Cyberwar Is Here: Are You Ready? | Satellite Hacking Experiment | “Enduring” Election Security Mission, and more

Trump Officials Considering Plan to Divert Billions of Dollars in Additional Funds for Border Barrier (Nick Miroff and Josh Dawsey, Washington Post)
Senior Trump administration officials are considering a plan to again divert billions of dollars in military funding to pay for border barrier construction next year, a way to circumvent congressional opposition to putting more taxpayer money toward the president’s signature project, according to three administration officials.

Trump’s Plan to Build Border Wall With Air Force Funds Could Threaten National Security: Report (Daily Beast)
A report put together by the U.S. Air Force says President Trump’s plan to pay for his border wall by redirecting funds from more than four dozen Air Force military construction projects poses a national security risk, according to NBC News. The report lays out the needs of 51 military projects that are at risk of losing their funding, including the construction of a gate at Incirlik Air Base in Turkey. “Security breaches have increased since the base began Operation Inherent Resolve Support,” the report says. “If not funded, the main gate remains vulnerable to hostile penetration in the midst of contingency operations and an increased terrorist threat.” Another base at risk is Andersen Air Force Base in Guam where money for a project to build facilities to store more than $1 billion in munitions was diverted to the wall. That could endanger the largest munitions stockpile in the region, the report warns. Another air base needs funds to replace a boiler whose failure is “imminent” and could force the evacuation of an entire base in Alaska.

Another False Emergency Warning Accidentally Activated in Hawaii (Leila Fujimori, The Honolulu Star-Advertiser)
Similar to the Jan. 13, 2018, false missile alert, it was a government employee at the Honolulu Police Department undergoing routine training Wednesday who sounded the sirens heard across Oahu and in Kahului on Maui.

Whistleblower Fight Could Chill Reports of Wrongdoing (Amy Mackinnon, Foreign Policy)
Laws on whistleblowing weren’t crafted to deal with concerns about a president.
Blowing an actual whistle may be loud and attention-grabbing, but whistleblowing within the U.S. intelligence community is intended to be anything but that. It’s supposed to serve as a discreet and legally protected way for people within the intelligence agencies to report concerns about mismanagement, fraud, waste, or abuse.
That channel partially imploded this week when it was revealed that acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire refused to hand over details of a whistleblower complaint to the House Intelligence Committee as is usually required under law, prompting a standoff between Congress and the country’s top intelligence official.
The complaint by an intelligence official allegedly concerns one or more conversations that U.S. President Donald Trump had with foreign leaders, according to reporting by the New York Times and theWashington Post. The official reportedly found the president’s behavior so concerning it led them to report it to the intelligence community’s inspector general.
The complaint at hand, first made on Aug. 12, was found by the Office of the Intelligence Community Inspector General to be credible and a matter of urgent concern. The inspector general then forwarded it to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, who is then required to forward it to congressional intelligence committees within seven calendar days.
The acting director of national intelligence’s refusal to hand over the complaint to the intelligence committees is both unprecedented and reflects the fact that at the time the whistleblower statutes were drafted, they did not consider that the subject of complaint could be the president of the United States.

The NSA Is Running a Satellite Hacking Experiment (Patrick Tucker, Defense One)
Low Earth orbit will soon be awash in small satellites, and the national security community is increasingly concerned about their security.

Cyberwar Is Here: Are You Ready? (Chloe Albanesius, PC Mag)
The US government now has the authority to unleash on its enemies some of the most powerful cyber weapons at its disposal. But what do our adversaries have planned for us?