Observations on current events

Data Security:

Wired: RESIST PHISHING ATTACKS WITH THREE GOLDEN RULES
"Follow these three rules to keep from getting hooked.

Rule 1: Use Context Clues The best way to spot a phishing scheme is to listen to your gut. Remember, even if an email looks like it comes from a friend, that doesn't mean it's safe. If you weren’t expecting an email from someone, or if you were but the email seems rushed, or their tone is off, or they’re sending you a Facebook message when they usually text you ... If anything seems even a little bit off, check with the purported sender on another platform to confirm that they actually reached out. If a message comes from a person or entity you don’t already know, consider the context of why you might be receiving it and whether the message really makes sense. Most online services won’t, for instance, appear out of the blue, asking you to make account changes through an email link. And even if they do, you should always navigate to the site separately, log in, and check to see what’s actually going on. Treat attachments with even more suspicion and avoid opening them altogether, particularly if you didn’t ask for them or didn’t have a pre-arranged plan to receive them.

Rule 2: Remember the Basics Following standard digital defense advice will help with phishing as well. Keep a backup of your data. Enable multifactor authentication on every account that offers it. Close accounts you don’t use anymore. And set up a password manager to keep track of unique, robust passwords. All of these steps make you a tougher target, but more importantly, they'll help contain damage if you ever do get phished.

Rule 3: Know Thyself At its core, phishing defense requires an awareness of the human traits scams prey on. “The thing I find fascinating about phishing is it’s really exploiting a very primal part of human behavior,” says Crane Hassold, a threat intelligence manager at the security firm PhishLabs, who previously worked as a digital behavior analyst for the FBI. “It’s all about curiosity, trust, and fear. Those qualities are really hardwired into humans, so a lot of protection against phishing has to do with conditioning yourself to look out for things that could be a red flag.” This means being in touch with your instincts and emotions as you read your messages. That sense of urgency, or that threat from an authority figure, or that random ask for help, all conspire to force you to click. You need to recognize those emotions before acting on them and consider the possibility that a message has nefarious reasons for trying to elicit them. It’s time to really internalize a hard truth: No one is ever going to give you free cruise tickets. Truly never."



Tax 'Reform'

NY Times: Trump Promised to Kill Carried Interest. Lobbyists Kept it Alive
"“We will eliminate the carried interest deduction, well known deduction, and other special interest loopholes that have been so good for Wall Street investors and for people like me but unfair to American workers,” Mr. Trump said, incorrectly referring to the special treatment of carried interest as a tax deduction. So what happened? Gary D. Cohn, the director of the White House’s National Economic Council, said on Wednesday that the administration tried more than two dozen times to eliminate the carried interest loophole and that, as recently as this week, Mr. Trump asked why it was not gone. Mr. Cohn, a former top Goldman Sachs executive, said opposition from lobbyists and lawmakers on Capitol Hill was intense and that the best that could be done was to extend the “holding period” for investments that qualify for the tax break to three years from one..."



Bad Government:

The Atlantic: American Kakistocracy

"There’s a case to be made that the United States is governed by the least scrupulous of its citizens..."



The Intercept: TRUMP WHITE HOUSE WEIGHING PLANS FOR PRIVATE SPIES TO COUNTER “DEEP STATE” ENEMIES

"The Trump Administration is considering a set of proposals developed by Blackwater founder Erik Prince and a retired CIA officer — with assistance from Oliver North, a key figure in the Iran-Contra scandal — to provide CIA Director Mike Pompeo and the White House with a global, private spy network that would circumvent official U.S. intelligence agencies, according to several current and former U.S. intelligence officials and others familiar with the proposals. The sources say the plans have been pitched to the White House as a means of countering “deep state” enemies in the intelligence community seeking to undermine Donald Trump’s presidency. The creation of such a program raises the possibility that the effort would be used to create an intelligence apparatus to justify the Trump administration’s political agenda. “Pompeo can’t trust the CIA bureaucracy, so we need to create this thing that reports just directly to him,” said a former senior U.S. intelligence official with firsthand knowledge of the proposals, in describing White House discussions. “It is a direct-action arm, totally off the books,” this person said, meaning the intelligence collected would not be shared with the rest of the CIA or the larger intelligence community. “The whole point is this is supposed to report to the president and Pompeo directly.” North, who appears frequently on Trump’s favorite TV network, Fox News, was enlisted to help sell the effort to the administration. He was the “ideological leader” brought in to lend credibility, said the former senior intelligence official. Some of the individuals involved with the proposals secretly met with major Trump donors asking them to help finance operations before any official contracts were signed...."

Orwellian Language Controls

Washington Post: CDC gets list of forbidden words: Fetus, transgender, diversity
"The Trump administration is prohibiting officials at the nation’s top public health agency from using a list of seven words or phrases — including “fetus” and “transgender” — in official documents being prepared for next year’s budget. Policy analysts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta were told of the list of forbidden terms at a meeting Thursday with senior CDC officials who oversee the budget, according to an analyst who took part in the 90-minute briefing. The forbidden terms are “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “diversity,” “transgender,” “fetus,” “evidence-based” and “science-based.” In some instances, the analysts were given alternative phrases. Instead of “science-based” or ­“evidence-based,” the suggested phrase is “CDC bases its recommendations on science in consideration with community standards and wishes,” the person said. In other cases, no replacement words were immediately offered. The Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the CDC, “will continue to use the best scientific evidence available to improve the health of all Americans,” HHS spokesman Matt Lloyd told The Washington Post. “HHS also strongly encourages the use of outcome and evidence data in program evaluations and budget decisions.” The question of how to address such issues as sexual orientation, gender identity and abortion rights — all of which received significant visibility under the Obama administration — has surfaced repeatedly in federal agencies since President Trump took office. Several key departments — including HHS, as well as Justice, Education, and Housing and Urban Development — have changed some federal policies and how they collect government information about lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans..."


Open, Fast, Affordable Internet?

Wired Magazine: Koch Brothers Are Cities' New Obstacle to Building Broadband
"...Look what happened in Louisville, Kentucky. It's a city of about 750,000, the largest in the state. Earlier this year, the city noticed that the state of Kentucky was funding a "middle mile" fiber network designed to connect the state’s 120 counties and provide cheaper connectivity for municipal buildings—KentuckyWired. As part of the project, Louisville—also known as Jefferson County—would be able to run 100 miles of fiber alongside the state network for just the cost of materials. That seemed like a great deal to Louisville. The city estimated that if it installed fiber for city use from scratch, it would cost $15 million. With the KentuckyWired offer, the same project would cost just $5.4 million—with half of that amount dedicated to placing fiber nodes in West Louisville, a struggling, de facto segregated area of concentrated poverty, poor health outcomes, and general economic distress. The public benefits of jumping on the KentuckyWired offer would be substantial: Not only would West Louisville get a chance at better access for its homes and businesses, but the city could install fiber-controlled traffic signals, create better and cheaper connectivity for public-safety agencies, and ship data around inexpensively to improve its operations. In a nutshell, the city would build the infrastructure and lease capacity to private internet-service providers. "We were looking at this as our smart city foundation," Grace Simrall, Louisville's chief of civic innovation, says. At least half of the new fiber capacity would be reserved for open access leases, to encourage last-mile retail providers to wire homes and businesses. All for just the cost of the fiber lines. It seemed to be a no-brainer. “I can't think of a more sensible plan," Simrall says. "I just didn't think that we were going to face opposition on this. We thought surely people would understand that this was a way for us to leapfrog where we were for a fraction of the cost." But when Simrall and her colleagues went to talk to members of the Louisville Metro Council in May, they found that interest groups, including the cable trade association in Kentucky and something called the Taxpayers Protection Alliance, had been there already. Suddenly, the city's eminently sensible plan was in trouble. "The cable trade association in Kentucky was very vocal about how they thought that this was a waste of taxpayer money and had just spoken to numerous council members on the record about that," Simrall says. Then Simrall and the city found out that the Washington, DC-based Taxpayers Protection Alliance had been posting frequently on social media opposing Louisville's fiber plan. (Typical tweet: “Google suspended its fiber efforts in many cities due to cost - now wants Louisville taxpayers to foot the $5.4M bill.” The Louisville plan had nothing to do with Google.) That's when Simrall learned who had joined the forces determined to block Louisville from spending a dime on fiber for the city's use: Charles and David Koch, the brothers backing environment-hostile fossil fuels and funding politicians who dole out goodies to the super-rich. "It's widely known that they [the Taxpayers Protection Alliance] receive a lot of funding from the Koch brothers," Simrall says..."

Shared Burden?

NY Times: A Historic Tax Heist
"With barely a vote to spare early Saturday morning, the Senate passed a tax bill confirming that the Republican leaders’ primary goal is to enrich the country’s elite at the expense of everybody else, including future generations who will end up bearing the cost. The approval of this looting of the public purse by corporations and the wealthy makes it a near certainty that President Trump will sign this or a similar bill into law in the coming days. The bill is expected to add more than $1.4 trillion to the federal deficit over the next decade, a debt that will be paid by the poor and middle class in future tax increases and spending cuts to Medicare, Social Security and other government programs. Its modest tax cuts for the middle class disappear after eight years. And up to 13 million people stand to lose their health insurance because the bill makes a big change to the Affordable Care Act. Yet Republicans somehow found a way to give a giant and permanent tax cut to corporations like Apple, General Electric and Goldman Sachs, saving those businesses tens of billions of dollars...
...Republicans offered one fantasy after another to make the case for their budget-busting tax cuts. For example, the White House has said that cutting the corporate tax to 20 percent from 35 percent will lead to a boom in investment and wages — an argument disputed by most credible economists. Almost all of those extra profits will enrich senior executives and shareholders, experts say. This week, The Times reported that despite the repeated claims of the Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, his department never produced an analysis that backs up the administration’s assertion that the tax cuts would pay for themselves. It is not hard to see why. The Joint Committee on Taxation, the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center and other experts say that the bill would not come close to paying for itself..."