Other Helpful Links

Amaryllis Fox was in her last year as an undergraduate at Oxford studying theology and international law when her writing mentor Daniel Pearl was captured and beheaded. Galvanized by this brutality, Fox applied to a master’s program in conflict and terrorism at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, where she created an algorithm that predicted, with uncanny certainty, the likelihood of a terrorist cell arising in any village around the world. At twenty-one, she was recruited by the CIA.

Life Undercover is exhilarating, intimate, fiercely intelligent–an impossible to put down record of an extraordinary life, and of Amaryllis Fox’s astonishing courage and passion.

If anyone could be considered a Russian counterpart to the infamous British double-agent Kim Philby, it was Oleg Gordievsky. The son of two KGB agents and the product of the best Soviet institutions, the savvy, sophisticated Gordievsky grew to see his nation’s communism as both criminal and philistine. He took his first posting for Russian intelligence in 1968 and eventually became the Soviet Union’s top man in London, but from 1973 on he was secretly working for MI6. For nearly a decade, as the Cold War reached its twilight, Gordievsky helped the West turn the tables on the KGB, exposing Russian spies and helping to foil countless intelligence plots, as the Soviet leadership grew increasingly paranoid at the United States’s nuclear first-strike capabilities and brought the world closer to the brink of war. Desperate to keep the circle of trust close, MI6 never revealed Gordievsky’s name to its counterparts in the CIA, which in turn grew obsessed with figuring out the identity of Britain’s obviously top-level source.

Unfolding the delicious three-way gamesmanship between America, Britain, and the Soviet Union, and culminating in the gripping cinematic beat-by-beat of Gordievsky’s nail-biting escape from Moscow in 1985, Ben Macintyre’s latest may be his best yet. Like the greatest novels of John le Carré, it brings readers deep into a world of treachery and betrayal, where the lines bleed between the personal and the professional, and one man’s hatred of communism had the power to change the future of nations.

Explores a variety of ways of thinking ethically about drone violence

The violent use of armed, unmanned aircraft (‘drones’) is increasing worldwide, but uncertainty persists about the moral status of remote-control killing and why it should be restrained. Practitioners, observers and potential victims of such violence often struggle to reconcile it with traditional expectations about the nature of war and the risk to combatants. Addressing the ongoing policy concern that state use of drone violence is sometimes poorly understood and inadequately governed, the book’s ethical assessments are not restricted to the application of traditional Just War principles, but also consider the ethics of artificial intelligence (AI), virtue ethics, and guiding principles for forceful law-enforcement.

Uses the perspective of parliamentarians to reassess the relationship between security and politics. Received an honourable mention from the International Political Sociology section of the International Studies Association.

Andrew W. Neal argues that while ‘security’ was once an anti-political ‘exception’ in liberal democracies – a black box of secret intelligence and military decision-making at the dark heart of the state – it has now become normalised in professional political life. This represents a direct challenge to critical security studies debates and their core assumption that security is a kind of illiberal and undemocratic ‘anti-politics’.

This book explores the challenges leaders in intelligence communities face in an increasingly complex security environment and how to develop future leaders to deal with these issues.

As the security and policy-making environment becomes increasingly complicated for decision-makers, the focus on intelligence agencies ‘to deliver’ more value will increase. This book is the first extensive exploration of contemporary leadership in the context of intelligence agencies, principally in the ‘Five Eyes’ nations (i.e. Australia, United States, United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand).

Librarians are uniquely positioned to rise to the challenge that artificial intelligence (AI) presents to the field. Libraries and their like have existed for millennia; they progress with society, altering and adapting their services to meet the information needs of their communities.

The Rise of AI introduces implications and applications of artificial intelligence in academic libraries and hopes to provoke conversations and inspire new ways of engaging with the technology. As the discussion surrounding ethics, bias, and privacy in AI continues to grow, librarians will be called to make informed decisions and position themselves as leaders in this discourse.

Defence contract is the largest struck between Australia and an Asian nation, and its signing came during a visit by South Korean President Moon Jae-in to the capital of Australia, Canberra.

Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison and South Korean President Moon Jae-in have signed a $717m defence deal.

Worth about 1 billion Australian dollars, the contract was signed on Monday during a four-day visit by Moon to Canberra. The South Korean president is the first foreign leader to visit Australia since the pandemic began.

Additional security measures will feature on the roughly one million new licences which will be issued to Victorians following the Optus data breach.

VicRoads said victims would be issued new cards with an additional security number on the back, which will operate in a similar way security codes are used on credit and debit cards.

More than 942,000 Victorian licence holders had their details compromised in the Optus data breach, a Department of Transport spokesperson said.

A top security officer for Twitter resigned on Thursday as new owner Elon Musk’s revamp of the platform saw a boomlet of fake accounts, drawing a rare warning from US regulators.

“I’ve made the hard decision to leave Twitter,” tweeted chief security officer Lea Kissner, who reportedly stepped down with other key privacy or security executives.

The walk-outs came a day after the chaotic launch of new features introduced by Musk following his $44 million buyout of the influential one-to-many messaging app.

A 33-year-old Russian and Canadian national has been arrested in Canada over his role in LockBit ransomware attacks against critical infrastructure and major industrial groups worldwide.

The individual, Mikhail Vasiliev, was arrested in late October, Europol said on Thursday. He is described as one of the world’s most prolific ransomware operators and one of Europol’s high-value targets due to his involvement in many high-profile ransomware cases. Authorities said he demanded ransom payments ranging between €5 and €70 million.

The US Justice Department announced charges against the alleged cybercriminal, saying that he is awaiting extradition.

The British government told its departments on Thursday to stop installing Chinese-made security cameras inside sensitive buildings due to potential security risks.

The directive follows an internal review of current and future security risks posed by surveillance systems.

“The review has concluded that, in light of the threat to the UK and the increasing capability and connectivity of these systems, additional controls are required,” cabinet office minister Oliver Dowden said in a written statement to parliament.

Hundreds of Chinese-manufactured drones have been detected in restricted airspace over Washington, D.C., in recent months, a trend that national security agencies fear could become a new means for foreign espionage.

The recreational drones made by Chinese company DJI, which are designed with “geofencing” restrictions to keep them out of sensitive locations, are being manipulated by users with simple workarounds to fly over no-go zones around the nation’s capital.

The nuclear AUKUS alliance, violent anti-vaxxers and foreign interference in elections and Australian businesses have climbed to the top of the pile of national security threats, according to Australia’s domestic spy chief Mike Burgess. The list of priority concerns has been revealed in the unclassified version of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation’s (ASIO) annual report, tabled in parliament on Budget night, along with the fact the spy agency has been recruiting (now former) journalists into its ranks.

Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and new owner of Twitter, has given credence to a fringe conspiracy theory about the violent attack on Paul Pelosi. Musk tweeted a link to an article full of baseless claims about Pelosi. The article was posted on a website that purports to be a news outlet.

Australia’s government has declared the nation is planning to go on the offensive against international cyber crooks following recent high-profile attacks on local health insurer Medibank and telco Optus. The aggressive posture was expressed in the announcement of a “Joint standing operation” that will see the Australian Federal Police and the Australian Signals Directorate (Australia’s GCHQ/NSA analog) run a team with a mission “to investigate, target and disrupt cyber-criminal syndicates with a priority on ransomware threat groups.”

Troubled social media giant Twitter has lost the services of its chief information security officer to cap off another chaotic week following its acquisition by Elon Musk. Lea Kissner used their former employer’s platform to post: “I’ve made the hard decision to leave Twitter. I’ve had the opportunity to work with amazing people and I’m so proud of the privacy, security, and IT teams and the work we’ve done.”

Over the past 15 years, this “global war on terror” mindset has become the default at the CIA. After accusations that it was stuck in the Cold War, the agency began to trade concealment devices and human sources for military hardware. Under a directive from President George W. Bush, it expanded its ranks to fight terror. It bulked up its abilities to track and target a dispersed enemy fighting an asymmetrical war. Gone were the days, it seemed, of risky brush passes in a heart-pounding, adrenaline-filled four-second period when an officer was “black”—meaning free, just for a moment, from hostile surveillance and able to pass a message to an asset. The Cold War was over; we had a new enemy to defeat.

Italy’s ’Ndrangheta Mafia has capitalized on South America’s cocaine boom to secure its role as one of the most influential drug trafficking groups in the world. Based in the southern Italian region of Calabria, this group has grown to become a multibillion-dollar enterprise with a presence that spans the globe.

Our latest research finds that organizations whose employees derive value from using artificial intelligence are six times more likely to get significant financial benefits from AI compared with other organizations. To help your team find value in AI, we’ve compiled several action steps you can take to encourage individual use of AI — and it’s all backed by our research. We’ll show you how to build trust, understanding, agency, and awareness of AI with your employees right now.

Cybersecurity researchers said they have found evidence of Chinese spyware in Uyghur-language apps that can track the location and harvest the data of Uyghurs living in China and abroad.

Uyghurs are a Turkic Muslim minority predominantly in China’s northwestern region of Xinjiang, where a recent UN report said Beijing may have committed crimes against humanity.

​​A new framework has been devised to help informant handlers better identify motivations.

Deployed informants are a vital tactic for law enforcement and intelligence agencies to identify and manage threats. Accurately identifying an informant’s motivations for providing information enables informant handlers to better influence the informant’s behaviour and reduce risks. In this article, Drs Ian Stanier and Jordan Nunan outline their mnemonic-driven framework.

Building on existing mnemonics (e.g. MICE: Money, Ideology, Coercion, and Ego), the FIREPLACES framework highlights a broader scope of informants’ motivations and acknowledges that motivation is not a fixed or singular concept. It explores the multidimensional nature of motivation and aims to promote the opportunities and identify the risks behind an informant providing information

It might seem like data breaches are occurring more frequently than ever in the wake of the Optus cyber-attack, but while cybercrime incidents are constantly on the rise, Australia isn’t really a hot new target.

Since Optus first disclosed its massive data breach at the end of September, breaches or attacks have been reported by Medibank, Woolworths’ MyDeal, EnergyAustralia, Vinomofo and Medlab.

And those are just the ones that we’ve heard about.

But cybersecurity experts say it’s just that companies have been more forthcoming in announcing data breaches since Optus – and the media has been more focused on reporting them.

The United States took to the polls this week to vote in a high-stakes midterm election. With public trust in election systems at an all-time low, the secret ballot is more important now than ever before. We also took a look at a flawed app built by prominent right-wing provocateurs that has been used to challenge hundreds of thousands of voter registrations.

Meanwhile, the Department of Justice announced that a Georgia man has pleaded guilty to wire fraud nine years after stealing more than 50,000 bitcoins from the Silk Road, the legendary dark-web market. You may have heard that things are chaotic over at Twitter, with a wave of corporate impersonations plaguing the platform hours after the rollout of a service that allows anyone who pays $8 a month to get a blue check mark showing they are “verified.” It’s a gift for scammers and grifters of all shades.

Open AI’s recent release of the DALL-E 2 text-to-image generator and Meta’s subsequent announcement of its “Make a Video” tool could erode barriers to creating “deepfakes,” synthetic images or video content created through artificial intelligence.

These new products, along with similar tools being developed by other companies, may provide significant advances in promoting the next wave of digital creators. At the same time, they could be exploited to create deepfakes that could have unintended economic, social, and geopolitical consequences..

Many people wonder what it would be like to be a famous private investigator like Sherlock Holmes, Magnum PI, or Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple — going from one exciting case to the next.

Well you are about to find out.

The men and women in this podcast are licensed to spy and you will hear them revealing their most fascinating and hair-raising cases.

Using their powers of deduction, observation, surveillance and disguise, these guns for hire deal with everything from corruption, adultery, greed, and violence as they solve crimes, catch cheats and rescue children.

We speak with Larry Clinton, author of Cybersecurity for Business. Larry is the president of the Internet Security Alliance. He advises industry and government on cyber policy and regularly appears in the media to provide an expert opinion. He has briefed NATO, the Organization of American States (OAS), G-20 and the US Congress. He has twice been named to the NACD ‘Directorship 100’ list of the most influential individuals in corporate governance. Larry is also the author of the published book, ‘Cybersecurity for Business’. The Internet Security Alliance provides thought leadership in cybersecurity and works with the US government to advocate for public policy that will advance the interests of cybersecurity.

In this episode, we are joined by Nick Lowles from Hope Not Hate. Hope Not Hate is the real organisation behind ITV’s The Walk-In.

Nick joins us to discuss the work of Hope Not Hate, and he gives us an overview of the far-right in Britain today.

We also discuss a Far Right plot by the terrorist group National Action to murder Labour MP, Rosie Cooper. That plot was foiled by a National Action member who objected to violence and became an informant for Hope Not Hate. The plot to murder Rosie Cooper has now been turned into an excellent ITV television drama called “The Walk-In.”