How to Combat Domestic Terrorism | Ransomware Epidemic | Flooding from Below, and more

Ailing Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi Puts “Professor” Abdullah Qardash in Charge of ISIS (Jordan Siegel, The Times)
The leader of Isis is to hand day-to-day running of the terrorist network to one of his lieutenants, adding to speculation that he has been wounded and is suffering from chronic illness.
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has promoted Abdullah Qardash, a former officer in Saddam Hussein’s army who rose through the extremist ranks after the dictator was captured in 2003, according to Amaq, Isis’s news agency.
Baghdadi, 48, and Qardash, whose age is not known, were both jailed by US forces over their links to al-Qaeda in 2003, and held together at the Camp Bucca detention centre in Basra. It is where Baghdadi is thought to have come of age as a jihadist demagogue, converting hundreds of prisoners to his cause and refining his vision for his so-called caliphate. Qardash is believed to have worked with him ever since.

Democrats Press FBI, DHS on Response to White Supremacist Violence (Cristina Marcos, The Hill)
House Democrats on Thursday pressed the FBI and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to beef up their strategies to combat the threat of violence motivated by white supremacist extremism after the shooting in El Paso, Texas, this month.
In letters to FBI Director Christopher Wray and Acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan, 65 House Democrats accused the Trump administration of withholding information from Congress about domestic terrorism committed by alleged white supremacists in recent years and not giving the issue enough priority.

Flooding from Below, a Year After Historic Wisconsin Rains (Chris Hubbuch, Wisconsin State Journal)
County officials say years of excessive precipitation — including 11-15 inches of rain that fell in August 2018 — have left the groundwater tables so high that the soil can’t drain, making low-lying areas prone to flooding.

Cyberhackers Hold 22 Cities to Ransom (Ben Hoyle, The Times)
At least 22 towns and cities in Texas have been hit by a coordinated cyberattack from hackers demanding millions of dollars in ransom.
The security breach is affecting mostly small, rural administrations. Gary Heinrich, the mayor of Keene, a city of 6,100 people outside Fort Worth, said the hackers wanted a collective ransom of $2.5 million.
Investigators have not established who is behind the attack but the evidence points to “one single threat actor”, according to the Texas Department of Information Resources.
There have been 169 ransomware attacks on state and local governments since 2013 and 60 this year. But the latest assault is on a different scale.

The Pentagon Is Turning to Nature to Solve Its Most Complex Problems (Jack Corrigan, Defense One)
DARPA is exploring ways to harness chemical reactions, biological processes and other natural phenomena to build a more efficient computer.

How Do We Stop Driverless Cars and Autonomous Delivery Drones from Becoming Weapons? (Kalev Leetaru. Forbes)
As we look to the future of driverless cars and autonomous delivery drones, one of the most existential questions of their future is how to prevent them from being used for harm. What is to stop a driverless car from being loaded with explosives and sent off to its destination or a delivery drone from being loaded with explosives or a chemical weapon and used to target an individual with pinpoint precision? Terrorist groups are already making increasing use of modified civilian drones as weapons platforms, including as explosives delivery systems, while militaries are increasingly eyeing such drones as inexpensive and deniable weapons systems ideally suited for close-quarters navigation of urban environments. What can manufacturers do to curb such repurposing of their products?
A few hundred dollars, a few open source packages and an afternoon of work is all that’s required to turn an off-the-shelf civilian drone into a “killer robot” autonomous weapon today. Even less effort is required to jury rig a manually controlled drone to drop a payload and control it remotely by camera.

Ottawa to Fund Research on Far-Right Extremism in Quebec (Katelyn Thomas, Montreal Gazette)
The announcement for funding comes after Ottawa added far-right extremists to the list of the country’s terrorist entities in June.

The Tit-for-Tat Dynamics of 21st Century Extremism (Valery Perry, Just Security)
The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the later rise of ISIS and its declared caliphate in 2014, fueled the overwhelming focus of the 21st century on military and law enforcement efforts to counter militant jihadist terrorism. Since a 2015 White House Summit, that reaction-driven and hard-security approach has been supplemented to a certain extent by enhanced efforts to prevent and counter the deeper drivers of that type of violent radicalization. Even more importantly, there are signs of a broader understanding of another form of extremism – that of the violent far-right or ultra-nationalist variety. As leaders and experts begin to grapple with this phenomenon, the experience of the Western Balkans can offer some pointers, including on one particularly pernicious angle – the tendency of one type of extremism to fuel another.
The wars of the disintegrating Yugoslavia in the early 1990s that killed some 150,000 people and displaced millions were often viewed at the time as an unfortunate exception to the ideological Cold War “victory” thought to have been secured by the West. But the recent global mushrooming of strongmen, the co-optation of certain media to distort and blur the truth, the demonization of the other in public rhetoric, and the rejection of pluralism in the name of regressive, tribal essentialism suggests that this regional conflagration may not have been the last gasps of a bloody 20th century, but the first winds of a new 21st. century.
That destructive Balkan playbook illustrates tools and methods typically used by capricious ethno-nationalist influencers as they promote their agendas, and indicates what can make societies more or less resilient to these threats. Paradoxically, some of the same projects, activities and approaches supported by the United States and others in the post-war reconstruction of the Balkans might now provide pointers for preventing and countering violent extremism in these “donor” countries themselves. While they are not dealing with the total upheaval of war, the internal battles playing out over values and ideas is in many ways similarly poisonous and polarizing.