• Iran Blames Israel for Suspected Sabotage at Nuclear Facility, Vows Revenge

    Iran has vowed to take “revenge” for an alleged act of sabotage at its main Natanz nuclear site that it blames on its archenemy Israel, an incident that could overshadow diplomatic efforts to revive the 2015 nuclear deal abandoned by former U.S. President Donald Trump.

  • Messaging Authoritarianism: China’s Four Messaging Pillars and How ‘Wolf Warrior’ Tactics Undermine Them

    A messaging strategy is only as good as the goal it serves; as Xi Jinping has made clear, China is seeking to make the world safer for its brand of authoritarianism by reshaping the world order. An analysis of messaging from China’s diplomats, state-backed media, and leaders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) demonstrates that Beijing repeatedly uses narratives, angles, and comparisons that serve to change perceptions about China’s autocracy and the United States’ democracy—to China’s advantage.

  • After the Islamic State: Social Media and Armed Groups

    The Islamic State is often credited with pioneering the use of social media in conflict, having created a global brand that drew between 20,000 and 40,000 volunteers from at least 85 countries. Social media served as a key recruiting tool, source of fundraising, and platform for disseminating graphic propaganda to a global audience. Laura Courchesne and Brian McQuinn write that the Islamic State perfected tactics and strategies already widely used by hundreds of other armed groups.

  • Global Security Trends

    The National Intelligence Council (NIC) on Thursday released the seventh edition of its quadrennial Global Trends report. Global Trends 2040: A More Contested World is an unclassified assessment of the forces and dynamics that the NIC anticipates are likely to shape the national security environment over the next twenty years. Global competition for influence will intensify. “During the next two decades, the intensity of competition for global influence is likely to reach its highest level since the Cold War,” the report notes.

  • Former National Security Officials Call for a 9/11 Commission-Like investigation of the Attack on the Capitol

    More than a hundred former senior national security, military, and elected officials, both Republicans and Democrats, have called on lawmakers to form an independent bipartisan commission to investigate the attack. “We write to encourage this Congress to establish an independent and bipartisan national commission to investigate the January 6th assault of the U.S. Capitol Complex and its direct causes, and to make recommendations to prevent future assaults and strengthen the resilience of our democratic institutions,” the letter, which was signed by 140 officials, read.

  • U.S. “Monitoring” as Iran Sends Fuel Tankers to Venezuela in Defiance of Sanctions

    As Iran sent three gasoline shipments to fuel-starved Venezuela in recent months in defiance of U.S. sanctions, the Biden administration apparently did nothing to stop the tankers, signaling a reticence to enforce the sanctions and a savviness by the anti-U.S. allies in evading them.

  • Biden Announces Actions on Gun Violence

    U.S. President Joe Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland spoke Thursday about a set of new measures meant to address gun violence in the United States. Ahead of their remarks, the White House released details of some of the initiatives, calling gun violence a “public health epidemic.”

  • Lawmakers Back 5G Alternatives to China-Made Equipment

    Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-VA) led a bipartisan group of Senators in urging President Joe Biden to request at least $3 billion as part of his budget request to Congress for the adoption of 5G alternatives to Chinese-made equipment. Specifically, the Senators urged Biden to request at least $1.5 billion each for two funds established by Congress to encourage the adoption of Open Radio Access Network (Open RAN) equipment, which would allow additional vendors to enter the 5G market and compete with manufacturers like Huawei, which is heavily subsidized by the Chinese government.

  • Cybersecurity Tech for Emergency Communications Centers

    DHS S&T is expanding pilot testing of a technology to improve the cybersecurity defenses of the nation’s emergency communications infrastructure. Odenton, Md.-based SecuLore Solutions in the research and development (R&D) of a cybersecurity defense solution based on predictive analytics and cyber data that helps detect and mitigate cybersecurity attacks against legacy emergency communications systems and new Next Generation 911 (NG911) and Internet Protocol-based technologies.

  • The EU Online Terrorism Regulation: A Bad Deal

    On 12 September 2018, the European Commission presented a proposal for a regulation on preventing the dissemination of terrorist content online—dubbed the Terrorism Regulation, or TERREG for short—that contained some alarming ideas.

  • U.S. Immigration Courts Brace for Flood of Asylum Claims

    U.S. immigration courts, already swamped with a backlog of 1.3 million cases, are ill-prepared to handle a crush of new asylum claims filed by a rising number of people crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, especially children traveling alone, current and former immigration judges told VOA.

  • Shining Light on China’s Secretive International Lending Program

    A new study and dataset reveal previously unknown details about China—the world’s largest official creditor—and its lending practices to developing countries. A cache of documents shows that Chinese loan contracts have unusual secrecy provisions, collateral requirements, and debt renegotiation restrictions.

  • Violent Extremism in America

    People who radicalize to extremist ideologies often are triggered by negative life events or exposure to propaganda, and those who escape from extreme groups frequently are aided by an individual or group that intervenes to help them reject the philosophy, according to a new study from the RAND Corporation.

  • The International Far-Right Terrorist Threat Requires a Multilateral Response

    Right-wing violence is a global phenomenon. The United Nations Counter-Terrorism Committee Executive Directorate (CTED) illuminated this global challenge in 2020 when it issued an alert that cited “a 320 percent increase in terrorist attacks by groups or individuals affiliated” with right-wing extremism. Jason M. Blazakis and Naureen Chowdhury Fink write that a U.S.-only focus to countering far-right terrorism will not curb this growing threat to international peace and stability. “The frameworks established to address the terrorist threat posed by al-Qaeda, the Islamic State and their affiliates can be adapted to manage far-right violence.”

  • Monitoring Current and Future Biological Threats

    DHS S&T has awarded $199,648 to Mesur.io Inc., for analysis and reporting of outbreak-related data. The Mesur.io project proposes to adapt their Earthstream Platform to provide DHS and NBIC with data that tracks metrics related to an outbreak or emergence to predict various risks of a biological threat.