Our picksRaising Flood-Prone Roads | Haiti’s Big One Coming | Iran’s Terror Financing, and more

Clearview AI Says Its Facial Recognition Software Identified A Terrorism Suspect. The Cops Say That’s Not True. (Ryan Mac, Caroline Haskins, Loan McDonald, BuzzFeed News)
Clearview AI has built a database of billions of photos that it says can reveal just about anyone’s true identity. But there are troubling questions about its past.

California Will Be Hit Hard as Trump Administration Weakens Clean Water Protections (Anna M. Phillips, Los Angeles Times)
Defying environmentalists and public health advocates, the Trump administration on Thursday announced the replacement of Obama-era water protections with a significantly weaker set of regulations that lifts limits on how much pollution can be dumped into small streams and wetlands.
The changes to the Clean Water Act’s protections are expected to hit California and other Western states especially hard.

Iran Needs to Do More to Combat Terrorist Financing (David Uren, National Interest)
Or more sanctions are coming.

China Building a Hospital to Treat Virus, Expands Lockdowns (Yanan Wang, AP)
China announced Friday that it is swiftly building a 1,000-bed hospital dedicated to patients infected with a new virus that has killed 26 people, sickened hundreds and prompted unprecedented lockdowns of cities during the country’s most important holiday.
On the eve of the Lunar New Year, transportation was shut down in at least 13 cities home to more than 36 million people. The cities are Wuhan, where the illness has been concentrated, and 12 of its neighbors in central China’s Hubei province.

State Department Still Has Poor Cybersecurity, Audit Finds (Mariam Baksh, Defense One)
Spending more money didn’t fix problems auditors have been reporting for more than a decade, State’s IG found.

Raising Flood-Prone Roads Has Angered Miami Beach Residents. Experts Say They Need to Go Higher (Alex Harris, Miami Herald)
City-hired consultants told residents that under their new calculations, emergency roads would have to be elevated higher than the city previously called for, but residential roads could stay lower than originally planned.

Haiti’s 2010 Earthquake Killed Hundreds of Thousands. The Next One Could Be Worse (Jacqueline Charles, Miami Herald) The 2010 quake caused over 100,000 structures to crumble and created enough rubble to fill five football stadiums. At the time, Haiti had no quake-resistant building codes or in-depth understanding of its vulnerability.

Why One Researcher Mimicked Russian Hackers in Breaking into a European Utility (Sean Lyngaas, Cyberscoop)
Jason Larsen was tired of hearing about the skills of Russian-linked hackers, particularly those who cut power in parts of Ukraine in 2015 and 2016.
These were groundbreaking and worrying attacks, he thought to himself, but giving the attackers too much credit makes defending against them more complicated than it needs to be.
So Larsen, a researcher at cybersecurity company IOActive, broke into the substation network of a European electric utility using one of the Russian hackers’ techniques. The first segment of the attack — gaining root access on some firmware— took him 14 hours. He took notes by the hour and shared them with the distribution utility, one of his clients, to improve their defenses.

A Watchful Eye on Threats That Could Alter the Election (Mark Shimabukuro, New York Times)
Our cybersecurity reporter answers questions about hackers, Burisma and vulnerabilities in November.