US hackers are said to have caused a power outage in Venezuela

Now, the New York Times has quoted unnamed US officials as confirming that the power outage was in fact the result of a cyberattack, marking the first time that the US government has been reported to have carried out such a hacking operation. US forces also used hacking capabilities to disable Venezuela’s air defense radar before the incursion, the newspaper reported, citing officials. US Cyber ​​Command also added in a somewhat vague statement to the Times that it was “proud to support Operation Absolute Resolution,” as the US government called the Venezuelan operation.

According to the Times, power was restored “quickly” — possibly by cyber command — and caused no deaths in hospitals, due to the use of backup generators.

Previously, only the Russian hacker group known as Sandworm had caused blackouts through cyberattacks, causing power outages in various regions of Ukraine in at least three confirmed cases starting in 2015. When asked by a WIRED reporter why the United States had not publicly condemned one of the blackout attacks that struck the Ukrainian capital of Kiev in 2016, Tom Bossert, a former top cyber official in the Trump administration, responded that the United States itself needed the freedom to carry out such attacks if it saw fit. That’s appropriate. “If you and I put ourselves in Captain America’s chair and decided to go to war with someone, we might turn off power and communications to give ourselves a strategic and tactical advantage,” Bossert said.

It remains unclear, of course, whether the United States was technically at war with Venezuela in any way at the time of the operation. Either way, the cyberattack represents another unprecedented move by an administration that cares little about precedent.

Journalist Laura Jadid didn’t expect to hear back after she applied to work as a deportation officer while covering an ICE job fair. She has ignored emails, ignored a drug test, dodged paperwork, and her negative opinions about ICE and the Trump administration as a whole can be easily searched online. However, you still receive a “Welcome to ICE!” Email with start date.

The Trump administration has gone to great lengths to hire a lot of officers in a short period of time — in December, the Department of Homeland Security announced it had received more than 220,000 applications for more than 10,000 officer positions at ICE — and a new account raises questions about how much vetting was actually done on candidates going through the application process.

An artificial intelligence tool that was supposed to review the resumes of potential ICE agent candidates and sort them by whether or not they have prior law enforcement experience has already broken, according to two law enforcement officials who spoke with NBC News. Candidates with no law enforcement experience were supposed to undergo eight weeks of in-person training, including classes on immigration law. Instead, applicants with the word “officer” on their resume — including those who simply said, for example, that they aspired to become ICE officers — were placed in a shorter online course. A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said it affected about 200 employees, who eventually reported to the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center for full training.

Palantir’s for-profit partnership with the Department of Homeland Security amid the wave of mass deportations is no secret. But now news outlet 404 Media has revealed the precise app Palantir built for ICE that helps it select targets and determine which neighborhoods it will focus its raids on. The tool, called Enhanced Lead Identification and Targeting for Enforcement, or ELITE, provides a map of human targets and confidence scores that they are likely to reside at a given address based on data sources ingested from official and surveillance sources. “This app allows ICE to find the closest person to arrest and disappearance, using government and business data, with the help of Palantir and Trump’s Big Brother databases,” Senator Ron Wyden told 404 Media. “It mocks the idea that ICE is trying to make our country safer. Instead, it says agents are selecting people to deport from our country in the same way you would select a nearby coffee shop.”

The internet outage in Iran amid the protests rocking the country was one of the longest and most complete in history. But some activists have managed to stay online thanks to efforts to smuggle Starlink satellite internet devices into the country. According to activists who spoke to The New York Times, there are about 50,000 satellite modems in Iran, providing a window into Internet access despite government efforts and helping share information about the government’s crackdown on protests that have claimed thousands of Iranian lives. Several activists who spoke to the Times expressed fears that Starlink’s owner, Elon Musk, would change his mind and make the service unavailable, as he did in China — a country that censors the internet where Musk has business interests.