Author posts
How to rise above the war your government waged
You are not your government. An Iraqi is not theirs. Is it time to retune your perspective?
January 16, 2018
Former CIA Operative Reveals How to Overcome 3 Roots of Terrorism
How do you spot terrorism before it happens? Look for patterns in what might seem like unlikely places. Like the living wage of a border guard.
September 02, 2017
Russia and AI: Why Global Election Tampering Will Only Get Worse
Which country influences foreign elections the most? An extensive dataset of every election from 1946 to now has the answer.
August 21, 2017
Raised Racist: How David Duke's Godson Decided to Oppose White Nationalism
As a teenager, Derek Black was the webmaster for Stormfront, the Internet's most prominent message board for white nationalists. But Black escaped that world thanks to an unlikely ally.
August 17, 2017
Amaryllis Fox
Amaryllis Fox is a Former CIA Clandestine Service Officer, writer, television host and peace activist. Before attending university, she traveled to the Thai-Burmese border to volunteer in the Mai Laa refugee camp and worked with the Burmese democracy movement and eventually interviewing Aung San Suu Kyi for the BBC, which landed her a brief stint in Burmese prison at the age of 18, but also resulted in the first radio broadcast from Suu Kyi in almost a year.
In 2002, after extensive field work in East Timor and Bosnia, Amaryllis graduated from Oxford with an honors degree and started graduate work in international security at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service. There she developed an algorithm to predict terrorist activity under thesis advisor Dan Byman, a leading thinker on terrorism and US security policy. Asked by the University's CIA Officer in Residence, Dallas Jones, to share the algorithm with the Agency, she began work as a political and terrorism analyst for SE Asia, commuting between Langley and Georgetown to finish her degree with honors. Following graduation, she moved into CIA's Directorate of Operations and deployed as a Clandestine Service officer, focused on counterterrorism and counterproliferation. She served in 16 countries in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, before leaving government service in 2010.
Following her CIA career in the field, Amaryllis has used her coding abilities and international experience to build projects in support of international development and has covered current events and offered analysis for CNN, National Geographic, al Jazeera, BBC, and other global news outlets. She speaks at events and universities around the world on the topic of peacemaking and her videos about dialogue and nonviolence have been viewed over 120 million times online. She is the co-host of the History Channel series American Ripper and lives in San Francisco, CA, with her daughter Zoë.
