Welcome to The Cybersecurity 202! I hope everyone is looking forward to a nice Juneteenth weekend. We'll see you back here Tuesday. Here’s “I, too” by Langston Hughes, a great D.C. poet before he moved to New York.
Below: The United Kingdom ordered WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange extradited to the United States, and Dutch authorities say they caught a Russian spy at the war crimes court.
The baseless claims of hacking and fraud that former president Donald Trump and his allies spread after his 2020 loss have polluted conversations about election security ever since, making it far harder to talk about legitimate dangers to the voting process.
Trump allies have routinely misrepresented legitimate security concerns to serve their own ends. They’ve also co-opted the language of election security to promote wild conspiracy theories and degrade public faith in the democratic process.
They’ve claimed to have found digital vulnerabilities and back doors in voting machines that make no sense to experts who’ve studied those machines. They’ve conducted vote audits that violate all audit protocols and render election machines too insecure to be used again.
The result: Talking about genuine election security concerns has become a tortuous process as experts try — usually in vain — to ensure nothing they say will be mischaracterized.
After a group of women linked to Islamic State jihadists returned to Australia on May 7, posts falsely claimed Prime Minister Anthony Albanese restored "their previously cancelled citizenship". The...