Top Democrat calls for Facebook to halt cryptocurrency plans until Congress investigates
“Facebook is continuing its unchecked expansion and extending its reach into the lives of its users,” Rep. Maxine Water said
Hours after Facebook announced its plans for a global cryptocurrency project, a top House Democrat is calling for Facebook to halt its plans until Congress and regulators have had a chance to investigate potential risks.
“With the announcement that it plans to create a cryptocurrency, Facebook is continuing its unchecked expansion and extending its reach into the lives of its users,” House Financial Services Committee Chairwoman Maxine Waters (D-CA) said in a statement. “Given the company’s troubled past, I am requesting that Facebook agree to a moratorium on any movement forward on developing a cryptocurrency until Congress and regulators have the opportunity to examine these issues and take action.”
Waters’s comments came shortly after the top Republican on the committee, Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-NC) wrote to Waters requesting a hearing on Facebook’s new initiative. “We know there are many open questions as to the scope and scale of the project and how it will conform to our global financial regulatory framework,” McHenry wrote, “It is incumbent upon us as policymakers to understand Project Libra. We need to go beyond the rumors and speculations and provide a forum to assess this project and its potential unprecedented impact on the global financial system.”
It’s unclear when such a hearing would occur, although Waters said that Facebook executives should testify before the committee on the issue. Over a year ago, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg sat before Congress for the first and only time to discuss the fallout of the companies Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Other lawmakers are also calling for oversight over Facebook’s plans. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) said in a statement today that he would be calling on the government’s top financial “watchdogs” to assess the company’s crypto and blockchain efforts.
“Facebook is already too big and too powerful, and it has used that power to exploit users’ data without protecting their privacy,” Brown said. “We cannot allow Facebook to run a risky new cryptocurrency out of a Swiss bank account without oversight. I’m calling on our financial watchdogs to scrutinize this closely to ensure users are protected.”
A Facebook spokesperson responded to the requests in a statement to The Verge saying, “We look forward to responding to lawmakers’ questions as this process moves forward.”
https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/18/18684268/facebook-libra-cryptocurrency-stop-congress-house-democrat-maxine-waters-regulation
#cryptocurrency #libra #facebook #DeleteFacebook
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“Facebook is continuing its unchecked expansion and extending its reach into the lives of its users,” Rep. Maxine Water said
Hours after Facebook announced its plans for a global cryptocurrency project, a top House Democrat is calling for Facebook to halt its plans until Congress and regulators have had a chance to investigate potential risks.
“With the announcement that it plans to create a cryptocurrency, Facebook is continuing its unchecked expansion and extending its reach into the lives of its users,” House Financial Services Committee Chairwoman Maxine Waters (D-CA) said in a statement. “Given the company’s troubled past, I am requesting that Facebook agree to a moratorium on any movement forward on developing a cryptocurrency until Congress and regulators have the opportunity to examine these issues and take action.”
Waters’s comments came shortly after the top Republican on the committee, Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-NC) wrote to Waters requesting a hearing on Facebook’s new initiative. “We know there are many open questions as to the scope and scale of the project and how it will conform to our global financial regulatory framework,” McHenry wrote, “It is incumbent upon us as policymakers to understand Project Libra. We need to go beyond the rumors and speculations and provide a forum to assess this project and its potential unprecedented impact on the global financial system.”
It’s unclear when such a hearing would occur, although Waters said that Facebook executives should testify before the committee on the issue. Over a year ago, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg sat before Congress for the first and only time to discuss the fallout of the companies Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Other lawmakers are also calling for oversight over Facebook’s plans. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) said in a statement today that he would be calling on the government’s top financial “watchdogs” to assess the company’s crypto and blockchain efforts.
“Facebook is already too big and too powerful, and it has used that power to exploit users’ data without protecting their privacy,” Brown said. “We cannot allow Facebook to run a risky new cryptocurrency out of a Swiss bank account without oversight. I’m calling on our financial watchdogs to scrutinize this closely to ensure users are protected.”
A Facebook spokesperson responded to the requests in a statement to The Verge saying, “We look forward to responding to lawmakers’ questions as this process moves forward.”
https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/18/18684268/facebook-libra-cryptocurrency-stop-congress-house-democrat-maxine-waters-regulation
#cryptocurrency #libra #facebook #DeleteFacebook
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Forwarded from BlackBox (Security) Archiv
No new Bitcoin: Don't touch Facebooks Libra!
Facebook wants to become the central bank with Libra and profit from the Bitcoin hype. But the blockchain is primarily a facade, Libra is neither decentralized nor a crypto currency.
If Facebook is the answer, Libra will develop into a world currency. But the Facebook coin has little in common with Bitcoin and other crypto currencies. Libra is a digital currency that resembles Wechat Pay rather than Bitcoin. The question of whether Libra is a crypto currency is directly related to considerations of privacy and user trust.
Crypto currencies vs. central banks
With the blockchain as a technology and especially with crypto currencies, a lot revolves around trust. In principle, this is very similar to conventional currencies such as the euro, which also work solely because we trust, for example, that the state and the central bank will not devalue them. In the case of fiat currencies, i.e. uncovered money, recent history - actually only from the 20th century onwards - has shown that this trust in the state is not always justified. Replacing this blind trust in a central authority that controls the monetary system has been one of the core promises of crypto currencies from the outset and can be found in Bitcoin's first announcement, written by Satoshi Nakamoto.
Facebook also wants to give the impression that its digital currency is decentralized, so that users do not have to rely on a central authority. Libra is to be controlled by the Libra Association based in Switzerland, which includes many other companies such as Paypal, Visa, Uber and Mastercard. The mere fact that many well-known companies are on board - and have each paid at least ten million US dollars for it - combined with the ambitious goal of creating a global financial network, is causing a lot of hype. If you then stick the label "Blockchain" on such an ambitious project, you can be sure that everyone is talking about it.
Decentralised, my ass: Libra Association acts as central bank
"[The new blockchain for the global currency] is a decentralized, programmable database designed to support a low-volatility crypto currency that acts as a medium of exchange for billions of people," the Libra white paper says. Admittedly, there are many superficial technical reminiscences of Ethereum or Bitcoin in Libra: Smart Contracts, Dapps, Move, a programming language of its own, and all that even faster and better. The Libra blockchain is to be used by around 2.7 billion people who have a Facebook profile and can process up to 1,000 transactions per second. Bitcoin processes around seven transactions per second.
Unlike Bitcoin or Ethereum, the Libra Blockchain is not a public blockchain, but a Consortium Blockchain in which only paying members of the Libra Association are involved in mining. According to Facebook, this is necessary in order to avoid problems such as high energy consumption, slow transactions and other difficulties that plague Bitcoin, for example. For this reason alone, the Libra Association acts as a sort of central bank. According to Facebook, this will change after five years and the Libra blockchain will open, but one can be sceptical about this.
https://t3n.de/news/libra-ist-keine-kryptowaehrung-kein-bitcoin-1172551/
#DeleteFacebook #libra #CryptoCurrency #decentralized #paypal #visa #uber #mastercard #why
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Facebook wants to become the central bank with Libra and profit from the Bitcoin hype. But the blockchain is primarily a facade, Libra is neither decentralized nor a crypto currency.
If Facebook is the answer, Libra will develop into a world currency. But the Facebook coin has little in common with Bitcoin and other crypto currencies. Libra is a digital currency that resembles Wechat Pay rather than Bitcoin. The question of whether Libra is a crypto currency is directly related to considerations of privacy and user trust.
Crypto currencies vs. central banks
With the blockchain as a technology and especially with crypto currencies, a lot revolves around trust. In principle, this is very similar to conventional currencies such as the euro, which also work solely because we trust, for example, that the state and the central bank will not devalue them. In the case of fiat currencies, i.e. uncovered money, recent history - actually only from the 20th century onwards - has shown that this trust in the state is not always justified. Replacing this blind trust in a central authority that controls the monetary system has been one of the core promises of crypto currencies from the outset and can be found in Bitcoin's first announcement, written by Satoshi Nakamoto.
Facebook also wants to give the impression that its digital currency is decentralized, so that users do not have to rely on a central authority. Libra is to be controlled by the Libra Association based in Switzerland, which includes many other companies such as Paypal, Visa, Uber and Mastercard. The mere fact that many well-known companies are on board - and have each paid at least ten million US dollars for it - combined with the ambitious goal of creating a global financial network, is causing a lot of hype. If you then stick the label "Blockchain" on such an ambitious project, you can be sure that everyone is talking about it.
Decentralised, my ass: Libra Association acts as central bank
"[The new blockchain for the global currency] is a decentralized, programmable database designed to support a low-volatility crypto currency that acts as a medium of exchange for billions of people," the Libra white paper says. Admittedly, there are many superficial technical reminiscences of Ethereum or Bitcoin in Libra: Smart Contracts, Dapps, Move, a programming language of its own, and all that even faster and better. The Libra blockchain is to be used by around 2.7 billion people who have a Facebook profile and can process up to 1,000 transactions per second. Bitcoin processes around seven transactions per second.
Unlike Bitcoin or Ethereum, the Libra Blockchain is not a public blockchain, but a Consortium Blockchain in which only paying members of the Libra Association are involved in mining. According to Facebook, this is necessary in order to avoid problems such as high energy consumption, slow transactions and other difficulties that plague Bitcoin, for example. For this reason alone, the Libra Association acts as a sort of central bank. According to Facebook, this will change after five years and the Libra blockchain will open, but one can be sceptical about this.
https://t3n.de/news/libra-ist-keine-kryptowaehrung-kein-bitcoin-1172551/
#DeleteFacebook #libra #CryptoCurrency #decentralized #paypal #visa #uber #mastercard #why
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Facebook Plans on Backdooring WhatsApp
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/08/facebook_plans_.html
This article points out that Facebook's planned content moderation scheme will result in an encryption backdoor into WhatsApp:
In Facebook's vision, the actual end-to-end encryption client itself such as WhatsApp will include embedded content moderation and blacklist filtering algorithms. These algorithms will be continually updated from a central cloud service, but will run locally on the user's device, scanning each cleartext message before it is sent and each encrypted message after it is decrypted.
The company even noted that when it detects violations it will need to quietly stream a copy of the formerly encrypted content back to its central servers to analyze further, even if the user objects, acting as true wiretapping service.
Facebook's model entirely bypasses the encryption debate by globalizing the current practice of compromising devices by building those encryption bypasses directly into the communications clients themselves and deploying what amounts to machine-based wiretaps to billions of users at once.
Once this is in place, it's easy for the government to demand that Facebook add another filter -- one that searches for communications that they care about -- and alert them when it gets triggered.
Of course alternatives like Signal will exist for those who don't want to be subject to Facebook's content moderation, but what happens when this filtering technology is built into operating systems?
The problem is that if Facebook's model succeeds, it will only be a matter of time before device manufacturers and mobile operating system developers embed similar tools directly into devices themselves, making them impossible to escape. Embedding content scanning tools directly into phones would make it possible to scan all apps, including ones like Signal, effectively ending the era of encrypted communications.
I don't think this will happen -- why does AT&T care about content moderation -- but it is something to watch?
EDITED TO ADD (8/2): This story is wrong. Read my correction:
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/08/more_on_backdoo.html
📡 @NoGoolag
#WhatsApp #fb #facebook #libra #why #backdoor #encryption
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/08/facebook_plans_.html
This article points out that Facebook's planned content moderation scheme will result in an encryption backdoor into WhatsApp:
In Facebook's vision, the actual end-to-end encryption client itself such as WhatsApp will include embedded content moderation and blacklist filtering algorithms. These algorithms will be continually updated from a central cloud service, but will run locally on the user's device, scanning each cleartext message before it is sent and each encrypted message after it is decrypted.
The company even noted that when it detects violations it will need to quietly stream a copy of the formerly encrypted content back to its central servers to analyze further, even if the user objects, acting as true wiretapping service.
Facebook's model entirely bypasses the encryption debate by globalizing the current practice of compromising devices by building those encryption bypasses directly into the communications clients themselves and deploying what amounts to machine-based wiretaps to billions of users at once.
Once this is in place, it's easy for the government to demand that Facebook add another filter -- one that searches for communications that they care about -- and alert them when it gets triggered.
Of course alternatives like Signal will exist for those who don't want to be subject to Facebook's content moderation, but what happens when this filtering technology is built into operating systems?
The problem is that if Facebook's model succeeds, it will only be a matter of time before device manufacturers and mobile operating system developers embed similar tools directly into devices themselves, making them impossible to escape. Embedding content scanning tools directly into phones would make it possible to scan all apps, including ones like Signal, effectively ending the era of encrypted communications.
I don't think this will happen -- why does AT&T care about content moderation -- but it is something to watch?
EDITED TO ADD (8/2): This story is wrong. Read my correction:
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/08/more_on_backdoo.html
📡 @NoGoolag
#WhatsApp #fb #facebook #libra #why #backdoor #encryption