Technology Archive

China’s central bank is currently conducting trials for its digital currency, which it hopes to have available for widespread use by the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. But many privacy advocates are alarmed at the amount of data that Chinese authorities will be able to collect through the new digital yuan, and the resulting potential for abuse. On the Trend Lines podcast this week, WPR’s Elliot Waldman discussed the implications of China’s new digital currency with Yaya Fanusie, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security. Listen to the full interview with Yaya Fanusie here: If you […]

The U.S. had barely begun its recovery from the SolarWinds compromise, when another large-scale, state-sponsored cyberattack came to light in January. Like the SolarWinds hack, the Microsoft Exchange Server data breach exploited several zero-day vulnerabilities and has been attributed to a nation-state. But unlike SolarWinds, while the Microsoft attack was initially a targeted attack, it went on to create widespread collateral damage, leading some commentators to characterize it as “reckless.” Microsoft has attributed the compromise to a Chinese state-sponsored espionage group called “Hafnium.” Recent U.S. sanctions against Russia, in part motivated by the SolarWinds attack, have given rise to an […]

Every few years, the U.S. National Intelligence Council, or NIC, gazes into its crystal ball and imagines the world 20 years hence. The latest installment, released on April 8, is a harrowing read. “Global Trends 2040: A More Contested World” anticipates an era even more chaotic and divided than our own, in which institutions at all levels struggle to adapt to abrupt demographic shifts, economic turbulence, runaway climate change and technological innovation. The COVID-19 pandemic, which has left governments thrashing and multilateral institutions flailing, is the shape of things to come. “Global Trends 2040” is the seventh in a series […]

Every four years, the U.S. intelligence community, led by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, publishes its Global Trends report looking ahead 20 years into the future. As efforts to identify far-horizon threats today, the reports usually make for fairly gloomy reading. This year’s “Global Trends 2040” report is no exception. It describes the ongoing pandemic as “the most significant, singular global disruption since World War II, with health, economic, political and security implications that will ripple for years to come.” Worse still, it warns of “more intense and cascading global challenges” ahead. Though he is not cited […]

When it comes to armed drones, is smaller and more precise necessarily better? The question came to my mind upon seeing the news that the U.S. Air Force just successfully test-launched a new weaponizable drone, the ALTIUS-600, making it the smallest drone in operation. Even more remarkably, this tiny aircraft was launched from the second-smallest-drone, the Kratos XQ-58A Valkyrie, while the Valkyrie was in flight. There is nothing objectionable about the development of mini-drones. One could even argue they would be improvements, in humanitarian terms, over the use of the much larger Reaper to deliver 500-pound bombs in allegedly “precise” […]

Ever since the 2016 referendum on Brexit, the U.K. has been busy reimagining its place in the world. Now, with the umbilical cord between the U.K. and the European Union finally cut, London will have to put into practice its long-stated ambitions for a “Global Britain.” The British government’s Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy, published on March 16, offers the first official and comprehensive expression of how it plans to do so. The Integrated Review has a great deal of interest for cyber-watchers. For example, the word “standards” appears more times in the document than “China.” […]