Welcome to Threat Status: Share it with your friends who can sign up here. Send tips to National Security Editor Guy Taylor.
A former spy for China’s secret political police describes his work in the “darkest department of the Chinese government.”
…Hezbollah launched more than 60 rockets at Israel this week and claims to have shot down an Israeli “spy” balloon.
…A new analysis identifies TikTok as a Chinese military “cognitive warfare” weapon and points to the app’s role in anti-Israel protests on U.S. college campuses.
…Authorities have charged a “lone wolf” gunman in the shooting that wounded Slovakia’s populist prime minister, who’s known for pushing pro-Russian, anti-American narratives.
…The imbroglio surrounding a Chinese state-owned company’s attempt to take exclusive control over a Peruvian megaport is deepening.
…And the Biden administration is halting funding to a U.S. firm that paid for research at China’s Wuhan virus laboratory.
A former spy who worked for China’s secret political police has defected to Australia and recently went public with details about Beijing’s intelligence operations. The former intelligence officer, who was identified by name only as “Eric,” worked for the Chinese Ministry of Public Security from 2008 to early 2023, according to the Australian public broadcaster ABC.
The ex-spy revealed how the MPS, the main political security unit for the ruling Chinese Communist Party, targets dissidents and perceived regime opponents internally and abroad. According to the former intelligence operative, the MPS has a secret unit called the Political Security Protection Bureau, or First Bureau, that operates as a key tool of repression.
Its mission is to work around the world tracking, kidnapping and silencing critics of the Communist Party, especially those who criticize President Xi Jinping. The ex-spy describes the First Bureau as “the darkest department of the Chinese government.”
A bipartisan group of lawmakers has unveiled a roadmap for Congress to forge new policies for regulating artificial intelligence.
The roadmap prioritizes the protection of children online from AI, the establishment of a testing and development framework for autonomous vehicles, and a potential ban on AI for various uses such as social scoring. It’s the culmination of months of private forums between senators and tech executives, including X’s Elon Musk, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s Sundar Pichai and OpenAI’s Sam Altman.
“The AI Working Group encourages the executive branch and the Senate Appropriations Committee to continue assessing how to handle ongoing needs for federal investments in AI … with the goal of reaching as soon as possible the spending level proposed by the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI) in their final report: at least $32 billion per year for (non-defense) AI innovation,” states the roadmap, made public on Wednesday.
The NSCAI, created via a 2018 defense bill and chaired by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, wants the money to go to a slew of federal agencies and triple the number of federally funded AI research institutes. National security sources say the developments are crucial to ongoing U.S. efforts to remain ahead of such adversaries as China in the global race for AI dominance.
The explosion of commercially available artificial intelligence tools in the past two years has made digital propaganda campaigns possible for a greater number of U.S. adversaries, with Russia and Iran leading the charge, according to top U.S. intelligence officials.
Rather than trying to hack voting machines and directly change election outcomes, foreign malign influence efforts include attempts to sway minds or trick voters into believing false information about a campaign or a candidate.
Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines says American spy agencies have prepared for the onslaught of generative AI-powered influence campaigns by creating an intelligence community group “focused on multimedia authentication,” using the latest technology to enable the agencies’ ability to understand manipulated content online.
Ms. Haines testified Wednesday to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that Russia represents “the most active foreign threat to our elections,” while Iranian efforts to undermine the U.S. political debate are “becoming increasingly aggressive.” She told lawmakers that China’s sophisticated influence apparatus appears relatively dormant.
The Chinese-owned video app TikTok serves as one of the “foremost weapons” within what the Chinese military calls “cognitive warfare,” according to an analysis by Ian Oxnevad, senior fellow in national security at the National Association of Scholars.
Military sources define cognitive warfare as activities to alter the attitudes and behaviors of people and populations for political purposes by degrading rationality and changing perceptions of reality. Army Gen. Paul Nakasone, until recently director of the National Security Agency, has stated that about one-third of American adults get their news from TikTok and 1 in 6 children in the U.S. are regular users.
The app’s content has been described as an “AI-powered subversion weapon” by Vinod Khosla, a major investor in Open-AI. Mr. Oxnevad, meanwhile, writes that TikTok has played a role in recent anti-Israel protests on U.S. college campuses. He writes that a recent study found TikTok users more likely to believe Jewish people are dishonest in business, disloyal to the United States, and have too much power in the media.
A legal fight looms over TikTok’s future. President Biden signed legislation last month requiring TikTok to separate from its Chinese owner, ByteDance, within a year or face a U.S. ban. TikTok is already banned in 18 nations over concerns China’s government is using it for malign purposes, including to covertly gather personal data of its users.
Former President Donald Trump must, at some level, realize that defending Europe is a vital U.S. national security interest, writes columnist Jed Babbin, who argues that instead of threatening NATO, Mr. Trump “should propose that the NATO Treaty be renegotiated to require more investment in defense and better coordination of the methods and means of defense.”
While Mr. Babbin openly criticizes Mr. Biden’s handling of U.S. policy toward the Ukraine war, he writes that “Mr. Trump is infamous in Europe for calling many of the NATO nations deadbeats because they don’t spend at least 2% of their gross domestic product on defense.”
Mr. Trump has gone much farther with his rhetoric recently by telling European nations: “You don’t pay your bills, you get no protection. It’s very simple.” But it’s not all that simple, writes Mr. Babbin, who notes that Article 5 of the NATO Treaty “requires us — and all other NATO members — to defend one another from attack.”
While students across America’s elite institutions of “higher learning” spew hate toward Jews and display openly antisemitic behavior, and some Arab countries continue to “celebrate” the massacre of innocent Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023, Azerbaijan stands out as a “global model for religious tolerance,” writes S. Rob Sobhani.
“This nation of 10 million, the size of South Carolina, is sending a clear message to the world that practicing one’s faith in a spirit of tolerance is a universal human right,” asserts Mr. Sobhani, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University.
• May 16 — No Invasion Necessary: A Discussion of How China Can Employ a Coercion-Based Strategy to Take Taiwan Without a War, American Enterprise Institute.
• May 16 — Preserving and Strengthening Democracy in Latin America, Wilson Center.
• May 19-21 — Foreign Policy for America: 2024 Leadership Summit, FP4A.
• May 20 — Strategic Synergies: India-US Technology Cooperation, Hudson Institute.
• May 21 — A Conversation with Former Algerian Foreign Minister Lakhdar Brahimi: Reflections on Diplomacy and Peace, U.S. Institute of Peace.
Thanks for reading Threat Status. Don’t forget to share it with your friends who can sign up here. And listen to our weekly podcast available here or wherever you get your podcasts.
