• Home for the Holidays? The Global Implications of a State-Level Cyberattack

    The 4 December 2021 cyberattack on the Maryland Department of Health (MDH) appeared, at first blush to be a local-to-Maryland problem. Maggie Smith writes, however, that “the MDH hack points to a concerning development at the nexus of cybercrime and data supply chains,” as it “shows how fragile data supply chains can be and signals how easy it is to disrupt even the most critical data flows by stopping the upstream flow of data that provides the insights and statistics on which the nations’ decision-makers rely.”  

  • Warnings of “Civil War” Risk Harming Efforts Against Political Violence

    A year on from the Jan. 6 riots, experts warn of catastrophic political violence, while political commentators invoke the specter of the 1860s. Anjali Dayal, Alexandra Stark, and Megan A. Stewart write that the emerging cottage industry of speculation and alarm specifically about a civil war in the United States worries them. “The shape and content of this debate … risks mis-framing an urgent problem for non-specialist audiences.”

  • Hostage Situation Continuing in Texas

    The FBI joined local and state police to surround a synagogue in Coleville, Texas, a city of about 26,000 residents about 15 miles northeast of Fort Worth, where a man has been holding the rabbi and four other people hostage since late morning. A few minutes ago, the hostage taker released a man who was suffering from a medical condition.

  • U.S. Judge Orders Colombia’s Now-Demobilized Insurgents to Compensate Family of Kidnapped Politician

    A Pennsylvania federal judge ruled on Thursday that Colombia’s now-demobilized Marxist guerrilla, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), will have to pay $36 million in compensation to the son of Ingrid Bentacourt, a Colombian politician who was kidnapped by FARC in 2002 and held hostage for six years.

  • Massive Cyberattack Targeting Ukraine’s Government Websites

    Several Ukrainian government websites have been targeted in a massive cyberattack amid heightened tensions between the West and Russia, which has massed troops and military equipment near the border with Ukraine.

  • British Intelligence Shines Light on Chinese Spy 'Hiding in Plain Sight'

    Pressure is mounting on Britain’s domestic intelligence agency, MI5, to explain why it did not alert lawmakers sooner about the activities of a suspected Chinese spy, who the security service now say was “knowingly engaged in political interference in the U.K.”

  • Civil War in the U.S. Is Unlikely Because Grievance Doesn’t Necessarily Translate Directly into Violence

    Claims that America is at the greatest risk of civil war since, well, the Civil War, recently received additional support from some experts in the field of political science. But civil wars are rare events. But even if a civil war in America is unlikely, this does not preclude the occurrence of other forms of less intense violence. Concerns about increased violent extremism in the United States recently led the U.S. Justice Department to establish a new domestic terrorism group.

  • Examining How Countries Go Nuclear — and Why Some Do Not

    In a new book, political scientist Vipin Narang argues that too often we imagine that all countries pursue nuclear weapons the way the U.S. and Soviet Union did during and after World War II — a swift race culminating in the rapid buildup of arsenals, leaving little room for intervention. But that paradigm applies to almost no other country. Recognizing how different countries choose different paths to proliferation is an essential part of arms control: Grasping how one country is pursuing nuclear weapons can help other countries constrain that pursuit.

  • The Progress of Iran’s Nuclear Weapons Program

    As of November 2021, Iran had enough enriched uranium hexafluoride (UF6) in the form of near 20 and 60 percent enriched uranium to produce enough weapon-grade uranium (WGU), taken here as 25 kilograms, for a single nuclear weapon in as little as three weeks. It could do so without using any of its stock of uranium enriched up to 5 percent as feedstock. The growth of Iran’s stocks of near 20 and 60 percent enriched uranium has dangerously reduced breakout timelines.

  • German Police Unlawfully Accessed Data on Contact-Tracing App

    Police investigators in the German city of Mainz used the Luca app to search for witnesses in a case they were working on. To get around federal and state laws banning such use of the contact-tracing app, the city’s prosecutor office simulated a COVID-19 infection originating near the scene of the incident under investigation.

  • How Our Outdated Privacy Laws Doomed Contact-Tracing Apps

    Last spring, when the disease first started its rapid spread, contact-tracing apps were heralded as a promising way to control it by tracking diagnoses and exposure through self-reporting and location tracking. Jessica Rich writes that these apps have had mixed success worldwide, but “they’ve been a huge failure in the United States.” He adds: “A key reason for this failure is that people don’t trust the tech companies or the government to collect, use, and store their personal data, especially when that data involves their health and precise whereabouts.”

  • DOJ Adding New Unit Dedicated to Combatting Domestic Terrorism

    The Justice Department’s National Security Division is adding a new unit, dedicated to combatting domestic terrorism, as attacks, threats, and associated cases continue to grow. The FBI tells lawmakers that the greatest threat of mass casualty attacks against civilians in the United States comes from racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists.

  • Radicalization Pipelines: How Targeted Advertising on Social Media Drives People to Extremes

    Behind-the-scenes mechanisms feed an item you search for on Google, “like” on social media, or come across while browsing into custom advertising on social media. Those mechanisms are increasingly being used for more nefarious purposes than aggressive advertising. The threat is in how this targeted advertising interacts with today’s extremely divisive political landscape. As a social media researcher, I see how people seeking to radicalize others use targeted advertising to readily move people to extreme views.

  • We Don’t Need a Civil War to Be in Serious Trouble

    With extremist movements and rhetoric on the rise, a growing number of people, including some historians and many opinion writers, believe the U.S. is on the brink of disaster. “There are so many bad things that can happen well short of civil war that I wish we, as a country, were talking more about,” says Harvard University’s Jay Ulfelder, a political scientist who studies civil wars.

  • U.S. Cyber Officials Bracing for Fallout from “Log4j” Vulnerability

    More than a month after the Log4j software vulnerability was first discovered, U.S. cybersecurity officials are still warning about it, saying that some criminals and nation state adversaries may be waiting to make use of their newfound access to critical systems.