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Published 21 October 2022

·· The Intelligence Community Doesn’t Warn About All Attacks Against the US Homeland. Why Not?
Potential victims are not warned about the methods and goals of foreign governments

·· The Emerging Cyber Threat to the American Rail Industry
Is the implementation of Positive Train Control (PTC) just trading in one deadly risk for another?

·· Analyst Acquitted at Trial Over Discredited Trump Dossier
No “Deep State” sweeping conspiracy to derail Trump’s candidacy, and then his presidency

·· Flynn Group Recruits Cops, Vets for ‘One More Mission’—to Watch Election Sites
Election deniers to watch over the election

·· Cleta Mitchell Is Training Thousands of Trump Loyalists to Monitor the Polls on Election Day
What could go wrong?

·· Will Biden’s New Border Policy Stop Asylum-Seekers from Coming to NYC? City Officials Aren’t Sure
Around 20,000 asylum-seekers came to New York City since spring

·· To Survive More Frequent Hurricanes, Puerto Rico Needs to Rethink Preparedness
Ignoring lessons of earlier hurricanes is not a good idea

·· The Mysterious Rise of Food Allergies
Food allergies are becoming increasingly common

·· Multimodal Biometrics: A Better Security System?
Some emerging biometrics examine the uniqueness of a wide range of biological traits

·· Homeland Security Staff Want Biden to Oust Watchdog, a Trump Pick
After an exodus of lawyers from the watchdog agency, staffers call for the agency’s head to go

The Intelligence Community Doesn’t Warn About All Attacks Against the US Homeland. Why Not?  Courtney Weinbaum, Defense One)
A simple policy change could help defend America against threats to non-military targets.

The Emerging Cyber Threat to the American Rail Industry  (Claudia Swain, Lawfare)
In 2008, Congress passed theRail Safety Improvement Act(RSIA), which required the installation of Positive Train Control (PTC) systems—autonomous operation of a train to correct for human error—on most of the United States’almost 140,000 route miles

Analyst Acquitted at Trial Over Discredited Trump Dossier  (Associated Press / VOA News)
A jury on Tuesday acquitted on all counts a think-tank analyst accused of lying to the FBI about his role in the creation of a discredited dossier about former President Donald Trump.
The case against Igor Danchenko was the third and possibly final case brought by Special Counsel John Durham as part of his probe into how the FBI conducted its own investigation into allegations of collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and the Kremlin.
The first two cases ended in an acquittal and a guilty plea with a sentence of probation.
The acquittal marked a significant setback for Durham. Despite hopes by Trump supporters that the prosecutor would uncover a sweeping conspiracy within the FBI and other agencies to derail his candidacy, and then his presidency, the investigation over the course of more than three years failed to produce evidence that met those expectations. The sole conviction — an FBI agent admitted altering an email related to the surveillance of a former Trump aide — was for conduct uncovered not by Durham but by the Justice Department’s inspector general, and the two cases that Durham took to trials ended in across-the-board acquittals.

Flynn Group Recruits Cops, Vets for ‘One More Mission’—to Watch Election Sites  (Will Sommer, Daily Beast) Despite its nonpartisan claims, One More Mission is funded by a group led by some of the most prominent pro-Trump election deniers in the country.

Cleta Mitchell Is Training Thousands of Trump Loyalists to Monitor the Polls on Election Day  (David Freedlander, New York Magazine)
Despite the focus of the political class on the many Republican candidates who refuse to accept that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, Mitchell has engaged in something more immediate: harnessing the energy of the angry Trumpian faithful to embed themselves in the guts of the nation’s election machinery, believing the apparatus of poll workers and election observers and U.S. Postal Service employees is biased against conservatives.

Will Biden’s New Border Policy Stop Asylum-Seekers from Coming to NYC? City Officials Aren’t Sure  (Sahalie Donaldson, City & State)
The flow of asylum-seekers into the city slowed in recent days, but officials say that’s unlikely to be related to the new border policy.

To Survive More Frequent Hurricanes, Puerto Rico Needs to Rethink Preparedness  (Efraín O’Neill-Carrillo and Ruth Santiago, Scientific American)
Our leaders ignored the lessons learned from Hurricane María, and Fiona caused more destruction than it should have.

The Mysterious Rise of Food Allergies  (Umair Irfan, Vox)
More kids and adults are finding out that they can’t eat their favorite foods. Why?

Multimodal Biometrics: A Better Security System?  (CREST)
Biometric security systems are any system that uses a form of biometric identification for security. Some of these you already see in use today such as unlocking phones using fingerprints and face scanning. Some emerging biometrics are less commonly used as scientific research continues to examine the uniqueness of a wide range of biological traits, e.g., the way people using these systems type, the way they speak, or even their gait while walking.

Homeland Security Staff Want Biden To Oust Watchdog, A Trump Pick  (NPR)
Joseph Cuffari, the Trump-appointed leader of the Department of Homeland Security’s watchdog agency, has been in office for three years. During that tenure, the majority of lawyers in the Office of Counsel have left. The pattern has hurt the attorneys’ abilities to to conduct their oversight work. Now, some staffers have called on President Biden, who previously criticized Trump’s dismissal of agency watchdogs, to fire Cuffari.