Our picksSafer Nuke Shipments | Blackouts to Prevent Wildfires | Digital Sleuths & Fake News, and more
· Turkish-Backed Forces Are Freeing Islamic State Prisoners
· Trump’s Weak Sanctions May Only Help Erdogan
· Shadow Politics: Meet the Digital Sleuth Exposing Fake News
· NATO Allies Need to Come to Terms with Offensive Cyber Operations
· U.S., Critics Split on Whether Tech Made Nuke Shipments Safer
· Are California Blackouts the New Normal for the State?
· With Warming, Get Used to Blackouts to Prevent Wildfires
· No-Deal Brexit Could Lead to Increased Terrorism in Northern Ireland, Police Say
Turkish-Backed Forces Are Freeing Islamic State Prisoners (Lara Seligman, Foreign Policy)
Ankara’s radical proxies are also apparently executing Kurdish prisoners and killing unarmed civilians, videos show.
Trump’s Weak Sanctions May Only Help Erdogan (Keith Johnson and Elias Groll, Foreign Policy)
U.S. President Donald Trump vowed to destroy Turkey’s economy if its troops misbehaved after he greenlighted the Turkish invasion of northern Syria. Instead, even in the face of reports of Turkish atrocities and other offenses, Trump slapped Turkey’s wrist on Monday, announcing that he would levy sanctions against a trio of government ministers and the country’s steel industry.
It’s a far cry from the economic havoc he promised—and in any event comes as tens of thousands of Kurds are fleeing, Islamic State jails are emptying, and U.S. credibility is in tatters.
Shadow Politics: Meet the Digital Sleuth Exposing Fake News (Issie Lapowsky, Wired)
Buried in media scholar Jonathan Albright’s research was proof of a massive political misinformation campaign. Now he’s taking on the world’s biggest platforms before it’s too late.
NATO Allies Need to Come to Terms with Offensive Cyber Operations (Max Smeets, Lawfare)
In May 2008, the U.S. Department of Defense and the German Ministry of Defense signed a memorandum of understandingconcerning “Cooperation on Information Assurance and Computer Network Defense.” Computer network defense (CND) refers to actions taken on computer networks to monitor and protect those networks. It is not the onlymemorandum the U.S. Department of Defense has signed with allies on cyber defense.
In late 2016, U.S. Cyber Command operators wiped Islamic State propaganda material off a server located in Germany. The German government wasnotifiedin some fashionbut not asked for advance consent, causing much frustration. While U.S. Cyber Command’s reported action may have violatedGermany’s sovereignty, it didn’t explicitly violate the memorandum. It wasn’t an act of CND; it was a computer network attack (CNA), seeking to disrupt, deny, degrade or destroy. (Cont.)
