The U.S. military’s Cyber Command hunted down foreign adversaries overseas ahead of this year’s mid-term elections, taking down their infrastructure before they could strike, the head of U.S. Cyber Command said.

U.S. Army General Paul Nakasone said the cyber effort to secure the vote began before the Nov. 8 vote and carried through until the elections were certified.

“We did conduct operations persistently to make sure that our foreign adversaries couldn’t utilize infrastructure to impact us,” Nakasone, who is also the director of the U.S. National Security Agency, told reporters.

“We understood how foreign adversaries utilize infrastructure throughout the world, we had that mapped pretty well, and we wanted to make sure that we took it down at key times.”

Nakasone’s language suggests Cyber Command carried out both offensive and defensive cyber operations.

He declined to identify which adversaries were targeted but acknowledged he saw the same kinds of foreign adversaries as he had in the past.

“I saw the same foreign adversaries that I’ve seen before, a lot of the same ones, the proxies and the elements of the Russian and Iranian governments that do this type of work,” Nakasone said.

The United States has given high priority to cyber operations to safeguard major elections in recent years, particularly since U.S. intelligence agencies accused Russia of trying to sway 2016 elections, a charge Moscow has denied. U.S. agencies also accused Iran of trying to influence American elections, which Tehran has denied.

Nakasone says the campaign to safeguard the latest U.S. elections fit into his broader campaign of persistent engagement, which includes operating overseas with partners to observe adversaries’ cyber tradecraft and malware on foreign networks.

“This is the idea of understanding your foreign adversaries and operating outside the United States,” he said.

He said the goal was to expose those adversaries, working with foreign governments hosting his teams and with the private sector.

“I am trying to make it as costly (as possible) for our adversaries to operate in terms of their time, money, and focus,” he said.

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A former director of finance at New York University was indicted on Monday for what prosecutors described as the defrauding of the school to divert about $3.4 million intended to fund minority- and women-owned businesses.

Cindy Tappe is accused of diverting the money into bank accounts via two shell companies she had created and using at least $660,000 of the funds to renovate her Connecticut home and other personal expenses, including an $80,000 swimming pool.

She drafted false invoices for three subcontractors to submit in order to divert the funds, and the subcontractors took between 3% and 6% without doing any of the contracted work, prosecutors from the Manhattan district attorney’s office said.

The remainder of the diverted funds was sent to Tappe’s shell companies, High Galaxy Inc and PCM Group Inc, and used to pay legitimate grant-related expenses and to reimburse NYU employees for expenses and services, though without proper school oversight, the indictment said.

Tappe is charged with money laundering, grand larceny, falsifying business records and other fraud charges.

She could not immediately be reached for comment and her lawyer, Deborah Colson, declined to comment.

The fraud began in 2012 soon after Tappe became the director of finance and administration for NYU’s Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and Transformation of Schools and continued until school officials confronted her in September 2018, prosecutors said.

NYU discovered “suspicious activity” by Tappe after it began using a new electronic payment system in 2018, John Beckman, a school spokesman, said in a statement.

Findings by the school’s internal audit unit were shared with the New York Department of Education and the New York State Comptroller’s office. When confronted, she misled school officials about her relationship with the subcontractors and shell companies, and Tappe left the school, the statement said.

“We are deeply disappointed that an employee abused the trust we placed in her in this way, and we are pleased to have been able to assist in stopping this misdirection of taxpayer money,” the statement said.

The funds were intended to go to women- and minority-owned businesses to provided services for English-language learners and students with disabilities in New York schools.

President Joe Biden met Ecuador President Guillermo Lasso on Monday to discuss efforts to stem the flow of migrants to the United States as the White House faces increased pressure over its immigration policies.

The Biden administration is required this week to lift Title 42, a public health order first issued under former President Donald Trump that allows U.S. Customs and Border Protection to rapidly expel migrants to Mexico or back to their home countries to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 virus in U.S. holding facilities.

Lifting the order, as required by a judge who said it was “arbitrary and capricious” and violated federal regulatory law, could lead to thousands of asylum-seeking migrants being released in border state communities and a greater influx of migrants to the U.S.-Mexico border.

Biden and Lasso sat beside each other in the Oval Office to begin their discussions.

“Today we’re going to keep building on the progress we’ve made. Together we’ve made historic strides on migration,” Biden told reporters.

Lasso said he and Biden would affirm democratic values of liberty and respect for human rights. After the meeting, he told reporters that migration did come up in their talks.

“We have talked about migration and migration as a consequence of the economic problems of many countries in Latin America. We have ratified our commitment to continue supporting, as we have done, the migration phenomenon, especially (migrants) from Venezuela in Ecuador,” he said.

U.S. lawmakers, both Republicans and Democrats, on Sunday pressed Biden to take action to manage an expected wave of asylum seekers at America’s southern border.

U.S. Senator Joe Manchin, a conservative Democrat, appearing on the CBS News “Face the Nation” program on Sunday, urged Biden to ask for an extension of Title 42.

“The president needs to find a way,” Manchin said.

Lasso visited the White House after former U.S. Senator Chris Dodd, who is Biden’s special adviser for the Americas, extended an invitation on the president’s behalf during a recent visit to Ecuador.

Lasso attended the Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles last summer after a number of key presidents opted to skip it and send delegations instead.

The Biden administration has sought to tackle what it calls the “root causes” of immigration, including poor economic conditions and political instability.

“We are obviously invested in Ecuador’s success and the president of Ecuador, democratically elected as he is, is working hard to deliver prosperity and security for his people,” White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said in a call with reporters on Friday.

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Sam Bankman-Fried may be ready to come to the U.S. to face criminal charges related to the collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX following a chaotic court appearance in the Bahamas.

A lawyer for Bankman-Fried was quoted as saying Monday the disgraced FTX founder has agreed to be extradited to the United States. A court hearing was stopped earlier in the day when his attorneys said it was premature for him to stand before the court.

Jerone Roberts, a local defense attorney for Bankman-Fried, told The New York Times that lawyers will prepare the necessary documents for extradition. “Mr. Bankman-Fried wishes to put the customers right, and that is what has driven his decision,” the Times quoted Roberts telling reporters.

It was not immediately clear when extradition could occur.

The court appearance came just a week after Bankman-Fried’s lawyers had initially said that they planned to fight extradition. An extradition hearing had been scheduled for Feb. 8. The reversal could speed up the timetable for him to be sent to the U.S.

Bahamian authorities arrested Bankman-Fried last Monday at the request of the U.S. government. U.S. prosecutors allege he played a central role in the rapid collapse of FTX and hid its problems from the public and investors. The Securities and Exchange Commission said Bankman-Fried illegally used investors’ money to buy real estate on behalf of himself and his family. The 30-year-old could potentially spend the rest of his life in jail.

Bankman-Fried arrived at the courthouse in a black van marked Corrections, which was escorted by a SWAT vehicle and a police vehicle. Police quickly whisked him into an entrance at the back of the courthouse.

A handful of people who said they were either crypto enthusiasts or FTX customers came to the courthouse to witness the proceedings.

“We want him to feel the weight of what he’s done,” said Ben Armstrong, the founder of the BitBoy Crypto website. Armstrong said he’d come to the courthouse with a dozen people, some of whom had lost their money with FTX.

If he is brought to New York, Bankman-Fried will likely be held, at least temporarily, in a federal detention center in Brooklyn. Other famous prisoners at the Metropolitan Detention Center in recent years have included the sexually-abusive singer R. Kelly, the pharmaceutical company executive Martin Shkrelli and the socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted of helping the millionaire Jeffrey Epstein sexually abuse children.

During her time at the MDC, which houses around 1,600 prisoners, Maxwell’s lawyers repeatedly complained to a judge that it was unsanitary, plagued by cockroaches and rodents. In recent years, three guards there have been convicted of sexually abusing inmates. In 2019, a power failure left inmates shivering for a week in the dead of winter.

Once he’s back in the U.S., Bankman-Fried’s attorney will be able to request that he be released on bail. A separate judge in the Bahamas denied Bankman-Fried’s request for bail last week on the grounds he was a flight risk.

Bankman-Fried’s downfall, from crypto evangelist to pariah, occurred with stunning speed. FTX filed for bankruptcy protection on Nov. 11 when it ran out of money after the cryptocurrency equivalent of a bank run.

Before the bankruptcy, Bankman-Fried was considered by many in Washington and on Wall Street as a wunderkind of digital currencies, someone who could help take them mainstream, in part by working with policymakers to bring more oversight and trust to the industry.

Bankman-Fried had been worth tens of billions of dollars — at least on paper — and was able to attract celebrities like Tom Brady or former politicians like Tony Blair and Bill Clinton to his conferences at luxury resorts in the Bahamas. One prominent Silicon Valley firm, Sequoia Capital, invested hundreds of millions of dollars in FTX.

The new CEO of FTX, John Ray III, told a congressional committee on Tuesday that there was nothing sophisticated about what Bankman-Fried was up to.

“This is just old fashion embezzlement, taking money from others and using it for your own purposes,” he said.

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The workers allege they were fired for complaining about Musk’s tweets.

Patrick Pleul/AP

• Two Tesla workers claim they were illegally fired for criticizing Elon Musk and company policy. 
• They filed complaints with the National Labor Relations Board through their attorneys. 
• Some SpaceX employees made similar claims earlier this year.  

Two Tesla employees say they were illegally fired for complaining about company policies, according to complaints filed with the National Labor Relations Board earlier in December. 

The workers claim they were cut loose for discussing their working conditions, including “Tesla’s failure to enforce its non-harassment policy and its implementation of its post-COVID return to office policy,” according to the filings. Discussing working conditions is a protected activity under US labor law. Bloomberg first reported their complaints. 

Tesla did respond to a request for comment. 

The employees were part of a group drafting letters to Tesla’s executive team, according to a press release from their attorneys. They were fired before the letters were circulated, but after they had been discussed on internal chat groups, lawyers said. 

One letter called for changes to the company’s strict return-to-office policy announced in May, which required all Tesla employees to work from a company office for at least 40 hours per week. At the time, Musk tweeted that anyone not on board with the plan should “pretend to work somewhere else.”

Another said that Musk’s “sexualized and gendered” tweets violated Tesla’s anti-harassment policy, the attorneys said. 

One employee was fired a month after receiving a performance-based raise. The other was told that organizing employee discussions amounted to an “attack” on Tesla, according to a filing. 

In June, a group of SpaceX employees filed a similar complaint saying they were fired after writing an open letter calling out Musk’s behavior. (The rocket company was founded and is run by Musk.) Both sets of employees are represented by the same attorneys from Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein LLP. 

Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, an advocate for permanent daylight savings time, called the issue “polarizing as hell.”

Joshua Roberts/Getty Images

• The House could have voted this year to make daylight savings time permanent. But it didn’t.
• A bill to do so, backed by a bipartisan group of senators, unexpectedly passed the Senate in March.
• The chair of the relevant House committee told Insider he still wants to find “consensus” on the issue.

Congress came closer than ever this year to moving the country towards permanent daylight savings time, ending the biannual ritual of adjusting clocks and bringing more sunlight to winter afternoons.

So close, yet so far: after the Senate passed the Sunshine Protection Act by unanimous consent in March, it was up to the House to hold a vote on the bill. It never did.

“It’s polarizing as hell,” Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, a key sponsor of the bill, told Insider at the Capitol in December. “It’s the dangest thing, you know? It knows no partisan boundaries, but people get really emotional about it, both ways.”

The Sunshine Protection Act, sponsored by a bipartisan group of senators that includes eight Democrats and 10 Republicans, would have made daylight savings time — the time configuration that the US switches to in the warmer months of the year — permanent year-round across the country, unless states specifically opt out of it.

While the bill has drawn support from conservatives, liberals, and moderates alike, it has also faced opposition, including from those who believe that opting for darker mornings in the winter could pose a safety issue, including for children waiting for school buses.

In fact, the bill’s passage in the Senate was something of an accident, according to a report from BuzzFeed. Rubio had asked for unanimous consent to pass the bill, a move used to pass non-controversial bills that no one in the Senate opposes. Senators sometimes use the measure performatively, asking for unanimous consent on partisan or otherwise controversial bills or nominations with the expectation that another senator will object, preventing passage.

Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas would’ve done just that, but was not informed of the vote by his staff, BuzzFeed reported.

A missed opportunity in the House

With the surprising Senate passage of the bill, the ball was in the House’s court. 

Insider asked Democratic Reps. Hakeem Jeffries of New York and Pete Aguilar of California, both members of Democratic leadership, whether the House might consider the bill at a press conference the following day in March.

“I think it’s an important step that we should take in the House of Representatives, but I look forward to hearing from other members of the caucus,” said Jeffries.

“I think it just caught us all by surprise that the Senate actually produced something and sent it to us,” said Aguilar. “Usually bills go the other way.”

But months went by without any action, despite a hearing on the topic by the House Energy and Commerce Committee just days before the Senate passed the bill.

“While I have yet to decide whether I support a permanent switch to Standard or Daylight Saving Time, it’s time we stop changing our clocks,” said Democratic Rep. Frank Pallone of New Jersey, the chairman of the committee, at that hearing.

“I believe that any justifications for springing forward and falling back are either outdated or are outweighed by the serious health and economic impacts we now know are associated with the time changes,” he added.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer told Insider at a briefing with reporters in December that there were “not a lot of discussions” among lawmakers about trying to move the bill, suggesting that the bill faced opposition from Pallone.

“The chairman of the committee, as you know, is not too enthusiastic about it,” said Hoyer, noting the bill hadn’t been reported out of the committee. 

Democratic Rep. Frank Pallone of New Jersey, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call via Getty Images

But Pallone — though confirming that it “doesn’t look likely” the bill would get a vote in the House, didn’t explicitly say he was against permanent daylight savings time, instead indicating a desire for agreement among committee members.

“I’m just trying to reach a consensus,” he told Insider at the Capitol. “The problem is, half the people want standard time, others want daylight [savings time], others don’t want to change it at all.”

For now, the yearly time switch will remain in place, despite the best efforts of a motley crew of lawmakers.

“A cloud of darkness is set to descend on Americans this weekend,” said Democratic Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts, another Senate proponent of the bill, as daylight savings time ended in November this year. “I’m sending rays of support to the House to get this done so Americans don’t have to suffer in darkness.”

Former US President Donald Trump arrives to speak to supporters from The Ellipse near the White House on January 6, 2021, in Washington, DC.

BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images

• The Jan. 6 select committee released a summary of its final report on Monday. 
• In it, they said Trump appeared to have told White House photographers to stop taking pictures.
• The ban on photographs began after Trump seemingly found out that the deadly riots were unfolding. 

After advisers informed former President Donald Trump a violent mob descended on the Capitol on January 6, 2021,  he signaled to the White House photographers to stop taking pictures, lawmakers revealed.

The House January 6 committee on Monday published its more than 150-page executive summary of its upcoming final report, which includes accounts of Trump’s interactions with a White House photographer after the former president had been informed about the riots.  

Trump found out that the Capitol was under attack at 1:25 p.m. local time, the report said. He asked a White House staffer if they saw his speech earlier in the day, to which they responded that the speech was cut off due to the unfolding scene at the Capitol. When Trump asked why the speech was cut, the staffer reiterated that there were riots at the Capitol.

“Oh really?” Trump asked, according to the report. “All right, let’s go see.” A White House photographer captured a picture of the moment Trump found out about the riots, which the report said was “the last one permitted until later in the day.”

“No photographs exist of the President for the remainder of the afternoon until after 4 p.m. President Trump appears to have instructed that the White House photographer was not to take any photographs,” the report said. 

Additionally, the House select committee said it found no official records of Trump’s phone calls and no information from his diary during the afternoon. 

Trump’s office did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.

Meanwhile, the January 6 committee on Monday also asked the Department of Justice to prosecute Trump over his connection to the riots, recommending charges for conspiracy, obstruction, and inciting the insurrection.

The 18-month investigation into the Capitol riots is expected to conclude later this week when a final report detailing all the findings is published. 

This story is developing. Please check back for updates.

Michael Burry

Astrid Stawiarz/Getty Images

• Michael Burry commented on news that the accountant that produced Binance’s proof-of-reserves report would halt all work for crypto firms.
• The legendary “Big Short” investor described proof of reserves, which has been popularized since FTX’s implosion, as “essentially meaningless.”
• Burry was one of the first investors who predicted the subprime mortgage crisis.

Michael Burry, the legendary investor who foresaw the subprime mortgage crisis, is wary of so-called proof of reserves that crypto exchanges have touted since FTX crashed. 

The “Big Short” former hedge fund manager tweeted on Friday that such reviews on a firm’s digital holdings are “essentially meaningless.” 

“In 2005 when I started using a new kind of credit default swap, our auditors were learning on the job,” Burry tweeted on Friday. “That’s not a good thing. Same goes for FTX, Binance, etc. The audit is essentially meaningless.”

—Cassandra B.C. (@michaeljburry) December 16, 2022

The tweet came as a comment on news that Mazars, the French accounting firm used by Binance and other larger players in the space to produce proof-of-reserves reports, halted all work with crypto-related clients on Friday.

Binance in particular has touted proof of reserves as a way to assure customers that their assets are secure in an effort to boost transparency amid the FTX scandal. 

But critics have said that proof of reserves doesn’t provide a complete picture of a company’s risks and can be misleading.

There’s been a thunderous cry for audits of major crypto firm’s following the collapse of FTX, the once $32 billion empire started by Sam Bankman-Fried.

FTX filed for bankruptcy last month after a Coindesk report revealed that FTX’s native token FTT was being used to prop up Bankman-Fried’s quant trading firm Alameda Research. The embattled firm lost $8 billion of customer money as a result.

Federal, state and local authorities along the U.S.-Mexico border have been readying for a possible rise in the already record numbers of migrant crossings if COVID-era restrictions are lifted this week, with some estimating tens of thousands of people are waiting in Mexico for news of the policy change.

U.S. Representative Henry Cuellar, a Democrat whose South Texas district borders Mexico, has said – citing U.S. border authorities – that an estimated 50,000 people are waiting in Mexico for the chance to cross if the restrictions are lifted Dec. 21 as ordered by a federal court.

Those waiting include about 200 Venezuelans who have been sleeping at a church in Ciudad Juarez, a Mexican city across the border from El Paso, Texas, in recent weeks in anticipation of the possible end of an order known as Title 42 that has barred many asylum seekers since early 2020.

The Democratic administration of U.S. President Joe Biden is preparing for the possibility of 9,000-14,000 migrants per day trying to cross the border if Title 42 is lifted, Reuters and other outlets have reported, about double the recent daily rate.

On Monday, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said at a press conference that the administration was “surging resources” to the border to prepare and stressed that “the border is not open” since migrants entering illegally could still be removed via other means if the order is no longer in place.

But because of an ongoing legal battle, it remains unclear whether Title 42 will end on Wednesday.

The public health order aimed at slowing the spread of COVID-19 was issued in March 2020 under Republican former President Donald Trump, an immigration restrictionist, and kept in place for more than a year by the Biden administration.

A federal judge last month ruled that the order was unlawful but a group of states with Republican attorneys general on Monday asked the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene to stop it from being lifted this week.

Since Biden took office in January 2021, about half of the roughly 4 million migrants encountered at the U.S.-Mexico border have been expelled under Title 42 while the other half have been allowed into the United States to pursue their immigration cases. Mexico only accepts the return of certain nationalities, including some Central Americans and more recently Venezuelans.

For months, El Paso has been receiving large groups of asylum-seeking migrants, including many Nicaraguans who cannot be expelled to Mexico. On Saturday, the city’s mayor declared a state of emergency to move migrants from city streets as temperatures have dropped below freezing.

In anticipation of the Title 42 termination, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) last week updated a six-pillar plan that calls for resources and personnel to be supplied to the border and for the expanded use of a fast-track deportation process.

The revised DHS plan suggests there could be expansion of legal pathways for migrants to enter the country from abroad, similar to a program launched for Venezuelans in October.

Biden officials privately have discussed employing several Trump-style plans to deter people from crossing, including barring single adults seeking asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border.

DHS also has asked Congress for $3.4 billion in additional funds to manage the border as part of a spending bill expected to pass before the end of the year, but it is not certain that the extra resources will be approved.

In El Paso, shelters have struggled to house incoming migrants, straining limited resources that are already accommodating the local homeless population. City officials say most arriving migrants have other U.S. destinations, with many headed to join relatives elsewhere. But the volume of people crossing, including those with no U.S. sponsors to pay for onward travel, has made it difficult to move them out quickly.

Rescue Mission of El Paso, a shelter near the border, last week housed 280 people, far beyond its 190-person capacity, with people sleeping on cots and air mattresses in the chapel, library and conference rooms, said Nicole Reulet, the shelter’s marketing director, in an interview with Reuters.

“We have people where we tell them, ‘We have no room,'” she said. “They beg for a place on the floor.”

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