A20 eZ re the washington post.friday, february 21 , 2020
PowerPost
intelligence for leaders washingtonpost.com/powerpostBY KARIN BRULLIARDThe U. S. Agriculture Depart-
ment restored to its website
animal welfare inspection re-
ports for dog breeding opera-
tions and other f acilities on Tues-
day, the deadline set by Congress
for providing searchable access
to documents the agency abrupt-
ly removed three years ago.
Tuesday’s move made avail-
able unredacted reports for n ear-
ly 10,000 zoos, circuses, breed-
ers, research labs and Te nnessee
walking horse shows that were
publicly available on Jan. 30,
2017 — days before they were
purged — as well as those gener-
ated since, the department said.
The reports, based on unan-
nounced inspections, can be
used by the agency to build cases
against facilities that violate ani-
mal welfare regulations, and ani-
mal protection groups had long
used them to call attention to
operations they said treated ani-
mals inhumanely.
The USDA said in 2017 that it
removed the reports and other
records over concerns about due
process and privacy rights of
animal business owners. It later
reposted some, but in heavily
redacted form. Others were
available only through Freedom
of Information Act requests,
which could take months or
years to be fulfilled.
Over the past three years,
animal welfare groups have filed
several lawsuits aimed at forcing
the a gency to r estore the records.
They also lobbied Congress. In
December, U.S. lawmakers
passed a spending bill that or-
dered the USDA to bring back
the searchable database and use
it to publish various animal wel-
fare records.
“The purge left Americans in
the dark and was clearly an
attempt to keep groups like ours
from holding the USDA account-
able,” Kitty Block, chief executive
of the Humane Society of the
United States, and Sara Amund-
son, president of the Humane
Society Legislative Fund, wrote
in a blog post. They called it “an
important win for animals, forAmerican consumers, and for
animal advocates who fought
long and hard for this outcome.”
But the Humane Society and
other animal welfare organiza-
tions emphasized that theUSDA’s announcement Tuesday
still left several kinds of records
unpublished. The agency said it
would take up to 60 days to post
those documents, which include
enforcement records, invento-ries of animals at individual
facilities and “teachable mo-
ments.” The teachable moments
note violations by facilities, such
as insufficient drinking water or
dirty cages, but do not count
them as citations.
“We’re making use of what’s
available now, and we’re holding
our breath and waiting to see
what will come within 60 days
and ultimately how they will
seek to interpret t he language” of
the s pending bill, said Cathy Liss,
president of the Animal Welfare
Institute.
The agency’s use of teachable
moments has risen, and cita-
tions have dramatically de-
cli ned, amid a Tr ump adminis-
tration push to deregulate in-
dustry. Critics, including animal
protection groups and former
USDA animal welfare inspec-
tors, say the approach puts
animals at risk. The agency says
it allows inspectors to help ani-
mal owners fix problems more
quickly.
The removal of welfare re-
cords in 2017 was criticized evenby some facilities regulated by
the U SDA, i ncluding the national
chain Petland and the Associa-
tion of Zoos and Aquariums,
which argued that transparency
gave the public more confidence
in their operations.
But the purge was welcomed
by others, such as the Te nnessee
walking horse industry, mem-
bers of which had sued USDA
over the publication of records
they said sullied the names of
horse owners before they had an
opportunity to defend them-
selves. On Tuesday, the Pet In-
dustry Joint Advisory Council
echoed that.
“This is a positive move to-
ward restoring transparency
that will allow the regulated
individuals and facilities to dem-
onstrate that they are responsi-
ble and accountable animal care-
takers,” its president and chief
executive, Mike Bober, said. “We
are concerned, however, that the
database was restored in a way
that offers no protection for the
privacy of individual breeders.”
[email protected]USDA reposts animal welfare records it purged from its website in 2017
Mike Clark For the Washington Post
Members of the Tennessee walking horse industry welcomed the
Agriculture Department’s 2 01 7 purge of its animal welfare records.Democratic presidential
candidates are doing a pretty
good job protecting their
campaigns against hacking by
Russia and other adversaries,
according to a report out
Thursday from the cybersecurity
company SecurityScorecard.
Those results are a positive
sign they’ll be able to fend off the
sort of digital attacks that
upended Hillary Clinton’s
campaign in 2016. But the
election is still a long way off and
hacking threats are likely to grow
more sophisticated and
dangerous as the election nears.
“They’re seemingly all taking
[cybersecurity] seriously,” s aid
Paul Gagliardi,
SecurityScorecard’s head of
threat intelligence. “We didn’t
really find any low-hanging fruit.
But security changes every single
day... As the election comes
closer, we could get some very
targeted attacks by sophisticated
actors.”
And another hack and leak
campaign like the one that
targeted Clinton could not only
severely damage the Democratic
nominee’s prospects, it might
compromise faith in the electoral
process. “You don’t want a
foreign power impacting or
modifying the sanctity of our
elections,” Gagliardi said.
All the Democratic candidates
still in the race earned an A or a
B using the company’s grading
system, which is based on
information available on the
Internet, such as whether
campaign websites are patched
against computer bugs and
whether they’re taking basic
precautions to guard against
phishing emails. Campaigns with
high marks are five times less
likely to be breached than those
earning Cs or lower, the company
said, based on its customer base
of more than a million
organizations.
campaigns are more secure than
many major businesses and even
better secured than the
Democratic National Committee
when the company performed a
similar test in May. T hey’re
almost certainly more secure
than Clinton’s campaign, which
fell prey to a basic phishing
attack — a phony email thatCampaigns for top-polling
candidates such as former vice
president Joe Biden, former New
York mayor Mike Bloomberg,
former South Bend, Ind., mayor
Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Amy
Klobuchar (D-Mass.) say they’re
taking basic measures such as
mandating cybersecurity
training for staff and requiring
that staff use extra security
precautions before accessing
smartphones and websites. Sens.
Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and
Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) have
declined to answer security
questions.
High security scores mean themanaged to snare campaign
chairman John Podesta’s
password.
But those protections may not
be enough to protect against a
highly trained army of nation-
state hackers, and officials are
growing increasingly concerned
about sophisticated efforts to
undermine the contest — not justfrom Russia but also from China,
Iran and North Korea.
“It’s hard to ever say that you
feel comfortable defending your
network against the likes of
Russia or China,” Gagliardi said.
The only major problem, the
company found, was numerous
vulnerabilities in an app used by
supporters of Andrew Yang, a
tech entrepreneur who has since
dropped out of the race. The app
was not used by the campaign
itself, SecurityScorecard said.
The report comes as top U.S.
intelligence and law enforcement
agencies are sounding an alarm
about efforts to undermine the2020 contest through hacking or
disinformation and “working
directly with campaigns and
candidates to educate them
about ways to help keep their
networks secure,” according to a
USA To day op-ed published
Wednesday.
The op-ed was written by
Attorney General William P. Barr,
FBI Director Christopher A.
Wray, acting Department of
Homeland Security chief Chad
Wolf, acting director of National
Intelligence Joseph Maguire and
the leader of DHS’s cybersecurity
division, Chris Krebs.
Those officials haven’t
identified any foreign hacking
efforts aimed at preventing or
changing votes during the first
few primaries and caucuses of- But they warn that
adversaries are eager to
“undermine our trust and
confidence in each other, our
democratic society and
democracy itself.”
They’re also calling on the
public to join in a “whole-of-
society approach” t o prevent
election interference by ensuring
they’re double-checking
anything that might be
misinformation and going to
trusted sources for election
information such as times and
polling locations.
“A s leaders of our government,
we are committed to defending
our democracy, but we need your
help, too,” t he op-ed states.
They also “encourage
candidates, election officials,
technology companies and
others involved in elections to
report suspicious cyber activity”
to the FBI and DHS.
“We cannot prevent all
disinformation, foreign
propaganda or cyberattacks on
our infrastructure,” t he officials
write. “However, together, we
can all help to mitigate these
threats by exercising care when
we share information and by
maintaining good cyber hygiene
to reduce the risks that malicious
cyberattacks will succeed.”
[email protected]
Most Democratic presidential campaigns score high on cybersecurity protections
Carolyn Van houten/the Washington Post
S everal Democratic campaigns, including that of former vice president Joe Biden, say they have taken basic measures to prevent hacking,
such as requiring cybersecurity training and mandating that staffers use extra security precautions before using smartphones and websites.“We didn’t really find any low-hanging fruit.”
Paul Gagliardi, head of threat intelligence for securityscorecard, which
analyzed Democratic presidential candidates’ cybersecurity protectionsThe Cybersecurity 202
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