Police brace for Capitol rally defending Jan. 6 mob . . . Members of Congress and law enforcement are bracing for potential security threats on Sept. 18 when a “Justice for J6” rally is planned to support the more than 570 people charged with crimes related to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. The Capitol Police are expected to present their security plan to the Capitol Police Board this week, according to a congressional source, while the Metropolitan Police Department is also expected to ramp up its presence for the planned rally near the Capitol’s west front. The group organizing the rally, Look Ahead America, is led by Matt Braynard, who served as a campaign staffer for former President Trump. About 300 to 500 attendees are expected at the event, including members of far-right extremist groups such as the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, according to multiple reports. The Hill

New U.S. guidelines ban network-connected voting systems, acknowledging vulnerability to attack . . . After years of warnings about state-sponsored hackers and the contentious end of the 2020 election, the federal commission that sets the standards for American voting machines has made a major change rather quietly: Going forward, vote systems cannot be connected to any digital networks, and wireless technology must be disabled too. The Election Assistance Commission's Voluntary Voter System Guidelines 2.0 were released earlier this year without much fanfare and nominal media coverage, even though they were the first major revisions since 2015 and the first complete overhaul since VVSG 1.0 was issued 16 years ago. Just the News

 

Get Ready for the Blackouts . . . Mismanagement and the push for renewables are degrading the reliability of the U.S. electrical grid.  Generac Power Systems, a company that produces home generators and other equipment, announced in July record sales of $920 million during the second quarter, a 68% jump over last year. But what’s good for Generac is bad for America. That’s no slam on the Wisconsin-based company, which manufactures about three-quarters of the home standby generators sold in the U.S. Instead, Generac’s soaring sales are evidence that the U.S. electric grid is becoming less reliable, which will make Americans less wealthy and less secure. Consumers are spending billions of dollars on generators to have on hand when the power goes out.  Blackouts are deadly and create costly drags on the economy. Bad policies and lack of oversight contributed to the February blackouts in Texas. The final tally: about $200 billion in damage and some 700 people dead from hypothermia, carbon monoxide poisoning and other causes. In California—a state that is hemorrhaging residents—blackouts have become a near-daily event. Generac says in a recent investor presentation that power outage severity is “increasing significantly.” Between 2000 and 2020, the number of what the Energy Department calls “major electric disturbances and unusual occurrences” jumped 13-fold. Wall Street Journal

 

Encryption poised to hamper Jan. 6 investigators' phone records push . . . Lawmakers probing the Capitol riot are edging closer to seeking communications, including that of their colleagues. But in some cases, the data is encrypted.

The encryption used on many of those services will limit the amount of data the select committee is able to gather if it does make a formal request or issue a subpoena for the actual messages, experts say.  Companies like the encrypted messaging app Signal “don’t have the ability to provide” records or contents of individuals' messages because of the end-to-end encryption their services use. On the other hand, the committee would likely be able to get phone records from telecommunications companies or unencrypted emails like those sent through AOL or Gmail. Google confirmed it received the committee’s letter and said it is “committed to working with Congress on this.” Twitter, which also doesn’t use encryption, declined to comment. ProtonMail, an end-to-end encrypted email service, said in a statement that the company's use of “zero-access encryption means that we do not have access to the message content being requested” and that Swiss law prevented the company from sharing information from U.S. authorities. Politico

State Dept. voices concerns over all-male Taliban government . . . The State Department on Tuesday expressed concerns over the makeup of the new interim Afghan government announced by the Taliban, including the lack of female leaders and the past actions of some of those appointed to top posts.

A State Department spokesperson said in a statement shared with The Hill that although the Taliban “has presented this as a caretaker cabinet,” the U.S. “will judge the Taliban by its actions, not words.”  “We have made clear our expectation that the Afghan people deserve an inclusive government,” the spokesperson added. The Hill

 

 

 

 

 

Wuhan lab documents show Fauci ‘untruthful’ about gain-of-function research: critics . . . Dr. Anthony Fauci has been accused by critics of lying after newly released documents appear to contradict his claims that the National Institute of Health did not fund gain-of-function research at China’s Wuhan lab. Senator Rand Paul led the criticism against Fauci on Tuesday after the documents, obtained by The Intercept, detailed grants given to EcoHealth Alliance — the nonprofit that funneled federal funds to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for bat coronavirus research. Included in the trove of documents is a previously unpublished grant proposal that EcoHealth Alliance, which is run by Peter Daszak, filed with Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease. Fauci has repeatedly insisted that NIH funding of the Wuhan lab does not constitute as “gain-of-function” research. New York Post

Intelligence Community Assessment on COVID-19 Origins Ignores Readily Available Information . . . The declassified version of the intelligence assessment on the origins of COVID-19 has now been released. The report is only 493 words long and curiously ignores readily available information, instead choosing to focus on and reinforce questions that are, for the most part, unknowable. Specifically, the Intelligence Community (IC) claimed that in order to reach a conclusive assessment, it required “clinical samples or a complete understanding of epidemiological data from the earliest cases.” This China-reliant approach aligns with a recent response from Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). When he finally conceded in June of this year that the virus might have originated in a Wuhan lab, Fauci also said that clinical samples of the earliest cases were needed. At the same time, while the IC claims that China’s cooperation is needed to determine the origins of COVID-19, it acknowledges that China has refused to cooperate with any true investigation. Fauci and the IC both understand that if there was information helpful to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), that information would have been released immediately. Epoch Times

 

World Trade Center 'surfer' struggles to comprehend his survival 20 years later . . . As one of only two people who survived 9/11 by surfing down the Twin Towers collapse, Pasquale Buzzelli has a mixture of survivor’s guilt and gratefulness.“Here I am given this gift, and I wanted to make the most of it,” he told 60 Minutes Australia. At the same time, he struggles to make sense of why he survived and others didn’t.

Perhaps it was a mixture of luck, divine intervention, and quick wits to pick a place to weather the collapse: curled up in the corner of a stairwell against two concrete walls. Buzzelli was on the 22nd floor of the North Tower when he rode a small patch of concrete flooring down another 18 stories, suffering just a broken leg and ankle. Washington Examiner