Shrugging toward Doomsday; disinformation becoming unstoppable; Terror report: DHS bypassed, and more

Fuzzy thinking about drones (Jon Askonas and Colby Howard, War on the Rocks)
Are drones reliable? Would you bet your life on them? A recent article argued that “the troops don’t trust drones” to protect them in combat with close air support.

Leaked memo: Trump admin to boost use of private prisons while slashing federal staff (Eric Katz, Government Executive)
New memo reveals plan to shift inmates to contract facilities.

How to limit presidential authority to order the use of nuclear weapons (Lisbeth Gronlund, David Wright, Steve Fetter, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists)
In the United States, the president has sole authority to order the use of nuclear weapons, for any reason and at any time. This arrangement is both risky and unnecessary.

Left-of-launch missile defense: ‘You don’t want to have just one solution to the threat’ (Caroline Houck, Defense One)
The 3-star commander of the US Army’s space and missile-defense efforts talks about the changing mix of ways to counter threats.

Anything new under the sun? Nuclear responses to cyberattacks. (Herb Lin, Lawfare)
A recent New York Times story regarding the draft Nuclear Posture Review said: “A newly drafted United States nuclear strategy that has been sent to President Trump for approval would permit the use of nuclear weapons to respond to a wide range of devastating but non-nuclear attacks on American infrastructure, including what current and former government officials described as the most crippling kind of cyberattacks.”

The U.S. government commissioned fiction about a nuclear Holocaust (Alexis C. Madrigal, The Atlantic)
The strange story of how an appendix to an obscure report helped launch a blockbuster and push back the possibility of atomic war.

Disinformation is becoming unstoppable (Dipayan Ghosh and Ben Scott, Time)
We are in the midst of a “tech-lash.” For months, the leading Internet companies have faced a wave of criticism sparked by revelations that they unwittingly enabled the spread of Russian disinformation that distorted the 2016 election. They are now beginning to listen. While Facebook’s intentions are laudable, their reach may exceed their grasp. The purveyors of disinformation may indeed need to change their approaches to spreading mendacious or otherwise deceitful content over social media. This is nothing new

Wave of confusion follows tsunami alert (Robert Mittendorf, Bellingham Herald)
A tsunami warning and a tsunami watch were issued from the western tip of the Aleutian Islands in Alaska to San Diego in California in the wake of a 7.9 magnitude earthquake.

Could Hawaii’s missile alert error happen in Florida? Remember the bogus boiled water notice… (Dinah Voyles Pulver, News-Journal, Daytona Beach)
‘Volusia County boil water notice. Residents are advised to boil water before consumption,’ warned the notice. It was a mistake.

The Pentagon should adjust standards for cyber soldiers — as it has always done (Crispin Burke, War on the Rocks)
Cybersecurity is one of the fastest-growing job sectors in the world and qualified experts are in short supply. It is estimated that nearly 1.5 million cybersecurity jobs worldwide, in both the public and the private sector, will go unfilled by 2020.

Inside Facebook’s year of reckoning (Elizabeth Dwoskin, Washington Post) Mark Zuckerberg’s crusade to fix Facebook this year is beginning with a startling retreat. The social network, its chief executive said, would step back from its role in choosing the news that 2 billion users see on its site every month. The company is too “uncomfortable” to make such decisions in a world that has become so divided, Zuckerberg explained recently.

Riddles of Armageddon: Legal enigmas of a nuke launch order (Robert Eatinger, Cipher Brief)
The recent discussion of whether North Korean leader Kim Jong Un or President Donald Trump has the bigger “nuclear button” raises the question again of procedures, policies and circumstances surrounding the use of nuclear weapons. U.S. military officers who would be in a position to receive an order for a nuclear strike might particularly lose sleep over their role in such a scenario.

Cyber takes on new prominence in shutdown government (Derek B. Johnson, FCW)
Congress has until Feb. 8 to strike a funding deal before the continuing resolution currently funding the government runs out. During the brief a just-concluded shutdown, agencies got a sneak preview from the Office of Management and Budget about how to prioritize resources and staff, and what has changed since the 2013 government shutdown. Cybersecurity is more prominent in 2018. The Jan. 19 OMB memo providing guidance to agencies classified cybersecurity functions as necessary to avoid imminent threat to federal property, even during a shutdown.

It’s time for the Justice Department to hold Hezbollah accountable (Derek Maltz, Emanuele Ottolenghi, Foreign Policy)
The U.S. government must answer tough questions about its efforts to stop the group’s drug trafficking activities.

New smart-gun company says it’s making a pistol gun owners might actually want (Alex Yablon, The Trace)
The market for smart guns has been plagued by years of false starts, but a new company believes it can crack the code to getting Americans to accept personalized firearms.

CIA boss gives latest indication Trump may consider preemptive strike on North Korea (Spencer Ackerman, Daily Beast)
The spy agency is briefing the president about military options on North Korea, which *outside* analysts warn could escalate to nuclear war.

Washington State legislators revive debate over nuclear evacuation plans (Jim Camden, Spokesman-Review)
Critics argue, however, that lifting the Reagan-era prohibition would only help bolster an “illusion” that nuclear war is winnable.

Team Trump bypassed DHS analysts to produce bogus terror report (Spencer Ackerman, Daily Beast)
The Trump administration was clear: ‘An analysis conducted by DHS’ concluded that 73% of terrorists were ‘foreign-born.’ Except DHS analysts had nothing to do with the conclusion.

The new way your computer can be attacked (Bruce Schneier, The Atlantic)
Unprecedented computer-chip vulnerabilities exposed this month paint a grim picture of the future of cybersecurity.

Limited strikes on North Korea would be an unlimited disaster (Luke O’Brien, Foreign Policy)
There’s no clear upside — and plenty of potential downsides — to punching Pyongyang in the nose.

If we start deliberately cooling the Earth, we may not be able to stop (Angela Chen, The Verge)
Geoengineering isn’t a silver bullet

Diminished at home, durable Boko Haram may go global (Levi Maxey, Cipher Brief)
Terrorist group Boko Haram has lost most of the territory it claimed as a “caliphate” within Nigeria back in 2015. But group still strikes government officials, troops and civilians from its few remaining safe havens in the northeast of the country, and is positioning itself to take terrorism global.

Facebook’s fake war on fake news (Violet Blue, Engadget)
Zuck just gave your racist uncle a bigger platform to stand on.

What (if anything) do Facebook’s News Feed changes mean for fake news? (Laura Hazard Owen, Nieman Lab)
Facebook, as you certainly know by now, announced last week that it’s making changes to News Feed. Posts from friends and family are in; content from Pages (including publishers) is out. There are a lot of questions about what this means for publishers. There are also questions about what it means for the spread of fake news on the platform.

This hacking gang just updated the malware it uses against U.K. targets (Danny Palmer, ZDNet)
The National Cyber Security Centre issues a warning over updated Neuron malware attacks by the Turla hacking group.

Facebook admits what we all know: that social media can be bad for democracy (James Vincent, The Verge)
‘I wish I could guarantee that the positives are destined to outweigh the negatives.’

Cellular agriculture: The coming revolution in food production (C. S. Mattick, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists)
Cellular agriculture is a nascent technology that allows meat and other agricultural products to be cultured from cells in a bioreactor rather than harvested from livestock on a farm. It is an important, and perhaps revolutionary, technology that presents opportunities to improve animal welfare, enhance human health, and decrease the environmental footprint of meat production. At the same time, it is not without challenges.

Flu season worst since 2009 swine flu pandemic (Rachel Alexander, Spokesman-Review)

Forty Washingtonians died from the flu in the past week, according to the Washington Department of Health, nearly doubling the total flu season count to 86 deaths.

What a nuclear missile attack on Hawaii would look like (Patrick Tucker, Defense One)
A blast over Honolulu would be catastrophic. That doesn’t mean the government shouldn’t help the public prepare for one.

Silicon Valley and the threat to democracy (Niall Ferguson, Daily Beast)
Forget Russian hacking—the real threat to democracies around the globe is social media’s inexorable and unavoidable destruction of common ground and shared perspective.

Nations seek the elusive cure for cyberattacks (David E. Sanger, New York Times)
Securing the world against cyberattacks — from nations, criminal groups, vandals and teenagers — will be on the agenda when many of the world’s top leaders gather at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, this week.

Security fears spark crackdown on Chinese tech (Ali Breland and Morgan Chalfant, The Hill)
The federal government is taking steps to reduce the presence of some Chinese technology firms in American markets.

We don’t need a bigger nuclear button (Nathan Kohlenberg, Defense One)
The plan outlined in a draft of the Nuclear Posture Review would cost trillions of dollars — and make Americans no safer.

Pentagon says confronting Iran now tops terrorism concerns (Jack Detsch, Al Monitor)
The new National Defense Strategy envisions America’s military focusing on combating authoritarian ideals rather than the protracted global war on terror.

Twitter and Facebook have very different ideas about “fake news.” One of them is terribly wrong. (Paris Martineau, The Outline)
Hint: It’s Facebook.

Why are American prisons so afraid of this book? (Jonah Engel Bromwich, New York Times)

In Texas, the state prisons have banned more than 10,000 titles. These books are not allowed in prisons’ libraries, and the relatives of prisoners cannot bring them to the prisons during family visits. The banned titles list includes “The Color Purple,” a compilation by the humor writer Dave Barry, the 1908 Sears, Roebuck catalog, and best sellers like “Memoirs of a Geisha” and “A Time to Kill.” “Mein Kampf” by Adolf Hitler, and books by white nationalists, including David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard, are allowed.

Jared Kushner is China’s Trump card (Adam Entous and Evan Osnos, New Yorker)
How the President’s son-in-law, despite his inexperience in diplomacy, became Beijing’s primary point of interest.