• China Speeding Up Plans to Overtake U.S. on World Stage, Says U.S. Commander

    The inability of the United States to adequately push back against China’s growing military might is spurring Beijing to accelerate its plans to remake the current international order in its image, a top U.S. military commander told lawmakers Tuesday.

  • The Microsoft Exchange Hack and the Great Email Robbery

    The world is probably days away from the “Great Email Robbery,” in which a large number of threat actors around the globe are going to pillage and ransom the email servers of tens of thousands of businesses and local governments, Nicholas Weaver writes. Or at least pillage those that the purported Chinese actors haven’t already pillaged.” And now the Biden administration has a real hard policy problem: What now? The SolarWinds hack may have been significant, but [the Exchange attack] will affect far more institutions,” Weaver writes. “The Exchange attack showed complete disregard for possible consequences on behalf of those responsible for the breach,” but “without consequences, such broad attacks will simply continue.”

  • Explainable AI: A Must for Nuclear Nonproliferation, National Security

    As it is with raw human intelligence, so it is with artificial intelligence (AI). We may not know exactly what’s going on inside that elaborate black box built by humans, but its decisions can be so accurate that it earns our trust, if not our comprehension. But the need for understanding escalates when the stakes are higher. For national security concerns, it’s not good enough to know that a system works; scientists demand to know how and why. That’s the foundation for a field of study known as “explainable AI.”

  • U.S. Accuses Russia of Spreading Disinformation About Western COVID Vaccines

    The United States has accused Russian intelligence agencies of spreading disinformation about Western vaccines against the coronavirus in an attempt to undermine global confidence in their safety. The State Department’s Global Engagement Center, which monitors foreign disinformation efforts, told the Wall Street Journal that four websites it claims are associated with Russian intelligence have been publishing articles questioning the efficacy of the vaccines and raising questions about their side effects.

  • Cyber Threat Looms Large over German Election

    Whether hacking attacks or disinformation campaigns, online meddling could sway public opinion and influence the outcome of the September vote, experts warn. Recent incidents suggest that the threat is real.

  • Was SolarWinds a Different Type of Cyber Espionage?

    The Biden administration announced that it will impose sanctions and other measures against Russia in response to the SolarWinds incident. The cybersecurity firm FireEye disclosed the compromise of numerous government and private-sector networks in December 2020. SolarWinds is among the top cybersecurity breaches the U.S. government has ever confronted and has raised critical questions about the integrity of federal networks and Russia’s ultimate intentions. “Given the incident’s significance, it is understandable that the Biden administration is grappling with how to appropriately address it,” Erica D. Borghard writes. But setting aside important limitations of economic sanctions as a policy tool to address malign cyber behavior, “there is a gap between how administration officials are framing the nature of the SolarWinds incident and what the available evidence indicates about it,” she adds.

  • Northern Ireland Loyalists Pull Support for Good Friday Peace Deal

    Loyalist paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland have reportedly told the British prime minister that they are withdrawing support for the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. Loyalists are supporters of Northern Ireland being a part of the U.K., and the decision was taken amid concerns over the U.K.’s Brexit deal with the European Union. The development raises fears of renewed violence.

  • The Questions FBI Director Christopher Wray Wasn’t Asked

    It was the most catastrophic intelligence failure since Sept. 11, 2001. One of the three branches of American government faced violent invasion. The invaders threatened the lives of the speaker of the House, the vice president of the United States, and all members of Congress. People died. Many more were injured. Moreover, Tia Sewell, Benjamin Wittes write, the intruders successfully interrupted the basic functioning of American democracy: its peaceful transfer of power and its ability to honor the results of an election in which those in power lost. “Yet on March 2, the man who heads the intelligence component chiefly responsible for domestic intelligence matters, for terrorism investigations, and for combatting violent extremism appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee and had a pleasant exchange with senators. The committee members seemed positively uninterested in his agency’s obvious institutional failure in the run-up to Jan. 6.”

  • Book Review: Hidden Hand – Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World

    Hidden Handis right to remind people that: China and the CCP are not one and the same; China has a party-state system of government that is authoritarian and not democratic; China does not have Western-style rule of law; it does not recognize universal human rights in the way we understand them. What is missing is a balanced discussion of the central debate about the appropriate approach to be taken in the West’s relations with China.

  • China’s Military Tech Ambitions – What’s the U.S.- EU Gameplan?

    A key test of the Biden era of transatlantic relations will be the issue of how the United States and the European Union respond to China’s aggressive efforts to seize market share and industrial knowledge in areas of technology that are critical to national security. Kathleen Doherty writes that the Europeans are divided and have been reluctant to rein in Chinese technological capabilities and ambitions. “The United States and the European Union (EU) have no time to waste in finding a common (or at least complementary) approach.”

  • U.S. Capitol Police Tighten Security as Thursday Threat Looms

    The U.S. Capitol Police Department says it is taking seriously intelligence about a possible plot by a militia group to breach the Capitol on Thursday. A far-right conspiracy theory has been circulating on social media platforms, contending that Donald Trump, who is continuing to spread lies about a fictitious mass voter fraud which cost him the election, would return to power on 4 March. This date was inauguration day for U.S. presidents until 1933, when it was moved to 20 January.

  • Can QAnon Survive Another “Great Disappointment” on March 4? History Suggests It Might

    Thursday could be a big day. On March 4, Donald Trump will be triumphantly returned to power to help save the world from a shadowy syndicate of Satan-worshipping pedophiles – or at least that is what a small fraction of American citizens believe. But before you circle the date and dust off the MAGA hats, a note of caution: We have been here before. Adherents of the same conspiracy theory, QAnon, had previously marked Jan. 20, the day of Joe Biden’s inauguration, as the big day. It might be thought that enough failed predictions would eventually discredit a prophet, but apocalyptic movements rarely simply dissolve when prophecies are seen to fail. But these failures have often only strengthened movements, giving rise to new theories that attempt to explain the shortcomings of earlier ones.

  • Germany’s AfD Party Placed under Surveillance as “Extremism Suspect”

    Germany’s interior intelligence agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) has classified the entire Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party as an “extremism suspected case.” The two largest parties in Germany, Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Social Democratic Party are members of the governing coalition, making the populist, far-right AfD the leader of the opposition in the Bundestag. The designation allows the BfV to use additional surveillance powers given to it by the Bundestag last year, including monitoring email communications and recruiting party members as informants.

  • French Far-Right Militia Dissolved by Government Decree

    The French government yesterday voted to dissolve a far-right militia called Génération Identitaire (GI). The ministry of the interior has already used dissolution decrees against three Islamist groups, and, in October 2020, it dissolved the Turkish ultranationalist group “Gray Wolves.” The moves, led by the hard-charging Minister of the Gerald Darmanin, are part of the Macron government’s decision to confront extremists more forcefully.

  • Economics, National Security, and the Competition with China

    The world has faced the financial crisis and the coronavirus epidemic, but now, George Magnus, writes, it has been presented with a third existential shock that is the defining drama of these early decades of the 21st century: a more truculent and assertive China. China, once viewed by liberal-leaning democracies simply as a formidable consumer and feisty competitor, has also grown and changed over the last decade to become an economic and national security adversary with which the United States has locked horns in ideological and strategic competition.