Regional Editor
Sunday, July 18, 2021
Trump "Shit-Storm" Scheduled To Return To "Ground-Zero" Arizona
Mark your calendars -and get your tickets - for one more day of Infamy Saturday July 24, 2021
Place: Arizona Federal Theater in downtown Phoenix.
"Arizona is at the epicenter of the 2022 midterms and, of course, the next presidential election in 2024,” said Charlie Kirk, president of Turning Point Action.
“It’s critical that our support is stronger than ever so the average American’s trust in our systems and institutions is restored.
> We must start earlier and work harder than ever before to save Arizona and the republic.
> We are honored that President Trump is committed to that fight, and
> We know Arizonans are thrilled that he’s decided to pay their home state a special visit.”
Source: Trump scheduled to return to Arizona
The event comes as the Arizona Senate’s audit of 2.1 million Maricopa County 2020 General Election ballots wraps up.
Trump has said the audit would uncover enough errors to potentially erase the nearly 11,000 vote deficit he had in the election. The loss handed now-president Joe Biden Arizona’s 11 Electoral College votes, marking the first time since 1996 a Democrat won the state.
The event also happens as Republicans look to gear up their political operations for a 2022 election that will feature chances to gain a seat in the U.S. Senate, maintain the governor’s office, attorney general and expand on thin majorities in both state legislative chambers.
Seats will be given on a first-come, first-served basis.
Those hoping to attend can register at tpaction.com/rally.
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shit·storm
ˈSHitˌstôrm/
noun
vulgar slang
noun: shit-storm
a situation marked by violent controversy
Source: The Atlantic March 2017 Issue
. . . if liberal advocates are clinging to the hope that federalism will allow them to create progressive havens, they’re overlooking a big problem: Power may be decentralized in the American system, but it devolves to the state, not the city.
Recent events in red states where cities are pockets of liberalism are instructive, and cautionary.
. . . if liberal advocates are clinging to the hope that federalism will allow them to create progressive havens, they’re overlooking a big problem: Power may be decentralized in the American system, but it devolves to the state, not the city.
Recent events in red states where cities are pockets of liberalism are instructive, and cautionary.
About
“Shitstorm”, a portmanteau of the words “shit” and “storm,” is an Internet slang term referring to a type of public outrage . . .
Origin
The exact origin of the term is unclear. On November 7th, 2002, Urban Dictionary[1] user D’emon submitted an entry for “shit storm,” describing it as an unpleasant consequence of failure
Over the past few years, city governments and state legislatures have fought each other in a series of battles involving preemption, the principle that state law trumps local regulation, just as federal law supersedes state law. It hasn’t gone well for the city dwellers.
Alabama and Arizona both passed bills targeting “sanctuary cities”—those that do not cooperate with the enforcement of federal immigration laws.![Trump Shit] Storm Tracker. It can detect [bull] at street… | Flickr](https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSAtztwg8NJpbG6scDiVlHxK1sa-3cPDNR4DA&usqp=CAU)
Even though courts threw out much of that legislation, other states have considered their own versions. Arizona also made sure cities couldn’t ban the gifts in Happy Meals (cities elsewhere had talked about outlawing them, on the theory that they lure kids to McDonald’s), and when some of its cities cracked down on puppy mills, it barred local regulation of pet breeders, too.
Alabama and Arizona both passed bills targeting “sanctuary cities”—those that do not cooperate with the enforcement of federal immigration laws.
Even though courts threw out much of that legislation, other states have considered their own versions. Arizona also made sure cities couldn’t ban the gifts in Happy Meals (cities elsewhere had talked about outlawing them, on the theory that they lure kids to McDonald’s), and when some of its cities cracked down on puppy mills, it barred local regulation of pet breeders, too.
Close observers of these clashes expect them to proliferate in the years to come, with similar results. " . . . We are about to see a shit storm of state and federal preemption orders, of a magnitude greater than anything in history,” says Mark Pertschuk of Grassroots Change, ..By the group’s count, at least 36 states introduced laws preempting cities in 2016."
Most of these laws enforce conservative policy preferences.
That’s partly because Republicans enjoy unprecedented control in state capitals—they hold 33 governorships and majorities in 32 state legislatures. . ."
Most of these laws enforce conservative policy preferences.
That’s partly because Republicans enjoy unprecedented control in state capitals—they hold 33 governorships and majorities in 32 state legislatures. . ."
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FLIM-FLAM LADY KOOKIE KAREN FANN: Shallow Diving Into Arizona's "Ground-Zero" Talent Pool
Let's tap more into the Great State of Arizona's "Ground-Zero" Talent Pool
(Photo credit: Gage Skidmore)
Top ALEC Official Is Ringleader of Arizona Election Audit Circus
"The public face of the preposterous Maricopa County ballot audit is Republican Arizona State Senate President Karen Fann—who also serves as the second-highest ranking board member of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the country’s pre-eminent pay-to-play corporate lobbying group.
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Arizona Senate holds election audit meeting after U.S. House committee launches investigation
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The U.S. House Oversight Committee launched an investigation into the company conducting the election audit in Maricopa County. This came as Arizona Senate P...
The audit, which has now earned the nickname “The Mess in Maricopa,” is the most conspicuous ongoing attempt by Republicans to bolster the “Big Lie” conspiracy theory that Donald Trump didn’t really lose the presidential election in November.
In her role as ALEC board treasurer, Fann oversees the group’s agenda and is likely next in line to become its national chair, as ALEC does not currently have a vice chair. Unlike other ideologically conservative lobbying groups, ALEC’s business model is specifically to pursue corporate agendas at the state level.
So while American corporations are trying to distance themselves from extremist Republican challenges to democracy at the state level, Fann’s prominent and unapologetic role in the Arizona farce adds to the already ample evidence that at least some American corporations are aggressively supporting state-level actions that, as over 100 democracy scholars explained on Tuesday, “are transforming several states into political systems that no longer meet the minimum conditions for free and fair elections.”
In 2012, ALEC was forced to publicly disband its “Public Safety and Elections” task force after scores of major corporations started dropping their membership due to its pursuit of “Stand Your Ground” and Voter ID model legislation.
But in the summer of 2019, ALEC secretly launched a “Process Working Group” that is tasked with elections and redistricting. Fann is part of that group, which is chaired by fellow Arizona State Rep. Shawnna Bolick (R) as well as disgraced attorney and Trump advisor Cleta Mitchell.
> As Senate president, Fann approved the initial state payment of $150,000 for the audit. The audit is now also receiving funds through a dark money vehicle run by staffers with the ultra-right-wing broadcasting company One America News (OAN), which traffics in election conspiracies.
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Karen Fann owns this farcical crusade to prove Trump isn’t a big loser
"
Just when you thought the farce that is the Arizona Senate’s proposed audit of the 2020 election couldn’t be any more farcical, news comes about a hand recount conducted by volunteers that makes it impossible not to laugh at the sheer ineptitude of this entire unnecessary endeavor.
And that ineptitude only serves to highlight a fact that must not be lost sight of: This entire effort is in service of the lie that fraud led to Donald Trump’s defeat in November, and the audit is squarely aimed at finding the non-existent proof that will finally expose the “truth.”
It isn’t aimed at finding the actual truth — which is that there was no massive fraud and Trump lost because he mismanaged a pandemic and alienated independents and moderate Republicans — but at verifying the alternate reality “truth” that Trump spent months injecting into his base.
One thing the audit certainly won’t be is the “big step in returning trust and confidence in our election process” as Senate President Karen Fann claims. . ."
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“We are paying for some of the security and the cost of the Coliseum [where the audit is held],” Fann told CNN last week, adding that “anything over and above is being covered by others” and that she does “not know who they are.”
The private funding of the audit comes shortly after Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R) signed a bill in April banning the private funding of elections going forward, and “pledged to partner with the Legislature to provide elections officials with adequate resources.”
Fann Questioned Vote Count Within a Week After the Election
Six days after the election, on November 9, 2020, Fann wrote a letter to Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs (D) urging her to “make available all data and the logic and accuracy tests to independent expert evaluation.”.
Fann argued that claims of voter fraud in the state “will linger indefinitely and may cause substantial damage to the credibility of our democratic processes if something isn’t done to alleviate claims that the election was conducted unfairly, if not fraudulently.”
But no evidence of voter fraud emerged in Arizona.
A number of legal challenges to the election results were filed in the state, but all were dismissed. One was filed by Arizona GOP Chairwoman Kelli Ward, a former ALEC-tied lawmaker, who has faced allegations within her own party that her election to the party’s top post in the state was fraudulent.
Ward tweeted on the day of the Capitol insurrection: “Congress is adjourned. Send the elector choice back to the legislatures.”
Ward told Newsmax she hoped the Maricopa audit would set a national precedent: “Arizona is the first domino that will fall and then other states will look into irregularities, abnormalities, mistakes and potentially outright fraud that happened in their states as well.”
To conduct the audit, Fann in March chose a fellow Stop the Steal advocate, Doug Logan, owner of an untested Florida-based company called Cyber Ninjas. This is Cyber Ninjas’ first election audit.
The Arizona Mirror reported that in December, Logan had reposted a tweet from “Ron Watkins — a conspiracy theorist and former administrator of 8chan who has promoted QAnon and is believed by some to have run the Q account— that claimed an audit of the election might show that ‘Trump got 200k more votes than previously reported in Arizona.'”
The Center for Media and Democracy filed a public records request with Arizona state senators for records related to the Cyber Ninjas selection, but has not yet received a response. American Oversight has sued the Arizona Senate for failing to produce records related to the audit.
An official with Dominion Voting Systems, whose vote-counting machines are being examined as part of the audit, told reporters: “The firms selected to conduct this audit are beyond biased. Publicly available information shows they are led by conspiracy theorists and QAnon supporters who have helped spread the Big Lie.”
Arizona Democrats and others concerned with the security and motives of the audit sued the Arizona Senate in an attempt to stop the audit, but settled on May 5 when guarantees were put in place for ballot security and voter privacy, as well as spaces for the press and others to observe.
On May 20, Hobbs, the secretary of state, announced that the voting machines turned over to Cyber Ninjas and other companies would need to be replaced because of uncertainty over what is being done to them.
> In an apparent act of retaliation, Republicans in the Arizona House then stripped Hobbs of her ability “to defend election lawsuits,” and transferred that ability to Republican Attorney General Mark Brnovich. Brnovich is a member of the Republican Attorneys General Association, a group that recently doubled down on Trump’s Big Lie, leading to an exodus of staff and leadership.
Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Chairman Jack Sellers (R), called the ongoing recount a “grift disguised as an audit” at a news conference earlier in the month, after Fann was forced to backtrack a claim that the county deleted a database and that ballots were missing.
Maricopa County internal and external reviews of the November 2020 election found zero evidence of fraud.
Fann told CNN last week that Arizona’s audit will be “a lesson in democracy” and “the basis of a gold standard.” History will almost assuredly prove her correct about that first part.
Disclosures Begin Today > PEGASUS SURVEILLANCE SPYWARE GLOBAL REACH
Let's get ahead of the story > The Guardian and its media partners will be revealing the identities of people whose number appeared on the list in the coming days. They include hundreds of business executives, religious figures, academics, NGO employees, union officials and government officials, including cabinet ministers, presidents and prime ministers. . .
The disclosures begin on Sunday, with the revelation that the numbers of more than 180 journalists are listed in the data, including reporters, editors and executives at the Financial Times, CNN, the New York Times, France 24, the Economist, Associated Press and Reuters.
THE PEGASUS PROJECT SURVEILLANCE
Revealed: leak uncovers global abuse of cyber-surveillance weapon
Spyware sold to authoritarian regimes used to target activists, politicians and journalists, data suggests
Stephanie Kirchgaessner, Paul Lewis, David Pegg,Sam Cutler,Nina Lakhani and Michael Safi
Last modified on Sun 18 Jul 2021 16.39 EDT
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". . . Human rights activists, journalists and lawyers across the world have been targeted by authoritarian governments using hacking software sold by the Israeli surveillance company NSO Group, according to an investigation into a massive data leak.
The investigation by the Guardian and 16 other media organisations suggests widespread and continuing abuse of NSO’s hacking spyware, Pegasus, which the company insists is only intended for use against criminals and terrorists.
Pegasus is a malware that infects iPhones and Android devices to enable operators of the tool to extract messages, photos and emails, record calls and secretly activate microphones.
The leak contains a list of more than 50,000 phone numbers that, it is believed, have been identified as those of people of interest by clients of NSO since 2016.
Forbidden Stories, a Paris-based nonprofit media organisation, and Amnesty International initially had access to the leaked list and shared access with media partners as part of the Pegasus project, a reporting consortium. . .Through its lawyers, NSO said the consortium had made “incorrect assumptions” about which clients use the company’s technology. It said the 50,000 number was “exaggerated” and the list could not be a list of numbers “targeted by governments using Pegasus”. 
The lawyers said NSO had reason to believe the list accessed by the consortium “is not a list of numbers targeted by governments using Pegasus, but instead, may be part of a larger list of numbers that might have been used by NSO Group customers for other purposes”. After further questions, the lawyers said the consortium was basing its findings “on misleading interpretation of leaked data from accessible and overt basic information, such as HLR Lookup services, which have no bearing on the list of the customers' targets of Pegasus or any other NSO products ...
> Claudio Guarnieri, who runs Amnesty International’s Security Lab, said once a phone was infected with Pegasus, a client of NSO could in effect take control of a phone, enabling them to extract a person’s messages, calls, photos and emails, secretly activate cameras or microphones, and read the contents of encrypted messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal. . . By accessing GPS and hardware sensors in the phone, he added, NSO’s clients could also secure a log of a person’s past movements and track their location in real time with pinpoint accuracy, for example by establishing the direction and speed a car was travelling in.
The latest advances in NSO’s technology enable it to penetrate phones with “zero-click” attacks, meaning a user does not even need to click on a malicious link for their phone to be infected.
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Amnesty, research groups map out global reach of Israeli NSO Group’s spyware
Pegasus software ‘has been used in some of the most insidious digital attacks on human rights defenders,’ Amnesty International charges; NSO says claims are ‘recycled,’ inaccurate
"The ‘Digital Violence: How the NSO Group Enables State Terror’ platform that details the operations of Israeli startup NSO Group (Courtesy)
An interactive online platform created by research agency Forensic Architecture, and supported by Amnesty International and the internet watchdog group Citizen Lab, has mapped the global spread of the spyware Pegasus, made by Israeli cybersecurity firm NSO Group.
Titled “Digital Violence: How the NSO Group Enables State Terror,” the website shows, for what is said to be the first time, geographic areas in which Pegasus spyware has been deployed worldwide, and interviews lawyers, activists and other civil society figures about their experiences.
Forensic Architecture, based in the University of London, investigates human rights violations by states, police forces and corporations.
“The company’s Pegasus spyware has been used in some of the most insidious digital attacks on human rights defenders,” Amnesty International said on its website. “When Pegasus is surreptitiously installed on a person’s phone, an attacker has complete access to a phone’s messages, emails, media, microphone, camera, calls and contacts.”
“The investigation reveals the extent to which the digital domain we inhabit has become the new frontier of human rights violations, a site of state surveillance and intimidation that enables physical violations in real space,” said Forensic Architecture researcher Shourideh Molavi in the Amnesty statement.
Guarnieri has identified evidence NSO has been exploiting vulnerabilities associated with iMessage, which comes installed on all iPhones, and has been able to penetrate even the most up-to-date iPhone running the latest version of iOS. His team’s forensic analysis discovered successful and attempted Pegasus infections of phones as recently as this month. . ."
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06 November 2019
An Opinion Piece in the New York Times caught your MesaZona blogger's eye today.What Poses a Greater Privacy Threat Than Facebook? Spyware
WhatsApp’s lawsuit against the spyware company NSO Group is a smart move for Facebook and an important defense of privacy and civil liberties.
A lawsuit that is a genuine step forward for drawing attention to the spyware market and the need for stricter regulation of private surveillance companies like NSO.
Pegasus is a spyware that can be installed on devices running certain versions of iOS, Apple's mobile operating system, developed by the Israeli cyberarms firm, NSO Group
"Facebook is under fierce scrutiny for its decisions about political advertisements and consumer privacy, and its foray into developing a new cryptocurrency.
So it makes sense that the company would try to drum up a little positive publicity and remind people that there are tech firms out there that pose much greater threats to privacy, democracy and civil liberties.
As for surveillance, let’s be clear:
We’re talking total surveillance
"Whatever you may think of Facebook, the Israeli spyware company known as the NSO Group — whose products have been used to compromise devices belonging to lawyers, dissidents, journalists and diplomats around the world — is inarguably worse. . ."
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Pegasus:
The ultimate spyware for iOS and Android
April 11, 2017
Apple iPhone and iPad users usually believe they are safe. There’s no malware for iOS, they say. Apple does little to discourage the impression — the “fruit company” doesn’t even allow antivirus solutions in its App Store, because, you know, allegedly they’re not needed.
FROM KASPERSKY LABS Link > https://www.kaspersky.com/blog/pegasus-spywareThe keyword here is allegedly. There actually is malware in the wild that targets iOS users — it’s been proved a number of times, and in August 2016 researchers proved it again by revealing the existence of Pegasus, spyware capable of hacking any iPad or iPhone, harvesting data about the victim, and establishing surveillance on them.
That discovery made the whole cybersecurity world… uneasy.
At our Security Analyst Summit, researchers from Lookout revealed that Pegasus exists not only for iOS, but for Android as well. The Android version is different in some ways from its iOS predecessor.
Let’s shed some light on Pegasus and explain why we use the word “ultimate” to describe it.
Pegasus: The beginning
Pegasus was discovered thanks to Ahmed Mansoor, a UAE human rights activist, who happened to be one of its targets.
It was a spear-phishing attack: He received several SMS messages that contained what he thought were malicious links, so he sent those messages to security experts from Citizen Lab, and they brought another cybersecurity firm, Lookout, to the investigation. . .
Pegasus has been attributed to the NSO Group, an Israeli company whose bread and butter is developing spyware.
That means the malware is commercial — it’s sold to whoever is willing to pay for it.
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2016 was an exciting year for Orbital ATK’s Flight Systems Group with numerous launches, tests, and production milestones.
Highlights include launches of Antares and Pegasus, significant rate increases for composite parts, and the final qualification test of the solid rocket boosters for NASA’s Space Launch System.
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28Feb 2017
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