OUR PICKSForeign Fighters in Ukraine | Resilient U.S. Healthcare System | African Coastal Terror Attacks, and more
· Preparing for the Next Pandemic: Building a More Resilient U.S. Healthcare System
· I&A Identified Threats Prior to January 6, 2021, but Did Not Issue Any Intelligence Products Before the U.S. Capitol Breach
· Israeli System Downs Isis Drones in Mozambique
· Pro-Russia Rebels Are Still Using Facebook to Recruit Fighters, Spread Propaganda
· Facebook Allows War Posts Urging Violence Against Russian Invaders
· The Rise of White Nationalist Hispanics
· A Turning Point in the Fight Against Right-Wing Extremism
· West African Coastal Terror Attacks: Just the Tip of the Iceberg – Analysis
· UK’s Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation Vows to Focus on Online Extremism
· Nations Warned to Monitor and Prevent Extremist Foreign Fighters from Heading to Ukraine
Preparing for the Next Pandemic: Building a More Resilient U.S. Healthcare System (Brock Long and Jeff Bokser, HSToday)
The COVID-19 crisis taught us that we rely too heavily on foreign countries for medical supplies and pharmaceutical components.
I&A Identified Threats Prior to January 6, 2021, but Did Not Issue Any Intelligence Products Before the U.S. Capitol Breach (DHS OIG)
I&A identified specific threat information related to the events on January 6, 2021, but did not issue any intelligence products about these threats until January 8, 2021. Open source collectors in I&As Current and Emerging Threats Center collected open source threat information but did not produce any actionable information. This resulted from inexperienced open source collectors who received inadequate training and who did not fully consider I&A Guidelines for reporting threat information. Collectors also described hesitancy following scrutiny of I&As reporting in response to civil unrest in the summer of 2020. Although an open source collector submitted one product for review on January 5, 2021, I&A did not distribute the product until 2 days after the events at the U.S. Capitol. Additionally, I&As Counterterrorism Mission Center (CTMC) identified indicators that the January 6, 2021 events might turn violent but did not issue an intelligence product outside I&A, even though it had done so for other events. Instead, CTMC identified these threat indicators for an internal I&A leadership briefing, only. Finally, the Field Operations Division (FOD) considered issuing intelligence products on at least three occasions prior to January 6, 2021, but FOD did not disseminate any such products ultimately. It is unclear why FOD failed to disseminate these products.
I&A did email threat information to its local partners in the Washington, D.C. area on several occasions before the events at the U.S. Capitol. However, this information was not as widely disseminated as I&As typical intelligence products. As a result, I&A was unable to provide its many state, local, and Federal partners with timely, actionable, and predictive intelligence.
