Tag: secrecy

Cruz-Klobuchar Amendment Would Give Lawmakers Powers To Scrub Private Information From The Internet

In a move that will raise eyebrows amongst transparency proponents, US Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas) are gearing up to put forth an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that could provide lawmakers with unprecedented powers to censor a plethora of internet-based information. The proposed change, however, has sparked concerns around potential censorship of news reports and impingements upon freedom of speech.

The proposed legislation would extend the privilege to lawmakers, their family members, select congressional staff identified as high-risk, and individuals cohabitating with lawmakers, enabling them to demand the extensive elimination of certain personal data online, referred to as “covered information.” The amendment enumerates “covered information” to include home addresses, secondary residences, personal email accounts, cell phone numbers, and other personal and sensitive travel details.

Furthermore, the amendment equips lawmakers with the power to obliterate private data amassed by digital devices, including apps. This is proposed as a response to fears of lawmakers being located precisely based on this data. Despite the legitimate anxiety around personal data being traded by data brokers, the new amendment would equip lawmakers with a set of privacy rights which would be inaccessible to ordinary citizens, who might be similarly vulnerable to security risks.

The proposed amendment, though, has precipitated concerns about press freedom. Investigative journalism often requires accessing private information of lawmakers. The new amendment could seriously impede such investigations.

Past instances of influence peddling, often cloaked by home-related favors, might have gone unexposed under this amendment, Lee Fang opined.

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Veteran US Marine fears he’ll end up dead ‘like Jeffrey Epstein’ after being warned by ‘men in black’ not to speak about UFO he claims he saw during Sumatran earthquake humanitarian mission in 2009

A US Marine veteran who claimed his unit saw a secret military UFO in 2009 has said he is now living in fear for his life as he believes dark forces want him silenced. 

Former rifleman Michael Herrera, 33, has said he doesn’t want to end up like disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein – who he suggests was killed, despite his August 2019 death being ruled a suicide. 

Last month, Denver-born Herrera sensationally claimed that while he was serving in Indonesia in 2009, his six-man unit stumbled across a flying saucer being loaded with weapons. 

Herrera was then a 20-year-old rifleman sent on a Navy humanitarian mission during the 2009 Sumatra earthquake and tsunami that devastated the region.

He told the Mail that while guarding an airdrop of aid supplies outside the city of Padang in October that year, his six-man unit stumbled across a hovering octagonal craft in apparent use by clandestine US forces. 

‘I could see something moving and rotating. It was changing colors between a very light matte gray to a very dark matte black,’ he said. ‘It stuck out like a sore thumb.’

They were then threatened at gunpoint by unmarked US forces at the scene who told him not to disclose his sighting of the ‘flying saucer’ to anyone, according to Herrera, and his camera was seized by some mysterious ‘men in black’.

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PENTAGON JOINS ELON MUSK’S WAR AGAINST PLANE TRACKING

A TECHNOLOGY WISH LIST circulated by the U.S. military’s elite Joint Special Operations Command suggests the country’s most secretive war-fighting component shares an anxiety with the world’s richest man: Too many people can see where they’re flying their planes.

The Joint Special Operations Air Component, responsible for ferrying commandos and their gear around the world, is seeking help keeping these flights out of the public eye through a “‘Big Data’ Analysis & Feedback Tool,” according to a procurement document obtained by The Intercept. The document is one of a series of periodic releases of lists of technologies that special operations units would like to see created by the private sector.

The listing specifically calls out the risk of social media “tail watchers” and other online observers who might identify a mystery plane as a military flight. According to the document, the Joint Special Operations Air Component needs software to “leverage historical and real-time data, such as the travel histories and details of specific aircraft with correlation to open-source information, social media, and flight reporting.”

Armed with this data, the tool would help the special operations gauge how much scrutiny a given plane has received in the past and how likely it is to be connected to them by prying eyes online.

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Pentagon typo leaked millions of sensitive messages to African nation

A common typo within the U.S. military has misdirected millions of emails and messages containing sensitive information to the African country of Mali, the Pentagon confirmed Monday.

The issue comes from the U.S. military’s “.MIL” domain name used for emails, which is commonly mistyped as “.ML,” the domain for Mali. The leak has resulted in the exposure of unclassified but sensitive information, such as diplomatic documents, tax returns, passwords and the travel details of top officers, according to an initial report from the Financial Times.

The Pentagon acknowledged the issue in a statement to Fox News on Monday, saying emails sent outside the “.MIL” domain are typically blocked.

“The Department of Defense is aware of this issue and takes all unauthorized disclosures of Controlled National Security Information or Controlled Unclassified Information seriously. DoD has implemented policy, training, and technical controls to ensure that emails from the “.mil” domain are not delivered to incorrect domains. Such emails are blocked before they leave the .mil domain and the sender is notified that they must validate the email addresses of the intended recipients,” the Pentagon said.

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Teacher instructs 10-year-old to ‘make sure this email is deleted’ after private communications about student’s gender identity in Olympia, Washington

A teacher in the Olympia School District was privately communicating with a 10-year-old student about her gender identity, and even invited the girl to her house and suggested she set up a private email account and delete messages, “…otherwise when your mom looks, you will be outed instantly.”

Alesha Perkins, who has put a spotlight on the policies of the Washington school district obtained thousands of emails and documents as part of a public disclosure request and turned them over to the unDivided podcast.

According to host Brandi Kruse, the emails from the summer to the fall of 2022, is between Jennifer Knight, a teacher at Centennial Elementary School, and one of her 5th-grade students.

In an email to school staff on April 28, Knight said that the student, a biological girl, would now be using he/him/they/them pronouns.

“Crew Knight,” the teacher wrote referring to the class, “has a student who has recently changed their name and pronouns in school and this email is to inform you of that change because you work with this child in some capacity.” 

The student “…has opened up to me these past few months and has just requested this change. Please understand that this change is his right and is not to be questioned. Please also know that they are not going by this change at home, and we will not be discussing this with his family.”

The district’s policies allow for teachers and staff to conceal gender identity and other related issues from a student’s parents, similar to the state policy which reads, “…in general, school staff should not share a student’s transgender or gender-diverse status, legal name, or sex assigned at birth with others, who could include other students, school staff, and non-school staff.”

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10 Alleged Ultra Top Secret Shadow Government Projects

The idea of “secret projects” such as MKUltra were once considered complete fiction and nothing but conspiracy theories. As were secret projects to influence the weather or the use of remote viewers by such intelligence agencies as the CIA. However, we now know that these efforts existed, at least on an initial research and experimental level.

If these top secret and once-denied projects were more factual than authorities would have originally had us believe, then what should we make of some of the other, albeit bizarre, allegations of top secret projects and programs that operate in the shadows of governments, funded by the “black budget?” Here are ten such programs. Some are more believable than others, no doubt, but all are intriguing to the max.

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Top US Officials Have ‘First-Hand Knowledge’ of Secret UFO Program: Rubio

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) has claimed that multiple senior government officials—including Pentagon employees with “high clearances”—are aware of a secret UFO craft crash retrieval program being run by the United States.

The Republican lawmaker made the claims in an interview with NewsNation on June 26, shortly after Air Force veteran and former intelligence officer David Grusch alleged that the Pentagon had discovered dead alien bodies from spacecraft that had crashed.

“There are people that have come forward to share information with our committee over the last couple of years … I want to be very protective of these people,” said Rubio, who serves as vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

“A lot of these people came to us even before protections were in the law for whistleblowers to come forward,” Rubio said, adding that many of those claimed to have “first-hand knowledge” of the alleged extraterrestrial retrieval program.

The Florida Republican alleged that some of the whistleblowers who have stepped forward with similar claims to Grusch are public figures with “high clearances” and “high positions within our government.”

“We’re trying to gather as much of that information as we can … Some of these people still work in the government,” Rubio said. He added that many of them are fearful of losing their jobs, losing their clearances, and being harmed.

Rubio’s comments come amid an ongoing investigation—led by House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.)—into the alleged secret military UFO program. The committee is expected to hold a hearing on the matter soon.

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Congress doubles down on explosive claims of illegal UFO retrieval programs

Asked June 26 about allegations of secret UFO retrieval and reverse-engineering programs, Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) made several stunning statements.

In an exclusive interview, Rubio told NewsNation Washington correspondent Joe Khalil that multiple individuals with “very high clearances and high positions within our government” “have come forward to share” “first-hand” UFO-related claims “beyond the realm of what [the Senate Intelligence Committee] has ever dealt with.”

Rubio’s comments provide context for a bipartisan provision adopted unanimously by the Senate Intelligence Committee, which would immediately halt funding for any secret government or contractor efforts to retrieve and reverse-engineer craft of “non-earth” or “exotic” origin.

This extraordinary language added to the Senate version of the Intelligence authorization bill mirrors and adds significant credibility to a whistleblower’s recent, stunning allegations that a clandestine, decades-long effort to recover, analyze and exploit objects of “non-human” origin has been operating illegally without congressional oversight.

Additionally, the bill instructs individuals with knowledge of such activities to disclose all relevant information and grants legal immunity if the information is reported appropriately within a defined timeframe. Moreover, nearly 20 pages of the legislation appear to directly address recent events by enhancing a raft of legal protections for whistleblowers while also permitting such individuals to contact Congress directly.

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James Cameron reveals he knew Titanic sub imploded on Monday – raising questions over rescue secrecy

Hollywood filmmaker James Cameron said he received the information within 24 hours of the disappearance of the submersible Titan that it had imploded when it lost communication with its mothership.

“We got confirmation within an hour that there had been a loud bang at the same time that the sub comms were lost,” Mr Cameron, who directed the 1997 movie Titanic, said.

“A loud bang on the hydrophone. Loss of transponder. Loss of comms. I knew what happened. The sub imploded,” he said, adding that he told colleagues in an email on Monday, “We’ve lost some friends,” and, “It’s on the bottom in pieces right now”.

The submersible carrying five people to the Titanic imploded near the site of the shipwreck and killed everyone on board, authorities said on Thursday. The Titan launched on Sunday around 8am EST and was reported overdue that afternoon about 435 miles south of St John’s, Newfoundland.

But after one hour and 45 minutes, the craft lost contact with its mothership, the Polar Prince.

Those on board were British billionaire Hamish Harding, Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet, Pakistan-born businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood, and OceanGate Expedition’s chief executive Stockton Rush.

“This was a catastrophic implosion of the vessel,” said rear admiral John Mauger of the First Coast Guard District, adding that the bodies of the victims may never be recovered from the Atlantic.

The decorated director’s statement comes amid reports that secret US Navy underwater microphones detected the Titan sub’s implosion several days ago, but the information was released on Thursday.

The Navy used a top secret acoustic detection system to search for any sign of the OceanGate Expeditions submersible soon after it was reported missing on Sunday, a US defence official told The Wall Street Journal.

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Why does the government keep obstructing UFO transparency efforts?

It’s been nearly 27 years since I submitted my first Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA , request on UFOs . I was 15 years old at the time. That request unearthed a four-page Defense Intelligence Agency document detailing a 1976 event in which multiple UFOs shut off the communications and instrumentation panels of two separate Iranian F-4 Phantom jets. The advanced capabilities of these UFOs sparked my interest, and through the FOIA, I quickly discovered the incident was not an isolated one. I learned that there was much more to discover within official files.

My website, The Black Vault , showcases thousands of UFO files I’ve received from the government. The documents, overall, hint at a mysterious phenomenon the U.S. military and government have struggled to identify adequately for decades. Indeed, they appear to have often kept the public in the dark using various tactics to block legally or at least severely prohibit accessing some of these records that date back to the 1940s.

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