Altruism Today

Source: BBC News

Over the past few days, we’ve all watched a number of situations where accounts of what’s occurring inside the Beltway conflict. The resignation of four highly placed state department officials reported yesterday has been characterized by major media sources as 1) a firing, 2) a resignation in advance of Tillerson’s assuming the lead and in protest of the tone being set, or 3) just normal turnover. So the fact that for a while it was somewhat unclear who cancelled the meeting next week between Donald Trump and Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto is no surprise.

It seems that the media is, as with some other issues, trying valiantly to get a straight story out of the administration as one set of assertions quickly supplants another. In the case of Mexico, it’s something of a who-broke-up-with-whom scenario, but with about $600 billion a year’s worth of stakes. (That is the annual value of trade between the two countries.) Whoever cancelled did so after Trump continued to declare that not only would a $12–15 billion border wall be built, but that the Mexican government would pay for it. Trump told Republican lawmakers who were on retreat in Philadelphia yesterday that the meeting cancelation was by mutual agreement, but he had already declared the meeting would be “fruitless” unless Mexico treated the U.S. “with respect” by paying for the border wall. Peña Nieto had a slightly different story, saying that he only cancelled the visit after Trump pretty much forced his hand with a full-on campaign of public posturing. “If Mexico is unwilling to pay for the badly needed wall, then it would be better to cancel the upcoming meeting,” the U.S. president wrote on Twitter Thursday morning.

Peña Nieto, for his part, says, “I’ve said time and again: Mexico won’t pay for any wall.” Indeed, he cannot agree to such a proposal; many Mexicans were outraged when Candidate Trump described Mexican migrants as murderers and rapists (though he said that some, he assumed, were good people) and disapproved of a previous meeting between Peña Nieto and Trump. They see the wall proposal as divisive, unnecessary, inhumane, expensive, and ineffective. By most accounts, they disapprove of any political kowtowing to Trump on their behalf, so, in the context of Trump’s public goading, it would have been next to politically impossible for Peña Nieto to travel to D.C. to meet with Trump.

Meanwhile, Sean Spicer made it known that one of the president’s proposed plans to pay for the “big, beautiful” wall was a 20 percent tariff on Mexican goods. Vanity Fair pointed out the apparent consequence of this: Americans, not Mexicans, would end up paying. After that, White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus told reporters that a border tax is just one of a “buffet of options” to pay for the wall. (Mexico, by the way, Is the U.S.’s third-largest trade partner.)

President Obama has accelerated clemency to low-level drug offenders.

Near the start of his second term, President Barack Obama had granted clemency at a lower rate than any president in recent history. He had pardoned 39 people and denied 1,333 requests. He had used his power to commute a prisoner’s sentence just once.

But as Obama enters the final days of his administration, he has dramatically picked up the pace. He’s now issued commutations to 1,176 people since entering office — more than George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Ronald Reagan put together. In December, Obama commuted the sentences of 231 people in a single day.

Much of Obama’s increased activity can be attributed to an initiative begun in 2014 to shorten sentences of non-violent offenders who would likely have received less time for their crimes under current law and who had already served at least 10 years of their prison sentences. Low-level drug offenders have received most of the commutations, part of a broader push by the administration to reform sentencing guidelines.

“Historically, clemency has been used to heal national wounds after a war,” said Mark Osler, a law professor at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota who started the first federal commutations law clinic. “There was a big batch of grants during and after the Civil War, after World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War — and, in a way, Obama is doing it after the War on Drugs.”

While Obama’s commutation numbers have accelerated, they do not, as the White House has put in press releases, exceed those of the last 11 presidents combined, Osler pointed out. Gerald Ford put together a clemency board in 1974 specifically looking to pardon Vietnam War draft dodgers. In just a year, the board reviewed 31,500 petitions and recommended clemency for 13,603.

A sagging economy, a complex job market, and a lack of social programs have led to an increase in the number of elderly people living—and dying—on the streets.

Herbert Manown is a self-described “jack-of-all-trades but master of none.” A Harley Davidson-riding Vietnam War Navy veteran, he has worked in construction, at the post office, and with the United States Census Bureau. At 62, he’s still fit and healthy, with a strong handshake and grandfatherly eyes framed by black glasses and thick, bushy brows.

Life was stable for Herb until 2013, when he “got lazy” and neglected to renew his truck-driver license. He didn’t realize the severity of his error until he applied for a new license but could not pass the written test. Although Herb quickly landed a job as a security guard at a fast-food restaurant, even working overtime didn’t provide enough for him to make ends meet. He fell behind on rent and was evicted.

Herb has four children in the Bay Area, but he was reluctant to ask if he could move in with any of them. As he put it, “We have very different lifestyles.” And while he also has siblings in the area, they had a major falling out, so he refuses to turn to them for help. He wound up settling in at the East Oakland Community Project, a shelter located near his old apartment. He volunteered in the kitchen and was even voted president of the shelter, a position that entails acting as a go-between for residents and management. But after a few months, he felt pressure to move on. “Herb, you have to go,” he recalls them saying. So he bought a used car and moved into it.

Read on here: https://psmag.com/radical-efforts-to-end-homelessness-old-sick-and-on-the-street-80ea458ea7ee#.5f7rkdaei

"Public disclosures like this enable collective cyber defense through information sharing." 

Says Admiral Jim Stavridis (Ret.) http://twitter.com/stavridisj Supreme Commander of NATO (2009-2013); Dean, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University

As we begin the new year, most media pundits will continue to focus their attention on the U.S. sanctioning of Russian entities and the expulsion of nearly three dozen of their intelligence agents from the U.S. An even bigger story, however, is the unprecedented steps taken by the Obama administration to shine a light on the tactics and procedures behind Russia’s “malicious cyber-enabled activities.” These were revealed in a 13-page report published jointly by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center, a branch of the Department of Homeland Security.

Publicly laying this level of detail out sets a dramatic precedent that could serve a significant blow to Russia’s current and future cyberoperations in the U.S. and elsewhere. The technical details of the report constitute an intelligence windfall for ordinary network defenders who have been starving for rich real-time threat information from the federal government to protect their systems against sophisticated actors. While there are downsides to such a dramatic reveal, it is clearly the right thing to do.

The report from the D.H.S. and F.B.I. marks the first time the federal government has gone to such lengths to attribute “malicious cyberactivity” to specific threat actors associated with a designated country. To most Americans, its contents are confusing and highly technical. The report’s files contain a lot of random IP addresses, signatures and character combinations known as file hashes.  

Publicly laying this level of detail out sets a dramatic precedent that could serve a significant blow to Russia’s cyberoperations.

But for any information security practitioner charged with defending against network intrusions, this data is a gold mine. Now that these cyber signatures have been disclosed, governments and companies of all sizes can automatically ingest and neutralize them. And perhaps more importantly, they can go hunting on their own networks to root out any previous compromises. Once the data is in hand, a quick scan or review of log history can lead defenders to the Russian activity.

In many respects, releasing information on an adversaries’ tools and operational infrastructure is the cyber equivalent of naming undercover spies. Once disclosed, malicious code becomes harmless, and the command-and-control nodes ― usually vulnerable web servers or other unwitting endpoints ― are either abandoned by the hackers or hardened to prevent further exploitation. In other words, the adversary’s avenues of access to a target are burned, forcing them to seek additional vectors of attack.

Burning a hacker’s access revises the economics of the operation in favor of the defense. Gaining and maintaining persistent access to infrastructure “hop points” using custom-developed programs is a human and time-intensive endeavor ― especially the operation involves physical intervention. In fact, one of the reasons most cyber intruders sit dormant for months on a victim’s network before executing an attack is to protect themselves against the consequential fallout of detection.

Of course, there are two sides to every story. While exposing the hacker’s tradecraft can be highly damaging to the offense, it also poses risks to the defense. The Obama’s administration’s decision to release Russian threat signatures was a calculated one that undoubtedly weighed the cost of compromising intelligence sources and methods. Indeed, it is safe to assume that the U.S. burned some of its assets as a result of this report.

It signals a promising development in the government’s efforts to streamline the disclosure process.

Nevertheless, the costs of publishing the report are dwarfed by the benefits of proliferating more intelligence for citizens, businesses and governments to consume and use in the interest of network defense. Unlike traditional intelligence, where policymakers or war fighters are the primary customers, cyberthreat intelligence ― especially the technical details ― is most valuable when shared with software manufacturers, network administrators and even ordinary users. In this respect, the Obama administration’s action is not about “naming and shaming” but rather about enabling collective cyber defense through information sharing.

It is worth noting that the process of identifying and disclosing new cyber tradecraft, threats and vulnerabilities is well-established. The antivirus industry, for example, is constantly consuming signatures from security researchers and updating their software to protect end users. But the normal cycle of identifying a new vulnerability, disclosing it to the appropriate manufacturer and hardening the affected system is often protracted, leaving network defenders multiple steps behind the attackers.

Recent advances in automation, however, have contributed to significantly closing the gap between detection and remediation of new threats. Specifically, the practice of “automated indicator sharing” allows for real-time machine-to-machine sharing of threat intelligence ― precisely the type of data contained in the joint D.H.S. and F.B.I. report. The sharing of trusted and structured data enables organizations to, for example, automatically block traffic associated with a newly identified attack vector.

It’s time for government cybersecurity investigators to reveal more of their findings for the greater good.

While the technology behind trusted and automated information sharing is in place, most of the data shared is not particularly high-value intelligence ― either because the federal government is unwilling to declassify it or, by the time it is declassified, the information is stale. In this case, this intelligence contained in the joint D.H.S. and F.B.I. report is far less valuable than it would have been had it been released months ago.

Nevertheless, it signals a promising development in the federal government’s efforts to streamline the disclosure process and its appetite to serve a broader public base. After all, the vast majority of the nation’s cyber infrastructure is owned and operated by the private sector. It’s time for government cybersecurity investigators to reveal more of their findings for the greater good.