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The annual migration of red crabs has brought traffic to a standstill on an Australian island. Apart from the epic journey, the species is also notorious for eating its own young.

Tens of millions of crustaceans are swarming Canberra-governed Christmas Island, which is almost a thousand miles northwest of the Australian mainland. Parks Australia, a government body in charge of wildlife conservation on the island, has deployed its staff to manage traffic, rake crabs off roads and provide advisories to local residents regarding road closures. Authorities are well-prepared to deal with the epic crab march as it repeats every year, usually in October and November. There are even special bridges and tunnels in place, built over and under busy roads so as to minimize the number of crabs crushed by cars. The sight of millions of these creatures making their perilous trek has become one of Christmas Island’s main tourist attractions.

Millions of crabs have flooded the roads on Australia’s Christmas Island pic.twitter.com/Qa2CbSzwMW

— RT (@RT_com) November 18, 2021

The exact timing of the red crabs’ journey from forest to ocean is defined by rainfall and lunar phases. The march is led by male crabs, which are later joined by females. On reaching the ocean, they mate and spawn, with each female capable of producing as many as 100,000 eggs. However, most of the young crabs never make it back to the forest as they end up being eaten by fish and whale sharks for whom this is a veritable feast. To make matters worse, the crab larvae that do make it to the beach are often devoured by returning adult crabs of the very same species, hence one of their names – the cannibal crab.

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Sports goods retailer Decathlon has said it won’t be selling canoes in its stores in northern France anymore because the light vessels are increasingly being used by migrants trying to cross into England.

“Given the current context… the purchase of canoes will no longer be possible” in Decathlon stores in Calais and Grande-Synthe, outside Dunkirk, the French retailer announced.

The two cities overlook the Strait of Dover, which is the narrowest point in the English Channel. Thousands of migrants have been using this spot in recent years to try to make the dangerous 34-kilometer-long sea journey from France to the UK.A lot of canoes aren’t being purchased for their original sporting purpose, Decathlon complained.

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They “could be used to cross the Channel” and as a result of this, “people’s lives would be endangered,” it pointed out.

“We are committed to never putting our customers at risk in the use of our products, whatever the circumstances,” the company said. 

The initiative to remove canoes from the shelves came from the stores themselves and was backed by the head office, according to the retailer. However, Decathlon will keep selling the vessels online and in its other shops across France.

Last Thursday, two canoes were found adrift in the Channel near Calais, while two migrants were rescued from the water. The next day, three more people were reported missing after attempting to get to England using canoes.

Tensions between London and Paris are high after a record number of migrants – 1,185 – were able to cross the Channel a week ago. 

Britain said it was “unacceptable” that France had let so many people slip through, but the French government insisted they were “neither their collaborators nor their assistants” and blamed the soaring crossings on the smugglers and the UK’s labor market, which makes the country attractive to people eager to “work at low cost.”

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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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Scientists have used artificial intelligence to “predict” formulas for new designer drugs, with the stated goal of helping to improve their regulation. The AI generated formulas for nearly nine million potential new drugs.

Researchers with the University of British Columbia (UBC) used a deep neural net for the job, teaching it to make up chemical structures of potential new drugs. According to their study, released this week, the computer intelligence fared better at the task than the scientists had expected.

The research team used a database of known designer drugs – synthetic psychoactive substances – to train the AI on their structures. The market for designer drugs is ever-changing, since their manufacturers are constantly tweaking their formulas to circumvent restrictions and produce new “legal” substances, while cracking their structure takes months for law enforcement agencies, the researchers said.

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“The vast majority of these designer drugs have never been tested in humans and are completely unregulated. They are a major public-health concern to emergency departments across the world,” one of the researchers, UBC medical student Dr. Michael Skinnider has said.

After its training, the AI was able to generate some 8.9 million potential designer drugs. Afterwards, researchers ran a data sheet of some 196 new drugs, which had emerged in real life after the model was trained, and found that more than 90% of these have been already predicted by the computer.

“The fact that we can predict what designer drugs are likely to emerge on the market before they actually appear is a bit like the 2002 sci-fi movie, Minority Report, where foreknowledge about criminal activities about to take place helped significantly reduce crime in a future world,” senior author Dr. David Wishart, a professor of computing science at the University of Alberta, has said.

Identifying completely unknown substances remains an issue for the AI, the research team has noted, but they hope it might potentially help with that task, since the computer was also able to predict which formulas of designer drugs were more likely to be created and hit the market. The model “ranked the correct chemical structure of an unidentified designer drug among the top 10 candidates 72 percent of the time,” while throwing in spectrometry analysis, which is an easily obtained measurement, bumped the accuracy to some 86%.

“It was shocking to us that the model performed this well, because elucidating entire chemical structures from just an accurate mass measurement is generally thought to be an unsolvable problem,” Skinnider stated.

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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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Vaccination of all Hungarian citizens against Covid-19 is inevitable, PM Viktor Orban has said, stating that even the most hardline anti-vaxxers will ultimately face a choice between dying with the virus and getting a jab.

Speaking to Kossuth radio on Friday, the Hungarian leader lashed out at those reluctant to get vaccinated against coronavirus, branding them a threat “not only to themselves but to all others.”

In the end, everyone will have to be vaccinated; even the anti-vaxxers will realize that they will either get vaccinated or die. So, I urge everyone to take this opportunity.

The EU member state is currently experiencing its fourth wave of coronavirus, Orban stated, blaming the situation on those who had not got vaccinated. “If everybody were inoculated, there would be no fourth wave or it would be just a small one,” the PM claimed.

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Apart from urging the unvaccinated to go and finally get their jabs, Orban also promoted booster shots, revealing that he had already taken three doses of a coronavirus vaccine.

“The only thing that protects us from the virus is vaccination. And we are now also seeing, at least the experts are unanimous in saying, that four to six months after the second vaccination, the protective power of the vaccine weakens. Therefore, a third vaccination is justified,” he said.

Hungary has already announced new anti-Covid measures, though somewhat short of the strict measures proposed by the nation’s Medical Chamber on Wednesday. The medical body called for a blanket ban on mass events, and suggested making entry to restaurants, theaters and other indoor venues conditional on bearing a Covid-19 inoculation certificate. Instead, Budapest rolled out compulsory mask wearing for most indoor environments, as well as making booster shots mandatory for all medical workers, starting from Saturday.

A nation of 10 million, Hungary’s total tally of logged Covid cases is hovering just below the one million mark. On Friday, it registered a new daily record, with nearly 11,300 new Covid infections. More than 32,700 people in Hungary have succumbed to the disease over the course of the pandemic.

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A Roadmap for AI in the Intelligence Community

(Editor’s Note: This article was first published by our friends at Just Security and is the fourth 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.  This article considers a new IC approach to risk management.)

OPINION — I have written previously that the Intelligence Community (IC) must rapidly advance its artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to keep pace with our nation’s adversaries and continue to provide policymakers with accurate, timely, and exquisite insights. The good news is that there is strong bipartisan support for doing so. The not-so-good news is that the IC is not well-postured to move quickly and take the risks required to continue to outpace China and other strategic competitors over the next decade.

In addition to the practical budget and acquisition hurdles facing the IC, there is a strong cultural resistance to taking risks when not absolutely necessary. This is understandable given the life-and-death nature of intelligence work and the U.S. government’s imperative to wisely execute national security funds and activities. However, some risks related to innovative and cutting-edge technologies like AI are in fact necessary, and the risk of inaction – the costs of not pursuing AI capabilities – is greater than the risk of action.

The Need for a Risk Framework

For each incredible new invention, there are hundreds of brilliant ideas that have failed. To entrepreneurs and innovators, “failure” is not a bad word. Rather, failed ideas are often critical steps in the learning process that ultimately lead to a successful product; without those prior failed attempts, that final product might never be created. As former President of India A.P.J. Abdul Kalam once said, “FAIL” should really stand for “First Attempt In Learning.”

The U.S. government, however, is not Silicon Valley; it does not consider failure a useful part of any process, especially when it comes to national security activities and taxpayer dollars. Indeed, no one in the U.S. government wants to incur additional costs or delay or lose taxpayer dollars. But there is rarely a distinction made within the government between big failures, which may have a lasting, devastating, and even life-threatening impact, and small failures, which may be mere stumbling blocks with acceptable levels of impact that result in helpful course corrections.

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As a subcommittee report of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) notes “[p]rogram failures are often met with harsh penalties and very public rebukes from Congress which often fails to appreciate that not all failures are the same. Especially with cutting-edge research in technologies … early failures are a near certainty …. In fact, failing fast and adapting quickly is a critical part of innovation.” There is a vital difference between an innovative project that fails and a failure to innovate. The former teaches us something we did not know before, while the latter is a national security risk.

Faced with congressional hearings, inspector general reports, performance evaluation downgrades, negative reputational effects, and even personal liability, IC officers are understandably risk-averse and prefer not to introduce any new risk. That is, of course, neither realistic nor the standard the IC meets today. The IC is constantly managing a multitude of operational risks – that its officers, sources, or methods will be exposed, that it will miss (or misinterpret) indications of an attack, or that it will otherwise fail to produce the intelligence policymakers need at the right time and place. Yet in the face of such serious risks, the IC proactively and aggressively pursues its mission. It recognizes that it must find effective ways to understand, mitigate, and make decisions around risk, and therefore it takes action to make sure potential ramifications are clear, appropriate, and accepted before any failure occurs. In short, the IC has long known that its operations cannot be paralyzed by a zero-risk tolerance that is neither desirable nor attainable. This recognition must also be applied to the ways in which the IC acquires, develops, and uses new technology.

This is particularly important in the context of AI. While AI has made amazing progress in recent years, the underlying technology, the algorithms and their application, are still evolving and the resulting capabilities, by design, will continue to learn and adapt. AI holds enormous promise to transform a variety of IC missions and tasks, but how and when these changes may occur is difficult to forecast and AI’s constant innovation will introduce uncertainty and mistakes. There will be unexpected breakthroughs, as well as failures in areas that initially seemed promising.

The IC must rethink its willingness to take risks in a field where change and failure is embraced as part of the key to future success. The IC must experiment and iterate its progress over time and shift from a culture that punishes even reasonable risk to one that embraces, mitigates, and owns it. This can only be done with a systematic, repeatable, and consistent approach to making risk-conscious decisions.

Today there is no cross-IC mechanism for thinking about risk, let alone for taking it. When considering new activities or approaches, each IC element manages risk through its own lens and mechanisms, if at all. Several individual IC elements have created internal risk assessment frameworks to help officers understand the risks of both action and inaction, and to navigate the decisions they are empowered to make depending upon the circumstances. These frameworks increase confidence that if an activity goes wrong, supervisors all the way up the chain will provide backing as long as the risk was reasonable, well-considered and understood, and the right leaders approved it. And while risk assessments are often not precise instruments of measurement – they reflect the quality of the data, the varied expertise of those conducting the assessments, and the subjective interpretation of the results – regularized and systematic risk assessments are nevertheless a key part of effective risk management and facilitate decision-making at all levels.

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Creating these individual frameworks is commendable and leading-edge for government agencies, but more must be done holistically across the IC. Irregular and inconsistent risk assessments among IC elements will not provide the comfort and certainty needed to drive an IC-wide cultural shift to taking risk. At the same time, the unique nature of the IC, comprised of 18 different elements, each with similar and overlapping, but not identical, missions, roles, authorities, threats and vulnerabilities, does not lend itself to a one-size-fits-all approach.

For this reason, the IC needs a flexible but common strategic framework for considering risk that can apply across the community, with each element having the ability to tailor that framework to its own mission space. Such an approach is not unlike how the community is managed in many areas today – with overarching IC-wide policy that is locally interpreted and implemented to fit the specific needs of each IC element. When it comes to risk, creating an umbrella IC-wide framework will significantly improve the workforce’s ability to understand acceptable risks and tradeoffs, produce comprehensible and comparable risk determinations across the IC, and provide policymakers the ability to anticipate and mitigate failure and unintended escalation.

Critical Elements of a Risk Framework

A common IC AI risk framework should inform and help prioritize decisions from acquisition or development, to deployment, to performance in a consistent way across the IC. To start, the IC should create common AI risk management principles, like its existing principles of transparency and AI ethics, that include clear and consistent definitions, thresholds, and standards. These principles should drive a repeatable risk assessment process that each IC element can tailor to its individual needs, and should promote policy, governance, and technological approaches that are aligned to risk management.

The successful implementation of this risk framework requires a multi-disciplinary approach involving leaders from across the organization, experts from all relevant functional areas, and managers who can ensure vigilance in implementation. A whole-of-activity methodology that includes technologists, collectors, analysts, innovators, security officers, acquisition officers, lawyers and more, is critical to ensuring a full 360-degree understanding of the opportunities, issues, risks, and potential consequences associated with a particular action, and to enabling the best-informed decision.

Given the many players involved, each IC element must strengthen internal processes to manage the potential disconnects that can lead to unintended risks and to create a culture that instills in every officer a responsibility to proactively consider risk at each stage of the activity. Internal governance should include an interdisciplinary Risk Management Council (RMC) made up of senior leaders from across the organization. The RMC should establish clear and consistent thresholds for when a risk assessment is required, recommended, or not needed given that resource constraints likely will not allow all of the broad and diverse AI activities within organizations to be assessed. These thresholds should be consistent with the IC risk management principles so that as IC elements work together on projects across the community, officers have similar understandings and expectations.

The risk framework itself should provide a common taxonomy and process to:

• Understand and identify potential failures, including the source, timeline, and range of effects.
• Analyze failures and risks by identifying internal vulnerabilities or predisposing conditions that could increase the likelihood of adverse impact.
• Evaluate the likelihood of failure, taking into consideration risks and vulnerabilities.
• Assess the severity of the potential impact, to include potential harm to organizational operations, assets, individuals, other organizations, or the nation.
• Consider whether the ultimate risk may be sufficiently mitigated or whether it should be transferred, avoided, or accepted.

AI-related risks may include, among other things, technology failure, biased data, adversarial attacks, supply chain compromises, human error, cost overruns, legal compliance challenges, or oversight issues.

An initial risk level is determined by considering the likelihood of a failure against the severity of the potential impact. For example, is there is a low, moderate, or high likelihood of supply chain compromise? Would such a compromise affect only one discrete system or are there system-wide implications? These calculations will result in an initial risk level. Then potential mitigation measures, such as additional policies, training, or security measures, are applied to lower the initial risk level to an adjusted risk level. For example, physically or logically segmenting an organization’s systems so that a compromise only touches one system would significantly decrease the risk level associated with that particular technology. The higher the likelihood of supply chain compromise, the lower the severity of its impact must be to offset the risk, and vice versa. Organizations should apply the Swiss Cheese Model of more than one preventative or mitigative action for a more effective layered defense. Organizations then must consider the adjusted risk level in relation to their tolerance for risk; how much risk (and potential consequence) is acceptable in pursuit of value? This requires defining the IC’s risk tolerance levels, within which IC elements may again define their own levels based upon their unique missions.

Understanding and considering the risk of action is an important step forward for the IC, but it is not the last step. Sometimes overlooked in risk assessment practices is the consideration of the risk of inaction. To fully evaluate potential options, decision-makers must consider whether the overall risk of doing something is outweighed by the risks of not doing it. If the IC does not pursue particular AI capabilities, what is the opportunity cost of that inaction? Any final determination about whether to take action must consider whether declining to act would cause greater risk of significant harm. While the answer will not always be yes, in the case of AI and emerging technology, it is a very realistic possibility.

And, finally, a risk framework only works if people know about it. Broad communication – about the existence of the framework, how to apply it, and expectations for doing so – is vital. We cannot hold people accountable for appropriately managing risk if we do not clearly and consistently communicate and help people use the structure and mechanisms for doing so.

Buy-in To Enhance Confidence

An IC-wide AI risk framework will help IC officers understand risks and determine when and how to take advantage of innovative emerging technologies like AI, increasing comfort with uncertainty and risk-taking in the pursuit of new capabilities. Such a risk framework will have even greater impact if it is accepted – explicitly or implicitly – by the IC’s congressional overseers. The final article in this series will delve more deeply into needed changes to further improve the crucial relationship between the IC and its congressional overseers. It will also provide a link to a full report that provides more detail on each aspect of the series, including a draft IC AI Risk Framework.

Although Congress is not formally bound by such a framework, given the significant accountability measures that often flow from these overseers, a meeting of the minds between the IC and its congressional overseers is critical. Indeed, these overseers should have awareness of and an informal ability to provide feedback into the framework as it is being developed. This level of transparency and partnership would lead to at least two important benefits: first, increased confidence in the framework by all; and second, better insight into IC decision-making for IC overseers.

Ultimately, such a mutual understanding would encourage exactly what the IC needs to truly take advantage of next-generation technology like AI: a culture of experimentation, innovation, and creativity that sees reasonable risk and failure as necessary steps to game-changing outcomes.

Read also AI and the IC: The Tangled Web of Budget and Acquisition

Read also Artificial Intelligence in the IC: Culture is Critical

Read also AI and the IC: The Challenges Ahead

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Israel has allegedly launched two missiles targeting an area south of the Syrian capital, Damascus, Syria’s state media reported, noting that one of the projectiles was intercepted. There are no reports of damage.

The reported attack took place shortly after midnight on Wednesday local time, according to Syria’s SANA news agency. The projectiles came from the direction of the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, the outlet noted. The strike targeted an “empty building” south of the capital and resulted in no losses, according to the report.

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Israel routinely makes incursions into Syria under the pretext of taking out alleged Iranian outposts there. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) typically refrain from commenting on the raids, in line with its long-standing policy on military operations conducted outside its borders. Just over a week ago, two Syrian soldiers were injured in reported Israeli missile strikes on the cities of Tartus and Homs, near Russia’s naval base. The bombing also reportedly inflicted material losses. 

Damascus has repeatedly condemned Israeli attacks against its territory as violations of its sovereignty. Russia, Iran, and Turkey have also denounced the Israeli airstrikes in Syria as a breach of international law.

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The annual migration of red crabs has brought traffic to a standstill on an Australian island. Apart from the epic journey, the species is also notorious for eating its own young.

Tens of millions of crustaceans are swarming Canberra-governed Christmas Island, which is almost a thousand miles northwest of the Australian mainland. Parks Australia, a government body in charge of wildlife conservation on the island, has deployed its staff to manage traffic, rake crabs off roads and provide advisories to local residents regarding road closures. Authorities are well-prepared to deal with the epic crab march as it repeats every year, usually in October and November. There are even special bridges and tunnels in place, built over and under busy roads so as to minimize the number of crabs crushed by cars. The sight of millions of these creatures making their perilous trek has become one of Christmas Island’s main tourist attractions.

Millions of crabs have flooded the roads on Australia’s Christmas Island pic.twitter.com/Qa2CbSzwMW

— RT (@RT_com) November 18, 2021

The exact timing of the red crabs’ journey from forest to ocean is defined by rainfall and lunar phases. The march is led by male crabs, which are later joined by females. On reaching the ocean, they mate and spawn, with each female capable of producing as many as 100,000 eggs. However, most of the young crabs never make it back to the forest as they end up being eaten by fish and whale sharks for whom this is a veritable feast. To make matters worse, the crab larvae that do make it to the beach are often devoured by returning adult crabs of the very same species, hence one of their names – the cannibal crab.

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Controversial agriculture laws that saw farmers across India protesting for over a year are going to be rolled back, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has unexpectedly announced.

“I want to tell the country that we have decided to repeal the three farm laws,” Modi said in a televised address on Friday, which local media described as “stunning.”

The Indian parliament will complete the constitutional process of repealing the agricultural legislation in late November, he added.

However, the PM again defended the divisive legislation, saying that the reform of the sector, which accounts for some 15% of India’s $2.7 trillion economy, was actually aimed at supporting the country’s small farmers.

Whatever I did was for farmers. What I am doing is for the country.

“Maybe something was lacking in our efforts, which is why we couldn’t convince some farmers about the laws,” Modi acknowledged.

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The laws, which were introduced last September, allowed farmers to sell their crops outside of the government-regulated wholesale markets, in which they were guaranteed a minimum price.

The government argued that it would see them earning more, but growers feared that that move would, on the contrary, cause a drop in prices and make them hostages to large corporations.

Thousands of farmers joined the protests against what they called “black laws,” and some rallies turned violent. A year later, many demonstrators remain camped along roads outside the capital New Delhi.

And the farmers aren’t planning on going home just yet, with one of their leaders saying on Twitter: “We will wait for parliament to repeal the laws.”

Modi’s concession to the protesters may have been unexpected, but it comes several months ahead of elections in India’s most populous state of Uttar Pradesh, as well as two other northern states with large rural populations.

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