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The threat of CEO fraud and one NGO's resilient response
In January 2020, Heidi Kühn, founder and CEO of Roots of Peace, returned from an overseas trip to devastating news: her finance department had unwittingly transferred over $1 million to an unfamiliar bank account. Kühn and her team quickly realized they’d become victims of a CEO fraud cyber attack—cybercriminals had infiltrated the company’s email accounts via spear phishing and impersonated Kühn to trick the finance team into sending funds abroad.
The theft had an enormous impact on Roots of Peace, a nonprofit dedicated to converting minefields into arable farmland in former war zones. Following the attack, Roots of Peace reached out to the CyberPeace Insitute, an organization that provides free cybersecurity assistance, threat detection and analysis to NGOs and other critical sectors. Roots of Peace was able to recover some of the funds, but to date, only $175,000 of the $1.34 million total stolen has been returned.
Roots of Peace is an international humanitarian organization, but their story isn’t unusual: In 2021, CEO fraud caused $2.4 billion in losses to US businesses alone, according to the FBI Internet Crime Report. Kühn’s story is featured in the second episode of “Caught in the Digital Crosshairs: The Human Impact of Cyberattacks,” a new video series on cyber security produced by GZERO in partnership with Microsoft and the CyberPeace Institute. GZERO spoke with Kühn and Derek Pillar, a cyber security expert from Mastercard, to learn more about the threat of CEO fraud, the real-life impact of cyberattacks against the humanitarian sector, and how you can prevent similar attacks from happening to you and your organization.
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Trump indicted (again)
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Hi everybody, Ian Bremmer here and a Quick Take from Nantucket.
Another exciting week, far more eventful than we'd like in the US political environment, particularly because of more indictments that have come down on former President Donald Trump. You're used to me saying that these are unprecedented times in US politics. Unfortunately, all of the new precedents that are being set are about eroding political institutions. They are corrosive. The guardrails are being weakened, and it is very hard to find structural changes that are strengthening US democracy. All sorts of things that we can say that are promising about the US economy, maybe being able to avoid recession, about the US defense sector, and about its ability to protect not just the US but other countries around the world.
I can go on and on, but when it comes to the political system, it's getting weaker. And that is particularly in terms of the upcoming US presidential election. Now, these latest indictments that have come down from the special counsel, Jack Smith, focusing on Trump's efforts to overturn a legitimate, free, and fair election in the United States, are rejected categorically out of hand by Trump himself. Not surprisingly, that's what he would say in any case. And also by the overwhelming majority of his supporters. They are serious charges. They are, in my view, much more serious than the other charges that we have seen, the charges that we saw about obscuring hush money for sex that he had with a porn star, which also were illegal in terms of framing in the campaign contributions, are unserious charges. They're real charges, but they shouldn't rise to a level of felony, in my view. They are politicized, and I certainly don't think they should have an impact on his ability to run for 2024. I think that the issue of classified documents is more serious, but still, in my view, something that a lot of political leaders have been caught mishandling documents is a massive level of over classification that occurs with documents.
I also think that Trump, the big thing that he has done wrong, in my view, is not the fact that he originally took those documents, but rather that he has acted like a child in lying about the fact that he had them in telling people to destroy video. In other words, it's the cover-up and not because anyone really believes he was trying to do anything particularly malevolent with the classified documents. It wasn't like anyone is credibly accusing him of trying to give them to or sell them to, you know, spies or, you know, other governments. It's more that, you know, Trump just thinks that because he's all-powerful and former president and the Donald, that means that the rules don't apply to him. So he should be able to have those documents, and he's busy, and he shouldn't have to respond to the FBI when they demand a response. In other words, you know, he's just, you know, he couldn't be bothered. I do think those are serious charges. And I think that they should probably have a significant impact in whether or not he can run again. But I don't know that I would try to preclude him from running on the basis of those charges.
These charges are different, these much closer to the second impeachment. These have much more to do with the fact that President Trump attempted to subvert the core principles of rule of law in having a peaceable transition from one president to another. He has never accepted the legitimacy of the 2020 election. He's never accepted the legitimacy of President Biden and did everything in his power and a lot of things that were not in his power to try to ensure that there would not be a peaceful transfer of power. In other words, that there would not be an effective republic that democracy would not hold, and that certainly takes him out of the running for being able to be president going forward in my view. But my view is not just positive here. And unfortunately, irrespective of the severity of the crime, how you feel about this, almost certainly if you're an American citizen, is aligned with how you feel about the person of Trump. If you like Trump, if you would vote for Trump, if you believe that he is someone that is a better and more suitable president than Biden, it is overwhelmingly likely that you feel like these charges are politicized, that the Department of Justice and the FBI are engaged in a vendetta, probably led by Biden to unjustly remove Trump from the running. If you can't stand Trump, if you wouldn't vote for him, you believe that he's guilty before you even have a case. And it doesn't matter what the charges are, he should be out anyway. That is the opposite, of course, of rule of law is the opposite to the way a functional democracy runs. And that's because the United States is increasingly a dysfunctional democracy. It is the weakest part of America's global power status, the state and the trajectory of the American political system. And I don't think this is going to get resolved legally. I think this is going to be resolved politically, which is exactly the way it shouldn't be resolved. What's going to happen is that you're going to have a nomination process for the GOP.
It is very likely Trump is going to be the GOP nominee. It is more likely because of these crimes, which is, of course, the opposite of what it would be in a functional democracy because of the tribalism, because of the political alignment, because of the belief that this is a witch hunt. And it is possible that one or two of the cases will be resolved before the actual election. But it is not probable. It is more likely that the election itself will be held without having any of these cases concluded, which means that the outcome of the vote is what's going to determine to what extent and whether Trump himself will be punished or whether Trump will be president again. It is a horrible position to be in. It means that the election increasingly looks likely to be seen as illegitimate by virtually the entire political opposition, no matter who it is. In other words, if Trump wins in that environment, Biden supporters believe that he should be president and that the election was not legitimate. If he loses, Trump's supporters believe that the election is not legitimate.
This still has a long way to go because, of course, American elections are entirely too long. They are way too expensive. The Republic would probably be better off if there wasn't an election going on in 2024, even though, of course, that's also a subversion of the US political process and of course, around the world for all of those countries that look to the United States as an ally, as a partner, as someone you need to count on. In this environment, it becomes much harder to do so, much more dangerous going forward because we are in an environment of active war with the Russians, of much greater political tension and crisis with the Chinese. The only countries out there, the only actors out there that are excited about the 2024 US elections are rogue actors, rogue states, core adversaries of the US and terrorist groups. Really not what you want to say about the most important political transition that occurs in the world. What I'm not looking forward to, but one I'll certainly be focused very closely on. We'll be talking about it over the coming months and year plus.
So that's it for me. And I'll talk to you all real soon.
Hunter Biden's legal issues are an opportunity for GOP
Jon Lieber, head of Eurasia Group's coverage of political and policy developments in Washington, DC shares his perspective on US politics.
Is President Biden's son Hunter a political liability for him?
This week, an extraordinary scene played out in a courtroom in Delaware as a judge rejected a plea deal that was negotiated by lawyers for President Biden's son Hunter over illegal possession of a firearm and tax evasion. Republicans have been criticizing the plea deal for weeks, saying it was far too lenient on the president's son, and reflected what they've called a two-tier justice system being pursued by federal law enforcement. One tier is attempting to prosecute former President Trump for mishandling classified documents and his role in trying to overturn the election results in 2020, and another that is giving the current president's son a slap on the wrist that would've provided him immunity from far more serious charges that he acted as an unregistered foreign agent.
The younger Biden has struggled with drug addiction and has been involved in what seems to be some very shady business deals, including serving in lucrative board positions for foreign companies, despite seemingly offering very little value other than his last name, and making significant sums of money selling his art to democratic donors and others trying to curry favor with the Biden administration. Despite this, President Biden has defended him and kept him close, even inviting him to the state dinner last month with Indian Prime Minister Modi. And though Biden sees no threat to his reelection campaign, Republicans see this as a massive opportunity to take one of Biden's biggest campaign assets, the appearance of his integrity, and turn it against him by painting Biden with a whiff of corruption, including unfounded allegations that he took bribes as vice president to interfere with an ongoing investigation in Ukraine.
Republicans are hoping to neutralize the charges being leveled against former President Trump in state and federal courtrooms and paint the FBI and federal law enforcement as deeply politicized. Republicans don't have to prove a thing for this tactic to be successful. With the amount of confusing information about what President Biden did and didn't do that will come out in congressional hearings and a likely impeachment inquiry later this year, it will be enough for even normal independent voters to start asking questions about the politicization of federal law enforcement, what Biden did and didn't do, and ultimately discredit the Department of Justice with a large segment of the most partisan Republican voters. These issues are not top of mind for voters this year. The economy is. But they do show how brutal and ugly the 2024 campaign season is going to be.
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Podcast: How to fix the US government's classified information problem with Jane Harman
Listen: Maintaining secrecy can be invigorating, whether you're a child with hidden treasures or a CIA agent safeguarding classified information. However, the more secrets you bear, the heavier the burden becomes. This week’s guest, Jane Harman, who served nine terms in Congress and was a ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee after 9/11, understands the weight of secrecy firsthand.
While there are valid justifications for classifying information, Harman asserts that the US government has grappled with an issue of excessive classification for decades. "A bad reason to classify is to protect your turf—you don't want other people to know what you know in order to protect yourself from embarrassment."
The 9/11 Commission revealed that inadequate information-sharing between agencies like the CIA, FBI, and NSA hindered the government's ability to prevent the tragic terrorist attacks. One significant factor contributing to this failure was the over-classification of information. Each year, approximately 50 million documents are estimated to be classified, though the exact count remains elusive—not due to classification, but because the government struggles to effectively manage the vast volume. In the words of former US Solicitor General Erwin Griswold, some “secrets are not worth keeping.”
Subscribe to the GZERO World Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or your preferred podcast platform, to receive new episodes as soon as they're published.Lessons from the COVID lab-leak fiasco
The US Department of Energy made unlikely headlines over the weekend when The Wall Street Journal reported that new evidence had led the agency to conclude with “low confidence” that the COVID-19 virus probably escaped from a Chinese lab. The DOE’s findings match up with the FBI’s, which point to an accidental leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology with “moderate confidence.”
This follows investigations by four other agencies plus the National Intelligence Council that concluded with low confidence that the virus spread naturally from animals to humans, possibly in a wet market in Wuhan. Other intelligence agencies, including the CIA, remain undecided, much like DOE was until recently.
The bottom line is we still don’t know how the pandemic got started. Both origin stories – natural transmission and laboratory leak – are scientifically plausible. The DOE’s report should lead us to update our beliefs slightly toward the lab-leak theory, but the score in the intelligence community is still 5-2 in favor of zoonotic transfer, and all but the FBI’s conclusions were reached with low confidence.
One thing we do know – and all agencies agree on this – is that the virus was not deliberately engineered and released by China as a bioweapon. We also know that Beijing systematically lied to the international community, the World Health Organization, and its own citizens about the virus, making the outbreak worse than it had to be. (Yes, those two thoughts are compatible: The Chinese government’s sketchiness can be easily explained by many reasons other than bioterror.)
But we will likely never get to the bottom of COVID’s true origins, precisely because China refuses to allow a proper investigation.
So … what more is there to say about this?
Well, I think there is an important lesson here about the politicization of science in the United States. Coming out as a believer in the lab-leak hypothesis would have gotten you banned from social media just two years ago. Today, multiple U.S. intelligence agencies consider it reasonable if not likely. What gives?
Uncertainty reigned supreme in the early days of the pandemic. Nobody knew how deadly the disease was, how easily it could spread, who was vulnerable to it, or how to protect themselves from it. Back then, the dominant narrative about the virus’s origins was that it had jumped from a bat to a human at Wuhan’s live-animal market.
But in February 2020, Republican Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton went on Fox News and raised the possibility that coronavirus may not have emerged naturally while accusing Beijing of a lack of transparency.
“We don’t know where it originated, but we do know we have to get to the bottom of that,” the senator said. “We also know that just a few miles away from that food market is China’s only biosafety level-4 super laboratory that researches human infectious diseases. We don’t have evidence that this disease originated there,” he clarified, “but because of China’s duplicity and dishonesty from the beginning, we need to at least ask the question to see what the evidence says, and China right now is not giving evidence on that question at all.”
Cotton’s message found a receptive audience in right-wing conspiracy theorists. Almost immediately, what had started as a perfectly legitimate question got spun into an unfounded story that the virus was a bioweapon deliberately engineered by the Chinese Communist Party for nefarious purposes. Some even went so far as to claim Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the face of the U.S. pandemic response, funded China’s biowarfare program.
Mind you, Cotton himself never said he thought COVID was an act of biological warfare. In fact, he called that possibility “very unlikely.” All he said was it was an open scientific question that called for further investigation, requiring access to evidence Beijing was refusing to provide.
And he was 100% right. COVID’s origins were (and still are) very much an open scientific question. And this question was especially hard to answer given the Chinese government’s (ongoing) obstruction.
But, inured to former President Donald Trump’s racist antics and the American right’s penchant for amplifying misinformation, Twitter scientists, pundits, and journalists in the mainstream media rushed to shout Cotton down, lumping his views in with those of the cranks.
They called any suggestion that the virus did not emerge naturally a “debunked conspiracy theory” motivated by an anti-China and anti-science agenda, even though the lab-leak hypothesis was neither a conspiracy theory nor had it been debunked. They dismissed the message not because it was wrong but because they disagreed with the messenger’s worldview and disliked some of his political bedfellows.
As it turned out, the fact that Cotton’s doubts may have been colored by his anti-China bias, or that others took his hypothesis too far, was irrelevant to the question at hand. And the media’s uber-confident proclamation of a fake consensus when the science was nowhere near settled did real harm, delegitimizing public health authorities and further eroding trust in science.
Why did otherwise smart, judicious, and well-intentioned journalists and scientists react so virulently – and, indeed, unscientifically – to the lab-leak hypothesis? Two words: politics brain.
The political environment was exceptionally charged back then. Partisan polarization had divided Americans into tribes bitterly pitted against each other. Citizens were constantly bombarded with conflicting information, and whether something was accepted as true or false depended as much or more on who it came from than whether it was actually true.
So when a vocal China hawk representing a political party hostile to science and comfortable with conspiracy theories raised questions about the prevailing narrative, the natural instinct of many in mainstream media was to push back. Because many of those who publicly raised questions about the virus’s origins were bad actors, the act of raising questions itself became an act of bad faith. That’s what politics brain does to us: It clouds our judgment and supercharges cognitive biases like groupthink, mood affiliation, and motivated reasoning.
There’s another lesson here. Yes, parts of the media and the scientific community were biased. Bias is human. Bias is inevitable. I can live with bias. But the bigger problem was the misplaced confidence.
One thing that annoyed me about Dr. Fauci – who I’ve gotten to know a bit and consider a dedicated public servant – was how certain he came off in some of his early communications on questions that he obviously wasn’t certain about. Now, people don’t like uncertainty, and science is hard. Sometimes it needs to be simplified for the public to understand. Fauci didn’t want to cede any ground that the anti-science crowd could exploit to sow doubt. I get that.
But all that false certainty ends up doing is delegitimizing science at a time when trust in objective truth and institutions of knowledge is at historic lows. It’s genuinely better to treat people with respect, explain the nuances, say “I don’t know” when you don’t know, and hope they’ll get it. That goes for the pandemic’s origins, vaccine effectiveness, long COVID, climate change, and many other areas of scientific inquiry.
When it comes to science, just … follow the science.
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Will the DOJ charge Trump after Mar-a-Lago raid?
Jon Lieber, head of Eurasia Group's coverage of political and policy developments in Washington, DC, shares his analysis on US politics.
How bad does the Mar-a-Lago document situation have to get before it becomes a problem for President Trump?
The answer is very bad and probably much worse than what we know of today. In the three weeks since the raid at Mar-a-Lago, we've learned very little about the contents of the documents that former President Trump is alleged to have improperly been storing in his Florida compound.
But we have learned, at a minimum, he kept classified documents outside of a secure facility. And the government is now alleging that Trump's legal team lied about the number and nature of the documents being stored there, which made it much more difficult for them to get the documents back and set up the premises for this sensational raid at Mar-a-Lago.
Even though he continues to maintain that he declassified at least some of the documents stored at his residence, the facts laid out by law enforcement so far don't look good for former President Trump. And even elected Republican officials, who rallied to his support and attacked the FBI in the wake of the raid, are much quieter than they were initially. But polling continues to show that President Trump is strong. A recent Ipsos poll found that Trump is more popular in the Republican Party than President Biden is in the Democratic Party, with 59% of Republicans saying Trump should be the Presidential nominee in 2024, versus only 44% of Democrats who want Biden to be their nominee.
Can Trump be charged? Well, that's a question for the DOJ, who will have to measure the political and institutional implications of charging a former and potentially future president, the risks of federal law enforcement being delegitimized and seen as political actors by huge parts of the country, the way they were after investigations into Hillary Clinton's emails and the Trump campaigns alleged ties with Russia. And they'll have to weigh the chances of proving beyond a reasonable doubt that not only were these papers improperly stored, but that President Trump himself, and not one of his staff or associates, was criminally responsible for the improper handling.
This still seems like a very tall order that would play out in a trial that would take place in the middle of a presidential campaign that is likely to start as soon as this November. Almost anyone else surely would be charged with a crime based on what we know today. But for years now, Trump has avoided the kinds of political and legal liabilities and consequences that would've brought other people down. And so far, this doesn't look much different. Thanks for watching. This has been US Politics In a Little Over 60 Seconds.
Trump Mar-a-Lago affidavit: who accessed top secret documents?
Jon Lieber, head of Eurasia Group's coverage of political and policy developments in Washington, DC, shares his analysis on US politics.
What does the redacted affidavit from the Trump raid tell us?
Not much. The government today released a redacted version of the affidavit that provided the basis for the sensational raid of the compound of former President Donald Trump, two weeks ago, that resulted in the removal of multiple boxes of what are alleged to be classified materials that were being improperly stored. The documents were heavily redacted, reportedly to protect sources. And the parts of the affidavit that are available do not tell us much beyond what was already revealed. As a result, we haven't learned much about the contents of these boxes since the raid, except that they may have contained government secrets that carry the highest levels of classification. And if you believe the leaks to the media, potentially information about the US nuclear program. Still, all of this is speculation.
President Trump maintains he did nothing wrong, that as president, he can verbally declassify anything he wants, and as the push to get back what he thinks of as "his documents". If the allegations in the affidavit and the search warrant are true, President Trump almost certainly broke the law by removing classified documents and storing them in places that were far from secure, including in places where foreign nationals or other guests at Mar a Lago could have potentially gained access to them. Politically, it is this question of access that is most interesting.
Republicans have largely rallied around the former president after the initial allegations that he was improperly handling classified documents. But if it turns out that government secrets are being shared at Mar a Lago, it will become much more difficult to defend him. There's no evidence of this to date however, The New York Times did report that the FBI is looking at surveillance video at the site, possibly to determine if there was a breach. Again, this is all anonymously sourced.
In the meantime, President Trump's popularity in the Republican Party is soaring as he continues to use what he calls his prosecution by the so-called deep state to further the politics of grievance by the political elites that took him from a reality TV star to the president of the United States in just five years.
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Former U.S. President Donald Trump.
Why did the FBI raid Trump’s Florida pad?
The US Justice Department on Friday released part of the FBI affidavit used to search Mar-a-Lago, President Trump’s sprawling estate in Florida – part of its probe into alleged mishandling of sensitive government documents. The heavily redacted legal brief – used to convince a judge to authorize the FBI search on Aug. 8 – was released after a federal judge ruled it was in the public’s interest to view the document some two weeks after FBI agents searched the former president’s estate. Authorities carried away 26 boxes of documents, which reportedly included several marked as classified and one as top secret. The episode has led to an uptick in aggressive rhetoric and some violence, particularly targeting law enforcement. It is extremely unusual for an affidavit to be made public before charges have been handed down. Trump has not been charged with a crime in this case, but the courts acquiesced to arguments that it is in the public interest – amid increased talk of a Trump bid in 2024 – to see the document that allowed the search.