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Quotes of the Day:
“Self-education, I firmly believe, is the only kind of education there is. The only function of a school is to make self-education easier; failing that, it does nothing.
- Isaac Asimov
“I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of mediation anyone has so far found. By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This to me is a miracle.
- Kurt Vonnegut
“The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.”
- William Blake
1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, AUGUST 22 (Putin's War)
2. Ex-Twitter exec blows the whistle, alleging reckless and negligent cybersecurity policies
3. China's ASEAN Silk Road gets slippery as other powers move in
4. FDD | Taliban circulates video of Haqqanis plotting 2010 suicide raid against U.S. troops
5. New weapons for Ukraine suggest preparation for closer combat
6. 'All of it is a lie': Russian paratrooper condemns his country's war in Ukraine
7. U.S. urges citizens to leave Ukraine as fears grow of Russian attacks on capital
8. Exclusive: Iran has dropped some demands for nuclear deal, U.S. official says
9. FDD | Amnesty Report Endangers Ukrainian Civilians
10. China Is Now Courting Thailand, A Key US Ally, With Joint Military Drills & Massive Arms Sales
11. To Fight Election Falsehoods, Social Media Companies Ready a Familiar Playbook
12. White House launches new war on secrecy
13. Is the U.S. giving Ukraine some weapons secretly?
14. Ukraine’s Russian ‘Liberators’ Are Seeing That We Live Better Than They Do
15. Behind the lie of ‘87,000 armed agents’: How an obscure factoid was bent into a popular GOP talking point
16. To Defeat Autocracy, Weaponize Transparency
17. Technology Controls Can Strangle Russia—Just Like the Soviet Union
18. Porcupine Strategy: Taiwan Is Learning Lessons from Ukraine on How it Could Stop A China Invasion
19. Terrorism fused with great power conflict may be the west’s next challenge
20. Star U.S. Prof Masterminded Surveillance Machine for Chinese
1. RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, AUGUST 22 (Putin's War)
Maps/graphics: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-august-22
RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, AUGUST 22
understandingwar.org
Kateryna Stepanenko, Karolina Hird, Grace Mappes, Layne Philipson, George Barros, and Frederick W. Kagan
August 22, 6:15 pm ET
Click here to see ISW's interactive map of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This map is updated daily alongside the static maps present in this report.
Russian occupation officials in Zaporizhia Oblast have obliquely declared the region’s independence from Ukraine by falsely identifying Ukrainian citizens entering the occupied region as temporary asylum seekers. Head of the Zaporizhia Oblast occupation administration Yevheny Balitsky signed an order that designates Ukrainian citizens arriving in occupied Zaporizhia Oblast as temporary asylum seekers based on Russian law.[1] The order requires the registration of Ukrainian and Russian citizens based on their place of residence or place of arrival in the Russian-occupied parts of Zaporizhia Oblast and requires the distribution of temporary identification forms for all “stateless persons.” Ukrainians and Russians may register if they present proof of their temporary asylum application. This decree has various implications under both international law and domestic Russian law. International law states that a refugee is an individual from outside the country (or who is stateless) who is seeking “temporary asylum” in another country to escape persecution.[2] Russian law defines a refugee as a person ”who is outside of his/her country of nationality or habitual residence.”[3] Neither of these statuses properly apply to the majority of people crossing from unoccupied Ukraine into occupied Zaporizhia.
Russian occupation authorities are thus falsely classifying all Ukrainians entering occupied territories in Zaporizhia Oblast as refugees escaping persecution in Ukraine. The order also de facto identifies Ukraine as a separate country from the Zaporizhia Oblast entity, as defined by the occupation authority. By classifying all Ukrainians as refugees, Russian occupation authorities are establishing a new legal category that might have its own restrictions. Russian occupation authorities may use the refugee status to restrict Ukrainians who temporarily return to occupied territories after evacuating from them. The order will likely affect Ukrainian citizens traveling to occupied Kherson Oblast via the checkpoint in Vasylivka, Zaporizhia Oblast, as the order requires the registration of individuals at the point of arrival in the occupied Zaporizhia Oblast, and Vasylivka is the checkpoint serving Kherson as well as Zaporizhia Oblasts.
Key Takeaways
- Russian-backed occupation authorities in Zaporizhia Oblast have obliquely declared the independence of the occupied areas of the oblast by falsely identifying Ukrainian citizens entering from unoccupied Ukraine as temporary asylum seekers.
- Russian forces conducted localized spoiling attacks southwest and southeast of Izyum.
- Russian forces continued ground attacks southeast of Siversk and northeast and south of Bakhmut.
- Russian forces continued attempts to advance from the northern and western outskirts of Donetsk City and conducted limited ground attacks southwest of Donetsk City.
- Russian forces made marginal gains along the Mykolaiv-Kherson line.
- Ukrainian intelligence stated that the Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR) will start “general mobilization” processes on September 1.
- Prymorsky Krai announced the formation of a new repair and service volunteer battalion.
- Ukrainian partisans continued to conduct attacks against Russian forces in occupied Melitopol.
We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because those activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We will continue to evaluate and report on the effects of these criminal activities on the Ukrainian military and population and specifically on combat in Ukrainian urban areas. We utterly condemn these Russian violations of the laws of armed conflict, Geneva Conventions, and humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.
- Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine (comprised of one subordinate and two supporting efforts);
- Subordinate Main Effort—Encirclement of Ukrainian Troops in the Cauldron between Izyum and Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts
- Supporting Effort 1—Kharkiv City
- Supporting Effort 2—Southern Axis
- Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts
- Activities in Russian-occupied Areas
Main Effort—Eastern Ukraine
Subordinate Main Effort—Southern Kharkiv, Donetsk, Luhansk Oblasts (Russian objective: Encircle Ukrainian forces in Eastern Ukraine and capture the entirety of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)
Russian forces conducted limited ground attacks southwest and southeast of Izyum near the Kharkiv-Donetsk Oblast border on August 22. Ukrainian sources reported that Russian troops attempted to advance on Dibrovne and Nova Dmytrivka—both within 25 km southwest of Izyum.[4] As ISW has previously assessed, Russian attacks southwest of Izyum are likely limited and localized spoiling attacks and not coherent attempts to advance in a specific direction.[5] The Ukrainian General Staff also stated that Russian forces conducted offensive operations in Krasnopillya, which lies between Izyum and Slovyansk along the E40 highway.[6] Russian forces continued to shell along the Izyum-Slovyansk line and struck economic infrastructure in Kramatorsk.[7]
Russian forces conducted limited ground attacks southeast of Siversk on August 22. The Ukrainian General Staff stated that Russian forces attempted to launch an advance southwest of Spirne (13 km southeast of Siversk) towards Vesele (15 km southeast of Siversk).[8] This attempt to advance south of the Spirne area may be intended to advance on Soledar from the north and support attacks toward Bakhmut from the Soledar area. Russian forces additionally continued artillery strikes on and around Siversk.[9]
Russian forces continued ground attacks northeast and south of Bakhmut on August 22. Russian troops continued efforts to advance through Soledar, about 10 km northeast of Bakhmut.[10] Combat footage posted by Russian outlet Zvezda shows Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) soldiers reportedly moving through residential areas of Soledar under the cover of artillery fire.[11] The Ukrainian General Staff noted that Russian troops also attempted to advance on Bakhmut from Pokrovske (10 km east), a report that is supported by statements that Russian troops control a section of Patrice Lumumba Street, which runs from Pokrovske into Bakhmut.[12] Russian forces also continued attempts to advance north of positions in the Horlivka area and fought around Hladsove (18 km south of Bakhmut), Kodema (15 km southeast of Bakhmut), Vershyna (12 km southeast of Bakhmut), and Zaitseve (8 km southeast of Bakhmut).[13] Russian forces continued air and artillery strikes near Bakhmut and surrounding settlements.[14]
Russian forces continued ground attacks near the northern and western outskirts of Donetsk City on August 22. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian troops attempted to advance on Avdiivka from Novoselivka Druha and Krasnohorivka—both less than 10 km north of Avdiivka.[15] Russian troops also attempted to push westward of positions in Pisky (on the northwestern outskirts of Donetsk City) toward Nevelske and Pervomaiske, where fighting is reportedly ongoing.[16] Russian Telegram channels continued to report on Russian attempts to advance through Ukrainian fortifications in Marinka, on the southwestern outskirts of Donetsk City.[17] Social media users in Donetsk City additionally reported a large explosion at a Russian ammunition depot in the east of Donetsk City.[18] Several Russian sources claimed that the explosion was the result of a Ukrainian strike.[19]
Russian forces conducted several ground attacks southwest of Donetsk City near the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border on August 22. The Ukrainian General Staff stated that Russian troops fought near Novomykhailivka (25 km southwest of Donetsk City) and around Makarivka, Vremivka, and Velyka Novosilka, all in western Donetsk Oblast within 10 km of the Zaporizhia Oblast border.[20] Russian forces also continued efforts to cut Ukrainian lines of communication around Vuhledar and shelled Vuhledar and surrounding areas in order to gain access to the Vuhledar-Marinka road.[21]
Supporting Effort #1—Kharkiv City (Russian objective: Defend ground lines of communication (GLOCs) to Izyum and prevent Ukrainian forces from reaching the Russian border)
Russian forces did not make any confirmed territorial gains on August 22. The Ukrainian General Staff stated that Russian forces are attempting to improve their tactical positions around Kharkiv City in unspecified locations.[22] Geolocated footage shows Russian soldiers in Rubizhne on the right bank of the Pechenihy Reservoir, and Russian news outlet Izvestia reported on August 21 that Ukrainian forces maintain positions 500 m from Rubizhne.[23] Russian forces conducted airstrikes on Pytomnyk (15 km north of Kharkiv City) and Staryi Saltiv and Verkhnii Saltiv (both on the right bank of the Pechenihy Reservoir).[24] Russian forces continued shelling and UAV reconnaissance throughout the line of contact.[25]
Supporting Effort #2—Southern Axis (Russian objective: Defend Kherson and Zaporizhia Oblasts against Ukrainian counterattacks)
Russian forces conducted multiple assaults on the Mykolaiv-Kherson line and likely captured the frontline village of Blahodatne, Mykolaiv Oblast, approximately 35 km from Mykolaiv City, on August 22. Russian sources reported that Russian forces captured Blahodatne on August 22, and the Ukrainian General Staff seemingly confirmed these Russian claims, stating that Russian forces had unspecified “partial success” near Blahodatne.[26]
Ukrainian forces struck both road bridges across the Dnipro River in Kherson Oblast on August 21-22, likely rendering both unusable for heavy transport. Ukrainian Advisor to the Kherson Oblast Military Administration Head, Serhiy Khlan, claimed that Ukrainian forces again struck the Antonivsky road bridge as a Russian convoy was transporting ammunition across the bridge.[27] Russian sources claimed that the Ukrainian HIMARS strike damaged the roadbed and injured 15 construction workers who were repairing the bridge.[28] Images and footage of large fires on the Antonivsky road bridge are consistent with claims that Ukrainian strikes targeted explosives on the bridge.[29] Images from previous Ukrainian strikes across the Antonivsky bridge did not feature a fireball and smoke as this one did. Footage from before the strikes on August 21-22 shows Russian forces again using pontoon bridges and barges near Kherson City to transport supplies across the Dnipro River.[30] ISW has previously forecasted that Ukrainian forces would likely target such infrastructure with further HIMARS strikes.[31] ISW cannot currently verify reports that the Antonivsky road bridge collapsed after the Ukrainian strikes.[32] Footage posted on August 21-22 shows smoke rising from the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant (HPP) after Ukrainian forces reportedly stuck the bridge on the evening of August 21.[33] Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian strikes damaged both the roadbed and HPP infrastructure.[34]
Russian and Ukrainian sources reported shelling at a thermal plant in Enerhodar, approximately 5 km from the Zaporizhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP). Geolocated footage posted on August 22 showed damaged water lines and a stalled car with a deceased driver after Russian forces reportedly shelled the thermal plant.[35] Enerhodar Mayor Dmytro Orlov denied Russian accusations that Ukrainian forces shelled the thermal plant from their positions in Nikopol, located across the Dnipro River from Russian-occupied positions in Zaporizhzhia Oblast.[36]
Russian forces continued focusing their efforts on maintaining occupied positions, preventing Ukrainian forces from advancing, and replenishing losses along the Southern Axis on August 22.[37] The Ukrainian Southern Operational Command reported that Russian forces continued conducting reconnaissance and are using aviation and missile weapons to launch remote strikes on Ukrainian positions along the frontline.[38] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces carried out at least eight airstrikes, including near Bila Krynytsia and Andriivka, likely targeting the Ukrainian bridgehead and staging grounds near the Inhulets River.[39] Russian forces also continued using tank, tube, and rocket artillery to shell settlements along the frontline on the Southern Axis.[40]
Russian forces continued to target settlements in Dnipropetrovsk, Odesa, and Mykolaiv Oblasts with artillery and missile strikes on August 22. Ukrainian officials reported that Russian forces struck Zelendolsk with Uragan MLRS and shelled Nikopol and other settlements throughout Dnipropetrovsk.[41] Ukrainian officials also claimed that Russian forces launched two Kh-59 missiles from Su-35 aircraft toward an unspecified infrastructure facility in Odesa Oblast.[42] Russian sources claimed that Russian forces struck a bridge in the coastal settlement of Zatoka, south of the Dniester Estuary.[43] The Ukrainian Southern Operational reported that Russian forces launched four S-300 missiles on Mykolaiv City at night on August 21-22 and continued shelling other settlements throughout Mykolaiv Oblast.[44]
Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts (Russian objective: Expand combat power without conducting general mobilization)
Ukrainian intelligence reported that the Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR) will begin “general mobilization” proceedings on September 1. The Ukrainian Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) reported on August 22 that LNR Head Leonid Pasechnik announced the start of the first phase of general mobilization during a radiobroadcast in occupied Svatove, Luhansk Oblast.[45] The GUR noted that LNR officials will mobilize Ukrainian citizens who received Russian passports and satisfy military requirements during the first phase of the mobilization. The GUR also stated that the second phase will mobilize the rest of the male population aged 18 to 65. ISW could not locate the original radio broadcast in open sources and cannot independently verify this report. The LNR also claimed that it has not announced mobilization and is not engaged in covert mobilization on August 20.[46] The LNR previously announced a general mobilization on February 19 that conscripted all eligible men ages 18 to 55—both registered and not registered at the military recruitment centers—and reservists.[47] The LNR’s previous February mobilization also prohibited men from leaving the territory of occupied Luhansk Oblast and transitioned the economy to a wartime mode. Pasechnik previously claimed that the LNR ended its active mobilization periods in late March.[48] Russian law allows the Russian military to activate both reservists and new conscripts during general mobilization, including those previously exempted from conscription.[49]
The GUR report, if true, could indicate that the LNR is unable to generate and motivate sufficient forces to continue fighting in Donetsk Oblast via recruitment drives or covert mobilization. The GUR previously reported that Russian forces are planning to call up 8,000 people from occupied territories in Ukraine.[50] Ukrainian officials have consistently reported that LNR authorities abduct men off the streets and even commit Russian mine workers to the frontlines.[51]
Russian federal subjects (regions) continued to form new volunteer units and recruit volunteers for Russian security services. Prymorsky Krai announced the formation of a new repair and service “Arsenievskiy” Volunteer Battalion on August 22.[52] The battalion will focus on evacuating damaged military equipment, repairing damaged equipment, and returning refurbished equipment to the frontlines. Kremlin-affiliated outlet Kommersant reported that the battalion had already recruited 140 out of 280 planned volunteers as of August 22.[53] Prymorsky Krai offered recruits ages 18 to 60 a one-time enlistment bonus of 300,000 rubles (about $4,980) and monthly salaries of 200,000 rubles (about $3,320). ISW has previously reported that Primorsky Krai is forming a naval infantry volunteer battalion “Tigr,” but only offered 150,000 rubles (about $2,490) as a one-time enlistment bonus.[54] The Republic of Buryatia increased its one-time enlistment bonus to 200,000 rubles (about $3,320) instead of the originally promised 100,000 (about $1,660).[55] ISW has previously reported that Republic of Tatarstan also increased its one-time recruitment bonus, and it is likely that these republics are increasing their enlistment bonuses due to lack of recruits.[56]
The Kremlin likely ordered authorities of the Russian federal subjects to increase their advertisement of contract military service. Novosibirsk Mayor Anatoliy Lokot recorded a video encouraging locals to enlist in the Russian armed forces and posted the official recruitment announcement on the mayor’s official website.[57] Novosibirsk outlet NGS.RU also reported that local officials distributed contract service ads to apartment building entrances throughout the city and posted identical recruitment information in different social media groups.[58] Tatarstan State Council Parliamentarian from the Russian Communist Party, Nikolay Atlasov, published an opinion piece discussing the linguistic benefits of volunteer battalions that are composed of ethnic personnel.[59] Atlasov’s op-ed simultaneously advertised volunteer battalions that are currently forming in the ethnic republics of Chuvashia, Sakha (Yukutia), and Tatarstan. The Kremlin’s aggressive advertisement campaign for contract service might generate some pushback from locals, as it significantly differs from the Russian portrayal of the war in Ukraine as a short-term ”special military operation.”[60]
Activity in Russian-occupied Areas (Russian objective: consolidate administrative control of occupied areas; set conditions for potential annexation into the Russian Federation or some other future political arrangement of Moscow’s choosing)
Ukrainian civilians attacked a Russian soldier in occupied Melitopol overnight on August 21-22. Footage of the aftermath shows Russian soldiers carrying an injured soldier on a stretcher away from a crowd on the street.[61] Ukraine's Resistance Center reported that Ukrainian partisans attacked a Russian soldier who harassed an underage girl but did not specify the method or result of the attack.[62] Ukrainian sources also reported explosions and gunfire throughout Melitopol overnight on August 21-22.[63] Ukraine's Resistance Center reported that Ukrainian resistance activity is actively inhibiting occupation authorities’ efforts to set conditions for a referendum in Kherson Oblast, causing unspecified preparation efforts in Henichensk, Kherson Oblast to fail.[64]
Note: ISW does not receive any classified material from any source, uses only publicly available information, and draws extensively on Russian, Ukrainian, and Western reporting and social media as well as commercially available satellite imagery and other geospatial data as the basis for these reports. References to all sources used are provided in the endnotes of each update.
[23] https://twitter.com/rollowastaken/status/1561711838903115777; https://t... https://iz dot ru/1382946/2022-08-21/voenkor-izvestii-pervym-pobyval-na-territorii-rubezhnogo-pod-kharkovom
[25] https://www.facebook.com/GeneralStaff.ua/posts/pfbid0MTnfN3zpHDVBEWN6WiE... https://suspilne dot media/273540-vtorgnenna-rosii-v-ukrainu-den-180-tekstovij-onlajn/
[28] https://tass dot ru/mezhdunarodnaya-panorama/15531747; https://t.me/rybar/37563; https://t.me/kommunist/8696; https://t.me/bo... https://t.me/boris_rozhin/61109
[45] https://gur dot gov.ua/content/v-lnr-namahaiutsia-provesty-zahalnu-zahalnu-mobilizatsiiu-ta-provodiat-poshuk-rashystivdezertyriv.html
[47] https://www dot gazeta.ru/social/news/2022/02/19/17314351.shtml; https://storage dot lug-info.com/a/3/1b8decaf-df6b-4dd4-92a0-25d6f98206f7.pdf
[52] https://www dot kommersant.ru/doc/5524219
[53] https://www dot kommersant.ru/doc/5524219
[55] https://vtinform dot com/news/138/181732/
[57] https://ngs dot ru/text/politics/2022/08/22/71571194/
[58] https://ngs dot ru/text/politics/2022/08/22/71571194/
[59] https://kazanfirst dot ru/articles/590506
[60] https://ngs dot ru/text/politics/2022/08/22/71571194/comments/
[62] https://sprotyv.mod dot gov.ua/2022/08/22/v-melitopoli-pidpillya-likviduvalo-okupanta-gvaltivnyka/
[63] https://t.me/ivan_fedorov_melitopol/449; https://twitter.com/KyivIndepe... https://sprotyv dot mod.gov.ua/2022/08/22/v-melitopoli-pidpillya-likviduvalo-okupanta-gvaltivnyka/
[64] https://sprotyv dot mod.gov.ua/2022/08/22/okupanty-ne-mozhut-normalno-pidgotuvatysya-do-psevdoreferendumu-na-hersonshhyni/; https://armyinform dot com.ua/2022/08/22/hersonshhyna-bojkotuye-psevdoreferendum/
understandingwar.org
2. Ex-Twitter exec blows the whistle, alleging reckless and negligent cybersecurity policies
Admit nothing, deny everything, make counter accusations (and attack the whistleblower). So is this sour grapes of a fired employee or is this a real national security issue?
Excerpts:
In a statement, a Twitter spokesperson told CNN that security and privacy are both longtime priorities for the company. Twitter also said the company provides clear tools for users to control privacy, ad targeting and data sharing, and added that it has created internal workflows to ensure users know that when they cancel their accounts, Twitter will deactivate the accounts and start a deletion process. Twitter declined to say whether it typically completes the process.
"Mr. Zatko was fired from his senior executive role at Twitter for poor performance and ineffective leadership over six months ago," the Twitter spokesperson said. "While we haven't had access to the specific allegations being referenced, what we've seen so far is a narrative about our privacy and data security practices that is riddled with inconsistencies and inaccuracies, and lacks important context. Mr. Zatko's allegations and opportunistic timing appear designed to capture attention and inflict harm on Twitter, its customers and its shareholders. Security and privacy have long been company-wide priorities at Twitter and we still have a lot of work ahead of us."
Ex-Twitter exec blows the whistle, alleging reckless and negligent cybersecurity policies
By Donie O'Sullivan, Clare Duffy and Brian Fung, CNN Business
Video by John General, Zach Wasser and Logan Whiteside, CNN Business
Portraits by Sarah Silbiger for CNN
Updated 5:59 AM ET, Tue August 23, 2022
CNN
Twitter has major security problems that pose a threat to its own users' personal information, to company shareholders, to national security, and to democracy, according to an explosive whistleblower disclosure obtained exclusively by CNN and The Washington Post.
The disclosure, sent last month to Congress and federal agencies, paints a picture of a chaotic and reckless environment at a mismanaged company that allows too many of its staff access to the platform's central controls and most sensitive information without adequate oversight. It also alleges that some of the company's senior-most executives have been trying to cover up Twitter's serious vulnerabilities, and that one or more current employees may be working for a foreign intelligence service.
The whistleblower, who has agreed to be publicly identified, is Peiter "Mudge" Zatko, who was previously the company's head of security, reporting directly to the CEO. Zatko further alleges that Twitter's leadership has misled its own board and government regulators about its security vulnerabilities, including some that could allegedly open the door to foreign spying or manipulation, hacking and disinformation campaigns. The whistleblower also alleges Twitter does not reliably delete users' data after they cancel their accounts, in some cases because the company has lost track of the information, and that it has misled regulators about whether it deletes the data as it is required to do. The whistleblower also says Twitter executives don't have the resources to fully understand the true number of bots on the platform, and were not motivated to. Bots have recently become central to Elon Musk's attempts to back out of a $44 billion deal to buy the company (although Twitter denies Musk's claims).
Document: Twitter whistleblower reveals alleged security lapses, violations, fraud
Zatko was fired by Twitter (TWTR) in January for what the company claims was poor performance. According to Zatko, his public whistleblowing comes after he attempted to flag the security lapses to Twitter's board and to help Twitter fix years of technical shortcomings and alleged non-compliance with an earlier privacy agreement with the Federal Trade Commission. Zatko is being represented by Whistleblower Aid, the same group that represented Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen.
John Tye, founder of Whistleblower Aid and Zatko's lawyer, told CNN that Zatko has not been in contact with Musk, and said Zatko began the whistleblower process before there was any indication of Musk's involvement with Twitter.
Read More
CNN sought comment from Twitter on more than 50 specific questions regarding the disclosure.
In a statement, a Twitter spokesperson told CNN that security and privacy are both longtime priorities for the company. Twitter also said the company provides clear tools for users to control privacy, ad targeting and data sharing, and added that it has created internal workflows to ensure users know that when they cancel their accounts, Twitter will deactivate the accounts and start a deletion process. Twitter declined to say whether it typically completes the process.
"Mr. Zatko was fired from his senior executive role at Twitter for poor performance and ineffective leadership over six months ago," the Twitter spokesperson said. "While we haven't had access to the specific allegations being referenced, what we've seen so far is a narrative about our privacy and data security practices that is riddled with inconsistencies and inaccuracies, and lacks important context. Mr. Zatko's allegations and opportunistic timing appear designed to capture attention and inflict harm on Twitter, its customers and its shareholders. Security and privacy have long been company-wide priorities at Twitter and we still have a lot of work ahead of us."
Peiter "Mudge" Zatko was the head of security at Twitter.
A well-known "ethical hacker," Zatko also previously held senior roles at Google, Stripe and the US Department of Defense.
Some of Zatko's most damning claims spring from his apparently tense relationship with Parag Agrawal, the company's former chief technology officer who was made CEO after Jack Dorsey stepped down last November. According to the disclosure, Agrawal and his lieutenants repeatedly discouraged Zatko from providing a full accounting of Twitter's security problems to the company's board of directors. The company's executive team allegedly instructed Zatko to provide an oral report of his initial findings on the company's security condition to the board rather than a detailed written account, ordered Zatko to knowingly present cherry-picked and misrepresented data to create the false perception of progress on urgent cybersecurity issues, and went behind Zatko's back to have a third-party consulting firm's report scrubbed to hide the true extent of the company's problems.
The disclosure is generally much kinder to Dorsey, who hired Zatko and whom Zatko believes wanted to see the problems within the company fixed. But it does depict him as extremely disengaged in his final months leading Twitter -- so much so that some senior staff even considered the possibility he was sick.
CNN has reached out to Dorsey for comment. A person familiar with Zatko's tenure at Twitter told CNN the company investigated several claims he brought forward around the time he was fired, and ultimately found them unpersuasive; the person added that Zatko at times lacked understanding of Twitter's FTC obligations.
Zatko believes his firing was in retaliation for his sounding the alarm about the company's security problems.
The scathing disclosure, which totals around 200 pages, including supporting exhibits -- was sent last month to a number of US government agencies and congressional committees, including the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice. The existence and details of the disclosure have not previously been reported. CNN obtained a copy of the disclosure from a senior Democratic aide on Capitol Hill. The SEC, DOJ and FTC declined to comment; the Senate Intelligence Committee, which received a copy of the report, is taking the disclosure seriously and is setting a meeting to discuss the allegations, according to Rachel Cohen, a committee spokesperson.
The claims I've received from a Twitter whistleblower raise serious national security concerns.
Sen. Chuck Grassley, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee
Sen. Dick Durbin, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee and also received the report, vowed to investigate "and take further steps as needed to get to the bottom of these alarming allegations."
Sen. Chuck Grassley, the same panel's top Republican and an avid Twitter user, also expressed deep concerns about the allegations in a statement to CNN.
"Take a tech platform that collects massive amounts of user data, combine it with what appears to be an incredibly weak security infrastructure and infuse it with foreign state actors with an agenda, and you've got a recipe for disaster," Grassley said. "The claims I've received from a Twitter whistleblower raise serious national security concerns as well as privacy issues, and they must be investigated further."
The Whistleblower
Zatko first came to national attention in 1998 when he took part in the first congressional hearings on cybersecurity.
"All my life, I've been about finding places where I can go and make a difference. I've done that through the security field. That's my main lever," he told CNN in an interview earlier this month.
Zatko, center, was among a group of hackers who testified before Congress on cybersecurity in 1998.
The events leading to his decision to become a whistleblower began before he worked at Twitter, with a devastating hack in 2020 in which the Twitter accounts of some of the world's most famous people, including then-presidential candidate Joe Biden, former President Barack Obama, Kim Kardashian and Musk, were compromised. Twitter told CNN that in response to the incident, the company began compartmentalizing access to customer support tools.
After the attack, Dorsey recruited Zatko, a well-known "ethical hacker" turned cybersecurity insider and executive who previously held senior roles at Google, Stripe and the US Department of Defense, and who told CNN that he'd been offered a senior, day-one cyber position in the Biden administration.
What Zatko says he found was a company with extraordinarily poor security practices, including giving thousands of the company's employees — amounting to roughly half the company's workforce — access to some of the platform's critical controls. His disclosure describes his overall findings as "egregious deficiencies, negligence, willful ignorance, and threats to national security and democracy."
After the January 6 insurrection, Zatko was concerned about the possibility someone within Twitter who sympathized with the insurrectionists could try to manipulate the company's platform, according to his disclosure. He sought to clamp down on internal access that allows Twitter engineers to make changes to the platform, known as the "production environment."
But, the disclosure says, Zatko soon learned "it was impossible to protect the production environment. All engineers had access. There was no logging of who went into the environment or what they did.... Nobody knew where data lived or whether it was critical, and all engineers had some form of critical access to the production environment." Twitter also lacked the ability to hold workers accountable for information security lapses because it has little control or visibility into employees' individual work computers, Zatko claims, citing internal cybersecurity reports estimating that 4 in 10 devices do not meet basic security standards.
[I]t was impossible to protect the production environment. All engineers had access. There was no logging of who went into the environment or what they did.
From Zatko's disclosure
Twitter's flimsy server infrastructure is a separate yet equally serious vulnerability, the disclosure claims. About half of the company's 500,000 servers run on outdated software that does not support basic security features such as encryption for stored data or regular security updates by vendors, according to the letter to regulators and a February email Zatko wrote to Patrick Pichette, a Twitter board member, that is included in the disclosure.
The company also lacks sufficient redundancies and procedures to restart or recover from data center crashes, Zatko's disclosure says, meaning that even minor outages of several data centers at the same time could knock the entire Twitter service offline, perhaps for good.
Twitter did not respond to questions about the risk of data center outages, but told CNN that people on Twitter's engineering and product teams are authorized to access the production environment if they have a specific business justification for doing so. Twitter's employees use devices overseen by other IT and security teams with the power to prevent a device from connecting to sensitive internal systems if it is running outdated software, Twitter added.
The company also said it uses automated checks to ensure laptops running outdated software cannot access the production environment, and that employees may only make changes to Twitter's live product after the code meets certain record-keeping and review requirements.
In an e-mail exchange between whistleblower Peiter Zatko and Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, Zatko expresses confusion around expectations for corrective documents.
Twitter has internal security tools that are tested by the company regularly, and every two years by external auditors, according to the person familiar with Zatko's tenure at the company. The person added that some of Zatko's statistics surrounding device security lacked credibility and were derived by a small team that did not properly account for Twitter's existing security procedures.
But Twitter's security concerns had come to light prior to 2020. In 2010, the FTC filed a complaint against Twitter for its mishandling of users' private information and the issue of too many employees having access to Twitter's central controls. The complaint resulted in an FTC consent order finalized the following year in which Twitter vowed to clean up its act, including by creating and maintaining "a comprehensive information security program."
Zatko alleges that despite the company's claims to the contrary, it had "never been in compliance" with what the FTC demanded more than 10 years ago. As a result of its alleged failures to address vulnerabilities raised by the FTC as well as other deficiencies, he says, Twitter suffers an "anomalously high rate of security incidents," approximately one per week serious enough to require disclosure to government agencies. "Based on my professional experience, peer companies do not have this magnitude or volume of incidents," Zatko wrote in a February letter to Twitter's board after he was fired by Twitter in January.
The stakes of Zatko's disclosure are enormous. It could lead to billions of dollars in new fines for Twitter if it's found to have violated its legal obligations, according to Jon Leibowitz, who was chair of the FTC at the time of Twitter's original 2011 consent order.
[I]f there's a violation here — and that's a big if — then I think the FTC should very seriously consider not just fining the corporation but also putting the executives responsible under order.
Jon Leibowitz, former chair of the FTC
The agency now has another opportunity to show the tech industry it is serious about holding platforms accountable, Leibowitz added, after officials opted not to name top Facebook execs including Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg in the FTC's $5 billion privacy settlement with that company in 2019.
"One of the big disappointments in the Facebook order violation case was that the FTC let executives off the hook; they should've been named," Leibowitz told CNN in an interview. "And if there's a violation here — and that's a big if — then I think the FTC should very seriously consider not just fining the corporation but also putting the executives responsible under order."
Twitter told CNN its FTC compliance record speaks for itself, citing third-party audits filed to the agency under the 2011 consent order in which it said Zatko did not participate. Twitter also said it is in compliance with relevant privacy rules and that it has been transparent with regulators about its efforts to fix any shortcomings in its systems.
Zatko's allegations are based in part on a failure to grasp how Twitter's existing programs and processes work to fulfill Twitter's FTC obligations, the person familiar with his tenure told CNN, saying that misunderstanding has prompted him to make inaccurate claims about the company's level of compliance.
Foreign threats
Twitter is exceptionally vulnerable to foreign government exploitation in ways that undermine US national security, and the company may even have foreign spies currently on its payroll, the disclosure alleges.
The whistleblower report says the US government provided specific evidence to Twitter shortly before Zatko's firing that at least one of its employees, perhaps more, were working for another government's intelligence service. The report does not say whether Twitter was already aware or if it subsequently acted on the tip.
Parag Agrawal, Twitter's former chief technology officer, was made CEO after Jack Dorsey stepped down last November.
Last year, prior to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Agrawal — then Twitter's chief technology officer — proposed to Zatko that Twitter comply with Russian demands that could result in broad-based censorship or surveillance of the platform, Zatko alleges.
The disclosure does not provide details of Agrawal's suggestion. Last summer, however, Russia passed a law pressuring tech platforms to open local offices in the country or face potential advertising bans, a move western security experts said was intended to give Russia greater leverage over US tech companies.
While Agrawal's suggestion was ultimately discarded, it was still an alarming sign of how far Twitter was willing to go in pursuit of growth, according to Zatko.
The fact that Twitter's current CEO even suggested Twitter become complicit with the Putin regime is cause for concern about Twitter's effects on US national security,
From Zatko's disclosure
"The fact that Twitter's current CEO even suggested Twitter become complicit with the Putin regime is cause for concern about Twitter's effects on U.S. national security," Zatko's disclosure says.
Zatko's report is becoming public just two weeks after a former Twitter manager was convicted of spying for Saudi Arabia.
The Saudi case underscores the gravity of the allegations Zatko now levels at Twitter. His report could further inflame bipartisan concerns in Washington about foreign adversaries and the cybersecurity threats they pose to Americans, ranging from the theft of US citizens' data to manipulating US voters or stealing technology and trade secrets.
Twitter did not respond to specific questions about its alleged foreign intelligence vulnerabilities.
The Musk element
Zatko's disclosure comes at a particularly fortuitous moment for Musk, who is engaged in a legal battle with Twitter over his attempt to back out of buying the company. Musk has accused Twitter of lying about the number of spam bots on its platform, an issue that he claims should let him terminate the deal.
While the binding acquisition agreement that Musk signed with Twitter in April did not include any bot-related exemptions, the billionaire claims that the number of bots on the platform affect the user experience and that having more bots than previously known could therefore impact the company's long-term value. After Musk moved to terminate the purchase, Twitter responded with a lawsuit alleging that he is using bots as a pretext to get out of a deal over which he now has buyers' remorse following the recent market downturn, and asking a court to force him to close the deal. The case is set to go to trial in Delaware Chancery Court in October.
Twitter employees walk by the company's headquarters in San Francisco.
User numbers are vital information for any social media business, as advertising revenue depends on how many people could potentially see an ad. But figures about how many users a service has, or how many people actually view a given ad on a site, are notoriously unreliable throughout the tech and media industries due to manipulation and error.
Alone among social media companies, Twitter reports its user numbers to investors and advertisers using a measurement it calls monetizable daily active users, or mDAUs. Its rivals simply count and report all active users; until 2019, Twitter had worked that way as well. But that meant Twitter's figures were subject to significant swings in certain situations, including takedowns of major bot networks. So Twitter switched to mDAUs, which it says counts all users that could be shown an advertisement on Twitter -- leaving all accounts that for some reason can't, for instance because they're known to be bots, in a separate bucket, according to Zatko's disclosure.
The company has repeatedly reported that less than 5% of its mDAUs are fake or spam accounts, and a person familiar with the matter both affirmed that assessment to CNN this week and pointed to other investor disclosures saying the figure relies on significant judgement that may not accurately reflect reality. But Zatko's disclosure argues that by reporting bots only as a percentage of mDAU, rather than as a percentage of the total number of accounts on the platform, Twitter obscures the true scale of fake and spam accounts on the service, a move Zatko alleges is deliberately misleading.
Zatko says he began asking about the prevalence of bot accounts on Twitter in early 2021, and was told by Twitter's head of site integrity that the company didn't know how many total bots are on its platform. He alleges that he came away from conversations with the integrity team with the understanding that the company "had no appetite to properly measure the prevalence of bots," in part because if the true number became public, it could harm the company's value and image.
Jack Dorsey reached out and asked me to come and perform a critical task at Twitter. I signed on to do it and believe I'm still performing that mission.
Peiter "Mudge" Zatko, former Twitter head of security
Experts on inauthentic behavior online say it can be difficult to quantify "bots" because there isn't a widely agreed upon definition of the term, and because bad actors constantly change their tactics. There are also many harmless bots on Twitter (and across the internet), such as automated news accounts, and Twitter offers an opt-in feature to allow such accounts to transparently label themselves as automated. Twitter told CNN that the claim it doesn't know how many bots are on its platform lacks context, reiterating that not all bots are bad and adding that to focus on the total number of bots on Twitter would include those the company may have already identified and taken action against. The company also does not believe it can catch every spam account on the platform, Twitter said, which is why it reports its less-than-5% figure, which reflects a manual estimate, in its financial filings.
But Zatko told CNN he thinks there would still be value in attempting to measure the total number of spam, false or otherwise potentially harmful automated accounts on the platform. "The executive team, the board, the shareholders and the users all deserve an honest answer as to what it is that they are consuming as far as data and information and content [on the platform ... At least from my point of view, I want to invest in a company where I know what's actually going on because I want to invest strategically in the long-term value of an organization," he said.
Twitter says that it allows bots on its platform, but its rules prohibit those that engage in spam or platform manipulation. But, as with all social media platforms' rules, the challenge often lies in enforcing its policies.
Elon Musk is engaged in a legal battle with Twitter over his attempt to back out of buying the company.
The company says it regularly challenges, suspends and removes accounts engaged in spam and platform manipulation, including typically removing more than one million spam accounts each day. Twitter said the total number of bots on the platform is not a useful number. The company declined to answer questions about the total number of accounts on the platform or the average number of new accounts added on the platform daily as context around its daily bot deletion figure.
But in casting doubt on Twitter's ability to estimate the true number of fake and spam accounts, Zatko's allegations could provide ammunition to Musk's central claim that the figure is much higher than Twitter has publicly reported.
By going public, Zatko says, he believes he is doing the job he was hired to do for a platform he says is critical to democracy. "Jack Dorsey reached out and asked me to come and perform a critical task at Twitter. I signed on to do it and believe I'm still performing that mission," he said.
CNN
3. China's ASEAN Silk Road gets slippery as other powers move in
Competition is good.
Charts and graphics at the link. Note the major infrastructure financier is Japan.
China's ASEAN Silk Road gets slippery as other powers move in
U.S., Europe, India join battle to build regional supply chains from Thailand to Vietnam
https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Asia-Insight/China-s-ASEAN-Silk-Road-gets-slippery-as-other-powers-move-in?utm_campaign=GL_asia_daily&utm_medium=email&utm_source=NA_newsletter&utm_content=article_link&del_type=1&pub_date=20220823190000&seq_num=2&si=1a7616f4-4be1-42a4-8e48-bcfa3a262b90
LIEN HOANG, Nikkei staff writer
AUGUST 23, 2022 06:00 JST
HO CHI MINH CITY -- Chinese blue-and-white porcelain first hauled along the Silk Routes to Europe proved so popular with British consumers that by the late 1800s the phenomenon spawned a nickname: "Chinamania." Today, the China obsession has a darker shade, as European and Pacific powers compete with Beijing's "new Silk Road" infrastructure projects -- and offer their Asian trade partners an alternative.
The battle is intense on China's doorstep in Southeast Asia, where bridges and ports have sprung up to meet the infrastructure needs of some of the world's fastest-growing economies and key supply chain hubs. Tokyo has long been the main donor behind the region's truck and train routes, but Beijing changed the game when it struck out on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) nearly a decade ago to build its own trade networks.
Now the puzzle pieces are shifting again as Beijing's billions trigger a response from democratic adversaries. These rival powers have announced a string of ambitious and overlapping hybrid state and commercial projects. Australia's new government is expected to increase development aid, the European Union wants to sign an infrastructure deal with Southeast Asia, and the U.S. has led a Group of Seven riposte to the BRI -- a $600 billion infrastructure aid fund launched in June. Some suggest unleashing Indian conglomerates as well.
The mix of donations, commerce and realpolitik flowing to the region raises a crucial question: Are China's competitors too late to the quest to build Southeast Asia's next generation of infrastructure?
"Chinamania is leading our political actors to make rash decisions," said Terence Wood, a research fellow at the Development Policy Center, an Australian think tank, and a former New Zealand aid official. He argues that rich countries are financing some projects based on a perceived China threat, rather than recipient nations' needs.
The first train on the China-Laos Railway. China has laid down track for a "Silk Rail" to reach Singapore by way of Laos, Thailand and Malaysia, but progress has stalled. © Getty Images
Pavida Pananond at Thailand's Thammasat University welcomed the G-7 funds but asked how much would materialize and how projects among "countries with diverse interests" would be chosen.
"These issues could reduce the real impacts of the G-7 plan and raise doubts whether the attempt is more to counteract China's growing geopolitical and geoeconomic power," the professor of international business told Nikkei Asia.
She added, "It remains to be seen if the scheme could catch up with China's BRI."
Democratic allies treat the BRI as a foil to what they claim are their own "value-driven, high-quality and transparent" infrastructure partnerships, in the words of European Parliament researcher Gisela Grieger.
Japan has held onto its crown as Southeast Asia's biggest infrastructure financier, with recent aid ranging from a 0.1% interest loan for Indonesia's Patimban Port to subways in that country, Vietnam and the Philippines. The U.S., the world's top foreign aid donor overall, announced in May a transportation partnership with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and clean-energy funding for ASEAN infrastructure.
Japan, Southeast Asia's top source of infrastructure financing by far, has funded subway train systems across the region, including this one in Ho Chi Minh City. (Photo by Lien Hoang)
The funds, disclosed at a summit of ASEAN leaders at the White House, were part of a $150 million package. It swiftly drew unflattering contrasts to China, which, for example, spent $14 million on one multiroad project in Cambodia alone.
Supporters of the new effort by the U.S. and other countries say it should not all be seen through the prism of geopolitical competition. Friederike Roder, vice president of anti-poverty group Global Citizen, told Nikkei Asia that global problems from COVID to climate change demand solidarity and coordination.
"It's quite terrible ... that we still need to make this point," she said.
The most blunt reincarnation of China's Silk Road in Southeast Asia is perhaps the plan for a high-speed train network zipping through five countries. China has laid down track for a "Silk Rail" to reach Singapore by way of Laos, Thailand and Malaysia. But progress has stalled, while rivals are leaving their mark on transportation construction elsewhere. Thai bridges were funded with Australian dollars, the French will help build an Indonesian airport and U.S. taxpayers financed a study to upgrade Vietnam's busiest container port.
European companies in Vietnam said better infrastructure is their top need, second only to help with red tape, a poll released on July 4 showed. Several Japanese officials also said that logistical constraints created a "bottleneck" for investors in Southeast Asia.
"We expect that infrastructure development would create and stimulate [the] investment climate," the Japan International Cooperation Agency's Indonesia branch told Nikkei Asia. Aid cash "basically contributes to economic and social benefits of recipient countries because they are important partners for Japan."
Public and private financing from Japan is backing $330 billion of ongoing construction projects across the ASEAN bloc, according to Fitch Solutions, which counted funds in all member states except Brunei. The figure linked to Chinese financing is $100 billion, less than Japan but more than Europe and North America combined.
Whenever asked if they can match Beijing's largesse, G-7 governments stress China's hidden costs and their own capitalist talent. This narrative began with the Trump administration, which responded to the BRI by dispatching aid officials to talk up free markets.
"America's Indo-Pacific strategy offers our partners an enterprise-driven future, and private enterprise is the greatest force known to man for lifting lives and building communities," Mark Green, then the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, said in 2018.
The Thai-Lao Friendship Bridge. Australia has supported bridge construction across Thailand. © Reuters
This approach continued with the Biden administration, which says the new G-7 infrastructure campaign is worth more than its headline budget of $600 billion.
"In the case of Southeast Asia, what we're really trying to stimulate is a long-term economic relationship rooted in private-sector investment -- not in massive cash transfers from the American Treasury," U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan said at an event in June.
In ASEAN, the next phase of the power battle may be more literal. The region's energy investment must double from current annual averages to at least $130 billion by 2030 to keep pace with demand, the International Energy Agency said in a May report. Renovations to electric lines have been fraught, such as a proposed ASEAN Power Grid that has stalled after some progress.
But there are glimmers of light. Investors from the Dutch to the Danes have streamed into Southeast Asia's market for solar and wind power, often with government backing. The EU is keen to sign an ASEAN Connectivity Partnership, modeled on one it inked with India in 2021. This would include deploying the European Investment Bank to finance renewable energy and other infrastructure. Chinese manufacturers and Japanese installers also have flocked to the photovoltaic panel business in the region.
Southeast Asia's biggest solar producer, Vietnam, demonstrates how aid money has followed the private trend. It received $533 million in infrastructure aid in 2019, before the pandemic, according to the OECD, which tallies donations mostly from rich EU and Pacific nations except China. About 48% of those funds to Vietnam involved energy.
The energy race also shows the approach of the G-7, comprising Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the U.K. and the U.S., plus the EU. The USAID Clean Power Asia program spent $16.3 million on Southeast Asian alternative energy from 2016 to 2021 but claimed credit for $7 billion in investment. The agency said it had focused on "mobilizing finance," especially private funds for grid-connected projects, such as its advisory on a $115 million wind farm in Vietnam and a $40 million contract for Thai supermarket giant Big C to put photovoltaic cells on its rooftops.
Southeast Asia's biggest solar producer, Vietnam, received $533 million in infrastructure aid in 2019. About 48% of those funds involved energy. © AP
The key word is "mobilize," used in the announcements of several Belt and Road alternatives. These include the EU's new Global Gateway for "quality infrastructure" aid and investment; a similar $50 billion program from Quad members India, the U.S., Japan and Australia; and the G-7 fund, once dubbed Build Back Better World.
Beijing dismissed the $600 billion G-7 fund and speculated mockingly about where it would end up. Recipient nations might very well spend the G-7 money to build infrastructure by buying cheap materials from China, the state-owned Global Times claimed.
Just as their ancestors profited from porcelain, Chinese merchants expect to cash in on the trade routes of the 21st century, no matter who finances them.
Additional reporting by Nana Shibata and Dominic Faulder.
4. FDD | Taliban circulates video of Haqqanis plotting 2010 suicide raid against U.S. troops
FDD | Taliban circulates video of Haqqanis plotting 2010 suicide raid against U.S. troops
fdd.org · by Bill Roggio Senior Fellow and Editor of FDD's Long War Journal · August 22, 2022
The Taliban released a video showing its deputy emir and interior minister Sirajuddin Haqqani and other top terrorist commanders finishing preparations for a large-scale suicide assault against U.S. forces based in eastern Afghanistan in 2010.
1) The Taliban has circulated a video showing top Haqqani leaders, including Sirajuddin & Badruddin Haqqani, Qari Zakir, Mullah Sangeen Zadran, and Ghani Muhammad sending off the suicide assault team that attacked Forward Operating Base Fenty at Jalalabad Airport in 2010. pic.twitter.com/N2Z5IpJATa
— Bill Roggio (@billroggio) August 22, 2022
The video, which was circulated by Taliban supporters on social media, shows the whose who of the Haqqani Network, the powerful Taliban faction that is listed by the U.S. as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, seeing off the team of suicide bombers who attacked Forward Operating Base (FOB) Fenty on Nov. 12, 2010. FOB Fenty was located at the Jalalabad City airport in the Behsud district in Nangarhar.
The attack was ultimately repelled by a quick reaction force of U.S. and Afghan troops. Six attackers were killed and two suicide vests were recovered.
In the video, Sirajuddin Haqqani, who at the time was the operational commander of the Haqqani Network, was joined by his brother Badruddin Haqqani, Qari Zakir, the Taliban’s chief of suicide bombers, Mullah Sangeen Zadran, a dangerous Haqqani leader, and Ghani Muhammad, an Al Qaeda-linked military commander based in Pakistan.
The terrorist leaders are first seen sitting in the room with the suicide team. The group then prays together. Afterward, Sirajuddin and his deputies embrace the members of the suicide team as they leave to execute the attack.
Sirajuddin has since risen to the top tier of the Taliban’s leadership. He currently serves as one of two deputy leaders of the Taliban, as well as the interior minister of the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.
Badruddin, Sangeen, and Zakir have since been killed in U.S. counterterrorism operations.
Badruddin was added to the list of Specially Designated Global Terrorists on May 11, 2011. He was a member of the Miramshah Shura, one of several Taliban regional military commands, and direct attacks in southeastern Afghanistan. “The foreign fighters supported by Badruddin include al Qaeda fighters,” Jason Blazakis, the chief of the State Department’s Terrorist Designations Unit, told The Long War Journal in May 2011.
Badruddin was also one of several handlers for the fighters involved in the June 28, 2011 assault on the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul. He was recorded while he issued instructions to one of the fighters, and was heard laughing during the attack that killed 11 civilians and two Afghan policemen [see LWJ report, Haqqani Network directed Kabul hotel assault by phone from Pakistan].
Qari Zakir, the Haqqani Network’s chief of suicide operations, was also listed as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist. Zakir, who is also known as Abdul Rauf, was also Haqqani Network’s “operational commander in Kabul, Takhar, Kunduz, and Baghlan provinces” in Afghanistan. Additionally, Zakir directed the group’s “training program, which includes instruction in small arms, heavy weapons, and basic improvised explosive device (IED) construction.”
Zakir’s ties to Al Qaeda and other foreign fighters were extensive. He is thought to have been killed alongside Hamza bin Laden, the son of Osama bin Laden and a rising star in Al Qaeda, in a U.S. drone strike in Pakistan’s Kurram tribal agency in September 2019.
Mullah Sangeen Zadran, like many top Haqqani Network leaders, was also listed as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist. According to State, Sangeen helped “lead fighters in attacks across Southeastern Afghanistan, and is believed to have planned and coordinated the movement of hundreds of foreign fighters into Afghanistan.” He served as the Taliban’s military commander and then shadow governor of Paktika province in eastern Afghanistan, as well as a senior aid to Sirajuddin before he was killed in a U.S. drone strike in the Ghulam Khan area of Pakistan’s tribal agency of North Waziristan on Sept. 5, 2013.
Four years before his death, Sangeen openly admitted that the bond between the “brothers” of Al Qaeda and the Taliban were unbreakable. In an interview released in Sept. 2009 by As Sahab, Al Qaeda’s official media outlet, Sangeen said: “We do not see any difference between Taliban and Al Qaeda,” and the two groups “are all one and are united by Islam.” Sangeen also noted that Osama bin Laden “has pledged allegiance” to Taliban emir Mullah Muhammad Omar “and has reassured his leadership again and again.”
Sangeen was so revered by the Taliban that the group put up a billboard with his image on it in Khost province less than a month after the group took control of Afghanistan.
Ghani Muhammad is a military commander who is known to be close to Sirajuddin. In the past he was based out of Mir Ali in Pakistan’s tribal agency of North Waziristan. Mir Ali is a known hub for foreign jihadists, including Al Qaeda. A U.S. intelligence source told FDD’s Long War Journal that Muhammad previously worked with Abu Kasha al Iraqi, a top Al Qaeda military commander who was based in Mir Ali and is thought to have been killed in a U.S. drone strike in 2012.
Bill Roggio is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Editor of FDD’s Long War Journal. Follow him on Twitter @billroggio. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
fdd.org · by Bill Roggio Senior Fellow and Editor of FDD's Long War Journal · August 22, 2022
5. New weapons for Ukraine suggest preparation for closer combat
Excerpts:
U.S. security aid in recent months has focused on long-range rockets and howitzers such as multiple-launch precision rocket systems, known as HIMARS, to support Ukraine in the brutal artillery fight in the eastern Donbas region. Those weapons have been effective at precisely targeting enemy command posts and ammunition depots, and have led to a reduction in the scale of Russia’s shelling. But they have not shifted the front lines.
“We haven’t seen a significant retake of territory, but we do see a significant weakening of Russian positions in a variety of locations,” the senior official said.
Ukrainian troops have struggled to punch through Russian-held territory or capitalize on earlier counteroffensives, such as one near Kherson in June that liberated villages in the region. Ukrainian forces have not made much progress since then and have found themselves exposed in flat terrain as Russian troops surge artillery units into the area and launch reconnaissance missions to probe Ukrainian defenses.
The TOW missiles being sent to Ukraine can either be set up on a heavy tripod or loaded onto the back of a vehicle like a Humvee. That setup allows troops to launch a missile and quickly depart to avoid return fire — a technique known as “shoot and scoot.”
The Humvees can also be used to haul newly provided 105mm howitzers, which trade power and range for ease of transport and maneuverability compared with the heavier M777 howitzers the United States has already sent.
New weapons for Ukraine suggest preparation for closer combat
The Washington Post · by Alex Horton · August 22, 2022
The Pentagon is sending new weapons and equipment to Ukraine that will better prepare its military to fight Russian troops at closer ranges, potentially signaling that Kyiv and its backers see an opportunity to retake lost ground after weeks of grinding artillery duels along the front lines.
Ukrainian officials have been openly discussing an offensive on the Russian-held strategic port city of Kherson, but there is little evidence along the front lines that Ukraine is prepared to execute an operation that would require large numbers of troops, armored vehicles and powerful close-range weapons to overcome the numerically superior Russian military.
The latest package appears to be a first step toward addressing some of the shortfalls in the weaponry Ukrainian forces would need to launch a counterattack, particularly across mined areas in the approach to well-entrenched Russian positions. A successful offensive would include an ability to attack from a variety of distances.
The nearly $800 million in assistance announced Friday will include 40 bomb-resistant vehicles equipped with rollers that help detonate mines, as well as lighter howitzers that are easier to move than the more powerful guns the United States has previously sent. The aid will also include recoilless rifles with a range of few hundred meters and missile launchers limited to less than three miles — much closer than the current distance between Ukrainian and Russian units in many places.
“The mine-clearing is a really good example of how the Ukrainians will need this sort of capability to be able to push their forces forward and retake territory,” a senior U.S. defense official told reporters Friday. “These are capabilities that are enhancing the Ukrainians’ mobility as they look at this very challenging environment in southern Ukraine, in particular.” The official spoke on the condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the Pentagon.
The armored vehicles known as MRAPs, an iconic vehicle in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, would shield troops from explosions and small-arms fire while triggering mines with rollers that project from the front like lobster antennae.
U.S. security aid in recent months has focused on long-range rockets and howitzers such as multiple-launch precision rocket systems, known as HIMARS, to support Ukraine in the brutal artillery fight in the eastern Donbas region. Those weapons have been effective at precisely targeting enemy command posts and ammunition depots, and have led to a reduction in the scale of Russia’s shelling. But they have not shifted the front lines.
“We haven’t seen a significant retake of territory, but we do see a significant weakening of Russian positions in a variety of locations,” the senior official said.
Ukrainian troops have struggled to punch through Russian-held territory or capitalize on earlier counteroffensives, such as one near Kherson in June that liberated villages in the region. Ukrainian forces have not made much progress since then and have found themselves exposed in flat terrain as Russian troops surge artillery units into the area and launch reconnaissance missions to probe Ukrainian defenses.
The TOW missiles being sent to Ukraine can either be set up on a heavy tripod or loaded onto the back of a vehicle like a Humvee. That setup allows troops to launch a missile and quickly depart to avoid return fire — a technique known as “shoot and scoot.”
The Humvees can also be used to haul newly provided 105mm howitzers, which trade power and range for ease of transport and maneuverability compared with the heavier M777 howitzers the United States has already sent.
The package also includes 2,000 rounds for Carl Gustav recoilless rifles. The weapons are carried by infantrymen to fire 84mm rounds at vehicles and fighting positions within a few hundred meters.
Rob Lee, a senior fellow with the Foreign Policy Research Institute and expert on the Russian military, cautioned that the most recent Pentagon package is not proof that an offensive is coming. Elements of the aid may have other uses, and some parts, such as the MRAPs, may not be ideal for close combat because of their high silhouette and visibility, but are better than the alternative of unarmored trucks.
Other weapons, Lee said, suggest a possible desire on the part of the Pentagon to provide weapons but draw from stocks it was already divesting in, rather than dipping into critical reserves and harming readiness by shipping expensive or advanced weapons. The United States has already eyed retiring vehicles such as Humvees and MRAPs and weapons such as the TOW.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if there was an economic element to this,” Lee said. Some newly provided weapons could also be useful in the artillery fight in the east or an offensive in the south, such as using the ScanEagle drone and radar-detecting missiles in tandem to find and destroy Russian air defense systems. Removing those from the battlefield would allow troops to harness their own drones in a counterattack and move more freely around the battlefield.
A classic counteroffensive with a lot of troops and vehicles may not be the best strategy anyway, Lee said. Ukraine has found success bombarding Russians with long-range rockets and sabotaging positions in occupied Crimea, undermining confidence that Russians far from the battlefield are safe.
“I don’t know if they have the forces to do it,” Lee said of an offensive in Kherson. An attrition strategy, he said, “makes the most sense for Ukraine.”
The Washington Post · by Alex Horton · August 22, 2022
6. 'All of it is a lie': Russian paratrooper condemns his country's war in Ukraine
An influence operations coup? How will this be effectively exploited?
'All of it is a lie': Russian paratrooper condemns his country's war in Ukraine
CNN · by Matthew Chance and Rob Picheta, CNN
(CNN)The Kremlin's justification for invading Ukraine "is a lie," a Russian paratrooper who previously publicly condemned his country's war in Ukraine has told CNN.
Two weeks ago, Pavel Filatyev spoke out against the conflict in a 141-page-long testimony posted to his VKontakte social media page, then fled Russia. He is the first serving member of the Russian military to publicly criticize the invasion of Ukraine and leave the country.
Now he tells CNN that his fellow troops as tired, hungry and disillusioned -- and that the Kremlin's war effort is "destroying peaceful lives."
"We understood that we were dragged into a serious conflict where we are simply destroying towns and not actually liberating anyone," Filatyev told CNN's Matthew Chance. CNN is not disclosing the location of the interview for the security of the interviewee.
"Many understood that we do not see the reason that our government is trying to explain to us. That all of it is a lie," he said. "We are just destroying peaceful lives. This fact immensely influenced our morale. That feeling that we are not doing anything good."
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Filatyev served in Russia's 56th air assault regiment.
Filatyev, 33, told CNN "corruption" and repression are rife in his home country and said his unit -- which was based in Crimea and sent to Ukraine entering Kherson early in the conflict -- was ill-equipped and given little explanation for Russia's invasion.
According to Filatyev, the soldiers and their commanders did not know what they were expected to do in Ukraine. He added that they soon became disillusioned with the government's reasoning for its invasion after arriving in Kherson and facing resistance from locals who did not want to be "liberated."
The paratrooper served in Russia's 56th air assault regiment and was also involved in efforts to capture the city of Mykolaiv. He was evacuated from the front lines because of an injury.
He told CNN the Russian army lacked basic equipment, as well as drones and other types of unmanned aircraft during his stint on the front line.
"Our barracks are about 100 years old and are not able to host all of our servicemen ... all of our weapons are from the times of Afghanistan," he said.
"Several days after we encircled Kherson many of us did not have any food, water or sleeping sacks on them," he said. "Because it was very cold at night, we couldn't even sleep. We would find some rubbish, some rags, just to wrap ourselves to keep warm."
Analysis: A grim winter will test Europe's support for Ukraine like never before
The capture of Kherson was a significant early military success for Russia. Ukraine is now battling to regain the city as fighting increasingly shifts to the country's south.
But Filatyev said he struggles to understand the vision of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who launched the invasion of Ukraine nearly six months ago and has seen his troops locked in a grinding, costly conflict.
"Now that I am out of there and without a gun, I think this is the worst, stupidest thing our government could have done," he said. "I do not know where the government is leading us. What is the next step? Nuclear war?"
Filatyev was evacuated from the front lines following an injury.
"I see what is happening to my country and I am terrified. Everything is destroyed, corrupted," he told CNN. "The only laws that function well are repressive ones."
Filatyev fled Russia after conducting some initial media interviews. But he suggested the Kremlin could take revenge for his public position.
"I will either be put in prison ... or they will just silence me by taking me out. There were a lot of cases like that in the past," he said.
"I do not see any other way out. If it happens, it happens."
CNN · by Matthew Chance and Rob Picheta, CNN
7. U.S. urges citizens to leave Ukraine as fears grow of Russian attacks on capital
What is our intelligence telling us?
U.S. urges citizens to leave Ukraine as fears grow of Russian attacks on capital
Reuters · by Max Hunder
- Summary
- U.S. urges citizens to leave Ukraine 'now'
- Heightened fears of attack on Kyiv around independence day
- Wednesday marks six months since Russian invasion
- Concern over dangers to nuclear plant
KYIV, Aug 23 (Reuters) - The United States on Tuesday urged its citizens to leave Ukraine, saying it believed Russia was preparing to target civilian and government infrastructure in the next few days as the war reaches the six-month mark.
The warning followed a ban by the Ukrainian government on celebrations in the capital Kyiv on Wednesday's anniversary of independence from Soviet rule due to fears of attack. read more
Leaders of dozens of countries and international organizations were due to take part on Tuesday in the so-called Crimea Platform in solidarity with Ukraine on the Russian invasion's six-month anniversary. Most would do so by video.
On the battlefield, Russian forces carried out artillery and air strikes in the Zaporizhzhia region in southeastern Ukraine, where fighting has taken place near Europe's largest nuclear power plant, the Ukrainian military said.
But six months on from Russia's Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine, and with thousands of deaths and widespread destruction of cities, the conflict is locked in a stalemate.
Russian forces control a large swathe of the south, including along the Black Sea coast, and chunks of the eastern Donbas region. The prospects for peace look almost non-existent.
Fearing a surge in Russian attacks, the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv on Tuesday urged U.S. citizens to leave if they could.
"The Department of State has information that Russia is stepping up efforts to launch strikes against Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure and government facilities in the coming days," the embassy said in a statement.
U.S. citizens should leave Ukraine "now" by their own means if it was safe to do so, it said.
Although it was not the first time the United States has issued such a warning, this one was made as Ukraine was due on Wednesday to mark 31 years of independence from Soviet rule.
It also followed the killing of Darya Dugina, the daughter of a prominent Russian ultra-nationalist, in a car bomb attack near Moscow on Saturday. Moscow has blamed the killing on Ukrainian agents, an accusation Kyiv denies.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has also said Moscow could try "something particularly ugly" in the run-up to Wednesday's anniversary. read more
Kyiv is far from the frontlines and has only rarely been hit by Russian missiles since Ukraine repelled a ground offensive to seize the capital in March.
The mood in the city remained calm on Tuesday, with many people still wandering the streets with smiling faces, but signs of the increased threat could be felt.
Authorities have told Ukrainians nationwide to work from home where possible from Tuesday to Thursday, also urging people to take air raid warnings seriously and seek shelter when sirens sound.
The Kyiv city administration banned large public gatherings until Thursday, fearing that a crowd of celebrating residents could become a target for a Russian missile strike.
Polish President Andrzej Duda, one of Ukraine's strongest supporters, was in the capital on Tuesday to discuss further support for Ukraine with Zelenskiy, including military aid.
NUCLEAR POWDER KEG
Russian shelling hit the eastern city of Kharkiv - Ukraine's second-largest city - around dawn on Tuesday, regional governor Oleh Synehubov said. A house had been hit but no one was hurt, he said.
In the south, Ukraine said Russia fired artillery and mounted air strikes in several towns in the Zaporizhzhia region, where Russian forces captured the nuclear power plant shortly after the start of the invasion.
Artillery and rocket fire near the Zaporizhzhia nuclear reactor complex, on the south bank of the Dnipro River, has led to calls for the area to be demilitarised.
The two sides have traded blame over frequent shelling at the plant. Kyiv accuses Moscow of basing troops and storing military hardware there. Russia denies this and accuses Ukraine of attacking Zaporizhzhia with drones.
Moscow requested a U.N. Security Council meeting be held on Tuesday to discuss the Zaporizhzhia plant, Russian state-owned news agency RIA reported, citing Deputy Ambassador to the United Nations Dmitry Polyanskiy. read more
In other action, Ukrainian forces shelled a building housing the local administration headquarters in the centre of separatist-controlled Donetsk city on Tuesday, TASS news agency reported, quoting Russian-installed officials. Three people were killed, it said.
Russia's defence ministry said its forces had downed a Ukrainian SU-27 warplane over the Kharkiv region.
Russia sent its troops over the border in what it calls a "special military operation" saying it wanted to demilitarise its neighbour and protect Russian-speaking communities. Ukraine and its Western allies accuse Moscow of waging an unjustified war of aggression.
The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights said on Monday that 5,587 civilians had been killed and 7,890 wounded between Feb. 24 and Aug. 21, mainly from artillery, rocket and missile attacks. The U.N. children's agency UNICEF said at least 972 children have been killed or injured over six months of war.
Separately, Ukrainian armed forces chief General Valeriy Zaluzhnyi provided what appeared to be the first public Ukrainian military death toll, saying nearly 9,000 soldiers had died in action.
Russia has not said how many of its soldiers have been killed. Ukraine's General Staff have estimated the Russian military death toll at 45,400.
Reuters has been unable to verify military losses.
Reporting by Ron Popeski and Natalia Zinets; Writing by Stephen Coates and Angus MacSwan; Editing by William Maclean
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Reuters · by Max Hunder
8. Exclusive: Iran has dropped some demands for nuclear deal, U.S. official says
Exclusive: Iran has dropped some demands for nuclear deal, U.S. official says
Reuters · by Steve Holland
WASHINGTON, Aug 23 (Reuters) - Iran has dropped some of its main demands on resurrecting a deal to rein in Tehran's nuclear program, including its insistence that international inspectors close some probes of its atomic program, bringing the possibility of an agreement closer, a senior U.S. official told Reuters on Monday.
The United States aims to respond soon to a draft agreement proposed by the European Union that would bring back the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran that former President Donald Trump abandoned and current President Joe Biden has sought to revive.
The official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, said that although Tehran has been saying Washington has made concessions, Iran has dropped some of its key demands.
"They came back last week and basically dropped the main hang-ups to a deal," the official said.
"We think they have finally crossed the Rubicon and moved toward possibly getting back into the deal on terms that President Biden can accept," the official added. "If we are closer today, it's because Iran has moved. They conceded on issues that they have been holding onto from the beginning."
Iran's foreign ministry had no immediate comment.
Iran had already largely relented on its demand that the United States lift its designation of the Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO) entity, the official said. read more
"We said under no circumstances would we do that. They continued to push it. A month ago they started to soften that core demand and said you can keep the (FTO) designation but we would like lift it from a number of companies affiliated with the IRGC. We said 'no we're not going to do that,'" he added.
Iran also wanted a guarantee that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) would close investigations involving unexplained traces of uranium.
"Iran wants guarantees that the IAEA would close all of them. We said we would never accept that," the official said.
The IAEA board of governors in June overwhelmingly passed a resolution criticizing Iran for failing to explain the presence of uranium traces at three undeclared sites. read more
The official said that gaps remain between the United States and Iran and that "it could take a little longer" to come to a final agreement, if one is possible.
"We’re studying Iran’s response now and we'll get back to them soon," the official said.
Earlier, State Department spokesman Ned Price said there was no guarantee a deal can be struck, saying "the outcome of these ongoing discussions still remains uncertain as gaps do remain."
Washington would have to lift some sanctions under the terms of the agreement, but U.S. officials say returning to the deal is crucial to preventing a nuclear crisis in the Middle East.
"If we get this deal, yes, we do lift some sanctions, but Iran has to dismantle its nuclear program," the official said.
All this comes at a time when Iran is thought to have enough enriched uranium to - if further purified - build multiple weapons, and is closer than ever to being able to produce them, the official said.
The nuclear deal between Iran and world powers appeared near revival in March after 11 months of indirect U.S.-Iran talks in Vienna.
But negotiations broke down over obstacles such as Iran's desire to remove the Revolutionary Guards from the FTO list.
Iran has also demanded the United States guarantee that no future U.S. president would abandon the deal. Biden cannot provide such ironclad assurances because the deal is a political understanding rather than a legally binding treaty.
A second official said that under full implementation of the deal, the IAEA would be able to resume a comprehensive inspections regime that could detect any Iranian effort to pursue a nuclear weapon covertly. Much of this monitoring would remain in place indefinitely.
This official also said Iran would be prohibited from enriching and stockpiling uranium above very limited levels, denying it the material required for a bomb.
In addition, the official said, Iran would not be permitted to have any of the 20% and 60% enriched uranium that it is stockpiling today; advanced centrifuges Iran is operating would be stopped and removed, including all of the centrifuges at its fortified underground facility at Fordow.
"Strict limits on Iranian enrichment would mean that even if Iran left the deal to pursue a nuclear weapon, it would take at least six months to do so," the official said.
Reporting By Steve Holland and Arshad Mohammed; Editing by Mary Milliken and Gerry Doyle
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Reuters · by Steve Holland
9. FDD | Amnesty Report Endangers Ukrainian Civilians
Excerpts:
As the Kremlin exploits Amnesty’s findings, Ukrainian officials have called out the report’s misleading conclusions. Cofounder of Amnesty’s Swedish branch, Per Wastberg, as well as the head of Amnesty International Ukraine, Oksana Pokalchuk, resigned, citing the Amnesty report’s hypocrisy. Pokalchuk noted that Amnesty did not give Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense adequate time to respond and did not sufficiently cover Russian troops’ aggressions. As a result, Pokalchuk lamented, the report resembles “a tool of Russian propaganda.”
Responding to widespread criticism of the recent report, Amnesty International Secretary-General Agnes Callamard doubled down, calling on “Ukrainian and Russian social media mobs and trolls” to stop their “disinformation” and “misinformation.” Never mind that Russians were praising Amnesty’s findings. Amnesty later said it “regrets the distress and anger” caused by the report but still “fully stand[s] by [its] findings.”
Amnesty says its “purpose is to protect individuals wherever justice, fairness, freedom and truth are denied.” Its report, however, does the opposite. One hopes Amnesty will reflect on its shortcomings and do better next time. So far, it looks like we shouldn’t hold our breath.
FDD | Amnesty Report Endangers Ukrainian Civilians
David May
Senior Research Analyst
Ivana Stradner
Advisor
fdd.org · by David May Senior Research Analyst · August 22, 2022
Russia may have banned Amnesty International in April for reporting on Russian atrocities, but the human rights group’s August 4 report, titled “Ukrainian fighting tactics endanger civilians,” has received a hero’s welcome in the Kremlin. While Kyiv certainly should not be immune to criticism, Amnesty’s study omits key facts, contains serious methodological flaws, and was poorly presented to the public. As a result, Amnesty has handed Moscow a potent propaganda weapon with which to justify its military’s ongoing bombardment of Ukrainian civilians.
The report found that in 19 towns and villages, Ukrainian forces had “launch[ed] strikes from within populated residential areas as well as bas[ed] themselves in civilian buildings,” including schools and hospitals. “Such tactics violate international humanitarian law and endanger civilians, as they turn civilian objects into military targets,” Amnesty noted.
While this may indeed be true, the study fails to acknowledge that in many cases, Russia’s decision to attack urban areas has forced the Ukrainian military to operate in and around residential and other civilian structures. A journalist who accompanied Amnesty officials while they compiled evidence in Ukraine noted that despite his attempts to get Amnesty to “differentiate between defensive and offensive operations in urban areas,” the organization had already made up its mind that “Ukraine was endangering its own civilians by the mere act of attempting to defend its cities.”
Likewise, Amnesty omits Ukrainian efforts to evacuate civilians prior to operations. For example, the report accuses Ukrainian forces of operating in residential areas in Lysychansk, a city in eastern Ukraine recently taken by Russia, but ignores the continual efforts by local authorities to relocate civilians.
While none of this exempts Ukrainian forces from their obligation to take all feasible precautions to protect civilians, omitting this key context creates the false impression that Ukraine willingly endangers civilians. It takes the onus off Russia for its wanton disregard for civilian casualties, as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy noted.
Furthermore, the manner in which Amnesty collected its data may have biased its findings. According to the Ukrainian government’s Center for Strategic Communications, some of the data in Amnesty’s report came from interviews conducted by local volunteers and independent journalists in Russian-occupied territory as well as so-called “filtration camps” under the surveillance of Russia’s FSB secret police.
As a result, the Center says, the Ukrainian interviewees “may have been … under significant pressure” to give answers that would please their Russian persecutors. Amnesty has since denied these allegations.
Finally, as Zelenskyy indicated, Amnesty shifted responsibility for civilian deaths onto Ukraine. When allegations of Palestinians operating near civilian infrastructure surfaced in 2009, a senior Amnesty researcher clarified that that did not turn those buildings into “legitimate military targets.” And when it released a report on this topic in 2015, to preempt Israeli claims of Palestinians using human shields, Amnesty justified Hamas’ urging of civilians not to evacuate buildings facing impending attack. Such deliberate messaging vis-à-vis Ukraine could have avoided this controversy.
Unsurprisingly, Moscow’s propaganda machine pounced. Pro-Russia Telegram and Twitter accounts went into a frenzy, gloating that the report had vindicated the Russian military against accusations of war crimes. The Russian Mission in Geneva tweeted that Amnesty confirmed Ukraine was turning civilian structures into “legitimate target[s].” Russia’s Embassy in the United Kingdom wrote that Amnesty confirmed what Russia “has been saying all along.”
On August 9, state-owned Russian news agency RIA Novosti published pro-Russia child writer and activist Faina Savenkova’s appeal to Amnesty to speak out against the Ukrainian army’s “killing of children” in Donbass. This was not Savenkova’s first tour in Russia’s propaganda army. In 2021, she addressed the United Nations on Children’s Day to decry what she framed as Ukraine’s violent campaign against Russian-led separatist forces in occupied Luhansk.
As the Kremlin exploits Amnesty’s findings, Ukrainian officials have called out the report’s misleading conclusions. Cofounder of Amnesty’s Swedish branch, Per Wastberg, as well as the head of Amnesty International Ukraine, Oksana Pokalchuk, resigned, citing the Amnesty report’s hypocrisy. Pokalchuk noted that Amnesty did not give Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense adequate time to respond and did not sufficiently cover Russian troops’ aggressions. As a result, Pokalchuk lamented, the report resembles “a tool of Russian propaganda.”
Responding to widespread criticism of the recent report, Amnesty International Secretary-General Agnes Callamard doubled down, calling on “Ukrainian and Russian social media mobs and trolls” to stop their “disinformation” and “misinformation.” Never mind that Russians were praising Amnesty’s findings. Amnesty later said it “regrets the distress and anger” caused by the report but still “fully stand[s] by [its] findings.”
Amnesty says its “purpose is to protect individuals wherever justice, fairness, freedom and truth are denied.” Its report, however, does the opposite. One hopes Amnesty will reflect on its shortcomings and do better next time. So far, it looks like we shouldn’t hold our breath.
David May is a senior research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where Ivana Stradner is an advisor. Follow them on Twitter: @DavidSamuelMay and @ivanastradner. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy. The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author’s own and not a reflection of the views of 19ForyFive.
fdd.org · by David May Senior Research Analyst · August 22, 2022
10. China Is Now Courting Thailand, A Key US Ally, With Joint Military Drills & Massive Arms Sales
One of our 5 Asia-Pacific allies.
Excerpts:
The first joint training exercise for Falcon Strike took place in 2015. The PLA Air Force brought J-10C fighter jets, JH-7A fighter-bombers, and KJ-500 airborne early warning aircraft for the fifth edition this year.
At the same time, the Royal Thai Air Force provided Saab JAS 39C/D Gripen fighter planes and Saab 340 airborne early warning aircraft built in Sweden, as noted by Chinese state media Global Times.
The two air forces will practice small and large-scale troop deployment operations, air support, and strikes on ground targets. Some incredibly realistic air warfare simulations are anticipated with the aid of airborne early warning aircraft, fighters from both sides, active electronically scanned array radar, and modern air-to-air missiles.
...
The Royal Thai Navy said it might accept a Chinese-made engine for the S26T diesel-electric submarine it ordered from China Shipbuilding & Offshore International Co (CSOC) – replacing the originally specified German-made MTU396 diesel engine – if the substitute meets requirements.
...
Further, according to Zhang Mingliang, a professor of Southeast Asian studies at Jinan University in Guangzhou, Bangkok deepened its military connections with Beijing partly because the Americans disapproved of the present junta and the coup that put it in power in 2014.
While the US has spoken against the human rights violations in Thailand, China has been a complicit friend.
China Is Now Courting Thailand, A Key US Ally, With Joint Military Drills & Massive Arms Sales
eurasiantimes.com · by Sakshi Tiwari · August 22, 2022
South East Asia has become a battleground for influence between the US and China, with both countries using all the tools in their arsenal to gain ground in the region.
In a new development, China is courting a staunch US ally – Thailand – by supplying arms and sharing best military practices.
On August 14, the Chinese and Thai Air Forces kicked off the 11-day ‘Falcon Strike 2022’ drills at Udorn Royal Thai Air Force Base in northern Thailand. This came after a US$380 million deal to buy a Chinese-made S26T Yuan-class submarine for the Royal Thai Navy was revived last week, Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post reported.
This assumes significance as the joint annual exercise between the United States and Thailand, called the ‘Cobra Gold,’ was scaled down this year with the traditional war games absent from the two-week module. However, they are expected to be back to full-scale next year.
The military drills between China and Thailand also come during increased tensions between Beijing and Washington in the Indo-Pacific. Both sides have upped their deployment and have sharpened their rhetoric on Taiwan. Some experts believe a war in the region could just be a matter of time.
Retaliating to US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan this month, China shut off military communication lines with the US.
The People’s Liberation Army conducted extensive live-fire training exercises across the island. On August 15, after another US congressional delegation visited Taipei, the PLA started a fresh set of military drills.
With China’s growing influence in the region and a weakening US presence, the latter has taken it upon itself to rekindle its ties with the ASEAN countries that will be of critical strategic value in case of conflict with Beijing.
Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III Meeting With Thailand Prime Minister and Minister of Defence Prayut Chan-o-chacha- File Image
US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin visited Thailand in June, saying it was part of efforts to strengthen an “unparalleled network of alliances and partnerships” in the region.
Thailand has also signaled that it is ready to join the elite F-35 club. Thailand’s House Budget Scrutiny Committee recently approved a budget of 369 million baht ($14.7 million) for the 2023 fiscal year to facilitate the RTAF’s procurement of two F-35s (variant A for conventional take-off and landing).
However, the US is still trailing behind China in arms sales to Bangkok.
China’s Military Ties With Thailand On A Rise
The first joint training exercise for Falcon Strike took place in 2015. The PLA Air Force brought J-10C fighter jets, JH-7A fighter-bombers, and KJ-500 airborne early warning aircraft for the fifth edition this year.
At the same time, the Royal Thai Air Force provided Saab JAS 39C/D Gripen fighter planes and Saab 340 airborne early warning aircraft built in Sweden, as noted by Chinese state media Global Times.
The two air forces will practice small and large-scale troop deployment operations, air support, and strikes on ground targets. Some incredibly realistic air warfare simulations are anticipated with the aid of airborne early warning aircraft, fighters from both sides, active electronically scanned array radar, and modern air-to-air missiles.
Falcon Strike 2019- File image
The Falcon Strike military drills between the two have thus come at a reasonable time and follow US military drills with Indonesia at China’s doorsteps. The US also recently concluded its RIMPAC military drills with an emphasis on ‘Free and Open Indo Pacific.’
In recent years, China has somewhat surpassed the US as Thailand’s primary arms supplier, giving the country’s governing military junta everything from VT-4 main battle tanks to a Type 071E amphibious dock ship.
Type 071 amphibious transport dock – Wikipedia
The People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) currently has five vessels of the Type 071 class commissioned in its fleet, with three more on the way. Thailand became the first export customer of the vessel.
Not just that, the Yuan-class submarine deal stuck in limbo due to Thailand’s objections to China’s home-grown engines has been revived. China has offered reverse-engineered Chinese-made engines certified by German MTU.
The Biggest Deal Is Back On Track!
The Royal Thai Navy said it might accept a Chinese-made engine for the S26T diesel-electric submarine it ordered from China Shipbuilding & Offshore International Co (CSOC) – replacing the originally specified German-made MTU396 diesel engine – if the substitute meets requirements.
EurAsian Times had earlier reported that Thailand’s Prime Minister, Prayut Chan-o-cha, had warned in April that the planned procurement deal with China could be shelved if Beijing could not fit the German engines specified in the original purchase agreement. With the deal back on track, the cooperation is set for a new high.
Scaled model of S26T submarine displayed by CSOC during the 2017 Defense & Security exhibition in Bangkok, Thailand. (Navy Recognition)
The Royal Thai Navy will now conduct a complete evaluation by September 15 after receiving the specifications for an upgraded version of the CHD620 diesel engine from the Chinese shipbuilder.
Vice-Admiral Pokkrong Monthatphalin, a spokesperson for RTN, said earlier this month that the sale might proceed if the parameters are adequate and a sample engine passes more testing.
Further, according to Zhang Mingliang, a professor of Southeast Asian studies at Jinan University in Guangzhou, Bangkok deepened its military connections with Beijing partly because the Americans disapproved of the present junta and the coup that put it in power in 2014.
While the US has spoken against the human rights violations in Thailand, China has been a complicit friend.
eurasiantimes.com · by Sakshi Tiwari · August 22, 2022
11. To Fight Election Falsehoods, Social Media Companies Ready a Familiar Playbook
Mark Jacobson tweets an important point about this article:
Mark R. Jacobson
@markondefense
40m
Why are @nytimes and @facebook using “misinformation” and “disinformation” interchangeably? The two are significantly different (“mis” = mistake and “dis”= deliberate/calculated untruth)?
@stuartathompson
To Fight Election Falsehoods, Social Media Companies Ready a Familiar Playbook
nytimes.com · August 23, 2022
infomrAs the United States enters into an election season, social media companies are steeling themselves for a deluge of political misinformation.Credit...Whitney Curtis for The New York Times
The election dashboards are back online, the fact-checking teams have reassembled, and warnings about misleading content are cluttering news feeds once again.
As the United States marches toward another election season, social media companies are steeling themselves for a deluge of political misinformation. Those companies, including TikTok and Facebook, are trumpeting a series of election tools and strategies that look similar to their approaches in previous years.
Disinformation watchdogs warn that while many of these programs are useful — especially efforts to push credible information in multiple languages — the tactics proved insufficient in previous years and may not be enough to combat the wave of falsehoods pushed this election season.
Here are the anti-misinformation plans for Facebook, TikTok, Twitter and YouTube.
Facebook
Facebook’s approach this year will be “largely consistent with the policies and safeguards” from 2020, Nick Clegg, president of global affairs for Meta, Facebook’s parent company, wrote in a blog post last week.
Posts rated false or partly false by one of Facebook’s 10 American fact-checking partners will get one of several warning labels, which can force users to click past a banner reading “false information” before they can see the content. In a change from 2020, those labels will be used in a more “targeted and strategic way” for posts discussing the integrity of the midterm elections, Mr. Clegg wrote, after users complained that they were “over-used.”
Facebook will also expand its efforts to address harassment and threats aimed at election officials and poll workers. Misinformation researchers said the company has taken greater interest in moderating content that could lead to real-world violence after the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Facebook greatly expanded its election team after the 2016 election, to more than 300 people. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, took a personal interest in safeguarding elections.
But Meta, Facebook’s parent company, has changed its focus since the 2020 election. Mr. Zuckerberg is now more focused instead on building the metaverse and tackling stiff competition from TikTok. The company has dispersed its election team and signaled that it could shut down CrowdTangle, a tool that helps track misinformation on Facebook, some time after the midterms.
“I think they’ve just come to the conclusion that this is not really a problem that they can tackle at this point,” said Jesse Lehrich, co-founder of Accountable Tech, a nonprofit focused on technology and democracy.
In a statement, a spokesman from Meta said its elections team was absorbed into other parts of the company and that more than 40 teams are now focused on the midterms.
TikTok
In a blog post announcing its midterm plans, Eric Han, the head of U.S. safety, said the company would continue its fact-checking program from 2020, which prevents some videos from being recommended until they are verified by outside fact checkers. It also introduced an election information portal, which provides voter information like how to register, six weeks earlier than it did in 2020.
Even so, there are already clear signs that misinformation has thrived on the platform throughout the primaries.
“TikTok is going to be a massive vector for disinformation this cycle,” Mr. Lehrich said, adding that the platform’s short video and audio clips are harder to moderate, enabling “massive amounts of disinformation to go undetected and spread virally.”
TikTok said its moderation efforts would focus on stopping creators who are paid for posting political content in violation of the company’s rules. TikTok has never allowed paid political posts or political advertising. But the company said that some users were circumventing or ignoring those policies during the 2020 election. A representative from the company said TikTok would start approaching talent management agencies directly to outline their rules.
Disinformation watchdogs have criticized the company for a lack of transparency over the origins of its videos and the effectiveness of its moderation practices. Experts have called for more tools to analyze the platform and its content — the kind of access that other companies provide.
“The consensus is that it’s a five-alarm fire,” said Zeve Sanderson, the founding executive director at New York University’s Center for Social Media and Politics. “We don’t have a good understanding of what’s going on there,” he added.
Last month, Vanessa Pappas, TikTok’s chief operating officer, said the company would begin sharing some data with “selected researchers” this year.
In a blog post outlining its plans for the midterm elections, the company said it would reactivate its Civic Integrity Policy — a set of rules adopted in 2018 that the company uses ahead of elections around the world. Under the policy, warning labels, similar to those used by Facebook, will once again be added to false or misleading tweets about elections, voting, or election integrity, often pointing users to accurate information or additional context. Tweets that receive the labels are not recommended or distributed by the company’s algorithms. The company can also remove false or misleading tweets entirely.
Those labels were redesigned last year, resulting in 17 percent more clicks for additional information, the company said. Interactions, like replies and retweets, fell on tweets that used the modified labels.
The approach may help the company navigate difficult freedom of speech issues, which have dogged social media companies as they try to limit the spread of misinformation. Elon Musk, the Tesla executive, made freedom of speech a central criticism during his attempts to buy the company earlier this year.
YouTube
Unlike the other major online platforms, YouTube has not released its own election misinformation plan for 2022 and has typically stayed quiet about its election misinformation strategy.
“YouTube is nowhere to be found still,” Mr. Sanderson said. “That sort of aligns with their general P.R. strategy, which just seems to be: Don’t say anything and no one will notice.”
Google, YouTube’s parent company, published a blog post in March emphasizing their efforts to surface authoritative content through the streamer’s recommendation engine and remove videos that mislead voters. In another post aimed at creators, Google details how channels can receive “strikes” for sharing certain kinds of misinformation and, after three strikes within a 90-day period, the channel will be terminated.
The video streaming giant has played a major role in distributing political misinformation, giving an early home to conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones, who was later banned from the site. It has taken a stronger stance against medical misinformation, stating last September that it would remove all videos and accounts sharing vaccine misinformation. The company ultimately banned some prominent conservative personalities.
More than 80 fact checkers at independent organizations around the world signed a letter in January warning YouTube that its platform is being “weaponized” to promote voter fraud conspiracy theories and other election misinformation.
In a statement, Ivy Choi, a YouTube spokeswoman, said its election team had been meeting for months to prepare for the midterms and added that its recommendation engine is “continuously and prominently surfacing midterms-related content from authoritative news sources and limiting the spread of harmful midterms-related misinformation.”
nytimes.com · August 23, 2022
12. White House launches new war on secrecy
Interesting timing for this report given current events.
Excerpts:
Aftergood said he was a bit disappointed that the memo kicking off the White House effort doesn’t lay out a clearer vision — and send a stronger message of intent.
“It did not send clear performance goals or objectives,” he said. “It didn’t say, ‘how can we reduce the volume of classified information by 50 percent?’ It didn’t say, ‘How can we accelerate the declassification of historical documents?’
“I thought it was a missed opportunity,” he added.
But the pressure is also growing from Congress. “The complex interagency process necessary to achieve this long-overdue reform demands active leadership from the White House,” Moran and Wyden told Biden.
“Everybody recognizes there is a lot of slack in the system and the scope of classification is unnecessarily broad and that the declassification process is cumbersome and slow,” Aftergood said.
But he expects a nasty brawl that could also spill out into public view. “Some of those differences will not be ironed out,” he said. “There are fundamental inconsistencies between a broad vision of open government and the priorities of the national security agencies. There is only limited middle ground.”
“I am hopeful,” Harper added. “But it really does require folks in leadership positions like at the National Security Council and the close circle around President Biden really pushing this stuff. Fundamentally it is important to our democracy to have these things work properly.”
White House launches new war on secrecy
By BRYAN BENDER
08/23/2022 05:00 AM EDT
Politico
The National Security Council has initiated a behind-the-scenes effort to rein in the classification system. But that means digging in for an overdue brawl with spy agencies.
The National Archives and Records Administration estimates that government agencies create petabytes — or millions of gigabytes — of classified information each year. | Mark Wilson/Getty Images
08/23/2022 05:00 AM EDT
The government keeps way too many secrets, the Biden administration asserts. The sprawling spy community — made up of 18 separate intelligence agencies — sees it quite differently.
But despite differing worldviews, the White House is quietly gearing up to try to pierce the veil, according to eight government officials and secrecy experts and internal documents. And it is enlisting a leading advocate for greater government transparency in the effort.
The National Security Council initiated a review this summer to determine how to overhaul the elaborate and often arbitrary classification system that Democrats and Republicans contend is undermining democracy and national security.
The initiative comes amid extraordinary scrutiny over the proper management of classified documents as the Justice Department investigates former President Donald Trump for allegedly mishandling sensitive national secrets after leaving the White House.
The Biden administration believes that reforming the classification system is needed to more broadly share intelligence between government agencies and with allies to more effectively combat potential enemies, particularly Russia and China’s aggressive disinformation campaigns.
Top military officials, for example, have called for loosening some restrictions on foreign threats — gathered by human spies, satellites or other collection tools — so that more government agencies, contractors and foreign governments can better coordinate military and diplomatic responses.
It’s also about making the national security bureaucracy more transparent to the American people, particularly past government actions — including potentially illegal activities — that have been shielded from the public for decades.
“It’s in our nation’s best interest to be as transparent as possible with the American public regarding U.S. government records and activities,” said an administration official privy to the review process. “We will look at how technological advancements can speed declassification … and permit greater information sharing.”
It remains to be seen how willing President Joe Biden is to go to battle with the CIA, the Pentagon and other intelligence agencies that have resisted his predecessors’ attempts or watered down their executive orders to compel them to share more information with other agencies and the American public.
“Modifications to the declassification executive orders generally happen at gunpoint for the intelligence agencies,” said Kel McClanahan, executive director of National Security Counselors, a non-profit public interest law firm that specializes in national security cases and has advised intelligence agencies. “The same people who screamed bloody murder before will be arguing against it.”
The year-long review marks the first such attempt to rein in the classification system in more than a decade, after what insiders and oversight authorities say has been frustratingly little progress since the Obama administration took on the task.
The National Archives and Records Administration estimates that government agencies create petabytes — or millions of gigabytes — of classified information each year, a trend that has only increased in the decades since the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States led already tight-lipped agencies to clamp down more.
Tens of billions of dollars are spent on classifying information, while only a fraction is dedicated to declassifying information.
“We believe there is immense potential to improve government efficiency and transparency simultaneously within this effort,” stated an internal June 2 memo from Yohannes Abraham, the executive secretary of the National Security Council.
A major focus, he said, is “revising or replacing” Executive Order 13526 that was issued by President Barack Obama in 2009 setting the parameters for classified national security information.
Up for review are the criteria for classification, how much is spent on declassification, and a reconsideration of what qualifies for the highest levels of protection, such as “special access programs,” the memo added.
The review is also scrubbing Executive Order 13556 governing “controlled unclassified information” that Obama also signed in 2010 — but was also widely considered to have fallen short of the goal of forcing into public view more government files.
‘Extremely good news’
Helping to advise the effort is a critic of what many consider to be an epidemic of over classification, current and former officials said.
John Powers is the associate director for classification management at the Information Security Oversight Office at the National Archives and Records Administration, which advises the president on the security classification system and has been advocating for reducing secrecy.
Powers also worked at the National Security Council from 2015 to 2018.
The National Security Council did not respond to multiple requests for comment on Powers’ role. But the administration official confirmed he “is part of the team that is working on this.”
Powers did not respond to several requests. But he told POLITICO in an interview last year that he believes “the classification system is a beast at this point.”
“It’s 80 years old and we’re still trying to turn a battleship but we haven’t turned it,” he said. “And our national security threats are really completely different now and we have not reacted in a way we should.”
His role in the effort is seen by advocates for government transparency as signaling a strong desire for reform.
“Not only is he bullish on transparency, but he knows the system from the inside,” said Steven Aftergood, who ran the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists from 1991 to 2021. “And he has a sense of where change is feasible and where things that sound like good ideas might not be quite realistic.”
The nation’s top intelligence official also believes the current system shields far too much information than necessary.
Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, who oversees all spy agencies, testified to Congress in May the system also hampers Washington’s ability to share information more widely inside the government and with allies to confront quickly evolving threats.
Over classification, she said, “is a challenge from a democratic perspective but it’s also a challenge from a national security perspective, because if we can’t share information as easily as we might otherwise … if it were appropriately classified, that obviously affects our capacity.”
The Biden administration took unprecedented steps to declassify information about Russian activities in the weeks leading up to its February invasion of Ukraine, despite pushback from leading elements in the spy community.
“I think there are lessons to be learned from Ukraine,” Haines told the Senate Armed Services Committee. “I do think it has helped other people understand the value of ensuring we are classifying things at the appropriate level. And how declassification can support foreign policy in different ways. And that’s all to the good.”
Top military officers have also been pressing in recent years for ways to share more classified intelligence with allies.
Haines has assured senators that she is taking steps on her own “to improve the declassification process,” as she wrote in a January letter to Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Jerry Moran (R-Kan.), who have been pressing Biden for reforms.
“The failures of the current obsolete system have been extensively documented,” they wrote to the president in May, urging him to “begin the process of updating the executive order governing classification and declassification.”
“We spend $18 billion protecting the classification system and only about $102 million … on declassification efforts,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said in an exchange with Haines at the May hearing. “That ratio feels off in a democracy.”
“It is a very challenging issue,” Haines acknowledged. “There are technical aspects, there are cultural aspects to it.”
Haines’ office declined a request to discuss her expectations for the new NSC initiative. But her role in the process is another hopeful sign for open government advocates.
She has “such influence over how the rest of the government operates,” said Lauren Harper, director of public policy at the National Security Archive at George Washington University. “I think that will give a lot of momentum if they are the ones pushing for good classification reform.”
‘An imperative’
Aftergood, McClanahan and Harper are among a coalition of experts in national security law and government secrecy that is calling for a series of landmark changes in the new executive order.
Among their top priorities are requiring that secret documents be declassified after 40 years and that major new investments be made in technology to help review, process and make available declassified documents.
They are also advocating for more specific steps, such as mandating unclassified summaries be released of the president’s daily intelligence briefing, releasing all or portions of the classified legal opinions from the Justice Department’s Office Of Legal Counsel, and the collection and release of the CIA’s files on the torture program it initiated after the 9/11 attacks.
Powers has also been working closely with the Public Interest Declassification Board, the bipartisan advisory panel also housed at the National Archives that has been hammering Biden to declassify more secrets.
It has recently lobbied for the release of records related to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy and environmentally disastrous nuclear tests during the Cold War that continue to make generations of Pacific Islanders ill.
The members, who are appointed by the president and Congress, told Biden last year that “our classification and declassification system is in crisis and near failure.”
“Modernizing this system is an imperative for our national security and for our democracy to operate effectively in the digital age,” they wrote.
The board’s 2022 priorities include “increasing government transparency, prioritizing the declassification of historically significant records, reducing overclassification, [and] developing new policies and practices for modernizing the classification and declassification system.”
But previous efforts have made little impact, according to board member Benjamin Powell, a former general counsel in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence during the George W. Bush administration.
For example, while the 2009 executive order “provides the authority for agencies to establish declassification centers, agencies have generally chosen not to establish such centers,” he said at a public meeting of the board on Friday.
Those are considered particularly important for coordinating the review of classified documents for public release, which often requires multiple agencies to sign off.
“The tools that we have to increase public transparency need to be modernized,” the board’s chair, Ezra Cohen, who served as the Pentagon’s acting undersecretary for intelligence in the Trump administration, said at Friday’s public hearing. “Some of this can be solved through technology, but there are also major systematic changes that need to be made.”
A new presidential order with teeth is seen as the best lever to force greater transparency.
“Every aspect of [the classification system] is being looked at to try to make it more understandable, more accessible, and make sure that we get more things that should be in the public domain at the earliest possible time,” said John Tierney, another member of the Public Interest Declassification Board and a former Democratic chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s national security panel who has been briefed on the progress.
Some of the key questions that need to be addressed, he said, range from “are matters over classified and what leads to that” to whether current classification levels — such as secret, top secret and other designations that further limit access — are “too numerous and should they be narrowed down and focused?”
The pushback
But like others, he is anticipating a major clash with the CIA, Pentagon and other national security agencies.
“The intelligence community in particular routinely pushes back on any effort to restrict or narrow their discretionary authority over classification matters, and would no doubt do so here as well,” said Bradley Moss, an attorney who has sued spy agencies to release documents under the Freedom of Information Act. “No real overhaul has happened since the Clinton administration. Both Presidents Bush and Obama made minor revisions on the periphery but nothing more.”
“FBI and CIA in particular are always very conscious of sources and methods and trying to protect those,” Tierney added. “They define those rather broadly,” including “documents that are very old, about people who may be long dead. And the question is ‘who are we protecting?’”
Aftergood said he was a bit disappointed that the memo kicking off the White House effort doesn’t lay out a clearer vision — and send a stronger message of intent.
“It did not send clear performance goals or objectives,” he said. “It didn’t say, ‘how can we reduce the volume of classified information by 50 percent?’ It didn’t say, ‘How can we accelerate the declassification of historical documents?’
“I thought it was a missed opportunity,” he added.
But the pressure is also growing from Congress. “The complex interagency process necessary to achieve this long-overdue reform demands active leadership from the White House,” Moran and Wyden told Biden.
“Everybody recognizes there is a lot of slack in the system and the scope of classification is unnecessarily broad and that the declassification process is cumbersome and slow,” Aftergood said.
But he expects a nasty brawl that could also spill out into public view. “Some of those differences will not be ironed out,” he said. “There are fundamental inconsistencies between a broad vision of open government and the priorities of the national security agencies. There is only limited middle ground.”
“I am hopeful,” Harper added. “But it really does require folks in leadership positions like at the National Security Council and the close circle around President Biden really pushing this stuff. Fundamentally it is important to our democracy to have these things work properly.”
POLITICO
Politico
13. Is the U.S. giving Ukraine some weapons secretly?
Excerpts:
Okay, so maybe NatSec Daily was overthinking things. But then today, two people familiar with the move said the U.S. included Excalibur precision-guided munitions in the Aug. 19 weapons package, even though the administration didn’t publicly announce them. Furthermore, a document sent by the administration Friday to lawmakers, and seen by NatSec Daily, lists what was in the latest $775 million package, noting that what goes to Ukraine isn’t “limited” to what’s featured in the notification.
We admit this is all speculation. No member of the administration confirmed or even hinted that there were secret shipments of weapons to Ukraine. Even if there were, there’s little to no chance they’d share a classified decision with us.
But if there's anything to the secret-weapons theory, some experts would be supportive of the more-quiet approach. “It’s gratifying that the administration appears to be talking less and doing more in terms of the weapons transfers. That’s good because it gives the Russians a little bit of uncertainty about what we’re doing,” said the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ TOM KARAKO.
Is the U.S. giving Ukraine some weapons secretly?
By ALEXANDER WARD, LEE HUDSON and PAUL MCLEARY 08/22/2022 04:13 PM EDT
Politico · by Alexander Ward · August 22, 2022
With help from Lawrence Ukenye and Daniel Lippman
PROGRAMMING NOTE: National Security Daily won’t publish from Monday, Aug. 29, to Friday, Sept. 2. We’ll be back on our normal schedule on Tuesday, Sept. 6, after the holiday.
Rumors are swirling around Washington that the United States has provided Ukraine with more weapons than the administration has announced publicly.
On Friday, a senior Pentagon official said the U.S. had been quietly supplying the Ukrainians with High-speed Anti-Radiation missiles — used for targeting radar systems — for some time. “[W]hen we first announced the initial provision of HARM missiles, the way that we characterized it in the announcement was not specific. We described that we were providing a counter-radar capability,” the official said.
Two days later, Yahoo! News published a story that argued the recent attacks on Russian targets in Crimea weren’t the result of special operations teams carrying explosives, as Ukraine suggests. Instead, the blasts were the result of long-range missile strikes, former U.S. special operators told MICHAEL WEISS and JAMES RUSHTON. But Ukraine doesn’t have any missiles with the range to strike Saki air base in Crimea, they noted — at least not with the missiles America and its partners publicly say they transferred.
One possibility, per Weiss and Rushton, is that the U.S. has secretly sent the Army Tactical Missile System, or ATACMS, to Ukraine. If true — and it’s not clear that it is — that would go against what the administration has said publicly. In July, national security adviser JAKE SULLIVAN told the Aspen Security Forum that sending those missiles would further provoke Russia and potentially instigate World War III.
Okay, so maybe NatSec Daily was overthinking things. But then today, two people familiar with the move said the U.S. included Excalibur precision-guided munitions in the Aug. 19 weapons package, even though the administration didn’t publicly announce them. Furthermore, a document sent by the administration Friday to lawmakers, and seen by NatSec Daily, lists what was in the latest $775 million package, noting that what goes to Ukraine isn’t “limited” to what’s featured in the notification.
We admit this is all speculation. No member of the administration confirmed or even hinted that there were secret shipments of weapons to Ukraine. Even if there were, there’s little to no chance they’d share a classified decision with us.
But if there's anything to the secret-weapons theory, some experts would be supportive of the more-quiet approach. “It’s gratifying that the administration appears to be talking less and doing more in terms of the weapons transfers. That’s good because it gives the Russians a little bit of uncertainty about what we’re doing,” said the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ TOM KARAKO.
The whispers about the U.S. giving Ukraine more than it lets on are only growing, not dying out. We’ll stay on it to see if it’s part of the D.C. rumor mill or there really is something to it.
The Inbox
9,000 UKRAINIAN TROOPS DEAD: About 9,000 Ukrainian troops have died since Russia’s invasion began on Feb. 24, the top Ukrainian military leader said Monday.
The figure, shared by Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine VALERIY ZALUZHNYY, is a rare update on Ukraine’s casualty count.
Our own CHRISTOPHER MILLER made two noteworthy observations. First: “Around 4,400 Ukrainian troops were killed fighting Russian forces over 8 years, between April 2014 and Feb 2022. This is double that in just 6 months,” he tweeted. Second: Zaluzhnyy “did not specify whether it refers to all branches of the Ukrainian defense (ie Army, Nat Guard, territorial defense, etc) or only Armed Forces service members.”
Earlier this month, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy COLIN KAHL said “it's safe to suggest that the Russians have probably taken 70 or 80,000 casualties in less than six months.”
FSB BLAMES UKRAINE FOR DUGINA KILLING: Russia’s FSB accused Ukrainian secret services of killing the daughter of a prominent ultranationalist — a statement that could further inflame tensions.
State-run media says that a Ukrainian woman, NATALIA VOVK, traveled to Russia in July with her 12 year-old daughter in order to murder DARYA DUGINA. “On August 21, after a remote-controlled explosion of the Toyota Land Cruiser Prado car Dugina was driving, Vovk and her daughter left through the Pskov Region to Estonia," per the FSB.
The FSB provided no direct evidence, Kyiv has denied any involvement and Estonia said it hasn’t had a request from Russia for help with the investigation. But if it is true — and that’s a very big if — that also means Russia’s security service just admitted to letting the murderer escape from the country.
ALEXANDER DUGIN, the slain woman’s father, is out for blood. "Our hearts are not simply thirsting for revenge or retribution," he wrote in a statement. "We only need our victory [against Ukraine]. My daughter has sacrificed her young life on the altar of victory. So please win!"
14. Ukraine’s Russian ‘Liberators’ Are Seeing That We Live Better Than They Do
From an army medic and former member of parliament.
More on Russian brutality from frontline observation.
Ukraine’s Russian ‘Liberators’ Are Seeing That We Live Better Than They Do
nytimes.com · August 23, 2022
Ukrainian citizens, like these on Dnieper River in Kyiv in 2014, enjoyed a higher standard of living than many of the Russian soldiers now occupying parts of the country.Credit...Jonatha Borzicchi/Redux
In early April I walked into Andriivka, a village about 40 miles from Kyiv, with my battalion in the Ukrainian territorial defense forces. We were among the first Ukrainian troops to enter the village after a Russian occupation that had lasted about a month. Shell casings and boxes of ammunition were scattered everywhere, and the houses were in various states of ruin. In one of the yards we passed there was an abandoned burned-out tank sitting on the grass.
The Russians killed civilians in Andriivka, and they ransacked and looted houses. The locals told us something else the Russians had done: One day they took mopeds and bicycles out of some of the yards and rode around on them in the street like children, filming one another with their phones and laughing with delight, as if they’d gotten some long-awaited birthday present.
A few days earlier we were in Bucha, a suburb northwest of Kyiv that was subjected to an infamously brutal occupation. The people there told us that when the first Russian convoy entered the town, the troops asked if they were in Kyiv; they could not believe that such idyllic parks and cottages could exist outside a capital. Then they looted the local houses thoroughly. They took money, cheap electronics, alcohol, clothes and watches. But, the locals said, they seemed perplexed by the robotic vacuum cleaners, and they always left those.
One resident, who told me that she was taken hostage by the Russian soldiers in her house, said they could not get over the fact that she had two bathrooms and kept insisting that she must have more people living with her.
This war is Vladimir Putin’s fatal mistake. Not because of economic sanctions and not because of the massive losses of troops and tanks but because Mr. Putin’s soldiers are from some of the poorest and most rural regions of Russia. Before this war, these men were encouraged to believe that Ukrainians lived in poverty and were culturally, economically and politically inferior.
Now the invaders have seen the reality: The Ukrainians live better than they do.
The war has brought that reality home to me, too. When Ukraine and Russia left the Soviet Union about 30 years ago, we had the same resource-based economies, the same endemic corruption and poverty. Foreigners would often think Ukraine was part of Russia, and even Ukrainians did not always understand the fundamental differences between Russians and us. But at some point, our paths diverged.
I grew up in Avdiivka, in Donetsk Oblast in eastern Ukraine. When I fell ill as a child and had a high temperature, my grandmother called an ambulance. When it didn’t arrive, we called again, and they told us they did not have enough gas to reach us. I remember that hospital, with its floor covered in tattered and bristling Soviet linoleum. People had to bring their own cotton wool. And I remember our neighbors, who worked at a chicken factory. When the business didn’t have cash it gave them a salary of chickens. Numberless chickens ran all over the yard.
I left Avdiivka in 2014 when Russian-backed separatists declared east of my city to be the Donetsk People’s Republic. The roads I left on were covered with deep holes that nobody had ever come to fix, so people filled them with the remnants of the coal they burned on their stoves at home. You could lose your car in those holes. But this spring, when I left Kyiv to head back east to Avdiivka and the front line, I drove about 460 miles of perfect roads in less than ten hours.
When I saw the hospital again, I felt as if I were in a hospital in a small Western European town. The building had been completely renovated, and lots of the equipment looked new. I got a similar feeling when I visited a local school that was damaged by shelling in 2015. It, too, had been renovated and equipped with modern computers. (Both the school and the hospital were recently almost completely destroyed by the Russians.)
Ukraine has learned how to build roads, schools and hospitals. Ukrainians have been able to travel to the European Union without a visa since 2017. And when Volodymyr Zelensky, a political outsider, was elected president in 2019 on an anti-corruption, pro-European platform, the previous president, Petro O. Poroshenko, conceded immediately.
Of course, Ukraine still has its problems. There is still corruption. We cannot say that we are satisfied with our justice system: Our courts are not independent. Before the war, large numbers of Ukrainians left to work in Poland and other countries every year. We still have a long list of work that needs to be completed.
But these problems are not the same as those in Russia, where Mr. Putin has been more or less in charge for more than 20 years and elections are basically meaningless, where badly maintained roads crisscross the country — except when they just end — and where a person can be sentenced to prison for merely expressing an opinion, like Aleksei Gorinov, a member of a local council who was recently sentenced to seven years in prison for speaking out against the war in Ukraine.
Ten years ago Ukrainians could drink beer with Russians after the European Championship soccer matches, but we didn’t realize then that Ukraine was moving forward and Russia was moving in the opposite direction. Ukraine was trying to build a path to freedom, and Russia was building a path back to the Soviet Union with Kremlin TV and petrodollars. Eventually we grew too far apart, and something snapped.
Every day for months I have been carrying Ukrainians who have been wounded in the fight to protect what we’ve built. Now the invaders have seen what we’ve built, too. That’s a truth that they can take home with them.
Yegor Firsov is a medic in the Ukrainian military. He was a member of the Ukrainian Parliament from 2014 to 2016.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.
nytimes.com · August 23, 2022
15. Behind the lie of ‘87,000 armed agents’: How an obscure factoid was bent into a popular GOP talking point
Disinformation not misinformation. These talking points are not a mistake. They are deliberate.
The lie went all the way around the world before the truth could put its pants on. And it will not be removed from the minds who are prone to believe this in support of their political agenda.
Behind the lie of ‘87,000 armed agents’: How an obscure factoid was bent into a popular GOP talking point
Amid a spike in threats against federal law enforcement, Republicans place their sights on an old target: the Internal Revenue Service.
Jason Paladino, Investigative Reporter, and Maggie Severns, Domestic Policy ReporterAugust 22, 2022
grid.news
A strange, false claim is all over conservative cable TV, right-wing social media and in the halls of Congress, where it’s been repeated by dozens of Republican lawmakers: President Joe Biden, the warning goes, is going to hire and arm 87,000 Internal Revenue Service agents to target everyday Americans.
As the head of the Republican National Committee hyperbolically tweeted recently: “How long until Democrats send the IRS ‘SWAT team’ after your kids’ lemonade stand?”
How long until Democrats send the IRS ‘SWAT team’ after your kids’ lemonade stand?
— Ronna McDaniel (@GOPChairwoman) August 11, 2022
It’s a ludicrous claim, repeatedly debunked by nonpartisan experts and outlets.
The tale of how the tale of 87,000 armed agents made it into mainstream political dialogue began last May on the website of Americans for Tax Reform, a conservative advocacy group run by anti-tax fixture, Grover Norquist. And while it was repeated occasionally from then to now, it exploded in recent weeks following relentless efforts by a cross-section of the Republican firmament to promote the false claim on social media, in right-wing broadcasts and in the halls of Congress.
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The claim is particularly dangerous, given the political atmosphere is increasingly tinged with violent threats and actual violence against federal law enforcement.
“This is kind of the fever pitch of targeting the IRS since the Tea Party movement,” Dr. A.J. Bauer, a professor at the University of Alabama who has studied the conservative media environment, told Grid.
“As the Republican Party has drifted rightward, including openly affiliating with militia organizations like Oath Keepers and the likes of Ammon Bundy, it has started associating with folks who harbor conspiratorial fantasies about the IRS and who are primed to think that the federal government is coming for them.”
Since the beginning of July, Republican members of Congress have tweeted the “87,000 agents” lie hundreds of times, garnering millions of impressions, a Grid analysis found. Fox News personalities and guests have repeated it so frequently — over 90 times this month alone — that in one 48-hour period, the network broadcast the fabrication in virtually every hour of its coverage, according to the Stanford Cable TV News Analyzer.
On Monday, just days after the nonpartisan PolitiFact project deemed similar claims “false” and “mostly false,” the Republican National Committee released a video featuring the fictional agents. “Eighty-seven thousand new IRS agents — it is insane,” voices say, while the words, “An IRS on steroids” appear onscreen.
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The genesis of a falsehood
The Republican claim is not new: GOP lawmakers and their allies have made such false allegations about the 87,000 IRS agents since May 2021, Grid found.
Grid traced the origin of the lie to an article produced by a conservative anti-tax group in May 2021.
“Biden Plans to Hire 87,000 New IRS Agents, Enough to Fill Nats Park Twice,” read the headline of the article, published online by Americans for Tax Reform (ATR), a Republican-friendly advocacy group helmed by Norquist. ATR appears to have been inspired by a figure buried in a Treasury Department proposal, which floated an increase of 86,852 full-time employees by 2031.
Norquist, one of the right’s most veteran anti-tax warriors, has infamously declared he wants to “shrink” the government to where he can “drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” His group’s goal is to reduce government revenue, opposing legislation it believes would raise taxes. ATR does not disclose its donors, but past reporting by the Boston Globe revealed the group received funding from casino operators, large corporations and a billionaire.
A few weeks later, Republican Sen. Joni Ernst (Iowa) repeated the mischaracterization on the Senate floor, apparently becoming the first lawmaker to do so.
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“President Biden would also spend your taxes to double the size of the IRS over the next decade, adding almost 87,000 new employees at a cost of nearly $80 billion,” she said on June 9, 2021, before changing her statement. “You heard that right — 87,000 new IRS agents.”
Norquist, his organization and Ernst did not respond to requests for comment.
A falsehood returns
In the past few weeks, Republicans have mounted a broad effort to give new life to the lie, this time pinned to a provision of the Inflation Reduction Act that Biden signed into law last week — and bearing arms. The IRS only has about 2,000 armed enforcement agents and has not signaled an intention to radically grow that number. (The IRS for years has purchased weapons and ammunition for its criminal investigative division. In 2019, under the Trump administration, the IRS spent $2 million on ammunition, more than any single year of the Biden administration, according to federal procurement records.)
Even as warnings of violence have multiplied and fact-checkers debunked their claims, GOP lawmakers and right-wing outlets have doubled down on their strategy, further amplifying and embellishing their original misleading claims.
Even senior, respected Republican figures have amplified the falsehood. Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa asked on Fox and Friends on Aug. 11 whether the IRS would “have a strike force that goes in with AK-15′s [sic] already loaded ready to shoot some small business person in Iowa.”
Grassley earned an immediate rebuke from Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.). The two men have shared oversight responsibilities over the IRS, as chair and ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee. “The incendiary conspiracy theories Republicans are pushing about armed IRS agents are increasingly dangerous and out of control,” Wyden said in a statement released on Aug. 12. “High-ranking Republicans, including the former chair of the Finance Committee” — an apparent reference to Grassley — “are saying shockingly irresponsible things.”
Grassley did not respond to requests for comment.
IRS agents in the crosshairs
Representatives for IRS employees have expressed alarm over the GOP’s persistent false claims about them and their agency.
“There is a concern on the part of some members that this negative, inaccurate information could ultimately result in some IRS employees being seriously hurt,” Tony Reardon, national president of the National Treasury Employees Union, told Grid. “IRS employees are federal employees who have taken an oath to the Constitution. They do not deserve to be characterized in that manner,” Readon said.
Federal law enforcement is increasingly on edge about potential violence from the right, following an armed attack on the FBI’s Cincinnati office. The IRS itself has faced violent attacks in the past. In 2010, a man killed one IRS employee and wounded 13 others when he mounted a suicide attack by flying a small plane into a building in Austin, Texas, that housed an IRS office.
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House Minority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), nonetheless cranked up the temperature by targeting his political opponents.
“Do you make $75,000 or less? Democrats’ new army of 87,000 IRS agents will be coming for you,” McCarthy tweeted Aug. 9.
Do you make $75,000 or less?
Democrats' new army of 87,000 IRS agents will be coming for you—with 710,000 new audits for Americans who earn less than $75k.
— Kevin McCarthy (@GOPLeader) August 9, 2022
On Tuesday, Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee — and allegedly the wealthiest member of Congress — wrote an “open letter” to people considering taking a job with the IRS. The letter, “Don’t Work for Biden’s IRS Army,” claims that the 87,000 new employees are “mostly armed.”
On Tucker Carlson’s show two weeks ago, Fox News commentator Brian Kilmeade implied these agents would “hunt down and kill middle class taxpayers that don’t pay enough.”
Neither Scott nor McCarthy responded to requests for comment.
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Platforms take note
Grid found the most prolific and florid embellisher of the GOP’s violent IRS agents trope may be Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), who has repeated the claims in over 20 creative tweets and posts. “The IRS has never pointed a gun at a billionaire or his employees,” reads one tweet, “so why does the IRS need 87,000 new agents, AR-15′s, and 5 million rounds of ammunition? They’re not gunning for billionaires or their bank accounts.”
The IRS has never pointed a gun at a billionaire or his employees, so why does the IRS need 87,000 new agents, AR-15’s, and 5 million rounds of ammunition?
They’re not gunning for billionaires or their bank accounts.
— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) August 15, 2022
Too late, some platforms may be taking notice of the deluge of dangerous falsehoods. Instagram has begun labeling some memes that include the “87,000 IRS Agents” claim as “missing context.”
“It is highly irresponsible for people to make false statements about IRS workers,” said Reardon. “This is a workforce that collects the money to fund national defense and public services.”
Republicans continued to one-up their own extreme messaging through last week. On Wednesday, Massie shared a video on Twitter of an IRS Criminal Investigation recruiting event at a Utah college. The video, which shows students conducting a mock arrest with fake firearms, quickly went viral. It was soon reposted by ACT for America, an anti-Muslim group with a large online following, stripped of context. “SHOCKING Footage Shows an ARMED IRS Training Session” is how ACT for America, considered a hate group by experts, labeled the video.
Another viral video purported to show the new training is ripped from a similar college recruitment event in New Jersey from 2017. Dan Bongino, a right-wing commentator, posted the video on Facebook to his 5 million followers. Charlie Kirk, executive director of the MAGA-friendly group Turning Point USA, did the same, as did Kilmeade. None of the men responded to requests for comment.
Thanks to Alicia Benjamin for copy editing this article.
grid.news
16. To Defeat Autocracy, Weaponize Transparency
Radical transparency. Weaponize transparency. Interesting concepts.
Excerpts:
Some will argue that radical transparency only serves to inform adversaries of what the United States knows and allow them to adapt. This is a feature, not a bug, of weaponizing transparency. It should drive behavior change across and within autocratic regimes. There is inevitably a “cat and mouse” dynamic to all information collection, but in the modern and hyper-connected era, the advantage will increasingly favor openness. For example, the vast majority of information on Chinese activities remains sourced from news, public websites, statements, and social media. If a concerted effort to collect, organize, vet, and share this information leads to greater obfuscation, then autocratic leaders must pay a cost for that through additional work on their end and decreased accessibility of information to the wider world.
Defense, intelligence, and diplomatic efforts will always necessitate some degree of secrecy, but the forces driving the rise of global transparency are not going away. Fortunately, the United States and its allies have significantly less to hide than their autocratic adversaries. To make the most of this democratic advantage, national security agencies need to see the strategic value of producing, funding, and sharing public national security data as a means to achieve their goals. This starts with a consensus that information transparency is both a critical tool to push back against autocracy, and a global good that can help secure a more equitable and free international order.
To Defeat Autocracy, Weaponize Transparency - War on the Rocks
GARRETT BERNTSEN AND RYAN FEDASIUK
warontherocks.com · by Garrett Berntsen · August 23, 2022
The gap between what governments know and what members of the public can discover is shrinking. The proliferation of high-quality, open source data and the diffusion of analytic tools and skills outside of government have democratized what were once unique capabilities held exclusively by our national security institutions. This will require a paradigm shift in the way these institutions operate — one uniquely poised to benefit the United States and its allies, if they are willing to embrace it.
Every government has its secrets, but some need them more than others. This is a fundamental difference between democracies like the United States and autocracies like Russia and China, and a tremendous source of American strength. A renaissance in open source data collection is forcing autocracies to expend significant resources to obfuscate their actions and retain control of the information space. In the years to come, the United States will have an opportunity to both harness and empower open source intelligence networks, especially as it pushes back against a rising China.
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In the Struggle Against Autocracy, Transparency Is a Key Weapon
Democracies have a significant advantage in weaponizing transparency at scale to highlight autocratic activities that break international norms or inflict damage on local economies and populations. The Biden administration’s latest strategic disclosure of sensitive information to the public is only one of many tools in its arsenal to promote such transparency. Others include the publication and dissemination of data produced by the U.S. government, federally funded data creation through non-governmental institutions, and a cultural shift toward embracing transparency in partnership with non-governmental practitioners. Each of these tools brings unique opportunities and challenges, but all can be wielded to improve America’s position in the global information space. Agencies are already spending significant resources on modernizing their information management systems internally to begin applying 21st-century analytical tools to the challenges of foreign policy, and these existing efforts will support the goal of making unclassified information more accessible to the public.
How would this differ from the general idea of weaponizing information? The scale and approaches to doing so are adapted to the technical realities of the 21st century. The urgency and sophistication of the challenge will demand that democracies transparently scale up the production and release of unclassified data on autocratic adversaries.
The Biden administration’s decision to rapidly declassify and disseminate information about President Putin’s intentions, strategy, and operations has helped the United States stay ahead of Russian moves and rally a surprisingly diverse coalition to Ukraine’s defense. In its decision to weaponize transparency, the Biden administration likely calculated that the benefit of preemptively calling out Russian plans outweighed the potential risk to sources and methods of intelligence, or of rapid Russian adaptation.
Like many autocracies, Russia’s national security apparatus has long been hidebound by a culture of secrecy — owing largely to the historical role of its military and intelligence services in managing domestic politics. Modern Russia hides its nuclear modernization programs. Its oligarchs hide their wealth. Putin hid the true intent of his “special military operation,” the invasion of Ukraine, from the first soldiers he sent into that country — all while “yes men” in the security state even hid the truth about their military readiness from Putin himself.
This reliance on secrecy is not unique to Russia. The People’s Republic of China has long obfuscated its efforts to undermine and ultimately replace the rules-based international order established by the United States and its allies. As early as 1989, then-Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping encouraged China’s foreign policy apparatus to “hide your strength, and bide your time” — a strategy embraced by successive Chinese leaders up to and including Xi Jinping. This obfuscation includes hiding its military spending, concealing its global influence operations under the auspices of “united front work,” and threatening and intimidating members of the Chinese diaspora while attempting to maintain plausible deniability. Domestically, China hides its unfair trade practices and coercive economic diplomacy, leaning on foreign firms to share their own secrets in exchange for access to the Chinese market. Abroad, China hides the strings attached to its foreign assistance programs. This is to say nothing of the Chinese government’s effort to obfuscate its global ambitions, or its Orwellian domestic information control efforts to hide genocide, leadership abuses, and lockdowns.
Each of China’s secrets constitutes both moral failures and potential strategic opportunities, which the United States can utilize in its mission to uphold a liberal international order. As technology ushers in even greater transparency, national security institutions must adjust their policies and processes to incentivize the greater collection, distribution, and magnification of publicly available information about China’s malign activities, corrupt business practices, human rights abuses, rising militarization, and flaunting of international norms. Reliance on legacy public diplomacy through social media and standard news outlets is simply not sufficient, especially as the broader information ecosystem becomes more diffuse and federated. To ride the global wave of digitally literate information producers and brokers, democratic institutions must become more aggressively transparent generators of national security data.
Any effort to promote greater government transparency must itself be transparent. Attempts to manipulate the facts and shape global narratives through the release of cherry-picked information has proven disastrous — for example, in the lead-up to the Iraq War. But rigorously researched and well-documented information generation and disclosure on a broad scale, even when not perfectly aligned with executive-branch priorities, will build trust and support broader U.S. interests.
As the saying goes, sunlight is the best disinfectant. Democratic governments can take three steps to better weaponize transparency: streamlining the ways they currently collect and publish data, funding public-private partnerships to harvest more of it, and encouraging a cultural shift within their intelligence networks.
First, democratic governments should streamline access to their own unclassified data holdings. Dating back to the establishment of the census in the Constitution, the United States has a long but imperfect history of collecting and sharing data and analysis with the public. In the modern era, this information is best delivered at scale in the form of machine-readable data. While the volume and scope of the data collected by the U.S. government has exploded, what has not kept pace is the ability to structure, clean, store, and easily share unclassified data with the public. This is a missed opportunity because much of the data collected and analyzed by national security agencies — by some estimates, as much as 80 percent — is unclassified. Yet, in 2022, the key manner by which the U.S. government shares data and analysis remains massive PDF files strewn across hundreds of individual agency websites. This antiquated approach makes it harder for a growing ecosystem of industry, think tanks, foreign allies, international civil society, and nonprofits to utilize the underlying data for their own specific needs, research, and applications.
Second, democracies can lean on civil society to widen the net of public data collectors. Academic research centers like William and Mary’s AidData, the University of Maryland’s National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, and Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology have contributed tremendous value to public, private, and government researchers alike. With relatively minimal government funding, these and other disaggregated research centers can produce high quality data that is can be bought once and used many times. This academic model also provides the auxiliary benefits of strengthening American research institutions and training future national security practitioners in areas that are technical and policy priorities. What’s more, publicly funded academic data projects sidestep many of the proprietary issues that prevent sharing datasets produced by the private sector. Academics can independently confirm and reproduce information which was already known to the intelligence community, without being stamped with classification restrictions — a valuable service. Increasing funding for such programs should be a no-brainer for Congress, as it can directly bring funds to American institutions (and member districts) while improving national security.
Finally, a strategy built on weaponizing transparency will necessitate buy-in from intelligence agencies, the Defense Department, and the State Department. Critics of this new paradigm of openness will push back against the additional risk to sources and methods that greater information and data sharing with the public may create. This is a risk that must be taken seriously, but that clear policy frameworks and better classification guidance can help mitigate. Overclassification has been a serious problem across the national security enterprise for decades, with little common sense applied to what cannot be shared and why. This hinders both internal government operations and any ability to rapidly share data externally to non-government organizations.
China’s “great firewall” blocks Chinese access to external information, and its massive censorship apparatus means the state can manipulate public discourse and totally lock down information on contentious topics. It is therefore unlikely that a Western-led push for strategic transparency will affect Chinese domestic politics or discourse. However, few other countries have such ironclad control over the information space. In many places around the world, greater access to information on Chinese corruption, persecution, and political manipulation of other countries can massively alter domestic political discourse and undermine public support for collaborating with the Chinese government and its proxies.
Some will argue that radical transparency only serves to inform adversaries of what the United States knows and allow them to adapt. This is a feature, not a bug, of weaponizing transparency. It should drive behavior change across and within autocratic regimes. There is inevitably a “cat and mouse” dynamic to all information collection, but in the modern and hyper-connected era, the advantage will increasingly favor openness. For example, the vast majority of information on Chinese activities remains sourced from news, public websites, statements, and social media. If a concerted effort to collect, organize, vet, and share this information leads to greater obfuscation, then autocratic leaders must pay a cost for that through additional work on their end and decreased accessibility of information to the wider world.
Defense, intelligence, and diplomatic efforts will always necessitate some degree of secrecy, but the forces driving the rise of global transparency are not going away. Fortunately, the United States and its allies have significantly less to hide than their autocratic adversaries. To make the most of this democratic advantage, national security agencies need to see the strategic value of producing, funding, and sharing public national security data as a means to achieve their goals. This starts with a consensus that information transparency is both a critical tool to push back against autocracy, and a global good that can help secure a more equitable and free international order.
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Garrett Berntsen is the Deputy Chief Data Officer at the U.S. Department of State.
Ryan Fedasiuk is an adjunct fellow at the Center for a New American Security.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. government.
Commentary
warontherocks.com · by Garrett Berntsen · August 23, 2022
17. Technology Controls Can Strangle Russia—Just Like the Soviet Union
Technology Controls Can Strangle Russia—Just Like the Soviet Union
Foreign Policy · by Maria Shagina · August 22, 2022
Export restrictions are slow and imperfect, but they work.
By Maria Shagina, a research fellow for sanctions, standards, and strategy at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
Victory parade in Moscow
A column of Msta-S self-propelled howitzers parade through Moscow’s Red Square during a military parade on May 9. ALEXANDER NEMENOV/AFP via Getty Images
Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Western countries imposed unprecedented sanctions on the Kremlin. Much has been said about the impact of asset seizures, flight bans, and financial restrictions, but it is export controls that are the untold story of the West’s latest attempt to contain Russia. In a highly coordinated fashion, the United States and 37 other countries imposed a novel and complex regime of export controls against Russia. These controls severely restrict the export of strategic technologies, including semiconductors, microelectronics, navigation equipment, and aircraft components, to Russia—harking back to the highly successful Western export restrictions that helped isolate, contain, and ultimately defeat the Soviet Union.
Given time to work, export controls will play a crucial role in undermining Russia’s defense industry and eroding its military capabilities to wage the war. Russian manufacturing companies’ dependence on foreign components and machinery remains high, despite Moscow’s attempts to increase domestic self-sufficiency, such as the import substitution program it launched in 2015. With only limited domestic production of key technologies, Russia’s lifeline on the battlefield is to source these critical items from elsewhere. Export controls are thus as a powerful tool to impede Russia’s ability to replenish its depleting stockpiles of weapons and ammunition.
Usually bundled together by nonspecialists, sanctions and export controls have a very different logic of operation. Unlike sanctions, which can halt trade and banking relations almost instantly, export controls are a softer tool directed at curtailing the target’s access to commodities and technologies. Export controls are almost never successful in completely suppressing technology transfers and do not permanently bar the target from catching up by other means—by achieving domestic production, evading controls via third countries, or getting help from controls-busting Western companies. The success of export controls therefore depends on the tightness of restrictions, uniqueness of each technology, and concentration of supply chains. As long as there are alternative suppliers in nonsanctioning countries, such as China and India, the impact of export controls will be weakened. Unilateral export controls are rarely effective, so international coordination is of the essence.
Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Western countries imposed unprecedented sanctions on the Kremlin. Much has been said about the impact of asset seizures, flight bans, and financial restrictions, but it is export controls that are the untold story of the West’s latest attempt to contain Russia. In a highly coordinated fashion, the United States and 37 other countries imposed a novel and complex regime of export controls against Russia. These controls severely restrict the export of strategic technologies, including semiconductors, microelectronics, navigation equipment, and aircraft components, to Russia—harking back to the highly successful Western export restrictions that helped isolate, contain, and ultimately defeat the Soviet Union.
Given time to work, export controls will play a crucial role in undermining Russia’s defense industry and eroding its military capabilities to wage the war. Russian manufacturing companies’ dependence on foreign components and machinery remains high, despite Moscow’s attempts to increase domestic self-sufficiency, such as the import substitution program it launched in 2015. With only limited domestic production of key technologies, Russia’s lifeline on the battlefield is to source these critical items from elsewhere. Export controls are thus as a powerful tool to impede Russia’s ability to replenish its depleting stockpiles of weapons and ammunition.
Usually bundled together by nonspecialists, sanctions and export controls have a very different logic of operation. Unlike sanctions, which can halt trade and banking relations almost instantly, export controls are a softer tool directed at curtailing the target’s access to commodities and technologies. Export controls are almost never successful in completely suppressing technology transfers and do not permanently bar the target from catching up by other means—by achieving domestic production, evading controls via third countries, or getting help from controls-busting Western companies. The success of export controls therefore depends on the tightness of restrictions, uniqueness of each technology, and concentration of supply chains. As long as there are alternative suppliers in nonsanctioning countries, such as China and India, the impact of export controls will be weakened. Unilateral export controls are rarely effective, so international coordination is of the essence.
The Western allies had considerable experience in blocking the Soviet Union from access to sensitive technology. At the start of the Cold War, the West used multilateral export controls to halt the flows of strategic materials and technology to the communist bloc in order to prevent it from gaining military advantage. While the global technology landscape has undergone profound shifts since then, the core issues of export controls remain the same: how to balance national security and economic interests, how to ensure that all participating parties share the rationale behind the controls, how to right-size the scope so it’s neither too narrow nor too broad, and how to make sure the controls are efficiently administered. During the Cold War, this was accomplished by national authorities working with the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls—widely known as CoCom and shut down in 1994.
The West’s new restrictions on Russia are the most comprehensive controls applied against a single country since the Cold War.
The West’s new restrictions on Russia are the most comprehensive controls applied against a single country since the Cold War. Before the Russian invasion, existing export controls mainly covered a small set of advanced military equipment and dual-use technologies, and they were not always strictly enforced. Now, for the first time since the end of the Cold War, Western countries agreed to expand the scope of controls far beyond current multilateral export control regimes—the Wassenaar Arrangement, the Australia Group, the Missile Technology Control Regime, and the Nuclear Suppliers Group, all of which are narrowly focused on weapons of mass destruction, nonproliferation, or specific arms embargos.
The new controls on exports to Russia include four types of restrictions. First, they ban the export, reexport, and transfer of any commodity, software, or technology essential for Russia’s defense, aerospace, and maritime sectors. To amplify their effectiveness, these controls apply to Russia’s close ally Belarus as well. Second, in coordination with allies and partners, the United States applied the so-called foreign direct product rule, which significantly limits Russia’s access to foreign-made products using U.S. software and technology. Before now, this strict rule has only been imposed on Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei, never on an entire country.
Third, a near-total embargo was put in place to prohibit the export of items with U.S. origin to the Russian military. And fourth, for good measure, more than 100 entities were added to the Entity List compiled by the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security, including Rostec and Sukhoi Aviation. Companies on the list are subjected to sweeping sanctions, “restricting Russia’s access to items that it needs to project power and fulfill its strategic ambitions.”
The Kremlin, however, has long experience in counteracting and circumventing sanctions. A recent report from the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) looked at 27 of Russia’s most up-to-date military systems—including communications systems, cruise missiles, and electronic warfare equipment—and found them to contain at least 80 different types of components subject to U.S. export controls. The report’s findings have several implications for the effectiveness of export controls.
First, Russia’s military-civil fusion is as worrying as China’s. “Military-civil fusion” is a term used by U.S. defense analysts to refer to China’s national strategy to bolster military capabilities by systematically eliminating the barriers between the defense industry and ostensibly civilian research institutions. The falling of boundaries between the military and civilian sectors is a Russian phenomenon, too.
Russia has a long-standing history of scientific and technological espionage. During Soviet times, Moscow’s intelligence services targeted leading Western computer and semiconductor companies, particularly in the United States and Japan, as part of an illicit procurement campaign. More recently, Russian research institutes have been actively involved in industrial espionage by redirecting critical items to the defense sector. In April, for example, a Russian scientist working at the University of Augsburg in Germany was convicted of spying—he had passed information on European rocket propulsion technology to Russian intelligence. In the latest batch of sanctions, the United States therefore targeted a number of nominally civilian high-technology entities, including the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and the Skolkovo Foundation. The research institutes actively collaborated with numerous Russian defense entities such as Uralvagonzavod, Russia’s largest tank producer; Almaz-Antey, the country’s largest arms producer; and the United Aircraft Corporation, an aerospace and defense corporation.
Second, exempting consumer products is considered a way to spare ordinary citizens, but it can backfire and undermine controls. Russian and Belarusian companies on the Entity List are eligible for exemptions for consumer technology, including computers, memory devices, digital cameras, network access controllers, and software. The theory is that the spread of this technology in Russia will “make it harder for the Russian government to control the message getting to the Russian people.”
While mitigating collateral damage for ordinary Russians is important in the information war, these exemptions can be exploited by the Russian defense sector. RUSI’s report showed cases where semiconductors destined for civilian use ended up in Russian weapons. In May, U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo reported that Russia was seemingly resorting to the microprocessors in dishwashers and refrigerators to replenish dwindling chip supplies for military hardware. Reusing consumer-grade semiconductors for military purposes might not ensure the best-quality weapons, but it still serves the purpose for the Russian military to wreak maximum havoc on the battlefield. By repurposing programmable chips, Russia’s use of consumer technology is effective in mitigating the impact of export controls.
Finally, the supply of critical items is hard to close off entirely, as transshipments from third-party suppliers are harder to control. If a certain technology cannot be geographically pinpointed and controlled, procuring it through clandestine networks in third-party jurisdictions is just a matter of time. Russia has reportedly used offshore companies in such jurisdictions as Hong Kong and Vietnam to conceal the ultimate end users. The reexport of noncontrolled goods is another weak spot. RUSI assembled a long list of low-technology consumer goods repurposed for Russian weapons. These items can be shipped to Russia and Belarus as long as they are not specifically destined for military purposes. Those items are particularly hard to control, as they are not listed on the Commerce Control List and require close tracking to ensure they are not used improperly. Using intermediaries to divert components to military end users is a common tactic among sanctions-busters—and when this involves technology that isn’t tightly restricted in the first place, it becomes even easier.
The past success of export controls illustrates that they are well suited for imposing higher hurdles for the target to acquire any given technology. Even if they work slowly, they can be one of the most powerful tools in the West’s toolbox of economic statecraft. But the impacts on Russia’s ability to wage war won’t be automatic—they require constant monitoring, stringent enforcement, and adjusting to Moscow’s evolving adaptation tactics.
Maria Shagina is a research fellow for economic sanctions, standards, and strategy at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Twitter: @maria_shagina
18. Porcupine Strategy: Taiwan Is Learning Lessons from Ukraine on How it Could Stop A China Invasion
Porcupine Strategy: Taiwan Is Learning Lessons from Ukraine on How it Could Stop A China Invasion
19fortyfive.com · by Alia Shoaib · August 21, 2022
China could someday decide to invade Taiwan. If that day comes, Taiwan wants to make that attack as painful as possible:
Taiwan is learning lessons from Ukraine on how it could defend itself against a possible Chinese invasion, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal.
Since Russia began its invasion of Ukraine in February, the country has effectively used smaller weapons to fight back and humiliate Russia’s larger army.
This method of defense aligns with Taiwan’s “porcupine strategy,” also known as asymmetrical warfare, which it uses to prepare for a possible Chinese invasion.
The strategy was first introduced by then-chief of the Taiwanese military forces Lee Hsi-Ming in 2017 and involved stocking up on anti-air, anti-tank, and anti-ship weapons rather than larger equipment.
“The porcupine strategy is really when a smaller military tries to defend itself from a larger military, which is the attacker, and it uses lots of smaller weapons,” Alastair Gale, the Wall Street Journal’s Asia security correspondent, said in a video.
“Much like the animal, it tries to inflict so much pain on the larger rival that it stops the attacker,” he said.
Taiwan is closely watching how Ukraine has inflicted losses on Putin’s forces to learn lessons on how to successfully defend against an invader with a larger army and weapons, the report says.
China’s military, which is estimated at two million strong, far outnumbers Taiwan’s 200,000 troops, according to data from their defense ministries.
Similarly, Russia outnumbers Ukraine’s forces with over 1 million military personnel compared with 500,000, per Statista.
While Taiwan previously favored investing in heavy, expensive equipment such as fighter jets, helicopters, and tanks to prepare against a possible Chinese invasion, defense experts say these would easily be destroyed by an attacker, according to the Journal’s report.
Image Credit: Chinese Internet.
Taiwan’s president was pictured posing with a shoulder-launched anti-armor rocket
Ukraine’s effective use of smaller weapons is inspiring Taiwan, as they have been able to have an outsized impact on the more heavily armed Russian invaders.
Throughout the war, Ukraine has exploited US-provided handheld weapons such as Javelin and Stinger missiles and attack drones to destroy Russian tanks and aircraft.
As of August 8, more than 600 Russian tanks and aircraft have been destroyed since the beginning of the war, the Journal said, citing open source website Oryx.
Taiwan has been considering increasing training in the use of portable missiles, according to The Journal. Even Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen has been pictured posing with the Taiwan-made shoulder-launched Kestrel anti-armor rocket.
Image: Lockheed Martin.
The smaller anti-aircraft and anti-aircraft missiles have limitations in their reach, with the Javelin only having a 2.5-mile operating range.
Ukraine has also recently had a string of success with US-supplied HIMARS, which has a much more extensive operating range of 53 miles. The US approved the first sale of HIMARS to Taiwan in 2020.
Taiwan is also looking to expand its drone arsenal. It’s developing indigenous weapons like the Teng Yun, and the US has also agreed to sell Taiwan its MQ-9 Reaper drones.
The Taiwanese government has also pledged to spend an extra $8.7 billion on military equipment, per the report.
Military experts say that China is also taking note of the Russian invasion, learning that they will need to use overwhelming force if they wish to succeed, the report says.
China sees the self-governed island of Taiwan as a breakaway province that it wishes to unify. For decades, it has pressured governments not to recognize it as a sovereign nation. Some military analysts believe that China might eventually invade the island.
T-93 sniper rifle with the Taiwanese team competing in the International Sniper Competition at Fort Benning, Georgia in 2010
Tensions have recently heightened following House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visiting Taipei, Taiwan’s capital, despite China repeatedly warning her not to.
In response to her visit, China conducted military drills around Taiwan and said that further “training and war preparation” would continue.
One think tank’s war game analysis suggested that if Taiwan could fend off a Chinese invasion with the help of the US, it would come with heavy losses.
Alia Shoaib is a junior news reporter on the weekend team based in London for Insider (where this first appeared). She was previously an editorial intern at The Economist’s 1843 magazine and a social media fellow at The Economist. Before that, she was a part-time researcher for The Times foreign desk. Alia has written articles for The Independent, The Guardian, 1843 Magazine, The Economist, and others. She also has an MA in International Journalism from City, University of London.
19fortyfive.com · by Alia Shoaib · August 21, 2022
19. Terrorism fused with great power conflict may be the west’s next challenge
Another form of "hybrid?"
Terrorism fused with great power conflict may be the west’s next challenge
Financial Times · by Raffaello Pantucci · August 21, 2022
The writer is senior fellow at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies
Terrorism is the past and the future is great power conflict. In a moment of nearly perfect public narrative, the death of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri was almost entirely overshadowed by the visit of US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan. Yet the risk is that we miss how the two problems can become entangled and make each one worse.
As national security agencies turn their focus to states, they will inevitably deprioritise terrorist threats. Yet the shift is unlikely to be as tidy as this suggests. Even more worrying than the risk of paying less attention to terrorist groups is the potential for the two threats to interact with each other. In a worst-case scenario, great power conflict might make global terrorism worse.
The use by states of terrorist groups as proxies is not new. Iran has a long history in this regard. Hizbollah in Lebanon is the largest of numerous proxies that Iran has used to attack its adversaries. In recent years, Tehran has become more overt about using terrorist tactics directly itself.
In July 2018, an Iranian diplomat was arrested in Germany alongside a pair of Iranians in Belgium for planning to bomb a high-profile dissident rally in Paris. Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump’s former lawyer, and several British MPs were due to attend the event. This month, the US Department of Justice charged a member of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards with directing agents in the US to murder John Bolton, Trump’s national security adviser.
Tehran may be the most blatant about it, but it is not the only power to use such groups or engage in such plots. Moscow’s hand can be seen behind some extreme-right terrorist networks in Europe. India detects Chinese intelligence playing in the shadows of some of its domestic conflicts. India and Pakistan have honed the art of manipulating such groups against each other, and suffered the blowback as a result. Furthermore, all these powers see supposedly all-powerful western intelligence agencies lurking behind various networks and plots that they perceive as threats.
The second risk comes from how the war on terrorism has been pursued around the world. As the west grows frustrated with longstanding counter-terrorism campaigns in distant places, resources have been pulled back or withheld. Clearly, some capability is retained, but in certain places a vacuum has emerged and Russia has most frequently filled it. Private security group Wagner has stepped in to bolster local authorities and launch offensives in the name of counter-terrorism. It is questionable how much this helps. It often appears as though these campaigns exacerbate the underlying anger that creates the terrorist groups in the first place.
Mali is the most obvious example, with the situation escalating to the point that the country’s government is now accusing France — a previous leader in providing counter-terrorism support — of working with jihadis. At the same time, Wagner is celebrated in the streets of Bamako, the capital. But Wagner forces have also been deployed in the Central African Republic, Libya and Mozambique, all places suffering from terrorism that the west has failed to address or is not focusing on.
According to one view, it is a relief to have someone else deal with such problems. But the risk is that they are only making the situation worse, or that they may try to manipulate groups on the ground to their own ends, with little regard for any backlash that might strike the west. Or, this could be their intention.
The other side to this shift in attention is that taking pressure off terrorist groups may end up with no one focusing on them. We do not really know whether the reason we are now seeing a lowered terrorist threat is because the threat has gone down or because of the pressure that was on it.
The exact nature of how threat and response play off against each other is poorly understood. But just because we have stopped worrying about a problem does not mean it no longer exists. It is hard to say with confidence that any of the underlying issues that spawned the international terrorist threat have been resolved. Some analysts think they have grown worse.
Twenty years of conflict have changed the international terrorist threat that we face. But it has not gone away, and in a nightmarish twist it may start to fuse with the great power conflict we find ourselves locked into. The world has a habit of throwing multiple problems at us. In a growing world of threat, disinformation, proxies and opacity, terrorist groups offer a perfect tool. The west may one day rue the fact that it no longer has the relative clarity of the early years of the war on terror.
Financial Times · by Raffaello Pantucci · August 21, 2022
20. Star U.S. Prof Masterminded Surveillance Machine for Chinese
Star U.S. Prof Masterminded Surveillance Machine for Chinese
‘WAKEUP CALL’
A Maryland professor created software that can read people’s personalities and “predict their behavior” for tech giant Alibaba, documents obtained by The Daily Beast show.
Yuichiro Kakutani
Published Aug. 22, 2022 4:51AM ET
The Daily Beast · August 22, 2022
exclusive
Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty
A star University of Maryland (UMD) professor built a machine-learning software “useful for surveillance” as part of a six-figure research grant from Chinese tech giant Alibaba, raising concerns that an American public university directly contributed to China’s surveillance state.
Alibaba provided $125,000 in funding to a research team led by Dinesh Manocha, a professor of computer science at UMD College Park, to develop an urban surveillance software that can “classify the personality of each pedestrian and identify other biometric features,” according to research grant documents obtained via public records request.
“These capabilities will be used to predict the behavior of each pedestrian and are useful for surveillance,” the document read.
Alibaba’s surveillance products gained notoriety in 2020, when researchers found that one of its products, Cloud Shield, could recognize and classify the faces of Uyghur people. Human rights group believe these high-tech surveillance tools play a major role in the ongoing Uyghur genocide in Xinjiang.
“The bottom line is that Alibaba financed U.S. academic research that was tailor-made for China’s surveillance state,” Ryan Fedasiuk, an associate fellow at the Center for New American Security, said in an email to The Daily Beast.
Manocha is a decorated scholar in the AI and robotics field who has earned awards and accolades from Google, IBM, and many others. His star status brings rewards: Maryland taxpayers paid $355,000 in salaries to the professor in 2021, according to government watchdog Open the Books. The U.S. military also provides lavish funding for the professor’s research, signing a $68 million agreement with Manocha’s lab to research military applications of AI technologies.
But Maryland taxpayers and the U.S. military are not the only ones funding Manocha’s research. In January 2018, the University of Maryland and Alibaba signed an 18-month research contract funding Manocha’s research team.
In the grant document obtained by The Daily Beast, Manocha’s team pledged to “work closely with Alibaba researchers” to develop an urban surveillance software that can identify pedestrians based on their unique gait signatures. The algorithm would then use the gait signatures to classify pedestrians as “aggressive,” “shy,” “impulsive,” and other personalities.
The grant required UMD researchers to test the algorithm on videos provided by Alibaba and present their findings in person at Alibaba labs in China. The scholars also had to provide the C++ codebase for the software and the raw dataset as deliverables to Alibaba.
The software’s “clear implication is to proactively predict demonstrations and protests so that they might be quelled,” Fedasiuk told The Daily Beast. “Given what we know now about China’s architecture of repression in Xinjiang and other regions, it is clear Dr. Manocha should not have pitched this project, and administrators at UMD should not have signed off on it.”
“[Manocha’s case] is yet another wakeup call.”
UMD declined to comment on this story. Manocha did not reply to multiple requests for comments.
It’s not just Alibaba that was interested in the professor’s expertise. In January 2019—back when the Alibaba grant was still active—Manocha secured a taxpayer-funded, $321,000 Defense Department grant for his research team.
The two grants funded very similar research projects. The Alibaba award was titled “large-scale behavioral learning for dense crowds.” Meanwhile, the DoD grant funded research into “efficient computational models for simulating large-scale heterogeneous crowds.”
Unsurprisingly, the research outputs produced by the two grants had significant overlap. Between 2019 and 2021, Manocha published multiple articles in the AI and machine-learning field that cited both the Alibaba and DoD grant.
There is no evidence that Manocha broke the law by double-dipping from U.S. and Chinese funding sources to fund similar research projects. Nevertheless, the case still raises “serious questions about ethics in machine learning research,” Fedasiuk said.
Many in the U.S. government share Fedasiuk’s concerns. In recent years, U.S. policymakers have pushed to discourage scientists from seeking foreign funders.
A 2021 White House memorandum—written under the Trump administration and endorsed by the Biden White House—sought to counter Chinese interference in U.S. academia by requiring U.S. taxpayer-funded researchers to “fully disclose information that can reveal potential conflicts of interest.” Meanwhile in Congress, Rep. Mike Waltz introduced legislation that banned U.S. researchers from participating in foreign talent recruitment programs.
The congressman said Manocha’s case is “yet another wakeup call” and “precisely why” he introduced the legislation.
Manocha’s ties to China extend beyond his work with Alibaba. Between 2014 and 2016, the professor worked as a Thousand Talents Scholar, a Chinese program considered a national security threat by the U.S. government. In 2018, Baidu, another Chinese tech giant, brought on Manocha as a senior consultant for its research arm.
The professor has continued to work with Chinese counterparts even after the Alibaba grant expired in June 2019, co-writing a paper with Chinese academics affiliated with the Chinese military-industrial complex in 2020.
Jessica Brandt, a policy director for the Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology Initiative at the Brookings Institution, told The Daily Beast that Manocha’s case should be a cautionary tale for other U.S. researchers.
“I think this case highlights how consequential researchers’ choices about collaboration can be and how important it is that the academic community develop codes of conduct to guide those choices,” she said.
The Daily Beast · August 22, 2022
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