• Americans Bought 1.6 Million Guns Last Month. Who Were the Buyers?

    Americans bought 1.6 million guns last month – an impressive number, but only the 14th highest on record, and still down 18 percent from May 2020. What has remained far more opaque is who exactly was doing the buying last year. This week, we started to have a more definitive answer.

  • Defining Domestic Terrorism: Does the U.S. Need New Criminal Penalties for Domestic Terrorism Events?

    Debates over what legally constitutes domestic terrorism—and the barriers to prosecuting these incidents—stretch back decades. “Significant political opposition to anti-domestic terrorism statutes are already being observed among lawmakers,” Lucy Tu writes, adding that “Individual lawmakers, however, are not the only opponents to the new bill.”

  • Cyber Attacks Can Shut Down Critical Infrastructure. It’s Time to Make Cyber Security Compulsory

    The 7 May attack on the Colonial Pipeline highlights how vulnerable critical infrastructure such as fuel pipelines are in an era of growing cyber security threats. In Australia, we believe the time has come to make it compulsory for critical infrastructure companies to implement serious cyber security measures.

  • Airlines Shun Belarusian Airspace as Calls for Sanctions over Plane Diversion Grow

    The global aviation industry has moved to isolate Belarus as the leader of the country’s opposition called for the international community to act in concert to stop authoritarian leader Alyaksandr Lukashenka from continuing to act with “impunity” following the diversion of a commercial airline to Minsk, where one of the passengers, an opposition journalist, was arrested.

  • Belarus Kidnapping: What International Law Says about Capture of Dissident journalist Roman Protasevich

    The full details of what happened with the plane which flew from Athens in Greece to Vilnius in Lithuania on May 23, and which was forced, by the Belarus air force, to land in Minsk, remain a matter of dispute. But even if Belarus can show that its diversion of the plane was lawful, the detention by the Belarus police of opposition blogger Roman Protasevich and his girlfriend is another question entirely. Under the ICAO treaties, Flight FR4978 was under the jurisdiction of Poland as the country of registration of the aircraft. The aircraft was still “in flight,” even when diverted to Minsk. No country has the right to detain suspects on a civil aircraft for crimes that were not committed on board that aircraft.

  • The Case for a “Disinformation CERN”

    Democracies around the world are struggling with various forms of disinformation afflictions. But the current suite of policy prescriptions will fail because governments simply don’t know enough about the emerging digital information environment.

  • On Christchurch Call Anniversary, a Step Closer to Eradicating Terrorism Online?

    Is it possible to eradicate terrorism and violent extremism from the internet? To prevent videos and livestreams of terrorist attacks from going viral, and maybe even prevent them from being shared or uploaded in the first place? Courtney C. Radsch writes that the governments and tech companies involved in the Christchurch Call are dealing with a difficult issue: “The big question is whether the twin imperatives of eradicating TVEC while protecting the internet’s openness and freedom of expression are compatible,” Radsch writes.

  • It’s Time to Surge Resources into Prosecuting Ransomware Gangs

    In the popular imagination, hacking is committed by lone wolves with exceptional computer skills. But in reality, the vast majority of hackers do not have the technical sophistication to create the malicious tools that are essential to their trade. Kellen Dwyer writes that hacking has exploded in recent years because criminals have specialized and subspecialized so that each one can concentrate on facilitating just a single phase of a successful data breach. This is known as cybercrime-as-a-service and it is a massive business. This intricate cybercrime ecosystem offers the key to fighting it: “While organization and specialization are strengths of cybercriminals, they are also weaknesses. That means there are organizations that can be infiltrated and exploited.”

  • U.S. Anti-Hate Crime Law Provides New Enforcement Tools, but Will It Work?

    A bill that President Joe Biden signed into law Thursday gives local and federal officials new tools and resources to combat hate crimes, while putting the spotlight on a surge in anti-Asian hate during the COVID-19 pandemic. The impetus for the new law was a dramatic increase in attacks on Asian Americans since the start of the pandemic in Wuhan, China, more than a year ago.

  • Family De-Planning: The Coercive Campaign to Drive Down Indigenous Birth-Rates in Xinjiang

    Beginning in April 2017, Chinese Communist Party authorities in Xinjiang launched a series of “strike-hard” campaigns against “illegal births” with the explicit aim to “reduce and stabilize a moderate birth level” and decrease the birth-rate in southern Xinjiang by at least 4.00 per thousand from 2016 levels. This followed years of preferential exceptions from family-planning rules for indigenous nationalities. The crackdown has led to an unprecedented and precipitous drop in official birth-rates in Xinjiang since 2017. The birth-rate across the region fell by nearly half (48.74 percent) in the two years between 2017 and 2019.

  • The TSA Should Regulate Pipeline Cybersecurity

    Fuel deliveries to the east coast of the United States have been brought to a standstill by cybercriminals that have gained access to Colonial Pipelines’ networks and forced the company to shut down its distribution system. After two decades of trying to make a voluntary partnership with industry work, this incident demonstrates that neither thoughts, prayers, nor information sharing is sufficient. It is time for the federal government to exercise its existing authority to regulate the cybersecurity of pipelines.

  • Unreliable Witness Testimony Biggest Cause of Miscarriages of Justice

    Unreliable witness testimony has been the biggest cause of miscarriages of justice over the past half century, a major new study suggests. The research also suggests that regulations governing the powers of police have been effective in reducing wrongful convictions caused by unreliable confessions.

  • QAnon Hasn’t Gone Away – It’s Alive and Kicking in States Across the Country

    By this point, almost everyone has heard of QAnon, the conspiracy spawned by an anonymous online poster of enigmatic prophecies. Perhaps the greatest success of the conspiracy is its ability to create a shared alternate reality, a reality that can dismiss everything from a decisive election to a deadly pandemic. The QAnon universe lives on – now largely through involvement in local, not national, politics. Moving on from contesting the election, the movement’s new focus is vaccines and pandemic denialism.

  • Tighter Gun Laws Help Reduce Mass Shooting Violence: Research

    President Joe Biden recently called for tougher gun laws to reduce mass shooting violence. Columbia University researchers have conducted research related to measures proposed by Biden, including on the impact of state gun laws and the Federal Assault Weapons Ban of 1994; the use of high-capacity magazines in high fatality shootings; and the effects of exposure to gun violence on children.

  • How Much Regulation of the Tech Industry Is Too Much?

    As prominent figures, including former President Donald Trump, are banned from social media platforms for posting disinformation or inflammatory remarks, technology regulation has become a hot topic of debate. “We are living in times where technology has fundamentally changed almost all aspects of our lives,” says UCLA’s Terry Kramer. “It is within this context that we must carefully balance and enable the advantages of technology, which can improve our lives, improve our connectedness, lower the cost of critical goods and services, and improve health care against forces that can create negative externalities. Developing a critical understanding of the trade-offs is essential.”