Tag: pentagon

Long-awaited UFO report mentions no aliens, but asks for more money for US spies

The newly released US intelligence community report on unexplained aerial phenomena (UAP) offers more questions than answers. It doesn’t mention aliens, says UAP might be a national security threat – and asks for more funding.

Released on Friday afternoon by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the entire unclassified report clocks in at only nine pages, including two pages of appendices with definitions of terms. 

The dataset it is based on relies on US government reports of incidents between November 2004 and March 2021. However, no standardized reporting mechanism existed until the US Navy set one up in 2019, and the Air Force adopted it the following year.

We were able to identify one reported UAP with high confidence. In that case, we identified the object as a large, deflating balloon. The others remain unexplained.

The report mentions 144 reports, of which 80 “involved observation with multiple sensors.” While some UAP “may be attributable to sensor anomalies,” most “probably do represent physical objects” given they were “registered across multiple sensors, to include radar, infrared, electro-optical, weapon seekers, and visual observation.”

If and when the incidents are resolved, the report said, the US intelligence community believes they will break down into five potential categories: “airborne clutter” such as birds, balloons, drones or plastic bags; natural atmospheric phenomena such as ice crystals; US government or industry research projects, foreign adversary systems, and “other.” 

ODNI was “unable to confirm” that classified research and development programs by the US government or industry “accounted for any of the UAP reports we collected.” Some UAP sightings “may be” technologies developed by China, Russia or someone else.

If that is the case, UAPs would “represent a national security challenge” as well as a threat to flight safety, but US spies said they “currently lack data to indicate any UAP are part of a foreign collection program or indicative of a major technological advancement by a potential adversary.”

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Facebook Doesn’t Want to Talk About Fake Users Created by the Pentagon

On a press call a few years ago, I asked Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, Nathaniel Gleicher, if the company would treat a misinformation campaign orchestrated by the US government the same as it would as one from a foreign adversary.

Facebook had organized the call to tout how it had discovered and deleted dozens of Iranian accounts, groups, and pages linked to “coordinated inauthentic behavior”—the company’s term for when people and organizations create fake accounts in an attempt to mislead and manipulate other users and the broader information landscape. The conversation came at a time when Facebook was conducting a spate of such announcements and media briefings championing its work removing phony networks tied to foreign governments.Recent reporting says US operatives “engage in campaigns to influence and manipulate social media.”

Gleicher’s response to my hypothetical question about whether they would react the same way was quite clear: “Yes. Part of the key of our operations here is that we engage based on behavior—not based on content and not based on the nature of the actor. And that’s been a very intentional choice on our part.”

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Pentagon gets ‘woke’: Whistleblowers reveal segregation for ‘privilege walks,’ critical race theory

Sen. Tom Cotton has revealed some of the hundreds of whistleblower complaints from service members who object to critical race theory indoctrination in the military, including airmen being divided by race and sex into groups for “privilege walks.”

The service members also spoke out against receiving reading lists of critical race theory books as part of the Pentagon’s new anti-extremism and diversity training within the ranks.

“This is about a very specific kind of anti-American indoctrination that is seeping into some parts of our military,” Mr. Cotton said at a recent Senate Armed Services Committee hearing.

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The Pentagon gave $39 MILLION to Dr. Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance – the charity that funded coronavirus research at the Wuhan lab accused of being the source of the outbreak, federal data reveals

The Pentagon gave $39 million to a charity that funded controversial coronavirus research at a Chinese lab accused of being the source for Covid-19, federal data reveals.

The news comes as the charity’s chief, British-born scientist Dr. Peter Daszak, was exposed in an alleged conflict of interest and back-room campaign to discredit lab leak theories.

The charity, EcoHealth Alliance (EHA), has come under intense scrutiny after it emerged that it had been using federal grants to fund research into coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.

The U.S. nonprofit, set up to research new diseases, has also partly funded deeply controversial ‘gain of function’ experiments, where dangerous viruses are made more infectious to study their effect on human cells.

A political storm broke when former president Donald Trump canceled a $3.7 million grant to the charity last year amid claims that Covid-19 was created in, or leaked from, the Wuhan lab funded by EHA.

But federal grant data assembled by independent researchers shows that the charity has received more than $123 million from the government – from 2017 to 2020 – and that one of its biggest funders is the Department of Defense, funneling almost $39 million to the organization since 2013.

Exactly how much of that money went toward research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology is unknown.

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Pentagon Focuses on New Weapons Research in $715 Billion Budget

On Friday, the Pentagon released its $715 billion budget request for the 2022 fiscal year, part of the $752.9 billion Biden is requesting for so-called “national defense.” The budget emphasizes research for new weapons technology, which the US sees as vital for competition with China and Russia.

In a statement on the budget, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin named China as the Pentagon’s primary focus. “The budget provides us the mix of capabilities we need most and stays true to our focus on the pacing challenge from the People’s Republic of China,” he said.

The budget request asked for over $112 billion for research, development, testing, and evaluation, known as RDT&E. It is about a 5 percent increase from the 2021 budget and is the highest-ever request for RDT&E.

US military officials frequently say that investment in technology like artificial intelligence, robotics, space and cyber capabilities, and hypersonic missiles are needed to compete with Beijing in the coming years. Space Force’s top scientist recently said human augmentation to create super-soldiers should be embraced by the US.

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Pentagon Marches Towards AI Taking The Kill Shot

Dozens of autonomous war machines capable of deadly force conducted a field training exercise south of Seattle last August. The exercise involved no human operators but strictly robots powered with artificial intelligence, seeking mock enemy combatants.

The exercise, organized by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a blue-sky research division of the Pentagon, armed the robots with radio transmitters designed to simulate a weapon firing. The drill expanded the Pentagon’s understanding of how automation in military systems on the modern battlefield can work together to eliminate enemy combatants.

“The demonstrations also reflect a subtle shift in the Pentagon’s thinking about autonomous weapons, as it becomes clearer that machines can outperform humans at parsing complex situations or operating at high speed,” according to WIRED. 

It’s undeniable artificial intelligence will be the face of warfare for years to come. Military planners are moving ahead with incorporating autonomous weapons systems on the modern battlefield.

General John Murray of the US Army Futures Command told an audience at the US Military Academy in April that swarms of robots will likely force the military to decide if a human needs to intervene before a robot engages the enemy.

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Pentagon launches program to surveil military personnel’s social media

The Pentagon is planning on launching a program that would screen military personnel’s social media for “extremist material” — looking to retain a private firm to do the digging in order to circumvent First Amendment protections, according to a report.

Internal Defense Department documents reviewed by The Intercept reveal that Bishop Garrison, a senior advisor to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin tasked with addressing “extremism” in the armed forces, is currently in the process of designing a social media screening program which will “continuously” monitor for “concerning behaviors.”

In the past, the Pentagon has shied away from surveilling members due to First Amendment protections, as well as other privacy concerns.

This program, according to the outlet, citing a senior Pentagon official, will rely on a private firm in order to avoid being accused of circumventing First Amendment restrictions through government.

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Pentagon uses world’s largest ‘secret army’ of 60,000 undercover operatives to carry out ‘domestic & foreign’ operations – media

The US military operates a vast network of soldiers, civilians, and contractors that it uses for clandestine missions both at home and abroad, Newsweek has claimed, adding that the force also manipulates social media.

After a two-year investigation, the outlet reported that the undercover army consists of around 60,000 people, many of whom use fake identities to carry out their assignments. The Pentagon’s agents operate in real life and online, with some even embedded in private businesses and well-known companies. 

The massive program, unofficially known as “signature reduction,” is reportedly 10 times the size of the CIA’s clandestine service, making it the “largest undercover force the world has ever known,” Newsweek claimed. But the true scale and scope of the shadow army remains a closely guarded secret. No one knows the program’s total size, and Congress has never held a hearing on the military’s increasing reliance on signature reduction. There appears to be very little or no transparency regarding the massive clandestine military force, even as its continued development “challenges US laws, the Geneva Conventions, the code of military conduct, and basic accountability,” the outlet said. 

Around half of the signature reduction force is said to consist of special operations personnel who hunt down terrorists in war zones and work in “unacknowledged hot spots” such as North Korea and Iran. Military intelligence specialists reportedly make up the second-largest part of the secret army. 

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Pentagon collecting Americans’ phone data without warrants and hiding details, senator says

U.S. federal agencies including the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) have been purchasing access to large databases of phone location data and hiding their motives in what Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) described as “warrantless surveillance” of Americans.

In a Thursday letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Wyden called on Austin to declassify all answers about the Department of Defense’s data collection practices. Wyden noted that of eight questions he raised with the DoD, he received unclassified answers to three questions, while the answers to the five remaining questions were offered in a classified manner.

“In February 2020, media reports revealed that U.S. government agencies are buying location data obtained from apps on Americans’ phones and are doing so without any kind of legal process, sich as a court order,” Wyden wrote. “I have spent the last year investigating the shady, unregulated data brokers that are selling this data and the government agencies that are buying it. My investigation confirmed the warrantless purchase of American’s location data by the Internal Revenue Service, Customs and Border Protection, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).”

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