Our picksPrivate Mossad for hire; foreign VPN apps; misguided active-shooter drills, and more

Private Mossad for hire (Adam Entous and Ronan Farrow, New Yorker)
Inside a plot to influence American elections, starting with one small-town race.

Active-shooter drills are tragically misguided (Erika Christakis, The Atlantic)
There’s scant evidence that they’re effective. They can, however, be psychologically damaging—and they reflect a dismaying vie

Foreign VPN apps need a close look from DHS, senators say (Sean Lyngaas, Cyberscoop)
The Department of Homeland Security should assess the security threat posed by foreign VPN applications to U.S. government employees, a bipartisan pair of senators says.
Some popular VPN apps send a phone’s web-browsing data to servers in countries interested in targeting federal personnel, raising “the risk that user data will be surveilled by those foreign governments,” Sens. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Ron Wyden, D-Ore., wrote in a letter to DHS Thursday. VPN providers promise to obfuscate the physical location of a web browser, but users are generally at the mercy of those companies’ decisions to collect and log data.

To save the Earth someday, team builds spacecraft to crash into an asteroid and shove it off course (Tim Prudente, Baltimore Sun)
A team of scientists, astronomers and engineers meets weekly in a conference room on a Howard County research campus and plans to save the world.
“Keep calm and carry DART,” reads a poster on the wall.
DART — the Double Asteroid Redirection Test — is their plan to avert catastrophe. It’s also NASA’s first mission not to explore space, but to defend against it.
The research team at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel plans to launch a spacecraft, speed it up really fast and smash it into an asteroid. BOOM!

We can’t tell if Chinese firms work for the Party (Ashley Feng, Foreign Policy)
Huawei claims to be an independent firm, but China’s own laws mandate a different reality.

Mossad, MI6 smuggled Iranian nuclear scientist to the U.K.– report (Hagay Hacohen, Jerusalem Post)
The Iranian scientist was allegedly involved in the 2012 assassination of Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan in Tehran and was able to enter the UK using the migrant crises as a cover, reports The Daily Mail.

Salvadoran man has evidence he’s not a gang member. US still separated him from his kids (Laura C. Morel, Reveal)
In early November, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers accused a Salvadoran father – known in court documents only as “Mr. A” – of being an MS-13 gang member.
They didn’t show him any evidence to back up their claim. Mr. A denied he was ever part of the group and stripped off his clothes to prove he wasn’t hiding any gang-related tattoos.
Still, the officers didn’t believe him. On Nov. 5, officers hauled Mr. A out of a Texas immigration detention facility to court for a hearing. When he returned to his cell that day, his 11-year-old daughter and 9-year-old son were gone.
He hasn’t seen them in the nearly three months since, even though the government hasn’t offered any proof of his gang membership. Mr. A’s lawyers have compiled a stack of evidence to the contrary.

Trump’s new Syria timetable raises concern among key anti-ISIS allies (Ellen Mitchell, The Hill)
The Trump administration’s reported plans to pull out all U.S. forces from Syria by the end of April put key anti-ISIS allies on high alert, with many now worried that a hastened withdrawal will leave Washington’s Kurdish partners without any protection.
The White House, which is planning to redeploy most American troops by next month, still has no agreement with regional powers to protect the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a group that has helped the United States fight the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

SpaceX Texas launch site risks being split in two by border wall (Business Times)
Elon Musk’s SpaceX has a big stake in the battle over border security being waged in Congress: a launchpad on the US-Mexico border that it plans to use for rockets carrying humans around the world and eventually to Mars.