Our picksColonial Pipeline Attack Is a Dark Omen | UFOs Spotted in Restricted U.S. Airspace | Satellites Are Watching You, and more

Ransomware Operators in Turmoil after Colonial Pipeline Backlash  (Keumars Afifi-Sabet, ITPro)
U.S. authorities seize DarkSide’s assets while a widely-used cyber crime forum cuts ties with ransomware groups.

The Colonial Pipeline Attack Is a Dark Omen  (Zeynep Tufecki, The Atlantic)
Our digital world wasn’t built with security in mind.

A Cyber-Attack Exposes Risks to America’s Energy Infrastructure  (Economist)
And the threats are likely to grow.

2018 Tech Audit of Colonial Pipeline Found “Glaring” Problems  (AP / MarketWatch)
”An eighth-grader could have hacked into that system,” consultant says.

Why Charles Koch Wins When Our Energy System Breaks Down  (Christopher Leonard, New York Times)
There’s little incentive for the Colonial Pipeline to improve its security, since every time the pipeline fails, its owners make more money.

He Bought the Land Where He Crossed into the U.S. Illegally. Now He’s Offering It up to Other Immigrants to Do the Same.  (Adilfo Flores, BuzzFeed News)
Four decades after crossing the US-Mexico border as an undocumented immigrant, a ranch owner at the border has placed ladders on his property to make it easier for others to cross.

McCarthy Denies Election Fraud Claims  (Olivier Knox with Mariana Alfaro, Washington Post)
On Sunday, 9 May, former president Donald Trump condemned “our fake Presidential Election.” On Monday, 20 May, Trump railed against having been cheated of a second term in “the greatest Election Fraud in the history of our country” and compared November to a jewel heist. On Tuesday, 22 May, he called for new actions “so we never again have an election rigged and stolen from us.”
So it was a little … startling? … to hear House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), who joined a majority of his Republicans in voting to overturn President Biden’s victory in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, say this after an Oval Office meeting yesterday:
McCarthy, following a meeting with President Biden, said: “I don’t think anybody is questioning the legitimacy of the presidential election. I think that is all over with. We’re sitting here with the president today.”
“From that point of view I don’t think that’s a problem,” McCarthy added.

The Real Reason Behind the Misinformation Epidemic in Online Moms’ Groups  (Kiera Butler, Mother Jones)
The mass vaccination of children could herald the end of the most catastrophic social costs from the pandemic in the United States: Schools and day care facilities will be able to resume normal operations, which means parents will no longer have to perform the nearly impossible act of juggling simultaneous work demands and child care. Cue the collective sigh of parental relief: It’s the moment we’ve all been waiting for!
Well, maybe not all of us. According to an April poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation, nearly a quarter of parents surveyed said they definitely wouldn’t get their child vaccinated, and an additional 15 percent said they would only have their child vaccinated if their school required it. About a third said they didn’t plan to get their children vaccinated right away; instead they planned to wait and monitor for side effects.
Even before the COVID vaccines were approved for teens, anti-vaccine groups were already out in force in online parenting communities. A few viral posts round up entries from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, the federal database where people can report any symptoms they’ve experienced after a vaccine. These posts are compelling—like this one from an anti-vaccine advocate purporting to find a pattern of heart problems in 16-year-olds who have received a COVID vaccine.What the people behind the posts don’t disclose is that VAERS reports aren’t verified independently, nor are they official medical reports: Anyone can submit an entry. But this is a perfect template for how misinformation works: Its spreaders omit key context or details and hope readers will have an emotional reaction without thinking too hard about the veracity of what they’re reading.

Soon, Satellites Will Be Able to Watch You Everywhere All the Time  (Christopher Beam, MIT Technology Review)
Can privacy survive?

Beyond Terror and Textbooks — a Review of Krithika Varagur, The Call: Inside the Global Saudi Religious Project  (Ayaan Hirsi Ali, TLS)
Can the West counter Saudi Arabia’s promotion of extremism?

UFOs Regularly Spotted in Restricted U.S. Airspace, Report on the Phenomena Due Next Month  (Bill Whitaker, CBS News)
regular sightings of unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAP, that have spurred a report due to Congress next month.