Tag: transparency

UFO sleuths want fewer secrets in Trump-era investigations

After generations of stigma and secrecy around sightings of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs), or what the public calls UFOs, investigators probing hundreds of unsolved cases say the second Trump administration could be a turning point for transparency.

“We’re trying to get as much of the raw evidence out as we can without putting our partners’ equities at risk,” said Jon Kosloski, director of the Pentagon’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, the government-wide task force leading research into mysterious sightings.

“The office has hired additional personnel and we’re investing in automated security review software that can redact the sensitive information from videos,” he said of an effort to release more currently classified material related to the probes.

Congress established the Resolution Office in 2022 to “detect, identify and attribute” mysterious objects of interest in the air, outer space, and underwater, with special focus on mitigating potential threats to military operations and national security.

More than 1800 cases have been reviewed by the Pentagon so far, with the vast majority ultimately resolved as likely balloons, drones, debris or animals based on a comprehensive review of available data.

Kosloski says “several dozen” cases remain anomalous even after rigorous analysis of evidence. They continue to receive new reports of anomalies by military service members and the general public every month.

“It’s a potential problem, a national security problem, safety of flight issue,” Kosloski told ABC News. “We seem to have the full support of the administration” in pursuing answers.

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UK Leads Global Push For Notification Data Requests

Back in 2023, we reported on how US agencies have used push notification metadata on smartphones for surveillance, pressuring tech companies like Apple and Google to hand over user information. Prompted by Senator Ron Wyden’s inquiry, Apple revealed it had been legally barred from disclosing this practice, which raises serious concerns about civil liberties and government overreach.

Cut to today and government demands for user information tied to Apple’s push notification system continued into the first half of 2024, with the United Kingdom submitting 141 requests, despite the nation’s relatively small size, and the United States following with 129.

Germany also obtained data during this period. Singapore, despite making inquiries, received none. These figures come from Apple’s most recent transparency report, shedding light on global government interest in a lesser-known surveillance vector.

Even some privacy apps can be undermined by surveillance at the push notification level. Many apps have to rely on Apple or Google to deliver notifications; services that can expose critical metadata such as which app sent the notification, when it was sent, and how often.

This metadata can be used by governments to infer user activity, and social connections, and even de-anonymize users. It bypasses app-level encryption entirely, exploiting a layer outside the user’s or developer’s control.

Apple’s report outlines what’s at stake with these requests. When someone enables notifications for an app, the system generates a “push token” that links the device and app to a specific Apple account.

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Who’s Programming The AI, Mr. President?

President Trump’s new legislative centerpiece – the One Big Beautiful Bill – has a promising name and some compelling goals: reduce government bloat, streamline agencies, and modernize operations with cutting-edge technology.

But there’s a problem. A big one.

No one will tell us who’s programming the AI.

This sweeping bill includes a 10-year moratorium on any state or local government regulating artificial intelligence. According to The Washington Post and AP, more than 60 existing state-level laws will be overridden if this provision passes. All regulatory authority over AI—including systems that will be used in law enforcement, healthcare, defense, and finance—will be centralized in the federal government for a decade.

Even worse? The bill empowers the Department of Commerce to deploy “commercial AI” across virtually every federal agency—from the IRS to Homeland Security—according to Indian Express and The Verge.

And yet, no one in the White House or Congress has revealed who is writing the AI code, what datasets it’s trained on, whether it can be independently audited, or whether it’s bound by the U.S. Constitution.

This isn’t just a transparency issue. This is a constitutional crisis in the making.

To be clear, President Trump’s instincts here may be sound. We’ve long needed to shrink the federal leviathan and replace unconstitutional bureaucracies with systems that serve the people—not special interests.

But good intentions won’t protect us from unseen programmers, black-box algorithms, and unaccountable automation.

This bill mandates AI integration across government “to improve efficiency and security.” But efficiency isn’t liberty. Security isn’t sovereignty. And no AI—no matter how “smart”—should be allowed to rewrite, ignore, or reinterpret constitutional rights.

According to Business Insider, the AI moratorium’s stated goal is to “foster innovation” and avoid a “fragmented regulatory landscape.” In reality, it strips states of their authority to protect their citizens from deepfakes, algorithmic bias, digital censorship, and mass surveillance.

This is not governance. This is outsourced tyranny, hidden under the guise of modernization.

So let’s ask the question about what happens when AI is weaponized. If the systems being implemented were open source, transparent, built entirely on constitutional jurisprudence, and auditable by the public, we’d be having a very different conversation.

Instead, we’re facing a future where an algorithm may determine whether you’re eligible for services, a machine learning system may flag you as a “threat” based on your social media posts, and a black-box model may deny you a loan, reject your legal challenge, or freeze your bank account.

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Jill Biden’s Press Sec GOES OFF on Bidens For Concealing One Scandal After Another… “Allergic to Transparency”

Jill Biden’s former press secretary Michael LaRosa went off on the Bidens for concealing one scandal after another.

“This was a group in the White House who were allergic to transparency, and I’m talking about just in the East Wing. The very first day walking into the White House, the usher was fired, and I couldn’t get reporters straight answers, because nobody would give me straight answers,” LaRosa said on Fox & Friends.

Michael LaRosa said the Bidens lied about everything from the dogs biting secret service agents to wedding arrangements.

“They took days and months to be deliberative, and I’m talking about the small things, about when the dog bites occurred,” Michael LaRosa said.

“Or about the wedding with the grandkids,” he added. “They got caught lying to the press about press coverage, because they were so scared to be transparent about anything.”

“I said to myself at some point, ‘If it’s this hard to get them to just be transparent and disclose things and to just be upfront from the beginning about anything, even the small things… My God, what would happen if there were big things?’” he said.

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FBI Director Patel Says Transparency on Russia Collusion Claim in ‘a Week or Two’ — ‘The Biggest D.C. Deception Game We Have Ever Seen’

During this week’s broadcast of FNC’s “Sunday Morning Futures,” FBI Director Kash Patel discussed the 2017 claim that President Donald Trump’s first presidential election win resulted from Russian collusion.

Despite the statute of limitations having expired on prosecuting any criminality, Patel told host Maria Bartiromo to expect a “wave of transparency” in a week or two.

Partial transcript as follows:

BARTIROMO: I watched it with you and Devin Nunes, when you were truth-tellers on all of this, and you were as well, Dan, throughout the Russia collusion story and the rest.

PATEL: Look, I can speak to the folks that were in our seats, our predecessors, and they intentionally failed the American public by putting on the biggest D.C. deception game we have ever seen. They said the FBI was the most storied institution for law enforcement, and it was. And it will be again very soon.

But when the likes of Comey and McCabe and Strzok and company came in here with the James Bakers of the world and intentionally lied to a federal court, only to rig a presidential election by lying to the American public and using taxpayer dollars, likely illegally, to fund this entire operation, and then withholds sculptor information from a federal court that I used to appear before to manhunt terrorists, that’s what broke the FBI.

And then, when they were caught, they lied about it. And you and a few others like Dan and others were brave enough to cover it six, seven, eight years ago. And we’re still talking about it today, because, as Congress is working rigorously with us, the Crossfire Hurricane documents are coming fast and hard. And they’re being sent there unredacted, so we can have full accountability.

And that’s how you restore what the — the trust that was lost to the American public when it comes to the FBI.

BARTIROMO: Yes, but, come on, Director. With all due respect, we have been talking about this for a long time, and I have been demanding accountability for many, many years.

One of the — you mentioned Comey, Strzok and the rest. They have got TV shows. They have got media platforms. They’re fine. There’s been no accountability.

PATEL: Well, look, it’s a fair criticism. But what I will tell people is, we weren’t here in the FBI in the last five years, when we had statute of limitations that were still in play, where we could have investigated criminal conduct. Most of these statute of limitations are 5 years old.

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Iran Offers More Nuclear Transparency In Exchange For Lifting Sanctions

Iran says that ready to make its nuclear program more transparent at a moment it is preparing to send representatives for a third round of talks with the United States, set for April 26.

Iranian government spokeswoman Fatemeh Mohajerani said Tuesday that Tehran in return for this greater transparency wants US-led sanctions lifted.

“We will try to create more transparency and more trust [in the nuclear program] in exchange for lifting sanctions. In other words, in exchange for lifting sanctions — I emphasize, in a way that is effective and has a [positive] effect on people’s lives — Iran is ready to create more trust in its nuclear program and more transparency,” Mohajerani told reporters.

Mohajerani made clear that Tehran is ready to reach “good agreement” with the United States on nuclear issue. “We are confident that reaching a good agreement in a short time while respecting our national interests is realistic,” she said, calling the prior two rounds “good” amid a “constructive” atmosphere.

The day prior to these optimistic remarks, Iran’s Foreign Ministry warned that Israel was seeking to “undermine” the ongoing nuclear talks with Washington, amid reports in Israeli media that leaders are mulling a ‘limited’ attack on the Islamic Republic.

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei said Monday that a “kind of coalition is forming… to undermine and disrupt the diplomatic process” and that the “Zionist regime is at the center of this effort.”

Alluding to reports from last week of an internal US administration split on Iran, Baghaei further warned that hawks in the US are also involved in the effort to sabotage the talks. “Alongside it are a series of warmongering currents in the United States and figures from different factions,” he said.

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Republicans Debut Transparency Bill After Uncovering Millions Of Secret Spending On China

The Biden administration funneled $18 million in U.S. tax dollars — approximately $4 million of which Republican Sen. Joni Ernst’s staff found buried or absent from the federal government’s funding database — to causes in Communist China.

The majority of the payments were funneled through the U.S. Departments of State and Health and Human Services to various Chinese entities and China-based projects for diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility trainings (including some at the U.S. consulate), “art billboards,” a bicycle parking cover, pro-LGBT events, various climate change initiatives, and rat research and reported on USAspending.gov.

Buried in that federal spending database, however, is more of Americans’ hard-earned money that the National Institutes of Health handed to at least one Chinese university.

In one example, the NIH grant database and USAspending.gov show Peking University in Beijing raked in approximately $4.8 million in U.S. tax dollars from 2021 to 2024. A cursory search shows that the only project grant Peking University received U.S. funding for between 2021 and 2024 was a “China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study.” Ernst’s office, however, uncovered another $1.08 million to Peking researchers concealed as a subaward under a grant to the University of Southern California for sensors designed to provide imaging of “neuromodulators” that “regulate addiction attention, cognition, mood, memory, motivation, sleep and more through their influence on brain circuits.” The subaward’s purpose and amount are not associated with the university’s profile on USAspending.gov.

An April 2023 Government Accountability Office audit confirmed that projects and programs in China often receive American funding through subawards but noted the “full extent of these subawards is unknown because of limitations in the completeness and accuracy of subaward data reported in government systems.”

“Limitations in subaward data is a government-wide issue and not unique to U.S. funding to entities in China,” the report added.

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Massie Bill Demands Federal Candidates Reveal Dual Citizenship

Seeking to spotlight federal office-seekers who may have a conflict of interest, Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie has introduced a bill that would require candidates for federal office to disclose any non-American citizenships they hold.  

“Personally, I don’t think dual citizens should serve in Congress, but I ultimately decided to introduce a transparency bill requiring full disclosure of citizenship,” said Massie in a Monday Fox News interview with Will Cain. “Voters can then make the decision.” So far, Massie’s Dual Loyalty Disclosure Act (HR 2356) has attracted four co-sponsors, all of them Republicans: Andy Biggs (AZ-5), Clay Higgins (LA-3), Marjorie Taylor Greene (GA-14) and Nicholas Begich (AK at-large).

While it’s not a provision of his transparency-focused bill that would amend the Federal Election Campaign Act, Massie thinks dual citizens in Congress “should… abstain from votes specifically benefitting those countries,” the libertarian-minded MIT grad said in a press release accompanying the introduction of his bill. “We swear an oath to the Constitution, and the question is, if you’re a citizen of two countries, which oath are you taking more seriously, or can you take them both seriously?” Massie told Fox’s Cain. 

Underscoring the mystery that Massie is seeking to end, it’s unclear how many current members of Congress have citizenship in a foreign country. Indeed, ZeroHedge wasn’t able to identify any members who have disclosed dual citizenships on their own. According to Pew Research, there are 19 foreign-born members of the 119th Congress, but that doesn’t necessarily equate to holding citizenship abroad. Among those 19, the countries of birth are Mexico (4 members), India (3), South Korea (2) Ukraine (2), Colombia, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Japan, Peru, Somalia and Taiwan.    

“I’m not picking on any particular country,” said Massie. However, American social media and other discourse regarding US officials’ potential dual citizenship has overwhelmingly focused on Israel, which receives billions of dollars in US military aid every year, in a relationship that foments intense foreign resentments against the United States, and terrorism against Americans. 

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Attorney General Pam Bondi Provides Major Update on Epstein Files — Promises Only Minimal Redactions to Protect Victims

Attorney General Pam Bondi announced a major update on the long-awaited release of Jeffrey Epstein case files — and made it clear that only minimal redactions will be made, strictly to protect the privacy and safety of the victims.

Appearing on Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo, Bondi addressed the tidal wave of speculation and concern surrounding the Epstein files, following reports that up to 1,000 FBI agents and civilians have been pulled from vital national security duties to comb through mountains of evidence related to Epstein’s international sex trafficking ring.

Maria Bartiromo:
A lot of conversation about the Epstein files. And I recognize that when you’re dealing with children, it takes much more time. You’ve got to ensure that what you’re sending out publicly is not revealing any personal information. But can you give us a sense of those two items and whether or not we’ll learn more about them?

Pam Bondi:
Yes, you’re absolutely right, Maria. You know, tens of thousands of pages of documents and hundreds and hundreds of victims of Jeffrey Epstein. So the FBI — they have been working round the clock, at my directive, at Kash Patel.

Now Dan Bongino is there, who is a great asset for all of us at the FBI as well. But yeah, we have to protect their identity, their personal information, to make sure they’re safe.

But other than that, we are releasing all of these documents as soon as we can get them redacted — to protect the victims of him, of all of these horrific crimes that he committed.

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Burchett calls for government transparency on UAPs, spending: ‘We deserve to know’

Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) called for the government to reveal what it’s spending taxpayer money on relating to Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) amid growing calls from lawmakers for increased transparency on the issue.

“They’re spending tens of millions of dollars on this subject. And then they turn around tell us they don’t exist,” the Tennessee Republican told NewsNation’s Blake Burman on “The Hill” Friday.

Burchett stressed the need for greater government transparency on extraterrestrial life while discussing the recent hiring of former intelligence officer and UFO whistleblower David Grusch by Rep. Burlison (R-Mo.).

“I think he can help us ask questions that need to be asked, that should be asked, that maybe we’re not asking the right questions because we’re not supposed experts on this,” Burchett said of Grusch.

“I want to know what they’re spending the money on,” he later added.

The topic of UAPs has received greater attention from Congress in recent years, with congressional hearings in 2024 and 2023 diving deeper into whether or not government sectors are withholding evidence from lawmakers.

“They need to they need to disclose everything and do it now,” Burchett said on Friday. “America needs to know. We need to demand that of our elected officials. Quit joking around about little green men and flying saucers. We’re spending tens of millions of dollars on something that, goddamnit, we deserve to know. Give us the information.”

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