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ISISNorway Government Collapses over Repatriation of IS Terrorist’s Spouse, Kids
The governing coalition in Norway has lost its parliamentary majority after the far-right, populist Progress Party announced today (Monday) that it was leaving the government after the cabinet’s Friday decision to allow a Norwegian woman to return from Syria with her two young kids. One of the children requires medical treatment. The woman left for Syria in 2013 to marry an ISIS terrorists, and the children were born in Syria. The dilemma with which Norway has been grappling is reflected in other countries across Europe, which must decide whether or not to allow their citizens who left to join the fight in Syria or marry IS terrorists to return home.
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The Russia connectionU.K. PM Warns Putin Not to Repeat Chemical Attacks on Britain
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has told Vladimir Putin in their first official meeting that Moscow must not repeat a chemical attack on Britain like the 2018 nerve agent attack in Salisbury against former Russian spy Sergei Skripal.
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African securitySenators to Secretary Esper: Reconsider AFRICOM Drawdown
U.S. Senators Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) and Chris Coons (D-Delaware) last week sent a letter to Secretary of Defense Mark Esper concerning the possible troop reduction or complete withdrawal from the AFRICOM area of responsibility. “Africa is a continent full of potential, and this is the wrong time to withdraw U.S. troops serving to stabilize fragile regions of the continent, the senators write.
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EncryptionHomomorphic Encryption Improves Cloud Security
A new approach to encryption — homomorphic encryption system — could improve user perception of cloud computing services where the users are concerned about private or personal data being exposed to third parties.
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Public healthEdible “Security Tag” Protect Drugs from Counterfeit
Manufacturing prescription drugs with distinct markings, colors, shapes or packaging isn’t enough to protect them from counterfeiting, DEA reports have shown. Researchers are aiming to stump counterfeiters with an edible “security tag” embedded into medicine. To imitate the drug, a counterfeiter would have to uncrack a complicated puzzle of patterns not fully visible to the naked eye.
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SuperbugsNew Agents to Fight Multidrug-Resistant Germs
Resistance to antibiotics is on the rise worldwide. Fraunhofer scientists have joined forces with partners in the Phage4Cure project to explore alternatives to antibiotics. One objective is to vanquish multidrug-resistant pathogens with viruses called bacteriophages. Another is to see these phages approved to treat the dreaded hospital germ Pseudomonas aeruginosa, the most frequent bacterial cause of pneumonia.
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WildfiresBefore We Rush to Rebuild after Fires, We Need to Think about Where and How
Public support for rebuilding in the same disaster affected places is often high. But as fire-fighting agencies are aware, our bushfires are increasing in size, intensity and duration, and a warming climate will continue to worsen these factors. We need to start being more strategic about where we rebuild homes and facilities lost to fire, and how.
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Climate mitigationThe Prospects of Climate Engineering
Climate engineering may offer a last-ditch technological solution to catastrophic climate change, but who makes the decisions on which solutions to implement, and who the beneficiaries will be? Once we start fiddling with the Earth’s fundamental processes, where will it end?
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ArgumentThe Age of Open Assassination
In killing Iranian Major General Qassem Soleimani, head of the Quds Force, with an MQ-9 Reaper drone, the United States openly targeted a senior official of a sovereign nation-state, carrying out a satisfying act of short-term revenge but undermining its long-term strategic interests. We are in a dangerous period: “Revenge is an ungovernable impulse that easily spirals out of control,” Audrey Kurth Cronin writes. “U.S. policymakers must resist the temptation to use their technological and military prowess to target senior government officials, remembering who is watching and learning from what they do.”
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PerspectiveAn Open Source Effort to Encrypt the Internet of Things
End-to-end encryption is a staple of secure messaging apps like WhatsApp and Signal. Such encryption ensures that no one—even the app developer or the device manufacturer—can access the user’s data as it travels the web. “But what if you could bring some version of that protection to increasingly ubiquitous—and notoriously insecure—Internet of Things devices?” asks Lili Hay Newman.
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Our picksHackers Coming for the 2020 Election | Submerged Florida Keys | Drones Near Nuclear Missile Silos, and more
· U.S. Tech Sector Sees Only Modest Relief in China Trade Deal
· German Soccer Club FC St. Pauli Symbol Listed on U.K. Counterterrorism Guide
· Hackers Are Coming for the 2020 Election — and We’re Not Ready
· The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It
· Russia’s Role in the Libyan Civil War Gives It Leverage Over Europe
· Are the Mystery Drone Swarms Lingering Near Nuclear Missile Silos?
· How AI Will Improve Threat Protection in 2020
· The Cyberwar with Iran is Already a Decade Old: So Where Does It Go Now?
· Residents of Florida Keys Face Losing Homes as Rising Sea Levels Threaten to Cut Them Off
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Iran’s nukesEuropean Unity on Iran Nuclear Deal May Be Cracking
There are signs that cracks are beginning to appear in European unity over its backing of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, or JCPOA, as allies come under growing pressure from the United States to abandon the agreement in the wake of Tehran’s downing of a passenger jet January 8. Iran announced this month it would ignore all restrictions on its nuclear enrichment activities, but insisted it was permitted to do so under the 2015 deal, because the U.S. was the first signatory to break the agreement.
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China syndromeChinese Communist Party’s Media Influence Expands Worldwide
Over the past decade, Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leaders have overseen a dramatic expansion in the regime’s ability to shape media content and narratives about China around the world, affecting every region and multiple languages, according to a new report. This trend has accelerated since 2017, with the emergence of new and more brazen tactics by Chinese diplomats, state-owned news outlets, and CCP proxies.
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Truth decayCombating the Latest Technological Threat to Democracy: A Comparison of Facebook and Twitter’s Deepfake Policies
Twitter and Facebook have both recently announced policies for handling synthetic and manipulated media content on their platforms. Side-by-side comparison and analysis of Twitter and Facebook’s policies highlights that Facebook focuses on a narrow, technical type of manipulation, while Twitter’s approach contemplates the broader context and impact of manipulated media.
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SurveillanceIsraeli Court to Hear Case against Spy-Software Company NSO Behind Closed Doors
On Thursday, a judge at Tel Aviv’s District Court begin hearing arguments as to why Israel’s Ministry of Defense (MoD) should revoke the export license of NSO Group. The firm’s Pegasus software has been used to target journalists and activists in several countries – including in Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Mexico, and the United Arab Emirates.
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ImmigrationNumber of Illegal Immigrants in Europe Declines
The number of illegal immigrants in Europe (EU states plus Switzerland, Norway, and Iceland), including asylum seekers, increased substantially between 2014 and 2016, reaching about 5 million, but has been declining since, and now stands at about 4.8 million. Pew Research Center notes that the number of illegal immigrants corresponds to less than 1 percent of the European population — compared to the United States, where illegal immigrants account for about 3.4 percent of the U.S. population.
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Costly disastersTropical Cyclones Causing Billions in Losses Dominate 2019 Natural Catastrophe Picture
Natural catastrophes cause overall losses of $150 billion, with insured losses of about $52 billion. Severe typhoons in Japan cause the year’s biggest losses. Hurricane Dorian, the strongest hurricane of the year, devastates the Bahamas, but the U.S. mainland was largely spared. Humanitarian tragedy caused by cyclones in Mozambique, with more than 1,000 deaths. – Better protection is urgently needed
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Climate crisisClimate Change will Take Increasingly Heavier Toll on People’s Welfare, Security: Experts
The World Economic Forum has just issued its annual Global Risk Report, based on input from more than 750 global experts and decision-makers, who were asked to rank their biggest concerns in terms of likelihood and impact on the welfare and security of people around the world. For the first time in the survey’s 10-year outlook, the top five global risks in terms of likelihood are all related to the environment: intensification of extreme weather events; failure of climate mitigation and adaptation; increasing human-induced damage to the environment; ecosystem collapse; growing vulnerability of more people to natural disasters such as earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, and geomagnetic storms.
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PerspectiveOn A Hotter Planet, We Are All Australians
Warm the human body by 7 degrees Fahrenheit and death ensues. David Spratt writes that on the Paris Agreement emissions trajectory, the entire world is heading for around 7 degrees Fahrenheit of warming once system feedbacks are included. The Lancet wrote: “Without immediate and efficient climate action, catastrophic bushfires will become a common disaster and might destroy the future of Australia and possibly of humanity.” Spratt says: “On a hotter planet, we are all Australians, one way or another. And the fire season is far from over.”
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Our picksKiller Robots | Sinking New Haven | Stuxnet Training, and more
· Europe Is Running Out of Time to Save the Iran Deal
· Al-Shabaab’s Attacks Come Amid Backdrop of West’s Waning Interest
· Huawei Not Part of Trade Deal (Bill Gertz, Washington Times
· Giuliani Associates May Have Surveilled U.S. Ambassador, New Evidence Shows
· Immigrants Are Big Fans of Germany’s Anti-Immigrant Party
· Federal Coastal Plan Recommends Way to Protect New Haven from Rising Seas
· This Is Your Life on Climate Change
· Airbus Researcher Explores “Stuxnet-Type Attack” for Security Training
· Killer Robots Reconsidered: Could AI Weapons Actually Cut Collateral Damage?
· Berwick-upon-Tweed, the British Town at War with Russia
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Iran’s nukesIsrael Warns Iran is Closer to Nuclear Bomb
Israeli military analysts say that by the end of 2020 Iran will have enough enriched uranium for one nuclear bomb. The assessment comes after recent tensions between the U.S. and Iran brought them to the brink of war. The United States pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal in 2018, and Israeli intelligence officials speculated that Iran would resume its efforts to acquire a nuclear bomb.
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TerrorismIn Niger, 89 Killed in Islamic State Attack
Islamic State claimed responsibility for the 9 January attack on a military base in Niger, in which 89 soldiers were killed. It was the deadliest terrorist attack in the Sahel region since Islamist groups began to escalate their activities in the region in 2015, and it came one month after a similar attack on another military base in Niger killed 71 soldiers. In 2019, Islamist terrorists killed more than 4,000 people in Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso.
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More headlines
The long view
Perspective: Family separationAssessing the Legal Landscape of Family Separation in the Immigration Context
While prior presidential administrations have certainly struggled with periodic migration and border security challenges, officials in the Trump administration revived a controversial proposal that had been considered briefly during the Obama administration, but quickly shelved as “too opprobrious and unpalatable.” Carrie Cordero, Heidi Li Feldman, and Chimène Keitner write that “Once implemented last year, the early effects of the family separation policy and practice were swift, and devastating: Children were separated from their parents or family members at the border as a consequence of a new prosecutive guideline from the Justice Department. Parents were given little or no information about where the children were re-located to, or when, if ever, the families would be reunited.” They add: “As far as we know, until 2018, the U.S. government had not previously implemented a policy and practice of intentionally separating migrant and asylum-seeking families as a means of deterrence. As Americans, each of us was horrified our government would rip vulnerable children from their families in such a deliberate way.”
Perspective: New warWhy America Isn’t Equipped for the New Rules of War
Sean McFate is a former paratrooper in the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division; he’s also worked as a private military contractor in West Africa. Today he’s a professor at the National Defense University and Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service. His book The New Rules of War, published earlier this year, dissects the ways warfare must change in order for America to succeed. MIT Technology Review’s war reporter Janine di Giovanni sat down to ask him about his vision for the future of conflict.
Perspective: Swedish strifeBomb Attacks Are Now a Normal Part of Swedish Life
“Normalization” is a term that we have come to associate with domestic violence: the victim begins to think of abuse as a part of everyday life. Paulina Neuding writes that explosions have become so normalized in Sweden that SVT, Sweden’s equivalent of the BBC, did not even mention the three explosions in the country’s capital on its national news program that evening. The explosions were left to the local news. Wilhelm Agrell, professor of intelligence analysis at Lund University, has warned that the situation has become so dire that the integrity of the Swedish state is in jeopardy. “The state’s monopoly on violence, the actual token of a sovereign government, has been hollowed out bit by bit and no longer exists,” he wrote a few weeks ago. “The armed criminal violence is having effects that are increasingly similar to those of terrorism.”
Perspective: ISISTrump’s Syria Troop Withdrawal Complicated Plans for al-Baghdadi Raid
President Trump’s abrupt order three weeks ago to withdraw U.S. troops from northern Syria disrupted the meticulous, patient planning which was underway for killing al-Baghdadi, and forced Pentagon officials to speed up the plan for the risky night raid before their ability to control troops, spies, and reconnaissance aircraft disappeared with the pullout, senior officials said. Al-Baghdadi’s death in the raid on Saturday, they said, occurred largely in spite of, and not because of, Trump’s actions. Richard N. Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said on Sunday that “The irony of the successful operation against al-Baghdadi is that it could not have happened without U.S. forces on the ground that have been pulled out, help from Syrian Kurds who have been betrayed, and support of a U.S. intelligence community that has so often been disparaged.” He added: “While the raid was obviously a welcome success, the conditions that made the operation possible may not exist in the future.”
Perspective: Oligarchs, populists, and the EU The Money Farmers: How Oligarchs and Populists Milk the E.U. for Millions
Before 1990, under Communism, farmers in the rich-soil fields west Budapest were growing wheat and corn for a government that had stolen their land. The New York Times reports that today, their children toil for new overlords, a group of oligarchs and political patrons who have annexed the land through opaque deals with the Hungarian government of Victor Orban. “Every year, the 28-country bloc pays out $65 billion in farm subsidies intended to support farmers around the Continent and keep rural communities alive. But across Hungary and much of Central and Eastern Europe, the bulk goes to a connected and powerful few. re is a twist: these land barons are financed and emboldened by the European Union.” The Times adds: “Europe’s farm program, a system that was instrumental in forming the European Union, is now being exploited by the same antidemocratic forces that threaten the bloc from within.”
Perspective: BackdoorsWhy Adding Client-Side Scanning Breaks End-To-End Encryption
Recent attacks on encryption have diverged. On the one hand, we’ve seen Attorney General William Barr call for “lawful access” to encrypted communications, using arguments that have barely changed since the 1990’s. Erica Portnoy writes that we’ve also seen suggestions from a different set of actors for more purportedly “reasonable” interventions, particularly the use of client-side scanning to stop the transmission of contraband files, most often child exploitation imagery (CEI).
Arguments: ConspiracismThe Danger Is Real: Why We’re All Wired for ‘Constructive Conspiracism’
Michael Shermer, the publisher of Skeptic magazine, says that the tendency to believe in conspiracy theories should not be dismissed as a mere folly. Rather, we should adopt the concept he calls “constructive conspiracism”: “Sometimes ‘they’ really are out to get you, so it pays to be careful,” Shermer writes. “Imagine you lived three million years ago on the plains of Africa as a tiny small-brained bipedal primate that was highly vulnerable to the region’s many terrifying predators. You hear a rustle in the grass. Is it just the wind or is it a dangerous animal?” Over time, those who imagined the rustle in the grass to be a predator will survive, while those who imagined the rustle to be nothing but the wind will be eaten by the predator, if there was a predator. “Conspiracy theorists have dedicated their lives to searching the long grass for the still-hidden creatures that supposedly engineered these tragedies. They’ll never find them because they don’t exist. But given all the very real predators that have tried to devour us over the eons, you can’t blame them for looking.”
Perspective: Middle EastThe Coming Middle East Conflagration
Israel is girding for the worst and acting on the assumption that fighting between Israel and Iran, or between Israel and Iran’s regional proxies, could break out at any time. Michael Oren writes that it’s not hard to imagine how it might arrive. “The conflagration, like so many in the Middle East, could be ignited by a single spark. Israeli fighter jets have already conducted hundreds of bombing raids against Iranian targets in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq. Preferring to deter rather than embarrass Tehran, Israel never comments on such actions. But perhaps Israel miscalculates, hitting a particularly sensitive target; or perhaps politicians cannot resist taking credit. The result could be a counterstrike by Iran, using cruise missiles that penetrate Israel’s air defenses and smash into targets like the Kiryah, Tel Aviv’s equivalent of the Pentagon. Israel would retaliate massively against Hezbollah’s headquarters in Beirut as well as dozens of its emplacements along the Lebanese border. And then, after a day of large-scale exchanges, the real war would begin.”
Perspective: Islamic StateIslamic State after the Death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi
As its so-called caliphate expanded across Syria and Iraq, Islamic State (IS) promised its followers an apocalyptic battle to come. Eager jihadist propagandists predicted that a final victory over the “crusader armies” would usher in the day of judgment and give birth to a new world. The man who was to lead that battle, the self-proclaimed caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, instead blew himself up in a tunnel in Syria on October 26th, murdering two of his own children as he died. The Economist writes that “His suicide, to avoid capture by American forces, marks the end of an era for IS,” “Yet this does not mark the end of IS.”
Arguments: Declining homicidesHomicide Is Declining Around the World – but Why?
Americans are currently living in one of the lowest crime periods ever – and so are many people in the rest of the world. Following decades of increasing crime during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, U.S. homicide rates declined by almost 40 percent throughout the 1990s, and have remained low since. Mateus Renno Santos and Alexander Testa write that in their new study, they make the case for a possible explanation: The population of countries around the world is getting older.
Perspective: Border intelligenceBorder Agents Can Now Get Classified Intelligence Information. Experts Call That Dangerous.
Pushing further toward its goal of “extreme vetting,” the Trump administration is creating a new center in suburban Virginia that will allow immigration agents to access, for the first time, the sprawling array of information scooped up by America’s intelligence agencies, from phone calls intercepted by the National Security Agency to material gathered by the CIA’s spies overseas to tips from informants in Central America. “Legal experts worry that immigration agents could potentially use this secret data to flag entire categories of people that fit ‘suspect’ profiles and potentially bar them from entering the U.S., or prompt them to be tracked while they’re here,” Melissa Del Bosque writes. “It could also be nearly impossible for those denied entry to challenge faulty information if wrongly accused, they say, since most of it is classified.”
Perspective: Age of fireCalifornia Wildfires Signal the Arrival of a Planetary Fire Age
Another autumn, more fires, more refugees and incinerated homes. For California, flames have become the colors of fall. Stephen Pyne writes that free-burning fire is the proximate provocation for the havoc, since its ember storms are engulfing landscapes. But in the hands of humans, combustion is also the deeper cause. Modern societies are burning lithic landscapes - once-living biomass now fossilized into coal, gas and oil - which is aggravating the burning of living landscapes. “Add up all the effects, direct and indirect – the areas burning, the areas needing to be burned, the off-site impacts with damaged watersheds and airsheds, the unraveling of biotas, the pervasive power of climate change, rising sea levels, a mass extinction, the disruption of human life and habitats – and you have a pyrogeography that looks eerily like an ice age for fire,” he writes. “You have a Pyrocene. The contours of such an epoch are already becoming visible through the smoke. If you doubt it, just ask California.”
Perspective: Truth decayThe Trolls Are Everywhere. Now What Are We Supposed to Do?
Forget the decline of gatekeepers. Imagine a world bereft of gates and uncrossable lines, with no discernible rules. Andrew Marantz’s just published book, Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation, offers a detailed and disturbing study of how the social media platforms, rolled out over the last decade by a group of nerdy but naïve Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, have been hijacked by “edge lords” — another name for a collection of nihilists, right-wing nationalists, conspiracy purveyors, white supremacists, and more, whose goal is to downgrade the discourse in a way that would soon corrode the entire system. “The ranking algorithms on social media laid out clear incentives: provoke as many activating emotions as possible; lie, spin, dog-whistle; drop red pill after red pill; step up to the line repeatedly, in creative new ways,” Marantz writes. Public discourse is being replaced by the dance of discord and enragement and noxiousness.
Perspective: The TroublesWhy a 1972 Northern Ireland Murder Matters So Much to Historians
In a recent decision, a court in Northern Ireland ruled that evidence from an oral history project could not be considered in a 1972 murder case, clearing 82-year-old Ivor Bell of soliciting the killing of Jean McConville. Evidence from the Belfast Project, an oral history of Northern Ireland’s Troubles, indicated Bell and other members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) kidnapped and murdered McConville because they incorrectly believed she had provided information to the British Army about IRA activity in Belfast. This evidence played an important role in Bell’s indictment and trial in the McConville case. This ordeal strained the relationship between legal justice and historical truth, Donald M. Beaudette and Laura Weinstein write. “Though in court, lawyers, judges and juries assess the guilt of alleged offenders according to well-honed rules of evidence and interpretations of the law, assessing historical truth is more complex,” they write. They argue that scholars “can and must write and speak more broadly about how historical interpretation works, so citizens are better equipped to understand that the dominant interpretation of history is not the only one, nor is it necessarily the correct one.”
Perspective: Climate emergencyHow Scientists Got Climate Change So Wrong
Few thought it would arrive so quickly. Now we’re facing consequences once viewed as fringe scenarios. Had a scientist in the early 1990s suggested that within 25 years a single heat wave would measurably raise sea levels, at an estimated two one-hundredths of an inch, bake the Arctic and produce Sahara-like temperatures in Paris and Berlin, the prediction would have been dismissed as alarmist. But many worst-case scenarios from that time are now realities.
Perspective: DisinformationOnline Disinformation and Political Discourse: Applying a Human Rights Framework
The framers of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) saw human rights as a fundamental safeguard for all individuals against the power of authority. Although some digital platforms now have an impact on more people’s lives than does any one state authority, the international community has been slow to measure and hold to account these platforms’ activities by reference to human rights law. Kate Jones writes that “Although international human rights law does not impose binding obligations on digital platforms, it offers a normative structure of appropriate standards by which digital platforms should be held to account. Because of the impact that social media can have, a failure to hold digital platforms to human rights standards is a failure to provide individuals with the safeguards against the power of authority that human rights law was created to provide.”