Vaccination timebomb; no facial recognition for SF police; LA fire season beginning, and more

Worryingly, only 41 per cent trust the current range of official information available, with 15 per cent believing information is ‘promoted by drug companies’.
Dr. Helen Bedford, Professor of Children’s Health at UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health said: “While the majority of parents are happy to vaccinate, the rapid rise of anti-vaccination scares on social media is causing many to now question the need for vaccines.
“Due to a long-standing successful vaccination programme, as a nation we have forgotten the terrible toll these diseases can take on children.
“While the anti-vaccination sites may concentrate on perceived side-effects, they don’t show the real and often life-changing impact of catching a disease we vaccinate for.”

San Francisco may ban police, city use of facial recognition (Matt O’brien And Janie Har, AP)
San Francisco police say they stopped testing face recognition in 2017. Spokesman David Stevenson said in a statement the department looks forward to “developing legislation that addresses the privacy concerns of technology while balancing the public safety concerns of our growing, international city.”

A Cisco router bug has massive global implications (Lily Hay Newman, Wired)
The Cisco 1001-X series router doesn’t look much like the one you have in your home. It’s bigger and much more expensive, responsible for reliable connectivity at stock exchanges, corporate offices, your local mall, and so on. The devices play a pivotal role at institutions, in other words, including some that deal with hypersensitive information. Now, researchers are disclosing a remote attack that would potentially allow a hacker to take over any 1001-X router and compromise all the data and commands that flow through it.
And it only gets worse from there.

China to bid on D.C. Metro rail deal as national security hawks circle (Reuters)
China’s CRRC plans to bid on a big Washington D.C. subway project as it doubles down on a charm campaign in the United States to quash a rising chorus of critics who have cast the rail car maker as a threat to cyber security and U.S. industry.

Los Angeles fire season is beginning again. And it will never end. (David Wallace-Wells, New York Magazine)
A bulletin from our climate future.

Algeria and America: A complicated past, an uncertain future (Bruce Riedel, Brookings)
The ongoing popular demonstrations in Algeria, which have toppled the regime of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, are perhaps the most important political dynamics in the Arab world today. The demise of the old regime, still far from complete, in the largest country in the Arab world and in Africa, is important to American interests in both. The United States has had a complex relationship with the Algerians in the modern era; it’s unfortunately unlikely the Trump administration will be a helpful factor in Algeria’s quest for political reform.

How Trump might designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization (Scott R. Anderson, Lawfare)
According to the New York Times, members of the Trump administration—including the president himself—are once again pushing to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization, an idea that has been circulating among some of the president’s policy advisers for years. This most recent effort appears to be the result of an April 9 meeting between Trump and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who has helped lead a global campaign against the Muslim Brotherhood. Experts outside the government—and reportedly within it—have objected that such action would do little to advance counterterrorism efforts while alienating Muslims around the world and potentially harming Muslim organizations in the United States.

Is Trump yet another U.S. president provoking a war? (Robin Wright, New Yorker)
The United States has a long history of provoking, instigating, or launching wars based on dubious, flimsy, or manufactured threats. Today, the question in Washington—and surely in Tehran, too—is whether President Trump is making moves that will provoke, instigate, or inadvertently drag the United States into a war with Iran.

White House mulls plan to send up to 120,000 troops to Iran: NYT (Julia Arciga, Daily Beast)
Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan presented an updated plan to President Trump’s top national-security aides that potentially sends as many as 120,000 troops to the Middle East if Iran attacks U.S. forces or accelerates its work on nuclear weapons, The New York Times reports. National Security Adviser John Bolton ordered Shanahan to update the plan, which was presented at a meeting last week and does not call for a land invasion of Iran. Deploying the 120,000 troops was reportedly the “uppermost option” of the plan, and it was estimated to take “weeks or months” to execute. While the plan was presented, it is not clear if Trump was briefed on the plan’s details or if he would support it. Spokesmen for Shanahan and Gen. Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reportedly declined to comment. Garrett Marquis, a National Security Council spokesman, told the newspaper Monday the U.S.“does not seek war with Iran,” but said the administration would be “ready to defend U.S. personnel and interests in the region.” The troop figure—120,000—would “approach” the number deployed when the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, the Times reports. When Trump was asked if he wanted regime change Iran, he told reporters Monday that he’ll “see what happens” in the country. “If they do anything, it would be a very bad mistake,” he said.