Russia’s measles disinformation; public health & terrorism; TSA staff churn, and more

Huawei and managing 5G risk (Herb Lin, Lawfare)
Based on cybersecurity concerns, the United States, Australia and New Zealand have staked out policy positions that prevent or strongly discourage the acquisition of Huawei 5G technology for use in the national communications infrastructure of these nations. Other U.S. allies have announced or are considering policy positions that do not go so far and would indeed allow such acquisition at least to some extent.
Both sides have their public arguments, but the arguments are largely incompatible with each other.

The improbable rise of Huawei (Keith Johnson, Elias Groll, Foreign Policy)
How did a private Chinese firm come to dominate the world’s most important emerging technology?

A public-health approach to countering violent extremism(Michael Garcia, Just Security)
The recent horrific attack on two mosques in New Zealand has again prompted criticism that the United States and the international community failto address violence committed by far-right extremists as energeticallyas that of al-Qaeda or ISIS assailants. While we unequivocally should focus on both kinds of violence, a more effective strategy may be to concentrate on the factors that draw individuals to any violence-inspiring ideology in the first place. An approach to countering violent extremism (CVE) that employs practitioners across multiple disciplines to identify and mitigate such risk factors would eliminate the arbitrary nature of focusing on one form of violent extremism or another.
In other words, we need to apply public-health policies and practices to CVE.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) already viewsa public-health approach—a collective action by mental health, substance-abuse, psychological, and law enforcement practitioners—as a way to address violence in general. Researchers and practitioners recently examinedhow this idea could be applied to CVE. They crosswalkhow CDC’s essential public-health functions could be translated into CVE and how multi-sector and non-discriminatory techniques would foster a holistic approach.
While the reports resulting from these projects provide great frameworks and general recommendations, they do not detail how to implement such an approach from a policymaker’s standpoint. That is why my team and I at the National Governors Association are using one of 26 U.S. Department of Homeland Security CVE grantsto create a practical guide detailing how a state can adopt public-health policies and practices for CVE, with primary, secondary and tertiary prevention efforts.

Some Mueller team members aren’t happy with Barr’s description of their findings (Andrew Prokop, Vox)
A New York Times report describes behind-the-scenes dissent. Here’s what we know.

One in four TSA screeners quits within six months (Eric Katz, Defense One)
TSA administrator says low pay is to blame and promises new compensation system soon.

FEMA tells parish it can drop floodways from new maps (David J Mitchell, The Advocate)
The new figures have lowered flood risk for 1,200 properties, but the maps also came with new floodways, a first in Ascension Parish, that have caught some home and business owners off guard.

How news media talk about terrorism: What the evidence shows (Erin M. Kearns and Amarnath Amarasingam, Just Security)
After major extremist attacks, public discussion often becomes dominated by the question of whether white attackers are talked about differently and treated differently than non-white attackers. We inevitably see the famous “terrorism or mental illness” chart from a Family Guyepisode, frequent references to media hypocrisy, and exhortations from activists to “imagine if this guy was a Muslim.” But, what does the research actually show about how different attackers are discussed in the news media, and what gaps remain in our understanding of how all this plays out?
Most recently, after the Christchurch attack in New Zealand, the Daily Mirror, a British tabloid, was heavily criticized for the way it covered the shooter – “Angelic boy who grew into an evil far-right mass killer” – compared with the newspaper’s tone on attacker Omar Mateen in the 2016 Pulse Nightclub attack in Orlando, Florida – “ISIS Maniac Kills 50 in Gay Nightclub.”
These debates often descend into a kind of battle of anecdotes and Google Images. One side attempts to point out that deep-seated white privilege has an impact on whether and how white attackers are discussed in the public sphere, while the other side dismisses the existence of such a bias. Journalist and commentator Mehdi Hasan recently went on MSNBC to argue that, for white mass shooters, the question is “always, was he mentally ill, deranged, loner,” while a Muslim shooter is always “a terrorist fueled by ideology.” His appearance on the show sparked a lively debate on Twitter, which again had different commentators speaking past one another.
The facts around this issue are important, and go beyond mere Twitter spats. They speak to fundamental issues of white privilege and racialized media coverage and, especially in our current political climate, has the potential to fuel further division and polarization in our communities.

China’s pivot on climate change and national security (Scott Moore, Michelle Melton, Lawfare)
For decades, China was reluctant to deem climate change a national security issue, preferring instead to view it through the lens of development. The driving concern behind China’s reticence was sovereignty; Beijing feared that crisis rhetoric about climate change would be used to legitimate interventionist actions on the part of Western powers, including forcing Beijing to curtail its economic growth. Influential Chinese commentators called efforts to limit emissions “a conspiracy by developed nations” to contain the Middle Kingdom’s development, even as the Chinese military quietly acknowledged in a 2010 white paper on national defense that climate change contributes to security concerns. While the U.S. military recognized climate change was a potential national security issue in 2008, that same year, Chinese state media featured an editorial warning against “sensationalizing [climate change] as a security issue.”
The official positions of the U.S. and China have reversed in recent years. Despite decades of acceptance among U.S. military and civilian national security leadership that climate change poses a threat to U.S. interests, the Trump administration has continually questioned the fact of climate change itself and pushed to revoke assessments that climate change is a critical threat to U.S. national security and military readiness. In contrast, Beijing in 2017 broke with decades of reluctance to label climate change as a security issue by signing onto a joint statement with the European Union terming rising global temperatures “a root cause of instability.”
China’s shift from skeptic to true believer on climate change and security is not, for the most part, because leadership has suddenly become convinced that climate change is real. As the Chinese government acknowledged in its most recent comprehensive assessment of climate change, China is already affected by worsened floods, more extreme droughts, diminished fishery productivity and other ecological changes. The government has long understood that a warming climate will threaten the country’s agricultural production, make economically important cities vulnerable to catastrophic flooding and eventually dry out many of the country’s rivers. In particular, scientists predict that China’s northern region—the country’s breadbasket—will suffer crippling droughts, making it increasingly difficult to maintain the ruling Communist Party’s goal of basic self-sufficiency in key crops. China is already one of the most water-scarce countries in the world, and in the decades to come, this scarcity is projected to get much, much worse as the flow of rivers fed primarily by meltwater decreases sharply toward the end of the century.

For Russia, war with the US never ended — and likely never will (Janusz Bugajski, The Hill)
In case anyone harbored any doubts, Moscow’s top military leader has reaffirmed that Russia is engaged in a permanent war with the United States.
In a recent speech at Moscow’s Academy of Military Science, Gen. Valery Gerasimov, chief of the Russian general staff, issued a three-pronged warning to the United States. He broadened Moscow’s definition of war, threatened the nuclear option and invented a U.S.-sponsored “fifth column” that allegedly plans to destabilize Russia.
Gerasimov followed in Soviet footsteps by describing America as Russia’s main enemy and declared that there are no essential differences between open war and an opaque peace.
During peacetime, war is simply conducted by non-military means through clandestine influence and disinformation operations — what some have defined as hybrid or asymmetric attacks.