RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week Nov. 3 to Nov.9, 2019 Forget pajama-clad scammers dialing for dollars in musty basements. Today identity thieves digitally siphon people's savings with frightening sophistication as international cartels and rogue countries use bots to monitor victims' transactions in real time. In RealClearInvestigations, JohnWasikreports: Thieves from anywhere use cutting-edge technology including artificial intelligence to ,foil authentication and program bulk larceny -- stealing even from digitally savvy people who know they are being targeted. At least 14 million Americans were victimized last year. A Chicago-area business consultant's nightmare began when his financial adviser got an email requesting his bank account numbers. But nothing happened - at first. This was soon followed by similar attempts to get into his brokerage accounts. The man closed his checking account and opened a new one numerous times, but still the hackers knew what he was doing and kept at it. When the man finally got his financial accounts secure, hackers started ordering credit cards in his name. But cops couldn't crack the case with a delivery sting operation. Scammers even found out about his mortgage refinance and sent a fake email posing as the man's mortgage broker, requesting the $91,000 owed at closing. Read Full Article The Trump Investigations: Top Articles Why Media Aren't Following RCI's Lead in Reporting on 'Whistleblower', Washington Post 'Whistleblower' Attorney's 2017 Tweet: 'Coup Has Started', Breitbart 'Whistleblower' Firm Offered Rate Cut for Trump Informants, Breitbart After Steele, IG Focuses on FBI Agents Ignoring ‘Red Flags', John Solomon Reports Manafort Spread Ukraine Theory Before 2016 Election, BuzzFeed CIA, FBI Informant Was Source forRussiagateSmears, Federalist DoJSeeks Details on Trump 'Resistance' Op-Ed Writer, Washington Post Pro-Trumper's$500K Cemented Tie of Giuliani, Dirt-Digging Ally, NewYorkTimes Other Noteworthy Articles and Series Nation's Cops Using Flawed Breathalyzers New York Times Breathalyzers used to convict millions of Americans for drunk driving are often unreliable. A New York Times investigation found that the devices, found in virtually every police station in America, generate skewed results with alarming frequency, even though they are ballyhooed as precise. The machines are sensitive scientific instruments, but in many cases they haven't been properly calibrated, yielding wildly high alcohol levels. Maintenance is up to police departments that sometimes have shoddy standards and lack expertise. Judges in Massachusetts and New Jersey have thrown out more than 30,000 breath tests in the past 12 months alone, largely because of human errors and lax governmental oversight. Across the country, thousands of other tests also have been invalidated in recent years. The Global Fertility Crash Bloomberg Businessweek Population growth is vital for the world economy. It means more workers to build homes and produce goods, more consumers to buy things and spark innovation, and more citizens to pay taxes and attract trade. While the global average fertility rate was still above the rate of replacement—technically 2.1 children per woman—in 2017, about half of all countries had already fallen below it, up from 1 in 20 just half a century ago. For this article, reporters interviewed one woman in each of four countries with different fertility rates - France, Saudi Arabia, China and Nigeria - to explore some of the cultural and economic trends at work. In Leaked Video, 'GMA' Anchor Says ABC Quashed Epstein Exposé Project Veritas In "hot mic" video, Amy Robach of ABC News's "Good Morning America" and "20/20" complains on set that she had strong evidence of Jeffery Epstein's abuse of women but that her network quashed the story. She says her bosses told her no one cared about the thenrelatively unknown Epstein. But she also suspects they were influenced by fears surrounding potential exposure of his famous friends, including former President Bill Clinton, whom Robach colleague and GMA mainstay George Stephanopoulos once served as communications director.In a separate story from NPR, ABC News executives say their journalists were simply not able to corroborate the details of the reporting sufficiently for broadcast. Perhaps. Butthisis the same reason NBC Newsgave for not airing Ronan Farrow's reporting on Harvey Weinstein's alleged abuse of women, which went on to win a Pulitzer Prize after being published in the New Yorker. All this happened in a week of major media figures wringing their hands over protecting the anti-Trump whistleblower. Less such concern applied to a female CBS News staffer fired when it was learned that, while at ABC, she had access to the tape provided to Project Veritas. Vast U.S. Dragnet Targets Chinese Theft of Biomedical Secrets New York Times Seventy-one institutions, including many of the most prestigious medical schools in the United States, are now investigating 180 individual cases involving potential theft of intellectual property. The cases began after the National Institutes of Health, tipped off by the FBI, sent 18,000 letters last year urging administrators who oversee government grants to be vigilant. Almost all the cases involve scientists of Chinese descent, including naturalized American citizens, allegedly stealing for Beijing. The alleged thefts involve not military secrets, but scientific ideas, designs, devices, data and methods that may lead to profitable new treatments or diagnostic tools. The investigations have fanned fears that China is exploiting the relative openness of the American scientific system to engage in wholesale economic espionage. Some say ethnic Chinese scientists are being unfairly targeted for scrutiny as Washington's geopolitical competition with Beijing intensifies. Cities Are Alarmist on Climate Change, Except in Wooing Bond Investors Government Accountability Institute Politicians in many American coastal cities pull no punches about the threats posed by rising sea levels due to climate change. At times they even seem to read from the same script, repeating the phrase "existential threat" to describe the rising sea levels that menace their ports and coastlines. But when they authorize selling municipal bonds to pay for local development, do they mention any of these risks to investors? Bonds are rated and their coupon interest rates are determined by financial officials in these cities who must disclose all significant risks to the value of the bonds, by law. Do cities at the greatest risks from climate change pay higher interest than bonds from cities at no risk? Often, the answer is no. The Teams Tracking World's Most Dangerous Hackers MIT Technology When the Pentagon recently awarded Microsoft a $10 billion contract to transform and host the U.S. military's cloud computing systems, the mountain of money came with an implicit challenge: Can Microsoft keep the Pentagon's systems secure against some of themost well-resourced, persistent, and sophisticated hackers on earth? This article describes the threat-focusedgroupswhocomprisethe so-called MSTIC (Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center) team: one group, code-named Strontium, is responsible for Russian hackers; another, code-named Zinc, watches North Korean hackers; and yet another, code-named Holmium, tracks Iranian hackers.MSTIC tracks over 70 code-named government-sponsored threat groups and many more that are unnamed. The Great Iceland Bitcoin Heist Vanity Fair Has Bitcoin fulfilled everyone's fantasy by proving that, yes Virginia, there is a free lunch? This lively article tries to make the case. It begins in a former U.S. naval base not far from the Reykjavík airport in Iceland, where two hangar-likebuildings held rows of small, box-like computers, the size of two cartons of cigarettes, stacked in sky-high towers. Allwerededicated to a single job: mining the cryptocurrency known as Bitcoin.Working around the clock, seven days a week, the computers were part of the largest concentration of Bitcoin mining power in the world. By solving and packaging complex "blocks" of encrypted data, the machines helped secure and expand the worldwide network of digital currency, generating vast fortunes for their owners. Then one night, thieves arrived. "The criminals weren't robbing banks, or even Fort Knox. They were stealing the digital presses used to print money in the age of cryptocurrency." This article describes the heist and the sketchy world of Bitcoin. "Regular people … just don't get it," one man explains. "You're stealing machines that make money.Making money while you sleep." K-Pop's Dark Side: Sex Assault, Suicide, Spying Bloomberg BusinessWeek The South Korean producers behind the syrupy sweet K-pop sound work hard to maintain a squeaky clean image for their culturally conservative customers. This article reports that the wall of virtue collapsed this year, thanks to a scandal that continues to grip the industry. It began in January, after a man said he'd been beaten by guards for trying to stop a sexual assault at Burning Sun, a Seoul nightclub partly owned bySeungri, one of K-pop's most bankable stars. The claims spiraled into a series of overlapping allegations related to sex trafficking, date rape, spy-camera recordings, and bribery.Seungriand several other idols are under criminal investigation." Prosecutors are investigating claims police had been running interference for stars, ignoring reports of sexual assault and allowing venues such asBurningSun to function as hubs of predatory behavior. |