"Real Clear Politics"

October 31, 2021

Senate Budget Committee Bernie Sanders weighed in on the new slimmed-down "Build Back Better" budget bill during an interview Sunday on CNN's "State of the Union."

"I spent all of yesterday on the telephone," Sanders said. "We are paying the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs. The pharmaceutical industry has spent hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars to make certain that Americans pay ten times more for some drugs and the Canadians and the Mexicans, so that fight continues."

"It's a very good bill, but I can tell you we're going to work tomorrow to strengthen that bill. It is outrageous that we continue to pay the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs," Sander said. "And that one out of four Americans can not afford the prescriptions their doctor writes."

This is not easy stuff. But what we are trying to do is put together the most consequential piece of legislation in the modern history of this country, which will transform the role of government in protecting the needs of working families."

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2021/10/31/bernie_sanders_build_back_better_budget_still_being_worked_on.html

Oct 29, 2021 | CYBERSCOOP

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has begun working to map out the U.S. critical infrastructure that, if hacked, could result in serious consequences for national security and economic interests, CISA Director Jen Easterly said Friday.

Labeling such infrastructure is the subject of a proposal of the Cyberspace Solarium Commission, a congressional committee, which recommended identifying “systemically important critical infrastructure,” or SICI. Lawmakers have introduced SICI legislation in recent months, but Easterly said her Department of Homeland Security agency is proceeding ahead with or without a bill.

“Notwithstanding whether this ends up in legislation or not, and I certainly hope it does, we are already thinking through the model,” she said at an event hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “We’re in a state now where a critical infrastructure is much more vulnerable than it should be. And frankly, that’s what I worry about most every day.”

CISA is dubbing the effort, rather than SICI, “primary systemically important entities.” The criteria will be based on a preexisting method the agency has used to examine critical infrastructure, and how risk is intertwined.

“We’re prototyping a variety of different approaches in our National Risk Management Center, ” Easterly said, “to try and start identifying those entities that are in fact systemically important, and we’re doing it based on economic centrality, network centrality and logical dominance in the national critical functions.”

There are limits to what CISA can do on its own, however. While the agency might be able to begin categorizing infrastructure without Congress, legislation would need to address another facet of the Solarium proposal: imposing a mix of federal “benefits and burdens” for companies that receive the label, such as meeting required baseline security standards or receiving liability protections.

New York Rep. John Katko, the top Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee, has proposed one such bill, which excludes burdens for any critical infrastructure owners in favor of starting the labeling and prioritizing CISA services for owners and operators.

House Homeland Security Committee Democrats have signaled some support for Katko’s SICI legislation, although Katko lamented that panel leadership left it off a recent markup session.

“I think that what John is doing through his legislation really distills us to the elements that we must, must, must focus on in order to build out a robust protocol to address what we know are the constant bombardment of our critical infrastructure,” Rep. Yvette Clarke, D-N.Y., who chairs the panel’s cybersecurity subcommittee, said in October.

CISA’s ideal budget

Easterly agreed with Katko’s assertion that CISA needs a bigger budget. The agency sits at $2 billion now, although some policymakers are pushing for increases. Katko said CISA needs to be a $5 billion agency.

“Maybe it’s a $5 billion agency,” Easterly said. “As we are a very young agency and as we are transforming, we are making sure that we are putting all the processes in place so that we can absorb that funding and we can spend it responsibly and effectively.”

In particular, CISA is looking to spend money to hire key personnel, such as its corps of state cybersecurity coordinators, cybersecurity advisers for the private sector and specialists in vulnerability management, threat hunting and incident response.

“We are in the midst of doing a force structure assessment, sort of a ‘troops to task,'” Easterly said.

https://www.cyberscoop.com/sici-easterly-katko-psies-csis-cisa/

The Michigan State Police launched a criminal investigation this week after a piece of election equipment went missing.

The inquiry comes after a local official—who has publicly questioned the validity and security of the 2020 election—had refused to allow a vendor to run maintenance on the machine. Adams Township Clerk Stephanie Scott had been stripped of her election administration authority on Monday for failing to confirm that she would follow state law in certifying that public accuracy testing had been completed.

Scott had allegedly removed a tablet that was part of a voting machine, though authorities said they had recovered the device in question.

A spokesperson for the Michigan State Police told CyberScoop Friday that the agency executed a search warrant in the rural community as part of an investigation requested by the Secretary of State, but declined to offer any additional information.

Late Friday, a spokesperson for the Secretary of State announced that the missing equipment was recovered at the township call, and that the “investigation to determine if it was tampered with is ongoing. In the interim, the Secretary will continue fighting to hold accountable anyone who threatens the integrity or security of Michigan elections.” Scott did not respond to a request for comment.

This is the second example in recent months of election officials taking extreme measures with respect to voting equipment as part of what some worry is the growing insider threat of rogue election officials. In May, a Colorado clerk allowed an unauthorized employee to access and make a digital copy of the hard drive for one of her county’s voting machines. That data was eventually passed to conspiracy theorist Ron Watkins, a key figure behind the far-right QAnon movement.

Scott, a Republican with a history of posting QAnon-related messaging and questioning the legitimacy of the 2020 election, told Bridge Michigan that she didn’t trust the Hart Intercivic Inc. voting machine and wanted to preserve any old data on it. Michigan officials of both parties have repeatedly asserted the state’s elections are safe, pointing to more than 250 individual audits and reviews since the 2020 elections. In June, a Republican-led investigation found no proof of systemic fraud, and recommended that the state attorney general investigate and criminally charge those seeking to profit off of false information about the election.

“The county clerk’s office and now Secretary of State are demanding I drop off my machine for unfettered access, and God only knows what to it,” Scott told Bridge Michigan.

Marney Kast, the Republican county clerk the state put in charge of running the local election, told the news outlet that her office tried to get the machine, but that it was unable to locate it. Kast said county officials were able to obtain a tabulator case, only to unlock the device to find the “tablet” missing.

Scott is one of more than 1,500 local clerks that administer elections in Michigan’s decentralized election system. Former President Trump received 76% of the vote in Adams Township.

The state has been at the center of rampant disinformation related to the 2020 election after President Joe Biden carried the perennial battleground by more than 154,000 votes over Trump.

A human-caused reporting error in Antrim County in the northern part of the state has been at the center of claims from Trump supporters that election equipment was rigged to swing the election to Biden as part of a sprawling international plot to hack voting systems, even after a state-commissioned report by one of the nation’s top election security experts debunked the claims.

https://www.cyberscoop.com/michigan-police-execute-warrant-looking-for-missing-election-equipment/?category_news=threats