Today's Headlines and Commentary
Published by The Lawfare Institute
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The Hill's Carlo Munoz tells us that a Somali-born pirate will serve 12 life sentences in connection with the kidnapping, piracy, hostage-taking and murder of Americans last February off the coast of Oman.
Alissa Rubin writes in the New York Times on the NATO/Afghan response to the dramatic increase in attacks by members of the Afghan security forces against NATO (29 in total this year alone). Carlo Munoz at The Hill also reports on these reviews, including DOD working to improve screening of recruits to the Afghan military and police.
A plot to attack the Afghan Parliament was foiled by Afghan security forces over the weekend, writes Jon Stevenson of McClatchy.
David Axe at Wired's Danger Room writes on the U.S. drone campaign in the Horn of Africa.
And it looks like Al Qaeda is busy building a cell in Syria. Carlo Munoz brings us that news as well.
After attending the drone convention in Las Vegas, Greg McNeal ponders the question of whether the drone industry has the wherewithal to compete with the privacy lobby at Forbes.
Two big stories on Wikileaks today: first, it's been hacked, according to The Hill. Second, emails stolen from Stratfor Global Intelligence imply that the U.S. government has been using a counterterrorism computer program called TrapWire to spy on Americans, but those allegations appeared to be drastically overblown, according to the New York Times. The story also says that the hack might be in retaliation for its decision to post the emails.
Now even Senators are joining the calls for President Obama to issue an executive order on cybersecurity policies. Senator Rockefeller asked that he issue an executive order that establishes a program to encourage companies that operate critical systems adopt tighter security standards.
Roy Gutman of McClatchy writes on the details emerging from the investigation into the secret CIA prison in Poland. The country's former interior minister has already been charged with unlawful detention and corporal punishment for permitting the CIA to operate the prison between December 2002 and September 2003.
Here are Chris Hedges' latest thoughts on his campaign against last year's NDAA over on Truth-Out.
Mark Lewis of the Times digs deeper into the report by a Norwegian Commission on the massacre that killed 69 people last year.
Verizon will be presenting its report on the 911 outages in Fairfax County in June to the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments this Wednesday. Mary Pat Flaherty reports on the details of that report at the Washington Post, noting that the company did not know there were outages until the county called to tell them so. Verizon treated the outage as a service complaint rather than the widespread outage that it truly was (which resulted in its decision not to implement emergency command center procedures). The report also indicates that there was an outage at all not due to the storms' damage but because Verizon's backup generators failed. Yikes.
For more interesting law and security-related articles, follow us on Twitter, visit the Georgetown Center on National Security and the Law’s Security Law Brief, Fordham Law’s Center on National Security’s Morning Brief, and Fordham Law’s Cyber Brief. Email us noteworthy articles we may have missed at wakeman.lawfare@gmail.com and singh.lawfare@gmail.com.
Raffaela Wakeman is a Senior Director at In-Q-Tel. She started her career at the Brookings Institution, where she spent five years conducting research on national security, election reform, and Congress. During this time she was also the Associate Editor of Lawfare. From there, Raffaela practiced law at the U.S. Department of Defense for four years, advising her clients on privacy and surveillance law, cybersecurity, and foreign liaison relationships. She departed DoD in 2019 to join the Majority Staff of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, where she oversaw the Intelligence Community’s science and technology portfolios, cybersecurity, and surveillance activities. She left HPSCI in May 2021 to join IQT.
Raffaela received her BS and MS in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2009 and her law degree from Georgetown University Law Center in 2015, where she was recognized for her commitment to public service with the Joyce Chiang Memorial Award. While at the Department of Defense, she was the inaugural recipient of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s General Counsel Award for exhibiting the highest standards of leadership, professional conduct, and integrity.
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