Of God, Dolly and Gloria Steinem ... and the women who keep the faith

  Of God, Dolly and Gloria Steinem ... and the women who keep the faith

Trump designates protesters terrorists. How far will it go? Responsible Statecraft 

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Army Secretary Driscoll resigns after months-long turf war with Hegseth The Hill. Seriously not good.

US drivers overwhelmed by terrifying sunroof explosions as reports soar to record high… But government authorities have barely lifted a fingerDaily Mail

FBI Probes Service Selling 153M+ Drivers Licenses

Krebs on Security: A new identity theft service launched on the dark web this week is selling digital scans of more than 153 million drivers licenses from people in the United States and Canada. Based on interviews with individuals whose licenses are available for purchase on this service, it appears to be siphoning images collected by a widely-used identity verification company based in Louisiana. KrebsOnSecurity also has learned that the New Orleans field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation(FBI) today launched an official inquiry into the source of the images. 

A record available at this identity theft service that includes the drivers license for U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, one of several high-ranking U.S. government officials whose drivers licenses can be found for sale. On Monday, Aug. 31, a source alerted KrebsOnSecurity to a service advertised by a new user on the Russian cybercrime forum Exploit, offering access to digital scans of identity documents on more than 170 million people in North America. 

The source brought it to my attention because the proprietor of this identity theft service offered my Virginia drivers license as a free sample in their initial sales thread on Exploit. 

The service, dubbed Nexus, claims to have more than 153 million drivers licenses for people in the United States and Canada, as well as more than 10 million identification cards; more than three million travel documents and/or international IDs; and at least 579,000 medical cards. A quick look around Nexus finds they are likely not exaggerating about that 153 million number: 

Running a blank search in Nexus (with no search parameters entered) returns approximately 11.5 million pages of results, with roughly 15 results displayed per page. It includes documents from people in both Canada and the United States, but the bulk of these records are on Americans: searching for just Canadian drivers licenses returns approximately 1.1 million results, with the largest concentration from Ontario (473,673 records)…”

Who Will Save the Internet From Disappearing?

Current Affairs: “From deleted government records to disappearing music, our digital culture can be erased overnight. The Internet Archive’s Mark Graham and Chris Freeland explain what it will take to save it. We’ve all heard the warning that “the internet is forever.” 

In reality, huge swaths of the digital world are disappearing all the time, as websites go dark, governments purge public records, social media posts vanish, and streaming platforms remove films and music. Without deliberate efforts to preserve this material, much of our recent history could simply cease to exist. The Internet Archive has spent decades fighting that disappearance, most notably through its Wayback Machine, which preserves snapshots of a web that is otherwise constantly being rewritten. 

Current Affairs spoke with Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine, and librarian Chris Freeland, co-editor of the Internet Archive’s new Vanishing Culturereport, about why the internet is far more fragile than we think and what is lost when corporations and governments can make information disappear…”