• U.K. Proscribes Far-Right Terrorist Group

    The U.K. Home Secretary has the other day moved to outlaw the far-right terror group, Feuerkrieg Division. Priti Patel has asked Parliament for permission to proscribe the white supremacist group, which was founded in late 2018 and operates across North America and Europe.

  • White Supremacist Prosecutions Roundup

    Since 9/11, national counterterrorism strategies have focused largely on foreign terrorist groups—like the Islamic State and al-Qaeda—and federal prosecutors have used specifically tailored criminal statutes to prosecute individuals affiliated with these groups. Emma Broches and Julia Solomon-Strauss write that over the past few years, however, the domestic terrorism landscape has shifted as a result of a growing threat from individuals and groups with racially motivated violent extremist ideologies—including white supremacist and anti-government views. This means that law enforcement groups face a different, and potentially more challenging, set of obstacles to successfully counter this threat.

  • 2019: Global Terrorism Overview

    The new  Global Terrorism Overview highlights trends in worldwide terrorism in 2019. In 2019, there were nearly 8,500 terrorist attacks around the world, which killed more than 20,300 people, including 5,460 perpetrators and 14,840 victims. 2019 was the fifth consecutive year of declining global terrorism since terrorist violence peaked in 2014 at nearly 17,000 attacks and more than 44,000 total deaths. The total number of terrorist attacks worldwide decreased 50 percent between 2014 and 2019, and the total number of deaths decreased 54 percent.

  • Hateful Extremists Have Been Exploiting the Current Pandemic

    The U.K. Commission for Countering Extremism (CCE) has published a report Thursday, looking at the way in which extremists have sought to exploit the current pandemic. The CCE say that the government needs to ensure that their response to dealing with COVID-19 and future crises takes into account the significant threat of hateful extremism and the dangerous narratives spread by conspiracy theories.

  • Large-Scale Facial Recognition Is Incompatible with a Free Society

    In the U.S., tireless opposition to state use of facial recognition algorithms has recently won some victories. Outside the U.S., however, the tide is heading in the other direction. To decide whether to expand or limit the use of facial recognition technology, nations will need to answer fundamental questions about the kind of people, and the kind of society, they want to be. Face surveillance is based on morally compromised research, violates our rights, is harmful, and exacerbates structural injustice, both when it works and when it fails. Its adoption harms individuals, and makes our society as a whole more unjust, and less free. A moratorium on its use is the least we should demand.

  • Making Bioweapons Obsolete

    The Council on Strategic Risks (CSR) and Sandia National Laboratories convened experts and thought leaders in government, academia, and the private sector to discuss the ways to make a future in which the threat of biological weapons is greatly reduced.

  • Eroding Private Border Wall to Get an Engineering Inspection Just Months after Completion

    Months after the “Lamborghini” of border walls was built along the Rio Grande, the builder agreed to an engineering inspection of his controversial structure. Experts say the wall is showing signs of erosion that threatens its stability.

  • Suspicions Mount of Foreign Hand in Fire at Sensitive Iranian Nuclear Site

    There is growing support among outside security experts for the notion that an “incident” at Iran’s main nuclear-enrichment facility last week was an act of sabotage in a shadow war aimed at setting back Tehran’s nuclear activities. Many analysts believe that a foreign state, possibly Israel, was behind the 2 July fire at the Natanz facility in Iran’s central Isfahan Province.

  • Germany’s Domestic Intel. Agency: Right-Wing Extremists Greatest Threat to the County

    A new report by Germany’s domestic intelligence (BfV) agency says right-wing extremism now poses the greatest threat to security in the country. BfV said that the number of right-wing extremists in Germany has increased from 24,100 in 2018 to 32,000 in 2019. As worrisome, the number of extremists who are prepared to use violence to achieve their aims keeps growing, and now stands at 13,000. The number of left-wing extremists has increased from 32,000 to 33,500 but only 9,000 of them are regarded as committed to violence. Anti-Semitism continues to be central to right-wing extremist movement, and 94 percent of anti-Semitic crimes in Germany in 2019 were committed by members of these movements. Islamist terrorism is still a threat, but it is declining: 28,000 Germans are affiliated with Islamist Jihadist groups, but only 650 are regarded as potentially violent.

  • China Could Be Using TikTok to Spy on Australians, but Banning It Isn’t a Simple Fix

    In an age of isolation, video sharing platform TikTok has emerged as a bonding force for many. But recent headlines allege the service, owned by Beijing-based company ByteDance, is feeding users’ data to the Chinese Communist Party. In Australia, for example, politicians from both the governing party and the opposition are calling for banning the app. Could the app be a tool used by the Chinese government to spy on us? And could it be effectively banned?

  • Drivers Are Hitting Protesters as Memes of Car Attacks Spread

    Vehicles are becoming increasingly popular weapons that terrorists and other extremists around the globe use to intimidate, harm and kill. Cars and trucks are easily accessible, require little skill to operate and can facilitate unpredictable attacks with mass casualties.

  • FBI Director: China Uses Anti-Corruption Campaign to Target Dissidents in U.S.

    China is targeting hundreds of Chinese dissidents in the United States under the cover of an international anti-corruption campaign, using coercive tactics to force critics to return to China, FBI Director Christopher Wray said on Tuesday. 

  • China and AI: What the World Can Learn and What It Should Be Wary of

    China announced in 2017 its ambition to become the world leader in artificial intelligence (AI) by 2030. While the US still leads in absolute terms, China appears to be making more rapid progress than either the US or the EU, and central and local government spending on AI in China is estimated to be in the tens of billions of dollars. The move has led – at least in the West – to warnings of a global AI arms race and concerns about the growing reach of China’s authoritarian surveillance state.

  • Privacy Risks of Home Security Cameras

    Researchers have used data from a major home Internet Protocol (IP) security camera provider to evaluate potential privacy risks for users. The researchers found that the traffic generated by the cameras could be monitored by attackers and used to predict when a house is occupied or not.

  • GW Launches ISIS Files Digital Repository

    The George Washington University on Monday launched its ISIS Files repository. The virtual public repository features a selection of the 15,000 digitized pages from the documents collected in Iraq by New York Times journalist Rukmini Callimachi and a team of Iraqi translators.