• “The Russians play hard”: Inside Russia’s attempt to hack 2018 -- and 2020

    So what exactly is Russia planning for the upcoming election? The correct question, a half dozen security experts and former and current government officials say, is what are they not planning? And there will be new tactics, too. Nick Bilton writes in Vanity Fair that more than one expert told him that Russia will try to go after actual voting booths in smaller, more contentious districts across the country. The world we live in so intertwined with technology that you could imagine Russian hackers disrupting how we even get to the polls on Election Day. Ride-sharing services could be hacked. We’ve already seen instances of hackers faking transit problems on mapping apps, like Waze, to send people in the wrong direction, or away from a certain street. Perhaps most terrifying of all, one former official told Bilton, are the possibilities arising from Russia’s alleged 2015 cyber-attack on Kiev’s power grid, which plunged the city into darkness.

  • How immigration court works

    Can the U.S. attorney general unilaterally overturn an immigration-court court case? Yes, because, as I teach my surprised law students, immigration judges are not part of the judicial branch. They are attorneys in the Department of Justice. That means normal assumptions about judicial independence and freedom from political influence do not apply in immigration proceedings.

  • Houston and Hurricane Harvey: The lessons

    Hurricane Harvey made landfall near Rockport, Texas on 25 August 2017 as a Category 4 storm. Over the next four days, Harvey dropped more than 40 inches of rain over eastern Texas, causing catastrophic flooding. The resulting floods inundated hundreds of thousands of homes, displaced more than 30,000 people and prompted more than 17,000 rescues. Total damage from the hurricane is estimated at $125 billion. Through extensive interviews, a new Post-Event Review Capability (PERC) study identifies lessons learned from the 2017 Houston floods and provides recommendations for enhancing flood resilience - before the next event occurs.

  • Israel deploys tracking system to fight incendiary balloons and kites

    Israel’s famed military prowess has come up against a decidedly low-tech adversary, the humble party balloon, and found itself thwarted. Over the past few weeks, the residents of the Gaza Strip have let loose a barrage of colorful kites with burning tails as well as festive balloons, sometimes condoms, with fuel-soaked strips of cloth. They land inside Israeli territory, often starting serious fires. Israel has now deployed a system to track balloons and kites carrying burning material across the border.

  • Twitter release reveals the Kremlin’s news impersonation game

    On 18 June, Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee released around 1,100 names of Twitter accounts linked to the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency (IRA), the Kremlin’s disinformation and propaganda outfit. The new release brings the total number of known IRA-linked Twitter accounts to around 3,800. Analysis of the pages reveals that a major pillar of the Kremlin’s social media influence campaigns revolves around the impersonation of local news sources in order to gain trust among audiences and insert narratives into mainstream public discourse. This strategy of camouflaging disinformation channels as seemingly credible sources is even more prevalent in the IRA’s domestic efforts.

  • Weak response to Russian meddling emboldened Moscow, official says

    Russia was emboldened by the lack of a decisive response by President Barack Obama’s administration during the 2016 presidential election and will seek to interfere in future elections, a former top U.S. official said. Victoria Nuland, whose portfolio at the State Department made her a leading Russia official under Obama, made the comments 20 June during a hearing at the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is conducting a sweeping investigation of Russian actions in the United States.

  • German police find large quantities of castor seeds in bioweapon suspect’s apartment

    German police investigators have found more than 3,000 castor bean seeds in the Cologne apartment of a 29-year old Tunisian, who was arrested last week for making a biological weapon. The quantity of castor seeds was much larger than initially thought. Castor beans are used in making the toxin ricin. The suspect, who is married to a German woman, had been under police surveillance for contacts with Islamist extremists.

  • A first: Israeli air strike kills dozens of pro-Assad Iraqi fighters in Syria

    Israel has not commented on background-only briefing by a senior U.S. official, who said that Israeli air-strike early Monday morning killed 52 Assad regime-allied troops eastern Syria. What is notable about the attack is its location — the town of al Hari in Deir Ezzor, near the border with Iraq, hundreds of miles from Israel – and the fact that among those killed were 22 members of Kata’ib Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed Iraqi Shia militia.

  • What's happening at the border? Here's what we know about immigrant children being separated from their families

    The attention of the nation has turned to Texas and its border with Mexico after the Trump administration enacted the “zero tolerance” policy, resulting, so far, in about 2,000 children being separated from their parents at the border. Here’s what we know.

  • Trump and Sessions can end immigrant family separations without Congress’ help

    Only Congress can provide the comprehensive immigration reform that would address the fundamental problems plaguing the American immigration system, including the statuses of undocumented immigrants already living in the U.S. However, current immigration laws give the executive branch considerable discretion in deciding which immigrants to detain and release from custody. President Donald Trump has at his disposal a variety of alternatives – other than separating families – that would promote his stated goal of deterring migration from Central America. Those alternatives could avoid violating international human rights norms.

  • Synthetic biology could be misused to create new weapons

    Synthetic biology expands the possibilities for creating new weapons — including making existing bacteria and viruses more harmful — while decreasing the time required to engineer such organisms, concludes a new report by the National Academies of Sciences. Although some malicious applications of synthetic biology may not seem plausible right now, they could become achievable with future advances.

  • Modernization of nuclear arsenals continues

    A new report finds that all the nuclear weapon-possessing states are developing new nuclear weapon systems and modernizing their existing systems. Nine states—the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea—possess approximately 14,465 nuclear weapons. This marked a decrease from the approximately 14,935 nuclear weapons these states were estimated to possess at the beginning of 2017.

  • Israel arrests former energy minister on charges of spying for Iran

    Israel’s former energy minister has been arrested and accused of spying for Iran. The former minister served three years in jail for trying to smuggle extasy pills into Israel, and then tried his hands in various business ventures in West Africa, where he was recruited by Iran’s intelligence.

  • Potential threat to speech privacy via smartphone motion sensors

    Could smartphone motion sensors be used by cybercriminals to record speech? It is a question that many academic and industry researchers are working to answer in order to ward off this kind of malicious use before it happens. Recent studies suggest security flaws and sensitivities to low-frequency audio signals, such as human speech, in accelerometers and gyroscopes could allow cybercriminals to collect confidential information such as credit card numbers and Social Security numbers as users speak into or near a mobile device.

  • Bank withheld $1.6 million from top bump stock maker after Las Vegas shooting

    In a lawsuit, Slide Fire Solutions, the inventor and manufacturer of the bump stock, accuses Merrick Bank of holding more than $1.6 million of the company’s money “hostage.” The financial institution says it had to hedge its risk in light of threats to Slide Fire’s business arising from the Las Vegas shooting.