• Senate Intel Releases Report on Intel Community Assessment of Russian Interference

    On Tuesday, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released a new report, the fourth and penultimate volume in the Committee’s bipartisan Russia investigation. The latest installment examines the sources, tradecraft, and analytic work behind the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) that determined Russia conducted an unprecedented, multi-faceted campaign to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election. “One of the ICA’s most important conclusions was that Russia’s aggressive interference efforts should be considered ‘the new normal,’” said Senator Richard Burr (R-North Carolina), the committee’s chairman.

  • Chinese Agents Helped Spread Messages That Sowed Virus Panic in U.S., Officials Say

    U.S. intelligence agencies have assessed that Chinese operatives have pushed false messages across social media platforms, aiming to amplify and exaggerate the actions of the U.S. government in order to sow panic, increase confusion, and deepen political polarization in the already-on-edge American public. The amplification techniques are alarming to U.S. officials because the disinformation showed up as texts on many Americans’ cellphones, a tactic that several of the officials said they had not seen before. American officials said the operatives had adopted some of the techniques mastered by Russia-backed trolls. That has spurred agencies to look at new ways in which China, Russia and other nations are using a range of platforms to spread disinformation during the pandemic. President Trump himself has shown little concern about China’s actions, dismissing worries over China’s use of disinformation when asked about it on Fox News. “They do it and we do it and we call them different things,” he said. “Every country does it.”

  • The Totalitarian Temptation Resisted

    In Hungary, Azerbaijan, Egypt, Russia, the Philippines, and other countries, strongman leaders are taking advantage of a distracted international community to reinforce authoritarian agendas. Josef Joffe writes that, in contrast, national emergencies in the West do not breed despots, nor the grasping security state. Joffe argues that those who predict that the coronavirus epidemic will facilitate an authoritarian takeover, ignore four critical points – all of which contribute to making Western democracies resilient in the face of challenges such as an epidemic and other crises.

  • Is China winning?

    This year started horribly for China, with a respiratory virus spread in Wuhan, and the Chinese government hiding the truth about it from the world. But the draconian measures taken by the government appears to have worked, and Wuhan is back to normal (to a new, post-COVI-19 normal, that is). The Economist writes that China’s Communist Party hails this as a triumph not only for Chinese science: the country’s vast and well-oiled propaganda machine explains that China brought its epidemic under control thanks to its strong one-party rule – and the fact tat some Western democracies – chief among them the United States – have botched their response to the epidemic shows that Western liberal democracy is an inferior system of government compared to China’s own. “Some, including nervous foreign-policy watchers in the West, have concluded that China will be the winner from the COVID-19 catastrophe. These observers warn that the pandemic will be remembered not only as a human disaster, but also as a geopolitical turning-point away from America,” the Economist writes.

  • What to Make of New U.S. Actions Against Foreign Telecoms

    Recent moves by the administration mark another concrete step in the U.S. campaign to limit the digital and economic influence of Chinese telecommunications companies both within and outside U.S. borders. Justin Sherman writes that “The moves also demonstrate that current American efforts to limit the influence of the Chinese telecommunications sector are much broader than just the well-publicized targeting of Chinese telecom giant Huawei.”

  • Donald Trump Is a Braggart but He Has a Point about China's Role in the Coronavirus Crisis

    Were U.S. President Donald Trump a thatch-haired schoolboy, rather than the most powerful man on Earth, Stephen Glover writes in the Daily Mail, “I’ve no doubt he would be the bane of his poor teachers’ lives and attract their ire.” The teachers would note his nasty habit of trying to shift the blame on to others, and his termly reports would be full of reproving remarks about his boastfulness, mendacity, self-righteousness and generally questionable character. And yet a fair-minded teacher would have to concede that, for all his defects, the wayward pupil is sometimes able to extract a nugget of truth which evades the notice of more conventional minds, even if he is then inclined to fly off at a tangent. So it is with the President’s attack on the World Health Organisation (WHO), which Donald Trump accused of being ‘China-centric’ before announcing on Tuesday that he is freezing the funding it receives from Washington. “I [don’t] doubt that part of Trump’s motivation is to deflect some of the fire being directed at him for his flawed management of the crisis towards China and the WHO. This, after all, is election year.  The fact remains, however, that the WHO (a United Nations agency) is a very flawed outfit. It has been far too accommodating of Beijing.”

  • Trump Is Right to Ditch the West's Frighteningly Naive Stance on China

    It’s tricky to get ready for battle when the enemy has a gun to your head, Sherelle Jacobs writes in The Telegraph. Trump’s vow to suspend World Health Organization funding is an attempt to kick the sand of chaos into a situation where its rival has the advantage. Dangerous tactics? Certainly. But Washington is running out of options. This “we are witnessing the fallout of the CCP’s boldest new ruse – installing stooges at the helm of once credible bodies. That the WHO should praise China, having swallowed its faulty intelligence in January that investigations had found no evidence of human-to-human coronavirus transmission, is as absurd as it is unsurprising.” We may not be able to police the world’s second power, but we can better protect ourselves, Jacobs writes. “Britain hasn’t got the memo…. we must urgently [prepare] for the tech Cold war around the corner, treating healthcare as part of our defense sector, and becoming unreliant on China for crucial products and infrastructure.”

  • China Telecom Poses “Unacceptable” Espionage, Sabotage Risk in Providing U.S.-International Links: U.S. Govt. Agencies

    The U.S. Department of Defense, Homeland Security, and several other government agencies have urged the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) to revoke China Telecom’s license to provide links between the United States and foreign countries. A U.S. investigation of China Telecom’s operations found “substantial and unacceptable national security and law enforcement risks,” the U.S. Justice Department said last week. The agencies expressed particular concern about the nature of China Telecom’s U.S. operations, which, the agencies argue, could give China Telecom the ability to engage in economic espionage and sabotage, mainly through the re-routing of U.S. internet traffic through Chinese servers using something called BGP (border gateway protocol) hijacking.

  • Deepfakes 2.0: The New Era of “Truth Decay”

    Deepfake technology has exploded in the last few years. Deepfakes use artificial intelligence (AI) “to generate, alter or manipulate digital content in a manner that is not easily perceptible by humans.” The goal is to create digital video and audio that appears “real.” Brig. Gen. R. Patrick Huston and Lt. Col. M. Eric Bahm write that a picture used to be worth a thousand words – and a video worth a million – but deepfake technology means that “seeing” is no longer “believing.”  “From fake evidence to election interference, deepfakes threaten local and global stability,” they write.

  • Putin’s Long War Against American Science

    A decade of health disinformation promoted by President Vladimir Putin of Russia has sown wide confusion, hurt major institutions and encouraged the spread of deadly illnesses. The Putin regime mandates vaccination at home, but has launched a broad and sophisticated disinformation campaign in an effort to lower vaccine rates in Western countries, with two goals in mind: discredit Western science and medicine, and weaken Western societies by facilitating the re-emergence of diseases such as measles, long thought to have been eradicated. The COPVID-19 epidemic has not escaped the notice of the Kremlin’s disinformation and propaganda specialists. “As the pandemic has swept the globe, it has been accompanied by a dangerous surge of false information,” William Broad writes. “Analysts say that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has played a principal role in the spread of false information as part of his wider effort to discredit the West and destroy his enemies from within.”

  • U.S. Intelligence Warned in November that Coronavirus Spreading in China Could Be “Cataclysmic Event”: Report

    President Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that his administration could not have prepared for the pandemic because no government agency could have known that such an out-of-the-blue outbreak would happen. Justin Coleman writes that the president’s claims are false. The U.S. intelligence community began to warn about a global epidemic in November, saying that the outbreak in China could develop into a “cataclysmic event,” and policymakers, decisionmakers, and the National Security Council at the White House were repeatedly briefed on the issue. The coronavirus first appeared in the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) of intelligence matters — placed on the president’s desk every morning — in early January.

  • Coronavirus Social Distancing Presents Special Challenges to Spies

    While the COVID-19 public health crisis grabs the headlines and kills tens of thousands, state-actors and transnational terrorist groups continue to purloin data, spread disinformation  and plan terrorist attacks. Jason M. Blazakis writes that the U.S. national security community’s ability to detect threats may be less than optimal because Human intelligence (HUMINT) collection — a key tool to combat terrorism — is impaired during COVID-19.

  • Huawei and the Third Offset

    In order to effectively mitigate the security risks posed by Huawei, the U.S. Department of Defense needs to fund and integrate cutting-edge technologies from the private sector. Offset strategies are intended to counterbalance an adversary’s military advantages by developing asymmetric technological strengths.

  • Why China's Coronavirus Lies Don't Matter If It Plays the Long Information Game

    The world will never be the same after COVID-19 –but Mark Payumo writes that this will not be because people sheltered in place and reacquainted themselves with traditional family bonding, but because China opened a new front in information warfare. “This front is global in scale and one that Beijing has laid the groundwork for a decade prior to the pandemic,” he writes. “As it unravels, it underscores one fact that we already know: that the world, especially truly-functioning West democracies, continues to fail in responding to Chinese global statecraft that may threaten civil liberties as we know it.”

  • Right-Wing Extremism: The Russian Connection

    Over the past eight years, one of Russia’s more effective strategies to weaken the West, subvert liberal democratic societies, sabotage the U.S.-created post-WWII world order, and facilitate the expansion of Russian influence has been to provide active support – at times overt, often covert — to various far-right, ethnonationalist, and populist political parties and movements. Russia has been providing support not only to political parties and movements. As part of its effort to undermine the West and weaken democracies, the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence, has been supporting an assortment of violent, white supremacist groups in many European countries: fight clubs, neo-Nazi soccer hooligans, motorcycle gangs, skin heads, and neo-fascist rock groups. These groups are serving as conduits for the Kremlin’s influence operations in Western countries.