• Announcing the Electric Resilience Toolkit

    A new Electric Resilience Toolkit aims to support policymakers and stakeholders working on issues around electric sector regulation and climate resilience planning. Such planning is essential to ensure electricity infrastructure is designed and operated in a way that accounts for the impacts of climate change—impacts that are already being felt and which will only intensify in coming years.

  • Insights into Blockchain Vulnerabilities

    Distributed ledger technology, such as blockchains, has become more prevalent across a variety of contexts over the past decade. The premise is that blockchains operate securely without any centralized control and that they are immutable or unsusceptible to change. New report details how centralization can be introduced, affecting security.

  • The Administration’s New Vision for the National Flood Insurance Program

    The Biden administration is proposing a major overhaul to the National Flood Insurance Program, or NFIP — the main source of insurance for homeowners who are required to or choose to obtain coverage for flooding. The administration’s flood insurance reforms could improve transparency — and make some Americans more vulnerable.

  • DHS Unveils Strategy to Combat Uyghur Forced Labor in China

    DHS has unveiled a strategy aiming to combat the Chinese government’s use of forced labor by members of the Uyghur ethnic minority in the western province of Xinjiang.

  • Addressing China’s Growing Influence over Latin America’s Mineral Resources

    The United States and its partners in the hemisphere must address a major strategic challenge: China’s growing influence over Latin America’s critical and natural mineral resources. Adina Renee Adler and Haley Ryan write that “Allowing a geostrategic competitor like China to wield disproportionate influence over access to critical minerals—or allowing production to become concentrated in a single geographic region—poses a serious risk to the United States and its allies.”

  • China Looks to Africa in Race for Lithium

    Electric cars, and other green technologies, are dependent on lithium, and growing demand has caused the prices for lithium to increase by almost 500 percent in the past year. Africa has ample resources of lithium, and China is leading the race to control the continent’s lithium resources.

  • Five Cybersecurity Challenges Beyond Technology

    The data are clear: cyberattacks have been on the rise in recent years and the cybersecurity situation is increasingly complex. More than 90% of cyberattacks are made possible, to a greater or lesser extent, by human error.

  • U.S. Set to Block Most Imports Tied to China's Xinjiang Province

    Later this month, the Biden administration will begin enforcing a new law barring products made with forced labor in China’s Xinjiang province from being imported to the United States. Under the law, U.S. Customs and Border Protection will treat any goods that are made in Xinjiang, either wholly or in part, as the product of forced labor unless the importer can show “clear and convincing evidence” that they are not.

  • China’s Growing Agricultural Problems Pose Risks for the U.S.

    China is facing a growing demand on its agricultural production. The Chinese government has taken several domestic initiatives to address the growing problem, but it has also gone abroad to address its needs through investments and acquisitions of farmland, animal husbandry, agricultural equipment, and intellectual property (IP), particularly of GM seeds These efforts present several risks to U.S. economic and national security.

  • Inside the Government Fiasco That Nearly Closed the U.S. Air System

    The upgrade to 5G was supposed to bring a paradise of speedy wireless. But a chaotic process under the Trump administration, allowed to fester by the Biden administration, turned it into an epic disaster. The problems haven’t been solved.

  • Identifying and Predicting Insider Threats

    Insider threats are one of the top security concerns facing large organizations. Current and former employees, business partners, contractors—anyone with the right level of access to a company’s data—can pose a threat. A new project seeks to detect and predict insider threats.

  • Bad for Computer Security: Employees Returning to the Office

    When employees feel they deserve superior technology compared to other employees—and they don’t receive unrestricted access to it—they pose a security risk to their companies, according to a new research.

  • Faster Ransomware Detection

    Ransomware extortion is hugely expensive, and instances of ransomware extortion are on the rise. The FBI reports receiving 3,729 ransomware complaints in 2021, with costs of more than $49 million. What’s more, 649 of those complaints were from organizations classified as critical infrastructure.

  • Strengthen Advanced Manufacturing for Critical and Emerging Technologies

    NIST has awarded a total of $2.08 million to seven organizations in six states to develop manufacturing technology roadmaps to strengthen U.S. innovation and productivity. Each award will fund projects for up to 18 months to address national priorities such as manufacturing of critical infrastructure, communication, and transformative approaches and technologies in construction.

  • The "Rock-to-Metal Ratio" of Critical Minerals

    A new metric to quantify the amount of waste rock generated by mining for minerals essential to 21st century society has been created by the U.S. Geological Survey and Apple.