• China Working to “Develop, Export, and Institutionalize” Digital Authoritarianism: Report

    The Senate Foreign Relations Committee Minority Staff on Tuesday published a new report on China’s digital authoritarianism. “[T]the report is the culmination of a comprehensive Committee investigation into China’s efforts to develop, export, and institutionalize a new, authoritarian governance model for the digital domain,” the report’s authors say. “China is seeking to exploit new and emerging technologies to cultivate digital authoritarianism along multiple paths,” Senator Bob Menendez (D-New Jersey) said. “If successful, China – and not the United States and other like-minded nations – will be writing the future of cyberspace.”

  • MI5 Did Nothing to Stop Russia’s “Nihilistic” Campaign to Undermine, Corrupt British Democracy

    On Tuesday, the U.K. government released a long-awaited report by the British Parliament’s Intelligence Committee on Russian meddling in British politics. The report says that Russia has mounted a prolonged, sophisticated campaign to undermine Britain’s democracy and corrupt British politics. The committee’s account characterized Russia as a reckless country bent on recapturing its status as a “great power,” primarily by destabilizing those in the West. “The security threat posed by Russia is difficult for the West to manage as, in our view and that of many others, it appears fundamentally nihilistic,” the authors said. The report, in many ways, is harder on British officials than the Russians. It is unsparing in the answer it gives to the question who is protecting British democracy: “No one is,” the report warns.

  • Study of U.S. Mass Shootings Suggests Two-Pronged Policy Approach

    Over the past thirty years, mass shootings have fueled calls for changes in gun ownership and concealed carry legislation, but few studies have evaluated whether permissive gun policies deter mass shootings, and none have determined if their effects are the same on firearms homicides.

  • Chinese Government Hackers Charged with IP, COVID-19 Research Theft

    U.S. DOJ accused China on Tuesday of sponsoring criminal hackers to target biotech firms around the world working on coronavirus vaccines and treatments, as the FBI said the Chinese government was acting like “an organized criminal syndicate.”

  • U.S., Britain Increasingly See Eye-to-Eye on China

    The United States and the United Kingdom appear to be increasingly seeing eye-to-eye about the challenges posed by the Chinese government, say analysts and Western diplomats. The United States wants to capitalize on Britain’s hardening line toward Beijing. The U.K. Huawei ban was a major policy U-turn for Britain which has been trying to walk a tight rope between Washington, its long-stranding traditional ally, and Beijing, which it has been courting heavily since the 2016 Brexit vote in the hope of securing a lucrative trade deal.

  • Anti-Asian Hate Crime during the COVID-19 Pandemic

    Under the Hate Crime Statistic Act, hate crimes are defined as “crimes that manifest evidence of prejudice based on race, gender and gender identity, religion, disability, sexual orientation, or ethnicity.” Since the outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, the United States has seen a surge of Asian Americans reporting racially motivated hate crimes.

  • Tracking Misinformation Campaigns in Real-Time is Possible: Study

    A research team has developed a technique for tracking online foreign misinformation campaigns in real time, which could help mitigate outside interference in the 2020 American election. The researchers developed a method for using machine learning to identify malicious Internet accounts, or trolls, based on their past behavior. The model investigated past misinformation campaigns from China, Russia, and Venezuela that were waged against the United States before and after the 2016 election.

  • U.K. Government, Intel. Took "Eye Off the Ball” Regarding Russia’s Direct Threat to U.K.: Report

    A report on Russian interference in British politics concluded on Tuesday that the Kremlin tried to influence the outcome of the 2016 Brexit referendum and the British government’s ignorance of potential meddling was “astonishing.” The report also found similar evidence for Russian interference in the Scottish independence referendum of 2014.

  • Russia Report: Intelligence Expert Explains How U.K. Ignored Growing Threat

    The new report on Russia from parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) is damning. The document certainly isn’t a page-turner, and nor does it provide all the answers some had expected. But contrary to most ISC reports, it’s striking and blunt, and the message couldn’t be clearer: Russia’s intelligence agencies pose a direct threat to the U.K., but successive governments and the U.K. agencies have taken their eye off the ball.

  • Who Is Watching the Border Patrol?

    Since 2016 the Border Patrol (BP) has become highly politicized, even as the organization continues to be plagued by institutional violence and corruption at all levels. A closer examination of these federal agents and officers in green now highlights their extraordinary legal powers and reach. This is worrisome: In these challenging times, the BP is especially ill-prepared for more mission creep, nor are we ready for it. The Border Patrol is a loose cannon requiring immediate accountability and oversight by our elected representatives.

  • Farrakhan Remains Most Popular Anti-Semite in America

    Anti-Semitism has stained the speeches and statements of Nation of Islam (NOI) leader Louis Farrakhan for decades. This past 4 July was no different, as Farrakhan delivered an address replete with anti-Semitic lies and stereotypes, and calls for his listeners to speak out against Jews. Farrakhan’s speech has been viewed over 1.2 million times (as of 15 July) on numerous YouTube channels.

  • DHS, NSA Name Binghamton a Cyber Research Center

    In June, the National Security Agency and the Department of Homeland Security named Binghamton a National Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Research (CAE-R) through 2025. “The main goals,” said Professor Ping Yang, who is the director of the Center for Information Assurance and Cybersecurity (CIAC), “are to reduce the vulnerability in the information infrastructure of the United States by promoting higher education and research in cyber-defense and producing professionals with cyber-defense expertise.”

  • DHS Authorizes Domestic Surveillance to Protect Statues and Monuments

    You might not imagine that the U.S. intelligence community would have much stake in local protests over monuments and statues, Steve Vladeck and Benjamin Wittes write, but you’d be wrong. An unclassified DHS memo, provided to Lawfare, makes clear that the authorized intelligence activity by DHS personnel covers significantly more than protecting federal personnel or facilities. It appears to also include planned vandalism of Confederate (and other historical) monuments and statues, whether federally owned or not. “[W]e do not accept that graffiti and vandalism are remotely comparable threats to the homeland [as attacks on federal buildings] — or that they justify this kind of federal response even if, in the right circumstances, such activity would technically constitute a federal crime,” Vladeck and Wittes conclude.

  • U.K. to Examine Effectiveness of Existing Legislation in Dealing with Hateful Extremism

    As is the case in other countries, the U.K. is facing a sharp rise in activity extremist groups. The U.K. Commission for Countering Extremism (CCE) has launched a legal review to examine the effectiveness of existing U.K. legislation in dealing with hateful extremism. The CCE’s recommendations will be submitted to the Home Secretary.

  • What Does a "Terrorist" Designation Mean?

    From both the right and the left, there have been calls to designate various domestic organizations – the KKK, antifa, white supremacists – as “terrorists.” Anna Meier writes there is no legal mechanism in the United States for labeling purely domestic organizations as terrorist groups, but while there is no purely domestic terrorism statute in the United States, nor is there a domestic terrorism proscription mechanism, the “terrorist” label, even when not a formal legal mechanism, signals what kinds of political behavior cross the line from nonideal to unacceptable. “Trump’s threatened antifa designation, then, may not carry any legal weight, but it does signal to the public—and to law enforcement—an unacceptable form of contention in the eyes of the administration,” she writes.