Our picksFor Whom the Tok Tiks | How Vulnerable Is G.P.S.? | Body Bags and Enemy Lists, and more

Published 8 August 2020

·  For Whom the Tok Tiks

·  75 Years on, How Will the Nuclear Age End?

·  Body Bags and Enemy Lists: How Far-Right Police Officers and Ex-Soldiers Planned for ‘Day X’

·  Is QAnon the Most Dangerous Conspiracy Theory of the 21st Century?

·  Deepfakes Are Getting Better, Easier to Make, and Cheaper

·  State Department Offers up to $10 Million in Rewards to ID Hackers Who Interfere in Election

·  How the DHS Intelligence Unit Sidelined the Watchdogs

·  How Vulnerable Is G.P.S.?

·  Russia’s Race for Virus Vaccine Raises Concerns in the West

For Whom the Tok Tiks(Ian Bosot, The Atlantic)
TikTok could persist in many ways in America. None is good.

75 Years on, How Will the Nuclear Age End?(George Perkovich, War on the Rocks)
Seventy-five years ago, U.S. nuclear weapons devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For individual human beings, 75 years signals nearness to the end of life. But for the nuclear age, does this anniversary mark the beginning, the middle, or the end?
There are two dramatic ways in which the nuclear age could end: annihilation or disarmament. If one ending is undesirable and the other unachievable, leaders should prolong life with nuclear weapons by making their use much less likely and reducing their destructiveness in case they are used. Clearer adherence to the law of armed conflict and greater understanding of the climatic effects of nuclear war would serve both purposes.

Body Bags and Enemy Lists: How Far-Right Police Officers and Ex-Soldiers Planned for ‘Day X’(Katrin Bennhold, New York Times)
Germany has woken up to a problem of far-right extremism in its elite special forces. But the threat of neo-Nazi infiltration of state institutions is much broader.

Is QAnon the Most Dangerous Conspiracy Theory of the 21st Century?(Charlie Warzel, New York Times)
“It’s a collaborative fiction built on wild speculation that hardens into reality.”

Deepfakes Are Getting Better, Easier to Make, and Cheaper(Patrick Yucker, Defense One)
GitHub is becoming a destination site for make-your-own-deepfake software

State Department Offers up to $10 Million in Rewards to ID Hackers Who Interfere in Election(Jeff Stone, Cyberscoop)
The U.S. government is trying to be more proactive in fending off election interference.
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Wednesday offered up to $10 million in rewards for the identification or location of anyone trying to interfere in elections “through certain illegal cyber activities” at the direction of a foreign government.
The offer comes amid ongoing concern about meddling efforts designed to influence the U.S. election scheduled for Nov. 3. U.S. intelligence agencies previously concluded that Russian intelligence agencies interfered in the 2016 election by hacking the Democratic National Committee, then distributing emails meant to undermine Hillary Clinton’s presidential candidacy.

The Domestic Legal Framework for U.S. Military Cyber Operations (Robert Chesney, Lawfare)
Conventional wisdom holds that Congress has abandoned its duty regarding the government’s war powers. It is not hard to understand why. Between the agelessness and flexibility of the 2001 and 2002 Authorizations for Use of Military Force (AUMFs) and periodic unilateral uses of military force in Libya, Syria, and Iraq, the executive branch appears to act largely at its own discretion when it comes to conventional military operations. But matters are different in the cyber domain. With little fanfare and less public notice, Congress and the executive branch have cooperated effectively over the past decade to build a legal architecture for military cyber operations.

How Vulnerable Is G.P.S.?(Greg Milner, New Yorker)
An engineering professor has proved—and exploited—its vulnerabilities.

Russia’s Race for Virus Vaccine Raises Concerns in the West(Associated Press / VOA)
Russia boasts that it’s about to become the first country to approve a COVID-19 vaccine, with mass vaccinations planned as early as October using shots that are yet to complete clinical trials — and scientists worldwide are sounding the alarm that the headlong rush could backfire. Moscow sees a Sputnik-like propaganda victory, recalling the Soviet Union’s launch of the world’s first satellite in 1957. But the experimental COVID-19 shots began first-in-human testing on a few dozen people less than two months ago, and there’s no published scientific evidence yet backing Russia’s late entry to the global vaccine race, much less explaining why it should be considered a front-runner.