Time ever. We were just talking about 61,000. There it is at 68,000 for something that may or may not have value. We begin the hour with news on big tech, most of it not so good. Microsoft is still struggling to deal with a hack attack. U. S. Companies targeted by disinformation campaigns, a threatened ban on tiktok and a look at the troubles inside of google. First up is the microsoft hack. It happened in january but the ill effects are still affecting the company. Thats right. Microsoft updated the 8k this morning saying they are unable to stop the attack by an entity that is believed to be the Russian Foreign intelligence agency. Microsoft says the attacker which in cybersecurity circles is known by code names such as midnight blizzard and cozy bear has been using information stolen from corporate email systems to gain access to some of the companys source code repositories and internal systems. The company says that the russians have stolen secrets shared over email between customers and microsoft that microsoft has been reaching out to its customers to assist them in mitigating the damage here. The company also says the volume of some aspects of the attack have incrosed by as much as ten times in february. So this is clearly a serious and ongoing situation. It is worth noting that microsoft first saw the campaign in january. Now here we are two months later and they have not been able to push the attacker out of their systems. Microsofts language around the attacks has been particularly dire saying in january that given the vast resources of a nation state attacker, we are shifting the balance we need to strike between security and business risk, the traditional sort of calculus is simply no longer sufficient. And saying today that this attack reflects what has become more broadly an unprecedented global threat landscape. Tyler, back to you. Thank you very much. Wow, while you are here, we want to ask you about a couple of other things, about a new warning specifically from the intelligence xhount community. This is a lot of dire news today. Thats right. A new warning today from the u. S. Intelligence community alerting Corporate America of the threat of targeted chinese disinformation campaigns. Normally we think of these vast media campaigns designed to affect Election Results or sew division in society broadly but these are narrowly taperer local campaigns designed to oppose Company Plans to open new plants or facilities. These can take the form of phony opposition to development or phony Environmental Activism online with fake american personas designed to inflame real opposition in the real world. Chinas goal here is to slow down u. S. Development of resources that are crucial to the american high tech industry. Now in an exclusive statement to cnbc, National SecurityCenter Director mike casey says some western Critical Minerals firms compoting with china have found themselves targeted with disinformation operations designed to damage their reputations which can impact the companys bottom line. Companies need to be armed with response plans that they have tested and are ready to action when the disinformation tafrgts them. This warning follows a spoech that casey gave to Business Executives in alabama earlier this year in which we cited an incident in texas where fake social media accounts sprouted up saying that Rare Earth Minerals in that statewide expose residents to environmental hazards. It was code named dragon. The Texas Campaign was part of this global effort targeting rare earth projects in malaysia and elsewhere around the world. Something else for companies to watch out for. So these attacks would be to achieve a kind of commercial advantage for what . For chinose backed companies . This is about throwing sand in the gears and delaying access to Rare Earth Minerals and other products that high tech manufacturers need in the u. S. If you throw up fake environmental opposition, that can start real opposition from people who say im against that project too and that causes problems for american miners, businesses, plant owners and the like. It is geared towards chinas advantage in that area. All right, thank you very much. U. S. Companies find themselves targeted by foreign governments but the u. S. Government is targeting chinese companies. Momentum is gaining against tiktok as the House Committee voted to approve a bill that could lead to the platform being banned in the United States. Lawmakers argue the bill is more of a National Security measure against tiktok s owner byte dance and less the threat posed by tiktok itself. Lets bring in legal analyst Danny Cevallos and a social media professor at the university of florida. Professor, let me begin with you to describe what the sensitivity is with tiktok and byte dance, its parent . Well, there are a couple of different issues going on. The first is from a Data Security perspective. Thats one of the big issues we are hearing about. It is how the Chinese Government could get access to 170 million american users on tiktok, their data and use that data for various potentially nefarious purposes including spying on journalists, spying on politicians, depending on who is using it. The other significant issue is how the Chinese Government could essentially manipulate the algorithms and provide different content to the american audience as opposed to what the chinese audience sees. In china, they see content that encourages them to be good citizens, doctors, engineers. In the United States, the content is about young people create provocative dances or having a lot more discensus when it comes to the political system. We know there are two Critical Issues that the congress is worried about and justifiably so. Danny, banning tiktok would make a lot of parenting decisions very easy. That aside, there are significant free speech issues here. There are censorship issues here. Walk us through a couple of the items that ought to be of concern. The First Amendment is implicated but how . On the one hand, a Foreign Company doesnt necessarily have First Amendment rights in the u. S. But the rights that may be imprecated are the rights of the millions of users in the United States. They may have a right to speak on the platform and also, the Supreme Court has said that people have a right to receive information as well as part of the First Amendment and that can include a right to receive the information from abroad. One major case in the Supreme Court many years ago involved a situation where americans had a right to receive communist literature from other countries in the mail. So there is this First Amendment right and it is implicated but this is not absolute. This is only stage one. Stage two would be deciding whether or not the government, their interest is substantially related to this legislative fix. In other words, the government has to have a really good reason to infringe upon First Amendment rights. Their reason would arguably be that they are protecting the United States from foreign governments. Andrew, earlier on in the beginning answer, you were talking about collecting data from journalists or from politicians and the worry is that it would be used in nefarious ways. Didnt President Biden just recently join tiktok as part of his Election Campaign . What kind of data would be gathered and used in harmful ways . And why in the world did biden sign up for tiktok . There are two questions there. More significant one is why did he sign up for tiktok . I think that is obvious answer and thats to reach a younger audience. You can look at all of the polling data that indicates that his younger numbers are hurting. Along the same lines, one of the issues that has not received a lot of attention is the fact that a lot of the younger people who are upset with him had been upset because of his response to what is going on in gaza. We know from research and a lot of discussions going on online that a lot of the discussions on what is going on in gaza has been on tiktok. So if we look at it from that perspective, yes, he is trying to reach Younger Voters on the platform. And two, one of the reasons why potentially the Biden Administration may be supporting this legislation and a lot of members of congress, is because of the content that is being produced on there and how it is creating a negative reaction for them in the upcoming election. As for the data which is the significant issue, we have to keep in mind that all apps, all websites sell data and it is accessible to our government, any government or company that wants to purchase it including the chinese company. Where a lot more of the concern comes from is what data is tiktok specifically collecting that may be different from the data that facebook, instagram, or snapchat is collecting, and then how they are using the data to see who journalists are contacting, hong kong, mainland china. The bill refers to National Security interests. What are the National Security interests that are threatened by tiktok . The reason the wording is in the bill, of course, is they are trying to insulate in advanced a constitutional challenge by putting in the bill saying in case you are wondering future court that hears this case, National Security is our compelling interest and thats why if the court finds, whatever court in the future hears this issue, if the court finds this is infringing on the First Amendment, we have already put some of the magic words in there. If the interest is important enough, it can with stand strict scrutiny, the highest test of constitutionality whenever fundamental rights are being infringed upon. But again it is a two step process. The first amndment has to be involved here. It may be the case that users dont have a constitutional right to access tiktok. But there is another Supreme Court case that even gave convicted felons the right to access social media. So the courts have recognized that social media has become such a part of our culture, that there may be an increased right to access it in a way that we didnt think about two or three decades before social media even existed. Danny, how likely is it that tiktok will be banned in the United States if it does divest from the Apparent Company . That is the question because the thesecond part is the devestment. A ban would be more likely to have constitutional attacks. If you divest, you are not banned. Thats an additional step to try to keep the federal legislation from being overturned boy a court. And federal legislation is more likely to be constitutional than state legislation as we saw in montana. Not only is the First Amendment implicated but also it is a camera clause. An individual state can undually burden interstate commerce. If montana said only red cars in the state of montana, that would burden all kinds of commerce because so many trucks with any red of them would have to pull off on the exit and avoid montana. Fascinating stuff, thank you so much for joining us. Now we will turn to google, the company is firing an employee who protested at an israel tech event. Jennifer alis wrote the story and she is joining us from san francisco. Give us the rundown of what happened here, what the employee said and why the employee was fired as a result. Sure. As googles real director was making a key note speech at a tech conference in new york monday, a google cloud engineer stood up and protestedproject nimbus which is a billion dollar Artificial Intelligence contract with the Israeli Government and military. He was escorted out of the building and it was captured on camera and went viral online. The Company Fired him yesterday raising that it was interfering with an official Company Sponsored event. We also found this week that google prematurely shuttered an internal Discussion Forum in the company ahead of a planned International Womens day summit after a swarm of comments about the middle east crisis, palestinian women gained popularity in the forum. One example was claiming the companys a. I. Gemini was showing bias in search results. Those are things we found this week and you can tell the descent has been growing and it is harder for the leadership to quell this. If that was just this week, i imagine there may be other incidents that we may not know of yet. Is this part of a wider culture issue at google . I somewhat recall around 2016 election, there were issues as well sort of with free speech among the employees supporting different candidates . Right. Google has always since its founding fostered an open source, open discussion culture. And you know as it has ballooned the workforce, it has needed money in other areas that hasnt grown on trees for them very easily. It has had to kind of crack down and become what is a normal corporation. But it still tries to keep the spirit of openness. It has always struggled to have balance more so than other companies. Employees were recruited on the idealism, speaking out, descent, the founders did it themselves before stepping down. This is something that was inherited to current ceo sin dar pichai. I assume the individual was disrupting a function and it had nothing to do with the messaging of the person. But in the other case where the chat or messaging service was swamped with comments about the israel hamas conflict, what has the company said there if anything . Right. So the company has not addressed the specifically the gemini example, the chat bot showing bias when using it. As far as firing the employee, they claimed it was an official Company Sponsored event and it created a disruption that violated its policies, though it didnt tell us what the policy was. It is tough because at the same time, you can see in the video, as he is being escorted out of the building that the director is saying one of the great things he loves about working at google is the democraticivalus and the ability of others to have different opinions. So they are saying two Different Things and acting two different ways and expecting the employees to catch up to that. So what was the chat bot asked and why was what was the response if any . And why was that response regarded as insufficient or biassed . Well, one example we found was an employee tested it asking gemini if women in gaza deserve human rights. It didnt have results. It said check it out on Google Search or look it up separately. So it gave no response to that. When asked about other countries including france for example, it came up where gemini responded saying absolutely they deserve human rights and had several bullet points showing why they did and backing up that assertations. Doing things like that, that is one example of what employees found. So it was the absence of an affirmative response in a question that was posed about gaza specifically and then posed in a different context about france and whether women should have human rights. And it was a pretty straight forward question. Jennifer, we appreciate it. Thank you. Despite the feds hopes, the economy is still running a little hot. The jobs report is higher than expected, more on that ahead. As we head to break, a quick power check. On the positive side,etsy is up 5 and costco, sales are a little lighter than expected. I have been doing my part. Thats your power check. K. ll be right bac voya there are some things that work better together. Like your Workplace Benefits and retirement savings. Presentation looks great. Thanks. Voya provides tools that help you make the right investment and benefit choices. So you can reach todays financial goals. That one. And look forward to a more confident future. 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