ISIS Women Commanders | How China Spies on the West | Risks of Open Data Market, and more

The F.B.I. said its joint terrorism task forces were leading the investigation, which was “of the highest priority” and involved more than 20 field offices across the country. “Although at this time no explosive devices have been found at any of the locations, the F.B.I. takes all threats with the utmost seriousness and we are committed to thoroughly and aggressively investigating these threats,” the F.B.I. said in a statement. Students said they felt fearful, angry and mentally taxed by the threats. “A lot of us feel like this is political,” said Joyce Dihi, 19, a freshman at Spelman College in Atlanta, which received a threat on Tuesday, the first day of Black History Month. “There are people out there who don’t like that H.B.C.U.s support the excellence of Black people,” Ms. Dihi said.

Allison Fluke-Ekren Is a Rarity to Experts: A Woman Alleged to Have a Senior Role in ISIS  (Josh Meyer and Bart Jansen, USA TODAY)
Three weeks ago, an imprisoned woman known as “Lady al-Qaida” inspired a hostage-taking at a Texas synagogue. This week, an American woman appeared in court on charges she trained other women in the Islamic State and plotted bomb attacks. International terrorism charges against women are extremely rare, according to experts, because men tend to dominate the misogynistic groups such as al-Qaida, the lslamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS, and related groups in Pakistan, Afghanistan and elsewhere around the world. But a dozen cases over the last decade of U.S. citizens or permanent residents revealed women shedding traditional caretaker roles to recruit fellow warriors, train others to use rifles and explosives, and even kill. Veteran counter-terrorism officials say that while the latest case against Allison Fluke-Ekren, a former teacher from Kansas, is unusual in terms of the senior operational rank she allegedly achieved in ISIS, women have played important roles in the international Islamic jihad movement. “I think it’s startling to the American people because they’re like, ‘Wait, women do this too?’ But they’ve been doing it all along,” Tracy Walder, a former CIA counter-terrorism officer who served extensively in the Middle East, told USA TODAY.

British ISIS Beatles ‘Turn Supergrass and Reveal Masterminds Behind European Terror Attacks’ ahead of U.S. Trial  (Chris Jewers, Daily Mail)
Two of the British ISIS ‘Beatles’ reportedly turned supergrass and revealed the masterminds behind European terror attacks while awaiting trial in the United States. Alexanda Kotey and El Shafee Elsheikh are said to have given up the information to US secret service interrogators after their 2018 capture in Syria. They also revealed details of who ordered the kidnap and torture of Western hostages, according to French publication Mediapart. According to both men, Abu Lôqman - the head of Islamic State’s secret service - was in charge of the capture, imprisonment and torture of hostages. According to the French report, Kotey and Elsheikh confirmed the real identity of Abu Ahmed al-Iraqi as Oussama Atar (left), who is currently on trial in France in-absentia and believed to have masterminded terrorist attacks in Brussels and Paris. They also said that Abu Lôqman (right) - the head of Islamic State’s secret service - was in charge of the capture, imprisonment and torture of hostages  The pair of British ISIS fighters both reported to third ‘Beatle’ Mohammed Emwazi, aka Jihadi John, who himself reported to emir Abu Ahmed al-Iraqi. According to the French report, Kotey (aka Ringo) and Elsheikh (aka George) also confirmed the real identity of Abu Ahmed al-Iraqi as Oussama Atar.”

Alexander Vindman’s Lawsuit Is Right on the Law  (Richard Primus and David Schulz, Just Security)
In the fall of 2019, President Donald Trump and many of his associates and supporters publicly attacked Lt. Col Alex Vindman, a career military officer who testified in that year’s impeachment proceedings against the President. Under congressional subpoena, Vindman—then working at the National Security Council—testified truthfully about his knowledge of the infamous phone call in which Trump pushed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to launch an investigation of Joe Biden. In what seemed like attempts to discredit Vindman and punish him for his testimony, Trump and others described Vindman as a spy and as disloyal to the United States. Administration officials appear to have leaked classified information to Trump’s allies in Congress to support a false narrative about Vindman’s disloyalty and, according to some reports, also attempted to block Vindman’s promotion to the rank of Colonel. Ultimately, Vindman and his brother Yevgeny Vindman were both removed from their positions at the National Security Council, and Vindman’s military career was effectively ended.
In a suit filed this week, Vindman alleges that several defendants—including Donald Trump, Jr. and Rudy Giuliani—conspired to prevent his testimony by intimidation and, when that failed, to punish him for testifying. The statutory basis for Vindman v. Trump Jr. et al. is a nineteenth-century federal statute initially enacted to address misconduct by the Ku Klux Klan.
The two of us—respectively, a law professor with expertise in the Klan Act and a law professor with expertise in the First Amendment—conclude that Vindman has asserted claims viable enough to survive a motion to dismiss and, assuming he can prove his allegations after discovery, viable enough to prevail in the litigation.

China Watch

The Open Data Market and Risks to National Security  (Justin Sherman, Lawfare)
As 2021 came to a close, the Washington Post published an investigation showing that the Chinese government is heavily monitoring the internet abroad to collect data on foreigners. The Post reviewed “bidding documents and contracts for over 300 Chinese government projects since the beginning of 2020” and found they included “orders for software designed to collect data on foreign targets from sources such as Twitter, Facebook and other Western social media.” In that story lies an important reminder for U.S. policymakers. While the Chinese government’s 2015 hack of the Office of Personnel Management sticks in many people’s minds as the most prominent case of data mining from Beijing, the reality is that the ecosystem and market of openly available data on U.S. citizens is a current and ongoing national security threat.

How China Spies on the West  (Ian Williams, The Spectator)
The word Qingbao in Chinese means both ‘intelligence’ and ‘information’, and it neatly encapsulates the unique nature and breadth of a China’s vast spying system, which combines formal and informal techniques, both overt and covert, to obtain new intelligence. There is often a fine line between theft and the voluntary transfer of know-how, and China has pushed the latter to the limit. Over the years, the CCP has built a comprehensive system for spotting and acquiring foreign technologies by multiple means.

Arkansas Professor Pleads Guilty to Lying About China Patents  (Associated Press)
A University of Arkansas professor pleaded guilty Friday to lying to the FBI about patents he had for inventions in mainland China.
Simon Saw-Teong Ang pleaded guilty in federal court in Fayetteville, Arkansas, to one count from a 58-count federal indictment.
Prosecutors say that 24 patents bearing Ang’s name were filed with the Beijing government but that he failed to report the patents to the university and denied having them when questioned by the FBI.
The university requires disclosure of all faculty patents, which the university would own. The plea deal calls for a one-year prison sentence, but the crime could be punishable by up to five years in prison.

As Putin Lines Ukraine Border with Russian Troops, Is There a China Factor?  (Thomas Graham Jr., Just Security)
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s months-long troop buildup near the Ukrainian border may be coming to a head, with new reports almost daily of additional military assets mobilized, including most recently to the north in Belarus and to the south in the Black Sea. While Russian officials, including Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, deny plans for a new invasion of Ukraine, and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said after meeting with him in Geneva last week that the two had agreed to keep talking, the situation has the appearance of an imminent invasion force ready to act, regardless of what the United States and its European allies do.
But Putin may choose to hold off for a while longer, in part because of another factor that isn’t getting as much attention right now as it has at other times in the past year: China.

How to Protect Europe from Risky Foreign Direct Investment  (Francesca Ghiretti, Just Security)
Last September, Italian police raided the offices of an aeronautics firm called Alpi Aviation that provided drones to the country’s military. Alpi stood accused of violating the Golden Power, an Italian law intended to prevent the unregulated foreign acquisition of defense companies. In addition to sending a military drone to China marked as a “model aircraft,” Alpi allegedly failed to notify the government of its opaque 2018 sale to a Chinese enterprise linked to China Railway Rolling Stock.
The Alpi Aviation case has prompted renewed debate over the European Union’s foreign direct investment screening mechanism, which was implemented in 2020 and will be up for evaluation by 2023. There are several challenges to current European efforts to screen foreign investments: not all member states have national screening mechanisms; member states that do have screening mechanisms have uncoordinated approaches to information collection and regulation; and member states can ignore E.U. advice on how to manage potentially problematic investments.

The Growing Rivalry Between America and China and the Future of Globalization  (Aaron L. Friedberg, Texas National Security Review)
Friedberg considers the ways in which the intensifying rivalry between the United States and China may influence, and be influenced by, the evolving structure of the international economy. After reviewing the evolution of the international economy over the last two centuries, he looks at five possible scenarios for the how the global economy might continue to evolve.