• AI Could Be a Disaster for Humanity. A Top Computer Scientist Thinks He Has the Solution.

    Stuart Russell is a leading AI researcher who co-authored the top textbook on the topic. He has also, for the last several years, been warning that his field has the potential to go catastrophically wrong. In a new book, Human Compatible, he explains how. AI systems, he notes, are evaluated by how good they are at achieving their objective: winning video games, writing humanlike text, solving puzzles. If they hit on a strategy that fits that objective, they will run with it, without explicit human instruction to do so.

  • Bomb Attacks Are Now a Normal Part of Swedish Life

    “Normalization” is a term that we have come to associate with domestic violence: the victim begins to think of abuse as a part of everyday life. Paulina Neuding writes that explosions have become so normalized in Sweden that SVT, Sweden’s equivalent of the BBC, did not even mention the three explosions in the country’s capital on its national news program that evening. The explosions were left to the local news. Wilhelm Agrell, professor of intelligence analysis at Lund University, has warned that the situation has become so dire that the integrity of the Swedish state is in jeopardy. “The state’s monopoly on violence, the actual token of a sovereign government, has been hollowed out bit by bit and no longer exists,” he wrote a few weeks ago. “The armed criminal violence is having effects that are increasingly similar to those of terrorism.”

  • With anti-Semitism on the Rise Again, There Are Steps Everyone Can Take to Counter It

    Keeping track of all the attacks against American Jews these days is just about impossible unless it’s your full-time job. Jamie Levine Daniel, Jodi Benenson, and Rachel Fyall, all professors of public administration, write that “As we work to train government and nonprofit leaders to address issues like anti-Semitism, we also have identified four simple steps that anyone can take to counter it.”

  • New UN Report on Online Hate Speech

    Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, recently gave a highly promoted speech about the importance of protecting freedom of expression online—which was immediately criticized as taking too binary a view of the issues and presenting a false choice between free expression and Chinese censorship. Evelyn Douek writes that by contrast, David Kaye, the United Nations special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the freedom of opinion and expression, in a 9 October report, offered a very real reckoning with the trade-offs involved in protecting free speech while dealing with the real harm caused by some forms of expression, and is an attempt to find guiding, consistent standards. “There is still a lot of work to be done, not least by the companies themselves, to make this a reality,” Douek writes. “But this latest report will be a useful and influential guide in that process.”

  • Concerns Persist about Fate of Captured Islamic State Terrorists

    Fears that Turkey’s offensive in northeastern Syria allowed untold numbers of captured Islamic State terror group fighters to escape may be overblown, according to U.S. officials. Since Turkish-backed forces crossed the border and began clashing with Kurdish fighters aligned with the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), there have been reports of SDF-run prisons coming under attack and of IS fighters running free. But Wednesday, the U.S. insisted almost all of the estimated 12,000 captured IS fighters, including about 2,000 fighters from outside Syria and Iraq, were still behind bars.

  • Emerging Risk: Virtual Societal Warfare

    The evolution of advanced information environments is rapidly creating a new category of possible cyberaggression which involves efforts to manipulate or disrupt the information foundations of the effective functioning of economic and social systems. Researchers are calling this growing threat “virtual societal warfare.”

  • They’re Not All Racist Nut Jobs – and 4 Other Observations about the Patriot Militia Movement

    The so-called patriot movement is grabbing headlines once again, as its members pledge to protect Trump supporters at the president’s campaign rallies across the country. The patriot movement is a fragmented and fractious coalition of groups that distrust the federal government. Members believe the government is impeding their rights and liberties – but the movement is not monolithic, and it less black and white. Despite public perceptions, few members of the various appeared to be mentally ill or outwardly racist. Instead, their grievances and principles stem from a range of motivations, personal circumstances and political philosophies.

  • Trolls Exploit Weaknesses of Social Media Platforms to Spread Online Hate, Report Finds

    Social media platform design enables online harassment, as trolls often carry out coordinated attacks on a target by leveraging key platform features, according to a new report. Such features include the ability to be anonymous online, to create multiple accounts by one person, the fact that there is no limit to the number of messages one user can send to another, and the use of personal networks as weaponized audiences.

  • How a Weaponized Dollar Could Backfire

    United States foreign policy under President Donald Trump continues to run counter to America’s traditional post-war objectives. Should the U.S. carelessly relinquish leadership of the global multilateral order, the dollar might eventually lose its own long-standing primacy.

  • A Brief History of Russian Hackers' Evolving False Flags

    Deception has always been part of the hacker playbook, Andy Greenberg writes in Wired. “But it’s one thing for intruders to hide their tracks, and another to adopt an invented identity, or even frame another country for a cyberattack. Russia’s hackers have done all of the above, and now have gone one step further. In a series of espionage cases, they hijacked another country’s hacking infrastructure and used it to spy on victims and deliver malware.”

  • German Domestic Intelligence Chief on the New Wave of Hate

    In an interview with Der Spiegel, Thomas Haldenwang, the director of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, discusses the new threat of extremism in the wake of the Halle attack and his agency’s need for greater authority in the monitoring of such threats. “What’s new is the international dimension,” Haldenwang said. “Right-wing extremism as we know it was long a particularly German phenomenon. But now, we see Anders Breivik in Oslo, Brenton Tarrant in Christchurch, Patrick Crusius in El Paso, the perpetrator in Halle. It’s like links in a chain, almost an international competition. Another insight is that it appears that no deep ideology is needed to radicalize and develop plans for attacks. All that’s needed is this emotion, hate, incitement, the web-based instigation and this convergence of people who, on the basis of simplistic messages often rooted in fake news, arrive at this world view and think they have to strike immediately.”

  • Syrian Chaos Breathing Life into Islamic State

    Turkey’s incursion into northeastern Syria appears to be giving Islamic State new life, but U.S. counterterrorism officials caution the terror group’s next moves are far from certain. The officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, warn Islamic State is well-versed in using regional conflicts to its advantage, having done so in Iraq in 2005-2006, and again in the aftermath of the Arab Spring.

  • The Russian “Dark State” and the Russian Interference in the 2016 U.S. Election

    How do we understand Russia’s multi-layered interference in the 2016 elections? Elizabeth Wood, an MIT Russia expert and professor of history, analyzes Russia’s motives, noting that in his televised speech on May 29, Robert Mueller left no room for doubt about Russian interference in the 2016 election, when he said: “I will close by reiterating the central allegation of our indictments, that there were multiple, systematic efforts to interfere in our election. And that allegation deserves the attention of every American.” Wood says: “These tactics have been researched by excellent scholars, and they are worth considering in the larger context of Russian statecraft. After all, what I would call the Russian ‘dark state’ — i.e., that part of the state that operates abroad for nefarious purposes, including most recently interference in Ukraine, in Western European elections, and in the poisonings and beatings of both Russians and foreign nationals around the world — has been around for a long time; it is not an invention of Russian President Vladimir Putin, though he has certainly expanded its reach.”

  • What Can We Glean from a Bean: Ricin’s Appeal to Domestic Terrorists

    Just as policymakers have been slow to acknowledge and act upon the threat of domestic CBRN (chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear) terrorism, timely research on the issue is scarce as well. Ricin is one of the more dangerous agents of domestic terror. As government agencies acknowledge the threat domestic terrorism poses, policymakers and law enforcement should take ricin seriously as a potential weapon.

  • How to Protect America after the Syria Withdrawal

    President Trump’s impulsive, rash decision to withdraw U.S. troops from northern Syria has created a situation in which the United States is a far weaker position to fight ISIS. “The No. 1 U.S. priority in Syria is to maintain the detention facilities and encampments and keep pressure on ISIS. This will be difficult, given the Turkish assault as well as the deal the SDF has struck with the Syrian regime since the U.S. withdrawal announcement,” Joseph Votel and Elizabeth Dent write. “There is only so much America can do with no troop presence as other powers rush in to fill the void.”