OUR PICKSTerrorist Drone Attacks | Extremists Plotted Power Grid Attacks | Moscow’s Musings on Brinksmanship, and more
· North Korea Turns to Crypto Theft to Fund Weapons Programs
· Sentence Upheld for Coast Guard Officer Tied to Terror Plot
· Terrorist Drone Attacks: Could New Technology Stop the Threat?
· Drones Could Help Tackle Maritime Terrorists as UN Warns of ‘Major’ Threat in Africa
· MI5 Chief Ken McCallum: British Extremists Are Travelling to Afghanistan
· Cybersecurity Tools Lie Unused in Federal Agencies’ Toolboxes
· Moscow’s Musings on Brinksmanship from Stalin to Putin
· Flat-Earthers Keep Alienating Other Conspiracy Theorists—Even QAnon Believers
· Far-Right Extremists Plotted Power Grid Attacks to Start a Race War, Feds Say
North Korea Turns to Crypto Theft to Fund Weapons Programs (Christy Lee, VOA News)
Experts say North Korea is exploiting the lack of global regulatory controls on cryptocurrency to steal digital currencies to fund its nuclear weapons and missile programs.
“Crypto provides Pyongyang with a new form of currency that is significantly less regulated and understood by national governments, financial institutions and international bodies,” Jason Bartlett, a researcher at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) told VOA’s Korean Service.
Sentence Upheld for Coast Guard Officer Tied to Terror Plot (Michael Kunzelman, Associated Press)
A federal appeals court Tuesday upheld a prison sentence of more than 13 years for a former Coast Guard officer accused of stockpiling weapons and plotting politically motivated killings inspired by a far-right mass murderer. Christopher Hasson argued the district court judge who sentenced him in January 2020 improperly applied a “terrorism enhancement” that more than tripled the recommended range of a prison term under federal sentencing guidelines. Hasson was not charged or convicted of a terrorism-related offense. A three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected Hasson’s argument, saying he failed to demonstrate that the sentencing judge legally or factually erred in applying the enhancement. In a separate but similar case, the 4th Circuit ruled that a defendant does not need to be convicted of a federal crime of terrorism for the enhancement to be applied. It applies “whenever a defendant’s offense of conviction or relevant conduct was ‘intended to promote’ a federal crime of terrorism,” the panel noted in its ruling for Hasson’s case. U.S. District Judge George Hazel sentenced Hasson to 13 years and four months in prison after he pleaded guilty to possessing unregistered and unserialized silencers, being a drug addict in possession of firearms and illegal possession of tramadol, an opioid painkiller. Justice Department prosecutors called Hasson a domestic terrorist who appeared to be planning attacks inspired by the manifesto of Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian far-right terrorist who killed 77 people in a 2011 bomb-and-shooting rampage.
