Bigger Threat than Blackouts | Risks to Nuclear Deterrence | Encrypting More of the Internet, and more

A nuclear power plant would also be vulnerable to a drone flying directly into the cooling engine, disabling it. This could have devastating effects in a matter of minutes. As a “symbolic” demonstration of the vulnerability of a nuclear plant, in July of 2018, Greenpeace France crashed a drone into a French nuclear plant. Although the airspace surrounding and above the plant is a no-fly zone, it remained unsecured and lacked proper detection and remediation efforts.
In order to protect the nation’s infrastructure adequately, we will need to integrate comprehensive airspace security solutions, including 3D detection, monitoring, classification, tracking, and mitigation. Security systems must be able to detect the smallest drones before a perimeter breach occurs. While the DHS, the FBI, and other agencies agree that drones present a major concern for national security, Congress has been slow to enact laws that clearly identify what authority security forces have to mitigate or destroy these threats.

Border Apprehensions Have Plunged Since May—So Why Are US Military Troops Still There? (Chantal da Silva, Newsweek)
U.S. Customs and Border Protection Acting Commissioner Mark Morgan has lauded the Trump administration’s efforts to deter migration to the U.S. border, crediting President Donald Trump’s hardline immigration policies for overseeing a sharp decline in enforcement actions at the southern border in the month of September.
“This September marked the lowest number of law enforcement actions during fiscal year 2019,” Morgan said Tuesday, speaking at a White House press briefing.
According to CBP, the agency saw a combined total of 52,546 people apprehended or deemed inadmissible at the U.S.-Mexico border last month, representing a major drop from the record-breaking 144, 255 who were apprehended or turned away from the border in May.

U.S. Looks to Facilitate Financing for European 5G Vendors: Report (Juan Pedro Tomás, RCR Wireless)
The U.S. government is studying alternatives to facilitate financing to European 5G vendors Ericsson a Nokia in a move to put obstacles to the global expansion of Huawei, according to a report by the Financial Times.
Officials in the Trump administration have suggested issuing credit lines to companies such as Nokia and Ericsson to enable them to match the generous financing terms that the Chinese vendor offers to its customers, according to two people with knowledge of the situation.
The report highlighted that Huawei offers longer payment terms to its customers thanks to the multibillion-dollar credit lines from China’s state banks.
The move is part of a wider effort by Washington to fund a rival to the Chinese vendor, which is the largest telecom gear maker in the world and is pointed out by the U.S authorities as a security threat.

A Controversial Plan to Encrypt More of the Internet (Lily Hay Newman, Wired)
The road to routing all Domain Name System lookups through HTTPS is pocked with disagreements over just how much it will help.

Homeland Security, DoD, Transportation Officials Focus on Aviation Cyber Security (Frank Wolfe and Calvin Biesecker, Aviation Today)
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Pentagon, and the Department of Transportation (DOT) have been working since May to implement the cyber security goals of the National Strategy for Aviation Security, released earlier this year, and to coordinate cyber security priorities.
The Wall Street Journal first disclosed in an article last week that concerns about possible terrorist cyber attacks led U.S. officials “to re-energize efforts to identify airliners’ vulnerability to hacking” and that the new program would involve limited testing of aircraft.
Sister publication Defense Daily reported in 2017 that DHS’ Science and Technology division had bought a Boeing 757 and conducted cyber security testing of the aircraft at the airport in Atlantic City, but the Wall Street Journal article last week reported that such testing ended last year “amid a disagreement with Boeing…over the testing methodology and plans to publicly release some findings.”

Blackouts Used to Be Disastrous. Now There’s a Bigger Threat (Daniel Cusick, Thomas Frank, and Anne C. Mulkern, E&E News)
More than a million people in Northern California lost power yesterday in an intentional blackout that reveals the stunning measures utilities and state officials will take to ameliorate the risk of wildfire as the effects of climate change become more apparent.

AI Risks to Nuclear Deterrence Are Real (Zachary Kallenborn, War on the Rocks)
Why does the United States have so many nukes? Over 1,750 warheads are currently deployed on submarines, aircraft, and in missile silos. It’s less than the total at the peak of the Cold War — the U.S. stockpile exceeded 31,000 warheads in 1967 — but it’s still a lot.
There are a few reasons for this, but the most important is that nuclear deterrence relies, in part, on the ability of nuclear forces to survive a first strike. A nuclear threat is not as effective if an adversary can eliminate all U.S. nuclear forces in a single strike. The survivability of that deterrent is a core component of overall U.S. national security. As new technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) emerge and grow, an obvious question to ask is: What does this mean for nuclear deterrence?
In “Will Artificial Intelligence Imperil Nuclear Deterrence?” Rafael Loss and Joseph Johnson argue that technical limitations prevent AI from threatening the deterrent value of today’s nuclear forces.
I believe that AI could help create windows of opportunity in which a successful decapitation strike is possible. AI enables the development of novel platforms to collect intelligence and attack nuclear systems. Although AI has limitations, other, non-AI capabilities mitigate AI’s limitations regarding information processing. This means the potential for AI-based systems to aid second-strike platform identification should not be ignored.