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Mass Shootings: Trends, Effective Prevention, Policy Recommendations
In the last decade, thousands have been killed or injured as a result of mass violence in the United States. Such acts take many forms, including family massacres, terrorist attacks, shootings, and gang violence. Yet it is indiscriminate mass public shootings, often directed at strangers, that has generated the most public alarm. Now, 41 scholars have contributed 16 articles on the topic to a special issue of Criminology & Public Policy.
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U.S.: Chinese Government Hackers Behind Equifax Breach
Chinse government hackers stole the personal information of nearly 150 million Americans in 2017, when they successfully hacked Equifax. China has been using its vast network of intelligence agencies to conduct a sustained campaign aiming to collect data on the citizens of the United States and other countries, and systematically steal scientific research and innovation, in order to weaken Western economies and accelerate China’s march toward global scientific and economic hegemony.
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Senate Intel: Obama Admin “Frozen by ‘Paralysis of Analysis’” in Its Response to Russian Election Interference
Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on Thursday released the third volume in the Committee’s bipartisan investigation into Russian election interference. The report examines the Obama administration’s reaction to initial reports of election interference and the steps officials took or did not take to deter Russia’s activities. The 2016 Russian interference in the elections on behalf of Donald Trump was unprecedented in the history of the United States, but “Frozen by ‘paralysis of analysis,’ hamstrung by constraints both real and perceived, Obama officials debated courses of action without truly taking one,” said Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-North Carolina).
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Bioweapons, Secret Labs, and the CIA: Pro-Kremlin Actors Blame the U.S. for Coronavirus Outbreak
The Russia (earlier: Soviet) practice of spreading disinformation about public health threats is nothing new. During the Cold War, for example, a Soviet disinformation campaign blamed the United States for the AIDS virus. While epidemiologists work to identify the exact source of the Wuhan2019-nCov outbreak, pro-Kremlin actors are already blaming the United States for supposedly using bioweapons to disseminate the virus.
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The 6 Countries in Trump’s New Travel Ban Pose Little Threat to U.S. National Security
Over the past two decades, how many people have been killed in the U.S. by extremists from the six countries on the Trump administration’s new travel ban list? The answer is zero, according to data from Department of Justice. The same is true for the original travel bans imposed in 2017. There were, and still are, zero fatalities in the United States caused by extremists from the countries on those lists, too.
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Russia Unleashes New Weapons in Its “Cyber Attack Testing Ground”: Report
“Ukraine is, by and large, a Russian cyberattack testing ground,” Vitali Kremez told Forbes’s Zak Doffman. “One of the inherent cyber dangers with Russia, China, Iran and North Korea, but particularly with Russia, is the potential for state actors to sharpen their tools and techniques on neighboring countries,” Doffman writes. And Russia “doesn’t have Ukraine in its sights with this costly approach, it is looking much further west.”
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Antiterrorism Policy in Europe May Have Unintended Negative consequences
The present policy adopted by most European countries assumes that terrorism is not only a political or criminality problem, but also a societal problem that calls for societal solutions. That is why social workers, healthcare professionals and teachers are involved. “But the way these professional groups are involved in current terrorism policy can have negative consequences for fundamental human rights, such as privacy, freedom of religion and freedom of expression,” says one expert.
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Islamic State Poised for Comeback, U.S. Defense Officials Report
U.S. defense and intelligence officials say the special forces operation that killed former Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in Syria last October has done little to hinder the terror group. Instead, the Defense Intelligence Agency warns the organization’s command and control structure, as well as many of its clandestine networks remain intact, and recent turmoil in the region due to Turkey’s incursion into northeastern Syria has played to its advantage.
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The Iraq War Has Cost the U.S. Nearly $2 Trillion
Even if the U.S. administration decided to leave — or was evicted from — Iraq immediately, the bill of war to the U.S. to date would be an estimated $1,922 billion in current dollars. This figure includes not only funding appropriated to the Pentagon explicitly for the war, but spending on Iraq by the State Department, the care of Iraq War veterans and interest on debt incurred to fund 16 years of U.S. military involvement in the country.
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Turkey Launches Attacks against Syria, Killing 35 Syrian Soldiers
Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Monday said that Turkish airstrikes in northwest Syria killed up to thirty-five Syrian soldiers. The Turkish strikes came in retaliation for airstrikes conducted by the Assad regime against Turkish troops deployed inside Syria in the Idlib province. The Assad regime has agreed to Turkish military operations on Syrian soil against the Syrian Kurds, but it is opposed to Turkey’s plan to settle one million Syrian Sunni refugees, now in tent cities in Turkey, in Idlib Province.
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London's Latest Terror Attack Shows Harsher Punishment Is Needed
On Sunday, 20-year old Sudesh Amman, who had been released from prison on 22 January after being jailed for terror-related offense, stabbed two people in a south London store before being shot and killed by the police. Amman served less than half his three-year, four-month sentence for terrorism offenses. The security services had concerns about his behavior, including language that suggested he continued to hold extremist views, but he had to be released under current laws. Calls are growing for changing these laws.
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Britain Knows It’s Selling Out Its National Security to Huawei
Allowing Chinese telecom company Huawei access to a country’s 5G infrastructure makes that country vulnerable to espionage, sabotage, and blackmail. Yet, last Tuesday, in defiance of sustained U.S. pressure, Britain said it would allow Huawei to be involved in rolling out the U.K. 5G mobile network. “Upon closer inspection, the British government’s reasoning, and the basic assumptions underlying it, are eerily lightweight and sometimes openly self-contradictory.” Thorsten Benner writes. “London’s justification for cooperating with the Chinese telecommunications company is riddled with obvious contradictions.”
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Terrorists and Technological Innovation
On 9 October 2019, a terrorist motivated by anti-Semitic beliefs descended on a synagogue in Halle, Germany, where people were observing the Yom Kippur holiday. Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, Colin P. Clarke, and Matt Shear write that Baillet’s use of steel, wood and 3-D-printed plastic components to manufacture three weapons is an example of how violent nonstate actors (VNSAs) adopt new technologies. “As new technologies proliferate, there will invariably be individuals trying to figure out how to use these technologies to kill,” they write.
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Calls for Review of U.K. Terrorist Sentencing following London Attack
The London police shot and killed a terrorist who stabbed two people in a store in south London store. The perpetrator was wearing a fake suicide vest. The attacker, identified as 20-year old Sudesh Amman, had been under surveillance by the British counterterrorism unit, and was from prison at the end of January after serving only half of a 3-year and four-month prison sentence for the “possession and distribution of extremist material.”
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Across the U.S., States Are Bracing for More Climate-Related Disasters
Officials in states across the United States are calling for huge investments to mitigate the effects of wildfires, flooding, hurricanes, droughts, and other natural disasters made more devastating and frequent by climate change. Alex Brown writes that “Even states whose leaders don’t publicly acknowledge the existence of climate change, such as Texas and South Carolina, have applied for federal dollars citing ‘changing coastal conditions’ or ‘unpredictability’.”
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More headlines
The long view
Kinetic Operations Bring Authoritarian Violence to Democratic Streets
Foreign interference in democracies has a multifaceted toolkit. In addition to information manipulation, the tactical tools authoritarian actors use to undermine democracy include cyber operations, economic coercion, malign finance, and civil society subversion.
Patriots’ Day: How Far-Right Groups Hijack History and Patriotic Symbols to Advance Their Cause, According to an Expert on Extremism
Extremist groups have attempted to change the meaning of freedom and liberty embedded in Patriots’ Day — a commemoration of the battles of Lexington and Concord – to serve their far-right rhetoric, recruitment, and radicalization. Understanding how patriotic symbols can be exploited offers important insights into how historical narratives may be manipulated, potentially leading to harmful consequences in American society.
Trump Aims to Shut Down State Climate Policies
President Donald Trump has launched an all-out legal attack on states’ authority to set climate change policy. Climate-focused state leaders say his administration has no legal basis to unravel their efforts.
Vaccine Integrity Project Says New FDA Rules on COVID-19 Vaccines Show Lack of Consensus, Clarity
Sidestepping both the FDA’s own Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee and the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), two Trump-appointed FDA leaders penned an opinion piece in the New England Journal of Medicine to announce new, more restrictive, COVID-19 vaccine recommendations. Critics say that not seeking broad input into the new policy, which would help FDA to understand its implications, feasibility, and the potential for unintended consequences, amounts to policy by proclamation.
Twenty-One Things That Are True in Los Angeles
To understand the dangers inherent in deploying the California National Guard – over the strenuous objections of the California governor – and active-duty Marines to deal with anti-ICE protesters, we should remind ourselves of a few elementary truths, writes Benjamin Wittes. Among these truths: “Not all lawful exercises of authority are wise, prudent, or smart”; “Not all crimes require a federal response”; “Avoiding tragic and unnecessary confrontations is generally desirable”; and “It is thus unwise, imprudent, and stupid to take actions for performative reasons that one might reasonably anticipate would increase the risks of such confrontations.”
Luigi Mangione and the Making of a ‘Terrorist’
Discretion is crucial to the American tradition of criminal law, Jacob Ware and Ania Zolyniak write, noting that “lawmakers enact broader statutes to empower prosecutors to pursue justice while entrusting that they will stay within the confines of their authority and screen out the inevitable “absurd” cases that may arise.” Discretion is also vital to maintaining the legitimacy of the legal system. In the prosecution’s case against Luigi Mangione, they charge, “That discretion was abused.”