Reposted from CNBC

Cyber threats represent the greatest danger to the international community today, Raytheon International CEO John Harris told CNBC Friday.

"(Cyber) is, I would, say one of largest and most important threats to our nation and to our allies," Harris said ahead of the Munich Security Conference in Germany.

"One of the challenges of cyber is that access to that technology is easy. So any number of individuals, both state and non-state actors, have the ability to make fundamental negative impacts to societies and to nations."

The major U.S. defense contractor and weapons manufacturer was one of several hundred senior executives and policymakers attending the summit, convened to discuss current and future security challenges.

"Hundreds of thousands of malware products are designed each and every day, and any number of people — state and non-state actors — have the ability to employ those systems," Harris said.

Research from software firm Symantec revealed that one in 131 emails contained malware in 2017, and that ransomware attacks increased 36 percent on the previous year.

"Our job is to make sure that we understand where they're coming from, make sure we design architectures that are resilient, and afford our customers the opportunity to defend."

Cyberattacks at both commercial and governmental levels are more of a threat than they've ever been before, and there are numbers to prove it. In 2016, the U.S. government spent $28 billion on cybersecurity. That's up from just $7.5 billion in 2007, and it's expected to increase in 2018.

And the shadowy perpetrators don't limit themselves in their targets — malware threats have increasingly made headlines as they manifest themselves across industrial sectors, governments, financial institutions and households. The last two years have tested relations between countries amid allegations of Russian election hacking in the U.S. and threats emanating from North Korea and China, among others.

Major recent cyber disruptions include high-profile attacks like the WannaCry virus, NotPetya and more recently hacks by cyber espionage group Fancy Bear, which is believed to have targeted U.S. defense contractors, national election networks and web infrastructure for the Winter Olympics. Raytheon was one of Fancy Bear's targets, along with competitors including Boeing, General Atomics and Lockheed Martin.

"Cyber is a core focus of our company, it is one of the fastest growing elements both in defense and commercial area," Harris said, describing record investments the company has made in the last 15 years into the area, both in organic capability and mergers and acquisitions.

"The more we are connected the more we are vulnerable," the CEO added. "We understand the vulnerabilities, we understand the threats, and devise systems and solutions that afford us an opportunity to protect our networks, protect our products and protect our customers."

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Reposted from The New York Times

Four states in the Northeast with relatively strong gun laws banded together on Thursday to form a gun safety coalition, filling what the states called a vacuum of federal action by pledging to share registries of people prohibited from owning firearms in individual states.

The states — New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Rhode Island, all of which have among the lowest rates of gun deaths per capita in the country — will directly share information like the names of people who have been deemed mentally unfit to own a gun, people who have a domestic violence restraining order against them and people who have a warrant out for their arrest. The states will also share details about how guns are trafficked and sold within their borders and designate universities that can collaborate on regional gun violence research, according to a memorandum of understanding signed by the states’ governors, all Democrats.

“This is a federal government that’s gone backwards on this issue,” Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York said on a conference call with the other governors and reporters, outlining his dim hopes for new restrictions in the aftermath of the mass shooting in Florida. “President Trump has pledged allegiance to the N.R.A. and he’s delivered for them.”

Mr. Cuomo cited a proposal in Mr. Trump’s budget to cut funding to the federal background check system.

Some details about how the agreement will work in practice remain murky. The patchwork of state law means that states cannot necessarily restrict gun sales to everyone on another state’s no-gun list. And gun control advocates said states are already supposed to report to the national background check system people prohibited from owning guns under the parameters of state law, and not only those restricted by federal law.

But officials working on the coalition said the agreement would reinforce and expand what they share, including the names of people, for example, who have been voluntarily hospitalized for mental illness and are prohibited by some states from owning guns.

The agreement seemed poised to heighten the monitoring of people with mental illness, raising concerns among mental health advocates about unnecessarily stigmatizing people and discouraging them from seeking care. New York, for example, keeps a no-guns database that has grown to 77,447 names of people whom mental health professionals have reported as being a danger to themselves or others.

New York will now share that database with the other three states, Alphonso David, Mr. Cuomo’s chief counsel, said in an interview. It is not clear how the other states would act on it, given that the law in Connecticut and New Jersey, for example, expressly forbids firearm purchases only by people who have been committed to a mental health center.

But some states give their licensing authorities discretion to ban people they deem a risk to public safety, and Mr. David said they could use New York’s database as an investigative tool to make their own determination.

Sam Tsemberis, a former director of New York City’s involuntary hospitalization program for homeless and dangerous people, and now the chief executive of Pathways Housing First, which provides housing to the mentally ill, said that for people already vulnerable to feeling isolated and marginalized, putting so many of them on a list and then giving other states more medical information about them “is only going to exacerbate that condition.”

The vast majority of people with mental illnesses are not violent and there is scant information about how effective such databases have been. Mr. David said he did not know how many guns have been seized on the basis of New York’s list.

States will also share information about people with orders of protection against them, Mr. David said. All four states in the coalition, to varying degrees, use protective orders as a basis for restricting gun sales.

The states will also share the findings of law enforcement agencies about where illegal guns came from and how they are transported to the Northeast. Gun trafficking groups have often been found to buy guns, particularly handguns, in states south of New York along the Interstate 95 corridor, nicknamed the Iron Pipeline, and then drive them to the Northeast.

“It will help identify trafficking patterns,” said Elizabeth Avore, the legal and policy director at Everytown for Gun Safety, calling the coalition the most comprehensive she knew of. “It would be great to see states up and down the Iron Pipeline sharing information.”

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Reposted from the Huffington Post

Some people’s idea of justice is an eye for an eye, but China wants “severe punishment” for a man who stole a clay thumb.

Michael Rohana, 24, was charged last week for allegedly breaking a thumb off the left hand of a 2,000-year-old terra-cotta warrior on display at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. The incident is said to have occurred in December while he attended the museum’s ugly Christmas sweater party.

The FBI said Rohana snuck away from the party and used a cellular telephone as a flashlight to look at exhibits that were displayed in a closed-off showroom.

At one point, he stepped up onto a platform supporting one of the statues on display and took a selfie, according to China’s Xinhua News Agency. 

Security cameras show Rohana putting his hand on the left hand of the statue, and then appearing to break something off from its left hand and put it in his pocket before leaving the room, according to an arrest affidavit.

The museum-goer allegedly took the clay digit to his home in Bear, Delaware, as a souvenir. He is now accused of theft of an artwork from a museum, concealment of the artwork and interstate transportation of stolen property, according to The New York Times.

The statues featured in the Franklin’s “Terracotta Warriors of the First Emperor” exhibit are some of thousands discovered in China’s Xi’an city in 1974 by a group of farmers, according to the BBC. They are considered one of China’s most important archaeological finds.

The vandalized statue is worth quite a thumb, er, sum: $4.5 million.

The broken-off thumb wasn’t reported missing until Jan. 8, at which point the FBI’s Art Crime Team was contacted. The agency used the video as well as credit card information from the party to finger Rohana as the thumb thief.

Rohana allegedly attended the party with five friends, one of whom told investigators she heard the suspect mention the thumb on the ride home, according to USA Today.

Another friend said Rohana posted a photo of “a finger” from a terra-cotta warrior on Snapchat a day after the party.

Investigators interviewed Rohana on Jan. 13 and asked if he had anything in his possession that he wanted to turn over to the FBI. That’s when Rohana allegedly took an agent to his bedroom and grabbed the terra-cotta thumb from a drawer in a desk.

The Franklin Museum has apologized for the incident. An official from the Shaanxi Cultural Heritage Promotion Centre, the agency that arranged for the loan of the statues, seeks a “severe penalty” for the perpetrator, according to the South China Morning Post.

“The terracotta warriors are national treasures of our country,” an unnamed official told the paper. “Their historical and artistic value are impossible to value … We express strong resentment and condemnation towards this theft and the destruction of our heritage.”

Franklin Institute spokeswoman Stefanie Santo told the Philadelphia Inquirer that the warrior and its thumb will be repaired. She blames the incident on a contractor who did not follow security protocols the night of the theft.

Rohana is currently out on bail.

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Reposted from The Guardian

Wanton proliferation of artificial intelligence technologies could enable new forms of cyber-crime, political disruption and even physical attacks within five years, a group of 26 experts from around the world have warned.

In a new report, the academic, industry and the charitable sector experts, describe AI as a “dual use technology” with potential military and civilian uses, akin to nuclear power, explosives and hacking tools.

“As AI capabilities become more powerful and widespread, we expect the growing use of AI systems to lead to the expansion of existing threats, the introduction of new threats and a change to the typical character of threats,” the report says.

They argue that researchers need to consider potential misuse of AI far earlier in the course of their studies than they do at present, and work to create appropriate regulatory frameworks to prevent malicious uses of AI.

If the advice is not followed, the report warns, AI is likely to revolutionise the power of bad actors to threaten everyday life. In the digital sphere, they say, AI could be used to lower the barrier to entry for carrying out damaging hacking attacks. The technology could automate the discovery of critical software bugs or rapidly select potential victims for financial crime. It could even be used to abuse Facebook-style algorithmic profiling to create “social engineering” attacks designed to maximise the likelihood that a user will click on a malicious link or download an infected attachment.

The increasing influence of AI on the physical world means it is also vulnerable to AI misuse. The most widely discussed example involves weaponizing “drone swarms”, fitting them with small explosives and self-driving technology and then setting them loose to carry out untraceable assassinations as so-called “slaughterbots”.

Political disruption is just as plausible, the report argues. Nation states may decide to use automated surveillance platforms to suppress dissent – as is already the case in China, particularly for the Uighur people in the nation’s northwest. Others may create “automated, hyper-personalized disinformation campaigns”, targeting every individual voter with a distinct set of lies designed to influence their behavior. Or AI could simply run “denial-of-information attacks”, generating so many convincing fake news stories that legitimate information becomes almost impossible to discern from the noise.

Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh of the University of Cambridge’s centre for the study of existential risk, one of the report’s authors, said: “We live in a world that could become fraught with day-to-day hazards from the misuse of AI and we need to take ownership of the problems – because the risks are real. There are choices that we need to make now, and our report is a call-to-action for governments, institutions and individuals across the globe.

“For many decades hype outstripped fact in terms of AI and machine learning. No longer. This report … suggests broad approaches that might help: for example, how to design software and hardware to make it less hackable – and what type of laws and international regulations might work in tandem with this.”

Not everyone is convinced that AI poses such a risk, however. Dmitri Alperovitch, the co-founder of information security firm CrowdStrike, said: “I am not of the view that the sky is going to come down and the earth open up.

“There are going to be improvements on both sides; this is an ongoing arms race. AI is going to be extremely beneficial, and already is, to the field of cybersecurity. It’s also going to be beneficial to criminals. It remains to be seen which side is going to benefit from it more.

“My prediction is it’s going to be more beneficial to the defensive side, because where AI shines is in massive data collection, which applies more to the defence than offence.”

The report concedes that AI is the best defence against AI, but argues that “AI-based defence is not a panacea, especially when we look beyond the digital domain”.

“More work should also be done in understanding the right balance of openness in AI, developing improved technical measures for formally verifying the robustness of systems, and ensuring that policy frameworks developed in a less AI-infused world adapt to the new world we are creating,” the authors wrote.

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Reposted from The Telegraph

The Year of the Dog may be approaching, but on a recent Monday at the Palace Museum in Beijing it seemed to already be here. However, the chorus of 23 barking dogs that erupted as a stranger stepped into the museum’s kennel did not sound like a Lunar New Year celebration or a warm welcome.

These dogs help guard a huge hoard of national treasures every night. The museum, the country’s imperial palace from 1421 until the fall of the Chinese monarchy in 1911, houses as many as 1.86 million cultural relics. The collection of this single museum accounts for 42 per cent of the whole country’s registered national-level precious cultural relics.

Chang Fumao, 59, heads the five-person canine patrol squad. His office, also his bedroom, is hidden near the western gate of the palace complex. Before nightfall, visitors and the rest of the museum staff leave. Mr Chang and his colleagues are most familiar with the shadowy face of the ancient complex, where they are on duty from dusk to dawn.

Mr Chang started work helping monitor the museum when he was 20. In the 1980s the human guards had the help of only sound detectors in the exhibition halls. When something abnormal was heard they would rush to the scene in case there was a burglar.

Chasing and biting abilities are among the most valued characteristics of the dogs because they learn that the burglar is the top enemyChang Fumao, canine patrol squad head

“Sometimes I felt terrified checking the empty and dark palaces alone,” Mr Chang said. “There are many folk legends about supernatural phenomena, like ghosts, in the Forbidden City at night.”

A guard dog was a welcome addition. A German shepherd named Tiger became his friend for night patrol. “I’ve loved raising dogs since I was very young,” he said. “Tiger also gave me courage at first.”

But there was a ban on large dogs in downtown Beijing at that time, and the museum was no exception. Tiger was sent to the countryside. Shortly after that, a burglar sneaked into the palace. “My colleagues were very close to catching the burglar,” Mr Chang said. “They watched him climb over the wall.”

Mr Chang suggested organising a canine patrol squad at the museum and, in 1987, dogs came back. Mr Chang became not only a dog trainer but also headmaster of a puppy care centre.

He chose four-month-old puppies, most selected from the countryside or police stations, and began to train his young wards. “That’s how you can find each dog’s talent,” he said.

“Some are particularly good at fetching a ball from a long distance. That means they are good at tracking. Some have the keenest sense of smell, and some of the more energetic ones like biting things.”

We have chubby cats all over the palace but dogs are the unseen animal heroesShan Jixiang, museum director

When each dog is a year old it is given a tailored training course. Most start their career as guard dogs after three months’ intense training. “Chasing and biting abilities are among the most valued characteristics of the dogs because they learn that the burglar is the top enemy,” Mr Chang said.

At 4:30am, Mr Chang rises to give the dogs their morning practice. The entire Forbidden City is their training ground. They must finish before 7am, when some other museum employees start work.

After 5:30pm, when the palace gates are closed, more training begins as the dogs warm up for their night-time shifts. It is a separate world that many museum employees, let alone visitors, do not realise exists.

The Forbidden City is the world’s most visited museum – it had about 16.7 million visits last year – and it is not always easy to make sure everyone obeys the rules.

The museum also is immense, at 860,000sq yd. The dogs occasionally find people who have hidden in the museum at night, but the rule-breakers are generally released without charge if they have not stolen or broken anything.

“If I caught a burglar, I would become really well-known,” Mr Chang said. “However, at least we have prevented potential accidents and saved national treasures from being damaged. That’s the most important thing, right?”

People get sleepy, and machines sometimes malfunction. But the dogs are alert even when they are sleeping. They are the most reliable line of defenceChang Fumao, canine patrol squad head

In 2011, in the museum’s most recent theft, a burglar stole seven pieces of historic treasure from a temporary jewellery exhibition. He was later caught and all the lost items were recovered. Now a guard dog is assigned to every courtyard with a temporary exhibition to keep an even closer eye on exhibits.

The museum also has a video surveillance system that leaves no angles unseen, said Shan Jixiang, the museum’s director. “We now have a comprehensive security system combining people, dogs and machines. We have chubby cats all over the palace but dogs are the unseen animal heroes.”

Mr Chang praised the dogs as well. “People get sleepy, and machines sometimes malfunction. But the dogs are alert even when they are sleeping. They are the most reliable line of defence.” When and where patrols pass remain top-secret.

Guard dogs for the former imperial palace retire when they are seven years old, when it is possible they may be “unable to catch up with a young person in their 20s at full speed”, Mr Chang said. They spend their last years at the museum, and a few now among the group are retirees.

Mr Chang will retire next year, and worries that few young people will be willing to take his place, but the other four humans in the squad are younger than Mr Chang.

“This job is about being bitten,” Mr Chang said. “It’s common in training to get hurt by mistake. I cannot remember how many rabies vaccines I’ve had. But I love dogs and have raised dogs all my life, which is good enough.”

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Reposted from Artsy

Art storage facilities charged with the preservation of paintings, sculptures, and other cultural works share a mandate that is in some ways similar to that of Norway’s seed vault. That underground bunker houses a collection of food crop seeds, stored to restart the world’s agriculture after a “doomsday” scenario. But the vault, which faced flooding following the unexpected melting of permafrost last year, is itself already feeling the effects of climate change.

Though not quite as necessary (or edible) as food, art sustains humanity in an important way. And art storage facilities are also dealing with the threat of climate change. As stewards of artwork, cutting-edge storage facilities actively work to address the increased temperature shifts, severe storms, and erratic weather that are all part of climate change projections.

In October 2012, Hurricane Sandy barreled into New York, causing widespread flooding in Chelsea and at the art storage facility Christie’s maintains in Brooklyn. Since then, the storm has become a frequent frame of reference for New York art collectors, now keenly aware of the city’s vulnerability to flooding. “If they don’t [mention Sandy], their insurers do,” says Kevin Lay, the director of operations at ARCIS, a soon-to-open Harlem storage facility.  

That has storage facilities eager to boast about how the work inside is safe from natural disasters. As a result of the hurricane, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) revised its flood and surge zones for the city of New York. Some storage facilities now openly advertise how far they are outside of these zones as a way to drum up business.

“Of course hurricanes are number one on everybody’s list, both in New York and in Florida,” says John Jacobs, CEO and President of Artex Fine Art Services, which operates storage facilities in New York City, Washington, D.C., Boston, Fort Lauderdale, and Los Angeles. “The awareness of the potential for flooding from hurricanes is much greater than it has been in both New York and Miami,” he noted. It’s no wonder: Three out of five of the nation’s costliest hurricanes occurred in the last 10 years.

The basic blueprint of all Artex’s facilities are similar in terms of environmental controls such as humidity, cooling and backup generator capacity. Jacobs works with AXA ART Insurance Group’s Global Risk Assessment Platform (GRASP) to evaluate his facilities with over 2,000 industry standard questions ranging from the design of the building to institutional policies and workplace conditions. Jacobs says that GRASP is especially thorough, because it recognizes the crucial role employees play in disaster mitigation: “It’s one thing to have a fancy facility, but does your staff have the right training to handle art property either routinely or in an emergency?” he asks.

Regional climate affects the facilities’ placement. This explains the choice of inland Fort Lauderdale over art hub Miami and Artex’s 2013 move from Chelsea to Long Island City, 55 feet above sea level.

Fires also pose a threat to art collections. While it is difficult to link any single fire to climate change, “scientists have found that human-caused climate change is increasing the frequency and size of wildfires for much of the United States,” Vox recently reported. In early December, lovers of the J. Paul Getty Museum white-knuckled through the Los Angeles wildfire that raged not far from the museum (though a major freeway provided a firebreak that the fire never crossed). But robust fire protections built into the museum and the surrounding landscape led officials to insist that “the safest place for the collection to be is right here at the Getty Center,” as a spokesperson told Artsy at the time.  

Even when the art stored in museums and secure facilities is safe from disaster, art storage facilities are increasingly being called on to evacuate vulnerable work from collectors’ homes to safer harbor. This has them operating in some hazardous conditions. Elsewhere in the Los Angeles area, Artex kicked into gear to evacuate art from clients’ homes threatened by the fire.  

“We had a number of private collectors calling us, and that was a situation where things were happening so rapidly that it was very difficult to respond,” says Jacobs. “We had crews in pulling things out literally minutes before the houses caught on fire. And we were able to save a fair amount but you have to balance the risk to the staff and people and equipment.” Artex also evacuated art from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. “As soon as the national guard would let us in, they brought us in with armed escorts to start pulling things out,” Jacobs says.

Art storage facility UOVO, with its flagship in Long Island City, has also been called to evacuate art on short notice due to fire and floods. “On numerous occasions, we’ve received calls, literally on weekends even—Saturday and Sunday morning—from people’s offices, homes, and smaller-sized museums because someone saw a leak or a fire occurred, and they need a safe storage alternative immediately,” says executive vice president Clifford Davis.

Generally, the best disaster strategy is to keep art in storage facilities, where it is safe and sound behind layers of climate protection. The soon-to-open ARCIS building has 100 percent mechanical redundancy, meaning it has two HVAC systems and atomizers (which control humidity). The generator runs on natural gas, rather than diesel. “In the event of some natural disaster, we don’t have to run a diesel generator,” says Lay, “Good luck getting that diesel delivery when everyone else is trying to do the same thing.” UOVO has two onsite backup generators, and can run autonomously for two weeks, says Davis.

“We joke that if you see us moving artwork out of that building in an emergency circumstance something has gone very, very wrong in New York City,” says Lay.

While the climate protections built into major high-profile public museums like the Getty and the Whitney receive a great deal of press attention, the risk mitigation strategies employed by private storage facilities are similar, and increasingly interrelated. Artex, ARCIS and UOVO all function as supplementary storage for major museum collections. Jacobs estimates that 70 percent of his business is museum-oriented. Consequently, the facilities are purpose-built to museum-quality standards.

Adrian Tuluca, a senior principal with the architectural consulting firm Vidaris, conducted thermal analysis on ARCIS shortly after performing the same process for the new Whitney Museum building. Tuluca used computational fluid dynamics modeling (CFD) to determine how to stop condensation—which could lead to mold—from forming within the walls of the facility should temperatures outside drop to 20, 11, or four degrees Fahrenheit. He’s also done this same analysis for Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s upcoming Hudson Yards arts facility and the Shed, which required writing custom code to address the building’s unique movable shell.

As they look to the future, those tasked with safeguarding culture from natural disasters are thinking broadly about the threats posed to artwork. “In this time of changing climate, anything’s possible,” says Jacobs. He talks to art museums around the country about their plans in case of a disaster—whether a major storm, or a terrorist attack. In the world of insurance, the legal umbrella of force majeure, or unpreventable circumstances, includes both “acts of god” (such as a hurricane) and “acts of man” (such as a riot). We may look at the looting of Palmyra and the flooding of Miami as separate events, but the effects of climate change do have a direct impact on human action. The nonprofit Saving Antiquities for Everyone (SAFE), gives multiple examples of cultural artifacts being looted in the wake of environmental disaster. No one tasked with running art storage facilities believes in taking a passive approach to the external threats posed to the work inside.

“Taking care of cultural property is my religion,” says Lay. “I would almost rather die than let something happen to an artwork.”

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Reposted from the Citizen Times

A large emerald is missing from the Asheville Museum of Science, which reported the gem stolen late last month, more than three weeks after it was last seen. 

On Jan. 24, a museum representative reached out to the Asheville Police Department to report a larceny. Somebody had forcibly stolen an emerald, which the museum valued at $10,000, according to a police report. The museum didn't report the gem stolen until nearly a month after it was last seen. The last known secure date of the emerald, which was previously on display in the museum's gem and mineral collection, was listed as Jan. 1 in the police report.   

The museum provided the Citizen Times with a prepared statement via email, and declined to comment further on Thursday afternoon. In the museum's statement, Executive Director Anna Priest said that the museum hadn't been broken into and that nothing else had been taken. 

"The AMOS gem and mineral collection has immeasurable historical significance and the theft of the emerald is a sad loss," the museum statement reads. "One of the challenges for any museum is the tension between securing works of value while also making sure they’re available for the public to enjoy."

Priest also said that the museum is working to increase security measures. 

Police didn't have any updates regarding the investigation into the reported larceny Thursday. The status of the case was listed as "closed/leads exhausted" on the January incident report. 

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Reposted from The Sacramento Bee

Radicalized individuals — not teams of trained operatives — are the terror threats that most worry federal law enforcement agencies as the calendar turns to 2018.

Combating them is challenging, since many give little indication they’re planning an attack in the first place.

FBI Director Christopher Wray has indicated the FBI considers the most pressing domestic terrorism threats to be homegrown violent extremists radicalized by ISIS and other radical Islamist groups, as well as lone wolf attackers who aren’t connected to any other actors or groups. Cultists, “sovereign citizens” who don’t believe government constraints apply to them and those motivated by racial animus are a lesser but persistent concern, according to the bureau.

“If you look at the numbers, the repetition and the consistency, I think that’s No. 1 by a long stretch,” Heiman said, citing attacks in San Bernardino, Orlando, Fort Hood and the recent attacks in New York City. While other attacks happen every year, Heiman said other movements are not as consistent.

Some object to the categories as artificial and counterproductive. “There’s this focus on categorizing ideology, rather than focusing on methodology for committing these acts of violence. It springs from this necessity to categorize in order to distribute resources in an organized way, but we then come to believe those categories are real,” said Michael German, a former FBI official who worked in counterterrorism. “This whole concept of a radical Islam, which includes very different groups such as ISIS, Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah...it has nothing to do with keeping Americans safer.”

Still, while there may be disagreement about the framing, nobody questions that the United States needs to be on the lookout for potential attackers. And the FBI’s view will carry the day when it comes to allocating funds and manpower to the task. Here’s a closer look at how the agency is seeing things.

Homegrown violent extremists

Violent extremists wanting to join foreign fighters in support of ISIS, or those who aspire to attack the United States from within, continue to be at the top of the FBI’s watch list, with the threat amplified by “a surge in terrorist propaganda and training available via the Internet and social networking media,” Wray noted in testimony to a House committee at the end of November. Online recruitment and indoctrination mean that it’s no longer necessary for terrorist organizations to sneak operatives into the country to recruit others and act.

That’s a big change from the environment of a decade ago, Wray said.

In 2017, jihadist attacks claimed the most lives compared to other domestic extremist groups, with five attacks in the U.S. killing 17 people, according to Joshua Freilich, co-creator of the Extremist Crime Database. Figures on deaths attributable to terrorist groups vary slightly, due to differences in the criteria for labeling something a terrorist act. Freilich said his database defines these attacks as ideologically motivated homicides, or “incidents where the offenders – either wholly or partly – committed the attack to further their extremist beliefs.”

Interspersed attacks with comparably low fatalities have become the norm for aggressions committed under the umbrella of radical Islamic groups, according to Heiman, largely because ISIS has overtaken Al-Qaeda in prominence.

“Al-Qaeda was planning these epic, dramatic attacks. You compare that to the Islamic State, and their approach is, ‘Here’s what we’d like, you go out and figure out how to do it,’” Heiman said. “So then you get individuals picking up whatever they can, bats or cars or firearms, without a lot of training in how to get those mass casualties.”

While that means it’s less likely we’ll see repeats of 9/11 with thousands or even hundreds of deaths, attacks by individuals are also much harder to pinpoint, Heiman said.

German, however, sees the depiction of radicalization put forth by the FBI as misleading. He said in most cases it’s far more likely these terrorists are individuals already planning violent action and looking for an ideology to pin it on than it is that they come to their actions through online recruitment. And law enforcement too readily categorizes people of color based on flimsy evidence such as a few internet searches, according to German.

He compared Omar Mateen, the Orlando shooter who killed 49 people in 2016 at a gay nightclub who pledged allegiance to ISIS, to James Holmes, the Aurora shooter who killed 12 people in 2012 at a movie screening of “The Dark Knight Rises.” Mateen’s attack was seen as an obvious ideological attack against gay people, while “no one suggested Holmes was motivated by a hatred for Batman, or those who watch it.”

Lone-wolf attacks

“We are most concerned about the lone offender attacks, primarily shootings, as they have served as the dominant mode for lethal domestic extremist violence,” Wray said in November.

Lone-wolf attacks represent a significant hurdle for law enforcement by their very nature. If an American citizen is planning an attack alone, it’s “almost impossible to detect that, unless they open up about their feelings to family and friends,” Heiman said.

“We might not have as many large-scale attacks, but we have a steady drip of these attacks with one or two actors that come in with a highly destructive weapon, or drive a car into a crowd, and it’s still a significant loss of life,” Heiman said.

The most destructive example of a lone offender in 2017 is Stephen Paddock’s shooting in Las Vegas that killed 58 people. While Paddock’s motive is still unknown, meaning it hasn’t been classified as a terrorist attack, it’s emblematic of German’s critique of the emphasis placed on these categories. Regardless of whether Paddock was a terrorist or a criminal, his attack was still catastrophic.

Additionally, while mass shootings represent significant loss of life, the numbers still aren’t comparable to the number of homicide deaths constantly occurring, German said. There were about 17,000 homicides in the U.S. in 2016, according to the FBI, and 40 percent of them are unsolved.

Other extremist movements

“Domestic extremist movements collectively pose a steady threat to the United States,” Wray said in November. “We anticipate law enforcement, racial minorities, and the U.S. government will continue to be significant targets for many domestic extremist movements.”

White supremacists, sovereign citizens, black nationalists, radical religious and other cultist groups fall into this grouping. The FBI recently leaked to the public a counterterrorism report that identified a “black identity extremist” threat, saying these extremists were likely to increasingly target police officers over perceived racial injustice. Many – including German – criticized the report’s definition as overly broad and worried it was being used to target nonviolent protestors, such as members of Black Lives Matter.

Far-left domestic extremist groups (which includes black nationalists) have killed eight people in 2017, according to Freilich’s database, while nine people have been killed in attacks by far-right domestic extremist groups (which includes white supremacists and sovereign citizens) — but the FBI has no category for “white identity extremists.”

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Reposted from KCBD.com

Officials with Texas Tech University say security cameras are being installed in undisclosed locations across campus to help authorities keep the students, faculty and staff safe.

The effort is part of a larger security plan from President Lawrence Schovanec, the Texas Tech Police Department and the Student Government Association.

"At Texas Tech, we constantly review all the practices in place that relate to ensuring a safe environment," Schovanec said. "That means we should take advantage of all the technologies that are there.

"It’s part of the culture we want to create here so students would feel, as they go from building to building, as they cross this campus at night, that there are measures in place to ensure they can do that without feeling threatened or worried."

The security cameras are part of a continuing initiative to increase automated campus safety, as recommended by a committee composed of Texas Tech officials and student representatives.

"For the Texas Tech Police Department, the safety and security of the campus community is paramount," said Texas Tech Police Chief Kyle Bonath. "We are pleased to work with the president and the Student Government Association to protect the community we serve."

Officials say additional cameras will be installed in the near future. 

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Reposted from VV Daily Press

Caretakers of the California Route 66 Museum spent most of the morning wiping away tears and cleaning up broken glass after the popular tourist attraction was broken into.

Museum President Susan Bridges and her staff watched in disbelief as a security monitor recording showed a man smashing glass cabinets, overturning displays and stealing vintage artifacts and clothing inside the museum located on D Street in Victorville.

Bridges said the camera also caught the suspect breaking into the museum, stealing a “vintage and empty” cash register; leaving the building and returning later to “damage and steal” property.

“He was inside for about 10 minutes and did about $30,000 in damage,” Bridges told the Daily Press Monday. “It’s going to cost about $5,000 just to replace the glass. We’re going to be closed for at least a week so we can get everything back in order.”

San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department deputies arrested Roy Fonder after he was found with stolen items and a crowbar near the museum in Victorville. The 25-year-old Fonder, who matched the description of the suspect on the surveillance video, was later booked at High Desert Detention Center on suspicion of burglary and vandalism, Sheriff’s spokeswoman Mara Rodriguez reported.

Most of the stolen property has been recovered and the majority of the 4,500-square-foot museum was left untouched during the break in. But the scale model of Hulaville, six glass cabinets, the front door and numerous antique cars, trains and figurines were damaged in the break-in, Bridges said.

“He really did a number on Hulaville, but I saved the bottles,” said museum docent Bill Lamb, as he worked to restore the model and find missing pieces that had been scattered throughout the building. “You can replace glass, but you can’t replace history.”

Bridges, who said she was alerted to the break-in by Hi Desert Alarm just before 2 a.m. Monday, remarked that deputies “seemed to be heartbroken” by what they found when they arrived at the museum.

“This museum is part of who we all are,” Bridges said. “It holds so many memories and artifacts of Route 66 and the High Desert. I can see how anyone who lives here would be affected.”

Bridges said she is pleading with the public to “stop calling the museum” to inquire about the damage and stolen property.

“We’ve been getting calls from the High Desert and all over the country,” Bridges said. “We appreciate the love and support from all of our friends around the world, but we’re swamped trying to put everything back together. We’ll keep everyone updated on Facebook, Instagram and our website.”

The museum team is working hard to reopen the museum so they can serve “the army of Brazilian and Polish tourists” who are currently on vacation. Every year, the museum welcomes thousands of guests from Europe, Asia, South America and other places around the world, Bridges said.

Air Force veteran and museum docent Lou Tyson, 70, told the Daily Press his “childhood” hit him “square in the face” when he first walked through the doors of the museum.

“I was infuriated when I found out what happened here,” said Tyson, as the original “Hula Girl” cutout looked down on him. “The museum is my home-away-from-home, so this break-in makes me feel violated.”

For donation and general information, visit www.califrt66museum.org or www.facebook.com/Rte66Museum. The museum is located at 16825 D St. in Victorville.

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