NATSEC-TECH THURSDAY: Every Thursday’s edition of Threat Status highlights the intersection between national security and advanced technology, from artificial intelligence to cyber threats and the great power battle for global data dominance.
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America is entering a new age of civil-intelligence relations, with private companies and spies working closer than ever.
… U.S. officials say Iranians sent hacked material from former President Donald Trump’s campaign to the Biden campaign, while Microsoft claims Tehran prefers Vice President Kamala Harris and Russia prefers Mr. Trump in November’s election.
… Israel planted small amounts of explosives in pagers that Hezbollah had ordered from a Taiwanese company, according to U.S. officials briefed on the operation.
… The tech giant Intel has secured $3 billion to support local manufacturing of semiconductors for the U.S. military, in a development tied to the CHIPS and Science Act and Washington’s “Secure Enclave” strategy.
… California now has some of the toughest laws in the country cracking down on AI deepfakes ahead of the election.
… The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s plan to align the “collective operational defense capabilities” of more than 100 U.S. government agencies to reduce cyber risks notes that there is currently “no cohesive or consistent baseline security posture” across the agencies.
… And, the Biden administration is siding with X owner Elon Musk in the social messaging site’s free-speech right to continue operating in Brazil.
U.S. officials say they’ve disrupted China’s Flax Typhoon hacking group, which took aim at Americans’ cameras and other internet-connected devices. More than 260,000 devices in total were compromised by the China-sponsored hackers, according to an advisory from the National Security Agency, the U.S. Cyber Command, the FBI and allied nations’ agencies. About 126,000 of those devices were American.
The advisory said the hackers’ goal is to create a network of compromised nodes, or a “botnet,” positioned to carry out malicious activity.
“Flax Typhoon hijacked Internet-of-Things devices like cameras, video recorders and storage devices,” FBI Director Christopher A. Wray told the Aspen Cyber Summit in Washington this week, calling them “things typically found across both big and small organizations, and about half of those hijacked devices were located here in the U.S.”
Targets included media organizations, universities and government agencies, according to Mr. Wray.
Defense technology executives told Congress this week that the U.S. is at a major disadvantage because of its process for acquiring and adopting new drones.
Lessons learned on the battlefield in Ukraine have revealed a potential shortcoming in America’s arsenal. Ukraine has lost approximately 10,000 small intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance drones per month, according to Skydio Global Government President W. Mark Valentine.
“When I look at what they’re losing per month and what we currently have in our inventory, I think, ‘My goodness, we would last less than two months in a great-power conflict,’” he told lawmakers during a special hearing of the House Armed Services Committee held in Silicon Valley. “And I just personally think that’s unacceptable.”
Mr. Valentine and his fellow executives presented the warning amid concerns that China is outperforming the U.S. in key production processes.
Retired Army Gen. Paul M. Nakasone, who left the helm of the National Security Agency and the U.S. Cyber Command earlier this year, is opening a new institute to develop future national security leaders at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.
The retired general says the new Vanderbilt University Institute of National Security will help the school “prepare the right type of leader” for a new era. “[It] will harness this generational synergy to not only address current challenges but also create the future of collaborative national security leaders that approach problems with a multidisciplinary approach,” he said in a statement.
Vanderbilt has cited a talent crisis on the horizon. The school estimates 60% of the current national security workforce will retire within the next decade while just 7% are under 30 years old. The new institute’s initial funding will come from Discovery Vanderbilt, a university-operated investment mechanism that spent more than $50 million in 2022-2023 on research initiatives.
China-owned TikTok argued before a seemingly skeptical three-judge panel in Washington this week that the impending ban on the popular social media platform’s operations in the United States would violate the First Amendment.
At least two judges scrutinized the company’s claims of First Amendment protections, and Judge Neomi Rao, a Trump appointee, questioned why the court should second-guess Congress, “the first branch of government.” Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg, a Reagan appointee, rejected attorneys’ references to TikTok simply as foreign-controlled. “Instead of saying foreign control, let’s say ‘adversary control,’” he told counsel. “Think of it as ‘adversary control.’”
The TikTok ban, signed by President Biden in April, will go into effect Jan. 19 if ByteDance, the platform’s owner, has not divested itself of the social media company, which has 170 million American users. No matter how the judges from the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia rule, the case is expected to be appealed to the Supreme Court.
The U.S. tech giant Intel, the largest recipient of the new CHIPS and Science Act grants to rejuvenate leading-edge microchip production in America, recently reported a $1.6 billion second-quarter loss because its foundry arm is “bleeding cash,” writes economist Peter Morici, who takes aim at failures within President Biden’s industrial policies to revitalize domestic manufacturing and meet Chinese competition in artificial Intelligence.
“Competition in semiconductors is central to America’s complex rivalry with China — whose heft is central to the mischief-making of the broader Axis of Autocrats, which includes North Korea, Russia and Iran — because high-end chips, such as those designed by global industry leaders like Nvidia, Qualcomm and Broadcom, are critical to every security and industrial activity where AI is deployed,” writes Mr. Morici, who argues that “American policy is falling short” in several ways.
Among them is that the administration’s funding for boosting chip manufacturing capacity, even among those owned by allies’ firms, is “inadequate,” he writes. “China is offering $144 billion in subsidies, and Beijing can direct bank loans to the industry as it has for other priority activities. The U.S. advantage is primarily in semiconductor design and R&D, but the CHIPS Act allocates only $11 billion to this.”
• Nov. 21 — Competition Policy 2024: Urgent Questions Emerging Within Digital Markets, Chatham House
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