Tag: military industrial complex

How the U.S. Military Buys Location Data from Ordinary Apps

The U.S. military is buying the granular movement data of people around the world, harvested from innocuous-seeming apps, Motherboard has learned. The most popular app among a group Motherboard analyzed connected to this sort of data sale is a Muslim prayer and Quran app that has more than 98 million downloads worldwide. Others include a Muslim dating app, a popular Craigslist app, an app for following storms, and a “level” app that can be used to help, for example, install shelves in a bedroom.

Through public records, interviews with developers, and technical analysis, Motherboard uncovered two separate, parallel data streams that the U.S. military uses, or has used, to obtain location data. One relies on a company called Babel Street, which creates a product called Locate X. U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), a branch of the military tasked with counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, and special reconnaissance, bought access to Locate X to assist on overseas special forces operations. The other stream is through a company called X-Mode, which obtains location data directly from apps, then sells that data to contractors, and by extension, the military.

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Biden Will Likely Be Worse Than Obama. The Left Must Lead The Backlash, Or The Right Will.

Unlike Obama, Biden did not campaign on hope and change, he campaigned on opposing the socialist inclinations of Sanders progressives and an aggressive foreign policy of planetary domination. He assured rich donors that nothing will fundamentally change under his presidency and his transition team is full of corporate sociopaths, war pigs and propagandists. Biden has been a corporatist warmongering authoritarian throughout his entire career, and as his mental capacity continues to deteriorate he will function as nothing more than an empty vessel for his establishment handlers to advance their most pernicious agendas through. The empire has not gotten less desperate since Obama was in office, it has gotten more desperate.

If I prove right about this, the Biden administration will generate backlash just like that which arose in response to the Obama administration, and that backlash will be more severe than its previous iteration. This is absolutely guaranteed. You can only oppress, neglect and enrage a population so much before the discontent begins to grow.

There is absolutely nothing American leftists can do to prevent this backlash from coming. They will have absolutely no say in this administration’s policies or behavior; BidenCorp has no reason to listen to them, has made no pretense of having any interest in listening to them, and is even freezing Sanders and Warren out of cabinet roles already.

All US leftists will have any control over is whether this backlash will break to the left, or if it will break to the far right.

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Biden Will Have The Most Diverse, Intersectional Cabinet Of Mass Murderers Ever Assembled

Well you’ll be happy to know that the next US president and his crack team of ventriloquists are assembling a cabinet of mass murderers that’s as diverse, inclusive and intersectional as America herself. 

It’s been obvious for a long time that Joe Biden’s cabinet would be packed with Obama holdovers, war pigs and whatever primary opponents he owes favors to, but now that he is the media-anointed winner of the presidential election we’re getting a bit more confirmation on who they’re expected to be.

A new Politico report informs us that the heavy favorite to lead the US war machine into further imperial conquest as Secretary of “Defense” is a butcher of the fairer sex named Michele Flournoy, who was Obama’s Under Secretary of Defense for Policy from 2009 to 2012.

In an article titled “Biden: A War Cabinet?“, Antiwar‘s Mariamne Everett writes the following:

Flournoy, in writing the Quadrennial Defense Review during her time as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy under President Clinton, has paved the way for the U.S.’s endless and costly wars which prevent us from investing in life saving and necessary programs like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal. It has effectively granted the US permission to no longer be bound by the UN Charter’s prohibition against the threat or use of military force. It declared that, “when the interests at stake are vital, …we should do whatever it takes to defend them, including, when necessary, the unilateral use of military power.”

While working at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a “Top Defense and National Security Think Tank” based in Washington D.C., in June 2002, as the Bush administration was threatening aggression towards Iraq, she declared, that the United States would “need to strike preemptively before a crisis erupts to destroy an adversary’s weapons stockpile” before it “could erect defenses to protect those weapons, or simply disperse them.”

“In 2009, she joined the Obama administration as Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, where she helped engineer political and humanitarian disasters in Libya and Syria and a new escalation of the endless war in Afghanistan before resigning in 2012,” report Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J S Davies in another Antiwar piece on Flournoy. “From 2013-2016, she joined Boston Consulting, trading on her Pentagon connections to boost the firm’s military contracts from $1.6 million in 2013 to $32 million in 2016. By 2017, Flournoy herself was raking in $452,000 a year.”

Flournoy would be the very first female head of the US war department, and if that doesn’t make you want to listen to P!nk and kiss your Hillary Clinton pendant I don’t know what will.

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This Isn’t Feminism, It’s Imperialism In Pumps

This word “moderate” which the AP news agency keeps bleating is of course complete nonsense. Standing in the middle ground between two corporatist warmongering parties does not make you a moderate, it makes you a corporatist warmonger. Flournoy is no more “moderate” than the “moderate rebels” in Syria which mass media outlets like AP praised for years until it became undeniable that they were largely Al Qaeda affiliates; the only reason such a position can be portrayed as mainstream and moderate is because vast fortunes have been poured into making it that way.

As we discussed recently, Flournoy is a bloodthirsty imperialist and war profiteer who peace activists Medea Benjamin and Nicolas JS Davies accurately labeled an “angel of death” for the American empire. As leader of the laughably titled Department of “Defense” she can be expected to oversee the same agendas of unipolar global domination at the expense of rivers of blood as her predecessors, in more or less exactly the same ways.

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The Army Tried To Turn Nerf Footballs Into Hand Grenades

Few things are as quintessentially American as football and most people in this country have probably played it in some form at least once in their life. This was what the U.S. Army was banking on when it developed an anti-tank grenade using an explosive charge jammed into a hollowed-out Nerf football in the early 1970s.

The Army’s Land Warfare Laboratory (LWL) at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland concocted the “football device,” something I wrote about briefly years ago now, as part of a broader effort to develop a hand-thrown anti-tank weapon of some kind that began in July 1973. The Army had originally established LWL in 1962 to develop, test, and evaluate any and all weapons or other technology that might be applicable to counter-insurgency campaigns, a type of warfare that was emerging around the world at the time. This included in various countries in Southeast Asia, such as South Vietnam and Thailand, where the United States was already becoming increasingly embroiled at that time. 

In 1970, LWL was renamed the Land Warfare Laboratory, a switch that kept its acronym intact, and it began exploring systems that be might useful to a broader set of conflict types. One of these efforts was the anti-tank grenade project, a requirement driven by concerns about the utility of existing infantry anti-armor capabilities, especially in an urban environment, such as the ones the U.S. military expected to be a primary setting for any major conflict against the Soviets in Europe.

“Current standard US Army antitank weapons have been designed to provide maximum practical stand-off range,” a 1974 final test report on the football grenade, as well as the other types LWL evaluated, explained. The primary infantry anti-tank weapons in Army service at the time were the BGM-71 TOW and FGM-77 Dragon anti-tank guided missiles and variants of the M72 Light Anti-Tank Weapon (LAW), a shoulder-fired rocket launcher.

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As Millions Face Eviction and Starvation, Pentagon to Spend Nearly $2 Billion a Day on War

According to an analysis from Feeding America, food insecurity will hit 52 million people due to COVID-19 in the United States, which is an increase of 17 million people from pre-pandemic times. Supply line disruptions, lower levels of donations, and millions of unemployed people who’ve lost their jobs due to government-imposed lockdowns have created a massive strain on America’s food supply and more and more family’s are being pushed into a situation of food insecurity.

It’s not just the brink of starvation that millions of Americans face either. Thanks to government-mandated lockdowns, a record number of Americans are unable to find jobs as businesses are forced to close or have gone out of business permanently. This is creating a situation in which families are unable to pay their rent — leading to the potential for mass evictions.

In March the CARES Act imposed a federal moratorium on evictions, which mandated that it was illegal to evict tenants who participate in federal housing assistance programs or who live in properties with a federally backed mortgage loan due to the nonpayment of rent. When the CARES Act moratorium expired on July 24, a host of state and local governments passed their own eviction prevention measures—but these actions varied significantly across the country and left many renters vulnerable to eviction once again.

Then, on September 4, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued another moratorium on evictions through December 31, 2020. While this will certainly help those who rent — temporarily — all the moratorium did was pass the burden onto the landlord who may no longer be able to pay the mortgage on the property without the incoming rent.

And no, contrary to what many believe, most landlords are not mega rich property owners and live modest lifestyles.

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Biden’s Pentagon Transition Team Members Funded by the Arms Industry

On Tuesday, Joe Biden released a list of transition teams for the various departments in his future White House. The Pentagon transition team for Biden consists of 23 people, many of whom hail from hawkish think tanks.

The team is led by Kathleen Hicks, who worked in the Pentagon under the Obama administration. Hicks most recent employer is the Cen­ter for Strate­gic and Inter­na­tion­al Stud­ies (CSIS), a think tank that receives contributions from arms makers like Northrop Grumman, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon, to name a few.

CSIS also receives contributions from governments. The think tank’s top government donors are the US, the UAE, Taiwan, and Japan. Two other CSIS employees are on the transition team; Andrew Hunter and Melissa Dalton, who both worked in the Pentagon under the Obama administration.

CSIS employees author policy papers and Op-Eds that generally call for more US involvement around the world. In August, Hicks co-authored an Op-Ed in The Hill titled, “Pentagon Action to Withdraw from Germany Benefits Our Adversaries,” a piece that slammed Trump’s plan to draw down troops from Germany, which Biden could to call off.

Two members of the transition team come from the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), Susanna Blume, a former Pentagon employee, and Ely Ratner, who served as deputy national security advisor to then-vice president Joe Biden from 2015 to 2017.

CNAS is another think tank that enjoys hefty donations from weapons makers, major corporations, and governments. From 2019 to 2020, CNAS received at least $500,000 from the US State Department and at least $500,000 from Northrop Grumman. Other donors include Google, Facebook, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin.

Three more team members list their latest employer as the RAND Corporation, Stacie Pettyjohn, a wargaming expert, Christine Wormuth, who held a few roles in the Obama administration, and Terri Tanielian, a behavioral scientist.

RAND is another hawkish think tank that receives the bulk of its funding from the US government, including the US Army, Air Force, and Department of Homeland Security. RAND is also funded by the UAE, Qatar, and NATO.

A report from In These Times found at least eight out of the 23 team members come from organizations that receive funding from US weapons makers (not including RAND). Besides the CSIS and CNAS employees listed above, In These Times includes Sharon Burke, who works for New America, Shawn Skel­ly, from CACI International, and Vic­tor Gar­cia, from Rebellion Defense.

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The Space Force Has Created an “Orbital Warfare” Unit, and Now Has Its Own Spaceship

It’s not specifically a TIE fighter or X-Wing from the “Star Wars” series, but The Drive reported last week that Trump’s recently created Space Force is now in charge of the experimental X-37B spacecraft. A craft that was prior in the ownership of the Air Force, which should turn many heads.

The unit is also precariously known as Delta 9, according to the service. Military.com reports:

Space Operations Command was activated last month during a ceremony at Peterson Air Force Base, Colorado. Under the field commands are deltas and squadrons, according to the Space Force’s command hierarchy.

Delta 9’s Detachment 1 “oversees operations of the X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle, an experimental program designed to demonstrate technologies for a reliable, reusable, unmanned space test platform for the U.S. Space Force,” according to the unit’s fact sheet.

Delta 9 consists of three active-duty squadrons headquartered at Schriever Air Force Base, Colorado: 1st Space Operations Squadron, 3rd Space Operations Squadron and 750th Operations Support Squadron, along with Detachment 1. The three squadrons conduct “protect-and-defend operations from space and provide response options to deter and defeat adversary threats in space,” according to the chart.

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