Texas hold-’em-up: a voting-rights standoff

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Cybercrime is getting decidedly more dramatic. Ransomware attacks this year have hit a fuel pipeline, a beef conglomerate, a national health system. As more industries and institutions are being literally held to ransom, we ask how better to protect them. And once upon a time, eels were so abundant in Britain that they were scooped up from the rivers and used as fertilizer. Not so anymore. Now efforts to up their numbers by giving them a hand shimmying upriver seem to be working. But first.

There's an unfolding assault taking place in America today. An attempt to suppress and subvert the right to vote in fair and free elections.

President Joe Biden gave an impassioned speech yesterday defending voting rights in Republican held state houses. Around the country, moves are underway to change how and when voters can cast their ballots. What's really at issue is how much those change who casts a ballot. And Mr. Biden called on Republicans to take a principled stand.

We'll be asking my Republican friends in Congress in states and cities and counties to stand up, for God's sake, and help prevent this concerted effort to undermine our election and the sacred right to vote. Have you no shame?

The speech came as Democratic lawmakers from Texas find themselves in the middle of a kind of tactical field trip.

Joe Biden gave a speech in Philadelphia yesterday in which he described attempts by Republican led state legislatures to change voting rules in those states as the most significant test to our democracy since the Civil War.

John Prideaux is the Economist's United States editor.

And Joe Biden's speech took place against the backdrop of some extraordinary events in Texas this week, which are also related.

To voting laws and what's been going on in Texas.

Well, Jason, the Texas House has a rule that says that in order to form a quorum, 2/3 of legislators have to be present. And Texas Republicans are trying to push through a bill at the moment on the state level that changes voting rules. And Texas Democrats are so alarmed by this that they took an extraordinary measure which was to flee Texas. They headed to Washington, thereby both denying the House in Texas a quorum and also drawing attention to this problem and lobbying lawmakers in Congress and the Senate who they hope will come to their rescue. I'm going to tell you why I'm up here. I'm not up here to take a.

Vacation in Washington, D.C. one of those.

Was Samphronia Thompson, who's a Democratic member of the Texas House of Representatives.

When I look at the African American.

Museum, I thought about the struggle of my people fought in this country to.

Get the right to vote. And that right is sacred to my.

Constituents that I represent back in Houston, Texas. And so do you think it'll work in terms of stopping that legislation in Texas or as you say, drawing attention to it in Washington?

I think it does a better job of the latter thing drawing attention in Washington. I don't think ultimately it's going to work either way. So in Texas, in the legislature in Austin, Republicans do have clear majorities in both houses. And so Democrats can't delay the functioning of the legislature indefinitely. So at some point Republicans will get their way then when it comes to Washington. The problem from the Democratic perspective, Jason, is that the Democrats only have the narrowest majority in the Senate. So 50 plus one vote from the vice president, Kamala Harris, that's not enough to change voting legislation for which you'd need to get over the filibuster, unless Democrats are willing to ditch that, which so far they haven't been.

And in that sense, what have Republicans said about this bid?

Well, the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, has said that this is a political stunt and that the Texas Democrats are not doing their duty to the people they represent.

The Texas Democrats decision to break a.

Quorum in the Texas legislature and to.

Abandon the Texas state Capitol, that inflicts.

Harm on the very Texans who elected them to serve.

He's also, Jason, threatened to arrest them on their return, which neither seems like a great incentive for them to come back to Austin, nor does it seem a great way to sort of get the moral high ground in this battle over, you know, who's standing up for democracy here.

But this feels like a skirmish in a far wider war here at the state level on voting rights. I mean, how does this fit into that bigger picture?

Do you think the bill in Texas under consideration by Republicans is similar to bills being pushed in other states where Republicans are feeling a lot of competition from Democrats but still hold the state legislature. So Arizona, Georgia, Florida, few others as well. There's a fight in all these states over voting laws with I think Republicans trying to tweak them somewhat to their advantage in response to the November 2020 election result. But then there's also something going on which we at the Economist at least think is sort of bigger and more worrying and is getting a bit less attention, which is that the administration of elections, which as you know Jason, is a state level matter in America, is under attack at the moment. So the processes, this all sounds really nerdy, but the kind of processes around election certification, the personnel who administer elections in states have come under attack for certifying the election in November 2020 and are in many cases being replaced by people who are sort of all in on the Trump big lie about the election having been stolen and fraudulent.

Is a possible answer here simply to make the particulars of voting a national rather than a state concern?

Well, there is draft legislation to do that in Congress at the moment, various different bills and proposals floating around. Those would include proposals to get rid of gerrymandering entirely and hand the drawing of electoral districts over to non partisan commissions, which is something that already happens in a handful of states. The dynamic here of course is that Democrats hold power on the federal level and Republicans hold on hold more power on the state level. And so the Republican argument tends to be that states rights are important on this and attempts to federalise elections should be resisted. And then from the Democratic side, some of the legislation contains some overreach. More saliently their ability to get those bills through, given that they don't have a 60 vote majority in the Senate, it just looks impossible. So the net result of that is that Republicans like in Texas, are able to do what they want, whereas Democrats in Congress can't.

And so dare I ask where you see all of this headed?

Oh, I think it will continue. I think that Republicans will get their way in Texas, ultimately will get their way in other state legislatures and we'll be back here in four years time. And of course it's important to remember here that there's a strong racial angle to all of this. And if you look at a state like Texas, Texas, broadly, Republicans control suburbs and the rural areas, Democrats control the cities. Democratic voters are based in cities, the cities are diverse, the rural areas are not. And the Republicans in Austin seem to be particularly keen on making sure that it doesn't become any easier to vote than it already is. So not Only is this a dispute about sort of fairness and who's upholding democracy and who's undermining it. It's supercharged because race plays into this as well.

Thanks very much for your time, John.

Thanks, Jason.

It's already been a busy year for cybercrime, specifically the spread of online extortion schemes known as ransomware. The most worrisome attack began in April.

There's more news coming out today that.

A cyber attack forced the shutdown of.

A major gas pipeline in the US.

A hacker outfit called Darkside shut down the Colonial Pipeline, which supplies nearly half of the fuel used on America's east coast. They demanded and received $4.4 million. In May, another hack hit Ireland's health service. A group called Conti wanted $20 million to unlock health related IT systems. More recently, it's been a Russian linked ransomware gang called Revil. In June, they attacked an American beef producer called JBS demanding $22 million. JBS coughed up half. Over the Fourth of July weekend, REvil struck again, claiming to have attacked thousands of businesses.

The White House has confirmed that Russian criminals are most likely behind the latest attack on a major supply.

But as of yesterday, the payment website that are evil use and the blog on which they threatened to publish hacked information are gone. Perhaps it was Russian authorities that pulled them from the dark web. President Joe Biden has said he spoke to his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin about Russian linked cybercrime on Friday. The business of ransomware has become much more high stakes and much more geopolitical since its humble beginnings.

The first instance of what you might call ransomware. You can date it as far back as 1989 with a little computer virus that spread on floppy disks. Some of our listeners may remember those.

Tim Cross is the Economist's technology editor.

But I think it started to take off again in the early 2010s, by the time the consumer Internet was established. And the business model then was you would shake down ordinary users, you'd scramble their holiday photos and demand a few hundred dollars to fix them. But in the last maybe three, four, five years, it's really sort of professionalized and taken off. And in a lot of cases now the preferred target is a big company or a big organization that has a lot to lose and potentially quite a lot of money with which to pay.

And what is it that's changed beyond the size and scope of the targets?

I think the main cause is just a realization on the part of the attackers. This is a very good way to shake people down for money. And the old sort of scattergun business model, where you would just try and get a few hundred ordinary computer users infected, is not all that profitable. Whereas if you go after big companies or big organizations, you can potentially take in a lot more. We've seen average ransom payments rise sharply from like a few thousand dollars, if that, in 2018, to over 200,000 now, according to one set of figures. And at the high end, some of them get into the millions. This attack that brought down the Irish healthcare system, that the ransom demand there was $20 million. The rise of cryptocurrencies is another factor because it allows you to receive payments without having to deal with the sort of ordinary financial system which has all these guardrails around, money laundering and crime and so on.

And who is it that's carrying out the attacks?

This is fundamentally, it's cybercrime. It's a way to make money. These are sort of criminal gangs. You don't have to be particularly big or sophisticated. The Internet's kind of turbocharged this business model in the same way that it turbocharges legitimate business models. And one of the sort of complicating factors, I guess, though, is that a lot of these gangs are based in places like Russia or Iran or China, where the authorities seem to turn a blind eye if they attack foreign targets. The deal seems to be just don't attack targets at home, and we won't sort of get into this too much.

And given these rates have rise, lots more firms, institutions, bits of infrastructure can expect to be targeted.

Yeah, I think if you run a big company or even a medium sized company, you should expect to face something like this sooner rather than later. The pandemic might even even have turbocharged things a bit, because lots of people now are working from home, and that means that they're sort of outside the security walls that companies put around their own systems. And I think as well, computers are spreading. So there's this whole trend towards the Internet of things, where cars are now collections of computers on wheels and factories are computerized and so on. And the level of security and at least some of these things is not necessarily great. One of my favorite little cybersecurity demonstrations of recent years was someone figured out how to remotely hack into a computerized coffee maker. And you can make it, like spin the grinders and spurt boiling water everywhere and so on. And he said, hey, we could do ransomware for this. I hack into your coffee maker, I make it spray steam all around your kitchen if you want it to stop. Pay me $150. So the number of potential targets, I think is just growing all the time.

So with all of those forces at work, what's to be done?

Number one is the standard expectation that we've been giving for sort of 25 years. Make sure your security is at least half decent. So the colonial pipeline attack, one of the reasons they were able to get in is because a single password seems to have given them the run of the company's networks. They didn't have two factor authentication. It's kind of amazing that a company that runs a giant oil pipeline didn't have this set up. But the standard story in cybersecurity is do the basics. The basics are easy. Lots of people don't do them. One way to maybe make more of them do it is to sort of fix the incentives. And so there's this growing market now for cybersecurity insurance. If I get hacked, I have the insurance company standing behind me to help kind of bail me out. But, but the quid pro quo is like with home insurance, if I take some basic steps to secure my stuff, then my premiums will be lower. So I think, broadly speaking, the growth of that market should help. Then you've got the cybersecurity industry. So one kind of interesting wrinkle is that if you look at the number of attacks and the size of attacks and so on, that's been marching up for years. Spending on cybersecurity has also kind of been marching up for years. And there's long been a sort of general sense that this stuff maybe isn't quite as effective as we'd like it to be. So one thing that might help is trying to come up with some ways of objectively working out just how good this software is.

So that's what the private sector can do. What about what governments can do?

Well, so one thing governments can do is just take it seriously. I think all this latest rash of high profile attacks has really spooked people. And then the other thing that governments can do that the private sector can't really is they can kind of go on the attack a bit. Starting to look at some of the countries from which a lot of these attacks originate. You can imagine diplomats saying things like, okay, this is really starting to affect us now. We want you to clamp down on this stuff. And if they don't, you can maybe threaten them with sanctions or offline retaliation of various kinds.

So is that rising awareness enough? Do you think that genuine cybersecurity can be had at this stage?

If governments are really committed to doing this, you can especially push down, I would have thought, on the kind of spectacular attacks, because those attract the attention of governments. And to the extent that this is criminal activity, the last thing the crooks want is to attract attention when it comes to kind of more run of the mill attacks. I think the analogy here is probably with offline crime. Fraud is still with us, burglary is still with us. I don't think you'll ever eliminate cybercrime 100%, but at the same time, I do think beefing things up, having a working insurance market, getting the basics right, that will improve things a lot, even if it won't eliminate the problem entirely.

Tim, thank you very much for joining us.

Thanks, Jason.

There was a time when Britain ran on eels. Yes, those eels, the snake like fish, jellied eel pie and mashed potatoes used to be a staple of British cuisine. In medieval England, eels weren't just for dinner, they were actually used as currency. Landlords often requested that rents be paid in eels. One town in the east of England was so eely that it was named Ely with one e. Nowadays, though, the fish are much more elusive.

Eels once used to be incredibly fashionable in England. If you were wealthy, you had not just a lot of land and a lot of money, you had an awful lot of eels.

Catherine Nixie writes about Britain for the Economist.

So their social stock has gone down, but their actual stocks have collapsed. The number of young eels that arrive each year in Europe has fallen by about 90 to 95% in the past 40 years.

Why have those numbers tanked so badly?

Eels are suffering from so many different problems at the moment. Climate change is affecting them, as too are new invasive parasites that they're suffering from. And water turbines are particularly nasty for eels. They spin around and cut adult eels up like sushi, as one of the eel researchers I spoke to put it. But the biggest barrier that eels face in this country is actual barriers, just weirs and dams and all the many, many things that you see if you walk up an English river that get in the way of the water and therefore in the way of the eel. In Europe as a whole, there are 1.2 million barriers. And if their movement is blocked, then they struggle to reproduce because they can't get to the places they need to to spawn and they can't get back.

And so with eel populations endangered as they are, is anything being done about that? Removing the barriers, as it were?

Well, exactly that. So there have been a series of quite sternly worded Directives saying we have to help these eels up these rivers. So I went to Somerset, to a few miles west of Glastonbury Tor to see see where one of England's oldest and most important eel passes has been put in. Eel passes are really simple. Eels are very kind of clever creatures in some ways and you just have to help them along. And what you give them is a channel with bits of stuff sticking out of it. They look a bit like the kind of bristles you'd get on a toilet brush. And for eels, they're just fantastic. They swarm up them. In Somerset I went with Andy Don, who is an eel expert and has been championing eels for decades.

They're really simple devices.

They are just bristle brush really contained.

Within channel with a very tiny trickle.

Of water running down them. And that small trickle of water is.

Enough to attract eels in their thousands.

One May night, they had 10,292 pass through. And they know that because people sit there with clickers. Like you have people in a bar or a nightclub. Every eel that goes up gets a click, every eel that slides back down gets a click.

But as you say, eels have been extremely important in English history for so long. Why were they allowed to get near the brink before this sort of thing was done?

So it's no surprise that England's rivers are difficult for fish. People have known about this for centuries. So the barons bullied King John into putting eel passes into the Magna Carta. Richard the Lionheart legislated for eel passes. He said you had to have a space between obstructions that was big enough for a three year old hog to get through. Thomas Cromwell legislated to have noisome weirs that stopp fish breeding taken down. So people have known about it, but the thing that they have usually been interested in, these legislators, is the kind of fish that they like to eat, which is basically salmon and trout. So rich people make laws. Rich people like to fish and eat salmon and trout. And so salmon and trout get really well protected by fish passes and you can see salmon leaping up them. But eels can't leap, they just got stuck.

So to your mind, do these efforts to protect eels mean that we don't really need to worry too much about their future?

People in Somerset now could remember a time when eels were so plentiful that you could pretty much fish them out with buckets, carry them away by the wheelbarrow and pour them onto the fields for fertiliser. I think it's probably going to be a while before we get back to that level. But I think eels are probably not on their way to extinction just yet. I think they'll be slithering up a few more passes for a few more years to come.

Katherine, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you for having me.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, leave us a rating and a review and you can subscribe to the economist@examiner.com intelligenceoffer. The link is in the show notes. See you back here tomorrow.

Sam.