I had to Wikipedia the memorandum to even know what it was, but wasn't Obama president in 2014 when Russia first breached it? Asking honestly, was that not a crucial failure but Biden's response (or lack of one) in 2022 was crucial?
Right, and this fine is somewhat like fining an individual $0.10 for jaywalking. They'll probably decide it was worth the risk and keep doing the illegal thing, like Apple in this case or HSBC with lax anti-money-laundering compliance. The point is that these things won't be deterred until the people responsible are at risk of going to prison, or doing something else they're not going to gladly write-off as a cost of business.
This is very interesting. I have mixed feelings about focusing on these types of things too much, because I don't want to accept the premise that we can stop everything if we just try hard enough. But it can at least demonstrate that we should think hard before making further compromises of our values, if we can't even properly handle the capabilities we currently have.
So then low-paid hotel night-clerks are part of the front lines of the intelligence services. I just rented a hotel room with no reservation in the US a few nights ago. I gave ID, credit card, and car's license plate number. I was like 80% sure I had my license plate number memorized, but didn't feel like going outside to check, so I just wrote what I thought it was (without even indicating which US state it was from, I realized later) because I figured it didn't matter if they weren't going to verify it. Hopefully my memory was right, or it's a good thing my ID was not a convincing fake and that I'm not a terrorist, because the clerk would have failed to feed Big Brother good data even if there was a real-time national system to enter it into.
After writing that, I realized your "tracking license plates" may have referred to automated plate scanners. I think it would still be too easy to fake or mislead that, and it's going to cost a lot to deploy everywhere. After they are in every conceivable public location, another attack will happen and somebody will write, "if we had just known X car was in Y private house's garage..." and now we have to put surveillance equipment in every home, or concede that we're founded on ideas that preclude surveillance that intrusive and there will be times when that prevents law enforcement or national security.