martes, 9 de enero de 2018



Korea Talks: Warm Front Before Winter Games – Cyber Vigilantes & Hacktivists: Double-Edged Sword Against ISIS 


Tuesday, January 9, 2018
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Korea Talks: Warm Front Before Winter Games



North and Sound Korea are having their first high-level meeting in two years – to discuss North Korean athletes possibly attending the upcoming Olympics in the South Korean resort of Pyeonchang.

We asked John McLaughlin,
former Acting Director of the CIA, to opine on the art of the possible:
  • South Korea's goals: "I think the South is eager to take some of the heat out of the rhetoric and the exchanges up until now. Moon Jae-in, the South Korean president, has for a long time—including during his campaign—advocated a reach-out to North Korea for exactly that purpose."
     
  • North Korea's goals: "On the North side, it’s hard to know their motives here, but I think it’s a combination of things. They’ll be looking for some opening with the South, possibly looking to some greater investment in the North, which has been pretty much cut off…perhaps some aid. To a degree, Kim Jong-un realizes that we are quite serious about sanctions and about wanting to halt or slow or freeze or in some way limit his nuclear program. I think we’ve gotten his attention on that."
     
  • Will they talk nukes? "I would be surprised if there was much talk of nuclear matters here. As far as we can expect that to go is perhaps for the South to raise the issue of military-to-military talks, which occur sporadically, but which have not been occurring systematically for a long time. They might tip-toe up to the nuclear issue by proposing military-to-military exchanges, but that is about all I would expect."
Read the rest of McLaughlin's comments on the high-level talks between North and South Korea - or listen to today's TCB Daily Podcast to hear the full conversation.




Cyber Vigilantes & Hacktivists: Double-Edged Sword Against ISIS




iStock.com/gremlin

Cyber vigilantes and “hacktivists” increasingly fill the void left by governments in combating terrorist activity online. 
  • Hacktivists such as those who identify themselves as part of the Anonymous collective have made strides in combating the presence of ISIS online. Unburdened by the law, interagency equities, diplomacy or highly centralized decision making, hacktivists present a crowd-sourced alternative for laying siege to the virtual ISIS caliphate.
     
  • While such politically motivated non-state hackers are relatively effective at removing the presence of terrorist content, their continued operations could damage overall counterterrorism efforts by taking offline websites that are being monitored by the CIA or NSA. This stands in contrast to operations conducted by U.S. Cyber Command against the virtual caliphate, which are coordinated closely with other arms of the U.S. government as well as allied nations
     
  • A failure to clamp down on hacktivist groups – even when they target internationally agreed-upon threats such as ISIS – risks legitimizing the malicious cyber activity of adversarial states such as Russia, who often conduct deniable state-sponsored cyber operations under the guise of “patriotic hackers.”
Read the full brief, with expert commentary by:
- Chris Inglis, former Deputy Director of the National Security Agency
- Robert J. Bunker, Adjunct Research Professor, Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College
- Matt Devost, former Special Advisor, U.S. Department of Defense
- Robert Dannenberg, former Chief of Operations for the CIA Counterterrorism Center






Commentary: Trump Races Down 'Road to Authoritarianism'



TCB's Walter Pincus takes a bleak view of the Trump administration's record with regard to the norms of democratic governance:
  • "Don’t be diverted by gossip and bizarre tweets. The most important record of events shows that President Donald Trump and his allies are taking the U.S. federal government down a road toward authoritarianism, starting with their early attempts to destroy the integrity of the Justice Department, FBI and the intelligence community."
     
  • "If successful, Trump’s activities as president will cause permanent damage to these institutions and the rule of law in this country...It seems ironic that, even as Mueller’s inquiry is closing in on Trump, the president appears to be having more success in getting the FBI and Justice to do his bidding via Twitter, i.e. the FBI reopening investigations into the Clinton Foundation and Hillary Clinton’s e-mails."
Read this week's Fine Print column by Walter Pincus.




Trump's Mind: More than the Sum of His Tweets



Dr. Kenneth Dekleva, a former psychiatrist for the U.S. Department of State, has written political psychology/leadership profiles of many world leaders, including from Vladimir Putin, Slobodan Milosevic, Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-un.

This past week's commentary on the mental fitness of U.S. President Donald Trump prompted Dekleva to write on the "perils and challenges – both ethical and methodological – of predicting leadership behavior from afar," as well as the history of the practice of leadership analysis:
  • "In leadership analysis, political psychology is but one piece of a larger, more complex analytical puzzle, which can serve national security interests in understanding the psyches of our adversaries, allowing senior policymakers greater options for decision-making in a variety of circumstances."
     
  • "Novel approaches such as intelligence forecasting and artificial intelligence offer different ways of understanding and predicting leadership behaviors compared with traditional, qualitative approaches. Overall, this highlights the importance of leadership analysis as one piece of intelligence analysis, and as one piece of a larger methodological puzzle."
Read Dekleva's article on the practice of leadership analysis and political psychology.
 
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