Our picksISIS propaganda & Google Plus; Amazon & facial recognition; Conspiracy theorist in the dock, and more

Pro-ISIS propaganda finds fertile ground on Google Plus platform (Ali Breland, The Hill)
Scores of pro-ISIS accounts and communities have found a home on Google Plus despite being purged from other social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, according to a review by The Hill.

What has DHS learned from phases 1 and 2 of CDM? (Derek B. Johnson, FCW)
Halfway through a four-phase implementation, feds running the Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation program want to retool the process to ensure the back half runs smoother than the front half did.

Amazon pushes facial recognition to police. Critics see surveillance risk. (Nick Wingfield, New York Times)
In late 2016, Amazon introduced a new online service that could help identify faces and other objects in images, offering it to anyone at a low cost through its giant cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services. Not long after, it began pitching the technology to law enforcement agencies, saying the program could aid criminal investigations by recognizing suspects in photos and videos. That aggressive push is putting the giant tech company at the center of an increasingly heated debate around the role of facial recognition in law enforcement.

Pentagon bans personal devices from classified areas (Jack Corrigan, Defense One)
That includes phones, smartwatches and other devices that can transmit, store and receive data.

Questions remain on Energy’s cyber shop (Mark Rockwell, FCW)
There is bipartisan support to fund the Energy Department’s new cybersecurity office, some on Capitol Hill want more tangibles.

6 Sandy Hook families, FBI agent sue Alex Jones for Defamation (Sebastian Murdock, Huffington Post)
The lawsuit is the latest of several targeting the Infowars conspiracy theorist.

How North Korean hackers became the world’s greatest bank robbers (Patrick Winn, Medium)
The Reconnaissance General Bureau, North Korea’s equivalent to the CIA, has trained up the world’s greatest bank-robbing crews. In just the past few years, RGB hackers have struck more than 100 banks and cryptocurrency exchanges around the world, pilfering more than $650 million. That we know of.

U.S. State Department on alert after possible “sonic attack” in China (Adam K. Raymond, New York Magazine)
In an episode that recalls the so-called “sonic attacks” in Cuba from 2016 and 2017, a U.S. State Department employee in China has suffered a mild traumatic brain injury after reporting “subtle and vague, but abnormal, sensations of sound and pressure,” according to a health alert issued Wednesday.