• QAnon Poses a Threat to U.S. National Security: Report

    The QAnon movement poses a threat to U.S. national security, concludes a new report by the Soufan Center. Although commonly perceived as a domestic movement within the U.S., the data suggests that foreign states are utilizing the QAnon conspiracy theory to sow societal discord and even compromise legitimate political processes.

  • DHS Announces Domestic Violent Extremism Review at DHS

    DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Monday announced an internal review to address the threat of domestic violent extremism within DHS. A cross-departmental working group comprising senior officials will begin a comprehensive review of how to best prevent, detect, and respond to threats related to domestic violent extremism within DHS. 

  • U.S. Antisemitic Incidents Remained at Historic High in 2020

    Antisemitic incidents remained at a historically high level   across the United States in 2020, with a total of 2,024 incidents of assault, harassment and vandalism. While antisemitic incidents declined by 4 percent after hitting an all-time high in 2019, last year was still the third-highest year for incidents against American Jews since 1979.

  • QAnon Hasn’t Gone Away – It’s Alive and Kicking in States Across the Country

    By this point, almost everyone has heard of QAnon, the conspiracy spawned by an anonymous online poster of enigmatic prophecies. Perhaps the greatest success of the conspiracy is its ability to create a shared alternate reality, a reality that can dismiss everything from a decisive election to a deadly pandemic. The QAnon universe lives on – now largely through involvement in local, not national, politics. Moving on from contesting the election, the movement’s new focus is vaccines and pandemic denialism.

  • Coup Plots, Poison, Hacking, Sabotage: What Is the GRU’s Unit 29155?

    In 2012, the salaries of service members of three Russian intelligence units within the GRU were increased significantly. One of these units, Unit 29155, has grabbed outsized attention, having been linked by 2018 to an alleged coup plot in Montenegro and the near-fatal poisonings of a former Russian military intelligence officer in England and an arms dealer in Bulgaria. Now, Czech government allegations that the unit’s members were behind a 2014 explosion at a Czech ammunition depot. “These are the guys you send in because you want to break stuff,” said an expert on Russian security services.

  • Supreme Court Asked to Review DHS’s Warrantless Searches of International Travelers’ Phones, Laptops

    The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the American Civil Liberties Union, and the ACLU of Massachusetts on Friday filed a petition for a writ of certiorari, asking the Supreme Court to hear a challenge to the Department of Homeland Security’s policy and practice of warrantless and suspicionless searches of travelers’ electronic devices at U.S. airports and other ports of entry.

  • A Jan. 6 Commission is Crucial to Understand the Reality of the Attack, and the Alternate Reality of the Attackers

    A dangerous rift currently exists in the public perception of Jan. 6 – a rift that may have grave implications for the future of American democracy, Fadi Quran and Justin Hendrix write. Polls show that a small majority of Republicans continues to believe in the false claims that the 2020 election was stolen due to widespread election fraud, and that there were left-wing infiltrators who were responsible for the violence at the Capitol. Why does it matter that such voters believe in these untruths? Because, as the unclassified version of a report on the threat posed by domestic extremism from the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) suggests, “narratives of fraud in the recent general election” may well contribute to an increase in future violence.

  • The Sino-American Race for Technology Leadership

    The reaction in Washington – one of alarm and outrage — to reports that China trawls America’s open innovation ecosystem stealing prized technologies got that much right. AI and quantum computing, to name just two of them, could change the balance of global power. In identifying economic competitiveness, innovation, and democratic principles as core pillars of national security, the Trump team was on the right track, but instead of offering a coherent strategic response, the Trump administration opted for export and foreign investment control laws with broad and vague reach. “This approach was counterproductive to American innovation leadership. It also failed to address the reality that acquisition of U.S. technology is not the only challenge from China or even, arguably, the most important,” Ferial Ara Saeed writes.

  • Money Alone Can’t Fix Central America – or Stop Migration to U.S.

    To stem migration from Central America, the Biden administration has a $4 billion plan to “build security and prosperity” in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador – home to more than 85 percent of all Central American migrants who arrived in the U.S. over the last three years. The Biden plan is based on a sound analysis of Central America’s dismal socioeconomic conditions. As a former president of Costa Rica, I can attest to the dire situation facing people in neighboring nations. As a historian of Central America, I also know money alone cannot build a viable democracy.

  • Students Collaborate to Solve Homeland Security Challenges

    In the parlance of homeland security, soft targets are places that are easily accessible to the general public and relatively unprotected. Last month, innovative students from Arizona State University and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas competed in “Hardening Soft Targets” – a DHS-sponsored 3-day event in which students worked directly with experts from DHS, the Phoenix Police Department, industry leaders, and academics.

  • Tighter Gun Laws Help Reduce Mass Shooting Violence: Research

    President Joe Biden recently called for tougher gun laws to reduce mass shooting violence. Columbia University researchers have conducted research related to measures proposed by Biden, including on the impact of state gun laws and the Federal Assault Weapons Ban of 1994; the use of high-capacity magazines in high fatality shootings; and the effects of exposure to gun violence on children.

  • California's Wildfire Season Has Lengthened, and Its Peak Is Now Earlier in the Year

    California’s wildfire problem, fueled by a concurrence of climate change and a heightened risk of human-caused ignitions in once uninhabited areas, has been getting worse with each passing year of the 21st century.Researchers have found that the annual burn season has lengthened in the past two decades and that the yearly peak has shifted from August to July.

  • Syrian Missile Explodes Near Israel’s Dimona Nuclear Reactor

    A Syrian missile landed and exploded about forty miles from Israel’s nuclear reactor in Dimona. The IDF described the incident as unintentional: A Russia-made SA-5 was launched by a Syrian air defense unit, aiming at an IDF aircraft attacking Syrian military targets near Damascus. It appears that the Syrian missile had missed its target, and continued its flight trajectory which carried it all the way to the Negev desert, about 300 kilometers south of Damascus. There is unease in Israel over the fact that the missile managed to evade Israel’s robust anti-missile defenses.

  • Mathematics Professor and University Researcher Indicted for Grant Fraud

    A federal grand jury in Carbondale, Ill. On Wednesday returned an indictment charging a mathematics professor and researcher at Southern Illinois University – Carbondale (SIUC) with two counts of wire fraud and one count of making a false statement. The prosecution is part of the Justice Department’s ongoing China Initiative. Led by the Department’s National Security Division, the China Initiative is a broad, multi-faceted effort to counter Chinese national security threats and safeguard American intellectual property.

  • Domestic Violent Extremists’ Threat Has Increased Since 2015: Intelligence Chiefs

    Last week, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines released to Congress an unclassified annual report – the IC’s 2021 Annual Threat Assessment. DNI Avril Haines, CIA director Bill Burns, and FBI director Christopher Wray testified before the Senate and House Intelligence Committees. “DVE [domestic violent extremists] is an increasingly complex threat that is growing in the United States …. These extremists often see themselves as part of a global movement and, in fact, a number of other countries are experiencing a rise in DVE,” Haines said.