Reports & Papers

7 Items

Flooding Red River

Flickr CC/Loozrboy

Paper - Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and Wilson International Center for Scholars

Emergency Management in North America

| February 2022

North America continues to face evolving challenges to comprehensive emergency management. As climate change, technology, global health, and the nature and scale of emergencies change, so does the need for improved coordination among the United States, Mexico, and Canada. This is further complicated by the distinct federal systems that operate in each country, and the different roles that national, regional, and private corporations can and should play across all of these separate jurisdictions.

Donald Trump and Anthony Fauci

AP/Alex Brandon

Paper - Centre for International Governance Innovation

US Intelligence, the Coronavirus and the Age of Globalized Challenges

| Aug. 24, 2020

This essay makes three arguments. First, the US government will need to establish a coronavirus commission, similar to the 9/11 commission, to determine why, since April 2020, the United States has suffered more coronavirus fatalities than any other country in the world. Second, the COVID-19 pandemic represents a watershed for what will be a major national security theme this century: biological threats, both from naturally occurring pathogens and from synthesized biology. Third, intelligence about globalized challenges, such as pandemics, needs to be dramatically reconceptualized, stripping away outmoded levels of secrecy.

Travelers from China’s Wuhan and other cities go through body temperature scanners at Narita international airport in Narita, near Tokyo, Thursday, Jan. 23, 2020.

AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko

Paper - Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School

Weaponizing Digital Health Intelligence

| January 2020

This paper argues that these potential vulnerabilities deserve rigorous, urgent, and thorough investigation. First, it draws from cybersecurity literature, and reviews general sources of vulnerability in digital systems. Next, with these sources of vulnerability in mind, it reviews the health intelligence systems used in the US as well as in a current Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC), the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). It then It then reviews the possible motives state actors have to attack health intelligence systems, drawing on recent examples of state-led efforts to manipulate, conceal, or undermine health information. It then speculates about what an attack on a health intelligence system might look like. It concludes by proposing a research and education agenda to thoroughly interrogate these issues and generate policy recommendations needed to address them.

Paper - Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School

The Geopolitics of Information

| May 28, 2019

To compete and thrive in the 21st century, democracies, and the United States in particular, must develop new national security and economic strategies that address the geopolitics of information. In the 20th century, market capitalist democracies geared infrastructure, energy, trade, and even social policy to protect and advance that era’s key source of power—manufacturing. In this century, democracies must better account for information geopolitics across all dimensions of domestic policy and national strategy.

Deputy Secretary General Alexander Vershbow and the 28 Permanent Representatives to the North Atlantic Council visit NATO’s cyber defence centre at Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe in Mons, Belgium on Friday, 23 January 2015.

NATO

Report - Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School

National Counter-Information Operations Strategy

| February 2019

While nation-state competitors have employed propaganda and information operations (IO) targeting the United States for decades, in recent years their efforts have changed dramatically. The rise of the Internet and social media as mechanisms for disseminating news has made our country both more globally interconnected and simultaneously more vulnerable to foreign efforts to destabilize our democracy. There is now clear evidence that Russia used influence operations designed to undermine U.S. democracy and citizens’ trust in its integrity in both the 2016 and 2018 election cycles. Adversaries are actively using information as a weapon to attack the United States, our political system, and citizens’ trust in it.

Election Cyber Incident Communications Plan Template: International Edition

Adobe Stock

Report - Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School

Election Cyber Incident Communications Plan Template: International Edition

May 2018

This Template is primarily intended for use by political parties or campaigns as a foundation from which they can develop their own tailored communications response plans, which include best practices, recommended external response processes, and scenarios to anticipate an election cyber incident.