• How Will the Coronavirus Reshape Democracy and Governance Globally?

    The new coronavirus pandemic is not only wreaking destruction on public health and the global economy but disrupting democracy and governance worldwide. It has hit at a time when democracy was already under threat in many places, and it risks exacerbating democratic backsliding and authoritarian consolidation. Already, some governments have used the pandemic to expand executive power and restrict individual rights. Yet such actions are just the tip of the iceberg.
    Frances Z. Brown, Saskia Brechenmacher, and Thomas Carothers write for the Carnegie Endowment that the coronavirus will likely transform other pillars of democratic governance—such as electoral processes, civilian control of militaries, and civic mobilization—and potentially reset the terms of the global debate on the merits of authoritarianism versus democracy. The pandemic will almost certainly usher in broader effects on governance by overburdening countries’ basic governance functions, taxing their sociopolitical cohesion, exacerbating corruption, unsettling relations between national and local governments, and transforming the role of nonstate actors.

  • Authoritarian Regimes Seek to Take Advantage of the Coronavirus Pandemic

    The COVID-19 pandemic is accelerating efforts among authoritarian governments as regimes tighten their grip at home while seizing the opportunity to advance their agenda abroad. Over the past several years, autocratic governments have become increasingly assertive in nature. James Lamond writes for the Center for American Progress that an illiberal and undemocratic model of governing—championed primarily by Russia and China—has appeared to gain currency, particularly as the United States and other democracies turn inward to deal with domestic challenges. As former NATO Secretary General Anders Rasmussen testified before the U.S. House of Representatives in February 2019, “Tyranny is once again awakening from its slumber.” This assertiveness does not stop at national borders; just last year, the U.S. Intelligence Community warned that “Russia and China seek to shape the international system and regional security dynamics and exert influence.”
    Beyond the serious implications for the citizens of each respective country, if this trend continues, it could lead to a dangerous new level of competition among world powers at exactly the time when they need to be working together to combat a global pandemic and other emerging threats.
    There are three clear trends of how authoritarian states have responded to COVID-19 in ways that could have ramifications that will last far beyond the pandemic response: consolidating power at home; seeking geopolitical advantage amid the crisis; and trying to weaken democracies from within.

  • How to Protect Privacy When Aggregating Location Data to Fight COVID-19

    As governments, the private sector, NGOs, and others mobilize to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve seen calls to use location information—typically drawn from GPS and cell tower data—to inform public health efforts. Compared to using individualized location data for contact tracing—as many governments around the world are already doing—deriving public health insights from aggregated location data poses far fewer privacy and other civil liberties risks such as restrictions on freedom of expression and association. However, even “aggregated” location data comes with potential pitfalls.

  • U.S. Designates Russia-Based White Supremacist Group, Leaders as Terrorists

    The United States has designated the ultranationalist Russian Imperial Movement (RIM) along with three of its leaders as terrorists, marking the first time the classification has been applied to a white supremacist group. The decision comes after Trump signed an executive order in September 2019 that expanded sanctions for combating terrorism by allowing the terrorist designation to be applied to groups that provide training to terrorists.

  • New Report Outlines Tactics of Modern White-Supremacist Terrorism

    On Monday, as the U.S. Department of State, for the first time ever, designate a white supremacist group as a terrorist organization, a new report on white supremacist terrorism was released, analyzing the evolution of the threat presented by violent white supremacists. The report notes that, until Monday’s announcement of the Department of State’s decision, none of the 69 organizations designated by the U.S. Department of State as Foreign Terrorist Organizations is a white supremacist organization, despite the dramatic uptick in that threat.

  • Huawei and the Third Offset

    In order to effectively mitigate the security risks posed by Huawei, the U.S. Department of Defense needs to fund and integrate cutting-edge technologies from the private sector. Offset strategies are intended to counterbalance an adversary’s military advantages by developing asymmetric technological strengths.

  • Why China's Coronavirus Lies Don't Matter If It Plays the Long Information Game

    The world will never be the same after COVID-19 –but Mark Payumo writes that this will not be because people sheltered in place and reacquainted themselves with traditional family bonding, but because China opened a new front in information warfare. “This front is global in scale and one that Beijing has laid the groundwork for a decade prior to the pandemic,” he writes. “As it unravels, it underscores one fact that we already know: that the world, especially truly-functioning West democracies, continues to fail in responding to Chinese global statecraft that may threaten civil liberties as we know it.”

  • Not All Privacy Apps Are Created Equal

    New privacy laws like Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) have spawned a new industry of companies and platforms advertising that they can anonymize your data and be compliant with the law. But MIT researcher Aloni Cohen says that he has his doubts about these claims, and his team’s latest work shows that there’s reason to be skeptical.

  • Pandemics Can Fast Forward the Rise and Fall of Great Powers

    Fortunately for the United States, my research shows that democracies generally outperform their autocratic competitors in great power rivalries. Still, there is no time to lose. As U.S. leaders formulate their response to the coronavirus, they must think not only in terms of the immediate public health crisis, but also about the very future of American global leadership.

  • Right-Wing Extremism: The Russian Connection

    Over the past eight years, one of Russia’s more effective strategies to weaken the West, subvert liberal democratic societies, sabotage the U.S.-created post-WWII world order, and facilitate the expansion of Russian influence has been to provide active support – at times overt, often covert — to various far-right, ethnonationalist, and populist political parties and movements. Russia has been providing support not only to political parties and movements. As part of its effort to undermine the West and weaken democracies, the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence, has been supporting an assortment of violent, white supremacist groups in many European countries: fight clubs, neo-Nazi soccer hooligans, motorcycle gangs, skin heads, and neo-fascist rock groups. These groups are serving as conduits for the Kremlin’s influence operations in Western countries.

  • Coronavirus: China Floods Europe With Defective Medical Equipment

    As the coronavirus rages across Europe, a growing number of countries are reporting that millions of pieces of medical equipment donated by, or purchased from, China to defeat the pandemic are defective and unusable. Soeren Kern writes for the Gatestone Institute that the revelations are fueling distrust of a public relations effort by Chinese President Xi Jinping and his Communist Party to portray China as the world’s new humanitarian superpower. Two examples: In Spain, the Ministry of Health revealed that 640,000 coronavirus tests that it had purchased from a Chinese supplier were defective. In addition, a further million coronavirus tests delivered to Spain on March 30 by another Chinese manufacturer were also defective. The Czech news site iRozhlas reported that 300,000 coronavirus test kits delivered by China had an error rate of 80 percent. The Czech Ministry of Interior had paid $2.1 million for the kits.

  • DOJ: Deliberately Spreading COVID-19 to Be Prosecuted as Domestic Terrorism

    As panic and fear spread with the COVID-19 pandemic, stupid, or malicious, acts may soon be considered criminal offenses and subject to terrorism laws. DOJ has circulated a memo to law enforcement and federal prosecutors saying that deliberate acts to spread the coronavirus could be prosecuted under federal terrorism laws given that the virus is a biological agent.

  • Russia Using COVID-19 Disinformation, Conspiracy Theories to “Subvert the West”: Repot

    Russian President Vladimir Putin and his administration are using the coronavirus crisis to spread conspiracy theories in a bid to “subvert the West” and create a new world order, a new report has charges. The report says that Russia was propagating disinformation and conspiracy theories via social media accounts, fake news outlets, state-controlled media, pseudo-scientists and Russians living in the West.

  • UN Report Highlights Threat of Extreme Right-Wing Terrorism

    The UN Security Council Counter-Terrorism Committee Executive Directorate (CTED) has just issued a new report on the dangers posed by the rise of right-wing terrorism. The report cites experts who have identified extreme right-wing terrorism as a unique form of political violence with often fluid boundaries between hate crime and organized terrorism. It is a not a coherent or easily defined movement, but rather a shifting, complex and overlapping milieu of individuals, groups and movements (online and offline) espousing different but related ideologies, often linked by hatred and racism toward minorities, xenophobia, islamophobia or anti-Semitism.

  • Threats to Democracy Spread with the Virus, We Must Keep Both in Check

    As the coronavirus pandemic has spread, governments have responded predictably to the threat by agitating for increased authority. Melissa Hooper writes that the worst of these, the Hungarian proposal, was easily enacted into law on Tuesday, “setting a terrible precedent for other countries, in the West and around the world.” She adds: “Under the legislation, Hungary’s parliament will be disempowered in favor of rule by executive decree. The parliament now loses the ability to check the power of Viktor Orbán and his executive branch. Since the Fidesz government has hamstrung its court system, already limiting judicial oversight, this would remove the last obstacle to a dictatorial government. This is especially true since expanded executive power will be granted indefinitely: The bill has no sunset clause.”