Private industry needs better safeguards to avoid calamitous consequences in the event of cyberattacks like the ones that have targeted US infrastructure and corporations, US Attorney General Merrick Garland said on Tuesday.
“You have to have a secondary method if your first method is shut down. You have to have depth, and we need to work with them on that,” Garland said, one week after a meeting between US President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin, which included discussion of a spate of Russia-linked ransomware attacks in the past few months.
Such hacks, including a ransomware attack last month on Colonial Pipeline, are “extremely dangerous,” Garland said.
The US Department of Justice has responded with a task force focused on ransomware.
In a wide-ranging question-and-answer session with reporters, his first since being confirmed in March as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, Garland also reiterated his concerns about the death penalty, defended the department’s position in a defamation case against former US president Donald Trump and said that the government would work to protect journalists’ personal safety and their ability to conceal their confidential sources.
The conversation occurred as Garland has faced demands from Democrats to swiftly undo or reverse positions taken by the department during the Trump administration, including aggressive leak investigations in which law enforcement obtained telephone records of journalists and congressional officials.
The department inspector general is now investigating, and Garland last week met with executives from news media organizations after pledging that the government would abandon the practice of seizing reporters’ records in an effort to identify their sources.
Garland, who has made several major announcements during his tenure, but taken no questions from reporters before Tuesday, did not reveal any new details about how those subpoenas were authorized and did not answer when asked when he had learned about the issue.
However, he said it was clear the balance the department had sought for decades to strike between upholding journalists’ First Amendment rights and guarding against the disclosure of classified information is “not sufficient for your protection.”
He said he believed journalists need sources to expose wrongdoing and bad decisionmaking inside the government.
“I’m going to do everything I can to help protect you” from being forced to reveal those contacts, he said.
Garland also defended the department’s decision to maintain its position that Trump cannot be held personally liable for “crude and disrespectful” remarks he made about a woman who accused him of rape, because he made the comments while he was president.
Democrats had looked to that case as one place where Garland’s justice department might make a dramatic shift in position. Instead, the department’s stance has not changed.
Garland said the case law that government lawyers had reviewed tilted in favor of the argument that defamatory statements made to the news media by a public official are protected by law.
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
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Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
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