US news – Chicago Information Technology

‘A slap in the face’: AT&T workers upset jobs slashed despite Trump tax cuts

Company has cut more than 37,000 jobs in the US from when the first Trump bill went into effect in 2018 to the end of 2019

The day after Paul Lorenzano found out he was being laid off from his undertaking in January as an AT& T technician in Arcadia, California, the company sent out an email to all employees congratulating the workforce on AT& T’s gains and fiscal recital in 2019.

” We congregated or exceeded all of our commitments for the year. That’s thanks to a lot of good work on your proportion ,” Randall Stephenson, AT& T’s CEO, said in the email.

Lorenzano was devastated.

” That was almost like a ended slap in the face, says here great “were just” but here is your final wage receipt because we did so great last year so we’re going to keep this fund and not invest in back into the employment force like they said they would ,” said Lorenzano, who worked at the company for over four years before receiving his termination notice, along with dozens of other AT& T DirecTV technicians across California.

It was not meant to be like this. Huge tax cuts, supported by AT& T, were meant to allow companies to hire more and pay better. But instead AT& T has cut 37,818 jobs in the US from when the Trump tax cut proposal first went into effect in 2018 to the end of 2019, with more than 4,000 occupations cut in the last quarter of 2019, based on the company’s quarterly reports.

The company strongly supported the tax cut bill and promised proletarians a $1,000 bonus ahead of the bill’s passage amid claims of a rent spree.

The bill, legislated in December 2017, cut the corporate tax rates from 35% to 21%, saving AT& T an estimated $21 bn initially, with an estimated$ 3bn in annual savings. Despite AT& T’s promises to invest these savings back into their workforce, the company has shed employees since the greenback comes into effect, while capital investments have waned. In 2018, AT& T’s capital investments declined to $21.25 bn, and the company announced plans to reduce it further in 2020 to $20 bn, while rolling out a three-year plan to spend $30 bn on capital buybacks.

For recently unemployed workers like Lorenzano that situation has added insult to deep injury.

” AT& T was talking about its extensive relations with hires, how you can climb the ladder, that there’s area for increment. When I introduced all my chippings in that basket, all of a sudden it gets taken away and now I’m left with nothing. Right now I’m clasp for straws, panicking, trying to figure out what I’m going to supposed to do now ,” he said.

Overall, workers have not been able to obtained from the Trump tax cut greenback, despite various business claiming bonuses and wage increases were due to the bill’s passage.

” Even at the time, this was clearly nothing but PR. The financial speculation linking corporate tariff slice to wage additions was never supposed to occur immediately. Instead, it runs through a long chain of financial events, commencing with increased investment ,” said Hunter Blair, budget analyst with the Economic Policy Institute.” Without an uptick in asset, usual employees have no chance of benefiting from the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. And for the first time since the Great Recession, speculation has diminished for three straight quarterss. With asset cratering, there’s no reason to believe usual workers will see the benefits that proponents of the bill predicted .”

As AT& T has reduced investment, the company has continued shorten employment opportunities in 2020, with the layoff of 200 technicians in California. The Communications Employee of America union has warned more than 30,000 additional enterprise gashes or elimination in wages and benefits are coming if the proposals of AT& T’s hedge fund investor, Elliot Management, are enacted.

” I went into working as a technician and went into it for the long term. They result you to believe that was possible. I expended four years. I wouldn’t do that if I supposed otherwise ,” said Sean Martinez, 26, one of the technicians who lost their job in Los Angeles.” From everything we discover business is good. Next thing you know we get a heads up that they’re making layoffs. They didn’t helps explain why .”

AT& T proletarians have also reported the company is forcing current employees to train foreign replacings as their jobs are being outsourced.

” Some beings has been previously trained their substitutions ,” said an AT& T computer programmer in New Jersey who requested to remain anonymous for suspicion of reprisal.” We are at the caprice of managing the. One minute we are told we will be off payroll this year, then we are told we may be off payroll firstly quarter of next year .”

Another AT& T employee in IT excused the issue is recently laid off and contracted out to Accenture, where employees are currently training foreign replacement proletarians from India and east Europe.

” I’m seeing that at a wide scale right now. People need to know these places are being given away ,” one of AT& T’s IT laborers said.

Accenture did not reply to multiple requests for provide comments on this story.

” Like any business, we must align our workforce with the needs of our the consumers and the business ,” a spokesman for AT& T said in an email.” To the extent possible, we oversee faculty readjustments through retirements and voluntary differences, and we facilitate feigned hires find other positions within the company. For those who can’t, we put forward proposals severance wage and outplacement services .”

Sara Blackwell, a Florida based advocate who represents craftsmen displaced by offshoring or workers on visas, showed AT& T is using contractors to qualify foreign replacements to save AT& T fund while US laborers are left to suffer.

” It saves the company millions in payments, pensions, healthcare and even levies. The victim workers are frozen in dread of losing the ability to work in their industry if they speak to the media ,” Blackwell said.

Yigael Chavez, a AT& T DirecTV technician for four years who was laid off on February, debated the job slasheds are unnecessary.

” None of us want to see AT& T or DirecTV fail. We desire what the hell is do and what we have to offer. If the company actually backs up “what theyre saying” and do it, it would create a good produce, create jobs and income. Unfortunately we haven’t seen any of that ,” Chavez said.

How a data-backed Christian nationalist machine helped Trump to power

With help from a vast evangelical system and data on nearly the entire US voting population, the Christian right may have found the elevate it needed

By his own detail, Bill Dallas grew up in an unhappy household. His mother had been sexually abused by her leader and had her first pregnancy aged 17. Dallas’s dad was an alcoholic and a depressive whodied at 51. Dallas was an intense, obsessive offspring, dogged by feelings of shortage. You could say he was cabled for the fierce schema of sin-and-salvation religion.

But despite his challenging start in life, he had clear talents. He attended Vanderbilt University in Nashville, known for its vast academic gives. He dreamed of becoming an actor and after graduating with reputations, he moved to San Francisco. Blessed with photogenic ogles, he modeled for” a major retail chain “. Soon Dallas was at the center of an energetic social whirl. He and his friends hired unfold limos and people held him the name” Mr GQ “. Soon his contacts started to yield fruit- and temptation. Dallas acquired his lane into real estate and then the money began to pour in. But even as he compiled outward signeds of success, Dallas couldn’t shake the anxieties at his core. Then, things genuinely fell apart.

Dallas has publicly offered few details of his crimes, but he was convicted of magnificent crime theft and sentenced to prison. He was fined $772,000 in connection with illegal contributions to six nominees for metropolitan parts in Oakland.

As Dallas tells the story, he spent time in Susanville and then San Quentin prisons, moving into a cadre on the fourth rank of North Block. It was there that his life began to turn around.

His prison experiences launched him towards a system of millions of rectors, on the steering committee of Project Blitz, and in the cockpit of Christian nationalism’s taxpayer-subsidized, data-driven voter turnout machine.

* * *

As Dallas became acclimated to life in prison, and with the assistance of some of the “lifers” he filled there, he deepened his connection to God. He have a job at the prison’s Tv terminal, cultivating his style up to being a producer and on-air host.

When he left prison, he says, he was in the best mental, physical and spiritual influence of their own lives. But he still hadn’t paid his obligations. Dallas owed multiple fines and taxes- one penalty alone was close to $ 750,000. He immediately looked for ways to make a living.

In March 1998, Dallas had a holy visitation, telling him to start a satellite system delivering ministry training programs to churches all over the country. And he did- imagining of a national network of evangelical pastors and other church rulers. As it turns out, this was exactly what the growing Christian nationalist movement needed.

With the help of Silicon Valley tycoons including Reid Rutherford and venture capitalist John Mumford, Dallas’s Church Communication Network proliferated with exponential velocity.

But Dallas had a bolder perception. Working with millions of pastors allowed him to reach literally millions of congregants- and potentially millions of voters. With sell and communications increasingly driven by data quarrying, he knew there had to be a better lane to mobilize the nation’s republican Christians.

Religious rulers pray with Donald Trump after he signed a proclamation for a national day of devotion. Photograph: Evan Vucci/ AP

‘I like theater, dining and chasing women’: Mike Bloomberg in his own words

Hes protected stop-and-frisk and made offensive mentions about minorities. What else has the 2020 competitor said?

As Mike Bloomberg continues to surge in the hasten for the Democratic nomination, his past mentions are increasingly coming back to recur him.

From his defense of stop-and-frisk policing, to outmoded, offensive testimonies about maidens, the former New York City mayor’s own words often serve to puncture the idea of him as the anti-Trump billionaire and have handed plenty of ammunition to his 2020 opponents.

Bloomberg’s competitors are likely to remind him- and those watching at home- of his past beliefs at the Democratic debate tonight.

Here are some that might get a mention 😛 TAGEND

” Ninety-five per cent of cases of your assassinations- assassins and assassinate preys- fit one MO […] You can just take the description, Xerox it and pass it out to all the policeman. They are male, minorities, 16 to 25. That’s true in New York, that’s true in virtually every city .”

Bloomberg was speaking at the Aspen Institute in 2015 when he offered this defense of stop-and-frisk, a policing tradition he expanded as mayor which disproportionately affected black people.

” We threw all the cops in minority vicinities. Yes. That’s true. Why do we do it? Because that’s where all the crime is .”

This is from the same Bloomberg speech. He continued:” The practice you get the guns out of the kids’ sides is to throw them up against the wall and frolic them .”

” I think we disproportionately stop white-hots too much and minorities too little. It’s exactly the reverse of what they say .”

That was Bloomberg speaking on his weekly radio indicate in 2013. The then mayor was responding to criticism of stop-and-frisk- a year earlier 87% of all people stopped and romped were African Americans or Latino. Under Bloomberg the number of stops rose from 97,276 in 2002 to a high of 685,724 in 2011.

” There’s this enormous cohort of pitch-black and Latino males, age, let’s say, 16 to 25, that don’t have jobs, don’t have any potentials, don’t know how to find jobs, don’t know what their skillsets are, don’t know how to behave in the workplace where they have to work collaboratively and collectively .”

Bloomberg on job prospects for minorities in 2011.

” Class warfare and racist .”

This was Bloomberg’s assessment of Bill de Blasio’s campaign for mayor in 2013.” He’s making an appeal exploiting his family to gain support ,” Bloomberg said of De Blasio, whose spouse and children are African American.” I think it’s pretty obvious to anyone watching what he’s been doing. I do not think he himself is prejudiced. It’s comparable to me pointing out I’m Jewish in attracting the Jewish vote .”

” Kill it !”

Bloomberg’s reaction on learning an employee was pregnant, are in accordance with a 1997 sexual harassment lawsuit. The lawsuit alleged Bloomberg had made a series of sexist commentaries to female employees.

” If your exchange during a general elections is about some person wearing a dress and whether he, she, or it can go to the locker room with their daughter, that’s not a triumph formula for most people .”

Bloomberg on transgender claims in 2019.

” They would make it harder and more costly for businesses to stay, harder and more costly for businesses to stay, and harder and more costly for businesses to thrive .”

That’s Bloomberg stating his resist to a minimum wage in 2012, when New York city council hoped to introduce the measure.

” I, for example, am not in favor, have never been in favor, of produce the minimum wages .”

Bloomberg repetition his dislike for the measure in 2015.

” As chairperson, Mike will promote the minimum wage to $15 per hour to ensure that all employees are fairly compensated for the time they invest working .”

That’s according to a press release from Bloomberg exhausted on Sunday.

” Congress been involved- local elected officials, as well- and said:’ Oh that’s not fair, these people should be able to get credit .’ […] And once you started pushing in that direction, banks started clearing more and more lends where the recognition of the person or persons buying the house wasn’t as good as you would like .”

In 2008 Bloomberg claimed the end of “redlining”- a practice where banks would refuse to lend to parties in certain neighborhoods- was a key factor in the 2008 financial crisis. The redlined neighborhoods were frequently made up of African American beings, disproportionately preventing them from owning homes. Although the practice was technically realise illegal in 1968, people of color are still more likely to be denied a mortgage than white people. Experts say African Americans and Latinos were deliberately sold predatory lends in the lead up to the 2008 crash.

” The royal family- what a knot of misfits- a homosexual, an inventor, that horsey-faced lesbian, and a kid who gave up Koo Stark for some fattened broad .”

This is from The Portable Bloomberg, a work made by employees to celebrate Bloomberg’s 48 th birthday in 1990.” Yes, these are all actual paraphrases ,” wrote Elisabeth DeMarse, Bloomberg LP’s former chief market man and the book’s publisher.

Bloomberg’s expedition has feuded, sort of, some of the paraphrases.” Mike simply did not say the things somebody wrote in this gag gift ,” a campaign spokesman told the Washington Post. The spokesman added, however:” Mike openly admits that his terms have not ever aligned with his appreciates and the lane he has led his life and some of what he has said is disrespectful and wrong .”

” I could educate anybody- even people in this room , no offense planned- to be a farmer. It’s a[ process ]. You delve a gap, you applied a seed in, you introduced grime on top, included liquid, up comes the corn .”

Bloomberg on agriculture, back in 2016. He was likening farm to information technology, which he said is:” Essentially different because it’s built around changing people with technology, and the skill sets that you have to learn are how to think and analyze .”

” Whenever my spouse catches me eyeing some broad, she’s very careful to be considered in me and say:’ That’s the most expensive piece of ass in the world !'”

From The Portable Bloomberg.

” I know for a fact that any self-respecting woman who goes past a building area[ and] doesn’t get a whistle will turn around and walking past time and again until she does get one .”

The Portable Bloomberg again.

” I like theater, dining and chasing dames. Let me set it this route: I am a single, straight billionaire in Manhattan. What do you think? It’s a soak dream .”

Bloomberg offered this insight in an interview with the Guardian in 1996.

Michael Bloomberg dogged by more past controversial remarks

Apparent attack on intelligence of factory and farm worker as Trump and Bloombergs Democratic competitors step up their attacks

More past comments rose on Monday to further dog media mogul and billionaire Michael Bloomberg’s chase for the Democratic presidential nomination, including an apparent attack on the intelligence of plant and farm worker in the US.

Speaking at Oxford University’s Said business school in the UK in 2016, the former mayor of New York appeared to question if blue-collar works had the skills necessary to adapt to the information technology age. The remarks were reported by Fox News.

Also on Monday there was increasing scrutiny of 2013 Bloomberg speeches, cleared in his final year as mayor and reported by Politico, labelling local a number of members of the American Civil Liberties Union( ACLU) and New York’s schoolteachers’ union as “extremists” and likening them to the gun lobbying radical the National Rifle Association( NRA ).

The brand-new arguings come as Bloomberg seeks to gain ground in the fractured 2020 hasten to challenge Donald Trump for the White House in November, which continues with next Saturday’s Nevada caucuses and the following week’s South Carolina primary.

Bloomberg has opted to skip voting in the early states and focus instead on a grand acces to the race on Super Tuesday on 3 March, when Democrats in 14 nations go to the polls.

The uncovering of the latest videos reflects recent discoveries of other past comments, including divulged “stop-and-frisk” audio clips that sparked a Twitter feud between Bloomberg and Trump a week ago and a crisis in his safarus stemming from allegations of racism against the billionaire businessman.

Both Trump and Bloomberg’s Democratic contenders have stepped up their attacks, Democratic frontrunner Bernie Sanders telling advocates at a rallying in Nevada on Sunday that” the American people are sick and tired of billionaires buying ballots “.

In his 2016 Oxford mentions, delivered during a distinguished speakers’ meeting, Bloomberg was asked if citizens of middle America could be united with those living on the coasts.

” I could school anybody, even people in this room , no offense proposed, to be a farmer ,” Bloomberg said.

” It’s a process. You mine a pit, you introduced a seed in, you threw clay on top, contributed sea, up comes the corn. You could learn that. Then “were having” 300 years of the industrial civilization. You put the segment of metal on the lathe, you turn the crank in the direction of the arrow and you are able to have a job.

” Now comes the information economy[ which is] profoundly different because it’s building upon changing people with engineering and the skills and capacity that you have to learn are how to think and analyze, and that is a whole degree level different. You have to have a different skill set, you have to have a lot more gray matter .”

He continued that it” wasn’t clear” if” students can learn ,” even with subsidized residence and education.

The reporting of Bloomberg’s comments attracted swift admonition from antagonists, including People for Bernie, a pro-Sanders activist group with more than 185,000 Twitter partisans.” Time and again we attend Bloomberg insulting the middle class and the working class, union members and not yet union members ,” it said in a tweet.

Bloomberg’s obvious attack on civil rights workers and teachers in 2013 came when, as mayor, he was battling his city’s assembly of the ACLU over the New York police department’s “stop-and-frisk” programmes, which the group claimed was disproportionately altering young blacknes males.

” We don’t need extremists on the left or right extending our police district, whether it’s the NRA or the NYCLU ,” he said in the video obtained by Politico, which explained that the civil liberties group was pursuing legislation at the time that would make it easier for those targeted by the policy to sue the city.

Other Bloomberg comments the same year, merely several months after the Sandy Hook massacre at a Connecticut elementary school claimed 27 lives, scandalized the leadership of the New York’s united confederation of coaches, which had also been critical of stop and frisk.

” The NRA’s another region where the membership, if you do the polling, doesn’t agree with the leadership ,” Bloomberg said.

Randi Weingarten, the leader of the national teachers confederation and a former is chairman of the New York chapter, described the comments as “disgusting” at the time.” By comparing the NRA and the[ union ], it debases his advocacy about gun control at a time when we need his advocacy to be sharp ,” she said.

The two have since reconciled and Weingarten told Full Court Press at the weekend she imagines Bloomberg” can go all the channel “.

The Bloomberg campaign, meanwhile, sought to downplay the disagreement. Spokesperson Stu Loeser indicated by the” reference to the[ coaches organization] was something Mike said in the hot of the moment that he now repents ,” Politico reported.

Bloomberg is third in FiveThirtyEight’s national poll of Democratic candidates with 15.4%, trailing merely Sanders( 22.7%) and former vice president Joe Biden( 16.8% ).

Mike Pompeo restates US opposition to Huawei access

US secretary of state is on visit to meet Boris Johnson on eve of Brexit

The depth of American opposition to the UK granting the Chinese telecoms house Huawei access to its 5G system has been underlined as the US secretary of state said the Chinese Communist party represented the central threat of our times, and had front-door access to Huawei systems.

He said the US would try to work through its changes with the UK decision announced this week but stressed the US would never tolerate its national security information to go across networks in which it did not have confidence.

Mike Pompeo, who is on a see to London to meet Boris Johnson on the eve of the UK departure from the EU, was speaking alongside the foreign secretary, Dominic Raab.

Asked if the US would reduce intelligence sharing with the UK due to the Huawei access to the UK system, Pompeo said:” We will never permit American international security information to go across a network that we don’t have trust and confidence in.

” That’s service standards, whether it is a Microsoft system, it is the same whether it is a Ericsson, a Nokia system, that’s the standard if it is a Chinese system.

” We will work with our UK equivalents, and I know the Australians, the New Zealanders, all others in the’ five gazes ‘, will work together to ensure the systems are sufficiently secure and they are going to deliver the outcomes we need them to deliver, and that we have only a degree of jeopardy in information systems that we find tolerable.

” I’m sure that the authorities concerned will protect American information to that standard .”

The tone of his remarks advocate the US regards the UK decision as an open negotiating object with room to still change. The US believes that with the decision likewise unpopular on the Conservative backbenches, in the months onward it may in effect be nullified.

But Pompeo warned that the Chinese Communist party did not have” a technological back entrance to Huawei. They have the front doorway .”

He said the US had been reaching the suit that having Huawei technology within the network was ” very difficult to mitigate” and so was ” not worth the candle “.

” When you grant the information of your citizens or the national security information of your citizens to transit a network that the Chinese Communist party has a legal authorization to obtain it creates risk .”

But Pompeo located the Huawei decision in the starkest situation with people saying the US now regards the Chinese Communist party as antithetical to US costs and a bigger threat than terrorism.

Speaking later on LBC, Pompeo said:” We deem the intrusion of the Chinese Communist party into information technology structures as a very great risk, a national security risk as well as a core privacy jeopardy. If your health records are on a method that belongs and is controlled by the Chinese Communist party that is probably not something you would probably choose in the first instance .”

At the earlier affair with Raab, he wished ” Godspeed ” to the UK’s departure from the EU, he accentuated the tensions onward by saying it was fantastic that the UK in future would be able to disalign from EU regulations, so clearing business with the US easier.

His remarks mark the extent to which the UK will come under US pressure in trade negotiations to maximise its distance from the EU, even though this may mean a only limited UK-EU craft deal.

Pompeo said:” The previous administration took the view that if the United Kingdom made this decision it would be at the back of the line. We intend to gave the United kingdom government at the figurehead of the line .”

Both Raab and Pompeo held back from is forecast that a spate could be agreed before the US presidential elections this November.

Pressed to explain why the US had refused the UK government request to extradite Anne Sacoolas over the deaths among 19 -year-old Harry Dunn last year, Pompeo simply said the case was an enormous tragedy and he was terribly sorry for the loss of a British citizen’s life.

He said ” the US would do everything possible to shape that right in such a way that protects its most important relationship between both countries “. He said he was still “workin on” a good resolution to the disagreement, but did not go into any specifics. Nothing he said recommended he was going to comply with the UK extradition request.

Raab rebuffed any suggestion that there could be a link between the Sacoolas extradition and the US requests for Prince Andrew to cooperate with the inquiry into his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Raab said one of the points of the discussions with the US was to ensure that such an chapter did not reoccur, including its consideration of the extradition system.

Pompeo claimed the US policy of peak economic sanctions on Iran was working, saying ” the fewer dollars in the handwritings of the Ayatollah was a good thing”, describing Iran as the central threat to stability in the Middle East.

Although Raab agreed there had been wholesale non-compliance of the nuclear bargain by Iran, he said the UK still favoured staying inside the nuclear deal since it” wanted to leverage Iran back into some kind of diplomacy negotiation to get compliance “.

He added:” If the JCPOA( the technical period for the nuclear spate) are applied to do that, that would be valuable .”

The US left the deal in 2018, motivating Tehran to take a succession of steps away from it in an attempt to leverage European nations to do more to boost trade with Iran.

Tehran now territory it is free to take whatever steps it wishes to develop a civil nuclear power programme, but continues to allow the UN atomic auditors to monitor and report on the Iranian programme.

Throughout the one-hour joint conversation at the Policy Exchange thinktank Raab referred to the creases in the US-UK special tie-in, but focused on the shared objectives and evaluates that relate the special relationship.

Pentagon awards $10bn cloud computing deal to Microsoft, snubbing Amazon

Donald Trump said in August his administration would take a very long look at contract, after public swipes at Amazon

The Pentagon has awarded Microsoft a $10 bn cloud computing contract, vanquish out favourite Amazon, whose competitive dictation reaped disapproval from US president Donald Trump and its business rivals.

Bidding for the huge project, known as Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI, pitted leading tech titans Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle and IBM against one another.

The contracting process had long been mired in conflict of interest charges, and drew the attention of Donald Trump, who has publicly taken swipes at Amazon and its founder Jeff Bezos, who likewise owns The Washington Post. Trump in August said his administration was reviewing Amazon’s bidafter complaints from other companies.

The contract is part of a broader digital modernisation of the Pentagon meant to make it more technologically agile. One goal is to give the military better access to data and the cloud from battlegrounds and other remote locations.

In a statement, an Amazon spokesman said the company was ” surprised about this conclusion “.

The company said that a” detailed level purely on the comparative provides” would” clearly lead to a different conclusion ,” according to the statement.

Amazon is considering options for protesting the award, a person familiar with the matter said.

Although the Pentagon boasts the world’s most potent fighting force, its information technology remains woefully insufficient, according to many officials.

Officials have complained of having outdated computer systems and being unable to access documents or share information as quickly as they might be able to in the private sector.

” If I am a warfighter, I crave as much data as you could possibly gives people ,” lieutenant general Jack Shanahan, the director of the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, told reporters in August describing the importance of the contract.

Some companies were concerned that a single bestow would give the winner an unjustified advantage in follow-on work. The Pentagon has said it planned to award future cloud treats to multiple contractors.

This week, the US defence secretary, Mark Esper, removed himself from re-examine the transaction due to his adult son’s employment with one of the original contract applicants, IBM Corp. IBM had previously bid for the contract but had already been eliminated from the competition.

Microsoft said it was working on a comment. IBM and Oracle did not immediately return requests for comment.

In a statement foretell Microsoft as the winner, the Pentagon underscored its view that the tournament was conducted reasonably and legally.

” All( offers) were treated fairly and evaluated routinely with the solicitation’s stated evaluation criteria. Prior to the award, government departments conferred with the DOD Inspector General, which informed the decision to proceed ,” it said.

Los Angeles police: personal data of thousands of officers stolen in breach

More than 17,000 applicants likewise affected in breach of municipalities personnel department

The personal information of 2,500 Los Angeles police department patrolmen and 17,500 people who had applied to join the force were exposed in a data infraction, the department announced on Monday.

The department was informed of a potential violations of records held by the city’s personnel department on 25 July, and it notified affected men over the weekend.

” The Los Angeles Police Department is working with our metropoli marriages to better understand the extent and impact of the data breach ,” LAPD said in a statement.” We are also taking steps to ensure the Department’s data is protected from any further interferences .”

The endangered data included men’ names, dates of birth, the last four digits of their social security systems digits, and the mailing address and passwords they set up when applying for the job, a spokesman for the mayor’s office confirmed to the Guardian.

” We take the protection of personal data very seriously, and the City has been communicated to the individuals who may have been affected ,” the spokesman for Mayor Eric Garcetti said.” The City’s Information Technology Agency has added additional beds of security to guard against future events of this kind .”

The mayor’s office said police officer were informed” out of an abundance of forethought” after a potential intruder contacted the city claiming to have the data. The metropolitan is investigating whether the data in question has been sold or exposed.

The spokesman noted that the city of Los Angeles had propelled a number of cybersecurity curricula since Garcetti took office. Metropolis and law enforcement agencies become increasingly targeted by intruders in recent years.

Some metropolis have been targeted for political concludes. In 2015, Anonymous shut down the website of the city of Baltimore after rampages following the death of Freddie Gray. Anonymous too shut down the official website for the city of Cleveland following the police shooting of 12 -year-old Tamir Rice in 2014.

But city and state governments, as well as local police forces, have also increasingly been the victims of ransomware attacks, said Terence Jackson, director report security officer at Thycotic, a Washington DC security provider.

” The intruders are attacking these targets because of the criticality of the data they accumulate ,” he said.” This should be a wake-up call to municipalities all over the country to re-assess their current state of cyber security, find the breaches and implement the necessary countermeasures .”

Many city agencies lack funding to properly secure data and investigate after the hacks, said Arshad Noor, manager technology officer of StrongKey, aSilicon Valley data security company.

” While the infringement is just another example of what happens when security holds are mismatched to the resources being protected, there is a different kind of danger when the stealing of personal data involves law enforcement officials ,” he said.” In the case of law enforcement officers, the data may have unique value when those law enforcement officers are involved in sensitive clients, where, depending on the information stolen, it might be used to affect the outcome of such cases .”

LAPD said it would be in contact with changed members of the police force about whether there were continuing privacy concerns surrounding the hacker.

Black student group criticizes Harvard Law School after anonymous messages

Harvard Black Law Students Association says institution, which failed to determine who sent offensive emails and verses, woefully failed to act

An association of black students at Harvard Law School says the university” woefully failed to act” after four students received offensive emails and verse meanings from an anonymous sender.

The Harvard Black Law Students Association issued a statement criticizing the school after it was unable to determine who transport the” despicable, racist and sexist” letters, and after officials refused to share details of an investigation with students who received the messages.

Four students, including two who are black , apprise institution officials this year that the selection board had separately received themes with observations including” we all detest u”,” you know you don’t belong here” and” youre precisely here because of affirmative action “.

Harvard officials say the case was investigated by university police, information technology officials and an outside constitution firm.

” Sadly, the realities of technology sometimes grant persons who have committed such acts to circumvent sensing and we are disappointed that we were unable to identify who is responsible despite great efforts along multiple figureheads ,” a Harvard Law School spokesman said.

The student group believes the words came from another student or students, but Harvard officials be mentioned that has not been confirmed. The radical says the words were communicated from” retailer display phones” and two anonymous Gmail accounts.

Part of the dispute arises from a request to share details of Harvard’s investigation. The four students say Harvard officials promised to provide the findings of the investigation but have refused to do so. Harvard officials say student privacy statutes proscribe them from sharing the findings.

” For the purposes of student privacy and confidentiality reflected in federal principle and HLS practice, Harvard Law School will not publicly disclose details of investigations ,” Marcia Sells, the dean of students, said in a statement.” This rehearse is designed to protect the respective privileges of all parties involved in any investigation .”

Sells added that the school’s administrators” continue to condemn in the strongest terms any communication or action that is intended to demean beings “. But the group says the four students relied on the administration’s promise when they agreed to a school investigation.

” Now, more than seven months since the first abominable meaning was moved, the sender of this word remains unidentified and free to continue harassing black and women students, meanwhile the targeted students have been left to continue panicking for their safety ,” the group said in its statement.

Racial frictions is sometimes flared at the elite law school in recent years.

In 2015, paintings of various black profs were vandalized in a Harvard Law building, with slashes of pitch-black videotape placed over the photos. Harvard police closed the speciman without discover a culprit.

In 2016, the law school agreed to retire its official pinnacle after students complained over its connection to an 18 th-century slaveholder, Isaac Royall Jr, who donated his property to create the first principle professorship at Harvard.

Huawei helped North Korea build wireless network US reports

Chinese firm was blacklisted by Donald Trump over national security concerns

Huawei Technologies, the Chinese company put on a US blacklist because of national security concerns, privately helped North Korea build and maintain its commercial-grade wireless system, the Washington Post reported on Monday, quoting sources and internal documents.

The Chinese telecommunications company partnered with a state-owned Chinese firm, Panda International Information Technology, on a number of projects in North Korea over at least eight years, the Post reported.

Such a move would raise questions about whether Huawei, which has use US technology in its components, contravened American export ensures to furnish North Korea with paraphernalium, according to the Post.

The US put Huawei on a blacklist in May, citing national security concerns. The move censored US business from selling most parts and factors to Huawei without special licences, but President Donald Trump said this month that US firms could resume sales, in a bid to restart trade talks with Beijing.

Huawei did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but said in a statement to the Post it had” no business existence” in North Korea. It was not immediately possible to reach the Panda Group.

The US Department of Commerce, which too did not immediately respond to a request for comment, has investigated possible links between Huawei and North Korea since 2016 but has not publicly connected the two, the Post said.

Huawei and Panda quitted their Pyongyang office in the first half of 2016, the newspaper reported.

Feminist cyborg scholar Donna Haraway: The disorder of our era isnt necessary

Cyborg Manifesto author and philosopher who explores the nature of reality discusses the social sciences crusades and climate activism

The history of philosophy is also a story about real estate.

Driving into Santa Cruz to visit Donna Haraway, I can’t help feeling that I was born too late. The metal carve of a as standing on Haraway’s front porch, the dogs that scramble to her figurehead opening barking when we ring the buzzer, and the big color rooster strut in the coop out back- the entire decided elicits an era of freedom and creativity that postwar resource became possible in northern California.

Here was a counterculture whose language and sensibility the tech manufacture sometimes chooses, but whose practitioners it has principally priced out. Haraway, who came to the University of Santa Cruz in 1980 to take up the first tenured professorship in feminist assumption in the US, still shows the sense of a wide-open world.

Haraway was part of an influential cohort of feminist students who studied as scientists before turning to the philosophy of science in order to investigate how beliefs about gender influenced the production of knowledge about nature. Her most famous text remains The Cyborg Manifesto, are set out in 1985. It began with an assignment on feminist strategy for the Socialist Review after the election of Ronald Reagan and germinated into an oracular meditation on how cybernetics and digitization had changed what it meant to be male or female- or, actually, any kind of person. It gained such a religion following that Hari Kunzru, profiling her for Wired magazine years later, wrote:” To boho twentysomethings, her name has the kind of cachet typically set aside for techno plays or brand-new phenethylamines .”

The cyborg vision of gender as changing and changeable was radically new. Her map of how information technology associated people around the world into brand-new series of relationship, exploitation and solidarity feels prescient at a time when an Instagram influencer in Berlin can line the pockets of Silicon Valley executives by using a phone assembled in China that contains cobalt quarried in Congo to access a scaffold moderated by Filipinas.

Haraway’s other most influential text may be an essay that appeared a few years later, on what she called ” situated knowledge “. The hypothesi, developed in conversation with feminist philosophers and activists such as Nancy Hartsock, concerns how true is attained. Concrete practises of particular people build actuality, Haraway debated. The scientists in a laboratory don’t simply find or deport experiments on a cell, for instance, but co-create what a cadre is by regard, weighing, naming and manipulating it. Ideas like these have a long history in American pragmatism. But they became politically explosive during the so-called science battles of the 1990 s- a series of public debates among” technical realists” and “postmodernists” with repetitions in controversies about bias and objectivity in academia today.

‘ My attention is centered on the extermination and extinguishing junctures happening at a worldwide stage, on human and non-human displacement and homelessness. That’s where my vigours are .’ Photograph: Courtesy Icarus Films

Tag: US news