U.S. beefs up Marine unit in Japan amid fresh threats from China

The U.S. will station an upgraded Marine Corps unit with the ability to fire anti-ship missiles in Okinawa, Japan, in a move aimed at deterring China, top U.S. and Japanese officials announced on Wednesday.

The revamped unit, to be called the 12th Marine Littoral Regiment, will also be equipped with advanced intelligence and reconnaissance capabilities, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced on Wednesday.

“These actions will bolster deterrence in the region and allow us to defend Japan and its people more effectively in an increasingly challenging security environment,” Austin said, calling the unit “more versatile, mobile and resilient.”

The move sends a strong signal to China that the U.S. can quickly defend Japan, and the new unit will be able to rapidly respond to contingencies, Defense Department officials said.

A Marine Littoral Regiment is a hard-to-detect unit designed for operations in coastal waters. It is equipped with Naval Strike Missiles mounted atop unmanned variants of Joint Light Tactical Vehicles. The units comprise 1,800 to 2,000 service members.

Austin announced the news during a joint press conference at the State Department with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and their Japanese counterparts, and comes two days before President Joe Biden is slated to meet with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida at the White House.

While the number of American troops in Japan won’t change, Austin said the U.S. believes the new unit, which is replacing the 12th Artillery Regiment, will be “more lethal, more agile, and more capable.” The move is expected to be completed by 2025, he said.

The change is also essential to deter China from a possible invasion of Taiwan. "What we've seen from China in recent years is … an effort to undermine the longstanding status quo that's maintained peace and stability for decades," Blinken said.

That was an implicit reference to China's intensifying military intimidation of Taiwan, which in recent weeks included an incursion of a record number of nuclear-weapons capable bombers into the self-governing island's air defense identification zone. Those moves constitute Beijing's efforts to "establish a new normal" favoring Chinese military power in the Taiwan Strait, Austin said, while adding that he doubted that "an invasion is imminent."

Japan is home to 18,000 U.S. Marines, primarily based on Okinawa. But the large American military presence has been a source of tension with Tokyo for years. In all, the U.S. has roughly 54,000 troops in the country.

The deployment reflects what Blinken said was a mutual recognition that China "is the greatest shared strategic challenge that we and our allies and partners face."

Japanese Defense Minister Yasukazu Hamada used unusually blunt language in describing China as posing an "unprecedented and greatest strategic challenge" to the U.S.-Japan alliance. Hamada also expressed concern about "enhanced military cooperation" between Beijing and Moscow, an implicit reference to Chinese-Russian live-fire naval exercises in the East China Sea last month.

The news comes weeks after Tokyo unveiled its biggest military build-up since World War II, approving more than $2 billion in defense spending including hundreds of long-range Tomahawk cruise missiles.

Both Austin and Hamada referenced growing military tensions between Japan and China over the disputed island chain that Japan refers to as the Senkakus and what Beijing calls the Diaoyutai. China has fueled that friction with increasingly frequent incursions of ships into Japanese territory. "Japan and the U.S. will continue to be united in raising objections against China's attempts to change the status quo in the East China Sea," Hamada said.

Blinken also said the two nations will strengthen cooperation in space and cyberspace, including affirming that attacks in space could trigger Article V of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, which stipulates that the U.S. will defend Japan from an attack.

Joint U.S.-Japanese cooperation on space exploration aims "to land the first woman and person of color on the moon," Blinken said.

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Russia's cyberattacks aim to 'terrorize' Ukrainians

Russian cyberattacks against Ukraine are increasingly going after civilian services such as electricity and internet, making the situation even worse for Ukrainians as the conflict nears its one-year anniversary.

While Russia has relied more on missile strikes than cyber weapons to accomplish its goals in Ukraine, the attacks against energy, government and transportation infrastructure groups show that cyberattacks are still a key part of Moscow’s overall strategy to break the will of Ukrainians.

“The longer Russia wages this war, the harder it is going to be on those Ukrainian people and the more vulnerable they'll be to destructive cyberattacks against the critical infrastructure,” Rob Joyce, the director of cybersecurity at the NSA, said in an interview. “I'm concerned that the Russian actors will increasingly look to amplify the things they're doing with kinetic effects in that space.”

The pace of cyberattacks directed against Ukraine has been unrelenting over the past 12 months. While attacks have been aimed at military targets — such as a widely condemned attack on Ukrainian satellite company Viasat early in the conflict that disrupted Ukrainian military communications — hackers are taking aim even more at critical utilities used in daily life.

More than 2,000 cyberattacks were aimed at Ukrainian organizations in 2022, according to statistics from Ukraine’s Computer Emergency Response Team provided to POLITICO. While more than 300 of these attacks were against the security and defense sector, more than 400 attacks targeted groups impacting civilian life, including organizations in the commercial, energy, financial, telecommunications and software sectors. More than 500 other attacks were aimed at government groups.

Arecent report from Ukraine’s State Service of Special Communications and Information Protection found that while the pace of cyberattacks against Ukraine slowed overall between September and December of 2022, these attacks were increasingly aimed at public services and energy instead of military targets.

Moscow is attempting to make these attacks as psychologically difficult for Ukrainians as possible, insiders say. Microsoft warned in a December report that the Kremlin is coordinating cyberattacks and missile strikeson Ukrainian energy and water groups, and that these destructive cyberattacks may spread to countries, such as neighboring Poland, and private companies providing aid to Ukraine. These include organizations that provide humanitarian aid.

“Many of these attacks carried out were designed to affect the civilian populace rather than any military targets,” said John Hultquist, vice president of threat intelligence at cybersecurity company Mandiant, which has helped support Ukraine’s cyber defenses. “We think that some of these attempts, on power particularly, are done…to strike fear into every Ukrainian and really just up the psychological toll.”

Attacks have included anunsuccessful effort aimed at an electrical substation that would have disrupted power for millions of Ukrainians, an incident eerily similar to previous successful Russian-linked attacks in 2015 and 2016 that shut off the lights in portions of Ukraine. Those two earlier attacks both took place in the dead of winter, likely to cause maximum discomfort for Ukrainians, a tactic Russia is continuing to pursue during the current colder months.

“We’ve seen the Russians target civilian infrastructure in unsuccessful attempts to undermine the Ukrainians’ will to fight,” Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Mark Warner (D-Va.) said in a statement provided to POLITICO.

Joyce said Russian hackers have successfully compromised groups in the emergency, transportation and communications sectors as well, and were targeting surveillance cameras to potentially inform troop movements. He stressed that while overall cyberattacks have not had the widespread impact predicted they would prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, this is not due to a lack of effort on Moscow’s part.

“We know they continue to try to gain access,” Joyce said.

Ukrainian officials are acutely aware of the increasing threats to civilians in cyberspace, and are working to defend against them. Hultquist noted that “Ukrainian defenders have been hyper-vigilant” at identifying and responding to intrusions, and pointed to this as a major factor in preventing many attacks.

These efforts have not, however, prevented Moscow from attempting to take down systems. Victor Zhora, deputy chair and chief digital transformation officer of Ukraine’s SSSCIP, said that the public sector is now attacked “twice as much” as the military sector.

“The key purposes of Russia’s hacking activity are espionage, misinformation and damaging critical infrastructure that impacts large amounts of population,” Zhora said in a lengthy statement provided to POLITICO. “Russia’s activities in Ukraine, their unprovoked aggression in cyberspace, has the same goals as their so-called ‘military strategy’ for Ukraine, i.e. terrorizing Ukrainian civilians.”

These cyberattacks are only likely to intensify as the conflict grinds on in 2023. Zhora said that “complex” attacks on power grid operators and electricity distributors were ongoing, and warned that Moscow is targeting less secure companies that provide software to critical infrastructure groups in order to gain backdoor access.

Joyce said the NSA is “always worried” about supply chain compromises, citing the example of the SolarWinds attack in 2020, in which Russian government hackers used a vulnerability in software to infiltrate the networks of over a dozen U.S. federal agencies for months. He stressed his concern that Moscow will only become more “brazen” in its cyberattacks aimed at civilians if the war does not go in its favor.

“[I’m] more and more concerned for the outcomes as they get more and more desperate,” Joyce said. “They will use all the different means at their disposal from kinetic through non-kinetic.”

Ukraine may not be the only target. Following the invasion last year, President Joe Biden warned of potential Russian cyberattacks not only on Ukraine, but on the networks of the U.S. and other Ukrainian allies, prompting a nationwide effort to strengthen critical systems. While no successful major Russian cyberattacks on the U.S. in retaliation for assisting Ukraine took place in 2022, the threat remains.

“We have not seen the Russians really seriously deploy the formidable cyber capabilities we know they have in an attempt to target the West in this conflict,” Warner said. “Should they do so, they need to know that we also have formidable cyber capabilities that could be used to respond.”

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Appeals court seems poised to void part of sex trafficking law

A federal appeals court panel appears likely to strike down part of a law Congress overwhelmingly passed in 2018 to crack down on online advertising websites such as Backpage that were viewed as facilitating prostitution.

During arguments on Wednesday in a lawsuit brought by advocates for legalizing prostitution, a D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals panel expressed deep skepticism about the constitutionality of language in the anti-sex trafficking law that makes it a crime to operate a computer service with the intent to promote prostitution.

Two of the three judges on the panel, Patricia Millett and Harry Edwards, seemed inclined to rule that aspects of the statute known as the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act and Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act, or FOSTA-SESTA, violate the First Amendment because it appears to criminalize efforts to legalize prostitution.

Millett and Edwards repeatedly tangled with a Justice Department attorney defending the law, Joseph Busa.

The Justice Department contends that the law simply criminalizes the use of a computer service to aid and abet prostitution, but Edwards and Millett said those words weren’t used in the relevant part of the new law and that it didn’t seem to require any concrete connection to prostitution.

“In my mind, it’s not an aiding-and-abetting law — we know how to write them when we want to,” said Edwards, an appointee of President Jimmy Carter. “This doesn’t look like anything that I understand to be an aiding-and-abetting law. … That immediately tells me the government’s got great concern that the statute, as actually written, has problems. So, let’s make it something that it’s not. … My view as someone preparing the case is you just made something up.”

Millett, who was appointed by President Barack Obama, said the law appeared to ban operating or owning a computer service and advocating for legalizing prostitution at the same time. She said it was akin to banning library owners from pushing to decriminalize prostitution.

“It’s operating a computer with a bad intent,” Millett said. “It says it is illegal to own the library with a bad intent … and the First Amendment is fine with that?”

Busa insisted that broad-based advocacy wasn’t covered by the law.

“We’re talking about the underlying criminal transaction, not the concept of prostitution as a whole,” the Justice Department attorney insisted during the argument session, which was scheduled for 40 minutes but ran about twice as long.

When Busa said he wasn’t certain whether Congress could ban owning a library while having the intent to promote prostitution, both of the panel’s Democratic appointees expressed surprise.

“It’s worrisome, isn’t it?” Millett said.

“I don’t know why you haven’t thought about it,” Edwards added.

Busa called the hypothetical “fanciful,” but both judges disagreed.

One possibility raised by Wednesday’s arguments was that the appeals court would rule that part of the law that bans use of computers to “promote” prostitution would be struck down, but that a prohibition on using computers to “facilitate” prostitution might be found to pass muster.

The third judge on the panel, Justin Walker, seemed more open to the narrow reading of the statute the government was proposing.

“Backpage wasn’t running the prostitution business. It was the board — the equivalent of a bulletin board for sex traffickers to advertise,” he said.

Walker, an appointee of President Donald Trump, also suggested that existing federal laws banning travel with the intent of promoting prostitution arguably implicated the constitutional right to travel, but they have been found constitutional.

Millett, however, noted that those laws focus on transporting other people.

The lawsuit the court took up on Wednesday was filed by Human Rights Watch, the Internet Archive and the Woodhull Freedom Foundation, which says it advocates for “sexual freedom.” Many internet companies also opposed the law, but their lobbying efforts fell short in the wake of arguments that online sites like Backpage were facilitating prostitution, including in some cases sexual trafficking of children and teenagers.

A lawyer for the groups and individuals challenging the law, Robert Corn-Revere, emphasized on Wednesday that the statute was broad enough to cover many kinds of computer operators.

“FOSTA is not limited to classified advertising … and it’s not limited to bad-actor websites,” he told the appeals court.

Passage of the law followed a lengthy investigation of Backpage by a Senate subcommittee led by Sens. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), and wrangling with the firm over access to its records.

Less than a month after FOSTA-SESTA passed, the Justice Department announced the seizure of the Backpage website and the indictment of seven current and former leaders of the company. It also said that co-founder Carl Ferrer pleaded guilty to sex trafficking and was cooperating with prosecutors.

After long delays due in part to the Covid pandemic, six Backpage officials went to trial in 2021 in federal court in Arizona, but the judge declared a mistrial after prosecutors allegedly defied her instructions about limits on their case.

The criminal case is expected to go before a new jury in June of this year.

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What happened with the FAA's computer outage?

The FAA's system that notifies pilots about safety issues began to fail on Tuesday afternoon, though the public was not notified until hours later. After an attempt to backstop the problem failed overnight, the FAA grounded all planes nationwide from 7:20 a.m. to 9 a.m. Wednesday, the first instance of a nationwide flight grounding since Sept. 11, 2001.

All times Eastern.

Jan. 10:

3:28 p.m. — The FAA computer system that notifies pilots about certain safety issues fails for unexplained reasons.

7:47 p.m. — The agency's air traffic command center in Warrenton, Va., issues its first public notice of the computer breakdown and sets up an outage hotline.

8:20 p.m. — The FAA issues a fuller notification of the computer failure and says technicians are "working to restore the system."

Jan. 11:

6:27 a.m. — United Airlines issues a natiowide ground stop.

7:01 a.m. — Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg tweets about the outage.

7:21 a.m. — The FAA announces a nationwide "ground stop," halting all flights aside from those involving military aircraft and medical evacuations.

7:37 a.m. — The agency terminates the outage hotline.

8:54 a.m. — Buttigieg tweets that ground stop will be lifted, writing that the agency has "determined that the safety system affected by the overnight outage is fully restored."

9:07 a.m. — The FAA allows full air service to resume. More than 8,500 flights had been delayed and more than 1,200 had been canceled on Wednesday, a backlog that will take hours to resolve.

2:00 p.m. — Buttigieg tells reporters that a backup system went into effect the previous evening, but there were issues in the accuracy of information flowing into the system. FAA called for a reboot of the system at 5 a.m., and the ground stop was put in place until it was verified that the system was operating correctly.

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Never mind Britain: Germany looks for US to lead the way on battle tanks to Ukraine

Chancellor Scholz says deliveries of heavy weapons depend on coordination ‘with our transatlantic partner.’

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Barbara Lee tells lawmakers she's running for Senate

Rep. Barbara Lee has told her fellow lawmakers she’s running for Senate in California, according to two sources familiar with the situation.

She informed her colleagues in a closed-door Congressional Black Caucus meeting on Wednesday.

Asked later Wednesday about her plans, Lee said in a brief interview she’d officially announce “when it's appropriate.”

“Right now, in respect to [Sen.] Dianne Feinstein and the floods and what I'm doing, I'm doing my work. And we’ll let them know when I intend to go to the next step. But now's the time not to talk about that,” she said.

Lee declined to say whether she’d run against 89-year-old Feinstein if the California senator chose to run again rather than retire.

"I'm not really doing anything except letting colleagues know that there'll be a time to talk about the Senate race," she said.

Lee’s decision to run comes a day after Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) also announced a bid for the seat currently held by Feinstein (D-Calif.). Feinstein's future has been the subject of much speculation by Democrats in recent months, though she’s remained publicly noncommittal on her plans. It represents a safe Democratic seat for whoever can muscle through a likely crowded primary.

Lee spoke to Feinstein and California Gov. Gavin Newsom last month about her plans, according to a person familiar with the situation. Feinstein told Lee she would make a decision “soon” but understood Lee would need to plan her own bid.

The emerging Senate race is likely to draw from a deep well of ambitious House Democrats, many of whom have been waiting for shots at the statewide office. A former leader of the Progressive Caucus, Lee is known as a longtime leader in California politics. And Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) has also signaled his interest in running, though he hasn't officially announced. Schiff’s camp had knocked Porter for announcing amid historic storms and flooding in California, and Schiff used his email fundraising list to raise money for storm relief.

Lee was widely seen as leading the list of potential Feinstein replacements if she were to retire early and Gov. Gavin Newsom were to choose a successor, though there's no indication Feinstein would do so. The governor vetted Lee when then-Sen. Kamala Harris departed for the vice presidency, and he publicly committed to choosing a Black woman if he had the chance to make another appointment.

While she lacks the fundraising might of Porter and Schiff, Lee is a revered figure in the Oakland-anchored district she has represented for decades. Her deep Bay Area roots could be an asset given that both Porter and Schiff represent southern California districts.

Some other House members had emerged as potential contenders, but Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) isn't expected to seek the seat. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) has said he would defer a decision for a few months.

Jeremy White and Sarah Ferris contributed to this report

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Santos picks a fight with former Rep. Adam Kinzinger

"Go on @CNN and cry about it," he wrote to the retired congressman.

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