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ImmigrationCourt Allows Trump Asylum Rules to Take Effect in California, Arizona
A federal appeals court’s on Friday allowed the Trump administration partially to begin and reject asylum seekers at some parts of the U.S. The administration’s rule would reject asylum of migrants who passed through a third country but failed to apply for asylum in that country. The rule does not apply to Mexican seekers of asylum. The ruling from the ninth U.S. circuit court of appeals limited a lower court’s order against Donald Trump’s policy to California and Arizona. Under the ruling, U.S. district judge Jon Tigar’s 24 July 2019 order will not apply to New Mexico or Texas. The new rule would deny asylum to those migrants who have traveled through a country considered by the United States to be “safe,” and where the migrant should have, therefore, applied for asylum before continuing the journey to the United States.
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ExtremismU.K. Commission Releases Studies on the Causes, Prevalence, Responses to Extremism
The independent U.K. Commission for Countering Extremism is earlier this month published eight peer-reviewed academic papers on the causes of extremism, extremism online, and approaches to countering extremism. The papers cover the arguments on the causes of extremism, the complex relationship between social media and extremism, as well as discussions on how to best counter extremism.
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ExtremismObama Administration’s Countering Violent Extremism Initiative “Deeply Flawed”
The Obama administration’s program to prevent individuals from embracing violent extremism was deeply flawed, according to a new report. The Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) Initiative was plagued by vague goals, the lack of a budget or administrative structure, and the failure to address all forms of violent extremism, particularly white supremacy. In addition, the initiative was opposed by many Muslim-Americans, the report says.
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CatastropheA Cyberattack Could Wreak Destruction Comparable to a Nuclear Weapon
People around the world may be worried about nuclear tensions rising, but I think they’re missing the fact that a major cyberattack could be just as damaging – and hackers are already laying the groundwork. The threat of a new nuclear arms race is serious – but the threat of a cyberattack could be as serious, and is less visible to the public. So far, most of the well-known hacking incidents, even those with foreign government backing, have done little more than steal data. Unfortunately, there are signs that hackers have placed malicious software inside U.S. power and water systems, where it’s lying in wait, ready to be triggered.
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CatastropheGovernments Failing to Understand Global Catastrophic Risks: Report
Governments are failing to understand the human-driven catastrophic risks that threaten global security, prosperity and potential, and could in the worst case lead to mass harm and societal collapse, say researchers. The plausible global catastrophic risks include: tipping points in environmental systems due to climate change or mass biodiversity loss; malicious or accidentally harmful use of artificial intelligence; malicious use of, or unintended consequences, from advanced biotechnologies; a natural or engineered global pandemic; and intentional, miscalculated, accidental, or terrorist-related use of nuclear weapons.
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Private securityLEOSU Defeats SPFPA for Representing Paragon Protective Service Officers
In an impressive victory, the Law Enforcement Security Officers Union (LEOSU) won the representation election and will be representing the protective service officers at Paragon Systems, Inc. The company protects federal facilities throughout Louisville, Kentucky. “LEOSU is the strongest, fastest-growing law enforcement and security police union in America,” stated LEOSU Organizing Director Steve Maritas, “And I promise you that LEOSU will deliver for our new members with Paragon just like we have for our other Paragon PSO members from around the country.”
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Artificial intelligenceEvaluate AI capabilities in Helping Paramedics
Paramedics must make numerous life-saving decisions, often in the back of an ambulance with limited time. While they at times call doctors for additional medical directives, precious seconds tick away for the patient during these back-and-forth conversations. DHS S&T partnered with its Canadian counterpart to examine whether artificial intelligence could be used to improve that information overload.
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PerspectiveSilicon Valley Wants to Read Your Mind – Here’s Why You Should Be Worried
Not content with monitoring almost everything you do online, Facebook now wants to read your mind as well. The social media giant recently announced a breakthrough in its plan to create a device that reads people’s brainwaves to allow them to type just by thinking. These mind-reading systems could affect our privacy, security, identity, equality and personal safety. Do we really want all that left to companies with philosophies such as that of Facebook’s former mantra, “move fast and break things”?
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PerspectiveA Guide to Not Killing or Mutilating Artificial Intelligence Research
What’s the fastest way to build a jig-saw puzzle? That was the question posed by Michael Polanyi in 1962. An obvious answer is to enlist help. Polanyi found it obvious that the fastest way to build a jig-saw puzzle is to let everyone work on it together in full sight of each other. No central authority could accelerate progress. Polanyi, however, thought it “impossible and nonsensical” to guide science toward particular ends. Like in the jig-saw puzzle, no scientist understands more than a tiny fraction of the total domain. Joint opinion is reached when each scientist has overlapping knowledge with other scientists, “so that the whole of science will be covered by chains and networks of overlapping neighborhoods.” Intervention by a central authority can only “kill or mutilate” scientific progress, Polanyi argued; it “cannot shape it.”
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PerspectiveThe Religious Hunger of the Radical Right
Domestic right-wing terrorists, like the man accused of the shooting last weekend in El Paso, are not so different from their radical Islamist counterparts across the globe — and not only in their tactics for spreading terror or in their internet-based recruiting. Indeed, it is impossible to understand America’s resurgence of reactionary extremism without understanding it as a fundamentally religious phenomenon.
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Our picksRussia Inflames U.S. Racial Tensions | Sinking Jakarta | North Korean Malware, and more
· Sinking City: Indonesia’s Capital on Brink of Disaster
· Water Crisis Grips U.S. City after Lead Contamination
· Russian Link Revealed Behind Attempts to Escalate Racial Tension in the U.S.
· Senators Concerned Epstein Conspiracy Theories Play into Russia’s Hands
· U.S. Cyber Command Warns of North Korea-Linked Lazarus Group Malware
· Pentagon’s AI Center is Developing Tech that Could Revolutionize Disaster Response
· Gov. Greg Abbott Launches Domestic Terrorism Task Force in Wake of El Paso Massacre
· Watchdog: Hiring Freeze Increased Cyber Risk at State
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HateNYPD Searches for a Group of Teens Who Attacked 3 Elderly Jews in Brooklyn
NYPD has released surveillance footage in their search for a group of teens wanted in connection with at least three violent, possibly bias, attacks and attempted robberies which took place in the span of a few minutes in Brooklyn.
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ExtremismGermany: Far-Right Attacks Rise in 2019
Neo-Nazis and other far-right groups have committed 8,605 crimes in 2019 so far. The rise of anti-migrant and neo-Nazi groups has alarmed the German authorities. In a report submitted to the Bundestrag, the Interior Ministry said that the domestic intelligence service (BfV) was monitoring 24,100 right-wing extremists in Germany — 100 more than in 2017 — of whom 12,700 were considered “violence-oriented.”
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Truth decayAssault on Democracy: The New Conspiracism
Conspiracy theory has always been part of political life. Sometimes far-fetched, sometimes accurate, and sometimes a confusing mix of the two, traditional conspiracy theory tries to peel away deceptive masks to show how the world really works. It demands a cause proportionate to the dire effect. In a recently published book, two scholars argue that in today’s conspiracies, conspiracy and theory have been decoupled. We therefore face a distinctively malignant new phenomenon of conspiracy without the theory. Like all conspiracism, it rests on the certainty that things are not as they seem, but conspiracy without the theory dispenses with the burden of explanation. We see no insistent demand for proof, no exhaustive amassing of evidence, no dots revealed to form a pattern, no close examination of the operators plotting in the shadows. Conspiracy without the theory exists less to explain than to affirm. The result is toxic for a stable society and democratic politics.
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SuperbugsPowerful Potential Weapon May Overcome Antibiotic Resistance
UNC School of Medicine researchers led by Brian Conlon, PhD, discover how molecules called rhamnolipids could make common aminoglycoside antibiotics effective against the toughest Staph infections.
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Cargo securityTackling Cargo Shipping Security
Each day, thousands of containers travel the globe. Security agencies need to ensure the cargo that originally was shipped in them is what is in them when they reach their destination. Harmful or illegal content, added after the cargo was cleared for transport, must be detected and intercepted. Securing the global supply chain, while ensuring its smooth functioning, is essential to U.S. national security.
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Nuclear detectionRemotely Monitoring Nuclear Reactors with Antineutrino Detection
Technology to measure the flow of subatomic particles known as antineutrinos from nuclear reactors could allow continuous remote monitoring designed to detect fueling changes that might indicate the diversion of nuclear materials. The monitoring could be done from outside the reactor vessel, and the technology may be sensitive enough to detect substitution of a single fuel assembly.
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Seismic warningsPredicting the Strength of Earthquakes
Scientists will be able to predict earthquake magnitudes earlier than ever before thanks to new research. “Our research, which is technically rather simple, provides answers relevant not only to earthquake dynamics, but to prediction of earthquake behavior before the earthquake ends,” said one of the researchers.
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InfrastructureWhaley Bridge Dam Collapse Is a Wake-up Call: Concrete Infrastructure Will Not Last Forever Without Care
Torrential rain in the Midlands and North of England that saw half a month’s rain fall in one day caused such volumes of water to pass through the spillway of the Toddbrook Reservoir dam, above the town of Whaley Bridge in Derbyshire, that the protective concrete facing was damaged – badly enough to put the dam at risk of a full collapse. It is clear from data of dam failures in the UK and worldwide that the most common cause is overtopping of the dam due to the spillway’s inadequate capacity to discharge floodwaters, due to damage or design. The lesson from Whaley Bridge dam is that the maintenance of dam spillways cannot be ignored – in any circumstances or at any cost.
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PerspectiveWhen the Lights Went Out: On Blackouts and Terrorism
When the Northeast Blackout of 2003 killed electricity to more than 50 million people in the United States and Canada, the FBI, like many in New York who were still reeling from the September 11, 2001 attacks, shared these concerns. Just the previous year the agency concluded that terrorists were studying weaknesses in power grids. Meanwhile, groups across the country had been preparing for and speculating about doomsday scenarios — scenarios that the first moments of the 2003 blackout mimicked to a disquieting degree.
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PerspectiveHow Data Privacy Laws Can Fight Fake News
Governments from Russia to Iran have exploited social media’s connectivity, openness, and polarization to influence elections, sow discord, and drown out dissent. While responses have also begun to proliferate, more still are needed to reduce the inherent vulnerability of democracies to such tactics. Recent data privacy laws may offer one such answer in limiting how social media uses personal information to micro-target content: Fake news becomes a lot less scary if it can’t choose its readers.
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PerspectiveJeffrey Epstein’s Death and Our Age of Conspiracy Theories
In response to the news of Epstein’s death, conspiracy theories exploded across social media on Saturday. The hashtags “TrumpBodyCount” and “ClintonBodyCount” trended nationally, the former in no small part because President Trump himself retweeted the Clinton body count hashtag. In the U.S., conspiracy theories have historically thrived among groups that feel locked out, whether it’s Jim Crow–era African Americans or 19th-century white farmers during the Know-Nothing era who believed the “Pope in Rome” was plotting against them. What makes this moment so different — and dangerous — is that elites who presumably know better, or should know better, have become increasingly paranoid as well.
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The long view
Perspective: Long warsAmericas’ Longest-Running Insurgency: Lessons for U.S. Longest-Running War
In 2016, Colombia achieved a remarkable success by seemingly bringing to an end the Western Hemisphere’s longest-running insurgency. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) has been at war with government forces for more than fifty years. And yet here was a negotiated settlement by which two parties that had been fighting for generations agreed to lay down their arms—by which the guerrilla organization itself would be brought into the government’s formal power structures. The case raises important questions—not least for a U.S. government that watches the clock on its own counterinsurgency efforts in Afghanistan tick ever closer to two decades. How was this possible? And are there lessons that can be exported and applied to other intransigent conflicts, like Afghanistan?
Perspective: Nuclear wasteTruth and Fearmongering: Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository
Is it a good idea to store 77,000 tons of highly radioactive nuclear waste in a repository in Nevada’s Yucca Mountain? Many Nevada politicians say it is a bad idea, but scientists argue that the facts do not support the fears these politicians stoke. These scientists say that Colorado, whose surface rock contains about a billion tons of uranium, should have much more to worry about than Nevada. One scientist says: “If the Yucca Mountain facility were at full capacity and all the waste leaked out of its glass containment immediately and managed to reach groundwater, the danger would still be 20 times less than that currently posed by natural uranium leaching into the Colorado River.”
Perspective: Democracy backslidingPolarization versus Democracy
When can we realistically expect ordinary people to check the authoritarian ambitions of elected politicians? An answer to this question is key to understanding the most prominent development in the dynamic of democratic survival since the end of the Cold War: the subversion of democracy by elected incumbents and its emergence as the most common form of democratic breakdown.
Perspective: Election insecurityU.S. Election Infrastructure: Troubling Bipartisan Conclusions
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) released its first of several bipartisan reports about its own investigation into Russia’s 2016 election interference on Thursday. This one focused on Russian efforts against U.S. election infrastructure. The finding that dominated headlines was that Russia targeted election systems in all 50 states in 2016. This meant the Russian effort reached far deeper into the U.S. than previously understood by officials. What also caught people’s attention about the report was how heavily redacted it was. The report, with its worrying conclusions, provokes one overwhelming question: What can be done to stop this from happening again?
Perspective: Cyber warsSounding the Alarm about Another Kind of 9/11
Richard Clarke knows some things about clear and present dangers. As the first U.S. counterterrorism czar, he tried to alert important White House decision-makers before September 11 about the threat of a terrorist attack on U.S. soil, but those warnings were largely ignored; afterwards, he famously apologized publicly for the government’s failures. These days, Clarke is trying to get people to think hard about the next big attack—the cyber version—and all the ones that have already happened.
Perspective: Biological warfareBashar al-Assad’s Updated, Sinister Version of Biological Warfare
Biological warfare is generally understood as the deliberate wartime introduction of a lethal pathogen with the intent to kill or maim. Syria under President Bashar al-Assad is pursuing a sinister variation—one with long and dangerous historical precedents. Assad’s government has allowed pathogens normally controlled by public health measures—such as clean water, sanitation, waste disposal, vaccination, and infection control—to emerge as biological weapons through the deliberate destruction and withholding of those measures. The conflict has in effect reversed public health advances to achieve levels of disease not seen since the Napoleonic era.
Perspective: Great-power politicsJettisoning Arms Control Endangers America’s Edge in Great-Power Politics
The Trump administration’s National Defense Strategy identified the “reemergence of long-term, strategic competition” with China and Russia as the foremost threat to U.S. national security. Both the White House and Pentagon insist that the U.S. military needs enhanced capabilities to counter growing threats such as Russian hypersonic missiles and new Chinese warships and submarines. Yet, as the Trump administration escalates its hard-power focus, it is systematically eroding the restrictions on hard power that historically have limited the strength of potential great-power challengers.
Perspective: Rising seasGlaciers May Be Melting Faster Than We Expected
From Alaska to Antarctica, thousands of glaciers flow over the land and out to the ocean. These tidewater glaciers are rapidly retreating and melting, like much of Earth’s ice, continually adding to rising sea levels. But to date, scientists have struggled to pinpoint where on the face of a glacier’s terminus the most intense melting occurs—and exactly how fast it is happening. Until now.
Perspective: Science & politics Upholding Scientific Integrity at Federal Agencies
Republicans and Democrats on a House subcommittee on Thursday agreed that science-related policy decisions should be based on facts, but differed on how to protect the federal scientists who gather and analyze those facts from undue influence.
Perspective: JurisprudenceWhat the Mueller Investigation Was Always About
In the partisan warfare that dominated last Wednesday’s hearings, we’ve forgotten the point: Our elections are under threat, and the president doesn’t much care. Robert Mueller was originally charged with investigating Russian efforts to influence the outcome of the 2016 election and that only secondarily was he tasked with figuring out whether the president had obstructed justice by impeding that investigation. The whole point of the Mueller investigation and report is that Russia hacked an election, that it is right now hacking the next election, and that this is a threat to national security and the long-standing American experiment in representative democracy.
Perspective: RansomwareHackers’ Latest Target: School Districts
Some hackers demand ransom; others sweep up personal data for sale to identity thieves. But whatever hackers’ motives, school systems around the country have been the targets of their cyberattacks. Nearly two-thirds of school districts in the United States serve fewer than 2,500 students, and many do not have a staff member dedicated solely to cybersecurity.
Perspective: Nuclear weapons testing460,000 Premature Deaths: The Horror That Was Nuclear Weapons Testing
In March 1954, over the Bikini Atoll, the United States detonated a 15-megaton hydrogen bomb —one thousand times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. It was the largest explosion ever set off by Americans, and also the dirtiest. Researchers have now found that, more than sixty years after the nuclear tests the United States conducted in the area, the levels of radiation in several Marshall Island atolls, exceed that found at Chernobyl or Fukushima. The United States also detonated hundreds of atomic bombs in Nevada, and a 2017 study suggested that fallout from the Nevada nuclear testing could have led to between 340,000 and 460,000 premature deaths, mostly Americans and mainly through cancer.
Perspective: Rare earthsU.S. and Australia Team Up against China's Dominance in Rare Earths
An Australian rare-earth producer has enlisted an American partner to help it chip away at China’s dominance in supplying minerals that are crucial to making smartphones, missiles, batteries for electric vehicles and a long list of high-tech products. China has used its rare-earth dominance as a weapon in previous trade disputes and has signaled that it could do so again in its current fight with the U.S.
Perspective: Russian trollsRussian Twitter Trolls Stoke Anti-immigrant Lies Ahead of Canadian Election
Russian troll activity on Twitter aimed at influencing public opinion has attracted a lot of attention in the United States and other western democracies. Canadians may feel it’s not an issue here. But a recent examination of Twitter data suggests there are reasons to be concerned as the country heads into a federal election.
Perspective: Pre-disaster aidCoping with Climate Change with Forecast-Based Aid
Traditionally, disaster victims have received assistance after trouble hits. If a region is flooded, say, people in the area may get aid to rebuild. But a new approach to humanitarian giving is flipping the script and offering help in advance of disaster, using in-depth weather forecasting and risk analysis to predict future victims.
Perspective: EMPThe Threat of an Electromagnetic Attack
When much of Venezuela was plunged into darkness after a massive blackout this week, President Nicolás Maduro blamed the power outage on an “electromagnetic attack” carried out by the U.S. The claim was met with skepticism, but Maduro’s claim has raised questions over what exactly is an electromagnetic attack, how likely is it to occur and what impact could it have.