January 17th, 2013

New Mexican President may be able to break cycle of drug violence

CISAC Postdoctoral Fellow Ben Lessing outlines how Mexico's new president, Enrique Peña Nieto, may differ significantly from his predecessor in dealing with the country's drug war. Lessing argues Peña Nieto's middle path may lay the foundation to break Mexico's cycle of violence. Read more »

January 8th, 2013

Zegart: Brennan as CIA director reflects increasing public tolerance for torture

CISAC Faculty Member Amy Zegart discusses how changing American attitudes toward torture have impacted intelligence agencies. The Obama administration's recent appointment of John Brennan to lead the CIA is a case in point. Read more »

December 20th, 2012

The good, the bad, and the ugly of aviation security

CISAC Faculty Member and Foreign Policy blogger Amy Zegart explains the good, the bad and the ugly of aviation security. Despite the problems, there are positive developments in the Transportation Security Administration's work. Read more »

December 12th, 2012

Weinstein: Susan Rice "uniquely qualified" to lead State Department

Jeremy Weinstein defends Ambassador Susan Rice's career, saying that the potential candidate for Secretary of State is "uniquely qualified" for the position and hopes that President Obama will nominate her to the position. Read more »

November 28th, 2012

Why cultures clash when military leaders run the CIA

Amy Zegart explains why military leaders have a difficult time running intelligence agencies. Even though both deal with national security, their organizational structures create very different operational cultures.

• » King David
• » Focus on Officers, Not the Media

November 8th, 2012

Predicting Kim Jong Un's next steps not as easy as our elections results

Amy Zegart, CISAC faculty member, writes in Foreign Policy that national security threats can't be predicted as well as our election outcomes. Although data can be collected easily about ship locations and military movements, personalities and intentions are unpredictable. Read more »

November 1st, 2012

Cybersecurity Fellow Mayer exposes leaks of personal data by 2012 campaigns

Cybersecurity Fellow Jonathan Mayer exposes how personal information is being leaked to third-party trackers on presidential campaign websites, despite official claims that tracking is anonymous. The campaigns are leaking names, addresses and partial e-mail addresses to third parties. Read more »

October 30th, 2012

Experts predict personalized bioweapons possible in the near future

CISAC Affiliate Marc Goodman co-authors an article on how advances in biotechnology may be used in the near future to create personalized biological agents that target individuals based on their DNA. Read more »

October 2nd, 2012

Zegart: Americans' support for harsh counterterrorism methods increasing

In the face of a terrorist attack, one quarter of Americans said they would use nuclear weapons to stop terrorists. Read more »

September 14th, 2012

Zegart: “Spytainment” blurs the lines between Hollywood and Washington

CISAC affiliated faculty member and Foreign Policy blogger Amy Zegart explains how spy-themed entertainment has distorted perceptions about intelligence agencies. When government officials recruit Disney to help design the National Counterterrorism Center and a Supreme Court justice says the fictional 24 operative saved Los Angeles, these misperceptions influence intelligence policy in very real ways.

• » Foreign Policy: Langley Goes Hollywood
• » Zegart launches biweekly intelligence column at Foreign Policy

August 17th, 2012

Deciphering the National Intelligence Estimates on Iran's nuclear program

CISAC Affiliate Jeffrey Lewis, founder of the blog ArmsControlWonk.com, explains that journalists and foreign policy elites have misunderstood the National Intelligence Estimates on Iran's nuclear program, particularly the 2007 report, which claimed that Iran halted its covert nuclear weapons program in 2003. Lewis spoke with FSI's Tom Fingar, who explained that the report intended to signal that Tehran is sensitive to international pressure, and that it could restart the nuclear weapons program at a later date.

• » Foreign Policy: The Ayatollah's Pregnant Pause

May 31st, 2012

Jones, Esberg say Obama foreign policy will continue even with a Republican win

In a Campaign 2012 policy brief for the Brookings Institution, CISAC affiliate Bruce Jones, Thomas Wright, and former research assistant and honors student Jane Esberg, say the next president's foreign policy should pick up Obama's lead. Due to an interdependent global economy, the U.S. has become vulnerable and dependent on the actions of regional powers such as Brazil, China, and India -- leaving the president with a delicate balancing act. Read more »

March 5th, 2012

OpEd: Former Stanford honors student calls North Korea's new leader a "Corleone"

Former CISAC honors student Sheena Chestnut Greitens writes in an OpEd in The New York Times that North Korea's young new leader is a "Corleone" who now must be both head of state and mafia don. Chestnut Greitens' piece builds on her honors thesis about the state-sanctioned crime syndicate that permeates society in the isolated country.

• » A North Korean Corleone - NYTimes.com

January 6th, 2012

North Korea watchers look at Pyongyang's nuclear trajectory

In the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Niko Milonopoulos, Siegfried Hecker and Robert Carlin use detailed overhead imagery to assess Pyongyang's nuclear weapons program -- and examine how Kim Jong-un's rise may influence it. In a separate piece, written before Kim Jong-il's death, Hecker and Carlin review the developments in North Korea in 2011.

• » North Korea from 30,000 feet
• » North Korea in 2011: Countdown to Kim il-Sung's centenary

December 12th, 2011

Why it's time for a serious conversation about nuclear weapons

Writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, Benoît Pelopidas says we must review and debunk "three misguided ideas about nuclear weapons."

• » San Francisco Chronicle: Nuclear weapons' future ripe for discussion

December 8th, 2011

North Korea experts: Pyongyang is now courting Beijing, not the U.S.

Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Robert Carlin and John Lewis argue that normalizing ties with the U.S. is no longer North Korea's priority. Both researchers have visited North Korea several times, including the only American visit to the uranium enrichment facility at Yongbyon in November 2010. Read more »

December 6th, 2011

Charles Perrow discusses the "inevitability of accidents"

Writing in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, sociologist Charles Perrow argues that "some complex systems with catastrophic potential are just too dangerous to exist because they cannot be made safe, regardless of human effort." Perrow, a visiting professor at CISAC, is the author of the landmark 1984 book Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies.

• » Fukushima and the Inevitability of Accidents

October 23rd, 2011

Charles Perrow: How technology can nudge climate change politics

Writing in Bloomberg View, Charles Perrow says U.S. investment in carbon capture and storage technology could "induce China and Europe to follow suit." This "would allow the world time for renewable-energy technologies to mature -- to the point where we could do away with coal burning altogether." Read more »

October 10th, 2011

Sheena Chestnut Greitens: What Steve Jobs taught me about failure

Writing in Newsweek, 2005 CISAC honors program graduate Sheena Chestnut Greitens reflects on Steve Jobs' Stanford commencement address and the hidden virtues of failure. Read more »

September 26th, 2011

Matthew Rojansky: For now, Putin's return is mostly good for U.S.-Russia relations

Former CISAC visiting scholar Matthew Rojansky argues in the New York Times that Vladimir Putin's return to the Russian presidency will not require a reset of the U.S. reset policy.

• » 'No Need to Reset the Reset'

September 9th, 2011

Matthew Kroenig: Can terrorists be deterred?

"The deterrence approach that we advocated remains a poorly understood and underutilized element of U.S. counterterrorism strategy," write former CISAC fellow Matthew Kroenig and Barry Pavel in Foreign Policy. "It holds, however, great potential for helping to thwart future al Qaeda attacks." Read more »

September 7th, 2011

Amy Zegart: U.S. talk of defeating terrorism is dangerously premature

In the Los Angeles Times, Amy Zegart explains why the fight against Al Qaeda "is nowhere close to being won, and America's most perilous times may lie ahead." Read more »

August 1st, 2011

Dara K. Cohen: Why the numbers about sexual violence don't add up

In Foreign Affairs, Dara K. Cohen and co-authors argue that protecting women in conflict zones from sexual violence requires a better understanding of the extent of the problem. Read more »

July 31st, 2011

Matthew Kroenig: 'Nuclear Zero? Why Not Nuclear Infinity?'

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Matthew Kroenig argues "the world would not be safer if the U.S. had no nuclear weapons." Read more »

May 13th, 2011

Rodney Ewing: Why are rare events so common?

"More than a month has passed since the one-two punch of an earthquake and tsunami added a third dimension to the tragedy in Japan: a major nuclear crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station," writes CISAC's Rodney Ewing in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. "Over the next year, the impact of the Fukushima disaster on the public's perception of nuclear power will evolve, with advocates portraying the event as an opportunity to make an indispensable source of energy safer, and critics characterizing it as a final indictment of the dangers of nuclear energy. As this debate develops, the public would be well served by answers to a few simple but critical questions." Read more »