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The FBI’s Honeypot Phones Were More Widely Distributed in the U.S. Than Previously Thought

One of the weirder stories from last year involved a gargantuan FBI honeypot operation designed to catch crooks all over the world. According to Motherboard, that operation had a bigger imprint in the U.S. than originally believed.

During “Operation Trojan Shield,” the feds used a secret relationship with an encrypted phone company, called Anom, which sold devices exclusively to career criminals looking for a secure way to communicate with one another. The product’s developer, who had previously been busted for drug trafficking, agreed to act as a high-level federal informant and for at least two years sold devices to criminals while also secretly cooperating with authorities. Meanwhile the FBI, along with its international partners, intercepted all of the communications, which allowed them to capture evidence of widespread criminal malfeasance on a global scale.

It made for one helluva weird story when the bureau finally revealed what it had been up to last June, and “Shield” led to the arrest of hundreds of alleged criminals in countries all around the world—many of which are accused of using the phones to organize drug trafficking and other forms of organized crime. The arrests continue to this day.

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‘Strange Metal’ Discovered by Scientists Could Lead to Understanding of Three-Decade-Long Mystery

So-called “strange metals” do not behave in ways typical to other metals when they are heated or cooled, deviating from the usual rules of physics.Scientists have discovered a new “strange metal” with a behaviour they do not seem to understand. The moment occurred when looking into bosonic systems, where such behaviour had not been spotted before.The new research was published in Nature on Wednesday, titled “Signatures of a strange metal in a bosonic system”. The scientists discovered a never-before-seen type of metal behaviour in the system, where an electrical charge is not carried by electrons, as usual, but by so-called Cooper pairs.Cooper pairs are bosons — particular kinds of subatomic particles. Electrons are fermions, another kind of such particles.

“We have these two fundamentally different types of particles whose behaviours converge around a mystery”, Jim Valles, a professor of physics at Brown and an author of the new study, said, as cited by The Independent. “What this says is that any theory to explain strange metal behaviour can’t be specific to either type of particle. It needs to be more fundamental than that”.The new research could open the door to solving a mystery that has been troubling scientists for almost three decades, since cuprates — a class of materials that tend to behave in ways different to other metals — were discovered.These “strange materials” do not appear to display the same characteristics as other other metals when they are heated. Normally, their resistance goes up until the point when it becomes constant. Cuprates, however, do not follow these rules, and scientists are still struggling to figure out why.

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Are You A “Terrorist”? Take This 50 Question Quiz And Find Out!

Could you be the kind of person that the government is looking for?  The U.S. Justice Department has just announced that it will be creating a brand new unit “to counter domestic terrorism”, and they are going to need something to show for all of the time, money and energy that they are going to be putting into this new project.  You may be tempted to think that they will be going after the people that have rioted and burned buildings hundreds of times all across this nation over the past couple of years, but that simply is not going to happen.  Instead, they are telling us that this new unit will specifically target “extremist anti-government and anti-authority ideologies”.  So if you have been critical of the Biden administration, any of our government agencies, or any of our top public health officials, you could be in really big trouble.

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Cop Who Killed Ashli Babbitt Cleared Without Formal Law Enforcement Interview

According to a report from RealClearInvestigations, U.S. Capitol Police Lt. Michael Byrd was cleared of any wrongdoing following the Ashli Babbitt shooting without being forced to conduct a formal interview with law enforcement.

Byrd made a point to note that he had been investigated by several law enforcement agencies and was exonerated by the federal government for his actions when he appeared on “NBC Nightly News” with Lester Holt.

“There’s an investigative process and I was cleared by the DOJ, and FBI and Metropolitan Police,” he told Holt this past August.

According to several sources and documents reviewed by RealClearInvestigations, Byrd never conducted a formal interview with any law enforcement agency.

Byrd did answer questions about the shooting from Holt, alleging that he gave Babbitt a warning before firing. but these details were likely never shared with investigators because Byrd refused to answer their questions.

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Why did scientists suppress the lab-leak theory?

In August 2007 there was an outbreak of foot-and-mouth virus on a farm in Surrey. It was a few miles from the world’s leading reference laboratory for identifying outbreaks of foot and mouth. Nobody thought this was a coincidence and sure enough a leaking pipe at the laboratory was soon found to be the source: a drainage contractor had worked at the lab and then at the farm.

In December 2019 there was an outbreak in China of a novel bat-borne SARS-like coronavirus a few miles from the world’s leading laboratory for collecting, studying and manipulating novel bat-borne SARS-like coronaviruses. We were assured by leading scientists in China, the US and the UK that this really was a coincidence, even when the nine closest relatives of the new virus turned up in the freezer of the laboratory in question, at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Now we know what those leading scientists really thought. Emails exchanged between them after a conference call on 1 February 2020, and only now forced into the public domain by Republicans in the US Congress, show that they not only thought the virus might have leaked from a lab, but they also went much further in private. They thought the genome sequence of the new virus showed a strong likelihood of having been deliberately manipulated or accidentally mutated in the lab. Yet later they drafted an article for a scientific journal arguing that the suggestion not just of a manipulated virus, but even of an accidental spill, could be confidently dismissed and was a crackpot conspiracy theory.

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