Tag: secrecy

Oops! Deleted Tweet By Israel’s Former PM Disclosed Nuke Arsenal

In a major faux pax in US-Israeli relations, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak acknowledged the existence of the country’s nuclear weapon arsenal via Twitter — then deleted the tweet, presumably after realizing he’d violated the long-standing US-Israeli practice of pretending that arsenal doesn’t exist. 

Barak’s Tuesday tweet addressed growing worries about the growing presence of ultra-nationalist and ultra-religious factions in Israel’s government. Finance minister Bezalel Smotrich and his Religious Zionism party, for example, openly aspire to turn Israel into a theocracy. 

Barak wrote: 

“In conversations between Israelis and Western diplomatic officials, there are deep concerns raised of the possibility that if the coup in Israel succeeds, a messianic dictatorship — that possesses nuclear weapons and fanatically wishes for a confrontation with Islam centered on the Temple Mount — will be established in the heart of the Middle East.”  

Thanks in part to a former nuclear technician’s 1986 revelations, Israel is widely known to have a nuclear arsenal, with one estimate sizing it at 90 warheads. However, it’s never joined the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). It’s just one of only five countries in the world that haven’t done so, along with North Korea, India, Pakistan and South Sudan. 

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Thousands of Hours of Jan. 6 Video Hidden, Withheld from Defendants, Court Filing Says

The U.S. Department of Justice has withheld thousands of hours of video recorded at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, from January 6 criminal defendants, and U.S. Capitol Police might have held back more than 1,300 hours of security video from a congressional oversight committee, a new federal court filing alleges.

Defendant William Pope contends in an update to a previous court filing that he and others charged with crimes at the Capitol that day need access to what should be more than 152,000 hours of video. That is if Capitol Police preserved it all.

“Americans have historically been skeptical of opaque government processes, and that skepticism has never been more intense than it is now regarding January 6,” Pope wrote in a 17-page court filing before U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras.

“Concealment of the Capitol CCTV is fueling public speculation that there is more to January 6 than is being reported.”

Pope, who is representing himself, is seeking full access to the U.S. Department of Justice evidence database so he can use it in his defense.

Pope dissected a declaration from Capitol Police general counsel Thomas DiBiase introduced by federal prosecutors in his case. He also compared it to an earlier DiBiase declaration. In his new filing, Pope calls these documents the “dueling dubious DiBiase declarations.”

“Despite hundreds of January 6 CCTV clips now being public, Mr. DiBiase still believes other footage from those same cameras must be hidden from the American people,” Pope wrote.

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Senate Leaves AUMF for Secret Wars in Force

On March 29, the Senate voted to repeal two Authorizations for the Use of Military Force, (AUMF’s), one passed in 1991 and another in 2002. The repeal now goes to the House. But those Authorizations are irrelevant to the present; they apply only to the Iraq war. But a third AUMF, passed in 2001, was left untouched. And that AUMF is the only one that has a bearing on the present moment, because it provides legal cover for the many US military operations, open and secret, around the world.

The 1991 and 2002 AUMF’s gave Congressional approval for two wars on Iraq, known, respectively, as Operation Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom. After the hundreds of thousands left dead and the millions displaced as a result of the US wars on Iraq, the Senate repeal should be filed under “too little, too late. But good PR.”

The 2001 AUMF authorizing secret wars left untouched and still in force

The AUMF of 2001, the one untouched by the Senate, is an entirely different matter. Its content and use are explained in a nutshell here:

“The authorization granted the President the authority to use all “necessary and appropriate force” against those whom he determined “planned, authorized, committed or aided” the September 11 attacks, or who harbored said persons or groups…. Since 2001, U.S. Presidents have interpreted their authority under the AUMF to extend beyond al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan to apply to numerous other groups as well as other geographic locales. ….Today, the full list of actors the US military is fighting or believes itself authorized to fight under the 2001 AUMF is classified and therefore a secret unknown to the American public.

“The AUMF has also been cited by a wide variety of US officials as justification for continuing US military actions all over the world. (Emphasis, jw)…. According to a report by the Congressional Research Service, published May 11, 2016, at that time the 2001 AUMF had been cited 37 times in connection with actions in 14 countries and on the high seas. The report stated that ‘Of the 37 occurrences, 18 were made during the Bush Administration, and 19 have been made during the Obama Administration.’ The countries that were mentioned in the report included Afghanistan, Cuba (Guantanamo Bay), Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Georgia, Iraq, Kenya, Libya, the Philippines, Somalia, Syria and Yemen.”

What does this mean for the present? Here is what Just Security tells us:

“As General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently (June, 2021) testified before the House Armed Services Committee (here at 3:10:45), no current US military operations depend on the 2002 AUMF and thus its repeal would not affect the United States ongoing wars. Repeal of the 2002 AUMF costs the Biden administration little or nothing.

“Where the rubber meets the road on AUMF reform is the 2001 AUMF, the principal statutory authority for US military operations in the war on terror. As General Milley explained, the ‘2001 AUMF is the one we need to hang on to…it is the critical one for us to continue operations.’” (Emphasis, jw)

But as noted above, those “operations” which take place “all over the world” are a secret, unknown to the American people and the world.

The New York Times was optimistic in its reporting of the Senate action, noting that the repeal might be a stepping stone to dealing with the 2001 AUMF. However, in this case the word the Times used was not “repeal” but “replace.” (Obama had once spoken of the need to “refine” it.) General Milley must have heaved a sigh of relief as he read those carefully chosen words. He will be able to “continue operations” well into the future.

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DHS heavily redacted Disinformation Board emails despite claiming agency had nothing to hide

When the existence of the Disinformation Governance Board burst into public view, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said there was nothing sinister to hide and claimed the office was rooted in “best practices.”

A year later, Mayorkas’ department is refusing to let Americans see most of the legal justifications and talking points it created to defend the now-disbanded board from “blowback,” FOIA documents showed. 

More than 100 pages of internal communication between the board’s former executive director, Nina Jankowicz, and her staff were released with heavy redactions to the conservative nonprofit Citizens United. 

What little is visible makes clear that DHS underestimated the negative reaction the board would provoke and was scrambling to find ways to keep the story from being pushed by “hostile” news outlets.

In the FOIA emails, Jankowicz cited “blowback and abuse” after certain media outlets began describing the board as the “Ministry of Truth” as word spread about its formation. 

“There is a fair possibility this could end up on a hostile TV network in the coming days,” she wrote.

Some of the communications show the board’s responses to direct questions posed in a letter from Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.), such as what language in the Constitution allows DHS to create such a board and hire staff for it.

Other questions included which parts of DHS would be “responsible for monitoring and collecting data” on misinformation and what “specific actions” DHS intended to take to “counter misinformation.” Each answer was redacted by the department. 

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Nashville Police Refuse To Release Trans School Shooter’s Manifesto

Nashville police will not be releasing the manifesto of the deceased Covenant School shooting suspect, a police spokesperson told the Daily Caller News Foundation on Tuesday.

Nashville Metro Police Department (NMPD) announced that they had found “writings” from 28-year-old transgender suspect Audrey Hale’s home Monday that indicated a “calculated and planned” attack, according to an NMPD press release. An NMPD spokesperson told the DCNF Tuesday that the department had no intentions of releasing the documents to the public anytime soon, citing the ongoing investigation into Hale.

“No, we will not be releasing the manifesto during an open investigation,” the spokesperson told the DCNF.

The police spokesperson did not say for certain whether or not the manifesto would be released in the future after the investigation was closed and restated that due to the ongoing nature of the situation, there was no intention by law enforcement to release the documents.

NMPD Chief John Drake confirmed to reporters during a press conference that the shooting was a “targeted attack” and said that he would elaborate on that at a future date.

“We have a manifesto, we have some writings that we are going over that pertain to this day,” Drake said. “We have a map drawn out of how all this was going to take place.”

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Congressman Claims Alien Tech Is Secretly Being Reverse Engineered By US Government

Recovered UFO technology may be “being reverse-engineered right now,” but we “don’t understand” how it functions, according to a U.S. Representative.

Tennessee Congressman Tim Burchett told Newsweek that he believed “we have recovered a craft at some point, and possible beings.”

“I think that a lot of that’s being reverse-engineered right now, but we just don’t understand it,” he continued.

In early February, four objects were shot down over North America in quick succession. The first was identified by the Pentagon as a Chinese surveillance balloon and was shot down off the coast of South Carolina. China has stated it was a civilian airship collecting meteorological data.

The Defense Department has not confirmed the nature of the remaining three objects, which were targeted by U.S. fighter jet missiles over Alaska, Canada, and Lake Huron, Michigan.

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DHS has a program gathering domestic intelligence — and virtually no one knows about it

For years, the Department of Homeland Security has run a virtually unknown program gathering domestic intelligence, one of many revelations in a wide-ranging tranche of internal documents reviewed by POLITICO.

Those documents also reveal that a significant number of employees in DHS’s intelligence office have raised concerns that the work they are doing could be illegal.

Under the domestic-intelligence program, officials are allowed to seek interviews with just about anyone in the United States. That includes people held in immigrant detention centers, local jails, and federal prison. DHS’s intelligence professionals have to say they’re conducting intelligence interviews, and they have to tell the people they seek to interview that their participation is voluntary. But the fact that they’re allowed to go directly to incarcerated people — circumventing their lawyers — raises important civil liberties concerns, according to legal experts.

That specific element of the program, which has been in place for years, was paused last year because of internal concerns. DHS’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis, which runs the program, uses it to gather information about threats to the U.S., including transnational drug trafficking and organized crime. But the fact that this low-profile office is collecting intelligence by questioning people in the U.S. is virtually unknown.

The inner workings of the program — called the “Overt Human Intelligence Collection Program” — are described in the large tranche of internal documents POLITICO reviewed from the Office of Intelligence and Analysis. Those documents and additional interviews revealed widespread internal concerns about legally questionable tactics and political pressure. The documents also show that people working there fear punishment if they speak out about mismanagement and abuses.

One unnamed employee — quoted in an April 2021 document — said leadership of I&A’s Office of Regional Intelligence “is ‘shady’ and ‘runs like a corrupt government.’” Another document said some employees worried so much about the legality of their activities that they wanted their employer to cover legal liability insurance.

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Washington teacher says schools must do more to keep students’ info secret from ‘Christo-fascist’ parents

A Washington teacher complained on Friday that many schools’ “guidelines and laws” haven’t helped them keep students’ information secret from “Christo-fascist” parents.

A tweet shows Auburn School District 408 teacher Karen Love responding to another that urged parents to check their school district’s policy regarding keeping info about their child’s secret from them. 

“Parents-check your school districts’ policy regarding keeping info about YOUR child secret from you. There are some scary policies out there. Schools should not have a right to keep info about your child from you unless abuse by you is suspected. There I said it and mean it,” a tweet written by “The Principle’s Office” reads.

Love responded, “I cannot disagree with this more. So many students are not safe in this nation from their Christo-fascist parents. And our guidelines and laws haven’t caught up with this.”

The Twitter thread of Love and the other users was reposted as a screenshot by Ian Prior, a senior advisor at American First Legal. 

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How Does This Happen? U.S. Military Email Server Was Exposed for Two Weeks

Why is it that we can’t go more than a week without another Biden administration embarrassment?

On Tuesday, a top U.S. defense official verified to Fox News that a Department of Defense email server was left exposed for two weeks and that, as a result, internal emails were accessible without a password.

The exposed server was allegedly the result of a misconfiguration. Anyone who knew what the server’s IP address was could access the emails with a web browser.

“The server contained around three terabytes of military emails, with many related to the U.S. Special Operations Command, which is a military unit which conducts special operations,” Fox News reports. The emails on the server went back several years and contained personal information.

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Pentagon fixes glitch after tech researcher discovers unsecured email server with sensitive military info

An unsecured server that allowed for US military emails to be spilled across the web for weeks was repaired on Monday. 

The exposed server was hosted on Microsoft’s Azure government cloud, reports TechCrunch, “which uses servers that are physically separated from other commercial customers and as such can be used to share sensitive but unclassified government data.”

The server contained roughly three terabytes of military emails which may have pertained to US Special Operations Command. The site reports that a misconfiguration left the server “without a password,” which allowed the emails to be easily accessible by anyone with internet access with just a web browser, so long as the IP address was known.

One security researcher, Anurag Sen, found the server last weekend and gave the details to TechCrunch, which then alerted the US government.

The server contained sensitive military information and email messages which dated back “years.” One email included a filled-out questionnaire that federal employees use to seek security clearances. Those forms contain sensitive individual information before they are cleared to handle classified information.

The questionnaires hold a “significant amount of background information on security clearance holders valuable to foreign adversaries,” TechCrunch reports. 

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