The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC) has released the first edition of their Global Organized Crime Index, a unique data-driven tool that assesses the levels of organized crime and resilience to organized criminal activity in all 193 United Nations member states. Each country is assigned a criminality score...
After observing several attempts to undermine the integrity of election-related information for democracies around the world, the National Democratic Institute, the International Republican Institute, and the Stanford Internet Observatory came together to create a document intended to help societies push back against information manipulation. This playbook, entitled Combating Information Manipulation:...
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has released a preliminary report of the progress made in understanding Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP). The data used to create this report is based on U.S. government reports of incidents that occurred from November 2004 to March 2021, but data continues to...
In the wake of an increasing amount of events related to armed politics and violent activism in the United States, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies has released two reports that evaluate the growing threats of domestic extremist movements. The first report, Skinheads, Saints, and (National) Socialists: An Overview of...
Ransomware, a cybercrime in which attackers remotely compromise computer systems until a ransom is given, is posing an increasing risk to national security. These attacks can potentially cripple critical government infrastructure, disrupt schools and businesses, shut down hospital systems and other institutions, withhold and/or expose private data, and are on...
In an attempt to understand the impact that Winter Storm Uri had on Texas, the University of Houston’s Hobby School of Public Affairs conducted a survey of adults living in the 213 counties served by the Texas Electrical Grid. The survey gathered information on Texans’ experiences during the storm, as...
The U.S. Secret Service National Threat Assessment Center (NTAC) has been expanding their research of targeted violence prevention in communities across the country. In their efforts to demonstrate a path toward preventing school violence in particular, they analyzed 67 disrupted plots against K-12 schools from 2006-2018. This report, titled Averting...
In a report released by The Program on Extremism at George Washington University, a team of researchers aimed to analyze the more than 250 individuals who were charged in actively participating in the January 6th storming of the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. They gathered information from court records and...
