• Digital Authoritarianism: Finding Our Way Out of the Darkness

    From Chinese government surveillance in Hong Kong and Xinjiang to Russia’s sovereign internet law and concerns about foreign operatives hacking the 2020 elections, digital technologies are changing global politics — and the United States is not ready to compete, Naazeen Barma, Brent Durbin, and Andrea Kendall-Taylor write. The United States and like-minded countries must thus develop a new strategic framework to combat the rise of high-tech illiberalism, but “as a first step, U.S. government officials need to understand how authoritarian regimes are using these tools to control their populations and disrupt democratic societies around the world.”

  • Election Security after Iowa

    The Iowa caucus debacle offers an illustration of election security failure in action, and the failure was followed by public anger and the spreading of conspiracy theories. Simon Handler writes that “If the Iowa caucus delay is any indication of how the public may react to an electoral snafu, a great deal more mayhem could arise from a far more serious threat.” In 2015 Russian cyberattacks shutdown power stations in Ukraine, causing blackouts in parts of the country. “Disrupting power distribution at the right moment in the right portions of the U.S. grid, targeting a few select states or counties, could cause just enough disruption to bring on a level of chaos that would dwarf what happened in Iowa,” Handler writes.

  • U.S.: Chinese Government Hackers Behind Equifax Breach

    Chinse government hackers stole the personal information of nearly 150 million Americans in 2017, when they successfully hacked Equifax. China has been using its vast network of intelligence agencies to conduct a sustained campaign aiming to collect data on the citizens of the United States and other countries, and systematically steal scientific research and innovation, in order to weaken Western economies and accelerate China’s march toward global scientific and economic hegemony.

  • Senate Intel: Obama Admin “Frozen by ‘Paralysis of Analysis’” in Its Response to Russian Election Interference

    Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on Thursday released the third volume in the Committee’s bipartisan investigation into Russian election interference. The report examines the Obama administration’s reaction to initial reports of election interference and the steps officials took or did not take to deter Russia’s activities. The 2016 Russian interference in the elections on behalf of Donald Trump was unprecedented in the history of the United States, but “Frozen by ‘paralysis of analysis,’ hamstrung by constraints both real and perceived, Obama officials debated courses of action without truly taking one,” said Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-North Carolina).

  • Bioweapons, Secret Labs, and the CIA: Pro-Kremlin Actors Blame the U.S. for Coronavirus Outbreak

    The Russia (earlier: Soviet) practice of spreading disinformation about public health threats is nothing new. During the Cold War, for example, a Soviet disinformation campaign blamed the United States for the AIDS virus. While epidemiologists work to identify the exact source of the Wuhan2019-nCov outbreak, pro-Kremlin actors are already blaming the United States for supposedly using bioweapons to disseminate the virus.

  • Russia Unleashes New Weapons in Its “Cyber Attack Testing Ground”: Report

    “Ukraine is, by and large, a Russian cyberattack testing ground,” Vitali Kremez told Forbes’s Zak Doffman. “One of the inherent cyber dangers with Russia, China, Iran and North Korea, but particularly with Russia, is the potential for state actors to sharpen their tools and techniques on neighboring countries,” Doffman writes. And Russia “doesn’t have Ukraine in its sights with this costly approach, it is looking much further west.”

  • Britain Knows It’s Selling Out Its National Security to Huawei

    Allowing Chinese telecom company Huawei access to a country’s 5G infrastructure makes that country vulnerable to espionage, sabotage, and blackmail. Yet, last Tuesday, in defiance of sustained U.S. pressure, Britain said it would allow Huawei to be involved in rolling out the U.K. 5G mobile network. “Upon closer inspection, the British government’s reasoning, and the basic assumptions underlying it, are eerily lightweight and sometimes openly self-contradictory.” Thorsten Benner writes. “London’s justification for cooperating with the Chinese telecommunications company is riddled with obvious contradictions.”

  • U.S. to U.K.: Reconsider Huawei Deal or Risk Intelligence Sharing

    Following the U.K. government’s decision on Tuesday to allow Huawei access to Britain’s 5G communication infrastructure, the United States, in no uncertain terms, has told Prime Minister Boris Johnson to reconsider the decision. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that the Chinese company – subsidized by the Chinese government and with close ties to China’s intelligence and military establishments — posed a “real risk” and that United States would have to evaluate the consequences for intelligence-sharing. “This is an extension of the Chinese Communist Party with a legal requirement to hand over information to the Chinese Communist Party,” Pompeo said. “American information only should pass through trusted networks, and we’ll make sure we do that.”

  • Huawei and 5G: U.K. Had Little Choice but Say Yes to Chinese – Here’s Why

    For the time being, the British government can hardly be enjoying the fallout from its Huawei decision. To date, much focus has been on the confidentiality of communications over mobile networks, and risks of spying. A bigger issue is the need to keep the mobile phone network running. We are in an era where everything from Uber and Deliveroo to most credit card machines cannot function without it. The nightmare scenario is a hostile state-affiliated actor shutting down or damaging the mobile networks. It may have effectively been impossible for the U.K. to say no to Huawei, but the current compromise is far from ideal.

  • Allowing Our Infrastructure to Be Infected by Huawei Is a Far Bigger Risk Than the Coronavirus

    The government of Prime Minister Boris Johnson, defying heavy pressure from the United States, on Tuesday announced that it would allow Huawei access to the U.K. 5G communication infrastructure. “Imagine the situation the other way round,” Charles Moore writers. “Would China allow a British or American company to get itself near the heart of its secret systems? Of course not. The Huawei case is actually worse than that, because whereas British or American companies have independent lives of their own, a country like China does not. Huawei is an arm of the Chinese state, and Beijing would never allow it otherwise.”

  • Britain Grants China's Huawei Limited Role in 5G Network Rollout

    Britain will allow China’s Huawei Technologies to help build the country’s next-generation cellular network, dealing a blow to a U.S. campaign to launch a worldwide boycott of the telecom equipment giant. The British government said Tuesday it would permit Huawei to build less critical parts of the country’s new high-speed 5G wireless network.

  • USC Kicks Off 50-State Election Cybersecurity Trainings

    Today, 28 January, the University of Southern California is kicking off its nonpartisan, independent, 50-state election cybersecurity training initiative in Maryland. Attendees will learn how to best protect their campaigns against misinformation and disinformation, hacking threats, and how to prepare and manage a potential crisis.

  • U.S.: “Serious consequences” If U.K. Allows Huawei Access to Britain’s 5G Network

    President Donald Trump has warned British Prime Minister Boris Johnson of “serious consequences” if he allows the Chinese telecom giant Huawei a role in building Britain’s 5G phone network, according to officials on both sides of the Atlantic. Supporters of allowing Huawei access to U.K. communication infrastructure say that the espionage and disruption risk Huawei poses can be mitigated  by limiting Huawei’s access to “non-core” segments of Britain’s communication system, but U.S. intelligence officials and their counterparts at Britain’s GCHQ, the eavesdropping spy agency and the country’s largest intelligence service, say restricting Huawei to the non-core “edges” of the new network would make little difference to the security risk.

  • Lawmakers Raising Alarm over Huawei’s Risk to National Security – in the U.S. and Abroad

    Huawei is heavily subsidized by the Chinese government, so its products are much cheaper than the equipment produced by the company’s Western competitors – thus allowing the Chinese company to insinuate itself into a the communication infrastructure of countries where the Chinese intelligence agencies are interested in augmenting their information-gathering capabilities. U.S. lawmakers are angry at the Pentagon’s objections to Commerce Department regulations which would have made it more difficult for U.S. companies to sell to Huawei. “Huawei is an arm of the Chinese Communist Party and should be treated as such,” the senators write to the secretary of defense. “It is difficult to imagine that, at the height of the Cold War, the Department of Defense would condone American companies contracting with KGB subsidiaries because Moscow offered a discount.”

  • Artificial Intelligence and the Manufacturing of Reality

    The belief in conspiracy theories highlights the flaws humans carry with them in deciding what is or is not real. The internet and other technologies have made it easier to weaponize and exploit these flaws, beguiling more people faster and more compellingly than ever before. It is likely artificial intelligence will be used to exploit the weaknesses inherent in human nature at a scale, speed, and level of effectiveness previously unseen. Adversaries like Russia could pursue goals for using these manipulations to subtly reshape how targets view the world around them, effectively manufacturing their reality. If even some of our predictions are accurate, all governance reliant on public opinion, mass perception, or citizen participation is at risk.