Biden/Harris: People of the Year - 12/11/20

On today's Quick News Daily, we discuss the latest news about the FDA pre-approving the Pfizer COVID vaccine, as well as the news from the UK about 2 people who had serious allergic reactions to it. Then, I talk about the potentially game-changing antitrust lawsuit against Facebook, as well as an update on the Rebekah Jones raid in Florida.

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Sources:

Lawyers' group calls for disciplining Trump legal team over 'dangerous' fraud allegations 
Facebook antitrust case: FTC and several states launch lawsuits 
The antitrust case against Facebook: Here's what you need to know 
Florida state police release body cam video of raid on ex-Covid data's scientist home 
Evidence to justify raid on home of Rebekah Jones weak, experts say 
Pfizer Faces Enormous Task Of Covid Vaccine Distribution After FDA Panel Recommends Urgent Use 
FDA advisers recommend authorization of Pfizer/BioNTech coronavirus vaccine
https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/09/health/covid-vaccine-allergies-health-workers-uk-intl-gbr/index.html 

 (Mostly Accurate) Transcript:

COVID

 

The big news from yesterday (that I think we all expected) was that vaccine advisers to the FDA voted to recommend emergency use authorization for the Pfizer vaccine. On this panel, the vote was 17-4-1. 

 

I thought that this was like the final say, but now the FDA has to decide whether to accept the recommendation, but has signaled that it will issue the EUA for the vaccine. 

Then, after that, there’s still another step where the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices must meet to decide whether it recommends that the vaccine be deployed for use. That group has a meeting scheduled for today, and expects to vote during a meeting scheduled for Sunday.

Operation Warp Speed officials say they will start shipping the vaccine within 24 hours of FDA authorization. 

 

The FDA group is scheduled to meet again December 17 to discuss Moderna's EUA application. 

 

This is all good news, and I think when you weigh the amount of testing that has happened with this, I think it’s safe. At the same time, there is some unsettling news about a couple of allergic reactions that happened in the UK. 

 

The UK regulators issued new advice to healthcare professionals stating that any person with a significant allergic reaction to a vaccine, medicine or food -- such as previous history of anaphylactoid reaction, or those who have been advised to carry an adrenaline autoinjector -- should not receive the Pfizer vaccine. The two staff members who had that reaction both carried an Epipen and had a history of allergic reactions, and they developed symptoms of anaphylactoid reaction after receiving the vaccine on Tuesday. 

I think the scariest wording was that this advice also states that vaccines "should only be carried out in facilities where resuscitation measures are available." 

 

Finally, this advice recommends that people who carry an EpiPen to delay having a vaccination until the reason for the allergic reaction has been clarified. 

 

Again, I want to be careful on this because I think the benefits greatly outweigh the alternatives, and I don’t want to start any unnecessary vaccine panic because these were just two people, and the study alone was 44,000, but it’s definitely something to know. I also read that Pfizer’s trial protocols said that to be in that study, you couldn’t have a history of severe allergic reaction “to any component of the study intervention”. That might explain why this didn’t happen in the trial. Another expert in this CNN article said that until we know what part of the vaccine actually caused these reactions, the general public shouldn’t be worried, which makes sense; maybe it was something that was very rare. Just something to keep in mind though as we get closer and closer to this. 

FACEBOOK

 

Some other news that I was happy to hear is that both the government and regulators want Facebook to be broken up because they’re a monopoly. 

 

Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition, Ian Conner, said "Facebook's actions to entrench and maintain its monopoly deny consumers the benefits of competition. Our aim is to roll back Facebook's anticompetitive conduct and restore competition so that innovation and free competition can thrive."

 

The government and regulators are saying Facebook should have to sell off Instagram and WhatsApp. 

 

Facebook’s latest argument is that people choose its services not because they have to, but because they want to, which is pretty much a flat out lie. I wouldn’t be on there for this show unless it was absolutely necessary to build a community. For millions of small businesses, Facebook advertising is pretty much their main marketing strategy. You can’t go over to Twitter and get the same visibility. Facebook’s PR narrative is that they welcome regulation, but that cracking down too hard could risk giving other countries like China a competitive edge in the fast-moving technology sector. I’m glad that years and years of having to defend themselves for being a monopoly let them try out a bunch of defenses, and good for them for settling on the one that sounds like it hints at racism. I also don’t think it’s a coincidence that Trump brainwashed his followers into thinking that Biden loves China and calls the coronavirus the “China Plague” and all that, and then suddenly, Facebook uses this to defend itself when they know full well that they survive by letting white supremacist groups thrive on their platform.  

 

This all got started when New York Attorney General Letitia James announced in September 2019 that she was leading an investigation into Facebook for anticompetitive practices, which 47 state attorneys general signed on a month later.

 

These types of lawsuits understandably usually take a lot of time to play out. One of the most high-profile cases, a landmark lawsuit against Microsoft in 1998, took almost two years to come to a conclusion (actually, that seems pretty quick to me. When you take on a huge company who likes money and doesn’t like you stepping on their toes, 2 years seems pretty quick). I guess we should temper our expectations a bit, but the fact that this happened while Trump is in office is encouraging, because it’s usually Republicans who are all for business rights and that sort of thing. You know, the crooked capitalism that’s more of an oligopoly. 

 

REBEKAH JONES

In our third update of the week on this story, two videos of the raid on Rebekah Jones’ house were released by the FDLE. The videos show that Jones didn't exit her home until about 23 minutes after officers first rang the doorbell, and 15 minutes after they first announced themselves as police. Jones has claimed authorities waited 13 minutes while she got dressed.

"Police search warrant, open the door!" officers yell several times. "Make sure the whole block hears us," one agent tells his colleagues. 

Jones has said that officers in the house pointed guns at her 2- and 11-year-old children and her husband, which the department has denied. She released her own video of the raid showing officers inside with guns drawn, but it’s unclear whether those officers were also wearing body cameras. I’m just going to go out on a limb here, but we all know how these stories go: they’re going to find that these super reliable cameras mysteriously turned off on their own or malfunctioned or something, but just on the officers that went inside the home and allegedly pointed guns at her kids. 

The authorities also said that they seized three computers, two phones, and several memory cards and thumb drives. 

I hate to say I told you so, but I was kind of right: she wasn’t totally honest, but that doesn’t mean that ol’ Ronny DeSantis is in the clear either. There’s also some crazy stuff in her past with getting arrested 3 times in relation to an affair she was having where she was stalking the guy she was having it with. It’s all true, it’s in court documents she filed. These documents included 342 pages, so basically a full novel, about their affair, which is like the nerd version of 50 Shades. So yeah, maybe she’s not the perfect messenger, but there is some controversy over the actual affidavit that they used to get the search warrant. 

 

The FDLE claims to have traced "through the use of investigative resources" the origin of the message to an Internet Protocol (IP) address associated with Jones' Comcast account for her Tallahassee home.

"It is well known that IP addresses can be spoofed. In other words, I can make an IP or I can make it look as though Internet traffic is coming from somewhere else," said Kevin Butler, associate director of the Florida Institute for Cybersecurity Research and a professor of computer science at the University of Florida.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, the country's leading internet civil liberties and data privacy advocacy group, in 2016 published a 22-page white paper laying out why IP addresses on their own are unreliable personal identifiers, and are commonly misused or misunderstood by police and the courts. A key reason is that information can often relay through multiple IP addresses. "It's a thin read to just use the IP address, and it's one that we really, really discourage," said Cindy Cohn, the EFF's executive director. "An IP address is nothing, is not even remotely like a fingerprint... the reason that we worry about IP addresses is the cops will often pretend like they're a fingerprint."

Jason Lewis, an assistant professor of computer science who heads the cyber security program at Florida Southern College and a former law enforcement agent who served as an investigator for the United States Secret Service's Colorado Electronic Crimes Task Force, said the affidavit to his eyes did not sufficiently establish probable cause.

 

Lewis Another professor in this field says that "the use of investigative resources: now, I've used that phrase before, but never like this, that is a jump”, referring to the language in the affidavit that ties the IP address to Jones. "To say that I have an IP address, and then through use of investigative resources, it belongs to Rebekah I would dare say that to me doesn't scream probable cause. I really don't see how, that they're showing to a reasonable person, that the facts support a crime and tying it to her." "It would be like saying 'I found a bullet and through investigative resources Jason shot it'," he said.

Lewis  said there's no reason for records that would link the IP address to Jones' Comcast account to be confidential. Furthermore, IP addresses change over time and the affidavit does not demonstrate that FDLE proved that it corresponded to Jones at the time the message was sent, Lewis said. "​​​​​​There's no technique or source you need to protect when you say you're tying an IP address to a subscriber, so why not tell me that? To me that's really fishy."

Cybersecurity and digital rights experts also said the fact that the emergency system in question relied on a shared username and password further complicates the case. 

The username and password was shared among "multiple" users, past and present, according to the FDLE affidavit which did not specify the number of users with access. That’s just like rule number one: never share your password. That’s rule 1, and rule 2 is don’t make your password “password”.  

It was also revealed Wednesday that the username and password for the system are on a document that was publicly available on a Department of Health site, as first reported by Ars Technica. As of Thursday morning that document was still online. That’s wild! How can they claim only she could have hacked in when they had this stuff on the open internet? What’s up with that?

"Normally you don't see prosecutors prosecuting for computer crimes something that didn't cause any harm... it seems to be a very sketchy use of discretion to try to use this very serious statute against somebody who didn't cause any harm to your systems." - Cohn

The prosecutor that I mentioned a couple of days ago who resigned over this said "I have handled a lot of these kinds of cases in my career, and generally, the way that this statute is used, is to prosecute people who are hacking into other people's systems to steal their identity, to steal their money, to crash their servers, to cause some sort of harm to that person or entity, which is not present here,.”

Filipkowski, in his resignation letter, said he reviewed the warrant, and said the raid was "unconscionable." "It's broadened out to allow them to basically seize any of her devices including zip drives, including things that really are wholly unrelated to that criminal statute," he said. "There's no minimization." "I think they intentionally worded it that broadly because they are on a fishing expedition, because they're not just looking at violations of that statute. They're looking for communications that are between state employees and Rebekah," he said.

Lewis, the former cybercrimes investigator, also questioned why authorities seized thumb drives and memory cards to investigate accessing an online messaging system. "The only things I think that you would have had probable causes to seize would be the router and the computers" as well as the modem. Jones' router and modem weren't seized.

Cohn said the FDLE's actions and the information in the affidavit don't help dispel that perception the raid was politically motivated. "This is way out of proportion, and I think it feeds the argument that this is political and not about law enforcement."

Something is very fishy here, and of course it got found out this quickly: if something malicious did happen, Ron DeSantis is no genius. I will keep following this story and updating you. For this info today, it was from a great story in the Florida Today newspaper, which is like the Florida division of USA Today, so go check out that link and give them some traffic; this article was fantastic.