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An exoplanet some 70% the mass of Jupiter and about 1.4 times its size has been discovered by astronomers at India’s Physical Research Laboratory (PRL). The behemoth is 752 light years away from Earth, and has an incredible orbit.

The new discovery was revealed by the Indian Space Research Organization on Tuesday in a statement saying the country’s PRL Advanced Radial-velocity Abu-sky Search (PARAS) had measured the movements of the newly-discovered exoplanet between December 2020 and March 2021.

The planet, named either HD 82139 or TOI 1789 depending on which cataloguing method is used, is ultra-hot – with a surface temperature up to 2,000 degrees Kelvin.

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India’s PRL Advanced Radial-velocity Abu-sky Search (PARAS), an optical fiber-fed spectrograph, observed t he exoplanet and its movements from the Mt. Abu Observatory, according to the space agency. Not only is the planet ultra-hot, but it is also one of the closest to an orbiting star yet discovered.

The measurements obtained via PARAS were confirmed by Germany’s TCES spectrograph in April, and further verified by independent photometric observations from the PRL’s 43cm telescope, also located at Mt. Abu.

The exoplanet has an unusually quick orbit – a mere 3.2 days. The pace indicates that its distance from its host star is one-tenth the distance between Mercury and the Sun. This makes the exoplanet one of fewer than 10 such solar systems discovered thus far. Given the closeness to its host star – an aging orb 1.5 times the mass of the Sun – the new planet is also one of the lowest density planets yet discovered.

Planets so close to their host stars, with a distance less than 0.1 AU and masses between 0.25 to several times the mass of Jupiter, are known as “hot-Jupiters.”

The Indian space agency hailed the detection of the new planet as an opportunity to “enhance our understanding of various mechanisms responsible for inflation in hot-Jupiters and the formation and evolution of planetary systems around evolving and aging stars.” It is the second planet to be discovered by PARAS, with a previous discovery taking place in 2018.

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EXPERT PERSPECTIVE — Winston Churchill’s 04 June 1940 speech in which he vowed that he and his countrymen would “fight on the beaches “and would “never surrender” in the face of a seemingly inevitable Nazi invasion is rightly renowned as perhaps history’s most famous address by a wartime leader.  Less well known, however, is the cautionary tone the new Prime Minister struck in that same appearance before the House of Commons, as he sought to temper the joy and relief engendered by the seemingly miraculous extraction of the British army from the beaches of Dunkirk.  “We must,” Churchill warned, “be very careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory.”  “Wars” he admonished, “are not won by evacuations.”

Shortly before the 2011 Abbottabad operation that killed Osama bin Laden, I was asked by my HQ, my views on mounting an assault on the target we knew as Abbottabad Compound 1, (AC1) given that we were not sure it sheltered the terrorist leader.  After expressing my 95% confidence that the Al Qaeda (AQ) leader was in fact, there, I allegorically added that we must strike as ‘you cannot leave Hitler in his bunker and end the war’.  I was fortuitously, right in my assessment that the murderer of so many innocents was present within AC1.  Sadly, however, his death did not bring our war with radical Islamic terrorism to a conclusion.  As was the case after Dunkirk, our enemy was unwilling to quit the field or to limit his unbounded war aims.

Likewise, we should have no expectation that the withdrawal of our forces from the Afghan theater of combat signals an end to the conflict with terrorists who started that war by attacking us on September 11, 2001.  We cannot unilaterally declare an end to the War on Terror by leaving Afghanistan – however much we might wish to do so – for the very simple reason that our enemies do not share that desire.  As former Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta put it, “I understand that we’re trying to get our troops out of there, but the bottom line is, we can leave a battlefield, but we can’t leave the war on terrorism, which still is a threat to our security.”

The Taliban parading of the American-made weapons and accoutrements of their defeated foes was, in a manner akin to that of ancient Rome, intended not only to celebrate victory.  It was also meant to humiliate the vanquished.   Such triumphal demonstrations – and what will be a galling celebration of the anniversary of 9/11 as their own holiday to follow – will evoke enthusiastic responses from Islamic extremists and will draw many new adherents to the cause that lies at the core of Taliban legitimacy and belief.

As was the case when we left Iraq and later had to go back into the region to crush the ISIS Caliphate that metastasized in the wake of our departure, there is every prospect that the Taliban’s success will breathe new life into Islamic extremist groups.  And there is no reason to believe that the “new” and now much more heavily armed Taliban – an organization that refused to break with AQ over the course of a brutal twenty-year battle, will be any less receptive to working with Islamic terror groups than were their pre-9/11 forebears.

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“We are going to have to maintain very, very intense  levels of indicators and warnings and observstion and ISR [Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance] over that entire region to monitor potential terrorist threats”, said Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Mark Milley in a recent interview, adding it will not be easy.

As CIA Director William Burns said during Senate testimony in April, “Our ability to keep (the) threat…in check in Afghanistan from either al Qaeda or ISIS…has benefited greatly from the presence of U.S. and coalition militaries on the ground and in the air fueled by intelligence provided by the CIA and our other intelligence partners.” With the withdrawal of the American military, Burns said, “the U.S. government’s ability to collect and act on threats will diminish.”

Much discussed ‘over the horizon’ intelligence collection against Afghan terror targets will not fill the void left by the loss of our ability to monitor and attack terrorist targets from in-country bases.  With Afghanistan bordered by countries unlikely to be willing to host a significant US presence, intelligence collection missions will now have to be launched from bases well beyond the horizon with all that implies for the quantity, quality and timeliness of intelligence collected.  Such operations will also be commensurately more expensive and difficult to mount.  Moreover, the intimate knowledge of our adversaries that we have painstakingly built over the course of nearly 20 years on the ground, began aging the moment we departed Afghanistan.  Absent an intelligence presence on the ground, our ability to collect on terrorist groups operating in and from that country will only degrade further as time goes on.

After acknowledging that we “could see a resurgence of terrorism out of the region in the coming 12-36 months”, Milley went on that we will, “as opportunities present themselves… have to continue to conduct strike operations if there’s a threat to the United States.”  However, as our pre-9/11 experience showed, such remote strikes can delay our terrorist enemies’ plans, but will not deter them from their intent to strike the US homeland.

As such, Secretary Panetta is undoubtedly correct in his conclusion that US involvement in Afghanistan is not over.  “We’re going to have to go back in to get ISIS,” Panetta said.  “We’re probably going to have to go back in when al-Qaeda resurrects itself, as they will, with this Taliban.”  And, as was the case with our operations to destroy ISIS’s so-called Caliphate after we precipitously left Iraq, there can be no doubt that should we have to go back into Afghanistan, our task will be greatly complicated by the manner in which we left that country, abandoning our allies and bases there.

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The US withdrawal from Afghanistan will have profound geo-strategic implications for America’s position in the region and in the world.  Our Chinese, Russian and Iranian adversaries will seize the opportunity to fill the void left in the wake of our departure.

The Taliban has already indicated it will engage with China, which covets Afghanistan’s mineral wealth.  Entry into a transactional relationship with the cash-strapped Taliban regime and granting access to Afghan mineral resources – and possibly use of Bagram Air Base – in exchange for financial aid and Chinese support for the Taliban in international organizations would suit Beijing, which would evince no concerns about human rights and the like.

For their part, Central Asian countries will look away from Washington and ever more towards their old masters in Moscow and a rising China to ensure their security and economic well-being.   Islamabad, while publicly celebrating the victory of their Taliban proxies and its role in guiding it, must at the same time worry that the extremism embodied by the victors will gain renewed traction beyond its frontier provinces with all that implies for the security of the Pakistani state.

Caught by surprise by Washington’s decision to leave and the conduct of the withdrawal, even our closest and oldest allies are questioning US resolve.  They will surely think twice before acceding to any future US request to join in joint operations.  Our decision to quit Afghanistan, and its messy execution, will also evoke questions about the validity of American assurances to other nations under threat from aggressors.  It will not have been lost on them that the withdrawal of American air, intelligence, planning expertise and logistical support ensured the collapse of an Afghan Army that was dependent on the US.

Our adversaries, too, will see the chaotic nature of our departure as well as the abandonment of Americans, allied citizens and Afghans to uncertain fates as signs of weakness and enfeeblement.   This possibility is particularly dangerous in that they could seize this moment of US distraction to engage in opportunistic adventurism that could include movement by China against Taiwan; a Russian attempt to resolve its impasse with Ukraine forcibly; stepped-up Iranian prosecution of its proxy war with Israel; or a further ramping up by North Korea of its nuclear program.  Any such eventuality would force the US to respond vigorously or risk further erosion of its international credibility.

Finally, the costs involved in remotely monitoring and trying to deter threats emanating from a Taliban-controlled Afghanistan mean that we will be unable to shift intelligence and military resources away from the War on Terror to confront the threat posed by peer competitors to the degree we had hoped.

Aristotle is said to have pronounced, “You will never do anything in this world without courage. It is the greatest quality of the mind next to honor.”  Likewise, the courage shown by so many – and the heroic conduct of US military and CIA personnel in particular – in seeking to extract American citizens from Afghanistan and to honor our obligations to Afghans who worked and fought alongside us for so long, cannot obviate the dishonor attendant to having left so many behind.  Bloody Taliban outrages and reprisals against the latter are a certainty.

It will not be long before Kabul’s new rulers recognize that the Americans now under their control, are potentially useful pawns in trying to extract diplomatic, financial and other concessions in exchange for their freedom.  The effectiveness of our efforts hereafter to extract our own people and our Afghan allies from the clutches of the Taliban and how we respond to any attempts to use them as leverage against us, will determine the depth of the stain on our national honor already attendant to the disastrous end of our Afghan campaign.

In that same famous speech, Churchill solemnly told his countrymen that: ‘The Battle of France is over: The Battle of Britain is about to begin.”  He went on that “we would be well advised to gird our loins for the continued warfare to come.”

As we approach the 20^th anniversary of 9/11, we should honor our sacred dead from that horrible day.  But we should likewise prepare ourselves for the battles with Al Qaeda and its murderous kindred of Cain that will surely come.

Recent polls would indicate that Americans support the decision to withdraw from Afghanistan, if not the way in which it was conducted.  One wonders how those polled would have responded if the question had been ‘Do you support a withdrawal from Afghanistan even if it markedly increases the chance of terror attacks and atrocities directed at your fellow citizens at home and abroad?’  I fear we will find out soon enough.

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The Swedish government has announced plans to introduce mandatory Covid-19 passes starting next month, amid rising infection rates in Europe. The passes will be required to attend any indoor event with 100 or more participants.

The upcoming introduction of mandatory coronavirus vaccine passes was announced by Health Minister Lena Hallengren on Wednesday.

Citing the ongoing surge in coronavirus cases across Europe – which has not hit the country itself yet – the minister stressed the need to be ready for the new wave of infections, projected to reach Sweden mid-December.

“The spread is increasing in Europe. We haven’t seen it yet in Sweden, but we are not isolated,” Hallengren told a news conference. “We need to be able to use vaccination certificates.”

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Starting from December 1, the documents confirming a person’s vaccination status will be a requirement to enter any indoor event with 100 or more people in attendance. Sweden already boasts high vaccination rates, with 85% of its citizens aged over 16 having received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine. Over 81% have received two shots or more, public health data shows.

Earlier in the day, the country’s health authorities backtracked on a highly controversial decision to stop testing fully vaccinated people who showed symptoms of Covid. The recommendation was rolled out in October, leading to a 35% decline in Covid-19 tests taken.

“The Public Health Agency has decided to recommend that the regions offer testing to everyone who is 6 years and older who gets symptoms that may be COVID-19,” the health authority said in a statement.

Sweden bucked the trend among European governments in its approach to handling the pandemic, electing not to impose widespread lockdowns. Having relied primarily on voluntary measures and social distancing, the country displayed several times higher death rates per capita than its Nordic neighbors, though it still fared better than many European countries, registering some 1.18 million cases and just over 15,000 coronavirus deaths since the beginning of the pandemic.

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Cipher Brief Expert Tim Willasey-Wilsey is a Visiting Professor at King’s College, London and a former senior British diplomat. From 1996 to 1999 he was senior advisor to the British government on overseas counterterrorism.  This piece was first published by RUSI in London.  The views do not represent those of RUSI.

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Analysis of openly available sources indicates that a British report shared with the US in December 1998 described an early stage of the 9/11 plot.

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EXPERT PERSPECTIVE — Two extracts from Presidential Daily Briefs (PDB) are given some prominence in the 9/11 Commission report into the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington on 11 September 2001. One is from a PDB delivered to President Bill Clinton on 4 December 1998, and the other is from a PDB given to President George W Bush on 6 August 2001. Both are presented inside a textbox and both contain intelligence ‘from a friendly government’ which provided the first and only significant suggestion that Al-Qa’ida (AQ) planned to hijack aircraft in the US.

Eight months after the attacks, under Congressional pressure, the Bush administration was obliged to reveal some details of the PDBs, and on 17 May 2002 the New York Times disclosed that ‘the report provided to the president on Aug. 6, which warned him that Mr. bin Laden’s followers might hijack airplanes, was based on 1998 intelligence data drawn from a single British source, government officials said today’. The British government was obliged to acknowledge that the intelligence came from British sources. The Guardian reported on 18 May that ‘The memo received by Bush on 6 August contained unconfirmed information passed on by British intelligence in 1998’. The Independent ran much the same story with additional detail.

Both PDBs quoted from one British report from December 1998. The key question is whether this report, with its significant deviations from what actually happened on the day, actually referred to the 9/11 operation. Subsequently published evidence points compellingly to this indeed being an early version of the 9/11 plan.

The heavily redacted British contribution was shown on pages 127 and 128 of the 9/11 Commission’s report. It reads:

‘On Friday December 4 1998 the CIA included an article in the Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) describing intelligence received from a friendly government about a hijacking in the United States.

‘SUBJECT. Bin Laden preparing to hijack US aircraft. Reporting [passage redacted] suggests bin Laden and his allies are preparing for attacks in the US including an aircraft hijacking to obtain the release of Sheikh Omar Abdal Rahman,  Ramzi Yousef and Muhammad Sadiq Awda. One source quoted a senior member of the Gamaat Al-Islamiya (GI) saying that “as of late October the GI had completed planning for an operation in the US on behalf of bin Laden but that the operation was on hold. A senior bin Laden operative from Saudi Arabia was to visit GI counterparts in the US soon thereafter to discuss options – perhaps including an aircraft hijacking. GI leader Islambouli in late September was planning to hijack a US airliner during “the next couple of weeks” to free Abdal Rahman and the other prisoners according to what may be another source. The same source late last month said that bin Laden might implement plans to hijack aircraft before the beginning of Ramadan on 20 December and that two members of the operational team had evaded security checks during a recent trial run at an unidentified New York airport.’

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In May 2002 the US National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice issued a statement observing (correctly) that the report had mentioned ‘hijacking in the traditional sense’ with no indication that aircraft would be used as weapons of mass destruction. Her testimony to the 9/11 Commission made broadly the same point.

Indeed, even in late 1998, there was a profusion of threat reports of which the aviation strand was just one. The MI5 official history comments aptly that the Service was puzzled as to why there were so many more reports of threats than actual attacks: ‘Even the most reliably sourced intelligence received on this question usually consists of a snapshot of a proposed plan being discussed. Most of the reporting does not make clear how far advanced the plan is’ (Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm, pp. 802–806). What MI5 did not realise at the time was that AQ operations could take up to three years from inception to execution.

Steve Coll writes that ‘Within the morass of intelligence lay ominous patterns. One was an interest by bin Laden’s operatives in the use of aircraft … yet at the counter terrorism security group meetings and at the CIA’s counter terrorist centre there was no special emphasis placed on bin Laden’s threat to civil aviation or on the several exposed plots where his followers had considered turning hijacked airplanes into cruise missiles’ (Steve Coll, Ghost Wars, pp. 419–420).

Although the December 1998 report appears fragmentary, there were a number of aspects of particular interest. The first was the name Ramzi Yousef. Yousef had studied electrical engineering at Swansea Institute from 1986 to 1990 before exploding a massive bomb under the World Trade Centre in February 1993 and then planning the Bojinka Plot against airliners in the Philippines in 1994. Yousef had been arrested in Islamabad in February 1995 and sent to the US, where he was tried and imprisoned for life. He was an energetic and imaginative terrorist, and his uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was also known to move in terrorist circles.

The aviation link must have struck a chord, too. The British were also interested in Hussain Kherchtou, who had been in Kenya at the time of the Embassy bombings and was himself a pilot. He later provided a debrief to the FBI. His story and his courtship by the British came into the public domain because of a subsequent US court case and a talkative FBI officer.

The Egyptian angle also would have provoked little surprise. On 19 November 1995 Egyptian terrorists had blown up the Egyptian Embassy in Islamabad, killing 13 – only yards from the British High Commission compound with its exposed staff housing and kindergarten. The British had a miraculous escape that day.

The concern for the release of Sheikh Abdal Rahman, ‘the Blind Sheikh’, was consistent with the widespread devotion which the preacher inspired among Islamist radicals and particularly Egyptians. His imprisonment in New York for his part in Yousef’s attack on the World Trade Centre had caused significant distress among his many adherents, who all wanted his release.

The idea that AQ would strike the US had first surfaced in 1997 and felt like the logical next step. Only a month beforehand (in November 1998), AQ had attacked two US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224 people including 12 US citizens. These operations had served as a wake-up call for those who thought the AQ threat was being exaggerated, and some who even conceived of Osama bin Laden himself as a benign figure who had somehow got out of his depth.

There were also some puzzling elements in the report. The first was the rather outdated idea of hijacking an aircraft to demand the release of the Blind Sheikh. It felt more in tune with Palestinian terrorist methods of the 1970s, and it was already known that Ramzi Yousef had developed the idea of exploding full airliners in flight.

The involvement of Gama’at Islamiya (GI) seemed odd. Bin Laden was known to be close to Ayman Al-Zawahiri of Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ), with whom GI were usually at daggers drawn. At the time GI were conceived of more as domestic Egyptian terrorists compared to the internationalist EIJ. Indeed, GI’s most recent operation had been the Luxor Massacre of November 1997, which killed 56 foreign tourists.

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The name Islambouli carried great resonance. This was Mohammed Shawqi Islambouli, who had tried to assassinate Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Addis Ababa in 1995. His brother Khalid had been one of the assassins of President Anwar Sadat in October 1981 and had been tried and executed in Cairo. However, although Mohammed was thought to be in Afghanistan, he was not then known to be close to bin Laden, let alone Al-Zawahiri.

The dates made little sense. On the one hand an attack seemed imminent, but on the other hand it was ‘on hold’. But such is the nature of counterterrorist reporting: small fragments of a much bigger jigsaw.

Nonetheless, the report was taken very seriously on its receipt in the US. President Bill Clinton’s counterterrorism advisor Richard Clarke summoned his Counterterrorism Security Group. ‘To address the hijacking warning, the group agreed that New York airports should go to maximum security starting that weekend. They agreed to boost security at other East coast airports. The CIA agreed to distribute versions of the report to the FBI and FAA to pass to the New York Police Department and the airlines. The FAA issued a security directive on December 8, with specific requirements for more intensive air carrier screening of passengers and more oversight of the screening process, at all three New York City area airports.’

Of course, when 9/11 happened nearly three years later, there were two very significant differences. Although aircraft were indeed hijacked, they were used as missiles rather than as bargaining chips, and the terrorists were mainly Saudi and not Egyptian. So what happened between December 1998 and September 2001 which could explain these changes?

The 9/11 Commission report (drawing on material from the interrogation of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) provides a fascinating section on AQ’s development of aviation methodology. Even before bin Laden had left Sudan in mid-1996, he had allegedly discussed the use of aircraft with Mohammed Atef: ‘(1) they rejected hijackings aimed at gaining the release of imprisoned comrades as too complex, because al Qaeda had no friendly countries in which to land a plane and then negotiate; (2) they considered the bombing of commercial flights in midair, as carried out against Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, a promising means to inflict massive casualties; and (3) they did not yet consider using hijacked aircraft as weapons against other targets.’

So, why was the idea of a traditional hijacking still being discussed as late as December 1998? The answer must lie in the Egyptian jihadists’ determination to win the release of the Blind Sheikh. Mustafa Hamid, a journalist who was with bin Laden in Afghanistan, provides illuminating insight into the wrangling between EIJ and GI in Afghanistan. Hamid documents the tortuous process by which GI, with some reluctance, formed a union (‘The World Islamic Front against Jews and Crusaders’) with AQ, EIJ and others, but recounts how GI insisted on secrecy about their involvement. Hamid also describes GI’s determination to obtain the Blind Sheikh’s release and the involvement of one of their operatives in the African Embassy bombings (Mustafa Hamid and Leah Farrall, The Arabs at War in Afghanistan, p. 241 and pp. 263–266). So GI was indeed part of bin Laden’s group in Afghanistan and was involved in operations at the time of the December 1998 report.

However, bin Laden became increasingly irritated by the endless squabbling among the two Egyptian groups. Lawrence Wright, drawing upon a variety of sources, chronicles the disastrous attack on Luxor, which had the effect of alienating the Egyptian population from both groups. When on 23 February 1998 bin Laden’s second fatwa announcing the ‘World Islamic Front’ was published in an Arabic newspaper in London, GI were appalled, and some members tried to have Rahman pronounced emir instead of bin Laden. No wonder that Wright concludes that ‘bin Laden had had enough of the in-fighting between the Egyptian factions. He told both groups that their operations in Egypt were ineffectual and too expensive and that it was time for them to turn their guns on the United States and Israel’ (Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower, pp. 290–296). This may explain why the December 1998 report mentions the operation being ‘on hold’. Between December and the spring of 1999, the GI team and Islambouli must have been stood down.

According to the 9/11 Commission report, in March or April 1999, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) – who had hitherto allegedly been on the fringes of AQ – was summoned to Kandahar, where he discussed the aircraft plan with bin Laden and Mohammed Atef. Four operatives were chosen to begin work on the US project. However, ‘travel issues … played a part in al Qaeda’s operational planning from the very start. During the spring and summer of 1999, KSM realized that Khallad and Abu Bara, both of whom were Yemenis, would not be able to obtain US visas as easily as Saudi operatives like Mihdhar and Hazmi’. And so, the 9/11 plot developed with 15 of the 19 terrorists being Saudi nationals. Only Mohammed Atta was Egyptian.

KSM’s key involvement in the 9/11 plot makes it evident that there could not have been a second GI plot running in parallel, because KSM and Islambouli were close associates. Robert Baer and the 9/11 Commission report agree that KSM and Islambouli were working together in Qatar in the mid-1990s. For KSM it must have been difficult to abandon the rescue of his nephew, but he would have known that a traditional hostage release operation had none of the ambition or scale of bin Laden’s new thinking.

On 6 August 2001, only five weeks before the attacks, the December 1998 report featured once again in the PDB given to George W Bush at Crawford, Texas, entitled ‘Bin Laden determined to strike in US’. It began: ‘Clandestine foreign government and media reports indicate bin Laden since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the US’, and concluded: ‘We have not been able to corroborate some of the more sensational threat reporting such as that from a [redacted] Service in 1998 saying that bin Laden wanted to hijack a US aircraft to gain the release of “blind Sheikh” Omar Abdal Rahman and other US-held extremists … Nevertheless, FBI information since that time indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks.’

The PDB of 6 August caused some discomfort to the Bush administration and led to a National Security Archive page devoted to that one PDB (of which the December 1998 British report was just one constituent part).

The CIA Director George Tenet, who had been a tireless pursuer of the AQ threat before 9/11 and a regular correspondent with and visitor to London, regretted that more had not been done ‘to protect the United States against the threat. To cite two obvious and tragic failures, only after 9/11 were cockpit doors hardened and passengers forbidden from carrying box-cutters aboard US commercial airliners’ (George Tenet, At the Centre of the Storm, p. 205).

The British report of December 1998 was fragmentary, and while it was certainly ‘sensational’, it was not half as sensational as the actual events of that unforgettable and tragic day.

The views expressed in this Commentary are the authors, and do not represent those of RUSI or any other institution.

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(Editor’s Note: This article was first published by our friends at Just Security and is the third in a series that is diving into the foundational barriers to the broad integration of AI in the IC – culture, budget, acquisition, risk, and oversight.)

OPINION — As I have written earlier, there is widespread bipartisan support for radically improving the nation’s ability to take advantage of artificial intelligence (AI). For the Intelligence Community (IC), that means using AI to more quickly, easily, and accurately analyze increasing volumes of data to produce critical foreign intelligence that can warn of and help defuse national security threats, among other things. To do that, the IC will have to partner closely with the private sector, where significant AI development occurs. But despite the billions of dollars that may ultimately flow toward this goal, there are basic hurdles the IC still must overcome to successfully transition and integrate AI into the community at speed and scale.

Among the top hurdles are the U.S. government’s slow, inflexible, and complex budget and acquisition processes. The IC’s rigid budget process follows the standard three-year cycle for the government, which means it takes years to incorporate a new program and requires confident forecasting of the future. Once a program overcomes the necessary hurdles to be included in a budget, it must follow a complex sequence of regulations to issue and manage a contract for the actual goods or services needed. These budget and acquisition processes are often considered separately as they are distinct, but I treat them together because they are closely related and inextricably intertwined in terms of the government’s purchasing of technology.

Importantly, these processes were not intended to obstruct progress; they were designed to ensure cautious and responsible spending, and for good reason. Congress, with its power of the purse, and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), as the executive branch’s chief budget authority, have the solemn duty to ensure wise and careful use of taxpayer dollars. And their roles in this regard are vital to the U.S. government’s ability to function.

Unfortunately, despite the best of intentions, as noted by some in Congress itself, the budget process has become so “cumbersome, frustrating, and ineffective” that it has weakened the power of the purse and Congress’ capacity to govern. And when complicated acquisition processes are layered on top of the budget process, the result is a spider web of confusion and difficulty for anyone trying to navigate them.

The Need for Speed … and Flexibility and Simplicity

As currently constructed, government budget and acquisition processes cause numerous inefficiencies for the purchase of AI capabilities, negatively impacting three critical areas in particular: speed, flexibility, and simplicity. When it comes to speed and flexibility, the following difficulties jump out:

• The executive branch has a methodical and deliberate three-year budget cycle that calls for defined and steady requirements at the beginning of the cycle. Changing the requirements at any point along the way is difficult and time-consuming.
• The IC’s budgeting processes require that IC spending fit into a series of discrete sequential steps, represented by budget categories like research, development, procurement, or sustainment. Funds are not quickly or easily spent across these categories.
• Most appropriations expire at the end of each fiscal year, which means programs must develop early on, and precisely execute, detailed spending plans or lose the unspent funds at the end of one year.
• Government agencies expend significant time creating detailed Statements of Work (SOWs) that describe contract requirements. Standard contract vehicles do not support evolving requirements, and companies are evaluated over the life of the contract based on strict compliance with the original SOW created years earlier.

These rules make sense in the abstract and result from well-intentioned attempts to buy down the risk of loss or failure and promote accountability and transparency. They require the customer to know with clarity and certainty the solution it seeks in advance of investment and they narrowly limit the customer’s ability to change the plan or hastily implement it. These rules are not unreasonably problematic for the purchase of items like satellites or airplanes, the requirements for which probably should not and will not significantly change over the course of many years.

However, because AI technology is still maturing and the capabilities themselves are always adapting, developing, and adding new functionality, the rules above have become major obstacles to the quick integration of AI across the IC. First, AI requirements defined with specificity years in advance of acquisition – whether in the budget or in a statement of work – are obsolete by the time the technology is delivered. Second, as AI evolves there is often not a clear delineation between research, development, procurement, and sustainment of the technology – it continuously flows back and forth across these categories in very compressed timelines. Third, it is difficult to predict the timing of AI breakthroughs, related new requirements, and funding impacts, so money might not be spent as quickly as expected and could be lost at the end of the fiscal year. Taken together, these processes are inefficient and disruptive, cause confusion and delay, and discourage engagement from small businesses, which have neither the time nor the resources to wait years to complete a contract or to navigate laborious, uncertain processes.

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Simply put, modern practices for fielding AI have outpaced the IC’s decades-old approach to budgeting and acquisition. That AI solutions are constantly evolving, learning, and improving both undermines the IC’s ability to prescribe a specific solution and, in fact, incentivizes the IC to allow the solution to evolve with the technology. The lack of flexibility and speed in how the IC manages and spends money and acquires goods and services is a core problem when it comes to fully incorporating AI into the IC’s toolkit.

Even while we introduce more speed and agility into these processes, however, the government must continue to ensure careful, intentional, and appropriate spending of taxpayer dollars. The adoption of an IC risk framework and modest changes to congressional oversight engagements, which I address in upcoming articles, will help regulate these AI activities in the spirit of the original intent of the budget and acquisition rules.

As for the lack of simplicity, the individually complex budget and acquisition rules are together a labyrinth of requirements, regulations, and processes that even long-time professionals have trouble navigating. In addition:

• There is no quick or simple way for practitioners to keep current with frequent changes in acquisition rules.
• The IC has a distributed approach that allows each element to use its various acquisition authorities independently rather than cohesively, increasing confusion across agency lines.
• Despite the many federal acquisition courses aimed at demystifying the process, there is little connection among educational programs, no clear path for IC officers to participate, and no reward for doing so.

The complexity of the budget and acquisition rules compounds the problems with speed and flexibility, and as more flexibility is introduced to support AI integration, it is even more critical that acquisition professionals be knowledgeable and comfortable with the tools and levers they must use to appropriately manage and oversee contracts.

Impactful Solutions: A Target Rich Environment

Many of these problems are not new; indeed, they have been highlighted and studied often over the past few years in an effort to enable the Department of Defense (DOD) and the IC to more quickly and easily take advantage of emerging technology. But to date, DOD has made only modest gains and the IC is even further behind. While there are hundreds of reforms that could ease these difficulties, narrowing and prioritizing proposed solutions will have a more immediate impact. Moreover, significant change is more likely to be broadly embraced if the IC first proves its ability to successfully implement needed reforms on a smaller scale. The following actions by the executive and legislative branches – some tactical and some strategic – would be powerful steps to ease and speed the transition of AI capabilities into the IC.

Statements of Objectives

A small but important first step to deal with the slow and rigid acquisition process is to encourage the use of Statements of Objectives (SOO) instead of SOWs, when appropriate. As mentioned, SOWs set forth defined project activities, deliverables, requirements, and timelines, which are used to measure contractor progress and success. SOWs make sense when the government understands with precision exactly what is needed from the contractor and how it should be achieved.

SOOs, on the other hand, are more appropriate when the strategic outcome and objectives are clear, but the steps to achieve them are less so. They describe “what” without dictating “how,” thereby encouraging and empowering industry to propose innovative solutions. SOOs also create clarity about what is important to the government, leading companies to focus less on aggressively low pricing of specific requirements and more on meeting the ultimate outcomes in creative ways that align with a company’s strengths. This approach requires knowledgeable acquisition officers as part of the government team, as described below, to ensure the contract includes reasonable milestones and decision points to keep the budget within acceptable levels.

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New Authorities for the IC

Two new authorities would help the IC speed and scale its use of AI capabilities: Other Transaction Authority (OTA)  and Commercial Solutions Openings (CSO). Other Transaction Authority allows specific types of transactions to be completed outside of the traditional federal laws and regulations that apply to standard government procurement contracts, providing significantly more speed, flexibility, and accessibility than traditional contracts. While OTA is limited in scope and not a silver bullet for all acquisition problems, OTA has been used to good effect since 1990 by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Activity (DARPA), DOD’s over-the-horizon research and development organization, among others.

CSOs are a simplified and relatively quick solicitation method to award firm fixed price contracts up to $100 million. CSOs can be used to acquire innovative commercial items, technologies, or services that close capability gaps or provide technological advances through an open call for proposals that provide offerors the opportunity to respond with technical solutions of their own choosing to a broadly defined area of government interest. CSOs are considered competitively awarded regardless of how many offerors respond.

Both OTA and CSO authority should be immediately granted to the IC to improve the speed and flexibility with which the IC can acquire and transition AI into the IC.

Unclassified Sandbox

The predictive nature of the IC’s work and the need to forecast outcomes means the IC must be able to acquire AI at the point of need, aligned to the threat. Waiting several years to acquire AI undermines the IC’s ability to fulfill its purpose. But with speed comes added risk that new capabilities might fail. Therefore, the IC should create an isolated unclassified sandbox, not connected to operational systems, in which potential IC customers could test and evaluate new capabilities alongside developers in weeks-to-months, rather than years. Congress should provide the IC with the ability to purchase software quickly for test and evaluation purposes only to buy down the risk that a rapid acquisition would result in total failure. The sandbox process would allow the IC to test products, consider adjustments, and engage with developers early on, increasing the likelihood of success.

Single Appropriation for Software

DOD has a pilot program that funds software as a single budget item – allowing the same money to be used for research, production, operations, and sustainment – to improve and speed software’s unique development cycle. AI, being largely software, is an important beneficiary of this pilot. Despite much of the IC also being part of DOD, IC-specific activities do not fall within this pilot. Extending DOD’s pilot to the IC would not only speed the IC’s acquisition of AI, but it would also increase interoperability and compatibility of IC and DOD projects.

No-Year Funds

Congress should reconsider the annual expiration of funds as a control lever for AI. Congress already routinely provides no-year funding when it makes sense to do so. In the case of AI, no-year funds would allow the evolution of capabilities without arbitrary deadlines, drive more thoughtful spending throughout the lifecycle of the project, and eliminate the additional overhead required to manage the expiration of funds annually. Recognizing the longer-term nature of this proposal, however, the executive branch also must seek shorter-term solutions in the interim.

A less-preferable alternative is to seek two-year funding for AI. Congress has a long history of proposing biennial budgeting for all government activities. Even without a biennial budget, Congress has already provided nearly a quarter of the federal budget with two-year funding. While two-year funding is not a perfect answer in the context of AI, it would at a minimum discourage parties from rushing to outcomes or artificially burning through money at the end of the first fiscal year and would provide additional time to fulfill the contract. This is presumably why DOD recently created a new budget activity under their Research, Development, Test and Evaluation (RDT&E) category, which is typically available for two years, for “software and digital technology pilot programs.”

AI Technology Fund

Congress should establish an IC AI Technology Fund (AITF) to provide kick-starter funds for priority community AI efforts and enable more flexibility to get those projects off the ground. To be successful, the AITF must have no-year funds, appropriated as a single appropriation, without limits on usage throughout the acquisition lifecycle. The AITF’s flexibility and simplicity would incentivize increased engagement by small businesses, better allowing the IC to tap into the diversity of the marketplace, and would support and speed the delivery of priority AI capabilities to IC mission users.

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ICWERX  

To quickly take advantage of private sector AI efforts at scale, the IC must better understand the market and more easily engage directly with the private sector. To do so, the IC should create an ICWERX, modeled after AFWERX, an Air Force innovation organization that drives agile public-private sector collaboration to quickly leverage and develop cutting-edge technology for the Air Force. AFWERX aggressively uses innovative, flexible, and speedy procurement mechanisms like OTA and the Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer programs (SBIR/STTR) to improve the acquisition process and encourage engagement from small businesses. AFWERX is staffed by acquisition and market research experts who are comfortable using those authorities and understand the market. While the IC’s needs are not identical, an ICWERX could serve as an accessible “front door” for prospective partners and vendors, and enable the IC to more quickly leverage and scale cutting-edge AI.

De-mystify Current Authorities

While there is much complaining about a lack of flexible authorities in the IC (and a real need for legal reform), there is flexibility in existing rules that has not been fully utilized. The IC has not prioritized the development or hiring of people with the necessary government acquisition and contracts expertise, so there are insufficient officers who know how to use the existing authorities and those who do are overworked and undervalued. The IC must redouble its efforts to increase its expertise in, and support the use of, these flexibilities in several ways.

First, the IC should create formal partnerships and increase engagement with existing U.S. government experts. The General Services Administration’s Technology Transformation Services (TTS) and FEDSIM, for example, work across the federal government to build innovative acquisition solutions and help agencies more quickly adopt AI. In addition, DOD’s Joint AI Center has built significant acquisition expertise that the IC must better leverage. The IC also should increase joint duty rotations in this area to better integrate and impart acquisition expertise across the IC.

Second, the IC must prioritize training and education of acquisition professionals. And while deep acquisition expertise is not necessary for everyone, it is important for lawyers, operators, technologists, and innovators to have a reasonable understanding of the acquisition rules, and the role they each play in getting to successful outcomes throughout the process. Collaboration and understanding across these professions and up and down the chain of command will result in more cohesive, speedy, and effective outcomes.

To that end, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) should work with the many existing government acquisition education programs, as well as the National Intelligence University, to develop paths for IC officers to grow their understanding of and ability to navigate and successfully use acquisition rules. The ODNI also should strengthen continuing education requirements and create incentive pay for acquisition professionals.

Third, the IC should prioritize and use direct hire authority to recruit experts in government acquisition, to include a mix of senior term-limited hires and junior permanent employees with room to grow and the opportunity for a long career in the IC. Such a strategy would allow the IC to quickly tackle the current AI acquisition challenges and build a bench of in-house expertise.

Finally, practitioners should have an easily accessible reference book to more quickly discover relevant authorities, understand how to use them, and find community experts. A few years ago, the ODNI led the creation of an IC Acquisition Playbook, which describes common IC acquisition authorities, practices, and usages. The ODNI should further develop and disseminate this Playbook as a quick win for the IC.

Incentivize Behavior

To encourage creative and innovative acquisition practices, as well as interdisciplinary collaboration, the IC must align incentives with desired outcomes and create in acquisition professionals a vested interest in the success of the contract. Acquisition officers today are often brought into projects only in transactional ways, when contracts must be completed or money must be obligated, for example. They are rarely engaged early as part of a project team, so they are not part of developing the solutions and have minimal investment in the project’s success. Reinforcing this, acquisition professionals are evaluated primarily on the amount of money they obligate by the end of the fiscal year, rather than on the success of a project.

Therefore, to start, project teams should be required to engage acquisition officers early and often, both to seek their advice and to ensure they have a good understanding of the project’s goals. In addition, evaluation standards for acquisition officers should incorporate effective engagement and collaboration with stakeholders, consideration of creative alternatives and options, and delivery of mission outcomes. If an officer uses innovative practices that fail, that officer also should be evaluated on what they learned from the experience that may inform future success.

Lastly, the ODNI should reinvigorate and highlight the IC acquisition awards to publicly reward desired behavior, and acquisition professionals should be included in IC mission team awards as a recognition of their impact on the ultimate success of the mission.

Conclusion

Between the government’s rigid budget and acquisition processes and confusion about how to apply them, there is very little ability for the IC to take advantage of a fast-moving field that produces new and updated technology daily. Tackling these issues through the handful of priority actions set forth above will begin to drive the critical shift away from the IC’s traditional, linear processes to the more dynamic approaches the IC needs to speed and transform the way it purchases, integrates, and manages the use of AI.

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The Philippine government has accused the Chinese Coast Guard of unleashing water cannon on two supply ships in a disputed stretch of the South China Sea, claiming its boats were blocked and forced to turn around.

Manila’s Department of Foreign Affairs detailed the encounter in a statement on Wednesday, alleging that a pair of supply boats en route to the Ayungin Shoal – also known as the Second Thomas Shoal – were stopped by three Chinese vessels and “water cannoned” before they could reach their destination.

“Fortunately, no one was hurt; but our boats had to abort their resupply mission,” Foreign Affairs Secretary Teodoro Locsin said, adding that the department had conveyed its “outrage, condemnation and protest of the incident” to Beijing’s envoy to the Philippines, Huang Xilian.

The acts of the Chinese Coast Guard vessels are illegal. China has no law enforcement rights in and around these areas. They must take heed and back off.

Though both China and the Philippines claim territorial rights to the Ayungin Shoal, The Hague’s Permanent Court of Arbitration ruled in the latter country’s favor in 2016. And despite Chinese objections, the Philippines has occupied the area for much longer, after its military purposely grounded a naval vessel on the shoal in 1999.  

[3] I reminded China that a public vessel is covered by the Philippines-United States Mutual Defense Treaty.

— DFA Philippines (@DFAPHL) November 17, 2021

READ MORE: Manila backs controversial AUKUS security pact as move to fix ‘imbalance’ of power in Southeast Asia

Manila was also quick to note that the supply ships are “covered by the Philippines-United States Mutual Defense Treaty,” a pact inked with Washington in 1951 that calls for a US military response to any attack on the country, including “island territories under its jurisdiction in the Pacific Ocean, its armed forces, public vessels or aircraft.” 

Beijing so far has not commented on the alleged run-in.

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The Islamic State terrorist group is tearing a path across Afghanistan, establishing itself in “nearly all” of its provinces while increasing attacks more than five-fold in the past year, the UN’s envoy to the country has warned.

Addressing the UN Security Council on Wednesday, the body’s special representative for Afghanistan Deborah Lyons spoke of a major Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) surge through the war-torn country, claiming the jihadist group has now expanded nationwide.

“Once limited to a few provinces and the capital, ISKP now seems to be present in nearly all provinces, and increasingly active,” Lyons said, referring to the group’s Afghanistan-based ‘Khorasan’ faction. She added that so far in 2021, IS has carried out 334 attacks, up from just 60 last year.

To abandon the Afghan people now would be a historic mistake – UN envoy @DeborahLyonsUN tells UN Security Council. Read full statement https://t.co/siaZjUTKnP pic.twitter.com/JDrqH8gpag

— UNAMA News (@UNAMAnews) November 17, 2021

The envoy’s comments came just hours after an Islamic State bombing erupted in a Shiite Muslim neighborhood of the Afghan capital, killing one and wounding six others, according to Reuters.

Since taking over as the government following a chaotic US withdrawal and the outright collapse of the American-backed administration in Kabul last summer, the Taliban has struggled to keep the terrorist group at bay, Lyons said. Though she noted that the Taliban insists it is “waging a concerted campaign” against IS and is making “genuine efforts to present itself as a government,” she said its response “appears to rely heavily on extrajudicial detentions and killings.”

READ MORE: ‘Ghost soldiers’ to blame for Afghan government’s quick defeat – ex-minister

Despite the rise in IS attacks in recent months, however, Lyons said the overall security situation in Afghanistan has improved since the end of the US war, which stretched on for two decades.

In addition to the terrorism issue, the UN representative also cited broader concerns for the country in the coming months, warning of a looming “humanitarian catastrophe” driven by a litany of causes, including foreign sanctions – which she said have “paralyzed” the local banking system – as well as growing levels of food shortages due to famine and a failing economy, among other factors.

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Syrian-born musician Omar Souleyman, who worked with the likes of Bjork and Damon Albarn, has been detained in Turkey over alleged links to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, which is deemed a terrorist group by Ankara.

Souleyman was brought in for questioning on Wednesday, with officers also searching through his home in Turkey’s southeastern province of Sanliurfa, the singer’s manager said.

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The arrest was likely provoked by recent reports that the musician had traveled to an area in Syria controlled by the Kurdish militias known as the YPG, he added.

The YPG have been US allies in the fight against Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS), but Turkey considers them to be an extension of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and a threat to its national security.

For decades, the Workers’ Party has been fighting Turkish troops in the southeast of the country, striving for greater autonomy for the Kurdish population.  

Souleyman’s son denied his father’s alleged terrorist links, saying he didn’t have any political affiliation and had become the victim of a “malicious report.” Some media outlets claimed the musician could be released from custody later on Thursday.

Coming from Syria’s majority-Kurdish province of Hasekeh, Souleyman had been known as a prolific wedding performer in his home country. But his international career skyrocketed after he moved to Turkey a decade ago, fleeing the Syrian conflict. The 55-year-old’s clips, including his top hit ‘Warni Warni’, have garnered millions of views on YouTube. He performed at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in 2013, as well as at many large festivals around the globe.

His unique style, which is based on mixing traditional Middle Eastern folk music with electronic sound, has attracted the attention of such stars as Bjork, Four Tet, Damon Albarn, and Diplo, who have all collaborated with Souleyman.

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Chris Inglis’ new White House office has a startup feel to it. There are desks, a few chairs, a coffee maker and a poster hanging on the wall.  But as the head of the newly established Office of the National Cyber Director, Inglis has to make due with what he has while still advising President Joe Biden on the smartest ways for the US to prevent and respond to cyberattacks.

Inglis has already had numerous conversations with the president, who has made clear that the government has a role to play in the defense of the private sector and in assisting the private sector in defending critical infrastructure.  And the president knows, says Inglis, that means the government needs to get its own cyber house in order. 

But like any real startup, Inglis’ resources are scarce.  More than three months after being confirmed by the Senate, he still doesn’t have the full staff he needs to take on his timely and critical mission.  That’s because the funding for his office – some $21 million, part of the $1 trillion infrastructure bill making its way through Congress – is still stuck in the political spin cycle.  Why does it matter?

“The threat is greater than I can ever remember,” Inglis told me during last month’s AFCEA and INSA Intelligence & National Security Summit in National Harbor, Maryland. “The audacity, the brazenness, the thresholds that have been crossed at every turn; we’re in a difficult place.”

While he’s waiting for Congress to act, he says he’s spending about fifty percent of his time defining his role, being careful not to duplicate the work already being done by other agencies and departments, while spending another fifty percent building relationships that will be important later.  Eventually, he’s expected to have a staff of some 75 people who will be expected to work hand in glove with CISA, the National Security Council’s cyber staff, the OMB and others.  The remaining fifty percent of his time, Inglis jokes, is spent figuring out how to attract the country’s best talent.   

“People are starting to flow into the organization. I’m confident that we’re coming up to a breakout moment, not for the National Cyber Director, but the contribution that we can and should make. I’m sobered by the nature of the challenge, I’m optimistic we can make a difference.”

Optimistic he is.  And he’s not even complaining about being given a critical task for US national security and then having to wait for politics to play out before being able to act on it.

“It has been a semi-silver lining in that we would not have had time to think about how we want to apply the resources coming our way.”

While Inglis has been waiting, he and his small team have had time to think about the four things they’d like to focus on right away. 

First, is streamlining the roles and responsibilities in government of who handles what when it comes to protecting the public and private sectors from cyberattacks.  He also spoke during his confirmation hearing about the importance of allocation of resources and while the Office of the National Cyber Director doesn’t have the authority to move money, it does have what Inglis calls the responsibility to account for cyber money.

“One of the most critical gaps in cyber is that the physical digital infrastructure is not built to a common standard. The executive order related to this requires that within a certain amount of time we have to install basic procedures like multifactor authentication and encryption of stored material. That is a challenge and a potential vulnerability for us. We need to make sure that we make these investments necessary to buy down the lack of investment for years.

The second gap is in talent related to number of people required to occupy these jobs. It’s not simply the folks with IT or cyber in their name, but general cyber awareness. There is some expenditure of resources of time, attention, and money to get awareness right on the part of the truly accountable parties like agency and department heads. We have to make sure they don’t see cyber as a cost center, but an enabler on the part of all the users as they understand what their roles are and what the accountability is.

He admits there is still a level of education needed within government to get there.

“That is usually the case in both the government and the private sector,” he said.  “We need to think this way about cyber and invest in cyber so that we can enable the mission, not hold it back. I think that education is the most important and effective way to handle this. Then, it is to make sure that the accountability is aligned and harmonized. We tend to take risk in one place and expect someone in another place to be the mitigator of a risk they don’t understand was taken in the first place. We need to operate in a collaborative fashion and get away from divisions of effort which are an agreement not to collaborate and allow adversaries to pick us off one at a time.”

Inglis says that unity of effort must start at home.  “The executive order issued in May has begun to lay out common expectations about the hardware, software, and practices that we need to begin in those spaces,” he said.  “Externally, if we have sector risk management agencies who engage the private sector for the purposes of supporting and engaging the critical components of that infrastructure, we need to make sure you don’t need a Ph.D. in government to know who to deal with and what you’re going to get from them.”

He is arguing for the government to also put ‘valuable material’ on the table.  “That could be our convening power,” said Inglis. “We could perhaps address and reduce liability or give companies a clue as to what might be around the corner because the government has access to exquisite intelligence. If that setup is possible, we also need a venue where collaboration takes place. Information doesn’t collaborate, people do.”

Inglis likes to point to the example of CISA and the Joint Cyber Collaborative.  “They put people from the private sector and the public sector side by side to co-discover threats that hold us at common risk. That project sets up the possibility of implicit collaboration in what we then do with that common operational picture. The government could take ideas that private sector companies turn into proprietary systems and enrich and classify them to deal with it in their system.”

Using what he calls “all the tools in the toolkit,” Inglis also notes the importance of international relationships, which fits nicely into the White House’s International Summit on Ransomware last week in Washington, which zeroed in on tighter cryptocurrency standards, among other things. “Beyond the Five Eyes, what do other like-minded nations think about what is expected behavior in this? What are governmental actions that are appropriate,” he asked.  

Inglis has been an active participant in the president’s recent actions in cyber.  He took part in a White House meeting with tech leaders in August that was hosted by President Biden, who Inglis says, spent the first hour sharing his vision about how the country should focus on collaborative integration.  “The companies represented weren’t only companies like Microsoft and Apple, but people who operate in the critical infrastructure space,” said Inglis.  “The people component, educators, were represented reflecting the president’s view that cyberspace is not just technology, it is also the people component. They are a major link in the chain, and we need to get the roles and responsibilities right.”

While he’s waiting for the funding he needs to get his office fully staffed, Inglis said he’s also putting thought into reconciling resources with aspirations.  Managing expectations is going to be important.  Frustration has been growing for years over what some see as a lack of government response to some of the largest hacks in history.  The phrase ‘time and place of our choosing’ as a definition of response has grown old and some Americans are weary of a government that isn’t responding in a more public way to the beating it sees the US taking in cyberspace.

So, I asked Inglis whether there should be red lines in cyber.

“Red lines are both good and bad,” he answered.  “They are clear and crisp, and everybody knows what they are. The downside is that because of that, an adversary knows exactly how far they can go. It means that you set up a somewhat permissive environment. Red lines also don’t have context; sometimes there is a reason that a defender would make the ransomware payment. As a matter of policy, the U.S. government does not pay ransomware, but I imagine there will be a situation at some point where a hospital is against the Russian state and actual life and safety is at risk. If there is no other way to get the material back, in order to get back in the business of saving lives, they would want to rethink if a red line is a red line in that particular situation. I think the right thing to do here is not to establish hard thresholds of things with scripted responses, but outline what we are prepared to defend and what principles we will exercise in defense of those things. We commit to defending the private sector when it is held at risk by a nation state in cyberspace as much as in the kinetic space and make that clear to adversaries. I think that would be more helpful in changing decision calculus and creating a useful ambiguity about when and where we will come in.”

Inglis said he’s also thinking a lot about present and future resilience.  It’s a worthwhile focus, given that the White House estimates that nearly half a million public and private sector cybersecurity jobs are currently unfilled. 

“That is a massive problem,” said Inglis. “However, the more insidious problem is that the 320 million people in the United States who use the internet who have no idea how to properly take their place on the front lines of this issue. There is an awareness issue that requires us not to make Python programmers out of them but to make sure they understand the nature of this space.”

Everyone has heard the old saying that time is money, but in Inglis’ case, time is security so I asked him point blank whether he thought government was moving has quickly as it should on the cyber problem.

“Government is moving at speed; the question is if it is at the necessary speed. I don’t think anyone is moving at the necessary speed. Some are moving at light speed, but at the end of the day, we need an integrated, collaborative approach. While we won’t have unity of command, I think there needs to be a universally felt sense of urgency so that we will all get our heads in the game.”

Congress, are you listening?  Oh, and by the way, that poster in Inglis’ office? It reads, ‘Hours Since the Last Surprise.”

“As a startup with maybe too few resources at the start and who often didn’t understand how all the wickets are run, we have our occasional surprise,” said Inglis.  “When we encounter those surprises and go to someone with the deep and sharp expertise to help us navigate that, we get what we need. However, we are not a full functioning, full featured, fully capable organization yet. We’re trying to build somebody else’s airplane while we’re free falling from our own. We have a parachute, and we can land safely, but it is a bit of a challenge at times.”

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The city council in Austria’s second-largest city, Graz, has elected a new mayor. Communist Party member Elke Kahr has become the first Communist leader of a major city in the country.

The 60-year-old politician, who has been working in the municipal government for more than 15 years and previously served as vice mayor of Graz, was elected as the new city leader on Wednesday. A member of the Austrian Communist Party (KPÖ, Kommunistische Partei Österreichs) for almost 30 years, she won the election with 28 of 46 votes. Kahr succeeded the previous long-standing mayor Siegfried Nagl of the center-right, liberal-conservative People’s Party.

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“Who would have thought that the daughter of a locksmith, a Communist, would become mayor,” she said in her first speech following the vote.

Having acknowledged a number of issues to deal with in the city, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic, the new mayor highlighted a housing policy, pledging to put a stop to profit-driven construction in Ganz.

The Communists have also already formed a coalition with the Greens and the Social Democratic Party (SPÖ), and another precedent in European city governance was made – two women serving as mayor and deputy. Green leader Judith Schwentner was chosen as Graz’s vice mayor, with the new governing coalition saying they would support not only social, but also environmental changes, aiming to improve living standards especially for low-income groups. Providing a bicycle for every child in the city from the municipality is in their program.

However, not everyone in the local government is happy with the new Communist rule. A member of the right-wing Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), Alexis Pascuttini, described the choice as “unpleasant,” having accused the Graz Communists of empty catchphrases in their program and refusing to participate in what he described as “left-wing nonsense.” Kahr herself has been exposed to strong pressure to justify her party, being repeatedly asked about her position on “the crimes of communist parties around the world since 1917,” according to Austrian media.

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