Tag: darpa

GMO Tomato Project Funded by Gates Foundation and U.S. Taxpayers Hits Roadblock

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is funding research to genetically engineer tomatoes to be able to disrupt the reproductive cycle of the whitefly, a common insect that damages tomato plants, Jon Fleetwood reported on Substack.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) — a division of the U.S. Department of Defense — also funded the research as part of its “Insect Allies” project, according to a study on the tomatoes published last month in BMC Plant Biology.

Whiteflies, or Bemisia tabaci, are a common pest that drinks sap from phloem, the food-conducting tissue in tomato plant stems and leaves, sometimes causing the plant to dry up. The insects also excrete a sticky substance called honeydew, which attracts ants.

Whiteflies can decimate crops. The BMC study estimates the pest causes $2 billion in annual losses in cassava production in Africa alone, which can cause food insecurity in regions that rely on the crop.

The researchers aim to develop a genetic modification (GM) technology that could modify plants to produce proteins that target and destroy whitefly eggs. The authors note that targeting egg viability is a “unique strategy” for transgenic plants, setting it apart from most GM insecticidal plants that target adult insects.

Fleetwood raised concerns about the technology’s potential to harm human health and the environment.

“If commercialized, these ‘[t]ransgenic plants’ — genetically engineered to include genes from other species — could introduce reproductive-disrupting insecticidal compounds into the human food chain,” Fleetwood wrote.

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DARPA’s “Theory of Mind” Program Aims to Predict and Influence Behavior, Raising Privacy Concerns

A recent recruit of the US Department of Defense (DoD) Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Eric Davis – who joined earlier this year – has come up with a scheme dubbed, “the Theory of Mind.”

According to reports, it’s another DARPA shot at developing, this time algorithmic capabilities to predict, monitor, incentivize, and modify people’s future behavior.

This ambitious to say the least, and “upcoming” program, the existence of which has now – for some reason – been made public as a “special notice,” is framed as targeting adversaries and better equipping those making decisions within the US security apparatus, to either deter, or “incentivize” said adversaries.

The announcement could be there to act as a deterrent in and of itself, and there’s no doubt the US, and many other countries around the world are invested in finding ways to predict and control people.

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Former DARPA Drone Operator Claims Mysterious Drones Over U.S. May Be a ‘Distraction’ for Future Military Attack

In recent weeks, numerous reports of mysterious drone sightings have emerged across New Jersey and other East Coast states, causing public concern and prompting federal investigations.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has responded by imposing temporary flight restrictions over critical infrastructure in New Jersey, effective until January 17, 2025, threatening “deadly force” against aircraft violating the zones if they pose an “imminent security threat.”

Despite these measures, federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), have stated that the majority of these sightings involve lawful drone operations or misidentified manned aircraft.

They assert that there is no credible evidence suggesting a threat to national security or public safety.

Mike Glover, a former drone operator for both defense research lab DARPA and the US military, has warned that the recent wave of mysterious drone sightings over the U.S. could be part of a larger, more sinister agenda.

“In my career, I flew drones, a lot of drones. Almost every drone in the inventory, I was qualified to fly. I taught people how to fly the drones, and I worked a couple of special programs with DARPA on flying drones for Task Force… If a foreign adversary was doing a covert up to surveil, they’re not going to have flashing and illuminating lights,” Glover said during an interview with former Navy SEAL Andy Stumpf on Ironclad.

The broader concern voiced by Glover and others is the potential that these drone sightings are being used as a media diversion. Glover suggested that the intense focus on drones might be concealing other critical issues, such as growing tensions in the Middle East or covert military operations in Syria.

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DARPA, DoD, Nat’l Intelligence Office Classified, Concealed EcoHealth’s DEFUSE Proposal, Hiding ‘Smoking Gun’ COVID-19 Pandemic ‘Blueprint’

New evidence reveals that federal agencies, including DARPA, the Department of Defense (DoD), and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), classified and concealed EcoHealth Alliance’s unclassified “DEFUSE” proposal, effectively concealing what a letter from Senator Roger Marshall (R-KA) describes as a “blueprint” for genetically engineering SARS-CoV-2.

In a letter to the Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG) on November 14, 2024, Senator Marshall has called for an investigation into whether “deliberate actions” were taken by federal agencies to suppress key information during the COVID-19 origins probe.

The government-suppressed documents show that EcoHealth’s DEFUSE plan submitted to DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), if carried out, “could have produced a synthetic coronavirus in 2019 with the same unique construction as SARS-CoV-2 (SARS2).”

Sen. Marshall predicts a proper OIG investigation could uncover that these deliberate actions taken by DARPA, the DoD, and the National Intelligence Office “rise to the level of misconduct, false statements, obstruction of federal proceedings, conspiracy, conflicts of interest, or infractions of administrative or civil laws.”

DARPA’s current director is Dr. Stefanie Tompkins.

Dr. Tompkins also served as the deputy director of DARPA’s Strategic Technology Office as well as director of DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office, which is “the agency’s most exploratory office in identifying and accelerating breakthrough technologies for national security,” according to the bureau’s website.

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Could Helene Have Been a DARPA Creation?

I went to sleep early the evening of September 26 expecting a 130 mph hurricane Helene to pass directly over my home at about midnight. I woke up at 12:30 AM. Did not hear hurricane winds. I woke again at 3:30 AM. Too quiet. I fought off the thought that Helene had stalled just offshore and was working itself up into a 150-160 mph Category 5+, but managed to go back to sleep. My cats roused me at 6AM. A tiny bit of light from a morning that was trying to get underway, and no destruction. And no power. In my pre-coffee morning I tried to put them together: no destruction, no sign of any wind or rain, but no power.

With a gas burner I made coffee and ventured out looking for downed trees and shingles off the roof. A couple of large tree limbs but little else. I started to think I was still asleep having a good dream.

I located an old battery powered radio that miraculously worked and learned that at the last few minutes the eye which had experienced trouble maintaining itself had wobbled to the east about 55 miles east of me and south as it came ashore at Perry, Florida. Tallahassee, the state capital, was expecting devastation, but it was Perry to the southeast that took the hit.

The weather channel and the national TV networks are selling advertising. They play the hurricanes as if it is gladiators in the Roman colosseum fighting to the death against human opponents or lions. That Americans eat this up shows their enjoyment of violence. Increasingly, violence is America’s entertainment. Consider the extreme violence of American movies, the extreme violence of video games, the extreme violence of politics with law used as a weapon even against Donald Trump while he was in office, the extreme violence of the US and Israel against the Palestinians, the provocation of Russia into war.

Americans are entertained by violence. That is why there are no peace movements as the world awaits the West’s response to Putin’s statement that missiles fired into Russia means world war.

Back to the hurricane. Many people left the expected hurricane landing area because of the likely destruction. But not one word in the presstitute media of the destruction that would result from the White House’s decision to strike Russia with missiles.

As I am experiencing it, I can attest that it is an inconvenience not having access to water, power, and communication, but this inconvenience is nothing compared to the inconveniences that go with nuclear war. Nuclear war is the ultimate hell. It is identical to going to Hell. Everything should be done to avoid it. Instead the Satanists in Washington and Europe are encouraging it. The majority of the American people are more worried about their golf score, their college football team’s performance in the game against the main rival, and whether their teenage daughters are taking their birth control pills.

The first of the deep state’s assassination attempts on Trump was in Pennsylvania. The Democrat Pennsylvania government left the investigation in the hands of the FBI, which many believe was responsible for the attempt. The Secret Service is being blamed because of incompetence resulting from the Biden regime’s DEI policies. The Republicans are unwilling to go any further. They are satisfied with the conclusion that replacing merit with inclusiveness destroyed the capability of the US Secret Service.

Unlike Democrat Pennsylvania, Florida’s state government has asserted the right to investigate the second assassination attempt on Trump as it occurred in Florida. This concerns the FBI, which tried to block Florida’s investigation. Why? If the official FBI narrative is correct, an incompetent Secret Service is to blame. The incompetent element is meant to exonerate the deep state from suspicion.

Let’s look at a conspiracy theory as described by those who are paid to control the permissible narratives.

For many years the US Government has financed the HAARP investigations funded by the US Air Force, Navy, and DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects).

HAARP’s purpose is to investigate the potential for developing ionospheric enhancement technology that could be used to excite weather conditions in an area of the ionosphere. In other words, it is possibly a program to weaponize weather disguised as experiments to enhancement radio communications and surveillance, just as law and news “reporting” have been weaponized. Or the program could be what it is said to be.

As we have neither an honest media nor an honest government, we cannot know.

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Lockheed Martin Develops System to Identify and Counter Online “Disinformation,” Prototyped by DARPA

Various military units around the world (notably in the UK during the pandemic) have been getting involved in what are ultimately, due to the goal (censorship) and participants (military) destined to become controversial, if not unlawful efforts.

But there doesn’t seem to be a lot of desire to learn from others’ mistakes. The temptation to bring the defense system into the political “war on disinformation” arena seems to be too strong to resist.

Right now in the US, Lockheed Martin is close to completing a prototype that will analyze media to “detect and defeat disinformation.”

And by media, those commissioning the tool – called the Semantic Forensics (SemaFor) program – mean everything: news, the internet, and even entertainment media. Text, audio, images, and video that are part of what’s considered “large-scale automated disinformation attacks” are supposed to be detected and labeled as false by the tool.

The development process is almost over, and the prototype is used by the US Defense Department’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

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DARPA Funding Project To Turn Plastic Waste into Food for Soldiers

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is funding research to turn military plastic waste into a variety of different useful products, including food for military personnel.

According to Ars Technica, DARPA first put out a call in 2019 for projects to deal with the large amounts of plastic waste produced by military units when they work in remote locations.

The agency wanted a system that could convert plastic wrappers, water bottles and other plastic waste into usable products, such as fuel and rations. The system would have to be compact enough to fit in a Humvee, capable of running on low amounts of energy and use plastic-eating microbes.

DARPA’s goal, according to microbiologist Stephen Techtmann, who works at Michigan Technological University, is not to feed soldiers products made from the plastic, but the microbes themselves that digest and transform it. Techtmann and his team believe the technology will be available soon, and are currently conducting toxicity testing to ensure that plastic-eating microbes are safe for human consumption.

The system being developed by Michigan Tech involves using a small shredder to reduce plastic waste in size, before burning it and subject it to chemical treatment which allows it to be digested by special bacteria. These bacteria were found in compost piles. Many naturally occurring bacteria already have the ability to digest plastics.

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DARPA’s planned nuclear rocket would use enough fuel to build a bomb

High-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) has been touted as the go-to fuel for powering next-gen nuclear reactors, which include the sodium-cooled TerraPower or the space-borne system powering Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations (DRACO). That’s because it was supposed to offer higher efficiency while keeping uranium enrichment “well below the threshold needed for weapons-grade material,” according to the US Department of Energy.

This justified huge government investments in HALEU production in the US and UK, as well as relaxed security requirements for facilities using it as fuel. But now, a team of scientists has published an article in Science that argues that you can make a nuclear bomb using HALEU.

“I looked it up and DRACO space reactor will use around 300 kg of HALEU. This is marginal, but I would say you could make one a weapon with that much,” says Edwin Lyman, the director of Nuclear Power Safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists and co-author of the paper.

Forgotten threats

“When uranium is mined out of the ground, it’s mostly a mixture of two isotopes: uranium-238 and uranium-235. Uranium 235 concentrations are below one percent,” says Lyman. This is sent through an enrichment process, usually in gas centrifuges, where it is turned into gaseous form and centrifuged till the two isotopes are separated from each other due to their slight difference in their atomic weights. This can produce uranium with various levels of enrichment. Material that’s under 10 percent uranium-235 is called low-enriched uranium (LEU) and is used in power reactors working today. Moving the enrichment level up to between 10 and 20 percent, we get HALEU; above 20 percent, we start talking about highly enriched uranium, which can reach over 90 percent enrichment for uses like nuclear weapons.

“Historically, 20 percent has been considered a threshold between highly enriched uranium and low enriched uranium and, over time, that’s been associated with the limit of what is usable in nuclear weapons and what isn’t. But the truth is that threshold is not really a limit of weapons usability,” says Lyman. And we knew that since long time ago.

A study assessing the weaponization potential of uranium with different enrichment levels was done by the Los Alamos National Laboratory back in 1954. The findings were clear: Uranium enriched up to 10 percent was no good for weapons, regardless of how much of it you had. HALEU, though, was found to be of “weapons significance,” provided a sufficient amount was available. “My sense is that once they established 20 percent is somewhat acceptable, and given the material is weapons-usable only when you have enough of it, they just thought we’d need to limit the quantities and we’d be okay. That sort of got baked into the international security framework for uranium because there was not that much HALEU,” says Lyman. The Los Alamos study recommended releasing 100 kg of uranium enriched to up to 20 percent for research purposes in other countries, as they didn’t think 100 kg could lead to any nuclear threats.

The question that wasn’t answered at the time was how much was too much.

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Open Source Tools for Fighting Disinformation

Deepfakes and disinformation have the ability to move financial markets, influence public opinion, and scam businesses and individuals out of millions of dollars. The Semantic Forensics program (SemaFor) is a DARPA-funded initiative to create comprehensive forensic technologies to help mitigate online threats perpetuated via synthetic and manipulated media. Over the last eight years, Kitware has helped DARPA create a powerful set of tools to analyze whether media has been artificially generated or manipulated. Kitware and DARPA are now bringing those tools out of the lab to defend digital authenticity in the real world.

Kitware has a history of building various image and video forensics algorithms to defend against disinformation by detecting various types of manipulations, beginning with DARPA’s Media Forensics (MediFor) program. Building on this foundation, our team expanded its focus to include multimodal analysis of text, audio, and video under the SemaFor program. For additional information about Kitware’s contributions to SemaFor, check out the “Voices from DARPA” podcast episode, “Demystifying Deepfakes,” where Arslan Basharat, assistant director of computer vision at Kitware, is a guest speaker.

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FBI File On Jeff Bezos’ Grandfather, A DARPA Co-Founder, Has Been Destroyed

ZeroHedge reported that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ grandfather, Lawrence Preston Gise, helped form the Pentagon’s supersecret Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA—renamed DARPA) in 1958. Years later, DARPA developed the internet and spurred breakthroughs in high-speed networking, voice recognition, and internet search. When Gise’s FBI file was requested through the Freedom of Information Act, the FBI responded that if there was one, it has been destroyed. News website Leading Report’s Patrick Webb wrote that “There has long been speculation that DARPA has been involved in the creation of many popular big tech companies, using “frontmen” for the allusion of a startup led by outsiders.” Questions swirl about DARPA’s involvement in creating Amazon that hosts ‘secret’ cloud services for the CIA and NSA, and other intel agencies. Some critics speculated that if not for the government contracts, Amazon would be a struggling company.

What’s not widely known is that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ grandfather, Lawrence Preston Gise, helped form the Pentagon’s supersecret Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA—renamed DARPA) in 1958. Years later, DARPA developed the internet and spurred breakthroughs in high-speed networking, voice recognition, and internet search. 

John Greenewald Jr., who operates The Black Vault, a website dedicated to revealing declassified government documents through obtaining Freedom of Information Act requests, posted on X that he went after Gise’s “FBI file, but found out if there was one, it has been destroyed.” 

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