In this week’s roundup of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Mike is joined by Dave Willner, founder of Zentropi, and long-time trust & safety expert who worked at Facebook, AirBnB, and OpenAI in Trust & Safety roles. Together they discuss:
It was early morning on April 1 when Mohammad Halimi, a 53-year-old exiled Afghan scholar, got a panicked message from his son. Halimi’s name had just appeared in a viral post on X, shared by none other than the site’s owner and the world’s richest man, Elon Musk.
Halimi thought his son was joking. It was April Fools’ Day after all. Musk had been assigned a big job in the Trump administration, running the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency that was established to comb through the government to root out waste and fraud.
Halimi had a much smaller job, working on a contract for the United States Institute of Peace, an independent nonprofit funded by Congress that promotes conflict resolution efforts around the world, including in Halimi’s native Afghanistan. There was no way, he thought to himself, that someone like him would have landed on Musk’s radar.
But Halimi’s son was not joking. He told Halimi to go online and see for himself. The post, which Musk shared with his 222 million followers, was real. It had already been picked up by the local press back home. And it was potentially deadly.
“United States Institute of Peace Funded Taliban,” the post read. At the bottom, the post named Halimi and described him as a “former Taliban member,” and the payments to him as U.S. support for the militants. Below that, thousands of comments tumbled in, calling him a terrorist and a grifter. Republican U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia later chimed in to congratulate Musk for discovering that “the federal government is paying the Taliban and they covered it up.”
Halimi couldn’t make any sense of it. Critics of U.S. foreign aid efforts might argue that his small contract of $132,000 with USIP amounted to waste. But if there was one thing Washington should have known about Halimi, it was that he was no enemy of America.
It was true that he’d once worked for the Taliban government that ruled Afghanistan in the 1990s, but he had switched sides after the United States invaded following 9/11. He had even served as a cabinet minister in the U.S.-backed Afghan government, where he often shared his knowledge of the Taliban’s internal workings with intelligence officials and military leaders.
In fact, during President Donald Trump’s first term in office, Halimi was part of a team of advisers that helped the U.S. prepare for difficult diplomatic talks with the Taliban, which eventually included guarantees to allow American troops safe passage out.
And his political views were easy to figure out: Halimi had made numerous media appearances as one of the Taliban’s more ardent critics, accusing them of straying from Islam’s true principles.
This all made him an obvious target. The Taliban had attempted to assassinate Halimi as a traitor at least three times during the U.S. occupation. And the U.S. government knew he had faced real danger in the past. He narrowly managed to flee Afghanistan in the final days before the U.S.-backed government fell to the Taliban, with the help of the second-highest-ranking CIA officer in the country. Since then, he had tried to live a mostly quiet life, partly to keep the relatives he’d left behind safe from retribution.
The work he was pursuing with USIP had nothing to do with supporting the Taliban. It was the opposite.
ProPublica has obtained records making clear that Musk and his team at the newly formed DOGE should have known this too. Halimi’s work at USIP was spelled out in precise detail in the agency’s records, down to the tasks he performed on specific days. His role at the institute was far from top secret, but it had been treated as highly sensitive and confidential. Among other tasks, it involved a program gathering information on the ground about living conditions for Afghan women, who are largely barred from education past primary school or from having a role in public life.
Partly because of Halimi’s contentious history with the Taliban, the militants might equate his work at USIP to espionage and severely punish anyone involved with it. By exposing him, Musk and his team endangered those working with Halimi, as well his relatives who were still in Afghanistan. The White House and Musk did not respond to requests for comment.
Multiple senior government officials at the State Department were warned about the danger that DOGE’s callout posed to Halimi’s family, according to two USIP staffers interviewed by ProPublica. They were trying to stop the damage from spreading. But Musk’s crew was then locked in a pitched battle for control of USIP. The misleading narrative about Halimi became central to DOGE’s argument; American foreign aid was corrupt and even, at times, funding America’s enemies — and that’s why DOGE had to take over.
Those battles were playing out across the government at the time. DOGE often won, but ultimately Musk’s tenure was short-lived. He resigned from DOGE at the end of May, shortly before a public falling-out with Trump. DOGE’s hard-charging takeovers of government agencies brought chaos and confusion and left many qualified bureaucrats jobless. But Halimi risked losing a lot more.
Shortly after Halimi spoke to his son, a flood of threatening messages began appearing on his phone. The most ominous came from members of the Taliban. Just as Halimi had worried, they accused him of being a thief and traitor, which could be like a death sentence for anyone connected to him back home. “My family was in great danger,” Halimi thought to himself.
About a week after DOGE outed him, Halimi’s worst fears were realized. Taliban intelligence agents in Kabul descended on the homes of his relatives and detained three of his family members. They were blindfolded, thrown into the backs of 4×4 pickup trucks and driven to a small remote prison. They were held incommunicado over several days and repeatedly beaten and questioned about Halimi and his recently publicized yet ambiguous work for the United States.
The account of the beatings is based on interviews with multiple people familiar with the events. ProPublica did not interview any sources in Afghanistan, a country where people are sometimes imprisoned for speaking out against the government.
Zabihullah Mujahid, chief government spokesperson for the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, said Halimi “is not important to us and we do not want to talk about him that much.” He added that there was no active criminal investigation targeting him. The spokesperson did not answer questions about the treatment of Halimi’s family, saying, “I do not consider it necessary to answer.”
While Halimi felt powerless to do anything, his relatives in Afghanistan braced themselves for even worse. He tried to put on a brave face, though he knew from his own near-death experiences with the Taliban that the situation was increasingly bleak.
“To keep the morale of the family high, I did not show them my panic,” he told ProPublica in one of multiple interviews conducted through a translator.
He’d been frantically reaching out to his bosses in Washington to ask what was behind Musk’s social media blasts against him and to seek help clearing his name. But everyone Halimi worked with had been fired.
A 28-year-old college dropout named Nate Cavanaugh had been installed as USIP’s new president. DOGE had ousted its leader, State Department veteran George E. Moose.
Halimi and his loved ones were on their own. Maybe, they hoped, this would all pass if they stayed quiet and lay low. Then Musk and DOGE took their campaign against USIP and Halimi to another level.
In May, a little more than a month later, DOGE invited Fox News host Jesse Watters to sit in and film one of its team meetings. It was the first major media appearance by the larger DOGE team. For nearly 30 minutes on prime-time TV, Musk and more than a dozen triumphant young men in suits sat around a table congratulating one another. They swapped war stories about the government fraud they had exposed and the wasteful bureaucrats they had brought to heel.
At that point, DOGE was riding high: It had mostly shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development, the main foreign aid agency. The watchdog Consumer Financial Protection Bureau had been reduced to a skeleton crew. And at the Department of Education, DOGE had cut hundreds of millions of dollars to an internal research arm that tracks the performance of public schools.
For weeks, DOGE had been posting online hundreds of contracts it had canceled and tallying up the savings — though in multiple cases, the totals were later found to be wildly off, or the contracts mostly misrepresented. The White House has defended the accuracy of DOGE’s claims, with a spokesperson recently saying, “All numbers are rigorously scrubbed with agency procurement officials.”
With Watters, the DOGE team zeroed in on government spending. Steve Davis, Musk’s right-hand man at DOGE, shared an eye-popping example of waste from the Education Department. He said that the department had misused taxpayer money by funding parties at Caesars Palace, a casino and hotel in Las Vegas, before DOGE implemented new requirements to submit receipts. The claim appeared to have little resemblance to the truth: One school district in Utah had used DOE funds to send teachers to an education conference hosted at a Caesars hotel. Davis did not reply to a request for comment.
Musk went around the table, prodding the other members of the team as they one-upped one another with outrageous examples of their own. With each story, Watters egged them on, raising his eyebrows in disbelief. Every so often, the DOGE team would burst into laughter.
“The Taliban Gets DOGED”
At one point, Musk cued Cavanaugh with an awkward joke about how the work he’d found being done at the United States Institute of Peace was actually “the opposite of the title.”
Cavanaugh agreed, saying, “It was by far the least peaceful agency we worked with.” To prove his point, he turned toward Watters and said he’d uncovered documents showing that the agency was making payments to a contractor associated with the Taliban.
Watters looked at Cavanaugh in disbelief: “Get out of here.”
“This is real,” Cavanaugh said. Watters raised a hand, pressing on: “What was the money going to the Taliban for? … Was it for opium, or weapons, or a bribe?”
“Or nothing,” Musk interjected.
He and Watters burst into laughter. The chyron at the bottom of the screen read, “THE TALIBAN GETS DOGED.”
In a statement, a spokesperson with Fox News said, “It’s clear ProPublica is trying to insert FOX News into this story despite acknowledging the network having no part in any unmasking or identification of the independent contractor.” The spokesperson added, “At no point was the contractor identified, and the focus of the interview was on extreme spending practices and potential billing fraud within government agencies.”
In an email, Cavanaugh said he was mandated by Trump to dismantle the USIP, and “that includes the contract with former Taliban member Mohammad Qasem Halimi.” Cavanaugh added, “An overwhelming majority of Americans would agree that the Federal Government should not be funding former members of the Taliban when our country is $36T in debt.” He did not respond to questions about why DOGE chose to publicize Halimi’s contract or whether it knew the risk in doing so.
While DOGE initially referred to Halimi as a “former Taliban member,” the distinction was sometimes lost as Halimi’s contract became a viral social media and news story. For example, one social media post claiming that USIP had been “funding multiple terrorist organizations” was viewed by more than 180,000 people. And on Fox News, Cavanaugh dropped the reference that Halimi was a “former” Taliban member, describing his USIP work simply as payments to the Taliban.
Cavanaugh told Watters that DOGE was unable to find any justification for those payments. But ProPublica’s reporting showed that four weeks earlier, Cavanaugh had been sent dozens of pages of internal records from USIP outlining Halimi’s work in detail, according to documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. There were invoices, project descriptions, and dates and times showing what Halimi was supposed to be doing on specific days. Cavanaugh did not respond to questions about his access to these records or how they appeared to conflict with his statements on Fox News.
Timeline of Events
Mar. 17: DOGE staffers, standing alongside local law enforcement officers, work their way into the USIP headquarters in downtown Washington.
Mar. 313:58pm EST: DOGE sends Halimi an email notifying him that his contract with USIP has been terminated.
Mar. 317:17pm EST: In a post on X, DOGE exposes Halimi’s work with the USIP, worth $132,000, and calls him a former Taliban member.
Mar. 31 to Apr. 17:29 p.m. ESTto 2:41 p.m. EST: Two USIP holdover employees — who supported Musk’s initiative and, as IT staffers, had wide access to USIP systems — sent Cavanaugh and his DOGE team a series of emails with documents about Halimi’s employment, including receipts and a scope of work, making it clear his duties were well documented.
Apr. 17:46 a.m. EST: DOGE’s post about Halimi’s USIP contract is picked up by local press in Afghanistan, where the Taliban notice the development.
Around Apr. 9: Members of Halimi’s family are picked up by Taliban security forces around Kabul, taken to prison and beaten.
May 1: Cavanaugh, Musk and other DOGE staffers meet with Jesse Watters on Fox News, where they describe the payments to Halimi as a rogue contract with a Taliban member. Watters asks whether taxpayer money was really being used to run drugs and guns inside Afghanistan — allegations that are untrue.
USIP’s own records, obtained by ProPublica, show that none of the institute’s work involved payments to the Taliban. Much of what Halimi did was actually routine foreign policy consulting: He provided expert advice to the State Department to help U.S. diplomats understand religious dynamics and civil society in Afghanistan. He was paid to attend Islamic conferences, where he made contact with other prominent political and religious figures across the Middle East on behalf of the USIP.
He was also an adviser to USIP on women’s issues in Islam, something he was uniquely qualified to do both personally and professionally. Years earlier, Halimi’s sister had been murdered by her husband in an act of domestic violence, and Halimi spoke about her openly and emotionally, recalled Mary Akrami, an Afghan women’s rights advocate who opened the country’s first women’s shelter after the Taliban fell.
As an official in the government of Hamid Karzai, Halimi was an outspoken advocate for the shelter. “He was one of the most supportive and open-minded religious scholars I have ever known,” Akrami said in an interview.
Halimi went on to serve in a number of high-profile posts in the U.S.-backed government, including as an investigator at the Supreme Court, a spokesperson for the national religious council, an adviser to the national security council, and finally the minister for religious affairs and hajj under the last democratically elected president, Ashraf Ghani.
After the Fox News interview, Halimi was struggling to move forward. By early spring, the Taliban had released his beaten and terrified family members. But they made it clear that they expected Halimi to publicly admit that he was an American spy. There were no good options. Such an admission would mean that his family would never be safe again, since they’d forever be associated with a traitor. But if he refused, they would also be under constant pressure.
Halimi had barely escaped the country four years earlier, when the U.S.-backed government he worked for collapsed in the face of a rapid Taliban military advance into the capital. A prominent Taliban cleric had publicly singled him out as an apostate — a traitor to Islam — placing a bullseye on his head. And Halimi said that a broad amnesty offer from the Taliban, extended to most of their enemies, would not apply to him. (The Taliban spokesperson told ProPublica that Halimi was free to return to Afghanistan.)
The situation was dire, and the U.S. government knew it too. In those final days, a CIA operative reached out to Halimi and directed him to catch an evacuation flight. Disguised as an ambulance driver and with his nephew donning a nurse outfit, Halimi evaded multiple Taliban checkpoints en route to the U.S.-controlled airbase at Bagram. A CIA spokesperson declined to comment. The Pentagon declined to comment and referred questions about Halimi’s past work with the U.S. to the State Department.
“I never cried harder in my life than I did that night when I left my country,” he told ProPublica. “But I had no choice.”
It wasn’t Halimi’s first time in exile.
When he was 7 years old, his mother took him and his six siblings across the border to Pakistan to escape the civil war that engulfed Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion. “My earliest recollections are just of war, of violence, of blood and of killings,” Halimi said. “My mother used to tell me Afghanistan was a peaceful place in the past. I have no memory of it.”
Halimi’s father, the town imam in a rural Afghan village, had died when Halimi was young. He and his siblings grew up in a tent across the border within a refugee camp. From a dirt-floored classroom, Halimi found a way out through a scholarship to study Islamic law in Egypt.
Halimi’s time in Cairo, where he socialized with international students from across the globe, changed him. He began looking at the world differently, he said, with a curiosity about other cultures and a lifelong interest in foreign languages.
But by the time he returned home, a group of conservative religious students turned rebel fighters were dominating Afghanistan’s messy, multisided civil war and had consolidated power over the capital. They were known as the Taliban.
Halimi took a job in a government office responsible for dealing with foreign diplomats, not because he believed in Taliban ideology, but because, for a man with a college degree and political aspirations, “it was the only good job I could find,” he said.
Then came the U.S. invasion, which ousted the Taliban government and ushered in a bloody, protracted war. The George W. Bush administration ordered the detention of swaths of the Taliban government at a giant prison at Bagram Airfield. Halimi was among them. The treatment was brutal. He was constantly shackled by his hands and feet, except for short bathroom breaks. But along the way, he said, he learned English and built an understanding of his captors.
While some prominent Taliban fighters and leaders were sent to Guantanamo, Halimi, as a relatively unknown bureaucrat, was part of a group that was gradually let out. Some people were enlisted to join the U.S.-backed government; their experience made them useful to Washington and its local allies’ efforts to understand, and even communicate with, the Taliban.
In those early days of the conflict, the U.S. military and intelligence communities were under tremendous pressure to stop further attacks on the homeland. Yet they knew virtually nothing about their assumed enemy. What followed was two decades of American military intervention across the region that led to hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths and the resurgence of the very groups the U.S. once sought to unseat.
When U.S. forces finally withdrew for good from Afghanistan in late 2021, so did Halimi. His country had been savaged by warring powers for decades. Somehow, he had managed to stay alive through all of it, but now there was no place for him.
Nate Cavanaugh had nothing in his background to suggest he would be chosen to wind down an international conflict-resolution agency. His 15 minutes of fame on Fox News represented an unlikely turn for a young man who’d spent his short career founding niche tech startups.
Cavanaugh comes from a wealthy family — his father built a $100 million sports supplement company — and he told people he was inspired by the tech mogul Peter Thiel. He started two small companies, which focused on specialized software tools to help companies manage their finances and intellectual property. But investors in both told ProPublica that neither company successfully took off.
When DOGE was announced, Cavanaugh was eager to join up, a former co-worker told ProPublica. It’s not clear how he ultimately got connected to the group, but DOGE recruited heavily from young right-wing tech circles in California.
Friends and former colleagues said they’d never heard him discuss American foreign policy or show an interest in geopolitics. Yet in January, as a leader in Musk’s DOGE, he was assigned to evaluate and oversee budget cuts across a variety of federally funded international programs. Among the agencies in Cavanaugh’s portfolio were the Inter-American Foundation and African Development Foundation. He was part of the DOGE team that sought cuts at the National Endowment for the Humanities and redirected its funds to build a park full of statues of “American Heroes,” according to a lawsuit by NEH grant recipients.
But it was the U.S. Institute of Peace, housed in a futuristic, glass-encased building overlooking the Potomac River in downtown Washington, where Cavanaugh hit resistance. Established under President Ronald Reagan, the agency had once enjoyed bipartisan support. While it’s largely taxpayer funded, USIP is not a government agency; its contracts have not typically been posted publicly, and its employees operate with a degree of removal from U.S. officialdom. That gives the institute some ability to operate behind the scenes and establish relationships with figures at the center of complex conflicts — figures such as Mohammad Halimi.
It’s often pushing informal diplomacy: In 2023, for example, USIP staff helped facilitate a ceasefire between Islamic rebels and the government of the Philippines in the country’s restive south.
But in 2024, the Heritage Foundation — which led Project 2025 — published a report arguing that USIP had become a partisan, Democrat-controlled institution.
When Cavanaugh and several other DOGE officials first showed up to take control of the USIP in March, he was physically blocked from entering the building by its security chief, Colin O’Brien, who spent 15 years working as a police officer before joining the institute. Cavanaugh tried to enter again a little later, this time with two FBI agents in tow. O’Brien blocked him again, believing Cavanaugh and DOGE had no business dismantling the USIP, which had been established by Congress as an independent entity.
Over the next few days, DOGE put more pressure on O’Brien. FBI agents indicated O’Brien was the subject of a new Justice Department investigation. And they visited the home of one of his subordinates for questioning. Ultimately, the interim U.S. attorney in Washington at the time, Trump ally Edward Martin, demanded that USIP officials give DOGE access to the building.
The next time Cavanaugh appeared at the agency’s door, he and a phalanx of local police officers forced their way in. “I am a firm believer that what makes this country special is that we follow laws and process,” O’Brien said. “What happened that day was the antithesis of everything I believe in.”
An FBI spokesperson declined to comment on the role of FBI personnel in the takeover. Martin did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for the Metropolitan Police Department of D.C. referred ProPublica to a published statement, which said that police officers spoke with the new acting USIP president and assisted him in removing “unauthorized individuals” from the building.
Once in possession of its offices and information systems, Cavanaugh and his team fired virtually all USIP personnel, including over 100 overseas staff. With little warning or awareness of the potential danger to overseas employees, former staffers said, they shuttered USIP offices in Pakistan, Nigeria and El Salvador. After DOGE fired USIP’s international security team, its staff in Libya feared for their safety and were forced to flee on their own across the border. Cavanaugh and his staff canceled more than 700 contracts over 12 days.
They rifled through other USIP files, spotlighting expenditures they used to publicly embarrass the institute. On Fox, DOGE also bragged about uncovering payments for “private jets,” when, in fact, records show that USIP chartered a single plane for an evacuation mission out of a war zone for its staff. Cavanaugh did not answer a question about the assertion.
Over the following weeks, the DOGE team celebrated its newfound power inside the USIP building. Members were seen smoking cigars in the office and drinking beer as they worked late into the night. The agency’s insignia was torn from the entryway.
“DOGE was completely indifferent to the effect their actions had on human beings,” said Barnett Rubin, an Afghanistan expert who has served as a senior adviser for the United Nations and State Department. All it cared about, he said, was making “its enemies look bad.”
Months after Musk’s fateful retweet, Halimi is still picking up the pieces and trying to get answers.
During his long career as an official in the Afghan government, Halimi often rubbed shoulders with senior U.S. diplomats and generals, but now no one in the Trump administration is calling him back. He proudly showed ProPublica a letter he received from Stephen Hadley, the former U.S. national security adviser under George W. Bush, thanking him for his contributions to “promoting democracy” in Afghanistan.
A letter on White House letterhead sent to Halimi in 2005 from Stephen Hadley, assistant to the president for national security affairs, thanking him for his work Credit:Obtained by ProPublica
Former senior State Department, White House and national security officials who worked on Afghanistan over the last two decades described the Trump administration’s attack on Halimi as not only absurd, but also dangerous.
Johnny Walsh, a former State Department official who worked with Halimi, recalled that “he wanted the same thing as the Trump administration,” which was for a peaceful end to the war.
Lisa Curtis, a former senior adviser to the National Security Council who focused on Afghanistan in the first Trump administration, said, “DOGE did not do their homework. They are putting at risk individuals who are helping the United States.”
As for the graying Afghan scholar, the Taliban relented just long enough for several family members to make it out of the country. ProPublica is not disclosing how that happened or where they are for their safety, but they remain stranded without immigration status.
Cavanaugh, DOGE’s man inside USIP, announced he was leaving government service on Aug. 6. In a tweet, Cavanaugh thanked Trump “for the opportunity to help reduce wasteful spending” and said that “I’m hopeful the United States continues to prioritize sensible spending — I believe it is critical to maintain our supremacy 🇺🇸.”
USIP’s operations have been essentially frozen. Its headquarters is under federal control — standing empty aside from a few security guards monitoring the entrances. A new acting president, Darren Beattie, was named in late July.
Beattie is a former Duke University professor and Trump speechwriter who was fired in 2018 after it came out that he spoke at a conference regularly attended by white nationalists. Beattie did not address a ProPublica question about the event but previously dismissed the criticism, calling it “an honor to be attacked by the far-left.”
At USIP, he has promised to rebuild the organization to match the Trump administration’s foreign policy priorities.
In an emailed statement to ProPublica, Beattie defended the administration’s treatment of Halimi. The takeover of USIP, he wrote, “underscores President Trump’s resolve to end the weaponization of government, cut off funding to adversaries, and shut down reckless so-called peacebuilding programs that end up undermining our national security.”
George Foote, the former head lawyer of USIP who still represents its old leadership in ongoing litigation against the Trump administration, called DOGE’s outing of Halimi “criminally careless.”
Halimi remains without work. He wonders how he will support his wife and children and whether there’s any chance he can clear his name. At the very least, he hopes that the Trump administration will admit the error that has caused his family so much harm.
In one of ProPublica’s final interviews, Halimi made a last request: Could we help him get an audience with Musk?
“Why would one of the richest men in the world commit such an act of injustice?” Halimi asked. “Sometimes I think that if Elon Musk himself were fully informed about this matter, he would likely be deeply ashamed.”
The Chinese government has spent years placing its hands around the collective neck of its Uighur minority. For some reason, the massive government fears a small minority of Muslims and has subjected it to constant surveillance and outright oppression.
The Chinese government has been assisted in these efforts by Huawei, a tech company that realizes it’s better to live to manufacture another day than fight back against the surveillance state desires of this extremely powerful entity.
Huawei’s facial recognition advances have been used to target Uighurs for additional oppression. Its tech generates “Uighur alarms” that immediately flag suspected minorities. Huawei swore back in 2020 that this repurposing had indeed been proposed, but had not been implemented. Three years have passed and there’s no reason to believe Huawei hasn’t given the Chinese government at least a trial version of its anti-Uighur tech.
Huawei isn’t the only player in the anti-Uighur space but it is perhaps the most internationally recognizable brand that appears to be cooperating with ongoing oppression efforts in China. And, if it works there, there’s no reason it won’t work elsewhere.
Afghanistan’s Taliban government is interested in surveillance tech that can be deployed to increase oppression of religious minorities. That’s what this report from The China Project says is already in progress: the deployment of Uighur-focused surveillance by the Islamist extremist government in Afghanistan against the Muslims it considers to be enemies.
[A]n August 2023 agreement between the Taliban and Huawei, China’s giant telecommunications and surveillance technology company, could soon see the rollout of cameras equipped with facial-recognition capabilities in every province of Afghanistan, putting Uyghurs on high alert.
In China, software and hardware from Huawei and companies such as Hikvision have enabled the CCP to usher in a total surveillance state in northwestern China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, which shares a 57-mile border with Afghanistan high in the Pamir Mountains.
This potential development follows a goodwill tour of sorts by the Chinese government, which sent one of its ambassadors to Kabul, Afghanistan in September of this year. This adds China to the small list of Taliban supporters, which also includes Iran, Russia, and Pakistan.
The China Project puts this spin on the news, suggesting the Taliban is more concerned with safety and security than the ongoing oppression of a Muslim minority.
Enter Huawei’s cameras, which the Taliban will use to hunt down insurgents and terrorists. A Taliban enemy, the Islamic State Khorasan Province (IS-K, or more commonly ISIS-K), has 6,000 militia hiding in the east and parts of the north of Afghanistan. Its targeted bombing sprees include deadly attacks on the Russian Embassy in Kabul and a hotel used by Chinese businesspeople. Moreover, ISIS-K has threatened to bomb the embassies of China, India, and Iran.
None of this is speculative, however. The Taliban has a contract with Huawei, which suggests it desires access to Uighur-targeting tech. Then there’s this statement from the Taliban government, which suggests this tech may already be operative.
The Ministry of Interior said that the security cameras installed in Kabul and some highways across the country have facial-recognition capabilities.
The spokesman for the MoI, Abdul Matin Qani, said that many criminals have been detained through the use of these cameras.
“Some of the security cameras have high capabilities of facial recognition. We have good achievement in this regard in capturing criminals quickly and providing security in the city,” he said.
There’s a caveat, but that caveat depends on how much you trust the Taliban government to be honest. Qani claims this surveillance is a purely local effort, relying solely on Afghanistan tech companies.
He also stressed that there have been no contracts with any country regarding the cameras and that efforts are underway to make contracts for camera operations with domestic companies.
But that statement is potentially misleading. All it says is that the government is looking to local companies to provide cameras. It says nothing at all about adding foreign AI to its network of 65,000 cameras to keep an eye on its Uighur population.
Every oppressive government may be oppressive in its own way, but the Taliban’s plans for the Uighur population closely align with China’s. Why not avail yourself of the experience and expertise of a government and its favored contractors that have been in the Uighur oppression business for years? Sure, the Taliban government may want to spend locally, but AI specifically developed to target a very particular population would be a very handy addition to the Taliban’s toolkit.
As you may have noticed, headlines are full of the wonders of chatbots and generative AI these days. Although often presented as huge breakthroughs, in many ways they build on machine learning techniques that have been around for years. These older systems have been deployed in real-life situations for some time, which means they provide valuable information about the possible pitfalls of using AI for serious tasks. Here is a typical example of what has been happening in the world of machine translation when applied to refugee applications for asylum, as reported on the Rest of the World site:
A crisis translator specializing in Afghan languages, Mirkhail was working with a Pashto-speaking refugee who had fled Afghanistan. A U.S. court had denied the refugee’s asylum bid because her written application didn’t match the story told in the initial interviews.
In the interviews, the refugee had first maintained that she’d made it through one particular event alone, but the written statement seemed to reference other people with her at the time — a discrepancy large enough for a judge to reject her asylum claim.
After Mirkhail went over the documents, she saw what had gone wrong: An automated translation tool had swapped the “I” pronouns in the woman’s statement to “we.”
That’s a tiny difference, and one that today’s machine translation programs can easily miss, especially for languages where training materials are still scarce. And yet the consequences of the shift from singular “I” to plural “we” can have life-changing consequences – in the case above, whether asylum was granted to a refugee fleeing Afghanistan. There are other problems too:
Based in New York, the Refugee Translation Project works extensively with Afghan refugees, translating police reports, news clippings, and personal testimonies to bolster claims that asylum seekers have a credible fear of persecution. When machine translation is used to draft these documents, cultural blind spots and failures to understand regional colloquialisms can introduce inaccuracies. These errors can compromise claims in the rigorous review so many Afghan refugees experience.
In the future it is likely that the number of people seeking asylum will increase, not least because of environmental refugees who are fleeing lands made uninhabitable by climate change. Their applications for asylum elsewhere are likely to involve a wider range of lesser-known languages. Turning to machine translation will be a natural move by the authorities, since it takes time and resources to recruit specialist human translators.
The new generation of AI tools and their high-profile abilities will encourage this trend, as well as their use to evaluate applications and to make recommendations about whether they should be accepted. The Rest of the World article points out that OpenAI, the company that is behind ChatGPT, updated its user policies in late March with the following as “Disallowed usage of our models”:
High risk government decision-making, including:
Law enforcement and criminal justice
Migration and asylum
Governments trying to save money will doubtless use them anyway. It will be important for courts and others dealing with asylum claims to bear this in mind when there seem to be serious discrepancies in refugees’ applications. They may be all in the (machine’s) mind.
American armed forces entered Afghanistan nearly 20 years ago, bringing with them weapons, vehicles, and a vast amount of war tech. After 20 years, we’re finally out of Afghanistan, but much of what the US military brought to the country has been left behind.
Obviously, the best way to prevent this eventual outcome was no longer an option after October 7, 2001. Clean exits are impossible. The solution is to never enter. What was left behind to be used by the Afghanistan military (or simply because it was logistically impossible to remove) is now mostly in the hands of the Taliban.
As was reported earlier, devices used for the collection of biometric data are now possessed by the Taliban. Originally tasked with collecting data to be used to recognize and track insurgents and terrorists, the devices’ purpose expanded to include friendly locals who worked with the US military to help it identify and hunt down insurgents and terrorists.
As the Taliban swept through Afghanistan in mid-August, declaring the end of two decades of war, reports quickly circulated that they had also captured US military biometric devices used to collect data such as iris scans, fingerprints, and facial images. Some feared that the machines, known as HIIDE, could be used to help identify Afghans who had supported coalition forces.
According to experts speaking to MIT Technology Review, however, these devices actually provide only limited access to biometric data, which is held remotely on secure servers.
Good news? Well, maybe if the Taliban’s intel acquisition plans were limited to whatever it can recover from these biometric scanners. Unfortunately, a whole lot more information on Afghan residents who aided the US and/or fought the Taliban is contained in Afghan government databases, some of which were constructed with the US government’s help. Those are almost certainly already in the Taliban’s control.
MIT Technology Review spoke to two individuals familiar with one of these systems, a US-funded database known as APPS, the Afghan Personnel and Pay System. Used by both the Afghan Ministry of Interior and the Ministry of Defense to pay the national army and police, it is arguably the most sensitive system of its kind in the country, going into extreme levels of detail about security personnel and their extended networks.
A rough equivalent of the US government’s Office of Personnel Management, the database was created to cut down on fraud by collecting verifiable info on Afghanistan military members, gradually reducing the number of paychecks issued to nonexistent soldiers. But the database contains far more information than the OPM’s stash.
[I]t also contains details on the individuals’ military specialty and career trajectory, as well as sensitive relational data such as the names of their father, uncles, and grandfathers, as well as the names of the two tribal elders per recruit who served as guarantors for their enlistment.
The Tablian’s possession of this information doesn’t just threaten the lives of soldiers who fought against the Taliban during the war, but their extended families. A lot of this is tied to biometric markers that can’t be altered (or at least not altered easily or painlessly) like fingerprints and retina scans. Adding the biometric scanners to access to government databases is a potent combination. While the biometric scanners may not allow the Taliban to connect to US-controlled servers containing sensitive info, they can be used to collect more biometric data, which the Taliban can then attempt to match to records contained in this comprehensive database.
If there’s a silver lining, it’s that this database is, like a lot of things created by huge bureaucracies, kind of lousy.
Ultimately, some experts say the fact that Afghan government databases were not very interoperable may actually be a saving grace if the Taliban do try to use the data. “I suspect that the APPS still doesn’t work that well, which is probably a good thing in light of recent events,” said Dan Grazier, a veteran who works at watchdog group the Project on Government Oversight, by email.
This, too, was an inevitability of the extended conflict. Governments and their militaries are extremely interested in both their allies and their enemies. Amassing vast amounts of data was always going to be the answer. But this is how everything ends when a war effort ends in a loss after 20 years. The bad guys get all the stuff the good guys left behind. And in this day and age, the most powerful tools are portable, electronic, and bursting with information that makes it so much easier to mop up what’s left of the resistance.
The problem with harvesting reams of sensitive data is that it presents a very tempting target for malicious hackers, enemy governments, and other wrongdoers. That hasn’t prevented anyone from collecting and storing all of this data, secure only in the knowledge this security will ultimately be breached.
Hack after hack after hack after hack has shown entities seem to be far more interested in collecting data than protecting data. While steps are undoubtedly taken to protect the info gathered by government agencies and numerous super-snoopy private companies, sooner or later they’re never enough. It’s not that these data collections are always unnecessary. It’s that a breach is pretty much inevitable. And yet that inevitability almost always gets greeted as a surprise by those on the end of a malicious hacking.
What’s happening in Afghanistan isn’t exactly unprecedented. We saw the same thing happen when the United States military pulled out of Vietnam. The enemies that the US presence was supposed to deter were completely undeterred by local military (one we were supposed to be training to be self-reliant) left behind. We have exited one of our Forever Wars and the Taliban — proud supporters of Al-Qaeda — is taking over.
The devices, known as HIIDE, for Handheld Interagency Identity Detection Equipment, were seized last week during the Taliban’s offensive, according to a Joint Special Operations Command official and three former U.S. military personnel, all of whom worried that sensitive data they contain could be used by the Taliban. HIIDE devices contain identifying biometric data such as iris scans and fingerprints, as well as biographical information, and are used to access large centralized databases. It’s unclear how much of the U.S. military’s biometric database on the Afghan population has been compromised.
At first, it might seem that this will only allow the Taliban to high-five each other for making the US government’s shit list. But it wasn’t just used to track terrorists. It was used to track allies.
While billed by the U.S. military as a means of tracking terrorists and other insurgents, biometric data on Afghans who assisted the U.S. was also widely collected and used in identification cards, sources said.
The Defense Intelligence Agency that oversaw these data collections understandably had no comment. I mean, what could it say? That this wasn’t an inevitability? That pulling out of a country means taking all your stuff with you, including tons of data that won’t even need to be exfiltrated to end up in enemy hands?
And even as the fall of Afghanistan appeared to be the inevitable outcome of leaving the country, the US government was trying to add to the pile of sensitive data now in the Taliban’s possession.
[A] recent job posting by a State Department contractor sought to recruit a biometric technician with experience using HIIDE and other similar equipment to help vet personnel and enroll local Afghans seeking employment at U.S. embassies and consulates.
To claim this couldn’t be foreseen is ridiculous. Decades of propping up the Afghanistan government didn’t make the area any more stable. The never-ending War on Terror ensured tons of sensitive data would be compiled, especially in countries where US-based constitutional rights don’t apply. Pulling out may have been the right thing to do, but abandoning devices containing data on local allies and supporters is insane. Our government has had more than 200 years of practice. The people who helped us during our many years of ineffective occupation can now be targeted with ease. That should never be considered acceptable. Operational security shouldn’t just protect the highest and mightiest in the US government. It should protect everyone the government relies on, including nationals abandoned by a government that had every opportunity to mitigate collateral damage.
The news out of Afghanistan is distressing on many levels, and it’s bizarre to think that there’s a BestNetTech relevant story there, but (unfortunately) it seems like every story these days has some element of content moderation questions baked in. As the Taliban took over the country, it seems that they had a bone to pick… with Facebook. Facebook has banned the Taliban for a while, and has said that it will continue to do so, even as it takes over running the country of Afghanistan. And, the Taliban seem… pretty upset about it.
THE TALIBAN SPOKESMAN, Zabihullah Mujahid, emerged from the shadows on Tuesday and devoted part of his first press conference to a rant about Facebook, in which he accused the tech giant of violating the Islamist group?s right to free speech by banning them from all its platforms….
[….]
Journalists, Mujahid suggested, should ask people at Facebook ?who are claiming to be promoters of freedom of speech,? why the Islamist movement that seized power from Afghanistan?s elected government is banned from posting on any Facebook-owned platform, including Instagram and WhatsApp.
Yeah, so, I didn’t think I’d be lecturing the Taliban on how freedom of speech works, but this is not that. Of course, the Taliban is not exactly associated with supporting a “right to free speech,” so this is already bizarre. But, more to the point, as we’ve addressed at length, no private company owes anyone the right to use their website. That’s just not how it works.
That said, it is interesting to see just how the various social media platforms are now struggling with the question of how to deal with the Taliban wanting to use their platform. Even if they were banned before for being a terrorist group, does that change when they’re the running the country?
So far, Facebook and YouTube have said that the Taliban are banned from their platforms, per US sanctions policies. Twitter does not have a ban but told Recode that it takes down individual pieces of violent content. Eventually, though, more social media companies could start relaxing their rules on the Taliban, if the group gains legitimacy in the international community, experts say.
However, as the Washington Post noted in an article, Taliban supporters have become increasingly sophisticated in using social media in ways that abide by the platforms’ rules to avoid getting banned for policy violations:
In accounts swelling across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram ? and in group chats on apps such as WhatsApp and Telegram ? the messaging from Taliban supporters typically challenges the West?s dominant image of the group as intolerant, vicious and bent on revenge, while staying within the evolving boundaries of taste and content that tech companies use to police user behavior.
The tactics overall show such a high degree of skill that analysts believe at least one public relations firm is advising the Taliban on how to push key themes, amplify messages across platforms and create potentially viral images and video snippets ? much like corporate and political campaigns do across the world.
And, of course, all this really does is (once again) highlight the impossibility of doing content moderation well at scale. Groups that some deem as terrorists, others (including themselves) will often declare to be freedom fighters. And, of course, it gets tricky if you just rely on the US government’s designations as well — after all the US had Nelson Mandela listed as a terrorist until 2008. That’s not to compare Mandela to the Taliban, but to note that official designations are fraught with tricky questions as well.
But this is also why various websites should have a pretty free hand in determining their own moderation policies, rather than having any government tell them who is and who is not allowed to be on any platform.
For all the exaggerated talk of how much “damage” Ed Snowden has done, he hasn’t actually revealed the names of any spies or put them in any danger. No, that’s the White House’s job. An apparent slip-up meant that the White House distributed a list of people at a press briefing in Afghanistan that clearly identified the CIA’s top spy in the country.
The CIA’s top officer in Kabul was exposed Saturday by the White House when his name was inadvertently included on a list provided to news organizations of senior U.S. officials participating in President Obama’s surprise visit with U.S. troops.
The White House recognized the mistake and quickly issued a revised list that did not include the individual, who had been identified on the initial release as the “Chief of Station” in Kabul, a designation used by the CIA for its highest-ranking spy in a country.
Perhaps even more incredible is that, at first, the White House denied there was a problem with the list, until someone apparently figured out what happened:
In this case, the pool report was filed by Washington Post White House bureau chief Scott Wilson. Wilson said he had copied the list from the e-mail provided by White House press officials. He sent his pool report to the press officials, who then distributed it to a list of more than 6,000 recipients.
Wilson said that after the report was distributed, he noticed the unusual reference to the station chief and asked White House press officials in Afghanistan whether they had intended to include that name.
Initially, the press office raised no objection, apparently because military officials had provided the list to distribute to news organizations. But senior White House officials realized the mistake and scrambled to issue an updated list without the CIA officer’s name. The mistake, however, already was being noted on Twitter, although without the station chief’s name.
Meanwhile, back in the US, the guy who blew the whistle on the CIA’s waterboarding program is sitting in jail for “revealing” a CIA agent’s name, when he actually did much, much less (simply confirming to a reporter the name of someone that reporter might want to talk to about a story). But, as double standards tend to go, I would imagine no one will be going to jail over this much more serious leak. After all, whoever fucked up and put it in the list probably hasn’t blown the whistle on a program like the US torturing people.
Obviously, mistakes happen, but it’s fairly incredible how the same people will brush off “mistakes” like this one, while going absolutely crazy over claims that John Kiriakou or Thomas Drake or Ed Snowden somehow caused a tremendous amount of “harm” despite no evidence to actually support those claims.
The United States built Twitter-like social media programs in Afghanistan and Pakistan, like one in Cuba, that were aimed at encouraging open political discussion, Obama administration officials said Friday. But like the program in Cuba, which was widely ridiculed when it became public this month, the services in Pakistan and Afghanistan shut down after they ran out of money because the administration could not make them self-sustaining.
In all three cases, American officials appeared to lack a long-term strategy for the programs beyond providing money to start them.
Administration officials also said Friday that there had been similar programs in dozens of other countries, including a Yes Youth Can project in Kenya that was still active.
While you can see the appeal of better helping citizens in these countries communicate with each other, the secrecy concerning who is behind them is where it gets troubling. As the case in Cuba with ZunZuneo, we noted that this helps legitimize every crackpot theory about how various programs are really US government fronts.
In fact, as you read the details of these programs, many of them do appear to have been set up with perfectly noble intentions, to help people better communicate and share ideas. But having the US government behind them — especially given all of the recent revelations about US surveillance — completely undermines that intent. Furthermore, it really doesn’t seem like any of these services have had much of an impact at all. Instead, in all of the cases where we’ve heard of social networking services having any impact, they’re when citizens of a country adopt existing services, like Twitter and Facebook, rather than these specialized “local” services.
G Thompson was the first of a few of you to send in this story about the latest “three strikes” Tribunal hearing in New Zealand, in which the Tribunal ruled against a guy, despite the fact that he was a soldier in the NZ Armed Forces and deployed in Afghanistan at the time the various accusations of infringement occurred. Upon getting the third strike, having just returned from his tour of duty, he sent the tribunal a letter, noting that it was impossible for him to determine who had actually infringed, as he was away fighting for the country and there had been a number of flatmates in the place during the time of the accusations, such that it could have been any one (or multiple ones) of them downloading infringing material. Still, he agreed to “accept responsibility” because it was his account. That’s an honorable thing to do, though it’s simply ridiculous that he should have to do that, since he is clearly not at fault.
I have just returned from deployment overseas [in] Afghanistan and was not aware of music being downloaded. It is very difficult to determine who in the household is responsible for downloading music as flatmates are currently deployed around NZ.
However I understand entirely that I am the person who is held liable for these actions. I have spoken to the pers [sic] who have access to my internet IP address, and between 8 pers, we cannot determine who is fully responsible.
I ask that this notice be a lesson to those in my household as they now understand how severe the consequences may be for committing such an act. I do not wish this situation to grow any more than it needs to be. I am currently going through transitioning from military life in Afghanistan to life back home in NZ, and I’m not fit to tackle this allegation made against me.
However, I take full responsibility for the acts committed under my IP address and wish for this to be resolved asap. I am willing to co-operate by any means required of me.
And yet… the Tribunal still made him pay $255.97, despite not doing anything. The breakdown was $200 to reimburse the RIANZ for the application against him, $50 in fees, and another $5.97 for the “price” of the 3 songs on iTunes. Of course, since he wasn’t the one who downloaded the songs in the first place, it seems ridiculous that he should have to pay for those songs, let alone the various other fees.
As Rick Shera points out in the link above, the Tribunal even acknowledged that it could override the automatic fine by claiming such a ruling would be “manifestly unjust,” but bizarrely chose not to. Shera questions under what circumstances the Tribunal would ever use that ability if it didn’t use it in this case:
So, it was open to the Tribunal to decide in these circumstances – soldier overseas, no way of knowing who infringed and therefore no ability to recover any award, admitted responsibility – that to make an award was manifestly unjust. Remember that it is unjustness to the account holder (the soldier in this instance) that is relevant not any unjustness to or cost incurred by the copyright owner. Difficult for the Tribunal though without any argument on the point being presented by the Respondent.
I have said before that trying to show manifest unjustness will be extremely hard, especially given the presumption of guilt in section 122N and the fact that an account holder is liable for all actions taken using its account. I think this case underlines that. I find it hard now to imagine any circumstance that will invoke this protection for an account holder.
