OUR PICKSAnti-Terrorism Law & 5th Amendment | New Approach to Software Design Flaws | Contested Significance of January 6, and more
· The Contested Significance of January 6
· Facebook Sued Over Killing Tied to Boogaloo Movement
· District Court Rules Anti-Terrorism Law Violates Fifth Amendment
· Log4J Cyber Threat Requires New Approach to Design Flaws
· Understanding and Mitigating Russian State-Sponsored Cyber Threats to U.S. Critical Infrastructure
· DOD Inspector General Looking at How Well Military Is Scrutinizing Recruits for Extremist Activity
· In Idaho, Extremist Experts Say Antisemitic Groups Are ‘Emboldened’
· Sahel Violence Threatens West African Coastal States
· China Looks to Secure Supplies as Strains with U.S. and Its Allies Grow
The Contested Significance of January 6 (Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic)
Surveying the divide as America marked a fraught anniversary
Facebook Sued Over Killing Tied to Boogaloo Movement (Rohini Kurup, Lawfare)
On Jan. 6, the sister of a federal officer killed during racial justice protests in 2020 filed a wrongful death suit against Facebook’s parent company Meta, accusing the company of promoting groups that advocate violence. The lawsuit, filed in the California Superior Court for Alameda County, alleges that Facebook gave rise to the far-right extremist boogaloo movement that led Officer Dave Patrick Underwood’s killer and his accomplice to connect. The complaint claims that Facebook’s algorithms “are weighted to favor untrue, inflammatory, and divisive content that will grab and keep users’ attention.”
You can read the complaint in Underwood v. Meta Platforms, Inc. here.
District Court Rules Anti-Terrorism Law Violates Fifth Amendment (Scott R. Anderson, Lawfare)
The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York has held that the 2019 Promoting Security and Justice for Victims of Terrorism Act (“PSJVTA”)—successor to the 2018 Anti-Terrorism Clarification Act—cannot subject the Palestinian Authority or Palestine Liberation Organization to the personal jurisdiction of federal courts for the purposes of terrorism-related civil liability, as the means by which it purports to secure their consent to such jurisdiction are in violation of the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause.
You can read the decision here.
Log4J Cyber Threat Requires New Approach to Design Flaws (Jeremy Bash and Michael Steed, War on the Rocks)
Information security professionals have spent the past month battling one of the most significant cyber threats to the computer systems that control America’s critical infrastructure. To put it in perspective, this software is so commonly used that it would be akin to security managers discovering that every lock bought via the commercial supply chain could be opened with a few clicks of a keyboard.
The threat comes from a newly discovered flaw in a widely used piece of software known as Apache’s Log4J. The White House called this discovery a “national security concern” just days ago when it announced it was convening a summit of software company chief executive officers, signaling the gravity of the threat and the continuing fallout. (Cont.)
