Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of thirty-eight.  Sunrise is 7:22 AM and sunset 4:24 PM, for 9h 01m 42s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 45.6% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Library Board meets via audiovisual conferencing at 6:30 PM, and the Whitewater Unified School District Board meets via audiovisual conferencing in closed session at 6:15 PM and open session at 7 PM.

  On this day in 1937, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the world’s first full-length animated feature, premieres at the Carthay Circle Theatre.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Erica Newland writes ‘I’m Haunted by What I Did’ as a Lawyer in the Trump Justice Department: 

I was an attorney at the Justice Department when Donald Trump was elected president. I worked in the Office of Legal Counsel, which is where presidents turn for permission slips that say their executive orders and other contemplated actions are lawful. I joined the department during the Obama administration, as a career attorney whose work was supposed to be independent of politics.

I never harbored delusions about a Trump presidency. Mr. Trump readily volunteered that his agenda was to disassemble our democracy, but I made a choice to stay at the Justice Department — home to some of the country’s finest lawyers — for as long as I could bear it. I believed that I could better serve our country by pushing back from within than by keeping my hands clean. But I have come to reconsider that decision.

My job was to tailor the administration’s executive actions to make them lawful — in narrowing them, I could also make them less destructive. I remained committed to trying to uphold my oath even as the president refused to uphold his.

But there was a trade-off: We attorneys diminished the immediate harmful impacts of President Trump’s executive orders — but we also made them more palatable to the courts.

….

Watching the Trump campaign’s attacks on the election results, I now see what might have happened if, rather than nip and tuck the Trump agenda, responsible Justice Department attorneys had collectively — ethically, lawfully — refused to participate in President Trump’s systematic attacks on our democracy from the beginning. The attacks would have failed.

….

No matter our intentions, we were complicit. We collectively perpetuated an anti-democratic leader by conforming to his assault on reality. We may have been victims of the system, but we were also its instruments. No matter how much any one of us pushed back from within, we did so as members of a professional class of government lawyers who enabled an assault on our democracy — an assault that nearly ended it.

We owe the country our honesty about that and about what we saw. We owe apologies. I offer mine here.

Gregory S. Schneider reports Virginia’s statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee removed from U.S. Capitol:

Workers have removed a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee that represented Virginia in the U.S. Capitol, laboring in the wee hours of Monday morning to take the figure out of Statuary Hall.

Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (D) had requested the removal over the summer after a commission chartered by the General Assembly decided that a man who fought to uphold slavery was not a fitting symbol for a diverse and modern state.

How Elon Musk’s 700 MPH Hyperloop Concept Could Become the Fastest Way to Travel:

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of thirty-three  Sunrise is 7:22 AM and sunset 4:23 PM, for 9h 01m 39s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 36.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1917, the Soviets establish Cheka, the first in a series of secret police forces.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Dan Diamond reports ‘We want them infected’: Trump appointee demanded ‘herd immunity’ strategy, emails reveal (‘Then-HHS science adviser Paul Alexander called for millions of Americans to be infected as means of fighting Covid-19′):

A top Trump appointee repeatedly urged top health officials to adopt a “herd immunity” approach to Covid-19 and allow millions of Americans to be infected by the virus, according to internal emails obtained by a House watchdog and shared with POLITICO.

“There is no other way, we need to establish herd, and it only comes about allowing the non-high risk groups expose themselves to the virus. PERIOD,” then-science adviser Paul Alexander wrote on July 4 to his boss, Health and Human Services assistant secretary for public affairs Michael Caputo, and six other senior officials.

“Infants, kids, teens, young people, young adults, middle aged with no conditions etc. have zero to little risk….so we use them to develop herd…we want them infected…” Alexander added.

“[I]t may be that it will be best if we open up and flood the zone and let the kids and young folk get infected” in order to get “natural immunity…natural exposure,” Alexander wrote on July 24 to Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Stephen Hahn, Caputo and eight other senior officials. Caputo subsequently asked Alexander to research the idea, according to emails obtained by the House Oversight Committee’s select subcommittee on coronavirus.

….

In his emails, Alexander also spent months attacking government scientists and pushing to shape official statements to be more favorable to President Donald Trump.

For instance, Alexander acknowledges in a May 30 email that a draft statement from the CDC about how Covid-19 was disproportionately affecting minority populations was “very accurate,” but he warned HHS and CDC communications officials that “in this election cycle that is the kind of statement coming from CDC that the media and Democrat [sic] antagonists will use against the president.” The problems were “due to decades of democrat neglect,” Alexander alleged.

Masha Gessen writes Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya Is Overcoming Her Fears:

Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya has spent more than half of her short political career in exile. Six months ago, the former English teacher was a stay-at-home mom. Her husband, the businessman Siarhei Tsikhanouski, often used his popular YouTube channel to criticize the regime of the dictator Alexander Lukashenka, who has ruled Belarus for twenty-six years. In May, as Belarus prepared for the quinquennial ritual that Lukashenka calls a Presidential election, Tsikhanouski, who had planned to run, was arrested. So was another opposition candidate, Viktar Babaryka. A third, Valery Tsepkalo, was not allowed on the ballot.

Three women—Tsepkalo’s wife, Veronika; Babaryka’s campaign director, Maria Kalesnikava; and Tsikhanouskaya—joined forces and put Tsikhanouskaya forward as the opposition candidate for President. She was allowed on the ballot, apparently because Lukashenka didn’t take her seriously. On Election Day, August 9th, she appeared to get a majority of the vote. Lukashenka claimed victory, however. Hundreds of thousands of Belarusians took to the streets in protest and have continued protesting since. Every weekend for the last eighteen weeks, people have marched in the streets of Minsk, the Belarusian capital, and other cities and towns. Lukashenka’s forces have cracked down brutally, jailing upward of a thousand protesters some weekends, but the demonstrations continue.

How technology helps build Dubai’s mega skyscrapers:

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of thirty-six  Sunrise is 7:21 AM and sunset 4:23 PM, for 9h 01m 41s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 27.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1777, Washington and the Continental Army go into winter quarters at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Bellingcat reports FSB Team of Chemical Weapon Experts Implicated in Alexey Navalny Novichok Poisoning:

Today, alongside investigative partners CNN, Der Spiegel, and The Insider, we identified a long-running FSB [Russia’s Federal Security Service] operation to trail Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny, including a number of chemical weapons experts involved in the research and development of Novichok. How did we find all of this information, and how did we verify the information? We’ll detail our investigative methodologies here, with some discussion on Russian data markets, cross-referencing data to be sure of its veracity, and other topics.

Bellingcat has previously investigated the role of a chain of Russian government-run scientific institutes in providing research into and manufacturing of nerve agent for GRU’s [a Russian military intelligence agency, now formally the GU, still often called the GRU] overseas assassination program, including the March 2018 Novichok poisoning of Sergey and Yulia Skripal and the earlier poisoning of Bulgarian arms manufacturer Emilian Gebrev.

In the course of a Belingcat investigation into Russia’s renewed chemical weapons project, we analyzed call metadata for the telephone numbers used by two senior executives of SC Signal, an entity that we found to be directly involved in the development of new variants and application methods for nerve agents. We had observed that in the months preceding Alexey Navalny’s poisoning, both of these executives – Arur Zhirov and Victor Taranchenko – had communicated with Stanislav Makshakov, and less frequently with his FSB superiors Kirill Vasilyev and Vladimir Bogdanov. Moreover, we had observed a surge in the communication between this group of FSB operatives.

….

Tugging on one thread will unravel an entire tapestry of cross-referenced data, eventually revealing how Navalny’s poisoning was planned and carried out by a team of chemical weapon experts and FSB operatives. Much of this data is available due to the negligence of the Russian government — it’s hard to imagine an entire city’s vehicle registration database with passport numbers, addresses, license plate numbers, and other data to be leaked online annually for anyone to find in Germany or Canada — as well as the sloppiness of the security services themselves.

The FSB and GRU are as ambitious as they are dangerous in their operations, but the same cannot be said about their operational security practices. You do not need to look for dead drops in a park or trail people through alleyways to uncover the cover identities of spies, rather you just need a keen eye, patience, and the sense of knowing where to look for available leaked data sources.

Reporter Confronts Operative in Alexey Navalny Poisoning:

Watch what happened when this reporter confronted one of the secret operatives believed to be involved in the poisoning of Putin critic Alexey Navalny.

 Video from Space Weekly Highlights, Week of 12.13.20:

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of thirty-three  Sunrise is 7:21 AM and sunset 4:23 PM, for 9h 01m 48s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 17.8% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1958, Project SCORE (Signal Communication by Orbiting Relay), the world’s first communications satellite, is launched.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Natasha Bertrand and Eric Wolff report Nuclear weapons agency breached amid massive cyber onslaught:

The Energy Department and National Nuclear Security Administration, which maintains the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile, have evidence that hackers accessed their networks as part of an extensive espionage operation that has affected at least half a dozen federal agencies, officials directly familiar with the matter said.

On Thursday, DOE and NNSA officials began coordinating notifications about the breach to their congressional oversight bodies after being briefed by Rocky Campione, the chief information officer at DOE.

They found suspicious activity in networks belonging to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories in New Mexico and Washington, the Office of Secure Transportation at NNSA, and the Richland Field Office of the DOE.

The hackers have been able to do more damage at FERC than the other agencies, and officials there have evidence of highly malicious activity, the officials said, but did not elaborate.

The officials said that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which has been helping to manage the federal response to the broad hacking campaign, indicated to FERC this week that CISA was overwhelmed and might not be able to allocate the necessary resources to respond. DOE will therefore be allocating extra resources to FERC to help investigate the hack, even though FERC is a semi-autonomous agency, the officials said.

Craig Timberg and Ellen Nakashima report Federal investigators find evidence of previously unknown tactics used to penetrate government networks:

Federal investigators reported Thursday on evidence of previously unknown tactics for penetrating government computer networks, a development that underscores the disastrous reach of Russia’s recent intrusions and the logistical nightmare facing federal officials trying to purge intruders from key systems.

For days, it has been clear that compromised software patches distributed by a Texas-based company, SolarWinds, were central to Russian efforts to gain access to U.S. government computer systems. But Thursday’s alert from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency at the Department of Homeland Security said evidence suggested there was other malware used to initiate what the alert described as “a grave risk to the Federal Government and state, local, tribal, and territorial governments as well as critical infrastructure entities and other private sector organizations.”

While many details remained unclear, the revelation about new modes of attack raises fresh questions about the access that Russian hackers were able to gain in government and corporate systems worldwide.

[The U.S. government spent billions on a system for detecting hacks. The Russians outsmarted it.]

“This adversary has demonstrated an ability to exploit software supply chains and shown significant knowledge of Windows networks,” the alert said. “It is likely that the adversary has additional initial access vectors and tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) that have not yet been discovered.”

How Scientists Knew Hawaii’s Kilauea Was About to Erupt:

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of thirty.  Sunrise is 7:20 AM and sunset 4:22 PM, for 9h 01m 58s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 10.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Community Development Authority meets via audiovisual conferencing at 5:30 PM.

On this day in 1903, the Wright brothers make the first controlled powered, heavier-than-air flight in the Wright Flyer at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Thomas Bossert writes I Was the Homeland Security Adviser to Trump. We’re Being Hacked:

At the worst possible time, when the United States is at its most vulnerable — during a presidential transition and a devastating public health crisis — the networks of the federal government and much of corporate America are compromised by a foreign nation. We need to understand the scale and significance of what is happening.

Last week, the cybersecurity firm FireEye said it had been hacked and that its clients, which include the United States government, had been placed at risk. This week, we learned that SolarWinds, a publicly traded company that provides software to tens of thousands of government and corporate customers, was also hacked.

The attackers gained access to SolarWinds software before updates of that software were made available to its customers. Unsuspecting customers then downloaded a corrupted version of the software, which included a hidden back door that gave hackers access to the victim’s network.

This is what is called a supply-chain attack, meaning the pathway into the target networks relies on access to a supplier. Supply-chain attacks require significant resources and sometimes years to execute. They are almost always the product of a nation-state. Evidence in the SolarWinds attack points to the Russian intelligence agency known as the S.V.R., whose tradecraft is among the most advanced in the world.

….

The Russians have had access to a considerable number of important and sensitive networks for six to nine months. The Russian S.V.R. will surely have used its access to further exploit and gain administrative control over the networks it considered priority targets. For those targets, the hackers will have long ago moved past their entry point, covered their tracks and gained what experts call “persistent access,” meaning the ability to infiltrate and control networks in a way that is hard to detect or remove.

While the Russians did not have the time to gain complete control over every network they hacked, they most certainly did gain it over hundreds of them. It will take years to know for certain which networks the Russians control and which ones they just occupy.

 Heather Long reports Nearly 8 million Americans have fallen into poverty since the summer (‘Nation’s poverty rate has risen at the fastest pace ever this year after aid for the unemployed declined’):

The poverty rate jumped to 11.7 percent in November, up 2.4 percentage points since June, according to new data released Wednesday by researchers at the University of Chicago and the University of Notre Dame.

While overall poverty levels are low by historical standards, the increase in poverty this year has been swift. It is the biggest jump in a single year since the government began tracking poverty 60 years ago. It is nearly double the next-largest rise, which occurred in 1979-1980 during the oil crisis, according to James X. Sullivan, a professor at Notre Dame, and Bruce D. Meyer, a professor at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy.

Sullivan and Meyer created a Covid-19 Income and Poverty Dashboard to track how many Americans are falling below the poverty line during this deep recession. The federal poverty line is $26,200 for a family of four.

How One of The Oldest Dye Houses in Egypt Keeps Ancient Hand Dyeing Alive: