Extreme Wildfires Have Doubled in 2 Decades | Red Tape Is Making Hospital Ransomware Attacks Worse | The Supply Chain Is Under Strain, and more

If the supply chain disturbances of the pandemic proved anything, it was this: Trouble in any one place tends to ripple out widely.

Law Enforcement Is Spying on Thousands of Americans’ Mail, Records Show  (Drew Harwell, Washington Post)
The U.S. Postal Service has shared information from thousands of Americans’ letters and packages with law enforcement every year for the past decade, conveying the names, addresses and other details from the outside of boxes and envelopes without requiring a court order.
Postal inspectors say they fulfill such requests only when mail monitoring can help find a fugitive or investigate a crime. But a decade’s worth of records, provided exclusively to The Washington Post in response to a congressional probe, show Postal Service officials have received more than 60,000 requests from federal agents and police officers since 2015, and that they rarely say no.
Each request can cover days or weeks of mail sent to or from a person or address, and 97 percent of the requests were approved, according to the data. Postal inspectors recorded more than 312,000 letters and packages between 2015 and 2023, the records show.
The surveillance technique, known as the mail covers program, has long been used by postal inspectors to help track down suspects or evidence. The practice is legal, and the inspectors said they share only what they can see on the outside of the mail; the Fourth Amendment requires them to get a warrant to peek inside.

Pro-Trump Extremists Are Sure He Will Win. That Could Be Dangerous.  (Hannah Allam, Washinton Post)
Donald Trump has a history of fiery calls urging supporters to rise up, and his most militant fans often have obliged.
So it might seem counterintuitive that now, as Trump faces unprecedented legal problems and a close election in November, the nation is experiencing a lull in political unrest — in fact, one of the quietest periods that extremism researchers have recorded in recent years.
Chief among the factors explaining the lack of political violence, analysts say, is a simple one: Trump’s supporters believe he will win the presidency.
Trump himself has contributed to that certainty by insisting the only way he can lose is if the other side cheats. There’s little reason for pro-Trump extremist groups or radicalized MAGA fans to demonstrate when they foresee the presumptive Republican nominee coasting to victory over President Biden in five months and positioned to enact promised “retribution” against his enemies in seven, political violence trackers say.
Polling shows a tight race: Trump and Biden are roughly tied among registered voters nationally, with Trump tending to hold small leads in several of the all-important battleground states that Biden won four years ago.
But in the eyes of many Trump backers, he is almost certain to prevail if the vote is fair. Their confidence carries risk: Experts warn that should Trump lose, the gap between expectation and reality could make for a highly combustible period after the election.
“They’re assuming that Trump is going to win, and what’s jazzing them up right now is, ‘Then it’s going to be time for retribution,’” said Mary McCord, a former federal prosecutor who now leads the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection, a Georgetown Law center focused on threats to U.S. security and democracy.
Should Trump lose, however, “it’s just going to be the same thing [as 2020],” she said. “‘This was rigged, they cheated, they stole this.’ That narrative is super dangerous.”

Red Tape Is Making Hospital Ransomware Attacks Worse  (Matt Burgess, Wired)
Crippling ransomware attacks against hospitals and health care providers are on the rise. These ruthless cyberattacks can take medical systems offline for weeks—canceling appointments and surgeries and causing harm to patients. Doctors and nurses are plunged into crisis situations where they resort to using pen and paper, while IT staff work to make systems safe and bring them back online. The recovery can be long-lasting and brutal.
Health care professionals, lawyers, and cybersecurity experts tell WIRED that amid the chaos caused by criminal hackers, a little-known bureaucratic process can slow down hospitals and medical providers getting their systems working again.
The red tape involves organizations hit by ransomware sending detailed “assurance” or “attestation” letters to companies that they connect their systems or software with. These letters are designed to convince organizations that it is safe to reconnect after the ransomware attack, but they can add extra pressure to those already dealing with physically and mentally draining recovery operations.