Escalation in cyberspace; secret weapon: immigrants; KKK-inspired sheriffs?, and more

On balance, this initial implementation of the defend forward strategy suggests the United States can be more proactive and engaged in cyberspace without provoking dangerous escalation dynamics. This does not mean adversaries will not react to a more forward-leaning U.S. posture in cyberspace; rather, it implies that the United States can reasonably assume some additional risks to confront undesirable adversary cyber behavior. However, the U.S. cyber operation against the Internet Research Agency should also energize further research on identifying the thresholds above which offensive action in cyberspace could prove to be escalatory or trigger an undesirable adversary response.

Secret weapon: Immigrants help America keep its technological edge (Sam Peak, Ryan Khurana, National Interest)
Restricting student visas only helps Washington’s rivals.

GoFundMe bans anti-vaxxers who raise money to spread misinformation (Julia Arciga, Daily Beast)
Activists have raised more than $170,000 for their anti-science message.

Inside the Energy Dept.’s new $96M Infrastructure-Security Office (Brandi Vincent, Defense One)
The new Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response aims to deflect cyber, manmade and natural security hazards.

International terrorism prosecutions during winter 2019 (Emma Broches, Julia Solomon-Strauss, Lawfare)
Although the Washington Post reports the FBI has arrested more domestic terrorism suspects than international terror suspects over the past two years, recent months have seen foreign fighters who joined the Islamic State returning home to the United States to be prosecuted and other individuals who provided support working their way through the justice system. As of March 21, 178 individuals have been charged in the U.S. on offenses related to the Islamic State since the first arrests occurred in March 2014. Meanwhile, four sentences for providing material support to the Islamic State that judges issued in the past two months show a trend in how courts punish that crime. Individuals affiliated with other terrorist groups, including al-Qaeda, the Taliban and Lashkar e-Taiba have also been arrested, convicted and sentenced since the start of the new year. Below is a brief update and highlight of the new and ongoing cases.

A group of sheriffs is refusing to enforce gun laws based on a 1960s constitutional theory from the KKK (Jared A. Goldstein, Slate)
In recent months, a group of self-proclaimed “constitutional sheriffs” in Washington state has announced that they will not enforce the state’s new gun law, which tightens background checks and bans people under 21 years old from buying semi-automatic weapons. Asserting that the Second Amendment prohibits laws involving “registration of personal firearms under any circumstances,” members of the constitutional sheriffs movement declare that they have the right, even the duty, to refuse to enforce gun laws. Their refusal raises a thorny question: Should government officials ever refuse to enforce laws they personally believe are invalid?
The constitutional sheriffs movement likes to portray itself as a new incarnation of the civil rights movement, which follows Martin Luther King’s belief in “a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.” But, as I have argued, the movement owes more to the Ku Klux Klan than to King’s philosophy of civil disobedience.

The death of Fascist irony (Talia Lavin, New Republic)
What the Christchurch mass shooter’s manifesto reveals about the way jokes and memes are used on the racist right

HHS uses AI tools to help battle diseases (Phil Goldstein, FedTech)
The Department of Health and Human Services recently completed a technology sprint designed to take advantage of public data and artificial intelligence.

Facebook: hundreds of millions of passwords were stored in plaintext on internal networks (Jeff Stone, Cyberscoop)
Facebook plans to notify hundreds of millions of users their passwords were stored in an insecure format that could have allowed company employees to access and view login credentials.

An internal investigation has found that between 200 million and 600 million Facebook users may have had their passwords stored in plain text and searchable by more than 20,000 employees, according to KrebsOnSecurity, which first reported the news.