The Federal Bureau of Investigation will notify state officials when local election systems are believed to have been breached by hackers [the link may be paywalled], a pivot in policy that comes after criticism that the FBI wasn't doing enough to inform states of election threats, WSJ reported Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter. From a report: The FBI's previous policy stated that it notified the direct victims of cyberattacks, such as the counties that own and operate election equipment, but wouldn't necessarily share that information with states. Several states and members of Congress in both parties had criticized that policy as inadequate and one that stifled state-local partnerships on improving election security. Further reading: Despite Election Security Fears, Iowa Caucuses Will Use New Smartphone App.

Network security giant Cloudflare said it will provide its security tools and services to U.S. political campaigns for free, as part of its efforts to secure upcoming elections against cyberattacks and election interference. From a report: The company said its new Cloudflare for Campaigns offering will include distributed denial-of-service attack mitigation, load balancing for campaign websites, a website firewall, and anti-bot protections. It's an expansion of the company's security offering for journalists, civil rights activists and humanitarian groups under its Project Galileo, which aims to protect against disruptive cyberattacks. The project later expanded to smaller state and local government sites in 2018, with an aim of protecting servers containing voter registration data and other election infrastructure from attacks. Cloudflare's co-founder and chief executive Matthew Prince said there was a "clear need" to help campaigns secure not only their public facing websites but also their internal data security. The company said it's working with the non-partisan, non-profit organization Defending Digital Campaigns to provide its services to campaigns. Last year the Federal Elections Commission changed the rules to allow political campaigns to receive discounted cybersecurity assistance, which was previously a campaign finance violation.

Facebook said on Thursday that it would not make any major changes to its political advertising policies, which allow lies in ads, despite pressure from lawmakers who say the company is abdicating responsibility for what appears on its platform. The New York Times: The decision, which company executives had telegraphed in recent months, is likely to harden criticism of Facebook's political ad practices heading into this year's presidential election. The company also said it would not end so-called microtargeting for political ads, which lets campaigns home in on a sliver of Facebook's users -- a tactic that critics say is ideal for spreading divisive or misleading information. Political advertising cuts to the heart of Facebook's outsize role in society, and the company has found itself squeezed between liberal critics who want it to do a better job of policing its various social media platforms and conservatives who say their views are being unfairly muzzled.

The issue has raised important questions regarding how heavy a hand technology companies like Facebook -- which also owns Instagram and the messaging app WhatsApp -- and Google should exert when deciding what types of political content they will and will not permit. By maintaining a status quo, Facebook executives are essentially saying they are doing the best they can without government guidance and see little benefit to the company or the public in changing.

A new leak of more than 100,000 documents from Cambridge Analytica's work in 68 different countries "will lay bare the global infrastructure of an operation used to manipulate voters on 'an industrial scale,'" writes the Guardian.

Long-time Slashdot reader Freshly Exhumed shares their report: The release of documents began on New Year's Day on an anonymous Twitter account, @HindsightFiles, with links to material on elections in Malaysia, Kenya and Brazil. The documents were revealed to have come from Brittany Kaiser, an ex-Cambridge Analytica employee turned whistleblower, and to be the same ones subpoenaed by Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Kaiser, who starred in the Oscar-shortlisted Netflix documentary The Great Hack, decided to go public after last month's election in Britain. "It's so abundantly clear our electoral systems are wide open to abuse," she said. "I'm very fearful about what is going to happen in the US election later this year, and I think one of the few ways of protecting ourselves is to get as much information out there as possible."

The documents were retrieved from her email accounts and hard drives, and though she handed over some material to parliament in April 2018, she said there were thousands and thousands more pages which showed a "breadth and depth of the work" that went "way beyond what people think they know about 'the Cambridge Analytica scandal....'" Kaiser said the Facebook data scandal was part of a much bigger global operation that worked with governments, intelligence agencies, commercial companies and political campaigns to manipulate and influence people, and that raised huge national security implications.

During a campaign event on Monday, U.S. presidential candidate Joe Biden "suggested coal miners could simply learn to code to transition to 'jobs of the future,'" reports Newsweek: "Anybody who can go down 300 to 3,000 feet in a mine, sure in hell can learn to program as well, but we don't think of it that way," he said... "Anybody who can throw coal into a furnace can learn how to program for God's sake..."

Many Twitter users criticized Biden's comments as reductive. "Telling people to find other work without a firm plan to help them succeed will never be popular," communications professional Frank Lutz wrote... Congressional candidate Brianna Wu tweeted that she was "glad to see the recognition that you don't need to be in your 20s to do this as a profession," but also called Biden's suggestion "tone-deaf and unhelpful."
Long-time Slashdot reader theodp notes the response this speech got from New York magazine's Sarah Jones: "Please Stop Telling Miners To Learn To Code." And in comments on the original submission, at least two Slashdot readers seemed to agree. "Not everyone can code and certainly not every coal miner or coal worker," wrote Slashdot reader I75BJC. "Vastly different skills."

Slashdot reader Iwastheone even shared a Fox News article in which rival presidential candidate Andrew Yang argued "Maybe Americans don't all want to learn how to code... Let them do the kind of work they actually want to do, instead of saying to a group of people that you all need to become coders."

But is there something elitist in thinking that coal miners couldn't learn to do what coders learned to do? It seems like an interesting question for discussion -- so leave your own thoughts in the comments.

Should coal miners be encouraged to learn to code?

An anonymous reader quotes USA Today: Spotify announced Friday that it will suspend political advertising on its platform next year, making it the latest in a series of tech and social media platforms to publicly address how it will handle content targeting voters. The music streaming company said that its decision was made because it does not yet have the means to screen political advertising content.

"At this point in time, we do not yet have the necessary level of robustness in our processes, systems and tools to responsibly validate and review this content. We will reassess this decision as we continue to evolve our capabilities," a spokesperson said in a statement to media outlets.

The move by Spotify, which was first reported by AdAge, comes after a wave of backlash against Facebook, which said it would not fact check content in political ads... Twitter also committed to stop accepting political ads in a stance against "forcing highly optimized and targeted political messages on people." And Google has said it will restrict the way political advertisers can target specific audiences.

The network's furthering of lies from foreign adversaries and flagrant disregard for the truth have gotten downright dangerous. Garrett M. Graff, writing for Wired earlier this month: Monday's split-screen drama, as the House Judiciary Committee weighed impeachment charges against President Trump and as the Justice Department's inspector general released a 476-page report on the FBI's handling of its 2016 investigation into Trump's campaign, made one truth of the modern world inescapable: The lies and obfuscations forwarded ad infinitum on Fox News pose a dangerous threat to the national security of the United States. The facts of both dramas were clear to objective viewers: In the one instance, there's conclusive and surprisingly consistent evidence that President Trump pushed Ukraine to concoct dirt on a domestic political rival to affect the 2020 presidential election, and in the other, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz found that the FBI was proper to investigate Trump's dealings with Russia in the 2016 presidential campaign.

But that set of facts is not what anyone who was watching Fox News heard. Instead, Fox spent the night describing an upside-down world where the president's enemies had spun a web of lies about Trump and Ukraine, even as Horowitz blew open the base corruption that has driven every attack on the president since 2016. Sean Hannity, who had long trumpeted the forthcoming inspector general report and expected a thorough indictment of the behavior of former FBI director James Comey and other members of the "deep state," had a simple message for his viewers during Fox's Monday night prime time: "Everything we said, everything we reported, everything we told you was dead-on-center accurate," he said. "It is all there in black and white, it's all there." Except they weren't right and it wasn't there. But Fox News' viewers evidently were not to be told those hard truths -- they were to be kept thinking that everything in their self-selected filter bubble was just peachy keen.

Over on Fox Business, Lou Dobbs said the mere fact that the IG found no political bias in the FBI's investigation of Trump and Russia in 2016 was de facto proof of the power of the deep state. John Harwood, long one of Washington's most respected conservative voices in journalism, summed up Fox's approach Monday night simply: "Lunacy." It's worse than lunacy, though. Fox's bubble reality creates a situation where it's impossible to have the conversations and debate necessary to function as a democracy. Facts that are inconvenient to President Trump simply disappear down Fox News' "memory hole," as thoroughly as George Orwell could have imagined in 1984. The idea that Fox News represents a literal threat to our national security, on par with Russia's Internet Research Agency or China's Ministry of State Security, may seem like a dramatic overstatement of its own but this week has made clear that, as we get deeper into the impeachment process and as the 2020 election approaches, Fox News is prepared to destroy America's democratic traditions if it will help its most important and most dedicated daily viewer. The threat posed to our democracy by Fox News is multifaceted: First and most simply, it's clearly advancing and giving voice to narratives and smears backed and imagined by our foreign adversaries. Second, its overheated and bombastic rhetoric is undermining America's foundational ideals and the sense of fair play in politics. Third, its unique combination of lies and half-truths has built a virtual reality so complete that it leaves its viewers too misinformed to fulfill their most basic responsibilities as citizens to make informed choices about the direction of the country.

As a way to help his 2020 presidential bid, presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg is pouring tens of millions of dollars into an unknown digital business called Hawkfish -- which Bloomberg himself founded during the spring. CNBC reports: Hawkfish will be the "primary digital agency and technology services provider for the campaign," Julie Wood, a Bloomberg campaign spokeswoman, told CNBC. She added that the firm "is now providing digital ad services, including content creation, ad placement and analytics" for their campaign. It will also help Democratic races across the country in future election cycles, she said. Bloomberg, a billionaire former three-term mayor of New York, started building the company early in 2019, before he decided to seek the Democratic presidential nomination, the campaign aide said. While the campaign declined to say how much Bloomberg has invested in the company, Bloomberg has said he will spend over $100 million on anti-Trump digital ads. His campaign has already spent at least $13 million on Facebook and Google spots.

Bloomberg, who was dedicated to denying President Donald Trump a second term before he entered the Democratic race, built Hawkfish with the intention of overpowering the formidable data operation assembled by the Republican National Committee and Trump's cash-flush campaign. Hawkfish appears to have been assembled in secret. It has no public website. A search of elections databases turned up no financial records connected to work for other Democratic causes. No other candidate in the 2020 race is known to have created a vendor designed to aide their bid. [...] Using research company Accurint, CNBC reporters went to a New York address that was associated with Hawkfish. At the address, 909 Third Avenue, an attendant at the front desk said no business named Hawkfish existed there. The Bloomberg campaign spokeswoman said the address, which is about a five-minute walk from Bloomberg's namesake company, was only used for receiving paperwork. The address is the same as Mike Bloomberg's longtime accountant, Geller & Company. Hawkfish's leadership ranks include longtime Facebook Chief Marketing Officer Gary Briggs, and Jeff Glueck, former CEO of location-tracking firm Foursquare.

Glueck hinted that other former Silicon Valley players were with the company, but didn't name names. "The Bloomberg campaign is posting Hawkfish jobs on its website, including graphic designer, copywriter, video editor and senior software engineer," adds CNBC.

On Friday, Facebook and Twitter shut down a network of fake accounts that pushed pro-Trump messages all while "masquerading" as Americans with AI-generated faces as profile photos. The Verge reports: In a blog post, Facebook said that it connected the accounts to a US-based media company called The BL that, it claims, has ties to Epoch Media Group. In August, NBC News first reported that Epoch Media Group was pushing messages in support of President Donald Trump across social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Epoch has extensive connections to Falun Gong, an eccentric Chinese spiritual community that has faced significant persecution from the country's central government. In a statement provided to The Verge, the Epoch Times denied any connection to The BL.

Facebook noted that many of the fake accounts used in the latest campaign employed false profile photos that appeared to have been generated by artificial intelligence. Those accounts would post BL content in other Facebook groups while pretending to be Americans. Pro-Trump messages were often posted "at very high frequencies" and linked to off-platform sites belonging to the BL and The Epoch Times. The accounts and pages were managed by individuals in the US and Vietnam. Facebook said that it removed 610 accounts, 89 Facebook pages, 156 groups, and 72 Instagram accounts that were connected to the organization. Around 55 million accounts followed one of these Facebook pages and 92,000 followed at least one of the Instagram accounts. The organization spent nearly $9.5 million in advertisements, according to Facebook.

The House of Representatives voted to impeach President Donald J. Trump on Wednesday, marking the third time in the nation's history the House voted to impeach a sitting president. NBC News reports: Trump was impeached on two articles. The first vote, 230-197, was to impeach him for abuse of power and was almost entirely on party lines; it was followed quickly by a second 229-198 vote that the president obstructed Congress. One Democrat, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, who is running for president, voted "present" on both articles. Two Democrats, Reps. Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey and Collin Peterson of Minnesota, voted with Republicans against both articles of impeachment, while another Democrat, Rep. Jared Golden of Maine, voted yes on abuse of power and no on obstruction of Congress. No Republicans voted against Trump.

The trial in the GOP-controlled Senate on whether to remove the president will begin in early January. It is likely that Trump will be acquitted since a two-thirds majority is required for conviction and removal from office. "It doesn't really feel like we're being impeached," Trump said at a campaign rally minutes before the vote. "The country is doing better than ever before. We did nothing wrong. And we have tremendous support in the Republican party like we have never had before. Nobody has ever had this kind of support."

The impeachment vote centers around President Trump's call with Ukraine's leader Volodymyr Zelensky, urging him to contact Attorney General William Barr about opening an inquiry tied to Joseph R. Biden Jr.

Researchers at Valimail found that only 5% of the largest voting counties in the U.S. are protected against email impersonation and phishing attacks. TechCrunch reports: Researchers at Valimail, which has a commercial stake in the email security space, looked at the largest three electoral districts in each U.S. state, and found only 10 out of 187 domains were protected with DMARC, an email security protocol that verifies the authenticity of a sender's email and rejects fraudulent or spoofed emails. DMARC, when enabled and properly enforced, rejects fake emails that hackers design to spoof a genuine email address by sending to spam or bouncing it from the target's inbox altogether. Hackers often use spoofed emails to try to trick victims into opening malicious links from people they know.

But the research found that although DMARC is enabled on many domains, it's not properly enforced, rendering its filtering efforts largely ineffective. The researchers said 66% of the district election-related domains had no DMARC entry at all, while 28% had either a valid DMARC entry but no enforcement, or an invalid DMARC entry altogether. [...] The worry is that attackers could use the lack of DMARC to impersonate legitimate email addresses to send targeted phishing or malware in order to gain a foothold on election networks or launch attacks, steal data or delete it altogether, a move that would potentially disrupt the democratic process.

Google has stopped accepting political ads in Singapore months before a widely expected election. Reuters reports: In email correspondence between the Singapore Democratic Party and a senior Google public policy official, the tech firm said it "will not accept advertising regulated by the Code of Practice for Transparency of Online Political Advertisements." The new code of practice, part of a controversial 'fake news' law introduced in October, requires advertising intermediaries to maintain detailed records of political adverts and their sponsors and make those records available to authorities. The code applies to "all advertisement or paid content that can reasonably be regarded as being directed towards a political end." SDP said the "shocking policy" would deprive voters of information ahead of that ballot. "In an election with the media totally dominated by the state, alternative parties would have no ability to educate and inform the voters of Singapore in the run up to the elections if we are not able to use Google's advertising platforms in the first place," Paul Tambyah, chairman of SDP, said in the correspondence.

Reuters reports: In 2016, the U.S. Census Bureau faced a pivotal choice in its plan to digitize the nation's once-a-decade population count: build a system for collecting and processing data in-house, or buy one from an outside contractor. The bureau chose Pegasystems, reasoning that outsourcing would be cheaper and more effective. Three years later, the project faces serious reliability and security problems, according to Reuters interviews with six technology professionals currently or formerly involved in the census digitization effort. And its projected cost has doubled to $167 million -- about $40 million more than the bureau's 2016 cost projection for building the site in-house. The Pega-built website was hacked from IP addresses in Russia during 2018 testing of census systems, according to two security sources with direct knowledge of the incident. One of the sources said an intruder bypassed a "firewall" and accessed parts of the system that should have been restricted to census developers. "He got into the network," one of the sources said. "He got into where the public is not supposed to go." In a separate incident during the same test, an IP address affiliated with the census site experienced a domain name service attack, causing a sharp increase in traffic, according to one of the two sources and a third source with direct knowledge of the incident.

An anonymous reader writes: "Dutch prosecutors have asked a judge for a three-year prison sentence for a local politician who doubled as a hacker and breached the personal iCloud accounts of more than 100 women, stealing and then leaking sexually explicit photos and videos online," reports ZDNet. The hacker (VVD politician Mitchel van der K.) is believed to have been part of the Celebgate (TheFappening) movement. Between 2015 and 2017, van der K. used credentials leaked at other sites to hack into iCloud accounts belonging to acquaintances and Dutch celebrities, from where he stole nudes and sex tapes. Some he leaked online, some he kept for himself. Victims included acquaintances, but also local celebrities, such as Dutch YouTube star Laura Ponticorvo and Dutch field hockey star Fatima Moreira de Melo. After he was arrested, van der K. claimed he was forced to hack his victims by other hackers, an excuse which the prosecution quickly knocked down, pointing out that half of his victims were friends and acquaintances, and not celebrities that would be of interest to other hackers. Days before he was arrested, van der K. was also elected to his city's council, a position from which he resigned.

Two associate professors of communication at Clemson spent two years studying online propaganda and state-affiliated disinformation campaigns on social media. This week in Rolling Stone they explain how professional trolls share uplifting "Trojan horse" tweets meant to gain hundreds of thousands of followers, and then "use that following to spread messages promoting division, distrust, and doubt." Professional disinformation isn't spread by the account you disagree with -- quite the opposite. Effective disinformation is embedded in an account you agree with. The professionals don't push you away, they pull you toward them... The quality of Russia's work has been honed over several years and millions of social media posts. They have appeared on Instagram, Stitcher, Reddit, Google+, Tumblr, Medium, Vine, Meetup, and even Pokemon Go, demonstrating not only a nihilistic creativity, but also a ruthless efficiency in volume of production. Russia's Internet Research Agency (IRA) has been called a "troll farm," but they are undoubtedly a factory...

The factory doesn't stop. They attack issues from both sides, attempting to drive mainstream viewpoints in polar and extreme directions. In a free society, we must accept that bad actors will try to take advantage of our openness. But we need to learn to question our own and others' biases on social media. We need to teach -- to individuals of all ages -- that we shouldn't simply believe or repost anonymous users because they used the same hashtag we did, and neither should we accuse them of being a Russian bot simply because we disagree with their perspective. We need to teach digital civility. It will not only weaken foreign efforts, but it will also help us better engage online with our neighbors, especially the ones we disagree with...

Russia's goals are to further widen existing divisions in the American public and decrease our faith and trust in institutions that help maintain a strong democracy... Their work was never just about elections. Rather, the IRA encourages us to vilify our neighbor and amplify our differences because, if we grow incapable of compromising, there can be no meaningful democracy. Russia has dug in for a long campaign. So far, we're helping them win.
Their article includes specific examples from two accounts later suspended by Twitter.

It also notes that "consistent with past Russian activity, they attacked moderate politicians as a method of bolstering more polarizing candidates."

Just one-third of the 2020 U.S. presidential candidates are using an email security feature that could prevent a similar attack that hobbled the Democrats during the 2016 election. From a report: Out of the 21 presidential candidates in the race, according to Reuters, only seven Democrats are using and enforcing DMARC, an email security protocol that verifies the authenticity of a sender's email and rejects spoofed emails, which hackers often use to try to trick victims into opening malicious links from seemingly known individuals. It's a marked increase from April, where only Elizabeth Warren's campaign had employed the technology. Now, the Democratic campaigns of Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Michael Bloomberg, Amy Klobuchar, Cory Booker, Tulsi Gabbard and Steve Bullock have all improved their email security. The remaining candidates, including presidential incumbent Donald Trump, are not rejecting spoofed emails. Another seven candidates are not using DMARC at all.

mspohr quotes a report from The Guardian: Top Democrats on Tuesday proposed tough new privacy laws to rein in the U.S.'s tech companies after a series of scandals that have shaken confidence in the companies and exposed the personal data of millions of consumers. The effort, led by Senator Maria Cantwell, the top Democrat on the Senate commerce, science and transportation committee, aims to "provide consumers with foundational data privacy rights, create strong oversight mechanisms, and establish meaningful enforcement." The Consumer Online Privacy Rights Act (Copra) comes after a series of failed attempts to rein in the tech giants in the U.S.

The act resembles Europe's sweeping General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) legislation, passed in 2016. It would force tech companies to disclose the personal information they have collected, delete or correct inaccurate or incomplete information and allow consumers to block the sale of their information. The bill's sponsors are all Democrats and include presidential candidate Senator Amy Klobuchar. "Companies continue to profit off of the personal data they collect from Americans, but they leave consumers completely in the dark about how their personal information is being used," she said. "It's time for Congress to pass comprehensive privacy legislation."

schwit1 shares a report from The Age, a daily newspaper published in Australia: A Chinese spy has risked his life to defect to Australia and is now offering a trove of unprecedented inside intelligence on how China conducts its interference operations abroad. Wang "William" Liqiang is the first Chinese operative to ever blow his cover. He has revealed the identities of China's senior military intelligence officers in Hong Kong, as well as providing details of how they fund and conduct political interference operations in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Australia.

In interviews with The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and 60 Minutes, he has revealed in granular detail how Beijing covertly controls listed companies to fund intelligence operations, including the surveillance and profiling of dissidents and the co-opting of media organizations. [...] Mr Wang said he was part of an intelligence operation hidden within a Hong Kong-listed company, China Innovation Investment Limited (CIIL), which infiltrated Hong Kong's universities and media with pro-Chinese Communist Party operatives who could be activated to counter the democracy movement. He says he had personal involvement in an October 2015 operation to kidnap and abduct to the Chinese mainland a Hong Kong bookseller, Lee Bo, and played a role in a clandestine organization that also directed bashings or cyber attacks on Hong Kong dissidents. His handlers in China issued him a fake South Korean passport to gain entry to Taiwan and help China's efforts to systematically infiltrate its political system, including directing a "cyber army" and Taiwanese operatives to meddle in the 2018 municipal elections. Plans are underway to influence the 2020 presidential election - plans that partly motivated him to defect to Australia. Mr Wang is currently at an undisclosed location in Sydney pending formal protections from the Australian government. More information is expected to be revealed on Monday.

Plans to ensure patient safety as the nation transitioned to electronic health records have yet to come to fruition a decade later, according to a new report. From an investigation: In fall 2009, several dozen of the best minds in health information technology huddled at a hotel outside Washington, D.C., to discuss potential dangers of an Obama White House plan to spend billions of tax dollars computerizing medical records. The health data geeks trusted that transitioning from paper to electronic records would cut down on medical errors, help identify new cures for disease and give patients an easy way to track their health care histories. But after two days of discussions, the group warned that few safeguards existed to protect the public from possible consequences of rolling out the new technology so quickly. Because this software tracks the medicines people take and their vital signs, even a tiny error or omission, or a doctor's inability to access the file quickly, can be a matter of life or death. The experts at that September 2009 meeting, mainly members of the American Medical Informatics Association, or AMIA, agreed that safety should be a top priority as federal officials poured more than $30 billion into subsidies to wire up medical offices and hospitals nationwide. The group envisioned creating a national databank to track reports of deaths, injuries and near misses linked to issues with the new technology. It never happened.

Instead, plans for putting patient safety first -- and for building a comprehensive injury reporting and reviewing system -- have stalled for nearly a decade, because manufacturers of electronic health records (EHRs), health care providers, federal health care policy wonks, academics and Congress have either blocked the effort or fought over how to do it properly, an ongoing investigation by Fortune and Kaiser Health News shows. Over the past 10 years, the parties have squabbled over how best to collect injury data, over who has the power to require it, over who should pay for it, and over whether to make public damning findings and the names of those responsible for safety problems. In 2015, members of Congress derailed a long-planned EHR safety center, first by challenging the government's authority to create it and later by declining to fund it. A year later, Congress stripped the Food and Drug Administration of its power to regulate the industry or even to track malfunctions and injuries.

President Trump on Wednesday toured a Texas plant that makes high-end Apple computers, chatting with Apple's chief executive, Timothy D. Cook, and accepting a plate with the words "Assembled in USA." From a report: It was a pretty typical publicity event, until the end. Mr. Trump walked in front of the news cameras and took credit for the plant, suggesting it had opened that day. "For me, this is a very special day," he said. Mr. Cook stood next to him, stone-faced. The plant has been making Apple computers since 2013. Immediately after Mr. Trump's comments, Mr. Cook thanked the president and his staff. "I'm grateful for their support in pulling today off and getting us to this far. It would not be possible without them," he said. He did not correct the record. The moment was part of a bizarre afternoon in Texas, where the president played up a six-year-old factory as evidence of his three-year-old presidency's success in bringing manufacturing jobs back to the United States. It showed Mr. Trump's willingness to leverage his influence over American companies in his pitch to voters that he deserves another four years in the White House. And it illustrated the complicated position that Mr. Cook and other corporate executives find themselves in with this president, forced to stand silently by while he sometimes misleads about their businesses.

[...] On Wednesday, Mr. Trump called Mr. Cook a "very special person" because of his ability to create jobs. He turned to Mr. Cook and said, "What would you say about our economy compared to everybody else?" Mr. Cook replied, "I think we have the strongest economy in the world." "Strongest in the world," Mr. Trump said. The president then took questions on the impeachment inquiry and launched into a tirade against "the fake press." Mr. Cook stood silently nearby.