HOT SPOT ATTACKS...THE PERILS OF WIFI PROBING

WiFi Probing - User devices that have a WiFi interface periodically perform a wireless probe procedure by actively sending a control frame, known as a ''probe request''. The purpose of this procedure is to have nearby wireless access points send information about wireless networks that are available for connection.

If they have compatible data rates, a probe response is sent advertising the SSID (wireless network name), supported data rates, encryption types if required, and other 802.11 capabilities of the AP. A mobile station chooses compatible networks from the probe responses it receives.

1 broadcasts probes on average every 66 seconds, Android 4.4. 2 every 72 seconds, whereas iOS 8.1. 3 broad- casts on average every 330 seconds.

These measurements indicate that an adversary could track devices at the granularity of minutes.

2 Included in those messages is a unique fingerprint that can be collected and used to track you in public.

NOTE: Probe requests have been known to be collected at hotels, malls, airports and other public locations in order to track and identify unknowing passersby. Companies can sell this data or use it for their own market research

Protecting personal information from blanket collection and exploitation is only going to become a more challenging problem as the number of internet-connected devices expect to reach 75 billion by 2025.

WiFi probing exposes smartphone users to tracking, info leaks

Bill Toulas June 11, 2022 11:46 AM

BleepingComputer |

"Researchers at the University of Hamburg in Germany have conducted a field experiment capturing hundreds of thousands of passersby's WiFi connection probe requests to determine the type of data transmitted without the device owners realizing it.

WiFi probing is a standard process, part of the bilateral communication required between a smartphone and an access point (modem/router) to establish a connection.

By default, and for reasons of usability, most smartphones search for available WiFi networks all the time, and connect to them if trusted.

> NOTE: Many stores already use WiFi probing to track their customers' position and movement. Because this tracking only uses anonymized MAC addresses in the probe, it is considered GDPR compliant.

The researchers decided to analyze those probes to see what else they might contain, and in 23.2% of the cases, they found that the requests broadcast SSIDs of networks those devices connected to in the past.

Experiment findings

The experiment occurred in November 2021 in a busy pedestrian zone in the center of a German city. The team used six antennae to capture probes in various channels and spectrums.

They recorded all broadcasted WiFi connection problems for three hours, capturing a total of 252,242 probe requests, 46.4% in the 2.4GHz spectrum and 53.6% in 5GHz.

In just three hours, the researchers had 58,489 SSIDs from random passersby, which, in many cases, contained numeric strings with 16 or more digits that were likely "initial passwords" of popular German home routers from FritzBox or Telekom.

"Leaking passwords in SSIDs is especially critical if, along with the password, the device also broadcasts the true SSID either correctly or with a mistype that can be used to infer the true SSID," explain the researchers in the technical paper.

"The assumption that the sniffed passwords correspond to SSIDs that were also transmitted could additionally be verified by setting up fake access points on the fly using the potential credentials we observed."

In other subsets of the captured SSIDs, the researchers found strings corresponding to store WiFi networks, 106 distinct names, three email addresses, and 92 holiday homes or accommodations previously added as trusty networks.

Some of these sensitive strings were broadcasted tens, hundreds, and in some cases, even thousands of times during the three hours of recording through repeated bursts of probing.

Three probe bursts from the same device (University of Hamburg)

Tracking implications

Leaving aside the data exposure and the scenario of setting up malicious hotspots and accepting connections from nearby devices, the main implication here is persistent tracking.

The critical aspect on that front is MAC addresses randomization, which can act as a defense against tracking attempts. While it has come a long way in both Android and iOS to make device tracking harder, although not impossible.

Newer OS versions feature more randomization and less information in the probe requests, but when combined with dataset parameters like signal strength, sequence number, network capabilities, etc., fingerprinting individual devices might still be possible.

An overview of the privacy features of each OS version is given below.

NOTE that market share percentages reflect November 2021 figures.

WiFi probing-related privacy features on each OS version (University of Hamburg)

Clearly, the more recent the OS version, the stronger the privacy-protection features, but the availability of newer versions doesn't mean instant adoption.

At the time of the field experiment, Android 8 and older versions accounted for roughly one out of four Android smartphones. In iOS, the situation is better due to Apple's tighter software update policies and long-term support, but many still use older iPhone models.

Previous studies have also reflected the improvement from gradual upgrades to more secure operating systems. For example, in a 2014 study, 46.7% of recorded probe requests contained SSIDs, and in two others conducted in 2016, the percentage ranged between 29.9% and 36.4%.

How to bolster your privacy

1 The first and simplest thing a smartphone user can do is upgrade their OS and use a more recent and safer version that features more privacy protections.

2 Secondly, removing SSIDs you no longer use or need and which are unnecessarily broadcasted wherever you go would be a good idea.

3 Thirdly, Android and iOS offer a quick way to disable auto-join networks, rendering hotspot attacks impossible.

4 Finally, users can completely silence probe requests, which can be done via advanced network settings. This approach, however, has several practical drawbacks, such as slower connection establishment, inability to discover hidden networks, and higher battery consumption."

Related Articles:

Real-time voice concealment algorithm blocks microphone spying

'Mute' button in conferencing apps may not actually mute your mic

Android June 2022 updates bring fix for critical RCE vulnerability

Ransomware gangs now give victims time to save their reputation

Apple blocked 1.6 millions apps from defrauding users in 2021 

 

RELATED CONTENT

The Perils of Probe Requests

Brannon Dorsey

Jul 30, 2017 6 min read

[Ok, taking a step back, you might be wondering what you can do to protect yourself. The solution is not without flaws; turn your Wi-Fi off when you aren’t connected to a known network. Doing so will prevent your device from leaking your network names and device fingerprint to the open world. The solution is awkward, easy to forget, and sub-par. But its what we’ve got.]

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YOU MIGHT ENJOY THIS

ProbeKit and Beyond

ProbeKit in the wild

Back in 2015, I worked with Branger_Briz to create ProbeKit, a critical software art project that addressed the probe request problem through a metaphor of butterfly collection. We developed an application that captured probing devices as unique, one-of-a-kind, butterflies. The software allowed the user to collect MAC addresses and network information from nearby devices as they wandered around the city on a “network data safari.” Once captured, you could inspect each butterfly’s “migration patterns” inferring information about where the device owner works, lives, and plays.

ProbeKit map view

Probekit habitat view

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"All of the Wi-Fi devices you own are constantly broadcasting the name of every networks they’ve ever connected to. Turn them off.

You know how your phone automagically connects to any Wi-Fi network its seen before? Ever wondered how that works? It’s blatantly stupid. Whenever your phone’s Wi-Fi is turned on, but not connected to a network, it openly broadcasts the SSIDs (network names) of all previously-associated networks in an attempt to connect to one of them. These small packets, called probe requests, are publicly viewable by anyone in the area running trivially simple sniffing software, and you’d be surprised how unique your list of networks are.

What's worse, probe requests include a unique device fingerprint called a MAC address that can be used to specifically identify each device. So we’ve got a situation where:

1. Each device openly broadcasts incredibly identifiable network name history (names like “Jenny’s iPhone”, “UChicago”, “my favorite coffee shop”, etc…).
2. Included in those messages is a unique fingerprint that can be collected and used to track you in public.
3. Collecting these probe requests is easy from a consumer laptop . . .

Has your phone ever prompted you to “Turn on Wi-Fi for better location accuracy?” This feature uses your phone’s wireless card to scan and upload nearby access points to leverage these proprietary datasets, collected en masse (without payment), to offer highly-accurate geolocation information that can be derived from these network fingerprints.

WiGLE wardriving data from Chicago, IL, USA

 

FANTASTICAL ALTERNATE HISTORY SCIENCE FICTION: 'For All Mankind'...Workplace Thriller, Spy Thriller, Action Show, Big Crowd-Pleaser

Intro: Now in its third season, For All Mankind started with a simple question: What if the Americans weren’t first to put a man on the moon?

From that premise, though, it has built something far more complex: a show that combines political intrigue, military brinkmanship (aka a lunar standoff between American and Russian forces), and a space race that eventually lands on the surface of Mars.

 

REVIEW

Why ‘For All Mankind’ Is TV’s Next Great Drama

By Miles Surrey Jun 10, 2022, 5:50am EDT

The Ringer |

The third season of the alt-history series reinforces that ‘For All Mankind’ is not just an entertaining drama, but a truly great one, and an unlikely contender as the crowning achievement of Apple TV+. . .

[    ] Compared to Better Call Saul and Succession, which illuminate the darker side of human ambition, For All Mankind holds a more optimistic view of humanity in spite of our flaws. Even when characters become entangled in corporate greed or geopolitical face-offs, they strive to find common ground in the shared pursuit of scientific discovery. Their world is far from perfect, but For All Mankind presents an alternate history that imagines what people can accomplish when logic and empathy largely prevail. That it happens to be the one of the best shows on television only makes its hopeful message more resonant. When it premiered as part of Apple TV+’s launch in November 2019, For All Mankind was one small step of the company’s push into streaming. Four years later, the show is following its characters’ lead and reaching for the stars."

 

For All Mankind Is the Best Sci-Fi of Its Era

The Apple TV+ alternate history series is simply more ambitious and thought-provoking than its contemporaries.

[Image Courtesy of Apple TV+]

 

Graeme McMillan

Wired |

 

 

ANOTHER WEEK OF STEEP DROPS. . .GeoPolitical Uncertainties + Global Recession Fears

Yep, it is what it is

 

TODAY

El-Erian says the Fed has to move aggressively to beat inflation

CNBC

 

Data is a real-time snapshot *Data is delayed at least 15 minutes. Global Business and Financial News, Stock Quotes, and Market Data and...
6 hours ago

Dow falls 800 points after inflation hits 40-year high, consumer sentiment plummets

NBC News

 

Banks and cyclical stocks also moved lower, possibly reflecting recession fears. Shares of Wells Fargo shed 4%. Boeing dropped 3.6%.
4 hours ago

Dow Plunges 750 Points After ‘Very Troubling’ Inflation Report Fuels Fears Of Impending Recession

Forbes

 

Dow Plunges 750 Points After 'Very Troubling' Inflation Report Fuels Fears Of Impending Recession. Jonathan Ponciano. Forbes Staff.
5 hours ago

YESTERDAY

The Dow falls nearly 800 points as inflation hits 40-year high

By Nicole Goodkind, CNN Business

Markets are poised for yet another week of losses after steep drops on Friday. The Dow dropped nearly 800 points on Friday afternoon after a key inflation report missed estimates and showed a higher-than-anticipated increase in the price of consumer goods.

The May consumer price index rose 8.6% year-over-year, its highest level since 1981. Economists had forecast an 8.3% increase. The core index, which excludes FOOD and Energy Prices rose by 6%, slightly higher than estimates of 5.9%. . .

"The major risk to consumption, employment, and the economy overall, isn't an organic growth slowdown, but the extent to which extreme energy and food price increases could cause central banks to push against the string, and [the economy could] essentially fall into a damaging policy mistake," wrote Rick Rieder, chief investment officer of Global Fixed Income at BlackRock in a note. . .

"The probability of a recession in the next year or so is rising," said Sung Won Sohn. professor of Finance & Economics at Loyola Marymount University and chief economist of SS Economics. "Inflation is eating away at consumers' purchasing power."

Consumer spending accounts for about 70% of the US economy, and a real decrease in that spending would be a huge blow to gross domestic product. "The [Federal Reserve] now recognizes that it is way behind the curve on inflation and must act more decisively," said Sohn.

The two-year Treasury yield grew to 3% on Friday, its highest level since 2008. The S&P 500 and NASDAQ indexes were both down around 3%."

TWO WEEKS AGO

Markets Slump as Investors Fear a Recession | by Alex Artenie | May ...

DataDrivenInvestor

 

The S&P is down 19% for the year, the Nasdaq 31% and the Dow Jones index recorded eight straight weeks of selling, which is not something seen since 1923.
2 weeks ago

THREE WEEKS AGO 

US stocks post biggest one-day drop in two years as recessionary fears loom yet again

The Financial Express

 

Nasdaq 100, S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average, ... The fears of recession as witnessed during the global financial crisis 2008-2009...
3 weeks ago

 

ONE MONTH AGO

Wall Street’s dark day finishes with a bloodbath as the Dow falls over 1,000 points in stocks’ worst day since 2020

Fortune

 

Wall Street's dark day finishes with a bloodbath as the Dow falls over ... Fears of a U.S. recession are rising as traders worry that Fed...
1 month ago

 

FLASH-BACK: 'It's The Economy, Stupid'...All The Wrong Stuff

Intro: Factors that were hard, if not impossible, to foresee in early 2021.

What policy makers got most wrong may, in the end, prove to be not the risk of inflation but, rather, how miserable we’d feel about the inflation itself.

Ideas

How Did They Get Inflation So Wrong?

Yes, the stimulus was too big. But that’s not the main reason prices are through the roof.

By James Surowiecki June 10, 2022, 8:40 AM ET

The Atlantic

 

About the author: James Surowiecki is the author of The Wisdom of Crowds and blogs at Medium.

 

"Last week, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen did something unusual for a Washington policy maker: She admitted that she’d made a mistake. In an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer about the U.S.’s persistently high inflation rate, Yellen said, of her predictions last year that prices would stay under control, “I was wrong then about the path that inflation would take.”

That she was. In March 2021, when inflation hawks were arguing that the Biden administration’s $1.9 trillion stimulus plan was going to overheat the economy, Yellen called the risk of inflation “small” and “manageable,” and a couple of months later said, “I don’t anticipate that inflation is going to be a problem.”

She wasn’t alone. For much of 2021, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said that he thought inflation would be “transitory,” and even as inflation rose above 6 percent, the Fed kept interest rates near zero. (Its first interest-rate hike was not until March 2022.)

Along the way, that thing Yellen thought was not going to be a problem became a huge one—not least, politically.

Indeed, with today’s news that inflation in May was 8.6 percent (previously at 8.3 percent), it is arguably the biggest problem that the Biden administration faces—high prices are overshadowing pretty much everything else about the U.S. economy.

> The unemployment rate is a mere 3.6 percent, and last week, the Labor Department announced that the U.S. had added another 390,000 jobs in May.

> But all anyone wants to talk about is that average gas prices are now nearing $5 a gallon.

Yellen and Powell have, predictably, faced a barrage of criticism over their failure to keep inflation under control. When Yellen testified before Congress this week, Republican lawmakers practically lined up to say “I told you so.”

But amid the recriminations, surprisingly little attention has been paid to a couple of important questions:

Why did policy makers get it wrong? And what can we learn from their mistakes?

The simple answer to that first question is that the Biden administration and the Fed were, in some sense, fighting the last war—that being, in this case, the Great Recession of 2008–09. After the steep economic downturn over those two years, the U.S. economy grew at a very slow clip. From 2009 to 2016, GDP growth averaged about 2 percent a year. Unemployment, which reached nearly 11 percent in October 2009, was still above 7 percent four years later, while median wages rose only slowly.

In concrete terms, this meant that tens of millions of Americans had a miserable five years or more. And this happened even though policy makers had done quite a lot (or so it seemed then) to get the economy back on track. Democrats had passed a $787 billion stimulus plan, which at the time was the biggest such package ever enacted. And the Fed, under Ben Bernanke, had slashed interest rates to near zero and kept them there, while also trying to inject more money into the economy by buying up a wide range of assets in what was called QE Quantitative Easing.

These measures did keep the Great Recession from becoming another Great Depression, but it wasn’t until 2016 that the economy really took off.

On top of all this, downplaying the risk of inflation was easy because previous prophecies of doom had all turned out wrong.

> The 2009 stimulus and the Fed’s relatively loose monetary policy had inflation hawks insisting that “high-grade monetary heroin” was being injected into the system, which was likely to ignite “out-of-control inflation.”

> In 2010, with unemployment near 10 percent, a group of 23 economists, hedge-fund managers, and academics wrote an open letter to Bernanke, arguing that Quantitative Easing  risked “currency debasement and inflation” and should be discontinued.

[    ] At this point, the contention that the stimulus package was bigger than it needed to be—or at least, could have been better directed—seems inarguable, but equally true is that it probably accounts for only a fraction of the current inflation rate. Europe, after all, did far less in the way of fiscal stimulus than the U.S., yet inflation within the European Union is now about as high.

Some of that inflation may be imported from the U.S., thanks to higher American demand for goods. But much of it reflects factors that were hard, if not impossible, to foresee in early 2021. These include the persistence of supply-chain problems due to the continuation of the pandemic, and the war in Ukraine.

[    ] Of course, in a political sense, none of that really matters. Biden can talk about all the people who have jobs who otherwise would still be on the dole, and about all the workers at the lower end of the job ladder who have seen the sharpest increases in wages over the beginning of 2021, but that message can’t compete with the anxiety and anger induced by high prices. What policy makers got most wrong may, in the end, prove to be not the risk of inflation but, rather, how miserable we’d feel about the inflation itself."

INSERT FROM RELATED CONTENT ON THIS BLOG

The world is on fire. Irrational exuberance in markets is over. Billions of dollars are wiped-out in seconds. Stockholders are selling out of markets and nobody knows where the money is going [well maybe some people know].To say things are "in turmoil" or "uncertain" begs the question and is to say the least.
Global wars and "revolutions"  whether declared or not, are taking place both on the ground and in currency markets, with both people and capital running fast to get out of the way of trouble and seeking "safe havens" - but where?
There's a big blow-out, with a lot of blow-back: prevailing winds are hot and cold at the same time.
The Global Post report starts out like this:  "A fresh blast of cold air swept across global financial and commodity markets on Wednesday [blogger note: six days ago] raising fears that the world economy could be heading toward a recession — one perhaps even bigger than the last one."

09 April 2022

GLOBALIZATION THE GREAT ILLUSION

No doubt it was a 'feel-good' idea for the supremacy of Western capitalist democracy, but China’s leaders talk about the “century of humiliation.” They complain about the way the arrogant Westerners try to impose their values on everybody else.

Moreover, both China and Russia clearly want to establish regional zones that they dominate. Some of this is the kind of conflict that historically exists between opposing political

Globalization Is Over. The Global Culture Wars Have Begun.

(Image Credit...Tim Lahan)

By David Brooks

nytimes.com

"I’m from a fortunate generation. I can remember a time — about a quarter-century ago — when the world seemed to be coming together. The great Cold War contest between communism and capitalism appeared to be over. Democracy was still spreading. Nations were becoming more economically interdependent. The internet seemed ready to foster worldwide communications. It seemed as if there would be a global convergence around a set of universal values — freedom, equality, personal dignity, pluralism, human rights.

We called this process of convergence globalization. It was, first of all, an economic and a technological process — about growing trade and investment between nations and the spread of technologies that put, say, Wikipedia instantly at our fingertips. But globalization was also a political, social and moral process. . .

THE "HAPPY-TALK" FALLACY:

In the 1990s, the British sociologist Anthony Giddens argued that globalization is “a shift in our very life circumstances. It is the way we now live.” It involved “the intensification of worldwide social relations.” Globalization was about the integration of worldviews, products, ideas and culture.

This fit in with an academic theory that had been floating around called Modernization Theory. The idea was that as nations developed, they would become more like us in the West — the ones who had already modernized.

In the wider public conversation, it was sometimes assumed that nations all around the world would admire the success of the Western democracies and seek to imitate us. It was sometimes assumed that as people “modernized,” they would become more bourgeois, consumerist, peaceful — just like us. It was sometimes assumed that as societies modernized, they’d become more secular, just as in Europe and parts of the United States. They’d be more driven by the desire to make money than to conquer others. They’d be more driven by the desire to settle down into suburban homes than by the fanatical ideologies or the sort of hunger for prestige and conquest that had doomed humanity to centuries of war.

This was an optimistic vision of how history would evolve, a vision of progress and convergence. Unfortunately, this vision does not describe the world we live in today. The world is not converging anymore; it’s diverging. The process of globalization has slowed and, in some cases, even kicked into reverse. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine highlights these trends. While Ukraine’s brave fight against authoritarian aggression is an inspiration in the West, much of the world remains unmoved, even sympathetic to Vladimir Putin.

> The Economist reports that between 2008 and 2019, world trade, relative to global G.D.P., fell by about five percentage points. There has been a slew of new tariffs and other barriers to trade. Immigration flows have slowed. Global flows of long-term investment fell by half between 2016 and 2019. The causes of this deglobalization are broad and deep. The 2008 financial crisis delegitimized global capitalism for many people. China has apparently demonstrated that mercantilism can be an effective economic strategy. All manner of antiglobalization movements have arisen: those of the Brexiteers, xenophobic nationalists, Trumpian populists, the antiglobalist left.

There’s just a lot more global conflict than there was in that brief holiday from history in the ’90s. . .

As John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge wrote in a superb essay for Bloomberg, “geopolitics is definitively moving against globalization — toward a world dominated by two or three great trading blocs.” This broader context, and especially the invasion of Ukraine, “is burying most of the basic assumptions that have underlain business thinking about the world for the past 40 years.”

Sure, globalization as flows of trade will continue. But globalization as the driving logic of world affairs — that seems to be over. Economic rivalries have now merged with political, moral and other rivalries into one global contest for dominance. Globalization has been replaced by something that looks a lot like global culture war. . .

[. ] I’ve lost confidence in our ability to predict where history is headed and in the idea that as nations “modernize” they develop along some predictable line. I guess it’s time to open our minds up to the possibility that the future may be very different from anything we expected..."

 

 

GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTING OFFICE INVESTIGATES ARPA COVID RECOVERY FUNDS...

Are States and Localities Wasting Their ARPA Funds? Some in Congress Want to Know

By Kery Murakami | June 9, 2022 05:44 PM ET

The Treasury Department is not monitoring if governments are using the recovery money properly, Republican senators charge. They are asking the Government Accounting Office to investigate

[Image: Sen. Mike Crapo of Idaho Getty Images]

"Senate Republicans are concerned that some of the $350 billion in American Rescue Plan Act funds for states and local governments is being wasted, and this week, they asked the Government Accounting Office to investigate.

Fourteen Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee wrote the GAO saying there has not been enough congressional oversight of how the money is being used, and that the Treasury Department hasn’t made available detailed information as to whether states and localities are properly reporting how they’re using the money.

The lawmakers cited a Fortune report that said some of the ARPA money is going for “questionable uses,” including: $12 million for renovations of a minor league baseball stadium; $5 million for paying off debts of the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the U.S. Senate; $70 million for tourism marketing in Puerto Rico; $6.6 million to replace irrigation systems at two golf courses; $2.5 million to hire new parking enforcement officers in Washington, D.C.; and $2 million for a county to help purchase a privately owned ski area.

========================================================================

INSERT: The City of Mesa has dubious plans to purchase 111 West Main Street, a building that was in foreclosure and vacant for many years.

The site was once the location for ZENO's Cooperative Mercantile and Manufacturer in 1890. ZENO, a character form the Book of Mormon of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, was an early, and brief, name for Mesa. . .Like Lehi, Mesa also valued common wealth for the common good. An adobe schoolhouse was built in 1882 and The Zenos Cooperative Mercantile and Manufacturing Institution store by 1884. The 300 residents incorporated a city government in 1883.

Early Mesa pictured about 1883 shows the A. F. Macdonald home and gardens at lower left and at right the “relief society hall” (bishops storehouse? with flat roof), a hotel and store (on corner) and new city hall and jail (pitched roof). Macdonald, Mormon Stake President and first mayor, was sent to Mesa from Utah to iron out difficulties. He left in January 1885 to establish a colony in Mexico.             

Mesa to move on downtown business incubator

By Scott Shumaker, Tribune Staff Writer May 18, 2022

The state’s next big chip maker may get its start in downtown Mesa if City Council approves a new economic development project.

Potato chip maker, that is.

The city is planning to move forward on a partnership with economic development nonprofit First Local Arizona to open a food business incubator at 111 W. Main St. in Mesa.

The vacant building is next to the Nile Theater and once housed a Catholic Books and Gifts store. The “Newsboy” statue stands on the sidewalk in front of the building.

Mesa’s Downtown Transformation Manager Jeff McVay is slated and will ask Mesa City Council tomorrow, May 16, to approve a purchase of the property for $1.6 million.

At a discussion session last week, McVay said the city will use American Rescue Plan Act funds to buy the property and renovate the building. The city estimates the total cost of the project, including the purchase and remodeling, will be $3 to $3.5 million. 

The city plans to have the space ready in a year to a year-and-a-half, at which point the city will lease the building to Local First Arizona and let the organization manage the incubator.

The idea is to provide new food businesses based in Mesa, such as restaurants, caterers or food manufacturers, with a commercial kitchen, classes and other resources for growing their companies. . ."

========================================================================

A Route Fifty examination found that while the funds are being used for a variety of Covid-19-related reasons, including replacing lost funds during the pandemic and addressing health and housing issues, money has also been used for such things as building African American history museums and renovating state buildings.

“In light of reports of [recovery] funds being used in states and localities for things seemingly unrelated that have nothing to do with responding to the public health emergency … or with making necessary investments in water, sewer, or broadband infrastructure, what controls in Treasury have been established to ensure that reported expenditures by states and localities abide by the restrictions on uses put in place in ARPA?,” the Republicans, led by Sen. Mike Crapo of Idaho, the top Republican on the committee, asked GAO.

> The senators also want the GAO to look into whether states are complying with an ARPA requirement that the money not be used to fund tax cuts or bolster pension funds, and whether states and localities have made reporting errors.

The Treasury Department didn't immediately respond to a request for comment."

Kery Murakami is a senior reporter for Route Fifty.

SOMETHING MORE TO WORRY ABOUT: Bird Flu Spreads To Arizona and The Southwest After 37 Million Bird Deaths

Something more to worry about - Arizona Game and Fish officials announced this week that the disease was spotted after tests by federal wildlife officials in three wild cormorants that had been found dead in a park in the Phoenix suburb of Scottsdale . . .

Anne Justice-Allen, the department's wildlife veterinarian, said calls from the public alerted her agency to the dead cormorants, water-loving birds that often nest in groups. The three juveniles had fallen out of their nests and were spotted dead by morning walkers in the park, who called wildlife officials. . .“It's a good thing they did,” Justice-Allen said, because they were able to collect the birds and test them before park workers removed them.

Once an infection is found, the birds won't recover and are killed to prevent spreading the illness, Justice-Allen said.

Bird Flu Spreads To Southwest After 37 Million Bird Deaths

The disease has been detected in 40 states, as of June 3.

BOB CHRISTIE

HuffPost |

PHOENIX (AP) — Arizona officials have confirmed the first cases in the Southwest of a bird flu that has led to the deaths of 37 million birds from commercial farms in the central and eastern U.S. The disease was spotted after tests by federal wildlife officials in three wild cormorants that had been found dead in a park in the Phoenix suburb of Scottsdale, Arizona Game and Fish officials announced this week.

The disease has not yet been found in any domestic birds or in commercial operations, the agency said. However, Justice-Allen said a major concern is backyard flocks of chickens, which are allowed in parts of metro Phoenix. The disease has been found in many homeowner flocks across the country...The outbreak has not only killed domestic fowl. It has also had a heavy toll on bald eagles and other wild bird species, much more so than the nation's last bird flu outbreak detected in 2014. That outbreak cost more than 50 million domestic poultry.

Bird owners should watch for symptoms like birds not eating or lethargy, runny noses, seizures or diarrhea, she said. Anyone seeing those symptoms should call the state Department of Agriculture. . .

[    ] But it is a concern, according to Glenn Hickman, president and CEO of Hickman Family Farms, one of the largest egg producers in the Southwest. Hickman operates four chicken ranches in Arizona, one in California and two in Colorado.

The company has stopped any visits to its farms and doublechecked its biosecurity program, which is designed to prevent its approximately 2 million chickens from being infected. Its chickens are kept in barns that are secured so that wild birds can't enter, and any people or tools that enter are disinfected.

The company dodged a scare recently when the avian flu was found in a flock 3 miles (4.8 kilometers) from one of its Colorado farms, Hickman said Thursday. And while he's concerned about the Scottsdale find, its not anywhere near as concerning as if a nearby commercial operation had an outbreak.

“Those are a lot scarier because the massive amount of virus that is potentially produced when you have a large population is much more than the relatively small amount of virus per bird in the wild bird population,” he said. None of his farms were affected.

The first U.S. detection of the new strain of highly contagious avian flu in domestic poultry was in February in Indiana. More than 37 million birds have been killed to prevent the infection from spreading since then.

As of June 3, it had been detected in wild birds in 40 states, but not in California, Arizona, Nevada or New Mexico. Commercial flocks in 19 states have been infected.

Hickman said egg producers are so far making up for lost production from outbreaks affecting flocks this year.

“I think I can speak pretty firmly that regardless of how many birds that have been affected and depopulated, there are still eggs on every shelf in every grocery store in America,” Hickman said."