At a glance.
- Moscow fines Twitter and Facebook for not moving data into Russia.
- US continues to push allies on Huawei.
- US Senator proposes establishing a Data Protection Agency.
Russia uses courts in push for data sovereignty.
A Moscow court fined Facebook and Twitter yesterday for their failure to move data about Russian citizens into servers physically located in Russia. The ruling is consistent with the country’s push for data sovereignty. Roskomnadzor, Russia’s Internet regulatory authority, said the companies would be fined again if they failed to comply this year.
The ruling would appear to be in part symbolic, since the amounts aren’t, according to the AP, particularly large. The initial fines are four-million rubles each, which comes to about $63,000. The bigger hammer to be dropped if the social networks continue to dig in their heels for another year would only come to eighteen-million rubles, or $283,000, each, which practically amount to pocket change.
US continues to push allies on Huawei.
The US is continuing to work on its allies in the hope of excluding Huawei from their infrastructure, particularly from their 5G build-out. But these efforts are showing mixed success, the Washington Post reports. Australia, New Zealand, and Japan are on board with the US, but the UK seems to have sought a compromise third-way that will in all probability serve as a template for the European allies, especially France and Germany. Canada is still mulling the issue, but seems for now to be tilting slightly toward the US point of view.
The US has also opened up a new lawfare front against the Shenzhen hardware giant. The Justice Department has issued a sixteen count superseding RICO indictment against Huawei. Tech Crunch calls the sixteen-charge indictment "sprawling."
The Department of Justice says it’s found "decades-long efforts by Huawei, and several of its subsidiaries, both in the US and in the People's Republic of China, to misappropriate intellectual property, including from six US technology companies, in an effort to grow and operate Huawei's business." The defendants are Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.; Huawei Device Co., Ltd.; Huawei Device Usa Inc.; Futurewei Technologies, Inc.; Skycom Tech Co., Ltd.; and Wanzhou Meng. Ms Meng, you’ll recall, is the company's CFO who's currently in Vancouver, British Columbia, fighting extradition to the US.
Huawei calls the charges baseless, and another move by the US to "irrevocably damage" the company. The company says it expects to "prevail" in court.
Does the US need a Data Protection Agency?
Senator Kirsten Gillibrand thinks so. The New York Democrat and former Presidential candidate has introduced legislation to set one up. Its mission would be, she writes, to “bring the protection of your privacy and freedom into the digital age.” The legislation would establish a new enforcement outfit, but it would neither preempt state laws nor establish national standards.
Response from the security industry has been tepid, Threatpost reports, with many experts doubting that establishing a Federal agency to enforce standards without first setting those standards out is a workable approach to privacy.