• The Nuclear Arms Race’s Legacy at Home: Toxic Contamination, Staggering Cleanup Costs and a Culture of Government Secrecy

    The Manhattan Project spawned a trinity of interconnected legacies. Among other things, it led to widespread public health and environmental damage from nuclear weapons production and testing. And it generated a culture of governmental secrecy with troubling political consequences.

  • Nuclear War Would Be More Devastating for Earth’s Climate Than Cold War Predictions – Even with Fewer Weapons

    A limited nuclear war between India and Pakistan could kill 130 million people and deprive a further 2.5 billion of food for at least two years. A global nuclear war including the US, Europe, and China could result in 360 million people dead and condemn nearly 5.3 billion people to starvation in the two years following the exchange.

  • New Cipher System Protects Computers Against Spy Programs

    Researchers have achieved a breakthrough in computer security with the development of a new and highly efficient cipher for cache randomization. The innovative cipher addresses the threat of cache side-channel attacks, offering enhanced security and exceptional performance.

  • NSF Renews Cybersecurity Workforce Development Projects

    The U.S. National Science Foundation CyberCorps Scholarship for Service program is renewing funding for seven academic institutions, providing more than $24 million over the next four years. For over 20 years, the CyberCorps SFS program has played an important critical role in developing the U.S. cybersecurity workforce.

  • Crashed UFOs? Non-Human “Biologics”? Professor Asks: Where’s the Evidence?

    Congressional testimony this week about reverse engineering from crashed UFOs and the recovery of non-human “biologics” sounds like science fiction. And that’s the realm in which it will remain unless scientific and other hard evidence enters the picture, says an expert.

  • New National Cyber Workforce and Education Strategy

    Hundreds of thousands of cyber jobs in government and the private sector are vacant, and the administration says that filling them is a national security imperative. Today, the administration unveiled its ambitious National Cyber Workforce and Education  Strategy (NCWES) which aims at addressing both short-term needs and long-terms requirements.

  • De-Risking Authoritarian AI

    You may not be interested in artificial intelligence, but it is interested in you. AI-enabled systems make many invisible decisions affecting our health, safety and wealth. They shape what we see, think, feel and choose, they calculate our access to financial benefits as well as our transgressions. In a technology-enabled world, opportunities for remote, large-scale foreign interference, espionage and sabotage —via internet and software updates—exist at a ‘scale and reach that is unprecedented’.

  • Regulate National Security AI Like Covert Action

    Congress is trying to roll up its sleeves and get to work on artificial intelligence (AI) regulation. Ashley Deeks writes that only a few of these proposed provisions, however, implicate national security-related AI, and none create any kind of framework regulation for such tools. She proposes crafting a law similar to the War Powers Act to govern U.S. intelligence and military agencies use of AI tools.

  • Oppenheimer and the Pursuit of Nuclear Disarmament

    Stanford scholar and political scientist Scott Sagan talks about what the film “Oppenheimer” got right – and missed – about creating the world’s first atomic bomb: the politics of nuclear proliferation, Oppenheimer’s attempts after World War II to constrain the new military technology, and the frightening role nuclear weapons play today. “I think there’s a broader tragedy that came out less clearly: the political tragedy of the nuclear arms race,” he says.

  • The U.K. Government Is Very Close to Eroding Encryption Worldwide

    The Online Safety Bill, now at the final stage before passage in the House of Lords, gives the British government the ability to force backdoors into messaging services, which will destroy end-to-end encryption. If it passes, the Online Safety Bill will be a huge step backwards for global privacy, and democracy itself.

  • Experts: Vietnam May Benefit as US Companies De-risk Supply Chains Now in China

    Vietnam is well-positioned to draw U.S. investors seeking to de-risk supply chains now in China, but closer economic integration between Hanoi and Washington appears unlikely to lead to political realignment, according to experts.

  • One in Five Texans Lives in a Floodplain

    Almost 6 million Texans, or about 20% of the population, live in an area susceptible to flooding and one-fifth of the state’s land is in a 100-year floodplain. Texas launched a statewide effort to harden Texas against floods and rising sea levels.

  • Federal Government Is Challenging Texas Setting Up Buoys in the Rio Grande – Here’s Why These Kinds of Border Blockades Wind Up Complicating Immigration Enforcement

    The Rio Grande is the site of a legal battle between the U.S. federal government and the state of Texas regarding the right to enact blockades in the river. The U.S. Justice Department announced on July 24, 2023, that it filed a civil lawsuit against Texas for illegally placing a floating buoy barrier in a section of the Rio Grande that runs about 1,000 feet, or 304 meters, long.

  • The Fight to Save Israel’s Democracy

    Israeli philosopher and author Yuval Noah Harari says that to understand events in Israel, there is just one question to ask: What limits the power of the government? Robust democracies rely on a whole system of checks and balances. But Israel lacks a constitution, an upper house in the parliament, a federal structure, or any other check on government power except one — the Supreme Court. On Monday, the government took the first of several steps toward what legal scholars regard as hollowing out Israel’s democracy by substantially weakening judicial review of government actions.

  • DOJ Files Complaint Against Texas Over Placing Floating Buoy Barrier in the Rio Grande

    The Justice Department on Monday filed a civil complaint against the State of Texas because the state has built a floating barrier, consisting of buoys strung together, in the Rio Grande River without the federal authorization that is legally required under the Rivers and Harbors Act.