Ransomware Shame

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Corporate executives openly confess that they would aid and abet ransomware criminals by paying them for their crimes.

  • 78% of C-suite executives claim that they would be willing to pay a ransom
  • 56% would be willing to pay over $100,000 to resume operations

That’s deliberately hanging a target on their enterprises.

And this…

  • 74% of executives with hybrid work environments believe their in-house IT and security teams lack the capability to defend against ransomware
  • 60% of executives believe their employees could not identify a cyberattack

…indicates that those executives aren’t even trying seriously to train their IT and security teams or their employees, or to enforce security measures by their work-from-home employees.

Worse than that, they actively cover up their crime enabling:

well over half (61%) of business owners admitted to concealing a breach

This willingness to reward hackers for their hacking not only endangers their own companies, it endangers other companies, as well, by making the crimes routinely lucrative—which these executives are smart enough to know.

That willingness to pay the fee-for-hacking-services aggregates into a threat to our nation’s weal and security. After all, where are the hackers so willingly rewarded located? In our nation’s enemies: 82% of the attacks come from within Russia and the People’s Republic of China, split evenly between the two.

It’s a Start

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A coalition of 10 States, led by Texas, has filed an amicus brief in the 11th Circuit Appellate Court supporting Florida’s law requiring Big Tech to

consistently apply content-moderation practices and disclosures to affected users.

The Texas law, in particular and on which Florida’s law was modeled, specifies that

…social media sites in question must…disclose their content management and moderation policies and create a complaint and appeals process. The new law also prohibits email service providers from impeding the transmission of email messages based on content.

So far, so good for the two laws, but not far enough for either.

These platforms’ moderation teams also must be required to advise the poster/communicator, in advance of any adverse action, that the team is contemplating such action. In that advance notice, the moderation teams must advise the poster/communicator which platform criterion or set of criteria that the moderation team believes is being violated, and how—in concrete, measurable terms—the team believes that violation(s) is occurring.

For instance, in the case of “might offend some,” that notice must specify the group or groups the team believes might be offended and how that offense might occur—vis., if the potential offense is along the lines non-inclusiveness, the team must specify precisely how the non-inclusion is believed to be occurring.

The team also must suggest alternative phrasings (yes, plural) and for each alternative explain how the team’s suggestion conveys the same message as the original.

This advance notice also must provide the name and business contact data of the moderation team lead and the name and business contact data of the platform Director or Senior Vice President overseeing the platform’s moderation function.

The appeal itself must go to an independent arbitration board agreeable to both the poster/communicator and the platform and at the platform’s sole expense.

Worrying about the Wrong Time Frame

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A Wall Street Journal opinion piece subheadline well summarizes the piece itself:

the Speaker pushes Democrats to take votes that will end careers in 2022

The WSJ‘s Editors write this as if they take the matter seriously. But they, and far too many others who also should know better, are taking far too short a view.

“Career ending” votes were taken in favor of Obamacare, too. Obamacare survives, and here is the Progressive-Democratic Party back in power.

So it will be with the Progressive-Democrat reconciliation bill and the pre-amendment to it that is the “infrastructure” bill. A few Progressive-Democrats might lose their seats as they vote to force passage, but these two destructive bills will live on.

And, dangerously, the Progressive-Democratic Party will recover.

John Kerry Fails Again

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[L]ife is always full of tough choices and the relationship between nations. That was John Kerry answering David Westin, a Bloomberg Television anchor, who asked Kerry, “What is the process by which one trades off climate against human rights?” Kerry actually said that in all seriousness regarding the Biden-Harris administration’s prioritizing global warming over the People’s Republic of China’s genocide against Uyghurs.

Never mind that the Uyghurs are being murdered today, and even if Climatistas are right, nobody dies for generations under the warming.

But Kerry wasn’t done.

The point I’m making is that even as there were egregious human rights issues, which Ronald Reagan called them [Gorbachev and his Soviet Union] out on it, we have to find a way forward to make the world safer, to protect our countries, and act in our interests[.]

Never mind, either, that the Soviets—the Russians—were pushing serfdom, slavery. Serfs, slaves, however horrific their lives, are in fact alive and have a chance of escaping, of getting help to escape, their condition. The dead have no such opportunity.

This is what the Biden-Harris administration appoints and supports.

She Said No Such Thing

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The ACLU, pretending to celebrate the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her position on abortion, has utterly changed—falsified—what she said about the matter.

The ACLU’s fabrication:

The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a [person’s] life, to [their] well-being and dignity… When the government controls that decision for [people], [they are] being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for [their] own choices[.]

What Ginsburg actually said was this:

The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a woman’s life, to her well-being and dignity. It is a decision she must make for herself. When Government controls that decision for her, she is being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for her own choices.

But that wasn’t woke enough to suit the “lawyers” at the ACLU, so they fabricated a claim and falsely attributed their artifice to her.

Greg Scott, Senior Vice President of Communications at Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), has one aspect of this:

The ACLU literally erasing women.

Additional to erasing women, this is an example of how blatantly dishonest the American Civil Liberties Union—the ACLU—has become.