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For months, the names of Michael Horowitz and John Durham have figured in the pounding rhythms of right-wing media in which a heroically afflicted president faces down his perfidious enemies. A steady drumbeat of reports from Fox News, echoed by President Trump and Republican loyalists in Congress, proclaimed these two obscure Justice Department officials would get to the bottom of an alleged conspiracy against the Trump presidency.

They would, in Trumps words, investigate the investigators. It was oh so promising.

I will tell you this, Trump blustered on October 25. I think youre going to see a lot of really bad things, he said. I leave it all up to the attorney general and I leave it all up to the people that are working with the attorney general who I dont know. I think youll see things that nobody wouldve believed.

Horowitz, as the DOJ inspector general, had the narrower assignment. He was tasked with investigating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants issued to intercept the communications of Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. Horowitz had to answer the question: Was Page targeted for political reasons, perhaps based on the famous Steele Dossier?

Durham, a senior U.S. attorney in Connecticut, has a broader brief: to review the FBIs decision to open an investigation of the Trump campaigns contacts with Russians in 2015. Durham was selected for the job by Barr.

For those inclined to believe Fox News and the president, the deep state cabal that allegedly targeted Trump was running scared. In early October, Fox News reported that Barr and Durham traveled to Italy recently to talk to law enforcement officials there about the probe and have also had conversations with officials in the U.K. and Australia about the investigation. From this report, the Daily Caller imaginatively extrapolated that Durhams probe had expanded to include looking at the activities of foreign intelligence agencies. (One British official told the Independent that Barr and his minions asked, in quite robust terms, for help in doing a hatchet job on their own intelligence services.) On October 22, the Washington Examiner said Durham was scrutinizing four key figures; the Spectator, a right-wing British magazine, claimed former CIA director John Brennan was in Durhams crosshairs.

And so on.

"Things that nobody wouldve believed"

Trumps words, ironically, are coming true. Horowitz, it is now reliably reported, found that the Trump/Fox News talking points about a deep state conspiracy against Trump are, in fact, things that nobody wouldve believed.

Horowitzs report, says USA Today, is expected to conclude the FBI was justified in launching its two-year inquiry into the Trump campaign and possible ties to Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

The Washington Post reports that Durham has already disappointed Trump. In the course of Horowitzs investigation, Durham declined to endorse one key Republican talking point: that one witness, Joseph Mifsud, was actually a CIA or FBI agent deployed to undermine and defeat Trumps presidential bid.

Durham, according to the Post, has said he could not offer evidence to the Justice Departments inspector general to support the suspicions of some conservatives that the case was a setup by American intelligence. (The Post describes its source as people familiar with the matter.)

Horowitzs Letter

Those pundits expected Horowitz to side with the president could be detained by mere facts, no matter how public. Remember a couple of hundred news cycles ago mid-October when right-wing media was filibustering about the identity of the CIA whistleblower who first brought Trumps Ukraine pressure campaign to light?

At the time, Horowitz was engaged in a more substantive matter. As inspector general, Horowitz played a leading role in an extraordinary letter, signed by about 70 inspector generals, about the Justice Departments handling of the whistleblowers allegation. Although the letter never mentioned the attorney generals name, its message was a broad rebuke of Barr.

The legal question was far too intricate to generate pleasurable repartee on Twitter. The whistleblower complained in August to the inspector general in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). The DNI is legally bound to pass to Congress only whistleblower complaints of urgent concern. Joseph Maguire, the acting director of national intelligence, passed the buck and asked the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) for guidance. In a secret memo, dated September 3, the OLC decided the whistleblowers complaint was not an urgent matter that had to be passed to Congress.

The OLC, beholden to Barr, took the position that there was no need to tell Congress of the possibility that Trump was withholding congressionally appropriated funds from the beleaguered Ukraine armed forces in order to force the Ukraine president to investigate Joe Bidens son. The legal logic was fallacious and tortured.

Horowitzs name topped the list of roughly 70 inspectors general who declared:

the OLC opinion [written at Barrs behest] could seriously impair whistleblowing and deter individuals in the intelligence community and throughout the government from reporting government waste, fraud, abuse, and misconduct.

Of course, the letter was a dud on social media, cable TV, and Fox News. Who cares what a bunch of bureaucrats in Washington think? Horowitz, the hoped-for savior of Trump, had rebuked his boss, along with almost six dozen other senior civil servants in public. His real-world actions were ignored by conservative news outlets hyping imaginative reports on his investigation.

The question

Will John Durham follow Barrs lead? Or Horowitzs?

The modus operandi of this administration is that when they cannot dismiss somebody elses fact-based conclusions, they create a parallel narrative, Joel Brenner, a former inspector general at the National Security Agency in the George W. Bush administration, told USA Today.

What kind of narrative will Durham write?

One clue can be heard in The Report, a new movie starring Adam Driver about the Senate Intelligence Committees 2014 report on torture. The name Durham is heard exactly once in the movie. And yes, it is a reference to the same John Durham.

Durham is a career Justice Department prosecutor in Connecticut. In 2009, Attorney General Eric Holder assigned him to investigate the CIAs torture program. It was a delicate assignment. On the one side, he had to poke into the dirty business of a $15 billion-a-year agency that believed it had legal and presidential sanction for enhanced interrogation techniques. On the other side, he was working for a popular new president who said the program was abhorrent and a host of lawyers who said it might well be criminal.

Durham, in short, walked into a legal and political minefield. Two years later, he emerged unscathed with a supple, if not evasive, reading of the law. His investigation exonerated the CIA on 99 out of 101 incidents of torture.

Whatever you make of Durhams report legally and morally, it was politically adroit. The report pleased Obama and Holder, who dodged the need to take on the barons of the national security agencies. His report pleased the CIA, which dodged the bullet of indictments of senior officials who had approved the torture regime, including John Brennan. As a narrative, Durhams torture report shows that he implicitly shares the worldview of Brennan and other senior national security managers.

Hes also a career prosecutor sure to consider all the facts brought to his attention.

Trump was enraged and threatened by national security leaks, even before he took office. Did Brennan et al commit any technical violations of the Espionage Act in talking to reporters about the president-elects Russian contacts? Quite possibly. Would John Durham go out on a legal limb to prosecute former top U.S. officials on behalf of Barr and Trump, who will be gone from Washington in five years at the maximum? That seems highly unlikely.

As Trump sails into the high seas of a Senate impeachment trial, Durhams report on the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation is not likely to be a lifeline.

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Why John Durham won't save Trump either - Salon

David Bacon, senior software engineer in Googles quantum lab: Quantum computers do computations in parallel universes. This by itself isnt useful. U only get to exist in 1 universe at a time! The trick: quantum computers dont just split universes, they also merge universes. And this merge can add and subtract those other split universes.

David Reilly, principal researcher and director of the Microsoft quantum computing lab in Sydney, Australia: A quantum machine is a kind of analog calculator that computes by encoding information in the ephemeral waves that comprise light and matter at the nanoscale. Quantum entanglement likely the most counterintuitive thing around holds it all together, detecting and fixing errors.

Daniel Lidar, professor of electrical and computer engineering, chemistry, and physics and astronomy at the University of Southern California, with his daughter Nina, in haiku:

Quantum computerssolve some problems much fasterbut are prone to noise

Superpositions:to explore multiple pathsto the right answer

Interference helps:cancels paths to wrong answersand boosts the right ones

Entanglement makesclassical computers sweat,QCs win the race

Scott Aaronson, professor of computer science at the University of Texas at Austin: A quantum computer exploits interference among positive and negative square roots of probabilities to solve certain problems much faster than we think possible classically, in a way that wouldnt be nearly so interesting were it possible to explain in the space of a tweet.

Alan Baratz, executive vice president of research and development at D-Wave Systems: If were honest, everything we currently know about quantum mechanics cant fully describe how a quantum computer works. Whats more important, and even more interesting, is what a quantum computer can do: A.I., new molecules, new materials, modeling climate change

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This Week in Tech: What on Earth Is a Quantum Computer? - The New York Times

BURNABY, British Columbia, Dec. 09, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- D-Wave Systems Inc., the leader in quantum computing systems, software, and services, today announced that Dr. Alan Baratz will assume the role of chief executive officer (CEO), effective January 1, 2020. Baratz joined D-Wave in 2017 and currently serves as the chief product officer and executive vice president of research and development for D-Wave. He takes over from the retiring CEO, Vern Brownell.

Baratzs promotion to CEO follows the launch of Leap, D-Waves quantum cloud service, in October 2018, and comes in advance of the mid-2020 launch of the companys next-generation quantum system, Advantage.

Baratz has driven the development, delivery, and support of all of D-Waves products, technologies, and applications in recent years. He has over 25 years of experience in product development and bringing new products to market at leading technology companies and software startups. As the first president of JavaSoft at Sun Microsystems, Baratz oversaw the growth and adoption of the Java platform from its infancy to a robust platform supporting mission-critical applications in nearly 80 percent of Fortune 1000 companies. He has also held executive positions at Symphony, Avaya, Cisco, and IBM. He served as CEO and president of Versata, Zaplet, and NeoPath Networks, and as a managing director at Warburg Pincus LLC. Baratz holds a doctorate in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

I joined D-Wave to bring quantum computing technology to the enterprise. Now more than ever, I am convinced that making practical quantum computing available to forward-thinking businesses and emerging quantum developers through the cloud is central to jumpstarting the broad development of in-production quantum applications, said Baratz, chief product officer and head of research and development. As I assume the CEO role, Ill focus on expanding the early beachheads for quantum computing that exist in manufacturing, mobility, new materials creation, and financial services into real value for our customers. I am honored to take over the leadership of the company and work together with the D-Wave team as we begin to deliver real business results with our quantum computers.

The company also announced that CEO Vern Brownell has decided to retire at the end of the year in order to spend more time at his home in Boston with his family. Baratz will become CEO at that time. During Brownells tenure, D-Wave developed four generations of commercial quantum computers, raised over $170 million in venture funding, and secured its first customers, including Lockheed Martin, Google and NASA, and Los Alamos National Laboratory. Brownell will continue to serve as an advisor to the board.

There are very few moments in your life when you have the opportunity to build an entirely new market. My 10 years at D-Wave have been rich with breakthroughs, like selling the first commercial quantum computer. I am humbled to have been a part of building the quantum ecosystem, said Brownell, retiring D-Wave CEO. Alan has shown tremendous leadership in our technology and product development efforts, and I am working with him to transition leadership of the entire business. This is an exciting time for quantum computing and an exciting time for D-Wave. I cant imagine a better leader than Alan at the helm for the next phase of bringing practical quantum computing to enterprises around the world.

With cloud access and the development of more than 200 early applications, quantum computing is experiencing explosive growth. We are excited to recognize Alans work in bringing Leap to market and building the next-generation Advantage system. And as D-Wave expands their Quantum-as-a-Service offerings, Alans expertise with growing developer communities and delivering SaaS solutions to enterprises will be critical for D-Waves success in the market, said Paul Lee, D-Wave board chair. I want to thank Vern for his 10 years of contributions to D-Wave. He was central in our ability to be the first to commercialize quantum computers and has made important contributions not only to D-Wave, but also in building the quantum ecosystem.

About D-Wave Systems Inc.D-Wave is the leader in the development and delivery of quantum computing systems, software, and services and is the worlds first commercial supplier of quantum computers. Our mission is to unlock the power of quantum computing for the world. We do this by delivering customer value with practical quantum applications for problems as diverse as logistics, artificial intelligence, materials sciences, drug discovery, cybersecurity, fault detection, and financial modeling. D-Waves systems are being used by some of the worlds most advanced organizations, including Volkswagen, DENSO, Lockheed Martin, USRA, USC, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. With headquarters near Vancouver, Canada, D-Waves US operations are based in Palo Alto, CA and Bellevue, WA. D-Wave has a blue-chip investor base including PSP Investments, Goldman Sachs, BDC Capital, DFJ, In-Q-Tel, BDC Capital, PenderFund Capital, 180 Degree Capital Corp., and Kensington Capital Partners Limited. For more information, visit: http://www.dwavesys.com.

Contact D-Wave Systems Inc.dwave@launchsquad.com

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D-Wave Announces Promotion of Dr. Alan Baratz to CEO - GlobeNewswire

Making fast and powerful quantum computing available through the cloud can enable tasks to be processed millions of times faster, and could shape lives and businesses as we know it. For example, applications using quantum computing could reduce or prevent traffic congestion, cybercrimes, and cancer. However, reaching the quantum supremacy landmark doesnt mean that Google can take its foot off the gas. Rather, the company has thrown down the gauntlet and the race to commercialize quantum computing is on. Delivering this killer technology is still an uphill battle to harness the power of highly fickle machines and move around quantum bits of information, which is inherently error-prone.

To deliver quantum cloud services, whether for commercial or academic research, Google must tie together units of quantum information (qubits) and wire data, which is part of every action and transaction across the entire IT infrastructure. If quantum cloud services get to the big league, it will still rely on traffic flows based on wire data to deliver value to users. This raises a conundrum for IT and security professionals who must assure services and deliver a flawless user experience. On one hand, the quantum cloud service solves a million computations in parallel and in real time. On the other hand, the results are delivered through wire data across a cloud, SD-WAN, or 5G network. It does not matter if a quantum computer today or tomorrow can crank out an answer 100 million times faster than a regular computer chip if an application that depends on it experiences performance problems or a threat actor is lurking in your on-premises data centre or penetrated the IT infrastructure first and last lines of defence.

No matter what the quantum computing world will look like in the future, IT teams such as NetOps and SecOps will still need to use wire data to gain end-to-end visibility into their on-premises data centres and cloud environment. Wire data is used to fill the visibility gap and see what others cant; to gain actionable intelligence to detect cyber-attacks or quickly solve service degradations. Quantum computing may increase speed, but it also adds a new dimension of infrastructure complexity and the potential for something breaking anywhere along the service delivery path. With that said, reducing risk therefore requires removing service delivery blind spots. A proven way to do that is by turning wire data into smart data to cut through infrastructure complexity and gain visibility without borders. When that happens, the IT organization will fully understand with precise accuracy the issues impacting service performance and security.

In the rush to embrace quantum computing, wire data therefore cannot, and should not, be ignored. Wire data can be turned into contextually, useful smart data. With a smart data platform, the IT organization can help make quantum computing a success by protecting user experience across different industries including automotive, manufacturing and healthcare. Therefore, while Google is striving for high quality qubits and blazing new quantum supremacy trails, success ultimately relies on using smart data for service assurance and security in an age of infinite devices, cloud applications and exponential scalability.

Ron Lifton, Senior Enterprise Solutions Manager, NETSCOUT

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Quantum supremacy is here, but smart data will have the biggest impact - Quantaneo, the Quantum Computing Source

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As a new decade approaches, we are in a state of technological flux across many spectrums. One area to take note of is quantum computing. We are starting to evolve beyond classical computing into a new data era called quantum computing. It is envisioned that quantum computing (still in a development stage) will accelerate us into the future by impacting the landscape of artificial intelligence and data analytics. The quantum computing power and speed will help us solve some of the biggest and most complex challenges we face as humans.

Gartner describes quantum computing as: [T]he use of atomic quantum states to effect computation. Data is held in qubits (quantum bits), which have the ability to hold all possible states simultaneously. Data held in qubits is affected by data held in other qubits, even when physically separated. This effect is known as entanglement. In a simplified description, quantum computers use quantum bits or qubits instead of using binary traditional bits of ones and zeros for digital communications.

There is an additional entanglement relating to quantum, and that is its intersection with the Internet of Things (IoT). Loosely defined, the Internet of Things (IoT) refers to the general idea of things that are readable, recognizable, locatable, addressable, and/or controllable via the Internet. It encompasses devices, sensors, people, data, and machines and the interactions between them. Business Insider Intelligence forecasted that by 2023, consumers, companies and governments will install 40 billion IoT devices globally.

As we rapidly continue to evolve into the IoT and the new digital economy, both edge devices and data are proliferating at amazing rates. The challenge now is how do we monitor and ensure quality service of the IoT? Responsiveness, scalability, processes, and efficiency are needed to best service any new technology or capability. Especially across trillions of sensors.

Specifically, quantum technologies will influence: optimization of computing power, computing models, network latency, interoperability, artificial intelligence (human/computer interface), real-time analytics and predictive analytics, increased storage and data memory power, secure cloud computing, virtualization, and the emerging 5G telecommunications infrastructure. For 5G, secure end-to end communications are fundamental and quantum encryption (which generates secure codes) may be the solution for rapidly growing IoT connectivity.

Security of the IoT is a paramount issue. Currently cryptographic algorithms are being used to help secure the communication (validation and verification) in the IoT. But because they rely on public key schemes, their encryption could be broken by sophisticated hackers using quantum computers in the not so distant future.

On the other side of the coin, quantum computing has the ability to create an almost un-hackable network of devices and data. The need to securely encrypt and protect IoT connected devices and power them with exponential speed and analytical capabilities is an imperative for both government and the private sector.

As quantum computing and IoT merge, there will also be an evolving new ecosystem of policy Issues. These include, ethics, interoperability protocols, cybersecurity, privacy/surveillance, complex autonomous systems, best commercial practices.

As quantum computing capabilities advance, we should act now to prepare IoT for the quantum world. There are many areas to explore in research and development and eventually implementation. The coming decade will provide both imperatives and opportunities to explore quantum implications.

Chuck Brooks is a globally recognized thought leader and evangelist for Cybersecurity and Emerging Technologies. LinkedIn named Chuck as one of The Top 5 Tech People to Follow on LinkedIn. He was named by Thompson Reuters as a Top 50 Global Influencer in Risk, Compliance, and by IFSEC as the #2 Global Cybersecurity Influencer in 2018. He is also a Cybersecurity Expert for The Network at the Washington Post, Visiting Editor at Homeland Security Today, and a Contributor to FORBES.

Chuck Brooks, is also Chair of the IoT and Quantum Computing Committee of Quantum Security Alliance. Quantum Security Alliance was formed to bring academia, industry, researchers, and US government entities together to identify, define, collaborate, baseline, standardize and protect sovereign countries, society, and individuals from the far-reaching impacts of Quantum Computing.

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Quantum Trends And The Internet of Things - Forbes