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  • AP sources: Chinese hackers targeted phones of Trump, Vance, people associated with Harris campaign

    AP sources: Chinese hackers targeted phones of Trump, Vance, people associated with Harris campaign

    WASHINGTON — Chinese hackers targeted cellphones used by Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, his running mate, JD Vance, and people associated with the Democratic campaign of Kamala Harris, people familiar with the matter said Friday.

    It was not immediately clear what data, if any, may have been accessed. U.S. officials are continuing to investigate, according to the people, who were not authorized to publicly discuss the ongoing inquiry and spoke on the condition of anonymity to The Associated Press.

    An FBI statement did not confirm that Trump and Vance were among the potential targets but said it was investigating “unauthorized access to commercial telecommunications infrastructure by actors affiliated with the People’s Republic of China.”

    “Agencies across the U.S. Government are collaborating to aggressively mitigate this threat and are coordinating with our industry partners to strengthen cyber defenses across the commercial communications sector,” the FBI said.

    U.S. officials believe the campaigns were among numerous targets of a larger cyberespionage operation launched by China, the people said. It was not immediately clear what information China may have hoped to glean, though Beijing has for years engaged in vast hacking campaigns aimed at collecting the private data of Americans and government workers, spying on technology and corporate secrets from major American companies and targeting U.S. infrastructure.

    News that high-profile political candidates were targeted comes as U.S. officials remain on high alert for foreign interference in the final stretch of the presidential campaign. Iranian hackers have been blamed for targeting Trump campaign officials and the Justice Department has exposed vast disinformation campaigns orchestrated by Russia, which is said to favor Trump over Democrat Kamala Harris.

    China, by contrast, is believed by U.S. intelligence officials to be taking a neutral stance in the race and is instead focused on down-ballot races, targeted candidates from both parties based on their stance on issues of key importance to Beijing, including support for Taiwan.

    The New York Times first reported that Trump and Vance had been targeted and said the campaign was alerted by U.S. officials this week. Three people confirmed the news to the AP, including one who said that people associated with the Harris campaign were also targeted.

    A spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Washington said they were not familiar with the specifics and could not comment, but contended that China is routinely victimized by cyberattacks and opposes the activity.

    “The presidential elections are the United States’ domestic affairs. China has no intention and will not interfere in the U.S. election. We hope that the U.S. side will not make accusations against China in the election,” the statement said.

    Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung did not offer any details about the Chinese operation but issued a statement accusing the Harris campaign of having emboldened foreign adversaries, including China and Iran.

    The FBI has repeatedly warned over the last year about Chinese hacking operations, with Director Chris Wray telling Congress in January that investigators had disrupted a state-sponsored group known as Volt Typhoon. That operation targeted U.S.-based small office and home routers owned by private citizens and companies. Their ultimate targets included water treatment plants, the electrical grid and transportation systems across the U.S.

    Last month, Wray said that the FBI had interrupted a separate Chinese government campaign, called Typhoon Flax, that targeted universities, government agencies and other organizations and that installed malicious software on more than 200,000 consumer devices, including cameras, video recorders and home and office routers.

    The Wall Street Journal reported this month that Chinese hackers had burrowed inside the networks of U.S. broadband providers and had potentially accessed systems that law enforcement officials use for wiretapping requests.

    ____

    Michelle L. Price in New York and Jill Colvin in Austin, Texas contributed to this report.

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  • Local news sources are still drying up, but there’s growth in digital sites in metro areas

    Local news sources are still drying up, but there’s growth in digital sites in metro areas

    Newspapers in the United States closed at the rate of more than two per week during 2023, but a burst of activity among digital entrepreneurs illustrated some tiny shoots of growth in what has become a desert-like climate for local news.

    A total of 127 newspapers closed last year, while the 81 digital sites gained was the most in any year since the Medill Local News Initiative at Northwestern University began measuring that activity in 2018, and possibly the most ever.

    “It shows that there are some entrepreneurs and innovators out there,” said Tim Franklin, director of the Medill Local News Initiative.

    One caution: digital news is still an area with a lot of churn. There were actually 212 new sites that started last year, including 30 that were former newspapers that converted to digital only, while 131 closed, making for the net gain of 81.

    The big picture also remains ominous, as few of the factors that have led to the decimation of the local news industry have really changed. Advertisers and readers are still slipping away. More than 3,200 newspapers have closed since 2005, leaving roughly 5,600 remaining, Medill said. Nearly 2,000 newsroom jobs were lost in the last year alone.

    “The local news crisis is snowballing,” Franklin said. “We see it in the expansion of news deserts, the unrelenting pace of closures and the loss of newspaper jobs.”

    The list includes the Hinton Times in northwest Iowa, which closed after 28 years when its owners retired; the Northland Press outside of Brainerd, Minnesota, which ended after the death of its publisher; and the Tioga Tribune in North Dakota, whose editor left town.

    Of the new digital sites, some 90 percent are located in metropolitan areas, servicing communities that had been seeing less coverage because of job losses at larger news outlets. In the Chicago area where Northwestern is located, Block Club Chicago offers hyper-local coverage to nearly two dozen neighborhoods, The TRiiBE is geared to young, professional Black residents and the Cicero Independiente reaches Latino consumers.

    While that’s good news for those communities, there’s still an urgent need for news in rural areas, the report said. Using a metric that takes into account poverty and areas with only one news outlet, Medill placed 279 counties on its “watch list” of those at risk of losing local news altogether. That’s up 22 percent from the previous year.

    Medill also noticed an increased pace in newspapers changing ownership — 258 in 2023 compared to 180 the year before. A number of smaller companies are more active in acquiring papers, as opposed to a large chain like Gannett, leading to growth in companies like the Carpenter Media Group in Farmville, Virginia.

    More of the digital start-ups that have opened in the past few years are nonprofit instead of profit businesses, said Zach Metzger, director of the Medill State of Local News Project. That eliminates the expense of printing and distributing newspapers, while offering greater flexibility in funding sources, he said.

    ___

    David Bauder writes about media for the AP. Follow him at http://x.com/dbauder.



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  • X requests it be reinstated in Brazil after complying with judge’s orders, sources say

    X requests it be reinstated in Brazil after complying with judge’s orders, sources say

    SAO PAULO — In the high-stakes showdown between the world’s richest man and a Brazilian Supreme Court justice, Elon Musk blinked.

    Musk’s social media site X has complied with Alexandre de Moraes’ orders and requested its service be reestablished in the country, two sources said Thursday.

    X complied with orders to block certain accounts from the platform, name an official legal representative in Brazil, and pay fines imposed for not complying with earlier court orders, his lawyers said in a petition filed Thursday, according to the sources, who are familiar with the document. The sources spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the matter.

    On Saturday, de Moraes ordered the platform to submit additional documentation about its legal representative for court review, which the sources said has been done.

    X was blocked on Aug. 30 in the highly online country of 213 million people, where it was one of X’s biggest markets, with more than 20 million users. De Moraes ordered the shutdown after sparring with Musk for months over free speech, far-right accounts and misinformation. The company said at the time that de Moraes’ efforts to block certain accounts were illegal moves to censor “political opponents” and that it would not comply. Musk called the judge an enemy of free speech and a criminal. But de Moraes’ decisions have been repeatedly upheld by his peers — including his nationwide block of X.

    In a twist, X’s new representative is the same person who held the position before X shuttered its office in Brazil, according to the company’s public filing with the Sao Paulo commercial registry. That happened after de Moraes threatened to arrest the person, Rachel de Oliveira Villa Nova Conceição, if X did not comply with orders to block accounts.

    In an apparent effort to avoid her getting blamed for potential violations of Brazilian law — and risk arrest — a clause has been written into the representation agreement that any action on the part of X that will result in obligations for her requires prior instruction in writing from the company, according to the company’s filing at the registry.

    Associated Press emails and calls to her office were not returned. The Supreme Court’s press office has not confirmed receipt of X’s documents, and X did not immediately respond to a request from the AP.

    It’s still early to know whether the feud between X and Brazil’s top court is over, said ⁠Bruna Santos, a lawyer and global campaigns manager at nonprofit Digital Action. However, the platform’s decision to appoint a representative indicates the company has entered “a state of good-faith cooperation with Brazilian authorities.”

    And the fact that Brazilian users migrated in droves to rival platforms BlueSky and Threads may have played into X’s backstep, Santos added.

    “There must be a genuine concern on the platform that they are losing users, the core users from the early Twitter days, or the loyal ones, who stick around for good,” she said.

    At a university in Rio de Janeiro, some students told the AP they were heartened by the news.

    “I used it a lot as a way to search for information and news, and I missed it,” said João Maurício Almeida Raposo, a 19-year-old economics student. He started using Threads, but doesn’t like it.

    Brazil is not the first country to ban X — far from it — but such a drastic step has generally been limited to authoritarian regimes. The platform and its former incarnation, Twitter, have been banned in Russia, China, Iran, Myanmar, North Korea, Venezuela and Turkmenistan, for instance. Other countries, such as Pakistan, Turkey and Egypt, have also temporarily suspended X before, usually to quell dissent and unrest.

    X’s dustup with Brazil has some parallels to the company’s dealings with the Indian government three years ago, back when it was still called Twitter and before Musk purchased it for $44 billion. In 2021, India threatened to arrest employees of Twitter (as well as Meta’s Facebook and WhatsApp), for not complying with the government’s requests to take down posts related to farmers’ protests that rocked the country.

    Unlike in the U.S., where free speech is baked into the constitution, in Brazil speech is more limited, with restrictions on homophobia and racism, for example, and judges can order sites to remove content. Many of de Moraes’ decisions are sealed from the public and neither he nor X has disclosed the full list of accounts he has ordered blocked, but prominent supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro and far-right activists were among those that X earlier removed from the platform.

    Some belonged to a network known in Brazil as “digital militias.” They were targeted by a yearslong investigation overseen by de Moraes, initially for allegedly spreading defamatory fake news and threats against Supreme Court justices, and then after Bolsonaro’s 2022 election loss for inciting demonstrations across the country that were seeking to overturn President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s victory.

    In April, de Moraes included Musk as a target in an ongoing investigation over the dissemination of fake news and opened a separate investigation into the U.S. business executive for alleged obstruction.

    In that decision, de Moraes noted that Musk began waging a public “disinformation campaign” regarding the top court’s actions, and that Musk continued the following day — most notably with comments that his social media company X would cease to comply with the court’s orders to block certain accounts.

    Musk, meanwhile, accused de Moraes of suppressing free speech and violating Brazil’s constitution, and noted on X that users could seek to bypass any shutdown of the social media platform by using VPNs. In an unusual move for a democratic country, de Moraes also set exorbitant daily fines for anyone using virtual private networks, or VPNs, to access the platform.

    X’s defiant stance appears to have softened following the shutdown.

    On Sept. 18, after X became accessible to some users in Brazil despite the ban, the Government Affairs account posted that this was due to a change in network providers and was “inadvertent and temporary.” But, it added, “we continue efforts to work with the Brazilian government to return very soon for the people of Brazil.”

    The score is 1-0, but the game isn’t necessarily over, said Carlos Affonso Souza, a lawyer and director of the Institute for Technology and Society, a Rio-based think tank.

    “The first round ends with a victory for de Moraes, who adopted drastic measures, but which wound up producing the effect of making X do a reversal and comply with orders,” Affonso Souza said.

    ___

    Ortutay reported from San Francisco.

    ___

    Follow AP’s coverage of Latin America and the Caribbean at https://apnews.com/hub/latin-america

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  • The US is preparing criminal charges in Iran hack targeting Trump, AP sources say

    The US is preparing criminal charges in Iran hack targeting Trump, AP sources say

    WASHINGTON — The Justice Department is preparing criminal charges in connection with an Iranian hack that targeted Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in a bid to shape the outcome of the November election, two people familiar with the matter said Thursday.

    It was not immediately clear when the charges might be announced or whom precisely they will target, but they are the result of an FBI investigation into an intrusion that investigators across multiple agencies quickly linked to an Iranian effort to influence American politics.

    The prospect of criminal charges comes as the Justice Department has raised alarms about aggressive efforts by countries including Russia and Iran to meddle in the presidential election between Trump and Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, including by hacking and covert social media campaigns designed to shape public opinion.

    Iran “is making a greater effort to influence this year’s election than it has in prior election cycles and that Iranian activity is growing increasingly aggressive as this election nears,” Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen, the Justice Department’s top national security official, said in a speech Thursday in New York City.

    “Iran perceives this year’s elections to be particularly consequential in impacting Iran’s national security interests, increasing Tehran’s inclination to try to shape the outcome,” he added.

    The Trump campaign disclosed on Aug. 10 that it had been hacked and said Iranian actors had stolen and distributed sensitive internal documents. At least three news outlets — Politico, The New York Times and The Washington Post — were leaked confidential material from inside the Trump campaign. So far, each has refused to reveal any details about what it received.

    Politico reported that it began receiving emails on July 22 from an anonymous account. The source — an AOL email account identified only as “Robert” — passed along what appeared to be a research dossier that the campaign had apparently done on the Republican vice presidential nominee, Ohio Sen. JD Vance. The document was dated Feb. 23, almost five months before Trump selected Vance as his running mate.

    The FBI, the office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency subsequently blamed that hack, as well as an attempted breach of the Biden-Harris campaign, on Iran.

    Those agencies issued a statement saying that the hacking and similar activities were meant to sow discord, exploit divisions within American society and influence the outcome of elections.

    The statement did not identify whether Iran has a preferred candidate, though Tehran has long appeared determined to seek retaliation for a 2020 strike Trump ordered as president that killed an Iranian general.

    The two people who discussed the looming criminal charges spoke on condition of anonymity to The Associated Press because they were not authorized to speak publicly about a case that had not yet been unsealed.

    The Washington Post first reported that charges were being prepared.

    Justice Department officials have been working to publicly call out and counter election interference efforts. The response is a contrast to 2016, when Obama administration officials were far more circumspect about Russian interference they were watching that was designed to boost Trump’s campaign.

    “We have learned that transparency about what we are seeing is critical,” Olsen, the Justice Department official, said Thursday.

    “It helps ensure that our citizens are aware of the attempts of foreign government to sow discord and spread falsehoods — all of which promotes resilience within our electorate,” he added. “It provides warnings to our private sector so they can better protect their networks. And it sends an unmistakable message to our adversaries — we’ve gained insight into your networks, we know what you’re doing, and we are determined to hold you accountable.”

    Last week, in an effort to combat disinformation ahead of the election, the Justice Department charged two employees of RT, a Russian state media company, with covertly funneling a Tennessee-based content creation company nearly $10 million to publish English-language videos on social media platforms with messages in favor of the Russia government’s interests and agenda.

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