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Mr. Stamos joined Facebook from Yahoo in June 2015. He and other Facebook executives, such as Ms. Sandberg, disagreed early on over how proactive the social network should be in policing its own platform, said the people briefed on the matter.

Mr. Stamos first put together a group of engineers to scour Facebook for Russian activity in June 2016, the month the Democratic National Committee announced it had been attacked by Russian hackers, the current and former employees said.

By November 2016, the team had uncovered evidence that Russian operatives had aggressively pushed DNC leaks and propaganda on Facebook. That same month, Mr. Zuckerberg publicly dismissed the notion that fake news influenced the 2016 election, calling it a “pretty crazy idea

In the ensuing months, Facebook’s security team found more Russian disinformation and propaganda on its site, according to the current and former employees. By the spring of 2017, deciding how much Russian interference to disclose publicly became a major source of contention within the company.

Mr. Stamos pushed to disclose as much as possible, while others including Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s vice president of communications and policy, recommended not naming Russia without more ironclad evidence, said the current and former employees.

A detailed memorandum Mr. Stamos wrote in early 2017 describing Russian interference was scrubbed for mentions of Russia and winnowed into a blog post last April that outlined, in hypothetical terms, how Facebook could be manipulated by a foreign adversary, they said. Russia was only referenced in a vague footnote. That footnote acknowledged that Facebook’s findings did not contradict a declassified January 2017 report in which the director of national intelligence concluded Russia had sought to undermine United States election, and Hillary Clinton in particular.

By last September, after Mr. Stamos’s investigation had revealed further Russian interference, Facebook was forced to reverse course. That month, the company disclosed that beginning in June 2015, Russians had paid Facebook $100,000 to run roughly 3,000 divisive ads to show the American electorate.

The public reaction caused some at Facebook to recoil at revealing more, said the current and former employees. Since the 2016 election, Facebook has paid unusual attention to the reputations of Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg, conducting polls to track how they are viewed by the public, said Tavis McGinn, who was recruited to the company last April and headed the executive reputation efforts through September 2017.

Mr. McGinn, who now heads Honest Data, which has done polling about Facebook’s reputation in different countries, said Facebook is “caught in a Catch-22.”

“Facebook cares so much about its image that the executives don’t want to come out and tell the whole truth when things go wrong,” he said. “But if they don’t, it damages their image.”

Mr. McGinn said he left Facebook after becoming disillusioned with the company’s conduct.

By December 2017, Mr. Stamos, who reports to Facebook’s general counsel, proposed that he report directly to higher-ups. Facebook executives rejected that proposal and instead reassigned Mr. Stamos’s team, splitting the security team between its product team, overseen by Guy Rosen, and infrastructure team, overseen by Pedro Canahuati, according to current and former employees.

“I told them, ‘Your business is based on trust, and you’re losing trust,’” said Mr. McNamee, a founder of the Center for Humane Technology. “They were treating it as a P.R. problem, when it’s a business problem. I couldn’t believe these guys I once knew so well had gotten so far off track.”

They do this by sucking up and analyzing your data, using it to predict what will cause you to react most strongly, and then giving you more of that.

Algorithms that maximize attention give an advantage to negative messages. People tend to react more to inputs that land low on the brainstem. Fear and anger produce a lot more engagement and sharing than joy

The result is that the algorithms favor sensational content over substance.

for mass media, this was constrained by one-size-fits-all content and by the limitations of delivery platforms. Not so for internet platforms on smartphones. They have created billions of individual channels, each of which can be pushed further into negativity and extremism without the risk of alienating other audience members

On Facebook, it’s your news feed, while on Google it’s your individually customized search results. The result is that everyone sees a different version of the internet tailored to create the illusion that everyone else agrees with them.

It took Brexit for me to begin to see the danger of this dynamic. I’m no expert on British politics, but it seemed likely that Facebook might have had a big impact on the vote because one side’s message was perfect for the algorithms and the other’s wasn’t. The “Leave” campaign made an absurd promise—there would be savings from leaving the European Union that would fund a big improvement in the National Health System—while also exploiting xenophobia by casting Brexit as the best way to protect English culture and jobs from immigrants. It was too-good-to-be-true nonsense mixed with fearmongering.

Facebook was a much cheaper and more effective platform for Leave in terms of cost per user reached. And filter bubbles would ensure that people on the Leave side would rarely have their questionable beliefs challenged. Facebook’s model may have had the power to reshape an entire continent.

Tristan Harris, formerly the design ethicist at Google. Tristan had just appeared on 60 Minutes to discuss the public health threat from social networks like Facebook. An expert in persuasive technology, he described the techniques that tech platforms use to create addiction and the ways they exploit that addiction to increase profits. He called it “brain hacking.”

The most important tool used by Facebook and Google to hold user attention is filter bubbles. The use of algorithms to give consumers “what they want” leads to an unending stream of posts that confirm each user’s existing beliefs

Continuous reinforcement of existing beliefs tends to entrench those beliefs more deeply, while also making them more extreme and resistant to contrary facts

No one stopped them from siphoning off the profits of content creators. No one stopped them from gathering data on every aspect of every user’s internet life. No one stopped them from amassing market share not seen since the days of Standard Oil.

Facebook takes the concept one step further with its “groups” feature, which encourages like-minded users to congregate around shared interests or beliefs. While this ostensibly provides a benefit to users, the larger benefit goes to advertisers, who can target audiences even more effectively.

We theorized that the Russians had identified a set of users susceptible to its message, used Facebook’s advertising tools to identify users with similar profiles, and used ads to persuade those people to join groups dedicated to controversial issues. Facebook’s algorithms would have favored Trump’s crude message and the anti-Clinton conspiracy theories that thrilled his supporters, with the likely consequence that Trump and his backers paid less than Clinton for Facebook advertising per person reached.

The ads were less important, though, than what came next: once users were in groups, the Russians could have used fake American troll accounts and computerized “bots” to share incendiary messages and organize events.

Trolls and bots impersonating Americans would have created the illusion of greater support for radical ideas than actually existed.

Real users “like” posts shared by trolls and bots and share them on their own news feeds, so that small investments in advertising and memes posted to Facebook groups would reach tens of millions of people.

A similar strategy prevailed on other platforms, including Twitter. Both techniques, bots and trolls, take time and money to develop—but the payoff would have been huge.

2016 was just the beginning. Without immediate and aggressive action from Washington, bad actors of all kinds would be able to use Facebook and other platforms to manipulate the American electorate in future elections.

Renee DiResta, an expert in how conspiracy theories spread on the internet. Renee described how bad actors plant a rumor on sites like 4chan and Reddit, leverage the disenchanted people on those sites to create buzz, build phony news sites with “press” versions of the rumor, push the story onto Twitter to attract the real media, then blow up the story for the masses on Facebook.

It was sophisticated hacker technique, but not expensive. We hypothesized that the Russians were able to manipulate tens of millions of American voters for a sum less than it would take to buy an F-35 fighter jet.

Algorithms can be beautiful in mathematical terms, but they are only as good as the people who create them. In the case of Facebook and Google, the algorithms have flaws that are increasingly obvious and dangerous.

Thanks to the U.S. government’s laissez-faire approach to regulation, the internet platforms were able to pursue business strategies that would not have been allowed in prior decades. No one stopped them from using free products to centralize the internet and then replace its core functions.

To the contrary: the platforms help people self-segregate into like-minded filter bubbles, reducing the risk of exposure to challenging ideas.

No one stopped them from running massive social and psychological experiments on their users. No one demanded that they police their platforms. It has been a sweet deal.

Facebook and Google are now so large that traditional tools of regulation may no longer be effective.

The largest antitrust fine in EU history bounced off Google like a spitball off a battleship.

It reads like the plot of a sci-fi novel: a technology celebrated for bringing people together is exploited by a hostile power to drive people apart, undermine democracy, and create misery. This is precisely what happened in the United States during the 2016 election.

We had constructed a modern Maginot Line—half the world’s defense spending and cyber-hardened financial centers, all built to ward off attacks from abroad—never imagining that an enemy could infect the minds of our citizens through inventions of our own making, at minimal cost

Not only was the attack an overwhelming success, but it was also a persistent one, as the political party that benefited refuses to acknowledge reality. The attacks continue every day, posing an existential threat to our democratic processes and independence.

Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other platforms were manipulated by the Russians to shift outcomes in Brexit and the U.S. presidential election, and unless major changes are made, they will be manipulated again. Next time, there is no telling who the manipulators will be.

Unfortunately, there is no regulatory silver bullet. The scope of the problem requires a multi-pronged approach.

Polls suggest that about a third of Americans believe that Russian interference is fake news, despite unanimous agreement to the contrary by the country’s intelligence agencies. Helping those people accept the truth is a priority. I recommend that Facebook, Google, Twitter, and others be required to contact each person touched by Russian content with a personal message that says, “You, and we, were manipulated by the Russians. This really happened, and here is the evidence.” The message would include every Russian message the user received.

This idea, which originated with my colleague Tristan Harris, is based on experience with cults. When you want to deprogram a cult member, it is really important that the call to action come from another member of the cult, ideally the leader.

decentralization had a cost: no one had an incentive to make internet tools easy to use. Frustrated by those tools, users embraced easy-to-use alternatives from Facebook and Google. This allowed the platforms to centralize the internet, inserting themselves between users and content, effectively imposing a tax on both sides. This is a great business model for Facebook and Google—and convenient in the short term for customers—but we are drowning in evidence that there are costs that society may not be able to afford.

Second, the chief executive officers of Facebook, Google, Twitter, and others—not just their lawyers—must testify before congressional committees in open session

This is important not just for the public, but also for another crucial constituency: the employees who keep the tech giants running. While many of the folks who run Silicon Valley are extreme libertarians, the people who work there tend to be idealists. They want to believe what they’re doing is good. Forcing tech CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg to justify the unjustifiable, in public—without the shield of spokespeople or PR spin—would go a long way to puncturing their carefully preserved cults of personality in the eyes of their employees.

We also need regulatory fixes. Here are a few ideas.

First, it’s essential to ban digital bots that impersonate humans. They distort the “public square” in a way that was never possible in history, no matter how many anonymous leaflets you printed.

At a minimum, the law could require explicit labeling of all bots, the ability for users to block them, and liability on the part of platform vendors for the harm bots cause.

Second, the platforms should not be allowed to make any acquisitions until they have addressed the damage caused to date, taken steps to prevent harm in the future, and demonstrated that such acquisitions will not result in diminished competition.

An underappreciated aspect of the platforms’ growth is their pattern of gobbling up smaller firms—in Facebook’s case, that includes Instagram and WhatsApp; in Google’s, it includes YouTube, Google Maps, AdSense, and many others—and using them to extend their monopoly power.

This is important, because the internet has lost something very valuable. The early internet was designed to be decentralized. It treated all content and all content owners equally. That equality had value in society, as it kept the playing field level and encouraged new entrants.

There’s no doubt that the platforms have the technological capacity to reach out to every affected person. No matter the cost, platform companies must absorb it as the price for their carelessness in allowing the manipulation.

Third, the platforms must be transparent about who is behind political and issues-based communication.

Transparency with respect to those who sponsor political advertising of all kinds is a step toward rebuilding trust in our political institutions.

Fourth, the platforms must be more transparent about their algorithms. Users deserve to know why they see what they see in their news feeds and search results. If Facebook and Google had to be up-front about the reason you’re seeing conspiracy theories—namely, that it’s good for business—they would be far less likely to stick to that tactic

Allowing third parties to audit the algorithms would go even further toward maintaining transparency. Facebook and Google make millions of editorial choices every hour and must accept responsibility for the consequences of those choices. Consumers should also be able to see what attributes are causing advertisers to target them.

Fifth, the platforms should be required to have a more equitable contractual relationship with users. Facebook, Google, and others have asserted unprecedented rights with respect to end-user license agreements (EULAs), the contracts that specify the relationship between platform and user.

All software platforms should be required to offer a legitimate opt-out, one that enables users to stick with the prior version if they do not like the new EULA.

“Forking” platforms between old and new versions would have several benefits: increased consumer choice, greater transparency on the EULA, and more care in the rollout of new functionality, among others. It would limit the risk that platforms would run massive social experiments on millions—or billions—of users without appropriate prior notification. Maintaining more than one version of their services would be expensive for Facebook, Google, and the rest, but in software that has always been one of the costs of success. Why should this generation get a pass?

Sixth, we need a limit on the commercial exploitation of consumer data by internet platforms. Customers understand that their “free” use of platforms like Facebook and Google gives the platforms license to exploit personal data. The problem is that platforms are using that data in ways consumers do not understand, and might not accept if they did.

Not only do the platforms use your data on their own sites, but they also lease it to third parties to use all over the internet. And they will use that data forever, unless someone tells them to stop.

There should be a statute of limitations on the use of consumer data by a platform and its customers. Perhaps that limit should be ninety days, perhaps a year. But at some point, users must have the right to renegotiate the terms of how their data is used.

Seventh, consumers, not the platforms, should own their own data. In the case of Facebook, this includes posts, friends, and events—in short, the entire social graph. Users created this data, so they should have the right to export it to other social networks.

It would be analogous to the regulation of the AT&T monopoly’s long-distance business, which led to lower prices and better service for consumers.

Eighth, and finally, we should consider that the time has come to revive the country’s traditional approach to monopoly. Since the Reagan era, antitrust law has operated under the principle that monopoly is not a problem so long as it doesn’t result in higher prices for consumers.

Under that framework, Facebook and Google have been allowed to dominate several industries—not just search and social media but also email, video, photos, and digital ad sales, among others—increasing their monopolies by buying potential rivals like YouTube and Instagram.

While superficially appealing, this approach ignores costs that don’t show up in a price tag. Addiction to Facebook, YouTube, and other platforms has a cost. Election manipulation has a cost. Reduced innovation and shrinkage of the entrepreneurial economy has a cost. All of these costs are evident today. We can quantify them well enough to appreciate that the costs to consumers of concentration on the internet are unacceptably high.

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.

armchair epidemiology, which Slate described as “convincing but flawed epidemiological analyses.”

The prime example is a Medium blog post titled “Covid-19 — Evidence Over Hysteria” by Aaron Ginn, a Silicon Valley product manager and “growth hacker” who argued against the severity of the virus and condemned the mainstream media for hyping it.

Conservative pundits, who’d spent weeks downplaying the seriousness of the virus, were drawn to Mr. Ginn’s conclusion that “shuttering the local economy is a distraction and arbitrary with limited accretive gain outside of greatly annoying millions and bankrupting hundreds of businesses.”

The Fox News political analyst Brit Hume tweeted the post, and then so did the anchors Bret Baier and Laura Ingraham. Within hours, the blog post was amplified across conservative media.

“I am seeing this playbook more and more,” Dr. Bergstrom said. “Secondhand data showing a crisis narrative that feels just a bit too well crafted. Mixing the truth with the plausible and the plausible with that which seems plausibly true in a week.”

Epidemiologists disagreed, pointing to some of Mr. Ginn’s assumptions as “unsubstantiated” and ignorant of “first-chapter-of-the-epidemiology-textbook stuff.”

After a 31-tweet thread from the infectious-disease expert Carl Bergstrom debunking Mr. Ginn’s data as cherry-picked, Medium took the post down, prompting a backlash in conservative spheres. More than two million people had already viewed it.

Mr. Ginn’s post, which seems informed by his reflexive skepticism of the mainstream media, filled two needs for readers: It offered a scientific-seeming explanation that real scientists would not provide. And it provided a political foil, the media.

This, according to Dr. Bergstrom, is what makes armchair epidemiology so harmful. Posts like Mr. Ginn’s “deplete the critical resource you need to manage the pandemic, which is trust,

“When people are getting conflicting messages, it makes it very hard for state and local authorities to generate the political will to take strong actions downstream.”

At first glance, the piece looked quite convincing. Mr. Ginn drew heavily from charts from the C.D.C., Johns Hopkins and the Financial Times. “You don’t need a special degree to understand what the data says and doesn’t say,” he claimed.

Dr. Bergstrom argues that the advances in available data make it easier than ever for junk-science peddlers to appear legitimate.

“Statistical analysis is a black box to most of us,” Dr. Bergstrom said. “And it’s like, ‘I can’t challenge a multilinear statistical regression because I don’t know what that is,’

“And so a form of authority gets imposed on a reader and we tend not to challenge data the way we’ve learned to challenge words.”

Mr. Evans is concerned that ultimately important nuance will be lost and pro-Trump pundits will use the news to exclusively scapegoat China and divert blame away from domestic failings. “What’s scary is how smart the false stuff is,” he said.

Covid-19 and the immediate threat to public health means that networks like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have been unusually decisive about taking down misinformation. “In a case of a pandemic like this, when we are seeing posts that are urging people not to get treatment,” Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, said recently, “that’s a completely different class of content versus the back-and-forth of what candidates may say about each other.”

The Trump administration and right-wing media watchdogs will weaponize changing facts about the virus, pointing to them as proof of a deep state bent on damaging the president or a media apparatus trying to swing an election

Others will try to pin the blame for the pandemic solely on the Trump administration

What we don’t know about Covid-19 will degenerate into ever more intricate conspiracies — some almost believable, some outrageous but all dangerous.

“We’re in a stream of ever-evolving data, and it’s being shaped around cognitive biases, partisanship and preferences embedded in our cultural identities,”

I called Mr. Pomerantsev because the information vacuum around the virus made me think of the title of his earlier book on Russia — “Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible.

In the absence of new, vetted information, reckless speculation takes its place, muddling our conception of the truth.

in crisis situations — especially early on — our desire for information exceeds our ability to accurately deliver it. Add to this the complexities of epidemiology: exponential growth; statistical modeling; and the slow, methodical nature of responsible science.

Together, they create the ideal conditions for distrust, bad-faith interpretations and political manipulation, the contours of which we’re only beginning to see.

“The really big question that haunts me is, ‘When do we return to reality?’” Mr. Pomerantsev mused over the phone from his own quarantine. “Or is it that in this partisan age absolutely everything is chopped, cut and edited to fit a different view? I’m waiting for society to finally hit up against a shared reality, like diving into the bottom of swimming pool. Instead we just go deeper.”

On Tuesday, Australia's Minister for Agriculture, Drought and Emergency Management David Littleproud tweeted about the JBS cyberattack, saying the company is working closely with law enforcement agencies and in Australia and overseas to get operations back up and running and "to bring those responsible to account."

Later in May, Microsoft said it believed the hackers responsible for last year's SolarWinds attack targeted 3,000 email accounts at various organizations — most of which were in the United States.

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.

Steve Meyer, an economist with commodity firm Kerns and Associates, agreed that a one or two day disruption could cause wholesale meat prices to jump. But if the problem is resolved within a few days, he said, restaurants and grocery stores are unlikely to pass those costs onto consumers.

"Then you're probably going to have some buyers, whoever depends on JBS for their supplies, that probably could be short product," he said. In that case, for consumers, it would depend on where their local grocery store sources its meat. "If they buy it from JBS then you might see some shortages. If they don't buy it from JBS, you might not see anything at all."

That’s why the story was so appealing to Fox hosts like Sean Hannity and Lou Dobbs, who kept hyping it for days after it collapsed under the faintest scrutiny. There has never been a shred of credible evidence that Seth Rich had contact with WikiLeaks, and a series of bipartisan investigations found that the D.N.C. had been breached by Russian hackers.

It was like “throwing gasoline on a small fire,” Mr. Rich’s brother recalled in a telephone interview from his home in Denver. “Fox blew it out of everyone’s little echo chamber and put it into the mainstream.”

The story collapsed immediately, and in spectacular fashion. The former Washington, D.C., police detective whom Fox used as its on-the-record source, Rod Wheeler, repudiated his own quotes claiming ties between Mr. Rich and WikiLeaks and a cover-up, and said in a deposition this fall that the Fox News article had been “prewritten before I even got involved.”

“He never got back to me to say, sorry for ruining your family’s life and pushing something there’s no basis to,” he said. “Apparently, ‘sorry’ is a hard five-letter word for him.”

Getting through modern life seems to require adopting a corrosive view of society that makes a hash of our fundamental ideas about the value of cooperation and trust among our fellow humans

We’re bringing on a death-spiral of distrust

Our information system has slipped its moorings, and as a result, lying and scheming and fraud has simply become too effective a life strategy. As I argued in March, when the celebrity college admissions scandal broke, we’re seeing the “uberization” of corruption — bending the rules is becoming routine and pervasive, a push-button cheat code for modern life.

The grift wasn’t limited to politics. The tech industry welcomed hucksters with open arms. Look at WeWork, Uber and Theranos — once high-flying start-ups that promised to change the world in big ways and small, each unmasked for peddling false prospects, unreal tech or hiding systemic corruption and abuse

Facebook and other social media services were not just a haven of state-sponsored disinformation; with dodgy, easily gamed stats, social media increasingly came to provide a false view of the world.

Why are we being overrun by scams? Society’s signals for judging reputation and trustworthiness haven’t caught up with the changing tech.

rather than the establishment foiling Trump, his slippery style and overwhelming blizzard of lies would so fully alter political and media culture that by the end of the decade, members of the G.O.P. would be embracing and echoing his conspiracy theories as a way to forestall his removal from office.

It’s not a big leap from “Trust no one” to “swindle everyone.”

The Chinese intelligence service is also involved in the inquiry, Mr. Schmitt said.

China is one of Germany’s most important trading partners, and the two countries collaborate on international issues like climate change and hold regular government-level discussions.But the relationship has come under scrutiny since the Chinese acquired several German technology companies in 2016. The next year, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency accused China of using LinkedIn and other social media sites to infiltrate the government in Berlin, a charge that Beijing denied.A year ago, Poland arrested two people, including a Chinese employee of Huawei, and charged them with spying for Beijing.

Russia was believed to be behind it.

The so-called supply-chain attack means hackers effectively have access to all of SolarWinds's customers.

It turns out FireEye was just a small part of a much larger and more serious hack attack.

Invoking the 25th Amendment at the direction of the vice president and the cabinet, or impeaching Trump for a second time and holding a trial in the Senate.

The first of these seems unlikely to happen. It might require a broader deal -- if he were willing, Vice President Mike Pence could convince both Trump and the cabinet to remove the President in return for a full pardon from President Pence. It would be a risky move for Pence's future given the negative reception former President Gerald Ford received for pardoning Richard Nixon.

The House is likely to move on impeachment this week. The timing of sending the articles over to the Senate is where this gets interesting. The House can pass articles of impeachment quickly, but it is unlikely the Senate could pull off a trial before the President's term ended.

The bottom line is, while there are multiple options, it is still possible the President can run out the clock and once again avoid any legal responsibility for his actions. That's where the helplessness comes from for the majority of Americans. We've seen this movie before, and we don't like how it ends.

At a local club, make sure the pro knows they'll be no playing privileges. If he wants to play, he either has to own the course or join the hackers at the local public course. The PGA (who just announced the 2022 PGA Championship will not be played at Trump National Golf Club Bedminster in New Jersey) might offer him a deal -- privileges will be restored after a PGA official follows him for a year to record his real score and enter it into the handicap system.

We all buy books from the major publishers. Let them know you will no longer buy their books if they sign Trump to a book deal. Tell your local officials to stay away from Trump. No renaming of airports, highways or public buildings -- I might exclude toxic waste dumps and landfills from this list, however. If they don't listen, vote them out of office.

No awards or honors should be bestowed from your town, group or organization. No commencement speeches or honorary degrees from colleges and universities. In fact, following the example of Lehigh University, revoke a degree if it has already been awarded. If you are an author, make clear you won't work with publishers that do business with Trump.

If you work at a company, belong to an organization or trade association or an institution of higher education, let your bosses know that you won't tolerate paying Trump to come speak at events, conferences or any sort of engagement. Don't wait until he's booked, let them know in advance that he's not welcome. If you are a lecture agency and take Trump on as a client, understand that your other clients will go elsewhere for representation.

We can also pressure Congress to take further action. There is nothing in the Constitution that requires a former President be afforded the protection of the Secret Service. Also, nothing that says he deserves a million dollars a year for travel and a generous pension and healthcare plan. And of course, there should be no right to a state funeral.

Trump must be held accountable for crimes against the state.

Trump screwed up the most important job in the world -- president of the United States. Let's make sure he doesn't benefit now from the best job in the world -- former president of the United States. And for those who say this is cancel culture run amok, I say it's perfectly legal citizen justice well earned by Donald J Trump.

We have seen this already. In September, the Russian media outlet Kommersant reported that Russian hackers had stolen voter roll data from Michigan — but in fact, that data was already publicly available. A few weeks ago, Iranians sent threatening and intimidating emails to voters, masquerading as a white supremacist group.

3. Expect messiness.

4. Check before you share information

5. If you see something, say something.

6. Be patient.

7. Vote.

An American official briefed on the intelligence said it was wrong to equate the two countries. Russia, the official said, is a tornado, capable of inflicting damage on American democracy now. China is more like climate change, the official said: The threat is real and grave, but more long term.

Iran was seeking “to undermine U.S. democratic institutions, President Trump, and to divide the country”

Mr. Trump said, “The last person Russia wants to see in office is Donald Trump because nobody’s been tougher on Russia than I have.” He said that if Mr. Biden won the presidency, “China would own our country.”

“Donald Trump has publicly and repeatedly invited, emboldened and even tried to coerce foreign interference in American elections,” said Tony Blinken, a senior adviser to the former vice president.

“The director has basically put the American people on notice that Russia in particular, also China and Iran, are going to be trying to meddle in this election and undermine our democratic system,” said Mr. King, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Russia, but not China, is trying to “actively influence” the outcome of the 2020 election, said the American official briefed on the underlying intelligence.

Intelligence and other officials in recent days have been stepping up their releases of information about foreign interference efforts, and the State Department has sent texts to cellphones around the world advertising a $10 million reward for information on would-be election hackers.

In an ideal world, Mr. Biden and President Trump would jointly threaten retaliation. (In a less polarized political environment, such joint threats might even become a standard feature of presidential campaigns.) Yet President Trump has not evinced great concern about the possibility of foreign election interference. It falls to Mr. Biden to issue a threat that is clearer and more consequential than those he has issued so far.

t might also be the case that Russian and Iranian hackers are overrated or more cautious than we think and the risk of interference is small.

Dozens of election security experts on Monday released a letter saying claims of major hacks were unsubstantiated and absurd on their face.

Krebs headed the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) from its inception two years ago.He angered the White House over a website run by CISA dubbed “Rumor Control,” which debunks misinformation about the election, according to the three people familiar with the matter.

CISA Executive Director Brandon Wales is expected to take over

Wales has served in multiple positions within the DHS under the Trump administration and is not seen as a partisan figure, said a former colleague.

“Honored to serve. We did it right. Defend Today, Secure Tomorrow.”

White House officials had previously complained about CISA content that pushed back against false claims about the election, including that Democrats were behind a mass election fraud scheme. CISA officials declined to delete accurate information.

Among other things, one associate of Krebs said the White House was angry about a post rejecting a conspiracy theory that falsely claimed an intelligence agency supercomputer and program, purportedly named Hammer and Scorecard, could have flipped votes nationally. No such system exists, according to Krebs, election security experts and former U.S. officials.

“Chris Krebs should be commended for his service in protecting our elections, not fired for telling the truth.”

“His firing is very disappointing and appears to be an attempt to undermine the great work he and others at DHS/CISA have been doing.”

“The CISA and Director Krebs have worked diligently to safeguard our elections, provide vital support to state and local election officials, and inform the American people about what was true and what was not.”

Independent Senator Angus King said Trump was “firing Mr Krebs for simply doing his job.”

“Chris Krebs did a really good job — as state election officials all across the nation will tell you — and he obviously should not be fired,”

Senator Ben Sasse, who has been a Trump critic, was among the first Republicans to push back against the decision.

supply-chain attack

According to SolarWinds S.E.C. filings, the malware was on the software from March to June. The number of organizations that downloaded the corrupted update could be as many as 18,000, which includes most federal government unclassified networks and more than 425 Fortune 500 companies.

The magnitude of this ongoing attack is hard to overstate.

The Russians have had access to a considerable number of important and sensitive networks for six to nine months.

While the Russians did not have the time to gain complete control over every network they hacked, they most certainly did gain it over hundreds of them.

The logical conclusion is that we must act as if the Russian government has control of all the networks it has penetrated

The actual and perceived control of so many important networks could easily be used to undermine public and consumer trust in data, written communications and services.

hat should be done?On Dec. 13, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, a division of the Department of Homeland Security — itself a victim — issued an emergency directive ordering federal civilian agencies to remove SolarWinds software from their networks.

It also is impractical. In 2017, the federal government was ordered to remove from its networks software from a Russian company, Kaspersky Lab, that was deemed too risky. It took over a year to get it off the networks.

The remediation effort alone will be staggering

Cyber threat hunters that are stealthier than the Russians must be unleashed on these networks to look for the hidden, persistent access controls.

The National Defense Authorization Act, which each year provides the Defense Department and other agencies the authority to perform its work, is caught up in partisan wrangling. Among other important provisions, the act would authorize the Department of Homeland Security to perform network hunting in federal networks.

The response must be broader than patching networks. While all indicators point to the Russian government, the United States, and ideally its allies, must publicly and formally attribute responsibility for these hacks. If it is Russia, President Trump must make it clear to Vladimir Putin that these actions are unacceptable. The U.S. military and intelligence community must be placed on increased alert; all elements of national power must be placed on the table.

President Trump is on the verge of leaving behind a federal government, and perhaps a large number of major industries, compromised by the Russian government. He must use whatever leverage he can muster to protect the United States and severely punish the Russians.President-elect Joe Biden must begin his planning to take charge of this crisis. He has to assume that communications about this matter are being read by Russia, and assume that any government data or email could be falsified.

This finding is the latest example of how tough it is to vet products we buy online. Buggy software in off-brand smart devices is a recurring problem

digital marketplaces such as Amazon have done little to rein in offending manufacturers. Combine that with sponsored search results and opaque labeling — Amazon repeatedly called the Eken doorbells an “Amazon’s Choice: Overall Pick” — and shoppers have little recourse to figure out which devices are safe.

Smaller brands churn out smart lightbulbs and speakers to compete with bigger companies, often cutting corners on security. Big brands, meanwhile, do a better job with security but create new privacy concerns — do we really want Amazon peeking into every corner of our homes? Efforts to label consumer tech with simple security facts have languished.

Meanwhile, large online marketplaces put unvetted gadgets in front of millions of shoppers. In January alone, Amazon sold 4,200 Eken doorbells under 11 product listings, according to Consumer Reports. Whether you’re shopping for smart home tech or a simple tank top, having to navigate a sea of unfamiliar brands and dubious product reviews is now common