• How New Voting Machines Could Hack Our Democracy

    The United States has a disturbing habit of investing in unvetted new touchscreen voting machines that later prove disastrous. Jennifer Cohn writes that as we barrel toward what is set to be the most important election in a generation, Congress appears poised to fund another generation of risky touchscreen voting machines called universal use Ballot Marking Devices (or BMDs), which function as electronic pens, marking your selections on paper on your behalf. Most leading election security experts instead recommend hand-marked paper ballots as a primary voting system, with an exception for voters with disabilities.

  • Voting-Machine Parts Made by Foreign Suppliers Stir Security Concerns

    Voting machines which are widely used across the United States contain parts made by companies with ties to China and Russia, researchers found, raising anxious questions about the security of voting machines which use overseas suppliers. Several government agencies are now looking into the issue. Alexa Corse writes that a report issued Monday by Interos Inc., an Arlington, Virginia-based supply-chain monitoring company, says that voting-machine vendors could be at risk of using insecure components from overseas suppliers which generally are difficult to vet and monitor.

  • The Crossfire Hurricane Report’s Inconvenient Findings

    The DOJ IG report, Michael Sanchez, writers, confounds the hopes of Donald Trump’s more ardent admirers by failing to turn up anything resembling a Deep State cabal within the FBI plotting against the president, or deliberate abuse of surveillance authorities for political ends – but it also paints a disturbing picture of the FBI’s vaunted vetting process for FISA warrant applications.

  • Justice Department Inspector General’s Report Raises Troubling Questions About FBI’s Role in FISA

    The Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz concluded that the FBI’s initiation of the Russia probe met legal standards, but the report issued last Monday by the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) strongly criticized the FBI’s handling of one aspect of the probe: the request for a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) wiretap of ex-Trump campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page and subsequent renewals of the FISA. Peter Margulies writes that along with the record of Russian election interference compiled in the Russia probe, institutional reforms to the FISA process will be a valuable legacy of the investigation.

  • Telefonica Deutschland Chooses Huawei to Build Its German 5G Network

    Rebuffing U.S. pressure, German mobile provider Telefonica Deutschland announced Wednesday that it has chosen Finland’s Nokia and China’s Huawei to build its 5G network in Germany, the company. Huawei is a global leader in constructing equipment and infrastructure for ultra-high-speed 5G data networks, but the intelligence services of leading Western countries have argue that Huawei is a security threat because of its close ties with the Chinese military and intelligence establishments. 

  • U.K. Intelligence Probing Russian Election Meddling

    Britain’s cybersecurity agency is investigating whether state-sponsored Russian hackers were behind the leaks of British government documents used by opposition politicians to embarrass Boris Johnson’s ruling Conservative Party ahead of Thursday’s general election.

  • The New Kind of Warfare Reshaping Global Politics

    The list is long: Russian internet trolls interfering in the 2016 U.S. election; Russian operatives murdering Putin’s opponents abroad; Chinese spies manipulating Australian politics while the country’s coast guard ships harass Japanese fishing fleets, and much more. Simon Clark writes that these are not random acts of autocratic aggression. Rather, they are examples of a new form of warfare which is becoming a bigger challenge for the United States and its western allies: gray-zone conflict.

  • Picturesque Alpine Region Served as “Rear Base” for Russia’s GRU Agents

    The French intelligence services are leading an international hunt for Russian spies after what was described as a “rear base” of Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency was discovered in southeastern France. GRU agents used the region of the Haute-Savoie as a “stopover,” during which they would be given the final briefings before moving on to their missions in various European countries.

  • New Research Center Will Fight Misinformation

    On 3 December, the University of Washington launched the Center for an Informed Public (CIP). The CIP, an interdisciplinary center housed in UW’s Information School, will use applied research to engage with the public through community partners such as libraries to confront the misinformation epidemic. “If we care about common goals — things like safe communities, justice, equal opportunity — we have to care also about facts, truth and accuracy,” UW President Ana Mari Cauce said. “Misinformation can be weaponized. It has been weaponized to divide us and to weaken us.”

  • The Dark Psychology of Social Networks

    Every communication technology brings with it different constructive and destructive effects. Jonathan Haidt and Tobias Rose-Stockwell write that it typically takes some time to find and improve the balance between these negative and positive effects. The note that as social media has aged, the initial optimism which welcomed the new technology’s introduction has been replaced by a growing awareness of the technology deleterious effects – especially on the quality and purpose of political discussion.

  • Former Envoy Huntsman: Putin Likely ‘Joyful’ About Ukraine Theory

    President Donald Trump’s former ambassador to Russia said Vladimir Putin is likely “joyful” about the renewed prominence of a debunked conspiracy theory that Ukraine was responsible for meddling in the 2016 election, which experts consider Russian disinformation.

  • Russian Hackers Source of Labour Party’s “NHS for Sale” Document

    In a press conference last week, Jeremy Corbin, the leader of the Labour Party, showed the attendees a hefty document – 451 pages! — which, he claimed, was a classified government document detailing secret U.K-U.S. negotiations between the Conservative Party-led government and the United States to sell parts of the U.K. National Health Service (NHS) to American investors. Experts say Russian government hackers stole the document and handed it to Labour in order to discredit the government and deepen polarization ahead of the 12 December parliamentary election.

  • Britain’s Secret War with Russia

    A drab office building on the outskirts of the Swiss town of Spiez houses Switzerland’s Federal Office for Civil Protection, renowned for its work on global nuclear, chemical, and biological threats.Over the course of a few months in 2018, this outfit’s gentle existence was upended, as the lab became caught in a cold war between Russia on one side and the United Kingdom and the West on the other.

  • Germany Expels Two Russian Diplomats Following Berlin Killing

    Germany has expelled two Russian diplomats in response to what the German authorities described as Russia’s refusal to cooperate in a high-profile murder. German intelligence and law enforcement agencies said that the killing of Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, a 40-year-old former Chechen rebel commander, who was shot in the head from behind in Berlin’s Kleiner Tiergarten park in August, was carried out by Russian agents on Kremlin’s orders.

  • How the Nation’s Hydrogen Bomb Secrets Disappeared

    Given a choice of items to lose on a train, a top-secret document detailing the newly developed hydrogen bomb should be on the bottom of the list. In January 1953, amid the Red Scare and the Korean War, that’s exactly what physicist John Archibald Wheeler lost.