Our picksThe Cyber Monoculture Risk | Rethinking DHS | Risk of Declining China, and more
· China Is a Declining Power—and That’s the Problem
· Twenty Years After 9/11 Attacks, Congress Now Looks at the Future of DHS and TSA
· Amazon Is Selling Books That Promote Violence from a Neo-Nazi Publisher, Helping to Finance a Convicted Terrorist
· U.S. Plans to Keep Al-Qaeda in Check in Afghanistan with Air Strikes
· U.S. Military Concedes It’s Unready to Fight Terrorism From ‘Over the Horizon’
· DHS Releases Priority-Based Immigration Enforcement Guidelines
· Hackers Posed as Amnesty International, Promising Anti-Spyware Tool that Actually Collects Passwords
· Oath Keepers Panicked That the Left Would ‘Decapitate’ Them After Failed Capitol Putsch
· The Cyber Monoculture Risk
China Is a Declining Power—and That’s the Problem (Hal Brands and Michael Beckley, Foreign Policy)
The United States needs to prepare for a major war, not because its rival is rising but because of the opposite.
Twenty Years After 9/11 Attacks, Congress Now Looks at the Future of DHS and TSA (Lori Aratani, Washington Post)
Twenty years after 9/11, lawmakers in Washington this week sought to assess the performance of two key federal agencies that were formed to bolster national security in the wake of the attacks. At separate hearings before the House Homeland Security Committee and its Oversight Management and Accountability Subcommittee, lawmakers examined the critical role the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration have played in the years following attacks at the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Their conclusion: While safer, the United States faces evolving sets of domestic and international threats that will continue to test the capabilities of both agencies. “The threats we face today have grown beyond foreign terrorists to include cyber attacks, climate change and domestic violence extremism,” said the subcommittee chairman Rep. Lou Correa (D-Calif.) at the hearing. From its early days as the umbrella agency for 22 federal entities, DHS has evolved into the third-largest federal agency and has “matured to become more cohesive, and therefore more effective,” Correa added. Yet it struggles to recruit and retain employees, particularly among front line employees at TSA and Customs and Border Protection. Pay is an issue, but so is workplace culture, officials said, leaving a number of lawmakers concerned about the ability of DHS to carry out its mission.
Amazon Is Selling Books That Promote Violence from a Neo-Nazi Publisher, Helping to Finance a Convicted Terrorist (Mia Gingerich, Media Matters)
…The publisher of the books, the American Futurist, describes itself as seeking “to spread the message and ideas of James Mason” through “the promotion of books, articles and all other forms of media.” Mason, a neo-Nazi writer whose work is cited in The Movementarian Menace, is also a major influence behind Atomwaffen Division, a violent white nationalist terrorist group. As noted by the Counter Extremism Project, the American Futurist is associated with Atomwaffen Division (also known as the National Socialist Order) and multiple ex-members of the group have contributed content to American Futurist.
