This interview was conducted by the editorial board of The New York Times, which will announce its Democratic primary endorsement on Jan. 19. For noteworthy dialogues on...

Well, thanks for having me over.

Kathleen Kingsbury: Thank you for coming. So, we have heard you obviously talk about health care and climate and the Middle East a lot in the debates, so were going to try to ask you some questions we havent heard you answer in the past, and you will be shocked to hear that wed like to start with your time at McKinsey. You graduated from Oxford with sterling credentials. You could have pursued any number of career paths from there, including the choice you ultimately made to join the military. Can you walk us through why you decided to go to McKinsey from there?

Yeah, so the biggest thing was that I had a great academic education, but I was beginning to feel that there wasnt as much real-world experience mixed in with it. That in particular, I was eager to do as many things as I could, touching as many fields as I could, and to understand business in particular, about how people and money and goods move around the world and how that works.

KK: So you didnt just want to make a lot of money?

Whats that?

KK: You didnt just want to make a lot of money?

I definitely noticed the paycheck and that was important, too. I needed to make a living. Yeah. Im not going to pretend that that wasnt on my mind, too.

Binyamin Appelbaum: Wed like to talk about some of those real-world experiences. So one of the companies you worked for, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, you said that you were analyzing costs there, and after you completed that project, the company moved ahead with hundreds of layoffs and rate increases. Did you understand that what you were doing as a McKinsey consultant at that company that you were working to prepare for layoffs and price increases?

I had nothing to do with premiums, prices, fees or anything like that. Mostly what my team was looking at was overhead. Theres no way to know the relationship between analysis I did in 2007 and decisions they made in 2009, but certainly our focus was making sure that cost was under control there.

This video excerpt has been edited by The Weekly.

BA: You surely understood why a company like that would hire McKinsey to come in. Yeah?

How do you mean?

BA: When companies hire consultants, theyre usually trying to reduce their costs, right?

I think thats the only cost-cutting study I did out of all my time at McKinsey, so Im not sure its accurate to say that thats what most consulting work is.

BA: So it surprised you when that resulted in layoffs and price increases cases. That didnt seem like what you wouldve done if you had had that information.

I wasnt following news out of Michigan in 2009, so I found that out since, but yeah, Im not surprised. I mean, if an organization needs to cut costs, then that can involve layoffs.

BA: Another of your clients, Loblaws, the grocery chain, has since said that it was involved in the price fixing of bread during the time that you were analyzing grocery prices for them. Im curious first, just, did you analyze the price of bread for them? Is that part of your agreement?

Not in any detail. Basically the way my job worked was, they have about 50,000 items that they sold and I was creating and then crunching a database. What we would do is we would figure out, based on a years worth of sales, if they tried to cut a certain percent off their prices across a certain number of hundreds of stores, what would the impact of that be? So, bread was probably one of the U.P.C. codes in there, but I didnt pay attention to one product over another.

BA: When you were working at McKinsey, did you understand the companys purpose to be exclusively maximizing its own profitability? Did you understand the purpose of the companies you worked for to be exclusively to maximize their profitability?

Well, many of my clients as, you know, were public sector and nonprofits, so obviously their function is not about profitability. But yes, I worked for a company, a for-profit company.

BA: Do you think that that should be the sole mission of a corporation, though, to maximize profitability?

Well, I think that theres something to be said for the dialogue thats happening with, for example, whats going on in the Business Roundtable, but also this is where policy needs to come in. We cant expect corporate America to spontaneously change what it is about, without imposing different kinds of left and right boundaries.

To me, where the public sector and the function of regulation meets what private companies do is precisely to set up those kinds of boundaries. I welcome any time a company undertakes what is called corporate social responsibility, charitable activity or other factors in what they care about. I have been very interested to see the development of things like a B Corps, which has been a big conversation, especially around South Bend actually. Because one of the pioneering ones was a company called Better World Books that grew kind of up and around Notre Dame. But I also dont think we should be nave about how corporations behave unless they are regulated to ensure that their profit-seeking activities dont cause harm.

KK: In your view, if a company engages in criminal conduct, are the employees responsible for that conduct?

Well, obviously theres a whole theory in law about how liability works, but yeah, if somebody undertakes illegal behavior, they are as a general rule liable and should be.

BA: But bring that down to the practical level then: If youre working for a consultant to a company thats engaged in a massive price-fixing scheme, whats your responsibility?

Well, if you have anything to do with any wrongdoing, then youre responsible.

BA: You have criticized some of McKinseys more recent engagements with clients. Do you think that something fundamental has changed about the company since you left?

Its difficult from the outside looking in to gauge whether this reflects some kind of systemic shift or whether they just have a failure in terms of their guardrails. When I was there, there was a lot of talk about values. Firm values. Now, a lot of that was around impact and making sure that you put the clients interest first. Theres one story that they were proud of that I remember was part of our training. Where they had gotten some big contract to help a large multinational move into China, and it was going to lead to tons of work. But in the initial analysis, while they were doing their first round of work, the conclusion they reached was that this company shouldnt go to China at all. So, the story, at least the story as it was told within the firm, was that they gave the right advice, even though it cost them, right? So, you would hear a lot about a certain kind of ethic, but it was always about putting the clients interest first.

What you didnt hear as much was about whether what the client was doing had moral consequences that the firm didnt want to touch. I believe I remember a decision not to serve tobacco had been made by the time I was there. But my point is, there seems to be a problem there with assessing what they want to be associated with. Definitely with the ICE work, with the Saudi work, where you just say, this is a company thats good at helping clients meet objectives. But some of those objectives are not something we want anything to do with, and I think they need to step back and reassess what kind of client work they should take on in the first place.

KK: So you have portrayed a lot of the work that you did for McKinsey, like many analysts and junior staffers starting out in consulting, as mainly crunching data and making PowerPoint presentations and shuffling paper, more or less. Of course, there are also junior consultants and contractors who go to do government work, like Edward Snowden and Reality Winner, who see something that they think is wrong and decide to speak up. Can you tell us your opinion of Mr. Snowden and Ms. Winners actions?

Well, I think that we ought to have whistle-blower protections so that folks like that are not forced to choose between maintaining classified information and speaking up about wrongdoing. It may well be the case that were seeing the whistle-blower concept work in the way in which the current Ukraine process and investigation came about.

KK: So you think of Edward Snowden as a whistle-blower?

Not necessarily. I think he could have been, if that framework existed. Instead I think of him as somebody who divulged classified information.

KK: O.K. By some estimates, the federal governments work force is between 40 and 70 percent made up of contractors. What do you think of that ratio? What should it be ideally?

I think itd be arbitrary to just say theres some number that should be contractors. What I think we need to do, across our economy, and in some ways the federal government reflects this, is remove some of the magic between being an employee and being a contractor. So I think the biggest example were seeing of this in the new economy is, of course, with the gig economy, right?

This idea that you can drive for Uber and somehow not be a worker because you are contractor. A lot of this is about getting around labor standards. A lot of this is about cost-saving. Now, if we had a benefit structure in this country that was not only portable but also prorated, then we would be able to remove some of the magic that creates an incentive to have people be contractors rather than employees, and some of the incentives to be a part-time employer versus a full-time employer as well, for people who are employees on the books.

There will always be times, certainly in my administration, thereve been times when Ive turned, in particular, to law firms to supplement the work that our in-house legal team could do and other consultants with specialized expertise or some area where it just made more sense. Of course thats the case in the federal government too. But if its just a way to get around the obligations of having an employee, then I think it needs to be reassessed and the more that can be brought in house, the better. I guess what Im saying is we can make some changes in our economy and our benefits systems that would reduce some of the pressure to do that in the first place.

KK: This is just a yes or no question, but would you advise a senior at Harvard today to go to work at McKinsey?

Depends on the senior. I mean I get questions from people who are thinking about joining the military, as well as consulting companies, as well as political campaigns. Ill tell you when I was a senior at Harvard, they came around then, too. The standard that I had for myself was, your early 20s are such a precious time that you should prioritize what youre going to get out of your experience, way more than anything a paycheck can offer you in your early 20s and, for me, it didnt meet that standard when I was leaving college.

Pete Buttigieg speaking to a full house at New England College in Henniker, N.H. David Degner for The New York Times

KK: O.K. Were going to pivot to a new topic if you dont mind.

Mara Gay: Mr. Mayor, can you explain the mistakes that were made around your Douglass Plan? Why did your campaign falsely claim support from black leaders and then use tokenizing stock photos? Can you just talk about how that happened?

My understanding is that no false statement has ever been made about somebodys support for the plan. My understanding is that there were miscommunications about the public rollout of peoples names, all of whom had indicated at some point support for the plan, but not all of whom had reconfirmed that they were up for

MG: Right. They called it misleading.

having their names attached to that. So that was a process mistake, obviously, that led to changes in how we communicate with supporters and people that were in dialogue with about our policies. I dont know as much about the stock photo. I think it was on the website until September. I know that the vendor who was involved in running that part of the website or adding that kind of imagery has not been with the campaign for a while and obviously that was a mistake.

MG: How can you win the Democratic nomination, let alone the presidency, without the support of black voters? What do you make of the lack of support for your campaign from that community so far?

Well, I believe, first of all, that were earning support from black voters. I became mayor and was re-elected as mayor, largely because of support from every constituency, including the black community in my city. I believe that it is

Brent Staples: Whats the percentage of black citizenship there?

About 25 percent. I carried every district, including the minority-majority districts in our city, in primaries and generals, both times. I believe that anyone who proposes to be the president ought to be a president for everybody and also in particular, given what African-Americans are up against in the United States today, that the message of the Democratic Party needs to be one that speaks to black voters where they are. Its one of the reasons were being very intentional about that.

Now, I dont want to plunge in on polling numbers, but the last couple of rounds that came back suggested that the way that Im viewed among black voters is roughly the same in terms of the proportions as among white voters. But far more black voters say they dont know me or dont have an opinion. I think part of this reflects the fact, certainly something I hear from a lot of black voters, that folks feel not only abused by the Republican Party but often taken for granted by the Democratic Party. So the trust that you can build through quantity of time, through longevity, is very important. I dont have the kind of longevity that obviously some of my competitors

MG: So how do you overcome that?

So two things. First of all, the substance of what we have to offer. Im really proud of whats in the Douglass Plan. Its praised as the most comprehensive plan on dealing with systemic inequality put forward by a presidential candidate. Not, of course, because I sat in a room and thought up all these brilliant ideas, but because we had a lot of conversation and a lot of dialogue and fit our values to a plan to move forward. The more I communicate that plan, the better received it is and the better received I am.

But I also think before a lot of folks care whats in your plan, they need to know whats in your heart. And Im working in not just traditional campaign formats big speeches and TV appearances but also weve been doing more and more quiet and smaller engagements.

Our recent tour to the South, for example, had a lot of conversations that were between 20 and 50 people. Some of them very targeted around a policy issue like health equity or minority entrepreneurship. Some of it more about making sure that I was speaking to and hearing from folks who had been overlooked. So when we were in South Carolina, for example, we were with an almost all-black Democratic group in Allendale County. This is early presidential primary state, right? They hadnt seen a presidential candidate in more than a decade, and you could feel the extent to which they felt overlooked. Those kinds of engagements I think are very important, too. Its not just about obviously, our goal to win, its about deserving to win. I think that kind of dialogue coupled with all of the things that you do in traditional campaigning is really important right now.

MG: Your plans for tackling income inequality are not quite as detailed as some of the other candidates. For example, your policies on an inclusive economy say somewhat vaguely that youre going to knock down unfair barriers to entrepreneurship. What would that look like?

Sure. So first of all, we know that there are challenges to access to credit. In fact, virtually every small African-American-owned business that Ive visited in this campaign, I ask, howd you get started? Howd you get your start-up money? They always say they had to come up with the cash. Thats a pattern of course thats borne out on everything from how mom-and-pop businesses experience commercial banking to the well-documented fact of V.C. [venture capital] money, almost all going to a small handful of people and kinds of people in a certain number of places.

So there are things we can do about that. One thing we can do is capitalize CDFIs better Community Development Financial Institutions that have a much better track record of in turn supporting minority entrepreneurship. The way I would do it would be a 5X C.R.A. super credit for any of the larger institutions to flow funds into CDFIs.

Another thing we can do is direct co-investment this is part of our Walker-Lewis Initiative in businesses led by those who are underrepresented. Theres precedent for this with TEDCO in Maryland, and I think that kind of co-investment could be very powerful. Weve seen it in other countries you actually see it in the Israeli start-up community with state-supported grants.

Part of it is looking at other things that need to be reformed in credit scoring and credit systems generally, and then part of it is a little deeper in the chain of cause and effect, right? Where we know how much of the wealth in this country is inherited, not just among the ultrawealthy but just in general.

KK: Sure.

And how that flows through the implications for homeownership and access to education and health and all the other things that become barriers to folks being able to be empowered economically as they grow up.

KK: Who do you consider to be your most important advisers within the African-American communities, but also communities of color in general?

Well, first of all, our campaign team, we were about overall, I think were about 40 percent people of color.

I will turn to anybody from the local organizer in a given county that were traveling to in South Carolina to senior figures like Brandon Neal, our senior adviser on the campaign whos got a great track record from the Obama White House and the N.A.A.C.P. Or folks like our national investment chair, Swati Mylavarapu, who can speak a lot to some of those capital-formation issues. We try to make sure that Im listening to everybody I can learn from. I dont always start by getting permission for whether I can name check them, but a lot of conversation going on.

MG: Sorry. Just real quick, have you been to the museum in Montgomery?

I have. Yeah. Very recently, and it is haunting because it evokes things that Ive seen in places like Cambodia, and its on American soil. The way theyve constructed it is, I think, it forces you to understand the relationship between past, present and future. Thats, of course, all the brilliant work that Bryan Stevenson and the Equal Justice Initiative are doing. The fact that it arose out of activism on the death penalty, for example, in Alabama, a state that does not offer counsel past trial and, I think, maybe first appeal for the indigent even on death row, shows you that this is not just about marking something that happened. This is about connecting all of the patterns of injustice and surfacing the violent nature of that injustice in a way that forces us to contend with how its all connected.

BS: The death penalty as we know it evolved out of lynching.

Yes, as we know it, for sure. Which is, by the way, part of why Im calling for a constitutional amendment to end the death penalty. Anyway, it was a very powerful experience, and I think its very important for us to view not as an antiquarian kind of thing, but as a touchstone for what weve got to deal with right now.

MG: Thanks.

Aisha Harris: Mr. Mayor, you recently said that the failures of the old normal help explain how we got to Trump. Where does Obama fit into all of that? Because he was in office for eight years. I know you were misquoted at one point on that part.

You noticed.

AH: Yes, but Obama was in office for eight years. So where does he fit into the old normal as you see it?

Well, first of all, lets acknowledge that under President Obama, the Great Depression was avoided. Osama bin Laden was brought to justice. Health care was extended to millions of Americans. The auto industry was, was rescued in our country, is pretty good for eight years work. I also think that

BS: Thats the other thing that sorry to interrupt you. The other thing to that is the number of racist hate groups kind of quintupled under his leadership. I mean the mere fact of a black person in the White House brought that about.

Which is why we cant treat the Trump phenomenon as a blip or an anomaly. I mean this is surfacing things that as in a different way, the arrival of the first African-American president surfaced things that of course, had been here all along.

Were going to have to reckon with the extent to which Trump and Trumpism reflect a lot more about America than we might want to admit. Now, he was also, I think, capitalizing on a wave of populism that was responsive to what I would call a 40-year-long Reagan era that President Obama was the last Democratic president serving within. In other words, he was constrained by an atmosphere, a neoliberal consensus, where even for Democrats, most of the time, the only thing you could ever say you were going to do to a tax was cut it. There was this set of constraints that has dominated our political conversation leading to the conflagration that is Trump and Trumpism, and weve got to find our way out of it to something new.

AH: So how do you plan to sort of dismantle that old regime? Because in part, one of the issues that I think a lot of especially young people have is that you dont seem nearly as progressive or as revolutionary in some ways as some of the other candidates. Thats something a lot of young people are looking for. So how do you can you explain in a little bit more detail how you think about that?

Yeah. Sure. First of all, what Im proposing would make me the most progressive president in the lifetimes, not only of young people, but I mean, certainly in the last half century. Ill also say that it matters that we hold together an American majority that is progressive enough that it unlocks possibilities that were not available even 10 years ago during the Obama presidency. So it took everything that the Democratic Party had just to push through a health care reform in the A.C.A., invented by conservatives. Right? And that was a major achievement.

But that was as far as you could get during the constraints of that time. Where we are right now is that there is a powerfully large, not everybody obviously, but a powerfully large American majority. Not only to do the right thing on areas where Democrats have generally been trusted wages, labor, health but also areas where weve been on defense, like immigration, guns.

Holding that majority together is a big part of the task of the next president. Im not just talking about how to win an election. Im talking about how to govern this country. We need to have enough clarity of vision that we can see that the boldness of an idea is not measured only by how many people it can alienate, but by what it can get done. So theres always a more extreme solution on offer that sometimes Ill be competing with. But I also want to be very clear that what Im talking about would make the next era what Im proposing we do would make the next era very different from the one weve been living.

AH: Well, one

Thats my concern is to make that happen.

AH: So one final question. How do you convey that to younger voters? How do you counter the Mayo Pete memes? Are you familiar?

Im not. Do I want to know?

BS: You havent heard that expression?

AH: Well, mayonnaise as I think, and a lot of people think is really, really gross and there have been teens

BS: Wait a minute. [LAUGHTER]

AH: Lets not get off track.

BS: Wait a minute!

AH: Anyway, people feel strongly about mayo. There have been younger people theres a meme going around called Mayo Pete, and that I think does speak a little bit to the lack of youth support that you currently hold, even compared to those who are significantly older.

KK: A more generous interpretation is its bland.

PB: O.K.

John Broder: White.

Several others: And white. [LAUGHTER]

I get the white part.

AH: I didnt mean to imply that youre gross. [LAUGHTER] Thats not what I meant.

Well, first of all again, try to get folks to look at how big these ideas are. I mean Im talking to them about the biggest reform in the American health care system weve had since Medicare was invented. Im talking about a game-changing transformation on the availability of funds to go to college. Im talking about getting our climate carbon neutral by 2050.

That will test the limits of human capacity, and there will always be some folks who say, its not real. Health care reform isnt real unless you obliterate the entire private industry. College isnt real unless even the child of a billionaire can go without paying a penny in tuition. The climate change thing doesnt count unless its trillions more dollars than it is, and thats just not how I measured the bigness of an idea.

Continued here:
Opinion | Pete Buttigieg Says He's More Than a Resume - The New York Times

WASHINGTON The deadly shooting of three U.S. sailors at a Navy installation in December could reignite a long-simmering fight between the federal government and tech companies over data privacy and encryption.

As part of its probe into the violent incident, deemed a terrorist act by the government, the Justice Department insists that investigators need access to data from two locked and encrypted iPhones that belonged to the alleged gunman, a Saudi aviation student. The problem: Apple designed those iPhones with encryption technology so secure that the company itself can't read private messages.

The squabble raises two big questions. First, is Apple required to help the government hack its own security technology when requested? Second, is government pressure on this issue the prelude for a broader effort to outlaw encryption technology the feds can't break?

THE QUARREL SO FAR

The Justice Department and Apple have been in talks recently over the Saudi students iPhone. Justice officials contend that they still havent received an answer about whether Apple has the capability to unlock the devices.

During a news conference Monday announcing the findings of the Pensacola station investigation, U.S. Attorney William Barr said its critical for law enforcement to know with whom the shooter communicated and about what, before he died.

So far, Apple has not given any substantive assistance, Barr said. We call on Apple and other technology companies to help us find a solution so that we can better protect the lives of the American people and prevent future attacks.

Apple rejected that characterization. "Our responses to their many requests since the attack have been timely, thorough and are ongoing, the company said.

TRYING THE BACKDOOR

Our phones hold countless messages, files and photos tracings of our everyday life and work. But in 2013, the whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed the extent to which the government was spying on U.S. citizens. Tech companies like Apple and Google began taking steps to shield those digital tracings from prying eyes though often not their own by mathematically scrambling them with encryption.

Apple was one of the first major companies to embrace stronger end-to-end encryption, in which messages are scrambled so that only their senders and recipients can read them. Law enforcement, however, wants access to that information in order to investigate crimes such as terrorism or child sexual exploitation.

Barr and other top cops call the problem going dark, as data they used to be able to scoop up with wiretaps has become harder and harder to read.

Although most law enforcement officials are vague about how to solve the problem, security experts say the authorities are basically asking for an engineered backdoor a secret key that would let them decipher encrypted information with a court order.

But the same experts warn that such backdoors into encryption systems make them inherently insecure. Just knowing that a backdoor exists is enough to focus the world's spies and criminals on discovering the mathematical keys that could unlock it. And when they do, everyone's information is essentially vulnerable to anyone with the secret key.

WHAT LAW ENFORCEMENT CAN DO

Forcing tech companies to engineer backdoors into their security systems would almost certainly require an act of Congress. Legislators, however, have never come close to agreeing on what such a law should look like.

But there are alternatives. Four years ago, the Justice Department took the extraordinary step of asking a federal judge to force Apple to break its own encryption system. The legal move involved an iPhone used by the perpetrator of a December 2015 mass shooting in San Bernardino, California.

Apple acknowledged that it could create the software the feds wanted, but warned that it would be a bad idea. The software could be stolen by hackers and used against other iPhones, the company warned, and might also lead to similar demands from repressive governments around the world.

The FBI ultimately dropped the case shortly before it was to go to trial, saying a third party had found another way of getting into the phone. It never disclosed who that party was; there is an entire industry of shadowy companies such as the Israeli firm Cellebrite that discover or pay for information on flaws in encryption systems. These firms then develop tools to essentially create their own backdoors.

Such companies do significant business with governments and law enforcement. Companies like Apple, meanwhile, do their best to close such loopholes as soon as they learn about them.

WHERE THINGS STAND NOW

Apple is reportedly bracing for another possible legal fight over encryption with the Justice Department. So far, though, there's no clear sign that the government is headed that way .

Theyre just public shaming and asking nicely, said Bruce Schneier, an encryption expert at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Hurting everybodys security for some forensic evidence is a dumb tradeoff.

Barr said the growth of consumer apps with end-to-end encryption, from Apple's iMessage to Facebook's WhatsApp and Signal, have aided terrorist organizations, drug cartels, child molesting rings and kiddie porn-type rings. But the government's legal options could be limited.

For one thing, DOJ's own inspector general slammed the department in the aftermath of the San Bernardino case, noting that it had made few attempts to break into the iPhone itself before filing suit. The FBI unit tasked with cracking phones had only sought outside help the day before the department asked a judge to compel Apple's assistance, the inspector general's report found.

The same report found that an FBI section chief knew an outside vendor had almost 90% completed a technique that would have allowed it to break into the phone, even as the Justice Department insisted that forcing Apples help was the only option.

Civil liberties advocates have also protested. The American Civil Liberties Union called Barrs demands dangerous and unconstitutional.

Here we are again, Schneier said. It's stupid every time.

___

Associated Press writer Michael Balsamo contributed to this report.

See more here:
AP Explains: The Justice Department's New Quarrel With Apple - The New York Times

Written by Ann Brown

Jan 15, 2020

Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor turned whistleblower, recently declared: The most powerful institutions in society have become the least accountable to society.

In 2013, Snowden copied and leaked highly classified information from the NSA when he was a CIA employee and subcontractor. He handed over documents to journalists that detailed surveillance programs run by the NSA. The documents revealed that the NSA has tapped cell phone and Internet communications of people in the general public.

Listen to GHOGH with Jamarlin Martin | Episode 68: Jamarlin Martin Jamarlin talks about the recent backlash against Lebron James for not speaking up for Joshua Wong and the violent Hong Kong protestors.

At a recent Web Summit technology conference in Lisbon, Portugal, Snodwn asked the audience via video link: What do you do when the most powerful institutions in society have become the least accountable to society?

He added: Thats the question our generation exists to answer.

Snowden, who was charged with espionage and theft of government property and had his passport revoked, is living in asylum in Russia. He recently released a memoir, Permanent Record, for which the U.S sued him, alleging he violated non-disclosure agreements he signed when he worked with the NSA and CIA.

They dont like books like this being written, Snowden said. We have legalized the abuse of the person through the personal, he said, adding that the widespread collection of data by governments and corporations entrenches a system that makes the population vulnerable for the benefit of the privileged.

According to Snowden, there is too much attention being placed on data protection when it should be focused on data collection, which he says is the true problem. The problem isnt data protection, the problem is data collection, he noted. Regulation and protection of data presumes that the collection of data in the first place was proper, that it is appropriate, that it doesnt represent a threat or a danger.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a regulation in EU law on data protection and privacy in the European Union and the European Economic Area. Introduced last year, GDPR threatens to impose fines of up to 4 percent of a companys global annual revenues or 20 million euros ($22.3 million) whichever is the higher amount, CNBC reported.

Today those fines dont exist, Snowden argued, and until we see those fines every single year to the Internet giants until they reform their behavior and begin complying not just with the letter but the spirit of the law, it is a paper tiger.

See the original post:
Edward Snowden Says The Most Powerful Institutions In Society Have Become The Least Accountable - Moguldom

For all the public sparring between the two inflated egos known as Donald Trump and James Comey, the president and the former FBI director have some important commonalities. For starters, they both hate it when the common people keep secrets from the ruling class of which they represent competing factions.

The point of agreement between the two political antagonists became clear on January 14, when President Trump complained that Apple executives "refuse to unlock phones used by killers, drug dealers and other violent criminal elements." Some of us poked at our ears, wondering if we were hearing echoes. After all, not so long ago, as head of the FBI, Comey tried to force Apple to unlock encrypted cell phones and raged that Apple, Google, and other companies "market something expressly to allow people to place themselves beyond the law."

Trump agreed with Comey back then, too, by the way; in 2016, he called for a boycott of Apple until such time as the company helped the FBI break iPhone security.

Apparently, not as much divides these two men as they like to let on.

In public, Trump calls Comey a "disgrace" and Comey fires back at a man he calls a "strange and slightly sad old guy." Butaside from the fact that they're both correct about each other's flawsthat's intramural combat between power addicts over who should wield the power. That the public should be poked, prodded, and intruded upon is a given for Comey and Trump. And it's a sentiment that binds so many of our would-be lords and masters in public office.

The shared nature of official nosiness becomes clear when you remember last November's bipartisan vote to extend the Patriot Act, a measure that the Electronic Frontier Foundation says "broadly expands law enforcement's surveillance and investigative powers and represents one of the most significant threats to civil liberties, privacy, and democratic traditions in US history." Even as Democrats debated impeaching Donald Trumpa move they later approvedthey overwhelmingly joined with the Trump administration to support the surveillance bill's extension.

Trans-partisan hand-holding on surveillance state measures is certainly nothing new among the political class. The Patriot Act originally passed during the presidency of Republican President George W. Bush, but with plenty of cross-aisle support.

"I drafted a terrorism bill after the Oklahoma City bombing," senator and current leading Democratic presidential wannabe Joe Biden boasted to The New Republic after the Patriot Act's passage. "And the bill John Ashcroft sent up was my bill."

Biden's anti-privacy efforts extend back so far that he inspired Phil Zimmermann to complete the development of PGP encryption software.

Later, as vice president, Biden threatened countries that considered offering asylum to surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), another leading contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, frets that the data encrypted communications will "allow companies to hide from 'government spying'such as text messages and chatroom transcriptshave proven to be 'key evidence' in previous regulatory and compliance cases."

It seems Trump and Comey are in good company on the issue. Well, good-ishfor a certain D.C.-centric value of the word.

"Lawmakers are giving big tech firms an ultimatum: Give police access to encrypted communications or we'll force you," The Washington Post reported last month.

"It ain't complicated for me," Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told representatives from Facebook and Apple at a Capitol Hill hearing in December. "You're going to find a way to do this or we're going to do it for you."

"You all have got to get your act together or we will gladly get your act together for you," said Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), who also sits on the judiciary committee.

Ranking Democratic member Dianne Feinstein (Calif.), meanwhile, said she is "determined to see that there is a way that phones can be unlocked when major crimes are committed," whether tech companies like it or not.

And so on. Trump and Comey's frenemy act opposing communications privacy for people who don't draw government paychecks is the rule, not the exception.

Sure, there are some surveillance skeptics and privacy advocates among the political class. But they're rare, and except for a very few civil liberties-oriented and government-skeptic types who are usually on the outs with the real powerbrokers, they're awfully unreliable on the issue.

The problem is that the Trumps, Comeys, Grahams, Bidens, Feinsteins, Blackburns, and Warrens of the world largely agree that the government that defines their lives and gives them importance should be vastly powerful. The rationales they come up with depend on the specific priorities of the politician in question, the cultural moment, and the audience, but they're forever arguing in favor of an intrusive state from which we can keep no secrets.

"It had become clear, to me at least, that the repeated evocations of terror by the political class were not a response to any specific threat or concern but a cynical attempt to turn terror into a permanent danger that required permanent vigilance enforced by unquestionable authority," whistleblower Edward Snowden wrote of his growing awareness of what lay behind the surveillance state in Permanent Record, his 2019 memoir.

Substitute "violent criminal elements" or "criminal action by Wall Street" or "child abusers" or any other justification politicians might come up with if you wish, but it all leads in the same direction. Ultimately, the members of the political class may fight tooth and nail, but it's not over whether Leviathan should paw through our communications. They just disagree over who should be in charge of the pawing.

Read more:
Trump and Comey Are United Against Encrypted Communications - Reason

On January 14 and 15, 2020, the German Federal Constitutional Court will be holding a hearing to reevaluate the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) Act, which gives the BND agency (similar to the National Security Agency in the United States) broad surveillance authority. The hearing comes after a coalition of media and activist organizations including the Gesellschaft fr Freiheistrechte filed a constitutional complaint against the BND for its drag net collection and storage of telecommunications data. This new hearing continues a renewed effort on the part of countries around the world to re-access the high cost of liberty that comes with operating an invasive drag net surveillance program and may increase global pressure on the United States intelligence community.

One of the coalitions leading arguments against massive data collection by the foreign intelligence service is the fear that sensitive communications between sources and journalists may be swept up and made accessible by the government. Surveillance which, purposefully or inadvertently, sweeps up the messages of journalists jeopardizes the integrity and health of a free and functioning press and could chill the willingness of sources or whistleblowers to expose corruption or wrongdoing in the country.

In September 2019, based on similar concerns about the surveillance of journalists, South Africas High Court issued a watershed ruling that the countrys laws do not authorize bulk surveillance. In part, because there were no special protections to ensure that the communications of lawyers and journalists were not also swept up and stored by the government.

In EFFs own landmark case against the NSAs dragnet surveillance program, Jewel v. NSA, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press recently filed an Amicus brief making similar arguments about surveillance in the United States. When the threat of surveillance reaches these sources, the brief argues, there is a real chilling effect on quality reporting and the flow of information to the public.

This new complaint comes years after the revelations of global surveillance coalitions exposed by Edward Snowden, and only two years after a report revealed that BND had surveyed at least 50 phone numbers, fax numbers, and email addresses of known foreign journalists starting in 1999.

In 2016, Germanys Bundestag passed intelligence reform that many argued did not go far enough. Under the post-2016 order, an independent panel oversees the BND and any foreign intelligence collected from international communications networks must be authorized by the chancellor. However, the new reform explicitly allowed surveillance to be conducted on EU states and institutions for the purpose of foreign policy and security, and permitted the BND to collaborate with the NSAboth of which allow for the privacy of foreign individuals to be invaded.

It is worth noting that part of what allows a case like this to move forward is the ability of German citizens to know more about the surveillance programs their nation operates. In the United States, our lawsuit against NSA mass surveillance is being held up by the government argument that it cannot submit into evidence any of the requisite documents necessary to adjudicate the case. In Germany, both the BND Act and its sibling, the G10 Act, as well as their technological underpinnings, are both openly discussed making it easier to confront their legality.

We eagerly await the outcome of the German hearing and hope that the BND will be another fallen domino in the movement to restore global privacy. Meanwhile, EFF will continue to litigate our constitutional challenge to the U.S. governments mass surveillance of telephone and internet communications and will complete briefing in the Ninth circuit in late January 2020.

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The German Constitutional Court Will Revisit the Question of Mass Surveillance, Will the U.S.? - EFF

Australias Pine Gap spy base likely involved in the assassination of Qassem Suleimani By Patrick OConnor 14 January 2020

In the aftermath of the illegal assassination of Iranian General Qassem Suleimani on January 2, no-one within the Australian media and political establishment has raised the question as to whether the Pine Gap spy base in central Australia played a role in the killing.

If it did so, senior Australian government officials are implicated in war crimes. The failure of the press and the opposition Labor Party to demand an explanation from the government of Prime Minister Scott Morrison is another demonstration of the ruling elite closing ranks behind US imperialism. The Morrison government, with the tacit backing of Labor leader Anthony Albanese, has responded to Washingtons drive for war against Iran by doubling down on its support for US imperialism in the Middle East and internationally (see Australian government backs US provocations against Iran).

The Pine Gap facility began operations in 1970, when it was falsely billed as a space research centre. In reality it functioned as a major signals intelligence gathering facility for the US, primarily directed against the Soviet Union. Since the end of the Cold War, Pine Gaps role has expanded further, with additional infrastructure built at the desert site and hundreds of extra staff hired. According to intelligence expert Professor Des Ball of the Australian National University, Pine Gap has been used to intercept long-distance phone calls, satellite transmissions, anti-missile signals, and ballistic missile electronic communications.

In addition to this, American National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed in documents published in 2017 that Pine Gap has, over the last two decades, played a critical role in assisting US military operations, including identifying targets for missile attacks and drone assassinations.

An August 2012 NSA site profile of Pine Gap stated that it has a special section, known as the geopit, equipped with a number of tools available for performing geolocations. The document, which used the US intelligence codename RAINFALL for the Pine Gap facility, explained: RAINFALL detects, collects, records, processes, analyses and reports on PROFORMA signals collected from tasked entities, it stated. PROFORMA signals are communications data of radar and weapons systems, such as surface-to-surface missiles, anti-aircraft artillery and fighter aircraft.

This revelation followed the publication of other documents courageously leaked by Snowden in 2013 that showed that Pine Gap played a central role within a NSA program codenamed X-XKeyscore, that collects electronic data on people around the world, permanently storing phone numbers, email addresses, log-ins and user activity. As part of the Five Eyes global intelligence networkled by the US and including Australia, Britain, Canada, and New ZealandAustralian intelligence agencies have high-level access to the NSA data, including on Australian citizens.

The Snowden revelations confirmed previous media reports of Pine Gaps role in US drone assassination operations.

In July 2013, journalist Phillip Dorling wrote an article for the Age and Sydney Morning Herald, based on unnamed sources, including former Pine Gap personnel. He explained that Pine Gap allowed the US military to process intercepted electronic communications and provide target information to the US military within minutes.

Dorling reported that the Pentagon was critically dependent on Pine Gap for locating targets marked for extrajudicial execution by President Barack Obama. The facility provides information that feeds into the United States drone strike program and other military operations, with personnel sitting in airconditioned offices in central Australia directly linked, on a minute-by-minute basis, to US and allied military operations in Afghanistan and, indeed, anywhere else across the eastern hemisphere.

Given this record, it would be unusual if Pine Gap intelligence played no role at all in the US assassination of General Qassem Suleimani, leader of the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Details about the hit operation continue to emerge. According to the New York Times, a US MQ-9 Reaper drone fired two missiles at a convoy of vehicles that was departing Baghdad airport, near an air cargo terminal. The bombing killed Suleimani, as well as Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, of the Iraqi government-backed Popular Mobilisation Forces, and at least three other people. Iran responded by last Wednesday launching limited missile operations against two US military bases in Iraq, in Erbil and Ain al-Assad airbase in Anbar province.

The ratcheting up of tensions has paved the way for the Trump administration to prepare a devastating war of aggression against Iran, threatening a far wider conflagration engulfing the primary targets of US imperialism, Russia and China (see Trump bides his time, but the preparations for war against Iran will continue).

The Australian government is complicit in the drive to war. Canberra has been directly involved in every US provocation in the Middle East in recent decades, including the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq from 2003. Now the government, again without challenge from within the political establishment, is preparing to line up with an even greater war crime, the US-led regime change offensive against Iran.

The assassination of Suleimani underscores the urgent need for the development of an internationally unified antiwar movement. In Australia, among the primary demands of such a movement will be the immediate and unconditional end to the US-Australia military alliance and the closure of all US-connected military and intelligence bases, including Pine Gap.

The author recommends:

Australian spy base critical to Obamas drone assassinations[22 July 2013]

Snowden confirms Australian agencies involved in NSA global spying[10 July 2013]

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Australia's Pine Gap spy base likely involved in the assassination of Qassem Suleimani - World Socialist Web Site

LONDON (Reuters) - As the 1st Brigade Combat Team of the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division departed for the Middle East amid rising tensions with Iran, their divisional commander gave a simple order. All personnel entering the region were told to leave smartphones and personal devices in the United States.

It was a clear sign of growing official nervousness over the potential vulnerability of items that had become an unquestioned fact of life for soldiers and civilians alike, but which Washington fears potential foes could track, exploit and use for targeting. Such concerns are far from new, but were regarded less seriously when Americas primary enemies were seen as non-state groups such as Islamic State, the Taliban and al Qaeda. Now Washington is worried about other nations not just Iran, but Russia and China which are seen as a much more existential threat.

It also points to a much greater trend. Across the board, the communications revolution and the vast sea of data it produces has made surveillance much easier, a trend likely to be magnified by the growth of artificial intelligence. It has also facilitated the mass leaking of phenomenal amounts of information, as demonstrated by NSA contractor Edward Snowden. And simultaneously, it has overturned decades of tradecraft in espionage and associated fields, where despite the rise in fake news and online trickery, spy agencies like the CIA now reportedly find it almost impossible to maintain the multiple false identities on which they once relied.

The foundations of the business of espionage have been shattered, former CIA official Duyane Norman said in a Yahoo news report, which outlined how foreign governments have become much better at tracking real and covert U.S. identities through phone and bank records, facial recognition and even the records of off-the-shelf DNA tests. The debate [within the intelligence community] is like the one surrounding climate change. Anyone who says otherwise just isnt looking at the facts.

For military commanders, the options are also becoming limited. In Russias war with Ukraine, Moscows forces have shown remarkable skill in targeting counterparts on the battlefield as soon as they use their phones or radios. According to the U.S.-based Military Times, the U.S. Marine Corps already bans troops from taking personal devices on Middle East combat deployments. The U.S. Navy says it is reconsidering its rules, while the Army says such decisions - as with the 82nd Airborne - are at the personal discretion of commanders.

Decisions are inevitably compromises. Taking away devices reduces the ability of personnel not just to talk to their families, but can complicate communications and organization. But concerns are growing fast. This month, the Pentagon also demanded personnel stop using the Chinese-owned TikTok application, with other similar platforms including WhatsApp also added to some blacklists.

Reducing careless talk and unnecessary radio and other emissions is hardly new. As far back as World War One, British commanders discovered telephone systems in forward trenches had often been compromised by German signallers and did everything they could to ensure the most sensitive messages were instead carried by hand or word-of-mouth. Naval vessels, military aircraft and particularly submarines have long done everything possible to mask their signatures, particularly near enemy territory. Recent years, however, have seen growing lapses, including from those who might have been expected to know better.

In early 2018, data released by fitness app Strava identified assorted U.S., Russian and even Iranian secret bases in Syria where military personnel and contractors appeared to have recorded their exercise runs without realizing they would be highlighted and widely shared. The U.S. military has now gone so far as to incorporate such mistakes into training exercises, killing off an entire unit in one drill after a soldier posted a selfie photo whose geo-tagging gave away their position.

Authorities are also nervous about non-accidental release of information. This November, White House and military staff removed smartphones from reporters and presidential aides for the duration of President Donald Trumps unannounced Thanksgiving trip to Afghanistan, which appeared as much about ensuring the news did not leak as worries the phones themselves might be tracked.

In terms of the latter, the greatest threat will come when artificial intelligence and voice recognition software reach the point where phones can be used to monitor nearby conversations without use of a human analyst or translator. That may come sooner rather than later one reason why some security experts are extremely nervous about Chinese firm Huawei being at the heart of 5G phone networks in several European countries. That may include Britain, due to make its own choice soon. This week, the head of Britains Security Service told the Financial Times he believed that risk can be managed without barring the Chinese firm altogether. U.S. counterparts, however, are much more cautious.

For authoritarian states like China and Iran, both witnessing a major spike in often smartphone-coordinated protest and unrest, being able to access and track electronic devices and the population at large is seen as a priority. Most notably in Xinjiang province but also across the country, Beijing is turning China into the most sophisticated surveillance state in human history. Within its borders, China already has considerable, sometimes almost exhaustive, access to data and devices. Faster and more incisive artificial intelligence and machine learning will dramatically extend that reach.

The question for Western states will be how effectively their potential foes can repurpose that technology to gather information outside their borders. The United States and its allies have become used to being able to use whatever devices and communications they wished since the Berlin wall fell. Those days are ending fast.

*** Peter Apps is a writer on international affairs, localization, conflict and other issues. He is the founder and executive director of the Project for Study of the 21st Century; PS21, a non-national, non-partisan, non-ideological think tank. Paralysed by a war-zone car crash in 2006, he also blogs about his disability and other topics. Hewas previously areporter for Reuters and continues to be paid by ThomsonReuters. Since 2016, he has been a member of the British Army Reserve and the UK Labour Party, and is an active fundraiser for the party.

(The opinions expressed here are those of the author, a columnist for Reuters)

Originally posted here:
In next war, soldiers will leave their smartphones at home: Peter Apps - Reuters

Shortly after Iran lobbed two-dozen missiles into two U.S. military bases in Iraq last week, the country's foreign minister tweeted that Iran had "concluded" its "proportionate" response to the assassination of Major General Qassem Soleimani.

Few people in the U.S. military are taking this statement at face value. Iran is likely to step up its harassment of the U.S. using its network of proxy groups in the Middle East and elsewhere. If history is any guide, that response will include cyber attacks against the U.S. government, companies and high-profile individualsand possibly even the 2020 elections.

"I don't think Iran is finished," says Jon Bateman, a former Iran expert at the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency and now a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The door is open, he says, to "follow-on actions that are more covert or more plausibly deniable. Cyber classically is one of the tools."

Although Iran isn't considered to be one of the world's most formidable cyber threatsits program lags behind Russia's and China'sthe nation is still capable of causing a great deal of disruption. Its past cyber attacks have been characterized by unpredictability, and it's unclear how much its capabilities have improved in recent years.

It's been a decade since Iran weathered a sophisticated cyber-attack that set its nuclear weapons program back on its heels. The U.S. and Israel are widely thought to have launched an astonishingly intelligent bit of malware called Stuxnet, which was small enough to fit on a thumb drive but smart enough to wend its way like a heat-seeking missile through the internet to penetrate Tehran's heavily-fortified nuclear program. Not only did Stuxnet destroy uranium centrifuges, used to make bomb-grade uranium, it disguised itself by creating a false appearance of normalcy to the engineers who monitored the equipmentuntil it was too late. "Iran... has demonstrated a clear ability to learn from the capabilities and actions of others," said an NSA report released by Edward Snowden and reported in 2013 by The Intercept.

Heightened tensions in the aftermath of the Suleimani killing have U.S. cyber experts worried about Iran-backed cyber attacks in the months to come.

The big worries

The most worrying cyber threat from Iran are those that could result in a loss of life. In this respect, Iran is capable of using hackers to support some kind of conventional military action, such as a bombing or the assassination of an individual or a kidnapping. It could also use cyber espionage or data collection techniques to monitor the movement of troops, ships or planes in the Middle east and target them for attack.

To conduct a targeted assassination, Iran would need to bring together a variety of streams of intelligence. Infecting mobile phones with malware would give it access to a cornucopia of informationincluding potentially the real-time whereabouts of targets. A phone hack could provide what experts call "pattern of life" informationwhere an individual tends to go, and whenthat could be used to predict a target's whereabouts. By gaining access to phone calls, emails, text message and contact lists, hackers could even manipulate a target to walk unwittingly into a trap. "Iran has conducted many targeted killings abroad through its proxies and, perhaps, directly," says Bateman. "In 2020 that would include a cyber element. Any state would use that."

Installing malware on a mobile devices is not as hard as you might think. The simplest method is through "social engineering"tricking targets into divulging compromising information such as passwords or, as Russian operatives did with Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta in 2016, installing malware. In recent years, popular messaging apps WhatsApp and iMessage have had "no-click" vulnerabilitiessoftware bugs allow hackers to implant malware simply by sending a message, without requiring any action on the part of the target. Although these particular no-click vulnerabilities have since been patched, there could be others. Iran is not known to have exploited these vulnerabilities in the past, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't in the future.

Disinformation campaigns

Another worry is that Iran could generate disinformation for the purposes of inspiring violence. In recent months, Iran-backed groups have used social media to share false data about the U.S. militaryone widely-circulated claim was that U.S. Marines had arrested an Iraqi Parliamentarian, says Bateman. "Actions that kind of foment anger and distrust of U.S. forces and incite violence against them would be concerning," he says.

Although Iran doesn't have the kind of massive misinformation apparatus in place to sow division, the way Russia did in the run-up to 2016, it's conceivable that Iran could seek to influence the 2020 election, if it wanted to, by other means. Iran has good cyber-attack chops in breaking and entering computer systems. These skills could be useful for finding and leaking sensitive informationsimilar to Russia's hack of the Democratic National Committee in 2016. Security experts suspect that Iran was behind the 2015 attack on the Saudi Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which uncovered confidential diplomatic cables that were subsequently leaked, according to Bateman.

Iran was already caught once trying to hack the Trump campaign. In October, Microsoft reported that a hacker group called Phosphorous, which it believes is linked to the Iranian government, made more than 2700 attempts to identify email accounts and attacked 241 of them, including some associated with a U.S. political campaign. The Wall Street Journal later reported that the campaign under attack was Trump's. The hackers had succeeded in breaking into four accounts, none directly linked to the campaign, before Microsoft shut it down. "This effort suggests Phosphorus is highly motivated and willing to invest significant time and resources engaging in research and other means of information gathering," Microsoft said in its October statement.

Iran could also pose a plausible threat to voting machines. Although the U.S. election system is fragmented, Iran could try to compromise voting infrastructure in key districts, spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt. Undermining Americans' faith in the legitimacy of the election could be even more destabilizing than tampering with the actual vote results.

Experts say that such a tactic would be out of character for Iran, which in the past hasn't shown much interest in the U.S. political election system. From Iran's point of view, there isn't much difference between the policies of the two U.S. parties. "Iran sees a consistent four-decade-long pressure campaign that has bipartisan approval," says Bateman. "But the killing of Soleimani is more personal than previous U.S. actions because of the relationship he had with the Supreme Leader [Ayotallah Ali Khamenei], so I wouldn't rule out something that sought to embarrass or harm Donald Trump personally."

Soft corporate targets

Disrupting corporations is both in character for Iran and well within its current cyber capabilities. Although Iran wouldn't be able to make much headway with tech giants like Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft, myriad other organizations are vulnerable to hacking, including many banks, chemical plants, oil refineries, pharmaceutical companies, water treatment plans and the electrical grid. It's likely that Iran has been installing malware in such organizations over the past decade, to lie dormant for many years until the right moment. "It's called 'preparing the battlefield'," says Steven Bellovin, a computer-science professor at Columbia University in New York who consults for defense organizations. "You wait, like sleeper cells, until you have three or four chemical plants and a couple of power plants, and then you act."

The malware would presumably activate on a signal from Iran and then proceed to carry out a coordinated cyber attack. This could take many forms. In a power plant, malware could cause turbines to spin so erratically that they eventually broke down--which is exactly how Stuxnet took out the uranium centrifuges--shutting down portions of the grid. In a pharmaceutical company, malware could change dosages in pills coming off a factory line, sowing panic.

It's unlikely that Iran has the capacity for waging a cyber war that results in significant loss of life, experts say. For instance, although it could use malware to damage power plants, it would not likely be able to cause damage on enough of a scale to create a prolonged outage of the U.S. electrical grid. "A real cyber war would destroy critical infrastructure, killing potentially millions of people," says Scott Borg, director of the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit, a non-profit research group specializing in cyber security. "If we're totally talking about real cyber war, Iran has no capability."

The Stuxnet malware is also not likely to be replicated by Iran's engineers. That weapon required more than just expert programming: it required a massive amount of intelligence gathering to figure out how to launch the virus to the exact computer chips the Iranian nuclear engineers had built into their uranium centrifuges. Iran simply doesn't have the expertise or the resources to develop malware on such a scale, experts believe. "Cyber weapons, or malware, aren't as simple as just picking a gun off the street that someone has dropped and then loading it and firing it yourself," says Bateman. "A cyber operation is a complex sequence of events, in which you need to understand, and penetrate, a specific target and work your way up to a specific effect you'd like to achieve."

Learning curve

One factor working against Iran's cyber capabilities, says Borg, is distrust of the government. Although Iran possesses considerable talent in the realm of computing, most capable hackers in Iran and its diaspora don't see eye-to-eye with the Ayatollah, and therefore they withhold cooperation. "The Iran hacker groups are more moderate politically," he says. "It's hard to acquire technological expertise without becoming a little cosmopolitan and moderate."

"But if you could offend them enough to get them to rally around their leaders," he says, "Iran could become a formidable cyber power in a short timea matter of months."

See more here:
This Is What an Iranian Cyberattack On The US Would Look Like - Newsweek

To the Editor:In 1961 Philip Roth wrote about the difficulty a writer has trying to understand and then describe, and then make credible much of the American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally, it is even a kind of embarrassment to ones own meager imaginationThe daily newspapersfill me with wonder and awethe fixes, the scandals, the insanities, the treacheries, the idiocies, the lies, the pieties, the noise

That was then. What about now?

President Trump was impeached in December by the House of Representatives. Every Republican in the House opposed the two articles of impeachment. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he was not an impartial juror, and would closely coordinate any Senate trial with the White House.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi as late as September rejected impeachment. It was just not worth it. She changed her mind only after a CIA whistleblowers complaint became public, and then proceeded to narrow the impeachment investigation to the Ukraine scandal.

This ignored the Mueller Report, which found 10 possible obstructions of justice by Trump, in its investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election.

The Speakers strategy follows the advice of Lawrence Welk who said, You have to play what the people understand. Isnt it a pity that Pelosi believes the American people are not capable of understanding that Trumps pattern of behavior for three years makes him, in the words of Laurence Tribe, a serial abuser of power and someone who has committed many impeachable acts?

It was a mistake that the Democrats didnt make the broadest case for impeachment, especially in the wake of the assassination of Qassim Suleimani, and the possibility of war with Iran. Our Commander in Chief was described by John Kelly as an idiot, who said it was pointless to try to convince him of anything. Eliot Cohen concluded that any level-headed observer could see Trumps deficiencies, outlook and experience made him unfit for office.

The president has made well over 13,000 false or misleading claims. He has publicly asked not only the Ukraine, but also Russia and China to provide incriminating evidence on his political opponent.

Twenty women have accused him of rape, sexual assault or sexual harassment.

Trump has granted clemency to Edward Gallagher, a Navy Seal, and two other soldiers who were accused or convicted of war crimes. He makes decisions based on information learned each day from Fox News, and recently took credit for the opening of an Apple factory in Texas that had opened in 2013.

During the impeachment hearings, The New York Times published drawings by one of the terrorists behind the 9/11 attacks, showing how he had been tortured by the CIA. There was also a report in The Washington Post which documented that high-level officials in the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations repeatedly lied about progress in the 18-year war in Afghanistan and hid evidence that the war was unwinnable. In 1971, The Pentagon Papers similarly revealed that every President from Truman to Johnson (Nixon continued this tradition) had lied to the American people about the Vietnam War.

Speaker Pelosi, in justifying the impeachment of Trump because of the Ukraine scandal, said Our democracy is what is at stake. His actions are in defiance of the vision of our Founders, and the oath of office that he takes to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.

If democracy is at stake when Trump violates his oath of office, why wasnt it at stake for Democrats and Republicans in Congress when the Bush Administration lied about WMDs in Iraq, committed war crimes after 9/11 when the CIA carried out torture and renditions to black sites of suspected terrorists, and authorized illegal warrantless wiretaps? Speaker Pelosi recently admitted she was under pressure to begin impeachment proceedings against Bush for invading Iraq. However, she rejected this pressure, saying, I just didnt want it to be a way of life in our country.

Why wasnt democracy also at stake when the Obama Administration decided not to hold the Bush administration and the CIA accountable for its abuses of power in the war against terror and the war in Iraq, and when it failed to hold anyone accountable for the National Security Administration abuses revealed by Edward Snowden, who was immediately charged with violating the Espionage Act?

Who can make sense of all of this in a country that Philip Roth, decades ago described as an unreal environment, a distressing cultural and political predicament and the indigenous American berserk?

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The Treachery, the Idiocy | Letters to the Editor - The Chief-Leader

A senior adviser at Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, also known as FinCEN, pleaded guilty to conspiracy for leaking the Trump campaign's confidential banking information to a reporter at BuzzFeed News.

Natalie Edwards, 41, entered the plea in a Manhattan federal court and could be sentenced to five years in prison. The plea deal she reached with prosecutors will keep her from serving little or no time behind bars.

Edwards leaked thousands of confidential banking records known as Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs). Banks must file those reports if they believe certain transactions raise questions about financial wrongdoing. The SARs were from records of various campaign officials under investigation, including Paul Manafort.

Fox News:

As law enforcement swooped in, she wascarrying a government-issued USB flash drivecontainingnot only thousands of SARs, but also "highlysensitive material relating to Russia, Iran, and the terrorist group known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant," prosecutors said.

"Edwards is not known to be involved in any official FinCEN project or task bearing these file titles or code names," prosecutors said at the time.

Prosecutors say there were about a dozen articles in BuzzFeed over the past 18 months that were based on information in the SARs. Edwards apparently transmitted the documents via images taken by her cellphone and then texted using an encrypted application.

She was a very helpful source for the reporter.

When the judge asked her if she knew she was committing a crime, Edwards said she did not "know of the regulation" at the time but she knew about the federal Whistleblower Protection Act.

After consulting with her lawyer, Marc Agnifilo, she said she admitted that she agreed to disclose the SARs.

Prosecutors believe her motive was political.

He said prosecutors were "probably of the view that she was more politically motivated than she was for some conception like the good of our republic."

Agnifilo said his client believed "certain critical facts" weren't being handled in the right way by the government agencies tasked with handling them.

Yes, just because you mean well doesn't save you if you break the law -- a fact that Julian Assange and Edward Snowden should take to heart. Assange and Snowden believe that because their motives for leaking were pure, they shouldn't be prosecuted. They took it upon themselves to expose their idea of corruption in the arrogant belief that they had a corner on truth.

Edwards may have been motivated by nothing more than Trump-hatred. She had no high moral goals to satisfy. Hers was a partisan political act, not the actions of a "whistleblower."

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Ex-Treasury Official Pleads Guilty to Leaking Trump Campaign Financial Records | News and Politics - PJ Media