Tuesday briefing: Nasa could face trouble privatising the ISS

Your WIRED daily briefing. Today, an internal Nasa report throws doubt on a White House proposal to sell off the International Space Station, Amazon advises a 99 per cent facial recognition confidence threshold for law enforcement, North Korea doesn't appear to have given up building missiles and more.

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An internal report from Nasa's inspector general Paul Martin has found that the space agency may have trouble privatising the International Space Station, as proposed by the White House in January (Ars Technica). The plan would see Nasa withdraw from the ISS by 2025, reducing by half its total human exploration budget – a saving of up to $4bn a year. However, discussing the White House's proposal that Nasa find a private company to run the station and become a "tenant" of the ISS, Martin writes that "we question whether a sufficient business case exists under which private companies will be able to develop a self-sustaining and profit-making business independent of significant federal funding" – in other words, there's no compelling commercial need for a space station that would make private industry want to pick up the tab.

Amazon has recommended in a blog post that its facial recognition customers "do not use less than 99 per cent confidence levels for law enforcement matches", contradicting previous law enforcement posts advising a threshold of 85 per cent (Ars Technica). The new recommendation, which Amazon general manager for deep learning and artificial intelligence Matt Wood seems to imply it has always made, follows an American Civil Liberties Union test of Amazon's Rekognition machine learning system, which falsely matched 28 US politicians to criminal mugshots at an 80 per cent confidence. A response post from the ACLU also notes that Amazon's focus on confidence thresholds "attempts to sidestep the very real civil rights concerns raised by Amazon actively marketing Rekognition to law enforcement agencies."

Satellite imagery of North Korea's Sanumdong rocket production facility reveals that it appears to still be in active use and Washington Post sources inside US intelligence agencies say the construction of new intercontinental ballistic missiles may have begun (BBC News). Both commercial and – reportedly – US spy satellites have captured images of vehicles coming and going from the facility near the North Korean capital of Pyongyang, although it's not clear what, if any, construction is going on inside. Experts on the DPRK's weapons programme say that the facility – built for the construction of ICBMs and space-launch vehicles – has clearly been active during and after denuclearisation talks involving North Korea, South Korea and the USA.

Two PDF files will come to define the state of the West’s political landscape, circa 2018: the US Department of Justice’s indictment of twelve Russian intelligence agents for hacking the 2016 presidential election; and the British House of Commons’ interim report on disinformation and fake news, published this week (WIRED). What connects them is their subject matter: how technology has been weaponised to disrupt elections in multiple countries. The DOJ’s document is a fast-paced spy story, where spooks shoot about cryptocurrency to rent servers, steal the Clinton campaign's emails, and turn them over to Wikileaks – a digital transparency champion hijacked to do the bidding of shadowy agents. The British report reads, fittingly, more like a Lewis Carroll tale: the 12-person parliamentary committee on Digital, Culture, Media & Sport has stepped into a rabbit hole, burrowing deeper and deeper from an initial a question of semantics: "what does 'fake news' mean?"

Valve has removed casual platform game Abstractism from the Steam store and banned developer Okalo Union after players discovered evidence of cryptojacking malware and fake Team Fortress 2 items in the game (Steamed). YouTuber SidAlpha posted evidence of unusually CPU, GPU and memory-intensive behaviour from the game, backed up by others, who found unusual network activity and behaviour consistent with hidden cryptocurrency mining software. In a statement to Kotaku, Valve said the developer was banned for "shipping unauthorized code, trolling, and scamming customers with deceptive in-game items."

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