• Prosecutors Shift Focus to Possible Seditious Conspiracy in Capitol Insurrection Probe

    Since launching a wide-ranging investigation into the U.S. Capitol riot nearly three months ago, federal prosecutors have charged nearly 400 participants in the bloody insurrection with a variety of charges. That represents about half of the estimated 800 supporters of former President Donald Trump who breached the complex on January 6 to try to prevent Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s victory over Trump in the November election. By far the most serious charges have been brought against three dozen or so members of three far-right groups: the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters and the Proud Boys. Prosecutors are increasingly focused on building the conspiracy cases and considering upping the ante by bringing the little used but far more serious charge of seditious conspiracy.

  • Anti-Asian Hate Crime Crosses Racial and Ethnic Lines

    For many Americans, a 21-year-old white man has become the face of anti-Asian violence that has swept the country over the past year. That impression may be misleading. Robert Aaron Long, the son of a southern Baptist lay leader from Canton, Georgia, is accused of murdering eight people, including six Asian American women, at three spas in the Atlanta metropolitan area last week. Long has told police he launched his killing spree to eliminate sexual “temptation,” not to target the Asian community. While investigators have yet to determine a motive in the case, many of those who carry out attacks on Asian Americans do not fit Long’s racial profile. 

  • Why There’s Not Much Data on Anti-Asian Violence

    The murder of eight people in Atlanta on 16 March, including six Asian women, has brought the issue of an apparent rise in hate crimes against Asians and Asian Americans into the national spotlight. Jeff Asher writes that there is some evidence that anti-Asian hate crimes increased in 2020, though national data won’t be fully available for another six months. The reason: data on hate crimes is scarce—and incomplete. “Whether you are building a baseball team, combating a pandemic, or responding to a surge in hate crimes, a prerequisite to effective problem-solving is accurate, comprehensive and timely data,” he writes.

  • Think Global, Act Local: Reconfiguring Siege Culture

    It is not an easy time to be in a branded neo-Nazi group. Some groups have dissolved themselves, other groups have been proscribed by different governments, while group members of some groups have been arrested for a variety of offenses across the U.S., U.K., Germany, Australia, New Zealand, and other countries. Societal attitudes towards the broader extreme-right are hardening, and for the most extreme right-wingers, the future may be less digital, more local, and harder to police.

  • Extremism in the U.S. Military: Problems and Solutions

    Extremist movements pose many problems to society, from spreading hate and intolerance to engaging in significant and deadly violence.  It is particularly problematic when adherents of extreme causes are able to persist in key institutions dedicated to protecting the people of the United States, institutions such as emergency response units, law enforcement and the military.

  • Call for Action on Hate Crimes and Racism Against Asian-Americans

    The Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders in National Security, founded in 2021, is a grassroots initiative which seeks to advance discourse, develop policy, and implement solutions to combat the surge of hate crimes and racism against Asian-Americans in the United States. The group has just issued a statement, signed by dozens of Asian-Americans involved in U.S. national security inside and outside of the government, calling for more effective action to combat the surge of hate crimes and racism against Asian-Americans in the United States.

  • Harnessing Earth’s Magnetic Field to Detect Chemicals

    A newly designed spectroscopy instrument allows scientists, industry, and governments to decipher even trace amounts of chemicals using the Earth’s own magnetic field. The portable tool will help scientists, industry, and governments easily detect and identify trace amounts of chemicals.

  • Racially Motivated Violent Extremists Pose Most Lethal Domestic Threat: U.S. Intelligence

    Domestic violent extremists pose the most serious threat to public safety, says the unclassified summary of an intelligence community report released Wednesday. The intelligence report, echoing academic studies, stressed that white supremacists – to which the report also refers as “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists” — and militia extremists pose the most lethal threat among domestic extremists. In addition to racial and ethnic hatred, domestic extremists are motivated by the false “narrative of fraud” in the 2020 presidential election; the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol; Covid-19 restrictions; and conspiracy theories. The report found that extremists motivated by biases against minorities and “perceived government overreach” will continue to drive radicalization and violent mobilization. The report was prepared by the Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

  • Gun Violence Rises in TV Dramas over Two Decades, Paralleling U.S. Gun Homicide Tends

    Gun violence in popular prime-time broadcast television dramas has increased steadily over almost two decades, a trend that parallels the rise in U.S. homicide deaths attributable to firearms, according to new research. Overall gun violence on popular prime-time dramas doubled from 2000 through 2018. More important, gun violence as a proportion of the violence depicted in the shows rose significantly as well.

  • Are Telegram and Signal Havens for Right-Wing Extremists?

    Since the violent storming of Capitol Hill and subsequent ban of former U.S. President Donald Trump from Facebook and Twitter, the removal of Parler from Amazon’s servers, and the de-platforming of incendiary right-wing content, messaging services Telegram and Signal have seen a deluge of new users. Steven Feldstein and Sarah Gordon write that the two services rely on encryption to protect the privacy of user communication, which has made them popular with protesters seeking to conceal their identities against repressive governments in places like Belarus, Hong Kong, and Iran. “But the same encryption technology has also made them a favored communication tool for criminals and terrorist groups, including al Qaeda and the Islamic State.” Telegram has purged Islamic State from the platform, and it could the same with far-right violent extremists.

  • Fighting Domestic Extremism: Lessons from Germany

    As the U.S. Capitol insurrection, the prevalence of the QAnon conspiracy, and widely believed claims of election fraud indicate, potentially tens of millions of Americans are outside the consensus on the most fundamental U.S. democratic values: faith in official election results and the peaceful transfer of power. Daniel Koehler writes that, as a German, he is “frightfully reminded” of the Weimar Republic, which resulted in the end of Germany’s first democracy and the rise of domestic extremism from within. “Modern Germany is built on the legacy of the failure of its first democratic experiment and the unspeakable global suffering and destruction that followed,” he writes. The success of German democracy today “offers lessons for the United States as well as other countries seeking to counter extreme ideologies.”

  • Germany’s Spy Chiefs Urge Court to Agree on Monitoring of Far-Right AfD

    Germany’s domestic intelligence agency says there’s sufficient evidence to warrant labeling the country’s main opposition party, the populist far-right Alternative for Germany, AfD, as “anti-constitutional” and an organization hostile to democracy.

  • The Questions FBI Director Christopher Wray Wasn’t Asked

    It was the most catastrophic intelligence failure since Sept. 11, 2001. One of the three branches of American government faced violent invasion. The invaders threatened the lives of the speaker of the House, the vice president of the United States, and all members of Congress. People died. Many more were injured. Moreover, Tia Sewell, Benjamin Wittes write, the intruders successfully interrupted the basic functioning of American democracy: its peaceful transfer of power and its ability to honor the results of an election in which those in power lost. “Yet on March 2, the man who heads the intelligence component chiefly responsible for domestic intelligence matters, for terrorism investigations, and for combatting violent extremism appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee and had a pleasant exchange with senators. The committee members seemed positively uninterested in his agency’s obvious institutional failure in the run-up to Jan. 6.”

  • U.S. Capitol Police Tighten Security as Thursday Threat Looms

    The U.S. Capitol Police Department says it is taking seriously intelligence about a possible plot by a militia group to breach the Capitol on Thursday. A far-right conspiracy theory has been circulating on social media platforms, contending that Donald Trump, who is continuing to spread lies about a fictitious mass voter fraud which cost him the election, would return to power on 4 March. This date was inauguration day for U.S. presidents until 1933, when it was moved to 20 January.

  • Germany’s AfD Party Placed under Surveillance as “Extremism Suspect”

    Germany’s interior intelligence agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) has classified the entire Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party as an “extremism suspected case.” The two largest parties in Germany, Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Social Democratic Party are members of the governing coalition, making the populist, far-right AfD the leader of the opposition in the Bundestag. The designation allows the BfV to use additional surveillance powers given to it by the Bundestag last year, including monitoring email communications and recruiting party members as informants.