Newly released documents allege that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) knew it was wrong to censor concerns about the security of mail-in voting ahead of the 2020 election, yet it proceeded to do so anyway.
On Jan. 22, a tranche of documents published by America First Legal (AFL) alleged the Department of Homeland Security’s CISA was aware that mail-in ballots were less secure than in-person voting ahead of the 2020 election.
Nevertheless, it undertook an “unprecedented censorship campaign to mislead the American people about the truth,” according to Gene Hamilton, AFL’s vice president and general counsel.
“Common sense dictates that ballots submitted via mail are inherently less secure than verified, in-person voting by a citizen who shows identification before casting his or her ballot,” Mr. Hamilton said in a press release.
“The American people were lied to, and there must be accountability.“
AFL lawyer Michael Ding told The Epoch Times that the new documents were produced after AFL sued the CISA in November 2022.
Mr. Ding said AFL’s suit called for CISA to disclose documents it did not provide under an April 2022 Freedom of Information Act request. Under a court-managed process, Mr. Ding said, documents are gradually materializing.
“As we get closer to election day this year. I do hope that the election meddling and censorship that this agency engaged in during 2020 does not happen again,” Mr. Ding said.
“But ultimately, I think Americans need to hold these government officials accountable for trampling on their constitutional rights.”
The recently released documents detail how CISA acknowledged that mail-in voting carried more significant risks than in-person elections, yet it coordinated with technology companies to censor what it called misinformation, disinformation, or malinformation regarding the 2020 election.
Ahead of the 2020 vote, a wave of legislative changes were made in 23 states and the District of Columbia allowing Americans to vote by mail due to the supposed risks posed to voters by the COVID-19 virus.
By the fall of 2020, only voters in Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Tennessee, and Texas needed to report a reason to cast an absentee ballot by mail, according to internal CISA documents obtained by AFL. As early as September 2020 CISA knew mail-in voting would create significant problems, according to the documents.
An email replied to by Matthew Masterson, a senior cybersecurity advisor at CISA, on Sept. 24, 2020, revealed that the agency was aware of “three major challenges” with mail-in voting, observed during the primary elections.
Physically mailing and returning the ballots would be difficult, high numbers of ballots would be incorrectly completed, and there would likely be a shortage of personnel to process ballots, the email said.
Mr. Masterson’s email, referencing Wisconsin, said the state was short 700 poll workers and had to deploy 675 Wisconsin Army National Guard members to fill the gap.
That same email said the agency “could not conclude that voting … increased the spread of COVID.”
By October 2020, CISA had created an internal chart expanding on those risks. The chart, published by AFL, said, “For mail-in voting, some of the risk under the control of election officials during in-person voting shifts to outside entities, such as ballot printers, mail processing facilities, and the United States Postal Service.”
Also, in October 2020, CISA shared information about mail-in voting with members of the press during so-called unclassified media tours, according to newly-released emails.
Media outlets “covered up the evidence,” AFL said, choosing instead to report on statements made by then-CISA director Chris Krebs that downplayed the election integrity concerns raised by President Donald Trump.
At the time, the CISA ran a “rumor control” page reassuring Americans of the safety of mail-in balloting. Simultaneously, the CISA was watching social media for any commentary on the integrity of mail-in voting. It allegedly went so far as to contract multinational professional services company Deloitte to aid monitoring efforts.
Copies of “Elections Daily Digest” reports obtained and published by AFL showed Deloitte was preparing “daily social media trends” reports on the topics of voter suppression, COVID-19, vote-by-mail, election technology, and removed/flagged social media posts. These reports included the number of daily mentions of each topic and assessments of “change in sentiment.”
“Deloitte’s reports provided CISA with confirmation that its social media monitoring and censorship apparatus was working,” AFL said in a release.
“CISA interfered in the 2020 presidential election. CISA knew that in-person voting did not increase the spread of COVID. CISA knew mail-in voting was less secure. CISA nevertheless supported policy changes to encourage unprecedented widespread mail-in voting.”
CISA formed the Election Integrity Partnership 100 days before the 2020 election “to censor narratives relating to mail-in voting,” AFL said.
The Election Integrity Partnership, which involved CISA and Stanford University’s Global Engagement Center, aimed to “censor Americans’ speech in the lead-up to the 2020 election,” according to a report published on Nov. 6, 2023, by the House Judiciary Committee and its Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.
Washington-based AFL is led by Stephen Miller, who was a senior adviser to President Trump. On its website, Mr. Miller calls his organization an “answer to the ACLU” referring to the American Civil Liberties Union.
AFL, Mr. Ding said, first became interested in potential government censorship of electronic speech in July 2021.
At the time, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said in a press briefing that the White House was “flagging” posts, which they considered to be misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine, for Meta Platforms Inc.’s Facebook to remove.
In an email, CISA’s public affairs adviser Scott McConnell said the agency will not comment on the situation.
AFL also expressed alarm when the DHS issued a National Terrorism Advisory System Bulletin in February 2022. The bulletin declared “false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories, and other forms of mis-, dis-, and mal-information, introduced and/or amplified by foreign and domestic threat actors,” as a “terrorism threat.”
That bulletin said the CISA was working with “public and private sector partners—including U.S. critical infrastructure owners and operators—to mitigate risk.”
AFL published the first round of documents in May 2023. Those, according to AFL, detailed how CISA employees created both formal and informal partnerships with technology companies to monitor and flag accounts as well as delete posts. Moreover, the CISA employees, with official approval, allegedly set up back-channel electronic communications with private companies via Signal, a self-deleting messaging app.
Most notably, in the May round of documents, Brian Scully, a member of the CISA’s Countering Foreign Interference Task Force, detailed how the agency was working to both debunk unfavorable ideas and “pre-bunk” specific stories before they spread online.
Mr. Ding said AFL’s CISA investigation is closely related to, but not directly involved with, the Missouri v. Biden First Amendment case, which is due to be considered by the Supreme Court as soon as March.
Missouri v. Biden, filed by the office of Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, alleges the federal government coordinated with major technology companies to suppress social media posts that were politically disagreeable to the candidacy of then-candidate Biden in 2020.
For now, the Supreme Court has stayed an injunction—previously confirmed by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals—that directly prevents the government from engaging in similar activities.
Mr. Bailey, a Republican, previously told The Epoch Times he wishes to restore the national injunction and move ahead with his effort to “unroot and dismantle” what he called a “vast censorship enterprise.”
AFL will continue to publish more documents related to its suit against CISA as they are released.
Mathematicians use AI to identify emerging COVID-19 variants
Scientists at The Universities of Manchester and Oxford have developed an AI framework that can identify and track new and concerning COVID-19 variants…
Scientists at The Universities of Manchester and Oxford have developed an AI framework that can identify and track new and concerning COVID-19 variants and could help with other infections in the future.
Scientists at The Universities of Manchester and Oxford have developed an AI framework that can identify and track new and concerning COVID-19 variants and could help with other infections in the future.
The framework combines dimension reduction techniques and a new explainable clustering algorithm called CLASSIX, developed by mathematicians at The University of Manchester. This enables the quick identification of groups of viral genomes that might present a risk in the future from huge volumes of data.
The study, presented this week in the journal PNAS, could support traditional methods of tracking viral evolution, such as phylogenetic analysis, which currently require extensive manual curation.
Roberto Cahuantzi, a researcher at The University of Manchester and first and corresponding author of the paper, said: “Since the emergence of COVID-19, we have seen multiple waves of new variants, heightened transmissibility, evasion of immune responses, and increased severity of illness.
“Scientists are now intensifying efforts to pinpoint these worrying new variants, such as alpha, delta and omicron, at the earliest stages of their emergence. If we can find a way to do this quickly and efficiently, it will enable us to be more proactive in our response, such as tailored vaccine development and may even enable us to eliminate the variants before they become established.”
Like many other RNA viruses, COVID-19 has a high mutation rate and short time between generations meaning it evolves extremely rapidly. This means identifying new strains that are likely to be problematic in the future requires considerable effort.
Currently, there are almost 16 million sequences available on the GISAID database (the Global Initiative on Sharing All Influenza Data), which provides access to genomic data of influenza viruses.
Mapping the evolution and history of all COVID-19 genomes from this data is currently done using extremely large amounts of computer and human time.
The described method allows automation of such tasks. The researchers processed 5.7 million high-coverage sequences in only one to two days on a standard modern laptop; this would not be possible for existing methods, putting identification of concerning pathogen strains in the hands of more researchers due to reduced resource needs.
Thomas House, Professor of Mathematical Sciences at The University of Manchester, said: “The unprecedented amount of genetic data generated during the pandemic demands improvements to our methods to analyse it thoroughly. The data is continuing to grow rapidly but without showing a benefit to curating this data, there is a risk that it will be removed or deleted.
“We know that human expert time is limited, so our approach should not replace the work of humans all together but work alongside them to enable the job to be done much quicker and free our experts for other vital developments.”
The proposed method works by breaking down genetic sequences of the COVID-19 virus into smaller “words” (called 3-mers) represented as numbers by counting them. Then, it groups similar sequences together based on their word patterns using machine learning techniques.
Stefan Güttel, Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Manchester, said: “The clustering algorithm CLASSIX we developed is much less computationally demanding than traditional methods and is fully explainable, meaning that it provides textual and visual explanations of the computed clusters.”
Roberto Cahuantzi added: “Our analysis serves as a proof of concept, demonstrating the potential use of machine learning methods as an alert tool for the early discovery of emerging major variants without relying on the need to generate phylogenies.
“Whilst phylogenetics remains the ‘gold standard’ for understanding the viral ancestry, these machine learning methods can accommodate several orders of magnitude more sequences than the current phylogenetic methods and at a low computational cost.”
Journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
DOI
10.1073/pnas.2317284121
Article Title
Unsupervised identification of significant lineages of SARS-CoV-2 through scalable machine learning methods
While the size of the United States makes it hard for it to compete with the inter-city train access available in places like Japan and many European countries, Amtrak trains are a very popular transportation option in certain pockets of the country — so much so that the country’s national railway company is expanding its Northeast Corridor by more than one million seats.
Running from Boston all the way south to Washington, D.C., the route is one of the most popular as it passes through the most densely populated part of the country and serves as a commuter train for those who need to go between East Coast cities such as New York and Philadelphia for business.
Veronika Bondarenko captured this photo of New York’s Moynihan Train Hall.
Veronika Bondarenko
Amtrak launches new routes, promises travelers ‘additional travel options’
Earlier this month, Amtrak announced that it was adding four additional Northeastern routes to its schedule — two more routes between New York’s Penn Station and Union Station in Washington, D.C. on the weekend, a new early-morning weekday route between New York and Philadelphia’s William H. Gray III 30th Street Station and a weekend route between Philadelphia and Boston’s South Station.
According to Amtrak, these additions will increase Northeast Corridor’s service by 20% on the weekdays and 10% on the weekends for a total of one million additional seats when counted by how many will ride the corridor over the year.
“More people are taking the train than ever before and we’re proud to offer our customers additional travel options when they ride with us on the Northeast Regional,” Amtrak Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer Eliot Hamlisch said in a statement on the new routes. “The Northeast Regional gets you where you want to go comfortably, conveniently and sustainably as you breeze past traffic on I-95 for a more enjoyable travel experience.”
Here are some of the other Amtrak changes you can expect to see
Amtrak also said that, in the 2023 financial year, the Northeast Corridor had nearly 9.2 million riders — 8% more than it had pre-pandemic and a 29% increase from 2022. The higher demand, particularly during both off-peak hours and the time when many business travelers use to get to work, is pushing Amtrak to invest into this corridor in particular.
To reach more customers, Amtrak has also made several changes to both its routes and pricing system. In the fall of 2023, it introduced a type of new “Night Owl Fare” — if traveling during very late or very early hours, one can go between cities like New York and Philadelphia or Philadelphia and Washington. D.C. for $5 to $15.
As travel on the same routes during peak hours can reach as much as $300, this was a deliberate move to reach those who have the flexibility of time and might have otherwise preferred more affordable methods of transportation such as the bus. After seeing strong uptake, Amtrak added this type of fare to more Boston routes.
The largest distances, such as the ones between Boston and New York or New York and Washington, are available at the lowest rate for $20.
I am a conservation biologist who studies emerging infectious diseases. When people ask me what I think the next pandemic will be I often say that we are in the midst of one – it’s just afflicting a great many species more than ours.
I am referring to the highly pathogenic strain of avian influenza H5N1 (HPAI H5N1), otherwise known as bird flu, which has killed millions of birds and unknown numbers of mammals, particularly during the past three years.
This is the strain that emerged in domestic geese in China in 1997 and quickly jumped to humans in south-east Asia with a mortality rate of around 40-50%. My research group encountered the virus when it killed a mammal, an endangered Owston’s palm civet, in a captive breeding programme in Cuc Phuong National Park Vietnam in 2005.
How these animals caught bird flu was never confirmed. Their diet is mainly earthworms, so they had not been infected by eating diseased poultry like many captive tigers in the region.
This discovery prompted us to collate all confirmed reports of fatal infection with bird flu to assess just how broad a threat to wildlife this virus might pose.
This is how a newly discovered virus in Chinese poultry came to threaten so much of the world’s biodiversity.
Until December 2005, most confirmed infections had been found in a few zoos and rescue centres in Thailand and Cambodia. Our analysis in 2006 showed that nearly half (48%) of all the different groups of birds (known to taxonomists as “orders”) contained a species in which a fatal infection of bird flu had been reported. These 13 orders comprised 84% of all bird species.
We reasoned 20 years ago that the strains of H5N1 circulating were probably highly pathogenic to all bird orders. We also showed that the list of confirmed infected species included those that were globally threatened and that important habitats, such as Vietnam’s Mekong delta, lay close to reported poultry outbreaks.
Mammals known to be susceptible to bird flu during the early 2000s included primates, rodents, pigs and rabbits. Large carnivores such as Bengal tigers and clouded leopards were reported to have been killed, as well as domestic cats.
Our 2006 paper showed the ease with which this virus crossed species barriers and suggested it might one day produce a pandemic-scale threat to global biodiversity.
In the past couple of years, bird flu has spread rapidly across Europe and infiltrated North and South America, killing millions of poultry and a variety of bird and mammal species. A recent paper found that 26 countries have reported at least 48 mammal species that have died from the virus since 2020, when the latest increase in reported infections started.
Not even the ocean is safe. Since 2020, 13 species of aquatic mammal have succumbed, including American sea lions, porpoises and dolphins, often dying in their thousands in South America. A wide range of scavenging and predatory mammals that live on land are now also confirmed to be susceptible, including mountain lions, lynx, brown, black and polar bears.
The UK alone has lost over 75% of its great skuas and seen a 25% decline in northern gannets. Recent declines in sandwich terns (35%) and common terns (42%) were also largely driven by the virus.
Scientists haven’t managed to completely sequence the virus in all affected species. Research and continuous surveillance could tell us how adaptable it ultimately becomes, and whether it can jump to even more species. We know it can already infect humans – one or more genetic mutations may make it more infectious.
At the crossroads
Between January 1 2003 and December 21 2023, 882 cases of human infection with the H5N1 virus were reported from 23 countries, of which 461 (52%) were fatal.
Of these fatal cases, more than half were in Vietnam, China, Cambodia and Laos. Poultry-to-human infections were first recorded in Cambodia in December 2003. Intermittent cases were reported until 2014, followed by a gap until 2023, yielding 41 deaths from 64 cases. The subtype of H5N1 virus responsible has been detected in poultry in Cambodia since 2014. In the early 2000s, the H5N1 virus circulating had a high human mortality rate, so it is worrying that we are now starting to see people dying after contact with poultry again.
It’s not just H5 subtypes of bird flu that concern humans. The H10N1 virus was originally isolated from wild birds in South Korea, but has also been reported in samples from China and Mongolia.
Recent research found that these particular virus subtypes may be able to jump to humans after they were found to be pathogenic in laboratory mice and ferrets. The first person who was confirmed to be infected with H10N5 died in China on January 27 2024, but this patient was also suffering from seasonal flu (H3N2). They had been exposed to live poultry which also tested positive for H10N5.
Species already threatened with extinction are among those which have died due to bird flu in the past three years. The first deaths from the virus in mainland Antarctica have just been confirmed in skuas, highlighting a looming threat to penguin colonies whose eggs and chicks skuas prey on. Humboldt penguins have already been killed by the virus in Chile.
How can we stem this tsunami of H5N1 and other avian influenzas? Completely overhaul poultry production on a global scale. Make farms self-sufficient in rearing eggs and chicks instead of exporting them internationally. The trend towards megafarms containing over a million birds must be stopped in its tracks.
To prevent the worst outcomes for this virus, we must revisit its primary source: the incubator of intensive poultry farms.
Diana Bell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
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