• Intel Agencies in an Age of “Nuclear” Cyberattacks, Political Assassinations

    Even without the kind of network of global partners that many larger nations have, Israel manages to punch far above its weight in intelligence with the CIA as a partner. At a recent talk at Harvard, former CIA director John Brennan and Tamir Pardo, former head of Mossad, spoke about the close ties between the CIA and Mossad, and discussed the intelligence challenges the two countries face.

  • Holding the Line: Chinese Cyber Influence Campaigns After the Pandemic

    While the American public became more aware of Chinese cyber influence campaigns during the 2020 COVID-19 outbreak, they did not start there – and they will not end there, either. Maggie Baughman writes that as the world’s attention returns to the origins of the global pandemic and recommits to its containment, the United States must prepare for inevitable shifts in Chinese methods and goals in its cyber influence activities – “likely beyond what Western countries have previously experienced in dealing with China”

  • Rethinking Research Security

    How can or should the United States protect the gains of innovation without damaging the very research base it wants to protect? Ainikki Riikonen and Emily Weinstein write that the U.S. government has rightfully identified the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as an adversary intent on stealing technology for its national interests, and the Department of Justice established the China Initiative as a countermeasure. “But the China Initiative misses the mark on an effective approach to research security. It is out of alignment with evolving research security initiatives in the rest of the federal government…. In its current form, research security under the China Initiative may damage America’s ability to innovate and continue defining the cutting edge of technological research in the long term.”

  • New Report Offers Chilling Details of China’s hidden Prisons

    A new illustrated report offers a disturbing look into China’s Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location (RSDL). The report depicts RSDL with artwork, satellite images, and architectural sketches to bring the reality of this secret prison system to light.

  • Can China Keep Rising?

    “The East is rising,” Chinese leaders took to declaring around the time U.S. President Joe Biden entered office, “and the West is declining.” Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, the executive editor of Foreign Affairs, writes that while the second part of that declaration may draw eye rolls or angry objections in Washington and allied capitals, “the first has become a point of near consensus: a self-assured China, bolstered by years of dazzling economic performance and the forceful leadership of Xi Jinping, has claimed its place as a world power and accepted that long-term competition with the United States is all but inevitable as a result.” He notes, though, that “past performance does not guarantee future results.”

  • How America Turned the Tables on Huawei

    The United States started warning allies and partners in 2019 that having the Chinese telecom firm Huawei build their 5G telecom infrastructure risked exposing their citizens’ and their official data to Chinese state surveillance. The Trump administration argued that countries should keep Huawei out, both for their own sake and for the sake of collective security among democratic allies.

  • White House Launches Broader Scrutiny of Foreign Tech

    An executive order signed by President Joe Biden earlier this month dropped a Trump-era measure that barred Americans from downloading TikTok and several other Chinese smartphone apps. But analysts say the order also broadens the scrutiny of foreign-controlled technology.

  • New Federal Agency Needed to Help U.S. Compete with China in Advanced Industries, Technologies: Report

    To compete effectively with China, the United States must develop and implement a national advanced industry and technology strategy that is explicitly focused on the commercial competitiveness of select sectors that are most critical to the economy—and the U.S. government needs a new, free-standing agency that is solely dedicated to carrying out that mission.

  • Developing Research Model to Fight Deepfakes

    Detecting “deepfakes,” or when an existing image or video of a person is manipulated and replaced with someone else’s likeness, presents a massive cybersecurity challenge: What could happen when deepfakes are created with malicious intent? Artificial intelligence experts are working on a new reverse-engineering research method to detect and attribute deepfakes.

  • Think Small: Why the Intelligence Community Should Do Less about New Threats

    A week into his administration, President Joe Biden announced that he was “putting the climate crisis at the center of United States foreign policy and national security. Joshua Rovner writes that, in so doing, the president injected new urgency into an old question: What counts as a national security threat?

  • Poisoning of Russian Writer Bykov Linked with FSB Agents Suspected in Navalny Case

    Investigative journalists say a detailed investigation shows Russian writer and poet Dmitry Bykov, a critic of the government, suffered a poisoning attack two years ago at the hands of the same agents suspected of being involved in the poisoning of opposition figures Aleksei Navalny and Vladimir Kara-Murza Jr.

  • China's Internet Trolls Go Global

    Chinese trolls are beginning to pose serious threats to economic security, political stability, and personal safety worldwide. The CCP-backed trolls have become more than a nuisance, and the magnitude and frequency of their attacks will likely continue to increase. Formulating an effective response will require understanding their size, tactics, and mission as the CCP widens the scope of its public opinion war to include foreign audiences.

  • Study Shows AI-Generated Fake Reports Fool Experts

    AIs can generate fake reports that are convincing enough to trick cybersecurity experts. If widely used, these AIs could hinder efforts to defend against cyberattacks. These systems could set off an AI arms race between misinformation generators and detectors.

  • The Weaponized Web: The National Security Implications of Data

    Open societies have encouraged and promoted rapid technological advancement and market innovation —but both have outpaced democratic governance. Authoritarian powers have noticed the underlying opportunity to exploit the open standards of the democratically regulated digital information environment and undermine democratic values and institutions while shoring up their own regimes. This poses a novel challenge for democracies, which must adapt to compete in this conflict over the data, architecture, and governance framework of the information space without compromising their democratic principles.

  • U.S. to Make Intelligence on COVID-19 Origins Public

    The United States will share the results of a new deep-dive by its top intelligence agencies into the origins of the coronavirus pandemic that has killed millions of people across the globe. Top U.S. intelligence agencies said last year that their information supported “the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not man-made or genetically modified” but that they would “continue to rigorously examine emerging information and intelligence” to determine whether the outbreak began after the virus was transmitted to humans from animals in nature or as the result of a laboratory accident.