U.K. Parliament officials investigate cyberattack
British officials LONDON — were investigating a cyberattack Saturday on the country’s Parliament after discovering “unauthorized attempts to access parliamentary user accounts.”
A statement from the House of Commons said that as a precaution, remote email access for members has been disabled in order to protect the network from hackers. “As a result, some Members of Parliament and staff cannot access their email accounts outside of Westminster,” it said, adding that IT services at Parliament itself were working normally. It was not immediately clear how many people were affected or what the extent of the damage was. An email sent all those affected described a “sustained and determined attack on all parliamentary user accounts in an attempt to identify weak passwords,” according to the Guardian newspaper. “These attempts specifically were trying to gain access to our emails.” Last week, there were reports in The Times of London that the passwords of British Cabinet ministers, ambassadors and senior police officers were being sold online after Russian hacking groups gained access. According to The Times, the stolen data revealed the private login details of 1,000 British members of Parliament and parliamentary staff, 7,000 police employees and more than 1,000 Foreign Office officials. Chris Rennard, a Liberal Democrat member of the House of Lords, said on Twitter that urgent messages should be sent by text message because parliamentary emails might not work remotely. The National Cyber Security Center and the National Crime Agency were looking into the incident. Liam Fox, Britain’s International Trade Secretary, told ITV News that the attack was “a warning to everyone: We need more security and better passwords. You wouldn’t leave your door open at night.”
When SAN FRANCISCO — Wisconsin Republicans last redrew the state Legislature’s district boundaries, in 2011, they set off a multimillion-dollar legal battle over accusations of gerrymandering that last week was granted a potentially historic hearing by the Supreme Court.
Then there is California, which redrew its state legislative and congressional districts the same year with far less rancor.
California is the largest of a handful of states that are trying to minimize the partisanship in the almost invariably political act of drawing district lines. California has handed that task to the independent and politically balanced California Citizens Redistricting Commission, and Arizona has a somewhat similar commission. Florida has amended its Constitution to forbid partisanship in drawing new districts. Iowa has offloaded the job to the nonpartisan state agency that drafts bills and performs other services for legislators.
The trend has gained momentum in states like Oregon and Ohio, where voters have approved a new commission for redistricting for state seats — but not those in the House of Representatives — in 2021.
Still, on the whole, taking the politics out of map drawing is itself an act of political courage that many politicians, particularly those who benefit from district lines drawn to help their party, are unwilling to stomach.
Skeptics say that even nominally nonpartisan commissions can succumb to political calculation.
“An independent redistricting commission is only as independent as those who appoint it,” said Pamela Goodman, the president of the League of Women Voters of Florida.
But others say that if a populous and politically byzantine state like California can make an independent commission work, wringing partisanship and gerrymanders out of politics can be done anywhere.
Stan Forbes, an almond farmer and the owner of a bookshop in California’s agricultural heartland, is the chairman of the 14-member independent organization that draws the boundaries for California’s political districts.
“I don’t know if the political forces like us that much — they may curse us in their prayers at night,” he said. “But we have the best system if you want a nonpoliticized, nongerrymandered, public interest process.”
California’s commission
BIPARTISAN REDISTRICTING
States with bipartisan redistricting commissions: Alaska Arizona Arkansas California Colorado Hawaii Idaho Missouri Montana New Jersey Pennsylvania Washington was established in 2008 by a ballot initiative. It is made up of five Democrats, five Republicans and four members not affiliated with either party. Among the commission members are a lawyer, the owner of an insurance business, an engineer, a former director of the U.S. Census Bureau, professors and urban planners.
In 2011, the commission redrew what Forbes called “egregious” cases of gerrymandering, including one district that had grouped Democratic voters by stretching down the Pacific Coast and then inland 100 miles to Davis, a Democratic stronghold. The redrawn legislative boundaries followed the principle that “communities of interest” should not be broken up wherever possible. In some cases that meant not mixing urban residents with rural ones or uplanders with valley dwellers; it also meant grouping residents near Long Beach worried about pollution.
Michael Li, an expert on redistricting at the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, said that was as it should be.
“If you take a look at the legislative districts as a whole,” he said, “you should say, ‘Gosh, that looks like the state’ — not just Republicans and Democrats but the geography, the grouping of minorities. That’s what the framers wanted.”
What nonpartisan redistricting did not do, at least in California, was dent the majority party’s control of state and congressional offices. In California, where Democrats dominate, redistricting created a half-dozen newly competitive House seats, Forbes said. But Democrats actually picked up four seats and have held on to them since — a windfall that