Fighting Domestic Violent Extremism | DOD: From Abstraction to Action on Climate Change | Retaliatory Cyberattacks against Russia, and more

Big Tech CEOs Face Lawmakers in House Hearing on Social Media’s Role in Extremism, Misinformation  (Gerrit De Vynck, Cat Zakrzewski, Elizabeth Dwoskin, and Rachel Lerman, Washington Post)
House lawmakers from both sides of the aisle on Thursday interrogated the chief executives of Google, Facebook and Twitter, escalating their calls for swift regulation of the tech industry. During the more than five-hour hearing, lawmakers in five-minute intervals called out executives on a wide range of issues including extremism, misinformation, cyberbullying, climate change and the coronavirus. Many of the politicians attempted to force the chief executives to answer “yes” or “no,” cutting them off if they tried to explain how “nuanced” those issues are. The display demonstrated just how deep the desire in Washington goes to change how social media companies operate — while also underlining the lack of consensus on how exactly to do that. Some lawmakers proposed new legislation, while others called for reforming Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a decades-old law that shields tech companies from lawsuits stemming from the content users post on their sites. “The power of this technology is awesome and terrifying, and each of you has failed to protect your users and the world from the worst consequences of your creations,” said Rep. Mike Doyle (Pa.), the top Democrat on a House Energy and Commerce panel focused on technology.

DHS Weighing Major Changes to Fight Domestic Violent Extremism, Say Officials  (Ken Dilanian and Julia Ainsley, NBC News)
The Department of Homeland Security, which was created after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to protect the country from international terrorism, is moving toward a sweeping set of policy changes to detect and stop what intelligence officials say is now a top threat: domestic violent extremism. Two senior Biden administration officials said DHS, whose intelligence division did not publish a warning of potential violence before the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, is seeking to improve its ability to collect and analyze data about domestic terrorism — including the sorts of public social media posts that threatened an attack on the U.S. Capitol but were not deemed “actionable” by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies. DHS plans to expand its relationships with companies that scour public data for intelligence, one of the senior officials said, as well as to better harness the vast trove of data it already collects about Americans, including travel and commercial data through Customs and Border Protection, or CBP, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, the Coast Guard, the Secret Service and other DHS components. The department is also contemplating changes to its terrorist watch listing process “to see if there are ways we can leverage it to take into account international and domestic travel of known violent extremists,” the senior official said.

US Heading Anti-Jihadist Intelligence Sharing Operation — Report  (Times of Israel)
Some 30 countries have been sharing intelligence about jihadist terror organizations at a secret site with the aim of facilitating prosecutions, French newspaper Le Monde reports online. The “Gallant Phoenix” project, created in 2016, is being headed by the United States and located at a US Army base in Jordan, the daily says. It seeks to collect and centralize traces left online by terrorists, remnants from jihadist actions anywhere in the world and even the personal belongings of Islamists seized after arrest, all to help prosecutions and provide evidence at trials. The main contributors to the sharing effort are the Iraqi army, Kurdish forces, NATO allies and the members of the international military coalition against the Islamic State group. Le Monde says military intelligence units are always eager to collect and evaluate objects left behind by enemy combatants, but “‘Gallant Phoenix’ gives this collection of evidence a framework and a system.” Some 700 documents relating to 500 jihadists have been handed over by Phoenix to ongoing investigations into acts of terror, the report says.”

The Base Tapes  (Alex Mann and Kevin Nguyen, ABC)
…Joshua Fisher-Birch, a researcher with the US-based Counter Extremism Project, says these training camps enable recruits with military experience to train others, adding to their threat. “This very extreme neo-Nazi ideology, the way that they organized and kind of passed these skills onto one another, made them very dangerous,” he says. On the call, AdvocateCannibalism says he can help The Base with a place for weapons training through his contact in another right-wing group. “Basically, he’s into guns. He’s got property we can train on. He’s right into street fighting, that sort of thing.” Aware The Base is looking for recruits interested in the prepper lifestyle, AdvocateCannibalism says he’s got “several bugout bags”, hunting gear and “plate carriers” — vests which can be converted to tactical body armor. “What I would like to see is basically a group of networked survivalists across the country with access to firearms, legal access to firearms, so there’s no questions asked by the alphabets,” he says, referring to law enforcement and security agencies like the AFP and ASIO. Volkskrieger is impressed and discusses a plan to meet up again in Perth.

On Google Podcasts, A Buffet of Hate  (Reggie Ugwu, New York Times)
He had already been banned from Twitter, but on his podcast he could give full voice to his hateful conspiracy theories. The podcaster argued that the man in Atlanta who had confessed to killing eight people at massage parlors last week, including six women of Asian descent, was the one who had truly been victimized — the casualty of a supposed Jewish plot. “Your heart goes out to the guy,” he said. The remarks, emblematic of a longstanding online network of white supremacists and pro-Nazi groups, weren’t hidden in some dark corner of the internet, but could be found on Google Podcasts, the search giant’s official podcast app that was released for Android in 2018 and expanded to Apple devices last year. As leading social networks like Facebook and Twitter have taken some steps to limit hate speech, misinformation and incitements to violence in recent months, podcasts — historically fueled by a spirit of good-natured anarchy — stand as one of the last remaining platforms for the de-platformed. After Twitter last November suspended the account of Steve Bannon, the onetime adviser to former President Donald J. Trump, for suggesting that several officials be beheaded, he continued to enjoy large audiences with his podcast, available on both Apple and Google’s services.

How the Defense Department Can Move from Abstraction to Action on Climate Change  (Samuel Brannen, Sarah Ladislaw, and Lachlan Carey, War on the Rocks)
One week after he was sworn in as president, Joe Biden directed his secretary of defense to make climate change a central priority. The president’s executive order instructed the Department of Defense to work with an interagency group over the next 120 days to create a first-of-its-kind joint “Climate Risk Analysis,” and determine the implications of that analysis for the “National Defense Strategy, Defense Planning Guidance, Chairman’s Risk Assessment, and other relevant strategy, planning, and programming documents and processes.” Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin affirmed the department’s intent to execute those orders, and to report back annually to the National Security Council on its progress. He also announced a new Department of Defense Climate Working Group chaired by a special assistant to the secretary of defense. After joining the first meeting of that working group, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks publicly stated that “confronting climate challenges is mission critical,” which carries substantial weight given her central role in directing the Defense Department’s internal processes.
The Defense Department and the broader U.S. national security apparatus have since at least the early 1990s recognized climate change as a primary strategic threat shaping the security environment. However, relatively little has been done to address the overall implications of climate change through changes in strategy, planning, and resources.

Biden’s Retaliatory Cyberattacks against Russia Are Folly  (Anatol Lieven, Responsible Statecraft)

·  “The Biden administration is reportedly planning a ‘retaliation’ against Russia in the next three weeks or so for last year’s massive ‘SolarWinds’ hack … The New York Times has written that U.S. plans include both new sanctions against Russia and U.S. cyber hacking of Russian state institutions.”

·  “We hope that wiser counsels can still prevail, and in particular, that someone in the administration will notice both the logical incompatibility of these two responses, and the fact that they could set a precedent that will be used against America itself in future. … The threat of U.S. retaliation in kind declares out in the open that the United States also plans to engage in these supposedly illegitimate actions, and is an implicit acknowledgement that Washington has indeed repeatedly engaged in similar actions in recent years.”

·  “More importantly, the planned action reflects two very serious errors in judgement … The first is a tendency, amplified by much of the U.S. media, to attribute blame to Russia for negative developments based on inadequate evidence … The second error … is the use of the phrase ‘cyberattack,’ reflecting an extremely dangerous confusion between cyber espionage and cyber sabotage. … The SolarWinds hack was an act of espionage by contemporary means. … [I]f it [the hack] had not been voluntarily reported to the U.S. government by a private security firm, then—as with all the most successful espionage operations—nobody in America would ever have known that it had happened.”

·  “All states conduct espionage, including most notably the United States itself. … Moreover, the United States is a global leader in cyber sabotage. … The planned response to the SolarWinds hack reflects a much deeper problem in the Washington establishment’s attitudes and policy: the belief that the United States can unilaterally set the rules of the international system, and yet set different rules for itself whenever it feels an urgent need to do so. … In the area of cybersecurity it makes even less sense, for the internet really is (in many bad ways, alas) a great leveler.”