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Terrorism2019: Global Terrorism Overview
The new Global Terrorism Overview highlights trends in worldwide terrorism in 2019. In 2019, there were nearly 8,500 terrorist attacks around the world, which killed more than 20,300 people, including 5,460 perpetrators and 14,840 victims. 2019 was the fifth consecutive year of declining global terrorism since terrorist violence peaked in 2014 at nearly 17,000 attacks and more than 44,000 total deaths. The total number of terrorist attacks worldwide decreased 50 percent between 2014 and 2019, and the total number of deaths decreased 54 percent.
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ExtremismHateful Extremists Have Been Exploiting the Current Pandemic
The U.K. Commission for Countering Extremism (CCE) has published a report Thursday, looking at the way in which extremists have sought to exploit the current pandemic. The CCE say that the government needs to ensure that their response to dealing with COVID-19 and future crises takes into account the significant threat of hateful extremism and the dangerous narratives spread by conspiracy theories.
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SurveillanceLarge-Scale Facial Recognition Is Incompatible with a Free Society
In the U.S., tireless opposition to state use of facial recognition algorithms has recently won some victories. Outside the U.S., however, the tide is heading in the other direction. To decide whether to expand or limit the use of facial recognition technology, nations will need to answer fundamental questions about the kind of people, and the kind of society, they want to be. Face surveillance is based on morally compromised research, violates our rights, is harmful, and exacerbates structural injustice, both when it works and when it fails. Its adoption harms individuals, and makes our society as a whole more unjust, and less free. A moratorium on its use is the least we should demand.
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BioweaponsMaking Bioweapons Obsolete
The Council on Strategic Risks (CSR) and Sandia National Laboratories convened experts and thought leaders in government, academia, and the private sector to discuss the ways to make a future in which the threat of biological weapons is greatly reduced.
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Border securityEroding Private Border Wall to Get an Engineering Inspection Just Months after Completion
Months after the “Lamborghini” of border walls was built along the Rio Grande, the builder agreed to an engineering inspection of his controversial structure. Experts say the wall is showing signs of erosion that threatens its stability.
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Flood protectionVenice Ambitious Anti-Flood System Passes First Trial
Venice On Friday conducted the first test of a controversial dam system made up of 78 inflatable barriers, aiming to protect the city from severe flooding. The ambitious and costly dam system, launched in 2003, has been plagued by corruption and is nearly a decade behind schedule. It will becoe fully operational by the end of 20201, and it is designed to hold water surges as high as 10 feet.
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Our picksNeglected Pandemic | More Iran Explosions | Extremism Online, and more
· Nation’s Top Emergency-Preparedness Agency Focused on Warfare Threats Over Pandemic
· “I Would Be Very Careful in the Middle of the Street”: Drivers Have Hit Protesters 66 Times Since May 27
· Explosions in Iran Point to a Possible Israeli Sabotage Campaign
· CIA Kept Giving Intel to Russia, Got Nothing Back
· A Duty of Care Law Is Urgently Needed to Combat Rise of Hateful Extremism Online, Says Government Adviser
· Election Meddling Drives DHS to Seek Help Tracking Social Media
· Neo-Nazis Are Running out of Places to Hide Online
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Iran’s nukesSuspicions Mount of Foreign Hand in Fire at Sensitive Iranian Nuclear Site
There is growing support among outside security experts for the notion that an “incident” at Iran’s main nuclear-enrichment facility last week was an act of sabotage in a shadow war aimed at setting back Tehran’s nuclear activities. Many analysts believe that a foreign state, possibly Israel, was behind the 2 July fire at the Natanz facility in Iran’s central Isfahan Province.
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ExtremismGermany’s Domestic Intel. Agency: Right-Wing Extremists Greatest Threat to the County
A new report by Germany’s domestic intelligence (BfV) agency says right-wing extremism now poses the greatest threat to security in the country. BfV said that the number of right-wing extremists in Germany has increased from 24,100 in 2018 to 32,000 in 2019. As worrisome, the number of extremists who are prepared to use violence to achieve their aims keeps growing, and now stands at 13,000. The number of left-wing extremists has increased from 32,000 to 33,500 but only 9,000 of them are regarded as committed to violence. Anti-Semitism continues to be central to right-wing extremist movement, and 94 percent of anti-Semitic crimes in Germany in 2019 were committed by members of these movements. Islamist terrorism is still a threat, but it is declining: 28,000 Germans are affiliated with Islamist Jihadist groups, but only 650 are regarded as potentially violent.
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China syndromeChina Could Be Using TikTok to Spy on Australians, but Banning It Isn’t a Simple Fix
In an age of isolation, video sharing platform TikTok has emerged as a bonding force for many. But recent headlines allege the service, owned by Beijing-based company ByteDance, is feeding users’ data to the Chinese Communist Party. In Australia, for example, politicians from both the governing party and the opposition are calling for banning the app. Could the app be a tool used by the Chinese government to spy on us? And could it be effectively banned?
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CybersecuritySecuring the Smart Home
So…you’ve built your smart home, it’s got smart heating and lighting, all the latest smart communications and entertainment systems, and of course, smart power generation to make it smart and green. But, how do you keep it secure and stop forced digital or physical entry? Well, you need smart security too, of course.
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Nuclear wasteReducing Radioactive Waste in Dismantle Nuclear Facilities
On Monday, France announced it was shutting down the country’s oldest nuclear reactor – and that additional twelve aging reactors will be dismantled by 2035. Scientists have designed a methodology for dismantling nuclear facilities while limiting the amount of toxic nuclear waste generated in the process.
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Climate & conflictRoadmap for Studying Link between Climate and Armed Conflict
Climate change—from rising temperatures and more severe heavy rain, to drought—is increasing risks for economies, human security, and conflict globally. Scientists are offering ways better to assess the climate-conflict link to help societies manage the complex risks of increased violence from a changing climate.
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Hydrogen planesQuiet and Green: Why Hydrogen Planes Could Be the Future of Aviation
Today, aviation is responsible for 3.6 percent of EU greenhouse gas emissions. Modern planes use kerosene as fuel, releasing harmful carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. But what if there was another way? One possible solution is to use a new type of fuel in planes that doesn’t produce harmful emissions – hydrogen. Long touted as a sustainable fuel, hydrogen is now gaining serious traction as a possibility for aviation, and already tests are under way to prove its effectiveness.
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PERSPECTIVE: Vehicular attacksDrivers Are Hitting Protesters as Memes of Car Attacks Spread
Vehicles are becoming increasingly popular weapons that terrorists and other extremists around the globe use to intimidate, harm and kill. Cars and trucks are easily accessible, require little skill to operate and can facilitate unpredictable attacks with mass casualties.
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Our picksNational Counter-Drone Network | Encryption as a Bad Idea | International Students Visas, and more
· FBI Opens a China-Related Counterintelligence Investigation Every 10 Hours
· Cutting American Police Budgets Might Have Perverse Effects
· YouTube Runs Trump, Biden Campaign Ads Alongside Videos from White Supremacists and Russian Media
· Harvard, MIT File Suit over Trump Administration Visa Rule for International Students
· Deutsche Telekom under Pressure after Reports on Huawei Reliance
· Peaceful Protesters Targeted by Wave of Vehicle-Ramming Attacks
· Islamic State terrorist propaganda is going viral on Facebook
· Build a National Counter-Drone Network
· Why Let’s Encrypt is a really, really, really bad idea…
· China’s Own Documents Show Potentially Genocidal Sterilization Plans in Xinjiang
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Also noted
· Trump Plan to Build Nuclear Bombs Divides a Scarred Factory Town
· US Investigating “Breach” at Nuclear Weapons Facility
· Nation’s Top Emergency-Preparedness Agency Focused on Warfare Threats Over Pandemic
· Police partnerships with Amazon Ring raise alarms about racial bias, privacy
· Was ‘IS’ trying to sell €1 billion worth of drugs in Europe?
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China syndromeFBI Director: China Uses Anti-Corruption Campaign to Target Dissidents in U.S.
China is targeting hundreds of Chinese dissidents in the United States under the cover of an international anti-corruption campaign, using coercive tactics to force critics to return to China, FBI Director Christopher Wray said on Tuesday.
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China syndromeChina and AI: What the World Can Learn and What It Should Be Wary of
China announced in 2017 its ambition to become the world leader in artificial intelligence (AI) by 2030. While the US still leads in absolute terms, China appears to be making more rapid progress than either the US or the EU, and central and local government spending on AI in China is estimated to be in the tens of billions of dollars. The move has led – at least in the West – to warnings of a global AI arms race and concerns about the growing reach of China’s authoritarian surveillance state.
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DronesAccurately Pinpointing Malicious Drone Operators
Researchers have determined how to pinpoint the location of a drone operator who may be operating maliciously or harmfully near airports or protected airspace by analyzing the flight path of the drone.
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PrivacyPrivacy Risks of Home Security Cameras
Researchers have used data from a major home Internet Protocol (IP) security camera provider to evaluate potential privacy risks for users. The researchers found that the traffic generated by the cameras could be monitored by attackers and used to predict when a house is occupied or not.
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Future carsImproving Ethical Models for Autonomous Vehicles
There’s a fairly large flaw in the way that programmers are currently addressing ethical concerns related to artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomous vehicles (AVs). Namely, existing approaches don’t account for the fact that people might try to use the AVs to do something bad.
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More headlines
The long view
PerspectiveAssessing Cyber Risk from External Information
There is a vision for the future of assessing cybersecurity: The goal is a system of cyber metrics that are transparent, auditable, practical, scalable and widely agreed upon. To that end, it is useful—indeed, imperative—to evaluate various approaches to cyber risk quantification with the aim of informing the development of a public standard for measuring cybersecurity.
PerspectiveGovernment’s Handling of COVID-19 Is a Very British Disaster
British exceptionalism has brought an exceptional outcome, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard writes in The Telegraph. “We have both an eye-watering number of avoidable deaths and a staggering amount of avoidable economic damage. The purported trade-off between lives and jobs – always a false choice – has instead spared neither. It is the worst of both.” He is unsparing in his judgement. He notes that Greece, with far fewer resources than Britain and having to cope with both a deep austerity and waves of migrants, has had 14 deaths per million, while the U.K. has just hit 472 (as of 24 April: the number is much higher by now). Greece has had 151 deaths linked to coronavirus, while Britain’s coronavirus-related death toll is approaching 50,000. “Britain could have been in a low-death club with Greece, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, or Germany,” he writes. If Britain had a similar COVID-related mortality rate as Greece, “These deaths could have been held to at 1,000 or thereabouts, ideally by Korean methods, or failing that at least by sheer Greek determination. All the other deaths are in essence a policy failure.”
PerspectiveBans on Foreign Equipment in U.S. Critical Infrastructure
One executive order does not a trend make, but maybe two do. On May 1, President Trump issued an executive order banning the acquisition, importation, transfer or installation of any bulk electric power system equipment where the secretary of energy has determined, first, that the equipment was manufactured by a company controlled by—or subject to the jurisdiction of—a foreign adversary and, second, that the transaction poses an undue risk to the U.S. bulk-power system, economy or national security. Jim Dempsey writes “The order’s issuance signals that the administration’s efforts to purge from the nation’s telecommunications network any equipment made in China may represent a new approach to critical infrastructure in general.”
PerspectiveThe Kremlin’s Disinformation Playbook Goes to Beijing
The coronavirus pandemic is exposing a growing competition between democratic and authoritarian governments. Jessica Brandt and Torrey Tausing write that as the U.S. and Europe struggle to contain the virus at home, Russia and China are seizing the moment to enhance their international influence through information operations.
PerspectiveAmerica’s Never-Ending Battle Against Flesh-Eating Worms
Screwworms once killed millions of dollars’ worth of cattle a year in the southern U.S. Their range extended from Florida to California, and they infected any living, warm-blooded animal: not only cattle but deer, squirrels, pets, and even the occasional human. Sarah Zhang writes that to get the screwworms out, the USDA to this day maintains an international screwworm barrier along the Panama-Colombia border. The barrier is an invisible one, and it is kept in place by constant human effort. “The insect is relentless in its search for hosts. Those who fight it must be relentless too.”
ArgumentHow Conspiracy Theories Hurt Vaccination Numbers
Near the end of 2018, data released by the CDC showed that a small, but growing, number of children in the United States were not getting recommended vaccinations. One in 77 infants born in 2017 did not receive any vaccination. Michael Stein and Sandro Galea write this is more than four times as many unvaccinated children as the United States had at the turn of the century. “Some of this may be due to lack of access to vaccines; populations without insurance, and those living in rural areas have greater rates of nonvaccination,” they write. “But part of it is also likely due to the rise of conspiracy theories and the willful dismissal of scientific evidence when it comes to vaccines.”
PerspectiveMapping the China Debate
The debate over U.S. foreign policy toward China is often reduced into the usual hawk-versus-dove metaphor. Hawks see U.S.-China great power competition as requiring a more aggressive posture, while doves worry about the downsides of an adversarial relationship. Ganesh Sitaraman writes that this dualist frame glosses over the fact that neither camp has a shared set of views. Rather, both hawks and doves contain a variety of subgroups—and some subgroups disagree with others on critical policy questions. “But without tractable categories for analysis, the debate over policy toward China is too often imprecise and confusing.”
PerspectiveFacebook Knew Its Algorithms Promoted Extremist Groups, but Did Nothing: Report
A Facebook Inc. team had a blunt message for senior executives. The company’s algorithms weren’t bringing people together. They were driving people apart. “Our algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness,” read a slide from a 2018 presentation. “If left unchecked,” it warned, Facebook would feed users “more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention & increase time on platform.” The Wall Street Journal reports that the main reason behind Facebook’s decision to do nothing was the fear that any content moderation measures would disproportionately affect right-wing pages, politicians, and other parts of the user base that drove up engagement. The company also wanted to stave off accusations of bias against conservative posters.
ArgumentLeading the Intelligence Community Will Be a Test for Ratcliffe
Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-Texas) was confirmed last Thursday as President Donald Trump’s top intelligence adviser in a party line Senate vote, putting an inexperienced and highly partisan legislator at the top of the nation’s intelligence enterprise during a time of unprecedented threats to our security. Matt Olsen and Katrina Mulligan write that Ratcliffe made a name for himself defending the president, noisily and often falsely. At his confirmation hearing earlier this month, Ratcliffe vowed to “speak truth to power” and ensure the independence of intelligence agencies. But, will Ratcliffe keep those promises? Olsen and Mulligan are not sure:
Perspective“Domestic Terrorist Actors” Could Exploit Floyd Protests, DHS Memo Warns
The DHS intelligence unit has sent out a memo to law enforcement officials around the country warning of the mobilization of far-right domestic terrorists and violent extremists in the context of a national crisis. Betsy Woodruff Swan and Natasha Bertrand write that this is at least the fifth DHS has sent out to law enforcement officials in the last two months warning of the growing danger of far-right violent extremists.
PerspectiveInvoking “Terrorism” Against Police Protestors
President Trump on Sunday tweeted that the United States should designate Antifa, a movement of leftists radicals prone to violence, as a “terrorist” organization. Shirin Sinnar writes that leaving aside the fact that current law does not grant the president the authority to designate the movement a terrorist organization, the deeper issue is this: “The sad irony in all this is that, over the past two years, some on the left have vocally supported an expansion of domestic terrorism frameworks” – calls which neglected the many concerns that civil rights groups.
ArgumentMilitary Prestige during a Political Crisis: Use It and You’ll Lose It
Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, walked himself into a civil-military problem when he walked across Pennsylvania Avenue – in his battle fatigues! – last week. Jim Golby and Peter Feaver write that Milley was literally following President Donald Trump, who was on his way for a photo-op in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church in order to counter stories about the president holed up in his basement while riots raged outside. “Presidents who are struggling politically have a powerful incentive to wrap themselves in military garb precisely because the American public holds the military in high esteem. But, when the language of national security is stretched to provide cover for what is otherwise viewed as a nakedly partisan effort, it jeopardizes the very esteem for the military on which the administration relies,” they write.
PerspectiveFake News Is Fooling More Conservatives than Liberals. Why?
The “infodemic” around covid-19, declared by the WHO in February, is not the world’s first outbreak of misinformation, but one big difference between the infodemics of the past and those of 2020 is the rapid worldwide transmission of today’s nonsense, enabled by the internet. Social media enable people to share true news as well as the fake sort. But the fabulists seem to be winning. There is another difference between the past and the present: The historian Richard Hofstadter, in his seminal essay 1964 on the “paranoid style” in American politics, wrote that the paranoid style came as easily to those on the left as on the right, but, the Economist notes, “today’s infodemic appears to be spreading more easily among the world’s conservatives than its liberals.”
ArgumentWhy Were Out-of-State National Guard Units in Washington, D.C.? The Justice Department’s Troubling Explanation
Over the previous week, thousands of National Guard troops from states across the country arrived in Washington, D.C., as part of the Trump administration’s response to the largely peaceful protests taking place across the city. “But under what legal authority were they deployed to D.C. in the first place?” The mayor of Washington, D.C. asked Attorney General William Barr the same question – but Steve Vladeck writes that Barr’s response, that the deployment of the troops was under the authority of 32 U.S.C.§ 502(f), raises two vexing possibilities, neither of them reassuring: either Barr is wrong about 32 U.S.C.§ 502(f), or he is right.
PerspectiveNegotiating with Jihadists in the Sahel and Nigeria
Though the United States may be drawing down its forces in Western Africa, France, the other foreign power operating in the Sahel, has boosted troop numbers in the region from 4,500 to 5,100. Jacob Zenn, the author, most recently, of Unmasking Boko Haram: Exploring Global Jihad in Nigeria, writes that the increase came as a response to a January meeting with the G5 Sahel (Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger) that affirmed the Sahel’s top security threat is the Islamic State’s local affiliate, popularly known as the Islamic State in Greater Sahara (ISGS), which is formally part of the Islamic State’s West African Province.
LockdownThis Disastrous Lockdown Can Never Be Repeated, Even If the Virus Returns
Three months after we entered lockdown, as we tiptoe out to non-essential stores and meet a lonely relative, we can begin to benefit from something previously unavailable – experience. William Hague writes in The Telegraph that instead of having to rely entirely on widely varying mathematical models and fight an unknown virus in a fog of uncertainty, governments can start to see what has actually worked in different places around the world. The most important thing we now know is the true cost of a national lockdown, not just in economic but in human terms. The lockdown was a disaster on many fronts. “Such a disaster cannot under any circumstances be repeated. There can be no second lockdown.”