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Ruth King

Cybersecurity Threats: The Daunting Challenge Of Securing The Internet Of Things Chuck Brooks

https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckbrooks/2021/02/07/cybersecurity-threats-the-daunting-challenge-of-securing-the-internet-of-things/?sh=5d8691f25d50

The Internet of Things (IoT) broadly refers to devices and equipment that are readable, recognizable, locatable, addressable and/or controllable via the internet. This incorporates physical objects communicating with each other including machine to machine, and machine to people. It encompasses everything from edge computing devices to home appliances, from wearable technology to cars. IoT represents the melding of the physical world and the digital world.

By 2025, it is expected that there will be more than 30 billion IoT connections, almost 4 IoT devices per person on average and that also amounts to trillions of sensors connecting and interacting on these devices. State of the IoT 2020: 12 billion IoT connections (iot-analytics.com).  According to The McKinsey Global Institute, 127 new devices connect to the internet every second.

That is a whole lot of IoT devices and protecting such an enormous attack surface is no easy task, especially when there are so many varying types and security standards on the devices. The prevailing perspective from a security operations perspective on those billions of IoT devices  is that anything connected can be hacked.

What Happened to Officer Brian Sicknick? No one should discount the idea that Democrats and the news media would intentionally promote a totally fabricated story to destroy Donald Trump and vilify his supporters. By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/08/what-happened-to-officer-brian-sicknick/

The claim is so pervasive as not to be questioned: Five people died as a result of the January 6 “insurrection” at the Capitol building, killed by blood-thirsty Trump voters at the president’s behest, out for revenge over a stolen election.

Even though only one death—the shooting of Ashli Babbitt by a still-unidentified police officer—is provable by video evidence, the other fatalities nonetheless are accepted as an article of faith to stoke public outrage about what happened that day.

The most tragic death, the media and lawmakers lament, is that of United States Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick. The 42-year-old New Jersey native was a 12-year veteran of the Capitol police force and himself a supporter of Donald Trump.

Before details about his death could be confirmed, the media quickly insisted Sicknick died after he was attacked at the Capitol. 

“A United States Capitol Police officer died Thursday night from injuries sustained when he engaged with a pro-Trump mob that descended on the U.S. Capitol the day before,” the New York Times reported January 8. The officer, according to the Times, had been “struck . . . in the head with a fire extinguisher, according to two law enforcement officials. With a bloody gash in his head, Mr. Sicknick was rushed to the hospital and placed on life support.”

Sicknick died on January 7. A statement released by the police department later that night vaguely supported the media’s emerging narrative.

Is Palestine a State? by Alan M. Dershowitz

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17047/is-palestine-a-state

The highly politicized International Criminal Court just declared statehood for Palestinians. They did it without any negotiation with Israel, without any compromise, and without any recognized boundaries. They also did it without any legal authority, because the Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court, makes no provision for this criminal court to recognize new states.

The International Criminal Court is not a real court in any meaningful sense of that word. Unlike real courts, which have statutes and common law to interpret, the International Criminal Court just makes it up. As the dissenting judge so aptly pointed out, the Palestine decision is not based on existing law. It is based on pure politics.

The Palestinians — both in the West Bank and Gaza — who have refused to negotiate in good faith and have used terrorism as their primary claim to recognition, have been rewarded for their violence by this decision.

The real victims of such selective prosecution are the citizens of these third world countries whose leaders are killing and maiming them.

All in all, the International Criminal Court decision on Palestine is a setback for a single standard of human rights. It is a victory for terrorism and an unwillingness to negotiate peace. And it is a strong argument against the United States and Israel joining this biased “court,” and giving it any legitimacy.

Iran’s Dissidents Plead with US to Keep Up “Maximum Pressure” by Judith Bergman

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17046/iran-dissidents-pressure

“[T]he Islamic Republic Theocracy is on the verge of collapse”. — Letter from 38 Iran-based dissidents to the Biden administration, February 1, 2021.

“The moment Biden joins the nuclear deal and unblocks the money for the Islamic Republic, the regime will once again dish out money even to Taliban, ISIS, Al Qaeda, but Iranians will keep remaining in a bad state.” — Fatemeh Sepehri, interview with Masih Alinejad, Twitter, February 5, 2021.

“We don’t have human rights in Iran….People are repressed in Iran… Executions, unjust sentences, abysmal prison conditions… We Iranians don’t want the Islamic Republic any longer”. — Fatemeh Sepehri, interview with Masih Alinejad, Twitter, February 5, 2021.

Returning to the JCPOA on Iran’s terms will require lifting sanctions — an act that will strengthen and embolden the Iranian regime. Lifting sanctions is what the dissidents in Iran are literally pleading with the Biden administration not to do.

Taking huge personal risks, 38 Iran-based dissidents have asked the Biden administration to retain “maximum pressure” on Iran. In a letter dated February 1, they urge President Joe Biden to maintain “maximum political, diplomatic, and financial pressure on the regime” and to support the Iranians’ “determination in seeking a secular democratic government through a non-violent, free, and fair referendum”.

“Following the JCPOA agreement, when Iran received substantial financial benefits, the Islamic Republic lost a major opportunity to implement meaningful welfare reforms for its people…” the Iranian dissidents write in their letter.

Cutler Video: Will the Mullahs Call their Sleeper Agents into Action? How the Biden administration’s immigration policies will impact America.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/cutler-video-how-biden-administrations-immigration-frontpagemagcom/

This video is brought to you by a Freedom Center-Glazov Gang collaboration on a new exclusive webinar series, Teach-Ins for the Twenty-First Century. Join us as some of the leading thinkers and pundits on the scene today discuss key issues related to the coronavirus pandemic and its ongoing implications, confronting the Left, the jihad terror threat, and much, much more. And make sure to ask your own questions of our experts.

Hosted by Anni Cyrus, producer of The Glazov Gang and Founder of Live Up To Freedom.

This new webinar features Michael Cutler, a retired Senior Special Agent of the former INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service).

Michael discusses How The Biden Administration’s Immigration Policies Will Impact America. He analyses how, as Iran races towards nuclear break-out, America needs to be concerned about the potential that the Mullahs could call their sleeper agents into action — if any measures are taken to stop their nuclear aspirations.

Don’t miss it!

Black Lives Matter Wants to “Dismantle the Zionist Project” (VIDEO) Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/02/black-lives-matter-wants-dismantle-zionist-project-daniel-greenfield/

This comes from Marc Lamont Hill, courtesy of an intrepid online researcher of antisemitism. Hill had previously gotten into trouble for combining his CNN gig with support for murdering Jews. But even though CNN parted ways with him, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) are always happy to give an antisemites a forum, whether it’s Corbyn’s rep or Hill.

In 2014, Hill had claimed on CNN that the kidnapping and murder of three Jewish teens, Naftali Frenkel, Gilad Shaer, and Eyal Yifrah,  one of them an American citizen, wasn’t “terrorism”, but “resistance”.

Earlier this year, Hill had insisted that “occupied people have a legal and moral right to defend themselves” and that the idea that Israel has a “right to exist” is “propaganda”. In May of last year, he had argued that Trump’s “call for Palestine to ‘reject hatred and terrorism’ is offensive.”

“We have allowed this nonviolent thing to become so normative that we’re undermining our own ability to resist in real robust ways,” he complained.

A month after the Pittsburgh massacre, Marc Lamont Hill addressed a UN event in support of the terror colonialists occupying parts of Israel, endorsed BDS, called for the destruction of Israel and justified the murder of Jews.

The Anti-Trump Election Conspiracy Goes Public Time magazine provides a full confession. Matthew Vadum

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/anti-trump-election-conspiracy-goes-public-matthew-vadum/

A “conspiracy” between “left-wing activists and business titans” led to “an extraordinary shadow effort” to “protect” the 2020 presidential election from Donald Trump, according to Time magazine.

Never mind that Trump is the least authoritarian American president in probably a century and the most transparent American president ever – writer Molly Ball claims in an article titled “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election” that a huge effort was undertaken “fortifying,” but not “rigging” the election.

The American system of government hardly needed to be protected from Trump, who, throughout his four years in office gave away his presidential pay and barely had control over the federal Leviathan, filled as it is with disloyal left-wingers and careerist Democrats.

The same cannot be said of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris who view the government as a massive gravy train and a means of imposing one-party rule on the country and cleansing it of undesirables like conservatives and other patriots. Biden and Harris were fine with the deadly race riots that swept the country after drug-addicted career criminal George Floyd inconveniently died in police custody.

The shadow campaign, which was like a huge ACORN-style operation on steroids, “drew energy” from the Black Lives Matter-Antifa riots, which Ball describes as mere “racial-justice protests.” The effort eventually “reached across the aisle, into the world of Trump-skeptical Republicans appalled by his attacks on democracy,” she writes, assuming her readers agree with her baseless assertion that Trump attacked democracy.

Moral Narcissism and the Show Trial of Donald Trump Roger L. Simon

https://www.theepochtimes.com/moral-narcissism-and-the-show-trial-of-donald-trump_3690218.html

Discussing the Democrats’ impeachment trial in legal terms is a ludicrous waste of time. Anyone literate in the English language can see that the concept of impeaching a post-president is entirely absent from the U.S. Constitution.

Removing someone from office who is no longer in office in the first place is a serio-comic oxymoron straight out of the Theater of the Absurd.

What is actually going on is Trump Derangement Syndrome taken from a neurosis to some kind of bizarre psychosis with overtones of obsessive-compulsive disorder.

The level at which this “trial” is worth examining therefore has a psychoanalytic, not a legal, tilt. It raises, once again, the question of why the Democrats and their media cohorts despise Donald Trump so much.

Yes, I know they fear his political comeback above all things and wish to extinguish it, but what is it, on a deeper level, that makes them believe this man to be such a monster that they are going full Stalinist in conducting what Rand Paul aptly called a “Show Trial”?

Dems’ Sham Trump Impeachment: An Unconstitutional Abuse Of Power

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/02/09/dems-sham-trump-impeachment-an-unconstitutional-abuse-of-power/

With the second impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump looming, it can’t be said enough: This entire farce is an unconstitutional act, which has the sole purpose of silencing a political opponent and the more than 74 million who actively supported him in the last election.

Most people won’t recognize the dangerous precedent this sets. Nothing could stop a future Congress in the hands of a permanent Democratic majority from setting up political kangaroo courts for their political enemies. Nothing.

The goal of course is to come to a pre-ordained judicial conclusion, similar to the Soviet show trials of the 1930s. Then the Democrats will demand what prophetic George Orwell called, in his classic dystopian novel “1984,” “two minutes hate.” That’s when citizens of the totalitarian police state Oceania were expected to direct their rage at the government’s enemy.

For that reason, it’s important to repeat what we’ve stated before: America is a constitutional republic. That means the Constitution that has successfully guided our country for 234 years defines both our rights and the limits of our own government.

Why Democrats Want a Trump Trial They already know the result, but they think it will hurt the GOP.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-democrats-want-a-trump-trial-11612828183?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

The Senate on Tuesday begins the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump, now the former President. Democrats say the trial is crucial to punishing Mr. Trump for the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, but it seems more likely to do the opposite by acquitting him. It also looks like a needless partisan exercise that will further polarize America’s political factions.

***

As we’ve said several times, Mr. Trump’s actions that day and after the November election were disgraceful. He made false claims about a stolen election and later about overturning the Electoral College count. He also misled his supporters about Vice President Mike Pence’s solely ceremonial role in presiding over the vote count.

By rallying his supporters to march on the Capitol in the false hope of overturning the election result, and then refusing for hours to ask them to stand down, Mr. Trump tolerated an assault on a constitutional branch of government. Republicans who think this is impeachable conduct will get no criticism from us.

Yet the House impeachers don’t limit themselves to that charge. In their single and sloppy impeachment article, they accuse Mr. Trump of “incitement of insurrection.” This is a stretch, not least because Mr. Trump called on the marchers to behave “peacefully.” The House managers mention this only in passing in their trial brief. It is doubtful that Mr. Trump’s Jan. 6 remarks would qualify as incitement under the criminal code.