The change in the cyber risk environment coinciding with a heightened need for procurement of new technologies and services has created a new paradigm for a cybersecurity partnership between government and industry. The prioritization of that special partnership appears to be in the immediate plans for the new Trump Administration.
The appointment of former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani as a cybersecurity adviser signals the elevated importance of that intended government/industry partnership. One of his first tasks will be to assemble cybersecurity subject matter experts and leaders from industry to advise and spur innovation in and out of government. Mayor Giuliani has made it clear that the proposed group will work on cutting-edge cybersecurity solutions across industries such as the energy, financial, and transportation sectors.
Collaboration between government and industry stakeholders is a proven model that makes good sense. Together, government and the private sector can identify products and align flexible product paths, evaluate technology gaps, and help design scalable architectures that will lead to greater efficiency and fiscal accountability. Bridging R&D spending between the government and private sectors should also allow for a more directed and capable cybersecurity prototype pipeline to meet new technology requirements.
In addition to being collaborative, a working partnership of government and industry leaders should be focused and strategic in nature. To be effective the evolving cybersecurity partnership must also be 1) proactive and adaptive to change; 2) coordinated with The Department of Homeland Security (DHS); and 3) have a cyber risk management/consequence strategy.
Being Proactive and Adaptive to Change: There are many challenges of functioning in an exponentially changing digital world. This requires restructuring of priorities and missions for both government and industry. That is not an easy task and there is logic in joining forces.
As the capabilities and connectivity of cyber devices have grown, so have the cyber intrusions and threats from malware and hackers. The growing and sophisticated cyber threat actors include various criminal enterprises, loosely affiliated hackers, and adversarial nation states. A first mission for the new Administration’s cyber team will be to review recommendations prepared by cybersecurity experts from within and out of government and to assess gaps and vulnerabilities across the threat landscape.
In the past decade, the cybersecurity focus and activities by both government and industry have been predominantly reactive to whatever is the latest threat or breach. As a result, containing the threats was difficult because at the outset, defenders were always at least one step behind. That mindset has been changing due to a major series of intrusions and denial of service attacks (including OPM, Anthem, Yahoo, and many others) that exposed a flawed approach to defending data and operating with a passive preparedness.
Being proactive is not just procuring technologies and people it also means adopting a working industry and government framework that includes tactical measures, encryption, authentication, biometrics, analytics, and continuous diagnostics and mitigation, as applicable to specific circumstances.
The new advisory council led by Mayor Giuliani will become more proactive and adaptive in protecting assets and will also likely address policy and technology development implications around a whole host of other topics related to cyber threats. Some of these topics will include information sharing, securing the Internet of Things (IoT), protection of critical infrastructures, and expanding workforce training to mitigate the shortage of cybersecurity
Inhabitants of the Swedish city of Malmö are living in fear after a 16-year-old Iraqi boy was murdered last week. Ahmed Obaid had been gunned down by an unknown shooter in the Rosengard district on Thursday. The killing is part of a series of violent crimes that has plagued the city located in the south of the Scandinavian country for some time now. Obaid was shot near a bus stop. The teenager had never been involved in crime and was not known to police. His friends say he didn’t fight and had not previously been threatened, writes the dailyExpressen.
The perpetrators are still at large and their identities are still unknown. It does, however, seem yet another hallmark in the disintegration of the Swedish social fabric.
In response to the murder, demonstrators protested in front of city hall yesterday, writes the Swedish Local. Ahmed’s father Najm Obaid, who spoke at the gathering that was also attended by several politicians, said: “we won’t get Ahmed back, but I will be happy if this leads to the violence being stopped.”
Rim Jabboul, an 18-year-old schoolgirl who attended the protest, called the murder“devastating.” She said “it is a real shame that a 16-year-old should have to die like that. He had not lived his life yet. You have to look over your shoulder when you go out at night now. I don’t let my little brother go out at night any more. I hope that the politicians actually view this as a serious problem and start to solve this in Malmö.”
The organisers of the protest presented Justice and Migration Minister Morgan Johansson a set of measures he could implement in order to curb the violent crime wave.
“There’s nothing on it I don’t agree with,” Johansson commented on their proposals. “On the contrary,” he said. “In my opinion, there is no doubt what has to be done. We have to make sure that they can be prosecuted and that they can get long jail sentences.” The Minister furthermore stated that the Swedes “have to get rid of the weapons”, and he is also calling for“tighter punishment so that those who are held for serious gun crime can be arrested immediately and not just be released a few days later.” The government is already working on a draft that, amongst others, plans to quadruple the minimum sentence for the possession ofhand grenades. This type of weapon has recently been used in a Somali gang war that scourged the city of Gothenburg.
Stefan Löfven, Sweden’s Prime Minister, commented as well on the killing in Rosengard, a migrant-dominated precinct notorious for its virtual lawlessness. “On a personal level it’s a tragedy, of course,” he said when he was interviewed on the topic. “Then, on a societal level, it is completely unacceptable that we have this kind of environment where people take it upon themselves to murder.”
Sweden’s most thriving shopping mall has been turned into a no-go zone. According toExpressen, one of Sweden’s two national evening papers, local police are intimidated, and have been forced to implement special measures against the increasingly threatening behaviour of the perpetrators.
According to the authorities, the rise in the number of cases like this correlates with the increasing arrival of undocumented migrants, with incidents involving ‘youths’ from Syria, Afghanistan and Morocco. This causes legal problems when bringing offenders to justice: many claim to be underage, which forces the police to hand them over to social services. “I’ve had people in front of me that look like they are 35, but who claim to be 15. I can’t prove they’re lying so we have to release them,” Rikard Sorensen, a police officer, says.
Expressen made a video report on the matter, in which, among others, the following narratives were told.
It’s 20:00 and the stores in Gothenburg’s Nordstan Mall are closing. As they close, a transformation takes place: the children of the streets awaken. Expressen’s journalists are following policemen on their patrol through the mall. The police go there to look for drugs and to show they too still exist. They are noticed. Large groups of men are present, going out of their way to confront the officers, grazing their uniforms as they pass, otherwise acting aggressively, making derisive sounds, all the while hiding their faces in ski masks.
On one particular Friday, September 2016, fifteen-year-old Jonas (fictitious name) and a friend meet a group of young people just outside of Nordstan. Lured by promises of cigarettes and a game of football, they follow the group back to an alley. Once there, out of sight, they are forced to the ground and robbed of everything. Mobile phones, credit card, cash and house keys. They’re not even allowed to keep their shoes and the shirt they’re wearing.
“One guy frisked me, then took a broken glass bottle to my throat, telling me to take off my sweater,” says Jonas. “It was scary, I’ve never experienced anything like it.” Jonas‘ friend was taken in a stranglehold, while both were also threatened with an iron bar. His mother recalls not even feeling safe at home: “We had to change the locks because they had my son’s name, credit card, the keys to the front door. It was horrible.“https://gatestone.eu/migrant-gangs-sweden/
In the course of this year President Donald Trump will improve America’s relations with Russia. He will also start purging the irredeemably politicized U.S. intelligence apparatus. The hysteria of recent weeks will be seen—a year from now—as a bizarre footnote to a failed presidency.
The “dossier” concocted by a British dirty tricks purveyor hired to smear Trump (the only provable instance of foreign meddling in the 2016 election), didn’t even pass the giggle test; the agencies’ joint statement on “Russian malicious cyber-activity” was equally pathetic. As an eloquent British old-leftist has noted, the lies about Russia have made the world’s most self-important journalists laughing stocks: “In the country with constitutionally the freest press in the world, free journalism now exists only in its honorable exceptions.”
John McCain and Lindsey Graham may go on with their dog and pony show, the MSM will go on producing fact-free reportage, but it will not matter. As his Monday interview with The Times of London indicates, Trump remains strongly committed to détente with Russia, and open to the “obsolete” North Atlantic Alliance’s long-overdue downgrading. Washington and Moscow will develop a new modus operandi, based on a realist strategic paradigm and transactional approach to deal-making. That will be a breath of fresh air, a plus-sum game for America, Russia, and the world. The prospect of uncontrollable escalations leading to mushroom clouds—so likely had Hillary Clinton been elected—has been averted. That is a meta-historical feat. Trump is no subtle intellectual, thank God, which enables him to grasp that Russia—Putin’s Russia, which has not been post-modernized to the liking of the bicoastal anti-America—is a natural ally of the church-going, pickup truck-driving, Bud-drinking flyover America.
Unlike his predecessor, Trump also understand that Islamic extremism is an existential threat to our civilization, and that immigration—especially Muslim immigration—must be controlled and radically reduced. Also on Monday, he told the Bild that Angela Merkel had made made a “catastrophic mistake” by taking in hundreds of thousands of migrants. His immigration realism drives Western self-haters insane, but he will not open America’s floodgates to the swarms of unvettable Middle Eastern “refugees.” He knows that there are already more than enough Somalis in the Twin Cities, Iraqis in Dearborn, and Pakistanis everywhere. The author of The Art of the Deal is also (somewhat surprisingly) an instinctive defender of the Western civilization.
Rep. Jerry Nadler took to CNN to explain why he will not be attending President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration this Friday. The Manhattan Democrat, whose spokesman confirmed to us on Saturday that he was skipping the event, said, “I cannot go because of the President-elect’s inflammatory comments racist campaign, his conflict of interests, refusal to disclose his taxes, and the last straw was his personal ad hominem attacks on an icon of civil rights movement, someone who suffered beatings and almost gave his life for this country, John Lewis.”
Nadler also agreed with Lewis’s belief that Trump isn’t a “legitimate” leader. “He was legally elected, but the Russian weighing in the election, the Russian attempt to hack the election — and frankly, the FBI’s weighing in on the election — I think makes his election illegitimate. It puts an asterisk next to his name,” Nadler explained.
Nadler did say that he and other Democrats will “work with him when we agree with him, we’ll oppose him when we don’t agree with him.”
Here’s Nadler’s formal statement about refusing to participate in the inauguration:
“The rhetoric and actions of Donald Trump have been so far beyond the pale – so disturbing and disheartening – and his continued failure to address his conflicts of interest, to adequately divest or even to fully disclose his financial dealings, or to sufficiently separate himself from the ethical misconduct that legal experts on both side of the aisle have identified have been so offensive I cannot in good conscience participate in this honored and revered democratic tradition of the peaceful transfer of power.
“We cannot normalize Donald Trump, and we certainly cannot turn our heads and ignore such a threat to the institutions and values of our democracy. His refusal to adequately address his business conflicts of interest, to show remorse for the inflammatory rhetoric in which he engaged during his campaign, his attempts to intimidate the press, and his continuing failure to demonstrate any interest in uniting Americans reveal a deep disrespect for the office of President.
“I refuse to sit idly by as he flaunts his illicit behavior without regard for the American people’s interest. I refuse to abide any effort to undermine a free and independent press, which serves a pivotal role in any democratic system and whose rights are guaranteed by our Constitution. I refuse to applaud for a man with a history of offensive and abusive behavior to women and minorities. I refuse to treat January 20, 2017, as business as usual.
“For these reasons, I have no interest in participating in the inauguration ceremony of Donald J. Trump.”
http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/265477/jew-hatred-dressed-justice-john-perazzoEditor’s note: The following is the first in a series of articles highlighting the network of major hate groups in America that are supported and funded by the Left. For more information on Students for Justice in Palestine, visit the organization’s profile at DiscoverTheNetworks.org.
Founded at UC Berkeley in October of 2000, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) is a highly influential campus organization with chapters based at approximately 200 American colleges and universities, where it organizes and sponsors anti-Israel events and campaigns more actively than any other student group in the nation. SJP’s declared mission is to “promote the cause of justice,” “speak out against oppression,” and “educate members of our community specifically about the plight of the Palestinian people” at the hands of alleged Israeli abuses. The benign tenor of this mission statement stands in stark contrast, however, to the countless reams of SJP propaganda that echo much of what is said by the Hamas terrorists who seek to permanently end Israel’s existence as a sovereign Jewish state. The reason for this is simple: SJP was in essence formed to help spread anti-Semitism through the halls of American academia; to wage a campus war against Israel by providing rhetorical support for the Jew-hatred undergirding the Second Palestinian Intifada which Hamas and allied terrorists had recently launched in late September 2000.
SJP’s principal founder, Hatem Bazian, has quoted approvingly from a famous Islamic hadith which calls for the violent slaughter of Jews and which appears in Hamas’s founding charter. He once spoke at a fundraising dinner for a Hamas front group that the U.S. government later shut down due to the organization’s ties to Islamic terrorism. On another occasion, Bazian portrayed Hamas as “a classical anti-colonial nationalist and religious guerrilla movement.” And he described Hamas’s victory in the 2006 Gaza elections as “a monumental event.”
Notwithstanding Hamas’s calls for the mass murder and genocide of Jews, the website of SJP’s UC Berkeley chapter describes Hamas not as a terrorist group but rather as “a vast social organization” that “provides schools, medical care, and day care for a number of Palestinians who otherwise live difficult lives”; a group with a “clean record as far as domestic corruption in governance [is] concerned”; and an entity whose “officials have often stated that they are ready for a long-term truce with Israel during which time final status negotiations can occur.”
It is commonplace for SJP’s rank-and-file members to support, or to at least decline to condemn, Islamic terrorism. As a Columbia University SJP member said in 2002: “We support the right of Palestinians to resist occupation and do not dictate the methods of that struggle. There’s a difference between violence of the oppressed and violence of the oppressors.”
That same year, SJP’s national convention was sponsored by the Islamic Association for Palestine, a now-defunct, Illinois-based front group for Hamas. The conference featured keynote speaker Sami Al-Arian, a former University of South Florida professor who served as the North American leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a terrorist organization whose objectives include the destruction of Israel, the elimination of all Western influences in the Middle East by means of armed warfare, and the convergence of all Muslim countries into a single Islamic caliphate.
Routinely denouncing Israeli self-defense measures as assaults on the civil and human rights of Palestinians, SJP generally neglects to judge those measures in the context of Palestinian terror attacks. For example, in a September 2014 “vigil” at Binghamton University in honor of Palestinians who had been killed in Operation Protective Edge—Israel’s then-recent military incursion into Gaza—SJP member Victoria Brown told the campus newspaper that her group’s goal was to “commemorate” and “humanize” the Palestinian “children, women and innocent civilians who were massacred” by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). Yet she made no mention of the fact that the IDF’s actions were in response to a massive barrage of deadly rockets that Hamas terrorists had been firing indiscriminately into southern Israel.
On another occasion, New York City’s SJP created posters lauding the Palestinian terrorist Leila Khaled—who in September 1970 had participated in the multiple hijacking of five jetliners—for “committing her life to be a freedom fighter in the struggle for Palestinian liberation.”
With mere days remaining in office, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry returned to Southeast Asia to reminisce with his Communist friends and ideological soulmates in Vietnam.
He was welcomed with open arms in Vietnam, still a Communist dictatorship after all these decades. And why shouldn’t he be? He’s one of the reasons the United States lost the war there.
Kerry’s vicious lies about the behavior of the U.S. military during the Vietnam War launched a thousand draft-card burning ceremonies.
It’s a wonder he wasn’t awarded the Vietnamese equivalent of America’s Presidential Medal of Freedom for his service to Vietnamese Communism.
Throughout his adult life, Kerry has instinctively sided with America’s enemies. After serving in the Vietnam War, Kerry made a long, profitable career out of bashing America, insulting and belittling U.S. troops – even going as far as promoting false stories about them committing war atrocities, and aiding hostile foreign powers.
In 2005, Kerry falsely accused U.S. forces of “terrorizing” the Iraqi people. He Bob Schieffer on “Face the Nation”: “And there is no reason, Bob, that young American soldiers need to be going into the homes of Iraqis in the dead of night, terrorizing kids and children, you know, women…”
A liar and a useful idiot whose Botox obsession has turned his face into a Halloween mask, Kerry is the man who sent American singer James Taylor to France to sing soothing songs to the French people after brutal Muslim terrorist attacks while refusing to acknowledge the attackers were Muslim.
In addition to being a booster of Vietnam and the now-defunct Soviet Union, Kerry has long been an enemy of Israel and a friend of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its nuclear weapons development program, as well as a friend of Communist dictatorships in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Grenada.
So a final, nostalgic trip down the Ho Chi Minh Trail at U.S. taxpayer expense only seems appropriate.
The Clinton Foundation filed papers this week warning that 22 staffers will be laid off on April 15, when the Clinton Global Initiative is formally shut down.
The CGI is a program of the Clinton Foundation, centered around an annual meeting described as “the networking event of choice for corporations, nonprofits, nongovernmental organizations and wealthy philanthropists.” Before the election, when Hillary Clinton’s victory in the presidential race appeared likely, the Clinton Foundation declared that it would wind down the initiative no matter how the election turned out.
At the time, those plans made sense: It would be unseemly to say the least if a corporate- and foreign-government-funded networking event was directly connected to the sitting president. But there was never much official explanation of why CGI would need to shut down in the case of a Clinton defeat. After all, the world didn’t run out of poor people or sick people on November 8.
But after the election, some of the foundation’s donors acted as if the causes CGI supported were no longer worthy. The Australian government said it did not intend to continue its donations to the Clinton Foundation; it had given $88 million over ten years. After dramatically increasing its yearly donation in 2014 and 2015, the government of Norway chose to reduce its donation by 87 percent after the election.
Why would foreign governments suddenly lose interest in the charitable work the Clinton Foundation purported to do? They wouldn’t, unless the Clinton Foundation and CGI had existed to give foreign governments and businessmen a way to curry favor with a future president from the beginning. The April shutdown, then, makes complete sense: Why keep operating if there’s no influence left to peddle?
Clinton fans will vehemently deny that there’s anything to this cynical explanation, but the behavior of many foundation partners suggests that selling access and goodwill was a big part of the organization’s operations. Right before the election, one of the infamous WIkiLeaks documents revealed just how blurry the line was between the foundation’s non-profit activities and Bill Clinton’s for-profit activities.
For eight years, the Obama administration misjudged Vladimir Putin’s Russia, as it misjudged most of the Middle East, China, and the rest of the world as well. Obama got wise to Russia only when Putin imperiled not just U.S. strategic interests and government records but also supposedly went so far as to tamper with sacrosanct Democratic-party secrets, thereby endangering the legacy of Barack Obama.
Putin was probably bewildered by Obama’s media-driven and belated concern, given that the Russians, like the Chinese, had in the past hacked U.S. government documents that were far more sensitive than the information it may have mined and leaked in 2016 — and they received nothing but an occasional Obama “cut it out” whine. Neurotic passive-aggression doesn’t merely bother the Russians; it apparently incites and emboldens them.
Obama’s strange approach to Putin since 2009 apparently has run something like the following. Putin surely was understandably angry with the U.S. under the cowboy imperialist George W. Bush, according to the logic of the “reset.” After all, Obama by 2009 was criticizing Bush more than he was Putin for the supposed ills of the world. But Barack Obama was not quite an American nationalist who sought to advance U.S. interests.
Instead, he posed as a new sort of soft-power moralistic politician — not seen since Jimmy Carter — far more interested in rectifying the supposed damage rather than the continuing good that his country has done. If Putin by 2008 was angry at Bush for his belated pushback over Georgia, at least he was not as miffed at Bush as Obama himself was.
Reset-button policy then started with the implicit agreement that Russia and the Obama administration both had legitimate grievances against a prior U.S. president — a bizarre experience for even an old hand like Putin. (Putin probably thought that the occupation and reconstruction of Iraq were a disaster not on ethical or even strategic grounds but because the U.S. had purportedly let the country devolve into something like what Chechnya was before Putin’s iron grip.)
In theory, Obama would captivate Putin with his nontraditional background and soaring rhetoric, the same way he had charmed urban progressive elites at home and Western European socialists abroad. One or two more Cairo speeches would assure Putin that a new America was more interested in confessing its past sins to the Islamic world than confronting its terrorism. And Obama would continue to show his bona fides by cancelling out Bush initiatives such as missile defense in Eastern Europe, muting criticism of Russian territorial expansionism, and tabling the updating and expansion of the American nuclear arsenal. All the while, Obama would serve occasional verbal cocktails for Putin’s delight — such as the hot-mic promise to be even “more flexible” after his 2012 reelection, the invitation of Russia into the Middle East to get the Obama administration off the hook from enforcing red lines over Syrian WMD use, and the theatrical scorn for Mitt Romney’s supposedly ossified Cold War–era worries about Russian aggression.
As Putin was charmed, appeased, and supposedly brought on board, Obama increasingly felt free to enlighten him (as he does almost everyone) about how his new America envisioned a Westernized politically correct world. Russians naturally would not object to U.S. influence if it was reformist and cultural rather than nationalist, economic, and political — and if it sought to advance universal progressive ideals rather than strictly American agendas. Then, in its own self-interest, a grateful Russia would begin to enact at home something akin to Obama’s helpful initiatives: open up its society, with reforms modeled after those of the liberal Western states in Europe.
For decades, global warming scaremongers have been stealing energy from the environment using windmills, solar collectors, and biofuels, force-fed by carbon taxes and emission trading schemes. Their delusional dream is to cool the globe.
However, there has been no global warming for nearly 20 years. Right now, the great ice sheets are growing thicker, and record snow is blanketing much of the climate change leader, the Northern Hemisphere landmass. Solar panels are blinded by snow, and turbines don’t turn in the cold still air, or else they have to be shut down because of icing or high winds. Like all green things, wind and solar power often hibernate in winter.
Meanwhile, the unloved all-weather energy producers (coal, gas, and nuclear) are straining at their limits, as families huddle around heaters fearing the first flickers of failure from overloaded power grids.
No food is produced from land smothered in snow – farmers fear late frosts and welcome early spring rains and warmth.
For the last million years, Earth has experienced long cycles of ice separated by short warm inter-glacials. Today’s warm era is already a mature twelve thousand years old, and Earth’s climate is fluctuating naturally toward the next glacial cycle in which many animals and plants will perish. Only fools would assist the return of the ice.
Warmists are making a massive mistake by assuming that global cooling is better than global warming. They are ignoring their precious “Precautionary Principle.”
A frigid ice house is far more dangerous and destructive than a warm greenhouse.
