Tag: secrecy

Mystery Deepens As Spy Aircraft Disappears From US Air Base Without Explanation

An SR-71 Blackbird parked for years on an outdoor display at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center is no longer visible in commercial satellite imagery, and the agency has offered no public explanation of where it went.

The spy aircraft, the NASA 844, has been absent from its pad since at least May 17, according to Aviation Week.

Sources told the publication that the plane was moved into a hangar earlier this year for an inspection, though NASA has not described what that inspection involves, why it is taking place, or how long it will last.

The Serial 61-7980 was the last SR-71 built and the last to fly, completing its final flight in 1999 after the Air Force had already retired the type and NASA had retained a few surviving airframes for high-speed research.

Lockheed Martin produced 32 of the reconnaissance aircraft, 12 of which were lost in accidents and none to enemy action.

Questions about the disappearance of the SR-71 come a week after NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman discussed plans for a new high-altitude, high-speed X-plane and displayed images of silhouette that closely resembled a Blackbird at annual the All-In Summit in Los Angeles. 

“In the service of the first A [aeronautics] in NASA, we are rebuilding our X-plane fleet. The X-59 is researching quiet supersonic flight, but it’s just the beginning,” the NASA head told attendees.

“As NASA recommits to flight test and works alongside industry to push the boundaries of airframe and propulsion design, it will not be long before NASA once again is flying as high and as fast as we had in decades past, and then even more.”

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ICE Denounced for Enacting ‘Official Government Policy of Disappearing People’

Critics reacted with horror to a Monday report from The Associated Press detailing how US Immigration and Customs Enforcement has abruptly ended its practice of disclosing the locations of thousands of detainees.

According to the AP, ICE “has stopped publicly revealing where it is holding… detainees who are subject to final deportation orders, an unannounced move that has made it far more difficult for lawyers and relatives to find them.”

Immigration attorneys who spoke with the AP said that their clients had “vanished” from the system after ICE removed them from its online detainee locator system last week.

Greg Chen, senior director of government relations at the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told the AP that families of detainees “are freaking out because they think the person has been deported and they don’t know where the person might be.”

Chen added that the new policy has “serious implications” for attorneys’ ability to make contact with their clients.

Michelle Mendez, legal director at the National Immigration Project, told the AP that the new policy is “just another iteration of disappearing people.”

“Why would we do that in the United States of America?” Mendez asked. “It’s something we’d hear about in another country and be concerned about individual rights and due process.”

Tom Jawetz, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, echoed Mendez’s analysis, writing in a social media post that the AP report reveals “an official government policy of disappearing people,” as “systems for attorneys and loved ones to know where—even whether—a person with a final removal order is in ICE custody have been wiped clean.”

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, described the new ICE policy as “unprecedented” for US immigration enforcement.

“People who have been detained for months are suddenly disappearing from the locator system—even if they haven’t been moved anywhere,” Reichlin-Melnick explained. “And people newly arrested are not showing up at all, their location now hidden from view.”

Georgetown University political scientist Jonathan Ladd argued that the ICE policy was a fundamental violation of long-established rights in the US that date to before the country’s official founding.

“The government moving or hiding jailed people to avoid review by courts isn’t some loophole in our habeas corpus rights,” Ladd explained. “This government behavior has been considered a violation of the people’s habeas corpus rights since at least the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679.”

Ladd further pointed out that “habeas corpus rights are guaranteed by Article I of our Constitution,” which means “hiding prisoners from the courts is unconstitutional.”

Journalist Gillian Brockell observed that the new ICE policy “will make it nearly impossible to file habeas petitions, because attorneys won’t even know what federal district their client has been moved to to stage for their removal.”

Among those sharing the AP report on social media was Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch, an attorney for Wilbur Rafael Garces Perez, a 28-year-old Venezuelan shot by ICE in Austin, Texas on Sunday.

Initially, she and the immigrant’s wife could not make contact with him, because ICE moved him from the hospital “to an undisclosed location,” but Lincoln-Goldfinch said Monday afternoon that her client “is being held at Pearsall for interrogation.”

“We got Wilber on the phone live from detention at the press conference,” the attorney added. “He says he still has the bullet lodged in his shoulder. He says he is not doing well and has not received the medical care he needs.”

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Ottawa spent $1.9 billion housing asylum claimants since 2017, but cannot say how many are currently housed

The federal government has allocated approximately $1.9 billion to help provinces and municipalities house asylum claimants since 2017, but Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada cannot say how many people are currently living in facilities supported by the program.

The figures were disclosed in a response to an order paper question submitted by Conservative MP Fred Davies.

The Interim Housing Assistance Program pays provinces and municipalities to provide temporary accommodations and other housing support for asylum claimants. Eligible expenses include temporary housing, coordination, support services and the construction or acquisition of housing facilities.

Despite the program’s $1.9-billion price tag, IRCC said it does not have access to operational or client-specific information showing how asylum claimants move from hotels into municipally owned or controlled housing.

The department also said it cannot confirm how many people are presently housed, how many have left the system or the real-time capacity of facilities receiving federal funding.

Since January 2025, recipients have been required to report the number of asylum claimants supported twice per year.

As of May 2026, IRCC estimated that approximately 15,000 claimants received housing support between January and September 2025. Municipalities and provinces projected they would support roughly 40,000 claimants between January 2025 and March 2027.

Those plans include more than 1,500 bed spaces and 350 transitional-housing or reception-centre units.

Toronto reported supporting 7,030 asylum claimants, followed by Ottawa with 3,490 and Peel Region with 3,170. Other recipients included Durham Region, Hamilton, York Region, Waterloo Region, London, Halton Region, Simcoe County, New Brunswick and Newfoundland and Labrador.

IRCC said jurisdictions must report twice annually on expenditures and outcomes. The department acknowledged, however, that it has no real-time information about how many people are occupying the federally funded spaces.

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Newly Released Photos Show Classified Documents Stored at Penn Biden Center and Biden’s Delaware Home That the Government Fought to Keep Hidden

The Oversight Project forced the release of photos of Biden’s classified documents stored at the Penn Biden Center and Biden’s Wilmington home that the government fought to keep a secret.

“The pictures confirm what many suspected all along: Joe Biden got the kid-glove treatment, while President Trump was presumed guilty,” the Oversight Project said in a press release.

“The newly released photos show FBI agents at the Penn Biden Center and Biden’s Wilmington home handling classified materials with visible care — organized, contained, undisturbed, and literally wearing gloves. Compare that to Mar-a-Lago, where agents dumped documents across the floor for cameras to capture — images that were leaked and blasted across every front page within days, priming the public to see Trump as guilty before a single charge was filed. Two completely different postures — one designed to protect a reputation, the other to destroy one, they said.

The DOJ and FBI hid these photos for years.

Former Special Counsel Robert Hur in February 2024 released a 345-page report on his investigation of the stolen classified documents.

Robert Hur found that Joe Biden “willfully retained” classified information, however, he decided not to charge him. Hur said there is evidence Biden retained classified notebooks, “knowing he was not allowed to do so.”

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UK Government’s Apple iCloud Backdoor Secrecy Called “Farcical” in Court

The British government’s policy of neither confirming nor denying that it had ordered Apple to put a backdoor into iCloud has been described as “farcical” during a court hearing.

The London-based Royal Courts of Justice is the venue of the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, which on Thursday heard that the “neither confirm nor deny” (NCND) stance was “logically unsustainable” given that everybody already knows the fact.

Ben Jaffey KC, who represents the campaign groups Privacy International and Liberty, told the court that the government was defending a secret that no longer exists.

The tribunal is hearing Apple’s complaint alongside the complaint from Privacy International and Liberty, challenging the home secretary’s power to issue secret orders, known as technical capability notices (TCNs).

The January 2025 leak to the Washington Post revealed that the Home Office had issued a TCN to Apple, requiring access to end-to-end encrypted messages and data stored by Apple customers worldwide in iCloud. Apple did not comply with the order and instead pulled its Advanced Data Protection service from UK users.

But within hours of the Washington Post story, Home Office sources confirmed the report to the Times. In October 2025, the Home Office issued a new TCN, reportedly narrower in scope and aimed at UK users.

As the tribunal was told, this was not the only confirmation of the original order. A post on X by former US director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard in August 2025 was seen by more than three million people, while in December 2025, the investigatory powers commissioner, Brian Leveson, said that “lawful access can be achieved in a way that strikes a balance between maintaining strong encryption and ensuring law enforcement and the government can protect the public from terrorism, serious crime, and hostile state activity.”

Gabbard had reported that the UK had agreed to “drop its mandate” for Apple to provide a “backdoor” that would have enabled access to the protected encrypted data of American citizens.

Jaffey told the court that it was unlikely that Home Office sources would have confirmed the TCN without “tacit approval” from the government. “But here, within hours of reporting by the Washington Post, multiple sources were confirming to the Times the existence of the orders,” he said.

Leveson’s statement, Jaffey continued, “gives the game away.” The commissioner’s report would have been “clearly prejudicial to issues that might come in front of him in the future” had there been no TCN issued at all.

And while the Home Office is sticking to its NCND policy, WhatsApp and Google have confirmed in witness statements that they have not received any such orders – something they are free to say because there is no legal bar on disclosing that you have NOT received a TCN.

Apple, on the other hand, is in a different position because it did receive the order, and is now in court trying to force the government to confirm this, and by extension, admit that the TCN is still in force.

Another argument made by Jaffey is that Apple had to ask for permission before it could discuss the order with the US government, and that permission was granted. “The fact that Apple even needed to ask permission confirms there is a TCN,” he said.

The government’s argument against abandoning the NCND policy is that it would damage national security and hinder the investigation and prosecution of “serious crime,” including terrorism and online child abuse. But Jaffey said that “the horse has long bolted” as far as secrecy around the TCN is concerned, and that the government’s stance is “ridiculous” and “understates the principle of open justice.”

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Food Labeling Should Not Be This Hard

Knowing what’s in your food or whether what you’re about to eat comports with a medically prescribed diet can be difficult. There’s no reason why the government should make it harder. But that’s exactly what the United States Department of Agriculture and Food and Drug Administration are doing when they prohibit companies from conveying information about FODMAP content on food labels.

Although not inherently harmful to most people, FODMAPs are a broad category of short-chain carbohydrates and sugar alcohols believed to trigger gastrointestinal symptoms in individuals living with irritable bowel syndrome and possibly several other functional gastrointestinal disorders.

In technical terms, FODMAPs are fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides, and polyols. More practically, people with IBS might want to be careful around most standard dairy items, honey, several cereals and artificial sweeteners, and a cornucopia of fruits, vegetables, legumes, and spices.

When consumed, these items can lead to luminal distension by causing increased amounts of water to enter the gastrointestinal tract and increased gas production by bacteria living in the colon. In some individuals with IBS and other functional gut disorders, this may trigger or exacerbate certain symptoms of their condition (e.g., intense pain and changes in intestinal motility), possibly through neurons in the gut responding abnormally to these physiological responses to FODMAP consumption. 

Hence, some patients with these conditions choose to limit their FODMAP intake or are encouraged to do so by their health care provider. Some go on strict low-FODMAP diets long term. Others temporarily do so for two to eight weeks then work to reintroduce specific FODMAP-containing foods into their diet to determine what they can tolerate. Broadly speaking, a lot of patients with relevant conditions find that the diet helps alleviate their symptoms.

Low-FODMAP diets though are generally considered sort of bland. They also tend to require a certain amount of time and education to be effective. Looking at a table of high- and low-FODMAP foods to make decisions about what to eat may not require an advanced degree in nutrition, but it is not difficult to imagine how having to break out such a table to evaluate every item you consider purchasing at the grocery store could become rather burdensome, especially if you’re new to the diet.

Fortunately, there are organizations and companies out there to help. Monash University, for example, has labs that both study the effectiveness of low-FODMAP diets and test food items for FODMAP content. Monash also offers several resources to help those on low-FODMAP diets make informed meal choices and works with companies that wish to offer low-FODMAP food options. If a company wants to submit a product to Monash for evaluation and Monash determines the item is low in FODMAP content, the company can then use a trademarked label to convey this information to consumers.

However, as one US company learned, even if one of the world’s leading FODMAP research facilities tells you your food is low in FODMAPs, this isn’t exactly the kind of thing you can just put on a label in the United States.

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Covert Pentagon propagandists are tracking anti-war Americans, skirting the law

In mid-August, a conservative activist using the digital moniker “Datarepublican” quietly admitted she was employed by the Pentagon as a “special government employee.” For months, she’d been pocketing a government paycheck while intensely lobbying for President Trump’s imperialist misadventures online and tracking their most vocal critics in a digital database.

Datarepublican was identified in 2025 as Jennica Pounds, a Utah-based mother with nearly a million followers whose stated raison d’etre is “fighting communists” – a moniker she applies liberally to anyone perceptibly to the left of Barry Goldwater.

And she’s not alone. Pounds has emerged as the face of a new wave of right-wing influencers who are being covertly employed by the US Department of War to spread pro-government propaganda. On August 29th, Washington Post reporters revealed at least three more digital activists are surreptitiously working for the Pentagon, which designates them as either special government employees (SGEs) or as what the US military calls “highly qualified experts” (HQEs).

Named in the Pentagon’s army of influencers were retired Air Force colonel Rob Maness, and retired Army colonels Kurt Schlichter and Thomas Anderson. Like Pounds, Anderson also operated in relative anonymity until recently, posting under the Twitter handle “Cynical Publius.” Schlicter, for his part, is a prolific right-wing troll who has frequently fantasized about the ethnic cleansing and extermination of Palestinians.

The operation appears to be in breach of two federal laws, the Hatch Act and the Smith-Mundt Act, which prohibit government employees from engaging in political activities while on the clock, and forbid them from directing their propaganda efforts at the US population, respectively.

The aforementioned right-wing activists are the only ones known to have been working secretly for the Department of War. But the revelations about paid Pentagon propaganda posters come as the US military pursues a flurry of murky partnerships with prominent conservative influencers like top TPUSA widow Erika Kirk, who was appointed to the Air Force Academy Board of Visitors by Trump in March in an effort to further slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s “legacy.”

Then there’s Laura Loomer, the obsessively anti-Muslim Trump ally, who is producing de facto press releases for self-proclaimed “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth, enjoying Pentagon press credentials, and earning references as an “informal advisor to the Department of War.”

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The case for declassifying 9/11 records

New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani recently ordered the release of more than 170,000 pages of city records about the air quality in Lower Manhattan after the 9/11 attacks. This release, the first in a series of planned disclosures, shows how opening decades-old records, including those that expose government wrongdoing, is in the public interest. Political will to expand such efforts elsewhere is crucial.

Thousands of 9/11 survivors and victims’ families in Lower Manhattan have fought for more than two decades to hold foreign entities liable for the terrorist attacks — only to find that one of the biggest obstacles is their own government. While successive U.S. administrations have promised closure for victims, critical records remain classified 25 years after 9/11, delaying justice and accountability.

The executive order governing classification, EO 13526, mandates that most historical records must be automatically declassified at 25 years, unless they meet certain strict criteria.

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Pentagon reveals secret space weapons are already in orbit — but won’t say what they do

The U.S. has weapons orbiting Earth that can be used to defend American forces from attacks in space, the Air Force secretary revealed this week in a rare public acknowledgment of capabilities the Pentagon has largely kept secret.

Air Force Secretary Troy Meink said Monday that the Space Force now has “on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the joint force against hostile adversary action,” but declined to say what the weapons are, how they work or when they were deployed.

The carefully worded disclosure marks a shift in how openly the U.S. military talks about weapons in orbit as China and Russia develop their own capabilities to disrupt, disable or destroy satellites.

“Is there any question in the room, by anybody, about whether or not the Chinese or Russians have been developing these sorts of weapons?” Meink told reporters after his remarks at the Air & Space Forces Association’s Air, Space & Cyber Conference in National Harbor, Maryland — right outside of Washington, D.C.

“For over a decade, we’ve been talking about the fact, and we have expressed concern, that the Chinese and Russians were developing weapons for space,” he continued. “We need to focus on making sure we can protect ourselves operating in that environment.”

Exactly what the U.S. has put into orbit remains a mystery.

The U.S. has previously discussed placing weapons in space, including plans to deploy space-based interceptors capable of destroying incoming missiles as part of President Donald Trump’s Golden Dome missile defense system.

But Meink’s disclosure goes a step further: The Space Force already has weapons in orbit for “space control,” a mission aimed at protecting U.S. access to space and, if necessary, denying an adversary the ability to use it.

The Pentagon has historically revealed little about the weapons developed for that mission, with publicly known U.S. counter-space capabilities largely based on the ground.

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Trump Says He Might Release More 9/11 Records

President Donald Trump said on Sept. 13 he might release records related to the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

“I’m going to look at it when I get back,” he told reporters in Ireland, after being asked about recent requests from families of people who perished in the attacks.

A nephew of Lisa Marie Terry, who was in the North Tower at the World Trade Center when it was struck by one of the planes hijacked by Islamic terrorists, was among those who recently called on Trump to declassify records related to the attacks on the center and the Pentagon.

“For 25 years, the deep state has hidden the truth about what happened that day 25 years ago,” he said during a reading of the names of the victims in New York City on Sept. 11. “President Trump, you are our last hope. Release the unredacted files that implicate Saudi Arabia while what’s left of the victims’ families are still alive to see it.”

Terry Strada, whose husband, Tom Strada, died in the attacks, said during the same event that past administrations have chosen “to protect the Saudis instead of standing with the 9/11 families” and urged Trump to take action.

Fifteen of the 19 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia, according to the FBI. Some of the families have sued Saudi Arabia, alleging it is liable because officials supported Al Qaeda in the time leading up to the attacks.

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