Good morning.
Saturday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of thirty-nine. Sunrise is 6:36 AM and sunset 5:38 PM, for 11h 02m 00s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 63.6% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred seventy-first day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1868, the U.S. House of Representatives votes 126-47 to impeach Pres. Andrew Johnson. (He narrowly avoided removal from office by the U.S. Senate.)
Recommended for reading in full —
➤ Jeff Stein reports The math in Trump’s infrastructure plan is off by 98 percent, UPenn economists say:
President Trump is overselling the financial impact of his proposed $1.5 trillion infrastructure plan by about $1.3 trillion, according to economists at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.
Earlier this month, the White House unveiled a proposal that it said would stimulate $1.5 trillion in new infrastructure spending through a $200 billion federal investment. The White House said the other $1.3 trillion would come from new state, local and private spending unleashed by its spending plan.
But the Penn Wharton Budget Model team found that the new federal investment would lead at most to an additional $30 billion in state, local and private spending, or about 2 percent of the amount envisioned by the White House.
(98% off …)
➤ Sheera Frenkel and Daisuke Wakabayaski report After Florida School Shooting, Russian ‘Bot’ Army Pounced:
SAN FRANCISCO — One hour after news broke about the school shooting in Florida last week, Twitter accounts suspected of having links to Russia released hundreds of posts taking up the gun control debate.
The accounts addressed the news with the speed of a cable news network. Some adopted the hashtag #guncontrolnow. Others used #gunreformnow and #Parklandshooting. Earlier on Wednesday, before the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., many of those accounts had been focused on the investigation by the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
“This is pretty typical for them, to hop on breaking news like this,” said Jonathon Morgan, chief executive of New Knowledge, a company that tracks online disinformation campaigns. “The bots focus on anything that is divisive for Americans. Almost systematically.”
One of the most divisive issues in the nation is how to handle guns, pitting Second Amendment advocates against proponents of gun control. And the messages from these automated accounts, or bots, were designed to widen the divide and make compromise even more difficult.
Any news event — no matter how tragic — has become fodder to spread inflammatory messages in what is believed to be a far-reaching Russian disinformation campaign. The disinformation comes in various forms: conspiracy videos on YouTube, fake interest groups on Facebook, and armies of bot accounts that can hijack a topic or discussion on Twitter.
➤ Jeremy Raff writes So What? Maybe It Is a Concentration Camp’ (“Joe Arpaio made his name by building a harsh jail in the desert. Now, Trump is promising to take his punitive approach to immigration national”):
On the eve of the Iowa Caucuses in January 2016, when Donald Trump’s presidential campaign still seemed a long-shot, he landed a crucial endorsement. Joe Arpaio, the Phoenix-area sheriff hailed by conservative activists for being tough on immigration, embraced Trump with a prescient message. “Everything I believe in,” Arpaio declared, “he’s going to do when he becomes president.”
The former sheriff rose to national prominence by running an outdoor jail in the desert he once proudly referred to as a “concentration camp.” Arpaio, who is now running for the United States Senate, sees no reason to reconsider the remark. “I’m not going to back down,” Arpaio said in a recent interview. “So what? Maybe it is a concentration camp. I don’t want to make it look nice, like the Hilton Hotel. I want to say it’s a tough place so people don’t want to come there.”
Now Trump, his most prominent champion, is working to execute an Arpaio-style immigration crackdown at a scale neither may have imagined in Iowa. America’s immigrant detention centers have proliferated in recent decades as a result of bipartisan investment. But the Trump administration is aggressively expanding these facilities, where conditions often seem punitively harsh, locking up many immigrants who pose no obvious threat to public safety. A year into President Trump’s crackdown, tens of thousands of immigrants are living the consequences, and fighting against deportation from behind bars.
(These lumpen men now wield wrongly federal power over hundreds of millions.)
➤ Jordan Brunner writes of Kaspersky Lab v. DHS: The Government’s Response and Kaspersky’s Reply:
In December 2017, the Russia-based cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab filed suit against the Department of Homeland Security over an order labeling Kaspersky software an “information security risk” and ordering the removal of all relevant software from government national security systems after a review process of 90 days. The firm applied for a preliminary injunction under the Administrative Procedures Act (APA), arguing the order was “arbitrary and capricious.” Lawfare has previously summarized the lawsuit.
In February, the litigation between Kaspersky and DHS heated up. On Feb. 5, the government filed its response to Kaspersky’s application for a preliminary injunction, along with its evidentiary file. The evidentiary file includes a document entitled the “Maggs Report,” on which DHS relied in making its decision to link Russian espionage services and Kaspersky so closely together. On Feb. 12, Kaspersky filed its reply to these documents. The following is an update to this litigation providing a summary of all the above documents.
The “Maggs Report”
Though only briefly mentioned by both Kaspersky in its application for a preliminary injunction and by the government in its brief in opposition below, the Maggs Report, authored by Russian law expert Peter Maggs of the University of Illinois College of Law, provides a strong underpinning to the DHS says Kaspersky software presented an information security risk because of Kaspersky’s Russian connections. First, Maggs explains that Federal Law No. 40-FZ outlines a legal obligation by Kaspersky to assist Russian FSB officials in the execution of their duties, “including counterintelligence and intelligence activity.” Russian law also permits FSB personnel to be embedded in private enterprises, including Kaspersky, under the same law. Furthermore, because Kaspersky qualifies as an “organizer of the dissemination of information on the Internet” under Article 10. 1 of Federal Law No. 149-FZ, it is required to provide the FSB with metadata (as of July 1, 2018), and is also required to provide Russian officials with decryption keys for its data transmissions. Articles 6 and 8 of Federal Law No. 144-FZ also require Kaspersky to install equipment for the FSB to monitor data transmissions.