Extremists Threaten Critical Infrastructure | Dealing with High-Profile Anti-Semites | Colorado River Faces "Complete Doomsday Scenario” | Why Artificial Intelligence Worries Henry Kissinger, and more

As part of its ongoing efforts to confront racially-motivated, anti-government or otherwise violent domestic extremism, the Defense Department has asked the military services to compile data on every report taken and every investigation launched into what’s referred to as “prohibited activities.” The most recent data was compiled as part of a larger IG evaluation of several DoD and service-specific reports issued in 2021 and 2022, including from DoD IG, Army IG and the Government Accountability Office, that deal with diversity, equity and inclusion efforts across the department. The main problem the IG found with these efforts is that the services don’t use the same terminology across the board, making it difficult to present department-wide data. For example, the Army and Air Force Departments use the same terms as the FBI and the Homeland Security Department to describe different kinds of violent domestic extremism, as required by the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act, but the Navy Department has its own terms, the IG found.

‘Targeted’ N.C. Substation Gun Attack Comes Amid Escalating Critical Infrastructure Threats  (Brifget Johnson, HSToday)
Attacks resulted in “multiple equipment failures leaving about 45,000 customers without power” in Moore County; sheriff says attacker(s) “knew exactly what they were doing.”

The Table for Trump’s Antisemitic Banquet Was Set Long Ago  (Bret Stephens, New York Times)
The former president, who is running for his former office, invites to his home one of the most notorious antisemites in the United States, who brings along a well-known Holocaust denier.
If he were to win again, all this would be swept under the rug, just as it was the last time. This is the new normal. We shouldn’t be surprised. The ground for it was laid long ago.

Antisemitic Celebrities Stoke Fears of Normalizing Hate  (Michel Kunzelman, AP)
A surge of anti-Jewish vitriol, spread by a world-famous rapper, an NBA star and other prominent people, is stoking fears that public figures are normalizing hate and ramping up the risk of violence in a country already experiencing a sharp increase in antisemitism. Leaders of the Jewish community in the U.S. and extremism experts have been alarmed to see celebrities with massive followings spew antisemitic tropes in a way that has been taboo for decades. Some said it harkens back to a darker time in America when powerful people routinely spread conspiracy theories about Jews with impunity. Former President Donald Trump hosted a Holocaust-denying white supremacist at Mar-a-Lago. The rapper Ye expressed love for Adolf Hitler in an interview. Basketball star Kyrie Irving appeared to promote an antisemitic film on social media. Neo-Nazi trolls are clamoring to return to Twitter as new CEO Elon Musk grants “amnesty” to suspended accounts. “These are not fringe outliers sending emails from their parents garage or idiots no one has ever heard of. When influential mainstream cultural, political and even sports icons normalize hate speech, everyone needs to be very concerned,” said Miami Beach Mayor Dan Gelber, a leader in South Florida’s Jewish community.

Hate Speech’s Rise on Twitter Is Unprecedented, Researchers Find  (Sheera Frenkel and Kate Conger, New York Times)
Before Elon Musk bought Twitter, slurs against Black Americans showed up on the social media service an average of 1,282 times a day. After the billionaire became Twitter’s owner, they jumped to 3,876 times a day. Slurs against gay men appeared on Twitter 2,506 times a day on average before Mr. Musk took over. Afterward, their use rose to 3,964 times a day. And antisemitic posts referring to Jews or Judaism soared more than 61 percent in the two weeks after Mr. Musk acquired the site. These findings — from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, the Anti-Defamation League and other groups that study online platforms — provide the most comprehensive picture to date of how conversations on Twitter have changed since Mr. Musk completed his $44 billion deal for the company in late October. While the numbers are relatively small, researchers said the increases were atypically high. The shift in speech is just the tip of a set of changes on the service under Mr. Musk. Accounts that Twitter used to regularly remove — such as those that identify as part of the Islamic State, which were banned after the U.S. government classified ISIS as a terror group — have come roaring back. Accounts associated with QAnon, a vast far-right conspiracy theory, have paid for and received verified status on Twitter, giving them a sheen of legitimacy.

TamTam Deletes Channels Promoting Neo-Nazi Accelerationism and Terror  (CEP)
Following a report by the Counter Extremism Project (CEP), TamTam, a Russia-based messenger platform, has removed 18 channels endorsing neo-Nazi accelerationism and acts of terrorism. The channels posted bomb-making instructions and encouraged other activities meant to create “a climate of anxiety” and fear. CEP reported the channels to the communications app, citing the platform’s regulations that prohibit users from promoting and calling “for violence and cruelty, committing suicide and other illegal and immoral acts,” and promoting “extremism (or) terrorism” related to “ethnical or national identity, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious opinions, age, limited physical or mental abilities or diseases.” The successful effort with TamTam follows CEP’s success in preventing sales of a neo-Nazi edition of the infamous antisemitic book The International Jew by Barnes & Noble. The channels removed by TamTam posted guides on how to make explosives, the manifestos of several white supremacist mass shooters; videos from several neo-Nazi groups including the Atomwaffen Division, the National Socialist Order, The Base, and Feuerkrieg Division; a recently released propaganda video that encourages acts of terrorism and praises individuals who have committed acts of white supremacist violence; and a neo-Nazi accelerationist book that calls for lone actor violence, workplace violence, attacks on infrastructure, law enforcement, politicians, people of color, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, Latinos, and LGBTQ+ people. The book also includes information on making homemade bombs, conducting surveillance, and other information helpful in committing attacks.

Trump’s Dinner with Antisemites Provides Test of GOP Response to Extremism  (Isaac Arnsdorf, Josh Dawsey and Marianna Sotomayor, Washington Post)
Republicans are showing increasing willingness to criticize Trump over his meeting with white nationalist Nick Fuentes and Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West who has issued anti-Jewish diatribes

NTAS: Praise for Recent Attacks, Holiday Gatherings, Capitol Attack Anniversary Feed ‘Dynamic and Complex’ Threat Environment  (Bridget Johnson, HSToday)
Online extremists have praised the deadly shootings at LGBTQI+ bars in Colorado Springs and Slovakia and encouraged additional violence, new bulletin notes.

How Should We Deal with High-Profile Anti-Semites?  (Conor Friedershof, The Atlantic)
“For most of my adult life, antisemites—with exceptions like Pat Buchanan and Mel Gibson—have lacked status in America,” Michelle Goldberg writes in her most recent column for The New York Times. “The most virulent antisemites tended to hate Jews from below, blaming them for their own failures and disappointments.” But now, she laments, “anti-Jewish bigotry, or at least tacit approval of anti-Jewish bigotry, is coming from people with serious power,” arguably including a former president.
As Goldberg put it:

There is no excuse for being shocked by anything that Donald Trump does, yet I confess to being astonished that the former president dined last week with one of the country’s most influential white supremacists, a smirking little fascist named Nick Fuentes. There’s nothing new about antisemites in Trump’s circle, but they usually try to maintain some plausible deniability, ranting about globalists and George Soros rather than the Jews.
Fuentes, by contrast, is overt. “Jews have too much power in our society,” he recently wrote on his Telegram channel. “Christians should have all the power, everyone else very little.” Fuentes was brought to Trump’s lair by Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, who was evidently serious when he threatened to go “death con 3” on the Jews last month.

Jewish Texans See Surge in Antisemitism as a Precursor to Fascism  (Robert Downen, Texas Tribune)
As other kids in Austin recovered from trick-or-treating on Halloween last year, Sarah Adelman worried about white supremacists, her mom and their synagogue. After a series of antisemitic incidents around Central Texas, someone set fire to Congregation Beth Israel, where Sarah’s mother, Lori, is a leader. “It made me sad and really scared,” 10-year-old Sarah said last week. “It made me nervous for my mom.” The arson was part of an ongoing wave of antisemitic incidents that grew last year to its highest number in four decades. It came three years after a mass shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue and was followed months later by a hostage situation at a North Texas synagogue. In 2021, the Anti-Defamation League tracked 2,717 anti-Jewish incidents nationwide— a 34% increase since 2020 and the highest number since the group began tracking antisemitism in 1979. In Texas, the ADL recorded 112 antisemitic incidents in 2021 — almost triple since 2020 — and both the state and nation are on pace to eclipse those records this year.

Kansas City Area Man Among Three Indicted in Alleged Terrorist Conspiracy n Cameroon  (Bill Lukitsch, Kansas City Star)
Three U.S. citizens, including one from Lee’s Summit, face criminal charges for allegedly engaging in a conspiracy to support terrorism in the central African nation of Cameroon, federal prosecutors said Monday. Claude Ngenevu Chi, 40; Francis Chenyi Sr., 49, of St. Paul, Minnesota; and Lah Nestor Langmi, 46, of Buffalo, New York, are charged with conspiracy to provide material support for terrorism, receiving money from a ransom demand and money laundering. A grand jury indictment filed in the Western District of Missouri’s Kansas City office was unsealed Monday following the arrests and initial court appearances of all three men. Prosecutors allege the men, all of Cameroonian origin, worked in concert to provide support for a militant separatist group known as the Ambazonia Restoration Forces and other separatists based in the nation’s English-speaking regions. The country has been in the throes of a rebellion launched in 2017 with the goal of breaking away from the French-speaking majority country to form a new state.

Twitter Failed to Detect Upload of Christchurch Mosque Terror Attack Videos  (Eva Corlett, Guardian)
Twitter has removed freshly uploaded footage of the Christchurch terror attack that was circulating on the platform, but only after the New Zealand government alerted the company, which had failed to recognise the content as harmful. The video clips, filmed by the Australian white supremacist who murdered 51 Muslim worshippers at two mosques in Christchurch in 2019, were uploaded by some Twitter users on Saturday, according to the office of the prime minister, Jacinda Ardern. A spokesperson for the prime minister said Twitter’s automated reporting function didn’t pick up the content as harmful. Other users reported the videos and the government separately raised it with Twitter, the office said. “Twitter advised us overnight that the clips have been taken down and said they would do a sweep for other instances.” The mosque attack was livestreamed on multiple social media platforms and the terrorist’s manifesto published online.

Jewish Allies Call Trump’s Dinner with Antisemites a Breaking Point  (Jonathan Weisman, New York Times)
Supporters who looked past the former president’s admirers in bigoted corners of the far right, and his own use of antisemitic tropes, now are drawing a line. “He legitimizes Jew hatred and Jew haters,” says one. “And this scares me.”

Seditious Kvetching: The Surprisingly Non-Trivial Defense in the Oath Keepers Prosecution  (Roger Parloffm, Lawfare)
Because there was no concrete plan to storm the Capitol, the defendants have been able to argue that their rhetoric was no more than that: rhetoric.

Midterms Free of Feared Chaos as Voting Experts Look to 2024  (Associated Press / VOA News)
Before Election Day, anxiety mounted over potential chaos at the polls.
Election officials warned about poll watchers who had been steeped in conspiracy theories falsely claiming that then-President Donald Trump did not actually lose the 2020 election. Democrats and voting rights groups worried about the effects of new election laws, in some Republican-controlled states, that President Joe Biden decried as “Jim Crow 2.0.” Law enforcement agencies were monitoring possible threats at the polls.
Yet Election Day, and the weeks of early voting before it, went fairly smoothly. There were some reports of unruly poll watchers disrupting voting, but they were scattered. Groups of armed vigilantes began watching over a handful of ballot drop boxes in Arizona until a judge ordered them to stay far away to ensure they would not intimidate voters.
“The entire ecosystem in a lot of ways has become more resilient in the aftermath of 2020,” said Amber McReynolds, a former Denver elections director who advises a number of voting rights organizations. “There’s been a lot of effort on ensuring things went well.”

New Evolving Terrorist Threats Intersect with ‘Oldest Hatred’  (Amy Mintz, HSToday)
The next terror wave has been described as having an emphasis on technology as a driver, and no one ideology dominating over others.

THE LONG VIEW

Higher Immigration or Higher Interest Rates for America? (Ricardo Hausmann and Dany Bahar, Project Syndicate)
The persistence of restrictions on migrant workers and asylum seekers under President Joe Biden’s administration has exacerbated US labor shortages. The US must choose between a dynamic economy with lower interest rates and more foreigners, or a stagnant economy with high interest rates and fewer migrants.

How the Supreme Court Could Reshape Social Media  (Andrew Egger and Harvest Prude, The Dispatch)
Internet companies might lose some protection from legal liability for user-generated content.

Solar Geoengineering: The Case for Research Part II  (Charles Corbett and Michelle Melton, Lawfare)
We know very little about the consequences of stratospheric aerosol injection deployment, making it too early to draw conclusions about the desirability or inevitability of geoengineering deployment or the governance structures necessary to regulate it.

Officials Fear “Complete Doomsday Scenario” for Drought-Stricken Colorado River  (Joshua Partlow, Washington Post)
A once-unfathomable scenario — Lake Powell dropping to historic lows and shutting down power generators that serve millions — could start as soon as July.

The Days of the Hydrogen Car Are Already Over  (Tom Stacey and Chris Ivory, The Conversation)
Hydrogen fuel cell cars emerged as an alternative to both the electric and combustion engine vehicle in the early 2000s. They were widely considered an avenue towards universal green motoring. Powered through a chemical reaction between hydrogen and oxygen, the only tailpipe emission they produce is water.
The technology also promised a traditional driving experience. Drivers can refuel at filling stations and the range of a hydrogen car is comparable to the combustion engine vehicle. Hydrogen vehicle technology also offered oil companies the opportunity to shift their operations towards the production and transportation of hydrogen and hydrogen refuelling at existing stations.
But hydrogen cars have now all but disappeared. Toyota and Hyundai, the only vehicle manufacturers to produce hydrogen cars for the UK market, sold just 12 hydrogen cars in the country in 2021. Earlier this year, Shell closed all of its UK Hydrogen refuelling stations.
Meanwhile electric vehicles, despite not delivering the range or the fast refuelling of a hydrogen car, have surged in popularity. In 2010, 138 electric vehicles were sold in the UK. This grew to roughly 190,000 annual sales in 2021.

Why Artificial Intelligence Is Now a Primary Concern for Henry Kissinger  (David Ignatius, Washington Post)

·  “Henry Kissinger … has become ‘obsessed’ with a very modern concern—how to limit the potential destructive capabilities of artificial intelligence, whose powers could be far more devastating than even the biggest bomb. Kissinger described AI as the new frontier of arms control during a forum at Washington National Cathedral on Nov. 16. If leading powers don’t find ways to limit AI’s reach, he said, ‘it is simply a mad race for some catastrophe.’”

·  “The former secretary of state cautioned that AI systems could transform warfare just as they have chess or other games of strategy—because they are capable of making moves that no human would consider but that have devastatingly effective consequences. … ‘We are surrounded by many machines whose real thinking we may not know,’ he continued. ‘How do you build restraints into machines? Even today we have fighter planes that can fight … air battles without any human intervention. But these are just the beginnings of this process. It is the elaboration 50 years down the road that will be mind-boggling.’”

·  “Kissinger urged the leaders of the United States and China, the world’s tech giants, to begin an urgent dialogue about how to apply ethical limits and standards for AI. Such a conversation might begin, he said, with President Biden telling Chinese President Xi Jinping: ‘We both have a lot of problems to discuss, but there’s one overriding problem—namely that you and I uniquely in history can destroy the world by our decisions on this [AI-driven warfare], and it is impossible to achieve a unilateral advantage in this. So, we therefore should start with principle number one that we will not fight a high-tech war against each other.’”

·  “Kissinger told the cathedral audience that for all the destructiveness of nuclear weapons, ‘they don’t have this [AI] capacity of starting themselves on the basis of their perception, their own perception, of danger or of picking targets.’ Asked whether he was optimistic about the ability of mankind to limit the destructive capabilities of AI when it’s applied to warfare, Kissinger answered: ‘I retain my optimism in the sense that if we don’t solve it, it’ll literally destroy us. … We have no choice.’”

MORE PICKS

DHS Delays REAL ID Deadline Another Two Years  (Zach Schonfeld, The Hill)
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced it was extending the deadline by roughly two years for air passengers to use a REAL ID when traveling.

Hackers Linked to Chinese Government Stole Millions in Covid Benefits, Secret Service Says  (Sarah Fitzpatrick and Kit Ramgopal, NBC News)
The theft of state unemployment funds is the first pandemic fraud tied to foreign, state-sponsored cybercriminals that the U.S. government has acknowledged publicly.

Classified Documents Found in Trump Search of Storage Site (aggie Haberman and Alan Feuer, New York Times)
The discovery came as series of searches were conducted by a team hired by the former president, after a federal judge directed his lawyers to look for any materials still in his possession.

Justice Department Accuses Trump of Playing “Shell Game” in Records Dispute  (Robert Legare and Melissa Quinn, CBS News)
The Justice Department and Trump’s legal team are at odds over whether most of the material seized from Mar-a-Lago are subject to any type of protection and should be kept from investigators.

As Fatal Police Shootings Increase, More Go Unreported  (Andrew Ba Tran, Marisa Iati and Claire Healy, Washington Post)
Fatal police shootings by officers in at least 2,250 departments are missing from federal records since 2015, according to The Washington Post database.

As Western U.S. Population Grows, So Does Acrimony Over Access to Public Land  (Nathan Vanderklippe, Globe and Mail)
In states like Montana and Wyoming, federal land holdings are vast, but enjoying those wild spaces can involve a complicated legal mess on country roads and paths.

U.S. Weighs Asylum Limits as It Braces for End of Title 42 Border Restrictions  (Camilo Montoya-Galvez)
Title 42, a policy that allows U.S. border officials to expel some migrants on public health grounds, is set to end on Dec. 21 because of a court order.

9 in 10 US Counties Have Experienced a Climate Disaster in the Last Decade, Report Finds  (Jake Bittle, Grist)
Ninety percent of all counties in the United States have experienced a weather disaster over the past decade, and these climate-fueled events have caused more than $740 billion in damages, according to a new report from the climate adaptation group Rebuild by Design.

Los Angeles Bans New Oil Wells, Plans to Close Existing Ones  (Anne C. Mulkern, Scientific American)
The Los Angeles City Council voted unanimously on Friday to ban new oil and gas wells in the city and eventually close existing ones.

Court Implodes Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Defense (and the Errant Judge Who Bought It)  (Kimberly Wehle, The Bulwark)
Last Thursday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit finally put to rest the special master nonsense that Donald Trump set in motion late August, when he persuaded U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon to interfere with the FBI’s investigation of his illegal harboring of classified and other presidential records at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida. Special Counsel Jack Smith can now proceed apace with the investigation.
What’s remarkable about the decision is not the outcome—anyone with a passing legal education could see that Cannon’s ruling was indefensible. It’s how the panel of three judges utterly demolished Trump and Cannon both, in unforgiving language inspired by foundational principles of constitutional restraint.
Especially notable is that, like Cannon, two of the judges—Elizabeth Grant and Andrew Brasher—were appointed by former President Trump. Judge Grant clerked for Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Brasher previously served as a law clerk to the third judge on the Eleventh Circuit panel, William Pryor, who was appointed by George W. Bush. Given the exhausting polarization of party politics these days—and how it has infected a faction of the U.S. Supreme Court—the Eleventh Circuit’s decision in Trump v. United States stands as a triumph for the Constitution and the rule of law.
The court made a few things very clear: The FBI acted entirely by the book, which nobody disputes, including Trump. Cannon had no constitutional (that is, “jurisdictional”) authority to do what she did—unless a former president is somehow extra-special and above the laws that apply to everyone else. Cannon assumed Trump is. He’s not.

Cyber and Physical Threats Illuminate Need for Security Convergence in Energy Sector  (Ben Joelson, HSToday)
Cyber attacks that target physical infrastructure can have a devastating physical impact beyond operational disruption.

The Benefits and Risks of Extending Weapons Deliveries to the Cyber Domain  (Valentin Weber, Lawfare)
While NATO members continue to supply weapons to Ukraine, they should consider the benefits and risks associated with extending these deliveries to include cyber weapons.

Did al-Qaeda Die with Ayman al-Zawahiri?  (Raffaello Pantucci and Kabir Taneja, Lawfare)
Four months after Zawahiri was reportedly killed in a drone strike in Kabul, the terrorist organization still has not announced a successor.

Five Principles to Help Secure Technology Supply Chains  (Charles Clancy, HSToday)
As we consider this new normal of supply chains, with new risks and threats, a new approach is needed to secure our technology supply chains.

GOP Senators Agitate for Vote to Repeal Vaccine Mandate for Troops  (Caitlin M. Kenney, Defense One)
Sen. Paul said 20 senators have pledged to vote against moving the defense policy bill forward unless their amendment is brought to the floor.

Revealed: The Public Finally Gets to See the B-21 Stealth Bomber this Week  (Marcus Weisgerber, Defense One)
Some of the Northrop Grumman employees building the secret plane also worked on the B-2 bomber.

What the Census Bureau Can Learn From the IRS About Detecting Cyberattacks  (Mariam Baksh, Nextgov)
Inspectors general from Commerce and Treasury present a tale of two testing regimes.

San Francisco Cops Propose Using Killer Robots to Fight Crime  (Tony Ho Tran, Daily Beast)
Want a bleak example of our cyberpunk dystopia? Well, look no further than San Francisco, where the city is set to consider allowing cops to use robots to kill people.

U.S. Renewable Energy Will Surge Past Coal and Nuclear by Year’s End  (Benjamin Storrow, Scientific American)
Renewables are on track to generate more power than coal in the United States this year. But the question is whether they can grow fast enough to meet the country’s climate goals.

U.S. and NATO Scramble to Arm Ukraine and Refill Their Own Arsenals  (Steven Erlanger and Lara Jakes, New York Times)
The West thought an artillery and tank war in Europe would never happen again and shrank weapons stockpiles. It was wrong.

CIA Aims to Recruit Spies Among Russians Displeased with Ukraine War  (Warren P. Strobel, Wall Street Journal)
Agency is seeking to recruit military officials, oligarchs, executives; ‘We’re open for business,’ spymaster says.

It’s Finally Here: Pentagon Releases Plan to Keep Hackers Out of Its Networks  (Lauren C. Williams, Defense One)
Defense agencies have until 2027 to convert their networks to architectures that continually check to make sure no one’s accessing data they shouldn’t. 
This shift to zero trust principles is at the core of the Pentagon’s new five-year plan to harden its information systems against cyberattacks. The strategy and roadmap were released on Tuesday.