Cyberwar update: China; Erosion of American judicial independence and neutrality

For years, a personal major security concern has been America's vulnerability to cyberattacks by enemies. The problem is serious and quickly getting a lot worse. In my opinion, the combination of (i) being an open society and country, (ii) the difficulty of governing, (iii) intense private sector hostility to government, (iv) intense Republican Party hostility to government, (v) broken-gridlocked government, and (vi) other factors such as the size and number of targets for hackers make the US very vulnerable. 

Meanwhile, the private sector keeps gaslighting us saying that cybersecurity is a top priority. Despite cynical corporate propaganda but American companies keep getting hacked. The US government gets hacked. So does critical infrastructure such as the electrical grid, power plants and water plants. One estimate is that the economic cost to the US economy will be about $452 billion in 2024.

A rapidly growing threat comes from an increasingly aggressive and belligerent China. Breaking Defense writes:

NSA’s China specialist: US at a loss to deter Chinese hackers

"They’re not going to be motivated to stop," David Frederick, assistant deputy director for China at NSA, said of the Volt Typhoon hacking group

Officials from the National Security Agency and the State Department said they’re still struggling to come up with a way to deter a powerful hacking group allegedly backed by the Chinese government and accused of slipping into US critical infrastructure networks.

When asked how the US plans to deter the group dubbed Volt Typhoon from future attacks, David Frederick, assistant deputy director for China at NSA replied, “I don’t have a good answer to that.”

“They are trying to position themselves to have an asymmetric advantage in a crisis or conflict. If you look at the cost-benefit from their point of view and just the breadth of targets in the United States and our allies in terms of global networks, they’re not going to be motivated to stop,” Frederick said at an Intelligence and National Security Summit this week. “So that’s a hard problem — how do we get them, sort of thing.”

Volt Typhoon, which the US government says is “sponsored” by the Chinese government, has been accused of invading thousands of devices worldwide since it was discovered in 2021, Recorded reported. But the group gained more attention in May 2023 when it was more publicly outed by Microsoft security analysts.

On the same day Microsoft announced the existence of Volt Typhoon, the NSA and other national and allied agencies issued a warning about China state-sponsored cyber actors using built-in network devices to target US critical infrastructure, including in Guam.

The WaPo reports:

Chinese government hackers penetrate U.S. internet providers to spy

Beijing’s hacking effort has “dramatically stepped up from where it used to be,” says former top U.S cybersecurity official

Chinese government-backed hackers have penetrated deep into U.S. internet service providers in recent months to spy on their users, according to people familiar with the ongoing American response and private security researchers.

The unusually aggressive and sophisticated attacks include access to at least two major U.S. providers with millions of customers as well as to several smaller providers, people familiar with the separate campaigns said.

“It is business as usual now for China, but that is dramatically stepped up from where it used to be. It is an order of magnitude worse,” said Brandon Wales, who until earlier this month was executive director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, CISA.

The hacks raise concern because their targets are believed to include government and military personnel working undercover and groups of strategic interest to China.

The group’s emphasis on obtaining access for potential physical destruction “is nowhere near where the nations of the world behave,” said retired Gen. Paul Nakasone, who stepped down in February from his posts running U.S. Cyber Command and the National Security Agency.

We are in deep trouble and there is no way to fix this. The federal government will remain broken for the foreseeable future while the GOP tries to replace democracy and the rule of law with authoritarianism and the rule of the thug. Our own internal divisions are not only killing us from within, our internal war makes us vulnerable to lethal external cyberattacks.

Lethal is not overkill or hyperbole (in my opinion). If the US grid goes down, think what would happen. Power to critical infrastructure like water plants would go down. Without clean water for a couple of  months, people will start dying by the tens of thousands within a few weeks. After that, we will die in the tens of millions. Here in Southern California there is almost no free flowing clean water flow, if any. Where the hell would drinkable water come from? Nowhere, that's where. Same for Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, Utah, etc. And, what about sewage treatment? Those plants would be knocked out too. Consider that.

Perplexity:

Q: If there is a major nationwide cyberattack on the US electrical grid that damages it and knocks it out of operation, about how long would it take to restore power?

A: Restoring power after a major nationwide cyberattack on the US electrical grid could potentially take weeks, months, or even years, depending on the severity and extent of the damage.

Q: Is Germaine being an irrational alarmist or something worse about cybersecurity?

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News reports keep dribbling out that indicate an erosion of the neutrality, honesty and/or independence of federal and state courts. Blatant conflicts of interest and partisan bias are being denied and ignored. Judicial ethics is going extinct. The Verge reports:

Judge who owns Tesla stock greenlights X lawsuit against critics

A lawsuit aimed at punishing critics of Elon Musk’s X will go forward, thanks to a ruling from a judge with a financial interest in Musk’s success.

On Thursday, Judge Reed O’Connor denied a motion to dismiss X’s lawsuit against Media Matters For America (MMFA). The suit was filed in Texas last year and alleges that MMFA should be held legally liable for negative reporting that caused companies to pull ads from X. O’Connor dismissed objections that it was filed in a state where neither X nor MMFA is headquartered, saying the fact that MMFA “targeted” two X Texas-based advertisers — Oracle and AT&T — by mentioning them in articles and interviews is sufficient. (X is based in California, though its current San Francisco office will soon close and Musk has discussed moving to Texas.)

O’Connor also determined that X’s claims had enough merit to proceed in court — which is, to put it gently, concerning.

Unlike your standard libel lawsuit, X doesn’t say MMFA made a factually incorrect claim; it outright admits that X served ads against racist or otherwise offensive content. Instead, it argues that this situation is rare and the authors “deliberately misused the X platform to induce the algorithm to pair racist content with popular advertisers’ brands.” What constitutes misuse of a platform? Using accounts that had been active for more than a month, following the accounts of racists and major brands, and “endlessly scrolling and refreshing” to get new ads. In other words, X isn’t suing MMFA for lying — it’s suing them for seeking out bad things about a business and not reporting those things in a sufficiently positive light.

Drawing a weak case out is an unmitigated win for X and Musk, who have effectively infinite legal resources. It’s a win for the Musk-favored strategy of forum shopping. It’s a loss for MMFA, which laid off staffers in the wake of this suit and two equally specious investigations by Republican state attorneys general sympathetic to Musk, both of which have been blocked by other judges.

The Lever reports court news that is far scarier than the authoritarian (silencing legitimate criticism is authoritarian) crap Musk is pulling off:

Justice, Brought To You By Big Oil

Texas is opening a fossil fuel-backed business court stacked with judges who’ve represented oil and gas companies

On Sept. 1, Texas is slated to open its new business courts, a brand-new legal system backed by Big Oil — and several of the court’s main judges have in the past represented fossil fuel companies as lawyers, The Lever has found.

The judges were hand-picked over the last two months by Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, a major recipient of oil industry cash — and many can be quickly replaced if they hand down decisions he opposes, a judicial design that he championed.

The courts consist of 11 regional business courts and a new statewide court of appeals to hear appellate litigation, which are expected to have immediate impacts on environmental cases in the state. As Public Health Watch, an independent investigative news organization, reported last month, a suite of cases involving state environmental authorities will now be transferred from a generally liberal appeals court to the state’s new Fifteenth Court of Appeals, created to oversee the business courts.

There, these cases will be decided by a panel of conservative judges historically friendly to industry — particularly oil and gas interests, a powerful force in Texas.

“Greg Abbott created a boutique court for corporations where he, not the voters, gets to pick the judges,” said Adrian Shelley, the director of the Texas office at Public Citizen, a progressive advocacy organization. “It’s that simple.”

The judge that Abbott selected to head the new appellate court, Scott Brister, has since 2009 worked at a law firm known for its specialty in fossil fuel litigation. While an attorney there, Brister, a Republican, led the defense of the oil company BP in litigation over the catastrophic Deepwater Horizon oil spill, one of the worst environmental disasters in history, which released more than 100 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.

Before then, while serving on the Texas Supreme Court, Brister threw out a major guilty verdict against oil giant ExxonMobil for allegedly poisoning a town’s water supply.

A jury originally awarded $7 million in damages to the plaintiffs in that case, but in 2003, Brister and his fellow justices claimed that the scientific evidence was not robust enough to support that illnesses contracted by the town’s residents were connected with Exxon’s pollution.

The court reversed the verdict on the company’s appeal, and the plaintiffs received nothing.  

Texas’ model is different from many other states’ business courts, experts say: The judges are appointed personally by the governor, with virtually no oversight from the legislative branch. And they only serve two-year terms — in contrast to 12-year terms in Delaware and six-year terms in Nevada — in theory making it easy for Abbott or a successor to quickly replace a judge who doesn’t rule in favor of his political interests. Abbott has been pushing for Texas to create such a system for years.

There it is right out in the open, pro-business courts. Power flows to companies. Plaintiffs receive nothing because power has shifted to companies. This is the face of American radical right authoritarianism and the modern Republican Party. This is what they want to do to all courts. They want power shifted from the people to the elites. 

In all of this, one can reasonably believe that trifling concerns like global warming, pollution and human health are going to get very short shrift from this new system of "justice" in Texas, assuming they get any shrift at all.

He had his day in

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