The China Hack of United Airlines, Electronic Insurgency

Posted on July 29, 2015July 29, 2015 by Denise Simon

Warning corporations, industry and government entities is one thing, action and protection and or declaration of a cyber war is yet another.

July 2015:

Aspen Institute: Cyber warfare is one of the most potent security threats the United States faces, National Security Agency Director and Commander of the US Cyber Command General Keith Alexander told the crowd at the Aspen Security Forum in Aspen, discussing in conversation with NBC News Correspondent Pete Williams the nature of the threat and how his department is working to address it.
With the Stuxnet, Duqu, and Flame viruses in the fore of the public consciousness, Alexander took pains to point out that nation-states were not the only potential cyber actors. Citing power and water grids as his chief concerns, he said, “Somebody who finds vulnerability in our infrastructure could cause tremendous problems. They could erase the Input/output of a system so it can’t boot, and would have to be replaced. And these capabilities are not only nation-state-only capabilities.”

Alexander assessed the US’ readiness to confront such an attack as a three on a scale of ten, calling lack of adequately trained cyber defense forces the critical impediment to greater preparedness. “Our issue isn’t [having the tools] to address the threat,” he said. “It’s having the capacity, and building and training cyber forces. We have a big requirement, and a small force that is growing steadily.”

China-Tied Hackers That Hit U.S. Said to Breach United Airlines

Bloomberg:

The hackers who stole data on tens of millions of U.S. insurance holders and government employees in recent months breached another big target at around the same time — United Airlines.

United, the world’s second-largest airline, detected an incursion into its computer systems in May or early June, said several people familiar with the probe. According to three of these people, investigators working with the carrier have linked the attack to a group of China-backed hackers they say are behind several other large heists — including the theft of security-clearance records from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management and medical data from health insurer Anthem Inc.

The previously unreported United breach raises the possibility that the hackers now have data on the movements of millions of Americans, adding airlines to a growing list of strategic U.S. industries and institutions that have been compromised. Among the cache of data stolen from United are manifests — which include information on flights’ passengers, origins and destinations — according to one person familiar with the carrier’s investigation.

It’s increasingly clear, security experts say, that China’s intelligence apparatus is amassing a vast database. Files stolen from the federal personnel office by this one China-based group could allow the hackers to identify Americans who work in defense and intelligence, including those on the payrolls of contractors. U.S. officials believe the group has links to the Chinese government, people familiar with the matter have said.

That data could be cross-referenced with stolen medical and financial records, revealing possible avenues for blackmailing or recruiting people who have security clearances. In all, the China-backed team has hacked at least 10 companies and organizations, which include other travel providers and health insurers, says security firm FireEye Inc.

Tracking Travelers

The theft of airline records potentially offers another layer of information that would allow China to chart the travel patterns of specific government or military officials.

United is one of the biggest contractors with the U.S. government among the airlines, making it a rich depository of data on the travel of American officials, military personnel and contractors. The hackers could match international flights by Chinese officials or industrialists with trips taken by U.S. personnel to the same cities at the same time, said James Lewis, a senior fellow in cybersecurity at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

“You’re suspicious of some guy; you happen to notice that he flew to Papua New Guinea on June 23 and now you can see that the Americans have flown there on June 22 or 23,” Lewis said. “If you’re China, you’re looking for those things that will give you a better picture of what the other side is up to.”

Computer Glitches

The timing of the United breach also raises questions about whether it’s linked to computer faults that stranded thousands of the airline’s passengers in two incidents over the past couple of months. Two additional people close to the probe, who like the others asked not to be identified when discussing the investigation, say the carrier has found no connection between the hack and a July 8 systems failure that halted flights for two hours. They didn’t rule out a possible, tangential connection to an outage on June 2.

Luke Punzenberger, a spokesman for Chicago-based United, a unit of United Continental Holdings Inc., declined to comment on the breach investigation.

Zhu Haiquan, a spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Washington, said in a statement: “The Chinese government and the personnel in its institutions never engage in any form of cyberattack. We firmly oppose and combat any forms of cyberattacks.”

Embedded Names

United may have gotten help identifying the breach from U.S. investigators working on the OPM hack. The China-backed hackers that cybersecurity experts have linked to that attack have embedded the name of targets in web domains, phishing e-mails and other attack infrastructure, according to one of the people familiar with the investigation.

In May, the OPM investigators began drawing up a list of possible victims in the private sector and provided the companies with digital signatures that would indicate their systems had been breached. United Airlines was on that list.

Safety Concerns

In contrast to the theft of health records or financial data, the breach of airlines raises concerns of schedule disruptions or transportation gridlock. Mistakes by hackers or defenders could bring down sensitive systems that control the movement of millions of passengers annually in the U.S. and internationally.

Even if their main goal was data theft, state-sponsored hackers might seek to preserve access to airline computers for later use in more disruptive attacks, according to security experts. One of the chief tasks of the investigators in the United breach is ensuring that the hackers have no hidden backdoors that could be used to re-enter the carrier’s computer systems later, one of the people familiar with the probe said.

United spokesman Punzenberger said the company remains “vigilant in protecting against unauthorized access” and is focused on protecting its customers’ personal information.

There is evidence the hackers were in the carrier’s network for months. One web domain apparently set up for the attack — UNITED-AIRLINES.NET — was established in April 2014. The domain was registered by a James Rhodes, who provided an address in American Samoa.

James Rhodes is also the alias of the character War Machine in Marvel Comics’ Iron Man. Security companies tracking the OPM hackers say they often use Marvel comic book references as a way to “sign” their attack.

Targeting Pentagon

This isn’t the first time such an attack has been documented. Chinese military hackers have repeatedly targeted the U.S. Transportation Command, the Pentagon agency that coordinates defense logistics and travel.

A report last year from the Senate Armed Services Committee documented at least 50 successful hacks of the command’s contractors from June 2012 through May 2013. Hacks against the agency’s contractors have led to the theft of flight plans, shipping routes and other data from organizations working with the military, according to the report.

“The Chinese have been trying to get flight information from the government; now it looks as if they’re trying to do the same in the commercial sector,” said Tony Lawrence, a former Army sergeant and founder and chief executive officer of VOR Technology, a Columbia, Maryland-based cybersecurity firm.

It’s unclear whether United is considering notifying customers that data may have been compromised. Punzenberger said United “would abide by notification requirements if a situation warranted” it.

The airline is still trying to determine exactly which data was removed from the network, said two of the people familiar with the probe. That assessment took months in the OPM case, which was discovered in April and made public in June.

M&A Strategy

Besides passenger lists and other flight-related data, the hackers may also have taken information related to United’s mergers and acquisitions strategy, one of the people familiar with the investigation said.

Flight manifests usually contain the names and birthdates of passengers, but even if those files were taken, experts say that would be unlikely to trigger disclosure requirements in any of the 47 states with breach-notification laws.

Those disclosure laws are widely seen as outdated. The theft by hackers of corporate secrets usually goes unreported, while the stealing of customer records such as Social Security numbers and credit cards is required in most states.

“In most states, this is not going to trigger a notification,” said Srini Subramanian, state government leader for Deloitte cyber risk services.

Taliban Leader Mullah Omar Dead Again?

Posted on July 29, 2015July 29, 2015 by Denise Simon

One or more of the Taliban 5 that Obama traded out from Gitmo for Bowe Bergdahl is likely taken control and replaced Mullah Omar, even from the feeble detention in Qatar.

Directly after the attacks of 9/11, the CIA contacted Mullah Omar and said turn over Usama bin Ladin and the United States will not invade Afghanistan, Omar refused, so the war began against the Taliban. (factoid).

As ISIS, Islamic State has moved into Afghanistan and has declared the region a target, Taliban fighters have defected to ISIS. Meanwhile, no one has seen Mullah Omar in at least two years, yet some Afghanistan officials have made some declarations that he is dead. The Taliban has recently made some aggressive and deadly advances in designated Afghanistan territory while there is chatter that the terror group could merge with ISIS.

Given this possibility, it is curious that Mullah Omar has been declared dead, again.

Taliban splinter group claims Mullah Omar was killed 2 yrs ago

In part:

The Afghanistan Islamic Movement Fidai Mahaz’s spokesperson Qari Hamza, said the reclusive Omar was killed by commanders Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansoor and Gull Agha in July 2013.

Hamza said his group has evidence to prove its claims, Khaama Press reported on Thursday.

Afghanistan’s spy agency, the National Directorate of Security (NDS), had said in November last year that Omar had possibly died. There are also reports that the Afghan Taliban has split into three factions.

NDS spokesperson Hasib Sediqi told the media in November last year that the two Taliban factions are led by Mullah Qayum Zakir and Mullah Agha, while the third comprises “neutral” militant leaders.

Reports last year had also suggested that Omar had given his old friend and deputy, Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansoor, the authority to make decisions on his behalf regarding the peace process with the government.

Some officials in the presidential palace have claimed Omar is in custody of Pakistani security forces in the port city of Karachi.

Aimal Faizi, spokesperson for former president Hamid Karzai, said this information was shared by US secretary of state John Kerry. More of the story here.

Meanwhile, a document has been located, written in Urdu that spells out the plan ISIS has for targets in Afghanistan and even India. ISIS plans an end of the world operation.

Reported by Sara Carter via USAToday: The document was reviewed by three U.S. intelligence officials, who said they believe the document is authentic based on its unique markings and the fact that language used to describe leaders, the writing style and religious wording match other documents from the Islamic State, also known as ISIL and ISIS. They asked to remain anonymous because they are not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

The undated document, titled “A Brief History of the Islamic State Caliphate (ISC), The Caliphate According to the Prophet,” seeks to unite dozens of factions of the Pakistani and Afghan Taliban into a single army of terror. It includes a never-before-seen history of the Islamic State, details chilling future battle plans, urges al-Qaeda to join the group and says the Islamic State’s leader should be recognized as the sole ruler of the world’s 1 billion Muslims under a religious empire called a “caliphate.”

“Accept the fact that this caliphate will survive and prosper until it takes over the entire world and beheads every last person that rebels against Allah,” it proclaims. “This is the bitter truth, swallow it.”

By Graeme Wood: Bin Laden viewed his terrorism as a prologue to a caliphate he did not expect to see in his lifetime. His organization was flexible, operating as a geographically diffuse network of autonomous cells. The Islamic State, by contrast, requires territory to remain legitimate, and a top-down structure to rule it. (Its bureaucracy is divided into civil and military arms, and its territory into provinces.) Much more detail here.

Published by WaPo in part: The Afghan Taliban recently published a 5,000-word biography hailing its leader, whose whereabouts remain largely unknown. It maintains that Mullah Omar, who has a $10 million American bounty on his head, is alive, well, and in charge.

According to SITE Intelligence group, the lengthy paean comes at a conspicuous moment, given both the political efforts being made to curtail the Taliban’s Afghan insurgency as well as the growing antagonism between the Taliban and the Islamic State, the leading extremist Islamist militants of the moment.

As an aside, negotiations by the new Afghan leadership is still in some peace talks with the Taliban.

NYT: An Afghan government delegation met with Taliban officials in the Pakistani capital for the first time on Tuesday, in a significant effort to open formal peace negotiations, according to Afghan, Pakistani and Western officials.

The Islamabad meeting, brokered by Pakistani officials after months of intense effort by President Ashraf Ghani of Afghanistan to get them more centrally involved in the peace process, was the most promising contact between the two warring sides in years. And it followed a series of less formal encounters between various Afghan officials and Taliban representatives in other countries in recent months.

Secret White House Meetings on Cuba, Shooting From the Hip

Posted on July 29, 2015July 29, 2015 by Denise Simon

To date, agenda items are in place for normalizing relations with Cuba, while the larger needs list to have business and economic conditions and interactions are far from successful or advancing mostly due to distrust in the banking industry.

In part from the Miami Herald:

During a White House briefing last week with business people, academics and others who have been supportive of the normalization process, briefers said that a revision and clarification of some banking and travel rules would come out shortly. They also asked business executives to keep the feedback coming on the evolving rules.

Pompano-based Stonegate is the first U.S. bank to engage with Cuba under the regulations that came out in January.

But banks in general are very nervous about Cuba, said Ted Piccone, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “Part of it is the banking culture is very conservative, but the banks also have seen that they can be heavily penalized if they don’t abide by the letter of the law.”

Meanwhile, as U.S. business pioneers try to strike deals, they must also contend with a Cuban system that doesn’t necessarily mesh with U.S. business practices, limited Internet service, and a Cuban bureaucracy that often seems more interested in going slow than expediting business.

Beyond the sluggish bureaucracy, the government also is testing the shifting currents with caution.

Carlos Alzugaray, a retired Cuban diplomat, points out there are reasons the government wants to go slow and not risk losing political control by allowing too swift an economic transformation or rapprochement with the United States.

Secretive White House meeting reveals Obama’s plan to visit Cuba in 2016

Washington Examiner: A secretive White House meeting on Cuba last week revealed that President Obama is mulling a visit the island nation next year, and also discussed the controversial idea of the Cuban government opening consular offices in Miami.

After hailing embassy openings in Washington and Havana last week, the White House held an off-schedule, private meeting on Wednesday with U.S. officials involved in the administration’s Cuba policy. Nearly 80 activist members of the Cuban-American community from Florida and across the United States — mostly Democrats — were also there.

Valerie Jarrett, one of Obama’s closest advisers, was on hand, along with White House deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes and Roberta Jacobson, assistant secretary of State for the western hemisphere.

The White House Monday at first declined to talk about the meeting, and referred questions about it to the State Department. A State Department spokesman then referred the same questions to the Cuban embassy, which was already closed for the day.

On Tuesday, a White House official told the Washington Examiner that the briefing took place as part of the administration’s ongoing efforts to reach out and engage the Cuban-American community on the president’s efforts to normalize relations with the island nation.

“The president has been very clear that he supports measures to improve travel and commerce and further increase people-to-people contact, support civil society in Cuba, support the growth of Cuba’s nascent private sector and enhance the free flow of information to, from, and among the Cuban people,” the White House official said. “The president has also called on Congress to begin the work of ending the embargo.”

On Obama’s plans to travel to Cuba, the official said there are no announcements.

But according to sources familiar with the meeting, Rhodes told the group that President Obama is considering visiting the island nation next year, and will make an assessment early next year depending on progress in U.S.-Cuba relations.

While that historic visit would likely help Obama cement his legacy as the president who started to open up bilateral relations, it could be marred by or even delayed by Cuba’s arrest of dissidents. Those arrests have continued despite Obama’s gestures to Cuba, and could put Obama at risk of appearing to be too friendly with a country that often arrests members of political or religious groups dozens at a time.

Eduardo Jose Padron, the current president of Miami-Dade College who came to the U.S. as a refugee at the age of 15, used the White House meeting to ask about the state of human rights in Cuba, and State Department officials acknowledged that it is a dangerous time for dissidents on the island, one participant told the Examiner.

Andy Gomez, a retired assistant provost and dean of the University of Miami’s School of International Studies, said that so far, the Castro regime doesn’t appear to be changing its ways. Gomez previously served on the Brookings Institution’s Cuba Task Force from 2008 to 2010, and told the Washington Examiner Cuba needs to demonstrate a stronger commitment to human rights before Obama travels there or the U.S. agrees to allow it to open a consulate in Florida.

“Up until now, the Cuban government hasn’t even brought Cuban coffee to the table … I don’t see any signs of the Cuban government loosening up their control,” he said.

Pope Francis’s visit to Cuba, scheduled for later in September, he said, would be a good time for the Cuban government to release more political prisoners and demonstrate a true commitment to improving relations.

The idea of a consular office of the Cuban government in Florida is one that is already stirring debate among Cuban-Americans. During a question-and-answer session in the White House meeting, one participant asked about the chances for opening a Cuban consulate in Miami, according to a source who was there.

The White House responded that it was up to the Cuban government to decide when and where it would open the consulate.

But that response has only spurred more questions and concerns since the meeting, some of which deal with how it might hurt Hillary Clinton’s White House bid. The opening of an outpost in the heavily anti-Castro area of Miami could further anger Florida’s politically powerful Cuban-American community and create a backlash for Democrats that could hurt Clinton’s Florida presidential campaign operations.

“The consulate in Miami would create a bittersweet taste in the Cuban-American community, including those supporting these [normalization] changes,” said Gomez. “It would also hurt any chances of Hillary Clinton making inroads and gaining support among Miami’s Cuban-Americans.”

“I don’t think President Obama would do that to Hillary Clinton,” he added, noting that he believes a better place for the consulate would be in Tampa or Key West.

Ever since Obama’s December announcement to try to normalize relations with Cuba, South Florida’s major cities have fiercely debated the opening of a consulate, which would provide passport and visas services and emergency aide to visiting Cuban citizens, as well as other resources.

Officials have strongly objected to such an outpost in Miami-Dade County, home to nearly a million Cubans, the largest concentration in the world next to Havana.

But city leadership in Tampa, which has roughly 80,000 Cuban-Americans, is embracing the idea, viewing it as an economic opportunity for the city.

While recent polls have documented a generational shift in Cuban-American feelings about the Obama’s administration’s decision to re-engage with the Castro government, the political leadership in Miami is still heavily anti-Castro, dominated by descendants of those who fled the 1959 communist revolution regime, and some who had their property taken by Castro.

Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., who vehemently opposes Obama’s decision to restore ties, is strongly against a consulate in Miami. Two other Florida GOP congressmen, Mario Diaz-Balart and Carlos Curbelo, also are opposed, along with Miami Mayor Tomas Regalado.

Ros-Lehtinen said opening a consulate in Miami is another Obama administration effort to “legitimize an illegitimate regime.”

“Placing a Cuban consulate in Miami is nothing but an insult to so many who have been arrested, imprisoned, maimed, and tortured by the Castros and their ruthless thugs,” she told the Examiner. “This administration has done nothing but give dictators concession after concession yet what do we have to show for it? More arrests of pro-democracy activists in Cuba, a continued harboring of fugitives from American justice, and total disrespect for the suffering of victims of autocratic despots.”

Ros-Lehtinen also argues that any Cuban consulate would serve as a headquarters for espionage.

But others argue that South Florida Cuban-Americans are in real need of consular services and don’t view the opening as a serious problem.

“I would hope that it would make things easier for those traveling back home, about 400,000 are traveling back to Cuba a year,” said Jorge Duany, director of the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University. “Right now, it’s very expensive and cumbersome to apply for a visa and make all kinds of travel arrangements.”

13 Hours of Benghazi, Hat Tip to the Heroes RIP to the Heroes

Posted on July 28, 2015July 28, 2015 by Denise Simon

Hello Tanto, thanks buddy and to you Col. Wood, we honor you. Hugs to Oz, Mark, and Tig.

WSJ: Michael Bay is notorious for mounting massive-scaled blockbusters crammed wall to wall with explosions, twisted metal, swaggering heroes and supermodels.

The director’s next movie, however, is shaping up to be a lot more serious because the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on U.S. diplomatic facilities in Benghazi, Libya, is anything but the stuff of pure entertainment.

“13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi” is based on Mitchell Zuckoff’s nonfiction book “13 Hours,” which tells the story of the efforts of six members of a security crew who seek to protect the U.S. compound during the chaos that claimed the lives of four Americans.

The trailer for the film is still packed with plenty of Bay trademarks, such as action and pyrotechnic virtuosity, not to mention men of action and duty, but the tone is dead serious in a way that even Bay’s previous war film based around true events, “Pearl Harbor,” wasn’t. It’s like “Argo” meets “Zero Dark Thirty,” but filmed with Bay’s kinetic, flashy style.

Chuck Hogan, co-creator of FX’s “The Strain” and a novelist, wrote the screenplay for “13 Hours.” The film stars James Badge Dale, John Krasinski and Pablo Schreiber, and it is due to hit theaters Jan. 15.

WSJ App users can watch the trailer here.

Toggling Internet Speed and Broken Rural Installations

Posted on July 28, 2015July 28, 2015 by Denise Simon

Barack Obama made a pledge to get internet and broadband services to rural parts of the country. Billions were allocated and it has been a long yet failed pledge, resulting in more fleecing of our taxpayer dollars.

President Obama pitches $18 billion wireless broadband plan

Wired to fail

Politico:

How a little known agency mishandled several billion dollars of stimulus money trying to expand broadband coverage to rural communities.

In September 2011, as the U.S. economy continued to sputter in the shadow of the Great Recession, Jonathan Adelstein offered a bold promise on behalf of a tiny federal agency that had long strived to improve the lives of rural Americans.

The administrator of the little-known Rural Utilities Service had just finished announcing $3.5 billion in aid to expand high-speed Internet access to the hardest-to-reach areas of the country. The awards, part of the federal stimulus passed by Congress two years earlier, had been crucial to President Barack Obama’s blueprint for a recovery that would ensure farmers and remote businesses could compete in an increasingly global economy.

“These investments in broadband will connect nearly 7 million rural Americans,” Adelstein pledged in a report to Congress, “along with more than 360,000 businesses and more than 30,000 critical community institutions like schools, health care facilities and public safety agencies, to new or improved service.”

Judged against the agency’s 80-year track record, those numbers didn’t seem unrealistically ambitious. During the Great Depression, after all, RUS had loaned out millions of dollars to string electric lines to distant farms and small towns in parts of the country that private companies refused to serve — a bold and calculated risk that had transformed America in a single generation.

But more recently, the performance of RUS has been much less than stellar. Even the agency’s staunchest defenders in Congress had learned firsthand: When it came to funding broadband projects, RUS never found its footing in the digital age.

Sometimes, RUS ignored its rural mission by funding high-speed Internet in well-wired population centers. Sometimes, it chose not to make any loans at all. Sometimes, RUS broadband projects stumbled, or failed for want of proper management; loans went delinquent and some borrowers defaulted. Yet despite years of costly missteps that left millions of Americans stranded on the wrong side of the digital divide, a stable of friendly lawmakers swallowed their doubts about RUS and made sure the politically protected agency wasn’t cut out of the historic stimulus effort.

It should come as little surprise, then, that four years and four directors later, RUS has failed to deliver on Adelstein’s promise.

A POLITICO investigation has found that roughly half of the nearly 300 projects that RUS approved as part of the 2009 Recovery Act have not yet drawn down the full amounts they were awarded. All RUS-funded infrastructure projects were supposed to have completed construction by the end of June, but the agency has declined to say whether these rural networks have been completed. More than 40 of the projects that RUS initially approved never got started at all, raising questions about how RUS screened its applicants and made its decisions in the first place.

But a bigger, more critical deadline looms for those broadband projects still underway: If these networks do not draw all their cash by the end of September, they will have to forfeit what remains. In other words, they altogether may squander as much as $277 million in still-untapped federal funds, which can’t be spent elsewhere in other neglected rural communities.

And either way, scores of rural residents who should have benefited from better Internet access — a utility that many consider as essential as electricity — might continue to lack access to the sort of reliable, high-speed service that is common in America’s cities. Even RUS admits it’s not going to provide better service to the 7 million residents it once touted; instead, the number in the hundreds of thousands.

The checkered performance of RUS offers an all-too-familiar story of an obscure federal agency that has grown despite documented failures, thanks in large part to its political patrons in Congress. The massive infusion of stimulus money, which required RUS to disperse record sums faster than it ever had, further exposed its weaknesses — troubles that, in many ways, remain unaddressed, despite repeated warnings — even as RUS continues lending.

“We are left with a program that spent $3 billion,” Mark Goldstein, an investigator at the Government Accountability Office, told POLITICO, “and we really don’t know what became of it.”

* * *

It took a bigger economic crisis, more than eight decades earlier, to bring RUS into existence. The agency, known then as the Rural Electrification Administration, had been a centerpiece in President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s historic New Deal. But the effort was controversial from the start. Private companies derided the government’s investments in rural energy as “Bolshevik” and “un-American,” but within several years, hundreds of public utilities were operating, and within 20 years, almost all U.S. farms had electricity. The model was so successful that REA shifted shortly after World War II to providing low-interest loans for rural telephone cooperatives.

Dwight Eisenhower entered the White House, vowing to abolish the REA, which he derided as “creeping socialism.” Within two years, however, even he was extolling the agency’s performance, praising its “great advances for rural America.” The program grew under Kennedy and Johnson, who in 1937, had led the formation of an electricity cooperative in the Texas Hill country. Richard Nixon again tried to kill it, arguing that the program had outgrown its usefulness and at that time only served “country clubs and dilettantes.” But an outraged farm bloc in Congress, led by senators such as George McGovern of South Dakota and Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, forced Nixon to back down.

By the end of the 20th century, REA’s original electricity mission was more or less accomplished. And in 1994, REA and another agriculture program that had backed water and sewer projects were combined to form the Rural Utilities Service. Yet it was late in the Clinton administration that the agency’s portfolio expanded in a way that would be as dramatic — and ultimately, as controversial — as when it began.

Nations like Japan and South Korea had quickly achieved nearly universal and affordable broadband coverage, but the United States was lagging. “Internet access ought to be just as likely as telephone access,” President Bill Clinton said in April 2000. That year, Clinton’s budget included $102 million for a pilot broadband program to be administered by RUS, building on its previous telecom work.

Bolstered by a 2001 Brookings Institution study that estimated widespread adoption of basic broadband could add $500 billion to the U.S. economy, Congress approved permanent funding for the program. In the eyes of allies like Montana Sen. Conrad Burns, robust, widespread Internet access “would be as important to the national destiny as the railroads in the 19th century. … Universal broadband should be the national priority … (the) same way as putting a man on the moon was.” And low-interest federal loans, he believed, were the best way to do it. “The RUS telecom program has never issued a bad loan in over 50 years,” Burns said. “The government has actually made money off of those loans.”

In 2004, President George W. Bush proposed that broadband coverage should be universally available within three years. His support touched a nerve with Iowa’s Sen. Tom Harkin, a powerful Democrat who knew that one of the government’s primary mechanisms for meeting that goal was not up to the task. At a confirmation hearing for James Andrew, who eventually would take over RUS under Bush, Harkin recalled an encounter with the president in which he confided that universal broadband would never happen if RUS didn’t start spending money.

“We put in $2 billion (to the farm bill) to do that,” the senator grumbled to Bush, “but the Department of Agriculture has been dragging its feet.” By making onerous demands on its applicants and keeping them waiting months for approval, Harkin said RUS had managed to leave $1.6 billion on the table.

“I don’t want to sound too cynical,” Harkin told Andrew, “but it almost sounds like the cable companies and the big phone companies have gotten to somebody and said, ‘We don’t want this program to work.’”

Harkin then delivered to Andrew a brief sermon on the mission of RUS: “We were not risk averse when we put telephone lines out to farmsteads and our small towns in America. We knew there was risk in doing that, but we managed it. RUS manages risk. And that is what I am asking in broadband, manage risk. Don’t be so risk averse that you say, ‘We cannot give a loan out there because we want to make 100 percent certain that the company we give it to will not default and will not fail. Some of them will …” Read more here.