25 states added jobs in June
The US added 850,000 new jobs in June, bringing total employment to 145.8 million. The leisure and hospitality industry was the largest contributor to job growth. Government had the second-most growth, with the majority of it stemming from public education. USAFacts tracks the job gains in this report.
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High Pollution Advisory (HPA) | Notifies the public that the level of an air pollutant is forecast to exceed the federal health standard FOR CLEAN AIR
High Pollution Watch (HPW) | Notifies the public when there is potential for a pollutant to exceed the federal health standard FOR CLEAN AIR
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By Haley Cohen Gilliland
Almost 30 years ago, an American court ruled that victims of the Ferdinand Marcos regime in the Philippines should be compensated. The money was very well hidden
The 2019 report also highlighted that the agencies were operating legacy systems that were costly to maintain and hard to secure. All eight agencies—including the Social Security Administration and the Departments of Homeland Security, State, Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, Agriculture, Health and Human Services, and Education—failed to protect sensitive information they stored or maintained.
Tuesday’s report, titled Federal Cybersecurity: America’s Data Still at Risk, analyzed security practices by the same agencies for 2020. It found that only one agency had earned a grade of B for its cybersecurity practices last year.
“What this report finds is stark,” the authors wrote. “Inspectors general identified many of the same issues that have plagued Federal agencies for more than a decade. Seven agencies made minimal improvements, and only DHS managed to employ an effective cybersecurity regime for 2020. As such, this report finds that these seven Federal agencies still have not met the basic cybersecurity standards necessary to protect America’s sensitive data.”
The authors assigned the following grades:
| Department of State | D |
| Department of Transportation | D |
| Department of Education | D |
| Social Security Administration | D |
| Department of Agriculture | C |
| Department of Health and Human Services | C |
| Department of Housing and Urban Development | C |
| Department of Homeland Security | B |
> State Department systems, the auditors found, frequently operated without the required authorizations, ran software (including Microsoft Windows) that was no longer supported, and failed to install security patches in a timely manner.
> The department’s user management system came under particular criticism because officials couldn’t provide documentation of user access agreements for 60 percent of sample employees that had access to the department’s classified network. . .
> Details about the other departments are available in the report linked earlier.
> The report comes seven months after the discovery of a supply chain attack that led to the compromise of nine federal agencies and about 100 private companies. In April, hackers working on behalf of the Chinese government breached multiple federal agencies by exploiting vulnerabilities in the Pulse Secure VPN.
> For all of 2020, the White House reported 30,819 information security incidents across the federal government, an 8 percent increase from the prior year.
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NSA to National Security Employees: Avoid Working on Public Wi-Fi
Some of the biggest civilian agencies in the federal government have failed to act on internal cybersecurity audits dating back multiple years, a Senate report found.
The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Investigations dug through a decade of inspector general reports for eight federal agencies that rated lowest for compliance with the National Institute of Standards and Technology's Cybersecurity Framework in 2017: the Departments of Homeland Security, State, Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, Agriculture, Health and Human Services and Education as well as the Social Security Administration.
The primary finding was an overall failure to keep pace with even basic federal cybersecurity standards.
Seven of the eight agencies weren't properly protecting personally identifiable information, and six failed to regularly patch their machines and systems. Five agencies (DOT, HUD, HHS, State and SSA) weren't even able to keep an accurate inventory of their own IT assets, opening them up to potential intrusions or cyberattacks from unauthorized devices and users connected to their network, something that contributed to a 2018 data breach at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab. . .
"Given the sustained vulnerabilities identified by numerous Inspectors General, the Subcommittee finds that the federal government has not fully achieved its legislative mandate under [the Federal Information Security Management Act] and is failing to implement basic cybersecurity standards necessary to protect America's sensitive data," the subcommittee wrote.
Other metrics showed similar results. Seven of the eight agencies mentioned in the Senate report received a grade of "C" or lower for FISMA compliance in the newest version of the Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act Scorecard released by the House Oversight Committee June 26. Two (HHS and USDA) were given "F" scores, while DHS received the highest rating of the group with a "B." More broadly, a 2018 Office of Management and Budget assessment of the cybersecurity posture for 96 federal agencies found that 71 had programs that were at risk or high risk for a cyberattack, citing many of the same institutional problems referenced in the Senate report."
Your MesaZona is totally beside-himself to see a headline written by Alan Ohnsman that appeared in Forbes July 29th
Let's skip the unsubstantiated innuendoes:
"Federal prosecutors indicted Nikola Corp. founder Trevor Milton this week for fraudulent statements in public appearances and on social media that misled investors about the market-readiness of the electric truck startup’s products and technology. In doing so, stock regulators also appeared to aim a veiled warning at another, higher-profile tech executive with a history of problematic social media comments: Elon Musk, Tesla’s billionaire CEO.
Milton, 39, adopted an outspoken style to tout Nikola as it transitioned from obscure startup to a Nasdaq-traded company via a 2020 SPAC merger. He echoed Musk’s bombast and promotional techniques for Tesla. In Milton’s case, that’s proven to be an unwise choice. The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan charged him on July 29 with two counts of securities fraud and one count of wire fraud. Milton pled not guilty to the charges later that day and was freed on $100 million bail. The Securities and Exchange Commission also filed a civil suit against him for securities fraud. . .
Despite its volatile history, including brushes with bankruptcy in 2008 and 2017, Tesla has begun to thrive, posting eight consecutive quarters of net income, expanding global sales and becoming the world's most valuable automaker with a $680 billion market capitalization. The brand’s success has brought a rush of EV startups, including Fisker, Lucid, Rivian and Lordstown Motors, each seeking to raise billions of dollars to get their rival cars and trucks into production. . .This week’s warning from stock regulators probably doesn’t indicate a re-examination of Musk’s past comments, said John Coffee, a professor of business law at Columbia University. “The SEC will probably only sue Musk for future statements, not past ones.”
. . .Milton’s claims about Nikola were certainly outrageous. Among others included in the indictment, he falsely stated in 2016 that a non-functioning hydrogen truck prototype was driveable; he oversaw the release of a misleading video of a prototype truck that was just rolling down a hill, not operating under its own power; he’d said the company was already producing hydrogen fuel when it wasn’t; and tweeted that the Badger pickup would include a built-in drinking fountain with water produced from its hydrogen fuel cell system.
“Milton lied about nearly every aspect of his business,” Manhattan U.S. Attorney Audrey Strauss said on Thursday.
“I do not think Musk has approached the reckless absurdity of Milton with his statements about producing hydrogen and rolling a non-functional truck downhill,” said Coffee. . .
The legal action against Milton, who faces massive fines and potential jail time if found to be guilty of the charges, could eliminate lucrative gains he made from taking Nikola public. Already the value of his stake in the company has dropped from $8.7 billion at its height, in June 2020, to under $1 billion at the end of trading Thursday, Forbes estimates.
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