Situation reporter: Evan Gershkovich’s detention

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. As with any bureaucratic funding scheme, there is some fraud in America's social welfare programs. We talk through how hard it is to curb those abuses in a way that doesn't come at a cost to needy, hungry families. And you've probably heard about ChatGPT, a powerful bit of artificial intelligence that can hold conversations, write essays, even craft recipes. Our language columnist looks at another surprising skill. It can sound human, like in all manner of languages. First up, though, American officials are poised to make a momentous designation in the case of Evan Geshkovich, correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, who disappeared in Russia on March 29. In my own mind, there's no doubt.

That he's being wrongfully detained.

That phrase that Secretary of State Antony Blinken used yesterday, wrongfully detained, is actually a sign that the situation is escalating. Russian security Services had arrested Mr. Geshkovich on charges of espionage, a move not seen since the Cold War. But America now moving to call it a wrongful detention would essentially be saying Mr. Geshkovich is a hostage. Doing journalism in Russia since the start of the war in Ukraine was already hard, but foreign reporters certainly had it easier than Russian nationals did. Now that Western journalists can't count on those freedoms, the flow of truth out of Russia will surely slow and a diplomatic crisis is likely to build.

Evan Gershkovich, first and foremost, is a terrific journalist. He is a correspondent who cares deeply about the story he's covering, who believes deeply in the importance of being on the ground in places that are hard to get to, to shed light on the most important things happening in the world today.

Noah Snyder is the Economist's Tokyo bureau chief, but before that, he was our Moscow correspondent, where he worked alongside Mr.

Geshkovich, the cruel irony of this situation, I think, is that Evan not only deeply cares about Russia, but Russia is quite literally a part of Evan. He grew up in America, but in a Soviet emigre family. His par were Jews who left the Soviet Union in the 70s. So he put his background and his language skills to use on the ground in Moscow, working as a reporter for one of the world's most reputable media organizations, accredited by the Russian Foreign Ministry with every right to be on the ground, reporting and doing his job.

And so, Noah, take us through what happened then. How was Mr. Geshkovich arrested and on what charges?

Evan disappeared while on a reporting trip in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg. On March 29, he. He reappeared outside Lofortova Prison, a notorious prison in Moscow where many political prisoners and high level detainees are held. And the Russian government promptly announced that it had arrested him on charges of espionage. The Wall Street Journal, Evan's employer, has fiercely denied these allegations, which carry a potential sentence of up to 20 years in prison.

And what do we know about the conditions of his detainment?

Evan is being held in Lefortova, which we mentioned is a notorious high security prison in Moscow. It's often home to high profile detainees, dissidents, political prisoners. In the past, it's been home to folks like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the famous dissident Soviet writer. On Tuesday, lawyers were allowed to visit Evan in prison for the first time since his arrest. According to the Wall Street Journal and a Russian prison monitor, a member of a prison oversight commission was also able to get in to see Evan recently. He reported he was in good spirits and joking a lot, which for those of us who know Evan, sounds spot on. The conditions in the prison are understandably grim. Small cells, deep isolation. But he does have access, for example, to a well stocked prison library. And apparently he's started to read the famous Soviet writer Vasily Grossman's epic novel Life and Fate, which is really about the nature of totalitarian systems, which Evan is sadly experiencing firsthand.

And just to be clear, the charges here are clearly trumped up.

Absolutely. There's no question at all that Evan is a journalist and nothing but a journalist. The Wall Street Journal has vehemently denied these allegations from Russia's secret services. This is really an unprecedented step for Russia to take, at least in post Soviet times. This is in fact, the first foreign correspondent who's been arrested and charged since the Cold War.

So why is Russia doing this now then?

Well, I think this is all part of the tightening of the screws. And the closing down of the Russian system. In the wake of the war in Ukraine, we've seen a massive crackdown on Russian independent media that has forced many Russian journalists into exile. Foreign journalists continue to operate while accredited through the Russian Foreign Ministry. And there was always a sort of an understanding, certainly in the time when I was based in Moscow up until 2020, that being an accredited foreign journalist gave you an extra sort of layer of security, that there was an understanding that foreign journalists wouldn't be touched by the Russian state. And that has clearly changed, and they clearly are interested in sending that message to the rest of the foreign press corps. So this is really going to make reporting on Russia, understanding what's happening inside Russia a whole lot harder. There's a second element to this, which there's been a lot of speculation about, which is that this is part of a bigger diplomatic geopolitical game between Russia and America and perhaps a kind of a prelude to a future prisoner swap, that Evan essentially is being taken as a hostage so that he can be exchanged for assets that the Russian government would like to have back from America.

So with the Kremlin having taken this big step, this unprecedented step in post Soviet Russia, what happens from here? Is this the thin air of the wedge?

I think there's no question that this case is going to have massive implications for the rest of the foreign journalists and the rest of the Russian journalists still active inside the country. It signals a willingness by the Russian state to escalate to a level we, again, haven't seen, at least in recent years. And it's going, I think, to make Russia even more of a black box, which is exactly what Evan was worried about and exactly what motivated him to keep reporting from Russia on the ground, despite the risks that he understood all too well.

Thanks very much for joining us, Noah.

Thank you for having me, Jason.

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My name is Kayari Slater, and I've been on SNAP for a while now.

Kayari Slater is a single mom who lives in Baltimore, Maryland. She's not currently working, so she depends on government aid programs like snap, which is short for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, but is more commonly called food stamps. She also relies on another program called Temporary cash assistance, or TCA.

Tamara Jilksbohr is the Economist's US policy correspondent.

She started getting cash assistance in 2019 when she was pregnant with her second child and she was having health problems.

So I was having a lot of complications with my blood pressure towards the end of my pregnancy. So I had stopped working and I had just went and applied for TCA until I go back to work.

$750 in TCA cash is deposited each month into a debit account, and Keyara uses it to make ends meet and to provide for her two children. But at the beginning of January, soon after the funds should have arrived, she discovered that her account had been emptied.

I got a call from the automated system from the SNAP benefits card, and they stated that I had only $4. And my heart just literally dropped because I knew right then and there that I was a victim of the benefits being stolen.

She happened to be in social services when she got the call. So she ran up to one of the women who was working at the desk that day.

So she looked it up in the system to see, like, the transactions, and she was able to see that the money was taken in California.

Whoever did this on the other side of the country went to an ATM.

At like 7 something in the morning and took the money off.

The woman working at the desk printed out a piece of paper with the information and told Kayari to file a police report.

So I asked her, I said, if I make this police report, is there any chances that, you know, you guys will reimburse me the money? And she said, no, we don't replace anything that's stolen.

Kayari was devastated.

I remember just like literally walking out of the social service and crying because it was just like, I didn't know how I was going to buy pull ups for my son, pay my rent, pay my gas and electric bill. I had so much stuff that I needed to do and take care of that I wasn't able to because my benefits were gone.

What happened to Kayari is far from an isolated incident. The COVID 19 pandemic prompted governments all over the world to temporarily increase social welfare programs. And with all the extra money, these federal cash assistance schemes designed to help vulnerable families, increasingly became a target for fraudsters.

We saw massive amounts of fraud at the beginning of the pandemic.

This is Linda Miller, a former executive director of the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, a government agency that was created to oversee pandemic spending.

The fraud that's happening is having really, really significant impacts. These are extremely, desperately poor people who are being defrauded by these threat actors. And so it's a humanitarian crisis as well as a fraud crisis.

Linda says the government agencies giving out this money have done relatively little to prevent fraud.

It's very discouraging to those of us who've been in this field for a long time.

An analyst from LexisNexis Risk Solutions, a firm that sells fraud prevention services, estimates that about $20 billion could be stolen over the next six months from SNAP. That's an assumed fraud rate of 15%. But the government agency that administers SNAP, the United States Department of Agriculture or Usdathinks, that the sum will be much lower. It forecasts a fraud rate of only 0.01 to 0.02%. It's not just the extra pandemic money that has caused the current problems. Part of it is also that those gaming the system have become a lot more clever.

The new fraud environment is nothing like the fraud environment of five or 10 years ago. It's an entirely different set of very sophisticated actors using very sophisticated tools. And they're looking to defraud these programs on large scales.

There's a few different ways that these criminals are able to steal this money from their victims.

So with programs like TANF and SNAP that use debit card payments, we're seeing a variety of fraud schemes.

One classic method criminals are using are card skimmers.

Skimmers are these physical devices that threat actors place on ATMs or in retailer point of sale machines so that when the victim uses their card, the skimmer will actually steal the information, including all of the funds off of the card.

Then there's fraud based identity theft. With this method, actors can steal funds from cards before they have even reached the owners. In some cases, the data that allows criminals to do this is being stolen directly from the state systems themselves.

Many states still have pretty legacy systems. And so those systems are more vulnerable to being hacked. You know, people are selling in bulk information that they've stolen from different state systems to threat actors, and then they can use that information to essentially harvest the data from those cards.

Criminals are also using social engineering, phishing, and malicious computer bots to get access to this sensitive data.

And so there's just a lot more sophistication in how these cyber fraudsters are using these tools and technologies. And we as government agencies are just simply unprepared for the sophistication of this new adversary.

Not only is the government not well equipped to prevent this fraud, Unlike the private sector, government agencies have little incentive to prevent fraud. If a customer or investor thinks that a private bank isn't doing enough on.

Fraud, for example, they'll choose a different bank, they'll take their money out of a certain organization, and there'll be real consequences. Whereas in the government, there's not a lot of sticks that can be applied to encourage more proactive anti fraud activities.

And Linda says that some of the things that might be tempting to do, like firing people or slashing the budgets of programs that fail to curb fraud, would probably only end up hurting the needy families who rely on those funds to eat. But fortunately, at least at the state level, there are some steps being taken.

I'm senator Katie Freihester. I represent District 9 here in the state of Maryland.

Maryland state senator Katie Freihester introduced a bill which aims to both prevent this type of fraud and reimburse the families that have already been impacted. Going back to at least the start of 2022. The bill would help people like Kari who have had their benefits stolen.

It was $1.6 million stolen in 2022 from these poor folks. The Senate of Maryland is committed to making sure that by reimbursing them for the fraud, we can make them whole.

And in order to reduce the risk of future fraud, there are a few concrete things the bill would require of the vendors that are contracted to distribute these funds to recipients. The first is that these vendors would have to include chips on the debit cards that recipients get.

These are the same kind of chips that you and I have on our major bank cards.

This chip technology makes it much harder for skimming attempts to work. But up until now, many of these debit cards have lacked any chip protection. The bill also would require the vendor to create two way fraud alerts, similar to the kind credit card companies employ.

So just like bank of America would say, hey, it Looks like there's been suspicious activity on your bank card. It will require the vendor to alert a recipient of benefits that something fraudulent.

Looks like it's happening and to provide next steps if there has been fraud.

So if it appears that your benefits have stolen, you'll be able to text and get immediate support on what to do next.

Finally, the bill would push the state government to hire vendors that hold a form of insurance that could be used to reimburse a beneficiary in cases of fraud and identity theft, so that if.

The benefits are indeed stolen, again, it's the vendor's responsibility, not the state's, to pay them back.

So at least in Maryland, there is hope that things will improve. And Linda Miller from earlier, for her part, she's optimistic that wider change may be finally coming.

I am very hopeful that we're seeing a change now. This isn't something people were talking about, you know, five years ago, and we're talking about it now because we're so outraged by how much fraud happened during the pandemic. There's a much better understanding that this problem is systemic and that there needs to be significant, comprehensive steps taken to address it across government.

But there's especially one step that she'd like to see taken at the federal level.

I've been advocating for the creation of a fraud office within the government with a cabinet level appointee with senior authority and accountability mechanisms put in place.

As for Kayari, with her funds for the month of January stolen, she faced an uphill climb. She made it through that month, but it was far from easy.

I had to actually wind up borrowing the money from peers and stuff like that just to get by that month like it was very stressful.

Finally this month, Maryland began reimbursing some victims with the help of the usda. But it will probably take some time for most people to get their money back. And if bills like the one currently being considered in Maryland end up successfully preventing cases like Kayari's from happening again, that's no small thing.

The punditry about ChatGPT has been nothing short of breathless. It's what's called a large language model, and some people say it's the biggest tech breakthrough since the printing press. In truth, typing away with ChatGPT can feel like you're messaging a real person, a person with real talents. It can parody literary styles or create recipes from ingredients you give it, or even write computer code. But it has some abilities that even its makers didn't predict. And the best person to tell me about that is Lane Green, the Economist's language columnist. Hi, Lane, how's it going?

Hi, Jason. Fine, thanks. How are you?

Good, good, good. Tell me what we're going to be talking about here.

Well, today we're going to have a play around with ChatGPT, so I'd like you to bring it up on your screen, if you would, please.

Okay, I've got it. What should I do now?

Try asking it. How many languages could you translate this sentence into?

How many languages can you translate? It's thinking I can translate this sentence into dozens of languages.

Some of the languages I'm proficient in include English, Spanish, French, German, Chinese, Russian.

Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, and many more.

If you need to need a specific language, please let me know and I'll do my best to assist you.

Oh, it's so friendly and competent. Impressive.

Well, it does sound pretty impressive, but of course, there has been translation software out there for quite a long time. I think a lot of users will have tried Google Translate. And even if you spot an error or a bad translation here and there, especially for big language pairs like translating from English to Spanish or from French into English, the quality has been quite good for a few years now. What's really interesting about ChatGPT and what apparently surprised the designers themselves, is the natural and sometimes even quite human, like writing across quite a few different languages being produced by ChatGPT.

This sounds like just the sort of thing that you will have tested as our language guy.

Well, indeed. I was chatting with ChatGPT in different languages and it can be difficult to switch languages if you're a human speaker. But I asked it without announcing that I was going to switch to Portuguese. Who is Lane Green? Like a lot of other people, I was asking for a biography of myself.

The new version of Googling yourself.

Exactly. It says, lane Greeno, Elitrabalia como editor de negocios finances. Sober linguistica Dioma.

Well, sounds fair.

Close enough. So, Jason, I know you know Italian, so why don't you try the same thing and ask it, who is Jason Palmer in Italian?

Okay, let's give that a go. And then I need my little accent. Well, half and half. Davero. Yeah, Vast experience in the fields of science and technology. Bitching. I love it. I love it.

Maybe it knows to flatter you.

And it is, as you say, pretty good. Grammatically, it does sound like, well, what somebody would actually say. How'd you find it for the Portuguese?

Well, when I tested it, it did make some factual errors about my biography. So, like, it does in pretty much every language. It seems to, as they say in the jargon, hallucinate quite a lot. But that said, most of it was correct. And more impressively and more to the point, maybe of my interest, which is language. The Portuguese itself was impeccable. Now, to be fair, that's maybe not the hardest test, because Portuguese is one of the most spoken languages and in the world, spread by Portuguese colonialism to places like Brazil and parts of Africa and so forth. Italian a bit less, but still spoken by tens of millions of people. So what's really intriguing to me is how well ChatGPT performs in a lot less well known and less widely spoken languages.

Like which ones? I mean, this is an issue that translation software has had from the start, right?

Yes, it is. So I tested ChatGPT in Danish, which is spoken by only about five and a half million people. And even more to the point, there's not a huge volume of Danish online, partly because Danes do a lot of their professional work in English. So the training data, the data that is used to teach systems like ChatGPT how to do what they do, there's a lot less of that data for Danish than there is for languages that are far bigger, like English or Spanish or Portuguese. And even still, ChatGPT's answers, though they were just as factually faulty as they were in other languages, were expressed in almost perfect Danish. It says. Lane Green Ernamer Kains journalist herrbeiter for the Economist Wohr Premierz Grieber am Spro Kutur Technologies Hanna Osserfer Tifler he owner. But there are many other even less frequently spoken languages that ChatGPT says it can work with. And you might find some surprising ones on there, things like Esperanto, even alongside Zulu and Kannada spoken in southern India and so forth. It was quite a list. In all my tests, a tiny gender agreement error in Danish was the only mistake I caught in any of the languages that I tested.

So what is the secret sauce here? What is going on under the bonnet?

Well, we don't know everything because OpenAI, which is the developer of ChatGPT, won't tell us exactly how they train it and what they train it on. But what this is, it's not a general purpose artificial intelligence. It's not thinking. The system is trained to predict essentially what follows what in languages. And so, using billions and billions of data points, it gets extraordinarily good at spotting patterns. And those patterns are exactly what make ChatGPT's language sound so natural.

So obviously there's been a lot of talk about what these large language models like ChatGPT can do, about whose jobs it's going to take and its role in writing and art and what have you. But as a, as our resident language expert, what do you think it means for languages?

What's really interesting is that ChatGPT seems to be excellent with languages that are so much smaller than the languages we've usually trained language software on. Over the years, I've talked to lots of activists for languages like Icelandic and Catalan and Asturian spoken in northern Spain and other languages like that, where they worry that if a language isn't represented online or by technology, it is destined to second or third class status and eventually to shrivel and maybe even disappear in the worst case scenario. So we're seeing that less data is needed for such language systems than we used to think. And I think that in itself is really interesting technologically and it could be a good thing for smaller languages.

Lane, thanks very much for your time.

Jason, thank you.

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