Our picksRussians Hack Nuclear Plant | Portrait of the Fascist as a Young Man | The Coming Tech Cold War with China, and more

Russians Who Pose Election Threat Have Hacked Nuclear Plants and Power Grid (Nicole Perlroth, New York Times)
The hacking group, Energetic Bear, is among Russia’s stealthiest. It appears to be casting a wide net to find useful targets ahead of the election, experts said.

Insisting that the Hunter Biden Laptop Is Fake Is a Trap. So Is Insisting that It’s Real.(Thomas Rid, Washington Post)
The lesson of 2016 is to be even more careful with potential disinformation in 2020.

Trump Is Playing up China’s Threat to the 2020 Election. But the Evidence Shows Russia Is the Real Danger (Selina Wang, CNN)
For months, the Trump administration has been warning of the dangers of political interference by China in the US election.
In April, President Trump said Beijing wanted him out of the White House. Attorney General William Barr and Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe said Beijing was a bigger threat than Russia. And Bill Evanina, Director of the United States National Counterintelligence and Security Center, listed the ways that China had been “expanding its influence efforts.”
Yet, this week, China didn’t feature in the latest warning about election interference.
On Thursday, US national security officials accused Russian state-sponsored hackers of targeting state and local governments and of successfully stealing data in at least two instances. The allegations came shortly after officials accused Russia and Iran of using US voter registration information to undermine Trump’s campaign.
By contrast, very little evidence of China’s alleged meddling has emerged, weeks before the vote. The China-backed foreign misinformation efforts that have been made public had a minuscule reach compared Russia’s efforts before the 2016 US presidential vote.

Why Satellite Hacking Has Become The ‘Biggest Global Threat’ For Countries Like US, China, Russia & India? (Younis Dar, Eurasia Times)
The US Air Force in April this year organized a hackathon to test the vulnerabilities of its military satellites in orbit. The competitors were asked to hack into an actual US satellite orbiting the earth, during Defcon, one of the world’s largest hacker conferences.

The Tyranny of Data Has Put Us at the Mercy of a New COVID Priesthood (Philip Johnston, The Telegraph)
Politicians have shown themselves incapable of interrogating statistics or those who wield them

A Portrait of the Fascist as a Young Man (Ali Winston, New York Review of Books)
Robert Rundo’s career—nasty, brutish, and short—is a case study in the dangerous evolution of American far-right militancy.

Americans Have Lost Sight of What Fascism Means (Shadi Hamid, The Atlantic)
Many Americans who brand Trump and his allies as fascists are paying too little attention to abuses in Hong Kong and cultural genocide in Xinjiang.

WW3 Warning: India Puts China on Alert after Threat to “Strike First” against Beijing (Oli Smith, Express)
India has sent a terrifying message to China, after releasing footage of a new anti-ship missile destroying a frigate, accompanied by a pledge to “strike first and strike hard”.

Intelligence Services Warn against China’s Talents Plan (Nathan Greenfield, University World News)
In the 2019 report, Threats to the U.S. Research Enterprise: China’s Talent Recruitment Plans, the United States Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations said that the Chinese Communist Party is intimately involved with the Thousand Talents Plan (TTP), a Chinese government plan which funds Chinese scientists studying in the West and Western scientists working in China.
Chinese scientists and students sign legally binding contracts that incentivize members to “set up ‘shadow labs’ in China working on research identical to their US research, and, in some cases, transfer US scientists’ hard-earned intellectual capital” to China. Between 2008 and 2017 the TTP grew from 2,000 to 7,000 researchers and scientists.

The Coming Tech Cold War with China (Adam Segal, Foreign Affairs)
Beijing Is Already Countering Washington’s Policy

Beijing’s Human Rights Victims Shouldn’t Support Trump (Tenzeen Dorjee, Foreign Policy)
Tough on China or not, a second term would only spell more misery for Tibetans and other communities victimized by Beijing.