This paper explores the potential international ripple effects that can occur following changes to domestic encryption policies.  Whether these changes take the form of a single coherent national policy or a collection of independent (or even conflicting) policies, the impacts can be unexpected and wide-ranging.  This paper offers a conceptual model for how the ripple effects from national encryption policies might propagate beyond national borders. And we provide a set of factors that can help policy-makers anticipate some of the most likely ripple effects of proposed encryption policies.

This paper explores how efforts by companies to resist government requests for consumer information may disproportionately affect small and mid-sized law enforcement agencies, as small departments face obstacles to using commercially collected information that do not occur in the context of larger departments. Differences between law enforcement agencies that serve large communities and those that serve small communities suggest corresponding differences in their ability to adapt to changes in the process for obtaining data from digital communication companies.  Failing to account for these differences may encourage policies that will only work as expected for large law enforcement agencies.

In recent years, the three countries in North America (Canada, the United States and Mexico) and the three in the Northern Triangle of Central America (NTCA: Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras) have experienced large human mobility within the region. Traditionally dominated by South-North migration, with the US and Canada as the main destinations, this migration system is now more complex as it includes new flows, places of origin, and destinations. This study analyzes socioeconomic and demographic dynamics in the sending and receiving countries alongside the migration policies in the three main destinations to help understand (a) to what extent flows between and within North America and the NTCA may continue in the short term and (b) what changes in migrants profiles can be expected in the future.

This paper examines how the NOBUS approach works, its limits, and the challenging matter of what comes next. Traditionally, signals intelligence is neatly bifurcated into offense and defense: intercept adversaries’ communication technology and protect one’s own. In the modern era, however, there is great convergence in the technologies used by friendly nations and by hostile ones. Signals intelligence agencies find themselves penetrating the technologies they also at times must protect. To ease this tension, the United States and its partners have relied on an approach sometimes called Nobody But Us, or NOBUS: target communications mechanisms using unique methods accessible only to the United States.