored and one he used interchangeably as a noun and verb. “We’re going to redesign,” he told State Department staff during a town-hall meeting in December. “We’re not going to reorg. Reorg is taking boxes and pushing some of them together this way and pushing some of them together that way and then say we’re done. But what I’ve learned over 41 and a half years is when you do that, if you look behind the box, nothing’s changed about the way the work gets done. People are still dealing with the same inefficiencies; they’re still dealing with the same frustrations, complexities. You didn’t address the work. You just addressed the boxes.” Tillerson’s delight for the eye-glazing jargon of management consulting was a hallmark of his “redesign.” In a report submitted to Congress in August, he rhapsodically outlined “an evidence-based and data-driven process to enhance policy formulation and execution, as well as optimize and realign our global footprint.” Less attention was lavished on the fact that, in his relish for optimization and realignment, Tillerson was also making a virtue of budgetary necessity. Indeed, even before he had had a chance to evaluate the institution with which he was now entrusted, Tillerson had largely acceded to the White House’s stated goal of slashing the State Department’s budget by nearly a third, this notwithstanding the objections of Republican Senators Lindsey Graham, John McCain, and Bob Corker, as well as the more than 120 retired admirals and generals who wrote a letter to Congress last February objecting to the cuts.

Tillerson’s acquiescence to the administration’s demands hardly endeared him to the career foreign-service staff, many of whom understood what Tillerson’s ambition for the State Department effectively amounted to: “No one is ever going to be as excited about the redesign as the secretary himself,” a State Department official told Vanity Fair after the town-hall meeting. “Everyone understands what that really means—it means people losing their jobs.” A lot of people, in fact. Roughly 2,300, or 8 percent of the State Department’s total staff, is the target number for personnel cuts by the end of 2018. Tillerson got some help from the more than 300 civil servants who have already departed since the beginning of the Trump administration, many of them senior-level diplomats. One, Elizabeth Shackelford, blasted the secretary in her resignation letter when she exited in November. “I have deep respect for the career Foreign and Civil Service staff who, despite the stinging disrespect this administration has shown our profession, continue the struggle to keep our foreign policy on the positive trajectory necessary to avert global disaster in increasingly dangerous times,” she wrote. “With each passing day, however, this task grows more futile, driving the Department’s experienced and talented staff away in ever greater numbers.” The brain drain, together with a startling delinquency in filling top spots—dozens of ambassadorships remain vacant, including those for Germany, Egypt, and South Korea, and, with Tillerson’s ouster, six of the nine top jobs at State are now empty—have been devastating for the department’s esprit de corps. “The place empties out at 4 p.m.,” a former assistant secretary of state told The New Yorker’s Dexter Filkins in the fall. “The morale is completely broken.”

In many respects, Tillerson’s efforts may be regarded as a textbook example of a familiar phenomenon of new administrations—testing, in real time, theories of how government ought to work. Sometimes chief executives are explicit in this aim—say, Barack Obama’s attempt to transcend partisan politics or Sam Brownback’s endeavor to turn Kansas into a small-government utopia—but more often than not, the success or failure in discharging the responsibilities before them provides a referendum on implicit assumptions about government. Having interviewed Tillerson and written a profile of the man during his tenure as secretary of state, Filkins concluded: “As far as I could gather, Tillerson doesn’t have much of an ideology, apart from efficiency.” Fair enough, but efficiency is always a matter of the means to a certain end; it is never an end in itself. Unfortunately, the latter view is common among many business professionals, for whom greater efficiency is synonymous with greater profit, the ultimate end of their labors. The same logic doesn’t apply to government agencies, however. They can always benefit from greater efficiency, but their ultimate success is never measured by profit margins. This may seem like a simple fact, but for corporate executives, like Tillerson, who have adhered to the mantra of efficiency for decades, it can lead to a confusion of ends and means when they enter government service. Such confusion threatens their ability to discharge their duties responsibly, but it can be lethal if it is supported by two assumptions that are fairly common among conservatives: The American government is hopelessly inefficient, and resolving this problem is the key to government working for a change.

These assumptions can hamstring executives entering government by convincing them that they have nothing essential to learn from their new peers who, in turn, have everything to gain from their experience. “I have sympathy with everyone with experience in the private sector who comes into a government agency and thinks ‘this is not how things worked at my old office,’” Daniel Baer, the former United States ambassador for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe in the Obama administration, noted in an email. “I have less sympathy for folks who think, after a month or two, that they can simply import their prior world and impose it on their new one.” Of course, for one who is certain that a system is fundamentally flawed, blithe dismissal is not only tempting, it seems downright efficient. If government is little more than an unwieldy machine that smokes and sputters, why waste time on the engineers who tend it? But even beyond the risk of degrading the State Department’s mission in a misguided attempt to improve its operations, Tillerson made the greatest mistake for any CEO: he misallocated his time. According to Bloomberg, in the first eight months of his tenure, Tillerson traveled less than half as much as either of his predecessors in the Obama administration, preferring to hole himself up with a small coterie of subordinates in the executive suite of the Harry S. Truman Building and tinker with the elements of his “redesign.” For many observers, the choice communicated that Tillerson failed to appreciate or perhaps even fully understand the human elements of diplomacy, either as a global ambassador for American values or the leader of an essential organ of government. “When it comes to building a State Department for the next generation, I am hard pressed to name a single thing Tillerson has said or done to attract the best talent,” Derek Chollet, a former assistant secretary of defense for international-security affairs in the Obama administration, wrote in a column for Foreign Policy. “If anything, he’s driving people away.”

Given his successful tenure at ExxonMobil, this failure makes for perhaps the most surprising oversight of Tillerson’s tenure, that he seemed to forget the fact that, while the requirements of leadership and management can be usefully sorted, they remain symbiotic. Just as gross mismanagement can try the commitment of even the most dedicated team member, no amount of efficiency gains in an organization can compensate for sending a message that an employee’s work is meaningless. “People need to be brought into a vision of what is possible,” Baer wrote of Tillerson’s stewardship of the State Department in another piece for Foreign Policy. “Their good work deserves to be acknowledged, and they need to feel that the secretary of state has their backs.” At the December town hall, sensing that his job was in peril, Tillerson tried to win some allies and make amends. “When I came to the State Department, I didn’t know any of you,” he said. “I didn’t know anything about your culture, I didn’t know anything about what motivates you, I didn’t know anything about your work, I didn’t know anything about how you get your work done.” It was a bracing admission, courageous even, but insofar as Tillerson would go on to highlight the crucial importance of having integrated the USAID and State Department global address lists—“if you’re spending 30 seconds to a minute every time you try to engage with that system, sitting there watching it, and I multiply that times 25,000 people times how many encounters a year”—in more ways than one, it seems clear he never learned his lessons.

Amazon Sells Everything For The Home, Including The House

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by Pamela N. Danziger , -- Forbes -- I discovered you could buy homes on Amazon by accident one day while shopping. After I stopped laughing – “Who puts a $46,900 charge on their American Express there?” – I had to do more research. I discovered plenty of people are not afraid to buy a house on Amazon. Two companies that have built a home business on Amazon are Allwood Industrials selling cabin kits and MODS International offering container homes . Both companies have found a market there. Allwood cabin kits for the do-it-yourselfer With his roots in Scandinavia, Tapani Pekkala, who hails from Finland, offers an IKEA-inspired approach to home construction. The kit cabin market in Europe is well developed, he told me, where over 120,000 kits are sold each year. With limited space to build, Europeans who long for a Scandinavian-style lake house, erect kit cabins in their backyard to create a personal getaway. The trend is now moving state side. “Kit cabins are finally becoming popular here and they are playing a role in the tiny house movement, which happened to coincide with Allwood’s expansion into this category,” Pekkala says. After founding Allwood Industrials in 2000 selling imported wood products, Pekkala saw the opportunity to market cabin kits back in 2012. A friend from Finland who worked as head of sales for one of the largest cabin manufacturers there tested the product here. When that initial trial with the first US distributor did not work out, Allwood stepped in to secure its first major cabin kit supplier.

The company launched first on its own online website. Having been an established vendor with Home Depot and Lowes, Allwood approached these big-box home building retailers about selling kits, but they were originally lukewarm. Then after Allwood launched on Amazon in 2013, the big-boxes saw the light. “Back when we started working with Home Depot and Lowes, they were each others’ worse competitor. Now it’s becoming Amazon,” Pekkala shares. Today Allwood cabin kits are available on Houzz, eBay, Outlook.com and will shortly be added to HomeDepot.com and Wayfair. But Amazon will continue as a powerful third-party internet partner with great resources that they know how to use to the max. “Amazon is very thorough, so it is no surprise they are so successful,” Pekkala states. “Their seller support is great. They have been enthusiastic and supportive all the way even though we are a small company and sell a very unique product.” Allwood’s uniqueness has been a key advantage of listing its cabin kits on Amazon. When people come there searching for house or home, Allwood’s cabins end up in the Amazon Buy Box, the gold standard for a listing on Amazon, which is how I first came upon them. “Unlike in other product segments where different vendors have to fight to get a preferred listing in the Buy Box, we get there over 90% of the time. That is a huge driver of business and inquiries to us.”

Russia claims foreign hackers are trying to interfere with its election

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by Kieran Corcoran -- Business insider -- Russia, a country which has been accused numerous times of attempting to interfere with elections overseas, has claimed that its own presidential contest is under attack from foreign hackers. Officials in Moscow said that the Russian Central Election Commission's website was hit by a coordinated attack by IP addresses from 15 different countries on election day. It said that a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, which bombards a website with data requests in an attempt to overwhelm it, hit between 2 a.m. and 5 a.m. on polling day.

Russians are casting votes today for one of eight presidential candidates, including incumbent Vladimir Putin, who is all but guaranteed to win by a landslide. Putin faces no meaningful opposition in Russia — not least because his chief critic Alexei Navalny has been banned from running. The main source of interest in the results is almost certain to be the scale of victory for Putin, rather than whether he will win. The alleged DDoS attack was announced by election chief Ella Pamfilova, whose comments were reported by the Sputnik news website and the Tass news agency, both of which are controlled by the Russian government. It follows repeated accusations that the Russian state has tried to upend the democratic process in at least 20 countries around the world, using both cyber attacks and information warfare. A report published by US members of congress in January details alleged Kremlin efforts to destabilise 19 European countries, from its immediate Baltic and Scandinavian neighbours to more distant democracies like the UK, France and Italy. Russia has also been accused of meddling in the 2016 US election. Earlier this week the US

Facebook and its executives are getting destroyed after botching the handling of a massive data 'breach'

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by Michelle Mark -- Business Insider -- Facebook and its executives faced a torrent of backlash on Saturday following news reports that the data firm Cambridge Analytica, which worked on the Trump campaign in 2016, improperly harvested private information from 50 million Facebook users. The company quickly faced calls for increased regulation and oversight, and Massachusetts' Attorney General, Maura Healey, even announced an investigation. "Massachusetts residents deserve answers immediately from Facebook and Cambridge Analytica," Healey said on Twitter. Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota also excoriated the company, demanding that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg face the Senate Judiciary Committee for questioning. "This is a major breach that must be investigated. It's clear these platforms can't police themselves," she said on Twitter. "I've called for more transparency & accountability for online political ads. They say 'trust us.' Mark Zuckerberg needs to testify before Senate Judiciary." But much of the online outrage came after multiple Facebook executives took to Twitter to respond to the news reports, insisting the incident was not a "data breach." "This was unequivocally not a date breach," longtime Facebook executive Andrew Bosworth tweeted. "People chose to share their data with third party apps and if those third party apps did not follow the data agreements with us/users it is a violation. no systems were infiltrated, no passwords or information were stolen and hacked."

In a series of tweets that have since been deleted, Facebook's chief security officer, Alex Stamos, insisted that although user's personal information may have been misused, it wasn't retroactively a "breach." "The recent Cambridge Analytica stories by the NY Times and The Guardian are important and powerful, but it is incorrect to call this a "breach" under any reasonable definition of the term," Stamos tweeted. "We can condemn this behavior while being accurate in our description of it." Twitter users were not satisfied with that response — many accused the executives of deliberately missing the point by focusing on semantics. "It amazes me that [the Facebook executives] are trying to make this about nomenclature. I guess that's all they have left," Frank Pasquale, a University of Maryland law professor who has written about tech companies' use of data, told Reuters. "The lid is being opened on the black box of Facebook's data practices and the picture is not pretty."

The legacy of Stephen Hawking - a Catholic scientist reflects

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By Kevin Jones - Cambridge, England, (CNA/EWTN News).- The death of Stephen Hawking this week prompted a leading Catholic scientist to reflect on the life of the famed physicist, including his “astonishing” contributions to physics and his lifelong atheism. “He was of course a very great physicist and one of the greatest physicists of his generation,” Stephen M. Barr, a particle physics and cosmology researcher who is a professor at the University of Delaware, told CNA. “He made several major contributions to the understanding of gravity and the big bang and the black holes that will be remembered as long as physics is known.” Hawking, a Cambridge University physicist, passed away Wednesday morning at the age of 76. Author of the bestselling 1988 book “A Brief History of Time,” he became a symbol of science in pop culture, appearing on shows like “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and “The Simpsons.” In 1963, as a 21-year-old graduate student, Hawking he learned that he had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a neuromuscular disease known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. Doctors expected him to live only a few years. Hawking far outlived his prognosis, though over decades the disease gradually limited his ability to move, eventually to the point where he could only flex one finger and make eye movements. By the 1980s, computer technology had progressed to the point where he could communicate through a computer and voice synthesizer—though with an American accent. Barr reflected on Hawking’s success despite his poor health. “It’s amazing that he was able to do physics at such a high level when for example, most of us write on blackboards and do calculations on pieces of paper. We can hardly imagine being able to do our work when we can’t do those basic things,” he said. “It’s astonishing. It’s simply astonishing. A lot of what he did, he did in his head.” Hawking’s work developed several key insights, including calculations which appear to show that black holes, the densest objects in the known universe, do in fact emit energy – energy now known as Hawking radiation. Previously nothing was believed to escape the black hole’s intense gravity. Hawking’s intellectual process involved an unprecedented application of quantum mechanics to gravity. “The most important thing about Hawking radiation is that it shows that the black hole is not cut off from the rest of the universe,” Hawking said. Barr, the current president of the Society of Catholics Scientists, reflected on what Hawking’s role as a scientist means for beliefs about the origin of the universe.

In “A Brief History of Time,” Hawking “made some rather perceptive remarks to the effect that physics cannot even in principle explain why there is an actually existing universe,” Barr said. “In other words, he understood and said rather pithily in that book why physics can never substitute for a Creator, though he didn’t phrase it quite that way, that was the import.” Barr was critical of a later work of Hawking, “The Grand Design,” co-authored with theoretical physicist Leonard Mlodinow. “He seems to have forgotten his earlier insights,” said Barr. “He was arguing, in effect, that physics can explain why there is a universe at all and why there is an actually existing universe. I find this very puzzling. He actually understood the issue in the earlier book and got confused in the later book.” Barr suggested that Hawking’s lifelong atheism might have had an effect on those who overrate scientists’ ability to speak on non-scientific topics. He countered that many great scientists have also been religious.

Hawking himself found recognition from the Catholic Church, being named a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. This academy includes 80 global leaders in science from a variety of backgrounds and beliefs. He attended the group’s annual meeting in 2016 and gave a talk on “The Origin of the Universe.” He credited Catholic priest and physicist Msgr. Georges Lemaitre, a past president of the Pontifical Academy of the Sciences, as the true father of the “Big Bang” theory of the universe—a theory sometimes credited to another physicist. “Georges Lemaitre was the first who proposed a model according to which the universe had a very dense beginning. He, and not George Gamow, is the father of Big Bang,” Hawking said. Hawking also took part in an academic session marking the 50th anniversary of the death of Lemaitre, which closed with remarks by Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Mueller, then-prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Saudi Arabia Calls for Supporting Lebanese Army As Sole Legitimate Power

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by aawsat.com -- Saudi Arabia called for supporting the Lebanese Army based on a clear mechanism that ensures that it is the sole legitimate power in the country. In remarks before the Rome 2 Conference on Thursday, the head of the Saudi delegation, Deputy Minister of Defense Mohammed bin Abdullah Al-Ayesh, said that the vision of Saudi Arabia “meets with the objectives of the conference that seeks to preserve the security and stability of Lebanon under Security Council Resolution 1701, which defines the army as the sole legitimate power in accordance with the Constitution and the provisions of the Taif Accord.” He emphasized the Saudi stance towards the need to develop a clear vision of a mechanism that supports the Lebanese army according to its needs. On the sidelines of the conference, which is hosted by Italy to rally support for the Lebanese Army and security institutions, Hariri held separate meetings with Ayesh, the personal representative of the Russian President for the Middle East, Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov and Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni.

In his speech before the conference, the Lebanese premier said: “The Lebanese government recognizes that it is enjoying an exceptional moment of international consensus and support. We consider that it is in our national interest to preserve this international consensus and as such, we are committed to doing our part.” Hariri touched on the issue of the national defense strategy, which President Michel Aoun said he would address following the upcoming parliamentary elections. “The President of the Lebanese Republic, Michel Aoun, announced three days ago, that the National Defense Strategy will be discussed following the legislative elections in May. I join President Aoun’s call to the International community to support the Lebanese Armed Forces, to enable them to assume their duty of preserving security and stability in accordance with the National Defense Strategy,” he stated. The Lebanese premier emphasized that his government’s priority was to create a “virtuous cycle of security, stability, growth and employment for Lebanon and the Lebanese.” He noted in this regard that Rome 2 was a first step towards achieving this end, underlining his country’s commitment to the policy of dissociation, which was adopted by the government in December.