OUR PICKSBiometrics & Counterterrorism | Ransomware Persists | What Ukraine Can Learn from Finland, and more
· Why People Reject Vaccination—and How to Change Their Minds
· U.K. Anti-Vaxxers Block-Book Appointments to Stop People Getting Life-Saving Covid Jab
· Ransomware Persists Even as High-Profile Attacks Have Slowed
· A Grim Warning, as Paris Court Hears Testimony on The Making of a Terrorist
· Islamic Extremists Sidestep Facebook’s Content Police
· The Use of Biometric Technologies for Counter-terrorism Purposes in a Human Rights Vacuum
· Cyber Challenges for the New National Defense Strategy
· What Ukraine Can Learn from Finland
Why People Reject Vaccination—and How to Change Their Minds (Jenna Clark, Foreign Policy)
Anti-vaccination beliefs are highly dependent on cultural and social context. Here’s what worked in two United States-based studies.
U.K. Anti-Vaxxers Block-Book Appointments to Stop People Getting Life-Saving Covid Jab (Lizzie Roberts, The Telegraph)
Tactic said to have been used at Wembley Stadium vaccination center in London, but disrupted pre-bookings offset by walk-ins.
Ransomware Persists Even as High-Profile Attacks Have Slowed (AP)
In the months since President Joe Biden warned Russia’s Vladimir Putin that he needed to crack down on ransomware gangs in his country, there hasn’t been a massive attack like the one last May that resulted in gasoline shortages.
But even if the United States isn’t currently enduring large-scale, front-page ransomware attacks on par with ones earlier this year that targeted the global meat supply or kept millions of Americans from filling their gas tanks, the problem hasn’t disappeared.
A Grim Warning, as Paris Court Hears Testimony on The Making of a Terrorist (Michael Fitzpatrick, RFI)
In the final week of hearings before the winter break, the special criminal court in Paris heard from the relatives of some of the dead terrorists involved in the November 2015 attacks. A senior police investigator, meanwhile, warned that similar attacks could happen again at any time. The father of the man who made the suicide vests used in the Paris attacks had no answers. Driss Laachraoui told the court that he had watched, powerless, as his son lost interest in school and embarked on the tragic road that would lead from a local mosque to the Syrian war zone. Najim Laachraoui blew himself up in the suicide attack at Brussels airport in 2016. The case of the Clain family was even more mysterious. They were converts from Catholicism, the entire group including mother, two brothers, two sisters and their children, embracing a rigorous vision of Islam and then becoming active missionaries for the Salafist project that demands a return to the lifestyle lived in the early days of the Muslim tradition. The Clains moved from the Norman city of Alençon to Toulouse in the search for new converts and a place to live their austere version of the faith. When even their Muslim neighbors found them excessive, some family members moved to Egypt.