Korea Talks: Warm Front Before Winter Games – Cyber
Vigilantes & Hacktivists: Double-Edged Sword Against ISIS
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Korea Talks: Warm Front Before
Winter Games
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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."
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Cyber Vigilantes & Hacktivists:
Double-Edged Sword Against ISIS
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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.”
- 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
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Commentary: Trump Races Down 'Road
to Authoritarianism'
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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."
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Trump's Mind: More than the Sum of
His Tweets
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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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