Our picksPotential Unrest at the Polls | Emotet Malware | Paying Them to Hate Us, and more
· White Supremacists, Russia Pose Top Threats, Homeland Security Says
· Election Officials Are Preparing for Potential Unrest at the Polls
· Judge Orders Twitter to Unmask FBI Impersonator Who Set Off Seth Rich Conspiracy
· DHS Warns that Emotet Malware Is One of the Most Prevalent Threats Today
· Countering President’s Efforts, U.S. Officials Defend Integrity of Election
· Cybersecurity and the 117th Congress
· Paying Them to Hate Us: The Effect of U.S. Military Aid on Anti‐American Terrorism, 1968–2014
White Supremacists, Russia Pose Top Threats, Homeland Security Says (Rachael Levy, Wall Street Journal)
Among domestic violent extremists, white supremacists carried out half of all deadly attacks in 2018 and 2019
Election Officials Are Preparing for Potential Unrest at the Polls (Jennifer Steinhauer and Zolan Kanno-Youngs, New York Times)
Election experts say President Trump’s messaging, the pandemic and other factors are creating a tension around casting ballots not seen since the Jim Crow era.
Judge Orders Twitter to Unmask FBI Impersonator Who Set Off Seth Rich Conspiracy(Bobby Allyn, NPR)
A federal judge in California has ruled Twitter must reveal the identity of an anonymous user who fabricated FBI documents about the murder of Democratic National Committee (DNC) staffer Seth Rich and passed them to Fox News. The Twitter user @whyspertech is accused of providing faked documents to Fox News, which falsely linked Rich’s 2016 murder to the WikiLeaks hack of Democratic Party emails in the run-up to the presidential election. Fox News’s false claims were further disseminated by Donald Trump on Twitter. The lies about Seth Rich’s death were amplified by Trump supporters such as Rudy Giuliani and News Gingrich, who advanced the Seth Rich conspiracy theory in order to undermine the U.S. intelligence community’s finding that Russian intelligence hacked the DNC’s and the Clinton campaign’s computers. The GRU, Russia’s military intelligence branch, then coordinated with the Roger Stone the publication of the stolen emails on WikiLeaks in order to damage the Clinton campaign. Twitter has tried to keep the real identity of the user secret, but U.S. Magistrate Judge Donna Ryu has ordered that the company must turn over the information to lawyers representing Rich’s family in a defamation suit. Fox News falsely claimed that Rich leaked thousands of Democratic emails to WikiLeaks, and that his killing was related to the purported leak. The network later retracted the story.
DHS Warns that Emotet Malware Is One of the Most Prevalent Threats Today (Dan Goodin, Arstechinca)
US detects more than 16,000 alerts since July for nasty trojan that’s hard to spot.
Countering President’s Efforts, U.S. Officials Defend Integrity of Election (Eric Tucker, Associated press / 2KUTV)
Four weeks ahead of Election Day, senior national security officials provided fresh assurances about the integrity of the elections in a video message Tuesday, putting them at odds with President Donald Trump’s efforts to discredit the vote.
Cybersecurity and the 117th Congress (Simon Handler, New Atlanticist)
How many Congressional committees does it take to oversee cybersecurity? Apparently, dozens.
Paying Them to Hate Us: The Effect of U.S. Military Aid on Anti‐American Terrorism, 1968–2014 (Eugen Dimant, Tim Krieger, and Daniel Meierrieks, Cato Institute)
In response to the threat oftransnational terrorism, the United States has provided—among other measures—military assistance to foreign governments. From 1968 to 2014, the United States gave approximately $470 billion (adjusted for inflation) in foreign military aid; in 2014 alone, the United States spent about $10.5 billion on foreign aid. Does military aid actually make the United States safer?
