The Obama administration is preparing to elevate the stature of the Pentagon’s Cyber Command, signaling more emphasis on developing cyber weapons to deter attacks, punish intruders into U.S. networks and tackle adversaries such as Islamic State, current and former officials told Reuters.
Under the plan being considered at the White House, the officials said, U.S. Cyber Command would become what the military calls a "unified command" equal to combat branches of the military such as the Central and Pacific Commands.
Cyber Command would be separated from the National Security Agency, a spy agency responsible for electronic eavesdropping, the officials said. That would give Cyber Command leaders a larger voice in arguing for the use of both offensive and defensive cyber tools in future conflicts.
Both organizations are based at Fort Meade, Maryland, about 30 miles north of Washington, and led by the same officer, Navy Adm. Michael S. Rogers.
A former senior intelligence official with knowledge of the plan said it reflects the growing role that cyber operations play in modern warfare, and the different missions of the Cyber Command and the NSA. The official spoke on condition of anonymity.
A Cyber Command spokesman declined comment on the plan, and the NSA did not respond to requests for comment.
Established in 2010, Cyber Command is now subordinate to the U.S. Strategic Command, which oversees military space operations, nuclear weapons and missile defense.
U.S. officials cautioned that details of the plan, including some aspects of Cyber Command's new status, are still being debated.
It was unclear when the matter will be presented to President Barack Obama for final approval, but the former senior intelligence official said it was unlikely anyone would stand in the way.
A senior official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the administration was "constantly reviewing if we have the appropriate organizational structures in place to counter evolving threats, in cyber space or elsewhere."
"While we have no changes to this structure to announce, the relationship between NSA and Cyber Command is critical to safeguarding our nation’s security," the official said.
The Pentagon acknowledged earlier this year that it has conducted cyber attacks against Islamic State, although the details are highly classified.
"We are dropping cyberbombs. We have never done that before," Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work said in April.
The Washington Post reported last month that Pentagon leaders had been frustrated with the slow pace of Cyber Command's electronic offensive against Islamic State, militants who control parts of Iraq and Syria and have sympathizers and supporters worldwide.
In response, Rogers created Joint Task Force Ares to develop new digital weapons against Islamic State and coordinate with the Central Command, which is responsible for combat operations in the Middle East and South Asia.
The new task force has "the specific mission to accomplish cyberspace objectives in support of counter-ISIL operations," a Cyber Command statement said. Task Force Ares, it said, "comprises operations and intelligence professionals from each of the military services."
James Lewis, a cyber security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the plan that will be presented to Obama highlights how Cyber Command, reliant on the NSA in its early years, is developing its own work force and digital tools.
"It reflects the maturing of Cyber Command and its own capabilities," Lewis said.
Defense Secretary Ash Carter hinted at the higher status for Cyber Command in an April speech in Washington, in which he said the Pentagon is planning $35 billion in cyber spending over the next five years.
"Adapting to new functions will include changes in how we manage ourselves in cyberspace," Carter said.
NSA's primary mission is to intercept and decode adversaries' phone calls, emails and other communications. The agency was criticized for over-reach after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed some of its surveillance programs.
NSA's focus is gathering intelligence, officials said, often favoring the monitoring of an enemy's cyber activities. Cyber Command's mission is geared more to shutting down cyber attacks - and, if ordered, counter attacking.
The NSA director has been a senior military officer since the agency's founding in 1952. Under the plan, future directors would be civilians, an arrangement meant to underscore that NSA is not subordinate to Cyber Command.
(Reporting by Warren Strobel; Additional reporting by Idrees Ali; Editing by John Walcott and Grant McCool)
As more and more sick patients are going online and using social media to search for answers about their health, it’s raising a lot of thorny ethical questions for doctors.
“The internet and ready access to vast amounts of information are now permanent aspects of how we live our lives, including how we think about and deal with our health problems,” Dr. Chris Feudtner, director of medical ethics at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, said by email.
Social media in particular can affect how patients interact with doctors and what type of care they expect, Feudtner and colleagues write in an article about ethics in the journal Pediatrics.
“Clinicians should ask about what patients and families have read on the Internet, and then work through that information thoughtfully, as sometimes Internet information is not helpful and sometimes it is helpful,” Feudtner said. “Doing this takes time and effort, yet trust is built with time and effort.”
To explore the ethical challenges posed by patients’ virtual lives, Feudtner and examined a fictional case blending elements of several recent real-life situations.
In this hypothetical case, the parents of a 10-year-old boy hospitalized with cancer started a blog. Doctors, nurses and other hospital staff were among the 1,000 subscribers to his blog.
A year after his hospital stay ended, the boy relapsed, and his parents launched an online petition seeking access to an experimental cancer treatment that was only available through clinical trials. No trials were accepting new patients.
The petition draws 60,000 supporters in just 48 hours, and news crews descend on the hospital.
Aside from the obvious pressure this puts on one team of clinicians at one hospital to help one very sick child, this situation raises broader ethical issues about how treatment decisions should be made.
Fairness issues arise because not all families have the same access to social media or skill at using online communities to advocate for the care they want to receive, doctors argue in the article.
Hospitals and other healthcare institutions need to have policies in place to handle situations when patients’ social media posts go viral and take steps to respond proactively. Clinicians need to know they will be supported for providing appropriate care even when this clashes with what patients and families advocate for on social medial.
The case also serves as a reminder that doctors need to work with patients to keep the lines of communication open, said Dr. Robert Macauley, medical director of clinical ethics at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
“More and more often, patients are not only exploring potential treatment options on the Internet, but using web-based resources for determining diagnosis and prognosis,” Macauley, who wasn’t involved in the ethics article, said by email.
Especially when doctors know there’s a lot of inaccurate information online, they should be pro-active about asking patients and families what they’ve learned from the web, Macauley said.
“Open-ended questions designed to identify alternate (and potentially misleading) information that the patient has received—whether through the internet, social media, old-fashioned reading, or conversation with others—will help dispel misperceptions and ensure that both physician and patient are starting with the same set of facts,” Macauley added.
It took Princeton computer science professor Andrew Appel and one of his graduate students just minutes to hack into a voting machine still used in Louisiana, New Jersey, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, Politico reports.
Professor Andrew Appel purchased for $82 a Sequoia AVC Advantage, one of the oldest machines still in use. Within 7 seconds, he and his student, Alex Halderman, had picked the lock open. Within minutes, the duo had removed the device's unsecured ROM chips with their own hardware that makes it easy to alter the machine's results.
Appel, his colleagues and students have been hacking into voting machines at the Center for Information Technology Policy since the late 1990s. With their work, the group has come to the conclusion that at some point, the national election will be the target of a coordinated cyber attack.
Now, with the specter of Russian hackers looming over the election cycle, the Department of Homeland Security said electronic voting machines must now be treated as "critical infrastructure" -- a designation up until now reserved for dams, transportation systems and financial services.
The term refers to infrastructure “so vital to the United States that their incapacitation or destruction would have a debilitating effect on security, national economic security, national public health or safety, or any combination thereof.”
"This isn’t a crazy hypothetical anymore,” Dan Wallach, a computer science professor at Rice who studied under Appel told Politico. “Once you bring nation states’ cyber activity into the game? These machines, they barely work in a friendly environment.”
The electronic voting machines became popular after the 2000 after the contention Bush-Gore election that was hampered by mistakes and lack of clarity with manual voting and ballot counting.
However electronic voting adds a new threat -- that if Russian hackers wanted to target the November election, they could.
“Look, we could see 15 years ago that this would be perfectly possible,” Appel told Politico. “It’s well within the capabilities of a country as sophisticated as Russia.”
The FBI did not tell the Democratic National Committee that U.S officials suspected it was the target of a Russian government-backed cyber attack when agents first contacted the party last fall, three people with knowledge of the discussions told Reuters.
And in months of follow-up conversations about the DNC's network security, the FBI did not warn party officials that the attack was being investigated as Russian espionage, the sources said.
The lack of full disclosure by the FBI prevented DNC staffers from taking steps that could have reduced the number of confidential emails and documents stolen, one of the sources said. Instead, Russian hackers whom security experts believe are affiliated with the Russian government continued to have access to Democratic Party computers for months during a crucial phase in the U.S. presidential campaign, the source said.
As late as June, hackers had access to DNC systems and the network used by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, a group that raises money for Democratic candidates and shares an office with the DNC in Washington, people with knowledge of the cases have said.
A spokeswoman for the FBI said she could not comment on a current investigation. The DNC did not respond to requests for comment.
In its initial contact with the DNC last fall, the FBI instructed DNC personnel to look for signs of unusual activity on the group’s computer network, one person familiar with the matter said. DNC staff examined their logs and files without finding anything suspicious, that person said.
When DNC staffers requested further information from the FBI to help them track the incursion, they said the agency declined to provide it. In the months that followed, FBI officials spoke with DNC staffers on several other occasions but did not mention the suspicion of Russian involvement in an attack, sources said.
The DNC’s information technology team did not realize the seriousness of the incursion until late March, the sources said. It was unclear what prompted the IT team's realization.
Emails captured in the DNC hack were leaked on the eve of the July 25-28 Democratic Party convention to name Hillary Clinton as the party’s presidential candidate in the Nov. 8 election against Republican Party nominee Donald Trump.
Those emails exposed bias in favor of Clinton on the part of DNC officials at a time when she was engaged in a close campaign against U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders for the party's nomination.
The DNC said on Tuesday that three senior officials had resigned after the email embarrassment.
Last week, Debbie Wasserman Schultz stepped down as DNC chairwoman as criticism mounted of her management of the party committee, which is supposed to be neutral.
U.S. officials and private cyber security experts said last week they believed Russian hackers were behind the cyber attack on the DNC. The Obama administration has not yet publicly declared who it believes is responsible.
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said last week the U.S. intelligence community was not ready to "make the call on attribution."
It was not immediately clear how the FBI had learned of the hack against the DNC. One U.S. official with knowledge of the investigation said the agency had withheld information about details of the hacking to protect classified intelligence operations.
"There is a fine line between warning people or companies or even other government agencies that they’re being hacked – especially if the intrusions are ongoing – and protecting intelligence operations that concern national security," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The first internal DNC emails alerting party officials to the seriousness of the suspected hacking were sent in late March, one person said. In May, the DNC contacted California-based cyber security firm CrowdStrike to analyze unusual activity on the group’s network.
The Brooklyn-based Clinton campaign operation was also the target of hacking, people with knowledge of the situation have said. The Clinton campaign has confirmed that a DNC-linked system the campaign used to analyze voter data was compromised.
Yahoo News reported last week that the FBI had warned the Clinton campaign that it was the target of a hack in March, just before the DNC discovered it had been hacked.
Glen Caplin, a Clinton campaign spokesman, said it had taken steps to safeguard its internal information systems.
“Multiple Democratic party organizations, including our campaign and staff, have been the subject of attempted cyber attacks that experts say are Russian intelligence agencies, which enlist some of the most sophisticated hackers in the world,” Caplin said.
(Reporting By Mark Hosenball amd John Walcott in Washington and Joseph Menn in San Francisco; Editing by David Rohde and Grant McCool)
New York will bar registered sex offenders on parole from playing Pokemon Go over concerns that the wildly popular virtual reality game could help sexual predators lure young victims, state officials said on Monday.
Governor Andrew Cuomo has directed the New York Department of Corrections and Community Supervision to restrict the state's 3,000 sex offenders on parole from using Pokemon Go and similar games, Cuomo's office said in a statement.
To enforce the rule, the state is requesting Pokemon Go developer Niantic, Inc to cross-reference a list of sex offenders provided by the state with its list of players.
New York is also asking the company to remove locations, identified in the game as places where players can win special points, near offenders' homes. Paroled sex offenders will be instructed by their supervisors that playing Pokemon Go or similar games is in violation of their parole, state officials said.
Niantic and Nintendo Inc, which owns a large stake in the game's publisher, The Pokemon Company, could not immediately be reached for comment.
"Protecting New York's children is priority number one and, as technology evolves, we must ensure these advances don't become new avenues for dangerous predators to prey on new victims," Cuomo said. "These actions will provide safeguards for the players of these augmented reality games and help take one more tool away from those seeking to do harm to our children."
Pokemon Go incorporates colorful animated creatures from Nintendo's Pokemon universe into the real world using augmented reality and Google mapping technology. The game attracted 21 million active U.S. users in less than two weeks of its launch in July, leading to warnings about certain hazards.
A feature of the game that allows users to lure characters or players for a fee to specific locations, appears to have the potential to be abused by predators, Cuomo said.
The game has been blamed for illegal border crossing from Canada to the United States, prompted a U.S. senator to question the game's maker over privacy concerns, and led to a series of robberies and injures.
The game may also pose special risks to children as it encourages players to explore physical locations to win points.
On its website, Niantic says users must comply with age restrictions and applicable laws to play its games.
"You may use the services only if you are 13 years of age or older and capable of forming a binding contract and are not barred from using the services under applicable law," it said.
(Reporting by Laila Kearney; Editing by Richard Chang)
SolarCity Corp agreed to be acquired by sister company Tesla Motors Inc in a deal worth $200 million less than the initial offer, sending shares of both companies down in early trading on Monday.
Electric vehicle maker Tesla expects to achieve "significant" cost savings and "dramatic improvements" in manufacturing efficiency as a result of the acquisition of solar panel installer SolarCity, Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk said on Monday.
Musk said the combined companies will have a "stronger balance sheet," but likely will require a "small equity capital raise" next year. Both companies have been burning through cash and have projected achieving positive cash flow later this year.
Musk is the largest shareholder in both companies and is chairman of SolarCity. His cousins Lyndon Rive and Peter Rive are co-founders of SolarCity.
The two companies on Monday announced an agreement to merge, with Tesla holding 93.5 percent of the combined companies and SolarCity 6.5 percent. The deal is expected to win approval in the fourth quarter, the companies said.
The combined entity would sell solar panels, residential and commercial battery storage systems and electric vehicles under a single brand.
"Solar and storage are at their best when they're combined," the companies said in a blog post on Tesla's website.
Musk unveiled an updated "master plan" last month, sketching out a vision of an integrated carbon-free energy enterprise, offering electric vehicles, car sharing and solar energy systems.
The deal includes a "go-shop" provision that allows SolarCity to solicit offers from other potential buyers for 45 days through Sept. 14.
Up to Friday's close, SolarCity's stock had risen about 26 percent, valuing the company at $2.62 billion, since Tesla first made an offer on June 21 that was valued at $2.8 billion.
The companies said on Monday that SolarCity stockholders would receive 0.110 Tesla common shares for every share held.
The offer values SolarCity at $25.37 per share, based on the five-day volume-weighted average price of Tesla shares as of Friday.
SolarCity had formed a special committee to review Tesla's initial offer, which was pitched at 0.122 to 0.131 Tesla shares for each SolarCity share.
SolarCity , shares were down 5.1 percent at $25.34, while Tesla dropped 1.9 percent at $230.40.
Tesla and SolarCity expect to save $150 million in costs in the first full year after the deal closes as the combination would improve manufacturing efficiencies and reduce customer acquisition costs. Musk said he thought the combined companies could "significantly exceed" that mark in the first year.
Up to Friday's close, Tesla shares had risen 7 percent since the company first announced the offer.
(Reporting by Swetha Gopinath in Bengaluru and Paul Lienert in Detroit; Editing by Saumyadeb Chakrabarty and Jeffrey Benkoe)
The Kremlin said on Monday that U.S. allegations Moscow was behind the hacking of Democratic Party emails were part of a cover-up designed to hide the fact that the U.S. election campaign had been manipulated by domestic forces.
U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said on Sunday Russian intelligence services had hacked into Democratic National Committee computers, and she questioned Republican rival Donald Trump's overtures to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
"Such pronouncements by Mrs Clinton are of the pre-election rhetoric genre and do not contain anything tangible," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on a conference call.
"In this case they (the Americans) are trying to camouflage some of their own (pre-election) shenanigans by demonising Russia. We consider that to be wrong."
Peskov said Clinton's comments were absurd and emotional and lacking in facts, saying it was wrong to accuse Moscow of wrongdoing without first investigating the accusations.
"Official Russian bodies ... do not carry out cyber terrorism," he said, saying the Kremlin wanted to see U.S.-Russia relations normalised.
The Kremlin has repeatedly denied involvement in the hacking incident and said it does not favour any candidate in the Nov. 8 U.S. election.
Despite its official stance, Kremlin-backed TV has tilted its coverage in favour of Trump whom Putin has called "very talented."
(Reporting by Andrew Osborn/Dmitry Solovyov; Writing by Andrew Osborn; Editing by Christian Lowe)
U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said Russian intelligence services hacked into Democratic National Committee computers and she accused Republican contender Donald Trump of showing support for Russian President Vladimir Putin.
"We know that Russian intelligence services hacked into the DNC and we know that they arranged for a lot of those emails to be released and we know that Donald Trump has shown a very troubling willingness to back up Putin, to support Putin," Clinton said in an interview with "Fox News Sunday."
(Reporting by Doina Chiacu; Editing by Angus MacSwan)
It could be the end of an era for one of aviation's most iconic airplanes, with Boeing hinting at the end of the production line for its double-decker 747 aircraft.
Weak sales and encroaching competition are forcing the planemaker to re-evaluate the production of its legendary 747 aircraft, the original Jumbo Jet which changed the face of the industry when it debuted in 1970.
In a post-earnings call with analysts this week, Boeing said “it's reasonably possible” that production could halt altogether if sales continue to plummet.
The company has slashed production plans from 12 a year, to six, beginning in September.
In addition to its distinctive hump which is most commonly used as a first class cabin, the 747 became the world's first wide-body aircraft and held onto the title of world's biggest airliner for nearly four decades, before the arrival of Airbus A380 in 2007.
The most popular version of the 747 currently in service is the 747-400.
The newest iteration of the series is the 747-8, a powerful jet that can travel the length of three FIFA soccer fields in one second.
Airlines that have purchased the latest 747 as part of their fleet include Korean Air, Air China, Cathay Pacific, Lufthansa and All Nippon Airways. The 747-8 accommodates 410 passengers.
The 747-8 has also been chosen by the US Air Force to serve as Air Force One.
Following the hack of Democratic National Committee emails and reports of a new cyberattack against the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, worries abound that foreign nations may be clandestinely involved in the 2016 American presidential campaign. Allegations swirl that Russia, under the direction of President Vladimir Putin, is secretly working to undermine the U.S. Democratic Party. The apparent logic is that a Donald Trump presidency would result in more pro-Russian policies. At the moment, the FBI is investigating, but no U.S. government agency has yet made a formal accusation.
The Republican nominee added unprecedented fuel to the fire by encouraging Russia to “find” and release Hillary Clinton’s missing emails from her time as secretary of state. Trump’s comments drew sharp rebuke from the media and politicians on all sides. Some suggested that by soliciting a foreign power to intervene in domestic politics, his musings bordered on criminality or treason. Trump backtracked, saying his comments were “sarcastic,” implying they’re not to be taken seriously.
Of course, the desire to interfere with another country’s internal political processes is nothing new. Global powers routinely monitor their adversaries and, when deemed necessary, will try to clandestinely undermine or influence foreign domestic politics to their own benefit. For example, the Soviet Union’s foreign intelligence service engaged in so-called “active measures” designed to influence Western opinion. Among other efforts, it spread conspiracy theories about government officials and fabricated documents intended to exploit the social tensions of the 1960s. Similarly, U.S. intelligence services have conducted their own secret activities against foreign political systems – perhaps most notably its repeated attempts to help overthrow pro-communist Fidel Castro in Cuba.
Although the Cold War is over, intelligence services around the world continue to monitor other countries' domestic political situations. Today’s “influence operations” are generally subtle and strategic. Intelligence services clandestinely try to sway the “hearts and minds” of the target country’s population toward a certain political outcome.
What has changed, however, is the ability of individuals, governments, militaries and criminal or terrorist organizations to use internet-based tools – commonly called cyberweapons – not only to gather information but also to generate influence within a target group.
So what are some of the technical vulnerabilities faced by nations during political elections, and what’s really at stake when foreign powers meddle in domestic political processes?
Vulnerabilities at the electronic ballot box
The process of democratic voting requires a strong sense of trust – in the equipment, the process and the people involved.
One of the most obvious, direct ways to affect a country’s election is to interfere with the way citizens actually cast votes. As the United States (and other nations) embrace electronic voting, it must take steps to ensure the security – and more importantly, the trustworthiness – of the systems. Not doing so can endanger a nation’s domestic democratic will and create general political discord – a situation that can be exploited by an adversary for its own purposes.
New technology always comes with some glitches – even when it’s not being attacked. For example, during the 2004 general election, North Carolina’s Unilect e-voting machines “lost” 4,438 votes due to a system error.
But cybersecurity researchers focus on the kinds of problems that could be intentionally caused by bad actors. In 2006, Princeton computer science professor Ed Felten demonstrated how to install a self-propagating piece of vote-changing malware on Diebold e-voting systems in less than a minute. In 2011, technicians at the Argonne National Laboratory showed how to hack e-voting machines remotely and change voting data.
Voting officials recognize that these technologies are vulnerable. Following a 2007 study of her state’s electronic voting systems, Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer L. Brunner announced that
the computer-based voting systems in use in Ohio do not meet computer industry security standards and are susceptible to breaches of security that may jeopardize the integrity of the voting process.
As the first generation of voting machines ages, even maintenance and updating become an issue. A 2015 report found that electronic voting machines in 43 of 50 U.S. states are at least 10 years old – and that state election officials are unsure where the funding will come from to replace them.
A rigged (and murderous) voting machine on ‘The Simpsons’ satirized the issue in 2008.
Securing the machines and their data
In many cases, electronic voting depends on a distributed network, just like the electrical grid or municipal water system. Its spread-out nature means there are many points of potential vulnerability.
First, to be secure, the hardware “internals” of each voting machine must be made tamper-proof at the point of manufacture. Each individual machine’s software must remain tamper-proof and accountable, as must the vote data stored on it. (Some machines provide voters with a paper receipt of their votes, too.) When problems are discovered, the machines must be removed from service and fixed. Virginia did just this in 2015 once numerous glaring security vulnerabilities were discovered in its system.
Once votes are collected from individual machines, the compiled results must be transmitted from polling places to higher election offices for official consolidation, tabulation and final statewide reporting. So the network connections between locations must be tamper-proof and prevent interception or modification of the in-transit tallies. Likewise, state-level vote-tabulating systems must have trustworthy software that is both accountable and resistant to unauthorized data modification. Corrupting the integrity of data anywhere during this process, either intentionally or accidentally, can lead to botched election results.
However, technical vulnerabilities with the electoral process extend far beyond the voting machines at the “edge of the network.” Voter registration and administration systems operated by state and national governments are at risk too. Hacks here could affect voter rosters and citizen databases. Failing to secure these systems and records could result in fraudulent information in the voter database that may lead to improper (or illegal) voter registrations and potentially the casting of fraudulent votes.
And of course, underlying all this is human vulnerability: Anyone involved with e-voting technologies or procedures is susceptible to coercion or human error.
How can we guard the systems?
The first line of defense in protecting electronic voting technologies and information is common sense. Applying the best practices of cybersecurity, data protection, information access and other objectively developed, responsibly implemented procedures makes it more difficult for adversaries to conduct cyber mischief. These are essential and must be practiced regularly.
Sure, it’s unlikely a single voting machine in a specific precinct in a specific polling place would be targeted by an overseas or criminal entity. But the security of each electronic voting machine is essential to ensuring not only free and fair elections but fostering citizen trust in such technologies and processes – think of the chaos around the infamous hanging chads during the contested 2000 Florida recount. Along these lines, in 2004, Nevada was the first state to mandate e-voting machines include a voter-verified paper trail to ensure public accountability for each vote cast.
Proactive examination and analysis of electronic voting machines and voter information systems are essential to ensuring free and fair elections and facilitating citizen trust in e-voting. Unfortunately, some voting machine manufacturers have invoked the controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act to prohibit external researchers from assessing the security and trustworthiness of their systems.
However, a 2015 exception to the act authorizes security research into technologies otherwise protected by copyright laws. This means the security community can legally research, test, reverse-engineer and analyze such systems. Even more importantly, researchers now have the freedom to publish their findings without fear of being sued for copyright infringement. Their work is vital to identifying security vulnerabilities before they can be exploited in real-world elections.
Because of its benefits and conveniences, electronic voting may become the preferred mode for local and national elections. If so, officials must secure these systems and ensure they can provide trustworthy elections that support the democratic process. State-level election agencies must be given the financial resources to invest in up-to-date e-voting systems. They also must guarantee sufficient, proactive, ongoing and effective protections are in place to reduce the threat of not only operational glitches but intentional cyberattacks.
Democracies endure based not on the whims of a single ruler but the shared electoral responsibility of informed citizens who trust their government and its systems. That trust must not be broken by complacency, lack of resources or the intentional actions of a foreign power. As famed investor Warren Buffett once noted, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.”
The Kremlin dismissed as absurd on Tuesday allegations it was behind the hacking of U.S. Democratic Party emails, saying unidentified individuals were trying to cynically exploit fear of Russia for electoral purposes.
It responded after cyber security experts and U.S. officials said there was evidence Russia had engineered the release of sensitive Democratic Party emails in order to influence the Nov. 8 U.S. presidential election.
The emails, released by activist group WikiLeaks at the weekend, appeared to show favouritism within the Democratic National Committee (DNC) for Hillary Clinton and prompted the resignation of DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
President Vladimir Putin has tried to avoid giving the impression he favours any U.S. candidate, but has hailed Republican Party nominee Donald Trump as being "very talented".
Russian state TV, which hews closely to the Kremlin's world view, has left little doubt however that Moscow would prefer Trump. It casts Clinton, whom Putin accused of stirring up protests against him in her role as U.S. Secretary of State in 2011, as a warmonger.
"We are again seeing these maniacal attempts to exploit the Russian theme in the U.S. election campaign," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters when asked about the leaked emails.
"This is not breaking new ground, this is an old trick which is being played again. This is not good for our bilateral relations, but we understand that we simply have to get through this unpleasant period."
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said earlier on Tuesday he had raised the hacking issue at a meeting in Laos with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.
"I don't want to use four-letter words," was Lavrov's only response to reporters when asked whether Russia was responsible for the email hack.
Earlier this month, Carter Page, a foreign policy adviser to Trump, visited Moscow, where he gave a lecture complaining that Western governments had often had a hypocritical focus on democratisation in the post-Soviet world.
Analysts say the Kremlin would welcome a Trump win because the billionaire U.S. businessman has repeatedly praised Putin, spoken of wanting to get along with Russia, and has said he would consider an alliance with Moscow against Islamic State.
Trump's suggestion he might abandon NATO's pledge to automatically defend all alliance members is also likely to have gone down well in Moscow, where the military alliance is cast as an outdated Cold War relic.
(Additional reporting by Vladimir Soldatkin, Lesley Wroughton, Simon Webb; Editing by Catherine Evans)
The judge overseeing the probe that led to the arrest last week of suspected Islamist militants in Brazil said Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. co-operated with investigators by providing information about the suspects' use of both social networks.
In an interview late Sunday with Fantastico, a weekly news program on the Globo television network, Judge Marcos Josegrei da Silva said cooperation by both companies, after a judicial order tied to the investigation, was instrumental to understand the nature of discussions carried out by the suspects, a 12th of whom was detained late Sunday.
"The companies began to provide data related to the content of the conversations and data about where those conversations were posted," the judge said, without providing more details.
Spokesmen for Facebook and Twitter declined to comment on specifics of the case. Both spokesmen said that their respective companies have zero tolerance for activities related to terrorism and other crimes and that they cooperate with law enforcement authorities when necessary.
Brazilian investigators said the suspects in the ongoing probe, dubbed "Operation Hashtag," are sympathetic to the Islamic State militant group and through messaging services and the Internet had discussed attacking the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, which start Aug. 5.
In the Fantastico interview, the judge said "there is no anonymity for those sorts of activities on the Internet."
Separately, Brazil's federal police said Sunday night they had arrested the 12th suspect targeted by the investigation. The suspect, detained in the west-central state of Mato Grosso, will be questioned and transported, like the other suspects already in custody, to a federal penitentiary.
The judge's comment about cooperation by the social media companies comes amid growing debate in Brazil and around the world about privacy issues and law enforcement.
Facebook's WhatsApp messaging service, for instance, has been shut down temporarily on several occasions by Brazilian judges -- most recently just last week -- in efforts to get the company to hand over content for investigations.
Compared with content on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks that is openly shared with other users, however, data sent by WhatsApp and similar messaging services is encrypted. The data is scrambled between users and therefore, according to those companies, not something even they can access.
(Reporting by Paulo Prada; Editing by Michael Perry)
Shares of Nintendo Co <7974.T> tumbled as much as 18 percent early on Monday after the company said smash-hit mobile game Pokemon GO would have only a limited impact on its earnings.
Nintendo said after the market closed on Friday that it had already factored in anticipated revenues from its Pokemon GO Plus device - an accessory worn on the wrist to alert players of nearby monsters to catch - and that it had no plans to revise its annual earnings forecasts for now.
Nintendo said its affiliate Pokemon Co receives licensing and fees from the game's developer, Niantic Inc, and that profits at Nintendo from those revenues would be limited.
The company, which owns 32 percent of Pokemon Co, is due to report first-quarter earnings on Tuesday.
The phenomenal success of Pokemon GO has triggered massive buying in Nintendo shares and even with Monday's decline, the shares are still up some 60 percent compared with levels prior to the game's July 6 launch in the United States, Australia and New Zealand.
Nintendo shares were down 17.6 percent in mid-morning trade, a slide of 4,965 yen - just shy of the daily limit of 5,000 yen for the stock.
(Reporting by Ayai Tomisawa and Junko Fujita; Editing by Chang-Ran Kim and Edwina Gibbs)
