Why Foreign Interference in U.S. Elections is Growing | FBI Director Says America Faces Many Elevated Threats | Surge in Migrants Crossing at America’s Northern Border, and more

A Bookshop Cancels an Event Over a Rabbi’s Zionism, Prompting Outrage  (Ginia Bellafante, New York Times)
Shortly before 6 on Tuesday evening, Joshua Leifer was on his way to an event for his new book, “Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life,” when he got a call from his publicist.
In about an hour, he was to be in conversation with Andy Bachman, formerly the head rabbi at Congregation Beth Elohim, in Park Slope, Brooklyn, one of the best-known reform synagogues in the country. The talk had been planned a month ago; tickets had been sold and many people eventually showed up, but now there was a big problem.
The staff at Powerhouse, an arty but not aggressively political bookstore on the waterfront in Dumbo, where the discussion was being held, was objecting on the grounds that Rabbi Bachman was “a Zionist.”
He was not a Zionist who remained uncritical of Israel; he was not a zealot of the right. He believes in the Zionism of its literal definition, the animating principle of which is unacceptable to some faction of the pro-Palestinian left. “I mean that Jews have a right to self-determination and a homeland of their own,” he said.
In that call with his publicist, Mr. Leifer learned that she had been given the message that the conversation should avoid “uncomfortable territory,” Mr. Leifer, a doctoral student in history at Yale and a contributor to The New York Review of Books, told me the following morning. “My initial response was ‘Wow, that is a surprising and unsettling thing to hear from the bookstore.’” He presumed that those who had organized the evening had read his book, and he told his publicist to reassure them that the conversation would not deviate materially from it.
This proved in vain. A half-hour later, his publicist called him again to tell him that Powerhouse was “not willing to have Andy do an event at the bookstore.” Mr. Leifer, who describes himself as “an anti-occupation Jew” in favor of a democratic Israel, was welcome to speak on his own, but Rabbi Bachman was not invited to join him onstage. The writer was angry and mystified by this reversal of course — the event was to be a conversation, not a monologue; he was not going to address the audience by himself. Many people had come to hear Rabbi Bachman, a celebrity cleric who remains a beloved figure in Brooklyn even though he moved to Maine last year.

The Green Economy Is Hungry for Copper—and People Are Stealing, Fighting, and Dying to Feed It  (Vince Beiser, Wired)
Moqadi Mokoena had been feeling uneasy all day. When he’d left his home on the outskirts of Johannesburg, South Africa, for his job as a security guard, he’d had to turn around twice, having forgotten first his watch and then his cigarettes. He had reason to be nervous. His supervisor had assigned him to join a squad protecting an electrical substation where, just two days earlier, four other guards had been stripped naked and beaten with pipes by gun-wielding thieves. Now, on this day in May of 2021, Mokoena and a fellow guard were at that substation, peering tensely through their truck’s windshield as a group of armed men approached.
Mokoena pulled out his phone and called his wife, the mother of their 1-year-old daughter. He told her about the gang coming toward him. “I’m feeling scared,” he said. He didn’t have a gun himself. “I think they are the same ones who attacked our colleagues.”
“Call your supervisor!” she told him.
Minutes later, the men opened fire with at least one automatic weapon. Mokoena’s partner jumped out of the vehicle but was cut down by bullets. A third nearby guard dove for cover, shot back at the thieves, then ran for help. When he returned with the supervisor, they found Mokoena and his partner dead. Police later said the criminals made off with about $1,600 worth of copper cable.

Why Foreign Interference in U.S. Elections is Growing  (Paul R. Pillar, National Interest)
There is irony in what appears to be an Iranianhackof the electronic files of Donald Trump’s campaign. Details are unclear and unconfirmed, but a day after Microsoft issued areportabout efforts by hackers in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard to target a senior official in an unnamed U.S. presidential campaign, the Trump campaignstatedthat it was a victim of that effort. 
In what may or may not have been a result of such a hack, internal campaign documents—including a vetting file on eventual vice-presidential nominee JD Vance—were then sent to Politico, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheungdeclared, “Any media or news outlet reprinting documents or internal communications are doing the bidding of America’s enemies and doing exactly what they want.”
The irony comes from comparing that complaint with Trump’s posture toward such hacking by foreign adversaries during his first presidential campaign. “Russia, if you’re listening,”saidTrump in a campaign speech in July 2016, “I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing”—a reference to emails of his opponent, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. 
The Russian regime evidently was listening because shortly afterward, its hackerspulleddocuments from Clinton’s personal account as well as accounts of her presidential campaign. Russiaconveyedthe resulting large haul of documents to WikiLeaks—the operation that hasdivulgedwholesale much stolen classified material related to U.S. national security—as its instrument for disseminating the Clinton material. Trump repeatedly and publicly expressed hisdelightwith the Russia-WikiLeaks caper, saying, “I love WikiLeaks.”
Trump’s response to this operation was part of how he and his campaign welcomed, exploited, and facilitated Russia’s extensive and multifacetedinterferencein the 2016 election. Among other things, Trump or senior people in his campaign replayed material from Russian internet trolls andmetwith a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer to seek dirt on their Democratic opponents. At the same time, the chairman of Trump’s campaign repeatedlymetand shared polling data with a Russian intelligence agent. Trump brushed off any criticism of his use of the Russian election interference, sayingthis was just another form of “opposition research.”
The Founding Fathers were deeply worried about how partisan motivations could open the door in this way to foreign interferencein American politics. The worries extended to interference by putative allies as well as adversaries. A price of the alliance with France during the Revolutionary War had been French meddling that exploited divisions between factions within the Continental Congress.

Privacy Protections of the Stored Communications Act Gutted by California Court  (Stephanie Pell and Richard Salgado, Lawfare)
On July 23, the California Court of Appeal for the Fourth District issued a whopper of a decision that looks to upset decades’ long understandings of how users’ data is protected from disclosure by providers under the Stored Communications Act (SCA). It eviscerates the SCA’s prohibitions that prevent communication platforms from disclosing user communications and other content generally, including selling the content and, in some circumstances, providing it to governmental entities without a search warrant. It also overwhelms the considered, specific exceptions to the prohibitions that Congress crafted that will have ripple effects globally. While the appellate court takes solace in its belief that there are other mechanisms that might help fill the privacy-protection void it created, the decision diminishes the original comprehensive coverage of the SCA to a shadow of what Congress intended.

The companies directly involved in the case, Snap and Meta, are seeking review by the California Supreme Court of the sweeping decision. The California Supreme Court should exercise its discretion to review the case and reverse the court of appeal. The decision should also serve as a clarion call to Congress to update the SCA, a foresighted statute when first enacted in 1986, to account for the modern communications services on which the world relies, address any gaps or deficiencies, and buttress the statute for durability over the next 40 years.

Warrantless “Defensive” Searches of FISA Section 702 Data Violate the Fourth Amendment  (Noah Chauvin, Just Security)
Earlier this year, Congress enacted the Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act, or RISAA, capping a multi-year fight over whether to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).  Section 702 allows the government to collect the communications of non-U.S. persons (people who are not U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents) without a warrant.  This spying “inevitably” sweeps in Americans’ private phone calls, text messages, and emails as well, which intelligence officials can then “query” the database for—again without a warrant.  The government’s frequent abuses of this authority have caused bipartisan outrage, and many lawmakers in Congress vowed in 2023 not to reauthorize Section 702 without “significant reforms.”
As Congress negotiated what reforms to enact, intelligence officials began to make a new argument against a warrant requirement for U.S. person queries: That a significant number of such searches are “defensive” queries intended to identify the victims of foreign plots. As I explain in an article that will be published in the American University Law Review, this is a political argument, not a legal one. The Fourth Amendment protects the privacy rights of all U.S. persons, regardless of whether they are victims, and warrantless “defensive” searches violate those protections.
As Congress considers whether and in what form to reauthorize Section 702 when it expires in 2026, one question will surely be whether backdoor searches should be subject to a warrant requirement. Supporters of the status quo will likely argue that no such requirement should be imposed, in part because so many U.S. person queries are “defensive.” But even if that is a compelling policy argument against eliminating intelligence agencies’ authority to perform U.S. person queries, the Fourth Amendment requires that these searches be performed pursuant to a court order, regardless of whether the subject of the search is a victim.  Congress can help protect the constitutional rights of all Americans by enacting a warrant requirement for backdoor searches of Section 702 data.

Neo-Nazi Terrorist Group Using Steve Bannon Account to Radicalize People  (Ben Makuch, Guardian)
Joshua Fisher-Birch, an analyst at the Counter Extremism Project who specializes in monitoring the far right, confirmed he had seen the same Terrorgram-linked channel, the War Room Posse. “It is still a bit early to tell what Terrorgram channels will say specifically before the election,” said Fisher-Birch, adding that the “channels are also continuing to share manuals that promote lone actor attacks on people of color, LGBTQ people, Muslims, Jews, government officials and others, as well as encourage attacks on infrastructure”. That one of the most infectious propagandist groups on the far right is poisoning mainstream vectors of rightwing politics, shows a continued blurring of the line between GOP talking points and violent extremism. For law enforcement, it represents a broader threat as the election season, which already featured the attempted assassination of one presidential candidate, heads into the final stretch.

Riots Show How the UK’s Far Right Has Changed  (Daniel De Simone, BBC)
Will the disorder come to be seen as a one-off outburst quickly faced down by the public and police, or as a display of power by a newly dangerous far right? The murders in Southport of Elsie Dot Stancombe, Alice da Silva Aguiar and Bebe King were seized upon by extremists, who exploited the tragedy to promote their own hatreds and agendas. Online lies and misinformation inflamed the situation and some key instigators used social media and messaging apps to spread hatred and call for protests at fixed times and places. The result was a series of violent flash mobs, spanning over several days, with racial and religious hatred the central animating motive. Mobs attacked hotels housing migrants, tried to set the buildings alight and pulled people from their cars.