OODA hosts a monthly video call to help members optimize opportunities and reduce risk to discuss items of common interest to our membership. These highly collaborative sessions are always a great way for our members to meet and interact with each other while talking about topics like global risks, emerging technologies, cybersecurity, and current or future events impacting their organizations. We also use these sessions to help better focus our research and better understand member needs.

To encourage openness of discussion, these sessions take place with Chatham House rules, where participants are free to use the information in the meeting but are asked not to directly quote or identify other participants (we also keep privacy in mind when preparing summaries of these sessions, like the one that follows).

The September call (held on Friday, September 16th) had a unique format, with Dr. Bilyana Lilly presenting to the OODA Network on the topic of Russian Information Warfare: Questions, Cases, Frameworks, and Conclusions – which is also the subject of her new book,  Russian Information Warfare: Assault on Democracies in the Cyber Wild West.

On multiple occasions, OODA Network member Florian Wolf has presented to the OODA Network membership on the topic of small data.  An evangelist and subject matter expert on the topic, Wolf is the CEO of Mergeflow, a company he founded in 2007, where he is responsible for company strategy and product design.   Wolf has a Ph.D. in Cognitive Sciences from MIT and is a former research associate in Computer Science and Genetics at the University of Cambridge. Some of his work at MIT was funded by DARPA and he is a member of the Global Panel at MIT Technology Review.  Mergeflow initially developed analytics software for hedge fund investors. We recently checked in with Florian on all things machine learning and “small data”.

According to a recent open-source report from Strider Technologies, “The People’s Republic of China (PRC) is employing a Talent Superpower Strategy designed to incentivize academics, researchers, and scientists to go abroad, deepen their expertise, and return to China to advance its strategic interests. What began in the 1980s as a program to send young talent overseas has evolved to incorporate initiatives that seek to harness these individuals’ efforts for China’s gain and, ultimately, encourage them to return to the PRC to work in key technology sectors.”

A recent report from NBC News is worth a watch and can be found here, along with a link to the report.

Space debris has been a topic of conversation since a 2021 OODA Network member monthly conversation, when Leo Labs, a global, ground-based radar to track space junk business model was discussed in the context of the Russian anti-satellite [ASAT] test which broke up their Cosmos 1408 satellite, resulting in an in orbit, debris-generating event that put the International Space Station at risk.

This post is an update on recent space debris events and headlines and ongoing research efforts and U.S.-based policy proposals.

There is little doubt that cyber attacks are used by both state and nonstate actors a medium to support their geopolitical views and positions during times of regional and global crisis.  The Ukraine conflict has underscored what has been going on for several years – actors resorting to offensive cyber operations to register their displeasure against an offender and his allies.  In the early days, such as when NATO erroneously bombed the Chinese Embassy in Yugoslavia in 1999, or ongoing clashes over disputed territories like Kashmir, foreign policy decisions have been protested via an onslaught of cyber malfeasance.  Fast forward to today, and this type of hacktivism has greatly evolved, moving from primarily the work of aggrieved nonstate politically-minded online activists, to more organized groups, sometimes sponsored by a nation state, and even in some cases, directed by them or state agents.