News & Announcements

The Homeland Security Project at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs is pleased to announce the creation of a paper series examining current and critical issues in homeland security. The Homeland Security Project seeks a variety of viewpoints, and the paper series is non-partisan. The intended audience for the paper series is broad, including policymakers in Congress and the Executive Branch, the homeland security community, and the general public. This call for papers is open to policy practitioners, scholars, the private sector, and non-governmental organizations.

“It was too quiet.”

That was the sentiment expressed by a number of the 45 election officials from 23 states who gathered earlier this month at Harvard for a Belfer Center Defending Digital Democracy (D3P) Midterm After-Action Conference to discuss problems around their November midterm elections.  Most said they experienced significant but mostly unintended misinformation – and some disinformation – along with a number of other challenges to their electoral processes, but not the extensive foreign cyber and other attacks that took place during the 2016 presidential election.

Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs has named Michael Blake Greenwald a Fellow. While at the Kennedy School, Greenwald, who has served the U.S. government in several senior diplomatic roles, will lecture, conduct research, and engage with students on a range of issues including economic sanctions, illicit finance, national security, intelligence, and global finance.

Belfer Center Visiting Fellow Michael Greenwald, senior advisor to Atlantic Council President and Chief Executive Officer Fred Kempe, was interviewed by Rachel Brandenburg, director of the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security’s Middle East Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council, about the implications of the ongoing feud for the Gulf states and US interests. Greenwald is a former US Treasury attaché to Qatar and Kuwait.

More than 120 election officials from 38 states gathered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, this week to participate in role-playing exercises that provided them with tips, tools, and training to fortify their election systems against cyber attacks and information operations. Organized by the Defending Digital Democracy Project (D3P) at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, the two-day event featured a tabletop exercise (TTX) scenario for officials that simulated attacks on election systems ranging from hacks and social media misinformation to  manipulation of voter information and trust. The state and local election officials learned how to better prepare, defend, and respond to a range of attacks on the integrity of American elections and how to empower their colleagues back home with this knowledge as they prepare for the 2018 and 2020 elections.