• Iran Warns U.S. of “Firm Response” over Interference against Venezuela-Bound Fuel Tankers

    Iran has warned the United States against conducting “piracy” in the Caribbean as five Iranian tankers laden with fuel sail toward Venezuela. The tankers’ voyage comes as a senior U.S. official told Reuters on May 14 that the United States was considering what action it could take in response to Iran’s shipment of fuel to crisis-stricken Venezuela.

  • Germany: Revised Domestic Surveillance Bill Submitted to Bundestag

    A draft law to reform Germany’s BfV domestic intelligence agency is to be re-submitted to parliament after long debate. It will allow German domestic intelligence and law enforcement to conduct electronic surveillance of telephone calls and SMS text services, including encrypted “chats” via services such as WhatsApp and Telegram, but will  not allow the use of cyber “Trojan” trawling tools.

  • Governments Shouldn’t Use “Centralized” Proximity Tracking Technology

    By Bennett Cyphers and Gennie Gebhart

    Companies and governments across the world are building and deploying a dizzying number of systems and apps to fight COVID-19. Many groups have converged on using Bluetooth-assisted proximity tracking for the purpose of exposure notification. Even so, there are many ways to approach the problem, and dozens of proposals have emerged. One way to categorize them is based on how much trust each proposal places in a central authority.

  • Some Synthetic Biology May Not be Covered by the Biological Weapons Convention

    The study of viruses once challenged the world’s notion of what is “biological,” and for a time it was not clear whether viruses were regulated by the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC). Durward Johnson and James Kraska write that “SynBio and its convergence with emerging technologies may create weapons not currently banned by universal disarmament obligations or customary international law, and this legal gap raises the prospect of weaponization of nonbiological threat agents tailor-made to create targeted effects. These tactical biotechnological capabilities could have potentially strategic consequences and yet may fall outside the existing regime.”

  • Crisis Exposes How America Has Hollowed Out Its Government

    The government’s halting response to the coronavirus pandemic represents the culmination of chronic structural weaknesses, years of underinvestment and political rhetoric that has undermined the public trust — conditions compounded by President Trump’s open hostility to a federal bureaucracy that has been called upon to manage the crisis. Dam Balz writes that “The nation is reaping the effects of decades of denigration of government and also from a steady squeeze on the resources needed to shore up the domestic parts of the executive branch.”

  • Cold War Nuclear Tests Changed U.K. Rainfall

    Nuclear bomb tests during the Cold War may have changed rainfall patterns thousands of miles from the detonation sites, new research has revealed. Scientists have researched how the electric charge released by radiation from the test detonations, carried out predominantly by the U.S. and Soviet Union in the 1950s and 1960s, affected rainclouds at the time.

  • The Most Remarkable Part of Rick Bright's Testimony

    The most remarkable part of Rick Bright’s testimony: His claims about the government’s lack of COVID-19 preparedness went largely uncontested, even by the president’s allies. Russell Berman writes in The Atlantic that it was a single, salty sentence that first made Rick Bright realize a pandemic crisis was coming: “We’re in deep shit.” Those four words, punctuated by the profanity, also neatly summarize Bright’s stark message to Congress over the course of his four-hour testimony: The United States dropped the ball early in the pandemic, and it remains woefully unprepared for the painful months to come. “Lives were endangered,” he said, “and I believe lives were lost.” Without a significantly improved federal response, Bright told lawmakers, “2020 could be the darkest winter in modern history.”

  • COVID Is Ushering in a Surveillance State That May Never Be Dismantled

    Is the “new normal” to be a surveillance society, with tracing apps and facial recognition health passports? Philip Johnston writes in The Telegraph that the British government insists not; but if we are hit by a second wave of COVID-19, the temptation to extend the monitoring will be hard to resist.

  • COVID-19 and Terrorism: Assessing the Short and Long-Term Impacts

    A new report reveals how the COVID-19 pandemic is already having a significant impact on terrorism around the world. “One genuine concern is that COVID-19 may lead to a resurgence in interest among terrorists for using chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons,” says one expert. “While serious obstacles certainly remain, the huge impact of COVID-19 may re-ignite some interest in biological weapons.”

  • Data on Islamic State Attacks Could be Masking Growing Problem, Some Fear

    By Jeff Seldin

    Across Iraq and Syria there is a growing sense of unease that when it comes to the Islamic State terror group, data showing the jihadist force on its heels should not be trusted. While the U.S.-led military coalition argues Islamic State is a shadow of its former self, some officials with U.S. partner forces argue the terror group has actually become more powerful and more dangerous.

  • Germany Has “Hard Evidence” of Russian Cyberattack on Parliament

    German Chancellor Angela Merkel says there is “hard evidence” of the involvement of “Russian forces” in a 2015 cyberattack on the German parliament in which documents from her own parliamentary office were reportedly stolen. Last week that federal prosecutors in Germany had issued an arrest warrant for a suspected officer with Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency.

  • Foreign countries’ Efforts to Influence U.S. Public's Understanding of COVID-19

    The ongoing worldwide coronavirus pandemic hasn’t been immune to the problem of rampant disinformation—intentionally misleading information or propaganda. The European External Action Service of the European Union recently stated that “despite their potentially grave impact on public health, official and state-backed sources from various governments, including Russia and—to a lesser extent—China, have continued to widely target conspiracy narratives and disinformation both at public audiences in the EU and the wider neighborhood.” Thomas Rid, author of Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare, discuss how disinformation has impacted the COVID-19 pandemic.

  • Anti-Semitic Incidents in U.S. Hit All-Time High in 2019

    The American Jewish community experienced the highest level of anti-Semitic incidents last year since tracking began in 1979, with more than 2,100 acts of assault, vandalism and harassment reported across the United States. The record number of incidents came as the Jewish community grappled with violent and lethal anti-Semitic attacks against communities in Poway, Jersey City and Monsey, and a spree of violent assaults in Brooklyn.

  • State Actions Played Lesser Role in COVID-19 Economic Damage

    Actions by state governments to try to limit the spread of COVID-19 played only a secondary role in the historic spike in U.S. unemployment in March, according to new research. Ohio State University says that while state actions to close schools were linked to an increase in unemployment, these effects were dwarfed by the larger national and international impact of the pandemic, according to researchers at the Ohio State University and Indiana University. Hispanics, young adults (aged 20-24), those without a college education and those with four or more children saw the steepest job losses. In two separate studies – here and here — the researchers took a broad look at the very early impact of the pandemic on jobs in the United States.

  • U.S. to Accuse China of Hacking COVID-19 Vaccine Research

    By Masood Farivar

    For months, U.S. officials have been warning about a spike in cyberattacks during the coronavirus pandemic, but they’ve stopped short of pointing fingers at any one country. Now, as the all-out global race for a coronavirus vaccine accelerates and hackers home in on related scientific research, U.S. officials are preparing to single out a long-standing cyber adversary: China.