New York City’s digital front line | Maryland’s cyberdefenses | States & climate change

The city created its own Cyber Command by way of Executive Order in July 2017.  That organization is charged with leading the city’s cyber defense efforts and Geoff Brown is the man leading that charge.  The Cipher Brief’s soon-to-be-announced Cyber Initiatives Group spoke with Brown about the challenges associated with building a centralized organization that will keep New Yorkers safe from cyber threats.

Sovereign Citizen tells judge “Fuck You” after allegedly stalking mayor over 5G conspiracy theory (Kelly Weill, Daily Beast)
Christopher Bruce of South Dakota has no use for the law. The law doesn’t care.

Bolton: China continuing cyberattacks on government, private networks (Bill Gertz, Washington Free Beacon)
U.S. ramping up offensive cyberattacks to deter foreign adversaries

Trump accidentally undercuts his own “deep state” FBI conspiracy theory (Aaron Rupar, Vox)
Trump thinks Obama had it out for him in 2016. George Stephanopoulos debunked that idea with one question.
During an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulosthat aired in full on Sunday, President Donald Trump accidentally undercut the conspiracy theory he’s been pushing about how the Obama-era FBI leadership purportedly conspired to keep him from winning the 2016 election.
After Trump demeaned top FBI brass as “lowlives,” claimed that the entire investigation into Russian interference and his campaign’s role in it was “a setup” that President Barack Obama “must have known about,” and referenced an August 2016 text message in which then-FBI agent Peter Strzok mentioned “an insurance policy,” Stephanopoulos asked him a critical question.
“If they were determined to prevent you from becoming president, why wouldn’t they leak it beforehand?” he said.
But instead of pushing back, Trump acknowledged that Stephanopoulos’s premise was correct.
“You know what, you’d have to ask them,” Trump said. “And you know what — had that gone out before the election, I don’t think I would have had enough time to defend myself.”
In other words, even Trump agrees that had top FBI officials leaked word about the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia being under investigation in the months leading up to the election, it likely would have been fatal to his presidential hopes.

Maine GOP vice chair channels “White Genocide” conspiracy theories (Jared Holt. RightWingWatch)
Maine Republican Party Vice Chair Nick Isgro warned viewers of a livestream on Facebook that abortion providers were given subsidies “so we can kill our own people” while “global elites” bring immigrants into America “to be used for our own destruction.”
In a Facebook Live video uploadedto the “Restore Maine’s Future” page on Facebook last weekend, Isgro told viewers that the state of Maine was suffering an “absolute crisis.” Isgro said that sanctuary city policies in Portland, Maine, were a threat to the rest of the state.

How the Armenian genocide shaped the Holocaust (Stefan Ihrig, Daily Beast)
Nowhere was the debate over what was going on in Turkey to the Armenians more heated than Germany—and the conclusions drawn would change history.

New York isn’t the only state to set an aggressive climate goal this year, and might not be the last (Daniel C. Vock, Governing)
As the Trump administration rolls back carbon dioxide emissions regulations, several Democratic states are drastically raising their clean air standards.

Maryland moves to standardize, centralize cyberdefenses (Lucas Ropek, GovTech)
The Office of Security Management was created Tuesday through executive order. State CISO John Evans will lead the new office within the Department of Information Technology and oversee consolidation of cyberdefenses.

After remote-code test, DHS sounds the alarm on BlueKeep (Sean Lyngaas, Cyberscoop)
The Department of Homeland Security has added its voice to a chorus of government and corporate cybersecurity professionals urging users to patch their systems for BlueKeep, a critical vulnerability recently reported in old Microsoft Windows operating systems.