In a story released on Christmas Day, 2019, the Washington Post reported that U.S. Cyber Command is “developing information warfare tactics that could be deployed against senior Russian officials and oligarchs if Moscow tries to interfere in the 2020 U.S. elections through hacking election systems or sowing widespread discord.” According to this story, one option being explored is the targeting of “senior leadership and Russian elites (though probably not President Vladimir Putin, which would be considered too provocative)” to demonstrate that the “sensitive personal data” of these individuals could be hit if the election interference did not stop. The Post article also quotes Lawfare’s Bobby Chesney saying that such actions would send “credible signals to key decision-makers that they are vulnerable if they take certain adversarial actions.” Photo: U.S. Cyber Command Public Affairs

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In Aug. 2019, Bobby Chesney (from Strauss Center at the University of Texas at Austin) and Max Smeets (from ETH Zurich and also Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC)) convened a workshop in Amsterdam focusing on military operations in the cyber domain, from a transatlantic perspective. The “Transatlantic Dialogue on Military Cyber Operations—Amsterdam” gathered experts from military, civilian, and academic institutions hailing from a range of countries, including the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Estonia, and France.

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Given much of the recent coverage surrounding security and the fifth generation (5G) of cellular networks, you would be forgiven for assuming that security concerns are largely limited to China in general and Huawei in particular.

This is not the case.

Equally important are the concerns for United States’ security that extend beyond Huawei’s role in the development and deployment of 5G technology. Notably, while Huawei amplifies many pre-existing areas of concern, 5G would represent a significant challenge for American national security even if China was not a peer competitor in the market. 

Read the rest at The Wilson Center

Eighteen years ago, al-Qaeda operatives hijacked planes, toppled buildings, terrified an entire nation, and killed nearly 3,000 innocents. That the elaborate 9/11 plot went undetected will forever be remembered as one of the intelligence community’s worst failures. For many U.S. intelligence officials, memories of that day remain fresh, searing, and personal. Still hanging over the entrance to the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center is a sign that reads, “Today is September 12, 2001.” It’s a daily reminder of the agency’s determination to prevent future attacks—but also of the horrifying costs when intelligence agencies adapt too slowly to emerging threats.

For a decade after the Soviet Union’s collapse, the CIA and the FBI were mired in Cold War structures, priorities, processes, and cultures even as the danger of terrorism grew. My research has shown that even though many inside and outside U.S. intelligence agencies saw the terrorist threat coming and pressed for change years earlier, they could not get the necessary reforms enacted. The shock of 9/11 finally forced a reckoning—one that led to a string of counterterrorism successes, from foiled plots to the operation against Osama bin Laden. But now, nearly two decades later, America’s 17 intelligence agencies need to reinvent themselves once more, this time in response to an unprecedented number of breakthrough technologies that are transforming societies, politics, commerce, and the very nature of international conflict.

Read the Rest at The Atlantic.