A 'Worst Nightmare' Cyberattack | Attack of the Drones | Iran Rattled, and more
Titled “From Gangs to Groupuscules and Solo-Actor Terrorism: New Zealand Radical Right Narratives and Counter-Narratives in the Context of the Christchurch Attack,” the paper was written by William Allchorn, an expert on anti-Islamic extremism in Europe. It was published by the Hedayah Center and the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right, which study extremism, and funded by a European Union counter-extremism project. Allchorn found 25 different extremist narratives had been deployed in New Zealand, ranging from white supremacy to anti-Semitism to identitarianism. “Key narratives center upon ethno-nationalism and/or white supremacism, antisemitic and Islamophobic tropes, anti-establishment sentiment, environmentalism, and chauvinism at this present time,” he wrote.
Post-Riot Effort to Tackle Extremism in the Military Largely Overlooks Veterans (Paul Sonne, Alex Horton, and Julie Tate, Washington Post)
The Defense Department is focusing on how to weed out possible extremists from the active-duty ranks in the wake of the Capitol riot, with a recent, military-wide “stand down” for troops to discuss the issue ahead of policy decisions on the matter by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.
But the arrest data from the riot shows that allegedly criminal participation in the insurrection on Jan. 6 was far more prevalent among veterans than active-duty forces, a more difficult problem for the U.S. government to address.
Of the nearly 380 individuals federally charged in connection with the riot, at least 44 are current or former members of the U.S. armed forces, according to service records and data compiled by The Washington Post. At least three other veterans are among more than two dozen people charged in D.C. Superior Court for crimes like trespassing and curfew violations.
Federal Agencies Face April Deadline on Secret JFK Files (Jefferson Morley and Rex Bradford, Just Security)
Later this year President Joe Biden will face a decision about the disposition of the last of the U.S. government’s still-secret records related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. With an April 26 deadline looming, federal agencies must inform the National Archives later this month about their plans to release the historic documents or continue withholding them. The Archivist is scheduled to make a recommendation by September 26 about the disposition of the records. The president must then decide by October 26 whether to accept or modify the Archivist’s recommendations.
Some 15,834 assassination-related documents remain partially or wholly classified, according to the National Archives. Most of these records were generated by the CIA and FBI. They include contemporaneous reports related to the murder of the 35th president in Dallas on November 22, 1963, files of CIA officers who knew about accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, and interviews conducted by congressional investigators in the 1970s.
Attack of the Drones: The Mystery of Disappearing Swarms in the U.S. Midwest (Amelia Tait, Guardian)
When groups of sinister drones began hovering over homes in America’s Midwest, the FBI, US Air Force and 16 police forces set up a task force. But the drones vanished. Did they even exist?
A ‘Worst Nightmare’ Cyberattack: The Untold Story of The SolarWinds Hack (Dina Temple-Raston, NPR)
The routine software update may be one of the most familiar and least understood parts of our digital lives. A pop-up window announces its arrival and all that is required of us is to plug everything in before bed. The next morning, rather like the shoemaker and the elves, our software is magically transformed.
Last spring, a Texas-based company called SolarWinds made one such software update available to its customers. It was supposed to provide the regular fare — bug fixes, performance enhancements — to the company’s popular network management system, a software program called Orion that keeps a watchful eye on all the various components in a company’s network. Customers simply had to log into the company’s software development website, type a password and then wait for the update to land seamlessly onto their servers.
The routine update, it turns out, is no longer so routine.
