An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The group of Russian hackers accused of meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election earlier this year targeted the email accounts of Democratic state parties in California and Indiana, and influential think tanks in Washington and New York, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The attempted intrusions, many of which were…
Tag: Think Tanks
From Climate Change to the Dangers of Smoking: How Powerful Interests ‘Made Us Doubt Everything’
BBC News reports:
In 1991, the trade body that represents electrical companies in the U.S., the Edison Electric Institute, created a campaign called the Information Council for the Environment which aimed to “Reposition global warming as theory (not fact)”. Some details of the campaign were leaked to the New York Times. “They ran advertising campaigns designed to undermine public support, cherry picking…
Klobuchar, Microsoft’s Smith Warn of Election Interference
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Microsoft President Brad Smith warned of ongoing election interference through technology on Thursday at an Axios virtual event on the Future of Employability. From a report: “It was four years ago at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia that our eyes were first opened to nation-state cyberattacks on candidates and campaigns … Here we are again…
DOD, FBI, DHS Release Info on Malware Used in Chinese Government-Led Hacking Campaigns
The U.S. government today publicly exposed malware used in Chinese government hacking efforts for more than a decade. From a report: The Chinese government has been using malware, referred to as Taidoor, to target government agencies, entities in the private sector, and think tanks since 2008, according to a joint announcement from the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security…
Is Support Now Growing for a Universal Basic Income?
Economist Tyler Cowen and former world chess champion Garry Kasparov (now the chairman of the nonprofit Renew Democracy Initiative) co-authored an opinion piece this week in Bloomberg arguing that “a pandemic is providing a tragic preview of some of the conditions UBI was conceived to address.” Though they worry about the cost of such a program, “And, though there are some…
Who’s Behind the ‘Reopen’ Domain Surge?
Inspired by a thread on Reddit, KrebsOnSecurity has been investigating possible incidences of state-led astroturfing to put pressure on U.S. states to ease, end, or reduce the extent of coronavirus lockdowns. From the article: The Reddit discussion focused on a handful of new domains — including reopenmn.com, reopenpa.com, and reopenva.com — that appeared to be tied to various gun rights groups…
Google’s Black Box Algorithm Controls Which Political Emails Land in Your Main Inbox
Adrianne Jeffries, Leon Yin, and Surya Mattu, reporting for The Markup: Pete Buttigieg is leading at 63 percent. Andrew Yang came in second at 46 percent. And Elizabeth Warren looks like she’s in trouble with 0 percent. These aren’t poll numbers for the U.S. 2020 Democratic presidential contest. Instead, they reflect which candidates were able to consistently land in Gmail’s primary…
Bankrupt US Coal Producer Was Funding Climate Change Denial
The bankruptcy of one of America’s largest coal producers revealed that the company was helping to fund “think tanks that have attacked the link between the burning of fossil fuels and climate change, as well as to several conservative advocacy groups that have attempted to undermine policies intended to shift the economy toward renewable energy,” reports the Intercept. The document shows…
Bernie Sanders Accuses Liberal Think Tank of Smearing Progressive Candidates
The Vermont senator’s criticism of the Center for American Progress threatens to inflame the ideological divisions that roiled the Democratic Party in 2016. Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/14/us/politics/bernie-sanders-2020-candidates.html?partner=rss&emc=rss…