OUR PICKSInside Pentagon’s Shaky Efforts to Combat Russian Disinformation | Backdoor in XZ Utils That Almost Happened | Texas, Military Federalism, and the Southern Border
· Musk Magnifies Focus on Extremist Who Used Banned Nazi Slogan
Just months after enduring a firestorm over anti-Semitism, Elon Musk appeared to be courting another one when he amplified comments from a right-wing German extremist on the social media platform he owns
· Exploring List-Based Approaches and Potential Threat Agnostic Applications in US Biodefense and Public Health – Toward a Hybrid Approach
List-based approaches to prioritizing biological threats has many shortages
· Inside Pentagon’s Shaky Efforts to Combat Russian Disinformation
Internal documents reveal how the US struggled to fend off ‘Russian lie’ about US support for Ukraine weapons labs
· Sen. Ossoff Announces Significant Funding Increase for Border Security Technology
A 23% increase in funding to purchase and deploy next-generation technology to help strengthen border security, combat human trafficking, and prevent illegal drugs from crossing the border
· The Threat of Weapons in Space
The threat of weapons in space and U.S. vulnerabilities must be better understood to avoid misinformation published on various social media and television news outlets
· Backdoor in XZ Utils That Almost Happened
The recent cybersecurity catastrophe that wasn’t reveals an untenable situation, one being exploited by malicious actors
· Texas, Military Federalism, and the Southern Border
Interstate support for Texas’s border operations underscore states’ meaningful, but limited, independent authority to deploy military personnel for domestic operations
Musk Magnifies Focus on Extremist Who Used Banned Nazi Slogan (Bloomberg)
Just months after enduring a firestorm over anti-Semitism, Elon Musk appeared to be courting another one when he amplified comments from a right-wing German extremist on the social media platform he owns. Bjoern Hoecke, an influential regional figure in the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, wrote a post to Musk’s X over the weekend in which he complained he was being tried for using a proscribed Nazi slogan. “What did you say?” asked Musk in reaction to Hoecke’s tweet which was — unusually for the politician — formulated in English. According to prosecutors, the AfD’s leader in the East German state of Thuringia had at a 2021 campaign event used a slogan associated with the military arm of the Nazi dictatorship, which is illegal under German law. The former history teacher has long courted controversy for views deemed too extreme even by some in his own party. As recently as 2019 a German court judged that describing Hoecke as a fascist could not be ruled libelous. “Why is that illegal?” Musk asked, in a follow-up to the politician’s post.
Exploring List-Based Approaches and Potential Threat Agnostic Applications in US Biodefense and Public Health – Toward a Hybrid Approach (Yong-Bee Lim and Saskia Popescu, Health Security)
The authors discuss the shortcomings of list-based approaches to prioritizing biological threats and challenges to leveraging threat agnostic approaches to these threats. They discuss these hurdles and how they might be overcome, writing in their conclusion “Threat agnostic strategies have the potential to address key vulnerabilities in current efforts and increasingly complex biological threats, but it is critical they are seen as complementary to pathogen-specific programs rather than replacements in order to successfully integrate, implement, and unlock threat agnostic activities to the best extent possible.”
Inside Pentagon’s Shaky Efforts to Combat Russian Disinformation (Jason Leopold, Bloomberg)
Not long after Russia launched airstrikes in Ukraine in February 2022, siren-blaring-emoji tweets bombarded my Twitter feed. They all had a similar message: that some of Russia’s targets were laboratories where Ukraine had secretly been developing biological weapons with the help of the US government. The “bombshell” allegations seemed to be an obvious attempt to justify the invasion. They garnered thousands of retweets on right-wing media. Soon Fox News was amplifying the claims. (Cont.)
