• Official: U.S. Adversaries Taking Sides, Wielding Influence Ahead of Election

    By Jeff Seldin

    Russia, China and Iran are all actively meddling in U.S. presidential politics hoping to persuade American voters to put their preferred candidate in the White House, according to an extraordinary warning from Washington’s top counterintelligence official. As was the case in 2016, Russia is actively working to help Trump. Russia has also recruited Ukrainian “actors” to manufacture dirt on Joe Biden and his son, to be fed into the investigation of the Bidens by Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin). China and Iran would prefer to see Biden in the White House, but their interference efforts are not at the level of Russia’s broad campaign to help Trump. Trump rejected that part of the intelligence community’s assessment which details Russia’s broad effort on his behalf. “The last person Russia wants to see in office is Donald Trump,” he said. “I don’t care what anybody says.”

  • U.S. Accuses Russia of Complex Online Disinformation, Propaganda Operation

    The United States has accused Russia of developing a sophisticated “ecosystem” to spread disinformation and propaganda about the coronavirus and other issues. In a new report published on August 5, the State Department said Russia’s online operations use “five main pillars” to amplify false narratives and conspiracy theories in a bid to sow confusion and fear.

  • Russian Government Hackers Stole, Leaked Classified U.K. Trade Documents Ahead of 2019 Election

    A treasure trove of classified documents about secret trade negotiations between the United States and the United Kingdom – discussion which aimed to prepare the U.S.-U.K. economic relationship for the post-Brexit era – were stolen by Russian government hackers and leaked to the opposition Labour Party ahead of the December 2019 general election. The Russian government hackers stole the classified papers – 451 pages in all — from an email account of Liam Fox, who was then the U.K. trade secretary.

  • Pompeo: U.S. Will Take Action on Chinese Software in “Coming Days

    Chinese software companies operating in the United States assiduously collect customers’ personal date, browsing habits, facial images, and other information and deliver it to China’s intelligence agencies for possible use by China when it would serve China’s interests to do so. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Sunday that the fact the Chinese software companies serve as information collectors for China’s intelligence agencies poses a serious national security threat to the United States, and that the administration, in the coming days, will soon announce a series of measures aiming to restrict the ability of Chinese software companies to operate in this way, and ban some companies from operating in the United States altogether.

  • Mystery Seeds from China A Concern for USDA

    During the last few weeks, dozens of people in twenty-two states have been receiving mysterious packages of seeds from China in their mail. The purpose of the mystery packages is not clear, but USDA urges recipients of the seed packages to hold onto the seeds and packaging, including the mailing label, until someone from their states’ department of agriculture or USDA APHIS contacts them with further instructions. The mystery seeds should not be planted, or mixed with legitimate seeds.

  • “Ghostwriter” Influence Campaign: Fabricated Content Pushes Narratives Aligned With Russian Security Interests

    FireEye says that Mandiant Threat Intelligence has tied together several information operations which FireEye assess with moderate confidence to comprise part of a broader influence campaign—ongoing since at least March 2017—aligned with Russian security interests. FireEye has dubbed this campaign “Ghostwriter.”

  • What Is Russia's Vagner Paramilitary Group and What Was It Doing in Belarus ahead of Vote?

    By Irina Romaliiskaya Robert Coalson

    The Vagner Group is one of the best-known of several Russian private paramilitary organizations which have come into being over the past decade. The organization is widely believed to be controlled by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a longtime associate of Vladimir Putin who once served as the Russian president’s chef. Vagner’s operations have always been held in close secrecy, in part because mercenary activity is illegal under Russian law and in part because the group is widely believed to operate in close cooperation with Russian military intelligence.

  • New Partnership Aims to Detect, Mitigate Attempts to Subvert, Delegitimize November Election

    Four of the U.S. leading institutions focused on analysis of mis- and disinformation in the social media landscape have created a new partnership — the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) – which aims to detect and mitigate the impact of attempts to prevent or deter people from voting or to delegitimize election results.

  • Is West Turning Away from Nixon's Approach to China?

    By Jamie Dettmer

    In 1972 US President Richard Nixon shocked the world, and many in his administration, by announcing his intention to normalize relations with Communist China. Forty-eight years on, America and China are embarking on another perilous voyage, filled possibly with even greater uncertainty than encountered in the 1970s. Western powers fear Beijing is out to re-shape the liberal world order, subscribing to a growing view that not only does the Chinese Communist Party want to ensure its continued rule at home but to make China the number one global power.  

  • Huawei and TikTok Are at the Forefront of a New Drift to Regionalism – Many Others Will Follow

    By Zhongdong Niu

    Huawei and TikTok were two of the most successful examples of globalization. Both of these Chinese companies are now at the mercy of a widening geopolitical divide. The U.S. has led an increasingly successful campaign to eliminate Huawei from the global market over alleged security fears, and is threatening to ban TikTok too. These developments are signs of attempts by the U.S. to decouple from China’s economy and concentrate on alliances within its own political and economic sphere. It chimes with the wider drift away from globalization towards a more regional approach to trade.

  • U.K. to Overhaul Treason Laws

    Britain is overhauling its treason laws, the most sweeping reform of these laws since 1695. The overhaul will see a new Treason Act and a new Espionage Act for tracking foreign agents and agents of influence, as well as a rewriting of the Official Secrets Act to make it suitable for the digital age. Government officials say the reforms are needed better to deal with the Russia’s sustained campaign to undermine Western democracies and corrupt the politics liberal societies, and the growing efforts of China to steal intellectual property and gain access to other countries’ critical infrastructures by encouraging them to buy subsidized Chinese technology.

  • China Working to “Develop, Export, and Institutionalize” Digital Authoritarianism: Report

    The Senate Foreign Relations Committee Minority Staff on Tuesday published a new report on China’s digital authoritarianism. “[T]the report is the culmination of a comprehensive Committee investigation into China’s efforts to develop, export, and institutionalize a new, authoritarian governance model for the digital domain,” the report’s authors say. “China is seeking to exploit new and emerging technologies to cultivate digital authoritarianism along multiple paths,” Senator Bob Menendez (D-New Jersey) said. “If successful, China – and not the United States and other like-minded nations – will be writing the future of cyberspace.”

  • MI5 Did Nothing to Stop Russia’s “Nihilistic” Campaign to Undermine, Corrupt British Democracy

    On Tuesday, the U.K. government released a long-awaited report by the British Parliament’s Intelligence Committee on Russian meddling in British politics. The report says that Russia has mounted a prolonged, sophisticated campaign to undermine Britain’s democracy and corrupt British politics. The committee’s account characterized Russia as a reckless country bent on recapturing its status as a “great power,” primarily by destabilizing those in the West. “The security threat posed by Russia is difficult for the West to manage as, in our view and that of many others, it appears fundamentally nihilistic,” the authors said. The report, in many ways, is harder on British officials than the Russians. It is unsparing in the answer it gives to the question who is protecting British democracy: “No one is,” the report warns.

  • Chinese Government Hackers Charged with IP, COVID-19 Research Theft

    U.S. DOJ accused China on Tuesday of sponsoring criminal hackers to target biotech firms around the world working on coronavirus vaccines and treatments, as the FBI said the Chinese government was acting like “an organized criminal syndicate.”

  • U.S., Britain Increasingly See Eye-to-Eye on China

    By Jamie Dettmer

    The United States and the United Kingdom appear to be increasingly seeing eye-to-eye about the challenges posed by the Chinese government, say analysts and Western diplomats. The United States wants to capitalize on Britain’s hardening line toward Beijing. The U.K. Huawei ban was a major policy U-turn for Britain which has been trying to walk a tight rope between Washington, its long-stranding traditional ally, and Beijing, which it has been courting heavily since the 2016 Brexit vote in the hope of securing a lucrative trade deal.