critical infrastructure

PERSPECTIVE: 5G Networks Are No Place for Huawei

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This piece, by Peter Varnish, originally appeared in Homeland Security Today on August 27, 2019.

“We’re not going to do business with Huawei,” President Donald Trump told reporters outside the White House this month. “That doesn’t mean we won’t agree to something if and when we make a trade deal.” But should Chinese telecom giant Huawei be used as a bargaining chip?

China’s cyber espionage capabilities are notorious. Just last week, an investigation by the Wall Street Journal turned up evidence of Huawei intercepting encrypted communications to help African governments spy on political opponents.

All over the world, the Communist … Read More

PERSPECTIVE: Protecting Europe from China will strengthen the future of NATO

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This piece, by Douglas Lute, originally appeared in EurActiv on June 19, 2019. 

Competition with China is mostly economic, but NATO members need to pay attention. American and European interests align when it comes to the growing strategic competition between the Western alliance and China, writes Douglas Lute.

Douglas Lute was the U.S. ambassador to NATO from 2013 to 2017. He is a senior fellow at the Belfer Center at Harvard University, and president of Cambridge Global Advisors.

NATO, the world’s oldest and most successful alliance, recently turned 70 years old. As a report from Harvard’s Belfer Center explains, the … Read More

PERSPECTIVE: Post-9/11 Counterterrorism Is Right Model for Infrastructure Cybersecurity

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This piece, by Gen. Francis X. Taylor, originally appeared on Homeland Security Today on April 2, 2019.

Nearly 18 years ago, we were blindsided when terrorists attacked the World Trade Center in New York City on Sept. 11, 2001. We now know that if there had been better information sharing between U.S. law enforcement and intelligence organizations that we may have been able to foil the plot. In the years since that devastating attack, the U.S. national security establishment has revamped its approach to information sharing for the purpose of counterterrorism. That new approach involves the systematic sharing of threat … Read More

PERSPECTIVE: We’ve Spent Billions on Cybersecurity: How Are We Doing?

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This piece by Brian de Vallance, originally appeared on Homeland Security Today on January 30, 2019. 

Protecting America’s critical infrastructure — essential to our everyday life — from cyber attacks remains one of our nation’s most important missions. How are we doing?

Not so good, by some accounts. In 2017, a major MIT report concluded that after spending billions of dollars over the past few decades, our infrastructure is somehow less secure than we were 30 years ago. Its authors conclude that “the vulnerability of the systems that power our nation is a national disgrace.”

And this is not merely … Read More