Americans were presented with a bit of bad news last week that was mostly seen as a formality. President Joe Biden will be running for a second term in 2024.
The news is bad for Americans for a multitude of reasons, as Joe Biden’s first 2-plus years in office have served as an pitiful exercise in “I told you so’s” for many political observers that clearly saw trouble looming over the horizon in the event former President Donald Trump would be voted out of office.
The prevalent theme the past 27 months has been the lack of accountability for consistently atrocious results across all aspects of the Biden presidency. From the economy to foreign policy, to the pathetic response to the East Palestine disaster, America finds herself in a far weaker position then it was pre-COVID.
For starters, the botched Afghanistan pullout after America’s longest war saw a suicide bomber attack at Kabul airport that would kill 170 Afghans as well as 13 US soldiers. The Biden administration would also initially leave behind an estimated 78,000 Afghans who worked for the American government, according to a report from the non-governmental organization known as the Association of Wartime Allies.
Although this Afghanistan exit would take place more than half a year into the Biden presidency, the review of the US exit from Afghanistan that was released on April 6th of this year offered this ridiculous assessment: "The departing Trump administration had left the Biden administration with a date for withdrawal, but no plan for executing it.”
Joe Biden, who in large part ran on stopping the pandemic by saying, “I will not shut down the country,” and “I will shut down the virus,” even went as far as to blame COVID-19 deaths on Trump personally on numerous occasions during the campaign. But in reality, it only took the first 9 months of 2021 for COVID deaths to surpass the entire total for 2020. This was despite the fact that as a result of former President Donald Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed,” vaccines were available to most Americans for most of 2021.
President-elect Biden also took some time in December of 2020 during his transition to President to blame then still-sitting President Trump for what has been repeatedly pointed to by experts as the most wide-ranging reconnaissance hacking incident in history – the cyberattack against SolarWinds.
Playing on the “Russia-Trump narrative” that has taken a zombie-like existence in the darkest corner of the fake news universe, Biden seemed to imply that Donald Trump was attempting to shield Russia from liability for Solarwinds when he stated that the attack “certainly fits Russia’s long history of reckless, disruptive cyber activities,” and added that “the Trump administration needs to make an official attribution. This assault happened on Donald’s Trump watch.”
Much of the cyber-activity that has been reported in the media during Biden’s term has centered around the Ukraine war, with both sides ramping up offenses since the earliest stages of the conflict. Although there has been a concentration of hacks occurring half-a-world away from the US, there are still numerous major attacks affecting domestic targets on a regular basis, whether the Biden-loving mainstream and corporate media is reporting it or not.
In 2022, ransomware attacks affected 106 state or local government agencies, which represented a considerable increase from the 77 attacks in 2021, with 25% of those 106 incidents resulting in the theft of data.
Last year also saw a plethora of underreported attacks against the United States that were perpetrated by state-sponsored Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) groups. Some of the more notable hacks were against US defense contractors and originated from Russian state-sponsored actors. Additionally, Iranian Advanced Persistent Threat APT 34 targeted organizations across multiple sectors in Africa, Asia, Europe and the United States, with the support of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS).
In an effort to curb the onslaught against America, the Biden administration recently rolled out a new National Cybersecurity Strategy. Although this strategy claims that it will “rebalance the responsibility to defend cyberspace by shifting the burden for cybersecurity away from individuals, small businesses, and local governments, and onto the organizations that are most capable and best-positioned to reduce risks for all of us,” according to cyber compliance law firm Gibson Dunn, private companies “can expect to see direct liability, new regulations, and lawsuits from the federal government” if the current proposal is adopted.
The Gibson Dunn alert also warns that “increased (government) enforcement may also be complicated by multiple agencies pursuing the same actions, resulting in the potential for companies having to deal with overlapping and uncoordinated inquiries.”
In other words, this new Biden administration strategy may create a nightmare situation for private entities struggling to just keep their operations afloat in the midst of a struggling economy by having what has largely been an ineffective and incompetent executive branch force new compliance standards and costs.
The day-to-day traps that ensnare Americans online are difficult enough to navigate. From online phishing schemes to “Big-Tech” enabled malvertising, every click is a potential trap. So, with the Biden administration’s track record being less than sparkling, business owners should worry that they may be unfairly targeted and find themselves facing penalties as a result of poorly written and thought-out regulations.
Julio Rivera is a business and political strategist, Editorial Director for Reactionary Times, and a political commentator and columnist. His writing, which is focused on cybersecurity and politics, has been published by many of the most heavily trafficked websites in the world.