• DHS Intelligence Official Says He Was Pressured to Stop Providing Assessments of Russia’s Threat to U.S. Election

    Brian Murphy, the former head of DHS’s intelligence and analysis unit, said in a whistle-blower complaint  made public on Wednesday that he was pressured by acting DHS secretary Chad Wolf to stop providing intelligence assessments on the threat of Russian interference in the upcoming U.S. election. In his complaint, Murphy also says that acting DHS secretary Kenneth Cuccinelli directed agency analysts to downplay threats from violent white supremacy to make the threat “appear less severe,” and include information on violent “left-wing” groups and antifa. Murphy says that Wolf and Cuccinelli — both Trump appointees not yet confirmed by the Senate — appeared to want to shape DHS’s public announcements so they accord with the president’s language and political interests, even if modifying the department’s public announcements in this way contradicted the department’s own intelligence analysis.

  • Russian Government Hackers Targeted Political Consulting Firm Working for Biden

    Russia’s broad effort to help Donald Trump win reelection in November now extends to hacking political consulting firms. Reuters reports. Microsoft recently alerted Washington, D.C.-based SKDKnickerbocker, a campaign strategy and communications firm working with the Biden campaign, that Russian government hackers tried to hack the company. The hackers failed to gain access to the company’s networks, according to a source familiar with its response, Reuters said.

  • Russia’s Disinformation and Propaganda Ecosystem

    Last month, the U.S. Department of State’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) issued an important report – Pillars of Russia’s Disinformation and Propaganda Ecosystem – describing in detail the multifaceted, systemic, sustained, and effective disinformation and propaganda campaign which Russia has been conducting against the West for nearly a decade. The many different elements of this campaign are well coordinated and synchronized for maximum effect – so much so, that the GEC rightly calls it an “ecosystem” of disinformation and propaganda.

  • Pillars of Russia’s Disinformation and Propaganda Ecosystem: Excerpts

    From the report: “The ecosystem consists of five main pillars: official government communications, state-funded global messaging, cultivation of proxy sources, weaponization of social media, and cyber-enabled disinformation. The Kremlin bears direct responsibility for cultivating these tactics and platforms as part of its approach to using information as a weapon. It invests massively in its propaganda channels, its intelligence services and its proxies to conduct malicious cyber activity to support their disinformation efforts, and it leverages outlets that masquerade as news sites or research institutions to spread these false and misleading narratives.”

  • 3-D printing Poses a Threat to Privacy

    3D printing technology poses a “grave and growing threat” to individual privacy because of the potential for products to reveal private information about individuals, experts have warned. A new study warns about a lack of awareness among governments and companies about privacy issues associated with 3D printers, and calls for changes to treaties on copyright law and international human rights law.

  • Combatting Potential Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack

    Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) weapons have the potential to disrupt unprotected critical infrastructure within the United States and could impact millions over large parts of the country. DHS says it continues to prepare against evolving threats against the American homeland, most recently highlighting efforts to combat an EMP attack.

  • The Pandemic Has Revealed the Cracks in U.S. Manufacturing: Here’s How to Fix Them

    The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed glaring deficiencies in the U.S. manufacturing sector’s ability to provide necessary products – especially amidst a crisis. Globalization is at the heart of the problem. With heavy reliance on global supply chains and foreign producers, the pandemic has interrupted shipping of parts and materials to nearly 75% of U.S. companies. Decades of “offshoring” domestic manufacturing to other countries have led the U.S. to the current crisis. It has seriously damaged the nation’s industrial base, increased income inequality and caused stagnation in U.S. living standards. How the U.S. responds will determine the long-term health and prosperity of the nation.

  • DHS Draft Document: White Supremacists Are Greatest Terror Threat

    White supremacists present the gravest terror threat to the United States, according to a draft report from the Department of Homeland Security. Betsy Woodruff Swan writes in Politico that two later draft versions of the same document — DHS’s State of the Homeland Threat Assessment 2020 — describe the threat from white supremacists in slightly different language. “But all three drafts describe the threat from white supremacists as the deadliest domestic terror threat facing the U.S., listed above the immediate danger from foreign terrorist groups.” Woodruff Swan notes that “None of the drafts Politico reviewed referred to a threat from Antifa, the loose cohort of militant left-leaning agitators who senior Trump administration officials have described as domestic terrorists.”

  • What’s Ailing California’s Electric System?

    California made headlines for all the wrong reasons recently with widespread rolling power outages in the middle of a heat wave and a pandemic. These blackouts were not an accident—they were intentionally scheduled by the grid operator, the California Independent System Operator (CAISO), due to a shortage of resources available to keep the lights on.

  • Better Strategy to Protect U.S. Agricultural Sector

    The agriculture sector in the United States accounts for more than 5 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product (about a trillion dollars) and provides jobs for more than 10 percent of U.S. workforce, and threats to the agricultural sectors. Agriculture impacts more than just the food provided for the family dinner. It’s a part of forestry, fishing, food and beverages for restaurants, textile, and leather products. In the past, biological weapons (BW) attacks were typically considered with the framework of anti-personnel attacks. Experts say that state-actors or terrorists could wreak havoc – and misery – on millions of Americans by launching attacks on the U.S. agricultural sector.

  • Two Boogaloo Followers Charged with Trying to Sell Weapons to, Become Mercenaries for Hamas

    Federal prosecutors charged two self-proclaimed “Boogaloo Boys” with trying to sell weapons to someone they believed was a member of the Palestinian Islamist terrorist group Hamas for the purpose of attacking Israeli and U.S. soldiers. Prosecutors said that the two also considered becoming “mercenaries” for Hamas in order to raise funds for and boost the reputation of the Boogaloo movement.

  • To Prevent Extremist Violence in the United States, Think Beyond the Homeland Security Box

    Over the past decade, with the FBI focused on surveilling and otherwise investigating suspected terrorists, the United States has relied on the Department of Homeland Security to work with local law enforcement, municipalities and communities to strengthen their capacity to prevent violent extremism. “Our research and experience shows that the department’s emphasis on security can be counterproductive and that the most promising strategies can be found in models and partnerships led by actors not involved in security,” Eric Rosand, and Stevan Weine write.

  • DHS: Russia “Amplifying” Claims of Mail-In Voter Fraud

    New analysis by DHS’s intelligence unit, released Thursday to federal and state law enforcement agencies, warned that “Russian malign influence actors” have targeted the absentee voting process “by spreading disinformation” since at least March. ABC News has obtained the document, which says that Russia has sought to “amplify” concerns over the integrity of U.S. elections by promoting allegations that mail-in voting will lead to widespread fraud. This Russian campaign of disinformation replicates and reinforces President Donald Trump’s own campaign of unfounded claims about the integrity of mail-in voting.

  • How to Change an Election

    A 3 August report from the Transition Integrity Project, a bipartisan group of political, government, and academic experts that ran election crisis-planning exercises to game out what might happen between now and Inauguration Day, predicts “lawsuits, divergent media narratives, attempts to stop the counting of ballots, and protests drawing people from both sides.” With both sides wary of tampering, Daniel Carpenter, a Harvard government professor, tries to game the game on what tactics could follow a close result.

  • “Weapon of Terror”: A Novichok Creator Tells How Navalny Case Differs from the Skripal Attack

    Medical specialists in Germany have determined that Russian opposition politician Aleksei Navalny, who is being treated in a hospital in Berlin after falling ill on 20 August on a flight from Tomsk to Moscow, was poisoned with a form of the Soviet-developed nerve agent Novichok. The toxin found in Navalny is from the same group of poisons as the one used in the March 2018 poisoning of former Soviet intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, in the English city of Salisbury. Both Skripals survived the attack and were released after spending weeks in the hospital.