Can Ukraine Win? | Does Secrecy Matter? | Questions About Red Flags, and more

The implications of the Ukraine experience seem clear. Public intelligence is an important tool in the hands of diplomats as well as generals. Intelligence works when intelligence agencies are open-minded about open sources. And there is no going back. Gone are the days when secrecy was the coin of the realm, and when a state’s possession of private information was the key to strategic success. 
Technological advances have vastly increased the amount and quality of information available at our fingertips. Real-time data is abundant, making secrets seem unimportant and secrecy irrelevant. Yet there are reasons to believe that secrecy played an important role before and during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — and that it might prove vital to ending the war.

Why do Online Countering Violent Extremism Strategies Not Work? The Case of Digital Jihad  (Miron Lakomy, GNET)
Islamic State’s (IS) propaganda campaign in 2014-2015 marked a turning point in the history of digital jihad. The quality and scope of its activities on the Internet proved to be unprecedented. Other Salafi-jihadist violent extremist organisations (VEOs) followed in the footsteps of IS and quickly upgraded their propaganda capabilities. Nevertheless, 2015 marked the beginning of a crisis in Islamic State’s Internet campaign. This process corresponded with increased attention from governments, law enforcement agencies and Internet companies, as they were ramping up their online countering violent extremism (CVE) programs. Effectively, due to the dropping presence of IS on the surface, deep and dark web between 2015 and 2019, many stakeholders and experts believed that content takedown policies were the solution. However, there is not enough evidence to support this claim. In fact, it is quite the opposite, given that we have witnessed the ongoing reinvigoration of militant Islamist propaganda activity on the Internet for at least two years, despite the increasingly strict CVE strategies introduced worldwide. Why do online countering violent extremism strategies not work as intended?

U.S. Removes 5 Groups from Terror Blacklist, Retains Al-Qaida  (Matthew Lee, AP News)
The United States has removed five extremist groups, all believed to be defunct, from its list of foreign terrorist organizations. In notices published in the Federal Register on Friday, the State Department said it had removed the groups after a mandatory five-year review of their designations. Al-Qaida, which was also up for review, was kept on the list, which was created under the federal Immigration and Nationality Act, or INA. “Our review of these five FTO designations determined that, as defined by the INA the five organizations are no longer engaged in terrorism or terrorist activity and do not retain the capability and intent to do so,” the State Department said in a statement. “Therefore, as required by the INA, these FTO designations are being revoked.” Several of the removed groups once posed significant threats, killing hundreds if not thousands of people across Asia, Europe and the Middle East. The decision was politically sensitive for the Biden administration and the countries in which the organizations operated. It may draw criticism from victims and their families. The organizations removed are the Basque separatist group ETA , the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo, the radical Jewish group Kahane Kach and two Islamic groups that have been active in Israel, the Palestinian territories and Egypt.

U.S. Says Cuba Not Cooperating Fully Against Terrorism, Inflaming Tensions(Dave Sherwood and Matt Spetalnick, Reuters)
The Biden administration on Friday once again placed Cuba on a short list of countries the United States alleges are “not cooperating fully” in its fight against terrorism, further inflaming tensions with its long-time rival. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in the final assessment published Friday in the U.S. Federal Register, named Cuba among five countries - along with Iran, North Korea, Venezuela and Syria - that the United States says fall short of its expectations. Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez anticipated the move on Thursday, calling a draft notice from May 11 signed by Blinken “one more lie” coming from Washington. “The United States again maintains the slander of saying that Cuba doesn’t cooperate sufficiently in the fight against terrorism,” Rodriguez said on Twitter on Thursday, calling it a “pretext to continue an unceasing economic war universally repudiated.” The U.S. assessment is almost identical to the one issued by the Biden administration a year ago, which stuck with the Trump administration’s determination. A U.S. State Department spokesman told Reuters that its Friday decision was a result of a review of “counterterrorism objectives with that country and a realistic assessment of its capabilities.

The Buffalo Shooting Suspect’s Online Footprint Prompts Questions About Red Flags  (Odette Yousef, NPR)
Extremism researchers are combing through the digital footprint believed to be left behind by the man accused of shooting 13 people, killing 10 of them, in a racially motivated attack at a Buffalo supermarket. Among the materials is a nearly 600 page chat log written by an individual who identifies himself as Payton Gendron, the same name as the killing suspect, documenting roughly six months of personal reflections and activities leading up to the attack. The record, created on the social chat platform Discord, paints a picture of a committed racist obsessed with the mechanics of planning and executing a deadly mass shooting. Among the questions that experts are bringing to the document are: what red flags might have been missed by those around this individual? Where might there have been an intervention? And, what insight might it offer on what differentiates someone who carries out a violent attack from others who may share similar extremist views? But they also caution that the record should be read with a degree of skepticism. “Although he is seemingly candidly laying out his thoughts and observations on the world [and] his planning for the attack, he’s also writing for an audience,” said Emerson Brooking, resident senior fellow at the Digital Forensic Research Lab of the Atlantic Council.

Buffalo Suspect Exposes Dangers of Accelerationist, Neo-Fascist Lone-Actor Violence  (Jon Lewis, NBC News)
The recent act of targeted mass violence against Black Americans at a Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo, New York, is yet another reminder that accelerationist, neo-fascist lone-actor violence remains one of the dangerous domestic terrorism threats in the United States today. Best understood as a set of tactics and strategies explicitly designed to put pressure on and exacerbate latent social and societal divisions in order to collapse the system, experts believe neo-fascist accelerationism has been the inspiration for some of the deadliest acts of mass violence in the United States in recent years — from Black churchgoers in Charleston, Jewish congregants at synagogues in Pittsburgh and Poway, and Latino shoppers at a Walmart in El Paso.  Transnational accelerationist networks, designed not around formal material support but a shared community, create an in-group and interconnected online ecosystem for many of these terrorists. Transnational accelerationist networks, designed not around formal material support but a shared community, create an in-group and interconnected online ecosystem for many of these terrorists. This creates a far more amorphous and decentralized threat picture.

European Nations, Streaming Service Delete Extremist Audio  (AP News)
The European Union’s law enforcement agency said Friday that authorities in six countries have worked with music streaming service SoundCloud to detect and delete hundreds of files containing extremist propaganda. Europol said that the plan was initiated by Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office and the EU Internet Referral Unit, and that authorities in Denmark, Hungary, Portugal, Spain and the U.K. were also involved. Law enforcement authorities “detected and assisted the company to scour illegally uploaded jihadist, right wing terrorist and violent extremist propaganda,” Europol said in a statement. Around 1,100 profiles and audio files deemed to be illegal were flagged to SoundCloud, which “deleted the reported files that were considered a breach of its terms and conditions.” The content that was flagged included jihadist chants in several languages and audio promoting right-wing extremist groups. Some of the material had already gathered several thousand hits, Europol said. It added that the action was part of an ongoing partnership between SoundCloud, Europol and law enforcement agencies. German authorities said the files were flagged between May 5 and 13.

‘A Catastrophic Failure’: Computer Scientist Hany Farid on Why Violent Videos Circulate on the Internet  (Johana Bhuiyan, Guardian)
In the aftermath of yet another racially motivated shooting that was live-streamed on social media, tech companies are facing fresh questions about their ability to effectively moderate their platforms. Payton Gendron, the 18-year-old gunman who killed 10 people in a largely Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York, on Saturday, broadcasted his violent rampage on the video-game streaming service Twitch. Twitch says it took down the video stream in mere minutes, but it was still enough time for people to create edited copies of the video and share it on other platforms including Streamable, Facebook and Twitter. So how do tech companies work to flag and take down videos of violence that have been altered and spread on other platforms in different forms – forms that may be unrecognizable from the original video in the eyes of automated systems? On its face, the problem appears complicated. But according to Hany Farid, a professor of computer science at UC Berkeley, there is a tech solution to this uniquely tech problem. Tech companies just aren’t financially motivated to invest resources into developing it. Farid’s work includes research into robust hashing, a tool that creates a fingerprint for videos that allows platforms to find them and their copies as soon as they are uploaded.