• 2. A New Era of Terrorism

    Five years ago, when U.S. federal and state law enforcement agencies were asked to identify the most serious violent extremist threats they faced in their respective jurisdictions, they all cited far-right, anti-government extremists. Following far-right, white nationalist extremists on the list of threats the United States was facing, these law enforcement practitioners placed Salafi-Jihadi-inspired extremist violence; radical environmentalists; and racist, violent extremism. Law enforcement agencies in Western Europe reached similar conclusions.

  • 3. The Emergence of Lone-Wolf Terrorism

    Recent years saw the emergence of different foreign and now domestic extremist movements — whether motivated by Jihadi preaching or white nationalism — which have adopted and actively advocated via social media a strategy which encourages “lone wolves” to engage in individual acts of violence against a large number of designated enemies.

  • 4. Chinese Firms Secretly Own Leading VPNs

    China’s efforts to implement its persistent surveillance approach outside its borders go beyond helping Huawei to make the company’s 5G technology more competitive, and thus more appealing, to Western and non-Western countries. A recent study found that almost a third (30 percent) of the world’s top virtual private network (VPN) providers are secretly owned by six Chinese companies.

  • 7. Putin’s Russia Punching above Its Weight

    In 2014, President Barack Obama said that Russia was a “regional power” capable only of threatening its neighbors “not out of strength but out of weakness.” Yet Russia, with an economy smaller that the economy of Italy, has been able to play a role on the international stage – and in the politics of the United States and more than twenty other countries — out of proportion to its economy and other important metrics.

  • 8. Russia’s Modern-Day SMERSH

    SMERSH, the counterintelligence unit created by Joseph Stalin in 1943 to conduct sabotage and assassinations behind German lines, was disbanded in 1946, with its operatives and missions moved to the NKVD (later, the KGB). It was revived in three James Bond books as 007’s main nemesis. It now appears that SMERSH, or an organization with similar missions and methods, has been reconstituted within the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence organization. Its name is Unit 29155, and its mission is to conduct assassinations and sabotage in Western European countries.

  • 9. Iran’s Growing Middle East Sway

    The year which ends today saw growing tensions between Iran and the United States. The United States withdrew from the 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran, but the administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign, while causing some economic difficulties inside Iran, has failed to dissuade Iran from pursuing its two related strategic goals: Achieve regional hegemony in the Middle East, and shorten the nuclear weapons break-out time, that is, the time it would take Iran to build a functioning nuclear weapon once a decision to do so has been made.

  • 10. North Korea: The U.S. Top Security Threat

    Developments on the Korean peninsula show that the Trump administration’s policy toward North Korea has been a failure, and that the risk North Korea poses to the United States, and to U.S. allies in the region, has only increased. The administration has portrayed its North Korea policy as its signature initiative, but now bills North Korea as the U.S. top security threat.

  • How a Poisoning in Bulgaria Exposed Russian Assassins in Europe

    Western security and intelligence officials say the attempted 2015 poisonings in Sofia of a Bulgarian arms dealer was a critical clue that helped expose a campaign by the Kremlin and its sprawling web of intelligence operatives to eliminate Russia’s enemies abroad and destabilize the West.

  • The Chinese Threat to U.S. Research Institutions Is Real

    The Chinese government is pursuing a comprehensive, well-organized, and well-funded strategy to exploit the open and collaborative research environment in the United States to advance their economic and military expansion at our expense. Josh Rogin writes that for too long, U.S. research institutions have been asleep to Beijing’s efforts.

  • State Officials Are Unhappy with Rollout of Election Security Framework

    The federal government has developed a new threat-notification framework, which is meant to give U.S. officials a consistent process for alerting state personnel, the private sector, Congress, and the public of foreign attempts to interfere in U.S. politics through influence operations or cyberactivity. Sean Lyngaas writes that “State officials were only given a generic, one-page summary of the document, which is still restricted to the federal government” and quotes the secretary of state of West Virginia, who said that the document “was “either done without [states’] input or our input was ignored.”

  • Military Cyber Operations: The New NDAA Tailors the 48-Hour Notification Requirement

    Congress will soon enact the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2020 (NDAA fiscal 2020), which includes a provision that will fine-tune the range of military cyberoperations subject to the 48-hour notification requirement associated with “sensitive military cyber operations.”

  • ISIS Is Experimenting with This New Blockchain Messaging App

    The Islamic State has discovered blockchain. The technology which powers cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and ethereum promises to revolutionize almost all facets of society, from payment processing to online voting. David Gilbert writes that now ISIS is actively testing a blockchain-based messaging app that could provide everything it needs to thrive: secure, anonymous communication, a tamper-proof repository for beheading videos and other ISIS propaganda, and perhaps most ominously, the ability to transfer cryptocurrency anywhere in the world.

  • Cambridge Five Spies Burgess and Maclean Lauded by Russia as Heroes of Anti-Fascism

    The Russian intelligence community on Friday honored two of the notorious Cambridge Five spy ring, whose members spied for the Soviet Union from the late 1930s to the early 1950s. The Cambridge Five also included Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt, and John Cairncross. The five were attracted by communism, and the Soviet Union, as young Cambridge University students in the early 1930s, after coming to believe that British – and, more generally, Western — passivity in the face of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler was aiding in the growth and spread of fascism. Maclean and Burgess defected to the Soviet Union in 1951, and for three years lived in the town of Samara on the Volga. On Friday, a plaque bearing the two Britons’ names was unveiled on the wall of the apartment where the two lived until returning to Moscow in 1955.

  • Blood and Brexit

    The Troubles is the name given to the bloody war between Nationalists and Unionists in Northern Ireland, a war which began in the late 1960s and ended with the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. In a tiny country of a million and a half people, over three and a half thousand were killed in the Troubles. Almost fifty thousand were seriously injured. Nick Laird, a Northern Irish novelist and poet who experienced the inter-communal violence as a teenager, writes that unless care is taken, one of the consequences of Brexit might be the resumption of violence.

  • In Win for Harvey Victims, Federal Judge Finds Government Liable for Reservoir Flooding

    During Hurricane Harvey, thousands of properties behind two federally owned reservoirs flooded. On Tuesday, the United States Court of Federal Claims ruled that the government was liable for the flooding and that property owners are eligible for damages.