OUR PICKSThe Government Needs to Act Fast to Protect the Election | Special Ops Veterans Warn Against Impending Attacks | True-Crime Fans Are Banding Together Online to Try to Solve Cases, and more
· The Government Needs to Act Fast to Protect the Election
Following the Supreme Court’s Wednesday decision, federal agencies can and should resume their efforts to communicate with social-media companies about disinformation online
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More than a dozen men threatened, assaulted, tortured, or kidnapped 11 victims in likely the worst-ever crypto-focused serial extortion case of its kind in the US
· The US Wants to Integrate the Commercial Space Industry With Its Military to Prevent Cyber Attacks
As more and more infrastructure is deployed in space, the risk of cyber attacks increases. The US military wants to team up with the private sector to protect assets everyone relies on
· Special Ops Veterans Warn Against Impending Attacks
SOAA has penned an open letter highlighting concerns about the heightened risk of terrorist attacks
The Government Needs to Act Fast to Protect the Election (Gowri Ramachandran and Lawrence Norden, The Atlantic)
The sophistication, scope, and scale of disinformation in this year’s election could be beyond anything the country has experienced before. The federal government will not be able to solve this problem entirely, but because of Wednesday’s decision in Murthy v. Missouri, it will at least be able to work with social-media companies to try.
The legal challenge to the federal government’s efforts on this front began in 2022. The attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri filed a lawsuit along with several private plaintiffs claiming that the federal government had violated Americans’ First Amendment rights by identifying posts containing false information on social-media platforms, and in some instances asking platforms to take down those posts or to give authoritative information more visibility in users’ feeds. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court said that the plaintiffs did not have standing to file that lawsuit and dismissed the case. (Last December, together with our colleagues at the Brennan Center and the law firm Stris & Maher LLP, we filed an amicus brief in the case on behalf of a bipartisan group of current and former election officials, highlighting the importance of communication between social-media companies and the government.)
The case should never have gotten as far as the Court to begin with, and great costs were incurred while the case worked its way through the legal system. A sweeping district-court decision in July 2023 stopped federal agencies from communicating with social-media companies, and that ruling was mostly upheld by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals a few months later. As a result, federal agencies with expertise in elections and disinformation stopped sharing their intelligence—about foreign interference efforts, election denialism, and false information on when and where to vote—with social-media companies, a practice that had been common since Russia’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 election. They also stopped sharing accurate information about elections. This came as preparations for the 2024 presidential election were getting under way. (Cont.)
