• MISREPRESENTATIONTrump’s “Election Fraud” Declassification Bust

    By Patrick G. Eddington

    Last night during his national address, President Trump claimed that key documents he ordered declassified demonstrate that the US Intelligence Community (IC) withheld or otherwise soft-pedaled evidence of foreign election interference or voting machine vulnerabilities. The documents at issue—released in a process that can be charitably described as irregular at best—tell a different story.

  • QUICK TAKES // By Ben FrankelBehind the Fiction of Insecure Elections: Trump’s Worrisome Speech

    It would be tempting to write off Trump’s speech on election integrity as “sound and fury signifying nothing”—a noisy exercise in performative alarmism, full of Trump’s specialties: baseless assertions, fact-ree claims, and conspiratorial hints. On some level, that judgment would fit. But the danger is that the speech does signify something: a willingness to erode the very norms of losers’ consent and winners’ restraint on which a self respecting, sustainable democracy depends. And that is worrisome indeed.

  • AISpy Agencies Say AI Can Help Combat AI Cyber Risks. But Don’t Forget the Basics

    By Toby Murray

    Defenders should assume their adversaries already have access to AI on par with that used for cyber defense. Only by investing in strong foundations can they hope to escape the cat-and-mouse AI cyber arms race.

  • CHINA WATCHBefore SpaceX IPO, Investors in China Secretly Acquired Stakes

    By Justin Elliott and Joshua Kaplan

    A businessman with ties to Chinese military contractors was among the overseas investors who acquired stakes in SpaceX while it was still a private company. SpaceX built its business off sensitive U.S. government work like making spy satellites for the Pentagon, so it is important to know which people in countries like China bought into the company, and how.

  • FISA SECTION 702FISA Section 702 Lapsed on Friday—What Now?

    By Patrick G. Eddington

    Congress was asked to extend, without a warrant requirement, a surveillance program whose compliance record cannot be independently verified, whose oversight bodies have been deliberately disabled, and whose custodians have shown a personal willingness to turn its tools on the press. The program did not go dark on Friday. The real question is whether the House and Senate leadership will finally tell Trump that embracing the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement is the only way to end this saga.

  • SURVEILLANCEFrom Exporting Spyware to Surveilling Activists – How Democracies Became the New Digital Authoritarians

    By Ihsan Yilmaz and Nicholas Morieson

    “Digital authoritarianism” refers to governments using technology for surveillance and censorship to repress dissent. China remains the master practitioner, but democracies, too — in particular, India and Israel — are beginning to repress their citizens with the same tools and export them abroad.

  • FISAThe Fourth Amendment Forecloses a Foreign Intelligence Exception: A Brief Case Against the FISA Section 702 Program

    By Patrick G. Eddington

    The House and Senate versions of the extension of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) lack the only thing that matters: a warrant requirement to search the stored data of Americans collected under the program. In that sense, the 702 program has always been at odds with the plain language of the Fourth Amendment, thanks entirely to the secret court that oversees the semisecret surveillance activity.

  • COMPROMISING INTELLIGENCE Amateur Hour: The Unserious Appointment of Bill Pulte

    By Ben Frankel

    Pulte’s nomination is not an aberration but part of an established pattern. Trump’s national-security personnel choices routinely pass over the obvious pool of experienced professionals in favor of loyalists whose core qualification is ideological and personal devotion.

  • COMPROMISING INTELLIGENCE The Acting DNI and the Intelligence Office Trump Wants

    By Brian O'Neill

    Bill Pulte’s appointment as Acting Director of National Intelligence suggests that ODNI may now be serving a more political function than advising the president.

  • PERSISTENT SURVEILLANCEThe Open Signal: How Mobile Phone Location Data Can Expose and Endanger American Troops

    By Ben Frankel

    The architecture of the commercial mobile ecosystem favors exposure over concealment. As long as warfighters carry devices designed for convenience inside an economy designed for surveillance, the United States will remain vulnerable to enemies who can turn a phone’s signal into intelligence and intelligence into a strike.

  • AIThe Making of a Mythos: AI-Enabled Cybersecurity and the Emerging Architecture of Access

    By Meghna Pradhan

    Anthropic’s release of the frontier AI model Claude Mythos Preview has caused significant trepidation, as its autonomous code-reasoning capabilities surfaced previously undetected vulnerabilities across major operating systems and software infrastructure. The architecture of access, being constructed around such capabilities, creates an asymmetry in access. India needs to secure critical infrastructure by updating, modernizing or replacing legacy systems.

  • AIScaling Intelligence: The Security Foundations Beneath America’s AI Ambitions Are Cracking

    By Vinh X. Nguyen

    Artificial intelligence diffusion is stress-testing the assumptions that underpin U.S. cybersecurity. Inspecting those foundations isn’t a precaution against scaling AI—it’s the precondition for doing it with confidence.

  • ELECTION SECURITYClear and Present Danger: The Dismantling of America's Election Protections

    By Ben Frankel

    The only beneficiaries of making American elections less secure are malign foreign actors eager to interfere, and malicious domestic actors bent on exploiting the opening the administration has created for them.

  • ELECTION SECURITYFor the First Time in a Decade, the Next Election Could Be Less Secure Than the One Preceding It

    By Scott Shackelford

    The disbanding of federal offices that counter foreign influence operations make it harder for local officials to learn of threats to election infrastructure, like AI-enabled targeting of voting tabulation systems or deepfakes of candidates. Little is known about whether the proactive cyber deterrence that has defined U.S. elections for much of the past decade remains in place in any other form.

  • POLITICIZING INTELLIGENCEPulling Reports, Playing Politics

    By Joseph Stabile

    The CIA’s retraction of intelligence reports should raise concerns about politicization and the Trump administration’s embrace of white supremacist rhetoric.