Our picksIs Earthquake Insurance Worth It? | U.S. Scientist Murder Mystery | Ransomware Attacks, and more

Russia Is Perfecting the Art of Crushing Uprisings to Aid Authoritarian Regimes (Patrick Tucker, Defense One)
A Russian military leader revealed the blueprint for using mercenaries, militias, and special operations forces to backup dictators from Venezuela to Africa.

Earthquake Insurance: Is It Worth It? (David Lazarus, Los Angeles Times)
Earthquake insurance is expensive. The median home price in California now tops $500,000. Say the replacement cost of the structure is closer to $300,000; you’d be looking at a 15 percent deductible of $45,000.

Organizational Resilience Can Help Prevent the Next Ransomware Attack (Willy Fabritius, Defense One)
City and state governments should start with an informed, clear-eyed look at their vulnerabilities.

Why Was an American Scientist Murdered in a Nazi Bunker? (Barbie Latza Nadeau, Daily Beast)
The tortured corpse of a 59-year-old American superstar scientist was found wrapped in burlap inside a secret Nazi bunker on the island of Crete, Greece. Police want to know why.

UK Home Secretary Doubles Down on Cops’ Deeply Flawed Facial Recognition Trials (Kat Hall, The Register)
1984 is not an instruction manual, and yet here we are

‘It’s Not a Surveillance Program’… U.S. Govt Isn’t Going All Beijing on Us with Border Face-Recog, Official Tells Congress (Katyanna Quach, The Register)
Lawmakers told: ‘We don’t run the scans against any other databases’

Trump Officials Defend Use of Facial Recognition amid Backlash (Emily Birnbaum, The Hill)
Officials with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) defended the government’s use of facial recognition technology before a skeptical House panel on Wednesday, downplaying privacy and accuracy concerns as overblown.

Report: Did Fox News Fabricate ‘Federal’ Source on Seth Rich Conspiracy? (Matt Gertz, National Memo)
ox News editors “came to have doubts” about whether the network’s sole source for its subsequently retracted bombshell report that murdered Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich had delivered tens of thousands of DNC emails to WikiLeaks “actually existed,” according to a new report from Yahoo News.
In May 2017, FoxNews.com published a story from investigative reporter Malia Zimmerman which relied on an anonymous “federal investigator” from an unnamed agency to claim that Rich had provided WikiLeaks with the emails, contradicting the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment that Russian intelligence operatives had done so. That story — and the network’s strident on-air segments about it — amplified a long-debunked conspiracy theory that had circulated online since Rich’s death 10 months earlier, engulfing his family in a new wave of pain and sorrow.
The FoxNews.com article collapsed within hours, and a week later, Fox retracted it, saying it “was not initially subjected to the high degree of editorial scrutiny we require for all our reporting.” The network promised an internal investigation into how it had published the report.

How Conspiracy Theorists Taint the Justice They Seek (Travis View, Washington Post)
Investigative report in the Miami Herald helped U.S. attorneys in New York close the net on sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein, who now stands accused of sexually abusing 80 underaged women between 2001 and 2006. —  . and the attorneys. But while the people who actually helped bring Epstein closer to justice were quick to credit others for their help, another community baselessly claimed the credit for themselves. Since Epstein has long been accused of serial abuse of minors, he has been featured in the online conspiracy theories Pizzagate and QAnon. But when online conspiracy theorists aren’t rehashing old reporting about Epstein, they’re promoting some of the most absurd claims ever posted on social media.
It would be comforting to believe the warped, reality-defying worldview of online conspiracy theorists is so quarantined from mainstream political discourse that it’s unworthy of rebuke. But that’s not the case. President Trump has promoted several QAnon accounts on Twitter. Celebrities who have promoted QAnon include Roseanne Barr, Curt Schilling and Stacey Dash. Elected officials who have promoted QAnon include a city council member and a state lawmaker. Matthew Lusk, a congressional candidate for Florida’s 5th district, is the first QAnon follower to run for federal office.
Far from clarifying the serious allegations against Epstein and advocating for his alleged victims, the wild stories that online conspiracy theorists spin instead serve to distract from actual crimes. For example, people in the QAnon community believe that Epstein’s private island contains secret tunnels where children were sacrificed in occult rituals.
Just as they poison our political discourse, online conspiracy theorists poison the pursuit of justice. Sadly, there’s little reason to hope they’ll ever care more about fidelity to the facts than the wild narratives that keep them at the center of the story.