• Women’s March organizer again attends Farrakhan speech

    The ADL has called him “the leading anti-Semite in America,” and the SPLC has designated his Nation of Islam a hate group. True to form, Rev. Louis Farrakhan, in his annual Saviors’ Day address in Chicago on 25 February, claimed that “the powerful Jews are my enemy”; that “the Jews have control over agencies of those agencies of government”; and thatJews are “the mother and father of apartheid.” These anti-Semitic rants did not prevent Tamika D. Mallory, one of four presidents of the Women’s March, to participated in the 25 February rally. Mallory has on multiple occasions posted on her social media platforms about attending events with Farrakhan, and two other co-founders of the Women’s March, Linda Sarsour and Carmen Perez, have also praised and appeared at events with Farrakhan.

  • AI profiling: the social and moral hazards of “predictive” policing

    While the use of AI predictions in police and law enforcement is still in its early stages, it is vital to scrutinize any warning signs that may come from its use. One standout example is a 2016 ProPublica investigation which found that COMPAS software was biased against black offenders. Society needs to maintain a critical perspective on the use of AI on moral and ethical grounds. Not least because the details of the algorithms, data sources and the inherent assumptions on which they make calculations are often closely guarded secrets. Those secrets are in the hands of the specialist IT companies that develop them who want to maintain confidentiality for commercial reasons. The social, political and criminal justice inequalities likely to arise should make us question the potential of predictive policing.

  • Small-drone threats to infantry units require development of countermeasures

    The emergence of inexpensive small unmanned aircraft systems (sUASs) that operate without a human pilot, commonly known as drones, has led to adversarial groups threatening deployed U.S. forces, especially infantry units. Although the U.S. Army and the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) are developing tactics and systems to counter single sUASs, a new report emphasizes the need for developing countermeasures against multiple sUASs — organized in coordinated groups, swarms, and collaborative groups — which could be used much sooner than the Army anticipates. The committee that conducted the study developed a classified report that details its findings and recommendations, along with an unclassified public version that discusses key background issues presented in this news release.

  • Critically ill woman is daughter of ex-Russian spy, BBC reports

    Sergei Skripal, 66, a former colonel in Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency, was convicted of passing state secrets to Britain in 2006, but was released from prison and — sent to the West — in a spy swap in 2010. He is in a critical condition in hospital after being found unconscious on a bench near a shopping center in Salisbury in southern England on 4 March. A woman found unconscious on a bench next to him has now been identified as his 33-year old daughter. The unexplained incident drew comparisons with the death of Aleksandr Litvinenko, a former Russian security agent who became a Putin critic, who fell ill and died in London in November 2006 after ingesting radioactive polonium-210. A high-level British investigative commission has established that two Russian GRU agents poisoned Litvinenko on orders from Vladimir Putin. Andrei Lugovoi, one of the two Russian killers, has been awarded a medal by Putin, and is now a leading member of United Russia, Putin’s political party, in the Russian parliament.

  • Ecoterrorists suspected in acid attack on German energy executive

    German ecoterrorists are the main suspects in an acid attack on a German energy executive, which has left him badly injured. Bernhard Günther, the CFO of energy giant RWE’s green subsidiary, Innogy, was struck as he crossed a park in Haan, a well-to-do suburb of Düsseldorf, on Sunday. Left-wing groups – the most famous one the Rote Armee Fraktion (aka Baader-Meinhof group), which was active in West Germany from the early-1970s to the mid-1980s – have attacked and killed a score of German business people in the last four decades.

  • Atomwaffen, extremist group whose members have been charged in five murders, loses some of its platforms

    At least four technology companies have taken steps to bar Atomwaffen Division, a violent neo-Nazi organization, from using their online services and platforms to spread its message or fund its operations. The action comes after ProPublica reports detailing the organization’s terrorist ambitions and revealing that the California man charged with murdering Blaze Bernstein, a 19-year-old college student found buried in an Orange County park earlier this year, was an Atomwaffen member.

  • Bioengineers today emphasize the crucial ingredient Dr. Frankenstein forgot – responsibility

    Mary Shelley was 20 when she published “Frankenstein” in 1818. Two hundred years on, the book remains thrilling, challenging and relevant — especially for scientists like me whose research involves tinkering with the stuff of life. Talk of “engineering biology” makes a lot people squeamish, and technology can turn monstrous, but I read Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” not as an injunction against bioengineering as such. Rather, the story reveals what can happen when we – scientists and nonscientists alike – run away from the responsibilities that science and technology demand. Victor Frankenstein was certainly careless and perhaps a coward, unable to own up to the responsibility of what he was doing. We now know that science is best conducted with humility, forethought and in the light of day.

  • Judge orders Boeing to give details of $16 billion Iran deal to terror victim’s kin

    A federal district judge ordered airplane manufacturer, Boeing, to make terms of its $16 billion contract with Iran available to the family of an Israeli terror victim. The family of Noam Leibovitch, a 7-year-old girl who was killed when Iran-backed terrorists from Palestinian Islamic Jihad fired on their car in 2003, requested the contract in order to assess what assets may be available to satisfy a $67 million judgment against Iran. The judgment was awarded when Iran failed to respond to the lawsuit filed by the family in the United States District Court.

  • “We can't let Putin and his allies succeed”: Sen. Mark Warner

    In one of the more important speeches by a political leader in the last few years, Senator Mark Warner (D-Virginia), the vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, offered a sobering assessment of the challenge to U.S. interests and values posed by a resurgent Russia. “[W]hile our gaze shifted away from Russia, which we began to kind of write off and at a certain level dismiss as simply a regional power, Russia really never lost its focus on us,” Warner said. “Its geostrategic aim remains squarely targeted on the Western liberal order and, more specifically, on what its KGB-trained leadership views as the main enemy: The United States,” Warner said. “So Russia diligently honed and updated its toolkit for a different kind of Great Power rivalry. They couldn’t match us in the old Cold War paradigm, so Russia needed a strategy that would allow them to compete with us on a new, emerging battlefield,” Warner noted, adding that that the U.S. response is inadequate. “We need a president who will lead not just a whole-of-government effort, but in a sense a whole-of-society effort to try to take on these challenges. We need someone that will actually unify our nation against this growing asymmetric threat. We can’t let Putin and his allies succeed.”

  • New Congressional Biodefense Caucus launched

    A new Congressional Biodefense Caucus was launched last Monday. The caucus said it already has a bipartisan membership roll which includes twenty-seven Members of Congress. The caucus is “dedicated to strengthening our nation’s biodefense enterprise and national security.”

  • Kremlin hackers infiltrated the most secure German government communication network

    The German government yesterday (Wednesday) confirmed that it had suffered a large cyberattack which infiltrated federal computer networks in search of sensitive information. Anonymous German law enforcement sources said that the Russia hacking group APT28, aka Fancy Bear, had placed malware in a government network and infiltrated both the Foreign Ministry and the Defense Ministry. Fancy Bear, which is one of the hacking groups operated by the GRU (Russia’s military intelligence branch), conducted the 2016 hacking campaign of the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign. The Russian government hackers managed to infiltrate the German government’s “Informationsverbund Berlin-Bonn” (IVBB) network, a communication network which was specially designed as a secure communications platform.

  • If you want to know how to stop school shootings, ask the Secret Service

    While President Donald Trump has not shied away from offering suggestions on how to prevent school shootings – including one controversial idea to arm teachers – what often gets overlooked in the conversation is research on the subject that has already been done. This research includes one major study of school shootings conducted in part by the very agency charged with protecting the president of the United States himself - the U.S. Secret Service. Has this research been ignored or just forgotten?

  • Another mass shooting: An update on U.S. gun laws

    “The problem of mass shootings has been effectively addressed in other countries, with Australia being the most notable success story,” says Stanford Law Professor John Donohue III. “After a devastating mass shooting in 1996, Australia banned all semi-automatic rifles (a move far more stringent than the U.S. federal assault weapons ban), with no grandfathering of existing weapons––it was a real ban. The result is that Australia, which had been averaging close to one mass shooting a year over the prior fifteen years (a rate that was higher than the U.S. rate of mass murder at the time when adjusted for population), has now gone almost twenty-two years without a mass shooting––an astonishing achievement of public policy.” Donohue adds that Australia took many additional gun control steps, such as banning “personal protection” as a reason for obtaining a gun permit. “Importantly, their rates of homicide, suicide, and robbery have all trended down contrary to the assertions and predictions of the NRA,” Donohue says.

  • Putin’s fear of democracy; Fancy Bear targets diplomats; Facebook weak filters, and more

    · What scares Vladimir Putin the most? It’s still democracy.

    · Trump has done nothing to stop Russia from meddling in the 2018 midterms

    · Report: Russia probed at least 7 states’ voter systems before the 2016 election

    · Follow the Russian natural gas

    · State Department targeting Russia with anti-propaganda program

    · Mueller asking if Trump knew about hacked Democratic emails before release

    · Fancy Bear targeting North American, European diplomats

    · Facebook’s ad confirmation process won’t stop the Russians

    · Facebook’s ad confirmation process won’t stop the Russians

  • Trump has not ordered disruption of Russia election meddling: NSA chief Adm. Rogers

    President Donald Trump has not ordered, authorized, or given the U.S. intelligence agencies additional powers to retaliate against Russian meddling and disinformation campaigns, and prevent Russia’s plans to meddle in the 2018 midterm election. Adm. Mike Rogers, director of the NSA and head of the U.S. Cyber Command, said that U.S. weak response to Russian meddling in the 2016 election, and to Russia’s on-going hacking and disinformation campaign, has persuaded Vladimir Putin that there was “little price to pay” for continuing interference in the U.S. political system. “Clearly, what we’ve done hasn’t been enough,” Rogers told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee. “They have not paid a price that is sufficient to change their behavior.”