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This book addresses one of the most important issues in international relations – how wars are ended.

The volume draws on the direct experience of both soldiers and academics, who in each case have also been advisers on fighting and ending wars. Unlike more theoretical works, the book draws on first-hand experiences in the case studies, which include the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone and Indonesia, among others. The volume is constructed around a series of themes. The first theme is why wars start and how they can be understood, based on the assumption that knowing how, and why, wars start is fundamental to understanding how they might end.

The book will be of interest to students of military, strategic and security studies, peace studies and International Relations.

Essential reading on how technology empowers rogue actors and how society can adapt. Never have so many possessed the means to be so lethal. A dramatic shift from 20th century “closed” military innovation to “open” innovation driven by commercial processes is underway. The diffusion of modern technology–robotics, cyber weapons, 3-D printing, synthetic biology, autonomous systems, and artificial intelligence–to ordinary people has given them access to weapons of mass violence previously monopolized by the state.

As Audrey Kurth Cronin explains in Power to the People, what we are seeing now is the continuation of an age-old trend. Over the centuries, from the invention of dynamite to the release of the AK-47, many of the most surprising developments in warfare have occurred because of technological advances combined with changes in who can use them.

This book brings together insights into Pacific policing, conceptualising policing broadly as order maintenance involving the actions of multiple local, regional and international actors with sometimes competing and conflicting agendas. A complex and multifaceted endeavour, scholarship on this topic is relatively scarce and widely dispersed across diverse sources. It examines how Pacific policing is shaped by changing state-society relations in different national contexts and ongoing processes of globalisation. Particular attention is given to the plural character of Pacific policing, profound challenges of gender equity, changing dynamics of crime, and the prominence of transnational policing in resource and capacity constrained domestic environments.

The authors draw on examples from across the Pacific islands to provide a nuanced and contextualised account of policing in this socially diverse and rapidly transforming region.

It is absolutely true that intelligence officials, public health experts, and many others have been warning for years that the world was at risk of a global pandemic. American Directors of National Intelligence, for example, have often included global health threats in their annual testimony before Congress. And blue-ribbon commissions have frequently warned the need to be better prepared for infectious disease outbreaks. Several prominent warnings, in fact, came in the Fall of 2019, just before the COVID-19 outbreak began in China. To some extent, that is how things are supposed to work. We have a very complex system of national intelligence in the United States, and there are even more complex systems of medical and public health intelligence and surveillance in this country and around the world. So the bottom line is, we were warned.

Epidemiologists and national security agencies warned for years about the potential for a deadly pandemic, but in the end global surveillance and warning systems were not enough to avert the COVID-19 disaster. In The COVID-19 Intelligence Failure, Erik J. Dahl demonstrates that understanding how intelligence warnings work—and how they fail—shows why the years of predictions were not enough. Read in for a Q&A with the author to learn more about the book.

Wrapped up at the end of last year.

Australia’s first cyber ambassador, Tobias Feakin, has announced his retirement.

Feakin was first appointed to the role in 2016. At the time, he said his focus would be on combatting international cybercrime, and advocating against censorship.

In a statement on LinkedIn, Feakin said he wound up his time as ambassador for cyber affairs and critical technology at the end of 2022.

Upon the release of Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index 2022, one former whistleblower says that protections for those who expose corruption are deficient.

Jeff Morris paints a grim picture for any person thinking of blowing the whistle: it’ll ruin your life.

“Take it from me, the retaliation is absolutely massive,” Morris told The Mandarin.

“You will never work again in your chosen career, you’ll be driven out of the industry, as I was and as every other whistleblower has been.”

An Australian intelligence agency declared a year ago it was up to government departments whether to use equipment from Chinese companies Hikvision and Dahua, despite a new bipartisan push to remove such devices.

The advice from the Australian Signals Directorate was published in late 2021, at a time when the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, was defence minister.

The Biden administration has determined that the suspected Chinese surveillance balloon that traversed the United States last week was operating with electronic surveillance technology capable of monitoring US communications, according to a senior State Department official.

The balloon “was capable of conducting signals intelligence collection operations” and was part of a fleet that had flown over “more than 40 countries across five continents.”

“We know the PRC used these balloons for surveillance,” the official said.

The U.S. tracked what officials described as a Chinese reconnaissance balloon over the continental states this week, in what would be an aggressive act of intelligence gathering over sensitive American national security sites.

The balloon sighting came days before Secretary of State Antony Blinken was to make a planned trip to Beijing, according to U.S. officials, throwing into question efforts to repair relations between the two powers who are at odds over a host of global and regional issues. The balloon was first spotted on Wednesday by civilians in a commercial airliner, U.S. officials said.

The US military shot down what U.S. officials called a Chinese surveillance balloon off the coast of South Carolina on Feb. 4, 2023. Officials said that the US Navy planned to recover the debris, which is in shallow water.

The US and Canada tracked the balloon as it crossed the Aleutian Islands, passed over Western Canada and entered US airspace over Idaho. Officials of the US Department of Defense confirmed on Feb. 2, 2023, that the military was tracking the balloon as it flew over the continental US at an altitude of about 60,000 feet, including over Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana. The base houses the 341st Missile Wing, which operates nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles.

The Chinese “spy balloon” shot down over the United States has brought the seemingly strange methods of surveillance and espionage into news headlines. Balloons have long been used for espionage – and not just for surveillance, as appears to be the case with this one.

In the 1950s, Soviet soldiers in East Germany often saw white balloons overhead. Rather than spying, these balloons dropped propaganda leaflets produced by US-backed groups in West Germany.

A crowd of protesters was squaring off against a battalion of riot police on a city boulevard as plumes of tear gas and dust clouded the afternoon light.

It could have been Hong Kong or Santiago in 2019, Minneapolis or Portland in the summer of 2020, Tehran or Shanghai in the winter of 2022. But at this particular eruption of unrest in the spring of 2021—in Popayán, Colombia, a small city about 250 miles southwest of Bogotá—the basic grammar of protest and retaliation was about to take a harsh new shift.

Scores of young demonstrators were crouching behind a line of homemade shields, trying to hold back the authorities. Colombia had been in the midst of a general strike for more than two weeks, triggered by a series of tax increases handed down in the middle of a debilitating Covid shutdown. But as nationwide protests escalated in tandem with the state’s response to them, police brutality became the demonstrators’ main grievance.

On the front line that afternoon in Popayán, a 22-year-old engineering student named Sebastian Quintero Munera took cover behind a piece of plywood spray-painted with the phrase “Alison We Are With You”—referring to a local teen who had died by suicide the previous morning after alleging that she’d been sexually assaulted in police custody.

The annual Asia Power Index — launched by the Lowy Institute in 2018 — measures resources and influence to rank the relative power of states in Asia. The project maps out the existing distribution of power as it stands today, and tracks shifts in the balance of power over time.

The Index ranks 26 countries and territories in terms of their capacity to shape their external environment — its scope reaching as far west as Pakistan, as far north as Russia, and as far into the Pacific as Australia, New Zealand and the United States.

The 2023 edition — which covers five years of data up to 2022 — is the most comprehensive assessment of the changing distribution of power in Asia to date.

The return to office looks like it’s going backward. After office occupancy rose to over 50.4% in late January, it dropped to 45.6% by early February before recovering slightly to 48.6%. That’s despite many business leaders trying to get their employees back to the office in an effort to prevent “quiet quitting.”

The term “quiet quitting” emerged in early 2022, and refers to doing the bare minimal tasks of your job description well enough that you don’t get fired. The concept quickly went viral on TikTok.

The Commerce Department needs its own intel officers to take on China.

Figuring out what, exactly, China is up to is one of the intelligence community’s top priorities. Countering Beijing also happens to be a rare instance where there’s bipartisan support in Congress.

But what new lawmakers will quickly discover — especially those joining the House and Senate Intelligence Committees — is that a glaring gap exists that will impact Congress’ efforts to do so. The U.S. cannot adequately address its national security challenges related to China, which are increasingly driven by technology, without the help of a potentially surprising partner: the Department of Commerce.

A combination of the United States’ nascent modern industrial policy, diplomacy, and aligned governmental and commercial interests have set the conditions for it to pull ahead in the race to control vital telecommunications infrastructure in the Pacific. The race to control telecommunications infrastructure is founded upon a number of small island nations and territories in the Pacific Ocean that last saw global attention during the island-hopping campaigns of the Second World War.

This analysis will give particular focus to the nations and territories of Guam and the Solomon Islands and the effect that they have on subsea telecommunications infrastructure. Further, this analysis will review how competing American and Chinese telecommunication infrastructure strategies are affecting these Pacific Island nations and territories and how the convergence of the United States’ regulatory regimes, including “Team Telecom,” and commercial interests are dominating Pacific telecommunications.

True Spies takes you inside the world’s greatest espionage and detective operations. Our hosts Hayley Atwell, Vanessa Kirby and Sophia Di Martino talk to the real spies behind the missions. What do they know? What are their skills? And what would you do in their position? We explore and investigate real life thrillers, mysteries and crimes – stories that prove truth is stranger than fiction! These stories cover lies, murder, theft, sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll. You’ll meet experts from the top intelligence agencies including FBI, CIA, MI5, MI6 (SIS), KGB, GRU, Mossad and many others.

You’ll discover characters who spied because of money, ideology, coercion or just plain old ego. And, if you’d like to dig deeper into the world of secrets, and test your own secret intelligence skills, head over to spyscape.com for articles, games, experiences, puzzles and videos. A Cup & Nuzzle production. Series producers: Gemma Newby, Joe Foley. Music: Nick Ryan.

If you’ve committed any internet crimes lately, you probably shouldn’t have paid for them with Bitcoin. While many crypto-evangelists have long thought of digital currency as a means of buying legal and illicit goods on the web with total anonymity, the fact is that nearly all cryptocurrency transactions leave a digital trail behind them that can point to your true identity. No matter how hard you try to hide, a dedicated sleuth with the right resources can find you.

This week on Gadget Lab, WIRED senior cybersecurity writer and author of the book Tracers in the Dark digs into all the ways investigators, government agents, and hackers can track down criminals online by “following the money” exchanged in cryptocurrency transactions.