Private industry needs better safeguards to avoid calamitous consequences in the event of cyberattacks like the ones that have targeted US infrastructure and corporations, US Attorney General Merrick Garland said on Tuesday.
“You have to have a secondary method if your first method is shut down. You have to have depth, and we need to work with them on that,” Garland said, one week after a meeting between US President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin, which included discussion of a spate of Russia-linked ransomware attacks in the past few months.
Such hacks, including a ransomware attack last month on Colonial Pipeline, are “extremely dangerous,” Garland said.
The US Department of Justice has responded with a task force focused on ransomware.
In a wide-ranging question-and-answer session with reporters, his first since being confirmed in March as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, Garland also reiterated his concerns about the death penalty, defended the department’s position in a defamation case against former US president Donald Trump and said that the government would work to protect journalists’ personal safety and their ability to conceal their confidential sources.
The conversation occurred as Garland has faced demands from Democrats to swiftly undo or reverse positions taken by the department during the Trump administration, including aggressive leak investigations in which law enforcement obtained telephone records of journalists and congressional officials.
The department inspector general is now investigating, and Garland last week met with executives from news media organizations after pledging that the government would abandon the practice of seizing reporters’ records in an effort to identify their sources.
Garland, who has made several major announcements during his tenure, but taken no questions from reporters before Tuesday, did not reveal any new details about how those subpoenas were authorized and did not answer when asked when he had learned about the issue.
However, he said it was clear the balance the department had sought for decades to strike between upholding journalists’ First Amendment rights and guarding against the disclosure of classified information is “not sufficient for your protection.”
He said he believed journalists need sources to expose wrongdoing and bad decisionmaking inside the government.
“I’m going to do everything I can to help protect you” from being forced to reveal those contacts, he said.
Garland also defended the department’s decision to maintain its position that Trump cannot be held personally liable for “crude and disrespectful” remarks he made about a woman who accused him of rape, because he made the comments while he was president.
Democrats had looked to that case as one place where Garland’s justice department might make a dramatic shift in position. Instead, the department’s stance has not changed.
Garland said the case law that government lawyers had reviewed tilted in favor of the argument that defamatory statements made to the news media by a public official are protected by law.
Brazil, the world’s largest Roman Catholic country, saw its Catholic population decline further in 2022, while evangelical Christians and those with no religion continued to rise, census data released on Friday by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) showed. The census indicated that Brazil had 100.2 million Roman Catholics in 2022, accounting for 56.7 percent of the population, down from 65.1 percent or 105.4 million recorded in the 2010 census. Meanwhile, the share of evangelical Christians rose to 26.9 percent last year, up from 21.6 percent in 2010, adding 12 million followers to reach 47.4 million — the highest figure
A Chinese scientist was arrested while arriving in the US at Detroit airport, the second case in days involving the alleged smuggling of biological material, authorities said on Monday. The scientist is accused of shipping biological material months ago to staff at a laboratory at the University of Michigan. The FBI, in a court filing, described it as material related to certain worms and requires a government permit. “The guidelines for importing biological materials into the US for research purposes are stringent, but clear, and actions like this undermine the legitimate work of other visiting scholars,” said John Nowak, who leads field
Swedish campaigner Greta Thunberg was deported from Israel yesterday, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs said, the day after the Israeli navy prevented her and a group of fellow pro-Palestinian activists from sailing to Gaza. Thunberg, 22, was put on a flight to France, the ministry said, adding that she would travel on to Sweden from there. Three other people who had been aboard the charity vessel also agreed to immediate repatriation. Eight other crew members are contesting their deportation order, Israeli rights group Adalah, which advised them, said in a statement. They are being held at a detention center ahead of a
‘THE RED LINE’: Colombian President Gustavo Petro promised a thorough probe into the attack on the senator, who had announced his presidential bid in March Colombian Senator Miguel Uribe Turbay, a possible candidate in the country’s presidential election next year, was shot and wounded at a campaign rally in Bogota on Saturday, authorities said. His conservative Democratic Center party released a statement calling it “an unacceptable act of violence.” The attack took place in a park in the Fontibon neighborhood when armed assailants shot him from behind, said the right-wing Democratic Center, which was the party of former Colombian president Alvaro Uribe. The men are not related. Images circulating on social media showed Uribe Turbay, 39, covered in blood being held by several people. The Santa Fe Foundation
RSS