Mystical Mandate.

Kamala to the Court.

1. The United States and its European allies appear on the cusp of restoring the deal that limited Iran’s nuclear program, Biden administration officials said on Monday, but cautioned that it is now up to the new government in Tehran to decide whether, after months of negotiations, it is willing to dismantle much of its nuclear production equipment in return for sanctions relief. Speaking to reporters in Washington, a senior State Department official signaled that negotiations had reached a point where political leaders needed to decide whether they would agree to key elements of an accord that would essentially return to the 2015 deal that President Donald J. Trump discarded four years ago, over the objections of many of his key advisers. (Source: nytimes.com)

2. For someone with a deeply scientific job, Gil Herrera has a nearly mystical mandate: Look into the future and then shape it, at the level of strange quantum physics and inextricable math theorems, to the advantage of the United States. Mr. Herrera is the newly minted leader of the National Security Agency’s Research Directorate. The directorate, like the rest of the NSA, has a dual mission: secure American systems and spy on the rest of the world. The budget is classified, a secret among secrets, but the NSA is one of the world’s largest spy agencies by any measure and Herrera’s directorate is the entire US intelligence community’s biggest in-house research and development arm. The directorate must come up with solutions to problems that are not yet real, in a world that doesn’t yet exist. In his first interview since getting the job, Herrera lays out the tech—and threats—his group will now be focusing on. Read the rest. (Source: technologyreview.com)

3. FBI Director Christopher Wray: “When we tally up what we see in our investigations, over 2,000 of which are focused on the Chinese government trying to steal our information or technology, there’s just no country that presents a broader threat to our ideas, innovation, and economic security than China. The Chinese government steals staggering volumes of information and causes deep, job-destroying damage across a wide range of industries, so much so that we’re constantly opening new cases to counter their intelligence operations about every 12 hours. What makes the Chinese government’s strategy so insidious is the way it exploits multiple avenues at once, and often in seemingly innocuous ways. They identify key technologies to target. Their “Made in China 2025” plan, for example, lists 10 broad ones, the keys to economic success in the coming century, spanning industries like robotics, green energy production and vehicles, aerospace, and biopharma. Then, they throw every tool in their arsenal at stealing the technology to succeed in those areas.” A transcript of his remarks, delivered yesterday at the Ronald Reagan Library, is here. (Source: fbi.gov)