• U.S.-Funded Research, Scientists Help China’s Drive to Become World S&T Leader

    The U.S. government has so far failed to stop China from stealing intellectual property from American universities. Moreover, the Trump administration lacks a comprehensive strategy for dealing with the threat. These are the conclusions of a new report issued on Monday by the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. The report says problem is especially urgent because billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded research have “contributed to China’s global rise over the last twenty years” and to its goal of becoming a world leader in science and technology by 2050.

  • U.S. Investigating Universities over Russian, Chinese, Saudi Donations

    U.S. officials have asked MIT to turn over documents regarding the university’s contacts with foreign governments and donations from foreign sources, including those coming from Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia. The University of Maryland received a similar demand from the Education Department. MIT has been under scrutiny for a while, after accepting $300 million from Viktor Vekselberg, a Russian oligarch and a close ally of Vladimir Putin. Veklesberg is close to several of Donald Trump’s family members and members of the Trump organization. He was involved in the Moscow Trump Tower project. In 2018 MIT removed Veklesberg from its board — to which he was elected in 2013 — after the U.S. Treasury Department listed him and his business group among the Russian officials, “oligarchs,” and companies to be penalized for advancing Moscow’s “malign activities.”

  • U.S. Warns That Turkey's Syria Offensive Giving IS “Time and Space”

    U.S. defense intelligence officials are offering a sobering assessment of the impact Turkey’s incursion into northeastern Syria — and corresponding moves by the U.S. and other powers — will have on efforts to destroy the Islamic State terror group.

  • Cryptocurrency and National Insecurity

    A recent exercise at Harvard’s Kennedy School explored the dangers of large sums of money being secretly sent to hostile nations. The exercise brought together administration veterans, career diplomats, and academics to dramatize a very real prospect — the rise of an encrypted digital currency that would upend the U.S. dollar’s dominance and effectively render ineffective economic sanctions, like those currently applied to North Korea.

  • Dealing with the Soviet Nuclear Legacy

    On 29 August 1949, the Soviet Union conducted their first nuclear test. Over a 40-year period, they conducted 456 nuclear explosions at Semipalatinsk, in eastern Kazakhstan — 116 aboveground and 340 underground. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, many of the scientists and military personnel abandoned the site and fled the country, leaving behind large quantities of nuclear materials, completely unsecured. The Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) has been quietly helping Kazakhstan deal with the Soviet nuclear legacy.

  • Would Terrorists Set Off a Nuclear Weapon If They Had One? We Shouldn’t Assume So

    For decades, the nightmare of nuclear terrorism has haunted the corridors of power in Washington and the imagination of Western popular culture. While this was true even before September 11, 2001, in the days since, a consensus has formed from which few dare deviate: Terrorist organizations are trying to acquire nuclear weapons, and if they are successful, they will use them in an attack as soon as possible. But how valid is this “acquisition-use assumption,” Christopher McIntosh and Ian Store ask.

  • Deaths from Terrorism declined, but the Number of Countries Affected by Terrorism Is Growing

    Deaths from terrorism have decreased by 15.2 per cent in 2018 to 15,952 globally. This is the fourth consecutive year of improvement. Terrorism situation has improved in 98 countries in 2018, nut the situation in 40 deteriorated. Deaths  from terrorism  in Europe fell by 70 per cent, with Western Europe recording its lowest number of terror incidents since 2012. There has been an increase in far-right terrorism in Western Europe, North America, and Oceania for the third consecutive year, with the number of deaths increasing by 52 percent in 2018. This trend has continued into 2019, with 77 deaths to the end of September 2019. The global economic impact of terrorism was$33 billion in 2018, a decrease of 38 percent from the previous year.

  • White Supremacists Embrace "Accelerationism"

    Accelerationism is a term white supremacists have assigned to their desire to hasten the collapse of society as we know it. The term is widely used by those on the fringes of the movement, who employ it openly and enthusiastically on mainstream platforms, as well as in the shadows of private, encrypted chat rooms. 

  • Russian Hackers Attacked Me and Other Military Spouses. Why Can’t We Sue?

    In a systematic campaign aiming to sow panic and confusion, Russian government hackers, masquerading as ISIS fighters, have been hacking computers and smartphones of spouses of U.S. military personnel, stealing and distributing their personal and financial information, and spreading lies about the on the dark web. “Almost as astonishing as the discovery that Russia was behind the attacks was finding out that U.S. citizens have no legal recourse against foreign governments that target them online,” writes Lorri Volkman, whose husband serves in the military, and was attacked by Russian hackers four years ago.

  • Pentagon Report: U.S. Pullout from Syria Strengthens Terrorists

    The hasty decision by President Trump to pull most U.S. troops out of northeastern Syria in early October has strengthened the Islamic State terrorist group in that country, despite the U.S. military’s recent killing of the group’s leader, according to a new Pentagon assessment.

  • The Cost of the Global War on terror: $6.4 trillion, 801,000 Lives

    The estimated cost to the United States of America’s counterterrorism efforts, launched nearly two decades ago in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, stands at $6.4 trillion. An estimated $5.4 trillion of that total has funded, and will continue to fund, counterterrorism wars and smaller operations in more than 80 countries; an additional minimum of $1 trillion will provide care for veterans of those wars through the next several decades.

  • Do People Regard Terrorism More Important after Major Attacks?

    Paris, Brussels, Nice, Manchester and Barcelona: over the past years, the European Union has regularly been shaken by terrorist attacks. But what is the true impact of terrorism? Researchers looked at ten jihadi attacks and concluded that there are major differences between European countries.

  • New Report on Russia’s Online Operations: Pseudo-Think Tanks, Personas

    The Kremlin used many different techniques in its effective campaigns of interference in the politics of Western democracies, including the 2016 U.S. presidential election. One such technique is “narrative laundering” – the technique of moving a certain narrative from its state-run origins to the wider media ecosystem through the use of aligned publications, “useful idiots,” and, perhaps, witting participants. “Given that many of these tactics are analogs of those used in Cold-War influence operations, it seems certain that they will continue to be refined and updated for the internet era, and are likely to be used to greater effect,” a new report says.

  • Accelerationism: The Obscure Idea Inspiring White Supremacist Killers around the World

    In late July, FBI Director Christopher Wray said that a majority of the domestic terrorism cases in the United States “are motivated by some version of what you might call white supremacist violence.” Recent white supremacist terrorists were often linked to the alt-right, but Zack Beauchamp writes that these killers “are more tightly connected to a newer and more radical white supremacist ideology”: It’s called “accelerationism.”

  • Florida’s Building Code Doesn’t Take Sea Rise into Account. That Could Change This Year.

    The last time the Florida building code changed, in 2016, it required any new construction along the coast to elevate buildings by one foot. Three years later, this does not look to be enough. Experts call for going up yet another foot. Alex Harris notes that elevating the base of homes is a clear sign that political debates over climate change notwithstanding, “the people who plan and build in coastal Florida consider the threat of sea rise very real.”