Fate of America depends on the roll of the dice, for Democrats

https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2020/07/28/election-war-games-trump-scenario

On members of the Transition Integrity Project

Rosa Brooks

Michael Steele

John Podesta

Ret. Col. Lawrence Wilkerson

Governor Jennifer Granholm

Donna Brazile

Republican political consultants

former Republican members of Congress, some of whose names are not yet out there.

Bill Kristol

people who had worked for big tech companies

Rosa Brooks: "We used a form of gaming called the Matrix game

https://nypost.com/2020/09/03/man-accused-of-threatening-to-blow-up-portland-police-station/

A 36-year-old Seattle man threatened to blow up a Portland police station with an “undetectable” bomb unless police stood down from Black Lives Matter protests in the Oregon city, the US Attorney’s Office announced Thursday.

Kyle Robert Tornow was arrested Wednesday and accused of using the Portland Police TrackIT communication system to warn cops on July 24 that there was a bomb at the stationhouse, and if he were busted “others will take my place and immediately detonate the bomb,” the US Attorney’s Office in Washington state said in a release.

“I am going to bomb a police precinct in Portland OR,” the threat said, according to a federal complaint filed Wednesday. “The bomb is already in place and has been packaged in a way that prevents detection from canine officers. Unless your officers disengage your war with the citizens of Portland I will blow up this precinct.”

“You are weak,” it said. “We are strong, many and fluid in nature… This is a felony threat. Please take this seriously to avoid death.”

There is no indication that a bomb had actually been planted.

The FBI tracked the email address used in the threat, dark56korbit@yahoo.com, and traced it to Tornow, prosecutors said.

He is charged with making a threat to damage or destroy a building, and faces up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine if convicted.

Tornow has prior arrests for car theft, harassment and drug offenses, the federal complaint said.

https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdwa/press-release/file/1312411/download

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/sep/3/matt-gaetz-says-donald-trump-should-pardon-edward-/

Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida become the latest Republican congressman Thursday to recommend President Trump pardon former U.S. intelligence contractor and leaker Edward J. Snowden.

Mr. Gaetz, one of Mr. Trump’s staunchest defenders in Congress, suggested on Twitter the president intervene and end the government’s case against the wanted secret-spiller.

“Edward @Snowden deserves a pardon from President @realDonaldTrump,” Mr. Gaetz said on Twitter in a post tagging each of their accounts on the social media service.

Mr. Snowden quickly shared the congressman’s tweet with his own 4.3 million Twitter followers, while neither Mr. Trump nor the White House offered any immediate public reaction.

The Department of Justice has charged Mr. Snowden, 37, with violations of the U.S. Espionage Act and criminal theft in connection with leaking classified material to the press.

polling/focus groups must be killing Dems on these

https://www.lawfareblog.com/thirty-six-hours-cheapfakes

In the last days of August, with the clock ticking down until Election Day, senior Republican officials pulled off a disinformation hat trick: Over the course of two short days, figures affiliated with the GOP published three different deceptively edited videos on social media.

First, on the morning of Aug. 30, House Minority Whip Rep. Steve Scalise tweeted out a video of a conversation between Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and disabled activist Ady Barkan, manipulating Barkan’s words in the service of the false claim that Biden had agreed to defund the police.

That same day, White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Communications Dan Scavino shared a tweet with a deceptively edited clip that appeared to show Biden falling asleep during a TV interview.

The final offering came the next day from the Trump campaign account @TrumpWarRoom, which posted a three-second video that purported to show Biden saying, “You won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America.”

These were not deepfakes—hyperrealistic, synthetic audio or video that shows real people doing or saying things they never did or said. They were, rather, what are sometimes called “cheapfakes” or “shallowfakes”—synthetic media that doesn’t require any sophisticated technology to cobble together and is sometimes less convincing, and more easily detectable by experts, as a result. Cheapfakes aren’t really a new problem. In fact, the trio of fakes weren’t even the first cheapfakes the country has seen amplified by those close to President Trump: Back in the spring of 2019, Trump and his friend and lawyer Rudy Giuliani tweeted a video of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi that had been edited to make it appear that Pelosi was slurring her words.