• ESPIONAGEEspionage Boosted East Germany’s Economic Output by 7.4 Percent

    East Germany’s espionage activities in the West boosted the country’s economic output by 7.4 percent. Value added in manufacturing alone increased by 22.3 percent through industrial espionage, equivalent to 20.2 billion East German marks or approximately 4.1 billion euros at 2020 prices.

  • HACKINGThe FBI Data Breach Is a Counterintelligence Disaster

    By Justin Sherman

    Hackers stole thousands of FBI employees’ data, including about new hires and people in sensitive roles. It’s like giving a foreign adversary a gold mine.

  • HACKINGAmerica's Driver's License Breach Is a National Security Disaster

    By Tom Uren

    Krebs on Security brioke a story recently about a newly launched dark web service calling itself Nexus that was selling access to identity documents, including 3 million travel documents and 153 million driver’s licenses from U.S. and Canadian citizens. This is a huge breach that not only will be used for run-of-the-mill cybercrime but also will feed the intelligence machines of America’s adversaries.

  • THE MATTER AT HAND // BY BEN FRANKELThe AfD: Garden-Variety Extremists or Trojan Horse?

    What Berlin’s plan to keep secrets from the AfD tells us: The German federal government is planning to keep domestic security information – and information on NATO deployments and troop movements in Germany – from the new Saxony-Anhalt state government if it includes the AfD. The worry: the AfD will be able to identify and expose domestic intelligence agents tracking extremist activity in Germany, and deliver NATO secrets to Russia.

  • CHINA WATCHOpen Models Are Becoming a Tool of Chinese Statecraft

    By Kai-Shen Huang

    The argument in Washington over the past few months has been about whether to ban Chinese AI models or restrict them. What has been less examined is what Beijing intends to do with the open-weight – that is, publicly available and downloadable – models its labs have built. 

  • THE AMERICASMaduro Is Gone, but His Surveillance State Has a Chinese AI Upgrade on Order

    By Fergus Ryan

    Casual observers of Venezuelan politics might have assumed that the US capture and removal of former Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro in January would guarantee the dismantling of his authoritarian regime and a rupture with Beijing. Yet one of the most consequential pieces of Maduro’s authoritarian legacy remains intact.

  • CYBERSECURITY‘Gamified’ DDoS Attacks Wage Psychological Warfare Against NATO States: Study

    ‘Hacktivism’ is evolving into a hybrid threat that blurs the lines between propaganda, geopolitical warfare and financially incentivized cyber-crime, says study of pro-Russian hackers NoName057(16).

  • AI & MISINFORMATIONUsing AI to Thwart Election Misinformation

    By Katie Neith

    Election rumors, such as unverified accounts of voter fraud, have run rampant in the US in recent years. Powered by the speed of social media and artificial intelligence (AI), it can be hard for people to know what messages to trust. Now, a team led by Caltech researchers is using AI as a tool for good in the fight against election misinformation.

  • THE AMERICASTrump’s Cuba Report Borrowed Heavily from My Book on an Anti‑imperialist Movement – but Twisted the Arguments

    By Anne Garland Mahler

    A State Department’s 20 July 2026 report summarizes large portions of the argument in my book — From the Tricontinental to the Global South — without citation. The report preserves the structure of my book’s historical arguments, but it twists its interpretations and conclusions — and it also misrepresents a larger body of scholarship on the relationship between Cuba and the left wing in the U.S. The effect is to support the Trump administration’s false claim that Cuba has “backed an unprecedented wave of left-wing terrorism on American soil.”

  • CONSPIRACY THEORYThe Long Afterlife of QAnon Conspiracy Theories Haunting American Politics

    By Matthew N. Hannah

    Started on the online forum website 4chan in 2017, QAnon spread false, far-right theories on social media about a shadowy cabal of satanic pedophiles among the political elite, which Donald Trump was purportedly fighting alongside a mysterious ally named “Q.” While Q stopped posting in 2022, the movement did not disappear. Its conspiracy theories seeped from the margins into mainstream American politics, and the movement’s vocabulary quickly began to appear in official government circles at the start of Trump’s second term. Official uses of Q language have invigorated conspiracy theorists to advance new theories, undermining public health, governance, and civil society.

  • CYBERSECURITY17 Iranians Charged in Major Cybercrime Case in New York

    By Bethany Blankley, The Center Square

    Seventeen Iranian men have been charged in a cybercrime case being prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. The accused are members of the Mabna Institute, an Iranian-based company known for hacking U.S. higher education institutions and private sector companies on behalf of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

  • OFFENSIVE CYBER OPERATIONSWorth a Try: The U.S. Will Authorize Some Companies for Cyber Counterattacks

    By Jason Healey

    The United States has had enough in cyberspace. The White House has now created a program under which American companies can conduct offensive cyber operations against ransomware gangs and other ‘cyber-enabled transnational criminal organizations.’

  • FOREIGN MEDDLINGAI Detects “Foreign-Linked Opinion Manipulation” in 110 Million News Comments

    During election seasons or major national issues, online news comment sections often become heated spaces of conflict across gender, generation, and political lines. There have been growing concerns that behind some of these conflicts are interventions by foreign actors seeking to manipulate public opinion and deepen social divisions. Researchers have now developed an AI-based technology to precisely detect traces of such hidden influence operations.

  • DISINFORMATIONAI Is Making Disinformation Harder to Spot—but We've Found a New Way to Catch It

    By Seán Roberts and Kateryna Krykoniuk

    As generative AI becomes more powerful, malicious groups are increasingly using it to produce and spread disinformation online. Automated accounts can flood social media with convincing comments designed to sow division, inflame political debate and undermine trust in reliable information. But our latest research offers a way to spot these attempts.

  • THUCYDIDES TRAPThe Real Thucydides Trap Is Inside Western Tech

    By Justin Bassi

    Thucydides Trap is a theory which describes how the established power is so anxious about the rising power that it strikes at the rising power and starts a war. Whether or not history provides examples of Thucydides Trap is a subject of lively scholarly debates, but it does exist within Western tech companies. And if we do not change our ways, our desire for intense technological competition within and among Western nations, with economic outcomes prioritized over geostrategic, will again benefit only China.