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North Korea is on the verge of launching a second military spy satellite into orbit, months after sending its first reconnaissance satellite into space.
… The Kremlin just arrested two more top military officials in what increasingly looks like a purge by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
… Israeli forces have recovered the bodies of three more hostages taken by Hamas, as the top U.N. court rules that Israel must immediately halt its ground assault on Rafah — a ruling Israel is unlikely to heed.
… A major tech summit in South Korea saw world leaders ink a range of nonbinding regulatory pledges but fell short of addressing the issue of AI weaponization by authoritarian regimes.
… And U.S. lawmakers are pushing back on the Pentagon’s plan to shift Air Guard troops to Space Force, saying the move can work only with the explicit approval of state governors.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has created a unit focused on understanding cutting-edge technology applications, risks and supply chains. Casey Blackburn, a veteran CIA analyst heading the initiative, told a recent conference that the new unit is working to determine how the intelligence community can measure technology as an instrument of national power when evaluating foreign competitors.
Mr. Blackburn told the Special Competitive Studies Project’s AI expo in Washington this month that the burgeoning office of economic security and emerging technology is working with a “panicked sense of urgency.” He indicated that U.S. spies are scrambling to develop the business knowledge needed to provide Americans with economic security from foreign theft, coercion and competition.
Other efforts to bring business and technology talent into the intelligence community have involved debate over whether to turn the Commerce Department — specifically the department’s Bureau of Industry and Security — into a spy agency. The bureau is responsible for imposing export controls on the most sensitive technologies being developed in the U.S. private sector.
Republican Rep. Michael McCaul, who has oversight of the bureau as chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, offered insight on the debate recently during an exclusive video interview with Threat Status.
A major tech summit in Seoul this week saw the leaders of the G7 economies — the U.S., Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan — and the leaders of Australia, Singapore and South Korea agree on a range of “safe, innovative and inclusive” artificial intelligence usage protocols. They agreed, for instance, to expand the number of AI safety institutes, which are learning bodies that will align research on machine-learning standardization and testing.
But the agreements were not binding, and while China joined the summit, Russia, another leading player in using AI for weapons and disinformation, did not. And, critics say the summit did not properly address the weaponization of AI in global competition between authoritarian and democratic governments, according to Washington Times Asia Editor Andrew Salmon, who reported on the gathering from Seoul.
“One of the key struggles between democracies and authoritarian governments is who will control the latest cutting-edge AI, and how they will use it,” said Geoffrey Cain, author of “The Perfect Police State” and policy director of the Tech Integrity Project. He added that “voluntary pledges from companies are not going to solve a problem as enormous as this one.”
A group of House Republicans plans to give Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines an additional 90 days to submit an overdue report on corruption among Chinese communist leaders and to testify publicly on the matter.
The report, to be produced jointly by Ms. Haines and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, was supposed to be finished by the end of last year under a section of the fiscal 2023 defense policy signed into law by President Biden on Dec. 23, 2022. National Security Correspondent Bill Gertz writes that the report is expected to reveal the hidden wealth of party leaders and extensive corrupt practices by officials, including President Xi Jinping.
Among the Chinese communist figures being scrutinized are senior members of the 98-million member Chinese Communist Party, including the Central Committee, a senior panel with about 205 members; those within the Politburo, a 25-member unit; and officials within the seven-member Politburo Standing Committee, the collective dictatorship that is the most senior governing body headed by Mr. Xi.
Congress is investigating whether two Jordanian migrants caught trying to push their way onto U.S. Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia had terrorism ties. House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green, Tennessee Republican, says the incident reflected a “terrifying reality” about the U.S. southern border, where an unprecedented number of people on the terrorism watchlist have been detected trying to sneak into the country.
“This brazen attempt shows we are in an even more dire situation than many want to admit, and that eventually, the consequences of these potential national security threats running loose in our country will come back to haunt us,” Mr. Green said in a letter obtained exclusively by The Washington Times.
The Times’ Stephen Dinan has a deep dive on the May 3 incident in which security forces at Quantico encountered a box truck approaching the base. The two occupants said they were trying to make an Amazon-related delivery. They were later detained and are now facing deportation.
The governments of Ireland, Spain and Norway announced that beginning Tuesday they would recognize a Palestinian state.
“Hamas is cheering the news as a win — and pressuring other countries to follow suit,” writes Washington Times Online Opinion Editor Cheryl K. Chumley.
“The Jewish nation, overnight, has become a bit more isolated,” she writes. “The Jewish people, overnight, have become a bit more imperiled.”
The conflict in Ukraine has increased U.S. defense material production, but the endeavor has laid bare the erosion of U.S. domestic manufacturing, writes retired Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery, who heads the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and Isaac Harris, an adjunct fellow at the think tank.
In a commentary written for the Cipher Brief, the two write that the U.S. armed forces had for decades been able to send anything from tanks to toilet paper around the world in hours despite shrinking the number of parts maintained in storage facilities.
“However, since the end of the Cold War, the industrial manufacturing ability that fostered this on-demand system has gradually moved to the People’s Republic of China,” they write, adding that “the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) under Chairman Xi, now a direct U.S. competitor, has indicated its willingness to weaponize this industrial capacity for political advantage.”
• May 28 — Gender Based Violence in Mexican Politics, Wilson Center.
• May 29 — Lessons for an Unserious Superpower: The “Scoop” Jackson Legacy and U.S. Foreign Policy, American Enterprise Institute.
• May 31 — Asia-Pacific Regional Security Assessment 2024 Launch, International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS).
• June 4 — Supreme Allied Commanders on the Past, Present, and Future of NATO, Hudson Institute.
• June 4 — Flashpoints and High Stakes: America’s Blueprint to Counter China, Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD).
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