Our picksSchool shooting as homeland security issue?; TSA’s facial recognition pilot; Section 702, and more

A way forward on Section 702 queries (Elizabeth Goitein, Robert Litt, Lawfare)
The legislative debate over Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act has ended with passage of a six-year reauthorization that omitted many of the provisions privacy advocates had argued were necessary. But the legal and policy debate is likely to continue in the U.S. and in European courts.

Should we rethink school shootings as a homeland security threat? (CBS News)
More than 400 people have been shot since the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting in 2012 that rocked the nation, according to a New York Times analysis. A Washington Post analysis discovered more than 150,000 students at 170 schools have been touched by a shooting since the Columbine High School shooting in Colorado nearly two decades ago. But such attacks, taking place at the nation’s K-12 schools — unlike terrorism — are not listed as priority threats to homeland security.

Rubio calls for firearm task force (Mark Caputo, Politico)
Responding to his critics in the wake of Florida’s latest mass shooting, Sen. Marco Rubio says a task force of experts should examine the “epidemic” of mass shootings and expressed concern that Congress essentially bans federally funded research into firearm violence. Rubio said he was unaware that some of the research work of a task force could be hampered by a federal budget amendment, first passed in 1996 and approved yearly since, that restricts federal funding for research on gun violence and has led to a de facto ban.

Schools field security questions following Florida shooting (Nevonne Mcdaniels, Wenatchee World)
‘We lock doors, we train and practice safety procedures and have switched from hiding during a potential shooter to flee, hide or fight, depending on the situation.’

Iowa lawmakers pull gun bill after Florida deadly shooting (Rod Boshart, The Gazette)
Committee Chairman Sen. Brad Zaun, R-Urbandale, said he made the decision to pull the gun bill from Thursday’s debate list after receiving indications the Iowa House did not plan to debate the issue this year.

U.S. Customs wants to use your face as a boarding pass (Jack Corrigan, Nextgov)
By 2022, the agency plans to use biometrics to identify 97 percent of travelers flying out of the country.

TSA’s facial recognition pilot program may make travel worse for ethnic minorities (Rosie Spinks, Quartz)
Where the technology currently stands, face recognition doesn’t work the same for everyone. As CAPA Center for Aviation noted, “face recognition software is not so good at identifying ethnic minorities when most of the subjects used in training the technology were from the majority group.”

“Just an ass-backward tech company”: How twitter lost the internet war (Maya Kosoff, Vanity Fair)
Twitter faces more challenges than most technology companies: ISIS terrorists, trolls, bots, and Donald Trump. But its last line of defense, the company’s head of trust and safety, Del Harvey, isn’t making things easier. “Del overcomplicates things … and you can see that in the way some of these things are handled publicly.”

Horsepox synthesis: A case of the unilateralist’s curse? (Gregory Lewis, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists)
The publication last month of Canadian researcher Ryan Noyce’s horsepox work has proven controversial. Noyce and his colleagues have argued that demonstrating the feasibility of synthesizing horsepox will inform and advance the biosecurity conversation around smallpox. Others—such as Tom Inglesby, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security—have disagreed: Generating a risk to show it is indeed risky seems a dangerous path, and the potential benefits of a better smallpox vaccine may prove poor compensation for the increased possibility that a malicious actor could cause an artificial smallpox outbreak. Beyond the immediate issue of whether the horsepox work should have been performed (or published), the horsepox synthesis story highlights a more general challenge facing dual-use research in biotechnology: the unilateralist’s curse.