Educational

In September 2018, Google warned a selection of US senators and their aides that their Gmail accounts were being targeted by foreign government hackers. Google has issued warnings of phishing attempts by state-sponsored actors since 2012, though getting a notice does not mean the account has been

In the run-up to the November 2018 US midterm elections, Vice tested Facebook's new system of mandatory "Paid for" disclosure intended to bring greater transparency to the sources of ads relating to "issues of national importance". Placing political ads requires a valid ID and proof of residence

A combination of entrenched and litigious voting machine manufacturers with immense control over their proprietary software and a highly complex and fragmented voting infrastructure mean that even though concerns were raised as early as 2004 about the security of US voting machines, the 2018 midterm

In July 2018, Election Systems and Software (ES&S), long the top US manufacturer of voter machines, admitted in a letter to Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) that it had installed pcAnywhere remote access software and modems on a number of the election management systems it had sold between 2000 and 2006

In September 2018, when Massachusetts state police tweeted a map of responses to fires and explosions during a gas emergency, they inadvertently revealed that they were closely monitoring several activist groups, including a Facebook group for Mass Action Against Police Brutality, the Coalition to

In the run-up to the 2018 US mid-term elections, researchers found that the dissemination of fake news on Facebook was increasingly a domestic American phenomenon rather than, as in the 2016 presidential election, an effort driven by state-backed Russian operatives. Removing such accounts (Twitter)

A few months before the US 2018 midterm elections, the Trump campaign team signed a contract with the newly-formed Virginia-based company Excelsior Strategies to exploit the first-party data the campaign had collected. The contract was set up by Trump's campaign manager, Brad Parscale, who built the

In the months leading up to the US 2018 midterm elections, Republican officials in Georgia, Texas, and North Carolina made moves they described as ensuring voting integrity but which critics saw as blocking voter access. In Georgia, where Secretary of State Brian Kemp is charged with enforcing

In 2018, after the UK Cabinet Office said a trial of compulsory voter ID was necessary because reports of voter fraud had more than doubled between the 2014 and 2016 elections - a claim immediately disputed by a voter and upheld by the UK Statistics Authority. While it was true that there were 21

A little over a month before the US 2018 midterm elections, Twitter updated its rules to reduce manipulation of its platform. Among the changes, the company outlined the factors it would use to determine whether an account is fake and should be removed, provided an update on its automated detection

In 2018, British immigration officers demanded that the mothers of two children provide DNA samples in order to provide proof of paternity. The children both had British fathers and had previously been issued British passports, but their mothers were not UK citizens. In one case, the father had

In July 2018, members of the Internal Security Organisation, Uganda's counterintelligence agency, raided South African telecommunications provider MTN's Uganda data centre in Mutundwe. In a letter to the police, MTN said the ISO kidnapped a data manager who worked for the contractor that ran the

The proposed extension to the Trans Mountain pipeline, which would connect Alberta and British Columbia in parallel to the existing pipeline and triple its capacity, was controversial for years before Canada approved the project in 2016. In 2014, the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association

In May 2018, the ACLU of Northern California obtained documents under a FOIA request showing that Amazon was essentially giving away its two-year-old Rekognition facial recognition tools to law enforcement agencies in Oregon and Orlando, Florida. Amazon defended the move by saying the technology has

At the 2017 Champions League Final, South Wales Police deployed an automated facial recognition system that wrongly identified more than 2,000 people in Cardiff as potential criminals. The system's cameras watched 170,000 people arrive in Cardiff for the football match between Real Madrid and

In August 2018, two lawsuits, were filed against NSO Group, one brought in Israel by a Qatari citizen and the other in Cyprus by Mexican journalists and activists. All the plaintiffs had been targeted by the company's Pegasus spyware, which takes control of targets' phones when they click on links