A federal court in Boston has ruled that the government is not allowed to search travelers' phones or other electronic devices at the U.S. border without first having reasonable suspicion of a crime. From a report: That's a significant victory for civil liberties advocates, who say the government's own rules allowing its border agents to search electronic devices at the border without a warrant are unconstitutional. The court said that the government's policies on warrantless searches of devices without reasonable suspicion "violate the Fourth Amendment," which provides constitutional protections against warrantless searches and seizures. The case was brought by 11 travelers -- ten of which are U.S. citizens -- with support from the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who said border agents searched their smartphones and laptops without a warrant or any suspicion of wrongdoing or criminal activity. The border remains a bizarre legal grey area, where the government asserts powers that it cannot claim against citizens or residents within the United States but citizens and travelers are not afforded all of their rights as if they were on U.S. soil. The government has long said it doesn't need a warrant to search devices at the border.

Mozilla is calling on Google and Facebook to stop "microtargeting" political ads. "Political speech is critical to democratic discourse, but against the very real circumstances of organized disinformation and organic misinformation today, microtargeting keeps ideas from being debated in the open, and fiction parades as fact," Ashley Boyd, Mozilla's advocacy vice president, said in a statement. "Online platforms can take the important step toward quelling the manipulation by limiting political ads to a scale where they facilitate a public discourse." The Hill reports: Microtargeting, a method which uses consumer data and demographics to narrowly segment audiences, is used by political campaigns to specialize ads for different voting groups. The practice's critics include Federal Election Commission Chairwoman Ellen Weintraub, who wrote in a Washington Post op-ed that microtargeting makes it "easy to single out susceptible groups and direct political misinformation to them with little accountability, because the public at large never sees the ad." Mozilla's call follows reports that Facebook has considered restricting politicians' access to microtargeting.

Tekla Perry writes: Michael Kratsios, the fourth U.S. Chief Technology Officer, explains administration policies at the Fall Conference of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence -- and takes some tough questions from the audience. An exchange between Kratsios and Stanford's Eileen Donahoe hit on current hot topics, starting with the tension between the U.S. and China: Donahoe: "You talk a lot about unique U.S. ecosystem. In which aspect of AI is the U.S. dominant, and where is China challenging us in dominance?
Kratsios: "They are challenging us on machine vision. They have more data to work with, given that they have surveillance data."
Donahoe: "To what extent would you say the quantity of data collected and available will be a determining factor in AI dominance?"
Kratsios: "It makes a big difference in the short term. But we do research on how we get over these data humps. There is a future where you don't need as much data, a lot of federal grants are going to [research in] how you can train models using less data."

Donahoe turned the conversation to a different tension -- that between innovation and values.

Donahoe: "A lot of conversation yesterday was about the tension between innovation and values, and how do you hold those things together and lead in both realms."
Kratsios: "We recognized that the U.S. hadn't signed on to principles around developing AI. In May, we signed [the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development Principles on Artificial Intelligence], coming together with other Western democracies to say that these are values that we hold dear.
[Meanwhile,] we have adversaries around the world using AI to surveil people, to suppress human rights. That is why American leadership is so critical: We want to come out with the next great product. And we want our values to underpin the use cases."

A member of the audience pushed further:

"Maintaining U.S. leadership in AI might have costs in terms of individuals and society. What costs should individuals and society bear to maintain leadership?" Kratsios: "I don't view the world that way. Our companies big and small do not hesitate to talk about the values that underpin their technology. [That is] markedly different from the way our adversaries think. The alternatives are so dire [that we] need to push efforts to bake the values that we hold dear into this technology."

GitLab is considering blocking new hires from countries such as China and Russia over espionage fears. "There is a general train of thought that both Russian and Chinese intelligence agencies might use the same blueprint and plant agents or coerce GitLab staff into handing over data belonging to western companies," reports ZDNet. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report: Eric Johnson, VP of Engineering at GitLab, said discussions on banning new hires from the two countries began after enterprise customers expressed concerns about the geopolitical climate of the two countries. If approved, the hiring ban will apply to two positions; namely Site Reliability Engineer and Support Engineer, the two positions that handle providing tech support to GitLab's enterprise customers. Johnson said these two support staff positions have full access to customers' data, something that companies had an issue with, especially if tech support staff was to be located in countries like China and Russia, where they could be compromised or coerced by local intelligence services. Johnson said GitLab does not have "a technical way" to support data access permission systems for employees based on their country of origin. "Doing so would also force us to confront the possibility of creating a 'second class of citizens' on certain teams who cannot take part in 100% of their responsibilities," Johnson said.

The new "hiring ban" is not yet final. Open conversations on the topic started last month, and are scheduled to end November 6.

Facebook introduced a new brand Monday as the company faces calls from politicians and consumer advocates for the government to break it up into various pieces. NBC News reports: The company announced in a blog post that the new brand, which retains the name of the social network, would have a new logo to better indicate all the various products and services it now offers, including Instagram and WhatsApp. "Today, we're updating our company branding to be clearer about the products that come from Facebook," Antonio Lucio, the company's chief marketing officer, wrote in the blog post. "We're introducing a new company logo and further distinguishing the Facebook company from the Facebook app, which will keep its own branding."

"This brand change is a way to better communicate our ownership structure to the people and businesses who use our services to connect, share, build community and grow their audiences," Lucio wrote. The new logo features Facebook in capitalized letters with "custom typography." The company said the new brand would appear on Instagram, WhatsApp and its other offerings.

Yael Eisenstat, a visiting fellow at Cornell Tech in the Digital Life Initiative and a former elections integrity head at Facebook, CIA officer, and White House adviser, writes for the Washington Post: As the company continues to struggle with how to handle political content and as another presidential election approaches, it's clear that tinkering around the margins of advertising policies won't fix the most serious issues. The real problem is that Facebook profits partly by amplifying lies and selling dangerous targeting tools that allow political operatives to engage in a new level of information warfare. Its business model exploits our data to let advertisers custom-target people, show us each a different version of the truth and manipulate us with hyper-customized ads -- ads that, as of two weeks ago, can contain blatantly false and debunked information if they're run by a political campaign. As long as Facebook prioritizes profit over healthy discourse, they can't avoid damaging democracies.

Early in my time there, I dug into the question of misinformation in political advertising. Posting in a "tribe" (Facebook's internal collaboration platform), I asked our teams working on political advertising whether we should incorporate the same tools for political ads that other integrity teams at Facebook were developing to address misinformation in pages and organic posts. It was unclear to me why the company was applying different, siloed policies and tools across the platform. Most users do not differentiate organic content from ads -- as I clearly saw on a trip to India, where we were testing our ads-integrity products -- so why were we expecting users to understand that we applied different standards to different forms of content that all just appear in their news feeds?

The fact that we were taking money for political ads and allowing campaigns and other political organizations to target users based on the vast amounts of data we had gathered meant political ads should have an even higher bar for integrity than what people were posting in organic content. We verified advertisers to run political ads, giving them a check mark and a "paid for by" label, and I questioned if that gave the false impression that we were vouching for the validity of the content, boosting its perceived credibility even though we weren't checking any facts or ensuring that ads weren't spreading false information. Most of my colleagues agreed. People wanted to get this right. But above me, there was no appetite for my pushing, and I was accused of "creating confusion."

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has ardently defended Facebook's controversial political advertising policy hours after Twitter took a shot at its rival while announcing it will ban all political ads from its platform. From a report: "Although I've considered whether we should not carry [political] ads in the past, and I'll continue to do so, on balance so far I've thought we should continue," Zuckerberg told investors on a quarterly earnings call. "Ads can be an important part of voice - especially for candidates and advocacy groups the media might not otherwise cover so they can get their message into debates," he added. Facebook directed The Hill to Zuckerberg's remarks in response to an inquiry about Twitter's announcement. Zuckerberg and Facebook have been hit with a firestorm of criticism this month over its policy allowing politicians to lie in advertisements. For several weeks, Zuckerberg has engaged in an unusually public charm offensive as he seeks to defend Facebook's ad practices against critics who have accused the company of profiting off of and even encouraging political misinformation. Zuckerberg in the month of October offered interviews on Fox News and NBC, gave a public speech at Georgetown University, and testified before Congress about his view that Facebook should build policies to promote "free expression." Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey tore into those arguments with the series of tweets announcing his company's policy change.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: This week, the developer of the popular text- and code-editing software Notepad++ released a new version update. Nothing seemed particularly strange about it, except maybe the name: Notepad++ v7.8.1 is the "Free Uyghur" edition. In a blog post announcing the updated version, developer Don Ho writes about the plight of the Uyghur people, an ethnic minority in China that's faced persecution from the country's authoritarian government. China operates internment camps that are used to detain Uyghur people throughout the country's Xinjiang region.

Since the announcement, the software's GitHub "issues" page has been bombarded with spam, much of it in the Chinese language. "Stop sending meaningless political-related issues, it just makes you look like an idiot," reads one comment. Another one simply reads, "Bye ! Uninstall." There's a litany of curses, and one asks, "What do you know about China?" Others have moved in to criticize the Chinese government in response. Ho told The Verge that the software's dedicated site was also under a distributed-denial-of-service attack, but that it has been stopped by an anti-DDoS service provided by the site's host. Ho writes in the announcement that he anticipated potential pushback, saying "talking about politics is exactly what software and commercial companies generally try to avoid," but decided to take the step anyway. "The problem is," Ho writes in the announcement of the Free Uyghur edition, "if we don't deal with politics, politics will deal with us."

Twitter is planning to ban political ads from its service, the company announced Wednesday via a series of Tweets from its CEO Jack Dorsey. The ban will go into effect November 22. BuzzFeed News reports: Dorsey said the ban will cover ads about specific candidates and issues -- the broadest possible ban. The ban will also be global in nature, and not limited to the US. Some ads will be allowed to remain, including those encouraging people to vote. According to a Twitter spokesperson, news organizations are currently exempt from its rules on political advertising, and the company will release full details on exemptions next month.

In his Twitter thread, Dorsey took a swipe at Facebook's policy, noting that it is not credible to say "We're working hard to stop people from gaming our systems to spread misleading info, buuut if someone pays us to target and force people to see their political ad... well... they can say whatever they want!" He also poked at Facebook's argument that banning tweets will favor incumbents, giving challengers less voice. "Some might argue our actions today could favor incumbents," Dorsey said. "But we have witnessed many social movements reach massive scale without any political advertising. I trust this will only grow."

Google executives misled their own employees last week when they said a former top Department of Homeland Security official who had recently joined the company was "not involved in the family separation policy," government emails obtained under the Freedom of Information Act reveal. From a report: In fact, Miles Taylor, who served as deputy chief of staff and then chief of staff to former Homeland Security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, was involved in high-level discussions about immigration enforcement, helping to shape the department's narratives and talking points as one of Nielsen's trusted lieutenants. As Nielsen's deputy chief of staff, Taylor was included on some of the DHS secretary's emails and privy to her events schedule, often prepping his boss with reports and talking points ahead of public appearances between April and June 2018, when the family separation policy was in effect.

In one email obtained by BuzzFeed News, Taylor assisted Nielsen in preparing what he described as the "Protecting Children Narrative" -- the department's spin on a policy that horrified Americans when images of abandoned, caged migrant children in squalid camps emerged. Other emails from Nielsen's events planner show that he had been scheduled to participate in at least two weekly calls to "discuss Border Security and Immigration Enforcement" in June 2018. Two former DHS officials dismissed Google's claim that Taylor -- who last month joined the company as a government affairs and public policy manager advising on national security issues -- could have kept his hands clean from the policy.

The New York Times: The letter was aimed at Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive, and his top lieutenants. It decried the social network's recent decision to let politicians post any claims they wanted -- even false ones -- in ads on the site. It asked Facebook's leaders to rethink the stance. Facebook's position on political advertising is "a threat to what FB stands for," said the letter, which was obtained by The New York Times. "We strongly object to this policy as it stands." The message was written by Facebook's own employees. For the past two weeks, the text has been publicly visible on Facebook Workplace, a software program that the Silicon Valley company uses to communicate internally. More than 250 employees have signed the letter, according to three people who have seen it and who declined to be identified for fear of retaliation.

While the number of signatures on the letter was a fraction of Facebook's 35,000-plus work force, it was one sign of the resistance that the company is now facing internally over how it treats political ads. Many employees have been discussing Mr. Zuckerberg's decision to let politicians post anything they want in Facebook ads because those ads can go viral and spread misinformation widely. The worker dissatisfaction has spilled out across winding, heated threads on Facebook Workplace, the people said. For weeks, Facebook has been under attack by presidential candidates, lawmakers and civil rights groups over its position on political ads. But the employee actions -- which are a rare moment of internal strife for the company -- show that even some of its own workers are not convinced the political ads policy is sound. The dissent is adding to Facebook's woes as it heads into the 2020 presidential election season.

A small number of prolific U.S. Twitter users create the majority of tweets, and that extends to Twitter discussions around politics, according to a new report from the Pew Research Center out today. Building on an earlier study, which discovered that 10% of users created 80% of tweets from U.S. adults, the organization today says that just 6% of U.S. adults on Twitter account for 73% of tweets about national politics. TechCrunch reports: Though your experience on Twitter may differ, based on who you follow, the majority of Twitter users don't mention politics in their tweets. In fact, Pew found that 69% never tweeted about politics or tweeted about the topic just once. Meanwhile, across all tweets from U.S. adults, only 13% of tweets were focused on national politics. The study was based on 1.1 million public tweets from June 2018 to June 2019, Pew says (2,427 users participated).

Only 22% of U.S. adults even have a Twitter account, and of those, only 31% are defined as "political tweeters" -- that is, they've posted at least five tweets and have posted at least twice about politics during the study period. Within this broader group of political tweeters, just 6% are defined as "prolific" -- meaning they've posted at least 10 tweets and at least 25% of their tweets mention national politics. This small subset then goes on to create 73% of all tweets from U.S. adults on the subject of national politics. What's concerning about the data is that it's those who are either far to the left or far to the right who are the ones dominating the political conversation on Twitter's platform. A majority of the prolific political tweeters (55%) say they identify as either "very liberal" or "every conservative." Among the non-political tweeting crowd, only 28% chose a more polarized label for themselves. The report goes on to say that the polarized subgroup heavily leans left. "For example, those who strongly approve of President Trump generated 25% of all tweets mentioning national politics. But those who strongly disapprove of Trump generated 72% of all tweets mentioning national politics. (They're also responsible for 80% of all tweets from U.S. adults on the platform.)"

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: To transition the United States from fossil fuels to green energy, [Democratic Presidential candidate Andrew Yang] wants the government to invest $50 billion in the development of thorium molten-salt nuclear reactors -- and he wants them on the grid by 2027. "Nuclear isn't a perfect solution, but it's a solid solution for now," Yang's climate policy page reads. It calls out thorium molten-salt reactors in particular as "a technology we should invest in as a stopgap for any shortfalls we have in our renewable energy sources as we move to a future powered by renewable energy."

Thorium molten-salt reactors were first invented 60 years ago, but Yang appears to be the first presidential candidate to campaign on their promise to make nuclear energy safer, cleaner, and cheaper. Like all molten-salt reactors, they eschew solid rods of uranium-235 in favor of a liquid fuel made of thorium and a small amount of uranium dissolved in a molten salt. This approach to nuclear energy reduces proliferation risk, produces minimal amounts of short-lived toxic waste, and resists nuclear meltdowns. As in a conventional nuclear reactor, splitting the nuclei of a nuclear fuel -- a process known as fission -- produces heat, which gets used to turn a turbine to generate electricity. But the Cold War arms race meant the US was already in the business of enriching uranium for weapons, so nuclear reactors based on solid uranium took off while liquid reactors stalled. No country has built a commercial molten-salt reactor. As a result, many practical questions remain about the best way to design a thorium liquid-fuel reactor. Foremost among them, says Lin-Wen Hu, director of research and irradiation services at MIT's Nuclear Reactor Laboratory, is finding materials that can contain the corrosive molten salts. Furthermore, figuring out how to extract unwanted elements produced as thorium decays -- such as protactinium-233 -- from the fuel remains a major technical challenge. "The main advantage of thorium is that the waste has a half-life on the order of dozens, rather than thousands, of years," the report adds. "From a power-generation perspective, the better option for Yang and other Democratic candidates may be to invest in advanced uranium-based technologies. This includes molten-salt reactors, but also solid-fuel systems like next-generation fast reactors, which are safer and more efficient than previous nuclear reactor designs. In some designs, next-generation reactors can even use preexisting nuclear waste as fuel."

Heaven forbid a political candidate's Facebook account gets hacked. They might spread disinformation ... like they're already allowed to do in Facebook ads ... From a report: Today Facebook made a slew of announcements designed to stop 2020 election interference. "The bottom line here is that elections have changed significantly since 2016" and so has Facebook in response, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on a call with reporters. "We've gone from being on our back foot to proactively going after some of the biggest threats out there." One new feature is called Facebook Protect. By hijacking accounts of political candidates or their campaign staff, bad actors can steal sensitive information, expose secrets, and spread disinformation. So to safeguard these vulnerable users, Facebook is launching a new program with extra security they can opt into. Facebook Protect entails requiring two-factor authentication, and having Facebook monitor for hacking attempts like suspicious logins. Facebook can then inform the rest of an organization and investigate if it sees one member under attack.

U.S. presidential candidate Andrew Yang "is full of it," argues Slate's senior business and economics correspondent, challenging Yang's contention (in a debate Tuesday) that American jobs were being lost to automation: Following the debate, a "fact check" by the AP claimed that Yang was right and Warren wrong. "Economists mostly blame [manufacturing] job losses on automation and robots, not trade deals," it stated. But this was incorrect. No such consensus exists, and if anything, the evidence heavily suggests that trade has been the bigger culprit in recent decades. All of which points to a broader issue: Yang's schtick about techno doom may be well-intentioned, but it is largely premised on BS, and is adding to the widespread confusion about the impact of automation on the economy.

Yang is not pulling his ideas out of thin air. Economists have been debating whether automation or trade is more responsible for the long-term decline of U.S. factory work for a while, and it's possible to find experts on both sides of the issue. After remaining steady for years, the total number of U.S. manufacturing jobs suddenly plummeted in the early 2000s -- from more than 17 million in 2000 to under 14 million in 2007... [But] America hasn't just lost manufacturing workers; as Susan Houseman of the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research notes, the number of factories also declined by around 22 percent between 2000 and 2014, which isn't what you'd expect if assembly workers were just being replaced by machines. In a 2017 paper, meanwhile, economists Daron Acemoglu of MIT and Pascual Restrepo of Boston University concluded that the growth of industrial robots in the U.S. since 1990 could only explain between between 360,000 and 670,000 job losses. By comparison, the proof placing blame on trade and China is much stronger. Justin Pierce of the Federal Reserve Board and Peter Schott of Yale have found evidence that the U.S.'s decision to grant the People's Republic permanent normal trade relations in 2000 led to declines in American jobs...

New technology will change the economy and the way people work. It already is. But those shifts will be more complex than Yang admits and probably won't look like the wave of mass unemployment that he and his like-minded supporters tend to envision... It's not just unrealistic. It's lazy. When you buy the sci-fi notion that technology is simply a disembodied force making humanity obsolete and that there's little that can be done about it, you stop thinking about ideas that will actually prevent workers from being screwed over by the forces of globalization or new tech. By prophesying imaginary problems, you ignore the real ones.

For the "Privacy Project" newsletter of the New York Times, opinion writer Charlie Warzel interviewed U.S. presidential candidate Andrew Yang. Their far-ranging conversation covered everything from whether Facebook should be able to run political ads to his proposed Department of the Attention Economy: Andrew Yang: I was talking to a researcher recently and she described a concept called data dignity, which I thought really says it all. Right now we're being systematically deprived of our dignity and we think it is fine because we're getting these incredible services. Perhaps that worked in the early stages of the internet. But now we're waking up to the fact that the trade is much more serious and profound than we originally realized... I think we should be getting paid in a data dividend. Every time we post a photo or interact with a social media company we're putting information out there and that information should still be ours...

We've become like rats in a maze where we're constantly hit by messages from these companies know everything about us. They know more about us than our families do. We're responding to stimuli and we think we're making choices. But it's because we've shared so much over time that they have a keen sense of what we want. There's something fundamental at stake here, which is: What does human agency look like? What are our rights as citizens?
Yang also points out that when it comes to making things better, "it's not like individual consumers can band together to make this happen. Government needs to be a counterweight to the massive power and information inequities between us and the technology companies."

Yang also says people would be less desperate to sell their data if they were receiving his proposed Universal Basic Income -- but "if individuals want to share their data or information or even their private lives with other people, then that's their prerogative."

"Cyber-espionage operations from Cozy Bear, a threat actor believed to work for the Russian government, continued undetected for the past years by using malware families previously unknown to security researchers," reports BleepingComputer -- citing a surprisingly detailed report: Relying on stealthy communication techniques between infected systems and the command and control servers, the group managed to keep their activity under the radar for a long time. Cyber-espionage campaigns that likely started in 2013, collectively named "Operation Ghost," have been attributed to this group, and continued through 2019...

Researchers at ESET tracking this threat actor found at least three victims of Operation Ghost, all being European Ministries of Foreign Affairs including the Washington DC embassy of a European Union country. The victim count is likely larger but identifying them is difficult because the threat actor uses unique command and control infrastructure for each target.
The report notes the group used sites like Reddit, Twitter, and Imgur to deliver the URLs for some command-and-control servers, along with information hidden in images. And another stage of its malware platform used an even more robust site for its command-and-control server: Dropbox.

GitLab, a San-Francisco provider of hosted git software, recently changed its company handbook to declare that it won't ban potential customers on "moral/value grounds," and that employees should not discuss politics at work. The Register reports: The policy addition, created by co-founder and CEO Sid Sijbrandij and implemented as a git pull request, was merged (with no approval required) about two weeks ago. It was proposed to clarify that GitLab is committed to doing business with "customers with values that are incompatible with our own values." Such a declaration could run afoul of legal boundaries in some circumstances. While workers have no constitutional speech protection in the context of their employment, federal labor law requires that employees be allowed to discuss the terms and conditions of their employment and possible unlawful conduct like harassment, discrimination, and safety violations.

But it's perhaps understandable given how, over the past few years, workers in the tech industry have become more vocal in objecting to business deals with entities deemed to be immoral or work that conflicts with declared or presumed values. Sijbrandij amended his company's handbook to state: "We do not discuss politics in the workplace and decisions about what customer to serve might get political." And what reason does Sijbrandij's pull request provide to support this position? It says, "Efficiency is one of our values and vetting customers is time consuming and potentially distracting."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: While the 2020 U.S. presidential elections have lawmakers on edge over AI-generated fake videos, a new study by Netherlands-based deepfake-detection outfit Deeptrace shows that the main victims today are women. According to Deeptrace, deepfake videos have exploded in the past year, rising from 8,000 in December 2018 to 14,678 today. And not surprisingly for the internet, nearly all of the material is pornography, which accounts for 96% of the deepfake videos it's found online. The fake videos have been viewed 134 million times.

The numbers suggest deepfake porn is still niche but also growing quickly. Additionally, 90% of the fake content depicted women from the U.S., UK, and Canada, while 2% represented women from South Korea and 2% depicted women from Taiwan. "Deepfake pornography is a phenomenon that exclusively targets and harms women," the company notes. That small number of non-pornographic deepfake videos it analyzed on YouTube mostly contained (61%) synthesized male subjects. According to Henry Ajder, a researcher at Deeptrace, currently most of the deepfake porn involves famous women. But he reckons the threat to all women is likely to increase as it becomes less computationally expensive to create deepfakes. As for the political threat, there actually aren't that many cases where deepfakes have changed a political outcome.

The United States carried out a secret cyber operation against Iran in the wake of the Sept. 14 attacks on Saudi Arabia's oil facilities, which Washington and Riyadh blame on Tehran, two U.S. officials have told Reuters. From the report: The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the operation took place in late September and took aim at Tehran's ability to spread "propaganda." One of the officials said the strike affected physical hardware, but did not provide further details. The attack highlights how President Donald Trump's administration has been trying to counter what it sees as Iranian aggression without spiraling into a broader conflict.

Asked about Reuters reporting on Wednesday, Iran's Minister of Communications and Information Technology Mohammad Javad Azari-Jahromi said: "They must have dreamt it," Fars news agency reported. The U.S. strike appears more limited than other such operations against Iran this year after the downing of an American drone in June and an alleged attack by Iran's Revolutionary Guards on oil tankers in the Gulf in May. The United States, Saudi Arabia, Britain, France and Germany have publicly blamed the Sept. 14 attack on Iran, which denied involvement in the strike. The Iran-aligned Houthi militant group in Yemen claimed responsibility. Publicly, the Pentagon has responded by sending thousands of additional troops and equipment to bolster Saudi defenses -- the latest U.S. deployment to the region this year.