Leonardo Michael | US security chiefs target Russian antivirus company

Top US intelligence chiefs on Thursday publicly expressed doubts about the global cyber-security firm Kaspersky Labs because of its roots in Russia.   

Six leading intelligence officials told a Senate hearing on external threats to the United States of their concerns over the firm's broad presence, without specifying any particular threat.    

Asked if he was aware of a security threat tied to Kaspersky software, Federal Bureau of Investigation acting director Andrew McCabe replied: "We are very concerned about it and we are focused on it very closely."    

Defense Intelligence Agency director Lieutenant General Vincent Stewart said his agency is avoiding the company's products.    

"There is, as well as I know, no Kaspersky software on our networks," he said, adding that the agency's private sector contractors are also steering clear.   

The allegations against Kaspersky come amid heightened US concerns over Russian hacking after what intelligence chiefs say was a significant effort directed by Russian President Vladimir Putin to interfere with last year's election.    

President Donald Trump's former national security advisor Michael Flynn is under investigation for his links to Russia, which include being paid $11,250 to speak at a Kaspersky function.

Also indicating their concerns in brief were the heads of the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, and the director of National Intelligence.    

"I am personally aware and involved as director of the National Security Agency in the Kaspersky Lab issue," NSA head Mike Rogers said.  

Kaspersky was founded in Moscow in 1997 by Eugene Kaspersky, a computer engineer who served in the Russian military.    

The company quickly expanded to a global presence, with 3,600 employees, 400 million users of its software, and revenue of some $620m in 2015, according to its website.    

Its antivirus programmes regularly rank in the top five of such software for personal and business computers.    

But US officials have expressed doubts over its recruitment of some staff with alleged links to Russian defence and intelligence bodies.    

Some worry it might offer Russian intelligence a secret backdoor into users' computers. US officials are particularly worried that foreign hackers could penetrate US infrastructure via suspect software and malware.    

Kaspersky denied having ties to any government.    

"The company has never helped, nor will help, any government in the world with its cyber espionage efforts," it said in a statement on Thursday.    

"Kaspersky Lab believes it is completely unacceptable that the company is being unjustly accused without any hard evidence to back up these false allegations."  

Commenting on Reddit, Eugene Kaspersky also said his company had no links to the Russian government, offering to testify in the Senate.   

"I respectfully disagree with their opinion, and I'm very sorry these gentlemen can't use the best software on the market because of political reasons," he said, referring to the intelligence chiefs.         

Sean Kanuck, a former CIA officer who was the first US national intelligence officer for cyber issues, said the worries about Kaspersky have mainly come from US lawmakers who don't understand that it gets paid by companies and US government agencies to have "front-door" access to their systems.  

"That means that any Congressional questions about 'back doors' in Kaspersky products reflect a certain naivete, because many of Kaspersky's clients are intentionally paying for full-content monitoring on their networks."

Leonardo Michael | Alphabet paid Google CEO Sundar Pichai US$200 million in 2016

Google CEO Sundar Pichai received a US$200 million ($291m) compensation package last year for running the internet company that makes nearly all the money for Alphabet Inc.
Most of the pay consisted of Alphabet stock that the company valued at US$198.7m in securities documents filed Friday. Alphabet gave the award to Pichai in January 2016, a few months after he succeeded Larry Page as Google's CEO. Pichai still reports to Page, a Google co-founder who is now Alphabet's CEO.
Page limits his annual pay to US$1 because he already has an estimated fortune of US$41 billion.
The stock that Pichai received will vest in quarterly increments through January 2020.
The 44-year-old Pichai also received a US$650,000 salary last year in addition to personal security services and air travel valued at US$372,000.

Leonardo Michael | Welcome to Chinafornia: The Future of U.S.-China Relations

Matt Sheehan runs the weekly Chinafornia Newsletter. He is the former China Correspondent for The WorldPost, and is currently writing a book on Chinafornia (Counterpoint Press, 2018). This piece is part of a special RCW series on the U.S.-China geopolitical relationship. The views expressed here are the author’s own.

For half a century, the U.S.-China relationship was almost exclusively the purview of political and business elites: Henry Kissinger scheming with an aging Mao Zedong; CEOs salivating over a billion new customers. It was something that ordinary Americans only experienced in the form of pink slips at their factories or “Everyday Low Prices” at Wal-Mart.

But, in the last five years, all of that has changed. Chinese citizens, companies, and capital have arrived on U.S. soil in force, and they’re making their impact felt across small towns, college campuses, and corporate America.

The trend is national, but the epicenter is in California. As the top destination for Chinese investors, students, tourists, and homebuyers, California is the living laboratory for a new paradigm in U.S.-China relations. This new paradigm is built on grassroots ties and face-to-face interactions. I call it Chinafornia.

Chinafornia is the fluid ecosystem of entrepreneurs, students, investors, immigrants, and ideas bouncing back and forth between the Golden State and the Middle Kingdom. It’s the Chinese undergrads flooding onto California campuses and the Silicon Valley startups angling for a toehold in China. It’s the Chinese families buying up beachfront property in San Diego and the Los Angeles welders building Chinese-funded skyscrapers. It’s Chinese governors studying California carbon markets and California mayors courting Chinese manufacturing investment.

Chinafornia is where the rubber meets the road in an era of deep, multifaceted engagement between the world’s two superpowers. This engagement is bringing the U.S.-China story down from the realm of geopolitics and directly into the lives of ordinary Americans. It’s creating jobs, funding long-stagnant development projects, and giving a boost to cash-strapped public universities.

But it’s also creating new anxieties and frictions. Under normal conditions, a boom in investment is considered a win for local citizens. But when that money comes from far away investors -- especially from a country with a vastly different culture and an authoritarian government -- the influx creates thorny tradeoffs. Every benefit California derives from these interactions comes with a potential dark side, one that threatens to spark a nativist backlash against the new arrivals.

For a glimpse into how these trends are playing out in real time, let’s take a tour of Chinafornia on the ground.

Start in San Francisco’s Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood, the poorest and last predominantly black part of the city. Chinese investors have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into transforming the neighborhood’s abandoned navy shipyard into the city’s largest new housing and retail development in decades.

The funding comes from the controversial EB-5 program, which grants green cards to foreign investors who create ten new jobs in America. More than $400 million from EB-5 investors -- 80 percent of them Chinese -- finally got the long-delayed Hunters Point project off the ground. Today, as the money pours in and the buildings go up, local Hunters Point residents look on with hope for new jobs -- and fear of being displaced by foreign-funded gentrification.

For Chinafornia’s impact on higher education, head down to the University of California, San Diego. Ten years ago there were 70 undergraduates from mainland China at the school. Last year that number had skyrocketed to 3,534. It’s a transformation that has been replicated across the UC system, with the number of Chinese students multiplying by a factor of 10 in the last decade. The reason for that boom? Voracious Chinese demand for U.S. higher education, paired with a dramatic decline in state funding for public universities.

International undergrads pay approximately three times the tuition of California residents. Since the global financial crisis, ramping up Chinese enrollment has become a quick fix for universities facing devastating budget cuts. But it’s also stirring resentment among locals, who fear admission to their public universities is being auctioned to the highest bidder.

Hollywood and Silicon Valley face a different kind of Chinafornia conundrum: While the transpacific flow of funding and talent reaches new heights, the Chinese government has tightened censorship to levels not seen in decades.

Chinese tech and film investors are also pouring into California. They’re seeking out unicorn startups and filmmaking know-how. China’s tech juggernauts have all established research facilities or investment beachheads in Silicon Valley and Chinese filmmakers are looking to work with -- or outright acquire -- their American peers.

But when Silicon Valley and Hollywood execs return the visit, they are rebuffed. Many of Silicon Valley’s flagship companies -- Facebook, Google and Twitter, to name a few -- are outright blocked in China. Hollywood studios face sharp limits on the number of films that can enter China and they are often forced to sanitize scripts for fear of offending Chinese government censors. But the lure of a billion-person market remains strong: It has Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg studying Mandarin and Minnie Mouse dressing in a cheongsam at the new Shanghai Disneyland.

That attraction and repulsion leaves America’s two cultural powerhouses facing loaded ethical questions. How far will they bend to Chinese government demands to ensure market access? How can they engage ordinary Chinese people without abandoning their commitment to free expression?

Across these industries -- real estate, education, technology, entertainment, and many more -- we see the foundation being built for a new brand of U.S.-China relations. It’s one that’s full of new possibilities, but also creates local divisions with global implications. How we navigate these tradeoffs will set the stage for the most important bilateral relationship in the world. It’s up to the people of Chinafornia to get this new engagement right -- to guide these flows so they expand horizons and open opportunities for people in both countries. Let’s get to work.

Documentary Film Making | Sean Innis

Documentary films, as the name implies, are films produced with the intention of being an audio-visual documentation of a concept or event.

A documentary film is intended to be much more like a piece of journalism than a piece of entertainment or expressive art. There is typically a voice-over narrative going on throughout a documentary film with the narrator describing what's being seen in a businesslike way without any dramatic reading.

Documentary films are often made to more deeply explore a current events or history subject that has remained shrouded in mystery, been controversial, or in the opinion of the film maker misunderstood or underexposed. Documentaries have also been made simply to record an event of personal interest to the film maker.

Biographies, sports and music events, a compilation film of collected footage from government sources, and so on and so forth all may be subjects for a documentary film. Documentary film makers are typically the writers, directors, and producers. Often they may act as cameramen as well.

Documentary films are most often made for TV but in more recent times there have been more of them made as direct-to-video, made-for-video, straight-to-video, or straight-to-DVD formats in which they were never first played on TV or in the theaters but were simply distributed for home-viewing.

Some major motion pictures when released in DVD format also come with bonus DVDs that act as documentary films of the making of the movie. Documentaries also often feature re-enactments of events that could not or were not originally documented on film such as historical events from the year 1776. There have also been "mockumentaries" made, in which a piece of comedy fiction is made but is done up in the same dry and straightforward format of an actual documentary. "This Is Spinal Tap" and "The Gods Must Be Crazy" are two of the most successful mockumentaries ever made.

To put together a quality documentary film, the filmmaker first begins by doing research, even if he knows the subject matter well already. The Main point of a documentary film is to relay facts and information from all angles.

Quality documentaries usually include interviews at some point. This is a technique for lending authoritativeness to the film's producer by getting people to speak from first-hand knowledge about the subject matter or an aspect of it. A documentary film also has to be well organized in an interesting and logical format. Unlike with many fictional movie stories, a documentary should never deliberately confuse, mislead, or leave something mysterious. Multiple perspectives or opinions can be highly effective at giving a documentary film depth.