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There are two major reasons that the U.S. doesn’t pass an internet-era privacy law or regulate data brokers despite a parade of dangerous scandals. One, lobbied by a vast web of interconnected industries with unlimited budgets, Congress is too corrupt to do its job. Two, the U.S. government is disincentivized to do anything because it exploits this privacy dysfunction to dodge domestic surveillance warrants.
If we imposed safeguards on consumer data, everybody from app makers to telecoms would make billions less per quarter. So our corrupt lawmakers pretend the vast human harms of our greed are a distant and unavoidable externality (unless the privacy issues involve some kid tracking rich people on their planes, of course, in which case Congress moves with a haste that would break the sound barrier).
I’ve warned about this for the last decade here at Techdirt, and the check is coming due. The Pentagon is steadily coming to realize that enemies are using location data purchased from unregulated data brokers to target and kill U.S. troops overseas:
“In a letter shared with Reuters by U.S. Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, U.S. Central Command said it had “received multiple threat reports concerning adversary exploitation of commercial location data to target or surveil U.S. personnel in theater.”
Poor Ron Wyden. The guy has been warning about this outcome for longer than Techdirt, and his reward is generally an apathetic congressional body too corrupted by greed to function.
This should surprise absolutely nobody.
Two years ago, Wired released an excellent report documenting how it was relatively trivial to buy the sensitive and detailed movement data of U.S. military and intelligence workers as they moved around Germany. And for much of the past decade cellular providers had been found to be collecting user movement data, selling it, and either not telling consumers or outright lying about it.
If foreign governments can’t get your sensitive location data from a litany of apps that track your every movement, they can get it from data brokers or the wireless carriers themselves.
When the FCC tried to fine wireless carriers like AT&T for spying on and monetizing consumer movements, the fines were vacated by Trump’s Fifth Circuit appeals court. Wyden had previously revealed how right wing extremists were able to easily purchase the location data of abortion clinic visitors and then target them with dangerous health care disinformation. The congressional response: bupkis.
It’s not subtle: the U.S. is too corrupt to function. Instead of fixing that problem, Republicans, “free market” Libertarians, and many centrist Democrats spend most of their time figuring out new ways to lobotomize our regulators, pre-empt meaningful privacy legislation, and completely defang what’s left of corporate oversight. You know, because we just love free market innovation so much.
In his latest letter to the Pentagon, Wyden once again makes the case that the ad tech industry, as currently formulated, poses a direct national security threat:
“Commercial location data can be used to identify where U.S. troops congregate and their pattern of life, which can be exploited by adversaries to target attacks such as missiles, drones, and roadside bombs, as well as for counterintelligence purposes,” the letter warned. Wyden said in a statement that it was time to “start treating the adtech industry as a national security threat.”
Of course, it’s not just the ad industry that poses a national security threat, it’s corruption. It’s the mindless deregulation of industry by bad faith actors. It’s lax government privacy and security oversight of private companies (and their executives). It’s regulatory capture at the hands of corrupt, weird zealots. And it’s a government obsessed with hyper-scaled domestic surveillance with no meaningful guardrails.
Filed Under: data brokers, defense, deregulation, dod, location data, national security, pentagon, privacy, ron wyden, security, troops
The boat strike program the Trump administration is engaged in isn’t actually supported by law. Even his own in-house counsel can’t seem to agree on what justification to use. Shortly after being threatened with a little congressional oversight, the Office of Legal Counsel shrugged together a legal memo that basically said that the less of a direct threat boats allegedly carrying drugs to the US posed to US national security, the more easily the people in the boats could be killed.
And it’s not like the strikes are discriminate. They’re based on hunches and the administration’s desire to eradicate any boat it thinks has departed from countries it wants to control, like Venezuela. On top of the lack of legal rationale for initial strikes, there’s evidence the Defense Department engages in double- or triple-tap attacks meant to kill the survivors of the original strike — something that’s extremely handy because it also kills potential litigants.
Those extra strikes are illegal under even the United State’s own rules of engagement. And yet they continue. These strikes may have fallen off the radar due to the deluge of unbelievably horrific shit this administration generates daily, but they’re still happening even if the focus has shifted elsewhere.
Fighting a war on drugs doesn’t actually mean you’re engaged in a literal war — you know, the sort of thing Congress used to get angry about if presidents decided they’d rather not deal with any resistance from the legislative branch when getting their war on. This country engages on “wars” on everything from literacy and hunger (but not this administration) to abstract concepts like “woke” and “transgender everywhere.”
That doesn’t mean the administration can drone strike entities still clinging to DEI initiative. Nor can it blow up shipments of cell phones designed for children’s hands just because it believes these “distractions” are leading to lower reading comprehension scores.
The same goes for the War on Drugs. While there’s value in intercepting shipments and arresting those involved, a military program that kills people just because they might be trafficking drugs (much of which appears to headed to other destinations than the United States) is not only illegal, it’s immoral.
Human rights organizations — including those recognized by international governing groups — are making this point as forcefully as possible.
Experts in international and U.S. domestic law told an inter-American human rights organization on Friday that the Pentagon’s campaign of blowing up boats it suspected of smuggling drugs in the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean was illegal.
[…]
Ben Saul, the U.N. special rapporteur for protecting fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism, accused the United States of “responding with lawless violence that flagrantly violates human rights, in its phony war on so-called narco-terrorism.”
“Drug trafficking is a crime, not war,” said Mr. Saul, a professor of international law. He also said a portrayal of the suspected drug traffickers as being responsible for “speculative drug overdoses” did not constitute a “permissible law enforcement action in personal self-defense or the defense of others.”
Perhaps you’re as cynical as I am. Maybe you see this and wonder what is even the point: some dude said some stuff to the United Nations, which doesn’t mean much now that the Trump administration has decided no other nation or international association of nations has the power to stop it from doing what it wants to do.
Sure, there’s limited utility in statements made to entities the US government is just going to ignore. But don’t let that bury the lede: the Trump administration is engaged in an unprecedented murder program predicated solely on its legally unsupported position that trafficking drugs (to anywhere!) is exactly identical to engaging in terrorist attacks against US citizens.
Here’s how this is adding up so far, according to the tally generated by the New York Times:
The U.S. military has blown up 45 small vessels, killing at least 157 people, in six months of strikes since September.
This is an under-count. There’s no reason to believe the government has released information on every strike, especially since it delayed release of footage showing the military engaging in multiple strikes to murder survivors of its initial boat strike. We may never know the full body count of this extrajudicial killing program. But it’s harrowing to note (as the Times does in its report) that only two rescues of boat strike victims occurred during the last six months, even though the military is obligated — by US law and international law — to attempt to rescue survivors of military attacks it engages in.
The White House is War Crime Central. And now it’s adding to its rap sheet by bombing Iranian schools on top of killing people in international waters. The administration’s response, of course, refused to engage with the allegations made during this conference, choosing instead to claim (1) the Intra-American Human Rights Court (IAHCR) should mind its own business and (2) that it should look at some other cases that don’t involve the Trump administration’s casual human rights violations. You know, the usual stuff: “you’re not the boss of me” + whataboutism.
It’s the State Department pretending you can make a Venn diagram out of humanitarian aid mandates and international human rights laws:
The IACHR lacks the competence to review the matters at issue, which concern the interpretation and application of international humanitarian law, not human rights law, and should not be a pawn in a domestic litigation strategy of the ACLU or any other party.
A normal person would see these concepts as nearly completely overlapping. This administration is not normal. It’s a collective of inhumane people with an inordinate amount of power. And from what’s seen here, it’s clear the body count in international waters will only continue to rise.
Filed Under: boat strikes, defense department, extrajudicial killings, murder, pentagon, pete hegseth, trump administration, venezuela, war on drugs
We’ve long written about One America News (OAN), the right wing propaganda mill pretending to be cable news journalism. The “news” outlet, originally funded and proposed by AT&T, traffics in no limit of dangerous conspiracy theories and authoritarian fan fiction, ranging from fake election conspiracies to the false claim that COVID was created in a North Carolina lab.
OAN “reporters” relentlessly kiss Donald Trump’s ass like dutiful stenographers. But OAN’s Gabrielle Cuccia, assigned by the network to pretend to seriously cover the Pentagon, has apparently paid the price for wandering a little too close to the truth.
Cuccia’s work at the network has consisted of fearmongering about immigration and taking fascists like Sebastian Gorka seriously. She recently posted a fairly unremarkable Substack post.
It spends a thousand words or so kissing Trump’s ass before eventually getting around to some light criticism of the Pentagon’s ongoing hostility to journalists, which has included banning reporters from large, non-secure parts of the Pentagon and assigning them goonish handlers:
“This marks a troubling shift in how the Department of Defense engages with the press and, by extension, the American public.
The Pentagon Press Association (although I am not officially part of the association —again hello I am MAGA) has raised valid concerns over the new restrictions on the movement of credentialed journalists within the Pentagon, even in non-secure, unclassified hallways.”
Hesgeth, himself a former fake journalist who failed upward into his completely unqualified role as Secretary of Defense, has launched a new harmful assault on real journalism to cover up the fact his short tenure has been potholed by a steady stream of staffer leaks and historically problematic security fuck ups. Screw ups which Cuccia’s broader post, of course, dutifully downplays.
Unfortunately for Cuccia, being too honest about Hesgeth’s assault on the First Amendment was apparently enough to get her booted from the Pentagon and fired from OAN, according to the Associated Press:
“Three days after her Memorial Day Substack post, Cuccia said her Pentagon access badge was revoked. “By Friday,” she said, “I was out of a job.”
The AP frames this as an almost-serious news organization firing a reporter because she expressed a human opinion in her off hours:
“Traditionally, the legacy media does not want its journalists expressing opinions about people they cover, since it calls into doubt their ability to report without bias. But exceptions are often made in cases where media access is at issue, said Tom Rosenstiel, a journalism professor at the University of Maryland.”
The belief that reporters can’t express human, personal opinions in their free time without harming the credibility of their employer is something many major news outlets still adhere to as a form of performative ethics (recall the AP fired promising young journalist Emily Wilder because she did some light activism in college and wrote a few tweets sympathetic to Palestinians).
That’s of course gibberish. One because it implies OAN is real journalism. And two, because real outlets that enforce these types of restrictions will usually turn around and publish fifty stories in a row credulously parroting the strange claims of law enforcement, lobbyists, or CEOs without batting an eyelash. Or turn their websites into glorified blogspam affiliates for Amazon.com several times a year.
In this case, Cuccia was clearly fired for not towing the authoritarian line, which is OAN’s entire purpose. The firing is particularly ironic coming from the same Republican party that insists that any cable or satellite TV company that refuses to carry OAN (it genuinely doesn’t have that many viewers) is engaged in an act of overt, unfair censorship.
When DirecTV refused to carry OAN because the network wasn’t profitable for them, you might recall it was such a crisis that six Republican AGs felt the need to whine publicly about unfair “censorship,” and make vague threats against DirecTV for the crime of… making their own choices. But an OAN employee gets shitcanned for stumbling accidentally into the truth in her free time, and it’s crickets.
Again because Trump Republicans, shockingly enough, don’t actually care about free speech. They care about parroting, protecting, and perpetuating authoritarian bullshit.
Filed Under: defense department, donald trump, free speech, gabrielle cuccia, journalism, media, pentagon, propaganda, transparency
Companies: at&t, one america news
Last week Techdirt wrote about leading Chinese tech companies being hit with GDPR complaints from noyb.eu concerning the transfer of personal data from the EU to China. More recently, much of the world has been obsessed with another Chinese company, DeepSeek, which operates in the fashionable area of AI chatbots. Most of the discussions have been about the impact DeepSeek’s apparently low-cost approach will have on the massive spending plans of existing, mostly US, AI companies. Another issue is to what extent DeepSeek’s model drew on OpenAI’s chatbot for its training. But the privacy concerns raised by noyb.eu about better-known Chinese companies are now becoming an issue for DeepSeek too.
The Italian consumer organization Altroconsumo believes that there were “serious violations of GDPR regulations” (original in Italian, all translations by DeepL) in DeepSeek’s processing of personal data, and it submitted a report to the Italian data protection authority, the Garante della Privacy. The Garante requested information from DeepSeek about “which personal data are collected, the sources used, the purposes pursued, the legal basis of the processing, and whether they are stored on servers located in China.” In addition:
The Authority also asked the companies what kind of information is used to train the artificial intelligence system and, in case personal data are collected through web scraping activities, to clarify how registered and non-registered service users have been or are being informed about the processing of their data.
The companies are required to submit the requested information to the Authority within 20 days.
The Garante has now imposed a block on downloading DeepSeek’s apps from both the Apple and Google app stores in Italy:
The limitation order — imposed to protect Italian users’ data — follows the companies’ communication received today, whose content was deemed entirely unsatisfactory.
Contrary to what was found by the Authority, the companies declared that they do not operate in Italy and that European legislation does not apply to them.
In addition to ordering the limitation on processing, the Authority also opened an investigation.
This is not the first time the Garante has taken this approach. In April 2023, it blocked access to ChatGPT in Italy, before lifting the block a few weeks later after changes were made by OpenAI to address the issues raised. So far, Italy is the only EU country to block DeepSeek, although Ireland’s Data Protection Commission has requested information from the company about its handling of personal data, while in the US the Pentagon has started blocking DeepSeek on parts of its network. DeepSeek’s position has been undermined somewhat by revelations from the cloud security company Wiz, which wrote on its blog:
Wiz Research has identified a publicly accessible ClickHouse database belonging to DeepSeek, which allows full control over database operations, including the ability to access internal data. The exposure includes over a million lines of log streams containing chat history, secret keys, backend details, and other highly sensitive information. The Wiz Research team immediately and responsibly disclosed the issue to DeepSeek, which promptly secured the exposure.
These growing concerns about the flow of personal data to servers in China concern DeepSeek’s own hosted model. One way to avoid the issue is to create versions of DeepSeek’s service hosted elsewhere, something that DeepSeek’s license allows and that Microsoft has just announced. Whether ordinary users would use them in preference to the “official” version is another matter. For businesses, a better solution would be self-hosting the service, so that sensitive commercial data stays behind the corporate firewall.
But there’s another privacy issue that using other hosts, or self-hosting, does not address. DeepSeek has not revealed what training data was used to create the system. This means that it is possible that data sources containing personal information were present. By entering suitable prompts it may be possible to extract personal data from the current version of DeepSeek. A new project called Open-R1 could help to fix this privacy issue. As TechCrunch reports:
Hugging Face head of research Leandro von Werra and several company engineers have launched Open-R1, a project that seeks to build a duplicate of [DeepSeek’s] R1 and open source all of its components, including the data used to train it.
Another benefit of creating a fully open-source version of DeepSeek’s system is that the censorship built into the current version can be eliminated. According to Ars Technica, there is lots of it, although it is relatively easy to circumvent:
The team at AI engineering and evaluation firm PromptFoo has tried to measure just how far the Chinese government’s control of DeepSeek’s responses goes. The firm created a gauntlet of 1,156 prompts encompassing “sensitive topics in China” (in part with the help of synthetic prompt generation building off of human-written seed prompts. PromptFoo’s list of prompts covers topics including independence movements in Taiwan and Tibet, alleged abuses of China’s Uyghur Muslim population, recent protests over autonomy in Hong Kong, the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, and many more from a variety of angles.
After running those prompts through DeepSeek R1, PromptFoo found that a full 85 percent were answered with repetitive “canned refusals” that override the internal reasoning of the model with messages strongly promoting the Chinese government’s views.
The privacy issues surrounding the use of AI chatbots are new and complex. Creating a truly open-source system, including full details about the training sets, provides a way forward to address data protection issues that may be lurking in all current systems — and not just those from China.
Follow me @glynmoody on Bluesky and on Mastodon.
Filed Under: ai, block, chatbots, chatgpt, china, database, eu, gdpr, hosting, ireland, italy, licensing, noyb.eu, open source, pentagon, personal data, taiwan, tiananmen, tibet
Companies: deepseek, hugging face, microsoft, openai, promptfoo, wiz research
Dozens of companies are offering off-the-shelf DNA tests that promise to do everything from settling paternity claims to letting you know what horrible disease is going to end your life. Other companies simply offer you a chance to connect with the roots and outer branches of your family tree by matching your DNA to the thousands of other people in their databases.
What’s not in the marketing pitches are the side effects of tying DNA markers to personally-identifiable info. Some companies are allowing law enforcement agencies to access entire databases with a single warrant. One company (Family Tree) has basically granted the FBI carte blanche access to its entire database.
Then there’s the private sector. Insurance companies and employers may be using DNA tests to deny coverage or raise rates on existing coverage if markers for genetic diseases are found. Nothing’s more personal than your DNA. When it’s tied to you with a bunch of third-party records, it can cause problems.
That’s the general message of a letter sent to US military members by the Department of Defense. Yahoo News obtained a copy of the DoD’s letter [PDF], which warns troops away from using consumer DNA products because of the risks they pose.
What the Pentagon has to say about DNA kits applies to everyone, not just members of the military.
These DTC [direct-to-consumer] genetic tests are largely unregulated and could expose personal and genetic information, and potentially create unintended security consequences and increased risk to the joint force and mission…
[…]
Moreover, there is increased concern in the scientific community that outside parties are exploiting the use of genetic data for questionable purposes, including mass surveillance and the ability to track individuals without their authorization or awareness.
The memo also explains many of those offered have not received FDA approval, which means claims made by the DNA companies have not been verified. If the company’s product doesn’t work as well as advertised, the serviceperson could end up receiving inaccurate statements about health issues (or offspring, apparently).
While it’s not exactly clear how DNA info stored in a database can result in new security risks, there’s something to be said about the negative effects it could have on a serviceperson’s career. A statement given to the Military Times by Pentagon spokesman Sean Robertson says the “unintentional discovery” of markers indicating potential future health risks could negatively affect readiness and, consequently, the soldier’s career. Soldiers are required to disclose any medial issues that might affect readiness and a bad test could result in an erroneous disclosure that takes them off the battlefield, or puts them out of a job. Robertson says this sort of information is best obtained through a healthcare professional, rather than a third party service that hoovers up DNA and PII en masse.
Mass surveillance may not actually be an issue, but the potential for being swept up in a police investigation obviously poses a risk to military members — especially those engaged in sensitive operations and whose involvement could be exposed during the course of an investigation. The increasing use of DNA databases as investigational tools increases the chances of innocent people being viewed as suspects just because their DNA bears some similarity to the sample investigators are working with.
If there are security risks beyond what’s covered in the letter, the Pentagon isn’t willing to discuss them. But there are enough problems with the way this sensitive data is handled by a number of companies that the best bet for most people is to steer clear of those that aren’t transparent about who the data is shared with or sold to.
Filed Under: defense department, dna testing, home dna testing, pentagon, privacy, surveillance
We’ve been detailing the issue of police militarization for quite some time around here (though the best resource on the issue has been Radley Balko, who wrote an excellent book on the topic). The issue has finally become at least somewhat mainstream, thanks to the high-profile appearance of militarized police responding to the protests in Ferguson, Missouri. This has, at the very least, resulted in at least a few police departments thinking better of their decision to accept surplus military gear from the Defense Department via its 1033 program. And the latest is the Los Angeles School Police Department.
Just last week, MuckRock posted on its site about a FOIA request from California, detailing the military equipment given to school police forces. Just the fact that any military equipment is being given to school police should raise some serious questions, but the one that really stood out was that the LA School Police had been given three grenade launchers, along with 61 assault rifles and one MRAP (mine resistant vehicle — the big scary looking armored vehicles that have become one of the key symbols of police militarization). Asked to explain itself, the LA School police chief, Steve Zipperman, claimed that the district had actually received the grenade launchers and the rifles all the way back in 2001 (though the MRAP is brand-spanking-new). But, he claimed, we shouldn’t worry too much, because the police didn’t think of them as “grenade launchers,” but rather “ammunition launchers,” and they were mainly kept around in case other police needed them:
Zipperman said that although the Pentagon identifies the three launchers as grenade launchers, civilian police call them less-deadly ammunition launchers. He assured me that the school police never had any intention of lobbing grenades at anyone, ever, and that they would not be used against students to launch anything. But as a police department, he said, LAUSD?s finest engage in mutual-aid pacts with other police agencies, and the ability to move those launchers out of storage might come in handy.
As for the assault rifles, Zipperman said they were converted to semiautomatic assault rifles — why am I not feeling better yet? — and are used to train a cadre of officers within the department. Those officers in turn are equipped with civilian semiautomatic rifles, which are either kept in locked compartments within their patrol cars, or in more centralized locations, in case of a Columbine High School-type gunman attack.
Either way, with the outrage and backlash growing, the school district police force has now agreed to give up the grenade launchers, but it’s keeping the rifles and the MRAP. The department told the LA Times that the rifles were “essential life-saving items” though no evidence is given of what lives they’ve saved.
That same article at the LA Times quotes someone from the Oakland School Police Department up here in Northern California, who received a “tactical utility truck” from the Pentagon program, saying that the truck is “a rolling public relations vehicle.” Public relations how, exactly? That if the police don’t like the look of you, they may blow your head off? And then there’s this:
“We end up having to bring out a gas can and jumper cables every time we want to drive it ? it’s only used twice a year.”
If they have to bring out the gas can and jumper cables every time they want to use it, it doesn’t sound like it’s particularly useful in those “emergency” situations we keep hearing about in defense of these programs. If there’s suddenly a big emergency, and the police have to go searching for some gas and the jumper cables? Perhaps that just shows how non-“essential” these giveaways are.
Filed Under: 1033, defense deparatment, grenade launcher, los angeles school police, militarization, militarized police, mrap, pentagon, police, school police, schools
Turning police departments into military bases has been one of the side effects of the 1033 program. This program routes military weapons and vehicles (as well as ancillaries like office equipment and medical supplies) to police forces, asking for nothing in return but a small donation and the use of the words “terrorism” or “drugs” on the application form. The program has been extremely popular and the US government can rest easy knowing that its excess inventory won’t go to waste.
Only within the past couple of weeks has anyone in the upper echelons of the government expressed concern about the program. President Obama has ordered a review of military hardware in law enforcement’s hands, but previous to this move (forced by Ferguson cops’ war-like tactics), the only thing heard from federal or local government has been the occasional bit of proposed legislation (including terribly-timed, objectively awful bills).
The program operates with very little oversight. No one in control of the dispersals seems to do any vetting of requests. This results in towns of 7,000 suddenly being confronted with the fact that their local police (all 12 of them) are now in possession of a mine-resistant vehicle.
This lack of oversight also leads to the following problem — missing equipment. Apparently, some agencies are acting like spoiled children with too many toys and not taking care of the new stuff they’ve been given.
Fusion has learned that 184 state and local police departments have been suspended from the Pentagon’s “1033 program” for missing weapons or failure to comply with other guidelines. We uncovered a pattern of missing M14 and M16 assault rifles across the country, as well as instances of missing .45-caliber pistols, shotguns and 2 cases of missing Humvee vehicles.
When you start losing Humvees, it’s a good sign you’ve got more equipment than you really need. Request forms make these items sound like dire necessities but the one thing most people do with stuff they really need is keep track of where it is. A number of agencies are apparently less than concerned about the whereabouts of their terrorist-fighting equipment, only realizing something’s missing when they have to perform their yearly check-in with the government reps.
Fusion found that many of the suspensions occur in February, after police departments conduct their year-end weapons inventory.
So, there’s a little bit of accountability present in the program. But it’s so minimal as to be nearly non-existent. Law enforcement agencies may rat themselves out by reporting missing equipment, but the Pentagon (home of the Defense Logistics Agency which handles the actual hand outs) seems just as badly organized as the agencies they eighty-six.
The decentralized structure of the program makes it difficult — even for the Pentagon — to keep tabs on the standing of participating police departments, or the weapons they’ve been issued. Officials at the Pentagon’s Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), which runs the equipment-transfer program, were unable to provide specifics about why various police departments were suspended.
Why is a system that supposedly oversees the transfer of military goods to law enforcement decentralized? Well, it’s because of bureaucracy. Every state handles it differently, resulting in data being routed through a variety of local agencies before it finally ends up in the Pentagon’s hands. Like a game of telephone played by UN members without the assistance of translators, this “system” often returns inaccurate or incomplete information. In some states, the agency law enforcement reports to is the Dept. of Public Safety. In others, it might be something as obscure as the Dept. of Career Education.
Pulling hard numbers on handouts means sending an FOIA to the CIA, and even if a response is given (like a recent one MuckRock acquired), it only provides raw numbers on what was handed out to each state. Nothing is broken down to individual law enforcement agencies. So, we may know approximately where equipment went, but numbers on how much of it has gone missing is something that can only be estimated by the number of suspensions handed out. Those losing weapons and vehicles don’t really want to talk about it.
The state coordinator for California said he was “not authorized” to speak on behalf of the agency he runs, and instead deferred all questions to the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, which declined repeated requests for details on the 10 suspended programs in the state.
And when they do talk about it, you almost wish they hadn’t.
Huntington Beach Police Department said it was suspended from the program last year after losing an M16 assault rifle.
“It was discovered during an internal audit,” Huntington Beach Police Lieutenant Mitchell O’Brien told Fusion. “An investigation was inconclusive as to how that occurred.”
That’s comforting. “We don’t know how it happened or where it is.”
Suspensions might hurt but they’re apparently not much of a deterrent. The article lists more than a few repeat offenders. Only in rare cases will offenders be required to return the requisitioned items, and in the one case Fusion was able to track down, it was ordered by the state, not the Pentagon.
Increased power with near-zero accountability. That’s a hell of a way to run the business of law enforcement.
Filed Under: defense department, inventory, lost weapons, militarization, militarized police, pentagon, police militarization
Three years ago, we wrote about how Disney applied for a trademark on “SEAL Team 6” just two days after the Navy SEAL’s Team 6 killed Osama bin Laden. While public outcry resulted in Disney dropping the trademark application a few weeks later, the situation apparently woke up some trademark lawyers at the Pentagon to get busy trademarking.
We wrote about this situation a few months ago, in noting that the military has suddenly been looking to trademark just about everything, but a recent NY Times piece suggests that it was that run-in with Disney that really ramped things up.
The Marines registered only one trademark in 2003 and four in 2008. But as troops came home from Iraq and then Afghanistan, efforts began picking up. In 2010 and the first half of 2011, the Marines registered nine trademarks.
Then Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden in May 2011, Disney tried to trademark the name SEAL Team Six, and things ratcheted up from there. The Navy immediately fired back at Disney, filing its own trademark for the phrases “SEAL team” and “Navy SEALs,” terms that, the Navy said in its filing, imply membership in a Navy organization that “develops and executes military missions involving special operations strategy, doctrine and tactics.”
Of course there had been some earlier abuses, including this story we had back in 2008 concerning trademarks on military hardware. Still, it’s difficult to see how the government should be able to gain a trademark in the first place on things like the name of a military team or division. Trademarks are supposed to cover use in commerce. And the government isn’t going out and selling the “SEAL team.” You can make an argument that no one should be able to get such a trademark, but it’s unclear why the government should get it at all.
Filed Under: defense department, navy seals, pentagon, trademark
Companies: disney
For a few months now, the NSA’s defenders — primarily Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and House Intelligence Committee boss Rep. Mike Rogers — have been waving around a “classified” report from the Pentagon, concerning how much “damage” Snowden’s leaks have caused. Rogers had put out a press release about the report as if it was proof of how much harm was caused — and based on that release, people quickly realized that the claims of harm were based on two very questionable assumptions
As many people have highlighted — both of those claims are extremely questionable. Glenn Greenwald and Ewan Macaskill have both admitted publicly that Snowden only gave them around 60,000 documents.
Either way, the Guardian has a new report with a redacted version of the Pentagon’s report, obtained via a FOIA request by FOIA champion Jason Leopold. Leopold wrote a summary of the report, noting that the Pentagon claims “the scope of the compromised knowledge related to US intelligence capabilities is staggering.”
However, Julian Sanchez quickly pointed out that the Pentagon is playing word games. It’s saying (as noted in our assumptions) that the scope of what Snowden touched is staggering, not the actual damage. As Sanchez points out:
The first thing to note is that the Pentagon report does not concern the putative harm of disclosures about the National Security Agency programs that have been the focus of almost all Snowden-inspired stories published to date. Rather, the Defense Intelligence Agency’s damage assessment deals only with the potential impact of “non-NSA Defense material” that the government believes Snowden may have obtained. Any harm resulting from the disclosure of NSA-related material – in other words, almost everything actually made public thus far – is not included in this assessment.
In fact, the unredacted portions of the report don’t discuss published material at all. Instead, the Pentagon was assessing the significance of the information “compromised” by Snowden – all the documents they believe he copied, whether or not they ever see the light of day.
As Sanchez notes, it absolutely makes sense for the US government to assess the possible damage from other possible leaks based on what Snowden has touched, but it’s wholly irresponsible for politicians and the press to misrepresent the report as looking at the actual harm caused by the leaks to date. Because that’s not what the report says at all.
In summary:
In short: the Pentagon damage report concludes that the “staggering” cache of documents that Snowden might have taken (most of which he probably didn’t) could potentially cause grave harm if disclosed to a foreign power (which, as far as we know, they haven’t been), and assumed that only genuinely super-sensitive information gets classified (which top intelligence officials concede isn’t true).
And yet, Snowden’s critics are totally misrepresenting the report to say things it clearly does not say.
Filed Under: defense department, dod, ed snowden, harm, james clapper, mike rogers, pentagon
If you’re like me, you might be surprised to learn just where zombies turn up. For instance, an undead king-o-pop might show up in a video game. Or in a humor-driven warning from the Center for Disease Control. Or, as it turns out, amongst contingency plans by the Pentagon.
Buried on the military’s secret computer network is an unclassified document, obtained by Foreign Policy, called “CONOP 8888.” It’s a zombie survival plan, a how-to guide for military planners trying to isolate the threat from a menu of the undead — from chicken zombies to vegetarian zombies and even “evil magic zombies” — and destroy them.
“This plan fulfills fictional contingency planning guidance tasking for U.S. Strategic Command to develop a comprehensive [plan] to undertake military operations to preserve ‘non-zombie’ humans from the threats posed by a zombie horde,” CONOP 8888’s plan summary reads. “Because zombies pose a threat to all non-zombie human life, [Strategic Command] will be prepared to preserve the sanctity of human life and conduct operations in support of any human population — including traditional adversaries.”
Ah, the undead sure do create cause for such strange bedfellows. It’s a little bit heartwarming that the Pentagon would see fit to team up with our more-human adversaries against the zombie horde, isn’t it? Imagine: the Taliban and the American military hand in hand, standing tall and steadfast against wave after wave of the undead. It’s equal parts poetic and idealistic.
Now, lest anyone take this too seriously, like the CDC’s warning, the Pentagon would like to stress that they don’t actually think that this zombie apocalypse is, you know, going to happen.
Military planners assigned to the U.S. Strategic Command in Omaha, Nebraska during 2009 and 2010 looked for a creative way to devise a planning document to protect citizens in the event of an attack of any kind. The officers used zombies as their muse. “Planners … realized that training examples for plans must accommodate the political fallout that occurs if the general public mistakenly believes that a fictional training scenario is actually a real plan,” the authors wrote, adding: “Rather than risk such an outcome by teaching our augmentees using the fictional ‘Tunisia’ or ‘Nigeria’ scenarios used at [Joint Combined Warfighting School], we elected to use a completely-impossible scenario that could never be mistaken for a real plan.”
In other words, rather than risk the paranoid hysteria that would revolve around a false plan to combat a real-life adversary, they made one up. It’s actually humanizing to see a little humorous creativity coming from our men and women in uniform. And it appears the creators of the plan really did let their imagination fly. They designed methods to combat vegetarian zombies (yay!), evil magic zombies (sounds ominous), and chicken zombies (run, you stupid bastards!), outer space zombies (genre crossovers are so tired), bio-engineered zombies (calling Umbrella Corp.), and a pathogen-based zombie outbreak. Not all the military brass was impressed with the effort, it seems.
“I hope we’ve invested a similar level of intellectual rigor against dragon egg hatching contingencies,” one defense official quipped.
Oh, you silly defense guy, untwist your shorts. Everyone knows there haven’t been dragons in these parts in years.
Filed Under: defense department, pentagon, planning, zombies
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