National: A scholar asks, ‘Can democracy survive the Internet?’ | The Washington Post

In more innocent times, the rise of the Internet was seen by many people as a boon to democracy. Disruptive, yes, but the Web broadened the flow of information, introduced new voices into the political debates, empowered citizens and even provided a powerful fundraising tool for some lesser-known candidates such as Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders. Now, in what are clearly less innocent times, the Internet is viewed as a far less benign force. It can be a haven for spreading fake news and rewarding the harshest and most divisive of political rhetoric. It is a medium, for all its benefits, that has dark corners populated by anonymous actors (some not even real people) whose influence appears to be growing but not easily measured.

National: Comey Tried to Shield the F.B.I. From Politics. Then He Shaped an Election. | The New York Times

The day before he upended the 2016 election, James B. Comey, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, summoned agents and lawyers to his conference room. They had been debating all day, and it was time for a decision. Mr. Comey’s plan was to tell Congress that the F.B.I. had received new evidence and was reopening its investigation into Hillary Clinton, the presidential front-runner. The move would violate the policies of an agency that does not reveal its investigations or do anything that may influence an election. But Mr. Comey had declared the case closed, and he believed he was obligated to tell Congress that had changed. “Should you consider what you’re about to do may help elect Donald Trump president?” an adviser asked him, Mr. Comey recalled recently at a closed meeting with F.B.I. agents. He could not let politics affect his decision, he replied. “If we ever start considering who might be affected, and in what way, by what we do, we’re done,” he told the agents.

National: Trump was going to investigate voter fraud. What happened? | CNN

The White House does not have any immediate timeline for President Donald Trump’s voter fraud investigation and the commission he was adamant about creating during his first few weeks in office, even as the administration approaches the end of its 100 days. White House press secretary Sean Spicer told CNN that he expects something on the commission within the “next week or two, but I don’t want to get ahead of that.” Spicer said there would not be an executive order (as the President originally wanted) and in lieu of that there would be a commission headed up by Vice President Mike Pence. Spicer did say that the vice president will still be “very involved” in the investigation.

National: Senate Trump-Russia Probe Has No Full-Time Staff, No Key Witnesses | The Daily Beast

The Senate Intelligence Committee’s probe into Russia’s election interference is supposedly the best hope for getting the public credible answers about whether there was any coordination between the Kremlin and Trump Tower. But there are serious reasons to doubt that it can accomplish this task, as currently configured. More than three months after the committee announced that it had agreed on the scope of the investigation, the panel has not begun substantially investigating possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, three individuals with ties to the committee told The Daily Beast. The investigation does not have a single staffer dedicated to it full-time, and those staff members working on it part-time do not have significant investigative experience. The probe currently appears to be moving at a pace slower than prior Senate Intelligence Committee investigations, such as the CIA torture inquiry, which took years to accomplish.

National: House panel’s Russia hearing with Obama officials is back on | Los Angeles Times

A previously canceled House Intelligence Committee hearing to receive testimony from three former top Obama administration officials about Russia’s attempts to influence the 2016 election is back on for next month. The panel said Friday it had invited Sally Yates, the former acting attorney general fired by President Trump, former Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper and former CIA Director John Brennan, to testify sometime after May 2 in an open hearing after their original testimony was abruptly canceled in March by Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Tulare). The announcement indicates that the panel’s Russia investigation, which was thrown into turmoil last month after Nunes stepped aside as head of the probe following allegations he may have improperly disclosed classified information, is getting back on track.

National: Putin-linked think tank drew up plan to sway 2016 U.S. election – documents | Reuters

A Russian government think tank controlled by Vladimir Putin developed a plan to swing the 2016 U.S. presidential election to Donald Trump and undermine voters’ faith in the American electoral system, three current and four former U.S. officials told Reuters. They described two confidential documents from the think tank as providing the framework and rationale for what U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded was an intensive effort by Russia to interfere with the Nov. 8 election. U.S. intelligence officials acquired the documents, which were prepared by the Moscow-based Russian Institute for Strategic Studies [en.riss.ru/], after the election. The institute is run by retired senior Russian foreign intelligence officials appointed by Putin’s office. The first Russian institute document was a strategy paper written last June that circulated at the highest levels of the Russian government but was not addressed to any specific individuals. It recommended the Kremlin launch a propaganda campaign on social media and Russian state-backed global news outlets to encourage U.S. voters to elect a president who would take a softer line toward Russia than the administration of then-President Barack Obama, the seven officials said. A second institute document, drafted in October and distributed in the same way, warned that Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was likely to win the election. For that reason, it argued, it was better for Russia to end its pro-Trump propaganda and instead intensify its messaging about voter fraud to undermine the U.S. electoral system’s legitimacy and damage Clinton’s reputation in an effort to undermine her presidency, the seven officials said.

National: Gerrymandering Is Illegal, But Only Mathematicians Can Prove It | WIRED

Partisan Gerrymandering – the practice of drawing voting districts to give one political party an unfair edge—is one of the few political issues that voters of all stripes find common cause in condemning. Voters should choose their elected officials, the thinking goes, rather than elected officials choosing their voters. The Supreme Court agrees, at least in theory: In 1986 it ruled that partisan gerrymandering, if extreme enough, is unconstitutional. Yet in that same ruling, the court declined to strike down two Indiana maps under consideration, even though both “used every trick in the book,” according to a paper in theUniversity of Chicago Law Review. And in the decades since then, the court has failed to throw out a single map as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander. “If you’re never going to declare a partisan gerrymander, what is it that’s unconstitutional?” said Wendy K. Tam Cho, a political scientist and statistician at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

National: Trump-Russia probe to face challenge in Justice Department | Business Insider

A high-level official at the Department of Justice tasked with investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 election has announced that she will leave the DOJ in May, leaving a key position in the department’s National Security Division unfilled as President Donald Trump’s political appointees await confirmation in the Senate. Mary McCord, the acting assistant attorney general of the division, did not provide a reason when she told her staff that she would be leaving in May, according to NPR. She said “the time is now right for me to pursue new career opportunities.” McCord’s departure has raised questions about the future of the Trump-Russia probe, which will be in the hands of Trump’s deputy attorney general nominee, Rod Rosenstein, if and when he is confirmed. Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from Trump campaign-related investigations last month amid revelations that he failed to disclose two meetings he had with Russia’s ambassador to the US, Sergey Kislyak, in 2016.

National: FEC Mulls How Much Harassment Is Enough for Disclosure Exemption | Bloomberg

Lawyers for the Socialist Workers Party said the party shouldn’t have to show the party faces “serious” threats of harassment and reprisals in order to be exempt from Federal Election Commission disclosure rules. Extensive written comments filed by party lawyers ahead of an April 20 FEC open meeting sought to persuade the commissioners they should extend the party’s unique, decades-old exemption from campaign finance law requirements to disclose donors and vendors. The fringe party’s long history of persecution should be enough for a continued waiver from having to disclose, the comments said, despite arguments that recent incidents have been few and relatively minor.

National: The Continuing Fallout from Trump and Nunes’s Fake Scandal | The New Yorker

Recently, several members and staffers on the House Intelligence Committee, which is investigating Russia’s role in the Presidential election, visited the National Security Agency, in Fort Meade, Maryland. Inside the enormous black glass headquarters of America’s largest spy agency, the congressmen and their aides were shown a binder of two to three dozen pages of highly classified intercepts, mostly transcripts of conversations between foreign government officials that took place during the Presidential transition. These intercepts were not related to the heart of the committee’s Russia investigation. In fact, only one of the documents had anything to do with Russia, according to an official who reviewed them. What the intercepts all had in common is that the people being spied on made references to Donald Trump or to Trump officials. That wasn’t even clear, though, from reading the transcripts. The names of any Americans were concealed, or “masked,” the intelligence community’s term for redacting references to Americans who are not the legal targets of surveillance when such intelligence reports are distributed to policy makers.

National: Former Obama homeland security adviser: Election-style hacks ‘bound’ to happen again | The Hill

A former adviser to President Obama predicts that nation-states and others will try to use cyber intrusions to disrupt future election processes and “weaponize” data as Russia did during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The hacks targeting high-level Democratic Party officials marked a “new threshold” in cyber activity, Lisa Monaco, who advised Obama on homeland security and counterterrorism, told CNN commentator David Axelrod on his podcast “The Axe Files.” “We in the United States have entered a new threshold and crossed into a new threshold where we have state actors and others trying to use these cyber tools in new ways to intrude in our election process, to weaponize information,” Monaco said.

National: Mike Conaway Emerges From Relative Obscurity to Lead House Russia Inquiry | The New York Times

President Trump does not know Mike Conaway. A Republican congressman from a long brush stroke of West Texas, Mr. Conaway recalled meeting with him at the White House with other House Republicans. And he has shaken hands with Mr. Trump, a “standard, 500-people-on-a-rope-line, shaken-hand kind of thing.” “He wouldn’t know me from third base,” Mr. Conaway said. Whether he has exchanged pleasantries with the president may not have mattered before, but it does now. Mr. Conaway is taking over the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation into Russian meddling in the presidential election. He is replacing Representative Devin Nunes, the California Republican whose suspiciously cozy relationship with Mr. Trump derailed the inquiry before he was ultimately forced to step aside.

National: How will Big Data change gerrymandering? Both parties are eager to know what you do online | Salon

When you exit the Pennsylvania Turnpike just north of Pennsylvania, on Main Street in working-class Norristown, you’re in the overwhelmingly Democratic 13th congressional district — at least for a couple of miles. The help-wanted signs are in Spanish; people walk past the Premier Barber Institute, bail bondsmen, and the 99-cent stores wearing branded short-sleeve shirts from their chain-store jobs. But come around a corner and up and hill and suddenly the neighborhoods turn leafy and green. Suburban-looking dads walk large dogs with flowing tresses. The houses are lovely and set back from the road. This three-quarter-mile stretch is in one of the nation’s most infamously gerrymandered districts, Pennsylvania’s reliably Republican seventh, a one-time swing district so wildly drawn that it resembles Donald Duck kicking Goofy. Signs warn drivers not to tailgate.

National: The mathematician who’s using geometry to fight gerrymandering | PRI

After every new US census, states have to redraw their congressional districts to divide up their populations fairly. But in practice, these districts don’t always end up equal: Federal judges recently ordered Wisconsin lawmakers to redraw maps of the state’s legislative districts, after finding the districts had been shaped to favor Republican candidates. Allegations of gerrymandering are also playing out in states like Texas and North Carolina. So what does a gerrymandered district even look like on a map? More like a carved-out jigsaw piece than a rounded blot, as it turns out. But as Tufts University mathematician Moon Duchin explains, gerrymandering can be difficult to prove, even when something about a district’s shape seems fishy. “We’ve had justices saying that, ‘We know a bizarre, irrational shape when we see it, but we don’t know what precisely should the threshold be which makes a shape too tortured, or irregular, or unreasonable,’” she says. (Take a closer look at district shapes across the US.)

National: British spies were first to spot Trump team’s links with Russia | The Guardian

Britain’s spy agencies played a crucial role in alerting their counterparts in Washington to contacts between members of Donald Trump’s campaign team and Russian intelligence operatives, the Guardian has been told. GCHQ first became aware in late 2015 of suspicious “interactions” between figures connected to Trump and known or suspected Russian agents, a source close to UK intelligence said. This intelligence was passed to the US as part of a routine exchange of information, they added. Over the next six months, until summer 2016, a number of western agencies shared further information on contacts between Trump’s inner circle and Russians, sources said. The European countries that passed on electronic intelligence – known as sigint – included Germany, Estonia and Poland. Australia, a member of the “Five Eyes” spying alliance that also includes the US, UK, Canada and New Zealand, also relayed material, one source said.

National: Safer Elections Mean Newer Equipment, No Networks | StateTech Magazine

Among the many contentious arguments of the 2016 presidential election was the question of the security of the vote itself. Accusations flew, with claims that the election would be rigged or hacked in some way. In part, those accusations were lent credence by the state of voting equipment in the United States. In many localities, equipment is approaching the end of its useful life; many states and counties last upgraded with the help of federal funding provided through the Help America Vote Act of 2002. “As the 2000 election demonstrated, and now again, elections in general and voting technology in particular is a highly under-resourced and underappreciated part of our democratic infrastructure,” says Professor Charles Stewart III of the MIT Election Data and Science Lab.

National: Global Cyber Norms Insufficient to Prevent Future Election Hacks | MeriTalk

As the State Department works to gain international support for its cybersecurity framework, experts said that global norms and deterrence won’t be enough to convince state actors not to influence elections through cyber means in the future. Robert Axelrod, Walgreen Professor for the study of human understanding at the University of Michigan, compared the Democratic National Committee (DNC) hacks to Watergate. Both incidents involved the theft of information. The difference is that in Watergate, the incident was handled by domestic law enforcement and the president resigned. In the DNC hacks the incident was handled by international powers and there was “minor retaliation,” according to Axelrod. … “I think we’re going to see a lot more attacks like them in future campaigns,” said J. Alex Halderman, professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan. Halderman said that most people think that the United States’ voting machines are secure because they are different in each county and they aren’t connected to the Internet. “In fact, many of these things break down,” said Halderman.

National: The Entirely Preventable Battles Raging Over Voting Rights | The Atlantic

In 2013, Chief Justice John Roberts made a sweeping declaration about the state of voting rights in America. “Our country has changed,” he wrote in his majority opinion in Shelby County v. Holder, “and while any racial discrimination in voting is too much, Congress must ensure that the legislation it passes to remedy that problem speaks to current conditions.” With those words, Roberts and four other justices on the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a core provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a hammer of a civil-rights law that helped bludgeon recalcitrant states toward multiracial democracy. The majority concluded Congress was relying on out-of-date data when formulating which jurisdictions still had to receive federal approval to change their election laws and policies—a practice known as preclearance that’s meant to block discriminatory measures. Four justices, led by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, denounced the decision in stark terms. “Hubris is a fit word for today’s demolition of the VRA,” she wrote in dissent.

National: Gorsuch Arrives At The Supreme Court At A Crucial Moment For Voting Rights | TPM

Less then a week into the job, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch will have his first chance, behind closed doors at least, to weigh in on voting rights. When the justices meet Friday for their private conference, the first since Gorsuch’s confirmation, among the cases that they will be considering whether to take up is an appeal of a landmark ruling striking down North Carolina’s mammoth restrictive voting law. The moment is an anxious one for voting rights advocates, who had seen a number of lower court victories on key cases in the months since the death of Justice Antonin Scalia and were cautiously optimistic that the Supreme Court was about to flip their way in time for them to cement that progress at the highest court. While it is unclear how Gorsuch is likely to rule on the major questions bubbling up in voting rights litigation, if he does represent the second coming of Scalia, as he has been billed by his supporters, then some of those intermediary wins are now at risk.

National: New threat rising to Voting Rights Act | National Constitution Center

About four years after the Supreme Court took away the government’s strongest authority to protect minority voters’ rights, a backup power under the federal Voting Rights Act – weaker and harder to use – is now being threatened, just as federal courts have begun applying it. At issue now, as it was when the Supreme Court decided the case of Shelby County v. Holder in June 2013, is a form of government supervision of voting rights that goes by the technical term, “pre-clearance.” When operating against a state or local government, that means that officials cannot put any new voting law or procedure – however minor – into effect without first getting approval in Washington, D.C. Three cases now developing in federal courts based in Texas are testing whether the variation of “pre-clearance” will take the place of what the Supreme Court scuttled. And there are already serious challenges facing that prospect, in each of those cases.

National: Trump Says Voter Fraud Is a Huge Problem. A Top Republican Election Official Disagrees | Time

As voters began selecting their next president, Donald Trump repeatedly warned that Election 2016 was “rigged.” Millions of people, Trump said, are registered in two states and may therefore vote twice. Others would steal identities from the dead. Voting machines would malfunction. In January, less than a week into his presidency, Trump told lawmakers that between 3 million and 5 million illegal votes caused him to lose the popular vote — though not the election itself — to Democrat Hillary Clinton. He told senators a tale about ineligible voters being bussed into New Hampshire from Massachusetts. Trump then tapped Vice President Mike Pence to lead an investigation into voter fraud. … That’s not how Matthew Masterson sees it. Masterson, the newly minted Republican chairman of the bipartisan U.S. Election Assistance Commission, ranks Election 2016 among the most trouble-free elections ever.

National: FBI obtained FISA warrant to monitor Trump adviser Carter Page | The Washington Post

The FBI obtained a secret court order last summer to monitor the communications of an adviser to presidential candidate Donald Trump, part of an investigation into possible links between Russia and the campaign, law enforcement and other U.S. officials said. The FBI and the Justice Department obtained the warrant targeting Carter Page’s communications after convincing a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge that there was probable cause to believe Page was acting as an agent of a foreign power, in this case Russia, according to the officials. This is the clearest evidence so far that the FBI had reason to believe during the 2016 presidential campaign that a Trump campaign adviser was in touch with Russian agents. Such contacts are now at the center of an investigation into whether the campaign coordinated with the Russian government to swing the election in Trump’s favor.

National: Classified docs contradict Nunes surveillance claims, GOP and Dem sources say | CNN

After a review of the same intelligence reports brought to light by House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes, both Republican and Democratic lawmakers and aides have so far found no evidence that Obama administration officials did anything unusual or illegal, multiple sources in both parties tell CNN. Their private assessment contradicts President Donald Trump’s allegations that former Obama national security adviser Susan Rice broke the law by requesting the “unmasking” of US individuals’ identities. Trump had claimed the matter was a “massive story.” However, over the last week, several members and staff of the House and Senate intelligence committees have reviewed intelligence reports related to those requests at NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland.

National: U.S. Crackdown on Russian Hackers Ensnares Notorious Spammer | Bloomberg

U.S. efforts to disrupt Russian hacking rings took another step as a 10-year pursuit of a Russian man whom U.S. prosecutors called one of the world’s most notorious email spammers ended with his arrest in Spain last week. Peter Levashov, of St. Petersburg, Russia, hacked into email and bank accounts of thousands of Americans, federal prosecutors said Monday in a statement. They said he also operated under the name Peter Severa, who is among the top 10 of the world’s worst spammers, according to a list maintained by the antispam organization Spamhaus. The arrest is part of a crackdown on Russian hackers accused of targeting everything from financial institutions to the U.S. presidential election. U.S. intelligence agencies believe that Russia orchestrated computer attacks to meddle with the election last fall, including a break-in to systems operated by the Democratic National Committee. That investigation is underway, and no charges have been filed.

National: Russian computer programmer arrested in Spain reportedly over US election hacking | The New York Times

He refused to meet business associates in person and never talked on the phone, preferring instead to communicate via encrypted messaging services. But the elaborate precautions taken by the Russian computer spam kingpin known as Peter Severa appear to have failed him. Acting on an F.B.I. request, the police in Spain arrested a man this weekend named Peter Levashov, according to Russian news media reports and Reuters, citing a Russian Embassy spokesman in Madrid. Western cybersecurity researchers have identified Mr. Levashov as Peter Severa, though some doubt he is the same person. The initial reports in Russian news media of Mr. Levashov’s arrest did not say if he was suspected by United States intelligence agencies of being involved in attempts by Russian government hackers to meddle in the 2016 American presidential election. The American intelligence agencies have said Russian hackers broke into the servers of the Democratic National Committee and the email of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman and released documents in an effort to sway the election toward Donald J. Trump.

National: Questions, concerns continue to swirl around election security | GCN

At an April 4 Election Assistance Commission public hearing, a senior Department of Homeland Security official sought to stress one thing: The designation of election systems as critical infrastructure doesn’t cut into states’ autonomy. Concerns over DHS control have simmered since then-Secretary Jeh Johnson first suggested the critical infrastructure designation last summer. Yet Neil Jenkins, DHS’ director of the Enterprise Performance Management Office, said at the EAC hearing that his agency sees the National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS) Election Cybersecurity Task Force as the main point of contact for deciding when DHS system-scanning tools are needed. Jenkins also said he sees the EAC as a critical point of contact for local officials who may be interested in utilizing DHS scanning and security products.

National: Devin Nunes steps aside from House intelligence committee’s Russia inquiry | The Guardian

Devin Nunes, Donald Trump’s chief ally on the congressional committees investigating the president’s connections to Russia, has stepped aside from the inquiry, as he faces his own ethics investigation. Less than two weeks after the Democrats on the House intelligence committee called for Nunes to recuse himself, the committee chairman said he would “temporarily” leave the inquiry in the hands of other rightwing Republicans, leaving it unclear how much Nunes’ absence would transform an investigation stalled by deep partisan infighting. Nunes, a member of Trump’s national security transition team and the head of the House intelligence committee, is now the subject of an inquiry from the House ethics panel. … Nunes’ decision makes him the second Trump ally to remove himself from the varied Russia investigations. The first, attorney general Jeff Sessions, stepped aside on 3 March after revelations that he had meetings with the Russian ambassador while part of the Trump campaign.

National: Clinton: ‘Deeply concerned’ about Russian election role | Associated Press

Hillary Clinton said she is “deeply concerned” about allegations of Russian meddling in last year’s presidential election and says there needs to be an independent, nonpartisan investigation to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Speaking Thursday in New York at a summit on women’s issues, Clinton said Russian involvement was meant to sow “distrust and confusion. I think what was done to us was an act of aggression and it was carried out by a foreign power under the control of someone who has a deep desire to dominate Europe and send us into a tailspin,” she said, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Clinton called on Congress to put party squabbles aside and look into it. Otherwise, she said, “They will be back.”

National: C.I.A. Had Evidence of Russian Effort to Help Trump Earlier Than Believed | The New York Times

The C.I.A. told senior lawmakers in classified briefings last summer that it had information indicating that Russia was working to help elect Donald J. Trump president, a finding that did not emerge publicly until after Mr. Trump’s victory months later, former government officials say. The briefings indicate that intelligence officials had evidence of Russia’s intentions to help Mr. Trump much earlier in the presidential campaign than previously thought. The briefings also reveal a critical split last summer between the C.I.A. and counterparts at the F.B.I., where a number of senior officials continued to believe through last fall that Russia’s cyberattacks were aimed primarily at disrupting America’s political system, and not at getting Mr. Trump elected, according to interviews. The former officials said that in late August — 10 weeks before the election — John O. Brennan, then the C.I.A. director, was so concerned about increasing evidence of Russia’s election meddling that he began a series of urgent, individual briefings for eight top members of Congress, some of them on secure phone lines while they were on their summer break.

National: The Coming Voting Rights Battle: Access vs. Accountability | WhoWhatWhy

For many years, the voting integrity community has grappled with the question of how to accommodate voters with disabilities without making elections less secure. There might finally be a solution on the horizon. One-sixth of the American electorate — over 35 million eligible voters — is disabled. For many of them, simple tasks that many of us take for granted — say, putting pen to paper — is, at best, terribly inconvenient, and, at worst, impossible. This is why the disabled prefer direct-recording electronic voting machines (DREs), which advertise handicap-friendly features like touchscreens and audio-enabled ballots. But these machines often do not leave a paper trail, and are therefore considered less reliable by the voting-integrity community. This debate has created a rift among the advocates, forcing each side to think long and hard about how exactly to define a “fair election.” For many advocates, auditability — the degree to which an election outcome can be verified (audited) independent of the original vote-tabulating system — is the most important standard. According to this point of view, the only way to assure voters that elections have not been compromised (by incidental code hiccups or intentional tampering) is to create total system transparency — which means physical ballots and the paper trails they make possible. This is considered the ultimate safeguard against election tampering.