Critical Releases in Homeland Security: August 26, 2020

From the Introduction: "COVID-19 [coronavirus disease 2019] is the new virus this country has been preparing to take on for decades - and has, so far, failed miserably to stop. While peer countries have managed to get it under control, the United States faces rising cases and deaths. This is not a failure of resources: although decades of cutting health agency budgets is a big part of our problem, we remain a country rich in money and expertise. This is not a failure of individual courage; from health care workers through transport workers to people who produce and deliver food supplies, essential workers have shown up and done their jobs at significant personal risk. This has been, first and foremost, a failure of leadership and the implementation of an effective response. This collection of 36 expert assessments shows that the COVID-19 failure is, in important ways, also a legal failure[.]"

From the Document: "Russia has operationalized the concept of perpetual adversarial competition in the information environment by encouraging the development of a disinformation and propaganda ecosystem that allows for varied and overlapping approaches that reinforce each other even when individual messages within the system appear contradictory. This ecosystem reflects both the sources of disinformation and propaganda--official government statements, state-funded media outlets, proxy websites, bots, false social media personas, cyber-enabled disinformation operations, etc.--and the different tactics that these channels use. [...] This report provides a visual representation of the ecosystem described above, as well as an example of the media multiplier effect it enables. This serves to demonstrate how the different pillars of the ecosystem play distinct roles and feed off of and bolster each other. The report also includes brief profiles of select proxy sites and organizations that occupy an intermediate role between the pillars of the ecosystem with clear links to Russia and those that are meant to be fully deniable. The emphasis on these proxy sites is meant to highlight the important role they play, which can be overlooked given the attention paid to official Russian voices on one end of the spectrum, and the social media manipulation and cyber-enabled threats on the other."

From the Findings: "The Committee found that the Russian government engaged in an aggressive, multifaceted effort to influence, or attempt to influence, the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. Parts of this effort are outlined in the Committee's earlier volumes on election security, social media, the Obama Administration's response to the threat, and the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA)."

From the Abstract: "In this research note, we introduce and describe the collection of data on mask mandates in the United States. We detail the collection protocol as well as tools for accessing the data and offering feedback on amendments to the data. We present introductory visualization of the data. This project is part of a continuing effort to collect vital information about public policy interventions during the COVID-19 [coronavirus disease 2019] pandemic."