Taking Russian Nuclear Threats Seriously | 'Most Dangerous Individual in Metro Detroit' | Oil for Atoms, and more

  The FY2022 budget identified $617 million in similar categories.  That said, while the categories remain the same, the contents are slightly different and it is hard to make an apples-to-apples comparison between the two.
As of April 21, however, the Pentagon has now released the first-ever detailed justification book on DoD climate spending that outlines these investments across 42 pages.  (If you want the one-page summary, you can look at page 4-17 of the Budget Request Overview.)  This provides the details and various accounts that indicate how the Department calculated the $3.1 billion.
The key takeaway is that the $3.1 billion isn’t a distraction or a siphoning off of DoD funding from other priorities. Instead, it’s funding that supports and enhances DoD missions, ensuring the U.S. military will be able to perform its national defense mission in an environment increasingly disrupted by a rapidly-changing climate.  

Feds Fight to Jail ‘Most Dangerous Individual in Metro Detroit’  (Robert Snell, Detroit News)
Federal officials seized weapons and destructive devices from a paroled Islamic State “soldier” in Detroit but waited almost a year to alert a judge or try to send him back to prison despite public safety concerns. The materials, including knives, bayonets and road spikes, were found in June as court officials searched the home of Sebastian Gregerson, aka Abdurrahman Bin Mikaayl, on the west side of Detroit. The 35-year-old was freed in October 2019 after serving a 45-month sentence for a gun crime and buying fragmentation grenades in a criminal case that drew national attention and left lingering questions about Gregerson’s network of radical supporters.

Extremism, Hateful Rhetoric Becoming ‘Normalized’ in Canada, Spy Agency Head Warns (Jim Bronskill, The Canadian Press / Global News)
The head of Canada’s spy agency says the hateful rhetoric associated with ideologically motivated extremism is becoming “normalized” and is seeping into the mainstream. Speaking at the University of British Columbia, Canadian Security Intelligence Service director David Vigneault said the use of social media and other online platforms to sow disinformation, misinformation, propaganda and hate continues to increase and accelerate. Vigneault told a gathering at the university’s School of Public Policy and Global Affairs that this type of information manipulation and propaganda can have serious consequences, eroding trust in democratic institutions and in reasoned deliberation and science. He says it also polarizes public opinion and amplifies conflicting narratives and messaging. Vigneault warned the combination of major disruptive events like the COVID-19 pandemic, the ever-increasing influence of social media and the spread of conspiracy theories has created an environment open to exploitation by influencers and extremists. The spy service says the confluence of factors has the potential to inspire individuals to commit acts of violence. Since 2014, Canadians motivated in whole or in part by their extremist ideological views have killed 26 people and wounded 40 others on Canadian soil, Vigneault said.

Getting the Global Fragility Act Together: Reimagining Counterterrorism Must Be Part of the Plan  (Eric Rosand and Alistair Millar, Defense Post)
The ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine overshadowed the latest step taken in Washington to turn the page on 20 years of a costly, largely military-driven approach to addressing conflicts. Informed by some of the lessons from the past two decades, the long-awaited US Strategy to Prevent Conflict and Promote Stability marks a shift away from a reactive approach that often exacerbated the underlying drivers of, and prolonged rather than reduced, the violence. The new strategy, which is to implement the 2019 Global Fragility Act, favors a more sophisticated “whole of society” approach with an emphasis on prevention. It prioritizes addressing the factors contributing to violence and political instability and fostering and sustaining long-term partnerships in affected countries with governments, civil society, and the private sector. The strategy also articulates a long-overdue commitment to breaking down the array of bureaucratic and funding siloes that have too often hindered the development of a more integrated, effective, and sustainable approach to violence and conflict prevention. The framework makes references to counterterrorism and the need for complementarity between this new strategy and relevant, existing US strategic frameworks, including those related to counterterrorism.

U.S. Intelligence Is Helping Ukraine Kill Russian Generals, Officials Say  (Julian E. Barnes, Helene Cooper and Eric Schmitt, New York Times)
The United States has provided intelligence about Russian units that has allowed Ukrainians to target and kill many of the Russian generals who have died in action in the Ukraine war, according to senior American officials.
Ukrainian officials said they have killed approximately 12 generals on the front lines, a number that has astonished military analysts.

Why Washington Should Take Russian Nuclear Threats Seriously  (Stephen M. Walt, Foreign Policy)
Historically, states have escalated when facing the prospect of imminent defeat—and Putin has a track record of following through on his threats.

Guns Now Kill More Children and Young Adults Than Car Crashes  (Tanya Lewis, Scientific American)
Firearms now exceed automobile accidents as the leading cause of injury-related death for people ages one to 24, a new analysis shows.

Facebook Provided Warning to FBI Before January 6, GAO Report Reveals  (Justin Hendrix, Just Security)
A new report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) reveals that seven federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies were aware of open source information on social media about “potential violence” planned for January 6, 2021. The report suggests that federal agencies had ample authority and information to anticipate and prepare for a violent assault on the Capitol.
The findings of the report, titled “Federal Agencies’ Use of Open Source Data and Related Threat Products Prior to January 6, 2021,” also raise questions about statements by FBI Director Christopher Wray in previous testimony to Congress. The report states that the representatives of at least two social media platforms – Facebook and Parler – told the GAO that their companies provided information to the FBI “regarding potential violence at the U.S. Capitol on January 6.”

Dependency Issues: Solving the World’s Open-Source Software Security Problem  (John Speed Meyers, Zack Newman, Tom Pike, and Jacquelline Kazil, War on the Rocks)
The idea of a lone programmer relying on their own genius and technical acumen to create the next great piece of software was always a stretch. Today it is more of a myth than ever. Competitive market forces mean that software developers must rely on code created by an unknown number of other programmers. As a result, most software is best thought of as bricolage — diverse, usually open-source components, often called dependencies, stitched together with bits of custom code into a new application.
This software engineering paradigm — programmers reusing open-source software components rather than repeatedly duplicating the efforts of others — has led to massive economic gains. According to the best available analysis, open-source components now comprise 90 percent of most software applications. And the list of economically important and widely used open-source components — Google’s deep learning framework TensorFlow or its Facebook-sponsored competitor PyTorch, the ubiquitous encryption library OpenSSL, or the container management software Kubernetes — is long and growing longer. The military and intelligence community, too, are dependent on open-source software: programs like Palantir have become crucial for counter-terrorism operations, while the F-35 contains millions of lines of code.
The problem is that the open-source software supply chain can introduce unknown, possibly intentional, security weaknesses.