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101. Artificial Intelligence and National Security

Author:
Gregory Allen and Taniel Chan
Publication Date:
07-2017
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Center for a New American Security
Abstract:
Partially autonomous and intelligent systems have been used in military technology since at least the Second World War, but advances in machine learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI) represent a turning point in the use of automation in warfare. Though the United States military and intelligence communities are planning for expanded use of AI across their portfolios, many of the most transformative applications of AI have not yet been addressed. In this piece, we propose three goals for developing future policy on AI and national security: preserving U.S. technological leadership, supporting peaceful and commercial use, and mitigating catastrophic risk. By looking at four prior cases of transformative military technology—nuclear, aerospace, cyber, and biotech—we develop lessons learned and recommendations for national security policy toward AI.
Topic:
Science and Technology, International Security, Military Strategy, and Cybersecurity
Political Geography:
Global Focus

102. Mapping the Global Legal Landscape of Blockchain and Other Distributed Ledger Technologies

Author:
Julie Maupin
Publication Date:
10-2017
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
Centre for International Governance Innovation
Abstract:
Blockchain, tangle and other distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) are pushing a broad array of previously centralized global economic activities toward decentralized market structures. Governments should tackle the new regulatory conundrums of an increasingly disintermediated global economy by focusing on DLTs’ individual use cases rather than its underlying enabling technologies. Grouping the known use cases by common characteristics reveals three broad categories of blockchain-law interfaces. For ease of reference, this paper labels these the recycle box, the dark box and the sandbox. Each raises distinct legal, regulatory and policy challenges deserving of separate analysis.
Topic:
Science and Technology and International Security
Political Geography:
Global Focus

103. Experts, Coders, and Crowds: An analysis of substitutability

Author:
Kyle L Marquardt
Publication Date:
11-2017
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Varieties of Democracy Institute (V-Dem)
Abstract:
Recent work suggests that crowd workers can replace experts and trained coders in common coding tasks. However, while many political science applications require coders to both and relevant information and provide judgment, current studies focus on a limited domain in which experts provide text for crowd workers to code. To address potential over-generalization, we introduce a typology of data producing actors - experts, coders, and crowds - and hypothesize factors which affect crowd-expert substitutability. We use this typology to guide a comparison of data from crowdsourced and expert surveys. Our results provide sharp scope conditions for the substitutability of crowd workers: when coding tasks require contextual and conceptual knowledge, crowds produce substantively different data from coders and experts. We also find that crowd workers can cost more than experts in the context of cross-national panels, and that one purported advantage of crowdsourcing - replicability - is undercut by an insuffcient number of crowd workers.
Topic:
Science and Technology
Political Geography:
Global Focus

104. Closer Than You Think: The Implications of the Third Offset Strategy for the U.S. Army

Author:
Samuel R White Jr
Publication Date:
10-2017
Content Type:
Special Report
Institution:
The Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College
Abstract:
The Defense Innovation Initiative (DII), begun in November 2014 by former Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, is intended to ensure U.S. military superiority throughout the 21st century. The DII seeks broad-based innovation across the spectrum of concepts, research and development, capabilities, leader development, wargaming, and business practices. An essential component of the DII is the Third Offset Strategy—a plan for overcoming (offsetting) adversary parity or advantage, reduced military force structure, and declining technological superiority in an era of great power competition. This study explored the implications for the Army of Third Offset innovations and breakthrough capabilities for the operating environment of 2035-2050. It focused less on debating the merits or feasibility of individual technologies and more on understanding the implications—the second and third order effects on the Army that must be anticipated ahead of the breakthrough.
Topic:
Science and Technology and Military Affairs
Political Geography:
Global Focus

105. https://www.centeronhumanrightseducation.org/how-to-be-a-conscious-consumer/

Author:
Joey White
Publication Date:
01-2017
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre on Human Rights in Conflict
Abstract:
Are you guilty for contributing to the infringement of someone’s most basic labor rights? This certainly isn’t a question that pops into our head on a regular basis, but unfortunately in most cases the answer will be yes. The use of fair labor practice is not typically the first thing we think of when making purchases, but conscious consumer action can play a key role in promoting labor rights around the world.
Topic:
Human Rights, Science and Technology, Labor Issues, and Labor Rights
Political Geography:
Global Focus

106. Toward Practical Cyber Counter Deception

Author:
Christopher Porter
Publication Date:
02-2017
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of International Affairs
Institution:
School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University
Abstract:
Nation-states increasingly engage in strategic deception in cyberspace, frustrating traditional counter deception approaches. This paper evaluates and critiques the philosophical underpinnings and practical implications of existing military-political counter deception and computer forensic approaches. Analysts can better detect and expose strategic deception campaigns in cyberspace by focusing on the size and organizational strength threat actors need to conduct the operations.
Topic:
Security, Science and Technology, Military Strategy, and Cybersecurity
Political Geography:
Global Focus

107. Attribution of Malicious Cyber Incidents: From Soup to Nuts

Author:
Herbert Lin
Publication Date:
03-2017
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of International Affairs
Institution:
School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University
Abstract:
Attribution of malicious cyber activities is a deep issue about which confusion and disquiet can be found in abundance. Attribution has many aspects—technical, political, legal, policy, and so on. A number of well-researched and executed papers cover one or more of these aspects, but integration of these aspects is usually left as an exercise for the analyst. This paper distinguishes between attribution of malicious cyber activity to a machine, to a specific perpetrator (often a human being pressing the keys) initiating that activity, and to an adversary that is deemed ultimately responsible for that activity. Which type of attribution is relevant depends on the goals of the relevant decisionmaker. Further, attribution is a multi-dimensional issue that draws on all sources of information available, including technical forensics, human intelligence, signals intelligence, history, and geopolitics, among others. From the perspective of the victim, some degree of factual uncertainty attaches to any of these types of attribution, although the last type—attribution to an ultimately responsible party—also implicates to a very large degree legal, policy, and political questions. But from the perspective of the adversary, the ability to conceal its identity from the victim with high confidence is also uncertain. It is the very existence of such risk that underpins the possibility of deterring hostile actions in cyberspace.
Topic:
Security, Intelligence, Science and Technology, and Cybersecurity
Political Geography:
Global Focus

108. A Non-State Strategy for Saving Cyberspace

Author:
Jason Healey
Publication Date:
03-2017
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of International Affairs
Institution:
School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University
Abstract:
America’s future, and that of other nations and peoples, will be most secure in the long term with an emphasis on future prosperity unlocked by the Internet. The Internet may have surpassed Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press as history’s most transformative invention because of how it has spawned parallel and simultaneous revolutions across other technologies. By making information so cheap to produce, compute, and share, the Internet enabled rapid advances in technologies as far afield as manufacturing and genetics. The problem is that there is no guarantee the future of the Internet, and the larger entirety of cyberspace, will be as rosy as its past. It is possible, even likely, that the Internet will not remain as resilient, free, secure, and awesome for future generations as it has been for ours. Imagine that twenty years after the invention of the printing press, the pope and the princes of Europe—in fact, anyone who had some basic skills and desire to do so—had the ability to determine exactly what was being printed, exactly who was printing it, and exactly to whom they were sending it. Worrying about intellectual property theft, privacy, or civil rights (had those concepts existed) would have missed the bigger picture. With no trust in the underlying communication medium, the future of Europe and the future of humanity would have been profoundly changed—not just for five years, but for 500. If the printing press was so easily compromised as computers are today, could there even have been a Renaissance or an Enlightenment? This amazing transformative technology, the Internet, is unsustainable unless we make sweeping changes. We are all becoming absolutely dependent on an unknowably complex system where threats are growing far faster than the Internet’s own defenses and resilience.
Topic:
Security, Science and Technology, Cybersecurity, and Internet
Political Geography:
Global Focus

109. August 2017 Issue

Author:
Aaron Brantly, Charlie Winter, Devorah Margolin, Michael Knights, Kristina Hummel, and Raffaello Pantucci
Publication Date:
08-2017
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
CTC Sentinel
Institution:
The Combating Terrorism Center at West Point
Abstract:
After a respite from mass-casualty terrorism for more than a decade, the United Kingdom this past spring suffered three such attacks in the space of just 73 days, making clear it faces an unprecedented security challenge from jihadi terrorism. In our cover article, Raffaello Pantucci outlines what investigations have revealed so far about the March attack on Westminster Bridge, the bombing at a pop concert in Manchester in May, and the June attack on London Bridge and Borough Market. The early indications are that the Westminster attacker, Khalid Masood, had no contact with the Islamic State and the Manchester and London Bridge attackers were, at most, loosely connected to the group. The current threat environment, Pantucci writes, continues to be mostly made up of individuals and smaller scattered cells planning lower-tech attacks with very short planning and operational cycles—sometimes remotely guided by the Islamic State—rather than cells trained and dispatched by the Islamic State to launch large-scale, Paris-type attacks, but this could change as more British Islamic State recruits return home. Our interview this month is with Edward You, a Supervisory Special Agent in the Biological Countermeasures Unit in the FBI’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate. While the full liberation of Mosul last month effectively ended the Islamic State’s caliphate pretensions, Michael Knights warns the Islamic State and other jihadis are already bouncing back in several parts of Iraq and more strongly and quickly in areas where the security forces are either not strong enough or not politically flexible enough to activate the population as a source of resistance. As the Islamic State transitions from administering territory to a renewed campaign of terrorism and insurgency, Charlie Winter and Devorah Margolin examine the Islamic State’s apparent lifting of its moratorium on using women as suicide bombers. In a commentary, Aaron Brantly argues that creating back-doors in encryption, or banning it, would create significant societal costs without stopping terrorists from accessing the technology.
Topic:
Gender Issues, Science and Technology, Terrorism, Weapons of Mass Destruction, Insurgency, Counter-terrorism, Women, Islamic State, and Encryption
Political Geography:
Iraq, United Kingdom, Europe, Middle East, and Global Focus

110. Findings from the 2016 Symposium on Export Control of Emerging Biotechnologies

Author:
Steven Fairchild, Caroline R. M. Kennedy, Philippe Mauger, Todd J. Savage, and Raymond A. Zilinskas
Publication Date:
04-2017
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies
Abstract:
The Symposium on the Export Control of Emerging Biotechnologies was held during October 18-20, 2016 in Monterey, California, USA. Co-hosted by the International Biosecurity and Prevention Forum (IBPF) and the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS) at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, the symposium’s objectives were to identify emerging biotechnologies that are candidates for export control as well as effective mechanisms for their enforcement. A total of sixty experts from fifteen countries participated in the symposium. They represented the scientific, policy, industry, legal, and enforcement fields in roughly equal proportions. Attendees participated in one of nine working groups that were tasked with identifying emerging biotechnologies of concern and which, therefore, could be subject to realistic mechanisms for export control. In the event, participants identified seventeen emerging biotechnologies and services and debated whether each posed significant biosecurity risks. Participants then assessed options for new hard controls (export controls) and soft approaches (e.g., industry codes-of-conducts). Most participants flagged four biotechnologies and associated services as engagement priorities: ground-based aerosol generating systems; DNA synthesis and assembly equipment; high-throughput screening systems; and facility-wide production control software. Findings from the symposium have been documented in a final report that was published in April 2017 as CNS Occasional Paper #26.
Topic:
Science and Technology, Nonproliferation, and Biotechnology
Political Geography:
Global Focus