• Combatting Russia’s Assault on Democracies: Lessons from Europe

    A 2018 report by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee says: “For years, Vladimir Putin’s government has engaged in a relentless assault to undermine democracy and the rule of law in Europe and the United States. Mr. Putin’s Kremlin employs an asymmetric arsenal that includes military invasions, cyberattacks, disinformation, support for fringe political groups, and the weaponization of energy resources, organized crime, and corruption.” For people pondering the potential effects of Russian interference in the 2020 elections here in the United States, it is worth understanding what other democracies are doing to confront the same problem and what lessons can be learned from their experiences.

  • Facebook Isn’t Responsible as Terrorist Platform, Court Says

    Facebook Inc. doesn’t have to face a lawsuit by victims of Hamas attacks and their relatives who claimed that the social network unlawfully assisted the terror group, a federal appeals court ruled. the lawsuit was among several around the U.S. testing whether victims of terrorist attacks and their families can hold social-media companies to account for allowing violent extremists to use their platforms to recruit followers. The terrorism victims attempted for the first time to argue that social-media companies could be held liable under the U.S. Anti-Terrorism Act.

  • Food Festival Shooter Promoted Obscure Social Darwinist Screed

    In an Instagram post made not long before he attacked a food festival in California on 28 July, Santiago Legan quoted the book Might is Right, and urged people to read it. The book, originally published in 1896, has had an enduring history on the fringes of American thought and ideology. The book’s most appreciative modern audience, however, may be white supremacists.  Though Might is Right is not itself a work designed to promote or advance white supremacy, it contains many passages full of racist and anti-Semitic vitriol.

     

  • State Election Offices Made for an Easy Target for Russian Hackers

    In the months before the 2016 presidential election, one U.S. state received a notification from a federally backed cybersecurity group, warning about suspicious cyber activity directed at its networks. The state IT officials did not share the alert with other state government leaders and as late at January 2018, the same officials reported nothing “irregular, inconsistent, or suspicious” took place before the vote. In fact, GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency, had scanned one of the state’s “election-related” domains, according to a new Senate report.

  • UN Warns Islamic State Leader Plotting Comeback from Iraq

    The Islamic State terror group’s self-declared caliphate may be dead, but its leaders are hanging on in Syria and Iraq, dreaming of the day when they can again direct attacks on targets around the world. The conclusion is part of a sobering assessment in a newly released quarterly United Nations report on IS which warns the epicenter for the terror group’s budding renaissance is Iraq, “where Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and most of the ISIL leadership are now based.”

  • The Kremlin Weaponized News: RT and Sputnik

    Russian government media outlets RT and Sputnik perform three functions on behalf of the Kremlin, its policies, and its preferences. The first is “damage control” function for the Russian state during incidents such as the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in the United Kingdom. The second is to project Russian strength and construct news agendas favorable to the Kremlin and its outlook. The third function is weakening Western democracies by discrediting democratic, free-market, liberal, and pluralist values.

  • Texas might spend up to $20 billion to protect Houston from hurricanes. Rice University says it can do it for a fraction of that.

    A government plan to guard the Houston-Galveston region from deadly storm surge could cost as much as $20 billion and isn’t expected to become reality for at least 15 years. Rice University says it has a plan that could be completed faster for a fraction of the cost.

  • 2020 Election Security Can’t Wait Till 2020

    In the wake of last week’s testimony by Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the detailed report released by the Senate Intelligence Committee, the press coverage has emphasized—understandably—the need to harden U.S. defenses against various forms of cyber interference that Russia—and now Iran, too—appear intent on carrying out in the 2020 election. While it’s true that 2020 election security is critical, it’s important to emphasize that protecting our elections can’t wait until 2020 is upon us. That’s because, if our foreign adversaries’ goal is (as the Senate Intelligence Committee report confirmed) to undermine American confidence in our own democracy, the opportunities to do so are already unfolding.

  • Insurance Black Boxes and the Surveillance State – How Free Are You, Really?

    Over the last few years there’s been a noticeable rise in the number of drivers opting to fit a “black box” to their cars in order to obtain cheaper insurance. The idea is that the boxes send location data to nearby satellites, allowing insurance companies to monitor how people are driving, offering discounts and even refunds to those deemed to be driving more safely. Certainly, the driver wouldn’t know any different, as they’d still drive with the same acute awareness of the rules of the road.

  • Americas’ Longest-Running Insurgency: Lessons for U.S. Longest-Running War

    In 2016, Colombia achieved a remarkable success by seemingly bringing to an end the Western Hemisphere’s longest-running insurgency. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) has been at war with government forces for more than fifty years. And yet here was a negotiated settlement by which two parties that had been fighting for generations agreed to lay down their arms—by which the guerrilla organization itself would be brought into the government’s formal power structures. The case raises important questions—not least for a U.S. government that watches the clock on its own counterinsurgency efforts in Afghanistan tick ever closer to two decades. How was this possible? And are there lessons that can be exported and applied to other intransigent conflicts, like Afghanistan?

  • Sounding the Alarm about Another Kind of 9/11

    Richard Clarke knows some things about clear and present dangers. As the first U.S. counterterrorism czar, he tried to alert important White House decision-makers before September 11 about the threat of a terrorist attack on U.S. soil, but those warnings were largely ignored; afterwards, he famously apologized publicly for the government’s failures. These days, Clarke is trying to get people to think hard about the next big attack—the cyber version—and all the ones that have already happened.

  • U.S. Election Infrastructure: Troubling Bipartisan Conclusions

    The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) released its first of several bipartisan reports about its own investigation into Russia’s 2016 election interference on Thursday. This one focused on Russian efforts against U.S. election infrastructure. The finding that dominated headlines was that Russia targeted election systems in all 50 states in 2016. This meant the Russian effort reached far deeper into the U.S. than previously understood by officials. What also caught people’s attention about the report was how heavily redacted it was. The report, with its worrying conclusions, provokes one overwhelming question: What can be done to stop this from happening again?

  • What the Mueller Investigation Was Always About

    In the partisan warfare that dominated last Wednesday’s hearings, we’ve forgotten the point: Our elections are under threat, and the president doesn’t much care. Robert Mueller was originally charged with investigating Russian efforts to influence the outcome of the 2016 election and that only secondarily was he tasked with figuring out whether the president had obstructed justice by impeding that investigation. The whole point of the Mueller investigation and report is that Russia hacked an election, that it is right now hacking the next election, and that this is a threat to national security and the long-standing American experiment in representative democracy.

  • Russian Twitter Trolls Stoke Anti-immigrant Lies Ahead of Canadian Election

    Russian troll activity on Twitter aimed at influencing public opinion has attracted a lot of attention in the United States and other western democracies. Canadians may feel it’s not an issue here. But a recent examination of Twitter data suggests there are reasons to be concerned as the country heads into a federal election.

  • Polarization versus Democracy

    When can we realistically expect ordinary people to check the authoritarian ambitions of elected politicians? An answer to this question is key to understanding the most prominent development in the dynamic of democratic survival since the end of the Cold War: the subversion of democracy by elected incumbents and its emergence as the most common form of democratic breakdown.