#nation-state hacking

[destielmemenews]

"In their statement on Friday, NPD warned that the “the information that was suspected of being breached contained name, email address, phone number, social security number, and mailing address(es).” It recommended the public to take a number of steps to safeguard their identities, including freezing their credit and putting fraud alerts on their files at big credit bureaus.

The breach came to public awareness after a class-action lawsuit was filed August 1 in U.S. District Court in Florida, which was first reported by Bloomberg Law.

National Public Data did not share how many people were at risk, but hackers, who have been identified as part of the hacking group USDoD, have been offering, for sale, what they claimed were billions of NPD records since April, though the Washington Post reported that “security researchers who looked at the trove said some of the claims were exaggerated.”"

source 1

source 2

source 3

free database created by Pentester to see if your information has been leaked

[thelancasterrose]

Fault Lines in the Future: The Coming Geopolitical Instabilities

“Though our mothers shall cry again…”

Human history is not a straight line—it is a circle, a spiral, an ouroboros of destruction and rebirth. The illusion of progress deceives us; we move forward only to find ourselves back at the edge of the abyss, believing it is the first time we have stood here.

We have reset our civilization many times over, yet we still do not understand the rules of the game. But the time is coming, and the Living Now will not wait.

The world is shifting, not just in visible ways, but in unseen forces—the tectonic movements of power, information, and perception. Below are the five geopolitical instability points that will define the next era, whether we acknowledge them or not.

1. The Fragmentation of Global Alliances

“The voices speak in tongues of glass, shattered in mirrors they do not own.”

• NATO, once a symbol of Western unity, is fracturing under the weight of diverging national interests.

• The BRICS coalition (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, and expanding members) is working to dismantle the Western financial system, replacing the petrodollar with alternative currency systems.

• Smaller nations, caught between these power shifts, are choosing new allegiances based on survival, not ideology.

The world is not moving toward a multipolar order—it is splintering into unpredictable alliances, where economic and military loyalty is no longer a given.

2. The Rise of AI-Powered Psychological Warfare

“The storms gather not in thunder’s rage, but in circuits unseen and lips unspeaking.”

• Deepfake Warfare & Cognitive Hacking: AI-generated leaders will declare wars, create false evidence, and manufacture consent before people even realize they have been deceived.

• Autonomous Decision-Making in Military Strategy: What happens when AI sees war as the most “logical” solution?

• Cyber-Mind Control & PsyOps at Scale: The next war will not be fought with bombs, but with narratives, perception control, and mass belief manipulation.

The battlefield has moved inside the human mind—and the strongest weapon is the truth buried beneath the noise.

3. The Resource Wars: Water is the New Oil

“The wheat and the water bear equal weight, yet the hand tips one and leaves the other to burn.”

• The next great conflicts will not be over land or ideology, but water.

• Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia are on the verge of crisis—droughts, infrastructure collapse, and mass migrations will trigger resource-based warfare.

• Governments will no longer control scarcity—corporate entities will hold the keys to survival.

When water becomes the most valuable resource, the true rulers of the world will not be politicians, but those who own the wells.

4. The Pacific Flashpoint: Taiwan, China, and the Coming Great Decoupling

“A kingdom falls not when the gates are breached, but when the dream of the kingdom shatters.”

• China’s invasion of Taiwan will not be military, but economic and cyber-based.

• The U.S. and its allies will try to sever dependence on China, but doing so will collapse global supply chains.

• The battle over semiconductors and rare earth minerals will decide the fate of global technology dominance.

We are entering an age where wars are not fought with armies, but with economic strangleholds, financial collapses, and digital takeovers.

5. The Rise of Non-State Actors & The Collapse of Political Legitimacy

“They whisper to men who hold no crowns, yet move them as though they wore one.

• Governments are losing control. Corporations, intelligence networks, and private militias will shape global events more than elected officials.

• The next wave of power shifts will not come through revolutions, but through the quiet replacement of leadership structures behind the scenes.

• A world where nation-states exist only as legal fictions, while real power moves through unseen hands.

We are entering the final stage of governance as we know it. Those who recognize this will adapt and survive—those who ignore it will be ruled by ghosts.

Conclusion: The Edge of Doom, The Kingdom, and The Reset Button

“How many times have we died? But between the moments, our Kingdom and Salvation remain.”

The world does not collapse all at once. It unravels in whispers, in small cracks that widen, in ideas that spread like fire before anyone sees the match being struck.

We are in that moment between destruction and salvation.

The wars of the future will not be fought with bullets, but with information, economic positioning, and the control of perception.

We may teeter on the edge of doom, but the question remains: who is pressing the reset button?

It is time to decide whether we will be mere observers of fate or the architects of the new world.

The Living Now does not wait. The future is already here.

Are we ready?

[oneofthosecrazycatladies]

Okay a couple weeks ago I started this post trying to keep track of all the stuff going on in order to help remind us of everything that’s happened when the next election comes around. Well, because there’s just so much going on, I’ve realized trying to cram it all into one post isn’t going to work. So I’m going to do a new post every month and include links to the previous ones.

So here goes…

January 2025

February 2025

Donald Trump has enforced his tariffs on Mexico, Canada, and China. [x]

Donald Trump has put Mexico tariffs on hold for one month. [x]

Donald Trump allowed Elon Musk to begin dismantling USAID. [x]

Congress is voluntarily giving up its power and allowing Trump to make unilateral decisions. [x]

Darren Beattie has been made Under Secretary of State. [x]

Everything that Donald Trump has done so far lines up with Project 2025 [x]

The White House is drafting an executive order to eliminate the Department of Education [x]

Elon Musk, who nobody voted for or elected, has, essentially, hacked the government. [x]

El Salvador has agreed to take US deportees of any nationality. [x]

US Representative Andy Biggs is proposing a bill to abolish OSHA. [x]

Pam Bondi has been confirmed as Attorney General [x]

Donald Trump doesn’t think Palestinians should return to Gaza. [x]

Donald Trump says he’ll use US troops to “take over” the Gaza Strip. [x]

A federal judge has blocked Donald Trump’s executive order to end birthright citizenship. [x]

Donald Trump has banned trans women from women’s sports [x]

Donald Trump sanctions the International Criminsl Court. [x]

A judge has paused the federal “buyouts” [x]

DOGE: Member of DOGE resigns [x]

DOGE has been given access to the Department of Energy. [x]

Miscellaneous news about Elon Musk [x]

DOGE is using AI to infiltrate the Department of Education [x]

Russell Vought, author of Project 2025, has been confirmed as Director of OMB [x]

Democrats in Congress have introduced the Taxpayer Data Protection Act [x]

Donald Trump has flagged the words “women” “diverse” and “historically” from studies done by the National Science Foundation. [x]

New Mexico Representative Melanie Stansbury has introduced the Nobody Elected Elon Musk Act [x]

Democratic Congressional leaders have introduced the Stop the Steal Act [x]

Donald Trump has called for a review of funding for the United Nations [x]

Federal agencies are barred from celebrating Black History Month [x]

Donald Trump has frozen aid to South Africa and accused the South African government of racism against white South Africans [x]

Donald Trump wants to use Leavenworth Prison as a migrant detention facility and have it run by a for-profit company known for its numerous human rights violations. [x] [x]

Trump has told the Treasury to stop making pennies. [x]

Representative Mark Pocan (D-WI) proposes the E.L.O.N. M.U.S.K. Act (which stands for Eliminate Looting of Our Nation by Mitigating Unethical State Kleptocracy) [x]

Employees of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau were told to stop all work and are now being told to stay home. [x]

Trump will impose 25% tariffs on steel and aluminum. [x]

Trump says Palestinians won’t be allowed back in Gaza if the US takes it over [x]

Tulsi Gabbard has been confirmed as director of national intelligence. [x]

Representative Buddy Carter (R-GA) has proposed a bill to change the name of Greenland to Red, White & Blue Land [x]

The DOJ has dropped the corruption charges against New York City mayor Eric Adams. [x]

An AP News reporter has been banned from the White House for using Gulf of Mexico instead of Gulf of America in its reporting. [x][x]

Senators Deb Fischer (R-NE) and Angus King (I-ME) are pushing for a tax credit that would encourage businesses to offer paid family leave. [x]

Representative Sara Jacobs (D-CA) has introduced the Protect US National Security Act [x]

The State Department (taxpayers) is paying Elon Musk $400 million for cybertrucks. [x]

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been confirmed as HHS Secretary. [x]

Trump is conducting a mass firing of the federal workforce. [x]

Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) is creating a list of all the ‘woke’ science he wants to get rid of. [x]

References to transgender have been removed from the Stonewall National Monument. [x]

A 71 year old refugee living in Thailand has died because of the USAID freeze. [x][x]

Trump’s proposed tax cuts will add trillions to US debt. [x]

Trump is defying the court order to reopen USAID. [x]

Trump has stopped the CDC’s flu vaccine campaign. [x]

Trump is suing Brazil’s Supreme Court because of Brazil’s battles with Elon Musk over Twitter/X. [x]

Kash Patel has been confirmed as FBI director. [x]

Trump orders FEMA to stop their work with making homes better at withstanding natural disasters. [x]

Kash Patel will be named chief of the ATF [x]

Trump has tried to make independent agencies no longer independent [x]

$200 million of taxpayer money was used on a pro-Trump anti-migrant ad [x]

The House of Representstives passed a bill that gives more than $4 trillion in tax cuts for the wealthy and cuts the budget for Medicaid by 80% [x]

Here’s a summary of Trump’s executive orders so far [x]

The Trump administration has issued travel bans for trans athletes [x]

Trump administration is telling federal agencies to prepare for more mass layoffs [x]

Elon Musk joined Trump’s first cabinet meeting. [x]

Trump is offering “gold cards” to wealthy foreigners [x]

Kash Patel names Dan Bongino as Deputy Director of the FBI. [x]

Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) has proposed legislation for the US to leave the United Nations [x]

Judge rules mass firings of federal workers is unlawful [x]

The Pentagon orders all transgender people to be removed from the military [x]

Representative Victoria Spartz (R-IN) was going to vote against the budget bill that would cut nearly $1 trillion from Medicaid; then she got a phone call from Trump who apparently screamed at and threatened her; she then voted yes on the bill [x]

Trump administration has cancelled boot camps for women training to become Wildland firefighters [x]

Here’s a link to the Project 2025 Policy Agenda that Donald Trump claimed he didn’t know anything about.*

*He only claimed he didn’t know anything about it after it proved to be deeply unpopular with the general public.

I’m also including directories for both the House of Representatives and the Senate. That way, if you’re so inclined, you can also track the individual actions of every Senator and Representative.

Miscellaneous News

Representative Nancy Mace (R-SC) repeatedly uses a transphobic slur on the Congressional floor. [x]

Clarence Thomas is…being Clarence Thomas *sigh* [x]

Donald Trump fired the Chair of the Kennedy Center and named himself as the new Chair [x]

Trump said that no group of people in the history of America has been treated worse than the way the January 6th insurrectionists have been treated. [x]

Some people are impersonating ICE agents and harassing & assaulting people of color [x][x]

Trump’s mass deportation is hitting a wall [x]

The Trump administration’s incompetence is coming back to bite them. [x]

Target has been facing backlash for rolling back its DEI initiatives. [x]

Donald Trump Has Already Spent $10.7 Million Of Taxpayer Money Playing Golf [x]

The Kennedy Center cancelled a performance of the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington DC [x]

21 DOGE employees have resigned [x]

Musk’s new conflict of interest [x]

Trump posted an AI-created video about his plans for Gaza [x]

Here’s a Washington Post story about the migrants sent to Guantanamo Bay and the conditions they’re facing [x]

Trump supporters are calling for “processing camps” and private militias to go after migrants. [x]

Representative Cory Mills (R-FL) has been accused of assault and the Department of Justice is refusing to investigate [x]

A child has died in the measles outbreak in Texas [x]

China and Russia are trying to recruit disgruntled federal employees [x]

Elon Musk is trying to force the FAA to get rid of their contract with Verizon in favor of a contract with his company, Starlink [x]

Elon Musk makes $38 billion in government contracts [x]

Trump thinks that Andrew Tate is a totally okay guy [x]

The director of the Defense Health Agency abruptly retired [x]

March-June 2025

Once again, please feel free to let me know about anything I’ve missed. With this era of constant news we live in, it can be easy to forget so let’s give our future selves a little help!

[mothman-etd]

I have talked a few times about Psychological Operations or psyops on here, but I would like to point out a real world example of a PO Operation that was found out recently by the Department of Justice.

Before that though, If you would like to read more about the actual position of a PO soldier, you can look no further then the PO benefits page on the US Army special operations recruitment website (https://www.goarmysof.army.mil/PO/).

Personally I feel like many people still believe psyops to be some kind of conspiracy theory instead of a fairly standard military division in almost all modern militaries, anyways onto the example.

The US Department of Justice is going after (indicting) two RT (Russian state media) employees for committing fraud and violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

Basically they created a front "media" company in Tennessee, translated russian propaganda videos into english, then paid right-wing influencers to promote (reblog/retweet/talk about on streams) said videos.

Three of the named influencers that I could find were Tim Pool, Dave Rubin and Benny Johnson.

I honestly have no idea who these three are, but supposedly their platforms have millions of followers. Also, some of these influencers were paid up too $100,000 a week to promote their videos and messaging.

So to summarize, Russia setup a fake company to pay American influencers to repeat their lies so that their followers would interpret those lies as legitimate since their were coming from a source they trust.

When people talk about election interference this is what we are talking about.

$100K a week is insane money for most, I am sure many people would be hard pressed to not sell their soul for that much money. Many of the videos from this media company were lies about the Ukraine war, and looking into Tim Pool it seems he also has a very anti-Ukraine stance (Audio from one of this podcasts https://v.redd.it/41xgvuri0vmd1/DASH_AUDIO_128.mp4)

I generally do not talk about my job on here, but corporations used to pay me to run seminars to help train their employees on spotting these types of attacks--mainly targeted psyops attacks from nation states to hack into their company via end user interaction.

Or in layman's terms, to help companies protect themselves from Russian Ransomware Thieves and Chinese Intellectual Property/Information collectors. Both of these being extensions of the Psychological Operations military divisions of each country.

I am really not sure how to end this post other than I am just trying to show people how real it is that the militaries of the world are spending obscene amounts of money in trying to influence your opinions and day to day life via your internet consumption.

Surf responsibility, be very wary of anyone telling you not to vote and don't believe everything you see/hear on TikTok/youtube/twitter/Insta etc etc

[manorpunk]

A Brief Look at the Major (and Minor) Post-Crisis States of 2069

New Englanders: “We have successfully put aside our petty regional differences to unite against our common enemy: Mainers.”

Tidewater: “the continued existence of anyone who isn’t exactly like us is a never-ending indignity that we all must endure. Also, we’re not responsible for Philadelphia.”

Piedmont: “Yes, there was a race war. Yes, the white side lost. Yes, we live with the constant simmering fear that we’re going to glance over our shoulder and see tanks rolling over the hills for round two. But other than that things are pretty okay.”

Free New York: “Grunst the Rat-King is polling remarkably well among the 18 to 34 sewer-dwelling demographic. Also, we’re not responsible for Philadelphia.”

Great Lakes Republic: “The fact that we’re a large nation with porous borders and a dozen mid-sized cities rather than one really big city means that we’re kind of like America’s Germany, which is an awesome historical comparison with no unfortunate implications. Chicago? No, Chicago is its own thing.”

Chicago: “You must bow before the Lightfoot Daimyo before we will speak with you.”

Philadelphia: “You might be thinking ‘wow, look at this burning, toxic, post-industrial hellscape, the Polycrisis must have really hit this place hard’ but that’s just what Philly’s always looked like baybee! FUCK YOU!”

Front Range: “our desire to recolonize more land is hindered by how that land is, unfortunately, Wyoming.”

Greater Texas: “The oil wells may have dried up, global warming may have ruined our farms and ranches, but at times like this we need to remember what’s really important: Muslims have taken over the goldam moon.”

Philadelphia: *pelts you with batteries*

Cascadia: “maybe we could finally throw off the yoke of Californian oppression if we could go five minutes without puppygirls hacking our government servers.”

California: “Honestly we didn’t even need to join the Usonian Union, we’d be totally fine on our own, we just joined because we felt sorry for Sunny Roosevelt, we figured she ought to have someone who could class the place up and show her - don’t look under that sheet. It’s nothing, don’t worry about it, just - I SAID DON’T”

[namelessgakusei]

Devil May Cry x Reader

EP. 0 Down the Rabbit Hole

Warnings: it's dmc, based on the new Netflix series, reader insert fic, not proofread

Notes: I have like six drafts for Mark and major exams in a few days but I really, really need to get this out my system. Will fix this tomorrow or after exams. Add. note: Gaku of two days later here, hehehe I feel like a 13 year old that writes in wattpad again.

It happened during the night in Vatican City.

Birds cawed faintly outside, as the lull of the night comes to its peak. Statues of saints and historical figures lined up inside the building, serene and undisturbed by outside forces— all while ropes came down from a height and comes down a group of armed men.

The halls are silent, save for the occasional marching of Pontifical Swiss Guards on watch, spears in hand as they round the area. They fail to notice the intruders slipping past as their cameras get hacked and bombs get placed.

A single explosion started it all, as the way to the underground vaults was compromised. Guards take on their weapons, spears, which proved powerless against the men's bullets, ending with them all dead.

Display cases were broken and artifacts that looked like they have monetary value were seized as the thieves raided the vault. A single, ominous sword was left untouched due to its rusty and worn down state, in favor of the gold and rubies adorning the items around it.

"Well, this is awkward."

Immediately, the men went up with their arms pointed at the source of the voice, and out comes a man with a rabbit head, dressed formally and sauntering with poise. "I didn't realized the heist had such a specific dress code."

"And here I came in my Easter best."

The rabbit man grinned, his brooch, a single blue shard, glowed amidst the darkness.

Despite their initial confusion, the terrorists took aim at the creature before them. But their target easily lifted their hands in surrender, assuring that there's no need for violence while also sarcastically describing their nationality.

"Americans. Anything that doesn't fit your narrow understanding, you shoot, you bomb, or burn without hesitation."

The bunny man chuckled wryly, passing through the group with ease and heading towards the lone, intact glass case at the end of the room. "And look where it's gotten you."

"Four so-called soldiers of fortune stealing common stones for a mere 2.5 million," Instantly, the newcomer was surrounded, but the rabbit man paid no mind, opting to focus on the objective in front of him. The poor attempt of stanchions to prevent people from approaching the sword was easily slapped away. "—when there's something right in front of you that is beyond earthly value."

"How did you—?!"

"I was the one who offered it." The rabbit man cuts them off, pushing too hard on the glass to break it open. With a split of a moment, the sword was drawn and the corrosion that once covered its blade broke off, revealing its true form. Glowing ominously purple, the weapon thrummed with energy on the hands of its wielder.

"The Force Edge." Of course, the alarms went off the moment it was out of its fragile prison. "Sword of the demon knight, Sparda." Guards are heard from outside the vault, marching towards the source of alarm. "Ironic, isn't it?" The rabbit man smirked, sending fear coursing through the thieves. "That such a holy place would house the most powerful weapon of Hell?"

"Then again, Hell, as you call it, has always been the true heart of human religion." The rabbit man sneered at his co-conspirators. "You can curb the worst of your savageries only through collective fear and hatred of another world."

"My world."

At last, those men who surround him finally had enough, threatening him to give them their reward or the inevitable will happen. The rabbit man assured them that they'll receive what they are owed as he slices off the guy's neck with the sword. A glint appears in his eyes as the head rolls off. With a broad grin, the rabbit man parried the barrage of bullets shot at him, with it ricocheting off the walls and breaking the glass cases around them, realizing that they're being hit by their own bullets, they stopped, only to give the rabbit man a small opening to strike. With the strength that exceeds human capabilities, one of the men was thrown to a pillar by an elbow jab, breaking his insides as he bled to death. It was all for themselves as chaos ensued. Those who remain alive shot recklessly at nothing before they were either sliced or bludgeoned to death. The rabbit man giggled as he delivered the final blow, digging the sword down someone's throat as the Swiss Guards surround him, blanching at the grotesque sight.

"Here we stand together on the threshold of a new age," The bloodied white rabbit held out a detonator, grinning at the fearful guards. "The age of the Demon."

"This world is about to become much, much larger."

"Well, not for you." The rabbit man pressed the button, activating the bombs planted around the building, burying the humans alive as pillars fell onto them. Fire engulfed everything on sight, with the lone white rabbit standing at the center of it all, grinning maniacally.

EP. 1 INFERNO: A violent heist at a Vatican City museum sparks chaos, pulling unsuspecting demon hunters Dante and (Y/N) into a sinister plot to forge a rift between worlds.

EP. 1.1 IGNITION: After a botched demon hunting, you and Dante hoped for some reprieve in Fredy's diner, only to come face to face with Dante's long dead twin brother. EP. 1.2 COMBUSTION: His "brother" turned out to be a shapeshifting demon, who was targeting his mother's memento for some reason. Extra EP. 1.3 CONFLAGRATION: Unbeknownst to you and Dante, there are people plotting to bring the two of you down.

EP. 2 OUR LADY OF SORROWS: In Washington, DARKCOM gathers a group of mercenaries and offers a bounty to bring in Dante—and the family heirloom that hangs around his neck.

EP. 2.1 Lead us not into temptation: Mercenaries are hired, and a bounty was put over your heads. Enzo still insists on being your Dad despite it being untrue.

EP. 2.2 And deliver us from evil: The fight for Dante's pendant finally starts.

EP. 2.3 Amen.: The black haired lady got ahold of his amulet.

EP. 3 THE DEEP AND SAVAGE WAY: A flashback sheds light on your past. In the present, a convoy with previous cargo hits a roadblock as the White Rabbit creeps closer to his prey.

EP 3.1 This is how you shoot: Your capture made you dream about a past long gone.

EP 3.2: Take Aim: The lady reveals a bit of your past and the Vice President reveals Dante's. You get ambushed by the White Rabbit.

EP 3.2 And pull the trigger: You made some far-fetched conclusions over not-so-circumstantial evidences. Dante's amulet got merged with the White Rabbit's. You get caught, again.

EXTRA EP ANDERS: A man who's just trying to live a good life, ends up getting a visit from a ghost of a rabbit.

EP. 4 ALL HOPE ABANDON: The amulet's signal leads DARKCOM to a run-down apartment building. But is it really the Rabbit's lair... Or a trap? Dante learns his true origins

EP 4.1 Belief and Perception: A recorded message from the White Rabbit tests your relationship with Dante.

EP 4.2 Faith and Inhibition: The demons decided to torture Dante one last time before they blow up the plane. Someone "dies" before you all fall to your death and you gain something out of it.

EXTRA EP. 4.3 Rabbiting: The amulet's signal led DARKCOM to a run-down apartment building. Mary's values get tested.

EP. 5 DESCENT: Grim discoveries complicate Mary's mission. An exhilarating fall fuel's Dante's full transformation, forcing him to confront his demon side. You made a reckless decision based on your conflicting morals.

EP. 5.1 Wrong ways to use a sword: Anders' words echoes in your head as you see a familiar building while falling from the sky. Parting with Dante, you made use of Agni in an unconventional way. Hypocrisy is evident.

EP. 5.2 TBA

[sistertotheknowitall]

Don't Take Snacks From Some Guy

Masterpost

Duke knew better than to take food from strangers. Still it was nice of the other man to offer so he kept taking them.

----

Duke watched the kid type away at his laptop. He said kid but the guy was probably a few years older the him. Still, he wasn't supposed to be on the roof of a bank, Gotham National Bank to be specific. He didn't seem to be up to anything nefarious (Duke didn't think you needed to be on the bank to hack it) but he was still on the roof a bank. A closed bank at sunrise on a Sunday.

How did he even get up there? Duke doubted that he took the stairs. Unless he worked for the bank but that didn't answer why he was on the roof.

Making a decision, Duke disappeared and made his way over. He was quiet and cautious as he went to look over the other teens shoulder. He was writing …a paper? From what Duke could read it was a research paper (‘in accordance to what the Daily Planet has stated about the city’s hero’ -).

“Could you not breathe in my ear?” 

Duke flinched back and thankfully didn't make a sound. He was pretty sure he still invisible but tired eyes were staring at him - well, in his general direction. (Just to be sure Duke checked, and, yeah, still not visible.) For a moment they just sat still as Duke contemplated revealing himself. (The other could be bluffing but was it really bluffing if he was right?) The guy had known Duke was there and seemed able to at least sense his general position. He seemed annoyed but not violent. It was also clear that he definitely was not committing cyber crime unless the paper was code. (Could it be code?)

Continuing with caution Duke made himself visible and shifted awkwardly, “um, hi, I’m Signal -”

The other boy had turned back to his computer, appearing to read over what he had written. “You were almost pressed against me, dude.” 

Duke blushed, a little embarrassed, “right, sorry, I was just trying to see what you were doing.”

“I'm Danny and I was not hacking the bank, I promise.”

“Okay?” 

Duke continued to watch Danny as he finished reading and closed the laptop. Standing Danny stretched and started putting the computer away. Duke had winced at the popping of his spine. “So what are you doing up here?”

Shouldering his bag Danny told him, “writing about the sociological impact of superheroes vs vigilantes, or do you not know how to read?” 

Duke contemplated still arresting the man. He could still get him for loitering or trespassing or something. “No, I got that - “

“Did you?”

Ignoring the snippy remark Duke continued and asked “why are you writing on top of the bank? How did you even get up here?”

“The public library’s wifi is awful and this bank has a public password.” 

Duke blinked, “you're up here at sunrise for the wifi?”

“Yeah.”

"…….."

“So… think you could help me get down?”

----

Once back on solid ground Danny had held out a chocolate bar. Duke stared in confusion before realizing it was an offering, “oh thanks, but -” Danny sighed, grabbed Duke's wrist and forced the candy into his hand. Letting go, Danny had patted the vigilante on the shoulder, muttered his thanks and walked off.

Duke watched him go around the corner before considering the chocolate. While the guy hadn't been anything other than a little snarky and rude, Duke wasn't going to eat something a stranger gave him. Even if you didn't grow up in Gotham, accepting food from strangers was not wise. Duke knew this. 

So he had taken the candy bar back to the cave for analysis. 

Upon their seconf meeting nearly a week later Danny had been a lot more cheerful and had apologized to Duke for being grumpy. He then handed him a banana and left. Duke continued to run into Danny on roof tops, fire escapes, and once outside the entrance to a cemetery and while he wasn’t always in a talkative mood when they met (sometimes he would just walk by Duke, shoving food into his hands as he passed) he was always sure to give him something. Duke didn't know what to make of this but he was understandably careful. The banana had been tested like the chocolate, so had the fruit snacks, the granola bar, and the apple. All came back clean.

 It was a few days after the apple was cleared that the bats had come to the conclusion that Danny was not a threat. So when Duke was handed a donut on a stressful Tuesday, he ate it gratefully. Danny had seemed pleased that Duke continued to take the treats and Steph was always happy to eat what Duke didn’t.

Post 5

[karadin]

While you were sleeping ...

Federal judge puts back funding to USAID

Federal judge demands US put back health related federal websites

Judge Tanya Chutkan investigating Elon Musk's ability to run DOGE

The Department of Energy blocks firings of hundreds of employees who work for a key agency maintaining the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile

Federal judge stops Trump from sending detainees to Cuba

Federal judge stops Trump from shutting down Consumer Protection Agency

DOGE now at CMS which covers Medicare, Medicaid, the Children's Health Insurance Program, and the Health Insurance Marketplace and are allied with Rachel Riley who worked at privatizing healthcare under Trump's first term.

Trump seeks to gut the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and privatize the nation's weather reports and news

Judge blocks DOGE from sensitive Treasury Dept payment system, system being studied and re-programmed after DOGE invasion. expected to finish in August 25.

DOGE database on DOGE site found compromised, anyone can open and edit

Hundreds of federal workers illegally 'fired' from FEMA, DHS, CIS, CPA, the Coast Guard, USCIS, DHS' Science and Technology Directorate, the VA, Education and the US Forestry Service as well as half of the CDC Epidemic Intelligence Service, The Indian (Native American) Health Service. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the National Institutes for Health, HUD and NOAA.

There have been illegal mass firings of 'probationary' federal employees, those who have just taken on jobs up to those who have were hired 2 years ago.

After seven prosecutors quit refusing to give a Trump deal to NYC mayor, prosecutors put into room and all told they would be fired unless a prosecutor signed off on the deal - Eric Adams case has been dropped and as a result, Adams is allowing Trump immigration to invade NYC.

Trump signs order to block funding for schools that mandate Covid vaccines

Trump has already captured funds to house the homeless in NYC that were disbursed by FEMA

Elon Musk has charged the US gov 16 million to hack at government departments so far.

Elon Musk was granted a 400million deal to sell the US gov cybertrucks

Elon Musk is now going after NASA, despite being a contractor for NASA, Trump says Musk will 'police' his own conflicts of interest.

Trump inserts himself into 'negotiations' between Russia and Ukraine, siding with Russia and not guaranteeing that Ukraine will return to pre-war borders.

Apparently at negotiations, US handed President Zelenskyy a note (mafia style) seeking half of Ukraine's mineral rights, which Zelenskyy refused to acknowlege.

at Munich Security Conference VP Vance pushes the right-wing in Europe, shocking and angering NATO allies, changing US policy towards Putin and China. Trump now says there is no US intent to 'beat China'.

FAKE DOGE 'employees' appear in San Francisco city hall demanding access to state systems and data, leaving when confronted.

Trump makes himself head of the Kennedy Center for the Arts many staff resign and many artist pull out of sold-out shows.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

China hacked Verizon, AT&T and Lumen using the FBI’s backdoor

On OCTOBER 23 at 7PM, I'll be in DECATUR, presenting my novel THE BEZZLE at EAGLE EYE BOOKS.

State-affiliated Chinese hackers penetrated AT&T, Verizon, Lumen and others; they entered their networks and spent months intercepting US traffic – from individuals, firms, government officials, etc – and they did it all without having to exploit any code vulnerabilities. Instead, they used the back door that the FBI requires every carrier to furnish:

https://www.wsj.com/tech/cybersecurity/u-s-wiretap-systems-targeted-in-china-linked-hack-327fc63b?st=C5ywbp&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

In 1994, Bill Clinton signed CALEA into law. The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act requires every US telecommunications network to be designed around facilitating access to law-enforcement wiretaps. Prior to CALEA, telecoms operators were often at pains to design their networks to resist infiltration and interception. Even if a telco didn't go that far, they were at the very least indifferent to the needs of law enforcement, and attuned instead to building efficient, robust networks.

Predictably, CALEA met stiff opposition from powerful telecoms companies as it worked its way through Congress, but the Clinton administration bought them off with hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies to acquire wiretap-facilitation technologies. Immediately, a new industry sprang into being; companies that promised to help the carriers hack themselves, punching back doors into their networks. The pioneers of this dirty business were overwhelmingly founded by ex-Israeli signals intelligence personnel, though they often poached senior American military and intelligence officials to serve as the face of their operations and liase with their former colleagues in law enforcement and intelligence.

Telcos weren't the only opponents of CALEA, of course. Security experts – those who weren't hoping to cash in on government pork, anyways – warned that there was no way to make a back door that was only useful to the "good guys" but would keep the "bad guys" out.

These experts were – then as now – dismissed as neurotic worriers who simultaneously failed to understand the need to facilitate mass surveillance in order to keep the nation safe, and who lacked appropriate faith in American ingenuity. If we can put a man on the moon, surely we can build a security system that selectively fails when a cop needs it to, but stands up to every crook, bully, corporate snoop and foreign government. In other words: "We have faith in you! NERD HARDER!"

NERD HARDER! has been the answer ever since CALEA – and related Clinton-era initiatives, like the failed Clipper Chip program, which would have put a spy chip in every computer, and, eventually, every phone and gadget:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip

America may have invented NERD HARDER! but plenty of other countries have taken up the cause. The all-time champion is former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who, when informed that the laws of mathematics dictate that it is impossible to make an encryption scheme that only protects good secrets and not bad ones, replied, "The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia":

https://www.zdnet.com/article/the-laws-of-australia-will-trump-the-laws-of-mathematics-turnbull/

CALEA forced a redesign of the foundational, physical layer of the internet. Thankfully, encryption at the protocol layer – in the programs we use – partially counters this deliberately introduced brittleness in the security of all our communications. CALEA can be used to intercept your communications, but mostly what an attacker gets is "metadata" ("so-and-so sent a message of X bytes to such and such") because the data is scrambled and they can't unscramble it, because cryptography actually works, unlike back doors. Of course, that's why governments in the EU, the US, the UK and all over the world are still trying to ban working encryption, insisting that the back doors they'll install will only let the good guys in:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/05/theyre-still-trying-to-ban-cryptography/

Any back door can be exploited by your adversaries. The Chinese sponsored hacking group know as Salt Typhoon intercepted the communications of hundreds of millions of American residents, businesses, and institutions. From that position, they could do NSA-style metadata-analysis, malware injection, and interception of unencrypted traffic. And they didn't have to hack anything, because the US government insists that all networking gear ship pre-hacked so that cops can get into it.

This isn't even the first time that CALEA back doors have been exploited by a hostile foreign power as a matter of geopolitical skullduggery. In 2004-2005, Greece's telecommunications were under mass surveillance by US spy agencies who wiretapped Greek officials, all the way up to the Prime Minister, in order to mess with the Greek Olympic bid:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_wiretapping_case_2004%E2%80%9305

This is a wild story in so many ways. For one thing, CALEA isn't law in Greece! You can totally sell working, secure networking gear in Greece, and in many other countries around the world where they have not passed a stupid CALEA-style law. However the US telecoms market is so fucking huge that all the manufacturers build CALEA back doors into their gear, no matter where it's destined for. So the US has effectively exported this deliberate insecurity to the whole planet – and used it to screw around with Olympic bids, the most penny-ante bullshit imaginable.

Now Chinese-sponsored hackers with cool names like "Salt Typhoon" are traipsing around inside US telecoms infrastructure, using the back doors the FBI insisted would be safe.

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/07/foreseeable-outcomes/#calea

Image: Kris Duda, modified https://www.flickr.com/photos/ahorcado/5433669707/

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[sotomato06]

trump going on and on about everything he planned to do on day one. End the war in Ukraine within 24 hours, lower prices, especially the cost of eggs and "make America great again!". wanna know what he actually did? He cut aid to struggling people both within and outside the nation by cutting cancer research funding, USAID funding (which help both overseas people AND Americans), and threatening aid for California wildfire survivors.

In his first month, he instituted tarriff that's are proving to be detrimental to the us economy and the stock market, antagonized all of our allies overseas by threatening them needlessly and has now allied the United States ideologically with oligarchies and authoritarians world wide. To put that into perspective for all those who were unaware, we voted WITH RUSSIA to not condemn the war in Ukraine. What the actual fuck. He also filled the government up with so many rich, corrupt hacks who are destroying the foundations of our governmental process.

but don't worry Republicans, because a body of water is now named after our failing democracy and you can say there's only two genders as everyone in this nation suffers because of the actions of a tangerine terror and his behind the scenes army of Broligarchy Christian nationalist techbro Hitler wannabes. And I don't even care that I just used a bunch of buzzwords because they're correct description words for the scum of the earth, I would rather eat dog shit than be in the same state as any of them, worthless pieces of literal trash that surround the current administration.

I'm embarrassed to be American, but I am and I'm not going to let some shit head, wanna be daughter fucker ruin this beautiful country for the rest of us.

[kinardsevan]

i was watching some Gabriel Iglesias jokes and he was discussing the correlation between men and wine, and it made me need to write this. 🤣🤣🤣🤣 call it another trip down the outsider view of bucktommyweek, even though it's now September.

-

“Lucky bitch.” 

Taylor mutters under her breath as she shifts in her seat, waiting on her date now for at least ten minutes past when he last texted he’d be around. She’s not even sure why she’s still waiting, but she doesn’t have any other plans for the evening, and she’s not about to spend another night at the station editing footage together her field report on the wildfire in the Angeles National Forest. But as she stares across at the man a few tables over, he seems to be held up as well, checking his watch and phone every few seconds. He has two empty wine glasses on the table with him, and a bottle resting in ice. She recognizes enough of the label to know that it’s not cheap. She stares at him for a time, contemplates getting up and going over, asking if he wants company. He’s tall and muscular, beefy, as the youths say today, and she hasn’t been with a guy like that since…well, since Buck. And truth be told, even Buck wasn’t as muscular as this Adonis sitting feet away from her. 

All at once, she’s both irritated, jealous, and annoyed. Irritated that this specimen of a man is sitting so close, yet so far away, and he’s not there for her; jealous for exactly that reason, and annoyed that she’s still waiting on the arrival of her date when she could be chatting up the man sitting at the other table. Still, she’s not entirely sure what stops her. Maybe it’s the way he seems to have an invisible box up around him, shutting everyone else out, or the way he keeps staring at his phone, waiting on whoever hasn’t arrived to meet him yet. Maybe it’s because of something else she can’t put her finger on. Either way, she doesn’t get a whole lot of time to piece it together, because her own date finally arrives a few seconds later, and before he can launch into a list of excuses as to what took him so long, she stops him. 

“First of all, I wait on no one, so this is your singular warning to not do this to me again,” she states. “Second, I’ve already ordered appetizers because I’ve been here waiting all this time for you to arrive, so third, I hope you’re prepared to pick up the check.” 

Somehow, a miracle, she thinks, the man sits down in the seat across from her, finally launching into his speech about why he was late, and she’s a little shocked he didn’t bail at her lecture. She’s pulled it out before—laid out her expectations front and center—with the understanding that she won’t be treated like a petulant teenager because someone else can’t keep their time straight. 

After the long-winded excuse, the appetizer arrives, and then there’s an order of their own drinks and the main course, and the next time she looks over at the beautiful man, his date has clearly arrived, although Taylor can’t see her between the other patrons around them now. What she can see, is the gorgeous man smiling, enraptured by whatever his date is telling him, a twinkle in his eye as he sips from his wine. At the same time, her own date drones on about his day job, and all she can think, yet again, is lucky bitch.

. . .

“Oh come on, not this motherfucker again.” 

It’s four weeks later when she sees him again. They aren’t even at the same restaurant. He’s being delivered to a booth this time while she sits at a different table, waiting on a different date. Late guy didn’t even make it to her doorstep. She’d abandoned him in the parking lot of the restaurant after he’d made a comment about journalists being hacks. And now, when she’s having to meet Kenny, one of the network higher-ups about trying to gain more of an anchoring position, this jackass has to be front and center for her again. 

She tries to ignore his presence by scrolling through her phone, even taking time to scroll through Tinder. Still, she mostly swipes left as the tables around her fill up. Once again, she’s left waiting while other people start their meals, enjoy their dates, and so forth. When she looks up at the pretty one again, it’s clear that his girlfriend has arrived because he’s got that same stupid smile on his face, although maybe a bit more subdued? Like maybe everything isn’t perfect in fantasy land? She wiggles an eyebrow to herself, contemplating her chances again over whether she should introduce herself to the walking Statue of David. But then the network bigwig is arriving and taking her attention away from the pretty one, and the next time she looks over, she sees him holding someone’s hand. Well so much for that. 

. . . 

“You have got to be kidding me.” 

Six weeks. She’d gone six weeks without seeing the sexpot that was the beautiful man who was now plaguing her dreams. And, like, it’s not like she was fantasizing about him or anything…but she was very aware of how gorgeous he was both times she’d seen him previously, and she couldn’t help herself, taking inventory of him. Those muscles, that jaw, the curl of his hair…

Except, tonight he’s less buttoned-up. The sleeves of the maroon henley he has on are shoved up to his elbows, exposing the sinewy lines of his arms, as though he completed a workout not that long ago. But it’s the jeans that do it for her; the way they hug his ass and thighs, and all over again, she’s jealous. And also now, now she’s angry. She’s angry that she keeps getting roped into these stupid nowhere dates and network meetings that aren’t gaining her the traction she wants, but some other girl out there is getting to ride that stallion all over fucking Los Angeles. When is she going to get her turn? 

Clearly not tonight, because date number four with the guy she’s been out with over the past two weeks is starting out the same way the last three have—he’s late. And the thing is, Taylor gets being late. Reporters are, by nature, always late to the scene. It’s a minor miracle when they’re actually at a place, much less with cameras rolling when an event happens. More often than not though, they only get the aftermath, so she can rationalize not being on time all the time…. But this guy hasn’t been on time once. And they specifically picked this restaurant because it was closer to his place than hers. And yet…

The pretty one is on his phone, looking rather perturbed as he listens to whoever is on the other end of the line. She watches as his expression goes from that, to one of concern, a pause to smile and laugh—there’s that stupid twinkle again. Does this bitch even realize how good she has it?—back to the worried expression. He’s too far away for her to make out what he’s saying, but before long, he’s slapping money on the counter and leaving before she can figure out what’s driving his attention. Her journalist skills have her wanting to get up and leave, follow after the man and find out what has him so concerned all of a sudden…but her stupid date comes through the dining room then, already rattling off an excuse. She stands, lists all the reasons that she’s not staying and why there won’t be another date—and why the tab is on him for the drinks she had while waiting—but by the time she makes it to the parking lot, the beautiful man is gone. 

Taylor huffs. 

. . . 

Three weeks later, she’s sitting at a table in a coffee house, reading through an article she’s written up. She’s gotten a decent amount of bylines since her book got published, and if things are going to continue to fuck her over at her current network, then maybe it’s time for a change. Besides, she’s heard some good things back from a friend down at the sister network a few miles over, so why not? 

The door chimes, and she ignores it, along with whoever walks in and up to the counter. They’re too far away for her to really hear, but she looks up when a barista comes to her table with freshly ordered latté and scone…

…and her eyes fall directly onto one Evan Fucking Buckley. She stares at him with a furrowed brow for a minute. He’s in his LAFD hoodie and a pair of dark joggers, probably coming off of a shift and heading home, if his generally slumped composure is anything to go by. There’s a generous bruising along the side of his jaw that has her curious, but they haven’t spoken in quite some time—not since a few weeks after he was struck by lightening, and even then, it was a short conversation—so she’s not about to step back into his life and start asking questions. 

Still, she’s taken by seeing him out in the wild. She watches briefly as he makes small talk with the barista behind the counter—someone he clearly knows well. While she can’t hear them or read lips, she can tell by their postures that the barista is asking about the bruise, and he’s quick to dismiss it, as though having his face that color is just normal. Still, she doesn’t want to eavesdrop, and before long, she’s looking back at her computer, trying to work on the article she has up. 

The door chimes again, and this time, she looks up, only because her brain is still atuned to picking out Buck’s voice in a crowd. Still, her brow furrows when she overhears ‘hi, honey’. 

She looks back up, glancing around the café, very confused when she doesn’t see another female striding up to him. Instead, her jaw slacks open as her eyes fall on him. The fucking beautiful man. The one from the restaurants—the one she’d been so jealous about. And he-…wait what!? She watches him stride right up to Buck and slide a hand down his back right over his ass and use the other to turn his cheek with fingers wrapped around his chin, clearly eyeing the bruise. Buck nods—clearly having been asked if he’s okay—and then the gorgeous one kisses him and Taylor is pretty sure at that point her brain is in a puddle on the tabletop. 

A moment later though, she quickly recomposes herself, because they must’ve felt her staring, when Buck looks over in her direction. His brow furrows briefly, and then he lifts a hand and waves. She gives the slightest hint of an affiliative smile and a quick wave back, turning her attention back to her computer. She’d been right, all of those times she’d seen the gorgeous man before. He was taken, and the person lucky enough to have him was in fact a lucky bitch. 

She just never expected the lucky bitch to be her ex-boyfriend; and that spurred a jealousy all of its own. 

[mariacallous]

A short note here on what I’m covering and why. The political changes we’re seeing across the world are underpinned by technological ones that are now accelerating. For more than a decade, I’ve been trying to investigate and expose these forces. Since 2016 that’s included following a thread that led from Brexit to Trump via a shady data company called Cambridge Analytica and the revelation of a profound threat exploit at the heart of our democracies. But what’s happening now in the US is a paradigm shift: this is Broligarchy, a concept I coined last summer when I warned that what we were seeing was the proposed merger of Silicon Valley with state power. That has now happened. Writing about this from the UK, it’s clear we have a choice: we help lead the fight back against it. Or it comes for us next. Please share this with family and friends if you feel it’s of value. Thank you, as ever, Carole

Let me say this more clearly: what is happening right now, in America, in real time, is a coup.

This is an information war and this is what a coup now looks like.

Musk didn’t need a tank, guns, soldiers. He had a small crack cyber unit that he sent into the Treasury department last weekend. He now has unknown quantities of the entire US nation’s most sensitive data and potential backdoors into the system going forward. Treasury officials denied that he had access but it then turned out that he did. If it ended there, it would be catastrophic. But that unit - whose personnel include a 19-year-old called “Big Balls” - is now raiding and scorching the federal government, department by department, scraping its digital assets, stealing its data, taking control of the code and blowing up its administrative apparatus as it goes.

This is what an unlawful attack on democracy in the digital age looks like. It didn’t take armed men, just Musk’s taskforce of boy-men who may be dweebs and nerds but all the better to plunder the country’s digital resources. This was an organised, systematic, jailbreak on one of the United States’ most precious and sensitive resources: the private data of its citizens.

In 2019, I appeared in a Netflix documentary, The Great Hack. That’s a good place to start to understand what is going on now, but it wasn’t the great hack. It was among the first wave of major tech exploits of global elections. It was an exemplar of what was possible: the theft and weaponization of 87 million people’s personal data. But this now is the Great Hack. This week is when the operating system of the US was wrenched open and is now controlled by a private citizen under the protection of the President.

If you think I’ve completely lost it, please be advised that I’m far from alone in saying this. The small pools of light in the darkness of this week has been stumbling across individual commentators saying this for the last week. Just because these words are not on the front page in banner headlines of any newspaper doesn’t mean this isn’t not happening. It is.

In fact, there has been relentless, assiduous, detailed reporting in all outlets across America. There are journalists who aren’t eating or sleeping and doing amazing work tracking what’s happening. There is fact after fact after fact about Musk’s illegal pillaging of the federal government. But news organisation leaders are either falling for the distraction story - the most obviously insane one this week being rebuilding Gaza as a luxury resort, a story that dominated headlines and political oxygen for days. Or…what? Being unable to actually believe that this is what an authoritarian takeover looks like? Being unsure of whether you put the headline about the illegal coup d’etat next to a spring season fashion report? Above or below the round-up of best rice cookers? The fact is the front pages look like it’s business as normal when it’s anything but.

This was Ruth Ben-Ghiat on Tuesday. She’s a historian of fascism and authoritarianism at New York University and she said this even before some of this week’s most extreme events had taken place. (A transcript of the rest of her words here.)

“It’s very unusual. In my study of authoritarian states, it's only really after a coup that you see such a speed, such obsessive haste to purge bureaucracy so quickly. Or when somebody is defending themselves, like Erdogan after the coup attempt against him, massive purge immediately. So that's unusual. I don't have another reference point for a private individual coming in, infiltrating, trying to turn government to the benefit of his businesses and locking out and federal employees. It is a coup. I'm a historian of coups, and I would also use that word. So we're in a real emergency situation for our democracy.”

A day later, this was Tim Snyder, Yale, a Yale professor and another great historian of authoritarianism, here: “Of course it’s a coup.”

History was made this week and while reporters are doing incredible work, to understand it our guides are historians, those who’ve lived in authoritarian states and Silicon Valley watchers. They are saying it. What I’ve learned from investigating and reporting on Silicon Valley’s system-level hack of our democracy for eight long years and seeing up close the breathtaking impunity and entitlement of the men who control these companies is that they break laws and they get away with it. And then lie about it afterwards. That’s the model here.

Everything that I’ve ever warned about is happening now. This is it. It’s just happening faster than anyone could have imagined.

It’s not that what’s happening is simply unlawful. This is what David Super, an administrative law professor at Georgetown Law School told the Washington Post.

“So many of these things are so wildly illegal that I think they’re playing a quantity game and assuming the system can’t react to all this illegality at once.”

And he’s right. The system can’t and isn’t. Legal challenges are being made and even upheld but there’s no guarantee or even sign that Musk is going to honour them. That’s one of the most chilling points my friend, Mark Bergman, made to me over the weekend.

Last week, I included a voice note from my friend, tech investor turned tech campaigner, Roger McNamee, so you could hear direct from an expert about the latest developments in AI. This week I’ve asked Mark to do the honours.

He’s a lawyer, Washington political insider, and since last summer, he’s been participating in ‘War Game’ exercises with Defense Department officials, three-star generals, former Cabinet Secretaries and governors. In five exercises involving 175 people, they situation-tested possible scenarios of a Trump win. But they didn’t see this. It’s even worse than they feared.

“Those challenges have been in respect of shutting down agencies, firing federal employees and engaging in the most egregious hack of government. It all at the hand hands of DOGE, Musk and his band of tech engineers. DC right now is shell-shocked. It is a government town, USA, ID, the FBI, the Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security, CIA, no federal agency will be spared the revenge and retribution tours in full swing, and huge numbers have been put on administrative leave, reassigned or fired, and the private sector is as much at risk, particularly NGOs and civil society organizations. The more high-profile violate the law, which is why the courts have been quick to enjoin actions. “So yes, we've experienced a coup, not the old fashioned kind, no tanks or mobs, but an undemocratic and hostile takeover of government. It is cruel, it is petty. It can be brutal. It is at once chaotic and surgical. We said the institutions held in 2020 but behind institutions or people, and the extent to which all manner of power structures have preemptively obeyed is hugely worrying. There are legions ready to carry out the Trump agenda. The question is, will the rule of law hold?”

Last Tuesday, Musk tried to lay off the entire CIA. That’s the government body with the slogan ‘We are the nation’s first line of defense’. Every single employee has been offered an unlawful ‘buyout’ - what we call redundancy in the UK - or what 200 former employees - spies - have said is blatant attempt to rebuild it as a political enforcement unit. Over the weekend, the Washington Post reports that new appointees are being presented with “loyalty tests”.

Musk’s troops - because that’s what they are, mercenaries - are acting in criminal, unlawful, unconstitutional ways. Organisations are acting quickly, taking lawsuits, and for now the courts are holding. But the key essential question is whether their rulings can be enforced with a political weaponized Department of Justice and FBI. What Mark Bergman told me (and is in the extended note below) is that they’ve known since the summer that there would be almost no way of pushing back against Trump. This politicisation of all branches of law enforcement creates a vacuum at the heart of the state. As he says in that note, the ramifications of this are little understood outside the people inside Washington who study this for a living.

And at least some of what DOGE is doing can never be undone. Musk, a private citizen, now has vast clouds of citizens’ data, their personal information and it seems likely, classified material. When data is out there, it’s out there. That genie can never be put back into the bottle.

Itt’s what it’s possible to do with that data, that the real nightmare begins. What machine learning algorithms and highly personalised targeting can do. It’s a digital coup. An information coup. And we have to understand what that means. Our fleshy bodies still inhabit earthly spaces but we are all, also, digital beings too. We live in a hybrid reality. And for more than a decade we have been targets of hybrid warfare, waged by hostile nation states whose methodology has been aped and used against us by political parties in a series of disrupted elections marked by illegal behaviour and a lack of any enforcement. But this now takes it to the next level.

It facilitates a concentration of wealth and power - because data is power - of a kind the world has never seen before.

Facebook’s actual corporate motto until 2014 taken from words Mark Zuckerberg spoke was “Move fast and break things”. That phrase has passed into commonplace: we know it, we quote it, we also fail to understand what that means. It means: act illegally and get away with it.

And that is the history of Silicon Valley. Its development and cancerous growth is marked by series of larcenous acts each more grotesque than the last. And Musk’s career is an exemplar of that, a career that has involved rampant criminality, gross invasions of privacy, stock market manipulation. And lies. The Securities and Exchange Commission is currently suing Musk for failing to disclose his ownership stock before he bought Twitter. The biggest mistake right now is to believe anything he says.

Every time, these companies have broken the law, they have simply gotten away with it. I know I’m repeating this, but it’s central to understanding both the mindset and what’s happening on the ground. And no-one exemplifies that more than Musk. The worst that has happened to him is a fine. A slap on the wrist. An insignificant line on a balance sheet. The “cost of doing business”.

On Friday, Robert Reich, the former United States Secretary of Labor, who’s been an essential voice this week, told the readers of his Substack to act now and call their representatives.

“Friends, we are in a national emergency. This is a coup d’etat. Elon Musk was never authorized by Congress to do anything that he’s doing, he was never even confirmed by Congress, his so-called Department of Government Efficiency was never authorized by Congress. Your representatives, your senators and Congressmen have never given him authority to do what he is doing, to take over government departments, to take over entire government agencies, to take over government payments system itself to determine for himself what is an appropriate payment. To arrogate to himself the authority to have your social security number, your private information? Please. Listen, call Congress now.”

It’s a coup

I found myself completely poleaxed on Wednesday. I read this piece on the New York Times website first thing in the morning, a thorough and alarming analysis of headlined “Trump Brazenly Defies Laws in Escalating Executive Power Grab”. It quoted Peter M. Shane, who is a legal scholar in residence at New York University, “programmatic sabotage and rampant lawlessness.” It was displayed prominently on the front page of the New York Times but it was also just one piece among many, a small weak signal amid the overpowering noise.

There’s another word for an “Executive Power Grab”, it’s a coup. And newspapers need to actually write that in big black letters on their front pages and tell their tired, busy, overwhelmed, distracted, scared readers what is happening. That none of this is “business as usual.”

Over on the Guardian’s UK website on Wednesday, there was not a single mention on the front page of what was happening. Trump’s Gaza spectacular diversion strategy drowned out its quotient of American news. We just weren’t seeing what’s happening in the seat of government of our closest ally. As a private citizen mounted a takeover of the cornerstone superpower of the international rules-based order, our crucial NATO ally, our biggest single trading partner, the UK government didn’t even apparently notice.

The downstream potential international consequences of what is happening in America are profound and terrifying. That our government and much of the media is asleep at the wheel is a reason to be more not less terrified. Musk has made his intentions towards our democracy and national security quite clear. What he hasn’t yet had is the backing of the US state. That is shortly going to change. One of the first major stand-offs will be UK and EU tech regulation. I hope I’m wrong but it seems pretty obvious that’s what Musk’s Starmer-aimed tweets are all about. There seems no world in which the EU and the UK aren’t headed for the mother of all trade wars.

And that’s before we even consider the national security ramifications. The prime minister should be convening Cobra now. The Five Eyes - the intelligence sharing network of the US, UK, New Zealand, Australia and Canada - is already likely breached. Trump is going to do individual deals with all major trading partners that’s going to involve preposterous but real threats, including likely dangling the US’s membership of NATO over our heads all while Russia watches, waits and knows that we’ve done almost nothing to prepare. Plans to increase our defence spending have been made but not yet implemented. Our intelligence agencies do understand the precipice we’re on but there’s no indication the government is paying any attention to them. The risks are profound. The international order as we know it is collapsing in real time.

It’s a coup

We all know that the the first thing that happens when a dictator seizes power is that he (it’s always a he) takes control of the radio station. Musk did that months ago. It wasn’t that Elon Musk buying Twitter pre-ordained what is now happening but it made it possible. And it was the moment, minutes after Trump was shot and he went full-in on his campaign that signalled the first shot fired in his digital takeover.

It’s both a mass propaganda machine and also the equivalent of an information drone with a deadly payload. It’s a weapon that’s already been turned on journalists and news organisations this week. There’s much more to come.

On Friday, Musk started following Wikileaks on Twitter. Hours later, twisted, weaponized leaks from USAID began.

This is going to get so much worse. Musk and MAGA will see this as the opening of the Stasi archive. It’s not. It’s rocketfuel for a witchhunt. It’s hybrid warfare against the enemies of the state. It’s going to be ugly and cruel and its targets are going to need help and support. Hands across the water to my friends at OCCRP, the Overseas Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, an investigative journalism organisation that uncovers transnational crime, that’s been in Musk’s sights this weekend, one of hundreds of media organisations around the world whose funding has been slashed overnight.

It’s a coup

By now you may feel scared and helpless. It’s how I felt this week. I had the same sick feeling I had watching UK political coverage before the pandemic. The government was just going to ignore the wave of deaths rippling from China to Italy and pretend it wasn’t happening? Really? That’s the plan?

This is another pandemic. Or a Chernobyl. It’s a bomb at the heart of the international order whose toxic fallout is going to inevitably drift our way.

My internal alarm bell, a sense of urgency and anxiety goes even further back. To early 2017, when I uncovered information about Cambridge Analytica’s illegal hack of data from Facebook while the company’s VP, Steve Bannon, was then on the National Security Council. That concept of highly personalised data in the control of a ruthless and political operator was what tripped my emergency wires. That is a reality now.

The point is that the shock and awe is meant to make us feel helpless. So I’m telling a bit of my own personal story here. Because part of what temporarily paralyzed me last week was that this is all happening while my own small corner of the mainstream media is collapsing in on itself too. The event that I’ve spent the last eight years warning about has come to pass and in a month, 100+ of my colleagues at the Guardian will be out of the door and my employment will be terminated. I will no longer have the platform of the news organisation where I’ve done my entire body of work to date and was able to communicate to a global audience.

But then, it’s all connected. We are living through an information crisis. It’s what underpins everything. In some ways, this happening now is not surprising at all. Moreover, many of the people who I see as essential voices during this crisis (including those above) are doing that effectively and independently from Substack as I will try to continue to do.

And, the key thing that the last eight years has given me is information. The lawsuit I fought for four years as a result of doing this work very almost floored me. But it didn’t. And I’ve learned essential skills during those years. It was part of what powered me to fight for the rights of Guardian journalists during our strike this December.

The next fightback against Musk and the Broligarchy has to draw from the long, long fight for workers rights which in turn influenced the fight for civil rights that must now power us on as we face the great unknown. What comes next has to be a fight for our data rights, our human rights.

This was former Guardian journalist Gary Younge on our picket line and I’ve thought about these words a lot. You have to fight even if you won’t necessarily win. Power is almost never given up freely.

If you value any of this and want me to be able to continue, I’d be really grateful if you signed up, free, or even better, paid subscription. And I’d also urge you to sign up also for the Citizen Dispatch, that’s the newsletter from the non-profit I founded that campaigns around these issues. There is much more it can and needs to do.

[wilwheaton]

Donald Trump is on the verge of becoming the GOP nominee for the presidency for the third straight election. What might have seemed like a historical blip in 2016 that was remedied by Trump’s general election defeat in 2020 is now an eternal black mark on the Republican Party. Hijacked by Trump, purged of its traditional middle-of-the-road corporate conservatives, and transformed into a cult of personality, the Republican Party is unrecognizable as the party of Lincoln. Gone are the Bushes, Cheneys, and Romneys. In are the worst group of scoundrels, hacks, hangers-on, and would-be authoritarians this nation has ever seen. Whatever quaint and out-dated notions remained that Iowa’s Midwestern conservatism and its rural and highly educated populace would serve as an important early filter in the nominating process can be put to rest. A majority of Iowa Republican caucus-goers went for Trump after the travesties of the Trump presidency: the failed response to the COVID pandemic, the indignity of losing to Joe Biden, and the insurrection at the Capitol, among so many others.

Iowa GOP Embraces Insurrectionist For POTUS

Racist losers choose racist loser to represent the party of racist losers.

Also, just to keep some perspective: Shitler “won” by getting about 44,000 people in one state, known for its high concentration of white supremacist christians.

Don’t be fooled by media that this is some kind of meaningful comeback for him. He’s still a criminal, he’s still a liar and a conman. He’s still going to prison for the rest of his life. This is not his political comeback. This is forty thousand pieces of shit in a nation of around 340 million people who overwhelmingly despise him.

Stay vigilant. Get out the vote. Don’t get complacent, but don’t be fooled by a “comeback” narrative that horserace-driven media needs to sell advertising.

[mbta-unofficial]

I might be asking the wrong person here, but why is the Acela so expensive? I need to travel from Boston to DC for a week for work so I compared costs and convenience of driving, flying, and taking the Acela and was surprised to find that the Acela costs more than flying (I was able to find round trip flights BOS-DCA for about $170, the Acela starts at about $140 each way) despite being significantly slower. Why does it cost so much?

I will concede that the Northeast Regional is cheaper than flying (about $60 each way), but it's also even slower than the Acela.

The Acela has several problems compared to analogous systems in other countries, and as a business problems mean costs and costs means prices.

Making a direct comparison to air travel also requires talking a little bit about the economics of air travel, since there are surprising number of weird things about that business compared to rail.

Part 1. Amtrak doesn’t own most of its own tracks. While it does own most of the North East Corridor, it leases track rights for the boston-providence leg from ME MOTHERFUCKER I’M THE PROBLEM and also the states of NY and CT own a section between NYC and New Haven. Now, when you are trying to have trains at up to 160mph, you need maintenance to be done within extremely tight tolerances, you need signaling to be extremely precise and consistent, and small mistakes can be deadly. Signaling and Maintenance on rented tracks are not literally impossible but they are a huge pain in the ass. These sections are slower and make the whole network much more expensive.

Part Two! Electification: this is one of the oldest rail corridors in the world and that means there’s a lot of old DNA in the network that it would not have if there was a full rebuild. One of these design “features” is that when the line was built, electricity wasn’t standardized and different plants would churn out different voltages and AC frequencies.

Between NYC and Washington there is a catenary system that operates at 11kv, 25hz that was built in 1905. This is insane. The modern grid runs at 60hz, and transforming power from a modern plant into 11kv, 25hz is a huge project in and of itself. But of course, the Boston to Providence section, electrified in 1990, has only the most cutting edge technology. It’s electrified with 60hz, 12.5kv, 10 years ahead of its time which was 35 years ago. And, when the Acela was first planned and operated in 2000, it was planned and operated with the now modern standard of 60hz, 25kv. So there are three different electrification systems and, to not have to switch trains, each train needs to be able to run with all 3 of them.

This is deeply stupid and only something you would have to deal with if you were hacking together increasingly expensive short term repairs onto a system that would be cheaper in 20-50 years to completely overhaul but in the present would cost 10s of billions to meaningfully bring up to 20th century operating standards. It’s a good thing we did the smart thing in the 1970s when Amtrak nationalized the collapsing private passenger rail companies and Conrail nationalized the collapsing freight rail companies and we recognized that running these crucial services with public money could generate huge amounts of economic activity and benefit society even if they ran at a fiscal loss, and properly funded the systems to build reliable and interoperable infrastructure for the next generation. Hold on I have to take this phone call.

………….

Yep.

…………..

Yeah ok.

…………..

They did WHAT?

Part Three: Ronald reagan is not dead enough

So yeah the main reason that none of this shit got fixed in the last 50 years is that for 4 successive administrations between Reagan and Bush 2 electric boogaloo the government has been slobbing on that Neoliberal knob like its subsidized corn on a subsidized cob. Private operators immediately saw the potential for infinitely lucrative federal contracts when the US seized the assets of Erie Lackawanna and Penn Central during their bankruptcy and formed Conrail. This was mainly Norfolk southern and CSX, former competitors who pushed hard for the reagan, bush, and clinton organizations to refurbish the lines at taxpayer expense before selling them to absolute corporate bottomfeeders so they could snap up lines that had been the main sources of revenue for these defunct companies at kleptocratic rates. But we’re not done. Freight companies hate two things more than even paying taxes, and these are OSHA and Passenger rail.

You see, it’s actually very hard to run freight and passenger on the same tracks. Freight is slow with long trains, long sidings, and loose schedules. Freight is optimized to get there, you know, sometime as cheap as possible. However, if you have passenger rail, those people have places to be. They need things like advanced signaling to move faster than 15 miles an hour, sidings long enough to pass at speed, and even, gasp, rails that don’t have holes in them so they don’t derail on corners. It’s not hard for a freight train to move along a track that is 85% rust, they just go slow and if they derail you’re only looking at maybe 2 superfund sites. But passenger rail, there will be bumps and passengers will complain. Customers are so unreasonable.

So when the federal government acquired all the tracks that became conrail, what did they do? Cut sidings, cut double tracks down to single tracks, cut maintenance, sold land. None of these bothered their future freight owner-operators. But they did undermine American passenger rail, on purpose, for 50 years. As soon as the work was done, the tracks were unfit for anything other than 400 box trucks of nitroglycerin pulled by two locomotives with one operator. How do you run passenger rail on that? Well, you play by CSX and Norfolk Bastard’s rules. Fuck your schedule. Fuck it slow. Fuck it for so long that it hurts. And, when you’ve bled enough revenue, complain to the federal government that you can’t possibly keep going and need to be sold off to private equity for parts.

So yeah. Freight rail in the 70s, the ruthless march of neoliberal capitalism, a frankenstein’s monster of a network, and a complete lack of revenue from either public subsidy or ridership to fix either problem.

Oh and there’s the fact that every single Major airline operates their flights at a loss and use credit cards as their primary source of income. The scheme is you take out a credit card, they run like a normal credit card company, except whereas most banks give you cash back they give you “miles” or “points” the vast majority of which will never get spent. It’s almost a license to print money as long as you have enough people you can convince will someday be able to afford to go on vacation with that fancy credit card they paid for. Budget Airlines who don’t run this scheme are folding both in the sense that they are going under financially and also in the sense that you better hope that your spine lets you compress into the overhead compartment if you want to get to your destination.

[justforbooks]

Pentagon’s Pizza Index has accurately predicted 21 global crises since 1983

As tensions rise in the Middle East, a curious, crowd-driven theory known as the “Pentagon Pizza Index” has caught fire online.

On June 12 and 13, users on X (formerly Twitter) reported a sudden spike in pizza deliveries near the Pentagon and Department of Defense in Washington, D.C., sparking speculation that the United States may be quietly entering crisis mode behind closed doors.

The timing? Just hours before Israel reportedly struck targets in Iran in response to Tehran’s earlier drone and missile attacks. And once again, pizza orders were booming.

Cold war roots of the pizza theory. What began as a Soviet spy trick is now a digital-age meme

The idea isn’t new. During the Cold War, Soviet operatives observed pizza delivery activity in Washington, believing it signalled crisis preparation inside U.S. intelligence circles. They coined it “Pizzint” — short for pizza intelligence.

This tactic entered public lore on 1 August 1990, when Frank Meeks, a Domino’s franchisee in Washington, noticed a sudden surge in deliveries to CIA buildings. The next day, Iraq invaded Kuwait. Meeks later told the Los Angeles Times he saw a similar pattern in December 1998 during the impeachment hearings of President Bill Clinton.

As former CNN Pentagon correspondent Wolf Blitzer once joked in 1990, “Bottom line for journalists: Always monitor the pizzas.”

WWIII warning: What is the Pentagon Pizza Index today? A meme, an OSINT tool, or a symptom of digital-age paranoia?

The modern Pentagon Pizza Index is tracked through open-source intelligence (OSINT) tools. These include Google Maps, which shows real-time restaurant activity, and social media observations. Pages like @PenPizzaReport on X have dedicated themselves to watching for abnormal patterns.

On 1 June 2025, the account posted, “With less than an hour to go before closing time, the Domino’s closest to the Pentagon is experiencing unusually high footfall.”

A few hours later, reports emerged of a fresh escalation between Israel and Iran. For believers in the theory, it was yet another sign that something bigger was underway.

The April 2024 pizza spike. A recent example that reignited interest

The most notable recent instance occurred on 13 April 2024, the night Iran launched a massive drone and missile strike against Israel. That same evening, screenshots from delivery platforms showed pizzerias around the Pentagon, White House, and Department of Defense tagged as “busier than usual.”

Multiple Papa John’s and Domino’s branches reported increased orders. The correlation prompted viral memes and renewed interest in the theory.

According to Euro News, a user on X posted on 13 June 2025, “The Pentagon Pizza Index is hiking.”

Inside the logic: Why pizza? Food, fatigue and national security

The concept is deceptively simple. When military staff face a national emergency, they work longer shifts and can’t leave their posts. They need quick, filling food — and pizza fits the bill.

Studies in behavioural psychology show that under stress, people prefer calorie-dense, familiar comfort foods. During high-alert operations, officials may work 16–20 hour days. That creates a visible consumption spike that outsiders can track.

And because platforms like Google and Uber Eats share real-time data on restaurant activity, amateur analysts can monitor these patterns — no hacking required.

World War III: Pizza as a proxy for preparedness. It’s not perfect, but it’s consistent

The Pentagon Pizza Index isn’t a foolproof system. It could easily be triggered by something mundane: a long staff meeting, a software glitch, or a nearby college football game.

That’s why modern OSINT analysts often cross-reference pizza spikes with other indicators — like unusual aircraft movements, ride-hailing activity, or power usage near government buildings. When multiple signs align, it suggests more than coincidence.

As a senior analyst put it: “You can’t bank a war call on a pizza. But if the Pentagon’s burning the midnight oil and feeding everyone, it’s worth a second look.”

Official silence, public curiosity. What the US government says — and doesn’t say

Despite the chatter online, the US government has made no mention of pizza deliveries as indicators of crisis.

Responding to speculation about American involvement in Israel’s airstrikes on Iran, Republican Senator Marco Rubio said:

“We are not involved in strikes against Iran, and our top priority is protecting American forces in the region. Israel advised us that they believe this action was necessary for its self-defence.”

Still, the Pentagon’s silence on the pizza theory hasn’t stopped internet users from speculating.

Humour meets anxiety in the age of digital vigilance

In an age where open-source tools let ordinary people track the movement of jets, ships, and even pizzas, the Pentagon Pizza Index sits at the bizarre intersection of humour and fear. It turns snack food into a warning system.

It’s also a reminder: not all intelligence requires a badge. Sometimes, the clue might be just down the road — in a Domino’s queue.

Whether you see it as absurd or insightful, one thing is clear: when the pizzas fly, people pay attention.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?