OUR PICKSThe Army’s Newest Spy Plane | Cybersecurity Challenges in Scholl | Amateur Sleuths Who Helped to Bring Down SBF, and more
··Inside the Army’s Newest Spy Plane
To the U.S. Army, this plane—or something like it—is a ticket to the future of warfare
··New Report Uncovers Cybersecurity Challenges Facing K-12 Schools
The cybersecurity threat to K-12 schools is persistent
··The Twitter Files Are a Missed Opportunity
No one really knows what Elon Musk’s company is doing to free speech
··The Amateur Sleuths Who Helped to Bring Down Sam Bankman-Fried
A doctor at the hospital of a midwestern university had a hobby: Tracking SBF’s financial transactions
··Americans Don’t Want Election Deniers
In the midterms, voters spurned candidates who lacked a commitment to free and fair elections
Inside the Army’s Newest Spy Plane (Marcus Wisegerber, Nextgov)
Already watching over Ukraine, Leidos’ ARTEMIS is part of the service’s growing fleet of contractor-owned intelligence aircraft.
New Report Uncovers Cybersecurity Challenges Facing K-12 Schools (Josh Moulin, HSToday)
The MS-ISAC recommends K-12 schools take five decisive steps to effectively address their cyber risk.
The Twitter Files Are a Missed Opportunity (Renée DiResta, The Atlantic)
In the classic Japanese film Rashomon, four people retell the same incident in different and sometimes contradictory ways. The debate about the Twitter Files—documents from and Slack conversations within the social-media platform now owned by Elon Musk—reminds me of that movie. This month, the journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss and the author Michael Shellenberger have posted tweet threads describing the internal debates over banning the sharing of a 2020 New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, throttling the circulation of certain posts and accounts, and taking down then-President Donald Trump’s account after the January 6 riot at the Capitol. Depending on your perspective, you might conclude that suspending Trump was an essential safety measure, a big scandal, or utterly inconsequential.
The Amateur Sleuths Who Helped to Bring Down Sam Bankman-Fried (Will Dunn, New Statesman)
For years, unpaid investigators have been tracking and exposing the activities of cryptocurrency’s biggest players.
Americans Don’t Want Election Deniers (Bill Scher, Persuasion)
Apro-democracy Republican likely would have won the gubernatorial race in Arizona, as the state is hardly blue. A clear majority of Arizona voters preferred Republican House candidates to Democrats. The mainstream Republican running for re-election to serve as State Treasurer won with 56% of the vote. Yet Kari Lake failed to keep pace.
A post-election review of the race reported in the Arizona Republic identified swing voters who recoiled from Lake specifically because of where she stood on the 2020 election. One Phoenix-based voter, Stephen Frankini, backed Masters for Senate because he didn’t want to see Democrats pass federal gun control measures but split his ticket when it came to governor. “I don’t particularly care for the stolen election rhetoric,” Frankini said, “Normally, I would vote Republican, but that’s getting kind of ridiculous now.”
These anecdotes track the voter turnout data of Arizona’s Maricopa County, where the majority of Arizonans live. Nate Cohn of The New York Times reported that “75 percent of registered Republicans [in Maricopa] turned out, compared with 69 percent of Democrats. That was enough to yield an electorate in which registered Republicans outnumbered Democrats by nine percentage points. Yet Republicans like Masters and Lake lost their races for Senate and governor.”
This is a theme that reappeared over and over again in the 2022 midterm elections. Across the country, up and down the ballot, voters spurned candidates who lacked commitment to the most basic of democratic principles: accepting the results of free and fair elections.
