Good morning, this is The Smoke Eater, for Thursday, January 23, 2020, and you shouldn't bang unless you plan to hit something.
Quick Hit
Bill Barr wants your dick pics * Trumpland's latest anti-immigrant scheme * ISIL's drone air force * Russia's false flag in Syria * Robot dogs don’t follow orders *
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This Message Should Self-Destruct
The Project on Government Oversight has sent a letter to Attorney General William Barr saying the administration's demand to neuter encryption technology will make life much easier for hackers. The letter, signed by advocates and watchdogs in technology, privacy, democracy, tax reform, security, and government ethics, says the DOJ's most recent request for a back door into everything electronic could create "stepping stones" malicious actors could use to reach other critical systems. "Any effort to diminish the effectiveness of encryption will inherently diminish the security and, potentially, the integrity, of our elections," the letter states. "Hostile actors will likely direct similar efforts at campaign officials, political organizations, and politically engaged individuals in future elections." [Letter]
The letter and Barr's fight comes amid news that two years ago Apple scrapped plans to let users fully encrypt their iCloud data following an FBI tantrum. An Apple employee familiar with the matter tells Reuters, "Legal killed it ... They decided they weren’t going to poke the bear anymore." A former employee who worked on the project adds it's possible the project was scrapped in fear of users locking themselves out, like Rudy Giuliani.
Privacy advocates argue law enforcement's repeated requests for backdoors are moot: the FBI can gain access to phones almost as easily as the Saudi's can steal dick pics from Jeff Bezos. That federal agencies pay to crack encrypted cellphone data is nothing new, as was discovered in the wake of the 2016 San Bernadino shooting, but Michael Hayes reports numerous local police departments have similarly been cracking phones. According to Hayes, "law enforcement in at least 11 states spent over $4 million in the last decade on devices and software designed to get around passwords and access information stored on phones."
Papers, Please
Vox got its hands on State Department cables that show the administration wants to deny visas to pregnant people if a consular officer suspects the person may be trying to deliver their child in the U.S. The administration's attack on so-called "birth tourism" has been expected, and the new rules give consular officials broad authority to scrutinize people applying for short-term visas. The cable states officials are, "required to presume that giving birth for the purpose of obtaining U.S. citizenship is the applicant’s primary purpose of travel," if the official has, "reason to believe the applicant will give birth during their stay in the United States." A State Department official tells Vox, "People will die because of this."
Biden Our Time
The Washington Post has an interesting piece on wealthy, first-time Trump donors. What's immediately notable is that many of these donors are foreign nationals who seem to have shown little interest in politics before the 2016 election. A gander at their social media feeds shows selfies at Trump properties, often with Trumplandia's biggest celebrities.
Judd Legum reports Facebook has been letting one of the largest pro-Trump Super PACs run false ads despite very clear policies banning disinformation. Legum notes that ads pushed by the Super PAC, The Committee to Defend the President, have actually been debunked by Facebook's own factcheckers.
Joe Biden has a long op-ed in Foreign Affairs that dropped late this morning.
Things That Go Boom In The Night
A leadership vacuum for the Iranian-backed Shia militias in Iraq has created confusion in the wake of the U.S. assassination of Soleimani. Al Jazeera reports there is now a unique set of circumstances the U.S. could utilize to its advantage. With this in mind, Brett McGurk, the former Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS under Barack Obama, opines that Trump's "maximum pressure" campaign is based on an incoherent foreign policy strategy that's being cooked up by Mar-a-Lago members instead of experts.
Earlier this year al-Shabab militants attacked and overran a U.S. military base at Manda Bay Airfield in Kenya, killing three Americans. The attack was overshadowed due to the unfolding chaos in the Middle East in the wake of the assassination of Qassem Soleimani. The New York Times has a follow-up that goes into detail about the attack, how the U.S. Africa Command has been trying to keep the attack under wraps, and why some members of Congress are pissed. Writing for AP, Cara Anna explains that simply cutting the U.S. presence in Africa, as proposed by the Trump administration in order to refocus U.S. forces against Russia and China, isn't really the easy peasy solution they'd like people to believe.
ISIL forces in Syria were trying to build themselves a little air force with UAVs and Phantom-4 drones, reports Middle East reporter, Jenan Moussa. Mousa has been combing through abandoned hard drives and cellphones with data going back to 2017 that suggests the group was trying to buy hundreds of commercial drones and off-the-shelf hardware from online-based retailers in the U.S., Germany, Turkey and China.
Believe it or not, incidents of terrorism are on the decline throughout Europe. The opposite is true in the U.S. where, according to The Global Terrorism Database, incidents of terrorism are on the rise thanks to the prevalence of guns.
The team over at Bellingcat has published part three of its report on chlorine gas attacks on Syrian civilians. The conclusion, reached using an array of OSINT, is that it's unlikely a "false flag" operation was carried out -- a conspiracy theory pushed the Russia Federation and the Syrian delegation during an Arria meeting of the UN Security Council -- as witness reports confirm the city was under constant shelling at the time. The report cites recovered munitions, witness testimony, and an analyses of impact craters, chemistry, and bodies.
Robot Dogs and Russian Vaporware
The U.S. Air Force had a reasonably successful test of its Advanced Battle Management System. Most of the ABMS sits under shroud of secrecy, but it incorporates elements of cloud-based data systems so commanders can get real-time information on land, sea, and air forces. "I am thrilled to say that 26 out of 28 things work," said Will Roper, the Air Force’s assistant secretary for acquisition, technology and logistics. "That is too high of a success rate at this point in time, but I’ll take it." Of the things that still need work, Roper says, "We had some robot dogs — apparently those exist — that can go and do patrol. We were never able to patch their feeds in."
Russia's fancy new hypersonic missile is suffering from a "childhood illness" and sadly won't be harassing anybody anytime soon, The Drive reports. A test of the mysterious 3M22 Zircon (or Tsirkon) missile doesn't appear to have happened on schedule despite boasting from Kremlin in late December 2019. In a recent interview with the state-run RIA Novosti, Admiral Nikolai Evmenov, Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Navy, declined to offer details about when the weapon might see service beyond suggesting it could emerge within the next few years.
One More Thing...
Take a second and consider the Senate pages running back and forth with water (and milk) who, because of the cellphone ban during Trump's impeachment trial, have to hustle back and forth from the Senate floor like it's 1999.
OK, now here's a warm and fuzzy critter video! IT'S THE CREAMHEROES!
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