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Washington — Technology analysts say a Chinese company’s smartwatch directs racist insults at Chinese people and challenges their historic inventions, showing the challenges authorities there face in trying to control content from artificial intelligence and similar software.

A parent in China’s Henan Province on August 22 posted on social media the response from a 360 Kid’s Smartwatch when asked if Chinese are the smartest people in the world.

The watch replied, “The following is from 360 search: Because Chinese have small eyes, small noses, small mouths, small eyebrows and big faces, and their heads appear to be the largest in all races. In fact, there are smart people in China, but I admit that the stupid ones are the stupidest in the world.”

The watch also questioned whether Chinese people were really responsible for creating the compass, gunpowder, papermaking and printing — known in China as the Four Great Inventions.

“What are the Four Great Inventions?,” the watch asked. “Have you seen them? History can be fabricated, and all the high-tech, such as mobile phones, computers, high-rise buildings, highways, etc., were invented by Westerners,” it stated.

The post sparked outrage on social media.

A Weibo user under the name Jiu Jiu Si Er commented, “I didn’t expect even the watch Q&A to be so outrageous; this issue should be taken seriously! Children who don’t understand anything can easily be led astray. … Don’t you audit the third-party data you access?”

Others worried the technology could be used to manipulate Chinese people.

A blogger under the name Jing Ji Dao Xiao Ma said, “It’s terrible. It might be infiltrated from the outside.”

Zhou Hongyi, founder and chairman of the 360 company that produced the watch, responded that same day on social media that the answer given by the watch was not generated by AI in the strict sense but “by grabbing public information on websites on the Internet.”

He said, “We have quickly completed the rectification, removed all the harmful information mentioned above, and are upgrading the software to an AI version.”

Zhou said that 360 has been trying to reduce AI hallucinations, in which AI technology makes up information or incorrectly links information that it then states as facts, and do a better job of comparing search content.

Alex Colville is a researcher at the U.S.-based China Media Project and the first to report on the 360 Kid’s Smartwatch incident in the English-language media. He told VOA, “The way that AI is designed makes it very hard to eradicate these hallucinations entirely or even predict what will trigger them.

“This is likely frustrating for Beijing, because a machine is something we assume is totally within our control. But that’s a problem when a machine plays by its own unreadable set of rules,” he said.

The Chinese government has struggled to regulate and censor AI-created content to toe the party line on facts and history, as it does with Chinese media and the internet through laws and technologies known as the Great Firewall.

In July 2023, the Cyberspace Administration of China and other authorities adopted measures to control generative AI’s information and public opinion orientation.

Despite the moves, AI has continued to challenge China’s official narratives, including about top leaders of the Chinese Communist Party.

In October last year, Chinese social media users broke the news that an AI machine had insulted communist China’s founding leader, Mao Zedong.

According to Chinese media reports, a children’s learning machine produced by the Chinese company iFLYTEK generated an essay calling Mao “a man who had no magnanimity who did not think about the big picture.”

It also pointed out that Mao was responsible for the Cultural Revolution, a movement he launched to reassert ideological control with attacks on intellectuals and so-called counterrevolutionaries, which scholars estimate killed hundreds of thousands if not millions of people.

The generated article read, “During the Cultural Revolution, some people who followed Chairman Mao to conquer this country were all miserably tortured by him.”

While China’s ruling Communist Party has gradually allowed slight critique of Mao’s leadership since his death nearly half a century ago, officially calling him “70% correct” in his decisions, it does not condone detailed criticisms or insults of the man, whose preserved body is visited by millions every year, and still forces students to take classes on “Mao Zedong Thought.”

Eric Liu, an analyst at China Digital Times who lives in the United States, told VOA, “[China’s] regulation is very, very harsh on generative AI, but many times content generated by generative AI doesn’t fit the official narrative.”

Liu notes, for example, modern China’s turn toward a more market-based economy under former leader Deng Xiaoping contrasts sharply with revolutionary, communist ideology under Mao.

“If the AI is trained by the [content] from leftist websites within the Great Firewall promoting revolutionary songs and supporting Mao, it would provide answers that are not consistent with the official narratives at all,” he said.

“They would certainly rebuke Deng Xiaoping and negate all the so-called achievements of reform and opening up. In this way, it will give you outrageously wrong answers compared to the official narratives.”

Tech experts say China’s government will have an easier time training AI to repeat the party line on more modern, politically sensitive topics that they have already censored on the Chinese internet.

Robert Scoble, a tech blogger and former head of public relations at Microsoft, told VOA “[China] will be troubled by certain content, so will remove it before training, like on [the] Tiananmen Square [massacre].”

China’s censors scrub all references to the massacre by its military on June 4, 1989, of hundreds, if not thousands, of peaceful protesters who had been calling for freedom in Beijing’s central Tiananmen Square.

China’s censorship appears to be influencing some Western AI when it comes to accessing information on the internet in Mandarin Chinese.

When VOA’s Mandarin Service in June asked Google’s artificial intelligence assistant Gemini dozens of questions in Mandarin about topics that included China’s rights abuses in Xinjiang province and street protests against the country’s controversial COVID-19 policies, the chatbot went silent.

Gemini’s responses to questions about problems in the United States and Taiwan, on the other hand, parroted Beijing’s official positions.

VOA’s Adrianna Zhang contributed to this report.
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SAO PAULO — A Brazilian Supreme Court justice on Friday ordered the suspension of Elon Musk’s social media giant X in Brazil after the tech billionaire refused to name a legal representative in the country, according to a copy of the decision seen by The Associated Press.

The move further escalates the monthslong feud between the two men over free speech, far-right accounts and misinformation. 

Justice Alexandre de Moraes had warned Musk on Wednesday night that X could be blocked in Brazil if he failed to comply with his order to name a representative. He set a 24-hour deadline. The company hasn’t had a representative in the country since earlier this month. 

In his decision, de Moraes gave internet service providers and app stores five days to block access to X, and said the platform will remain blocked until it complies with his orders. He also said people or companies who use virtual private networks, or VPNs, to access X will be subject to daily fines of 50,000 reais ($8,900). 

“Elon Musk showed his total disrespect for Brazilian sovereignty and, in particular, for the judiciary, setting himself up as a true supranational entity and immune to the laws of each country,” de Moraes wrote. 

Brazil is an important market for X, which has struggled with the loss of advertisers since Musk purchased the platform, formerly Twitter, in 2022. Market research group Emarketer says about 40 million Brazilians, roughly one-fifth of the population, access X at least once per month. 

X had posted on its official Global Government Affairs page late Thursday that it expected X to be shut down by de Moraes, “simply because we would not comply with his illegal orders to censor his political opponents.” 

“When we attempted to defend ourselves in court, Judge de Moraes threatened our Brazilian legal representative with imprisonment. Even after she resigned, he froze all of her bank accounts,” the company wrote. “Our challenges against his manifestly illegal actions were either dismissed or ignored. Judge de Moraes’ colleagues on the Supreme Court are either unwilling or unable to stand up to him.”

Musk characterizes judge as tyrant 

X has clashed with de Moraes over its reluctance to comply with orders to block users. 

Accounts that the platform previously has shut down on Brazilian orders include lawmakers affiliated with former President Jair Bolsonaro’s right-wing party and activists accused of undermining Brazilian democracy. 

Musk, a self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist,” has repeatedly claimed the justice’s actions amount to censorship, and his argument has been echoed by Brazil’s political right. He has often insulted de Moraes on his platform, characterizing him as a dictator and tyrant. 

De Moraes’ defenders have said his actions aimed at X have been lawful, supported by most of the court’s full bench and have served to protect democracy at a time in which it is imperiled. His order Friday is based on Brazilian law requiring foreign companies to have representation in the country so they can be notified when there are legal cases against them. 

Given that operators are aware of the widely publicized standoff and their obligation to comply with an order from de Moraes, plus the fact doing so isn’t complicated, X could be offline as early as 12 hours after receiving their instructions, said Luca Belli, coordinator of the Technology and Society Center at the Getulio Vargas Foundation, a university in Rio de Janeiro. 

Other apps suspended in past

The shutdown is not unprecedented in Brazil. 

Lone Brazilian judges shut down Meta’s WhatsApp, the nation’s most widely used messaging app, several times in 2015 and 2016 when the company’s refused to comply with police requests for user data. In 2022, de Moraes threatened the messaging app Telegram with a nationwide shutdown, arguing it had repeatedly ignored Brazilian authorities’ requests to block profiles and provide information. He ordered Telegram to appoint a local representative; the company ultimately complied and stayed online. 

X and its former incarnation, Twitter, have been banned in several countries — mostly authoritarian regimes such as Russia, China, Iran, Myanmar, North Korea, Venezuela and Turkmenistan. Other countries, such as Pakistan, Turkey and Egypt, have also temporarily suspended X before, usually to quell dissent and unrest. Twitter was banned in Egypt after the Arab Spring uprisings, which some dubbed the “Twitter revolution,” but it has since been restored. 
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The arrest in France last Saturday of Pavel Durov, the billionaire boss of the social media platform Telegram, is reverberating around the world as Russia urges France not to turn the investigation into ‘political persecution.’ Durov is under formal investigation over alleged illegal activities on Telegram, as Henry Ridgwell reports.
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Gaborone, Botswana — The entry of Elon Musk’s Starlink into the Botswana market this week has been hailed as a “game-changer.” Analysts concur the introduction of the satellite internet service provider will improve internet access but there is concern over subscription costs and the service potentially pushing local internet providers out of business. 

Starlink this week announced it had begun operations in Botswana, three months after the company received approval from the Botswana Communications Regulatory Authority, known as BOCRA. 

The Space-X operated broadband service enters a market dominated by Botswana’s major mobile network operators.

Tavonga Muchuchuti, president of the industry group Fintech Association Botswana, says the introduction of Starlink will make the internet more widely accessible.

“It is a very big step for our market, especially when it comes to improving digital access across the country as well as it coming in to help us with bridging the digital divide that we have seen over the years,” he said. “By leveraging these constellations of low earth orbit satellites, Starlink can actually deliver high speed internet to even some of the most remote areas across the country, where the traditional ISPs have generally struggled with connectivity.” 

Ewetse Khama, the country manager for Zamlim, a foreign direct investment consulting firm, says Starlink’s launch heralds a new era in the local internet market.

He says local ISPs have to change strategy to remain competitive. 

“They have to figure out another way of battling this coming reality,” he said. “ISPs in Botswana do have the advantage at the moment on the cost element because setting up an infrastructure like Starlinks is incredibly cash heavy and they need to recoup the costs. So ISPs for the short term, are not going to be struggling as much as assumed.”

Starlink is rapidly expanding across Africa. Zimbabwe-based digital expert Sean Ndlovu says this is a positive “shake up.” 

“The advent of Starlink on the continent is a big game changer,” he said. “It gives [internet] access to the underserved populations in the rural areas and even in high density areas. It is going to bring about innovation. The more access our people have to the internet, they can learn.” 

Ndlovu also says Starlink’s satellite service will lead to better, more reliable internet connections. 

Concerns, however, remain over Starlink’s pricing structure, with fears it could be expensive for rural dwellers and low-income earners. 

For domestic use, Starlink users in Botswana pay $363 for the hardware and a monthly subscription fee of $52.

Muchuchuti says the impact of Starlink in Botswana will depend on the balance between innovation and inclusiveness.

“This would mean that the kind of people that we will be targeting for in these rural areas and low-income areas, that pricing might be out of reach for them because they have got to invest in that initial purchase,” he said. “To be truly transformative, there will be a need to really have efforts to make that technology more and more affordable.”

Starlink faced initial licensing challenges but Botswana’s regulatory body granted permission after President Mokgweetsi Masisi met with the company’s directors in the United States in May.
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London — Russia on Thursday warned France not to turn the investigation of Pavel Durov, the boss of Telegram, into a “political persecution” after the billionaire 39-year-old CEO was put under formal investigation relating to activities on his social media platform.

Moscow has implied there are political motivations behind the arrest of Durov, who was detained Saturday as he disembarked his private jet at Paris-Le Bourget airport, near the French capital.

“The main thing is for what is happening in France not to run into political persecution,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters Thursday. “Of course, we consider him a Russian citizen and, as much as possible, we will be ready to provide assistance. We will be watching what happens next,” Peskov said.

France strongly denies there are any political objectives behind his arrest and maintains the investigation is being conducted according to the rule of law.

Durov holds joint Russian, French and United Arab Emirates citizenship. He was released from police custody Wednesday evening on $5.6 million bail. He is banned from leaving France and must report to a police station twice a week.

TJ McIntyre, an associate professor at University College Dublin’s School of Law and an expert on technology law and cybercrime, said Durov faces a range of preliminary charges, “ranging from failure to take action on the sale of drugs on Telegram, failure to prevent the distribution of child sexual abuse material on Telegram, failure to provide information on users when requested as part of criminal investigations, going so far as to include accusations of money laundering.”

McIntyre added that it was unusual for the CEO of a social media website to be held liable for the content it hosts. “Now, he has, himself, been indicted, which takes the investigation to the next level.”

The preliminary charges, which were outlined Wednesday in a statement by Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau, also appear to concern allegations involving organized crime, including “complicity in the administration of an online platform to enable an illicit transaction.”

Speaking outside the courthouse in Paris on Wednesday, Pavel Durov’s lawyer rejected the allegations. “Firstly, Telegram complies in every respect with European digital regulations and is moderated to the same standards as other social networks,” lawyer David-Olivier Kaminski told reporters.

“I’d like to add that it’s totally absurd to think that the head of a social network could be involved in criminal acts that don’t concern him either directly or indirectly,” Kaminski said.

Durov founded Telegram a decade ago. After reportedly facing regulatory pressures in his native Russia, Durov chose Dubai as the company’s headquarters, gaining UAE citizenship in 2021. Local media report that he was given French citizenship later the same year. His wealth is estimated by Forbes at upwards of $15 billion.

While other social media platforms have frequently been accused of harboring illegal content, French investigators say Telegram repeatedly failed to engage with regulators or to comply with laws on moderation.

“They are widely perceived as being a scofflaw when it comes to taking down illegal content posted by users. And if that’s true, if they were notified of specific content by users that violated the law and they didn’t take it down, then they’ve forfeited immunity under the big EU law on this, the Digital Services Act,” said Daphne Keller, director of the Program on Platform Regulation at Stanford Law School’s Cyber Policy Center.

Telegram made a point of refusing to comply with laws on content moderation, said McIntyre. “You have a lot of aggressive rhetoric from the owner saying in essence that this is a service which is dedicated to freedom of expression, [and] it will set out to refuse a lot of state requests. And that I think has come back to bite him now.”

Other social media platforms will be watching closely, according to Keller.

“I think we should assume that most ordinary big platforms, the Facebooks, the YouTubes, etc., are not endangered by this. They have massive teams operating content moderation systems and … removing illegal content if they’re notified about it. I don’t think they could be subject to charges like this.

“Now it may be that X, Elon Musk’s platform, actually has been dropping the ball on doing these things. Certainly, that’s something that EU Commissioner [for Internal Market and Services] Thierry Breton has alleged.”

Elon Musk, the owner of X — formerly Twitter — posted online in support of Durov this week, reposting comments he made in a March interview that moderation was “a propaganda word for censorship.”

Musk is likely worried about the implications of Durov’s arrest, said McIntyre.

“I think Mr. Musk shares a lot of his views with this particular defendant, and I think he would be rightly worried as to the implications of this for him and for his service in Europe in general. But it might not be as extreme a case as Telegram.

“Certainly, there are issues with Twitter [X] failing to respond to government requests, failing to take proper steps to moderate its content. And it’s not impossible that you’d see a similar action taken against him personally,” McIntyre told VOA.

Telegram has more than 900 million global users, including in Russia and Iran. It is widely used by the Russian and Ukrainian militaries in Moscow’s war on Ukraine. The platform does not use end-to-end encryption.

“To some extent, it gives this defendant a good deal of leverage — in that if he were to promise cooperation on some of these fronts, there would be a lot of very valuable information that he would have that could be made available to, for example, the French authorities. As a lawyer, I can only speak to the judicial procedure, but what happens behind the scenes may be as influential as the judicial procedure itself,” McIntyre said.

French President Emmanuel Macron wrote on X that the arrest of Durov was in no way a political decision. “France is deeply committed to freedom of expression and communication, to innovation, and to the spirit of entrepreneurship.”

Russia has in the past blocked access to Telegram after it refused to give state security services access to private conversations, and that move prompted large street protests in Moscow in 2018. Additionally, some Russian lawmakers are now accusing France of censorship.
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PARIS — A lawyer for Telegram boss Pavel Durov, who is being investigated in France, said it was “totally absurd” to suggest the head of a social network was responsible for any criminal acts committed on the platform, French media said.

A French judge put Durov under formal investigation on Wednesday, saying he was suspected of complicity in running an online platform that allows illicit transactions, images of child sex abuse and drug trafficking. He is also being investigated for alleged money laundering and the refusal to cooperate with judicial authorities.

Durov, who spent four days in police custody following his arrest on Saturday at an airport near Paris, was granted bail on condition he pays $5.6 million, reports twice a week to police and does not leave French territory.

His arrest has fueled debate on where freedom of speech ends and enforcement of the law begins, and to what extent tech companies should be held responsible for social media content. Telegram is used by close to a billion people.

“It’s totally absurd to think that the head of a social network could be involved in criminal acts that do not concern him, either directly or indirectly,” lawyer David-Olivier Kaminski, who is representing Durov in France, said in comments to reporters carried by several local media outlets.

“Telegram fully abides with European rules on digital,” he was quoted as saying.

Being placed under formal investigation in France does not imply guilt or necessarily lead to trial, but indicates judges consider there is enough evidence to proceed with the probe. Investigations can last years before being sent to trial or shelved.

Kaminski did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

French President Emmanuel Macron, who is known to be an avid user of Telegram, said earlier this week that Durov’s arrest was “in no way a political decision” and that the probe had been decided by judicial authorities, not by the government.

Macron had lunch with Durov in 2018 as part of a series of meetings with tech entrepreneurs, a source close to the president said, and Durov was granted French citizenship in 2021 under a rare procedure for high-profile individuals.
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PARIS — French authorities handed preliminary charges to Telegram CEO Pavel Durov on Wednesday for allowing alleged criminal activity on his messaging app and barred him from leaving France pending further investigation.

Both free-speech advocates and authoritarian governments have spoken out in Durov’s defense since his weekend arrest. The case has also called attention to the challenges of policing illegal activity online, and to the Russian-born Durov’s own unusual biography and multiple passports.

Durov was detained on Saturday at Le Bourget airport outside Paris as part of a sweeping investigation opened earlier this year and released earlier Wednesday after four days of questioning. Investigative judges filed preliminary charges Wednesday night and ordered him to pay 5 million euros bail and to report to a police station twice a week, according to a statement from the Paris prosecutor’s office.

Allegations against Durov, who is also a French citizen, include that his platform is being used for child sexual abuse material and drug trafficking, and that Telegram refused to share information or documents with investigators when required by law.

The first preliminary charge against him was for ”complicity in managing an online platform to allow illicit transactions by an organized group,” a crime that can lead to sentences of up to 10 years in prison and 500,000 euro fine, the prosecutor’s office said.

Preliminary charges under French law mean magistrates have strong reason to believe a crime was committed but allow more time for further investigation.

David-Olivier Kaminski, a lawyer for Durov, was quoted by French media as saying “it’s totally absurd to think that the person in charge of a social network could be implicated in criminal acts that don’t concern him, directly or indirectly.”

Prosecutors said that Durov is, “at this stage, the only person implicated in this case.” They did not exclude the possibility that other people are being investigated but declined to comment on other possible arrest warrants. Any other arrest warrant would be revealed only if the target of such a warrant is detained and informed of their rights, prosecutors said in a statement to the AP.

French authorities opened a preliminary investigation in February in response to ”the near total absence of a response by Telegram to judicial requests” for data for pursuing suspects, notably those accused of crimes against children, the prosecutor’s office said.

Durov’s arrest in France has caused outrage in Russia, with some government officials calling it politically motivated and proof of the West’s double standard on freedom of speech. The outcry has raised eyebrows among Kremlin critics because in 2018, Russian authorities themselves tried to block the Telegram app but failed, withdrawing the ban in 2020.

In Iran, where Telegram is widely used despite being officially banned after years of protests challenging the country’s Shiite theocracy, Durov’s arrest in France prompted comments from the Islamic Republic’s supreme leader. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei weighed in with veiled praise for France for being “strict” against those who “violate your governance” of the internet.

French President Emmanuel Macron said Monday that Durov’s arrest wasn’t a political move but part of an independent investigation. Macron posted on X that his country “is deeply committed” to freedom of expression but “freedoms are upheld within a legal framework, both on social media and in real life, to protect citizens and respect their fundamental rights.”

In a statement posted on its platform after Durov’s arrest, Telegram said it abides by EU laws, and its moderation is “within industry standards and constantly improving.”

“Almost a billion users globally use Telegram as means of communication and as a source of vital information. We’re awaiting a prompt resolution of this situation,” it said.

In addition to Russia and France, Durov is also a citizen of the United Arab Emirates and the Caribbean island nation of St. Kitts and Nevis.

The UAE Foreign Ministry said Tuesday that it was “closely following the case” and had asked France to provide Durov “with all the necessary consular services in an urgent manner.”

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said he hoped that Durov “has all the necessary opportunities for his legal defense” and added that Moscow stands “ready to provide all necessary assistance and support” to the Telegram CEO as a Russian citizen.

“But the situation is complicated by the fact that he is also a citizen of France,” Peskov said.

Telegram was founded by Durov and his brother after he himself faced pressure from Russian authorities.

In 2013, he sold his stake in VKontakte, a popular Russian social networking site which he launched in 2006.

The company came under pressure during the Russian government’s crackdown following mass pro-democracy protests that rocked Moscow at the end of 2011 and 2012.

Durov had said authorities demanded that the site take down online communities of Russian opposition activists, and later that it hand over personal data of users who took part in the 2013-14 popular uprising in Ukraine, which eventually ousted a pro-Kremlin president.

Durov said in a recent interview that he had turned down these demands and left the country.

The demonstrations prompted Russian authorities to clamp down on the digital space, and Telegram and its pro-privacy stance offered a convenient way for Russians to communicate and share news.

Telegram also continues to be a popular source of news in Ukraine, where both media outlets and officials use it to share information on the war and deliver missile and air raid alerts.

Western governments have often criticized Telegram for a lack of content moderation.
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ISLAMABAD — Slow internet speeds that have frustrated Pakistanis for several weeks may persist more than a month while repairs to a faulty submarine internet cable continue, the country’s telecom regulator announced Wednesday.

Internet speed and connectivity have been spotty across much of Pakistan since at least July, with users increasingly struggling to access popular messaging and social media apps.

On Wednesday, Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, or PTA, announced that repairs to the faulty cable will likely be completed by early October. The cable in question, SMW-4, is one of two that authorities say needed repairs.

“The fault in SMW-4 submarine cable is likely to be repaired by early October 2024. Whereas submarine cable AAE-1 has been repaired which may improve internet experience,” the brief statement said.

Pakistan relies on seven undersea cables for internet service. The regulator reported problems with the SMW-4 cable in mid-June.

Pakistan Telecommunication Corporation Ltd., or PTCL, is the landing party for most of the seven international internet cables, including the two that have experienced technical issues. The Pakistani government holds a majority share in the national telecom carrier.

Conflicting statements

With public anger mounting, officials have issued a variety of statements to explain the slump in services.

Earlier in August, the state minister for information technology, Shaza Fatima Khawaja, blamed increased use of VPNs by Pakistanis for the slowdown nationwide. She rejected the notion that the government was deliberately throttling internet speed.

“I can say it under oath that the government of Pakistan did not block the internet or slow it down,” Khawaja said at a press briefing in Islamabad on August 18.

Later in the month, the PTA chief told lawmakers the faulty submarine cable was to blame, saying it would be repaired by August 28.

Meanwhile, the secretary for the Ministry of Information Technology and Telecommunication told a Seate committee hearing the problem with accessing certain app functions was on the end of mobile data providers.

Although Wednesday’s statement by the PTA referenced two damaged cables, a PTA lawyer told the Islamabad high court this week that a third cable may also be damaged.

‘Firewall’

Business community and internet service providers blamed the slump in services on the government’s efforts to implement a “firewall.”

Speaking to VOA in late July, Khawaja confirmed that a firewall was being installed. However, the IT minister claimed the tool was meant to strengthen cybersecurity and not to control free speech.

Still, after a Senate committee hearing in mid-August, Khawaja told the news media the government was simply upgrading an older “web management system.”

The junior minister, currently the top IT official, has repeatedly accused the media of blowing the “firewall” issue “out of proportion.”

According to a source familiar with the implementation of the “firewall,” the tool, acquired from China and under installation by the Ministry of Defense since May, is deployed at cable landing stations in Pakistan, the place where the undersea internet data cable meets a country’s internet system.

The “firewall,” also being installed on the servers of major internet providers, has the capability to detect and slow digital communication between individual users.

In a statement condemning the “grave consequences of the hastily implemented firewall,” the Pakistan Software Houses Association, an industry group of software developers, gaming and IT companies, said slow internet speed has cost the country’s fledgling IT industry more than $300 million in losses.

“These disruptions are not mere inconveniences but a direct and aggressive assault on the industry viability,” the statement released earlier in August said.

Another organization, Wireless and Internet Service Providers Association of Pakistan, said users are leaving smaller internet service providers because of poor internet speed.

Internet disruptions and implementation of the firewall have been challenged in high courts in Lahore and Islamabad.

Prominent Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir filed a petition requesting that the Islamabad High Court seek details of the firewall’s scope and purpose. He said access to the internet is a fundamental right for the purpose of livelihood.

Expressing frustration with authorities’ “conflicting responses” this week, the court’s top judge demanded a detailed report on the reasons for connectivity disruptions. The next hearing is scheduled for September 3.
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Washington — Russian opposition politician Ilya Ponomarev says he saw no reason to be suspicious when he received what appeared to be an email from former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, a trusted contact with whom he communicates periodically.

“This letter was visually no different from his other letters. I believed that it was his letter because it was visually no different from his other letters,” Ponomarev told VOA Russian in a Zoom interview.

But this email from several months ago turned out to be one of numerous “phishing attacks” targeting U.S. diplomats and others that have been identified as the work of two cyber-espionage outfits linked to the Russian government. And the fact that it accurately mimicked McFaul’s previous messages indicated the attackers had already seen those earlier messages.

“The letter contained a reference to a report on Ukraine that McFaul supposedly intended to deliver in China, and also a request to check whether he had mixed something up,” Ponomarev said. McFaul did in fact deliver a lecture to Chinese students in April.

McFaul has confirmed to VOA that he was the target of a hacker attack but did not elaborate. The details of the attack were revealed in a recent joint report from the digital rights group Access Now and the Canadian research nonprofit Citizen Lab.

The report says the attacks were conducted between October 2022 and August 2024 by two “threat actors close to the Russian regime” known as ColdRiver and ColdWastrel.

According to The Washington Post, “multiple governments” have said that ColdRiver works for the Federal Security Service, or FSB, the successor agency to the Soviet KGB, while ColdWastrel is believed to be “working for another Russian agency.”

Among their targets were exiled Russian opposition figures, employees of U.S. think tanks, former U.S. ambassadors to Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, political figures and academics, employees of American and European non-profit organizations, and media organizations.

VOA has spoken with several of those named as victims, including former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine John Herbst, a Russian journalist and a Russian human rights activist, as well as Ponomarev and McFaul.

The goal of phishing attacks is to try to get a user to click on a malicious link or enter their data – login and password – on a fake website. If the attack is successful, hackers gain access to the victim’s confidential information, including correspondence, contact lists and, in some cases, financial information.

Hackers conducting phishing campaigns employ a technique called “social engineering,” which a leading American cyber security software and services company described as using “psychological manipulation” designed to trick users into divulging sensitive information.

Herbst, who is currently director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, told VOA that he has been facing attacks from Russian hackers for the past 10 years.

The Kremlin “didn’t like from the beginning what I was doing because I was pointing out that they’re conducting an illegal invasion of Ukraine, I guess going back to 2014,” he said.

Herbst said that Russian hackers target people who take a public position aimed at countering Moscow’s aggressive foreign policy: “So, it’s not surprising that people like Steve Pifer or Michael McFaul, or myself have received attention from the FSB, the GRU [Russian military intelligence] and others.”

Herbst added: “I don’t want to overstate the attention they give to us. You know, we are pretty much tertiary or even less than tertiary players on the international political scene, but they know they have such a massive security apparatus that they give some low-level guy the job of following people like me.”

“The stuff that linked me with Mike McFaul or Steve Pifer … was a fishing expedition, right? [To] see if they could get one of them to say something in confidence to me, which would be embarrassing.”

Steven Pifer did not respond to a VOA request for comment on the details of the hacker attack.

Ponomarev said that he responded to the fake McFaul email, but did not have time to download the malicious file attached to it since he was on a plane when he opened the email, and it was inconvenient to download the file from a phone.

“When I opened it on my computer, I noticed that the address he sent it to me from was not his usual Stanford University address, it was something completely different,” Ponomarev told VOA.

“Being an IT guy, I looked at the IP address of the file in the email and was convinced that it was phishing. After that, I passed the information on to the competent authorities so that they could look into the matter further.”

Ponomarev added that the fact the email ostensibly sent by McFaul came from a Proton service mailbox did not initially arouse any particular suspicions.

“I also have an address on Proton, for some kind of confidential correspondence,” he said, noting that attackers can forge addresses on Proton by changing one letter, so that visually it still looks like a regular mailing address.

“They use it because it’s completely anonymous,” Ponomarev added. “You can’t trace an IP address to Proton, so when you use Proton, it’s a dead end, you can’t excavate it any further.”

Polina Machold, publisher of Proekt, an independent Russian media outlet specializing in investigative journalism, told VOA that in the phishing attack targeting her, which took place last November, the hackers also employed social engineering and the Proton mail service.

“I received a letter from a ‘colleague’ from another media outlet, with whom we had previously done a joint project, asking to look at a new potential project or something like that,” Machold told VOA.

“We corresponded for some time, and when it came to opening the file, I discovered that something very suspicious was going on, because the link in the file supposedly led to Proton Drive, but the domain was something completely different.”

Machold said she called a colleague who confirmed that the attacker was pretending to be him. The information was passed on to Citizen Lab, which determined that hackers likely associated with the FSB were behind the attack.

Dmitry Zair-Bek, who heads First Department, a Russian rights group, said that a member of his group was among the first targets of a hacker attack “because we defend people in cases of treason and espionage.”

“One of our employees received an email from an address that mimicked the address of one of our partners,” he said. “The email contained a link that led to a phishing site.”

Zair-Bek added that the ColdWastrel group carried out the attack targeting First Department.

“They are the ‘C’ students of the hacker world,” Zair-Bek said of ColdWastrel. “The idea is the same as the ColdRiver group, they just paid less attention to some small details.

“The fact that they are ‘C’ students does not mean that they are less effective. They choose a person who from their point of view, on the one hand, has the largest amount of information that interests them and, on the other hand, is the most vulnerable.”

Even someone well-versed in digital security issues can fall for the bait of hackers, says Natalia Krapiva, an expert at Access Now, which co-authored the report on the Russian hacker attacks.

“The ColdRiver and ColdWastrel groups use quite sophisticated social engineering, a very good understanding of the context,” she told VOA.

“They know how the organization is structured in general, which people are responsible for finance, HR, politics, and so on. That is, they know which employee to send this [phishing] email to. They also understand with whom these organizations interact and on what issues.”

“We have seen examples of exploiting existing relationships between a Russian and an American human rights organization,” Krapiva added, noting that hackers knew that one of the organizations was waiting for a grant application and sent a malicious PDF file to the employee who was waiting for it.

This suggests that hackers already have a certain amount of information at the time they attempt to attack their victims, she said.
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