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Portions of Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy Richard Stengel’s assessment were significantly more upbeat than those of other U.S. officials in recent weeks. “The virtual-caliphate itself is shrinking,” said Stengel, testifying Wednesday before the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “Now we see the tide turning. “There's now six times as much anti-ISIL content as pro-ISIL content,” he added, using an alternate acronym for Islamic State.
Stengel helps oversee an inter-agency group that coordinates U.S. counterterrorism messaging to foreign audiences. The initiative has sought to channel non-governmental elements to fight extremist messaging, drawing on technology companies, Hollywood producers, and peaceful Muslims around the world. As an example, Stengel said, thousands of pro-terrorist Twitter handles have been removed, and YouTube and Facebook are aggressively removing extremist material. If such efforts are beginning to succeed and Islamic State’s cyber platforms are shrinking, terrorist messaging still reaches eager audiences, according to Stengel.
The Islamic State hashtag (#ISIS) is seen typed into the Twitter application on a smartphone in this picture illustration taken in Zenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The under secretary of state called it a “misnomer” that “ISIL’s messaging is so diabolically clever that they are taking nice, young Muslim boys and girls and turning them into foreign terrorist fighters.” “They are tapping into an already existing market of grievance and unhappiness that is [exists] throughout the Muslim world. They are sometimes pushing on an open door,” Stengel said.
The committee’s chairman, Republican Congressman Ed Royce of California, said Islamic State’s cyber outreach remains potent. “ISIS operates a vast network of online recruiters, online propagandists,” Royce said. “They use popular media sites, and through that process ISIS can reach a global audience – it does this within seconds.” Last week, the FBI assistant director, Michael Steinbach, told a Senate panel that Islamic State had boosted the quality and volume of its messaging. “No matter the format, the message of radicalization spreads faster than we imagined just a few years ago,” Steinbach said. “The most concerning trend that we’ve seen in the past year when we identify these individuals online is the speed with which they mobilize.”
Stengel told lawmakers that Islamic State’s military losses are beginning to impact the group's cyber capabilities as well. “With our success on the military battlefield, getting back almost 40 percent of the territory in Iraq that ISIL once held, we are getting rid of a lot of those people who were creating that [cyber] content,” he said. Democratic Congressman Eliot Engel said that pressure must continue. “We’re connected on a global scale like never before. And so much good can come of that,” Engel said. “But we know it cuts both ways. This incredible tool can also be used for incredible harm.”
Islamic State Said to Be Shrinking in Cyberspace Too
Located in northern California, Silicon Valley is a melting-pot of different cultures, languages and technology companies. Palo Alto-based start-up Osmo reflects that diversity. “We’re always striving to get diversity from a cultural background because the product we’re building is for kids, and they are everywhere trying to learn,” Sharma said. Osmo’s latest toy teaches children as young as five the basic concepts of coding.
“What’s important is 'What’s your idea? What’s your thought process?',” Sharma said “Coding — you can think of it as communication between machine and you.”
Child's play
To play Osmo’s coding toy, children need to put commands together with physical blocks in front of an iPad. The camera on the iPad reads the instructions from the blocks which tell an animated creature in the iPad what to do, including walking, jumping and eating strawberries. Hayley Chu and her brother are testing the toy. They picked up the blocks and started creating commands. “There was no instruction manual that they read, they just went right in and started playing with it,” said the children’s mother, Rochelle Chu. “It’s good because it introduces it to them in a very friendly way where they are able to experiment and play and not be afraid.” Sharma said not being afraid to experiment is also true of the start-up culture in Silicon Valley. “How do we become creative with a few of the resources to innovate? That makes it challenging. What makes it fun is you have a lot of freedom. You can do almost anything,” said Sharma.
International appeal
He said Osmo's coding toy will have global appeal because learning how to communicate with a computer transcends differences in language and culture. The language of technology and computer also connects the people from around the world who work and live in Silicon Valley. “ I think my experience has been it matters a lot more on what your ideas are, what your thought process is [rather] than how you look, what language you speak, what accent you have,” said Sharma. A combination of a diversity of cultures and ideas, and the freedom to innovate, may be why engineers and computer scientists worldwide are drawn to Silicon Valley.
Silicon Valley Culture Attracts Immigrants
The European Union and the U.S. say the new Privacy Shield imposes stricter obligations on American companies, including the likes of Facebook and Apple, to safeguard the personal data of individuals, from health matters through to social media activities. Critics argue that the new framework doesn't go far enough, that the consumer protections are not strong enough and that the possibility of blanket surveillance from U.S. agencies remains. As part of the deal, the U.S. government has assured that any access on national security grounds by public authorities to personal data transferred under the new arrangements will be subject to "clear conditions, limitations, oversight and preventing generalized access."
The two sides say that includes stronger monitoring and enforcement by the U.S. Department of Commerce and Federal Trade Commission including increased cooperation with European authorities. Under the terms of the new deal, there will be an annual joint review of the pact and those who think their data has been misused has a route for complaint. And the U.S. will appoint a new official — an ombudsman based at the State Department — responsible for following up on European complaints. "The approval of the Privacy Shield is a milestone for privacy at a time when the sharing of data is driving growth in every sector, from advanced manufacturing to advertising," U.S. Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker said in Brussels at the launch of the data-sharing pact. "For businesses, the free flow of data makes it possible for a startup in Silicon Valley to hire programmers in the Czech Republic, or a manufacturer in Germany to collaborate with a research lab in Tennessee," she added.
The deal potentially brings an end to a period of uncertainty for businesses following last October's decision by the European Court of Justice that the previous Safe Harbor pact was invalid because it did not adequately protect consumers when their data was stored in the U.S. The pact, which had been used by around 4,500 companies, had allowed the easy transfer of data from the EU by having U.S. companies promise to provide privacy protections equivalent to those in the EU. The EU court's ruling that the pact was invalid opened up the possibility that data privacy officers across the 28-country EU might be inundated by complaints by consumers worried about their privacy. "The adoption of Privacy Shield will enhance legal certainty for thousands of businesses on both sides of the Atlantic while providing an adequate level of protection for citizens' data," Markus J. Beyrer, the director general of lobby group BusinessEurope. "Trans-Atlantic data flows are fundamental to the success of the European economy and today's decision will support job creation across industry."
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The San Francisco-based firm said in a blog post that it has also made progress in preventing users who were suspended from immediately returning to the platform using different accounts, which has been a problem in the past. It said its rate of daily suspensions is up by 80% since last year, although it did not provide specific numbers. The suspensions spike immediately following terrorist attacks, it said.
Twitter noted that there is no magic formula for identifying extremist accounts. Like other social media companies, it uses a variety of tools, including spam-fighting technology, automatic identification as well as reports from users, to help combat abuse. The report on its efforts come after Twitter has been criticised for not doing enough to keep extremist groups like Islamic State (IS) from using the short-messaging service to crowd-source supporters and potential attackers.
Last week, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit against Twitter that accused the company of supporting IS by allowing it to sign up for and use Twitter accounts. The judge agreed with Twitter that the company cannot be held liable because federal law protects service providers that merely offer platforms for speech, without creating the speech itself. At the same time, Twitter stressed that it was working to combat violent extremism on its service.
Twitter 'suspends 360,000 accounts over violent extremism' - BelfastTelegraph.co.uk
The Syrian Democratic Forces said the pictures, showing a convoy of hundreds of vehicles, were taken on Friday. The US-backed alliance of Kurdish and Arab fighters did not attack as there were civilians in each of the vehicles and it wanted to avoid casualties. The militants were thought to have gone north, towards the Turkish border. SDF fighters took full control of Manbij after a 10-week offensive backed by US-led coalition air strikes and special forces personnel.
Islamic State militants using human shields to flee the Syrian of Manbij in a convoy
As it became apparent that the town would fall, some 100 to 200 IS militants gathered members of their families, supporters and civilian hostages, Baghdad-based US-led coalition spokesman Col Chris Garver told reporters on Tuesday. The civilians were then placed with the militants in every vehicle in the convoy that headed north, tracked by SDF fighters and the coalition, he said. "We had to treat them all as non-combatants. We didn't shoot. We kept watching." Hundreds of the civilians were released on Saturday, while others escaped.
During the offensive, the SDF had offered the militants a safe route out of Manbij to avoid civilian casualties, but they refused. Col Garver said the jihadists kept "throwing civilians... into the line of fire, trying to get them shot to use that potentially as propaganda". IS militants attempted to flee the Iraqi city of Falluja in a large convoy in June, but were bombed by Iraqi and coalition warplanes. About 175 vehicles were destroyed.
Photos show IS militants fleeing Manbij with 'human shields' - BBC News
