Reforming Federal Disaster Recovery Approach | Disrupting Violent Extremists | Civil-Military Relations, and more

The former coalition official said that the Iraqi and Kurdish security forces have defeated the ability of the terror group to launch major attacks, limiting their activities to only “small attacks”. Caggins III concluded his assignment in September 2020. The terror group’s self-proclaimed caliphate was brought down by the Kurdish and Iraqi forces with the support of the international coalition against ISIS.  Despite its territorial defeat, ISIS still launches low-level insurgency against security and civilian targets across the country, including the disputed territories. The third annual conference officially began on Tuesday on the AUK campus, where parallel workshops were held.

Chinese Intelligence Official Sentenced to 20 Years in U.S. Prison  (Jeff Seldin, VOA News)
The first Chinese intelligence officer extradited to the United States and tried for attempting to steal trade secrets will spend 20 years in prison.
Xu Yanjun, a deputy division director at the Chinese Ministry of State Security, was arrested in April 2018 during a visit to Belgium to meet with an employee of a U.S. aviation company who had been working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

GAO Calls for Independent Commission to Reform the Federal Disaster Recovery Approach  (Kylie Bielby, HSToday)
State and local officials told GAO that the different sources of funding and time frames created uncertainty about whether and when they would receive disaster recovery grants. They explained that this uncertainty made it difficult for them to plan their recovery efforts in a way that would optimize their resources.

Big Tech Tells CISA to Exempt Third-Party Providers from Incident Reporting Rule  (Mariam Baksh, Nextgov)
Major industry groups clashed on how CISA should define key terms in its rulemaking process to implement the federal incident reporting law.

Disrupting Violent Extremists’ ‘Free Spaces,’ Online and Off  (Kim Cragin. Lawfare)
Domestic extremism today involves the mixing of many elements, making counterterrorism far more difficult. The case of the so-called New Mexico Civil Guard shows how racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists and anti-government elements can interact in one organization, and how groups use both virtual and physical spaces to organize themselves and plan attacks.

Without Congressional Action, Lafayette Square and January 6th Can Happen Again  (Ariela Rosenberg and Soren Dayton, Just Security)
In the two and a half years since National Guard troops descended on Lafayette Square during peaceful protests, Congress has done little to prevent it from happening again. And even after a summer and fall of congressional hearings on the events of Jan. 6 – in which it became clear that then-President Trump never called in the D.C. National Guard to protect the Capitol from rioters – the process for deploying the D.C. National Guard remains overly bureaucratic and beyond the control of D.C.’s chief executive.
Although the searing images of Lafayette Square and Jan. 6 have begun to fade from our collective memories, it remains critical that Congress pass legislation to close loopholes in the laws that govern domestic deployment of the U.S. military to ensure that it is never politicized and deployed in unlawful and dangerous ways again.