“Extremism: When Should We Worry?” Selected Wisdom team got together this week & filmed short clip, reboot of discussions we used to have about international terrorism but now we are worried about it at home. #TrustButVerify
If you like these short clips, please subscribe to the Selected Wisdom channel “Trust but Verify” as we’ll have new segments coming out on the next few weeks youtube.com/channel/UChEI1…
For those that remember the GWOT days, I stole the chart concept from this classic report by @will_mccants “Militant Ideology Atlas- Executive Report” ctc.usma.edu/app/uploads/20…
For a great book on the topic, I recommend @intelwire book “Extremism” which is a comprehensive breakdown on what we are facing today amazon.com/Extremism-MIT-…
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No one should be surprised about what happened with Trump supporters storming the Capitol yesterday, but why yesterday, and not on election day or some other day since the election, several reasons......
1 – on election day, Trump campaign needed people to vote, they still thought they could win and almost did, so they couldn’t lead supporters to a specific time & place, by Jan 6, Trump had lost & DC/Capitol became a place where all could be directed for chaos
2 – Yesterday's insurrection was completely foreseeable, lead up election day, we saw many groups (militias, white supremacists, anti-government) calling for mobilizations to violence. The same groups have set about planning this mobilization to DC for weeks.
“ideas included commandeering voting machines, with Powell as a special counsel to inspect the machines” as dumb as this sounds, this is key to success Trump reality distortion machine: employing physical actions to drive virtual conversations axios.com/trump-official…
Seizing voting machines will be a PR stunt, filming removal machines for nonsensical inspection, when the machines data has already been counted elsewhere and backed by paper ballots. It’s all a show from the start
I’m worried for incoming admin trying to counter nonsense, dumb as these schemes sound, they work & dry podium speeches will not be effective in dispelling the disinformation
A lot of interesting bits (bytes) in this likely Russian hack of Treasury/Commerce, suspected connection to SVR (RU foreign intelligence) makes sense as targets are political & economic espionage rather than just campaign related episodic hacking nytimes.com/2020/12/13/us/…
Timing is curious, question will be did they focus on Commerce/Treasury deliberately as a weak spot while U.S. worried about election, or was this when the opportunity revealed itself through the insertion and deployment of SolarWinds code?
Vaccine conspiracies are overtaking election disinformation, but we can & we must preempt this next wave of nonsense, new post- “COVID-19 Vaccine Conspiracies & the Next Wave of Disinformation” @FPRI fpri.org/fie/covid-19-v…
Most dangerous potential vaccine disinformation scenario near term. PizzaGate style acute mobilization or attack on a vaccine distribution point targeting health care workers, medical facilities. This can be anticipated & possibly disrupted if we prepare like we did election2020
Second less likely, but definitely harmful scenario would be vaccine disinfo inspired attack on supply lines for vaccines. Some unique vulnerabilities for deploying vaccines (cold temps, storage, scale, etc) will require different security than we'd normally consider
Reminder for those worried about calls for #CivilWar on social media. There’s never been a civil war fought where the average fighter was morbidly obese & struggled to walk more than a few hundred yards.
The worry with calls for #CivilWar should be increased risk of fringe domestic terrorism in 2021.
The more political leaders talk passively of #CivilWar, the more their followers will advocate for Civil War, and as a result, 1’s & 2’s will find greater justification for terrorist violence. The loud mouths lead the more silent but angry ...to targets.
Several aspects of the Proud Boys false incitement emails point to Iran - "FBI says Iran behind threatening emails sent to Florida Democrats" nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news… via @nbcnews
1 - was likely this was a foreign op as opposed to a domestic operation from the start, to employ stolen/hacked voter registration lists would lead to prosecution for a US domestic actor, 2 - Iran is both aggressive & sloppy, attempt things other states will not, and get caught
3 - cyber signatures for the webmail servers traced back to Saudi, an adversary of Iran, classic technique to tie up two enemies with one cyber move, Russia does this too, but, unlikely they'd move this way.