US Hackers Reportedly Caused a Blackout in Venezuela

Now The New York Times has cited unnamed US officials confirming that the blackout was in fact caused by a cyberattack, the first time the US government has ever been publicly reported to have carried out such a hacking operation. US forces also used hacking capabilities to disable Venezuelan air defense radar ahead of the incursion, the Times reported, citing officials. US Cyber Command also added in a somewhat ambiguous statement to the Times that it “was proud to support Operation Absolute Resolve,” as the US government dubbed the Venezuelan operation.

According to the Times, the power was restored “quickly”—perhaps purposefully by Cyber Command—and didn’t cause fatalities in hospitals, due to the use of backup generators.

Previously, only Russia’s hacker group known as Sandworm had caused blackouts through cyberattacks, turning off the power in various regions of Ukraine in at least three confirmed instances starting in 2015. When asked by a WIRED reporter why the US hadn’t publicly condemned one such blackout attack that hit the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv in 2016, Trump’s former top cyber official, Tom Bossert, responded that the US itself needed the freedom to carry out such attacks if it saw fit. “If you and I put ourselves in the Captain America chair and decide to go to war with someone, we might turn off power and communications to give ourselves a strategic and tactical advantage,” Bossert said.

It remains unclear, of course, whether the US was technically at war with Venezuela in any sense at the time of the operation. Either way, the cyberattack represents yet another unprecedented step from an administration with little apparent regard for precedents.

Journalist Laura Jedeed did not expect to hear back after she applied to be a deportation officer while covering an ICE recruitment expo. She ignored emails, shrugged off a drug test, shirked paperwork, and her negative views on ICE and the Trump administration as a whole are easily searchable online. And yet, she still received a “Welcome to ICE!” email with a start date.

The Trump administration has made a major push to hire a lot of officers in a short amount of time–in December, the Department of Homeland Security announced that it had received over 220,000 applications for more than 10,000 ICE officer positions–and Jedeed’s account raises questions about how much vetting was actually done for candidates going through the application process.

An AI tool that was supposed to review the resumes of potential ICE agent candidates and categorize them by whether or not they had past law enforcement experience was actually broken, according to two law enforcement officials who spoke with NBC News. Candidates without law enforcement experience were supposed to do eight weeks of in-person training, including lessons on immigration law. Instead, applicants with the word “officer” in their resume–including those who simply said, for example, they aspired to be an ICE officer–were placed in a shorter online course. A DHS spokesperson said it impacted around 200 hires, who eventually reported to the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center for full training.

Palantir’s for-profit partnership with DHS amid its mass deportation surge is no secret. But now news outlet 404 Media has revealed the exact app Palantir built for ICE that helps it choose targets and decide on which neighborhoods to focus its raids. The tool, called Enhanced Leads Identification & Targeting for Enforcement, or ELITE, provides a map with human targets and confidence scores of their likelihood to reside at a certain address based on data sources ingested from official sources and surveillance. “This app allows ICE to find the closest person to arrest and disappear, using government and commercial data, with the help of Palantir and Trump’s Big Brother databases,” Senator Ron Wyden told 404 Media. “It makes a mockery of the idea that ICE is trying to make our country safer. Rather, agents are reportedly picking people to deport from our country the same way you’d choose a nearby coffee shop.”

Iran’s internet blackout amid the protests roiling the nation have been some of the longest and most complete in history. But some activists are managing to stay online thanks to an effort to smuggle Starlink satellite internet devices into the country. According to activists who spoke to The New York Times, some 50,000 of the satellite modems are in Iran, offering a window of internet access despite the government’s efforts and helping to share information about a government crackdown on protest that has killed thousands of Iranians. Several activists who spoke to the Times expressed their fear that Starlink’s owner, Elon Musk, would change his mind and make the service unavailable, as he has in China—an internet-censoring country where Musk has business interests.