25 November 21
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I am thankful for the land and the water and the birds of the air and for all the people through the long ages who worked to keep faith with them all.
[We] Do by these Presents, solemnly and mutually, in the Presence of God and one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil Body Politick, for our better Ordering and Preservation, and Furtherance of the Ends aforesaid: And by Virtue hereof do enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal Laws, Ordinances, Acts, Constitutions, and Officers, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general Good of the Colony; unto which we promise all due Submission and Obedience.
The Narragansett people fared even worse. In 1675, they allied with King Philip and the Wampanoag in an effort to get their land in Massachusetts back. This resulted in an atrocity called the Great Swamp Massacre in which a combined force of Massachusetts militia, including a delegation from high-falutin’ Plymouth colony, laid waste to a large Narragansett encampment near modern day North Kingstown, Rhode Island. Somewhere between 300 and 1,000 Native non-combatants were killed or died of exposure after fleeing into the swampland in the middle of December. The site of the massacre is about 45 miles south of Douglas State Forest, the stolen land on which I had my first real job, in the summers of 1972, 1973, and 1976.
I was floating around the internet the other day while waiting for a bus, and I came upon the obituary of Bill Annese, who had been my supervisor at the state forest for all three of my summers there. Billy had died on August 10th of this year. I owe him a great deal, which we’ll get to in a minute.
We couldn’t have been an easy crew to wrangle. We were all college students, except one of us, who was finishing law school and getting ready to take the bar. We all were temporary help with our eyes down the road at what we wanted to do with our lives. We were smart-assed and prank-prone, and several of us had no bloody idea what tools did what. (I could swing an ax and clear brush, but I was absolutely hopeless with wrenches and ratchets and nobody dared give me a crack at the chain saw.) But this park was Bill’s livelihood and his love. He knew every trail, and there were a lot of them that hadn’t been cleared since the WPA came through to build a railroad bridge in the 1930s. He knew every inch of shoreline of Wallum Lake, the state forest’s body of water that extended into Rhode Island. Billy loved that place and, gradually, by working us hard at maintaining it, he made us love it, too.
To this day, when I feel Ishmaelishly grim and spleenful, I often drive back to the park and just sit by the water. There is a small, wooded peninsula just off the main beach where, in the summers between college semesters, I used to sit and think preposterously self-important thoughts until the waning sunlight spreading on the water cleared my head again and got me back in the moment, with the night breeze just coming up.
Billy Annese cared for the land. He might not even have been able to explain why, but he nurtured what he had and worked to preserve more of it. In his 38 years with the state, he added 75,000 feet of shoreline to the park and 657 acres to the forest itself. He taught me how to work hard and to love what I’m doing. He taught me the worth of the satisfaction that descends at the end of a hard day’s work. Cutting a trail in the deep woods or finishing a piece commissioned by a magazine, the feeling is the same. In my mind, I go back to the tip of that wooded peninsula, and the sun is going down and orange light is blessing the waters and, overhead, the ospreys are circling, circling, and stooping, finally, through the twilight toward the water, the way it should be, the way it always has been, all the way back to the people whose land this once was, who fished the same waters as these deathless hawks. I am thankful for the land and the water and the birds of the air and for all the people through the long ages who worked to keep faith with them all. That’s what I am thankful for in this year, 2021, 301 years since the Pilgrims landed and trouble advanced on the continent.
The shebeen is dark until Monday. Happy Thanksgiving, one and all, and to all that celebrate it.
Donald Trump. (photo: Getty Images)
The campaign, which was to be led by the military’s Special Operations forces, was designed to undermine the Iranian people’s faith in their government as well as shake the regime’s sense of competence and stability, according to those former officials.
The plan, which eventually grew to a 200-page package of options, involved “things that would cause the Iranians to doubt their control over the country, or doubt their ability to fight a war,” said a former senior defense official.
While being briefed on elements of the campaign, Trump acknowledged that it would have to be carried out by the incoming Biden administration, according to the former official.
It is unclear whether the Biden administration has continued to pursue the Trump-approved operations. But with the White House set to resume indirect nuclear talks with Iran in Vienna later this month, U.S. officials may have to decide whether the Trump-approved Pentagon campaign could jeopardize negotiations — or help compel Iran to an agreement.
It’s representative of a dilemma that was also faced by President Biden’s predecessors: how hard to prosecute the shadow war against Iran while also seeking to negotiate with Tehran.
The Department of Defense and the CIA declined to comment. The White House referred queries to the Pentagon.
Though the plan did not include targeted killings, the likelihood that Iranians might die during “kinetic” acts of sabotage and other operations — and because Iran itself was not considered a war zone — meant the Pentagon needed to receive approval from the president to move forward, according to former officials.
In fact, said former officials, many prongs of this “irregular warfare” campaign did not formally require presidential permission, and could have been approved by the secretary of defense and other top Pentagon officials.
But some in the Pentagon, especially within the Joint Staff, impeded the execution of these plans for years, according to former officials.
By early 2018, “very explicit direction went out” to the Pentagon on some elements of the campaign, said a former senior administration official. “Explicit direction was given; it was understood. And discretion was exercised liberally not to do it.”
“The Pentagon sat on it, refusing to take any action on it, because it didn’t want to,” said the former official. “And ultimately, at a point of exasperation, felt it had no choice or recourse but to present some of the components of it, as some broad plan to be approved in response to a task, so they wouldn’t look like they were completely resistant or incompetent.”
The last-minute push was the culmination of years of frustration by Trump administration officials over how to wage the shadow conflict with Iran. “The Joint Staff and CIA were obstructing everything,” said the former senior defense official.
The ex-official stressed that the plan, which aimed to weaken the Iranian government, was designed to deter a war, and not precipitate an overt military conflict with Tehran.
“It’s a very detailed escalation ladder,” said the former official. “It’s not like all of a sudden you go from zero to 60.”
Some of these actions would not be executed until the U.S. and Iran were “just at the brink” of war, said the source.
The proposed campaign was intensely scrutinized by Pentagon legal personnel, according to Trump-era officials. One of the “sticking points” within the Department of Defense was “the legality of it, whether this [campaign] constituted acts of war,” said a former senior Pentagon official. “It all came down to the definition of sabotage, and what that means legally.” Pentagon lawyers were also focused on actions that might increase “the likelihood of provoking war,” said the former senior defense official.
The proposal was developed and supported by top uniformed officials within the military’s Special Operations Command and Central Command, as well as senior civilians within the Defense Department overseeing special operations and intelligence matters, according to former officials.
Gen. Frank McKenzie, the head of U.S. Central Command, was an ardent proponent of the Iran-focused actions, according to former officials, who said Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, consistently slow-rolled the proposal.
The heads of Central Command and Special Operations Command “were furious at the Joint Staff,” said the former senior defense official. “Because they felt that Milley sitting on the package ... was actually tying their hands and putting American forces at risk. Because they weren’t able to build up the capabilities to deter Iran before a conflict.”
“The allegations here simply aren’t true,” said a spokesman for Milley. “Without commenting on any action for security reasons, Gen. Milley’s job as the chairman is to give military advice to our civilian decision makers. He gives advice by articulating the assessed risk and benefits of military action. He did this in the Trump administration, and he does this now.”
The plan, which officials said had been under development for years, involved operations that would take at least six months to get up and running once they were approved by the president. “Trump was briefed that none of these things were going to take place in his time” in office, said the former senior defense official.
President Trump reacted more with “supreme disappointment” that these options were only now being presented to him, said the former senior administration official.
Former officials described an interagency process on Iran that was rife with dysfunction. The CIA and Defense Department “were not providing good options to the decision makers, to the president,” because they thought Trump was “crazy and if they took [an] idea to him he’d say, ‘Do it,’ and so they felt they had to control him,” said former acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller, who also served in a number of NSC and Pentagon positions in the Trump administration.
Within the Pentagon, some top officials tried to steer the administration away from an overt attack on Iran by pushing for sub rosa, deniable options, which they believed would give the Iranians more room to save face and not precipitate a military response from Tehran.
“[Defense] Secretary [Jim] Mattis’s general order No. 1 to me was, ‘We don’t want a war with Iran,’” said Mick Mulroy, the former deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East. “One of the things that I proposed to take the steam out of the White House … was to do things like irregular-warfare-type stuff.”
The CIA, with its focus on covert action, was a natural ally, according to Mulroy.
The CIA’s Iran chief understood the White House-Pentagon dynamic — and the Pentagon’s desire to avoid overt conflict — and proposed initiating “internal-strife-type things” and propaganda-oriented covert operations against Iran at National Security Council meetings, said a second former senior Pentagon official.
But it’s not clear how many, if any, of the agency’s proposals actually came to fruition.
The CIA’s Iran Mission Center was doing “nothing” on Iran, said the former senior administration official. “And I’m being very, very charitable when I say nothing.”
Frustration with the agency was intense. “We would get briefed on all these wild, elaborate plans for various operations that never occurred,” said Victoria Coates, who served as deputy national security adviser for Middle East and North African Affairs.
Skepticism pervaded the relationship between top Trump national security officials and their CIA briefers. Administration officials pointedly questioned the agency’s assessments that Iran was not imminently capable of developing nuclear weapons, according to former officials.
In the end, Trump national security officials concluded that, though the CIA may have been obstructing their directives on Iran, the agency likely did not possess the capabilities to carry out the types of covert action demanded by administration policymakers.
When it came to covert action against Iran, administration officials asked the CIA, “What can we do tonight? Or what can we do next week? Or even six months from now?” said the former senior Pentagon official. “It was the ‘come to Jesus’ moment, [and] it’s like, 'That’s it, that’s all you’ve got?'” The agency’s capabilities were “completely underwhelming,” said this former official.
The CIA engaged in “this constant litany of why we couldn’t do anything, and then you have the Israelis champing at the bit to do stuff, and wondering why we would talk a good game and then go back and not produce anything,” said Coates.
Eventually, Trump told the Israelis, “'Go forth. Go, do. You be the kinetic arm, and we’ll do the maximum pressure campaign,'” said a second former senior administration official.
Meanwhile, then-CIA Director Gina Haspel was working to convince Milley that the agency should be in charge of the U.S.’s secret operations against Iran, according to the former senior defense official.
Haspel “wooed him into believing that CIA was responsible for this, and let CIA take care of this,” said this former official. “Meanwhile, CIA wasn’t doing anything.”
CIA and other officials strongly dispute this characterization. Long-running CIA programs and authorities — focused on countering Iran’s nuclear program, sowing dissent within the regime and delegitimizing it in the eyes of the Iranian public, and combating Iranian influence abroad, among other things — continued under the Trump administration, according to former agency and national security officials.
On counterproliferation-related activities, “they let us run wild, because they just didn’t want to get involved in the disruption part,” said the former senior agency official. In fact, argue some former CIA officials, during the Trump administration, the agency’s Iran center was so focused on covert action that it hurt the agency’s ability to develop Iranian source networks.
In 2018, the Trump administration also approved a new presidential finding permitting the CIA to conduct much more aggressive covert action in cyberspace. The agency subsequently conducted covert hack-and-dump operations against Iran and Russia and cyberattacks on Iranian infrastructure, former officials told Yahoo News. The secret authorization also freed up the agency to conduct these operations with less White House oversight.
But the issues went deeper than neglect, benign or not, by the Trump administration, according to another former CIA official. When it came to the administration’s ideas for covert action against Iran, “either it was overly aggressive — start a war or people die — or unrealistic,” said this former official. “Human life was not so much a concern.”
The agency’s diminished covert action capabilities in Iran may have been tied to its struggles in maintaining sources there, according to former officials. “The stable has been decimated, and there was no incentivization to rebuild it,” said the former senior CIA official.
Indeed, in the summer of 2021, the top CIA official abroad responsible for Iran operations sent a cable to agency headquarters warning that its Iran-related recruiting efforts had all been compromised, according to former CIA officials. The Iran-related cable was previously reported by the New York Times.
In October, the CIA dissolved its Iran Mission Center, folding it back into the agency’s broader Middle East operations division. Some former officials hope the agency will now refocus on more traditional intelligence-gathering activities.
“We need to understand what’s going on there, what’s happening,” said a second former senior CIA official. The lack of sourcing “has reverberated into what amounts to an operational disaster on the Iranian target.”
Thanksgiving. (image: Slate/Getty Images/National Archives and Records Administration/Wikipedia)
Making use of excerpts from Plymouth Colony Gov. William Bradford’s journals, all of these pieces tell roughly the same story about “the real meaning of Thanksgiving”: the Pilgrims went to Plymouth in 1620 with a utopian vision of holding property in common, but after being mugged by the reality of two years of poor harvests and starvation, they abandoned collectivism for capitalist individualism. These articles conclude in roughly the same way: The lesson of the first Thanksgiving was that “socialism does not work; the one and only source of abundance is free markets.” What’s more, many of the pieces claim, this true history has been suppressed, “deleted from the official story,” “no longer told in the textbooks because it is thoroughly unPC.”
To understand how Thanksgiving became a conservative touchstone, we need to turn to history—but to the history of opposition to New Deal liberalism, rather than the history of the Pilgrims of 17th-century New England. As Joshua Keating showed in Slate in 2014, the “free enterprise Thanksgiving” arguments misconstrue the history of the Plymouth settlement. For one thing, the Pilgrims celebrated the first Thanksgiving not in 1623, when they supposedly threw off the shackles of socialism, but in 1621, when they were still supposedly suffering under it. While the Pilgrims complained a lot in the early years, they did so more as unhappy shareholders of a corporation, then as victims of communism. The accuracy of these histories of the first Thanksgiving matters. So, too, does how and why this reading of the Pilgrims as repentant socialists and die-hard free enterprisers—as Whittaker Chambers–like converts from communism—emerged.
The narrative of free enterprise Thanksgiving was a proxy skirmish in the battle between conservatives and New Deal liberalism and its emerging welfare state, which many critics on the right conflated with socialism and even communism. In claiming Thanksgiving, a holiday associated with family, abundance, and Americanism, these critics sought the legitimation of history for their view that security underwritten by the state was not only un-American, but the path to authoritarian socialism—a charge that took on particular force during the Cold War, when this narrative of “free enterprise Thanksgiving” was born.
The first use I’ve found of the argument that Pilgrims found success by rejecting socialism appeared in 1920, a time when, according to an editorial in the South Idaho Journal, the story had “special significance” as “theories of socialism are running rampant throughout the world.” But the narrative of Thanksgiving as a vindication of free enterprise capitalism was widely popularized in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and gained momentum in the postwar years, as critics of expansive Rooseveltian liberalism sought to find a usable past to justify their dislike of his popular New Deal. By claiming that the Pilgrims rejected a philosophy that they analogized to New Deal liberalism and embraced free enterprise capitalism, these critics sought the sanction of history for their view that, as a political columnist wrote in 1952, “in recent years this love of liberty has been subordinated to an alien philosophy of security” and “the siren song of the welfare state.”
In 1939, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt moved up the Thanksgiving holiday, scheduled to fall on the last day of November, by one week to extend the Christmas shopping season, a Republican mayor in New Jersey, reflecting the unpopularity of this decision, called it Franksgiving. (Congress officially set the date as the fourth Thursday in November in 1941.) But Thanksgiving became associated with the Roosevelt administration in a more positive way in 1943, when Norman Rockwell illustrated each of FDR’s “Four Freedoms” (“freedom of speech,” “freedom of worship,” “freedom from fear,” “freedom from want”), which the president first enunciated in his 1941 State of the Union address, for the Saturday Evening Post. The most iconic of these images was Rockwell’s 1943 painting, Freedom From Want, which depicted a Thanksgiving dinner. Rockwell’s cozy portrayal of a bountiful family meal domesticated the idea of “freedom from want,” perhaps the most radical of the Four Freedoms, on the cover of a decidedly middlebrow magazine.
The association with Rockwell can make it look, from our perspective, like the Four Freedoms idea was universally embraced; it was not. From the moment he announced the Four Freedoms, critics of FDR condemned him for omitting “freedom of enterprise,” which Herbert Hoover, the former president and inveterate enemy of the New Deal, called the “Fifth Freedom” and the building block of all of the others. In December 1942, as the United States was one year into the global war against fascism, Republican Sen. Alexander Wiley from Wisconsin, referring to this fifth freedom, said: “Deny any man this most important freedom and you have taken the first step toward the tyranny that created the Nazi state.” Throughout World War II, the celebration of the Fifth Freedom, which was simultaneously a condemnation of FDR’s wartime goals, was a regular feature of business advertising. In a 1943 Thanksgiving ad, “the men and women of Kemper Insurance” offered the following proclamation to Roosevelt: “Free enterprise isn’t mentioned in the famous Four Freedoms, yet without it there is no free America.”
New Deal critics repeatedly singled out “freedom from want” as the most dangerous of the Four Freedoms. They emphasized that the security it promised was a trap, the very opposite of freedom. They employed images of imprisonment, enslavement, and caged animals to drive home the point that freedom from want was, in effect, a form of unfreedom. “A man in jail has the ‘four freedoms’ but what Americans want is the right to be free from government, and to work out our own destiny,” said Republican Rep. Frank Fellows from Maine in 1944. Speaking before the Gastonia Chamber of Commerce two years later, North Carolina Sen. Clyde Hoey, a conservative Democrat, claimed that the “African slave,” “criminals,” and the “farm animal” all possessed “freedom from want,” but they all lacked the more important quality of liberty.
In 1949, Thurman Sensing, the research director of the Southern States Industrial Council and a critic of the New Deal, said that Gargantua, the Ringling Brothers famous lowland gorilla who was displayed in a cage at the circus, represented “the perfect example of the four freedoms.” “In our frantic search for security in recent years,” proclaimed Sensing, “we have unquestionably been inclined to trade our birthright of freedom for a mess of pottage.” Government-backed security, in this view, was not freedom at all but its opposite; indeed, as an editorial on the “ ‘fallacy of freedom from want’ in a Louisiana newspaper opined in 1947, such a government assurance of sustenance “can come only as the final and complete step toward totalitarian government and dictatorship.” According to the Spokane Spokesman Review, in 1954, “There’s actually nothing in our Constitution about freedom from want and freedom from fear,” whose “goals are by no means part of what we commonly consider the American heritage.”
The battle over the Four Freedoms joined with related claims about the supposedly true history of Thanksgiving to consolidate the right’s repudiation of Roosevelt’s vision. The argument that the Pilgrims were anti–New Dealers avant la lettre, who experimented with but quickly rejected socialism and then became fervent free enterprisers, first appeared in former Rep. Samuel Pettengill’s 1940 book, Smoke Screen. This portion of the book was excerpted in newspapers in November 1939 and made the anachronistic claim that “our Pilgrim ancestors abandoned the same economic system the Socialists, Communists and Fascists are now urging us to adopt.” This contrasted with the much less explicitly partisan, more American-exceptionalist conventional academic wisdom of the time that, as the Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison put it in his 1952 edition of William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647, the Pilgrims’ history “is a story of a simple people inspired by an ardent faith to dauntless courage”—one that “made the Pilgrim Fathers in a sense the spiritual ancestors of all Americans, the pioneers.”
Pettengill, who had just stepped away from his seat in Congress, was an avid anti–New Deal Democrat from Indiana, soon to cross over and join the Republican Party, who believed that the biggest danger the United States faced was what he called Roosevelt’s “creeping collectivism.” This was the “smoke screen” of his title. Pettengill, beginning the tradition of drawing on Bradford’s journal to show him to be a collectivist-turned-capitalist, aimed to make the relevance of his history clear for the present. In the first sentence of this section of the book, he wrote, “It has been forgotten that the 102 pioneers who came over in the Mayflower set up a socialistic commonwealth, somewhat like … the Tugwelltowns of today.” Pettengill was referring to Rexford Tugwell, the head of the Resettlement Administration, which built the so-called Greenbelt towns.
Following Pettengill, many other critics sought to find a usable past in which free enterprise was as American as apple pie, with Thanksgiving at the center. Others followed suit in linking the dilemma of the Pilgrims to those of the modern conservative opponent of the welfare state. A 1949 editorial in the anti–New Deal Chicago Tribune said, “They go now by the names of communism, socialism, and the ‘welfare state.’ There was a little of all of these in the original experiment at Plymouth, but the same ideas had already been tried and found wanting on American soil.” A 1952 editorial in the Los Angeles Times, making the use of history of Thanksgiving for the purpose of fighting political battles in the present explicit, said, “For, in 1623, as in 1952, Americans saved themselves from the state, the welfare state or the socialist state.”
A key accelerant in the free enterprise Thanksgiving discourse was the publication in 1958 of W. Cleon Skousen’s The Naked Communist, a book that has been reprinted several times since, and has sold more than a million copies. Skousen, a former police chief of Salt Lake City, was very popular in far-right circles , and his histories remain so today. His central claim, like Pettengill’s, was that the Plymouth colonists “tried Communism before they tried capitalistic free enterprise.”
Many columnists and letter writers to newspapers repeated the Pettengill/Skousen narrative for decades thereafter, showing the reach of this story. These include Thurman Sensing, the conservative who had written about Gargantua. Most likely inspired by Skousen, Sensing first wrote about Thanksgiving in 1962 and continued to do so several times into the 1970s. Sensing’s Thanksgiving “lesson” was quoted verbatim in business advertising as early as 1963.
The most prominent dissemination of this view came in 1974, when the famous conservative economist Milton Friedman devoted his Newsweek column to the topic, “Giving Thanks for Thanksgiving.” After a brief preface in which he wrote, “As we seek the roots of our present discontent, we shall do well to ponder the experience of our Pilgrim fathers, who replaced ‘cultivating the lands in common’ with ‘private ownership,’” the rest consisted of quotations from Bradford’s journals, some of the passages already having been flagged by Pettengill and Skousen.
Popularizing these narratives, the late conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh, drawing on the “Dead White Guys, or What the History Books Never Told You,” chapter of his 1993 book, See, I Told You So, annually relayed to his listening audience what he called the “true story of Thanksgiving,” which was that the misguided Pilgrims at first followed a plan of collective property ownership that led to starvation and death, but within two years they had “harnessed the power of good old free enterprise by invoking the undergirding capitalistic principle of private property.”
So, though Sensing called this an “Untaught American History Lesson,” and Limbaugh implied that the story had been hidden on purpose, that’s far from the case. The narrative of Thanksgiving as a prescient warning against the dangers of a welfare state morphing into a dictatorship has circulated widely for decades, in both intellectual and popular conservative circles, in newspaper editorials, opinion pieces, advertisements, think tank websites, talk radio monologues, and political speeches.
he “free enterprise Thanksgiving” narratives depicted Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms as a prime example of the kind of collective security and overweening bureaucracy against which the Pilgrims supposedly revolted; this is what Pettengill meant when he condemned the misguided New Dealers who “would now go back to the system that the Pilgrims abandoned.” The attempt to recast Thanksgiving from a wholesome symbol of state-sanctioned security to a rejection of that very principle was only a small part of an overall critique of the emerging welfare state. The battle to reclaim the meaning of Thanksgiving was a form of politics by historical means. The lesson had less to do with the fate of the Pilgrims in the 1620s, than with the dangers of totalitarian collectivism in the guise of contemporary liberalism. Do all American families deserve a November Thursday off work to sit around a groaning table together—or just some, who’ve earned their cranberries and sweet potato casserole the right way? There’s a lot at stake in that debate, and those who talk about free enterprise Thanksgiving know it.
The logo of Israeli cyber firm NSO Group at one of its branches in southern Israel. (photo: Amir Cohen/Reuters)
The lawsuit comes just weeks after the U.S. Commerce Department blacklisted NSO from doing business with American companies
The suit, which seeks an injunction against NSO to stop it from using any Apple software, service or device, comes after the July publication of the Pegasus Project by The Washington Post and 16 other news organizations that detailed the use of Pegasus in dozens of attacks against journalists, human rights workers and political activists in countries across the world.
The NSO Group has repeatedly denied the conclusions of the Pegasus Project but also has been buffeted by a series of government and other actions fueled by the consortium’s findings, including a U.S. government decision earlier this month to blacklist the company.
NSO’s “notorious hackers” are “amoral 21st century mercenaries who have created highly sophisticated cyber-surveillance machinery that invites routine and flagrant abuse,” Apple claims in the lawsuit, which was filed in federal court in the Northern District of California.
NSO long has defended itself by saying spyware is essential to combating crime and terrorism in a world in which most communications are encrypted, making traditional wiretapping all but impossible. Breaking into a particular device, by contrast, allows police and spies to monitor the activities of individuals it is targeting — even when they use WhatsApp, Signal or other encrypted communications tools. The company has said it licenses Pegasus to dozens of military, intelligence and law enforcement agencies around the world but not before vetting its clients.
“Thousands of lives were saved around the world thanks to NSO Group’s technologies used by its customers,” NSO spokesman Oded Hershkovitz said in a statement Tuesday. “Pedophiles and terrorists can freely operate in technological safe-havens, and we provide governments the lawful tools to fight it. NSO group will continue to advocate for the truth.”
Apple’s legal move follows a similar lawsuit by the Facebook-owned messaging service WhatsApp in 2019 that accused NSO of targeting 1,400 of its users with spyware. A U.S. appeals court ruled this month that the suit can proceed.
Those seeking to curb the use of spyware praised the growing use of lawsuits and other legal tools to combat NSO and similar companies, calling such moves key to challenging an industry capable of developing a seemingly endless number of new ways to attack phones and other computerized devices. It’s a cat-and-mouse game that defenders — even at giant technology companies — are doomed to lose given the sprawling and ever-changing nature of software, experts say.
“You’re never going to get rid of all of the exploits,” said Johns Hopkins security researcher Matthew D. Green, using a common term for the software weaknesses exploited by hackers. He said lawsuits make it harder for companies like NSO Group to make big profits. “When companies like Apple turn on NSO and make it so that [surveillance] is not a profitable activity anymore, that’s a good thing.”
In announcing its lawsuit, Apple singled out a particular attack on iPhones called FORCEDENTRY that had been discovered by researchers for Citizen Lab, a technology research group at the University of Toronto that has long worked to detail abuses of Pegasus. Apple released a patch for the vulnerability shortly after Citizen Lab reported it to the company in September.
“State-sponsored actors like the NSO Group spend millions of dollars on sophisticated surveillance technologies without effective accountability. That needs to change,” Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, said in a blog post announcing the lawsuit.
“Apple devices are the most secure consumer hardware on the market — but private companies developing state-sponsored spyware have become even more dangerous,” he wrote. “While these cybersecurity threats only impact a very small number of our customers, we take any attack on our users very seriously, and we’re constantly working to strengthen the security and privacy protections in iOS to keep all our users safe.”
Among the findings of the Pegasus Project was that iPhones, despite their reputation for strong security compared with some other smartphones, had weaknesses that the NSO Group had learned to exploit to deliver spyware to the phones of targets.
In some cases NSO customers delivered Pegasus in such a stealthy way that users got no alert and needed to take no action in order for an infection to begin on their devices. Such “zero-click attacks” were an advance over previous generations that relied on users clicking on malicious links in text messages or other communication on their devices.
Once inside, Pegasus turned smartphones into sophisticated spying devices, revealing their locations, communications, pictures and other information. Pegasus, which also can be used to target Android devices, can activate microphones and cameras without users knowing.
The lawsuit accuses NSO of enabling customers to target U.S. citizens, despite the company’s pledge that its spyware “cannot be used to conduct cybersurveillance within the United States.”
Apple also said it was donating $10 million to support cybersecurity researchers and advocates against spyware. The company also said in its blog post that it had made recent improvements in its latest mobile operating system, iOS 15, and in particular to its Blast Door feature that’s intended to defend against malware, including Pegasus. It also is notifying users successfully attacked using the FORCEDENTRY exploit.
But by taking the fight to federal court, Apple has signaled that it is moving beyond technical approaches to combating spyware to challenging the companies that make such hacking easy to execute, even for governments without advanced technological abilities.
“What Apple has done … is putting NSO’s business model into the toxic category for all but the most unscrupulous investors,” said John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at Citizen Lab.
Apple is suing under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which was enacted in 1986, long before anyone imagined the interconnected world of mobile computing that now dominates everything from commerce to pop culture.
Legal experts say it’s still unclear whether the law, which prohibits anyone from “intentionally accessing a computer without authorization,” applies to companies like NSO Group. The company has argued in other lawsuits, including the one filed by WhatsApp, that it does not.
“It’s something that is sort of cutting-edge when it comes to computer law,” said Tor Ekeland, a defense attorney who often represents clients accused of hacking offenses.
Apple also attempts to thread a legal needle, acknowledging that Apple itself wasn’t the target of the hacks, but that it was still victimized because NSO abused “Apple services and servers to perpetrate attacks on Apple’s users and data stored on users’ devices.” That may be an overreach, said Orin Kerr, a University of California, Berkeley professor who focuses on computer crime law. “Suing a company based on hacking somebody else’s computer is pretty novel,” he said.
The legal complaint argues that the federal court in Northern California has jurisdiction in the case because NSO allegedly “created more than one hundred Apple IDs to carry out their attacks and also agreed to Apple’s iCloud Terms and Conditions (‘iCloud Terms’), including a mandatory and enforceable forum selection and exclusive jurisdiction clause that constitutes express consent to the jurisdiction of this Court.” Apple is based in Cupertino, Calif.
NSO has suffered a series of devastating blows in the months since the Pegasus Project investigation. This month, after the Commerce Department added the company to its red-flagged “entity list,” NSO’s new chief executive announced his resignation after only two weeks in the role. The U.S. government action has been seen as a Biden administration rebuke to the Israeli government, which approves all NSO Group exports — essentially dictating which countries can use Pegasus — but failed to prevent the abuses detailed in the Pegasus Project.
The company also faces significant financial peril. The credit rating agency Moody’s downgraded the company Monday, saying it faced an “increased risk” of default on hundreds of millions of dollars in debt.
In recent months, an internal investigation discovered traces of Pegasus spyware in the phones of five French cabinet ministers. And in the United Kingdom, a High Court judgment last month confirmed that the phones of Princess Haya, the ex-wife of Dubai’s ruler, as well as those of her legal and security advisers had been targeted with a Pegasus hack.
The White House raised concerns about NSO’s spyware to the Israeli government in July. Beyond the Commerce Department’s blacklist, members of Congress have also pushed for more severe financial sanctions and other measures to combat the spyware’s abuse.
A migrant worker sorts onions in Georgia. (photo: Stephen Morton/Bloomberg/Getty Images)
Migrant laborers were allegedly forced to dig onions with their bare hands for pennies per bucket as supervisors threatened them with a gun.
Now, two dozen accused members and associates of the crime ring that orchestrated the workers’ exploitation are facing a laundry list of felony charges—all thanks to a three-year, multi-agency federal investigation dubbed “Operation Blooming Onion,” a press release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Georgia said Monday.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office believes Operation Blooming Onion may be one of the country’s largest-ever human trafficking and visa fraud investigations, a spokesperson told VICE News.
The alleged conditions it uncovered were brutal; at least two workers died, and another was allegedly repeatedly kidnapped and raped.
While migrants toiled in Georgia’s fields as contract laborers, some of them dug onions with their bare hands for pennies per bucket, and people threatened them with a gun. Members of the accused human smuggling and labor trafficking operation held onto their passports and documents to keep them from escaping, the indictment alleges.
Migrant workers were also allegedly charged unlawful fees they could not afford; some were illegally forced to do lawn care, construction, and restaurant work; and others were threatened with violence or deportation, according to the indictment. All the while, many of the workers lived in cramped, dirty conditions, sometimes with little to no food or safe water.
Workers were even unlawfully sold and traded to other conspirators within the crime ring, a so-called “transnational criminal organization”—described as “Patricio TCO” in the indictment—that made more than $200 million as part of the scheme.
Maria Patricio, a 70-year-old resident of Nicholls, Georgia, for whom the organization is apparently named, is among the defendants in the federal indictment. She’s accused of filing fraudulent petitions to bring workers into the United States via the country’s H-2A work visa program. Her attorney did not immediately respond to VICE News’ request for comment, but court records show she’s pleaded not guilty to the charges against her.
Overall, members and associates of the alleged crime group—who were largely residents of Georgia, Florida, and Texas, and citizens of Mexico illegally living in the U.S.—are facing charges including mail fraud and mail fraud conspiracy, forced labor and forced labor conspiracy, money laundering conspiracy, and witness tampering, according to the feds’ press release.
“The American dream is a powerful attraction for destitute and desperate people across the globe, and where there is need, there is greed from those who will attempt to exploit these willing workers for their own obscene profits,” David Estes, acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Georgia, said in a statement.
“Thanks to outstanding work from our law enforcement partners, Operation Blooming Onion frees more than 100 individuals from the shackles of modern-day slavery and will hold accountable those who put them in chains,” Estes continued.
There were essentially three components to their alleged trafficking operation, according to the indictment: misusing the H-2A visa program to get people from Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras into the U.S. under the pretext of being agricultural workers, abusing and exploiting the laborers to make money once they were stateside, and laundering the proceeds through big cash purchases, cashier’s checks, and a casino.
And, allegedly, the crime ring tried to pull a ton of workers into this scheme: Starting in 2015 at the latest, the organization sent multiple false petitions to the government seeking over 71,000 laborers for an “agricultural employer,” the indictment alleges. The U.S. then issued “thousands” of these visas to foreign nationals.
The indictment also alleges that between September 2018 and November 2019, a member of the crime ring “repeatedly raped, kidnapped, and tried to kill Victim 12.” Those crimes were allegedly “aided and abetted” by the only two defendants expressly described as business owners in the indictment: Charles King, the owner of Kings Berry Farms and a registered agent of Hilltop Packing, and Stanley McGauley, the owner of Hilltop Packing. Both are residents of Waycross, Georgia. Neither could immediately be reached for comment.
The feds started investigating in November 2018; Homeland Security Investigations, the Labor Department, the Department of State’s Diplomatic Security Service, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, and the FBI were all involved in the probe.
A few members of the crime ring at one point attempted to instruct a witness to lie to a federal grand jury and deny any knowledge of illegal activity, the indictment alleges.
When asked about the status of alleged victims today, Barry Paschal, a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Georgia, said, “Victim/Witness services staff and NGOs are assisting the rescued victims (approximately 102).”
“In specific circumstances, federal law protects victims of crime from deportation,” Paschal said.
In a press conference this week, Estes urged other victims of human trafficking to come forward.
“We’re aware of somewhere around 70,000 who have come in under this program fraudulently,” Estes said. “We have 100 actual victims in our district that we were able to locate.”
International accompaniers join Hondurans marching with a flag reading 'Fuera JOH' (Out with JOH), short for President Juan Orlando Hernández. (photo: Peg Hunter/Flickr)
At stake in Honduras’s upcoming general election is the continuity or rupture of the neoliberal, authoritarian pact between political and economic elites.
A Restructuring of the Honduran Elite
After the 2009 coup, Honduras was forced down an increasingly neoliberal path. Organized crime infiltrated public institutions and society grew more authoritarian and militarized. The corollary of this process was a restructuring within the Honduran elite. Sectors linked to the banking system, telecommunications, energy, and services quickly came to the fore, maximizing their power in alliance with the country’s kleptocratic political elites. For many, the political class has been operating in the service of this business sector.
Economic growth rates show that, between 2006 and 2019, the manufacturing sector associated with the coup experienced an unprecedented boom. The financial sector, as well as communications, transportation, storage, electricity, and the water utility, grew at a rate of approximately 100 percent while also consolidating the largest flows of foreign investment. If you also include recent reports placing the cost of corruption at around 12 percent of Honduras’s GDP, it appears that the realignment in economic policy is aimed at benefiting the manufacturing and political sectors. The main agreement between this emerging elite sector and political elites has weakened public institutions. Corruption and impunity have overtaken the political and social landscape.
Benedicte Bull, director of the Norwegian Research Network on Latin America, asks, “What is strong when institutions are weak?” And she argues, “In the Northern Triangle, in particular, the answer is networks of elites and their dominance, as well as the competition among them for this dominance.” To this we must also add the growing presence of organized crime. As DarÃo Euraque asserts, “In the decade after the coup, it seems that the weight of the most powerful traditional segments and their influence on the concessionary state was assumed instead by transnational drug trafficking networks.” This pact is boosted by the promotion of plunderous economic policies, extractivism, and profit for these sectors, with the military and the Evangelical church defending and promoting this model.
The most evident political mark left by this pact between elites has been the consolidation of power in the executive and the democratic setbacks associated with it. With the Covid-19 pandemic, this process strongly intensified. The public health situation has served as a justification for greater doses of authoritarianism, an increase in military presence, restrictions on rights, and the closure of democratic spaces, among other human rights violations.
Electoral Scenarios
Opinion polls show a persistent and growing distrust in public institutions, political parties, and the judicial system. Similar attitudes are also seen toward other social actors such as private companies and nonprofit organizations. Nevertheless, the population seems to maintain hope in a transformative future. Opposition to Economic Development and Employment Zones (ZEDEs) shows the existence of a powerful land-based movement that resists neoliberal policies and authoritarianism. Similarly, important—albeit partial—political and electoral reforms have been achieved, such as securing the participation of the main opposition party in various electoral bodies and the passage of a new Electoral Law. In light of this situation, the forces that seek to continue the neoliberal-authoritarian project stoke violence and political tensions to foment instability, or perhaps even a coup. Between December 2020 and May 2021, the Institute for Democracy, Peace, and Security (IUDPAS) at the National Autonomous University of Honduras documented 35 cases of political violence.
Two large disputing blocs represented by the main contenders, the National Party and the Libre Party, make up the landscape ahead of the November elections. The “continuity bloc” of the neoliberal-authoritarian project is led by the National Party, an expression of the kleptocratic elite serving as a political tool for the emerging elites that consolidated politically and economically after the 2009 coup. This bloc is strongly supported by the Armed Forces, Evangelical churches, and mainstream media—i.e. those that have benefitted throughout the last decade. To exert its influence, the National Party relies on public and private resources—money, favoritism and political patronage, public institutions, legal services—as well as U.S. support. Despite the fact that both the current president and the National Party’s presidential candidate, Nasry Asfura, have been named in corruption cases and large-scale drug trafficking schemes, they have not received condemnation nor sanctions, as has been the case in countries not in line with U.S. regional policy.
The opposition bloc—or the "bloc of rupture from neoliberal authoritarianism"—is composed of social actors affected by the model installed after the coup. It has been organized, fundamentally, within social and territorial movements that maintain a temporary alliance with the Libre Party, founded by Manuel Zelaya after he was deposed in 2009. With Xiomara Castro as its candidate, Libre proposes a “new economic model” and what it calls a “refounding of the state.” However, within this bloc, made up of social and popular movements, there are differences of opinion regarding how to execute this new model. Broad sectors including members of civil society, public intellectuals, and grassroots Catholics have gathered around this bloc to fight to reclaim public institutions. Their resources, however, are limited. Their power depends in large part on territorial organization and access to alternative media.
Finally, there is also a third bloc that functions as a pivot in a possible negotiation scenario. This bloc is made up of traditional elite sectors close to opposition parties—mainly the Liberal Party and the Salvador de Honduras Party—that are vying to regain control over public institutions and the rule of law as means to restore the profitability of their businesses. However, these sectors oppose a project that implies an “alternative economic model” as proposed by the “bloc of rupture.” This places them in a middle ground position from which they could negotiate electoral or institutional support in the event of conflict or a transition.
There are two probable scenarios. The first would be a repeat of what happened in 2017: a fraudulent victory for the National Party, eventually imposing the governing party despite broad national mobilizations rejecting the outcome and calls from the international community to redo the elections. The other scenario would be a victory for Libre, but without a majority in the legislature. This would provoke serious challenges to its institutional refoundation agenda and would allow the National Party to systematically boycott Libre from within Congress and from within different public institutions, since the next Congress will elect officials to diverse institutional bodies. This does not mean we should rule out other possible scenarios of extreme polarization and political violence that could lead to a coup d’etat or suspension of the electoral process.
Monitoring respect for the popular will, supporting the restoration of democratic spaces, and bolstering reforms that improve the democratic electoral system and confidence in public institutions will be key for all sectors that seek to reclaim democracy and institutions in Honduras.
Corals fertilize billions of offspring by casting sperm and eggs into the Pacific Ocean off the Queensland state coastal city of Cairns, Australia, on Nov. 23, 2021. Australia's Great Barrier Reef is spawning in an explosion of color as the World Heritage-listed natural wonder recovers from life-threatening coral bleaching episodes. (photo: Gabriel Guzman/Calypso Productions/AP)
Scientists on Tuesday night recorded the corals fertilizing billions of offspring by casting sperm and eggs into the Pacific Ocean off the Queensland state coastal city of Cairns.
The spawning event lasts for two or three days.
The network of 2,500 reefs covering 348,000 square kilometers (134,000 square miles) suffered significantly from coral bleaching caused by unusually warm ocean temperatures in 2016, 2017 and last year. The bleaching damaged two-thirds of the coral.
Gareth Phillips, a marine scientist with Reef Teach, a tourism and educational business, is studying the spawning as part of a project to monitor the reef’s health.
“It is gratifying to see the reef give birth,” Phillips said in a statement on Wednesday. “It’s a strong demonstration that its ecological functions are intact and working after being in a recovery phase for more than 18 months.”
“The reef has gone through its own troubles like we all have, but it can still respond — and that gives us hope. I think we must all focus on the victories as we emerge from the pandemic,” Phillips added.
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