• Russia’s active measures architecture: Task and purpose

    Russia’s latest iteration of the Soviet-era tactic of “active measures” has mesmerized Western audiences and become the topic de jour for national security analysts. In my last post, I focused on the Kremlin’s campaign to influence the U.S. elections from 2014 to 2016 through the integration of offensive cyber hacking, overt propaganda, and covert social media personas In this post, I focus on the elements of Russia’s national power that execute active measures abroad.

  • U.S. disrupted major Russian cyberattack, possibly on Ukraine

    The U.S. Justice Department has seized an Internet domain controlled by a hacking group tied to Russian military intelligence that was planning a major cyberattack, possibly in Ukraine. The U.S. move late on 23 May was aimed at breaking up what the department said was a dangerous botnet of a half-million infected computer network routers that could have allowed the hackers to take control of computers and stage destructive attacks, as well as steal valuable information.

  • U.S. troops help fight terrorists in Africa -- quietly

    The attack on the U.S. troops in Niger last October, which left four American troops dead and two wounded, was a surprise to the American public because the presence of the U.S. forces in Africa was mostly off the media. The Niger operation is one of the several U.S. military missions ongoing in about twenty African countries, mostly in the northern half of the continent. Most of these missions have one goal: “rolling back Islamist extremism.”

  • Every second matters during active assailant events

    Studies, event after-action reports, and most publications on the subject have proven that during Direct Threat attacks, most casualties occur in the first 120 seconds (2 minutes). An armed responder to the event arrives in between 4 to 11 minutes on average. It takes an additional 2 to 5 minutes before they enter the building and an additional 2 to 6 minutes to engage the attacker(s). Even if armed intervention is on-site, their reaction and engagement take minutes. The best solution to Direct Threat attacks must thus reduce the timeline of an attack to as close to zero as technology will allow.

  • Mass shootings influenced school architecture long before Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick questioned entrances and exits

    Architects and school safety experts say that campuses are already designed with minimizing death in mind — but that architecture can only go so far.

  • Terrorists, criminals reap more than $43 billion a year from Latin America’s Tri-Border Area

    Terrorists and criminals are able to pocket up to $800 million a week or $43 billion a year from activities taking place in Latin America’s Tri-Border Area (TBA), according to a new report. The TBA is the rugged area between Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay. It encompasses a river system stretching for 2,100 miles and crossing five countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay.

  • Growing concerns about DIY gene editing

    There is a growing concerns regarding the rising popularity of do-it-yourself (DIY) gene editing. From the horsepox de novo synthesis to public stunts at conventions where biohackers injected themselves with HIV treatment, it is becoming difficult to ignore why these actions are dangerous.

  • Biosecurity: Do synthetic biologists need a license to operate?

    Advances in gene editing technology and the drop in costs make it possible for individuals to perform more sophisticated molecular biology experiments in private spaces. This hobby attracts a variety of people and has been hailed as a way to democratize genetic engineering. A few recent stunts raise concerns about what are the hazards of individuals with gene-editing capabilities.

  • Terror attacks: how psychological research can help improve the emergency response

    In this age of unpredictability, how can the emergency services prepare themselves to respond to a terror attack, like the one at the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester in 2017? We’ve looked into the psychology of decision making and how the key lessons from The Kerslake Report – which evaluated the emergency response during the Manchester attack – could be applied on the ground.

  • NIST updates Risk Management Framework to include privacy considerations

    Augmenting its efforts to protect the U.S. critical assets from cybersecurity threats as well as protect individuals’ privacy, NIST has issued a draft update to its Risk Management Framework (RMF) to help organizations more easily meet these goals.

  • Pompeo says U.S. to impose “strongest sanctions in history” against Iran

    U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says Washington will impose “the strongest sanctions in history [on Iran] once they come into full force” and that the “sting of sanctions will only grow more painful if the regime does not change its course.” Pompeo set twelve conditions for Iran to follow in order for the United States to agree to a new nuclear deal with Tehran in a speech in Washington today (21 May). Iran will have to choose between maintaining its economy or sponsoring terrorist and insurgent groups in countries like Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen — what he called “squandering precious wealth on fights abroad.” “It will not have the money to do both,” he said.

  • Russia’s corruption, influence “a matter of national security”: U.K. Parliamentary panel

    “Dirty” Russian money is undermining Britain’s efforts to stand up to the Kremlin and supports President Vladimir Putin’s campaign “to subvert the international rules-based system,” a British parliamentary report says. “The scale of damage that this ‘dirty money’ can do to U.K. foreign-policy interests dwarfs the benefit of Russian transactions in the City,” Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Tom Tugendhat said today (21 May) ahead of the release of the report. “Over the years, Moscow has turned from being a corrupt state to an exporter of instability. Russian corruption and influence has become a matter of national security,” he added.

  • “The day that we can't protect human sources”: The president and the House Intelligence Committee burn an informant

    It wasn’t that long ago that both the executive branch and the legislature considered the protection of intelligence sources a matter of surpassing national importance. In 1982 Congress passed the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which criminalized the knowing and intentional outing of U.S. covert operatives and intelligence sources whom the government is taking active steps to protect. So what happens, Quinta Jurecic and Benjamin Wittes write in Lawfare , “when the intentional outing of U.S. intelligence assets is the province not of rogue insiders, not of foreign hackers or foreign agents, not of people who end up spending the rest of their lives as fugitives, but of senior officials in two branches of this country’s government who are most responsible for protecting those assets” — and “when they do so for frankly political reasons?”

  • U.S., Gulf allies impose sanctions on Hezbollah’s top leaders

    In the latest iteration of economic warfare against Iran and its proxies, the United States and its Gulf allies imposed new sanctions on Hezbollah and its top officials. The sanctions targeted Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, his deputy Naim Qassem, and the group’s decision-making body, the Shura Council. Hezbollah is an Iranian-backed terror group that exercises complete political and military control over Lebanon.

  • The top three trends we miss when discussing Russian ads

    Last week, the Democrats of the House Intelligence Committee released the trove of over 3,500 Facebook ads purchased by the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency (IRA) from 2015 to 2017. For the most part, the release confirms what we already knew: Accounts based in Russia exploited America’s societal fissures to sow chaos in the United States in order to weaken our democratic structures, force us to turn inward, and thereby increase Russia’s standing in the world. But taken holistically, three trends emerge that are not evident when only highlighting the most divisive content.