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“Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity,” might suffice for someone to be elected to the governorship of a state, but not the presidency. Election would “require other talents, and a different kind of merit,” to gain “the esteem and confidence of the whole Union,” or enough of it to win the presidency. As a result, there would be “a constant probability of seeing the station filled by characters pre-eminent for ability and virtue.” This was the Framers’ goal in designing the system that would make “the choice of the person to whom so important a trust was to be confided.”

In a nutshell, while carrying out his official duties, a president has to put the country, not himself, first; he must faithfully follow and enforce the law; and he must act with the utmost care in doing all that.

can Trump do all that? Does his personality allow him to? Answering those questions doesn’t require mental-health expertise, nor does it really require a diagnosis. You can make the argument for Trump’s unfitness without assessing his mental health: Like James Fallows, for example, you could just ask whether Trump would have been allowed to retain any other job in light of his bizarre conduct

More than a diagnosis, what truly matters, as Lincoln’s case shows, is the president’s behavioral characteristics and personality traits. And understanding how people behave and think is not the sole province of professionals; we all do it every day, with family members, co-workers, and others.

its criteria for personality disorders—they don’t require a person to lie on a couch and confess his or her innermost thoughts. They turn on how a person behaves in the wild, so to speak.

Donald Trump, as president of the United States, is probably the most observable and observed person in the world. I’ve personally met and spoken with him only a few times, but anyone who knows him will tell you that Trump, in a way, has no facade: What you see of him publicly is what you get all the time, although you may get more of it in private

accounts of a person’s behavior from laypeople who observe him might be more accurate than information from a clinical interview, and that this is especially true when considering two personality disorders in particular—what the DSM calls narcissistic personality disorder and antisocial personality disorde

These two disorders just happen to be the ones that have most commonly been ascribed to Trump by mental-health professionals over the past four years. Of these two disorders, the more commonly discussed when it comes to Trump is narcissistic personality disorder, or NPD—pathological narcissism

it touches directly upon whether Trump has the capacity to put anyone’s interests—including the country’s and the Constitution’s—above his own.

A certain amount of narcissism is healthy, and helpful—it brings with it confidence, optimism, and boldness. Someone with more than an average amount of narcissism may be called a narcissist. Many politicians, and many celebrities, could be considered narcissists

“Pathological narcissism begins when people become so addicted to feeling special that, just like with any drug, they’ll do anything to get their ‘high,’ including lie, steal, cheat, betray, and even hurt those closest to them,”

The “fundamental life goal” of an extreme narcissist “is to promote the greatness of the self, for all to see,

To many mental-health professionals, Donald Trump provides a perfect example of such extreme, pathological narcissism: One clinical psychologist told Vanity Fair that he considers Trump such a “classic” pathological narcissist that he is actually “archiving video clips of him to use in workshops because there’s no better example”

The goal of a diagnosis is to help a clinician guide treatment. The question facing the public is very different: Does the president of the United States exhibit a consistent pattern of behavior that suggests he is incapable of properly discharging the duties of his office?

Even Trump’s own allies recognize the degree of his narcissism. When he launched racist attacks on four congresswomen of color, Senator Lindsey Graham explained, “That’s just the way he is. It’s more narcissism than anything else.” So, too, do skeptics of assigning a clinical diagnosis. “No one is denying,” Frances told Rolling Stone, “that he is as narcissistic an individual as one is ever likely to encounter.” The president’s exceptional narcissism is his defining characteristic—and understanding that is crucial to evaluating his fitness for office

The DSM-5 describes its conception of pathological narcissism this way: “The essential feature of narcissistic personality disorder is a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, and lack of empathy that begins by early adulthood and is present in a variety of contexts.”

The diagnostic criteria offer a useful framework for understanding the most remarkable features of Donald Trump’s personality, and of his presidency. (1) Exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements?

(2) Preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance

(3) Believes that he or she is “special” and unique and should only associate with other special or high-status people?

Trump claims to be an expert—the world’s greatest—in anything and everything. As one video mash-up shows, Trump has at various times claimed—in all seriousness—that no one knows more than he does about: taxes, income, construction, campaign finance, drones, technology, infrastructure, work visas, the Islamic State, “things” generally, environmental-impact statements, Facebook, renewable energy, polls, courts, steelworkers, golf, banks, trade, nuclear weapons, tax law, lawsuits, currency devaluation, money, “the system,” debt, and politicians.

(4) Requires excessive admiration? Last Thanksgiving, Trump was asked what he was most thankful for. His answer: himself, of course. A number of years ago, he made a video for Forbes in which he interviewed two of his children. The interview topic: how great they thought Donald Trump wa

(5) A sense of entitlement? (9) Arrogant, haughty behaviors? Trump is the man who, on the infamous Access Hollywood tape, said, “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything you want”—including grabbing women by their genitals. He’s the man who also once said, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.”

(8) Envious of others? Here’s a man so unable to stand the praise received by a respected war hero and statesman, Senator John McCain, that he has continued to attack McCain months after McCain’s death;

(6) Interpersonally exploitative? Just watch the Access Hollywood tape, or ask any of the hundreds of contractors and employees Trump the businessman allegedly stiffed, or speak with any of the two dozen women who have accused Trump of sexual misconduct, sexual assault, or rape.

Finally, (7) Lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings or needs of others? One of the most striking aspects of Trump’s personality is his utter and complete lack of empathy

The notorious lawyer and fixer Roy Cohn, who once counseled Trump, said that “Donald pisses ice water,” and indeed, examples of Trump’s utter lack of normal human empathy abound.

“It made no sense, Priebus realized, unless you understood … ‘The president has zero psychological ability to recognize empathy or pity in any way.’

What kind of human being, let alone politician, would engage in such unempathetic, self-centered behavior while memorializing such horrible tragedies? Only the most narcissistic person imaginable—or a person whose narcissism would be difficult to imagine if we hadn’t seen it ourselves. The evidence of Trump’s narcissism is overwhelming—indeed, it would be a gargantuan task to try to marshal all of it, especially as it mounts each and every day.

A second disorder also frequently ascribed to Trump by professionals is sociopathy—what the DSM-5 calls antisocial personality disorder

Central to sociopathy is a complete lack of empathy—along with “an absence of guilt.” Sociopaths engage in “intentional manipulation, and controlling or even sadistically harming others for personal power or gratification. People with sociopathic traits have a flaw in the basic nature of human beings … They are lacking an essential part of being human.” For its part, the DSM-5 states that the “essential feature of antisocial personality disorder is a pervasive pattern of disregard for, and violation of, the rights of others that begins in childhood or early adolescence and continues into adulthood.”

Trump’s sociopathic characteristics sufficiently intertwine with his narcissistic ones that they deserve mention here. These include, to quote the DSM-5, “deceitfulness, as indicated by repeated lying, use of aliases, or conning others.” Trump’s deceitfulness—his lying—has become the stuff of legend; journalists track his “false and misleading claims” as president by the thousands upon thousands.

Other criteria for antisocial personality disorder include “failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors, as indicated by repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest”; “impulsivity or failure to plan ahead”; and “lack of remorse, as indicated by being indifferent to or rationalizing having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another.

As for impulsivity, that essentially describes what gets him into trouble most: It was his “impulsiveness—actually, total recklessness”—that came close to destroying him in the 1980s

And lack of remorse? That’s a hallmark of sociopathy, and goes hand in hand with a lack of human conscience. In a narcissistic sociopath, it’s intertwined with a lack of empathy. Trump hardly ever shows remorse, or apologizes, for anything. The one exception: With his presidential candidacy on the line in early October

In a way, Trump’s sociopathic tendencies are simply an extension of his extreme narcissism

articular, “They change reality to suit themselves in their own mind.” Although Trump “lies because of his sociopathic tendencies,” telling falsehoods to fool others, Dodes argues, he also lies to himself, to protect himself from narcissistic injury. And so Donald Trump has lied about his net worth, the size of the crowd at his inauguration, and supposed voter fraud in the 2016 election.

The latter kind of lying, Dodes says, “is in a way more serious,” because it can indicate “a loose grip on reality”—and it may well tell us where Trump is headed in the face of impeachment hearings. Lying to prevent narcissistic injury can metastasize to a more significant loss of touch with reality

Experts haven’t suggested that Trump is psychotic, but many have contended that his narcissism and sociopathy are so inordinate that he fits the bill for “malignant narcissism.” Malignant narcissism isn’t recognized as an official diagnosis; it’s a descriptive term coined by the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, and expanded upon by another psychoanalyst, Otto Kernberg, to refer to an extreme mix of narcissism and sociopathy, with a degree of paranoia and sadism mixed in

In the view of some in the mental-health community, such as John Gartner, Trump “exhibits all four” components of malignant narcissism: “narcissism, paranoia, antisocial personality and sadism.”

Mental-health professionals have raised a variety of other concerns about Trump’s mental state; the last worth specifically mentioning here is the possibility that, apart from any personality disorder, he may be suffering cognitive decline.

His “mental state,” according to Justin A. Frank, a former clinical professor of psychiatry and physician who wrote a book about Trump’s psychology, “include[s] so many psychic afflictions” that a “working knowledge of psychiatric disorders is essential to understanding Trump.” Indeed, as Gartner puts it: “There are a lot of things wrong with him—and, together, they are a scary witch’s brew.”

when you line up what the Framers expected of a president with all that we know about Donald Trump, his unfitness becomes obvious. The question is whether he can possibly act as a public fiduciary for the nation’s highest public trust. To borrow from the Harvard Law Review article, can he follow the “proscriptions against profit, bad faith, and self-dealing,” manifest “a strong concern about avoiding ultra vires action” (that is, action exceeding the president’s legal authority), and maintain “a duty of diligence and carefulness”? Given that Trump displays the extreme behavioral characteristics of a pathological narcissist, a sociopath, or a malignant narcissist—take your pick—it’s clear that he can’t.

To act as a fiduciary requires you to put someone else’s interests above your own, and Trump’s personality makes it impossible for him to do that. No president before him, at least in recent memory, has ever displayed such obsessive self-regard

Indeed, Trump’s view of his presidential powers can only be described as profoundly narcissistic, and his narcissism has compelled him to disregard the Framers’ vision of his constitutional duties in every respect

Trump’s incapacity affects all manner of subjects addressed by the presidency, but can be seen most acutely in foreign affairs and national security.

All in all, Trump sought to impede and end a significant counterintelligence and criminal investigation—one of crucial importance to the nation—and did so for his own personal reasons. He did precisely the opposite of what his duties require. Indeed, he has shown utter contempt for his duties to the nation

hat constitutional mechanisms exist for dealing with a president who cannot or does not comply with his duties, and how should they take the president’s mental and behavioral characteristics into account?

it turns out that impeachment is a more practical mechanism

In short, now that the House of Representatives has embarked on an impeachment inquiry, one of the most important judgments it must make is whether any identified breaches of duty are likely to be repeated. And if a Senate trial comes to pass, that issue would become central as well to the decision to remove the president from office. That’s when Trump’s behavioral and psychological characteristics should—must—come into pla

One of the most compelling arguments about the meaning of those words is that the Framers, in Article II’s command that a president faithfully execute his office, imposed upon him fiduciary obligations. As the constitutional historian Robert Natelson explained in the Federalist Society Review, the “founding generation [understood] ‘high … Misdemeanors’ to mean ‘breach of fiduciary duty.’

Eighteenth-century lawyers instead used terms such as breach of trust—which describes the same thing. “Parliamentary articles of impeachment explicitly and repetitively described the accused conduct as a breach of trust,” Natelson argues, and 18th-century British legal commentators explained how impeachment for “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” was warranted for all sorts of noncriminal violations that were, in essence, fiduciary breaches.

why the discussion of Morris’s suggestion was so brief—the drafters knew what the words historically meant, because, as a House Judiciary Committee report noted in 1974, “at the time of the Constitutional Convention the phrase ‘high Crimes and Misdemeanors’ had been in use for over 400 years in impeachment proceedings in Parliament

Certainly Alexander Hamilton knew by the time he penned “Federalist No. 65,” in which he explained that impeachment was for “those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust.

What constitutes such an abuse or violation of trust is up to Congress to decide: First the House decides to bring impeachment charges, and then the Senate decides whether to convict on those charges. The process of impeachment by the House and removal by trial in the Senate is thus, in some ways, akin to indictment by a grand jury and trial by a petit jury

As Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz explain in their recent book on impeachment, “the Constitution explicitly states that Congress may not end a presidency unless the president has committed an impeachable offense. But nowhere does the Constitution state or otherwise imply that Congress must remove a president whenever that standard is met … In other words, it allows Congress to exercise judgment.”

As Tribe and Matz argue, that judgment presents a “heavy burden,” and demands that Congress be “context-sensitive,” and achieve “an understanding of all relevant facts.” A president might breach his trust to the nation once in some small, inconsequential way and never repeat the misbehavior, and Congress could reasonably decide that the game is not worth the candle.

It’s also an appropriate mechanism, because the constitutional magic words (other than Treason and Bribery) that form the basis of an impeachment charge—high Crimes and Misdemeanors, found in Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution—mean something other than, and more than, offenses in the criminal-statute books. High Crimes and Misdemeanors is a legal term of art, one that historically referred to breaches of duties—fiduciary duties—by public officeholders. In other words, the question of what constitutes an impeachable offense for a president coincides precisely with whether the president can execute his office in the faithful manner that the Constitution requires.

there’s another reason as well. The people have a right to know, and a need to see. Many people have watched all of Trump’s behavior, and they’ve drawn the obvious conclusion. They know something’s wrong, just as football fans knew that the downed quarterback had shattered his leg. Others have changed the channel, or looked away, or chosen to deny what they’ve seen. But if Congress does its job and presents the evidence, those who are in denial won’t be able to ignore the problem any longer.

But the administration is not "taking any options off the table" in response to the incident, press secretary Jen Psaki said at a press briefing earlier Wednesday, adding that there's an internal policy review process to consider any actions.

In April, the Biden administration announced a series of actions, including sanctions, against Russia for its interference in the 2020 US election, its ongoing actions in Crimea and the SolarWinds cyber attack. The attack on the software developer was one of the worst data breaches to ever hit the US government.

The JBS attack comes after a string of cyber breaches and ransomware attacks tied to nation state actors.

"I'm not going to give any further analysis on that. Other than to tell you that our view is that when there are criminal entities within a country, they certainly have a responsibility and it is a role that the government can play," she responded.

Microsoft also recently said that hackers who are part of the same Russian group behind the SolarWinds hack have struck again in the US and other countries, launching a new cyberattack on more than 150 government agencies, think tanks and other organizations.

On Monday, the platform went dark after a hacker took over the accounts of 178 users, including Torba and the Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Gab, a Twitter-like website promoted by Torba as a bastion of free speech, has long been a forum of last resort for extremists and conspiracy theorists who have been banned on other online platforms. It attained worldwide notoriety in 2018 when a user, Robert Bowers, wrote on the site that he was “going in”, shortly before allegedly entering the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and killing eleven people.

The leaked files contained what appears to be a database of over 4.1 million registered users on the site and tags identifying subscribers as “investors”, “verified” users and “pro” users.

The 2017 share offering, for example, required a minimum investment of $199.10, and rewarded investors who contributed a greater amount with “perks”. Users who invested $200 could display a “Gab investor badge” on the site. The badges corresponded with a tag in the database, which allowed investors to be looked at in detail.

Some of the people associated with investors’ accounts had high-profile jobs and public roles, while spewing hate and extremist beliefs online.

The data breach also appears to offer some insight into users tagged as “verified” by Gab, which according to the platform’s own explanation means that they have completed a verification process that includes matching their display name to a government ID.

And it appears to include a list of users registered as “pros”, which allows users to access additional features and a badge at a price starting at $99 year. The database indicates over 18,000 users had paid to be pro users at the time of the breach. Nearly 4,000 users were flagged as donors to Gab’s repeated attempts to attract voluntary gifts from users.

Direct messages included in the leak appear to show close communication between Torba and a major QAnon influencer who is labeled a Gab investor, seemingly reinforcing the CEO’s public efforts to make Gab a home for adherents to the QAnon conspiracy theory, which helped fuel the 6 January attack on the nation’s Capitol.

According to Wired, the data exposed in the apparent hack was sourced by a hacker who had found a security vulnerability in the site.

“Gab was negligent at best and malicious at worst” in its approach to security, she added. “It is hard to envision a scenario where a company cared less about user data than this one.”

It believes the hackers are part of the same Russian group behind last year's devastating attack on SolarWinds -- a software vendor -- that targeted at least nine US federal agencies and 100 companies.

The White House's National Security Council and the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) are both aware of the incident, according to spokespeople. CISA is "working with the FBI and USAID to better understand the extent of the compromise and assist potential victims," a spokesperson said.

When asked about the United States' ability to get ahead of any further cyberattacks, Austin told Starr on Friday it is his responsibility to present President Joe Biden with offensive options.

Cybersecurity has been a major focus for the US government following the revelations that hackers had put malicious code into a tool published by SolarWinds. A ransomware attack that shut down one of America's most important pieces of energy infrastructure — the Colonial Pipeline — earlier this month has only heightened the sense of alarm. That attack was carried out by a criminal group originating in Russia, according to the FBI.

"I'm confident that we can continue to do what's necessary to not only compete, but stay ahead in this in this, in this domain."

The data required to serve you any single ad may pass through many companies’ systems in milliseconds—from data broker to ad marketplace to an agency’s custom system.

Another way you can be tracked without your knowing it is through any open Wi-Fi hot spot you might pass. If your phone’s Wi-Fi is on, you’re constantly broadcasting a unique MAC address and a history of past Wi-Fi connections.

is that with most individual data vendors holding only parts of your data, your complete, identifiable profile is never all in one place. Giants like Google and Facebook , who do have all your data in one place, say they are diligent about throwing away or not gathering what they don’t need, and eliminating personally identifying information from the remainder.

There are plenty of ways to track you without getting your permission. Some of the most intrusive are the easiest to implement. Your telco knows where you are at all times, because it knows which cell towers your phone is near. In the U.S., how much data service-providers sell is up to them.

A map of the U.S., showing areas of unusually high visits to sites where location-based advertising firm Groundtruth pushes ads to mobile devices.

Retailers sometimes use these addresses to identify repeat customers, and they can also use them to track you as you go from one of their stores to another.

WeatherBug, one of the most popular weather apps for Android and iPhone, is owned by the location advertising company GroundTruth. It’s a natural fit: Weather apps need to know where you are and provide value in exchange for that information.

Every month GroundTruth tracks 70 million people in the U.S. as they go to work in the morning, come home at night, surge in and out of public events, take vacations, you name it.

Companies like Acxiom could be prime targets for hackers, said Chandler Givens, chief executive of TrackOff, which develops software to protect user identity and personal information

Nearly every year, a bill comes up in the Senate or House that would regulate our data privacy—the most recent was in the wake of the Equifax breach—but none has passed. In some respects, the U.S. appears to be moving backward on privacy protections.

The US military's Cyber Command has pursued a strategy in recent years of "defend forward" and "persistent engagement". This means hacking into adversary systems to find out what they are doing - and stopping operations against the US before they are unleased.

This contesting of cyber-space was seen by many as long overdue. But Russia and China appear undeterred. One option now might be to hit back harder. But escalation carries its own risks.

The US had considered espionage - stealing information - acceptable, because it practised it extensively, as whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed in 2013. The problem for Washington is recent breaches may fit into the same category.That leaves the US in a bind.

US says destructive cyber-attacks are unacceptable but was the first to cross that line a decade ago when it used the Stuxnet attack to destroy parts of the Iran nuclear system.

Three quarters of successful breaches were done by profit-minded criminals for financial gain. But the second most common type of breach was a state-affiliated attack “aimed at stealing intellectual property — such as classified information, trade secrets and technical resources — to further national and economic interests.”

In 76 percent of data breaches, weak or stolen user names and passwords were a cause. In 40 percent of cases, Verizon said the attackers installed malicious software on the victim’s systems; 35 percent of cases involved “physical attacks” in which the attackers did physical harm

In 29 percent of breaches, the attackers leveraged social tactics, such as spear phishing, in which a tailored e-mail to the victim purports to come from a friend or business contact. The e-mails contain malicious links or attachments that, when clicked, give the attacker a foothold in the victim’s computer network. Verizon said it witnessed four times as many “social engineering” attacks that used this method in 2012 as it did in 2011

But they made an even more devastating case by chronicling his inaction as commander-in-chief during the most frightening moments of the siege with clips from Twitter, Parler and YouTube; cell phone footage from reporters and members of Congress; desperate police radio dispatches calling for backup; officer body camera footage that was marked as being obtained by the US attorney's office; and an array of surveillance camera footage from across the Capitol that captured a bird's-eye view of key moments.

Wielding the element of surprise by unearthing many previously unreleased videos, they showed the harrowing moments where then-Vice President Mike Pence, his wife and daughter, were rushed to safety down a narrow stairway on the Senate side of the Capitol. They juxtaposed that surveillance video from an overhead Capitol camera with a video shot from within the angry mob outside chanting "Hang Mike Pence!" -- then crystallized the danger with a chilling photograph of a noose and a gallows that was erected that day outside the Capitol.

The managers tried to give it all context by showing Trump's tweet attacking Pence two minutes before the vice president was evacuated down those steps

To rebut Trump's defenders' claims that he did not incite violence and had no bearing on the events that unfolded that afternoon, the managers then showed video of a Trump loyalist outside the Capitol reading the former President's tweet accusing Pence of disloyalty in real time over a bullhorn as anger mounted.

Never before in history have Americans seen one attack on their nation from so many different perspectives. For hours, the managers outlined in painstaking detail what unfolded in each critical minute of the siege with timestamps — later played back against the President's actions or inaction. Sometimes, they showed the same few minutes or seconds from the vantage point of two or three different videos to punctuate their arguments. The montages were brutal, searing and unforgettable.JUST WATCHED'Storm the Capitol!': Rioters react to Trump speechReplayMore Videos ...MUST WATCH PlayM19.15 55.34l30.07-20a4 4 0 0 0 0-6.66l-30.07-20A4 4 0 0 0

At another point, impeachment managers tried to portray the danger that staff members felt as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was being hunted down by rioters who pounded on doors demanding to know where she was.

"They're pounding the doors trying to find her," the aide whispers into the phone. The bookend to the call was a video from minutes later, showing a rioter jamming his shoulder into an outer door and then breaking through near where they were hiding, before turning away.

In another near miss, new surveillance video showed Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman sprinting down a Senate hallway to respond to the breach, encountering Sen. Mitt Romney and gesturing for the Utah Republican, who had been critical of Trump's baseless election rhetoric, to turn and run in another direction to avoid encountering the mob.

The Democratic managers also used shaky, disjointed video to try to capture the confusion and fear that ensued when a Capitol Police officer shot pro-Trump rioter Ashli Babbitt

The gunshot is heard, then a gasp of profanity capturing the fear in that moment: "Take your pins off," members are heard telling one another. Swalwell noted that the buzzing sound in the background of the video emanated from the gas masks members were holding.

At 4:17 p.m. Trump finally tweeted an on-camera message telling rioters to disperse. A video displayed during the trial Wednesday showed the "QAnon Shaman" Jacob Chansley, who was seen inside the Capitol dressed in horns, a fur headdress and red, white and blue face paint, back outside on Capitol grounds telling others a short while later that Trump had released a video message conveying that they should all now go home.

Any minute that we lost, I need to know why,” Senator Amy Klobuchar, chair of the Senate rules committee, which is investigating the siege, said last month.The Pentagon document provides a timeline that fills in some gaps.

Sund asked for at least 200 guard members “and more if they are available”. But no help was immediately on the way. The Pentagon document details nearly two hours of confusion and chaos as officials attempted to work out a response.

Trump broke his silence at 4.17pm, tweeting that his followers should “go

home and go in peace”. By about 4.30pm, the military plan was finalized.

At about 4.40pm, Pelosi and Schumer were again on the phone with Gen Milley and Pentagon leaders. The congressional leadership “accuse[d] the national security apparatus of knowing that protesters planned to conduct an assault on the Capitol”, the Pentagon timeline says.

The call lasted 30 minutes, including a discussion of intelligence failures. It would be another hour before the first 155 national guard members arrived. Dressed in riot gear, they started moving out the rioters. There were few if any arrests.

The order set off a furious public battle on Wednesday between the Obama administration and one of the world’s most valuable companies in a dispute with far-reaching legal implications.

This is not the first time a technology company has been ordered to effectively decrypt its own product. But industry experts say it is the most significant because of Apple’s global profile, the invasive steps it says are being demanded and the brutality of the San Bernardino attacks.

Law enforcement officials who support the F.B.I.’s position said that the impasse with Apple provided an ideal test case to move from an abstract debate over the balance between national security and privacy to a concrete one

The F.B.I. has been unable to get into the phone used by Syed Rizwan Farook, who was killed by the police along with his wife after they attacked Mr. Farook’s co-workers at a holiday gathering.

Magistrate Judge Sheri Pym of the Federal District Court for the District of Central California issued her order Tuesday afternoon, after the F.B.I. said it had been unable to get access to the data on its own and needed Apple’s technical assistance.

Mr. Cook, the chief executive at Apple, responded Wednesday morning with a blistering, 1,100-word letter to Apple customers, warning of the “chilling” breach of privacy posed by the government’s demands. He maintained that the order would effectively require it to create a “backdoor” to get around its own safeguards, and Apple vowed to appeal the ruling by next week.

Apple argues that the software the F.B.I. wants it to create does not exist. But technologists say the company can do it.

pple executives had hoped to resolve the impasse without having to rewrite their own encryption software. They were frustrated that the Justice Department had aired its demand in public, according to an industry executive with knowledge of the case, who spoke on the condition of anonymity about internal discussions.

The Justice Department and the F.B.I. have the White House’s “full support,” the spokesman, Josh Earnest, said on Wednesday.

His vote of confidence was significant because James Comey, the F.B.I. director, has at times been at odds with the White House over his aggressive advocacy of tougher decryption requirements on technology companies. While Mr. Obama’s national security team was sympathetic to Mr. Comey’s position, others at the White House viewed legislation as potentially perilous. Late last year, Mr. Obama refused to back any legislation requiring decryption, leaving a court fight likely.

The dispute could initiate legislation in Congress, with Republicans and Democrats alike criticizing Apple’s stance on Wednesday and calling for tougher decryption requirements.

Donald J. Trump, the Republican presidential contender, also attacked Apple on Fox News, asking, “Who do they think they are?”

But Apple had many defenders of its own among privacy and consumer advocates, who praised Mr. Cook for standing up to what they saw as government overreach.

Many of the company’s defenders argued that the types of government surveillance operations exposed in 2013 by Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, have prompted technology companies to build tougher encryption safeguards in their products because of the privacy demands of their customers.

Privacy advocates and others said they worried that if the F.B.I. succeeded in getting access to the software overriding Apple’s encryption, it would create easy access for the government in many future investigations.

The Apple order is a flash point in a dispute that has been building for more than a decade. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Advertisement Continue reading the main story

The F.B.I. began sounding alarms years ago about technology that allowed people to exchange private messages protected by encryption so strong that government agents could not break it. In fall 2010, at the behest of Robert S. Mueller III, the F.B.I. director, the Obama administration began work on a law that required technology companies to provide unencrypted data to the government.

Lawyers at the F.B.I., Justice Department and Commerce Department drafted bills around the idea that technology companies in the Internet age should be bound by the same rules as phone companies, which were forced during the Clinton administration to build digital networks that government agents could tap.

The draft legislation would have covered app developers like WhatsApp and large companies like Google and Apple, according to current and former officials involved in the process.

There is no debate that, when armed with a court order, the government can get text messages and other data stored in plain text. Far less certain was whether the government could use a court order to force a company to write software or redesign its system to decode encrypted data. A federal law would make that authority clear, they said.

But the disclosures of government surveillance by Mr. Snowden changed the privacy debate, and the Obama administration decided not to move on the proposed legislation. It has not been revived.

The legal issues raised by the judge’s order are complicated. They involve statutory interpretation, rather than constitutional rights, and they could end up before the Supreme Court.

As Apple noted, the F.B.I., instead of asking Congress to pass legislation resolving the encryption fight, has proposed what appears to be a novel reading of the All Writs Act of 1789.

The law lets judges “issue all writs necessary or appropriate in aid of their respective jurisdictions and agreeable to the usages and principles of law.”

Christians in the early European Middle Ages, between roughly the 5th and 11th centuries, believed that God knew all human secrets, yet God’s secrets remained fundamentally unknowable to human beings. This widespread and deep-seated belief in an omniscient and mysterious being shaped institutional structures and social behavior in profound ways, as human efforts at concealment were considered futile

Today, a new form of mysterious omniscience is having a similarly widespread and unpredictable effect on human social behavior. We know that data about us is being compiled at breathtaking speeds, but most of us have little way of knowing what information is being collected, how it is being used and, crucially, how the various algorithms, clouds, networks and devices even work

The belief in an omniscient God structured almost every part of medieval life, especially around the rapidly developing legal systems of the time. Law codes named God as a constant witness in legal disputes in which human witnesses were considered deficient and God’s judgment functioned as a compelling legal tool.

By the 18th century, new secular forms of institutional power and surveillance emerged. Jeremy Bentham, for example, theorized the panopticon, a prison structure designed to harness a prisoner’s belief that he was always being watched to shape his behavior in favor of docility. What makes the architecture of the panopticon work is the mysterious omniscience of the prison guards, who can see from their tower into every cell without ever being seen themselves.

Today’s global data economy is the new form of mysterious omniscience. And as the reach of these technologies expands, their mystery will be one of the greatest barriers to its regulation.

Indeed, as scholar Shoshana Zuboff has written, firms actively confuse the public about the data they process so that their capabilities “remain inscrutable to all but an exclusive data priesthood.”

tion of fear and a belief in the benevolence of the divine

Where people in the early Middle Ages assigned benevolence to and held tremendous fear in their omniscient God, we have been facing — indeed embracing with remarkably little fear — this mysteriously omniscient technology reasoned to be benevolent because it makes life more convenient.

The way medieval law used God’s omniscience in cases of unreliable testimony foreshadows a future — in some ways, one already here — in which the information collected into that mysteriously omniscient entity (including data recorded by devices and retained by corporations) can be harvested and harnessed as evidence in courts of law, particularly where no other human witnesses are available to testify

In these cases, corporations have so far resisted sharing the data with the state, with the exception of counterterrorism efforts. But it also contributes to the corporate entity’s growing omniscience and mysteriousness

the move from the panopticon to this future iteration of mysterious omniscience could potentially entail a more insidious form of discipline stripped of the fear of punishment and, with its godlike status, of the possibility of democratic regulation.

the Department of Defense is aware of "further possible threats posed by would-be terrorists in the days up to and including Inauguration Day."

"I will tell you that given the events of this last week that this inauguration preparation has to be different than any other inauguration," Bowser said in an interview with CBS' "Face the Nation" on Sunday.

More than 6,000 members have already been mobilized in the wake of the Capitol being stormed by pro-Trump rioters to work in 12-hour shifts on Capitol grounds and work traffic control points throughout the city.

Plans for future armed protests, including a proposed secondary attack on the US Capitol and state capitol buildings on January 17, began proliferating on and off Twitter last week, the social media company said.

"Trump WILL be sworn in for a second term on January 20th!!," said a commenter on thedonald.win, a pro-Trump online forum, on Thursday, the day after the siege. "We must not let the communists win. Even if we have to burn DC to the ground."

"Law enforcement was ill prepared for an event the entire country knew was coming, and one that POTUS had been signaling for weeks," said Brian Harrell, former DHS assistant secretary for infrastructure protection. "The normal 'layers of security', with each inner layer being tougher to breach, was nearly non-existent. It's shocking, that in a post 9/11 world, we witnessed the 'people's house' be breached and ransacked with ease."

Layers of security, standoff distancing and tactical teams on standby will be used to minimize violence near the inaugural events, he said, adding that the biggest concerns should be an active shooter scenario, vehicle ramming and the deliberate targeting of critical infrastructure.

Washington State Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee announced Friday that he was mobilizing up to 750 members of the National Guard to provide security for the beginning of the state's legislative session, which starts Monday.

At the Pentagon, officials are assessing whether there is a need to bolster the number of National Guard forces to as many as 13,000 guardsmen for President-elect Joe Biden's inauguration, according to a defense official with knowledge of the planning. Prior to the US Capitol breach, the estimated need called for approximately 7,000 guard troops.

"You're going to see immediate improvement, fully aggressive posture by the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice as well, because we accept violence from no one," he said in an interview on Fox News Thursday.

Experts warn that the calls for violence, which circulated ahead of Wednesday's siege of the Capitol, have intensified ahead of Inauguration Day.

"We fully expect that this violence could actually get worse before it gets better."

"It's to show that a relatively small number of people can actually take over the system. It's supposed to be a rallying cry for -- 'join us, or you are now the enemy.'"

"We could start to see a lot of lives lost because of the moment that occurred on Wednesday, so very, very concerned about the cascading effects," the former official said. "It's a very concerning moment."

On Saturday afternoon, an unlawful assembly was declared in San Diego after protesters clashed and threw objects at police officers. According to tweets from the San Diego Police Department, protesters threw rocks, bottles and eggs at officers shortly after they were asked to leave the area. The tweets also said that pepper spray was being dispersed from the crowd toward the officers.

On the same day as the siege in Washington, DC, the Texas State Capitol building and grounds were closed to the public "out of an abundance of caution,"

The inauguration is designated as a National Special Security Event, which allows for greater federal security cooperation and law enforcement resources.

"In light of the most recent insurrection activity, the state cannot tolerate any actions that could result in harm, mayhem or interruption of function of democratic institutions," Inslee said Friday evening. In addition to Guardsmen, the governor says a "large number of Washington State Patrol troopers will be on hand."

"Some of the online rhetoric has called for protests at all 50 capitols plus DC," the official said. "FBI in particular has been continuing to put our threat assessments and we are at the state level as well."

"We know from the rioters themselves that if they had found Speaker Pelosi, they would have killed her,"

The House impeachment managers revealed for the first time Wednesday that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was evacuated entirely from the US Capitol complex during the insurrection to a secure off-site location.

Romney told reporters after the video played that it was "obviously very troubling" and that he hadn't known he had come that close to the rioters.

Wednesday's security footage also showed for the first time how the then-vice president was evacuated during the episode as rioters breached the Capitol, looking for him.

Some of the new security footage Democrats presented Wednesday showed how close Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and security detail came to encountering the rioters.

The footage shows Schumer walking up a ramp with his security when the group is forced to quickly change directions and run back in the direction they came.

"They came within just yards of rioters," said Rep. Eric Swalwell,

The Democrats showed how rioters were calling out for Pelosi as they moved through the halls of the Capitol, before showing new security footage of Pelosi's staffers barricading themselves in a conference room not long before rioters entered her suite of offices, trying to force open the door where the aides were in hiding.

The footage shows Pence and his family quickly moving down a set of stairs.

"As the rioters reached the top of the stairs, they were within 100 feet of where the vice president was sheltering with his family, and they were just feet away from one of the doors to this chamber," she explained. In one video, the crowd can be heard chanting "hang Mike Pence" as they stood in the open door of the Capitol building.

"After President Trump had primed his followers for months and inflamed the rally-goers that morning, it is no wonder that the vice president of the United States was the target of their wrath, after Pence refused to overturn the election results," Plaskett continued.

No. 2 Senate Republican John Thune of South Dakota saying the House impeachment managers did an "effective job" and were "connecting the dots" from Trump's words to the insurrection

Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana said he found much of the House impeachment managers' case against Trump jarring, adding that the rioters' attempts to thwart a peaceful transfer of power should alarm anyone who loves America.

Still, there's no sign that Senate Republicans are going to consider convicting Trump, no matter how compelling the Democrats' presentation may be. Forty-four of the 50 Senate Republicans voted Tuesday that the trial was unconstitutional, a defense most if not all of those senators are likely to cite if they vote to acquit Trump.

Rep. Madeleine Dean of Pennsylvania, a Democratic House impeachment manager, choked up as she closed her remarks by describing the loud bang that was heard when she was in the chamber that had been surrounded by rioters.

"So they came, draped in Trump's flag, and used our flag, the American flag, to batter and to bludgeon," Dean said. "And at 2:30 p.m., I heard that terrifying banging on those House chamber doors. For the first time in more than 200 years, the seat of our government was ransacked on our watch."

"I didn't learn anything that I didn't already know. We know a mob reached the Capitol and wreaked havoc in the building. I'm waiting for them to connect that up to President Trump and so far that hasn't happened," he said.Asked if he is worried the video will have an emotional impact on the jury, he said, "It would have an emotional impact on any jury. But there are two sides of the coin and we have not played ours."

“Security and privacy have long been top companywide priorities at Twitter,” said Twitter spokeswoman Rebecca Hahn. She said that Zatko’s allegations appeared to be “riddled with inaccuracies” and that Zatko “now appears to be opportunistically seeking to inflict harm on Twitter, its customers, and its shareholders.” Hahn said that Twitter fired Zatko after 15 months “for poor performance and leadership.” Attorneys for Zatko confirmed he was fired but denied it was for performance or leadership.

the whistleblower document alleges the company prioritized user growth over reducing spam, though unwanted content made the user experience worse. Executives stood to win individual bonuses of as much as $10 million tied to increases in daily users, the complaint asserts, and nothing explicitly for cutting spam.

Chief executive Parag Agrawal was “lying” when he tweeted in May that the company was “strongly incentivized to detect and remove as much spam as we possibly can,” the complaint alleges.

Zatko described his decision to go public as an extension of his previous work exposing flaws in specific pieces of software and broader systemic failings in cybersecurity. He was hired at Twitter by former CEO Jack Dorsey in late 2020 after a major hack of the company’s systems.

“I felt ethically bound. This is not a light step to take,” said Zatko, who was fired by Agrawal in January. He declined to discuss what happened at Twitter, except to stand by the formal complaint. Under SEC whistleblower rules, he is entitled to legal protection against retaliation, as well as potential monetary rewards.

A person familiar with Zatko’s tenure said the company investigated Zatko’s security claims during his time there and concluded they were sensationalistic and without merit. Four people familiar with Twitter’s efforts to fight spam said the company deploys extensive manual and automated tools to both measure the extent of spam across the service and reduce it.

In 1998, Zatko had testified to Congress that the internet was so fragile that he and others could take it down with a half-hour of concentrated effort. He later served as the head of cyber grants at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon innovation unit that had backed the internet’s invention.

Overall, Zatko wrote in a February analysis for the company attached as an exhibit to the SEC complaint, “Twitter is grossly negligent in several areas of information security. If these problems are not corrected, regulators, media and users of the platform will be shocked when they inevitably learn about Twitter’s severe lack of security basics.”

Zatko’s complaint says strong security should have been much more important to Twitter, which holds vast amounts of sensitive personal data about users. Twitter has the email addresses and phone numbers of many public figures, as well as dissidents who communicate over the service at great personal risk.

This month, an ex-Twitter employee was convicted of using his position at the company to spy on Saudi dissidents and government critics, passing their information to a close aide of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in exchange for cash and gifts.

Zatko’s complaint says he believed the Indian government had forced Twitter to put one of its agents on the payroll, with access to user data at a time of intense protests in the country. The complaint said supporting information for that claim has gone to the National Security Division of the Justice Department and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Another person familiar with the matter agreed that the employee was probably an agent.

“Take a tech platform that collects massive amounts of user data, combine it with what appears to be an incredibly weak security infrastructure and infuse it with foreign state actors with an agenda, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster,” Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee,

Many government leaders and other trusted voices use Twitter to spread important messages quickly, so a hijacked account could drive panic or violence. In 2013, a captured Associated Press handle falsely tweeted about explosions at the White House, sending the Dow Jones industrial average briefly plunging more than 140 points.

After a teenager managed to hijack the verified accounts of Obama, then-candidate Joe Biden, Musk and others in 2020, Twitter’s chief executive at the time, Jack Dorsey, asked Zatko to join him, saying that he could help the world by fixing Twitter’s security and improving the public conversation, Zatko asserts in the complaint.

The complaint — filed last month with the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Justice, as well as the FTC — says thousands of employees still had wide-ranging and poorly tracked internal access to core company software, a situation that for years had led to embarrassing hacks, including the commandeering of accounts held by such high-profile users as Elon Musk and former presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump.

But at Twitter Zatko encountered problems more widespread than he realized and leadership that didn’t act on his concerns, according to the complaint.

Twitter’s difficulties with weak security stretches back more than a decade before Zatko’s arrival at the company in November 2020. In a pair of 2009 incidents, hackers gained administrative control of the social network, allowing them to reset passwords and access user data. In the first, beginning around January of that year, hackers sent tweets from the accounts of high-profile users, including Fox News and Obama.

Several months later, a hacker was able to guess an employee’s administrative password after gaining access to similar passwords in their personal email account. That hacker was able to reset at least one user’s password and obtain private information about any Twitter user.

Twitter continued to suffer high-profile hacks and security violations, including in 2017, when a contract worker briefly took over Trump’s account, and in the 2020 hack, in which a Florida teen tricked Twitter employees and won access to verified accounts. Twitter then said it put additional safeguards in place.

This year, the Justice Department accused Twitter of asking users for their phone numbers in the name of increased security, then using the numbers for marketing. Twitter agreed to pay a $150 million fine for allegedly breaking the 2011 order, which barred the company from making misrepresentations about the security of personal data.

After Zatko joined the company, he found it had made little progress since the 2011 settlement, the complaint says. The complaint alleges that he was able to reduce the backlog of safety cases, including harassment and threats, from 1 million to 200,000, add staff and push to measure results.

But Zatko saw major gaps in what the company was doing to satisfy its obligations to the FTC, according to the complaint. In Zatko’s interpretation, according to the complaint, the 2011 order required Twitter to implement a Software Development Life Cycle program, a standard process for making sure new code is free of dangerous bugs. The complaint alleges that other employees had been telling the board and the FTC that they were making progress in rolling out that program to Twitter’s systems. But Zatko alleges that he discovered that it had been sent to only a tenth of the company’s projects, and even then treated as optional.

“If all of that is true, I don’t think there’s any doubt that there are order violations,” Vladeck, who is now a Georgetown Law professor, said in an interview. “It is possible that the kinds of problems that Twitter faced eleven years ago are still running through the company.”

“Agrawal’s Tweets and Twitter’s previous blog posts misleadingly imply that Twitter employs proactive, sophisticated systems to measure and block spam bots,” the complaint says. “The reality: mostly outdated, unmonitored, simple scripts plus overworked, inefficient, understaffed, and reactive human teams.”

One current and one former employee recalled that incident, when failures at two Twitter data centers drove concerns that the service could have collapsed for an extended period. “I wondered if the company would exist in a few days,” one of them said.

The current and former employees also agreed with the complaint’s assertion that past reports to various privacy regulators were “misleading at best.”

For example, they said the company implied that it had destroyed all data on users who asked, but the material had spread so widely inside Twitter’s networks, it was impossible to know for sure

As the head of security, Zatko says he also was in charge of a division that investigated users’ complaints about accounts, which meant that he oversaw the removal of some bots, according to the complaint. Spam bots — computer programs that tweet automatically — have long vexed Twitter. Unlike its social media counterparts, Twitter allows users to program bots to be used on its service: For example, the Twitter account @big_ben_clock is programmed to tweet “Bong Bong Bong” every hour in time with Big Ben in London. Twitter also allows people to create accounts without using their real identities, making it harder for the company to distinguish between authentic, duplicate and automated accounts.

In the complaint, Zatko alleges he could not get a straight answer when he sought what he viewed as an important data point: the prevalence of spam and bots across all of Twitter, not just among monetizable users.

Zatko cites a “sensitive source” who said Twitter was afraid to determine that number because it “would harm the image and valuation of the company.” He says the company’s tools for detecting spam are far less robust than implied in various statements.

The complaint also alleges that Zatko warned the board early in his tenure that overlapping outages in the company’s data centers could leave it unable to correctly restart its servers. That could have left the service down for months, or even have caused all of its data to be lost. That came close to happening in 2021, when an “impending catastrophic” crisis threatened the platform’s survival before engineers were able to save the day, the complaint says, without providing further details.

The four people familiar with Twitter’s spam and bot efforts said the engineering and integrity teams run software that samples thousands of tweets per day, and 100 accounts are sampled manually.

Some employees charged with executing the fight agreed that they had been short of staff. One said top executives showed “apathy” toward the issue.

Zatko’s complaint likewise depicts leadership dysfunction, starting with the CEO. Dorsey was largely absent during the pandemic, which made it hard for Zatko to get rulings on who should be in charge of what in areas of overlap and easier for rival executives to avoid collaborating, three current and former employees said.

For example, Zatko would encounter disinformation as part of his mandate to handle complaints, according to the complaint. To that end, he commissioned an outside report that found one of the disinformation teams had unfilled positions, yawning language deficiencies, and a lack of technical tools or the engineers to craft them. The authors said Twitter had no effective means of dealing with consistent spreaders of falsehoods.

Dorsey made little effort to integrate Zatko at the company, according to the three employees as well as two others familiar with the process who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive dynamics. In 12 months, Zatko could manage only six one-on-one calls, all less than 30 minutes, with his direct boss Dorsey, who also served as CEO of payments company Square, now known as Block, according to the complaint. Zatko allegedly did almost all of the talking, and Dorsey said perhaps 50 words in the entire year to him. “A couple dozen text messages” rounded out their electronic communication, the complaint alleges.

Faced with such inertia, Zatko asserts that he was unable to solve some of the most serious issues, according to the complaint.

Some 30 percent of company laptops blocked automatic software updates carrying security fixes, and thousands of laptops had complete copies of Twitter’s source code, making them a rich target for hackers, it alleges.

A successful hacker takeover of one of those machines would have been able to sabotage the product with relative ease, because the engineers pushed out changes without being forced to test them first in a simulated environment, current and former employees said.

“It’s near-incredible that for something of that scale there would not be a development test environment separate from production and there would not be a more controlled source-code management process,” said Tony Sager, former chief operating officer at the cyberdefense wing of the National Security Agency, the Information Assurance divisio

Sager is currently senior vice president at the nonprofit Center for Internet Security, where he leads a consensus effort to establish best security practices.

The complaint says that about half of Twitter’s roughly 7,000 full-time employees had wide access to the company’s internal software and that access was not closely monitored, giving them the ability to tap into sensitive data and alter how the service worked. Three current and former employees agreed that these were issues.

“A best practice is that you should only be authorized to see and access what you need to do your job, and nothing else,” said former U.S. chief information security officer Gregory Touhill. “If half the company has access to and can make configuration changes to the production environment, that exposes the company and its customers to significant risk.”

The complaint says Dorsey never encouraged anyone to mislead the board about the shortcomings, but that others deliberately left out bad news.

When Dorsey left in November 2021, a difficult situation worsened under Agrawal, who had been responsible for security decisions as chief technology officer before Zatko’s hiring, the complaint says.

An unnamed executive had prepared a presentation for the new CEO’s first full board meeting, according to the complaint. Zatko’s complaint calls the presentation deeply misleading.

The presentation showed that 92 percent of employee computers had security software installed — without mentioning that those installations determined that a third of the machines were insecure, according to the complaint.

Another graphic implied a downward trend in the number of people with overly broad access, based on the small subset of people who had access to the highest administrative powers, known internally as “God mode.” That number was in the hundreds. But the number of people with broad access to core systems, which Zatko had called out as a big problem after joining, had actually grown slightly and remained in the thousands.

The presentation included only a subset of serious intrusions or other security incidents, from a total Zatko estimated as one per week, and it said that the uncontrolled internal access to core systems was responsible for just 7 percent of incidents, when Zatko calculated the real proportion as 60 percent.

Zatko stopped the material from being presented at the Dec. 9, 2021 meeting, the complaint said. But over his continued objections, Agrawal let it go to the board’s smaller Risk Committee a week later.

Agrawal didn’t respond to requests for comment. In an email to employees after publication of this article, obtained by The Post, he said that privacy and security continues to be a top priority for the company, and he added that the narrative is “riddled with inconsistences” and “presented without important context.”

On Jan. 4, Zatko reported internally that the Risk Committee meeting might have been fraudulent, which triggered an Audit Committee investigation.

Agarwal fired him two weeks later. But Zatko complied with the company’s request to spell out his concerns in writing, even without access to his work email and documents, according to the complaint.

Since Zatko’s departure, Twitter has plunged further into chaos with Musk’s takeover, which the two parties agreed to in May. The stock price has fallen, many employees have quit, and Agrawal has dismissed executives and frozen big projects.

Zatko said he hoped that by bringing new scrutiny and accountability, he could improve the company from the outside.

“I still believe that this is a tremendous platform, and there is huge value and huge risk, and I hope that looking back at this, the world will be a better place, in part because of this.”

Russian and American officials have discussed how to stabilize the situation.

Fact-checking measures adopted by major tech and social-media companies are unlikely to stop Russia from seeking out new vulnerabilities in Western democracies.

While such an attack would mark a major escalation for Russia, it would not be unprecedented. Attacks on at least a dozen electric facilities in America—including one nuclear plant—have been traced back to a Russian-linked group. Russia is also thought to be behind an increasing number of cyberattacks against private corporations and government agencies in Ukraine. Similarly, Moscow waged a massive disinformation and propaganda campaign alongside its annexation of Crimea in 2014.

In recent years, Kremlin-linked cyber and disinformation campaigns of varying ambition have hit several European countries. In Germany, Russian state news spread a fake story about the rape of an underage girl by migrants during the height of Europe’s refugee crisis in 2016 that led to dozens of protests across the country. Similarly, Russian-backed broadcasters targeted Germany’s Russian emigrant community allegedly to bolster support for the country’s right-wing Alternative for Germany party in its bid to enter parliament for the first time. In France, Russian-linked hackers were believed to have stolen and leaked emails from French President Emmanuel Macron’s campaign. Moscow also recently launched a French version of RT, the public broadcaster formerly known as Russia Today. Spanish investigators found that both private and state-led Russian-based groups disseminated information on social media to try to sway public opinion ahead of Catalonia’s independence referendum in October.

“On the security side, there are some improvements that can happen without the [Trump] administration,” Sulmeyer, the former cyber official, said. “But without a greater counterweight or cost for Russia, none of this is going to stop.”

South Korea did everything the UK government could have done, but refused to implement. Its death toll so far: 263. It still has an occasional cluster of infection, which it promptly contains. By contrast, the entire UK is now a cluster of infection.

Had the government acted in February, we can hazard a guess about what the result would have been, as the world has conducted a clear controlled experiment: weighing South Korea, Taiwan and New Zealand against the UK, the US and Brazil.

The climate modeller James Annan has used his analytical methods to show what would have happened if the UK government had imposed its lockdown a week earlier. Starting it on 16 March, rather than 23 March, his modelling suggests, would by now have saved around 30,000 lives, reducing the rate of illness and death from coronavirus roughly by a factor of five.

While other countries either closed their borders or quarantined all arrivals, in the three months between the emergence of the virus and the UK’s lockdown, 18 million people arrived on these shores, of whom only 273 were quarantined. Even after the lockdown was announced, 95,000 people entered the UK without additional restrictions.

on 12 March, Johnson abandoned both containment and nationwide testing and tracking. A week later, the status of the pandemic was lowered, which meant that the government could reduce the standard of personal protective equipment required in hospitals, and could shift infectious patients into non-specialist care. Again, there was no medical or scientific justification for this decision.

Exercise Cygnus, a pandemic simulation conducted in 2016, found that the impacts in care homes would be catastrophic unless new measures were put in place. The government insists that it heeded the findings of this exercise and changed its approach accordingly. If this is correct, by allowing untested patients to be shifted from hospitals to care homes, while failing to provide the extra support and equipment the homes needed and allowing agency workers to move freely within and between them, it knowingly breached its own protocols. Tens of thousands of highly vulnerable people were exposed to infection.

In other words, none of these are failures of knowledge or capacity. They are de-preparations, conscious decisions not to act.

They start to become explicable only when we recognise what they have in common: a refusal to frontload the costs. This refusal is common in countries whose governments fetishise what we call “the market”: the euphemism we use for the power of money.

Johnson’s government, like that of Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, represents a particular kind of economic interest. For years politicians of their stripe have been in conflict with people who perform useful services: nurses, teachers, care workers and the other low-paid people who keep our lives ticking, whose attempts to organise and secure better pay and conditions are demonised by ministers and in the media.

This political conflict is always fought on behalf of the same group: those who extract wealth.

The interests of wealth extractors are, by definition, short term. They divert money that might otherwise have been used for investment into dividends and share buybacks.

Years of experience have shown that it is much cheaper to make political donations, employ lobbyists and invest in public relations than to change lucrative but harmful commercial policies

Working through the billionaire press and political systems that are highly vulnerable to capture by money, in the UK, US and Brazil they have helped ensure that cavalier and reckless people are elected.

It’s not that any of these interests – whether the Daily Mail or the US oil companies – want coronavirus to spread. It’s that the approach that has proved so disastrous in addressing the pandemic has been highly effective, from the lobbyists’ point of view, when applied to other issues: delaying and frustrating action to prevent climate breakdown; pollution; the obesity crisis; inequality; unaffordable rent; and the many other plagues spread by corporate and billionaire power.

Thanks in large part to their influence, we have governments that fail to protect the public interest, by design. This is the tunnel. This is why the exits are closed. This is why we will struggle to emerge.

he documents were revealed to have come from Brittany Kaiser, an ex-Cambridge Analytica employee turned whistleblower, and to be the same ones subpoeaned by Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election

The documents were retrieved from her email accounts and hard drives, and though she handed over some material to parliament in April 2018, she said there were thousands and thousands more pages which showed a “breadth and depth of the work” that went “way beyond what people think they know about ‘the Cambridge Analytica scandal’”.

“on our current trajectory these problems are likely to get worse, not better, and with crucial 2020 elections in America and elsewhere approaching, this is a very scary prospect. Something radical needs to be done about it, and fast.”

The unpublished documents contain material that suggests the firm was working for a political party in Ukraine in 2017 even while under investigation as part of Mueller’s inquiry and emails that Kaiser says describe how the firm helped develop a “sophisticated infrastructure of shell companies that were designed to funnel dark money into politics”.

more sophisticated actors will have been emboldened to interfere in our elections and sow social divisions

authorities in the west had failed to punish those practising social and other media manipulation

There are emails between these major Trump donors discussing ways of obscuring the source of their donations through a series of different financial vehicles. These documents expose the entire dark money machinery behind US politics.

“The documents reveal a much clearer idea of what actually happened in the 2016 US presidential election, which has a huge bearing on what will happen in 2020. It’s the same people involved who we know are building on these same techniques,”

“There’s evidence of really quite disturbing experiments on American voters, manipulating them with fear-based messaging, targeting the most vulnerable, that seems to be continuing. This is an entire global industry that’s out of controlbut what this does is lay out what was happening with this one company.

Republicans in the Trump years have gotten used to competing under rules biased in their favor. They have come to fear that unless the rules favor them, they will lose. And so they have learned to think of biased rules as necessary, proper, and just—and to view any effort to correct those rules as a direct attack on their survival.

What I wrote in 2017 has only become more true since: “We are living through the most dangerous challenge to the free government of the United States that anyone alive has encountered.”

No one has stopped him from defying congressional subpoenas looking into whether he was violating tax and banking laws. No one has stopped him from hiring and promoting his relatives.

Trump’s clemency to Stone reminded others who might hold guilty knowledge—people like Paul Manafort and Ghislaine Maxwell—of the potential benefits to them of staying silent about Trump.

How did Trump get away with using a public power for personal advantage in this way? There’s nothing to stop him. The Constitution vests the pardon power in the president.

a second-term Trump could demand that associates break the law for him—and then protect them when they are caught and face punishment. He could pardon his relatives—and even try to pardon himself.

Abuse of Government Resources for Personal Gain

Mr. Trump’s aides said he enjoyed the frustration and anger he caused by holding a political event on the South Lawn of the White House, shattering conventional norms and raising questions about ethics law violations. He relished the fact that no one could do anything to stop him,

“No one could do anything to stop him.” No one has stopped Trump from directing taxpayer dollars to his personal businesses.

Trump has a lot to hide, both as president and as a businessman. The price of his political and economic survival has been the destruction of oversight by Congress and the discrediting of honest reporting by responsible media

No one has stopped him from using government resources for partisan purposes. No one has stopped him from pressuring and cajoling foreign governments to help his reelection campaign.

No one has stopped him from using his power over the Postal Service to discourage voting that he thinks will hurt him.

The Hatch Act forbids most uses of government resources for partisan purposes. By long-standing courtesy, however, enforcement of that law against senior presidential appointees is left to the president. It’s just assumed that the president will want to comply. But what if he does not? The independent federal agency tasked with enforcing the Hatch Act, the Office of Special Counsel, has found nine senior Trump aides in violation of the law, and has recommended that Trump request their resignation. He has ignored that recommendation.

Abuse of the Pardon PowerOn July 10, 2020, Trump commuted the sentence of his longtime associate Roger Stone. As Stone’s own communications showed, he had acted as an intermediary between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks in 2016. Had Stone cooperated with federal investigators, the revelations might have been dangerous to Trump. Instead, Stone lied to Congress and threatened other witnesses.Just as Stone was supposed to go to prison, Trump commuted his sentence. Commutation was more useful to the cover-up than an outright pardon. A commuted person retains his Fifth Amendment right not to testify; a pardoned person loses that right.

The Justice Department would be debauched ever more radically, becoming Trump’s own law firm and spending taxpayer dollars to defend him against the consequences of his personal wrongdoing. The hyper-politicization of the Justice and Homeland Security Departments would spread to other agencies.

Directing Public Funds to Himself and His CompaniesIn the 230-year history of the United States, no president before Trump had ever tried to direct public dollars to his own companies—so no Congress had ever bothered to specifically outlaw such activity.

Trump’s superpower is his absolute shamelessness. He steals in plain view. He accepts bribes in a hotel located smack in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue. His supporters do not object. His party in Congress is acquiescent. This level of corruption in American life is unprecedented.

A willingness to line the Trump family’s pockets has become a mark of obeisance and identity, like wearing cowboy boots during the George W.  Bush administration

The result of this almost-universal Republican complicity in Trump’s personal corruption has been the neutering of Congress’s ability to act when corruption is disclosed.

Republicans in the House cheerfully support Trump when he defies subpoenas from Democratic chairs, setting a precedent that probably will someday be used against them.

“No one could do anything to stop him.” In his first term, Trump purged the inspectors general from Cabinet departments and punished whistleblowers. In a second Trump term, the administration would operate ever more opaquely to cover up corruption and breaches in national security.

In a second Trump term, radical gerrymandering and ever more extreme voter suppression by Republican governors would become the party’s only path to survival in a country where a majority of the electorate strongly opposes Trump and his party. The GOP would complete its transformation into an avowedly antidemocratic party.

Inciting Political ViolenceTrump has used violence as a political resource since he first declared his candidacy, in the summer of 2015. But as his reelection prospects have dimmed in 2020, political violence has become central to Trump’s message. He wants more of it

“The more chaos and anarchy and vandalism and violence reigns, the better it is for the very clear choice on who’s best on public safety and law and order,” Trump’s adviser Kellyanne Conway said on Fox & Friends on August 27. Two nights later, a 600-vehicle caravan of Trump supporters headed into downtown Portland, Oregon, firing paintball guns and pepper spray, driving toward a confrontation during which one of them was shot dead.

The people best positioned to regulate the level of political violence in the country are local police, whom Trump has again and again urged to do their work in ways that support him, no matter how “tough” that requires them to be. The police are represented by unions often aligned with the Trump campaign

“I can tell you,” Trump said in a March 2019 interview with Breitbart News, “I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump—I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough—until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.”

Trump’s appeal is founded on a racial consciousness and a racial resentment that have stimulated white racist terrorism in the United States and the world, from the New Zealand mosque slaughter (whose perpetrator invoked Trump) to the Pittsburgh synagogue murders to mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Gilroy, California. In recent weeks, political violence has caused those deaths in Kenosha and Portland

It’s a trick of authoritarian populists like Trump to proclaim themselves leaders of “the people,” even as large majorities of the electorate reject them. The authoritarian populist defines “the people” to exclude anyone who thinks differently. Only his followers count as legitimate citizens.

Legend has it that in the 1870s, “Boss” William Tweed, the famously corrupt New York City politician, taunted his critics by saying, “What are you going to do about it?”* Trump’s relentless defiance of law and decency does the same. Congress has done nothing. So it’s up to voters.

On Sunday, Trump noted indignantly on Twitter that China had never asked U.S. permission to devalue its currency, tax U.S. imports, and construct military installations in the South China Sea. In other words, it’s getting harder for Chinese leaders to minimize Trump’s provocations as inadvertent breaches of etiquette.

Shen’s anger and ambivalence about Trump’s call speak to broader anxiety in China right now about what to make of the U.S. president-elect and the trajectory of relations between the two countries. When I asked Shen whether he was concerned about a Trump presidency destabilizing international affairs, he told me disorder was already upon us. When I asked him whether he thought America, under Trump, would remain the most powerful nation on the planet, he answered without hesitation: “No.