EXCLUSIVE: Ron Dermer, Israel's Minister of Strategic Affairs, Discusses Strikes on Israeli Strikes on Iran + MORE
Ambassador Ron Dermer, Israel's Minister of Strategic Affairs and a key member of Israel's Security Cabinet, joined The Guy Benson Show today to break down what Israel has accomplished thus far in its war with Iran. Dermer explained how Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons posed a dire threat not just to Israel, but to the United States as well, underscoring the necessity of coordinated strikes. He previewed what might be next for Iran's nuclear sites and made the case for why Israel stands as America's most important ally in the 21st century. Listen to the full interview at the link below!
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Fast Company
22 minutes ago
- Fast Company
WhatsApp just got banned on Capitol Hill. Here's how you can make the Meta messaging platform more secure
The U.S. House of Representatives' Chief Administrative Officer (CAO), Catherine Szpindor, informed congressional staffers this week that WhatsApp is now banned from government phones. The move came after the CAO's Office of Cybersecurity deemed the Meta-owned app to be 'high-risk to users'—a claim that WhatsApp quickly rebutted. But the CAO is correct. While WhatsApp is one of the more secure messaging apps out there, it does have some privacy and security risks. Users can mitigate some of these risks, but others are beyond their control. Here's why WhatsApp is now banned in the U.S. House of Representatives and how you can make the app more secure on your phone. What the Office of Cybersecurity said, exactly The news that the CAO's Office of Cybersecurity had announced a ban on WhatsApp this week came from Axios. On Tuesday, the publication published parts of an internal CAO memo it received, which was sent to congressional staffers on Monday, announcing that WhatsApp was now verboten on government phones. The memo stipulated that 'House staff are NOT allowed to download or keep the WhatsApp application on any House device, including any mobile, desktop, or web browser versions of its products.' It went on to add: 'If you have a WhatsApp application on your House-managed device, you will be contacted to remove it.' The reason? According to the memo, 'The Office of Cybersecurity has deemed WhatsApp a high-risk to users due to the lack of transparency in how it protects user data, absence of stored data encryption, and potential security risks involved with its use.' The CAO didn't provide further details in the memo regarding the above risks. Still, it's easy to interpret some of the things that may have made the CAO leery about the continued use of WhatsApp by Congressional staffers. WhatsApp's transparency issue WhatsApp, like competing secure messaging apps including Apple's iMessages and Signal, is end-to-end encrypted, meaning that no parties other than the ones in the chat, even including Meta, can read the chat messages. But WhatsApp collects a lot more metadata from each chat than other secure messaging apps do, and it sends this info to Meta A chat's metadata includes information such as the identities of the chat participants, IP addresses, phone numbers, and the timestamps of messages. No one knows exactly what Meta does with this metadata. Still, it is shared with Meta's other platforms, including Instagram and Facebook. It is likely used to help the company build social graphs of users, leveraged for advertising purposes, and analyzed by the company to understand who is using their apps, and when and where. This opaqueness is likely some of the 'lack of transparency' risk that the CAO was referring to. As for the 'absence of stored data encryption,' the CAO may have been referring to the default method by which WhatsApp backs up a user's chats. While WhatsApp chats are end-to-end encrypted, if a user backs up those chats to the cloud, the backup itself is not end-to-end encrypted by default. This means that if a bad actor gains access to a WhatsApp user's cloud backup, they could read all of that user's messages. It's no wonder the CAO's Office of Cybersecurity finds this worrying. WhatsApp also doesn't have other privacy and security features on by default, including the ability to lock the app behind biometrics and requiring two-step verification when a WhatsApp account is installed on another phone. If you don't work in the House of Representatives, you can still keep WhatsApp on your phone. But you might want to mitigate its privacy and security risks. Here's how. How to make WhatsApp more secure on your phone Unfortunately, there's nothing you can do about WhatsApp's metadata problem. Meta designs WhatsApp so that the metadata of your chats is sent directly to the company. There's no way you can turn this data collection off. But you can make the app more secure on your phone by following some simple steps, including: End-to-end encrypt your WhatsApp backups: In WhatsApp, go to Settings>Chats>Chat Backup>End-to-End Encrypted Backup and turn this option on. Now your chat backups saved in the cloud will be end-to-end encrypted. Lock WhatsApp: You can set WhatsApp to refuse to open without further authentication by locking the app. This means that even if someone has access to your unlocked phone, they won't be able to open WhatsApp unless they know your phone's PIN, or have your face or fingerprint. To lock WhatsApp, go to WhatsApp's Settings>Privacy>App Lock and toggle the feature on. Enable two-step verification: If someone logs into your WhatsApp account on their phone, they'll be able to see your messages. That's why you should set up two-step verification for your account. This will require a PIN that you set to be entered whenever an attempt is made to log into your WhatsApp account on a new device. If the PIN isn't entered correctly, the new device won't have access to your account. To enable two-step verification, go to WhatsApp's Settings>Account>Two-Step Verification and toggle the feature on. Apps the CAO suggests using instead When reached for comment on the CAO's decision to ban WhatsApp, the organization's chief administrative officer, Catherine Szpindor, told Fast Company, 'Protecting the People's House is our topmost priority, and we are always monitoring and analyzing for potential cybersecurity risks that could endanger the data of House Members and staff. We routinely review the list of House-authorized apps and will amend the list as deemed appropriate.' In the past, the CAO has banned or imposed partial bans on various foreign apps, including those from ByteDance, such as TikTok. But the CAO has also previously announced bans or restrictions on apps made by American companies, including Microsoft Copilot and the free versions of ChatGPT. As for Meta, a company spokesperson told Fast Company that it disagrees with the CAO's characterization of WhatsApp 'in the strongest possible terms.' The spokesperson also asserted that, when it comes to end-to-end encryption, WhatsApp offers 'a higher level of security than most of the apps on the CAO's approved list that do not offer that protection.' In the Office of Cybersecurity's memo, the agency provided guidance on alternative secure messaging apps that House staffers could use now that WhatsApp had been banned. According to Axios, those apps include Apple's iMessage and FaceTime, Microsoft Teams, Wickr, and Signal.
Yahoo
24 minutes ago
- Yahoo
At least 34 killed in Israeli strikes in Gaza as ceasefire prospects inch closer
At least 34 people were killed across Gaza by Israeli strikes, health staff say, as Palestinians face a growing humanitarian crisis in Gaza and ceasefire prospects inch closer. The strikes began late on Friday and continued into Saturday morning, among others killing 12 people at the Palestine Stadium in Gaza City, which was sheltering displaced people, and eight more living in apartments, according to staff at Shifa hospital where the bodies were brought. Six others were killed in southern Gaza when a strike hit their tent in Muwasi, according to the hospital. The strikes come as US President Donald Trump said there could be a ceasefire agreement within the next week. Taking questions from reporters in the Oval Office on Friday, the president said: 'We're working on Gaza and trying to get it taken care of.' An official with knowledge of the situation told The Associated Press that Israel's minister for strategic affairs, Ron Dermer, will arrive in Washington next week for talks on Gaza's ceasefire, Iran and other subjects. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to speak to the media. Talks have been on and since Israel broke the latest ceasefire in March, continuing its military campaign in Gaza and furthering the dire humanitarian crisis. Some 50 hostages remain in Gaza, fewer than half of them believed to be still alive. They were among some 250 hostages taken when Hamas attacked Israel on October 7 2023, sparking the 21-month-long war. The war has killed more than 56,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza's Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants. It says more than half of the dead were women and children. There is hope among hostage families that Mr Trump's involvement in securing the recent ceasefire between Israel and Iran might exert more pressure for a deal in Gaza. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is riding a wave of public support for the Iran war and its achievements, and he could feel he has more space to move toward ending the war in Gaza, something his far-right governing partners oppose. Hamas has repeatedly said it is prepared to free all the hostages in exchange for an end to the war in Gaza. Mr Netanyahu says he will end the war only once Hamas is disarmed and exiled, something the group has rejected. Meanwhile, hungry Palestinians are enduring a catastrophic situation in Gaza. After blocking all food for more than two months, Israel has allowed only a trickle of supplies into the territory since mid-May. Efforts by the United Nations to distribute the food have been plagued by armed gangs looting trucks and by crowds of desperate people offloading supplies from convoys. Palestinians have also been shot and wounded while on their way to get food at newly formed aid sites, run by the American and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, according to Gaza's health officials and witnesses. Palestinian witnesses say Israeli troops have opened fire at crowds on the roads heading toward the sites. Israel's military said it was investigating incidents in which civilians had been harmed while approaching the sites.
New York Times
24 minutes ago
- New York Times
With Supreme Court Ruling, Another Check on Trump's Power Fades
The Supreme Court ruling barring judges from swiftly blocking government actions, even when they may be illegal, is yet another way that checks on executive authority have eroded as President Trump pushes to amass more power. The decision on Friday, by a vote of 6 to 3, will allow Mr. Trump's executive order seeking to end birthright citizenship to take effect in some parts of the country — even though every court that has looked at the directive has ruled it unconstitutional. That means some infants born to undocumented immigrants or foreign visitors without green cards can be denied citizenship-affirming documentation like Social Security numbers. But the diminishing of judicial authority as a potential counterweight to exercises of presidential power carries implications far beyond the issue of citizenship. The Supreme Court is effectively tying the hands of lower-court judges at a time when they are trying to respond to a steady geyser of aggressive executive branch orders and policies. The ability of district courts to swiftly block Trump administration actions from being enforced in the first place has acted as a rare effective check on his second-term presidency. But generally, the pace of the judicial process is slow and has struggled to keep up. Actions that already took place by the time a court rules them illegal, like shutting down an agency or sending migrants to a foreign prison without due process, can be difficult to unwind. Presidential power historically goes through ebbs and flows, with fundamental implications for the functioning of the system of checks and balances that defines American-style democracy. But it has generally been on an upward path since the middle of the 20th century. The growth of the administrative state inside the executive branch, and the large standing armies left in place as World War II segued into the Cold War, inaugurated what the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. coined the 'imperial presidency.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
