An Official’s Removal Is Sought After He Throws Cat During Zoom Meeting

The city Planning Commission meeting in Vallejo, Calif., last week followed the same humdrum pattern of so many municipal meetings: There was the Pledge of Allegiance and a roll call, followed by various reports.That posed the usual challenges: Commissioners with microphones muted when they were trying to be heard, some of them appearing half offscreen at times or talking over one another.But things took an unexpected turn about 2 hours and 24 minutes into the session after one of the commissioners, Chris Platzer, was asked if he had any comments after reviewing a project application.“Yes, this is the section where you can, Commissioner Platzer,” the commission’s chairman said.The cat meowed loudly again. “OK, first, I’d like to introduce my cat,” Mr. Platzer said, lifting it close to the camera and then, with two hands, tossing it off screen.The cat squeaked as it was being thrown, and a thud could be heard.One commissioner on the videoconference put his hands to his forehead and covered his eyes in response.The meeting concluded 26 minutes later, but that was hardly the end of it.Bob Sampayan, the mayor of Vallejo, which is about 30 miles north of San Francisco, and Robert McConnell, a City Council member and the liaison to the commission, have asked for the council to consider Mr. Platzer’s immediate removal at a meeting on Tuesday, a city spokeswoman, Christina Lee, said on Monday.“The city does not condone the behavior that Vallejo Planning Commissioner Chris Platzer exhibited during the April 20th Planning Commission meeting,” she said. “This type of behavior does not model the core values of the City of Vallejo.”After the planning meeting adjourned, Mr. Platzer was heard using expletives, she said, adding that the mayor and Mr. McConnell discussed his behavior immediately after the episode and called for his removal within 48 hours.Stephanie Bell, senior director of cruelty casework for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, said the group was prepared to place the cat “in an understanding, loving home” if Mr. Platzer’s “lack of patience or understanding” made cat guardianship inappropriate.“The cats in our care rely on us for everything, including food, respect and affection, and no one should ever punish them for seeking our attention,” she said. “While cats are known for agility, this cat was thrown and could have slammed into furniture, the wall or the ground.”As of Monday morning, the city had not received a formal resignation from Mr. Platzer, Ms. Lee said; however, The Times-Herald of Vallejo reported on Saturday that it had received an email from him suggesting that he was stepping down.Mr. Platzer, who could not be reached on Monday, was appointed to the volunteer position in August 2016 and his term was set to expire in June.“I did not conduct myself in the Zoom meeting in a manner befitting of a planning commissioner and apologize for any harm I may have inflicted,” he wrote in the email, The Times-Herald reported. “I serve at the pleasure of the council and no longer have that trust and backing.”He added, “We are all living in uncertain times and I certainly, like many of you, am adjusting to a new normalcy.”The Zoom episode was one of the latest to surface as officials adjust to remote working. In Florida, a judge this month admonished lawyers for getting too lax in their dress during their videoconference court appearances. Read the full article

Data of All 6.5 Million Israeli Voters Is Leaked

Israel’s Privacy Protection Authority said it was looking into what it called a “grave” security lapse by the maker of an app promoted by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud party that led to the exposure of personal data of all 6.5 million eligible voters in Israel, including full names and identity card numbers.The flawed website for the app, called Elector, failed to secure personal details in the voter registry, which also included the address and gender of each voter, even those who did not use it, and in some case phone numbers as well, the Haaretz newspaper first reported on Sunday, raising concerns about identity theft and foreign interference.The maker of Elector did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment, but in a statement issued to the Israeli news media, it sought to play down the potential consequences, describing the leak as a “one-off incident that was immediately dealt with” and saying it had since bolstered the site’s security.The data required essentially no hacking skills to access, and it was unknown how many people had downloaded the registry.Mr. Netanyahu had encouraged supporters to download the app, which offers news and information related to the March 2 election, the third in less than a year after the first two failed to provide an outright winner and efforts to form a coalition came up short.In a statement issued in response to the reports on Sunday, the Privacy Protection Authority, a unit of the Justice Ministry, said that responsibility for complying with Israeli privacy law involving use of the voter registry “lies with the parties themselves.”It stopped short of announcing a full-fledged investigation, however, and said it could not give further details at this stage. Ran Bar-Zik, a developer for Verizon Media who wrote the story the Haaretz published on Sunday, was alerted to the breach over the weekend.In an interview on Monday, he said he had received a tipoff about the Elector website breach on Friday night. The message was sent in English to Cybercyber, a Hebrew podcast that he runs that he hosts with two colleagues. As evidence, the tipster included Mr. Bar-Zik’s own details and those of his wife and son.“It was spooky,” Mr. Bar-Zik said.Explaining the ease with which the voter information could be accessed, Mr. Bar-Zik wrote in a blog post that visitors to the app’s website could right-click to “view source,” an action that reveals the code behind a web page.The code revealed the user names and passwords of site administrators, and using those credentials would allow anyone to log in and download the voter information.Mr. Bar-Zik said he chose the Likud administrator and “Jackpot! Everything was in front of me!”“When we talk about hacking, we imagine people in hoodies doing technical stuff,” Mr. Bar-Zik said. But in the Elector case, he added, no hacking technique was necessary.One Israeli website said it had been able to access the personal information of, among others, Mr. Netanyahu; his wife, Sara; the chief of staff for the Israeli military, Aviv Kochavi; and Nadav Argaman, the head of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security agency.The leak was believed to be the largest disclosure of Israeli voter information since 2006, when an employee of the Interior Ministry stole the population registry and then published it.The exposure of the database of Israeli voters could have significant consequences. Databases listing personal information of private citizens can be exploited for a number of purposes, including by criminals looking to make money through identity theft, or by foreign state-backed hackers looking to spy on Israeli voters ahead of a critical election.“This is a treasure for foreign countries with geostrategic interests in Israel,” Tehilla Shwartz Altshuler, head of the Media Reform Project at the Israel Democracy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank in Jerusalem, told Channel 12 news.Massive voter databases are one more reason that cybersecurity officials across the world have warned that new technology is best kept out of the hands of election officials and political parties.Most recommend that new technology, including voting machines and apps used by political parties, be tested for months, or even years before it is deployed to the general public.Cybersecurity experts specializing in election technology have begun holding specialized sessions at the world’s largest annual conference for hackers, DefCon. During the sessions they hack into voting machines and other technology used during elections around the world in an effort to lay their vulnerabilities bare.Last week, an app introduced by the Iowa Democratic Party to help tally votes during the Iowa caucus failed on the day of the vote, throwing the first-in-the-nation contest into chaos.The app, which had been privately developed for the party and had not been tested by independent cybersecurity experts, had been kept a secret by the party until the weeks leading up to the vote.When it was eventually unveiled, many had trouble downloading and using it. Cybersecurity experts quickly found the app was riddled with bugs and potential vulnerabilities. Read the full article

Clearview’s Facial Recognition App Is Identifying Child Victims of Abuse

“We thought it was too controversial of a feature because it was too easy to use that functionality for abuse,” said Mr. Burns. “And also it’s just a legal nightmare.”Still, Mr. Burns said, he understood why investigators would want to use facial recognition software. “They are faced with a very grim task, and if there’s a tool that gives them an opportunity to safeguard victims, I don’t blame them for trying to grab it with both hands,” he said.Since Clearview’s practices have come to light, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Venmo and YouTube have sent the company cease-and-desist letters, asking it to stop scraping photos from their sites and delete existing images in its database. The attorney general of New Jersey banned the use of Clearview by officers in the state and called for an investigation into how it and similar technologies were being used by law enforcement. A class-action lawsuit seeking certification was filed in Illinois, where a strong biometric privacy law prohibits the use of residents’ faceprints without their consent, and another was filed on Feb. 3 in Virginia.Bills banning the use of facial recognition by police have recently been introduced in New York and Washington. And Clearview received a letter from Senator Edward Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, asking for a list of law enforcement agencies that have used the app and whether biometric information has been collected for children under 13 years old.“While this type of technology has existed for quite some time, we believe we have created something that enables law enforcement to solve previously unsolvable crimes and, most importantly, protect vulnerable children,” Mr. Ton-That said in his email. “At the same time, we are responding to requests for information from government and other interested parties as appropriate, and look forward to engaging in constructive discussions with them as we work to make our communities safer.”In October, law enforcement groups sent a letter to members of Congress, urging them to not ban the use of facial recognition for their investigations. “We understand the public’s concern about protection of their privacy and civil rights,” they wrote. “With clear, publicly available policies we believe those concerns can be addressed.”Many agencies had been using Clearview for months at the time the letter was sent, but the letter made no mention of it.Michael H. Keller and Aaron Krolik contributed reporting. Read the full article

Who’s Watching Your Porch?

Ring offers a front-door view of a country where millions of Amazon customers use Amazon cameras to watch Amazon contractors deliver Amazon packages. Read the full article

Tech Bro Uniform Meets Margaret Thatcher. Disruption Ensues.

In the case of Mrs. Thatcher, the silk scarf, which, along with the skirt suit and pussy-bow blouse, became signifiers of the Iron Lady, the woman who put on her absolutely appropriate clothes like armor in her battle to liberate the markets and bring “tough capitalism” to Britain.Combining both, Mr. Denny, 37, found the shape, literally, of an idea.Mr. Denny is known for work that explores the culture of technology and its effects on society. He grew up in New Zealand and moved to Germany in 2007 to attend art school. After graduating, as he began developing his signature, he started “following” individuals he saw as paradigm changers: reading their press, their speeches and books; checking in as their careers progressed.Peter Thiel was one. Mr. Denny’s 2019 exhibition, “The Founder’s Paradox,” held in Auckland, New Zealand, featured Mr. Thiel (for one), the billionaire tech venture capitalist who is known for buying up swaths of land in that country, as a figure called Lord Tybalt, in art inspired by fantasy board games. Dominic Cummings, the architect of Boris Johnson’s electoral victory, is another. Ditto Mrs. Thatcher.“She was very visible in the 1980s, shaping a new kind of politics that emphasized the individual, deregulation and global neoliberalism,” Mr. Denny said, speaking on the phone from Berlin a few days before the opening.Though Mr. Denny has previously had exhibitions at MoMA PS1 and the Serpentine in London, and represented New Zealand at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015, this is the first time he has used fashion in his work, and it is partly because of the former prime minister. Read the full article

An Ice Skater’s Paradise in Quebec

On the Rivière du Loup, or Wolf River, Le Baluchon offers 89 rooms in a mix of inns and chalets on 1,000 acres featuring about 25 miles of cross-country ski and snowshoe trails, a tubing run and an ice rink with supplied equipment for broomball — a hockey-like game played with brooms and without skates. The sledders headed straight for the Nordic spa to steep in a series of hydrotherapy pools indoors and out.Later that evening, a full moon lit the riverside trail to the inn’s restaurant — acclaimed for its menu using local ingredients in dishes like walleye with Quebec seaweed butter — and of waterfalls stilled by ice.Agritourism on iceOne winter, when Jean-Pierre Binette and Madeleine Courchesne, beekeepers in rural Notre-Dame-du-Mont-Carmel, about an hour north of Trois-Rivières, had three children under the age of 9, they flooded a small section of woods on their property. Excited by the frozen forest playground, their children invited their friends, who invited their friends. In 1997, the seasonal diversion became a secondary business as Le Domaine de la Forêt Perdue, or the Lost Forest, opened to the public, keeping a form of agritourism alive in winter (in summer, they offer a high-ropes course).“We were the first skating path in Quebec and now we are training people who are opening trails around the province,” Thérèse Deslauriers, the managing director of the Forêt Perdue, said, as she worked the rustic entry house that doubles as a retail shop for honey products.Outside, beyond the skate rental tent, 15 kilometers — more than nine miles — of iceways wove through pine and hardwood forests dotted with farm pens occupied by goats, sheep, ducks, deer and more exotic animals, including an ostrich. Next to the alpaca enclosure, a repurposed phone booth dispensed handfuls of animal feed for a Canadian quarter. Read the full article

The F.A.A. Wants to Start Tracking Drones’ Locations

The Federal Aviation Administration proposed wide-sweeping regulations on Thursday that would require that all but the tiniest drones incorporate technology that would enable them to be tracked at all times while flying in United States airspace.“Remote ID technologies will enhance safety and security by allowing the F.A.A., law enforcement and federal security agencies to identify drones flying in their jurisdiction,” the federal transportation secretary, Elaine L. Chao, said in a statement.As drone operators, manufacturers and others involved in the rapidly expanding drone industry began sifting through the 319-page proposal on Thursday afternoon, responses varied wildly. While some applauded the F.A.A. for finally creating a system to rapidly identify owners of rogue — potentially deadly — drones, others declared that this was going to drastically hinder drone efficiency and cost effectiveness. Since 2015, operators of all drones that weigh more than half a pound have been required to register their devices, by submitting their names along with their email and home addresses to the F.A.A. Some federal facilities — prisons, for example — are authorized to use systems to detect the presence of drones, said Reggie Govan, a former chief counsel to the F.A.A. who now teaches at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.But at the moment, officials do not have a quick way to identify the owner of a given drone or to track the location of drones that have been registered by a particular person. Even airports and power plants currently lack the legal authority to track drones, Mr. Govan said. At the simplest level the proposed regulation requires all drones over 0.55 pound to emit a very particular kind of signal. “Once you have drones that are emitting an identifier then you can have a system that can track all drones,” Mr. Govan said, adding that he applauded the regulations.Brendan Schulman, vice president for policy and legal affairs at DJI, a Chinese company that is one of the leading manufacturers of small consumer drones, said that for the past several years, industry leaders and government stakeholders had been trying to figure out how to create a sort of drone “license plate system.” He said that the proposed system could make sense. His primary concern is that the cost and burden to drone pilots and operators remain low — something he is still evaluating. (DJI was embroiled in another government drone matter, with mounting security concerns that the cameras and other technology on its drones could send surveillance data back to China.)But for Paul Aitken, a founder of DroneU, a drone pilot training company in New Mexico, the costs immediately struck him as excessive. The new regulations require all registered drones within 36 months to begin carrying a specific type of remote identification system that broadcasts over the internet. Often finding an internet connection is not feasible in the locations where drone operators fly, Mr. Aitken said. According to his reading of the rules, if you don’t have cellular service or another way to connect to the internet, operators will have to limit flights to 400 feet laterally, which is roughly to the end of a block — and back.Search and rescue missions often require going at least four times that distance, he said. “People will literally die from these rules,” he said, adding that other “industries that are thriving with drones like utility inspection, precision agriculture, land surveying, ranch management and even some construction management would suffer greatly” given that the rules undermine efficiency, which for many is part of the appeal of drones.He is also concerned that drone pilots will have to publicly disclose their locations. “Pilots need privacy to protect them from fear-based citizens who think that drones are spying on them,” he said.A New York City councilman, Justin Brannan, said he thought this was a step in the right direction, however. It is currently illegal to fly a drone in most of New York City. “We need to create a framework for drones to legally and safely operate here in New York City because I do believe the benefits will outweigh the risks,” he said.The Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, as the proposed legislation is called, will be open for a 60-day comment period. At that point the regulations become law.Jonathan Rupprecht, a Florida-based lawyer who specializes in drones, was left with many questions as to how this would be enforced. He pointed out that the F.A.A. had rarely prosecuted violations of drone regulations — such as flying in a careless manner or flying an unregistered aircraft — over the last decade. “They should refrain from biting off more than they can chew,” he said. Mr. Rupprecht said that focusing on locations that need protecting, instead of creating an unwieldy tracking system for the entire United States, would be more realistic. Read the full article

Steven Seagal Settles Charges of Unlawfully Promoting Cryptocurrency

Steven Seagal, the actor best known for playing hard-bitten cops and commandos in action movies, has agreed to settle charges brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission for failing to disclose that he was being paid to promote a cryptocurrency investment on his social media accounts.The S.E.C. said on Thursday that Mr. Seagal, who lives in Moscow and holds both Russian and American citizenship, was promised $250,000 in cash and $750,000 worth of cryptocurrency from the company Bitcoiin2Gen in exchange for endorsing its initial coin offering, a crowdfunding strategy that involves creating and selling the virtual currency.In 2018, Facebook and Twitter accounts belonging to Mr. Seagal posted several times about the coin offering, calling him the “worldwide ambassador” for the company, the S.E.C. said. The posts did not disclose that Mr. Seagal, 67, was being paid for the promotions. The S.E.C. said that Mr. Seagal, who is also a trained martial artist, had 6.7 million Facebook followers during the time that he posted about the cryptocurrency company.The S.E.C. noted that Mr. Seagal’s posts about the coin offering came more than six months after the commission announced its decision that initial coin offerings — like initial public offerings of stocks — may be considered sales of securities and are subject to federal securities laws. Anti-touting provisions in those laws require individuals to disclose the amount of compensation they will receive in exchange for promoting a security.In a February 2018 news release, Bitcoiin2Gen called Mr. Seagal a “Zen Master” and said that the actor’s personal mission to lead people “into contemplation” and “enlighten them in some manner” aligned with the company’s objectives of creating a decentralized payment system.A spokesman for Mr. Seagal, Christopher Nassif, said in a statement on Thursday that the actor entered into an agreement allowing people associated with Bitcoiin2Gen to post on his social media accounts about the cryptocurrency, but that Mr. Seagal eventually became “concerned with the bona fides of the product” and terminated his relationship with the company. He was only paid part of the agreed-upon fee.Mr. Seagal agreed to settle the charges by paying back that part of the fee, $157,000, as well as a civil penalty in the same amount, the commission said. He also agreed to refrain from promoting any securities for three years.Mr. Nassif said that Mr. Seagal saw the agreement as “simply a case of someone paying a celebrity for the use of his image to promote a product,” and that he had fully cooperated with the S.E.C.’s investigation.Over the course of his acting career, Mr. Seagal’s parts have often highlighted his physical prowess, such as a firefighting specialist for an oil company in “On Deadly Ground” (1994), and a former C.I.A. operative-turned-police officer in “The Glimmer Man” (1996). In 2018, however, before he started promoting the cryptocurrency, Mr. Seagal accepted a very different role, this time from the Russian government: special representative to improve relations with the United States. (Russian officials said that the position was unpaid.)With the S.E.C. agreement in place, Mr. Nassif said that Mr. Seagal “looks forward to continuing his life’s work as an actor, musician, martial artist and diplomat.” Read the full article

U.S. Charges Huawei With Racketeering

WASHINGTON — The U.S. government has charged Huawei and two of its subsidiaries with federal racketeering and conspiracy to steal trade secrets from American companies, a significant escalation in the Trump administration’s legal fight with the Chinese telecommunications company.In a federal indictment unsealed on Thursday, the Department of Justice accused Huawei and its affiliates of a “pattern of racketeering activity” and said the companies had worked to steal trade secrets from six unidentified American firms. The stolen information included source code, as well as the manuals for wireless technology.“The new charges in this case relate to the alleged decades-long efforts by Huawei, and several of its subsidiaries, both in the U.S. and in the People’s Republic of China, to misappropriate intellectual property, including from six U.S. technology companies, in an effort to grow and operate Huawei’s business,” the Justice Department said in a news release.The new charges add more weight to Washington’s pressure campaign against Huawei, which is already barred from buying many American products and is viewed by the Trump administration as a threat to national security. The escalation is also part of a broader attempt by the Trump administration to crack down on what it says is a pattern of Chinese espionage and theft aimed at giving Beijing a technological edge.On Monday, four members of China’s military were charged with hacking into Equifax, one of the nation’s largest credit reporting agencies, and stealing trade secrets and the personal data of about 145 million Americans in 2017.The new indictment goes beyond the Justice Department’s earlier allegations of trade-secret theft and sanctions violations.It applies a federal racketeering law that has historically been used to bring down mob leaders and gang kingpins and allows the government to bring charges that would otherwise fall outside the statute of limitations. The criminal conspiracy that Huawei is accused of carrying out has been going on since at least 1999, according to the Justice Department.The indictment portrays Huawei as orchestrating a steady, if not sophisticated, campaign to steal trade secrets. For instance, the indictment alleged that in 2004, a Huawei employee sneaked back to a Chicago trade show to steal a competitor’s technology. The employee “was discovered in the middle of the night after the show had closed for the day in the booth of a technology company” and was found “removing the cover from a networking device and taking photographs of the circuitry inside.” The individual wore a badge listing his employer as “Weihua” — an anagram of Huawei — according to the indictment.A spokesman for Huawei did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Last year, the Justice Department charged Huawei’s chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, with outlining a decade-long attempt by the company to steal trade secrets, obstruct a criminal investigation and evade economic sanctions on Iran. Ms. Meng is in Canada, out of jail on bail of 10 million Canadian dollars, or $7.5 million, awaiting extradition to the United States. She is under 24-hour surveillance and must wear a GPS tracker on her ankle.The White House has looked to ratchet up the pressure on Huawei for years, with members of Congress from both parties backing its efforts. The new charges may give more fodder to the company’s critics on Capitol Hill, who have been pushing to make sure Huawei has no role in the next generation of wireless networks, known as 5G.“The indictment paints a damning portrait of an illegitimate organization that lacks any regard for the law,” said the top lawmakers on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Richard M. Burr, Republican of North Carolina, and Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia.Under the Trump administration, the Justice Department has focused on combating an array of threats that China poses to the United States and its allies in the West, including theft of trade secrets and espionage, as the country seeks to expand its sphere of economic and military power.Huawei, whose equipment powers telecom networks, sits squarely at the center of both of those concerns.Intelligence community analysts say Huawei can use its network equipment to monitor traffic across a network and potentially engage in unlawful surveillance.Huawei is also the leading supplier on every continent except for North America of equipment for 5G networks — an advanced telecommunications network that will underpin telecommunications and advanced technologies like self-driving cars.As countries around the world migrate their communications systems to 5G, and as more technology innovation is built on top of it, Huawei is in a position to gain a huge economic edge over U.S. tech giants, which have long been at the forefront of innovation and have lately powered the U.S. economy.Mr. Barr said last week that the Chinese government was using “every lever of power to expand its 5G market share” because it would gain ground in every technology that then touched 5G.“Our economic future is at stake,” Mr. Barr said in a speech during a conference in Washington on threats that China poses to the United States. “The risk of losing the 5G struggle with China should vastly outweigh other considerations.”For years, American intelligence officials have tried to convince companies and governments around the world that Huawei’s equipment could give Beijing access to sensitive communications networks.But that global campaign has faltered, as countries like Britain and Saudi Arabia opt to use Huawei’s gear in their next-generation wireless networks, known as 5G.In January, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said Britain believed that any risk could be managed and that the company’s products could be used in a portion of Britain’s 5G network. Germany is said to be close to a decision on whether to allow the company to work on its network, as well.As its global campaign to bar Huawei has faltered, American officials have argued that the United States should take aggressive action to help the world develop an alternative to Huawei’s products. Mr. Barr, in his speech, argued that the United States should consider providing direct or indirect financial support to Nokia and Ericsson, two European companies that are the primary competitors to Huawei’s networking gear. Read the full article