• Is cutting Central American aid going to help stop the flow of migrants?

    The United States is now stepping up its pressure on the governments of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras to take steps to curtail the migration of their own citizens by constricting U.S. aid. About $370 million in aid money for the three countries included in the 2018 budget will be spent on other projects, the State Department said on 17 June. Like many experts, I argue that slashing aid is counterproductive because foreign assistance can address the root causes of migration, such as violence and poverty.

  • Mass surveillance is coming to a city near you

    The tech entrepreneur Ross McNutt wants to spend three years recording outdoor human movements in a major U.S. city, KMOX news radio reports. Conor Friedersdorf writes in The Atlantic that if that sounds too dystopian to be real, you’re behind the times. McNutt, who runs Persistent Surveillance Systems, was inspired by his stint in the Air Force tracking Iraqi insurgents. He tested mass-surveillance technology over Compton, California, in 2012. In 2016, the company flew over Baltimore, feeding information to police for months (without telling city leaders or residents) while demonstrating how the technology works to the FBI and Secret Service.

  • Several German pro-immigration politicians receive death threats

    As the investigation of the killing of pro-immigration politician Walter Lübcke intensifies, Cologne’s mayor and several other German politicians who support generous refugee admission policies have had their lives threatened. Two of these politicians, in 2017, have already been attacked by knife-wielding far-right extremists.

  • The danger of labeling the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization

    President Donald Trump announced in April that he supported designating the Muslim Brotherhood, a prominent international Islamist movement, as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO). This decision has proven to be highly controversial due to the lack of legal justification for the designation, the repercussions for U.S. regional interests, and the absence of any strategic gains from adopting such a policy. Joe Boueiz writes in the National Interest that experts, pointing to the integral role of the Muslim Brotherhood in the countries that they operate in, worry that the FTO designation could elicit a strong anti-American backlash and prompt those who rely on the Brotherhood’s social services to view America as an enemy.

  • How deeply has Germany’s murderous far right penetrated the security forces?

    On June 2, Walter Lübcke was found dead in his garden with a bullet wound in the head. In his home town of Kassel, in the heart of Germany, the affable 65-year-old politician was a well-known member of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s center right party who had welcomed immigrants when she opened the country’s doors to refugees in 2015—and who had weathered a storm of hatred on social media as a result. Josephine Huetlin writes in the Daily Beast that at first, police insisted there was no political connection to the murder, and several investigators dismissed the possibility the killer came from the far right. But this week they arrested a suspect with neo-Nazi associations and a history of racist crimes. Now, the federal prosecutor’s office has taken over the case, which means it will be treated as an act of extremism and, in effect, of terrorism.

  • Terrorist sympathizer who placed bombs in South Carolina roadways sentenced

    A man and his daughter were driving down a rural highway in Anderson County, South Carolina, on 30 January 2018, when they noticed something odd—a glowing wicker basket in the middle of the road. On 4 and 15 February, the bomber placed other bomb-like devices in the area. Two more devices were found in the subsequent days. The FBI’s investigative and scientific teams cracked the case, and in February 2019 the culprit was sentenced to thirty years in prison.

  • Brain scans reveal cognitive triggers for extremist violence

    Scanning the brains of men who support a terror organization associated with Al Qaeda reveals insights into the psychology of radicalization and terrorist violence. Arguments and attempts at persuasion that rely on rational and seemingly reasonable attempts to pull people away also will have limited impact because the part of their brain associated with deliberative reasoning has deactivated.

  • Lawmakers raise alarm over CBP’s use of facial recognition tech on American citizens

    Lawmakers last week sent a letter to acting DHS secretary, sounding the alarm over reports that U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is using facial recognition technology to scan American citizens — raising concerns over privacy and potential misuse of the American people’s biometric data.

  • The challenges of Deepfakes to national security

    Last Thursday, 13 June 2019, Clint Watts testified before the House Intelligence Committee of the growing dangers of Deepfakes – that is, false audio and video content. Deepfakes grow in sophistication each day and their dissemination via social media platforms is far and wide. Watts said: “I’d estimate Russia, as an enduring purveyor of disinformation, is and will continue to pursue the acquisition of synthetic media capabilities and employ the outputs against its adversaries around the world. I suspect they’ll be joined and outpaced potentially by China.” He added: “These two countries along with other authoritarian adversaries and their proxies will likely use Deepfakes as part of disinformation campaigns seeking to 1) discredit domestic dissidents and foreign detractors, 2) incite fear and promote conflict inside Western-style democracies, and 3) distort the reality of American audiences and the audiences of America’s allies.”

  • Deepfake myths: Common misconceptions about synthetic media

    There is finally some momentum to “do something” about deepfakes, but crucial misconceptions about deepfakes and their effect on our society may complicate efforts to develop a strategic approach to mitigating their negative impacts.

  • European elections suggest US shouldn’t be complacent in 202

    In many ways, the European Parliament elections in late May were calmer than expected. Cyber aggression and disinformation operations seem to not have been as dramatic as in 2016, when Russian hackers and disinformation campaigns targeted elections in the U.S., France and elsewhere around the world. However, there is no reason to be content. The dangers remain real. For one thing, the target societies might have internalized the cleavages and chaos from information operations or self-sabotaged with divisive political rhetoric. As a reaction, Russia may have scaled back its efforts, seeing an opportunity to benefit from lying low.

  • “Preventing and countering violent extremism” can work

    “Welcome back to your motherland!” was heard recently in Kazakhstan, which has repatriatedsome 500 men, women and children who had been living in the so-called Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. Kazakhstan isn’t alone. Countries across Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and Central and Southeast Asia, and beyond, are grapplingwith whether to accept the thousandsof people who left home to join the Islamic State. Stevan Weine and Eric Rosand write in Just Security that Kazakhstan, however, is one of only a handful of countriesthat have accepted their citizens being held by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in northeast Syria or by the Iraqi government. In fact, most have so far refused to repatriate their citizens (including children born in the conflict zone). The reasonsinclude security concerns and pushback from nervous publics who don’t want them back in their communities.

  • Hackback is back: Assessing the Active Cyber Defense Certainty Act

    The “hackback” debate has been with us for many years. It boils down to this: Private sector victims of hacking in some instances might wish to engage in self-defense outside their own networks (that is, doing some hacking of their own in order to terminate an attack, identify the attacker, destroy stolen data, etc.) but for the prospect that they then would face criminal (and possibly civil) liability under 18 USC 1030 (the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, or CFAA).  Robert Chesney writes in Lawfare that a tricky question of policy therefore arises: Should the CFAA be pruned to facilitate hackback under certain conditions?  On one hand, this might produce significant benefits in terms of reducing harm to victims and deterring some intrusions. On the other hand, risks involving mistaken attribution, unintended collateral harms and dangerous escalation abound. It’s small wonder the hackback topic has spawned so much interesting debate (see here and here for examples).

  • Domestic Islamist extremism in the U.S.: 2018-2019

    While white supremacists and other right-wing extremists are responsible for most extremist-related domestic murders committed in the past decade, terrorism and violence inspired by Islamist extremism continues to pose a serious threat to Americans. ISIS’s violent ideology continues to resonate with and radicalize U.S. citizens, but domestic Islamist extremists are increasingly seeking inspiration from other foreign terror organizations such as Al Qaeda. In 2018, 13 individuals were arrested for domestic criminal activity motivated by Islamist extremism — all of them were lawfully in the United States at the time of their arrest. The number of individuals arrested for domestic Islamist extremist criminal activity decreased from 2017 to 2018 by approximately 40 percent.

  • NY State: Religious grounds no longer allowed to exempt children from vaccination

    New York is the latest state where parents can no longer refuse to vaccinate children on religious grounds. Both houses of the New York State Assembly passed the measure Thursday and Governor Andrew Cuomo signed it immediately.