Al Qaeda Isn’t Dead Yet | Our Narrative of Mass Shootings Is Killing Us | Help Wanted: State Misinformation Sheriff, and more

Al Qaeda Isn’t Dead Yet  (Lynne O’Donnell, Foreign Policy)
The United States, under then-President Donald Trump, made a peace pact in 2020 with the Taliban under the pretense that they would break ties with al Qaeda. It didn’t happen then, it hasn’t happened since, and now the group that blew up the twin towers is enjoying Taliban hospitality while remaining the dominant ideological and operational influence for jihadis from South Asia to North Africa. U.S. officials, in both the Trump and Biden administrations, saw the Islamic State rather than al Qaeda as the biggest threat to the American homeland. Al Qaeda, it was argued, was a spent force, especially after the forehead-tap elimination of leader Osama bin Laden in a raid by U.S. special forces in Pakistan in 2011. The reality is that al Qaeda remains the driving force of international terrorism, more than the locally focused Islamic State has ever been, and continues to inspire terrorist groups from Syria and Somalia to Mali and Mozambique. “Al Qaeda is ultimately the more dangerous enemy,” Bill Roggio, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies told Congress. “Al Qaeda continues to maintain effective insurgencies in multiple countries while using these bases to plot attacks against our homeland and our allies,” he told the House Committee on Homeland Security this year.

Young British Terror Offenders Being Inspired by US School Shootings, Police Counterterror Lead Warns  (Lizzie Dearden, Independent)
Young terror offenders in the UK are being inspired by school shootings in the US, with some wanting to commit mass murders themselves, counterterrorism police have warned. The concerning trend has emerged alongside a steep increase in prosecutions of teenagers with neo-Nazi leanings over the past five years. Earlier this month, a boy who claimed to be acquiring guns to commit an atrocity similar to the 1999 Columbine High School massacre was sentenced for terror offences. The Darlington teenager, who is Britain’s youngest known terror offender, was aged just 13 when he wrote online that he wanted “to do a Columbine here”, while consuming neo-Nazi propaganda. Dean Haydon, the senior national coordinator for Counter Terrorism Policing, said the consumption of material relating to school shootings had become a “trend” in terror cases. “If people start consuming propaganda material in the terrorism and extremism space, they just want to consume everything. If it’s violent they want to consume it,” he told The Independent. “If you look at people like Anders Breivik, Brenton Tarrant, the Buffalo shooter, they become icons in their own right, and heroes in their own community, particularly the right-wing community. “Others then seek to emulate it, they consume that material, and you’ve got this copycat attack issue.

Wray: Lone Actors’ ‘Purity of Radical Ideology’ Giving Way to ‘Weird Hodgepodge’ of Beliefs Behind Attacks  (Bridget Johnson, HSToday)
“We’re having more and more challenges trying to unpack what are often sort of incoherent belief systems, combined with kind of personal grievances.”

Understanding Accelerationist Narratives: The Great Replacement Theory  (Matthew Kriner, Meghan Conroy, Alex Newhouse and Jonathan Lewis, GNET)
On 14 May 2022, an 18-year-old white male allegedly perpetrated a carefully planned mass shooting targeting Black Americans. He opened fire at a Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo, New York, killing 10 and injuring three others; 11 of the individuals shot were Black. Preliminary analysis suggests the attack was an act of terrorism inspired by white supremacist views, particularly the Great Replacement conspiracy theory. The Great Replacement conspiracy theory posits that immigrants and existing populations of non-European descent – namely non-white people from African and Middle Eastern countries – are replacing white European populations in Western countries. It echoes similar conspiracy theories like Eurabia and white genocide. Each of these center around fears of demographic change and white extinction. The Great Replacement Theory first surged into the public consciousness in the immediate aftermath of the March 2019 Christchurch attack, and the subsequent release of the terrorist’s manifesto, whose accelerationist motivations we explored in our previous GNET piece. In fact, the Christchurch shooter titled his manifesto, ‘The Great Replacement’.
Therefore, this Insight explores how militant accelerationism manifested within the Buffalo attacker’s worldview, namely his belief in the Great Replacement Theory. It will demonstrate how militant accelerationism forms a critical framework through which we can understand the shooter’s individual radicalisation pathway, and the tactical manifestation of his violent ideations. The shooter’s tactics are consistent with militant accelerationism, which is common among right-wing violent extremists and is designed to exacerbate latent social divisions, often through violence, thus hastening societal collapse. Indeed, the Buffalo attacker’s rhetoric and language indicate a more opportunistic identification with accelerationism as a tactical framework to achieve his white supremacist goals.

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Even After Shootings, Experts Warn Against Cellphones in Schools  (Heather Kelly, Washington Post)
Students in Texas called 911 from their elementary school, but will more phones in classrooms make children safer?

Will More Countries Want Nuclear Weapons After the War in Ukraine?  (Joshua Keating, Grid)
From the Middle East to East Asia, nuclear crises loom.

Racist and Violent Ideas Jump from Web’s Fringes to Mainstream Sites  (Steven Lee Myers and Stuart A. Thompson, New York Times)
On March 30, the young man accused of the mass shooting at a Tops grocery store in Buffalo surfed through a smorgasbord of racist and antisemitic websites online. On BitChute, a video sharing site known for hosting right-wing extremism, he listened to a lecture on the decline of the American middle class by a Finnish extremist. On YouTube he found a lurid video of a car driving through Black neighborhoods in Detroit. Over the course of the week that followed, his online writing shows, he lingered in furtive chat rooms on Reddit and 4chan but also read articles on race in HuffPost and Medium. He watched local television news reports of gruesome crimes. He toggled between “documentaries” on extremist websites and gun tutorials on YouTube. The young man, who was indicted by a grand jury last week, has been portrayed by the authorities and some media outlets as a troubled outcast who acted alone when he killed 10 Black people in the grocery store and wounded three more. In fact, he dwelled in numerous online communities where he and others consumed and shared racist and violent content. As the number of mass shootings escalates, experts say many of the disturbing ideas that fuel the atrocities are no longer relegated to a handful of tricky-to-find dark corners of the web.

Our Narrative of Mass Shootings Is Killing Us  (Elliot Ackerman, The Atlantic)
After the July 2016 Bastille Day attacks in Nice,Le Monde announced that it would “no longer publish photographs of the perpetrators of killings, to avoid the potential effect of posthumous glorification.”
No American-media consensus exists on how to cover mass shooters. Is the French approach not worth considering? Although some American newsrooms avoid republishing the images and names of shooters, many others continue to do so. In a study on mass shootings and media contagion, Jennifer Johnston, a psychology professor at Western New Mexico University, found that “identification with prior mass shooters made famous by extensive media coverage … is a more powerful push toward violence than mental health status or even access to guns.” A heightened awareness of the narratives we apply to mass shootings needs to be considered as a tool to combat this phenomenon, alongside attention to mental health and gun control. Murderous rage is not unique to America, but the expression of that rage is culturally determined, and so requires cultural countermeasures.
A sickness is sweeping our land; one of its symptoms is these shootings. A certain subset of young men is trying to bring meaning to their lives through gun violence. Stories are where people have always gone to find meaning. We need to tell a different story; the current one is killing us.

A Summer of Blackouts? Wheezing Power Grid Leaves States at Risk  (Evan Halper, Washington Post)
Why the grid could buckle in large areas of the country as temperatures rise

First Amendment Absolutism and Florida’s Social Media Law  (Alan Z. Rozenshtein, Lawfare)
The Eleventh Circuit’s opinion striking down most of Florida’s controversial social media law mostly gets the First Amendment right but also shortchanges the important government interests at stake.

Protecting American Investments in AI  (Brian Drake, War on the Rocks)
Artificial intelligence is the most disruptive technology since the advent of nuclear fission. With market growth projections in the billions, AI is likely to infiltrate every aspect of life in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. Intelligence services will acutely feel the impact of AI as it opens new opportunities for and vulnerabilities to stealing secrets. Both Russia and China have prepared for this future through rapid AI adoption, using economic espionage against AI companies, and optimizing offensive intelligence to defeat opponent AI programs. The United States is woefully unprepared for the methods these adversaries will employ. Developing a robust counterintelligence strategy, security posture, and partnership structure for AI is vital to protecting the American economy and its intelligence services.
If intelligence is collecting and understanding secrets, counterintelligence is the other side of the coin. Counterintelligence protects sources and methods amassing information and disrupts adversary intelligence collection. Counterintelligence, as it stands today, is mostly reactive, under-resourced, and viewed as a paranoid sect of the intelligence community. As a result, the community’s major AI investments do not include counterintelligence missions. U.S. intelligence uses AI mostly for dissecting information about other countries’ militaries, processing dynamic data, and finding strategic weapons. All the while, counterintelligence considerations to protect those investments and negate adversary AI ecosystems are falling by the wayside.

The Texas Grid Is Designed to Fail  (Neel Dhanesha, Vox)
Faulty infrastructure is only a symptom of a larger problem.

We Have No Nuclear Strategy (Tom Nichols, The Atlantic)
The U.S. can’t keep ignoring the threat these weapons pose.

Securing Critical Infrastructure to the Cloud: Why Federal Operators Need Hardware-Enforced Cyber Defense  (Dennis Lanahan, HSToday)
From a regulatory and oversight perspective, several governing entities reinforce the value of this approach.

Cold War Catastrophes the U.S. Can Avoid This Time  (Anatol Lieven, The Atlantic)
Containing Russia is a good idea. Crusading against it is not.

Help Wanted: State Misinformation Sheriff  (Cecilia Kang, New York Times)
Several states are putting more money and effort into combating false and misleading information about elections.

After Texas Shooting, Schools Around U.S. Boost Security  (AP / VOA News)
In the aftermath of the elementary school massacre in Uvalde, Texas, schools around the U.S. have brought in additional security staff and restricted visitors as they deal with a new rash of copycat threats.

Compromised US Academic Credentials Identified Across Various Public and Dark Web Forums  (FBI)
The FBI is informing academic partners of identified US college and university credentials

advertised for sale on online criminal marketplaces and publically accessible forums. This

exposure of sensitive credential and network access information, especially privileged user

accounts, could lead to subsequent cyber attacks against individual users or affiliated

organizations.

Analysis: History Suggests Attention on Gun Policy Will Fade Well Before the November Elections  (Ross Ramsey, Texas Tribune)
In addressing mass shootings, Texas’ top officials have tailored their responses to the wishes of some of their most outspoken voters. The results haven’t changed because we haven’t changed.

How to Start a Cybersecurity Clinic  (Ann Cleaveland, Gregory J. Bott, Lisa Ho, Matthew Hudnall, Lawfare)
In their August 2020 Lawfare post, “Improving Cyber-Oriented Education, One Cyber Clinic at a Time,” R Street policy director Tatyana Bolton and Chris Inglis, now White House national cyber director, make the appeal that cybersecurity clinics are mutually beneficial to universities, their students and their surrounding communities. And the importance of clinics’ contributions at the frontlines of cyber civil defense is only growing.
But how does a cybersecurity educator go about establishing a cybersecurity clinic? We are among the founding members of a growing and international Consortium of Cybersecurity Clinics, committed to expanding the number of cybersecurity clinics that serve the public good and to sharing resources among clinic practitioners. This post describes key considerations for new cybersecurity clinics, drawing on the combined expertise of clinics operating at Indiana University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Alabama, and University of California, Berkeley, among others. 

Russia’s Nuclear Threat Inflation: Misguided and Dangerous  (Lawrence Korb and Stephen Cimbala, Just Security)
Russia’s war against Ukraine has been marked by many mistaken judgments. Russian leaders began the war with ambitious objectives well beyond the capabilities of their fighting forces, underestimating the determination of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the competency and valor of Ukrainian forces, and the willingness of NATO members to supply Ukraine with significant military capabilities. Facing these obstacles, Russian President Vladimir Putin and his advisers have frequently resorted to issuing threats of nuclear escalation to compensate for reversals and disappointments at the front.
This rocket diplomacy is not entirely new for Russia; Putin has been referencing Russia’s high-end nuclear capabilities — and his willingness to use them under certain circumstances – since at least 2007. Nevertheless, Russia’s cavalier use of nuclear coercive diplomacy is a misguided tactic, and it has dangerous implications for future international relations and Russia’s own national security policy.

FBI Asks for More Than $100M in Cyber and Data-Related Increases for 2023  (A. J. Vicens, Cyberscoop)
The FBI is asking for an additional $106 million in its fiscal 2023 budget to address a range of cybersecurity issues, FBI Director Christopher Wray said in prepared testimony before a congressional committee Wednesday.
The cyber-related requests make up nearly a third of the $324.6 million needed for various “program enhancements” Wray said, which range from threats from foreign intelligence services, international and domestic terrorism and IT upgrades needed to process an increasing amount of data generated as part of the FBI‘s investigative work.
The FBI is asking for a $10.8 billion overall budget for fiscal 2023, a six percent increase over this year’s total.