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Misperceptions about Misinformation and Disinformation
As the election cycle in the U.S. entered its final stretches, many personae non gratae have emerged, aiming to influence the election at the last minute by spreading political misinformation and disinformation. They include the Russian government and the individuals and groups it sponsored, such as the Internet Research Agency (IRA). They are allegedly…
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Electronic Voting and Election Security
With the onset of the pandemic, several countries and local governments, including state governments in the U.S., are considering or have adopted online voting, also known as remote voting or Internet-voting. Some countries, such as Estonia, have fully embraced I-voting as a regular mode of voting. Moreover, many governments have already adopted tools of…
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Innovation in Election Administration and Voter Turnout
Recently, mail-in voting has been under the media spotlight. Due to the COVID-19 pan- demic, demands for mail-in voting are expected to be significantly higher for this election. Political elites on both sides of the aisle have been busily reacting to this trend.
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Silencing Freedom: Belarus’ Internet Shutdown
When authoritarian regimes are faced with increasing protests and unrest within their domestic populations the blocking and throttling of a nation’s Internet is an all too common occurrence. Recent days have seen a bevy of reports that the Belarusian government of Alexander Lukashenko, having engaged in suspected election manipulations on a massive scale, is…
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The TikTok Ban: A Closer Look
TikTok, a Chinese video-sharing social networking service has risen in global prominence in recent years to a user base of more than 800 million. There are more than 40 million U.S. TikTok users. The Trump administration has declared TikToK to be national security threat. Most security analysts have found this not to be the…
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Book Review: The Decision to Attack: Military and Intelligence Cyber Decision-Making
Aaron Franklin Brantly University of Georgia Press, 2016, 226 pp. Reviewed by Dr. John G. Breen Distinguished Chair for National Intelligence Studies, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, and CIA Representative to the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center “The Russian government hacked into the e-mail accounts of top Democratic Party officials in order…
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Sticks and Stones – Training for Tomorrow’s War Today
Written with COL. Thomas COOK: ‘I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.’ – Albert Einstein Technology is great, when it works the way we want it to. Over the last couple years it seems the ever-mounting stream…
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Enter the Policy and Legal Void
Soldiers are down range and have suites of tools available to them that they cannot use to their full capability. They are not technically limited, but rather constrained by the authorities and pre-requisite policies established in a pre-digital age. We tell them to go and defeat ISIS, Al al’Qaeda, or pick another future adversary,…
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The Value of Intelligence and Secrets
Secretary of State Henry Stimson was famously quoted “Gentlemen don’t read each other’s mail” in 1929. Just a couple years later during the 1930-31 London Naval Conference and the 1932 Geneva Disarmament Conference, Secretary Stimson would come to understand and appreciate the value of national security intelligence and would reverse himself. The value of…
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The False Promise of Hacking Democracy
http://www.cyberdefensereview.org/2016/11/04/the-false-promise-of-hacking-democracy/ “Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities” It is immensely convenient to claim that a Federal election can be hacked; however, the reality of hacking such an election is far more difficult than one might realize. The level of complexity in the US electoral process is such that to hack the…