Our picksWrong about ISIS; strangers and citizens; an Ebola “perfect storm,” and more

Wrong about ISIS (Editorial, Weekly Standard)
We haven’t “wiped out” ISIS. Or Al Qaeda. Not even close.

Microsoft president says tech companies are “first line of defense” in cybersecurity (CBS News)
Cybersecurity is “job one” for businesses, consumers and governments around the world today, and technology companies are “the first line of defense,” according to Microsoft president Brad Smith. “The security engineers who work at our company – we have 3,500 of them – are the first responders when things go wrong. It has fundamentally changed the role we need to play and really elevated the responsibility we need to fulfill,” Smith said Monday on “CBS This Morning.”

An Ebola “perfect storm” is brewing in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (Julia Belluz, Vox)
The DRC’s most dangerous region is facing the seventh-largest Ebola outbreak in history.

Taking care of pets during Hurricane Florence earns criminal charges for a North Carolina woman (Katherine Timpf, National Review)
The animals could easily have died without her help. Now the government wants to punish her because she’s not a licensed veterinarian.

Google Maps is a better spy than James Bond (Nick Waters, Foreign Policy)
Open-source intelligence is a vital tool for governments—and for checking them.

California’s homeland security challenge (Eli Owen, Cipher Brief)
From wildfires to terrorist plots, to the arrest of individuals with IEDs, the State of California is constantly under threat.  With more than 38 million residents (equaling roughly 12 percent of the nation’s population), it is the most populous state in the U.S.  California manages the threat preparedness and response via the California State Threat Assessment Center (STAC), which is a part of the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services.
The STAC is the primary fusion center for the State and in 2018, California Governor Jerry Brown appointed Eli Owen to run it.  Owen manages the day-to-day operations, which is no small task given California’s vulnerability to earthquakes, floods, wildfires, public health emergencies, the impact of prolonged drought, cybersecurity attacks, terrorism, home-grown violent extremism, human trafficking and foreign intelligence collection operations.
California is also the home of Silicon Valley, at a time when tech and bot the use and misuse of tech, has a greater impact on security than at any other time in history.

Operation Ceasefire and the unlikely advent of precision policing (John Seabrook, New Yorker)
Professor David Kennedy’s radical approach to gang violence sounded like academic claptrap, but it worked, and it has led to a paradigm shift in urban law enforcement.

Strangers and citizens (Reihan Salam, National Review)
Immigration will only benefit our country if we’re committed to assimilating new arrivals.