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	Targeted Digital Threats Against Civil Society by Citizen Lab, University of Toronto Canada   Civil society organizations (CSOs) that work to protect human rights and civil liberties around the world are being bombarded with persistent and disruptive targeted digital attacks—the same sort of attacks reportedly hitting industry and government. Unlike industry and government, however, civil society organizations have far fewer resources to deal with the problem.   Communities @ Risk: Targeted Digital Threats Against Civil Society, a report by the Citizen Lab, an interdisciplinary research laboratory based at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs, sheds light on an often overlooked digital risk environment.   This report is the culmination of a four year study involving ten civil society groups. Using a mixed methods approach combining malware analysis, interviews, and fieldwork, the study sought to gain greater visibility into the technical, social, and political nature of targeted digital threats. Data from both the technical and contextual aspects of the research inform the report’s main findings.   Main Findings   In the digital realm, CSOs face the same threats as the private sector and government, while equipped with far fewer resources to secure themselves.   Counterintuitively, technical sophistication of malware used in these attacks is low, but the level of social engineering employed is high.   Digital attacks against CSOs are persistent, adapting to targets in order to maintain access over time and across platforms.   Targeted digital threats undermine CSOs’ core communications and missions in a significant way, sometimes as a nuisance or resource drain, more seriously as a major risk to individual safety.   Targeted digital threats extend the “reach” of the state (or other threat actors) beyond borders and into “safe havens.”   * Access the report via the link below.   http://targetedthreats.net/ http://citizenlab.org/publications/ http://bit.ly/2aoaZ1B Visit the related web page
	Alarm as Republicans seek to cut disability benefits for millions of people by 20 percent by Richard Eskow, Leo Gerard Our Future, agencies USA   The Right Tries (and Fails) to Justify Its Assault on Social Security.   How does the Republican right justify the kind of action Congress took this week, when it moved to cut disability benefits for millions of people by 20 percent? Answer #1: With buzzwords and rhetorical dodges. Answer #2: Not very well.   For details on the House’s action, we pointed yesterday to a number of well-informed analyses – by Nancy Altman and Eric Kingson, Kathy Ruffing, Alan Pyke, Dean Baker, and Michael Hiltzik. Republicans moved to cut Social Security disability benefits by blocking a routine reallocation of funds. That’s bad enough, but their end game is even worse: broad Social Security cuts and the privatization of the entire program.   That would be bad for most Americans, but great for the people who finance the Republican Party – and think tanks like the Heritage Foundation. There would be less pressure to increase taxes on billionaires. Wall Street would have more money under its control. And the far right’s antigovernment ideology would have claimed another scalp.   Heritage’s defense of the House is a good example of the right’s time-worn strategies for concealing – perhaps, at times, even from itself – the moral and human implications of its actions. It’s written by Romina Boccia, the “Grover M. Hermann fellow in federal budgetary affairs in the Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation” – (now there’s a title!) – and is called “The House Just Made It Harder for Politicians to Steal From Social Security Retirement Fund.”   See what they did there, before we’ve even read the text? They changed the subject from “disabled Americans” to “politicians.” (People hate “politicians,” right?) But the money wouldn’t go to “politicians,” who have generous retirement and disability plans. It would go to the disabled. And it wouldn’t be “stolen.” It would be borrowed – from the same payroll tax which funds retirement benefits.   The Heritage piece is a compendium of right-wing Social Security feints, many brewed up in the manifold organizations funded by anti-government hedge fund billionaire Pete Peterson. We’re told, for example, that the House’s parliamentary move “set the stage for long-overdue Social Security reforms to protect disabled Americans and seniors from indiscriminate benefit cuts” – (As opposed to ‘discriminate’ benefit cuts?) – and that it “strengthens the integrity of Social Security’s separate trust funds” by “prevent(ing) lawmakers from raiding retirement funds to shore up the bleeding disability trust fund.” (Emphases mine.)   “Strengthen.” “Integrity.” Raiding.” “Bleeding.” These are code words designed to fire neurons in the lizard brain. Take them away and what’s left? The distasteful sight of prosperous Republican House members cutting disabled people’s already meager benefits.   As for the transfer of funds, Ms. Boccia doesn’t mention that Congress has made this very minor adjustment 11 times in the past. She makes it sound as if President Obama and Treasury Secretary Jack Lew are proposing something novel, strange – even dangerous. She even throws in a scare paragraph from a fellow Heritage employee suggesting that the entire program is in danger and warning of the “destitution” that might ensue. Then she tips her organization’s hand:   “This change,” Ms. Boccia writes of the House’s move, “sets the stage for comprehensive Social Security reform in the 114th Congress.”   Well, of course it does. Disability benefits are just the prelude. They’re after bigger game. The right wants what it has wanted ever since Social Security was first created: its dismantlement.   Merriam-Webster tell us that to “reform” something is “to improve (it) by removing or correcting faults, problems, etc.” It does not mean “to shrink, truncate, terminate, slash, or cut.” But then, that’s how the right creates buzzwords: by hijacking real words and giving them new, zombified meanings.   Congress must “act responsibly,” we’re told. It must attack “fraud and mismanagement” (although there is no evidence that either is a significant problem in the disability program). We’re left with another invocation of “indiscriminate” cuts and a call for responsible “stewardship” of tax dollars.   Some of Ms. Boccia’s commenters have a predictable field day. “There is no trust fund,” writes a commenter. “There is just a bunch of IOUs.” That’s another conservative canard – unless you think that all those Treasury bonds held by JPMorgan Chase are “just IOUs” too. (Besides, don’t conservatives pay their IOUs?)   Other commenters regale their readers with anecdotes about twenty-somethings who are “not disabled” and are “mooching off the system.”   Know what isn’t mentioned, either by Ms. Boccia or her commenters? Tax increases on the wealthy and corporations. Actual corporate tax rates – the amount they actually pay – are at 60-year lows. Billionaires pay less than half the tax rate they paid in the 1950s. Likely voters - including three-quarters of registered Republicans and an equal number of independents – want to increase Social Security benefits and pay for it by having millionaires pay into the program at the same rate as everyone else (“lifting the cap”). They forgot to mention that.   The GOP is trying to take Health Care away from Millions of Americans, by Leo Gerard.   America just celebrated the season of giving with Christmas presents, year-end charity donations and soup kitchen volunteering. It is a time when Americans demonstrate the generosity, caring and kindness that define them as a people.   Now, however, Americans may suffer the season of GOP taking. Republicans already insisted on taking away a key protection in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. Now they’re intent on taking health insurance from millions of Americans who got it under the Affordable Care Act.   The Affordable Care Act (ACA) is a manifestation of Americans’ concern for each other’s welfare. Americans felt it was intolerable for so many of their friends, neighbors and relatives to be uninsured in the richest country in the world, to be bankrupted by medical bills, to die for lack of medical care. So they found a way to do something about it. That is the ACA. Among other benefits, it extends Medicaid and provides subsidies enabling the working poor to afford insurance.   But the GOP is all against it. Republicans tried to repeal the law, appealed to courts to overturn it and refused its expansion of Medicaid. As they become the majority party in both houses of Congress this month, Republicans will intensify their campaign to take health insurance from millions who got it through the ACA.   Just as the employer mandate requiring large businesses to offer health insurance finally goes into effect, Republicans will try to eliminate insurance for those newly-covered workers.   They’ve promised to vote to repeal the Affordable Care Act—again. None of their previous 50 votes to do that succeeded. Failure is likely again, too, since they won’t get 60 ayes in the Senate and President Obama won’t sign a repeal. So they’ve said they’ll next try killing the law piece by piece.   Unlike their congressional votes, Republicans have been tragically successful with lawsuits in denying Americans health insurance. The first of those suits that went to the U.S. Supreme Court didn’t kill the law outright but empowered Republican governors to prevent poor constituents from getting health insurance through the law’s Medicaid expansion. Millions are suffering as a result.   New statistics show that if the Supreme Court had not made expansion of Medicaid optional, more than 3 million people would have gained health insurance in the 24 states where Republicans refused the program. These 3 million are working Americans struggling on the financial edge, people whose income is less than $16,105 a year.   A new Republican-pushed lawsuit could take insurance from 5 million more. These are residents of states that decided to use the federal health insurance exchange instead of creating marketplaces of their own. People who now buy insurance on an exchange, state or federal, may receive subsidies to help them afford it if their income is up to four times the federal poverty level.   In the lawsuit, King v. Burwell, Republicans argue that language in the Affordable Care Act means that only people who buy their insurance on a state-run exchange qualify for the subsidies. The GOP wants to discriminate against people who get their insurance through the federal marketplace. They want to deny the ACA’s financial help to the working poor in 36 states without their own exchanges.   New federal information shows that 87 percent of those who buy their insurance on the exchanges receive subsidies. And a review by the private consulting firm Avalere Health showed that, on average, the subsidies paid for three-quarters of the purchaser’s insurance premium.   If the Supreme Court hands Republicans a win in this case, millions will lose their insurance because they can no longer afford it. These are people who got insured with the help of the ACA, and who will lose it on the demand of the GOP.   In another lawsuit, 36 Republicans in Arizona are trying to take Medicaid away from poor residents who got coverage in the expansion pushed through by Gov. Jan Brewer—yes, a Republican. Like several other Republican governors who accepted the expansion, Brewer was swayed by doctors and hospitals that prefer to treat insured patients rather than deny care or provide it for free.   But the three dozen Arizona Republicans, represented by the conservative Goldwater Institute, contend the expansion is illegal because it will be partially paid for by a levy on hospitals. Last week, the state Supreme Court said the case could proceed. If the GOP wins, it will take insurance from a quarter million Arizonians.   Maine is just the opposite. There, low income people never benefitted from Medicaid expansion because Republican Gov. Paul LePage vetoed it. Five times.   The most recent Congressional session was the second least productive in the modern era—exceeding the previous poor record by one piece of legislation. Now, however, with Republicans in control of both houses of Congress, a new low is promised.   Instead of passing positive or helpful or useful legislation, the GOP has pledged to take from the American people. It vows to take away a basic necessity—health care, to ensure the uninsured suffer.   That’s a promise that Americans must ensure is broken. For their own health. For their neighbors’ well-being. And for preservation of Americans’ self-image as caring and kind people. Visit the related web page
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