Deadly pathogens escaping; national DNA database; terrorism & body count, and more

Christchurch attacks could impact counterterrorism strategy (Nick Fishwick, Cipher Brief)
At least 50 people were killed and another 50 wounded in Friday’s Christchurch attacks.  New Zealand authorities worked through the weekend to identify the victims as quickly as possible in order to allow for them to be buried in accordance with Muslim tradition.
The suspect in the shootings, 28-year-old Brenton Harrison Tarrant has been charged with murder.
Cipher Brief Expert Nick Fishwick, who is a former senior member of the British Foreign Office, considers the impact that the attack could have on New Zealand’s strategies to combat terrorism.

Russian trolls can be surprisingly subtle, and often fun to read (Darren L. Linvill and Patrick Warren, Washington Post)

·  “On Sept. 10, 2018, @PoliteMelanie tweeted to her more than 20,000 followers: ‘Criticizing Trump in a book is just unfair. It’s like criticizing the Amish on television.’ The next day, this tweet won the Chicago Tribune’s ‘Tweet of the Week’ contest. What the Tribune’s readers didn’t know when casting their votes, however, was that ‘Melanie’ was a Russian troll.”

·  “Most Americans probably believe that they could spot a Russian troll from a mile away — and that they would certainly never engage with one. These assumptions, however, do not give credit to what [suspected funder Yevgeny] Prigozhin’s people have built. … [T]he IRA’s work is much subtler, often more palatable and always seemingly more organic than Americans may imagine.”

·  “We’ve spent the past year studying Russian IRA disinformation on Twitter with the goal of better understanding its strategy and tactics. Like KGB disinformation operations of the past, this campaign has two overt goals. First, it seeks to further divide and polarize the United States along ideological lines. … Second, it attempts to undermine our trust in the institutions that sustain a strong nation and a strong democracy.”

·  “[M]any troll messages are not negative. Instead, they are cute, or educational, or uplifting, all in an attempt to gain credibility and followers. PoliteMelanie won the ‘Tweet of the Week’ because Americans found her funny. They spread her messages and followed her account for that same reason. Before Twitter suspended PoliteMelanie’s account, her winning tweet had more than 125,000 retweets and likes — and this wasn’t even her most popular post.”

·  “Tweets from other accounts that were part of the PoliteMelanie network had similar success: We found them cited by The Washington Post, CNN, BuzzFeed, Al Jazeera, the New York Post and Essence magazine, to name a few. One of these accounts, @Blk_Hermione, had a tweet with cross-platform success, gaining more than 40,000 ‘upvotes’ to make the front page of Reddit.”

·  “An analysis of 2 million English-language IRA tweets released by Twitter last July shows that the trolls had at that point gained 30 million likes and 22 million retweets among 1,866 English-language accounts active between 2014 and 2017. And the data shows they have gotten better with each passing year.”

·  “We’ve seen debates that they helped foment move quickly from Twitter to mainstream print media. On topics ranging from vaccines to Colin Kaepernick, they can speak vehemently to the extremes of both sides. … That’s why IRA accounts have differing target audiences and differently tailored messages.”

·  “Twitter continually shuts down accounts… [but the IRA] can afford to routinely lose accounts, given the low cost of replacement and the efficiency with which they can build followers.”

·  “Other nations clearly view these asymmetrical tactics as fruitful, since new troll factories are spreading, to countries as diverse as Iran, Venezuela and Bangladesh.”

Body counts are terrible way for the public to assess U.S. counter-terrorism operations (Charles J. Dunlap Jr., Just Security)
President Donald Trump’s new executive order rescinding a provision of an Obama-era executive order that required public reporting of civilian and combatant deaths in U.S. counterterrorism strikes “outside areas of active hostilities” has garnered concern from transparency advocates. They express fears that President Trump’s action will deprive the public of information it needs to judge the appropriateness of the United States’ use of force in an era of persistent conflict against global terror threats. I agree that it is vitally important in democracy to keep the public informed, but giving the public raw numbers of deaths – “body counts” in essence – in isolation from other key factors essential to determining the propriety of the use of force will likely cause more confusion that clarity.

Why it’s a mistake to be a-waitin’ “the” Mueller Report (and why you should instead focus on two other reports) (Marty Lederman, Just Security)

Last Thursday, the House of Representatives passed a resolution, by a resounding vote of 420-0, calling for Robert Mueller’s Section 600.8(c) report explaining his prosecution and declination decisions—a report he’s required to submit to Attorney General Barr at the “conclusion of [his] work”—to be released to Congress in “full” and to be released to the public “except to the extent the public disclosure of any portion thereof is expressly prohibited by law.”
In a new Op-Ed in the Washington Post I explain that this so-called “Mueller Report” probably won’t see the light of day … .but that that’s not as troubling as it might appear at first glance… Mueller’s report to Barr is only one of three or more “reports” that ought to emerge when the Russia investigation ends.  And at least two of those other reports, which will be submitted to Congress and parts of which may well become public, are likely to be far more revealing and more significant than the so-called “Mueller Report”:
(i)  Barr’s own Section 600.9(a)(3) notification to the judiciary committees—which presumably Mueller will have drafted in large part—can be, and should be, a comprehensive account of the Russia investigation, consistent with Barr’s promise to senators in connection with his confirmation hearing that because “it is very important that the public and Congress be informed of the results of the Special Counsel’s work … my goal will be to provide as much transparency as I can consistent with the law.”  That report might well reveal a great deal of factual information about President Trump’s actions involving Russia.  We should not expect it, however, to include Mueller’s assessment about whether there are grounds to ask a grand jury to bring criminal charges against Trump after he leaves office, nor to offer any conclusions about whether Trump’s conduct did or did not satisfy the elements of any particular criminal offenses.  Accordingly, as long as Trump is in office it will be up to the committees themselves—and Congress as a whole—to (in the words of the Jaworski road map) “determine what action may be warranted … by [the] evidence” presented in Barr’s notification.

(ii) It’s likely, however, that the most important “report” of them all will be the briefing that DOJ must provide to the congressional intelligence committees conveying the results of the counterintelligence investigation Mueller has superintended.  In order to comply with the requirement of keeping those committees “fully and currently informed” of the results of the investigation, that briefing—which will probably include at least some written document—should include Mueller’s assessment, if any, about whether, how and to what extent Trump is compromised or is otherwise unable to perform his constitutional duties on behalf of the nation when it comes to the Russian threat to our electoral system.  Does Trump have financial obligations to Russian interests?  Was he — and does he continue to be —motivated by the prospects of a Moscow Trump Tower?  Does Russian intelligence have kompromat on Trump that makes him susceptible to undue influence?  Or is there a more benign explanation for Trump’s otherwise inexplicable conduct regarding Russia and Putin?  The counterintelligence investigation’s answers to these and similar questions — especially its assessment, if any, of the President’s current capacity to address the foreign threat — are of far greater current importance to the functioning of our government than determining whether Trump’s conduct in 2016-2017 violated any particular criminal statutes.