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Financial Surveillance Is Expanding—but So Is the Resistance
The last few months were hectic, but not all bad. Amidst the government surveilling cash, prosecuting people in bad faith, and creating new surveillance mechanisms, there were significant wins: Courts pushed back on overreach and Congress began to offer reforms to correct past mistakes.
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It’s Not Just Software. Physical Critical Equipment Can’t Be Trusted, Either
Just auditing the software in critical equipment isn’t enough. We must assume that adversaries, especially China, will also exploit the hardware if they can.
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Why the United States, South Korea, and Japan Must Cooperate on Shipbuilding
The tides of naval power are shifting as China’s shipyards churn out warships at an unprecedented pace, leveraging its massive commercial shipbuilding base, direct government funding, and integrated military-industrial strategy. To counter this, the United States, South Korea, and Japan should form a shipbuilding alliance.
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How to Help the U.S. Navy as It Helps Us: Build a Joint Submarine Facility
There’s a way for Australia to strengthen its case for the US presidential certification it will need for acquiring Virginia-class submarines. It should do so by accelerating construction of a planned shipyard in Western Australia and using it to help get US submarines out of a long maintenance queue.
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USGS to Fund States’ Efforts to Find Critical Minerals in Mine Waste
The U.S. Geological Survey invited states to compete for $5 million in cooperative agreements to find critical minerals needed to drive the U.S. economy in the materials left over from mining at active and legacy sites.
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Busting ‘Manufacturing Jobs’ Myths
A nostalgia-soaked return to the 1950s industrial workforce is neither preferable nor possible. Promises to use blanket tariffs to reengineer an industrial workforce of our parents’ distant memories are laughably out of touch.
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Ransomware Drives U.S. Health Data Breaches
Ransomware attacks — which involve a hacker putting encryption controls into a file and then demanding a ransom to unlock the files—have become the primary driver of health care data breaches in the United States, compromising 285 million patient records over 15 years.
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As Temperatures Rise, the U.S. Corn Belt Could See Insurance Claims Soar
Crop insurance is a lifeline for farmers. But research shows it’s not ready for climate change, as global warming worsens, bringing more uncertainty to the agricultural sector.
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Governments Continue Losing Efforts to Gain Backdoor Access to Secure Communications
The spotlight on encrypted apps such as Signal is a reminder of the complex debate pitting government interests against individual liberties.
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Shipbuilding to Citizenship: Solving the U.S. Skills Shortage with Immigration
Skill-based immigration can help the United States fill its severe shortage of shipbuilding workers, for both naval and civilian construction.
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U.S.-UK Trade Deal Illustrates Trump’s Shifting Trade Policy
The U.S.-UK trade agreement is Trump’s first since his “Liberation Day” tariff announcements. It could be a possible template for other nations seeking a deal, but it could also have major implications for global trading norms.
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Texas House Advances Bill That Would Prohibit Land Sales to People and Entities from Certain Countries
The legislation had only pertained to countries the government deemed national security threats. A last-minute change would let the governor add more countries to the ban.
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Apprentices Needed: Construction Shortages Threaten American Growth
U.S. plans for new factories, new tech hubs—even new homes—are about to crash into one very inconvenient fact: Not enough people work in construction to turn those plans into actual, hammer-and-nail reality. Not even close.
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Vocational Training Can Play a Greater Role in National Security
We talk a lot about resilience and preparedness. But these goals aren’t met solely through top-down directives or university research hubs. They rely on a skilled workforce—one that’s ready to respond across sectors, jurisdictions and threat types. That workforce is increasingly trained not in lecture theatres, but in registered training organizations.
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What Rare Earth Elements Are and Why They Matter
Rare 17 earth elements are critical to many industries—used in electric motors, medical imaging and diagnostics, oil and gas refining, and computer and phone screens. These elements have become a hot political issue, says an Earth Sciences professor.
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The long view
U.S.-China Tech Rivalry: The Geopolitics of Semiconductors
The United States and China are locked in a high‑stakes contest for dominance in computing power. In response to US sanctions and export controls, China has ramped domestic chip design and manufacturing, aiming to create an all‑Chinese semiconductor supply chain that reduces dependence on foreign technologies.
The American TikTok Deal Doesn’t Address the Platform’s Potential for Manipulation, Only Who Profits
If we want to protect democratic information systems, we need to focus on reducing the vulnerabilities in our relationship with media platforms – platforms with surveillance power to know what we will like, the algorithmic power to curate our information diet and control of platform incentives, and rules and features that affect who gains influence. The biggest challenge is to make platforms less riggable, and thus less weaponizable, if only for the reason that motivated the TikTok ban: we don’t want our adversaries, foreign or domestic, to have power over us.
Underground Data Fortresses: The Nuclear Bunkers, Mines and Mountains Being Transformed to Protect Our “New Gold” from Attack
Bunker scholars have long noted that these buildings are as much about time as they are about space. Bunkers are designed to preserve and transport their contents through time, from an apocalyptic present into a safe future.
Funding Cuts, Policy Shifts, and the Erosion of U.S. Scientific and Public Health Capacity
The U.S. continues to face mounting threats to its health, scientific enterprise, and national security. A recent report warns that proposed FY 2026 budget cuts to the National Science Foundation (NSF) could reduce its funding by more than half – from $9 billion in FY 2025 to under $4 billion. If passed by Congress, these cuts would result in an estimated ~$11 billion in economic losses.
U.S. Energy Supply Chains Are Unlikely to Meet Anticipated Demand
The U.S. fast-growing energy demands for clean energy sources faces a problem: Under current supply chain conditions, the United States is on track to fall significantly short of surging demand for three clean energy sources: wind, solar, and battery. The shortage is due to the scarcity of critical raw materials such as nickel, aluminum, and silicon.