Border emergency declaration; hacking Dublin’s tram system; Rep. Steve King’s bigotry, and more

What the Dublin tram system hack reveals about the future of hostage taking (Danielle Gilbert, Just Security)
Imagine hackers commandeered a capital city’s transit system, holding it hostage for a cryptocurrency ransom. Consider the implications of this attack: beyond a data breach, it raises serious questions about the security of transportation and infrastructure in modern cities. This isn’t the latest plot from Black Mirror. This really happened last week with an attack on the website of Dublin’s tram system Luas. On January 3rd, hackers posted a message on the Luas homepage, threatening to publish the site’s private data unless they received one bitcoin in ransom. This is not the newsiest of hacks — the tram system is still fully operational, and the demand of a single bitcoin, currently around $4,000, is small for a ransom. But there are reasons to pay attention to this story — not for the impact of the hack itself, but instead, for what it tells us about the future of extortion.
Here are four risks highlighted by the Luas attack.

How “Project Birmingham” spread misinformation in the 2017 Alabama Senate election (NPR)
It was a stunning upset in a deeply red state. Democrat Doug Jones beat his Republican opponent, Roy Moore, in the 2017 Alabama Senate race, a special election held to fill former Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ seat. The contest drew national attention after Republican candidate Roy Moore was accused of sexual assault and misconduct with teenage girls. Now, reporting following the race has focused on the controversial strategy used by one pro-Jones group called Project Birmingham.

When free societies copy Russian media tactics, there’s only one winner (James Ball, Guardian)
The Integrity Initiative debacle, in which this writer was named in leaked files, shows that western efforts to counter misinformation must be open

Steve King’s bigotry is the antithesis of American ideals (Jonah Goldberg, National Review)
In our civilization, we’re supposed to judge people on their individual merits, not keep score based on their ancestry.
As a percentage of its population, Iowa sent more troops to fight in the Civil War than any other state. Iowans fought on the side of the Union against the Confederate South. Abraham Lincoln, the president of the United States and the commander in chief of Union forces, was the first Republican president.
So it seems odd (to me, at least) that a Republican congressman from Iowa would display a Confederate flag on his desk. But that’s what Representative Steve King did as recently as 2016. (He removed it only after it was revealed that a cop-killer had waved a Confederate flag at an Iowa high-school football game.)
I’m not one of those people who think everyone who displays a Confederate flag is necessarily a racist or a bigot. But I usually reserve the benefit of the doubt for actual southerners who are nodding to tradition or nostalgia.
If there’s one thing King has not earned, it’s the benefit of the doubt. Even accounting for an IQ that seems to be in conflict with the idea that white people are superior, the man understands what he’s up to.
In an interview with the New York Times published Thursday, King asked: “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive? Why did I sit in classes teaching me about the merits of our history and our civilization?”
The obvious answer is because he needed an education — and still does.
….
One is reminded of Benjamin Disraeli’s famous retort to an Irish Catholic parliamentarian’s anti-Semitic attack on his heritage: “Yes, I am a Jew, and when the ancestors of the right honorable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon.”
But this is the wrong way to respond to King’s bigotry. Among the best ideas and ideals of Western, Christian, and, most importantly, American civilization is that we are supposed to judge people on their individual merits, not keep score based on their ancestry.
This vision was central to the creation of the Republican party, which is why it’s so dismaying that Representative King calls himself one.