Warning that the homeland is facing threats that have evolved significantly and become increasingly complex and volatile in 2021, the Department of Homeland Security issued a new National Terrorism Advisory System (NTAS) Bulletin.
Category: terrorism – Page 5
Dr. Natasha Bajema — Dir., Converging Risks Lab, Council on Strategic Risks — WMD Threat Reduction
Nuclear Nonproliferation, Cooperative Threat Reduction and WMD Terrorism — Dr. Natasha Bajema, Director, Converging Risks Lab, The Council on Strategic Risks.
Dr. Natasha Bajema, is a subject matter expert in nuclear nonproliferation, cooperative threat reduction and WMD terrorism, and currently serves as Director of the Converging Risks Lab, at The Council on Strategic Risks, a nonprofit, non-partisan security policy institute devoted to anticipating, analyzing and addressing core systemic risks to security in the 21st century, with special examination of the ways in which these risks intersect and exacerbate one another.
The Converging Risks Lab (CRL) is a research and policy development-oriented program designed to study converging, cross-sectoral risks in a rapidly-changing world, which brings together experts from multiple sectors of the security community, to ask forward-thinking questions about these converging risks, and to develop anticipatory solutions.
Dr. Bajema is also Founder and CEO of Nuclear Spin Cycle, a publishing and production company specializing in national security, entertainment, and publishing.
Prior to this, Dr. Bajema was at the Center for the Study of Weapons of Mass Destruction at the National Defense University, serving as Director of the Program for Emerging Leaders (PEL), as well as serving long-term detail assignments serving in various capacities in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Acquisitions, Technology and Logistics, Nuclear, Chemical and Biological Defense Programs and in Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation at Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration.
The Pentagon Inches Toward Letting AI Control Weapons
Last August, several dozen military drones and tanklike robots took to the skies and roads 40 miles south of Seattle. Their mission: Find terrorists suspected of hiding among several buildings.
So many robots were involved in the operation that no human operator could keep a close eye on all of them. So they were given instructions to find—and eliminate—enemy combatants when necessary.
The mission was just an exercise, organized by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a blue-sky research division of the Pentagon; the robots were armed with nothing more lethal than radio transmitters designed to simulate interactions with both friendly and enemy robots.
West Africa is the Latest Testing Ground for US Military Artificial Intelligence
In its preparation for great power competition, the US military is modernizing its artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques and testing them in West Africa.
by Scott Timcke
NIAMI, NIGER (Africa is a Country) — One striking feature of US military involvement in West Africa is the absence of an observable strategic vision for a desired end state. Nominally, US presence in the region’s multilayered conflicts revolves around building “security cooperation” with state partners to improve counterterrorism capabilities, ostensibly providing protection to communities that states cannot.
Making Sense Podcast Special Episode: Engineering the Apocalypse
In this nearly 4-hour SPECIAL EPISODE, Rob Reid delivers a 100-minute monologue (broken up into 4 segments, and interleaved with discussions with Sam) about the looming danger of a man-made pandemic, caused by an artificially-modified pathogen. The risk of this occurring is far higher and nearer-term than almost anyone realizes.
Rob explains the science and motivations that could produce such a catastrophe and explores the steps that society must start taking today to prevent it. These measures are concrete, affordable, and scientifically fascinating—and almost all of them are applicable to future, natural pandemics as well. So if we take most of them, the odds of a future Covid-like outbreak would plummet—a priceless collateral benefit.
Rob Reid is a podcaster, author, and tech investor, and was a long-time tech entrepreneur. His After On podcast features conversations with world-class thinkers, founders, and scientists on topics including synthetic biology, super-AI risk, Fermi’s paradox, robotics, archaeology, and lone-wolf terrorism. Science fiction novels that Rob has written for Random House include The New York Times bestseller Year Zero, and the AI thriller After On. As an investor, Rob is Managing Director at Resilience Reserve, a multi-phase venture capital fund. He co-founded Resilience with Chris Anderson, who runs the TED Conference and has a long track record as both an entrepreneur and an investor. In his own entrepreneurial career, Rob founded and ran Listen.com, the company that created the Rhapsody music service. Earlier, Rob studied Arabic and geopolitics at both undergraduate and graduate levels at Stanford, and was a Fulbright Fellow in Cairo. You can find him at www.after-on.
CRISPR: Can we control it? | Jennifer Doudna, Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, & more | Big Think
CRISPR: Can we control it?
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CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) is a revolutionary technology that gives scientists the ability to alter DNA. On the one hand, this tool could mean the elimination of certain diseases. On the other, there are concerns (both ethical and practical) about its misuse and the yet-unknown consequences of such experimentation.
“The technique could be misused in horrible ways,” says counter-terrorism expert Richard A. Clarke lists biological weapons as one of the potential threats, “Threats for which we don’t have any known antidote.” CRISPR co-inventor, biochemist Jennifer Doudna, echos the concern, recounting a nightmare involving the technology, eugenics, and a meeting with Adolf Hitler.
Should humanity even have access to this type of tool? Do the positives outweigh the potential dangers? How could something like this ever be regulated, and should it be? These questions and more are considered by Doudna, Clarke, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, psychologist Steven Pinker, and physician Siddhartha Mukherjee.
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TRANSCRIPT:
0:41 Jennifer Doudna defines CRISPR
3:47 CRISPR’s risks.
4:52 Artificial selection vs. artificial mutation.
6:25 Why Steven Pinker believes humanity will play it safe.
9:20 Lessons from history.
10:58 How CRISPR can help.
11:22 Jennifer Doudna’s chimeric-Hitler dream.
- Our ability to manipulate genes can be very powerful. It has been very powerful.
- This is going to revolutionize human life.
The US says China is committing genocide against the Uyghurs. Here’s some of the most chilling evidence
Here’s what you need to know:
The Uyghurs are a predominantly Muslim ethnic minority who live in what China refers to as the Xinjiang region, but what some Uyghurs call East Turkestan. There are an estimated 11 million Uyghurs in Xinjiang, a large patch of land in western China that shares a border with Pakistan, Kazakhstan and. The Uyghurs speak a Turkic language and have a different cultural identity than the Han Chinese population, which speaks Mandarin and is generally not religious.
The Chinese Communist government views the Uyghurs as a threat in part because some have sought greater autonomy or even a separate state. Chinese government officials allege there are extremists within the Uyghur community and have said their campaign to “re-educate” the Uyghurs is justified by terrorism concerns.
Bill Gates, who predicted the pandemic, names the next two monster disasters that could shake our world
In a recent interview, he said the next big disasters facing humanity are climate change and bioterrorism.
Gates was asked about the next crises the world may have to confront.
Shoot for the Moon: Its Surface Contains a Pot of Gold
Here’s a riddle: What do the Moon, nuclear weapons, clean energy of the future, terrorism, and lung disease all have in common?
The answer is helium-3, a gas that’s extremely rare on Earth but 100 million times more abundant on the Moon.
The capability to show anatomic details of the lungs and airways, and the ability to display functional imaging as a patient breathes, makes helium-3 MRI far better than the standard method of testing lung function. Called spirometry, this method tells physicians how the lungs function overall, but does not home in on particular areas that may be causing a problem. Plus, spirometry requires patients to follow instructions and hold their breath, so it is not great for testing young children with pulmonary disease.
Over the past several years, researchers have been developing MRI for lung testing using other hyperpolarized gases. The main alternative to helium-3 is xenon-129. Over the years, researchers have learned to overcome certain disadvantages of the latter, such as its potential to put patients to sleep. Since helium-3 provides the strongest signal, though, it is still the best gas for MRI studies in many lung conditions.
But the supply of helium-3 on Earth has been decreasing in recent years, due to the declining rate of dismantling of warheads, just as the Department of Homeland Security has required more and more of the gas for neutron detection. As a result, the cost of the gas has skyrocketed. Less is available now for medical uses–unless, of course, we begin mining it on the moon.
Suicide bomb detection method using Doppler radar to de“ data-react-helmet=”true
Over the past 25 years, suicide attacks have emerged as a method used on a large scale by terrorist organizations to inflict lethal damage and create fear and chaos. Data collected by the University of Chicago’s Project on Security & Threats shows that worldwide there were 5, 021 suicide attacks utilizing bombs, which resulted in 47, 253 deaths and 113, 413 wounded from 2000 to 2016.
And recent news reports have highlighted the attempted use of suicide bombs in U.S. subways and city streets as well as on major airlines. An individual willing to sacrifice their own life in an attack is a significant force-multiplier, who too often escapes conventional threat detection methods. However, new technologies may yet close the security gap.
To detect suicide bombers preparing to attack public places and other high-value targets, a research team led by a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School invented a method to detect persons wearing wires or a significant amount of metal that might be part of an explosive device.