Thursday Morning: It’s Still Morning Somewhere

[image: NOAA’s National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS)]

Fried. I am totally brain-fried after spending the night reading about flavivirus, rubivirus, arbovirus. So a morning post was not in the cards right away today in my time zone.

Things are fried elsewhere, too, as you can see from the global map above. These locations are suffering from drought:

Colombia – Drought has affected hydroelectric generation.

India – south – Heatwave coupled with drought cost lives

Malawi – Food crisis declared as crop yields fall off due to drought

Mongolia – Severe winter sandwiched between droughts devastates livestock

Morocco – Wheat crop output fell by 50% due to drought

Mozambique — Floods in the north and drought in the south damaged crops; a “red alert” now issued over food security.

Oceana (S Australia/Papua New Guinea) – Human trafficking reported, with girls sold in exchange for rice in Papua New Guinea due to drought-caused crop failures.

Venezuela – Country experiencing electricity shortages due to drought

Vietnam – Livestock are dying due to drought

Zimbabwe – Country is participating in a co-operative food aid program due to severe drought.

This is only a partial list of drought-affected countries; Mideast and Mediterranean countries, Thailand, more of the African continent, and the southwest U.S. also suffer from drought.

Some drought is due to cyclical trends like the current El Nino event, but much of the drought is deeper than the average cycle, and some of it is simply climate change. Many places are already facing agricultural crises, and others have been facing them for years now.

While the map above doesn’t reflect it, forecasts predict dryer-than-average conditions across the crop-growing region of the middle U.S. as well as a return to dryer conditions in California.

We are overdue for discussions about global food security as climate change worsens. We can start now.

Back to regular morning roundup programming tomorrow — see you then!

FBI Has Been Not Counting Encryption’s Impact on Investigations for Over a Decade

During the first of a series of hearings in the last year in which Jim Comey (at this particular hearing, backed by Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates) pushed for back doors, they were forced to admit they didn’t actually have numbers proving encryption was a big problem for their investigations because they simply weren’t tracking that number.

On the issue on which Comey — and his co-witness at the SJC hearing, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates — should have been experts, they were not. Over an hour and a quarter into the SJC hearing, Al Franken asked for actual data demonstrating how big of a problem encryption really is. Yates replied that the government doesn’t track this data because once an agency discovers they’re targeting a device with unbreakable encryption, they use other means of targeting. (Which seems to suggest the agencies have other means to pursue the targets, but Yates didn’t acknowledge that.) So the agencies simply don’t count how many times they run into encryption problems. “I don’t have good enough numbers yet,” Comey admitted when asked again at the later hearing about why FBI can’t demonstrate this need with real data.

In point of fact, a recent wiretap report shows that in the criminal context, at least, federal agencies do count such incidences, sometimes. But they don’t report the numbers in a timely fashion (5 of the 8 encrypted federal wiretaps reported in 2014 were from earlier years that were only then being reported), and agencies were eventually able to break most of the encrypted lines (also 5 of 8). Moreover, those 8 encrypted lines represented only 0.6 percent of all their wiretaps (8 of 1279). Reporting for encrypted state wiretaps were similarly tiny. Those numbers don’t reflect FISA wiretaps. But there, FBI often partners with NSA, which has even greater ability to crack encryption.

In any case, rather than documenting the instances where encryption thwarted the FBI, Comey instead asks us to just trust him.

Which is important background to an ancillary detail in this NYT story on how FBI tried a work-around for PGP in 2003 — its first attempt to do so — to go after some animal rights activists (AKA “eco-terrorists).

In early 2003, F.B.I. agents hit a roadblock in a secret investigation, called Operation Trail Mix. For months, agents had been intercepting phone calls and emails belonging to members of an animal welfare group that was believed to be sabotaging operations of a company that was using animals to test drugs. But encryption software had made the emails unreadable.

So investigators tried something new. They persuaded a judge to let them remotely, and secretly, install software on the group’s computers to help get around the encryption.

[snip]

“This was the first time that the Department of Justice had ever approved such an intercept of this type,” an F.B.I. agent wrote in a 2005 document summing up the case.

DOJ didn’t include this encounter with encryption in the wiretap reports that mandate such reporting.

It is also unclear why the Justice Department, which is required to report every time it comes across encryption in a criminal wiretap case, did not do so in 2002 or 2003. The Justice Department and F.B.I. did not comment Wednesday.

It didn’t count that encounter with crypto even though FBI was discussing — as Bob Litt would 13 years later — exploiting fears of “terrorism” to get Congress to pass a law requiring back doors.

“The current terrorism prevention context may present the best opportunity to bring up the encryption issue,” an F.B.I. official said in a December 2002 email. A month later, a draft bill, called Patriot Act 2, revealed that the Justice Department was considering outlawing the use of encryption to conceal criminal activity. The bill did not pass.

Now, it may be that, as remained the case until last year, FBI simply doesn’t record that they encountered encryption and instead tries to get the information some other way. But by all appearances, encryption was tied to that wiretap.

Which suggests another option: that FBI isn’t tracking how often it encounters encryption because it doesn’t want to disclose that it is actually finding a way around it.

That’d be consistent with what they’ve permitted providers to report in their transparency reports. Right now, providers are not permitted to report on new collection (say, collection reflecting the compromise of Skype) for two years after it starts. The logic is that the government is effectively giving itself a two year window of exclusive exploitation before it will permit reporting that might lead people to figure out something new has been subjected to PRISM or other collection.

Why would we expect FBI to treat its own transparency any differently?

Update: This post has been updated to include more of the NYT article and a discussion of how encryption transparency may match provider transparency.

CDC: Zika Virus Confirmed as a Cause of Microcephaly

CDC director Dr. Tom Frieden confirmed Wednesday that the flavivirus known as Zika is a cause of microcephaly and other severe fetal brain defects.

The confirmation is based on an evaluation of available data for potential teratogenic effects. Using both Shepard criteria and Bradford Hill criteria, researchers proved prenatal Zika virus infection has a causal relationship with microcephaly and other serious brain anomalies.

The first set of seven criteria used in the assessment were developed by Dr. Thomas Shepard to assess an agent’s teratogenicity — the ability to cause birth defects. The criteria of proof are:

1. Proven exposure to agent at critical time(s) in prenatal development

2. Consistent findings by two or more epidemiologic studies of high quality

a. control of confounding factors
b. sufficient numbers
c. exclusion of positive and negative bias factors
d. prospective studies, if possible, and
e. relative risk of six or more

3. Careful delineation of the clinical cases. A specific defect or syndrome, if present, is very helpful.

4. Rare environmental exposure associated with rare defect. Probably three or more cases.

5. Teratogenicity in experimental animals important but not essential.

6. The association should make biological sense.

7. Proof in an experimental system that the agent acts in an unaltered state. Important for prevention.

______
Note:
Items 1~3 or 1, 3, and 4 are essential criteria.
Items 5~7 are helpful but not essential.

Shepard criteria summary:

1. The microcephaly and other brain defects observed in infants and fetuses were consistent with maternal Zika infection during first and second trimester of pregnancy. Mothers exhibited symptoms, and/or had infections confirmed by labs, and/or had traveled to areas where Zika was endemic. This criterion was met.

2. Data documenting the location of Zika virus infections and the subsequent incidence of microcephaly in those areas was supported by two epidemiologic studies. But as sample sizes were too small and controls were lacking, this criterion has not yet been met.

3. Cases manifesting with a very specific defect (an atypical microcephaly) or syndrome (a narrow range of neurological defects in tandem with microcephaly) satisfied this third criterion. With Zika infection, microcephalic cases displayed adequate bone tissue and scalp skin production, but ‘collapsed’ due to the disrupted development of fetal brain tissue. This is not common in other microcephalies.

4. An adequate number of cases fulfilled the criteria of rare exposure and rare defect — one example cited was that of a pregnant woman who traveled for a week to areas with Zika were Zika was not endemic. She tested positive for Zika during her second trimester, and the fetus displayed brain defects associated with Zika after the infection.

5. Studies for this criteria — teratogenicity in animal models — are still under way. This criterion is not yet satisfied.

6. This criterion is met as the causal relationship makes biologic sense.

7. This criterion does not apply to infectious agents.

The essential Shepard criteria have been met for proof of teratogenicity.

Bradford Hill criteria summary

Of the nine criterion — the strength of association, consistency, specificity, temporality, biologic gradient, plausibility, coherence, experiment (on animal models), and analogy — only two criterion are not applicable or not available. The remaining seven criterion were met in much the same manner as the Shepard criteria 1, 3, 4 were met.

What’s next

A spectrum of additional fetal abnormalities has not yet been fully identified in association with Zika infection. This will become clear once some pregnancies being monitored reach term.

We don’t yet know if Zika virus affects adult neurological tissues; some cases of Guillain-Barre Syndrome (GBS) have been reported in areas where Zika is endemic. GBS has occurred in patients after viral infections where neurological tissues have been affected; it would make biologic sense for there to be a causal relationship between Zika and GBS. However, GBS has occurred in patients long after an initial infection, making it difficult to see obvious relationships without further screening and testing.

A Zika vaccine may be some time off; only yellow fever and a couple of encephalitis viruses have vaccines while others like West Nile and dengue do not.

Mosquito control varies widely from state to state, let alone by county or municipality. We do not know if it is adequate to ensure Zika’s spread via Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus mosquito species is limited. U.S. experience with the spread of West Nile Virus may be informative.

Funding for additional research, education, training, vaccine development and mosquito control, as well as funding increases for birth control are much needed, But the GOP-led Congress will likely avoid this issue during the remaining days it is in session this election year.

In the meantime, if you’re around mosquitoes in warmer areas of the U.S., are pregnant, plan to be pregnant, or might get someone pregnant, check the CDC’s guidelines on Zika.