WSJ | The
Federal Bureau of Investigation performed potentially millions of
searches of American electronic data last year without a warrant, U.S.
intelligence officials said Friday, a revelation likely to stoke longstanding concerns in Congress about government surveillance and privacy.
An
annual report published Friday by the Office of the Director of
National Intelligence disclosed that the FBI conducted as many as 3.4
million searches of U.S. data that had been previously collected by the
National Security Agency.
Senior
Biden administration officials said the actual number of searches is
likely far lower, citing complexities in counting and sorting foreign
data from U.S. data. It couldn’t be learned from the report how many
Americans’ data was examined by the FBI under the program, though
officials said it was also almost certainly a much smaller number.
The report doesn’t allege the FBI was routinely searching American data improperly or illegally.
The
disclosure of the searches marks the first time a U.S. intelligence
agency has published an accounting, however imprecise, of the FBI’s
grabs of American data through a section of the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act, the 1978 law that governs some foreign intelligence
gathering. The section of FISA that authorizes the FBI’s activity, known
as Section 702, is due to expire next year.
While
the ODNI report doesn’t suggest systemic problems with the searches,
judges have previously reprimanded the bureau for failing to comply with
privacy rules. Officials said the FBI’s searches were vital to its
mission to protect the U.S. from national-security threats. The
frequency of other forms of national-security surveillance detailed in
the annual report generally fell year over year, in some cases
continuing a multiyear trend.
The
3.4 million figure “is certainly a large number,” a senior FBI official
said in a press briefing Friday on the report. “I am not going to
pretend that it isn’t.”
More
than half of the reported searches—nearly two million—were related to
an investigation into a national-security threat involving attempts by
alleged Russian hackers to break into critical infrastructure in the
U.S. Those searches included efforts to identify and protect potential
victims of the alleged Russian campaign, senior U.S. officials said.
Officials
declined to give more details on the alleged Russian threat, including
whether it was linked to the Russian government or a criminal hacking
group. Russia has historically denied accusations of hacking the U.S. or other nations.
scheerpost | Since 2016, a number of other measures have been taken to bring
social media under the wing of the national security state. This was
foreseen by Google executives Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, who wrote in
2013, “What Lockheed Martin was to the twentieth century, technology
and cyber-security companies will be to the twenty-first.” Since then,
Google, Microsoft, Amazon and IBM have become integral parts of the
state apparatus, signing multibillion-dollar
contracts with the CIA and other organizations to provide them with
intelligence, logistics and computing services. Schmidt himself was
chairman of both the National Security Commission on Artificial
Intelligence and the Defense Innovation Advisory Board, bodies created
to help Silicon Valley assist the U.S. military with cyberweapons,
further blurring the lines between big tech and big government.
Google’s current Global Head of Developer Product Policy, Ben Renda,
has an even closer relationship with the national security state. From
being a strategic planner and information management officer for NATO,
he then moved to Google in 2008. In 2013, he began working for U.S.
Cybercommand and in 2015 for the Defense Innovation Unit (both divisions
of the Department of Defense). At the same time, he became a YouTube
executive, rising to the rank of Director of Operations.
Other platforms have similar relationships with Washington. In 2018,
Facebook announced that it had entered a partnership with The Atlantic
Council whereby the latter would help curate the news feeds of billions
of users worldwide, deciding what was credible, trustworthy information,
and what was fake news. As noted previously, The Atlantic Council is
NATO’s brain-trust and is directly funded by the military alliance. Last
year, Facebook also hired Atlantic
Council senior fellow and former NATO spokesperson Ben Nimmo as its
head of intelligence, thereby giving an enormous amount of control over
its empire to current and former national security state officials.
The Atlantic Council has also worked its way into Reddit’s management. Jessica Ashooh went straight
from being Deputy Director of Middle East Strategy at The Atlantic
Council to Director of Policy at the popular news aggregation service – a
surprising career move that drew few remarks at the time.
Also eliciting little comment was the unmasking of
a senior Twitter executive as an active-duty officer in the British
Army’s notorious 77th Brigade – a unit dedicated to online warfare and
psychological operations. Twitter has since partnered with
the U.S. government and weapons manufacturer-sponsored think tank ASPI
to help police its platform. On ASPI’s orders, the social media platform
has purged hundreds of thousands of accounts based out of China, Russia, and other countries that draw Washington’s ire.
Last year, Twitter also announced that
it had deleted hundreds of user accounts for “undermining faith in the
NATO alliance and its stability” – a statement that drew widespread
incredulity from those not closely following the company’s progression
from one that championed open discussion to one closely controlled by
the government.
The First Casualty
Those in the halls of power well understand how important a weapon
big-tech is in a global information war. This can be seen in a letter published
last Monday written by a host of national security state officials,
including former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former
CIA directors Michael Morell and Leon Panetta, and former director of
the NSA Admiral Michael Rogers.
Together, they warn that regulating or breaking up the big-tech
monopolies would “inadvertently hamper the ability of U.S. technology
platforms to … push back on the Kremlin.” “The United States will need
to rely on the power of its technology sector to ensure” that “the
narrative of events” globally is shaped by the U.S. and “not by foreign
adversaries,” they explain, concluding that Google, Facebook, Twitter
are “increasingly integral to U.S. diplomatic and national security
efforts.”
Commenting on the letter, journalist Glenn Greenwald wrote:
[B]y maintaining all power in the
hands of the small coterie of tech monopolies which control the internet
and which have long proven their loyalty to the U.S. security state,
the ability of the U.S. national security state to maintain a closed
propaganda system around questions of war and militarism is guaranteed.”
The U.S. has frequently leaned on social media in order to control
the message and promote regime change in target countries. Just days
before the Nicaraguan presidential election in November, Facebook deleted the
accounts of hundreds of the country’s top news outlets, journalists and
activists, all of whom supported the left-wing Sandinista government.
When those figures poured onto Twitter to protest the ban, recording
videos of themselves and proving that they were not bots or
“inauthentic” accounts, as Facebook Intelligence Chief Nimmo had
claimed, their Twitter accounts were systematically banned as well, in
what observers coined as a “double-tap strike.”
Meanwhile, in 2009, Twitter acquiesced to
a U.S. request to delay scheduled maintenance of its app (which would
have required taking it offline) because pro-U.S. activists in Iran were
using the platform to foment anti-government demonstrations.
More than 10 years later, Facebook announced that it would be
deleting all praise of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani from its many
platforms, including Instagram and WhatsApp. Soleimani – the most popular political
figure in Iran – had recently been assassinated in a U.S. drone strike.
The event sparked uproar and massive protests across the region. Yet
because the Trump administration had declared Soleimani and his military
group to be terrorists, Facebook explained,
“We operate under U.S. sanctions laws, including those related to the
U.S. government’s designation of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps
and its leadership.” This meant that Iranians could not share a majority
viewpoint inside their own country – even in their own language –
because of a decision made in Washington by a hostile government.
In a nutshell, Edward Snowden disclosed that the US government, and multiple allied governments had the ability to eavesdrop on everyone's phone calls, read their text messages, emails, internet searches, track their locations (via GPS in phones) and also remotely activate people's cell phone cameras and microphones to listen and see what people are doing in real time.
Based on these disclosures, it is estimated that the US and its allies have visibility into roughly 80% of all digital communications in the US.
None of these federal agencies should have been doing this to U.S. citizens, on US soil and that the mechanism exploited to achieve this panoptic surveillance capability was cooperation by the Level 3 Internet carriers. Verizon, AT&T, Sprint etc, were providing the "keys" to their networks to the government to provide this access.
The government is not supposed to take your data wothout a warrant but a private company can give it to them in circumvention of the 4th amendment. The real issue here is NOT whether a company will give your data to the govt with or without a warrant.
One thing you should be aware of is that this framing of the debate is pushed by the government because it favors their position. However, the real fight we should be focused on is not whether a warrant has been served, rather, it should be focused on WHO the warrant is being served upon.
Consider the mail as an example. If I send you a package that the governmentt wants to snoop on, they cannot serve a warrant on the mail carrier in possession of the package to get access to it (even if it's a private company like UPS, FedEx, etc). That's because the laws about mail were passed long before the Patriot Act when the government still respected the rights of citizens. US mail actually can be subject to search warrant. It appears that the warrant is served on the mail facility and not the sender or recipient (see page 31), HOWEVER, it must be a federal warrant.
Second, it seems pretty clear that these cases are almost entirely restricted to investigations of cases involving the mail itself, such as mail fraud ... this means that this pertains the sender abusing the mail, not the recipient. One's digital data should be treated more like the recipient of mail since the analogy of your digital data is more like you storing things in a lock box in your house. (Recipients of mail generally cannot be prosecuted until they take possession of the mail, obviating this entire issue.)
It should work the same way with your data. If the government wants my info from Twitter, they should be compelled to serve warrants on BOTH Twitter AND me. We should BOTH have the opportunity to inspect the warrant, fight it, etc.
The reason is that the amount of leverage the government has over companies is very high because like Joe Nacchio learned in 2009 - a company has a huge attack surface across a huge array of different facets while the cost of caving to government surveillance demands is relatively small.
For you, though, if your freedom is at risk, there's nothing else exposed for the government to leverage to get you to do what they want. They're already going after everything. So even companies like Google that vigorously defend warrants would have a tough time fighting the government on something the government really wanted to get because there's so much the government can do to strong arm them.
And then of course, most companies don't have the resources to mount a defense like Google could on your behalf, even if they wanted to. There are vanishingly few civically-minded companies that even want to. No one has an interest in protecting your data more than you do, so you should get a warrant just like the mail.
Cauley, citing sources familiar with events, reported the NSA
asserted that Qwest didn't need a court order — or approval under
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (which oversees NSA snooping) — to provide the data.
"They
told (Qwest) they didn't want to [run the proposal by the FISA court]
because FISA might not agree with them," one NSA insider told USA Today.
There is a record of the NSA running afoul of FISA: In July the FISA court ruled that the NSA violated the Fourth Amendment's restriction against unreasonable searches and seizures "on at least one occasion."
Furthermore,
Nacchio felt that it was unclear who would have access to Qwest
customers' information and how that information might be used. Sources
told Cauley that the NSA said government agencies including the FBI, CIA, and DEA might have access to its massive database.
BAR |The U.S. talks about "rule based order" because international law
is not on its side. The 1999 OSCE Charter explains why the Biden
administration would rather make up a new phrase out of whole cloth than
live up to agreements it signed.
In 1999, the United States and the 56 other participating states of
the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) signed a charter in Instanbul that is another intentionally ignored key to understanding the war in Ukraine.
The OSCE is the world’s largest regional security organization.
It claims to engage in political dialogue - that is, a forum for
political dialogue on a wide range of security issues. There are 57 OSCE
member states that cover three continents - North America, Europe and
Asia. The policies the OSCE deliberates over include security issues
such as arms control, terrorism, good governance, energy security, human
trafficking, democratization, media freedom, and the rights of national
minorities that affect more than a billion people. This is what they
say they do, anyway.
But the 1999 Instanbul Charter signed by all the member states says
that countries should be free to choose their own security arrangements
and alliances but specifies that, in doing so, countries "will not
strengthen their security at the expense of the security of other
states."
This charter was raised as the rationale for Russia mobilizing troops
inside its border in response to US and it western allies expanding
NATO eastward since the Cold War and refusing to rule out granting
membership to Ukraine. NATO says it is a defensive alliance that is open
to new members, but can we be honest - because we always are - and
point out that Russia was not doing anything in Ukraine or anywhere else
to put NATO on the defensive. This issue of the charter being violated
was raised by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in February 2022 when he
had a phone conversation with US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken.
"Our western colleagues are simply trying not even to ignore but to
consign to oblivion this key principle of international law agreed in
the Euro-Atlantic space," Lavrov said at the time. "We will insist on an
honest conversation and an honest explanation of why the West doesn't
want to fulfill its obligations or wants to meet them only selectively
to its own advantage."
Lavrov had written to the United States, Canada, and a number of
governments on January 28, 2022, to ask them urgently to explain how
they intended to fulfill this commitment to the principle of
"indivisible security" that they all agreed to in the 1999 OSCE Istanbul
Charter. What Russia received, instead of answers to its questions or
discussions about the West holding up its end of the charter agreement,
were US and NATO demands that Russia pull back troops from inside its
own borders.
This happened in February 2022, right around the same time that Biden
started claiming that Russia was going to invade Ukraine “ANY DAY
NOW!!!” The whole time, however, Russia was trying to get the US to
adhere to the OSCE charter. But it seems that the US was really just
pushing for this war.
pjmedia | According to financial records, Joe Biden has $5.2 million in
“unexplained income” that (by pure coincidence, of course) was acquired
around the same time Hunter Biden was raking in big bucks from foreign
business deals and earmarking “10 percent for the Big Guy.”
“The revelation ties the president even closer to Hunter’s overseas
business dealings – and makes his previous claims that he never
discussed them with his son, even less plausible,” the Daily Mailreports.
“Joe was able to pay the bills after earning millions of dollars
through his and his wife’s companies after he left office as vice
president.”
While some of the Bidens’ income came from book deals and speaking
engagements (imagine people paying to watch Biden speak!), there is a $7
million discrepancy between the income declared on his tax returns and
the income he declared on government transparency reports.
“Some of that difference can be accounted
for with salaries earned by First Lady Jill Biden and other sums not
required on his reports – but still leaves $5.2million earned by Joe’s
company and not listed on his transparency reports,” the Daily Mail‘s
investigation concludes. “The ‘missing millions’ – combined with emails
on Hunter’s abandoned laptop suggesting Joe would have a 10% share in
Hunter’s blockbuster deal with the Chinese – raise a troubling question:
did Joe Biden receive money from the foreign venture?”
Hm … a $5.2 million discrepancy? That’s not small potatoes. What
exactly was Biden trying to hide? Was it his cut of Hunter Biden’s shady
foreign business deals? There are a lot of unanswered questions here.
journal-neo |In what is clearly
becoming a US Administration war on food, the situation is being
dramatically aggravated by USDA demands for chicken farmers to kill off
millions of chickens in now 27 states, allegedly for signs of Bird Flu
infection. The H5N1 Bird Flu “virus” was exposed in 2015 as a complete
hoax. The tests used by the US government inspectors to determine bird
flu now are the same unreliable PCR tests used for COVID in humans. The
test is worthless for that. US Government officials estimate that since
first cases were “tested” positive in February, at least 23 million
chickens and turkeys have been culled to allegedly contain the spread of
a disease whose cause could be the incredibly unsanitary cage
confinement of mass industrial chicken CAFOs. The
upshot is sharp rises in prices of egg by some 300% since November and
severe loss of chicken protein sources for American consumers at a time
when overall cost of living inflation is at a 40-year high.
To make matters
worse, California and Oregon are again declaring water emergency amid a
multi-year drought and are sharply reducing irrigation water to farmers
in California, who produce the major share of US fresh vegetables and
fruits. That drought has since spread to cover most agriculture land
west of the Mississippi River, meaning much of US farmland.
US food security is
under threat as never before since the 1930s Dust Bowl, and the Biden
Administration “Green Agenda” is doing everything to make the impact
worse for its citizens.
In recent comments US
President Biden remarked without elaborating that the US food shortages
are “going to be real.” His administration also is deaf to pleas of
farmer organizations to allow cultivation of some 4 million acres of
farmland ordered left out of cultivation for “environmental reasons.
However this is not the only part of the world where crisis in food is
developing.
Global Disaster
These deliberate Washington actions are taking
place at a time a global series of food disasters create the worst food
supply situation in decades, perhaps since the World War II end.
In the EU, which is
significantly dependent on Russia, Belarus and Ukraine for feed grains,
fertilizers and energy, sanctions are making the covid-induced food
shortages dramatically worse. The EU uses its foolish Green Agenda as an
excuse to forbid the Italian government from ignoring EU rules limiting
state aid to farmers. In Germany, the new Green Party Agriculture
Minister Cem Özdemir, who wants to phase out traditional agriculture
allegedly for its “greenhouse gas” emissions, has given farmers who want
to grow more food a cold response. The EU faces many of the same
disastrous threats to food security as the USA and even more dependence
on Russian energy which is about to be suicidally sanctioned by the EU.
The major food
producing countries in South America, especially Argentina and Paraguay,
are in the midst of a severe drought attributed to a periodic La Niña
Pacific anomaly that has crippled crops there. Sanctions on Belarus and
Russia fertilizers are threatening Brazil crops, aggravated with
bottlenecks in ocean transport.
China just announced
that owing to severe rains in 2021, this year’s winter wheat crop could
be the worst in its history. The CCP also has instituted severe measures
to get farmers to expand cultivation to non-farm lands with little
reported effect. According to a report by China watcher Erik Mertz, “In
China’s Jilin, Heilongjiang, and Liaoning provinces, officials have
reported one in three farmers lack sufficient seed and fertilizer
supplies to begin planting for the optimum spring window…According
to sources within these areas, they are stuck waiting on seed and
fertilizer which have been imported to China from overseas – and which
are stuck in the cargo ships sitting off the coast of Shanghai.”
Shanghai, the world’s largest container port, has been under a bizarre
“Zero Covid” total quarantine for more than four weeks with no end in
sight. In a desperate bid by the CCP “ordering” increased food
production, local CP officials throughout China have begun transforming
basketball courts and even roads into cropland. The
food situation in China is forcing the country to import far more at a
time of global shortages, driving world grain and food prices even
higher.
Africa is also
severely impacted by the US-imposed sanctions and war ending food and
fertilizer exports from Russia and Ukraine. Thirty five African
countries get food from Russia and Ukraine. Twenty two African countries
import fertilizer from there. Alternatives are seriously lacking as
prices soar and supply collapses. Famine is predicted.
David M. Beasley,
executive director of the UN World Food Program, declared recently on
the global food outlook, “There is no precedent even close to this since
World War II.”
moonofalabama | The Americans are now crying ‘uncle’ about Russia’s hypersonic
weapons. After the most recent flight test of the scramjet-powered
Zircon cruise missile, the Washington Post on July 11 carried a Nato statement of complaint:
"Russia’s new hypersonic missiles are highly destabilizing
and pose significant risks to security and stability across the
Euro-Atlantic area," the statement said.
At the same time, talks have begun on the ‘strategic dialog’
between the US and Russia, as agreed at the June 16 Geneva Summit of
the two presidents. The two sides had already agreed to extend the START
treaty on strategic weapons that has been in effect for a decade, but,
notably, it was the US side that initiated the summit—perhaps spurred by
the deployment of the hypersonic, intercontinental-range Avangard
missile back in 2019, when US weapons inspectors were present, as per
START, to inspect the Avangard as it was lowered into its missile silos.
But what exactly is a hypersonic missile—and why is it suddenly such a big deal?
We all remember when Vladimir Putin announced these wonder weapons
in his March 2018 address to his nation [and the world]. The response
from the US media was loud guffaws about ‘CGI’ cartoons and Russian
‘wishcasting.’ Well, neither Nato nor the Biden team are guffawing now.
Like the five stages of grief, the initial denial phase has slowly given
way to acceptance of reality—as Russia continues deploying already
operational missiles, like the Avangard and the air-launched Kinzhal,
now in Syria, as well as finishing up successful state trials of the
Zircon, which is to be operationally deployed aboard surface ships and
submarines, starting in early 2022. And in fact, there are a whole slew
of new Russian hypersonic missiles in the pipeline, some of them much
smaller and able to be carried by ordinary fighter jets, like the Gremlin aka GZUR.
The word hypersonic itself means a flight regime above the speed of Mach 5. That is simple enough, but it is not only about speed.
More important is the ability to MANEUVER at those high speeds, in
order to avoid being shot down by the opponent’s air defenses. A
ballistic missile can go much faster—an ICBM flies at about 6 to 7
km/s, which is about 15,000 mph, about M 25 high in the atmosphere.
[Mach number varies with temperature, so it is not an absolute
measure of speed. The same 15,000 mph would only equal M 20 at sea
level, where the temperature is higher and the speed of sound is also
higher.]
But a ballistic missile flies on a straightforward
trajectory, just like a bullet fired from a barrel of a gun—it cannot
change direction at all, hence the word ballistic.
This means that ballistic missiles can, in theory, be
tracked by radar and shot down with an interceptor missile. It should be
noted here that even this is a very tough task, despite the
straight-line ballistic trajectory. Such an interception has never been
demonstrated in combat, not even with intermediate-range ballistic
missiles [IRBMs], of the kind that the DPRK fired off numerous times,
sailing above the heads of the US Pacific Fleet in the Sea of Japan,
consisting of over a dozen Aegis-class Ballistic Missile Defense ships, designed specifically for the very purpose of shooting down IRBMs.
Such an interception would have been a historic demonstration
of military technology—on the level of the shock and awe of Hiroshima!
But no interception was ever attempted by those ‘ballistic missile
defense’ ships, spectating as they were, right under the flight paths of
the North Korean rockets!
The bottom line is that hitting even a straight-line ballistic
missile has never been successfully demonstrated in actual practice. It
is a very hard thing to do.
But let’s lower our sights a little from ICBMs and IRBMs [and even
subsonic cruise missiles] to a quite ancient missile technology, the
Soviet-era Scud, first introduced into service in 1957! A recent case
with a Houthi Scud missile fired at Saudi Arabia in December 2017 shows
just how difficult missile interception really is:
At around 9 p.m…a loud bang shook the domestic terminal at Riyadh’s King Khalid International Airport.
‘There was an explosion at the airport,’ a man said in a video taken
moments after the bang. He and others rushed to the windows as emergency
vehicles streamed onto the runway.
Another video, taken from the tarmac, shows the emergency vehicles at
the end of the runway. Just beyond them is a plume of smoke, confirming the blast and indicating a likely point of impact.
The Houthi missile, identified as an Iranian-made Burqan-2 [a copy of
a North Korean Scud, itself a copy of a Chinese copy of the original
Russian Scud from the 1960s], flew over 600 miles before hitting the Riyadh international airport. The US-made Patriot missile defense system fired FIVE interceptor shots at the missile—all of them missed!
Laura Grego, a missile expert at the Union of Concerned
Scientists, expressed alarm that Saudi defense batteries had fired five
times at the incoming missile.
‘You shoot five times at this missile and they all miss?
That's shocking,’ she said. ‘That's shocking because this system is
supposed to work.’
Ms Grego knows what she’s talking about—she holds a physics doctorate
from Caltech and has worked in missile technology for many years. Not
surprisingly, American officials first claimed the Patriot missiles had
done their job and shot the Scud down. This was convincingly debunked in
the extensive expert analysis that ran in the NYT: Did American Missile Defense Fail in Saudi Arabia?
This was not the first time that Patriot ‘missile defense’ against this supposedly obsolete missile failed spectacularly:
On February 25, 1991, an Iraqi Scud hit the barracks in
Dharan, Saudi Arabia, killing 28 soldiers from the U.S. Army's 14’th
Quartermaster Detachment.
A government investigation revealed that the failed intercept at
Dhahran had been caused by a software error in the system's handling of
timestamps. The Patriot missile battery at Dhahran had been in operation
for 100 hours, by which time the system's internal clock had drifted by
one-third of a second. Due to the missile's speed this was equivalent
to a miss distance of 600 meters.
Whether this explanation is factual or not, the Americans’ initial
claims of wild success in downing nearly all of the 80 Iraqi Scuds
launched, was debunked by MIT physicist Theodore Postol, who concluded that no missiles were in fact intercepted!
defenseone | The trouble is, the new weapons keep failing in tests, sometimes in
fairly rudimentary ways that don’t lend themselves to evaluating and
improving the design. The truncated development strategy seems to
require a faith that American aerospace engineering can overwhelm all
the usual difficulties by force of sheer élan. The results turn out
differently.
Now, if you think I’ve just described the last few
years of U.S. efforts to build and fly hypersonic gliders and cruise
missiles, you’re right. In December, for example, the Air Force’s
Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW) failed in testing for
the third time running in 2021, not even leaving the wing of the B-52
bomber carrying it. ARRW, remarkably, is supposed to become an
operational weapon by 2023. Nor is it the only developmental hypersonic
missile with a troubled test record.
But
I could just as easily have been recalling U.S. efforts to build new
ballistic missile defense systems in the 1990s. It’s little remembered
now, but BMD got off to a rocky start. After repeated disappointments, a
trio of Pentagon agencies did something perhaps uncharacteristically
forward-looking: it assembled a panel of seasoned experts to examine the
situation, under the leadership of retired Air Force general Larry
Welch. It even allowed the panel’s reports to be released to the
public.
The first report of the Welch Panel
made something of a splash at the time. It’s worth recalling its frank
account of the self-defeating nature of short timetables in complex
technology development efforts:
“These programs are pursuing very
aggressive schedules, but these schedules are not supported by the state
of planning and testing…the perceived urgency of the need for these
systems has led to high levels of risk that have resulted in delayed
deployments…
“[Failures] were caused by poor design, test
planning, and preflight testing deficiencies; poor fabrication; poor
management; and lack of rigorous government oversight.
“The
tendency of the government and program managers to trivialize the causes
of these costly failures, combined with the aggressive schedule… has
led to a ‘rush to failure.’”
The report’s main recommendation—to put all BMD programs on “realistic schedules”—met with some predictable resistance,
and we can’t be sure how much influence any single report or expert
panel may have had. But it was surely vindicated after one of the most
troubled BMD efforts shifted to a longer timeline. Prototypes of the THAAD system
had produced four consecutive failures in hit-to-kill intercept tests
by the time of the first Welch report in February 1998. After another
two out of four test failures by August 1999, the program entered a new
phase of development. Flight tests did not resume until 2005, but have
yielded consistent successes since then—at least when the target missile
has not failed. The first operational THAAD battery, originally
scheduled to deploy in 1996, appeared in 2008.
We also don’t know
if all of the Welch Panel’s judgments about the shortcomings of missile
defense systems under development in the 1990s would apply equally to
today’s hypersonic weapons projects. But an April 2021 report from Congress’s Government Accountability Office sounds some unhappily familiar notes.
Most
of the efforts to develop these new missiles, GAO found, use a new
development authority that bypasses regular DOD “acquisition and
requirement development policies and processes.” These projects aim at
building an initial prototype within six months and deploying an initial
capability within five years. Among the many problems facing the
development of hypersonic missiles, GAO noted, were “immature
technologies and aggressive schedules.”
The lesson should be
clear: if it’s genuinely important to deploy these new missile types,
the Pentagon should adopt development schedules conducive to their
success. If it won’t do so, Congress should ask what drives it to repeat
the errors of the past.
NYTimes | The official story was clear: Saudi forces shot down
a ballistic missile fired by Yemen’s Houthi rebel group last month at
Saudi Arabia’s capital, Riyadh. It was a victory for the Saudis and for
the United States, which supplied the Patriot missile defense system.
“Our system knocked the missile out of the air,”
President Trump said the next day from Air Force One en route to Japan,
one of the 14 countries that use the system. “That’s how good we are.
Nobody makes what we make, and now we’re selling it all over the world.”
But an analysis of photos and videos of the strike posted to social media suggests that story may be wrong.
Instead, evidence analyzed by a research team of
missile experts appears to show the missile’s warhead flew unimpeded
over Saudi defenses and nearly hit its target, Riyadh’s airport. The
warhead detonated so close to the domestic terminal that customers
jumped out of their seats.
Saudi officials did not respond to a request for
comment. Some U.S. officials cast doubt on whether the Saudis hit any
part of the incoming missile, saying there was no evidence that it had.
Instead, they said, the incoming missile body and warhead may have come
apart because of its sheer speed and force.
The findings show that the Iranian-backed
Houthis, once a ragtag group of rebels, have grown powerful enough to
strike major targets in Saudi Arabia, possibly shifting the balance of
their years-long war. And they underscore longstanding doubts about
missile defense technology, a centerpiece of American and allied
national defense strategies, particularly against Iran and North Korea.
“Governments lie about the effectiveness of
these systems. Or they’re misinformed,” said Jeffrey Lewis, an analyst
who led the research team, which shared its findings with The New York
Times. “And that should worry the hell out of us.”
It's like all the media forgot that they themselves
were reporting on the neo-Nazi's in Ukraine as far back as eight years
ago.
In fact, it’s like all the MSM (*) outlets were told what to say
back then, and what precisely opposite things
to say now.
Ukraine First Minister Alexei Goncharuk speaks at the performance of Neonazi rock band "Sokyra Peruna" known for their Holocaust denial and antisemite songs. October 2019. The band has extremely close links with Azov and the Misanthropic Division. pic.twitter.com/Dgs3hYAkee
EUROPEAN "JUSTICE"
The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg ignored ALL 689
COMPLAINTS filed against Kiev for its slow motion killing of more than
14,000 civilians in the Luhansk People’s Republic in the past 8 years.
haaretz | But none of this is surprising,
considering the fashion in which Kolomoisky built his business empire.
He now has to fight both to maintain it and for an opportunity to expand
in the future, and he seems to be relishing the challenge. What has
astonished even those who know him well is how the oligarch – who
previously preferred to operate far from the public eye – has taken to
his new, exposed role. In the first week of his governorship in April,
he held a press conference in which he made no bones about blaming Putin
for Ukraine’s crisis.
In his colorful, often expletive-laden monologues, he said the Russian
president was a “psychopath,” a “schizophrenic of short stature” who is
“completely inadequate, totally insane. His messianic drive to recreate
the Russian empire of 1913 or the U.S.S.R. of 1991 could plunge the
world into catastrophe.” It became a personal feud between the outspoken
businessman and the former KGB officer. Putin responded a day later, at
a press conference in Moscow, calling Kolomoisky a “unique crook” and
questioning the motives of the Kiev government to appoint “such a
scoundrel. Now this crook is appointed governor of Dnepropetrovsk. No
wonder the people are dissatisfied.”
To add spice, Putin told reporters how Kolomoisky had allegedly
swindled “our oligarch,” Roman Abramovich (the London-based, Jewish
owner of Chelsea Football Club), in a multimillion dollar business deal.
Playing oligarchs off each other is a sport in which Putin is a
recognized grandmaster. But in Kolomoisky he is up against a formidable
foe, one who is, for now, outside his reach. And when the Kremlin made
him a target of their propaganda, they only added to his popularity in
Ukraine.
Kipperman is not worried by the feud with Moscow. “Putin is paying the
separatists, who are terrorists and criminals – this will bring about
his downfall, while we have stabilized the situation in Ukraine.”
After years of remaining in the shadows, Kolomoisky seems to be
enjoying his newfound notoriety. Unlike other oligarchs who, once they
made their fortunes, tried to construct suave new personas for
themselves – learning English and acquiring a wardrobe of tailored suits
– Kolomoisky is still happy to conduct his business in a T-shirt and
sweatpants, and is not a habitué of fancy restaurants. He also disdains
gadgets, proudly owning an old Nokia cellphone on which he makes his
calls.
It is fascinating to compare Kolomoisky with another Ukrainian-Jewish
billionaire, Victor Pinchuk, who a month ago held the annual Yalta
European Strategy conference of his private foundation. Statesmen such
as Tony Blair, academic superstars and journalists rubbed shoulders in
an ornate arts palace and heard lectures on the future of Europe, while
Kolomoisky was cloistered with his inner circle in smoke-filled rooms
drinking vodka. Pinchuk is the cosmopolitan, suave oligarch who hangs
out with international celebrities such as the Clintons and Elton John,
and is proud of having featured on Time Magazine’s 100 most influential
people list. Kolomoisky, on the other hand, prefers to stick with his
reputation as a street fighter.
‘Don’t go anywhere’
Neither has his new position made him give up his colorful and blunt
way of talking. Anonymous sources leaked a phone conversation between
him and Oleg Tsarov, a pro-Russia parliamentarian who had fled to
Moscow. In it, Kolomoisky, swearing and cursing throughout, told Tsarov
that following the death of a member of Dnipropetrovsk’s Jewish
community – a militia member killed in the fighting in the eastern city
of Mariupol – a $1 million reward had been put on Tsarov’s head. “They
will be looking for you everywhere,” he says in the tape. “Don’t go
anywhere.” Kolomoisky had no problem confirming that the tape, most
likely recorded by Russian intelligence, was authentic, though he
claimed he wasn’t threatening Tsarov.
Though not religiously observant, Kolomoisky has been proud of his
Jewish identity. Together with fellow oligarch Gennadiy Bogolyubov, he
has built the largest Jewish community center in the world in central
Dnipropetrovsk – a massive complex that includes a synagogue, library,
conference halls, three hotels, kosher restaurants and a supermarket. He
served as the president of the one of the organizations competing to
represent Ukraine Jewry – the United Jewish Community of Ukraine – and
as president of the European Council of Jewish Communities. The center’s
seven connected menorah towers stick out on Dnipropetrovsk’s skyline
like a middle finger to the Communists and Nazis who tried to
exterminate the local Jewish community, today prospering in a country
that knew so many centuries of persecution and pogroms.
He has been mentioned as a possible buyer of the Maccabi Tel Aviv
soccer club and was an investor in the short-lived JN1 cable news
station, which offered news on Israel and the Jewish world. Some of the
journalists who were employed there are now working for a new news
channel launched by Kolomoisky – Ukraine Today, which has been set up
specifically to counter the Kremlin-directed Russia Today network, which
is extremely hostile to Ukraine.
Despite repeated warnings of anti-Semitic attacks in Ukraine following
the revolution, many Jewish leaders have come out in support of the new
Kiev government. Dozens of prominent Jewish figures signed an open
letter to Putin in March, calling upon him to stop interfering in
Ukrainian politics and urging him to refrain from accusing the new
government of being anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi.
But while Kolomoisky is one of the leaders of this surge of Ukrainian
patriotism among the country’s Jews, his prominence has still made him
subject to criticism. Not all Jewish leaders are happy with the role he
has played in recent months. “Jews shouldn’t be involved in politics in
such a way,” says one community leader, who asked not to be named.
“There is enough anti-Semitism here without making us into more obvious
targets.”
“Putin is here to stay,” said another. “We don’t have to pick fights
with him.” Yuri Kipperman defended his partner, though, noting, “The
Jewish leadership helped to make sure the elections took place safely.
We were doing our duty.”
WaPo | Elon
Musk acquired Twitter for $44 billion on Monday, the company announced,
giving the world’s richest person command of a highly influential
social media site that serves as a platform for political leaders, a
sounding board for experts across industries and an information hub for
millions of everyday users.
The
acquisition followed weeks of evangelizing on the necessity of “free
speech,” as the Tesla CEO seized on Twitter’s role as the “de facto town
square” and took umbrage with content moderation efforts he views as an
escalation toward censorship. He said he sees Twitter as essential to
the functioning of democracy and said the economics are not a concern.
Ownership
of Twitter gives Musk power over hugely consequential societal and
political issues, perhaps most significantly the ban on former president
Donald Trump that the site enacted in response to the Jan. 6 Capitol
riot.
Under
the terms of the deal, Twitter will become a private company and
shareholders will receive $54.20 per share, the company said in a news
release. The deal is expected to close this year.
“Free
speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the
digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are
debated,” Musk said in the release. “I also want to make Twitter better
than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the
algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and
authenticating all humans.”
“Twitter
has tremendous potential — I look forward to working with the company
and the community of users to unlock it,” he added.
jonathanturley | Wikipedia editors are under fire this week for removing the entry for Rosemont Seneca Partners,
the investment company connected to Hunter Biden and his alleged
multimillion dollar influence peddling schemes. The site bizarrely
claimed that the company was “not notable.” The timing itself is notable
given the new disclosure
that Hunter Biden’s business partner, Eric Schwerin, made at least 19
visits to the White House and other official locations between 2009 and
2015. That included a meeting with then-Vice President Joe Biden despite
Biden’s repeated claim that he knew nothing about his son’s business dealings. Schwerin was the president of Rosemont Seneca.
Wikipedia has been accused of raw bias in removing the entry at a
time when interest in the company is at its peak, including the possibility of an indictment
of Hunter Biden over his financial dealings. Rosemont Seneca is one of
the most searched terms for those trying to understand the background
on the Biden business operations.
Yet, an editor “AlexEng” wrote that the company was simply “not
notable” — an absurd claim reminiscent of the recent claim by Atlantic
Magazine’s writer Anne Applebaum that she did not cover the scandal
because it simply was “not interesting.”
Alex wrote: “This organization is only mentioned in connection with
its famous founders, Hunter Biden and Christopher Heinz.” That itself is
an odd statement. It is mentioned as one of the key conduits of alleged
influence peddling money. Alex added that “keeping it around” ran the
risk of the page becoming “a magnet for conspiracy theories about Hunter
Biden.” It is that last comment that I found most concerning as part of
this decision.
Any Wikipedia page could be a magnet for conspiracy theories,
including the page on Hunter Biden himself. The fact is that this is a
real company with real dealings that are the subject of a real criminal
investigation. Indeed, various Republican members have already pledged
to conduct investigations into this and other companies if they secure
either house of Congress after the midterm elections.
So Wikipedia killed it just as a United States Attorney is drilling
down on financial dealings of Hunter Biden, including money received
from foreign sources through Rosemont Seneca.
lewrockwell | I have argued in this column and elsewhere that the Biden
administration sanctions imposed on Russian and American persons and
businesses are profoundly unconstitutional because they are imposed by
executive fiat rather than by legislation and because the sanctions
constitute either the seizure of property without a warrant or the
taking of property without due process.
When the feds seize a yacht from a person whom they claim may have
financed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s rise to power, they are
doing so in direct violation of the Due Process Clause of the Fifth
Amendment.
Similarly, when they freeze Russian assets in American banks, they
engage in a seizure, and seizures can only constitutionally be done with
a search warrant based on probable cause of crime.
As well, when the feds interfere with contract rights by prohibiting
compliance with lawful contracts, that, too, implicates due process and
can only be done constitutionally after a jury verdict in the
government’s favor, at a trial at which the feds have proved fault.
As if to anticipate these constitutional roadblocks to its
interference with free commercial choices, Congress enacted the
International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 and the Magnitsky
Act of 2016. These constitutional monstrosities purport to give the
president the power to declare persons and entities to be violators of
human rights and, by that mere executive declaration alone, to punish
them without trial.
These laws turn the Fourth and Fifth Amendments on their heads by
punishing first and engaging in a perverse variant of due process later.
How perverse? These laws require that if you want your seized property
back, you must prove that you are not a human rights violator.
As if to run even further away from constitutional norms, a group of
legal academics began arguing last week that the property seized from
Russians is not really owned by human beings, but by the Russian
government. And, this crazy argument goes, since the Russian government
is not a person, there is no warrant or due process requirement;
therefore, the feds can convert the assets they have seized and frozen
to their own use.
To these academics — who reject property ownership as a moral right
and exalt government aggression as a moral good — the argument devolves
around the meaning of the word “person.” The Fourth and Fifth Amendments
protect every “person” and all “people,” not just Americans.
And in American jurisprudence, “person” means both human beings and
artificial persons — corporations and governments capable of owning
property. Property ownership is defined by the right to use, alienate
and exclude. Only persons can exercise those rights.
Madison and his colleagues clearly sought to protect property rights
from government aggression, no matter the legal status of the owner. We
know this from the judicial opinions involving foreign property that
preceded and followed the ratification of the Fifth Amendment. If this
were not so, then nothing could prevent the feds from seizing and
converting the property of states or local governments or international
religious institutions to federal use.
War is the health of the state and the graveyard of liberty. The drug
war was a disaster for freedom. The war in Ukraine will be so as well,
only if we permit it.
indianpunchline | This is where the defeat in Donbass turns into a climactic event
calling into question the entire US narrative on Ukraine — NATO
expansion, European security, and dialogue with Russia — and, of course,
the fixation about Vladimir Putin’s leadership of Russia.
A
poll published Thursday by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public
Affairs Research shows Americans’ desire to get involved has waned
somewhat. Only 32% say the U.S. should have a major role in the
conflict, down from 40% last month. An additional 49% say the US should
have a minor role.
While speaking in Delhi, Johnson all but
discarded Biden’s narrative. Instead, he called for “setting out a
vision for the future of Ukraine in the security architecture of Europe.
Where does Ukraine fit in now?”
Johnson said Ukraine needs to be able to answer that question
eventually — “what the Ukrainians want eventually.” Interestingly, he
didn’t use the word “Ukrainian government.”
Johnson
dilated on “a collection of security guarantees from like-minded
countries — security commitments about what we can do to back them up
with weaponry, with training, and with intelligence sharing.” But he
quickly added that this cannot be “like an Article 5 (NATO) guarantee.”
Instead, he said, Ukraine should have “deterrence by denial.”
Per
Johnson’s vision, Ukraine’s NATO membership is inconceivable. Britain
anticipates new facts on the ground. Johnson appeared to recognise the
emergent political realities as the Russian juggernaut relentlessly
“grinds” Kiev’s war machine to dust.
mtracey | Another severe difficulty of Ling’s, which raises fundamental
questions about his ability to cover his declared beat, is recognizing
what “disinformation” even is. Maybe Ling missed it, but earlier this
month Ken Dilanian of NBC News — one of the most faithful mouthpieces of
the US national security state — went on air and openly revealed
that the US Government is mounting a full-fledged “information warfare”
campaign related to Ukraine. A key component of which is feeding fake
information to the media. Dilanian cited one particular fake story that had been deliberately planted to journalists by intelligence officials — despite those officials knowing it was fake. Weirdly though, all the newly emboldened, “disinformation” debunking journalists like Ling don’t seem to regard that campaign of unconcealed information warfare as within their job’s purview.
Ling also appears to have missed a recent revelation reported at CNN
of all places, in which an anonymous “Western” official is quoted
saying this about the current PR activities of Ukraine government
officials: “It’s a war — everything they do and say publicly is designed
to help them win the war. Every public statement is an information
operation, every interview, every Zelensky appearance broadcast is an
information operation.” And yet despite the admitted existence of this
“information operation,” Ling is gleeful to participate in it, by
giddily spreading around the Ukraine officials’ photos, videos, and
claims without a shred of independent corroboration — all under the
veneer of Ling’s tough, adversarial journalism. Russia is obviously
engaged in its own “information operation,” but so too is Ukraine. Will
Ling report on himself next as a “disinformation” culprit?
Of
course he won’t, because despite his bogus pretensions, Ling has made it
perfectly clear that he has no problem at all with “disinformation” as
such. In fact, he actively supports disinformation tactics when
it’s in service of his desired political objectives. He publicly
demanded that the “intelligence service” of his own government, Canada,
ought to be “doing a lot more”
to proactively counter Russia by utilizing more robust information
warfare techniques. So that’s Justin Ling for you: a “disinformation”
reporter who loves disinformation.
If you want to understand why
there is so little deviation today from the burgeoning pro-war
consensus, it’s got a lot to do with media functionaries like Ling. Most
journalists would be utterly mortified to be accused, in a “Serious”
outlet like Foreign Policy, of abetting a “Russian
disinformation operation.” And their fear would probably be rational:
this could genuinely be a career-killer, particularly in the current
war-fevered climate. All bets are off in terms of what retribution
tactics are potentially on the table. They could be socially shunned,
professionally ostracized, and have their material well-being seriously
imperiled. The self-appointed “disinformation” pontificators such as
Ling, posturing as these tenacious public-spirited watchdogs, really
could destroy them.
Ling is an especially blatant joke and fraud,
but the media industry is increasingly dominated by creeps like him.
Fortunately, they can’t do much to me — except to provide occasional
amusement at how pathetic they are.
guardian | The past week furnished a grim glimpse of the
future that awaits if Putin is able to continue to wage war with
impunity, commit more heinous crimes, threaten nuclear and chemical
blackmail and trash the UN charter. Drastically downgrading its growth
forecasts due to the conflict, the International Monetary Fund predicted
global economic fragmentation, rising debt and social unrest.
David Malpass, head of the World Bank, said a “human catastrophe” loomed as an unprecedented, estimated 37% rise in food prices,
caused by war-related disruption to supplies, pushed millions into
poverty, increased malnutrition, and reduced funding for education and
healthcare for the least well-off.
More than 5
million people have fled Ukraine in two months, and more will follow,
exacerbating an international migration emergency that extends from
Afghanistan to the Sahel. In drought-hit east Africa, the World Food
Programme says 20 million people may face starvation this year. Putin’s war did not create the drought, but the UN warns it could hurt efforts to reduce global heating, thereby triggering further displacement and forced migration.
The
broader, negative political impact of the war, should it rage on
indefinitely, is almost incalculable. The UN’s future as an
authoritative global forum, lawmaker and peacekeeper is in jeopardy, as
more than 200 former officials warned Guterres last week. At risk, too, is the credibility of the international court of justice, whose injunction to withdraw was scorned by Putin, and the entire system of war crimes prosecutions.
In
terms of democratic norms and human rights, the full or partial
subjugation of Ukraine would spell disaster for the international
rules-based order – and a triumph for autocrats everywhere. What message
would it send, for example, to China over Taiwan, or indeed to Putin as
he covets the vulnerable Baltic republics? Islamist terrorists who now furtively plot to exploit the west’s Ukraine distraction would relish such a victory for violence.
Failure
to stop the war, rescue Ukraine and punish Russia’s rogue regime to the
fullest extent possible would come at an especially high price for
Europe and the EU. In prospect is a second cold war with permanent Nato bases on Russia’s borders,
massively increased defence spending, an accelerating nuclear arms
race, unceasing cyber and information warfare, endemic energy shortages,
rocketing living costs, and more French-style, Russian-backed rightwing
populist extremism.
In short, the dawn of a new age of instability. Why on earth would politicians such as America’s Joe Biden, Germany’s Olaf Scholz,
and France’s Emmanuel Macron tolerate so fraught and dangerous a future
when, by taking a more robust stand now, they might prevent much of it
from materialising? By supposedly avoiding risks today, they ensure a
much riskier tomorrow.
BAR |The U.S. propaganda victory over Russia will do Joe Biden and the
democrats little good. Their willingness to act on their promises and
meet the people's needs will be the deciding factors in determining
their political fate.
Biden’s actions aren’t very surprising. He was the Ukraine point
person after the Barack Obama coup in 2014. He was always one of the
most hawkish democrats and came into the presidency with Antony Blinken,
Victoria Nuland and the same cast of characters who first violated
Ukraine’s sovereignty. He hoped to instigate Russia and kill the
NordStreamII pipeline and sanction Russia. He didn’t expect the full
incursion that he spent months saying would happen.
Now he is hoisted on his own petard, trying to bully other nations
into condemning Russia when it isn’t in their interests to do so, and
causing world wide suffering in a futile effort to destroy Russia’s
economy. Sanctions against Russia have increased fuel prices all over
the world. Disruptions in wheat production will reduce Ukraine’s harvest
and decrease supplies in places that had no connection with this ginned
up conflict. The anti-Russian propaganda is working but the pro-Biden
effort is not, hence the public disapproval.
Millions of Americans are now convinced that Putin is evil and
Zelensky is good, but they still have doubts about their own president.
The corporate media pro-Biden propaganda said that he was the most
progressive president since Franklin Roosevelt and had cut child poverty
in half. Now the child tax credit is gone, Build Back Better is up in
the air, and promises to relieve student loan debt are a distant memory.
Biden and his team think that spin about “Putin’s price hikes” will
help to minimize political damage but the polls are an indication of a
sour national mood.
Biden is mistaken if he thinks that Putin hatred is enough to save
his and the democratic party’s political fortunes. They will sink or
swim based on how well they meet needs here at home. Right now, public
money that we’re told can’t be used for a child tax credit is going to
the military industrial complex to “save” Ukraine.
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