Our picksPreparing for EMP Attacks | Bold Vision for Infrastructure | Rising Seas & American Homes, and more
· China’s surprise, years in the planning: An EMP attack
· U.S. Science Groups Wary of New Senate Bills to Curb Foreign Influences
· Twitter Labels Trump’s Tweet as ‘Manipulated Media’
· The Damage of Trump’s Voter-Fraud Allegations Can’t Be Undone
· Inside the Boogaloos’ Facebook-to-Violence Pipeline
· A Bold Vision for Infrastructure
· DHS Alerts to Ransomware Campaign Targeting Remote Access Systems
· Rising Seas Threaten an American Institution: The 30-Year Mortgage
· Emails Show Army Corps Scramble after Trump Gutted Resiliency Project
· Hidden Cyber War Between Israel and Iran Spills into Public View with Attacks on Physical Infrastructure
China’s surprise, years in the planning: An EMP attack (Peter Pry, The Hill)
The coronavirus pandemic has exposed dangerous weaknesses in U.S. planning and preparation for civil defense protection and recovery, and those weaknesses surely have been noticed by our potential enemies: China, Russia, North Korea, Iran and international terrorists.
Hostile foreign powers surely have noticed the panicked, incompetent U.S. response to the virus that shut down a prosperous U.S. economy, self-inflicting the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. The nationwide lockdowns brought shortages of all kinds, exposing societal and critical infrastructure fragility — and causing widespread fear.
So it is very bad news, more than a year after President Trump issued an Executive Order on Coordinating Resilience Against Electromagnetic Pulses, that the Department of Energy (DOE) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have done nothing to protect the national electric grid or other critical infrastructures that sustain the lives of 330 million Americans.
U.S. Science Groups Wary of New Senate Bills to Curb Foreign Influences (Jeffery Mervis, Science)
A bipartisan group of U.S. senators today proposed sweeping—and controversial—changes in how the federal government manages academic research in the face of threats from other countries.
The authors of the legislation, more than 1 year in the making, tout it as a way to stop China and other countries from stealing the fruits of federally funded research and using the information to damage U.S. economic and national security. But research advocates worry that if enacted, the bill could damage the U.S. academic research enterprise by restricting the flow of talent and ideas.
Twitter Labels Trump’s Tweet as ‘Manipulated Media’ (Reuters / VOA)
Twitter Inc added a “manipulated media” label on a video posted on U.S. President Donald Trump’s Twitter feed on Thursday that showed a doctored news clip with a mis-spelled banner flashing “Terrified todler runs from racist baby.” Twitter has been under fierce scrutiny from the Trump administration since it fact-checked Trump’s tweets about unsubstantiated claims of mail-in voting fraud. It also labeled a Trump tweet about protests in Minneapolis as “glorifying violence.”
