“Former Vice President Mike Pence said it’s a “bad idea” for President Donald Trump to receive a luxury jet from Qatar, arguing that accepting the gift could be unconstitutional and jeopardize national security.
“There are profound issues – the potential for intelligence gathering, the need to ensure the president of the United States is safe and secure as he travels around the world,” Pence told NBC’s “Meet the Press” in an interview released on May 16.
Accepting the plane “is inconsistent with our security, with our intelligence needs,” he added. “My hope is the president reconsiders it.””
“In his first 100 days in office, President Donald Trump has taken a sledgehammer to many of the nation’s cyber-focused agencies and programs. Now, a normally apolitical community is rising up in protest.
The nation’s cyber agencies, particularly the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, have faced relentless cuts to programs and personnel, heightening concerns about the stability of the workforce and resiliency of U.S. capabilities.”
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“The industry has long held the view that securing the nation’s most critical networks is a collective national security imperative, with private political opinions mostly kept secondary. But Trump has ushered in an era of hyperpartisanship in Washington and has rewarded public displays of allegiance to the MAGA cause, generating fury among exasperated professionals.
“With the politicization of basically everything in government, including cybersecurity, we are seeing what would be the normal course of business come under scrutiny,” said one cyber industry leader on the sidelines of the RSAC Conference, one of the largest gatherings of cyber professionals in the world. “There are a number of groups, communities if you will, that are trying to take a more aggressive approach to say, ‘Hey, we can’t be quiet or complacent anymore on the way we operate,’ because effectively good faith is no longer the tone that is being taken.””
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” “Nobody should be blackballed for doing their job,” said a third industry leader. “That’s the situation we have right now — widespread anger that it doesn’t seem to be getting any better. And where are our industry leaders?””
“Zheng Wei is a fairly common Chinese name. A tennis player, a movie director, an archaeologist, and multiple Chinese-American academics all share that name. So do an inventor at the consumer drone company DJI and a professor at China’s National University of Defense Technology.
And the U.S. government mixed up the last two people, with serious consequences, according to a recent lawsuit by DJI. The drone manufacturer is suing the U.S. Department of Defense for designating DJI as an arm of the Chinese military”
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“Similarly, the Pentagon claimed that DJI software engineer Zhang Tao was listed on a patent for a temperature-sensing device designed by China’s Military Science Academy. Again, DJI provided a declaration from its own Zhang Tao stating that he is not the same person as the Military Science Academy’s Zhang Tao.”
“H.R. McMaster, former national security adviser to former President Donald Trump,..said that Trump needs “a competent team around him” because he is susceptible to being manipulated.”
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“He added of the Republican presidential nominee: “People know kind of how to push his buttons, especially buttons associated with maintaining the complete support of his political base.””
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“In an excerpt published in the Wall Street Journal, McMaster lamented how Russian President Vladimir Putin pushed Trump’s buttons: “Putin, a ruthless former KGB operator, played to Trump’s ego and insecurities with flattery.”
“State secrets privilege, as the doctrine is known, has a long and sketchy history, evolving from bad official behavior after a 1948 plane crash that killed several civilian observers. When the observers’ widows sued in United States v. Reynolds, the government argued that information about the plane was too super-secret to be revealed in court. The Supreme Court agreed that some things are too sensitive to be used in legal proceedings and gave the executive branch a free pass to invoke the phrase “national security” as a shield against accountability.
“Decades later, declassified documents revealed that the flight had no national security import at all and that Air Force officials had perjured themselves when they told the Court otherwise,” Reason’s Matt Welch observed in 2006. “In the meantime, the ruling provided the framework for executive privilege, which the Bush administration has been trying to expand.”
Not just the Bush administration appreciated state secrets privilege, of course; all presidents enjoy the ability to act without consequence. That’s how we end up all these years later with the question of whether the state secrets privilege is so broad that it can protect federal agents from the need to square spying on Americans with the protections afforded by the Constitution.”
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“the government isn’t arguing just that some information is too sensitive for the public, but also that it should be kept from judges’ eyes. That would leave people with no recourse at all when federal agencies invoke the magic phrase “national security” to block lawsuits alleging rights violations.”