Tag: national security

New GOP-led panel to hold first public hearing Thursday on alleged ‘weaponization’ of federal government | CNN Politics

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CNN
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The GOP-led House committee on the alleged “weaponization” of the federal government kicks off Thursday with its first public hearing with a witness list that suggests Republicans on the committee will push a popular narrative among conservatives that has been disputed by federal officials.

The hearing will be split into two sessions, featuring a swath of current and former lawmakers, former FBI officials and legal experts. They plan to discuss allegations of how the government has been weaponized against Republicans, as well as the general belief among some conservatives that federal officials and mainstream media have been working to silence the right.

“We’re focused on the whole weaponization of government, and the idea that the government is not working for the American people,” subcommittee chairman Jim Jordan told CNN. “The government is supposed to protect the First Amendment, not have, as Mr. (Jonathan) Turley said, ‘censorship by surrogate,’” he said, referencing one of the witnesses slated for Thursday’s hearing who is a George Washington University Law Center professor.

The Ohio Republican continued, “I’m sure those will be some of the things that will come up in the course of the hearing,” he added, referencing a line from one of the witnesses GOP members have called.

Democrats on the panel, however, tell CNN they reject the premise of the weaponization subcommittee itself – and much of their time will be spent disputing GOP messaging.

“We have an overall strategy, which is to debunk the misrepresentations that are sure to be coming from it,” said Rep. Dan Goldman, a freshman Democrat from New York. “My understanding is that Sens. Grassley and Johnson are going to speak, and I’m glad they are. I hope they talk about how they used their Senate committees to weaponize Russian propaganda and disinformation in 2020.”

“I think our intention is to make sure that the American people are aware of the actual truth of the matter, and not whatever partisan misinformation that Republicans are going to peddle,” Goldman added.

Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, is being called as one of the Democrats’ witnesses. He told CNN that “one basic question is whether weaponization is the target of the committee or if weaponization is the purpose of the committee” – previewing a potential line of attack.

In a new memo released Thursday ahead of the subcommittee’s first hearing, the White House called the subpanel a “Fox News reboot of the House Un-American Activities Committee” and “a political stunt that weaponizes Congress to carry out the priorities of extreme MAGA Republicans in Congress.”

White House Oversight spokesman Ian Sams writes that the committee “plans to weaponize the MAGA agenda against their perceived political enemies” and is “choosing to make it their top priority to go down the rabbit hole of debunked conspiracy theories about a ‘deep state’ instead of taking a deep breath and deciding to work with the President and Democrats in Congress to improve Americans’ everyday lives.”

The first panel of witnesses to testify before the committee include GOP Sens. Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, as well as former congresswoman from Hawaii and ex-Democrat Tulsi Gabbard.

The lawmakers are only slated to deliver opening statements and are not expected to answer any questions while testifying, sources familiar with the committee’s plans tell CNN.

Gabbard has regularly appeared on Fox News since leaving Congress and frequently uses the network to accuse the FBI and the Justice Department of targeting political opponents of the Biden administration.

Grassley and Johnson have both previously attacked the Justice Department for how it has handled its investigation into Hunter Biden and its approach to addressing threats against school administrators.

Grassley has also accused the Justice Department of seeking to criminalize the First Amendment right of parents to protest school policies. The Justice Department has denied doing so, pointing to a line in the memo acknowledging that “spirited debate about policy matters is protected under or Constitution.”

The witnesses’ previous comments regarding the politization of the Biden Justice Department suggest that the committee plans to push a narrative that is popular among the right, but has been publicly disputed by the FBI. There is little public evidence supporting such claims, which Jordan says are backed up by unnamed whistleblowers. Some allegations have been debunked by fact-checkers or news reports, and Jordan has falsely claimed for years that there is an anti-GOP “deep state” within the FBI.

Democrats, meanwhile, plan to showcase Raskin’s testimony, who is the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee – which is investigating a series of polarizing issues such as Hunter Biden and the former and current presidents’ possession of classified documents. Raskin, a former member of the House select committee on the January 6, 2021, Capitol Hill insurrection, and a key fixture in both of former President Donald Trump’s impeachment trials, has been a crucial messenger for the left in pushing back against the GOP’s claims and controversial probes.

The second panel of witnesses will feature former FBI special agents Nicole Parker and Thomas Baker, as well as Turley and the Raben Group’s Elliot Williams.

Parker wrote an op-ed last month detailing how she left the bureau after over 10 years of service because she believed it became “politically weaponized.”

Baker, meanwhile, published a book in December 2022 titled, “The Fall of the FBI: How a Once Great Agency Became a Threat to Democracy.”

Turley was a prominent figure during Trump’s impeachment trials often referenced by the right.

Williams, a CNN analyst, is appearing on behalf of the Democrats. Williams previously served as deputy assistant attorney general for legislative affairs at the Department of Justice, where worked to secure Senate confirmation for both Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates.

Virginia Rep. Gerry Connolly, a Democratic member of the subcommittee, cast doubt on the effectiveness of Republicans’ strategy, telling CNN, “I fail to see what they think they’re going to accomplish by those kinds of witnesses. … I don’t know that that adds anything to their credibility or making their case. I’ll leave it at that.”

But Democrats are also cognizant of one potential disadvantage ahead of Thursday’s hearing – the fact they have not yet met as a group while the Republicans have. Connolly told CNN that, given they were just named as member of the panel last week, they have not yet had the opportunity to begin preparing for the onslaught of investigations GOP members have planned.

GOP subcommittee members told CNN the purpose of the first hearing is largely to outline the panel’s investigate plans in the months ahead, and set the stage for what viewers should anticipate from the weekly-hearings the committee is hoping to hold.

“Chairman Jordan wants to introduce people to what the committee hopes to accomplish, and the scope of the problem. Having these senators speak with authority helps set it. They won’t be questioned as witnesses, but they are testifying as to their observations,” GOP Rep. Darrell Issa said.

“I’m not sure we’re going to learn what we need to learn about what has happened inside government agencies in sufficient detail with these witnesses, but I think they can kind of cast the vision,” Republican subcommittee member Dan Bishop of North Carolina told CNN.

Bishop said he hopes the work of this panel will pave the way for legislation to address what he claimed were agencies “going off rogue.”

Jordan and House Judiciary Committee staff have met with series of whistleblowers behind closed doors this week for transcribed interviews regarding claims about the politicization of the Justice Department. The interviews will serve as the basis for much of the subcommittee’s probe, sources with direct knowledge of the interviews tell CNN.

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February 9, 2023
China wants to dominate the ‘near space’ battlefield. Balloons are a key asset | CNN

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Hong Kong
CNN
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In China’s eyes, the newest superpower battlefield sits between 12 and 60 miles above the Earth’s surface in a thin-aired layer of the atmosphere it calls “near space.”

Lying above the flightpaths of most commercial and military jets and below satellites, near space is an in-between area for spaceflight to pass through – but it is also a domain where hypersonic weapons transit and ballistic missiles cross.

China has paid close attention to other countries’ developments in this region, which has been hailed by Chinese military experts as “a new front for militarization” and “an important field of competition among the world’s military powers.”

In addition to developing high-tech vessels such as solar-powered drones and hypersonic vehicles, China is also reviving a decades-old technology to utilize this area of the atmosphere – lighter-than-air vehicles. They include stratospheric airships and high-altitude balloons – similar to the one identified over the continental United States and shot down on Saturday.

China maintains the balloon is a civilian research airship, despite claims by US officials that the device was part of an extensive Chinese surveillance program.

While questions remain about that incident, an examination of Chinese state media reports and scientific papers reveal the country’s growing interest in these lighter-than-air vehicles, which Chinese military experts have touted for use toward a wide range of purposes, from communication relay, reconnaissance and surveillance to electronic countermeasures.

Chinese research on the high-altitude balloons dates back to the late 1970s, but over the past decade there’s been renewed focus on using older technology equipped with new hardware as major powers around the world have bulked up their capabilities in the sky.

“With the rapid development of modern technology, the space for information confrontation is no longer limited to land, sea, and the low altitude. Near space has also become a new battlefield in modern warfare and an important part of the national security system,” read a 2018 article in the PLA Daily, the official newspaper of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

And a range of “near-space flight vehicles” will play a vital role in future joint combat operations that integrate outer space and the Earth’s atmosphere, the article said.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping has urged the PLA Air Force to “speed up air and space integration and sharpen their offensive and defensive capabilities” as early as 2014, and military experts have designated “near space” as a crucial link in the integration.

Searches on CNKI, China’s largest online academic database, show Chinese researchers, both military and civilian, have published more than 1,000 papers and reports on “near space,” many of which focus on the development of “near space flight vehicles.” China has also set up a research center to design and develop high-altitude balloons and stratospheric airships, or dirigibles, under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a top government think tank.

One particular area of interest is surveillance. While China already deploys a sprawling satellite network for sophisticated long-range surveillance, Chinese military experts have highlighted the advantages of lighter-than-air vehicles.

Unlike rotating satellites or traveling aircraft, stratospheric airships and high-altitude balloons “can hover over a fixed location for a long period of time” and are not easily detected by radar, wrote Shi Hong, the executive editor of Shipborne Weapons, a prominent military magazine published by a PLA-linked institute, in an article published in state media in 2022.

In a 2021 video segment run by state news agency Xinhua, a military expert explains how near-space lighter-than-air vehicles can surveil and take higher resolution photos and videos at a much lower cost compared to satellites.

In the video, Cheng Wanmin, an expert at the National University of Defense Technology, highlighted the progress by the US, Russia and Israel in developing these vehicles, adding China has also made its own “breakthroughs.”

An example of advances China has made in this domain is the reported flight of a 100-meter-long (328 feet) unmanned dirigible-like airship known as “Cloud Chaser.” In a 2019 interview with the Southern Metropolis Daily newspaper, Wu Zhe, a professor at Beihang University, said the vehicle had transited across Asia, Africa and North America in an around-the-world flight at 20,000 meters (65, 616 feet) above the Earth.

Another scientist on the team told the newspaper that compared with satellites, stratospheric airships are better for “long-term observation” and have a range of purposes from disaster warning and environmental research to wireless network construction and aerial reconnaissance.

It’s also clear that China is not alone in seeing new uses for a technology that’s been leveraged for military reconnaissance as far back as the late 18th century, when French forces employed a balloon corps.

The US has also been bolstering its capacity to use lighter-than-air vehicles. In 2021, the US Department of Defense contracted an American aerospace firm to work on using their stratospheric balloons as a means “to develop a more complete operating picture and apply effects to the battlefield,” according to a statement from the firm, Raven Aerostar, at the time.

“This isn’t just a China thing. The US, and other nations as well, have been working on and developing high-altitude aerostats, balloons and similar vehicles,” said Brendan Mulvaney, director of the China Aerospace Studies Institute (CASI), a research center serving the US Air Force.

“They are cheap, provide long-term persistent stare for collection of imagery, communications and other information – including weather,” said Mulvaney, who authored a 2020 paper that detailed China’s interest in using lighter-than-air vehicles for “near-space reconnaissance.”

China also appears acutely aware of the potential for other countries to use balloons to spy.

In 2019, a documentary series on China’s border defense forces produced by a state-owned television channel featured an incident where the PLA Air Force spotted and shot down a suspected high-altitude surveillance balloon that “threatened (China’s) air defense safety.”

The documentary did not provide further detail about the time and location of the incident, but a paper published last April by researchers in a PLA institute noted air-drift balloons were spotted over China in 1997 and 2017.

Other experts have pointed to the potential use of balloons in data collection that can aid China’s development of hypersonic weapons that transit through near space.

“Understanding the atmospheric conditions up there is critical to programming the guidance software” for ballistic and hypersonic missiles, according to Hawaii-based analyst Carl Schuster, a former director of operations at the US Pacific Command’s Joint Intelligence Center.

Chinese state media reports show China has also used balloons to test advanced hypersonic vehicles. In 2019, state broadcaster CCTV’s military channel showed footage of a balloon lifting off for what it described as maiden testing of three miniaturized models of “wide-range aircraft,” which according to Chinese media reports, can fly at a wide range of speeds, up to five times the speed of sound.

US intelligence officials believe the Chinese balloon identified over the US in recent days is part of an extensive, Chinese military-run surveillance program involving a fleet of balloons that has conducted at least two dozen missions over at least five continents in recent years, CNN reported on Tuesday.

Beijing on Thursday said the assessment was “likely part of the US’ information and public opinion warfare” against China. It has maintained that the device identified over the US is civilian in nature, and linked it to “companies,” though it declined to provide more information on which entity manufactured the balloons.

Both the self-governing island of Taiwan and Japan have acknowledged past, similar sightings, though it is not clear if they are related to the US incident.

A US military commander on Monday acknowledged that the US has a “domain awareness gap” that allowed three other suspected Chinese spy balloons to transit the continental US undetected during the previous administration.

An FBI team is working on understanding more about the equipment reclaimed from the balloon shot down over the sea – including what kind of data it could collect and whether it could transmit that in real time.

CASI’s Mulvaney said that whether the balloon itself is characterized as “dual use” or “state-owned,” data collected would have gone back to China, which is now receiving another kind of information from the incident.

“At the end of the day responses and (tactics, techniques, and procedures) from the US and other countries on how they react, or fail to – all of that has value to China and the PLA.”

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February 9, 2023
Initial classified balloon report wasn’t flagged as urgent, drawing criticism | CNN Politics

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Washington
CNN
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A day before the suspected Chinese spy balloon entered US airspace over Alaska, the Defense Intelligence Agency quietly sent an internal report that a foreign object was headed towards US territory, military and intelligence officials familiar with the matter told CNN.

The report – also known as a “tipper” – was disseminated through classified channels accessible across the US government. But it wasn’t flagged as an urgent warning and top defense and intelligence officials who saw it weren’t immediately alarmed by it, according to sources. Instead of treating it as an immediate threat, the US moved to investigate the object, seeing it as an opportunity to observe and collect intelligence.

It wasn’t until the balloon entered Alaskan airspace, on January 28, and then took a sharp turn south that officials came to believe it was on a course to cross over the continental US – and that its mission might be to spy on the US mainland.

This timeline of events – previously unreported – helps explain why US defense officials declined to act before the balloon had crossed over US territory. That lack of urgency has become a sharp political flashpoint on Capitol Hill, where some Republicans have criticized the administration for not sounding the alarm sooner.

“Our government knew a Chinese military spy balloon was going to enter the airspace over the continental U.S. at least TWO DAYS BEFORE it happened Yet they failed to act to stop it,” Sen. Marco Rubio, the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, tweeted on Wednesday. “Biden must disclose to Americans when they knew the spay [sic] balloon was headed towards the U.S. & explain why they didn’t stop it.”

Officials familiar with the original DIA report conceded Rubio’s point that they didn’t see the balloon as an urgent threat until it was already over US territory –  even as fresh revelations have emerged about what the US knew about Chinese spy balloons.

During a closed door briefing on Tuesday, Senate staff repeatedly pressed military officials about who knew what – and when. On Wednesday, Rubio and Sen. Roger Wicker, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, sent a letter to President Joe Biden’s top defense and intelligence officials raising questions about the administration’s decision-making after the balloon crossed into Alaskan airspace.

CNN reported on Tuesday that US officials tracking the balloon’s trajectory recognized it as part of a known aerial surveillance operation run by the Chinese military that officials say has flown dozens of missions world-wide, including half a dozen near or within US airspace. A military intelligence report from April of 2022, exclusively reported by CNN, revealed that the US had tracked previous flights by similar balloons.

It was only when the balloon turned south that it “got strange,” a senior US official told CNN. “We immediately started talking about shooting it down, then.”

On January 28, when the balloon entered US airspace near Alaska, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, sent up fighter jets to make a positive identification, according to defense officials, reflecting a subtle shift in urgency.

Still, officials tracking the balloon saw little reason to be alarmed. At the time, according to US officials, this balloon was expected to sail over Alaska and continue on a northern trajectory that intelligence and military officials could track and study.

Instead, shortly after the balloon crossed over land, it alarmed officials by making its unexpected turn south.

On January 31, the balloon had crossed out of Canada and into the Lower 48. And concerns that the balloon had been sent by Beijing explicitly to spy on the mainland US were confirmed when NORAD observed the balloon “loitering” over sensitive military facilities, multiple sources familiar with the intelligence told CNN.

How much control China exerted over the balloon’s path remains a matter of debate. Although the balloon was equipped with propellers and a rudder that allowed it to turn “like a sailboat,” according to the senior US official, it largely rode the jet stream – one of the reasons US officials were able to predict its path across the US in advance.

Senior administration officials appear not to have been made aware of the balloon until on or near January 28, when it crossed into Alaskan airspace, including America’s top-ranking general, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley.

Biden, according to senior administration officials, was not briefed until three days later, on January 31, when the balloon crossed out of Canada and into the continental United States. At that point, Biden asked the military to present options “immediately” to shoot the balloon down, officials said.

Military officials said it is not necessarily surprising that the president was not briefed until January 31, given the expectations for the balloon at the time.

The “tipper” sent by the DIA also goes out across government channels routinely, and although US officials have access to these reports, whether they read them or whether those reports are included in briefings to senior policymakers is a matter of discretion.

“Some of these places send emails and then count that as someone being informed,” the senior US official said.

As more information about the administration’s decision-making process on the balloon has continued to trickle out, Congress has taken a keen interest.

“There are still a lot of questions to be asked about Alaska,” a Senate Republican aide told CNN. “Alaska is still part of the United States – why is that okay to transit Alaska without telling anyone, but [the continental US] is different?”

Some Republican lawmakers have raised pointed questions about why the Biden administration did not move to shoot down the balloon before it crossed down into the continental US – either while it was over Alaska or sooner.

Military and intelligence officials who spoke to CNN said that it wasn’t known that the balloon was going to dip south into the Lower 48 until the balloon was already over Alaska. Before that, officials didn’t believe that it posed any real risk to the US, and in fact, presented more of an intelligence-gathering opportunity.

“The domain awareness was there as it approached Alaska,” NORAD commander Gen. Glen VanHerck told reporters on Monday. “It was my assessment that this balloon did not present a physical military threat to North America… And therefore, I could not take immediate action because it was not demonstrating hostile act or hostile intent.”

Once it was over US territory, officials have argued that the benefits of gathering additional intelligence on the balloon as it passed over far outweighed the risk of shooting it down over land.

The US sent up U-2 spy planes to track the balloon’s progress, according to US officials.

One pilot took a selfie in the cockpit that shows both the pilot and the surveillance balloon itself, these officials said – an image that has already gained legendary status in both NORAD and the Pentagon.

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February 8, 2023
US senators seek answers from Meta on whether user data was accessed by China, Russia and others | CNN Business

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Washington
CNN
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Top US lawmakers on the Senate Intelligence Committee want answers from Meta on a newly disclosed internal investigation it conducted in 2018 that found tens of thousands of software developers in China, Russia and other “high-risk” countries may have had access to detailed Facebook user data before the company clamped down on that access beginning in 2014.

In a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Monday, Sens. Mark Warner and Marco Rubio, the chair and vice-chair of the Senate committee, cited a document unsealed last week in an ongoing privacy lawsuit involving the company.

That document, an internal slide presentation from 2018, suggested that nearly 87,000 developers in China, 42,000 in Russia and a handful based in Cuba, Iran and North Korea had access to Facebook user information through an earlier version of the company’s programming interfaces. The presentation provides an interim update on the probe, which found, among other things, that Iran was home to a “significant number of seemingly Russian developers” of Facebook apps.

The document does not explicitly outline what types of information the developers could have accessed, but it focuses on a period prior to 2014, before Facebook had restricted third-party access to data such as political views, relationship statuses and education history, among other things.

The congressional letter seeks more information about the outcome of the investigation, with a particular focus on whether Facebook users’ data could have ended up in the hands of Chinese or Russian intelligence agencies.

“We have grave concerns about the extent to which this access could have enabled foreign intelligence service activity, ranging from foreign malign influence to targeting and counter-intelligence activity,” the lawmakers wrote.

The findings are “especially remarkable given that Facebook has never been permitted to operate in [China],” they added.

Meta’s investigation, launched after the company’s Cambridge Analytica data privacy scandal, had focused on third-party app developers with access to “large amounts of information” and whose software had exhibited “suspicious activity.”

On Tuesday, Meta told CNN in a statement that the document cited in the letter references data practices that are no longer in effect at the company.

“These documents are an artifact from a different product at a different time,” said Meta spokesman Andy Stone. “Many years ago, we made substantive changes to our platform, shutting down developers’ access to key types of data on Facebook while reviewing and approving all apps that request access to sensitive information.”

Meta declined to answer whether the app developer investigation is still ongoing or how many apps have been reviewed since the 2018 slide presentation, which was unsealed in court last week. The document had projected the probe would continue at least through 2020.

In recent years, policymakers have increasingly sounded the alarm about data leakages to foreign adversaries. Hostile governments could seek to use Americans’ personal information to spread disinformation or identify intelligence targets, US officials have said.

Those fears have culminated most visibly in tensions with the short-form video app TikTok, whose links to China through its parent company have prompted the US government and numerous states to ban the app from official devices. US officials have also sought to block Chinese telecom firms from the US market over similar concerns.

But the lawmakers’ letter highlights how worries about data access by foreign adversaries extends beyond TikTok and encompasses some of the largest social media platforms.

Although Meta has moved on with different, more restrictive policies for developers, Warner and Rubio called for the company to explain what information may have been transferred to China, Russia and other nations in the past, and for any evidence the company may have that the data has been abused to target Americans or engage in propaganda campaigns.

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February 8, 2023
Chinese spy balloons under Trump not discovered until after Biden took office | CNN Politics

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CNN
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The transiting of three suspected Chinese spy balloons over the continental US during the Trump administration was only discovered after President Joe Biden took office, a senior administration official told CNN on Sunday.

The official did not say how or when those incidents were discovered.

The official said that the intelligence community is prepared to offer briefings to key Trump administration officials about the Chinese surveillance program, which the Biden administration believes has been deployed in countries across five continents over the last several years.

Hear what Biden said after suspected Chinese spy balloon was shot down

After the Biden administration disclosed last week that a suspected Chinese spy balloon was hovering over Montana, the Pentagon said that similar balloon incidents had occurred during the Trump administration. In response, former Trump administration Defense Secretary Mark Esper told CNN on Friday that he was “surprised” by that statement.

“I don’t ever recall somebody coming into my office or reading anything that the Chinese had a surveillance balloon above the United States,” he said.

Former President Donald Trump also said on Truth Social this week that reports of Chinese balloons transiting the US during his administration were “fake disinformation.”

John Bolton, a former national security adviser under Trump, also pushed back on the assertion that balloons surveilled the US during the former president’s tenure, asking, “Did the Biden administration invent a time machine? What is the basis of this new detection?” but added he would take a briefing from the current administration on the Trump-era balloon discoveries if it was offered to him.

“The very fact, if it is a fact, that the Chinese tried this before, should have alerted us and should have caused us to take action before the balloon crossed into American sovereign territory,” Bolton said Monday on “CNN This Morning.”

The Biden administration official now says the incidents were not discovered until after the Trump administration had already left. But the official did not say how those incidents were discovered or when.

CNN reported on Sunday that the Pentagon had briefed Congress of previous Chinese surveillance balloons during the Trump administration that flew near Texas and Florida.

Rep. Michael Waltz confirmed in a statement to CNN that “currently, we understand there were incursions near Florida and Texas, but we don’t have clarity on what kind of systems were on these balloons or if these incursions occurred in territorial waters or overflew land.”

Another Chinese spy balloon also transited the continental US briefly at the beginning of the Biden administration, the senior administration official said. But the balloon that was shot down by the US military on Saturday was unique in both the path it took, down from Alaska and Canada into the US, and the length of time it spent loitering over sensitive missile sites in Montana, officials said.

The senior administration official said that with regard to the balloon shot down on Saturday, the analysis into its capabilities is ongoing. But, the official added, “closely observing the balloon in flight has allowed us to better understand this Chinese program and further confirmed its mission was surveillance.”

Republicans have criticized the Biden administration for not shooting the balloon down earlier after it was first noticed over Alaska on January 28. House Republicans are weighing the passage of a resolution this week condemning the Biden administration for its handling the balloon, CNN reported Sunday

Over the weekend, Biden revealed he ordered the Pentagon to shoot the balloon down last Wednesday when he was first briefed on it hovering over Montana, but that he was advised by his military team to wait until the balloon was over water to minimize the risk posed to civilians and infrastructure. Shooting it down over water also maximized the possibility of recovering the payload – the equipment carried by the balloon that the US says was being used for surveillance – intact and able to be examined further by the US intelligence community, officials said.

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February 6, 2023
Balloon over Latin America belongs to China, Beijing says | CNN

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Beijing and Hong Kong
CNN
—

A balloon spotted over the skies of Latin America belongs to China and was used for flight tests, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson said Monday in response to CNN’s queries.

This is the first time Beijing has admitted the balloon spotted over two Latin American countries belongs to China.

The balloon “seriously deviated” from its planned course and entered the skies over Latin America and the Caribbean “by mistake” due to weather conditions and limited control ability over the craft, Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said in a regular press briefing on Monday.

This is the second Chinese balloon Beijing claims has drifted off course due to the weather after the US military on Saturday shot down a suspected Chinese spy balloon that flew over the continental US for days.

“China is a responsible country. We have always strictly abided by international law. We have informed all relevant parties and appropriately handled the situation, which did not pose any threats to any countries,” Mao said, adding that all parties “expressed their understanding.”

The Colombian Air Force and Costa Rica’s Civil Aviation Authority both confirmed that a white observation balloon similar to the one spotted over the US was tracked in their airspace last week, though they did not attribute the vessel to China.

A similar high-altitude Chinese balloon was floating over the US for most of last week.

It was first detected by the North American Aerospace Defense Command on January 28 as it floated eastward over Alaska. The balloon then traveled down across Canada into the US where it spent some time loitering over sensitive missile sites in Montana, according to officials.

US officials say the balloon was being used for surveillance and the Pentagon tracked the balloon for several days as it made its way over the northern United States before US military fighter jets shot it down over the Atlantic Ocean on Saturday.

China expressed outrage that the aircraft was shot down and repeated their earlier claims that the balloon was for civilian use and that it drifted to the US airspace by mistake.

Multiple US Navy and Coast Guard vessels were in the region working to recover the debris. The Defense Department has launched “a collaborative effort” with the FBI and “counter intelligence authorities ” to assist with “categorizing and assessing the platform itself,” a senior military official official said.

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February 6, 2023
Landmark national security trial of Hong Kong democracy activists begins. Here’s what you need to know | CNN

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Hong Kong
CNN
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Some were seasoned politicians and veteran protest leaders. Others were academics, unionists and health care workers. They hailed from different generations and held a range of political views, but were brought together by what they say was a shared commitment to Hong Kong’s democratic future.

Now, the “Hong Kong 47,” as the group of pro-democracy activists in the semi-autonomous Chinese territory has come to be known, will start appearing in court from Monday facing charges that could send them to prison for life.

Sixteen of the defendants have pleaded not guilty to the charges laid against them and are expected to be the first ones to take the stand.

Their alleged crime? Organizing and participating in an unofficial primary election that prosecutors have called a “massive and well-organized scheme to subvert the Hong Kong government.”

This is Hong Kong’s largest national security law trial since Beijing imposed the sweeping legislation on the city following mass anti-government protests in 2019. The law criminalizes vaguely defined acts of secession, subversion, terrorism, and collusion with foreign forces, all of which are punishable by life in prison.

The landmark trial – the first involving subversion charges – is expected to run for weeks, but its implications could last for years or even decades in a city critics say is rapidly losing its political freedoms and autonomy.

John Burns, emeritus professor at the University of Hong Kong, said the trial of the democrats is a “test of will” of Beijing’s capacity to completely wipe out organized opposition in Hong Kong.

Burns said arresting the democrats and pressing charges against them was meant to both intimidate and eliminate the opposition, either by chasing them out of Hong Kong into exile or by jailing them.

“It is a process of removing them. By shutting down political parties, shutting down trade unions, they are shutting down the basis of the support for organized opposition,” Burns said.

The Hong Kong government has repeatedly denied such accusations. Instead, it insists the law has ended chaos and restored stability to the city.

“Hong Kong prides itself on the rule of law; law enforcement agencies are duty-bound to take action against unlawful acts, regardless of the political background of the suspects. Arrests made are based on evidence and strictly in accordance with relevant laws and regulations,” the government said in a statement in response to the criticism.

Here is what you need to know about the case:

The 47 pro-democracy figures have been charged with “conspiracy to commit subversion” under the national security law over their alleged roles in an unofficial primary election in July 2020.

The vote was held ahead of a legislative election to find out which contenders would be best placed to bid against pro-Beijing candidates.

Such contests are held in democracies around the world, and involve political parties selecting the strongest candidates for an election. Hong Kong’s democrats had previously held such votes in an attempt to match the organization and discipline of the rival pro-Beijing camp and avoid splitting the opposition.

Authorities, however, said the primary vote was a “vicious plot” intended to “paralyze the government and undermine state power” by winning a majority of seats and using the mandate to block legislation.

The government’s Electoral Affairs Commission also responded that the “so-called” primaries were “not part of the electoral procedures of the Legislative Council Election or other public elections.”

In January 2021, the 47 democrats were arrested en masse in a dawn raid. Since then, many have been remanded in custody or are in jail for other protest-related offenses. Fifteen have been granted bail under specific conditions.

It is extremely rare for defendants not to be granted bail in Hong Kong under the common law system. However, the national security law stipulates that defendants cannot be granted bail unless the court is convinced they will “not continue to commit acts endangering national security.”

A Department of Justice spokesman told CNN that bail application in cases concerning offenses “endangering national security” has been “handled fairly and adjudicated impartially by the court having regard to admissible evidence, applicable laws and merits of the case.”

The cases will be heard without a jury, deviating from the common law tradition.

The defendants include a wide variety of political activists who describe themselves as ranging from moderate democrats to radical localists, a movement that advocates Hong Kong’s independence from mainland China.

Among the 16 pleading not guilty is former journalist Gwyneth Ho, 32, of the now-defunct Stand News, which was closed down after a police raid in 2021 and two editors were charged with sedition.

Ho live-streamed the moment when assailants indiscriminately hit people – many of whom were returning from a pro-democracy march – with sticks and metal bars at a train station in July 2019. Ho’s footage of the incident made international headlines, sparking a probe into the lack of police presence. Ho was injured herself in the attack. She later stepped away from journalism to run for the 2020 Legislative Council elections.

Leung Kwok-hung, 66, nicknamed “Long Hair” for his signature locks, is a former legislator and retired civil servant. He had been on the front lines of the city’s politics for over two decades and is an outspoken critic of China. He’s known for political protests – both on the streets and inside the city’s legislative chamber. In 2017 he was disqualified from the legislature for refusing to take an oath swearing allegiance to China.

Lam Cheuk-ting, 45, regularly joined street protests which at times escalated into clashes with police, and he was often seen negotiating with officers and asking them to stop using tear gas.

He was sentenced to four months in prison in January 2020 for disclosing the personal information of individuals in a police investigation to the Yuen Long mob attack.

On the other hand, several prominent activists have pleaded guilty and await sentencing. They have either been detained under pre-trial custody or are serving jail time for other protest-related offenses.

These include well-known activist Joshua Wong, 26, labeled an “extremist” by China’s state media, and Benny Tai, 54, a former law professor and co-founder of the 2014 Occupy Central movement. Claudia Mo, 66, a former journalist-turned-legislator, who has previously been an outspoken critic of Beijing’s tightening grip over Hong Kong, has also pleaded guilty.

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February 5, 2023
A look at China’s history of spying in the US | CNN Politics

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CNN
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The suspected Chinese surveillance balloon that violated American airspace this week has fueled a diplomatic crisis with the postponement of Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s planned trip to Beijing.

But the two countries have a long history of spying on each other.

The US has sought to collect its own intelligence about the Chinese government, using methods that include flying surveillance aircraft over disputed islands claimed by Beijing, human sources and signal intercepts.

Still, American officials have sought to distinguish US actions from what they say is the more brazen espionage being carried out by the Chinese government.

US officials say Beijing uses every tool at its disposal to gain a strategic advantage over the United States, its primary geopolitical rival. But Chinese officials say a similar thing – Beijing has in the past repeatedly accused the US of espionage.

China denies that the balloon currently above the US is involved in any kind of espionage, claiming it is a “civilian airship used for research, mainly meteorological, purposes” that has been blown off course.

Here’s what we know about how China spies on the US:

While the suspected Chinese balloon spotted in the skies above multiple US states this week prompted an uproar from Republicans and Democrats alike, it is not the first time this kind of activity has been observed.

A US official said Friday there had been similar incidents over Hawaii and Guam in recent years, while another official on Thursday said, “Instances of this activity have been observed over the past several years, including prior to this administration.”

US officials have said the flight path of the latest balloon, first spotted over Montana on Thursday, could potentially take it over a “number of sensitive sites.” They say they are taking steps to “protect against foreign intelligence collection.”

What’s less clear is why Chinese spies would want to use a balloon, rather than a satellite to gather information.

Using balloons as spy platforms goes back to the early days of the Cold War. Since then, the US has used hundreds of them to monitor its adversaries, said Peter Layton, a fellow at the Griffith Asia Institute in Australia and former Royal Australian Air Force officer.

But with the advent of modern satellite technology enabling the gathering of overflight intelligence data from space, the use of surveillance balloons had been going out of fashion.

Or at least until now.

Recent advances in the miniaturization of electronics mean the floating intelligence platforms may be making a comeback in the modern spying toolkit.

“Balloon payloads can now weigh less, and so the balloons can be smaller, cheaper and easier to launch” than satellites, Layton said.

Outside Malmstrom Air Force Base in central Montana, spread across 13,800 square miles of open plains, more than 100 intercontinental ballistic missiles stand at the ready, buried deep underground in missile silos. These Minuteman III rockets are capable of delivering nuclear warheads at least 6,000 miles away and are part of the US Strategic Command, which oversees the country’s nuclear and missile arsenal.

Nestled among these silos are clusters of cell phone towers operated by a small rural wireless carrier. According to Federal Communications Commission filings, those cell towers use Chinese technology that security experts have warned in recent years could allow China to gather intelligence while also potentially mounting network attacks in the areas surrounding this and other sensitive military installations.

Huawei, the Chinese company that makes the tower technology, is shunned by the major US wireless carriers and the federal government over national security concerns.

Yet its technology is widely deployed by a number of small, federally subsidized wireless carriers that buy cheaper Chinese-made hardware to place atop their cell towers. In some cases, those cellular networks provide exclusive coverage to rural areas close to US military bases, CNN previously reported.

In 2018, the heads of major US intelligence agencies – including the FBI and CIA – warned Americans against using Huawei devices and products. Security experts say that having its technology deployed so close to the nation’s arsenal of ICBMs could pose a far greater threat.

In 2017, the Chinese government offered to spend $100 million to build an ornate Chinese garden at the National Arboretum in Washington, DC. Complete with temples, pavilions and a 70-foot white pagoda, the project thrilled local officials, who hoped it would attract thousands of tourists every year.      

But when US counterintelligence officials began digging into the details, they found numerous red flags. The pagoda, they noted, would have been strategically placed on one of the highest points in Washington, just two miles from the US Capitol, a perfect spot for signals intelligence collection, multiple sources told CNN last year.  

Chinese officials wanted to build the pagoda with materials shipped to the US in diplomatic pouches, which US Customs officials are barred from examining, the sources said.    

Federal officials quietly killed the project before construction started.

The canceled garden is just one of the projects that has caught the eye of the FBI and other federal agencies during what US security officials say has been a dramatic escalation of Chinese espionage on US soil over the past decade.        

Since 2017, federal officials have investigated Chinese land purchases near critical infrastructure, shut down a regional consulate believed by the US government to be a hotbed of Chinese spies and stonewalled what they saw as efforts to plant listening devices near sensitive military and government facilities.    

Some of the things the FBI uncovered pertained to Chinese-made Huawei equipment atop cell towers near US military bases in the rural Midwest.

According to multiple sources, the FBI determined the equipment was capable of capturing and disrupting highly restricted Defense Department communications, including those used by US Strategic Command, which oversees the country’s nuclear weapons.

CNN has also reported that Beijing has been leaning on expatriate Chinese scientists, businesspeople and even students in the US, according to current and former US intelligence officials, lawmakers and several experts.

There have been a number of high-profile arrests. In January, a former graduate student in Chicago was sentenced to eight years in prison for spying for the Chinese government by gathering information on engineers and scientists in the United States.

Ji Chaoqun, a Chinese national who came to the US to study electrical engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology in 2013 and later enlisted in the US Army Reserves, was arrested in 2018.

The 31-year-old was convicted last September of acting illegally as an agent of China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS) and of making a material false statement to the US Army.

According to the Justice Department, Ji was tasked with providing an intelligence officer with biographical information on individuals for potential recruitment as Chinese spies. The individuals included Chinese nationals who were working as engineers and scientists in the US, some of whom worked for American defense contractors.

Ji’s spying was part of an effort by Chinese intelligence to obtain access to advanced aerospace and satellite technologies being developed by US companies, the Justice Department said.

Ji was working at the direction of Xu Yanjun, a deputy division director at the Jiangsu provincial branch of the MMS, the DOJ statement said.

Xu, a career intelligence officer, was sentenced last year to 20 years in prison for plotting to steal trade secrets from several US aviation and aerospace companies. Xu was also the first Chinese spy extradited to the US for trial, after being detained in Belgium in 2018 following an FBI investigation.

CORRECTION: This story has been updated to correct the spelling of Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s first name.

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February 5, 2023
Inside Biden’s decision to ‘take care of’ the Chinese spy balloon that triggered a diplomatic crisis | CNN Politics

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Washington
CNN
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When President Joe Biden learned a likely Chinese spy balloon was drifting through the stratosphere 60,000 feet above Montana, his first inclination was to take it down.

By then, however, it was both too early and too late. After flying over swaths of sparsely populated land, it was now projected to keep drifting over American cities and towns. The debris from the balloon could endanger lives on the ground, his top military brass told him.

The massive white orb, carrying aloft a payload the size of three coach buses, had already been floating in and out of American airspace for three days before it created enough concern for Biden’s top general to brief him, according to two US officials.

Its arrival had gone unnoticed by the public as it floated eastward over Alaska – where it was first detected by North American Aerospace Defense Command on January 28 – toward Canada. NORAD continued to track and assess the balloon’s path and activities, but military officials assigned little importance to the intrusion into American airspace, having often witnessed Chinese spy balloons slip into the skies above the United States. At the time, the balloon was not assessed to be an intelligence risk or physical threat, officials say.

This time, however, the balloon kept going: high over Alaska, into Canada and back toward the US, attracting little attention from anyone looking up from the ground.

“We’ve seen them and monitored them, briefed Congress on the capabilities they can bring to the table,” another US official told CNN. “But we’ve never seen something as brazen as this.”

It would take seven days from when the balloon first entered US airspace before an F-22 fighter jet fired a heat-seeking missile into the balloon on the opposite end of the country, sending its equipment and machinery tumbling into the Atlantic Ocean.

The balloon’s week-long American journey, from the remote Aleutian Islands to the Carolina coast, left a wake of shattered diplomacy, furious reprisals from Biden’s political rivals and a preview of a new era of escalating military strain between the world’s two largest economies.

It’s also raised questions about why it wasn’t shot down sooner and what information, if any, it scooped up along its path.

What was meant to be a high-profile moment of statesmanship -as Secretary of State Antony Blinken prepared to travel to China instead transformed into a televised standoff, testing Biden’s resolve at a new moment of reckoning with China. As Navy divers and FBI investigators sort through the tangle of equipment and technology that tumbled into the Atlantic Ocean on Saturday, Biden and his team must also piece together what the episode means for the broader relationship with Beijing.

Minutes after the balloon was shot down at his order, a reporter asked Biden what message his decision sent to China. He looked on silently before stepping into his SUV.

On Tuesday, as Biden darted from Washington to New York City for an infrastructure event and a fundraiser, Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, informed him there was a Chinese balloon floating over Montana.

The location was unnerving: As officials watched the balloon’s path, there was alarm at what appeared to be deliberate effort to sit over an Air Force base that maintains one of the largest silos of US intercontinental ballistic missiles.

For some administration officials, the timing also appeared intentional. The balloon floated over the US the same week Blinken was due to depart for China, a high-stakes visit viewed as the culmination of intensive diplomatic efforts launched late last year by Biden and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping at a summit in Bali.

In his Tuesday briefing with the President, Milley informed Biden the balloon appeared to be on a clear path into the continental United States, differentiating it from previous Chinese surveillance craft. The President appeared inclined at that point to take the balloon down, and asked Milley and other military officials to draw up options and contingencies.

At the same time, Biden asked his national security team to take steps to prevent the balloon from being able to gather any intelligence – essentially, by making sure no sensitive military activity or unencrypted communications would be conducted in its vicinity, officials said.

That evening, Pentagon officials met to review their military options. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, traveling abroad in Asia, participated virtually. NASA was also brought in to analyze and assess the potential debris field, based on the trajectory of the balloon, weather, and estimated payload. When options were presented to Biden on Wednesday, he directed his military leadership to shoot down the balloon as soon as they viewed it as a viable option, given concerns about risks to people and property on the ground.

“Shoot it down,” Biden told his military advisers, he would later recount to reporters.

But Austin and Milley told Biden the risks of shooting the balloon down were too high while it was moving over the US, given the chance debris could endanger lives or property on the ground below.

“They said to me, ‘Let’s wait till the safest place to do it,’” Biden told reporters on Saturday

Biden had another key request, though: he wanted the military to shoot down the balloon in such a way that it would maximize their ability to recover its payload, allowing the US intelligence community to sift through its components and gain insights into its capabilities, officials said. Shooting it down over water also increased the chances of being able to recover the payload intact, the officials said.

While Beijing insisted on Friday that the balloon was simply a meteorological device that had strayed off course, the US government was confident that the balloons were being used for surveillance. Both the balloon discovered over the US and another spotted transiting Latin America carried surveillance equipment not usually associated with standard meteorological activities or civilian research, officials said – specifically, both featured collection pod equipment and solar panels located on the metal truss suspended below the balloon itself. The US also observed small motors and propellers on the balloons, leading officials to believe Beijing had some control over its path.

US officials said the balloons were part of a fleet of Chinese spy balloons that have been spotted across five continents over the last several years.

For the bulk of its journey across the US, the scramble to assess, monitor and eventually debilitate the balloon was kept to a close circle of Biden’s top national security advisers.

But by the middle of the week, however, the mysterious white object floating above more populated areas of Montana was difficult to conceal. The balloon caused an hours-long grounding of commercial flights around Billings on Wednesday as the military worked to respond.

And people starting looking up.

Michael Alverson was working at the mines in Billings when he looked up and noticed a glowing orb in the sky. Realizing it couldn’t be the moon, he brought out his binoculars to take a closer look.

“Me and my coworkers were shocked,” Alverson said. “It appeared to be a weather balloon – or so we thought.”

Ashley McGowan told CNN she received a call from her neighbor wondering if she had heard jets flying about their neighborhood in Reed Point, Montana, on Wednesday. McGowan said she went outside with her dogs and saw a bright white dot in the sky.

“What’s happening?” she recalled wondering. “Is this a UFO or is it like trash or is it the star? I had somebody try to tell me it was the green comet, I’m like that’s way too close to be the comet.”

“This isn’t normal,” she remembered thinking. “There’s jets flying everywhere.”

Officials attributed the decision to publicize the balloon’s existence to several factors, including the fact “that people were just going to see the damn thing,” one official acknowledged.

As the military was fine tuning its options, a parallel effort was underway with the Chinese to assess the feasibility of Blinken making his highly anticipated visit to Beijing at a moment of fresh tension.

Heading into the visit, White House officials had been cheered by more robust communications with China following Biden’s meeting with Xi late last year. After shutting down virtually all talks following then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan last summit, the Chinese were finally back at the table – a critical step, in the eyes of Biden’s advisers, to maintaining stability in the world’s most important bilateral relationship.

The balloon would dash all of it.

On Wednesday evening, China’s top official in Washington was summoned to the State Department, where Blinken and Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman delivered “a very clear and stark message” about the discovery of the surveillance balloon, officials told CNN.

Biden himself relayed to his top national security officials that he no longer believed the time was right for Blinken to visit Beijing, in part because the balloon would likely end up dominating his talks there.

The trip was postponed hours before Blinken was due to board his plane.

“In this current environment, I think it would have significantly narrowed the agenda that we would have been able to address,” a senior State Department official said.

Republicans immediately moved to attack Biden for not shooting the balloon down immediately. The attacks, which came as Biden ignored questions on the issue throughout the day on Friday, served as an annoyance “that evolved into frustration,” inside the White House, one person familiar with the dynamic said.

“This was a decision that was made at the recommendation of the Pentagon, for public safety reasons,” the person said in describing the rationale.

Still, administration officials moved to brief key lawmakers and staff on Capitol Hill. That included briefings for the staff of the top Republicans and Democrats on the intelligence panels, as well as the top four congressional leaders – a group known as the Gang of 8.

A formal briefing for the lawmakers in the Gang of 8 is scheduled to take place next week.

Still, coming just ahead of Blinken’s travel to China, it was a move that officials across the administration said made little sense on its face and required a public and private response.

US officials spoke to their Chinese counterparts throughout the week, making clear the balloon was likely to be shot down, an official said.

Biden himself would be updated regularly over the course of the week, with his national security team providing updates on their conversations with Chinese counterparts and military officials presenting updated military options.

US military and intelligence officials moved quickly to identify and close off any risks that may have extended from the balloon, though one official described them as “rather small to begin with,” given ongoing US efforts to mitigate spying threats from more sophisticated satellites.

Another official also said US assets were immediately put into motion to monitor and collect any intelligence from the balloon as it followed its path through the US – including the scrambling of military aircraft as the balloon floated high above the central part of the country.

Still, even without a direct threat to the American public, the widely held view inside the administration was that the balloon would need to be shot down, likely after it moved over open water.

Waiting to carry out the operation allowed the US to “study and scrutinize” the balloon and its equipment, a senior Defense official said.

“We have learned technical things about this balloon and its surveillance capabilities. And I suspect, if we are successful in recovering aspects of the debris, we will learn even more,” the official added.

Officials also suggested that collecting debris from the balloon could be easier if it landed in water as opposed to on land.

Government agencies worked throughout week to find the right place and right time to intercept the Chinese spy balloon, according to a government source familiar with the shoot-down plans. Earlier in the week, the Federal Aviation Administration had been told by the Pentagon to prepare options for shutting down airspace.

A plan to shoot down the balloon was once again presented to Biden on Friday night while he was in Wilmington, where he approved the execution plan for Saturday.

“We’re gonna take care of it,” Biden said later on the frigid tarmac Saturday in Syracuse, New York, where he was paying a brief visit to visit family.

Government officials were told Friday night “decisions would be made (Saturday) morning” on when to close down airspace, and FAA officials were told to “be by the phone” early Saturday morning and “ready to roll.”

Austin gave his final approval for the strike shortly after noon on Saturday from the tarmac in New York, according to a defense official. Austin had traveled north on Saturday for a funeral, but remained very engaged throughout the planning process and the operation, the official said.

At about 1:30 p.m. ET, the FAA instituted one of the largest areas of restricted airspace in US history, more than five times the size of the restricted zone over Washington, DC, and roughly twice the size of the state of Massachusetts.

The Temporary Flight Restriction – put in place at the request of the Pentagon, the FAA said – included about 150 miles of Atlantic coastline that effectively paralyzed three commercial airports: Wilmington in North Carolina and Myrtle Beach and Charleston in South Carolina.

Biden had just taken off from Syracuse when fighter jets that had taken off from Langley Air Force Base in Virginia fired a single missile into the balloon.

As its wreckage tumbled toward the Atlantic Ocean, Biden was on the phone with his national security team on Air Force One.

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February 4, 2023
A vulnerable power grid is in the crosshairs of domestic extremist groups | CNN

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CNN
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Gunshots fired at two power substations in Moore County, North Carolina, late last year left 45,000 homes and businesses without power and more attacks just like that could already be planned by domestic extremist groups, according to experts.

“All of a sudden, about 8:45 p.m., about 20 shots fired off right across the street,” Spencer Matthews told CNN affiliate WRAL shortly after the December attack.

The gunfire hit critical parts of the substations and the power went out.

“Got no way to heat because we don’t have a fireplace,” one woman told WRAL after her home was plunged into darkness.

Investigators found nearly two dozen shell casings from a high-powered rifle near the substations, but so far have not found a gun or made any arrests.

Experts say the two substation attacks could be the work of domestic extremists who have openly advocated targeting a vulnerable power system.

The motive behind the December 3 attack is still not known, but it came after an FBI bulletin in November warned of threats by extremist groups to “create civil disorder and inspire further violence.”

“This typically very primitive style attack equals millions of dollars in damage,” Brian Harrell, a former US Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary for Infrastructure Protection, told CNN. “If you were to shoot out some very key components you can quickly create an effect where this large multimillion dollar transformer becomes essentially a paperweight.”

In 2022 there were 25 “actual physical attacks” reported on power facilities across the US and one report of “sabotage,” according to the latest statistics available from the Department of Energy.

The data also shows 57 reports of suspicious activity, and 80 acts of vandalism.

The numbers are mostly trending up, compared with 2021, when there were six actual physical attacks reported and two reports of sabotage. The data also shows 32 reports of suspicious activity, and 52 acts of vandalism.

Many attacks remain unsolved.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that 2023… is probably going to be the most catastrophic when it comes to the uptick of DVE (Domestic Violent Extremist) attacks on electricity infrastructure,” Harrell said. “A number of individuals and extremist groups online right now have already signaled that this is a part of their playbook.”

One of those playbooks, with a swastika and lightning bolts on the cover, published on a social media platform by a neo-Nazi group, makes their aim quite clear.

“The main thing that keeps the anti-White system going is the powergrid,” the document reads. “This is something that is easier than you think. Peppered all over the country are power distribution substations… Sitting ducks, worthy prey.”

It’s part of a White-power philosophy called “accelerationism,” which wants to destroy society and replace it with one based on their racist ideologies.

“With the power off, when the lights don’t come back on… all hell will break lose, [sic] making conditions desirable for our race to once again take back what is ours,” they write.

The head of another accelerationist group posted on social media that these attackers have “cracked the code on lone wolf attacks.”

The attacks “check off all the necessary boxes which I didn’t think possible for lone wolf ops in USA – Frequency, sustainability, geographic concentration,” he is quoted as saying. “Law enforcement appears powerless (no pun intended) to stop them.”

These groups dream of striking exactly the right spots in the power grid, which government reports have warned for decades could cause a domino effect and leave huge parts of the country in the dark.

“If you were to target, you know, eight or nine very key nodes throughout the United States, you potentially could have a collapsing effect,” Harrell warns.

High voltage transmission power lines and substations are often spread across the country in out of the way places which can be hard to keep safe and technically challenging to secure.

“It’s inherently very difficult to harden or protect it all,” Granger Morgan, an engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University told CNN. “It may not take all that high tech an approach to cause physical disruption that could have very large consequences.”

Morgan is the chair of the National Academy of Science’s committee on enhancing the resilience of the nation’s power system.

“Physical attacks on major system components could cause serious physical damage, especially to large transformers and other hard to replace substation and transmission equipment such as high voltage circuit breakers,” one of his papers from 2017 warned. “Recovery could easily require many days or weeks.”

Right now there is no central authority that regulates the entire power system, which, Morgan says, gets in the way of changes needed to make the system more robust and resilient from attack.

Justice Department forms new domestic terrorism unit

“No one at the moment has authority to deal with the entire system, and we need to get that situation fixed,” he said. “We’ve got the federal regulators overseeing the high voltage system that brings power across long distances. We’ve got state public utility commissions dealing with things at the state level, we got both private and public power.”

Morgan said a presidential commission or other powerful political body needs to be appointed to take the lead in protecting the grid and making it more resilient to attacks.

“We just need to get much more systematic in terms of figuring out both how we protect against it, but also how we can quickly put the system back together again, once a problem arises,” he said.

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February 4, 2023
Traumatized and afraid, Jenin residents are still reeling from Israeli raid | CNN

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Jenin, West Bank
CNN
—

Mohammed Abu al-Hayja was sleeping alongside his wife and two young daughters last month when loud gunfire woke them up. Minutes later, Israeli soldiers rammed down his door and burst through his apartment.

“They spread through the house in seconds,” 29-year-old al-Hayja told CNN. “Two soldiers came up to me, told me to get up, one told me, ‘Leave your daughter with her mother,’ and then he took me and cuffed my hands behind my back.”

Al-Hayja’s traumatic run-in with Israeli security forces happened as they carried out what they described as a counterterrorism operation in the center of the Jenin refugee camp on January 26. The building they targeted is just a few meters from his home.

“The security forces operated to apprehend a terror squad belonging to the Islamic Jihad terror organization,” the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), the Israeli Security Agency and the Israel Border Police said in a joint statement, hours after the raid.

Ten Palestinians were killed in Jenin, including an elderly woman, according to Palestinian officials. Another Palestinian was killed in what Israel Police called a “violent disturbance” near Jerusalem hours later, making it the deadliest day for Palestinians in the West Bank in over a year, according to CNN records. As violence spiraled in the region, at least seven people were killed and three injured in a shooting near a synagogue in Jerusalem a day later according to Israeli police.

In Jenin, Al-Hayja recalls the events of January 26 clearly, explaining that after being handcuffed an Israeli soldier took him to the bathroom and made him kneel down, before wrapping a towel around his head.

Restrained, blindfolded and stuck in his bathroom, al-Hayja then started hearing gunfire from inside his apartment. “I could hear it, and if I concentrated I could hear one of the soldiers talking to my wife,” he says.

Al-Hayja says he was able to convince the soldiers to let him go to his wife. Still blindfolded, he crawled to his living room, as bullets flew above him.

Israeli soldiers had removed one of his couches and set up a firing position by the window to provide cover for their units engaging Palestinian gunmen nearby. Using apartments like al-Hayja’s to provide cover fire is “standard operating procedure,” a spokesman for the Israeli military told CNN.

Representatives of the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) visited Jenin in the days after the incident and spoke to al-Hayja and his family. “Their children were noticeably traumatized,” Adam Bouloukos, director of UNRWA Affairs in the West Bank told CNN. “This kind of invasion violates not only international law but common decency.”

As Israeli soldiers fired, the Palestinian gunmen fired back, holes from their bullets dotting the family home’s doors and walls. Al-Hayja showed CNN a bag of spent bullet casings he says the Israeli soldiers left behind. “They fired a crazy number of bullets,” he added.

While they did, al-Hayja and his wife lay on the floor clutching their young daughters for more than three hours. Their oldest daughter is 2-and-a-half, the youngest 18-months-old. “Honestly, I thought I had maybe 1% chance of making it out alive,” he said.

Moments later an explosion rocked the apartment. He later found out that Israeli soldiers had mounted a second firing position in his bedroom.

They sawed off the window bars and fired a rocket at the building the gunmen were in, with scorch marks smudging al-Hayja’s ceiling.

“I said to myself, we are going to die,” he said.

From atop al-Hayja’s building, the sprawling Jenin refugee camp spreads toward the horizon and up the hills. What were once temporary tents, is now a more permanent-looking slum of sandstone houses, cobbled on top of each other.

Down below, lies the building targeted by Israeli soldiers. The structure was so damaged after the raid that local officials decided it was safer to bulldoze it down. On the rubble, people have placed banners with the faces of some of those killed – “martyrs,” they read – and a lone Palestinian flag.

While this operation was one of the deadliest in years, for residents here, such Israeli incursions occur all too often. Posters remembering other people killed in confrontations with Israeli security forces over the years line walls across the neighborhood.

The IDF says these raids are targeted, aimed at terrorists, and that they open fire when those they are searching for fire at them.

But people in Jenin see it differently. “The Israelis raid the camp and they fire at anything that moves,” paramedic Abdel-Rahman Macharqa told CNN.

The 31-year-old has seen multiple gun battles in Jenin and says the situation is becoming increasingly riskier, even for those who save lives, like him.

“They [Israeli soldiers] have fired at me five times,” Macharqa said. “We don’t feel safe, even in uniform.”

“When we say goodbye to our wives and children to come to work, we know we could become martyrs,” he added.

Macharqa witnessed part of the raid in Jenin as it unfolded on January 26. The paramedic tried to help one of the three civilians whom Israeli officials say were killed there, along with seven gunmen.

“They opened fired on him and he was hit three times,” he recalled. Macharqa said he pulled the man away and attempted to resuscitate him, but he died.

“We deserve to live,” Macharqa said. He feels frustrated, not just by Israeli actions, but also what he sees as the passive attitude and double standards of the international community.

“Israelis claim he is a terrorist, but Ukrainians, when they defend themselves from the Russian invasion is that terrorism?,” he asked.

On the day of the raid, Ziad Miri’ee peaked out of his door after he heard gunfire. He saw an Israeli soldier firing through his car to hit a young man from his neighborhood.

“Our neighbors over there tried to pull him out (of the street),” he said. “The kid died.”

Miri’ee, 63, says he was one of the Jenin camp’s oldest residents, but he also believes the situation has been getting worse.

“In 2002, when they raided the camp and bulldozed the houses it was much easier than the three-and-a-half hours of last week’s raid,” he said. At the time, during the second intifada, Israeli forces occupied the camp, destroying around 400 homes.

“2002 was a child play compared to the incident here last week. We couldn’t step a meter outside the house because the bullets were coming in,” he said.

Miri’ee believes the situation is bound to get even worse, as frustration with the occupation grows, the lack of future on the horizon is driving more and more young people to join the ranks of militant organizations such as the Islamic Jihad.

“Yes, there’s more [fighters] from this generation,” he says. “This generation was born into the war.”

Upstairs from Miri’ee, al-Hayja is still shaken by the traumatic experience. Inside his home there’s no room for bravado, just concern over the safety of his daughters.

“I don’t interfere or get involved in these things, I just go from my work to my house and it all landed on my head,” he said. “You are in your city and you are not safe, you are in your house and you are not safe.”

“You are not safe from this occupier who occupies your land” he added. “You are not safe at all.”

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February 3, 2023
Apparent cyberattack forces Florida hospital system to divert some emergency patients to other facilities | CNN Politics

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CNN
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An apparent cyberattack has forced a network of Florida health care organizations to send some emergency patients to other facilities and to cancel some non-emergency surgeries, the health care network said Friday.

Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare, which operates a 772-bed hospital and multiple specialty care centers, said an “IT security issue” late Thursday night forced it to take down its computer system.

“We are also diverting EMS [emergency medical services] patients and will only be accepting Level 1 traumas from our immediate service area,” the hospital system said in a statement. Level 1 trauma refers to the most acute injuries and illnesses.

Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare spokesperson Tori Lynn Schneider told CNN “some” emergency patients were being diverted to facilities outside of the organization’s network, but declined to say how many patients. All non-emergency and elective procedures scheduled for Monday were canceled because of the hacking incident, Schneider said.

It’s the latest in a series of cyberattacks that have continued to hit resource-strapped US health care providers in the nearly three years of the Covid-19 pandemic. In another case, hackers accessed the personal data of nearly 270,000 patients in an attempted ransomware attack on a Louisiana health care system in October.

The FBI last month shut down the computer infrastructure used by a notorious ransomware gang to attack multiple US hospitals, according to the bureau. But the threat remains as multiple ransomware groups are known to target the health sector.

It’s unclear who was responsible for the apparent hack of Tallahassee Memorial. Tallahassee Memorial did not specify whether it had suffered a ransomware attack, but the organization’s statement described activity, including the need to shut down computer networks, consistent with a ransomware attack.

Staff have been unable to access digital patient records and lab results because of the shutdown, a hospital source told CNN.

Mark O’Bryant, Tallahassee Memorial’s CEO, notified staff in person Friday morning that the system had suffered a “cyberattack,” according to the source.

“To help us contain the issue, please completely turn off all PCs connected to TMH’s network immediately and leave them off until notified otherwise,” Tallahassee Memorial leadership said in a memo sent to employees Friday morning and obtained by CNN.

Max Henderson, a Tallahassee native and cybersecurity specialist who focuses on health care, said the effects of a shutting down a hospital’s computer network can last for weeks or months.

“Immediate, unplanned shutdowns can lead to a loss of recently gathered data regarding diagnosis, clinical notes, shift handovers and other various setbacks for the medical staff,” Henderson, who is senior manager for incident response at security firm Pondurance, told CNN.

“Nearly all hospitals rely on the internet for connectivity with vendors and remote offices for processing information in critical departments such as radiology, pharmacy, medical device maintenance, patient document scanning and payment processing,” Henderson added.

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February 3, 2023
Jim Jordan issues first subpoenas targeting Biden administration’s response to school board threats | CNN Politics

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CNN
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House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan on Friday subpoenaed the Department of Justice, the FBI and the Department of Education for documents as part of its investigation into whether a Justice Department strategy to address threats against teachers and school officials was abused to target conservative parents.

The flurry of subpoenas are the first from the Judiciary’s subcommittee dedicated to investigating the alleged weaponization of the federal government and are an early indication that the newly minted chairman intends to aggressively pursue its probe into the Biden administration’s response to rising tensions and threats of violence surrounding school board meetings.

The subpoenas set a document deadline of March 1. The panel sent the subpoenas after initially sending letters to the agencies for voluntary cooperation on January 17.

The allegations being investigated date to 2021, when protests and some violence erupted at school board meetings across the country. Most of the anger came from conservative parents who wanted to repeal mask mandates, opposed anti-racism courses and had concerns about LGBTQ policies.

With that backdrop, the National School Boards Association wrote to President Joe Biden asking for federal help to address the violence and threats against school administrators. The group said that “these heinous actions could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism” and encouraged the Justice Department to explore which laws, possibly including the Patriot Act, could be applied.

The group soon apologized for “some of the language” in its letter. But it quickly drew backlash, particularly among conservatives.

Attorney General Merrick Garland had issued a memo in response – which didn’t cite the letter, compare parents to “terrorists” nor invoke the Patriot Act. It merely told the FBI and federal prosecutors to step up collaboration with state and local law enforcement on the issue.

According to a report Jordan released last year, emails show that the Biden White House consulted with the NSBA on the letter before the group made its letter public. An independent review by NSBA concluded, however, that there was no “direct or indirect evidence suggesting the Administration requested the Letter” or reviewed the contents before the letter was sent.

Other emails also show that the Justice Department sent an advance copy of Garland’s memo to the NSBA.

The FBI later established a “threat tag” to internally track cases about school board threats under the same categorization. Republicans have seized on the “threat tag” to accuse the FBI of carrying out Biden’s desire to stomp out conservative speech at school boards. But the creation of an internal database does not mean the FBI initiated any sort of crackdown against parents.

Judiciary Republicans are requesting Garland provide a paper trail of the DOJ’s communications with the White House, intelligence agencies and members of the National School Boards Association about alleged violence at school board meetings.

The subpoena also calls for a number of documents relating to Garland’s directive for FBI and US attorneys’ offices to meet with federal, state and local law enforcement partners to discuss strategies for addressing the issue, focusing specifically on what meetings took place and what recommendations were made.

A Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment. Three days after Jordan’s voluntary request to DOJ, a department official responded to the Ohio Republican that “we share your belief that congressional oversight is vital to our functioning democracy” and encouraged the committee to prioritize its document requests to elicit efficient responses, according to a letter obtained by CNN.

The FBI subpoena specifically demands that Director Chris Wray produce a variety of documents, including communications related to meeting with US attorneys’ offices and “establishment of the Department of Justice’s task force.”

Wray is also told to hand over all documents related to formal and informal recommendations created or relied upon by FBI employees in accordance with Garland’s October 2021 memo.

The FBI said in a statement that the bureau “has never been in the business of investigating speech or policing speech at school board meetings or anywhere else, and we never will be,” adding that “attempts to further any political narrative will not change those facts.”

“The FBI recognizes the importance of congressional oversight and remains fully committed to cooperating with Congress’s oversight requests consistent with its constitutional and statutory responsibilities. The FBI is actively working to respond to congressional requests for information – including voluntary production of documents,” the FBI statement read.

Jordan’s subpoena to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona called on the Education Department to hand over any documents or communications related to a letter the National School Boards Association sent in September 2021.

Jordan’s subpoena also called for any files related to Viola Garcia’s appointment to the National Assessment Government Board. Garcia was the president of the National School Boards Association and was one of two individuals who signed the September 2021 letter to Biden.

An Education Department spokesperson told CNN that “the Department responded to Chairman Jordan’s letter earlier this week. The Department remains committed to responding to the House Judiciary Committee’s requests in a manner consistent with longstanding Executive Branch policy.”

CNN has reached out to Garcia for comment.

On Thursday, a day before the subpoena, the Education Department told Jordan’s team that the department played no role in crafting the letter from the National School Boards Association.

“I would also like to reiterate – as the Department has repeatedly made clear – that the Secretary did not request, direct any action, or play any role in the development of the September 29, 2021, letter from the NSBA to President Biden,” Gwen Graham, assistant secretary for legislation and congressional affairs at the Education Department wrote in a letter obtained by CNN. Graham added that an independent review for counsel retained by the NSBA did not find any connection between the letter and Garcia’s appointment.

Republicans gave Democrats on the committee a heads up that these subpoenas were coming, a source familiar told CNN. Democratic Del. Stacey Plaskett of the US Virgin Islands, the highest-ranking Democrat on the subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government, said the subpoenas were underpinned by “conspiracy theories” and said she is confident that what the Republicans have asked for “will once again disprove this tired right-wing theory.”

White House spokesperson for Congressional Oversight Ian Sams said in a statement to CNN, “Chairman Jordan is rushing to fire off subpoenas only two days after the Judiciary Committee organized, even though agencies already responded in good faith seeking to accommodate requests he made. These subpoenas make crystal clear that extreme House Republicans have no interest in working together with the Biden Administration on behalf of the American people and every interest in staging political stunts.”

Since the uproar at school boards became a major political issue in late 2021, Republicans have pushed the baseless narrative that Biden, Garland and Wray have weaponized federal law enforcement to attack innocent parents who care about education.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy falsely claimed that “Biden used the FBI to target parents as domestic terrorists.” Jordan has said Garland tried “to use federal law enforcement tools to silence parents.” This claim even came up in the GOP response to last year’s State of the Union. These claims have been repeatedly debunked by fact-checkers from CNN and other outlets.

For his part, Garland has aggressively pushed back against Republicans’ accusations. He previously testified to Congress that the Justice Department isn’t using counterterrorism resources against parents and said it was ridiculous to equate “angry” parents to “terrorists.”

When GOP senators grilled Wray about the “threat tag” matter at an August hearing, he defended the FBI.

“The FBI is not going to be in the business of investigating speech or policing speech at school board meetings,” Wray said. “We’re not about to start now. Threats of violence, that’s a different matter altogether. And there, we will work with our state local partners, as we always have.”

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February 3, 2023
What is a suspected Chinese spy balloon doing above the US? | CNN

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Seoul, South Korea
CNN
—

News that the Pentagon is monitoring a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon in the skies over the continental United States raises a series of questions – not least among them, what exactly it might be doing.

US officials have said the flight path of the balloon, first spotted over Montana on Thursday, could potentially take it over a “number of sensitive sites” and say they are taking steps to “protect against foreign intelligence collection.”

But what’s less clear is why Chinese spies would want to use a balloon, rather than a satellite to gather information.

This is not the first time a Chinese balloon has been spotted over the US, but this seems to be acting differently to previous ones, a US defense official said.

“It is appearing to hang out for a longer period of time, this time around, [and is] more persistent than in previous instances. That would be one distinguishing factor,” the official said.

Using balloons as spy platforms goes back to the early days of the Cold War. Since then the US has used hundreds of them to monitor its adversaries, said Peter Layton, a fellow at the Griffith Asia Institute in Australia and former Royal Australian Air Force officer.

But with the advent of modern satellite technology enabling the gathering of overflight intelligence data from space, the use of surveillance balloons had been going out of fashion.

Or at least until now.

Recent advances in the miniaturization of electronics mean the floating intelligence platforms may be making a comeback in the modern spying toolkit.

“Balloon payloads can now weigh less and so the balloons can be smaller, cheaper and easier to launch” than satellites, Layton said.

Blake Herzinger, an expert in Indo-Pacific defense policy at the American Enterprise Institute, said despite their slow speeds, balloons aren’t always easy to spot.

“They’re very low signature and low-to-zero emission, so hard to pick up with traditional situational awareness or surveillance technology,” Herzinger said.

And balloons can do some things that satellites can’t.

“Space-based systems are just as good but they are more predictable in their orbital dynamics,” Layton said.

“An advantage of balloons is that they can be steered using onboard computers to take advantage of winds and they can go up and down to a limited degree. This means they can loiter to a limited extent.

“A satellite can’t loiter and so many are needed to criss-cross an area of interest to maintain surveillance,” he said.

According to Layton, the suspected Chinese balloon is likely collecting information on US communication systems and radars.

“Some of these systems use extremely high frequencies that are short range, can be absorbed by the atmosphere and being line-of-sight are very directional. It’s possible a balloon might be a better collection platform for such specific technical collection than a satellite,” he said.

Retired US Air Force Col. Cedric Leighton, a CNN military analyst, echoed those thoughts.

“They could be scooping up signals intelligence, in other words, they’re looking at our cell phone traffic, our radio traffic,” Leighton told CNN’s Erin Burnett.

Intelligence data collected by the balloon could be relayed in real time via a satellite link back to China, Layton said.

Analysts also noted that Montana and nearby states are home to US intercontinental ballistic missile silos and strategic bomber bases.

US officials say they have taken actions to ensure the balloon cannot collect any sensitive data. They decided against shooting it down because of the risk to lives and property by falling debris.

And if the US could bring down the balloon within its territory without destroying it then the balloon might reveal some secrets of its own, Layton added.

But maybe there are no secrets or spying involved. This could be just an accident, with the balloon blown off course or Chinese operators losing control of it somehow.

“There’s at least some possibility that this was a mistake and the balloon ended up somewhere Beijing didn’t expect,” Herzinger said.

For its part, China says it’s looking into things.

“We are aware of reports [of the balloon] and are trying to understand the circumstances and verify the details of the situation,” a Foreign Ministry spokesperson said Friday. “I’d like to stress that before it becomes clear what happened, any deliberate speculation or hyping up would not help handling of the matter.”

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February 3, 2023
Democratic senator urges Apple and Google to ban TikTok from their app stores | CNN Business

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Washington
CNN
—

A member of the Senate Intelligence Committee is calling on Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their app stores over concerns about national security, in the latest indication of mounting scrutiny on the short-form video app from members of Congress.

In a letter sent to the two tech giants on Thursday, Colorado Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet calls TikTok “an unacceptable threat to the national security of the United States” and cites the same concerns that have prompted the federal government and more than half of US states to restrict TikTok from official devices and networks.

Writing to Apple CEO Tim Cook and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Bennet highlighted fears that China could use its national security laws to force TikTok or its parent, ByteDance, to hand over the personal information of the app’s US users. The laws in question, Bennet wrote, require organizations in the country to “cooperate with state intelligence work” and to allow the government to access company resources. ByteDance’s founder is Chinese and the company has offices in China. TikTok has also disclosed to European users that their data may be accessed by employees based in China.

China could potentially try to shape what US users see on the app, Bennet warned, with possible implications for foreign policy and democracy.

“We should accept the very real possibility that [China] could compel TikTok, via ByteDance, to use its influence to advance Chinese government interests,” Bennet wrote, “for example, by tweaking its algorithm to present Americans content to undermine U.S. democratic institutions or muffle criticisms” of China’s handling of Hong Kong, Taiwan or ethnic minorities.

Apple, Google and TikTok didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew is expected to testify before a House committee in March to discuss the company’s data security practices.

There is no evidence that the type of spying or manipulation US officials fear has actually occurred, but security experts have warned that it is a possibility.

TikTok has denied that it would ever hand over US user data to the Chinese government. It has increasingly moved to wall off its US operations from the rest of its business, technologically and organizationally — part of what the company has described as a good-faith effort to address the national security concerns.

TikTok has also spent years negotiating a potential national security deal with the US government that would seek to resolve some of the concerns, but the talks have been mired by delays, leading to frustration among some members of Congress. In recent months, multiple US lawmakers have introduced bills that would ban TikTok from all US devices, including personal ones.

Some other US officials have also called on Apple and Google to voluntarily remove TikTok from their app stores.

Last year, Brendan Carr, a commissioner at the Federal Communications Commission, wrote a letter to the companies urging them to de-list TikTok. The FCC does not regulate app stores, but Carr has said that his agency’s experience dealing with Chinese telecom companies has informed his views on the matter. The FCC has moved to block Chinese firms including Huawei and ZTE from the US market, over fears that their wireless networking equipment could be used to collect information on US communications.

Although the leading members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Virginia Democrat Mark Warner and Florida Republican Marco Rubio, have also been outspoken critics of TikTok, the two lawmakers had not been invited to co-sign Bennet’s letter before it was sent, according to a spokesperson for Bennet. Rubio is an author of one of the bills seeking to ban TikTok from the United States, while Warner has said he would prefer to see a bill that targets a broader category of worrisome apps, rather than a single app such as TikTok.

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February 2, 2023
Republicans slam Biden’s handling of the US-Mexico border in first congressional hearing | CNN Politics

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CNN
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Republican lawmakers slammed President Joe Biden’s border policies on Wednesday and laid the groundwork for an impeachment case against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in the first of a series of hearings on immigration since seizing control of the House.

Over the course of Biden’s presidency, Republicans have repeatedly criticized the administration over the handling of the US-Mexico border, where an influx of migrants has stretched federal resources. Critics argue the historic number of arrests is evidence of Biden’s policies not working despite the administration largely using the same protocols as the Trump administration, principally a Covid-era border restriction.

Now, with a House majority and leadership on key committees, Republicans plan to raise those criticisms in congressional hearings and seize on an issue that’s been a political vulnerability for the president, beginning with Wednesday’s House Judiciary Committee hearing.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan criticized Biden’s border policies at the outset of the committee’s first hearing this Congress, making clear the Republican’s intent to underscore what the GOP has described as a crisis on the US-Mexico border over the course of the more than three-hour hearing.

Jordan kicked off the hearing with a series of figures, including the record number of migrant encounters at the border and number of people flagged for being on the terror watchlist – arguing that the data is evidence of the administration’s failed border policies.

US border authorities encountered migrants more than 2.3 million times along the US-Mexico border in fiscal year 2022, according to US Customs and Border Protection data. Of those, more than 1 million migrants were turned away at the border.

“These numbers make clear that the Biden administration does not have operational control of the border,” Jordan said. “Month after month after month, we have set records for migrants coming into the country and frankly, I think it’s intentional.”

Republican lawmakers have argued that Mayorkas’ claims of having operational control of the border are unfounded and that the record arrests mark a dereliction of duty – two themes that came up during Wednesday’s hearing and have been cited as reason to impeach the DHS secretary. The House Judiciary Committee would have jurisdiction over an impeachment resolution.

The tone of the hearing didn’t sit well with New York Rep. Jerry Nadler, the committee’s top Democrat, who lambasted Republicans for their approach.

“I wish this hearing was starting off on a different note. This hearing is more of the same, haphazard chaotic style we have come to expect of this new Republican majority,” Nadler said in his opening remarks. “The first hearing will showcase the racist tendencies of the extreme MAGA Republican wing of the party,” he added.

Over the course of the hearing, Democrats seized on disagreements over border policy within the GOP conference. Democratic Rep. Hank Johnson, of Georgia, called it “nothing more than a distraction.”

The committee described Wednesday’s hearing – the first in a series – as an examination of “border security, national security, and how fentanyl has impacted American lives,” but it also served as a platform for GOP lawmakers to air their grievances over the administration’s immigration policies.

Brandon Dunn, co-founder of Forever 15 Project, which seeks to raise awareness on fentanyl, Sheriff Mark Dannels of Cochise County, Arizona, and El Paso County Judge Ricardo Samaniego testified before the panel.

The House Judiciary Committee is one of many committees that will be holding hearings over the situation at the US-Mexico border. The House Oversight Committee also intends to hold a hearing on the issue and has already engaged in a back and forth with the department over its witnesses.

House Oversight Chairman James Comer, a Kentucky Republican, accused DHS of “refusing to permit” four chief patrol agents to testify at an upcoming Oversight hearing that Comer invited them to the week of February 6.

DHS, however, offered US Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz, who oversees the four agents Comer requested, to testify before the House Oversight Committee and said it would make sector chiefs available for a member-level briefing, according to a letter from DHS to Comer obtained by CNN, citing its own assessment of who was appropriate to testify.

The Biden administration faces unprecedented movement across the Western hemisphere that has contributed to a surge of migrants at the border, including more people from different countries, such as Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua. The US is largely barred from deporting migrants to Cuba and Venezuela, presenting a unique set of challenges for DHS.

In early January, the Biden administration expanded a humanitarian parole program to include Haitians, Venezuelans, Nicaraguans and Cubans to provide a legal pathway for them to enter the US instead of crossing the border. The administration also made those nationalities eligible for Title 42, meaning they can now be turned away by authorities if they don’t apply for the program.

Since then, there has been a significant decline in migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela crossing the US-Mexico border unlawfully, according to the Department of Homeland Security, which attributed the drop to new border measures.

Encounters with migrants from those four nationalities declined 97% in January compared to December, officials previously told reporters, citing preliminary numbers. Border numbers often fluctuate depending on circumstances in the Western hemisphere, so it’s unclear how long the trend will hold.

Already, though, Republican-led states have sued the administration over the program. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, along with 19 other states, argued in a lawsuit that the administration didn’t go through the notice and comment rulemaking process before instituting the rule. As a result, the states are asking the court to block the program.

Administration officials immediately pushed back.

“It is incomprehensible that some states who stand to benefit from these highly effective enforcement measures are seeking to block them and cause more irregular migration at our southern border,” Mayorkas said in a statement.

This story has been updated with additional developments Wednesday.

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February 1, 2023
Tarand.io Offers Innovative Solutions to Fight Malicious Information Activities

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Tarand.io opens new horizons in protection from malicious information activities.

Press Release
–

Jan 31, 2023 09:15 EST

NEW YORK, January 31, 2023 (Newswire.com)
–
Tarand.io, a startup developing solutions for human-focused information security, has announced the launch of a new educational course designed to raise awareness and combat Russian malicious information activity.

Tarand Inc. is at the forefront of educating and combating such malicious activities as it provides the industry’s first human-focused information security solutions. Every day, a significant number of information attacks emanating from malicious states and non-state malicious actors take place around the world. Though there are means of recourse, it is not possible to trace and identify every perpetrator of every single attack and malicious information activity that occurs. However, it is possible to significantly boost immunity through education and raising awareness.

Disinformation, fake news, manipulation, propaganda, and all manner of malicious information activities create more and more problems, effectively putting victims at the mercy of the perpetrators of these targeted actions — this raises significant global concerns about information security.

In order to combat it and raise awareness, Tarand Inc. has developed a specialized training program for individuals and organizations that are at risk of becoming or have already become victims of Russian malicious information activity.

The program is titled: “Russian Propaganda and Information Operations.”

This educational course, developed by a dedicated group of experienced professionals, gives students a unique opportunity to delve into the complex and secret world of Russian disinformation, propaganda, and information operations. This and other courses offered by Tarand allow individuals and organizations to be proactive, inform themselves sufficiently, and not get lost in the modern era’s information jungle. Through these measures, they can sufficiently and effectively boost their information security immunity.

About tarand.io

Tarand.io is a startup that was founded in the United States amid an explosion of malicious information activity associated with the pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The startup provides human-focused information security solutions. The solutions developed by the startup are primarily designed to combat and raise awareness of malicious information activity. Tarand’s primary customers are universities, private enterprises, government bodies, and the military.

Source: Tarand Inc.

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January 31, 2023
China says it is ‘deeply concerned’ about reports of the latest US clampdown on Huawei | CNN Business

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Hong Kong
CNN
—

China has hit back after reports that Washington is moving to further restrict sales of American technology to Huawei.

“China is deeply concerned,” Mao Ning, a spokesperson for the country’s foreign ministry, said at a press conference Tuesday.

The Financial Times reported earlier that the US Commerce Department had notified some companies that it would no longer grant licenses for any company to export American technology to Huawei, citing unidentified people familiar with the matter.

Bloomberg also reported, citing anonymous sources, that officials were considering cutting off Huawei from all US suppliers, though it noted that a decision had not yet been made.

“We are closely following relevant developments,” Mao said.

“China firmly opposes the United States’ generalization of the concept of national security, abuse of state power, and unreasonable suppression of Chinese companies,” she told reporters, adding that such a move would “violate international economic and trade rules.”

Mao vowed that Beijing would “firmly safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese companies.”

Huawei declined to comment on the reports, while the Commerce Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment outside US business hours.

Huawei’s ties to the world’s biggest economy have already been curtailed in recent years as Washington continuously clamps down on the Chinese tech giant.

In 2019, Washington added the company to the so-called “entity list,” which restricts exports to select organizations without a US government license. The following year, the US government expanded on those curbs by seeking to cut Huawei off from chip suppliers using US-made technology.

US officials have argued that Huawei poses a risk to US national security.

Huawei has vehemently denied such claims, and its founder and CEO has repeatedly said the company would never hand data over to the Chinese government. Western security experts, however, have said that China’s national security and intelligence laws require Chinese companies to comply with demands for information.

— CNN’s Brian Fung and Juliana Liu contributed to this report.

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January 31, 2023
New US ransomware strategy prioritizes victims but could make it harder to catch cybercriminals | CNN Politics

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Washington
CNN
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US and European law enforcement’s disruption last week of a $100-million ransomware gang is the clearest public example yet of a new high-stakes strategy from the Biden administration to prioritize protecting victims of cybercrime – even if it means tipping off suspects and potentially make it harder to arrest them.

The extent to which the FBI and Justice Department can carry out similar operations on other ransomware groups – and get the balance right between when to collect intelligence on hackers’ operations and when to shut down computer networks – could affect how acute the threat of ransomware attacks is to US critical infrastructure for years to come.

In the case revealed last week, the FBI says it had extraordinary access for six months to the computer infrastructure of a Russian-speaking ransomware group known as Hive, which had extorted more than $100 million from victims worldwide, including hospitals. That covert access, officials said, allowed the FBI to pass “keys” to victims so that they could decrypt their systems and thwart $130 million in ransom payments.

Justice officials are still trying to arrest the people behind Hive and know where some of them are located, a senior Justice Department official told CNN. But sometimes waiting for an arrest before seizing hacking infrastructure “may mean waiting for a very long time – perhaps an unacceptably long time,” the official said in an interview granted on the condition of anonymity to discuss the case.

The decision to go public with a splashy news conference, fronted by FBI Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland, before making any arrests is evidence of a new approach to ransomware attacks which cost the US hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions, annually.

The strategy shift toward doing more to help victims of cybercrime – announced a year ago – is loosely based on the US government’s approach to counterterrorism, which centers around disrupting plots and thwarting attacks.

“I was preparing for this to be public long, long ago and was kind of surprised that we were able to do this for this long,” the senior Justice Department official said of US officials’ covert access to Hive computer servers.

After multiple ransomware attacks hobbled US critical infrastructure firms in 2021, pressure grew on US law enforcement from Congress, the White House and the public to do more to disrupt the hackers’ operations.

Still, the FBI announcement raised questions about why the bureau decided to go public with the action now rather than continuing to lurk in the Hive hackers’ networks and collect intelligence. And it is possible or even likely, US officials concede, that Hive’s operators will set up new infrastructure to try to resume their extortion attempts.

One law enforcement source told CNN the timing made sense because US officials may have exhausted the intelligence they were going to glean from Hive’s servers.

The senior Justice Department official explained the decision this way: “We saw significant value in the reputational damage we were going to incur against Hive by announcing this.”

Like in other businesses, customers of ransomware gangs have a choice of who they buy hacking tools from. One goal of the operation, the senior Justice official said, was to “discredit” Hive in the eyes of other ransomware criminals and have a psychological effect on their operations.

“Other [ransomware] groups will watch this and have to spend more time and money securing their infrastructure,” said Bill Siegel, CEO of Coveware, a cybersecurity firm that works closely with victims and the FBI.

The spate of significant ransomware attacks in the US in 2021 brought more scrutiny to how quickly the FBI and its partners can mitigate the impact the attacks.

After a July 2021 ransomware attack on a Florida-based software firm compromised up to 1,500 businesses, multiple US government agencies, including the FBI, deliberated about how and when to get the decryptor to victims. At least one victim organization, a Maryland tech firm, complained that they could have used the decryption key earlier to save on recovery costs, the Washington Post reported.

US officials weigh a number of factors when considering law enforcement operations to disrupt cybercriminal groups, a senior FBI official told CNN, including how the disruption will impact the broader cybercriminal ecosystem, how the FBI can help victims of the hackers recover, and the long-term “pursuit of justice” for the victims.

“Each case is different as far as what access [to the hackers’ infrastructure] looks like … what can be done quietly versus noisily,” the senior FBI official said. “Those all go into it.”

John Riggi, a former senior FBI official who is now national adviser for cybersecurity and risk at the American Hospital Association, applauded the disruption of Hive and hoped the crackdown on ransomware groups would continue. But ransomware attacks on health care organizations will likely continue as long as the hackers are getting paid off and are willing to tolerate the risk of carrying out the attacks, Riggi said.

Some cybercriminals “still view their attacks on hospitals as primarily data and financially motivated,” he told CNN.

One lingering problem for the FBI: Not enough victims are reporting ransomware attacks, leaving the bureau in the dark about the scope of the threat. Just 20% of Hive’s victim reported an incident to the FBI, Director Christopher Wray said last week.

“I still think that people have concerns that when they call the FBI that we’re going to come in with coats and we’re going to take their servers and they’re going to lose control of their business,” the senior FBI official told CNN. “And that’s so far from the truth, but most people are not interacting with the FBI on a daily basis.”

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January 31, 2023
Pakistan mosque blast death toll rises to 92 as country faces ‘national security crisis’ | CNN

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Islamabad, Pakistan
CNN
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The death toll from a suspected suicide bomb that ripped through a mosque in northwestern Pakistan Monday has risen to at least 92, marking one of the deadliest attacks in the country in years as it faces what one analyst described as “a national security crisis.”

Peshawar deputy commissioner Shafiullah Khan on Tuesday confirmed the fatalities and said more than 80 victims were still being treated in hospital following the blast at the mosque in a police compound in the city.

Nasarullah Khan, a police official who survived the explosion, said he remembered seeing “a huge burst of flames” before becoming surrounded by a plume of black dust.

Khan said his foot broke in the blast and he was stuck in the rubble for three hours.

“The ceiling fell in… the space in between the ceiling and wall is where I managed to survive,” he said.

Meanwhile, hope was fading in the search for survivors as rescue workers sifted through the rubble of the mosque that was all but destroyed Monday, when worshipers – mainly law enforcement officials – had gathered for evening prayers.

Photos and video show walls of the mosque reduced to fragments, with glass windows and paneling destroyed in the powerful blast.

“We are not expecting anyone alive to be found. Mostly dead bodies are being recovered,” Bilal Faizi, a rescue spokesperson, said Tuesday.

The blast Monday is the latest sign of the deteriorating security situation in Peshawar, capital of the restive Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province that borders Afghanistan and the site of frequent attacks by the Pakistani Taliban, known as Tehreek-e-Taliban (TTP).

The TTP is a US-designated foreign terrorist organization operating in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Last year, the breakdown of an already shaky year-long ceasefire between the TTP and Pakistan’s government threatened not only escalating violence in that country but potentially an increase in cross-border tensions between the Afghan and Pakistani governments.

Initially on Monday, TTP officials Sarbakaf Mohmand and Omar Mukaram Khurasani had claimed the blast was “revenge” for the death of TTP militant Khalid Khorasani last year.

But the TTP’s main spokesperson later denied the group was involved in the attack.

“Regarding the Peshawar incident, we consider it necessary to clarify that Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan has nothing to do with this incident,” TTP spokesperson Muhammad Khorasani said in a statement late Monday. “According to our laws and general constitution, any action in mosques, madrasas, funerals grounds and other sacred places is an offense.”

Pakistan authorities say an investigation is underway and have not confirmed either claim.

On Monday, Peshawar Police Chief Mohammad Aijaz Khan said the blast inside the Police Lines Mosque was “probably a suicide attack,” echoing a statement from Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif.

“The brutal killing of Muslims prostrating before Allah is against the teachings of the Quran,” Sharif said, adding that “targeting the House of Allah is proof that the attackers have nothing to do with Islam.”

Rights groups have condemned the deadly attack, which has raised fears of fresh violence amid a deteriorating security situation in the country.

The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan in a statement Monday said the attack could have been avoided if the “state heeded earlier warnings from civil society about extremist outfits in the province.”

“Ill-equipped law enforcement personnel continue to be targeted in incidents that dearly cost civilian and police lives. We demand the state take action now,” the statement said.

Madiha Afzal, a fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said the 2021 Taliban takeover in Afghanistan has “emboldened” the TTP and other terror groups.

“The TTP has also been emboldened by a Pakistani state that has had a shaky, uncertain response to the group in the last couple of years,” she said, adding a “sloppy policy toward terrorist groups has been more or less consistent across governments in Pakistan since the mid-2000s.”

Negotiations with the militants have “failed repeatedly because these groups are existentially opposed to the Pakistani state and constitution,” she added.

“This is now a national security crisis for Pakistan once again. The solution has to be a concerted military operation (against the TTP),” she said. “But that is now complicated by the fact that the TTP can go across the border into Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.”

The attack also comes at a fragile time for Pakistan, which has been grappling with a cost of living crisis as food and fuel shortages wreak havoc in the country of 220 million.

Sharif’s government has struggled to revive the country’s economy, further devastated by deadly floods last year that killed more than 1,500 people and submerged entire villages.

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January 31, 2023