Local Government Policy and Planning for Unmanned Aerial Systems

This research identifies key state and local government stakeholders in California for drone policy creation and implementation, and describes their perceptions and understanding of drone policy. The investigation assessed stakeholders’ positions, interests, and influence on issues, with the goal of providing potential policy input to achieve successful drone integration in urban environments and within the national airspace of the United States. The research examined regulatory priorities through the use of a two-tiered Stakeholder Analysis Process. The first tier consisted of a detailed survey sent out to over 450 local agencies and jurisdictions in California. The second tier consisted of an in-person focus group to discuss survey results as well as to gain deeper insights into local policymakers’ current concerns. Results from the two tiers of analysis, as well as recommendations, are provided here

Representations of swine flu: Perspectives from a Malaysian pig farm

© The Author(s), 2010. This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below.Novel influenza viruses are seen, internationally, as posing considerable health challenges, but public responses to such viruses are often rooted in cultural representations of disease and risk. However, little research has been conducted in locations associated with the origin of a pandemic. We examined representations and risk perceptions associated with swine flu amongst 120 Malaysian pig farmers. Thirty-seven per cent of respondents felt at particular risk of infection, two-thirds were somewhat or very concerned about being infected. Those respondents who were the most anxious believed particular societal “out-groups” (homosexuals, the homeless and prostitutes) to be at higher infection risk. Although few (4%) reported direct discrimination, 46% claimed friends had avoided them since the swine flu outbreak. Findings are discussed in the context of evolutionary, social representations and terror management theories of response to pandemic threat

Crowdsourcing Cybersecurity: Cyber Attack Detection using Social Media

Social media is often viewed as a sensor into various societal events such as disease outbreaks, protests, and elections. We describe the use of social media as a crowdsourced sensor to gain insight into ongoing cyber-attacks. Our approach detects a broad range of cyber-attacks (e.g., distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks, data breaches, and account hijacking) in an unsupervised manner using just a limited fixed set of seed event triggers. A new query expansion strategy based on convolutional kernels and dependency parses helps model reporting structure and aids in identifying key event characteristics. Through a large-scale analysis over Twitter, we demonstrate that our approach consistently identifies and encodes events, outperforming existing methods.Comment: 13 single column pages, 5 figures, submitted to KDD 201

THE DECLINE OF RUSSIAN HYBRID WARFARE? LESSONS FROM UKRAINE

Before 2022, many scholars held the view that Russia operated just below the threshold of war in pursuing its objectives in Europe. Important works applied the concept of hybrid warfare (HW) to argue that Russia prefers to wage a grey zone conflict rather than a large-scale conventional war. However, the invasion of Ukraine invalidated these assumptions. As a result, scholars now argue that HW is significantly less useful in analysing Russian strategy and operations because large-scale conventional war does not fall within the conceptual scope of HW. Although the European Union (EU) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) had previously used the concept to address Russia’s actions, they have also removed HW from their political rhetoric towards the Kremlin. This article examines the extent to which HW is a useful conceptual framework for analysing Russia’s war against Ukraine. The author argues that while the use of the concept in the context of the war is no longer politically advantageous, HW still provides a practical conceptual framework for analysing the war and, by extension, for informing decisions on Western defence policy. There exists more than one definition of HW and, depending on which version is applied, the Kremlin’s resort to large-scale military action does not mean that Russian HW is in decline. Instead, there is a shift towards an earlier understanding of HW, which puts a greater emphasis on using military force and violence. Consequently, since Russia keeps waging HW, the EU and NATO must not remove HW from their security toolbox, but rather enhance their defence against HW. To do so, they must increase their focus on multi-purpose defence capabilities and develop expertise in disrupting any adversarial capacity for multi-modal campaigns.&nbsp

Exploring Commercial Counter-UAS Operations: A Case Study of the 2017 Dominican Republic Festival Presidente

The proliferation of commercial off-the-shelf unmanned aircraft technology has resulted in a growing number of illicit or hazardous UAS activities, highlighting the growing need for effective counter-UAS mitigations. The purpose of this exploratory research is to develop a better understanding of the existing tactics, techniques, procedures involved in counter-UAS operations. Using a critical paradigm approach, the authors conducted a qualitative, unstructured interview with counter-UAS professionals. The authors sought to identify mission planning considerations, counter-UAS engagement tasks, and unanticipated conditions associated with performing a commercial [non-military] counter-UAS mission. The authors codified 11 key mission planning tasks and a 22-step engagement process by which one organization effected counter-UAS operations at a contracted, international event. The authors conclude that the study’s findings underscore existing vulnerabilities to UAS threats and the accompanying need for additional research in this field of UAS security

Enabling NATO’s Collective Defense: Critical Infrastructure Security and Resiliency (NATO COE-DAT Handbook 1)

In 2014 NATO’s Center of Excellence-Defence Against Terrorism (COE-DAT) launched the inaugural course on “Critical Infrastructure Protection Against Terrorist Attacks.” As this course garnered increased attendance and interest, the core lecturer team felt the need to update the course in critical infrastructure (CI) taking into account the shift from an emphasis on “protection” of CI assets to “security and resiliency.” What was lacking in the fields of academe, emergency management, and the industry practitioner community was a handbook that leveraged the collective subject matter expertise of the core lecturer team, a handbook that could serve to educate government leaders, state and private-sector owners and operators of critical infrastructure, academicians, and policymakers in NATO and partner countries. Enabling NATO’s Collective Defense: Critical Infrastructure Security and Resiliency is the culmination of such an effort, the first major collaborative research project under a Memorandum of Understanding between the US Army War College Strategic Studies Institute (SSI), and NATO COE-DAT. The research project began in October 2020 with a series of four workshops hosted by SSI. The draft chapters for the book were completed in late January 2022. Little did the research team envision the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February this year. The Russian occupation of the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant, successive missile attacks against Ukraine’s electric generation and distribution facilities, rail transport, and cyberattacks against almost every sector of the country’s critical infrastructure have been on world display. Russian use of its gas supplies as a means of economic warfare against Europe—designed to undermine NATO unity and support for Ukraine—is another timely example of why adversaries, nation-states, and terrorists alike target critical infrastructure. Hence, the need for public-private sector partnerships to secure that infrastructure and build the resiliency to sustain it when attacked. Ukraine also highlights the need for NATO allies to understand where vulnerabilities exist in host nation infrastructure that will undermine collective defense and give more urgency to redressing and mitigating those fissures.https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/1951/thumbnail.jp

Trojan Spoofing: A Threat to Critical Infrastructure

This article explores the phenomenon of location spoofing – where the spoofer is able to ‘teleport’ systems in and out of defined locations, either for the purpose of infiltration into no-go zones or for the ‘teleportation’ out of real, defined zones in the physical world. The research relied on a qualitative methodology, utilising academic research findings, media reports, hacker demonstrations, and secondary data from these sources, to situate the spoofing threat in the context of international security. This conceptual, argumentative essay finds that signal spoofing, the methods of which can be followed via online scripts, allows users the ability to overcome geographically-defined territorial restrictions. This, as this article finds, allows violent actors to weaponise systems such as unmanned ariel systems (UAS), potentially leading to the escalation of political tensions in extreme but unfortunately ever-frequent episodes. The article concludes that, while Trojan Spoofing (in particular) poses a real and an existential threat to international security, it is only a sum-of-all parts in considering other threats to critical functions in society. If geofences are to be used as a single point of security to protect assets against hostile actors, managers need to be aware of the vulnerability of intrusion and the resulting geopolitical consequences.publishedVersio

Smart Move Fargo Moorhead: Communications Plan for the Greater Fargo Moorhead EDC

An economic development corporation is, in many respects, the marketing arm of a community or metro area. The Organization needs to effectively sell the region to prospective companies and residents. The Organization also needs to tell its own story assuring its stakeholders that the Organization is effective. To do that, the Organization needs a communications plan. This paper uses stakeholder theory to evaluate the investors? roles to drive the communication plan. The paper also reviews economic development theories on marketing effectiveness. Finally, a survey of the Organization?s electronic newsletter recipients was conducted evaluating current communications efforts. A majority of participants represent investor companies, and the remaining participants represent partner institutions and primary-sector companies. Together the research and survey results provide feedback to evaluate the 2008 communication plan and provide guidelines to create a current communication plan