Archives for June 2021

The 2020 census is expected to cost $14.2 billion, well below a previous estimate of $15.6 billion, reflecting a slowdown in the price tag for the nation’s head count thanks to technological innovations, according to a new watchdog report released Monday.

The lower cost came even though the Census Bureau spent an extra $1.1 billion responding to the pandemic, whose spread in the U.S. coincided with the start of the nation’s head count for most U.S. residents in March 2020.

Technological innovations allowed most households to answer the census questionnaire online for the first time instead of just by mail or phone, surprising statisticians with a self-response rate that exceeded expectations.

The innovations also permitted census takers to take down answers from households using mobile devices that also created the most efficient routes for census takers to follow when going from home to home, according to a report from the Government Accountability Office.

Cost savings came from the bureau’s opening fewer field offices and using administrative records to fill in answers for households that didn’t respond on their own or didn’t open their doors to census takers seeking answers about their households, the report said.

The per-household cost of the 2020 census wasn’t significantly more than it was in 2010 — $96 per household versus $92 per household. By contrast, it had been jumping decade to decade before that, rising from $16 per household in 1970 to $80 per household in 2000. At the same time, self-response rates had declined, requiring more money to pay for census takers to knock on the doors of people who hadn’t yet answered the questionnaire, the report said.

“This suggests that even with the expenses associated with COVID-19, the Bureau moderated the historically rising cost curve of the census,” the GAO report said.

The pandemic caused delays in operations, forced the bureau to extend the deadline for ending field operations by several months and necessitated the purchase of millions of gloves and masks for census takers.

The biggest cost during the 2020 census was the actual gathering of information from households across the U.S., representing more than a third of the budget. Other big- ticket items included infrastructure costs such as office space, staff and equipment, representing about a quarter of the budget, and the price tag for developing the computer systems, representing about 12% of the budget, according to previous estimates.

The bureau also allowed people to respond without a unique identification number in an effort to make answering the questionnaire easier. The bureau received 17 million responses without the identification number when it had been expecting only 9 million, the report said.

The once-a-decade census determines how many congressional seats and Electoral College votes each state gets, as well as the distribution of $1.5 trillion in federal spending.

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Follow Mike Schneider on Twitter at https://twitter.com/MikeSchneiderAP

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SAN DIEGO (AP) — A producer for a now-defunct California porn website was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison Monday for coercing or tricking women into appearing in sex videos.

Ruben Andre Garcia, 31, was sentenced for conspiracy and sex trafficking involving San Diego-based GirlsDoPorn.com.

Prosecutors said that Garcia was a recruiter, producer and actor in movies for the website from 2013 to 2017.

He falsely promised models who answered ads that they would remain anonymous and their videos wouldn’t be distributed on the internet but only on privately-sold DVDs overseas, prosecutors said.

In fact, Garcia knew the videos were being posted on fee-based websites and that excerpts were being posted on free sites, including popular sites that received millions of views, prosecutors said.

Some women also alleged that they were coerced or threatened into doing sex scenes.

Garcia and others sometimes coerced victims into finishing sex videos by threatening “to sue the victims, cancel flights home, and post the videos online,” according to a statement from the U.S. attorney’s office. “Hotel room doors were at times blocked by camera and recording equipment, and the victims felt powerless and unable to leave.”

“This defendant lured one victim after another with fake modeling ads, false promises and deceptive front companies, ultimately devolving to threats to coerce these women into making sex videos,” authorities said.

“Even when victims told Garcia how the scheme had devastated their lives, he showed no regard for their well-being,” acting U.S. Attorney Randy Grossman said. “The crime was utterly callous in nature and there is no excuse or justification for his conduct, which was driven purely by greed.”

Garcia pleaded guilty to federal charges last December. He was among six people charged. Most have pleaded guilty to federal charges.

The site’s co-creator, Michael James Pratt, remains at large. A reward of up to $50,000 has been offered for information leading to his arrest.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department will tighten its rules around obtaining records from members of Congress, Attorney General Merrick Garland said, amid revelations the department under former President Donald Trump had secretly seized records from Democrats and members of the media.

“Consistent with our commitment to the rule of law,” Garland said Monday in a statement, “we must ensure that full weight is accorded to separation-of-powers concerns moving forward.”

Garland’s statement came as a Justice Department official said the top national security official, John Demers, planned to leave by the end of next week. Demers, who was sworn in a few weeks after the subpoena for the Democrats’ records, is one of the few Trump appointees who has remained in the Biden administration.

The Justice Department is struggling to contain the fallout over revelations that it had confiscated phone data from House Democrats and reporters as part of an aggressive investigation into leaks. The disclosure is also forcing Biden administration officials to wade back into a fight with their predecessors — something they’ve wished to avoid.

News outlets reported last week that the Justice Department had secretly subpoenaed Cupertino, California-based Apple Inc. in 2018 for metadata from two Democratic members of the House Intelligence Committee — California Rep. Adam Schiff and California Rep. Eric Swalwell — as their committee was investigating Trump’s ties to Russia. Schiff, at the time, was the top Democrat on the panel, which was led by Republicans.

Now the House Intelligence Committee Chair, Schiff said Monday that he had spoken with Garland, who had given his commitment to an independent investigation by the inspector general. Schiff said he had “every confidence” that Garland “will also do the kind of top-to-bottom review of the degree to which the department was politicized during the previous administration and take corrective steps.”

The intelligence panel initially said 12 people connected to the committee — including aides, former aides and family members — had been swept up, but more have since been uncovered, according to a person familiar with the matter who also was not authorized to discuss it publicly and spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity.

Some people might not know they were targeted because the Apple notification was by email and showed up in the spam filters of some of those who were contacted, the person said.

House Judiciary Committee Chair Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., announced an investigation into the subpoenas on members of Congress and journalists. Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., demanded a copy of the subpoena and other records about the decision to obtain the order.

Meanwhile, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., lambasted a demand by Democrats that former attorneys general William Barr and Jeff Sessions testify before a committee on the subpoenas, saying his Democratic colleagues had given into the “urge to pick at the scab of politically-motivated investigations.” He defended Barr, saying the move was a “witch hunt in the making.”

“There is no need for a partisan circus here in Congress,” he said.

The subpoena, issued Feb. 6, 2018, requested information on 73 phone numbers and 36 email addresses, Apple said. It also included a nondisclosure order that prohibited the company from notifying any of the people, and it was renewed three times, the company said in a statement.

Apple said that it couldn’t challenge the warrants because it had so little information available and that “it would have been virtually impossible for Apple to understand the intent of the desired information without digging through users’ accounts.”

Although Apple says it contests legal requests that it believes are unfounded, the company challenged or rejected just 7% of the U.S. demands it received during the 2018 period when it received the subpoena for the information about Schiff and Swalwell. Apple was even less combative during the first half of last year, challenging just 4% of the U.S. legal requests.

Apple has been turning over some customer data in 80% to 90% of the legal requests it has received in the U.S. in recent years, though the information often excludes the content of text, email or photos.

Like other major technology companies, Apple has been dealing with a steadily escalating torrent of legal requests for account and device information from around the world as its products and services have become more deeply ingrained in people’s lives.

During the first half of last year, for instance, U.S. law enforcement agencies sought information on 18,609 Apple accounts — nearly seven times the number of accounts requested during the same time in 2015.

The demands are becoming more broad, too. During the first half of 2018, when Apple received the subpoena affecting Schiff and Swalwell, the 2,397 U.S. legal requests that Apple received covered an average of seven accounts, according to the company’s disclosures. That was up from an average of roughly three accounts per request during the first half of 2015.

The department’s inspector general has launched a probe into the matter after a request from Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco. Inspector General Michael Horowitz said he would examine whether the data subpoenaed by the Justice Department and turned over by Apple followed department policy and “whether any such uses, or the investigations, were based upon improper considerations.”

In addition, Monaco has been separately tasked with “surfacing problematic matters deserving high level review,” Garland said.

Garland emphasized in his statement Monday that “political or other improper considerations must play no role in any investigative or prosecutorial decisions.”

Demers has been in charge of the department’s national security division since late February 2018, and his division has played a role in each of the leak investigations. He leaves as questions swirl over his potential involvement in the effort.

He had planned for weeks to leave the department by the end of June, a second person familiar with the matter said. The two could not discuss the matter publicly and spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity.

He will be temporarily replaced by Mark Lesko, the acting U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of New York, the official said, until President Joe Biden’s official pick, Matthew Olsen, is approved by the Senate.

Olsen is an Uber executive with experience in the Justice Department. He has served as director of the National Counterterrorism Center and as general counsel for the National Security Agency. Demers had remained in place while Olsen awaits a confirmation hearing.

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Liedtke reported from San Francisco. Associated Press writer Colleen Long in Washington contributed to this report.

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RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — A cyberespionage campaign blamed on China was more sweeping than previously known, with suspected state-backed hackers exploiting a device meant to boost internet security to penetrate the computers of critical U.S. entities.

The hack of Pulse Connect Secure networking devices came to light in April, but its scope is only now starting to become clear. The Associated Press has learned that the hackers targeted telecommunications giant Verizon and the country’s largest water agency. News broke earlier this month that the New York City subway system, the country’s largest, was also breached.

Security researchers say dozens of other high-value entities that have not yet been named were also targeted as part of the breach of Pulse Secure, which is used by many companies and governments for secure remote access to their networks.

It’s unclear what sensitive information, if any, was accessed. Some of the targets said they did not see any evidence of data being stolen. That uncertainty is common in cyberespionage and it can take months to determine data loss, if it is ever discovered. Ivanti, the Utah-based owner of Pulse Connect Secure, declined to comment on which customers were affected.

But even if sensitive information wasn’t compromised, experts say it is worrisome that hackers managed to gain footholds in networks of critical organizations whose secrets could be of interest to China for commercial and national security reasons.

“The threat actors were able to get access to some really high-profile organizations, some really well-protected ones,” said Charles Carmakal, the chief technology officer of Mandiant, whose company first publicized the hacking campaign in April.

The Pulse Secure hack has largely gone unnoticed while a series of headline-grabbing ransomware attacks have highlighted the cyber vulnerabilities to U.S. critical infrastructure, including one on a major fuels pipeline that prompted widespread shortages at gas stations. The U.S. government is also still investigating the fallout of the SolarWinds hacking campaign launched by Russian cyber spies, which infiltrated dozens of private sector companies and think tanks as well as at least nine U.S. government agencies and went on for most of 2020.

China has a long history of using the internet to spy on the U.S. and presents a “prolific and effective cyber-espionage threat,” the Office of the Director of the National Intelligence said in its most recent annual threat assessment.

Six years ago Chinese hackers stole millions of background check files of federal government employees from the Office of Personnel Management. And last year the Justice Department charged two hackers it said worked with the Chinese government to target firms developing vaccines for the coronavirus and stole hundreds of millions of dollars worth of intellectual property and trade secrets from companies across the world.

The Chinese government has denied any role in the Pulse hacking campaign and the U.S. government has not made any formal attribution.

In the Pulse campaign, security experts said sophisticated hackers exploited never-before-seen vulnerabilities to break in and were hyper diligent in trying to cover their tracks once inside.

“The capability is very strong and difficult to defend against, and the profile of victims is very significant,” said Adrian Nish, the head of cyber at BAE Systems Applied Intelligence. “This is a very targeted attack against a few dozen networks that all have national significance in one way or another.”

The Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, issued an April alert about the Pulse hack saying it was aware of “compromises affecting a number of U.S. government agencies, critical infrastructure entities, and other private sector organizations.” The agency has since said that at least five federal agencies have identified indications of potential unauthorized access, but not said which ones.

Verizon said it found a Pulse-related compromise in one of its labs but it was quickly isolated from its core networks. The company said no data or customer information was accessed or stolen.

“We know that bad actors try to compromise our systems,” said Verizon spokesman Rich Young. “That is why internet operators, private companies and all individuals need to be vigilant in this space.”

The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which provides water to 19 million people and operates some of the largest treatment plants in the world, said it found a compromised Pulse Secure appliance after CISA issued its alert in April. Spokeswoman Rebecca Kimitch said the appliance was immediately removed from service and no Metropolitan systems or processes were known to have been affected. She said there was “no known data exfiltration.”

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority in New York also said they’ve not found evidence of valuable data or customer information was stolen. The breach was first reported by The New York Times.

Nish, the BAE security expert, said the hackers could have broken into networks but not stolen data right away for any number of operational reasons. He compared it to a criminal breaking into a house but stopping in the hallway.

“It’s still pretty bad,” Nish said.

Mandiant said it found signs of data extraction from some of the targets. The company and BAE have identified targets of the hacking campaign in several fields, including financial, technology and defense firms, as well as municipal governments. Some targets were in Europe, but most in the U.S.

At least one major local government has disputed it was a target of the Pulse Secure hack. Montgomery County, Maryland, said it was advised by CISA that its Pulse Secure devices were attacked. But county spokesman Scott Peterson said the county found no evidence of a compromise and told CISA they had a “false report.”

CISA did not directly respond to the county’s statement.

The new details of the Pulse Secure hack come at a time of tension between the U.S. and China. Biden has made checking China’s growth a top priority, and said the country’s ambition of becoming the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world is “not going to happen under my watch.”

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LONDON (AP) — Facebook is subject to EU privacy challenges from watchdogs in any of the bloc’s member states, not just its lead regulator in Ireland, the bloc’s top court ruled Tuesday, in a ruling that has implications for other big tech companies.

Under the EU’s stringent privacy rules, known as the General Data Protection Regulation, only one country’s national data protection authority has the power to handle legal cases involving cross-border data complaints in a system known as “one-stop shop.” For Facebook, which has its European headquarters in Dublin, it is Ireland’s Data Protection Commission.

However, the European Union’s Court of Justice ruled that “under certain conditions,” a national watchdog has the power to take a company to court over a GDPR violation even if it’s not the lead regulator.

The ruling is in line with a preliminary opinion from a court adviser and, according to experts, potentially paves the way for a fresh onslaught of privacy cases across the EU’s 27 member nations.

The court’s decision brings to an end a lengthy legal battle between Facebook and Belgium’s data protection authority over jurisdiction for the case, which centered on the social network’s use of cookies to track behavior of internet users, even those who weren’t account holders. The company had argued that the Belgian watchdog no longer had jurisdiction after GDPR took effect in 2018.

Facebook painted it as a victory, noting that under the ruling the Irish regulator would remain in the lead except in limited circumstances.

“We are pleased that the CJEU has upheld the value and principles of the one-stop-shop mechanism, and highlighted its importance in ensuring the efficient and consistent application of GDPR across the EU,” Jack Gilbert, the company’s associate general counsel, said.

Ireland’s privacy watchdog has been criticized for taking too long resolve a growing number of GDPR cases involving tech giants including Apple, Twitter, Google and Instagram but it argues that the cases are complicated.

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