The Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) is the lead U.S. government agency responsible for administering economic sanctions designed to combat terrorism. These sanctions entail the blocking of assets in order to target international terrorist organizations and their supporters. OFAC has released its Twenty-ninth Annual Report...
The Biden-Harris administration recently released a key strategy document outlining critical actions needed to transform the United States’ “capabilities to respond rapidly and effectively to any future pandemic of high consequence biological threat.” The preparedness and response plan, titled American Pandemic Preparedness: Transforming our Capabilities, identifies the following five pillars...
The 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States provides opportunities for sober reflection on the events of that day, gives us pause to dissect what has ensued over the last twenty years, and encourages us to examine what is currently happening today as a direct result...
As the U.S. approaches the 20 year anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the lasting impacts of that day are still evident two decades later; from changes in government policy and first responder training to building construction safety standards. As the event that marked the beginning of the...
The Federal Bureau of Investigations has released Hate Crime Statistics, 2020 as part of its Uniform Crime Reporting Program. The hate crimes included in the dataset are defined as “a committed criminal offense which is motivated, in whole or in part, by the offender’s bias(es) against a race, religion, disability,...
The U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence has released an Unclassified Summary of Assessment on COVID-19 [coronavirus disease 2019] Origins. Details in the summary indicate that the most plausible origins of COVID-19 involve exposure to SARS-CoV-2 (severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2) via an infected animal or a...
In Hatescape: An In-Depth Analysis of Extremism and Hate Speech on TikTok, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) offers a comprehensive examination of how TikTok content creators exploit the platform’s unique features in order to spread messages of hate. The report analyzed a sample of 1,030 TikTok videos identified as promoting...
As mainstream social media companies have increased their scrutiny and moderation of right-wing extremist (RWE) content and groups, there’s been a move to alternative online content platforms. There’s also growing concern about right-wing extremism in Australia, and about how this shift has diversified the mechanisms used to fundraise by RWE...
The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) has launched a new project that will study the links between far-right extremism and online gaming. Called the Gaming and Extremism series, the goal of the project is to understand the “role online gaming plays in the strategy of far-right extremists” through a series...
Dr. Paul Stockton’s latest report for the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), “Defeating Coercive Information Operations in Future Crises,” provides an assessment of U.S. vulnerabilities to Chinese and Russian coercive Information Operations (IO) and proposes options for defeating and deterring attacks. For thousands of years, combatants have spread...
