The Drive's Adam Kehoe noticed something during this week's UFO hearings in the U.S. Congress. "After intense public speculation, stacks of official documents obtained via the Freedom Of Information Act, ambiguous statements from top officials, and an avalanche of media attention, it has now been made clear that the mysterious swarming of U.S. Navy ships off the Southern California coast in 2019 was caused by drones, not otherworldly UFOs or other mysterious craft.

"Raising even more questions, a similar drone swarm event has occurred off another coast, as well." These revelations came from top Department of Defense officials during a recent and much-anticipated house hearing on UFOs, which you can read all about here.

The strange series of events in question unfolded around California's Channel Islands in July of 2019. On multiple evenings, swarms of unidentified drones were spotted operating around U.S. Navy vessels. In numerous instances, the drones flew within close proximity to ships, even crossing directly over their decks. The behavior provoked defensive reactions from the ships, including the deployment of emergency security teams... Deck logs demonstrate that the Navy appears to have drilled and implemented a variety of counter-drone techniques in response to these incidents. This eventually included the deployment of Northrop Grumman's Drone Restricted Access Using Known EW (DRAKE) platform. The DRAKE system is a man-portable backpack that allows sailors to use radio frequency signals to interrupt the control links of drones. The DRAKE system appears to have been actually deployed in one of the incidents....

It is entirely unclear where the drones were operating from, how they were controlled, or who was controlling them. Still, the Navy could identify the objects as drones without those questions being fully answered at this time.... The Department of Defense's open acknowledgment of these drone swarm events just off U.S. shores shows that the threat is not theoretical. It is also not a future threat. Significant drone swarm events have occurred in the last three years, unknown to the public, and evidently unresolved by defense authorities. Judging by what is known to date about the 2019 incident, it is clear that the United States is not well-positioned to detect, identify and neutralize such threats. It remains to be seen what level of priority these issues will receive by lawmakers in relation to more speculative questions surrounding UAP.

If anything else, top confirmation that adversaries are operating swarms among America's most powerful weapons in training areas where their most sensitive capabilities are put to use should make national headlines, but because it was buried in sensationalism around UFOs, it clearly did not.

Thelasko shares a report from the BBC: Yury Borisov, the deputy prime minister in charge of military development, told Russian TV that a laser prototype called Zadira was being deployed in Ukraine and had burned up a Ukrainian drone within five seconds at a distance of 5km (three miles). [...] Little is known about the Zadira laser program, but in 2017 Russian media said state nuclear corporation Rosatom had helped develop it as part of a program to create weapons based on new physical principles, news agency Reuters reported. [...] However, an official with the US Department of Defense said he had not seen "anything to corroborate reports of lasers being used" in Ukraine. Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky mocked the Russian claim, comparing it to the so-called "wonder weapons" that Nazi Germany claimed to be developing during World War Two. "The clearer it became that they had no chance in the war, the more propaganda there was about an amazing weapon that would be so powerful as to ensure a turning point," said Zelensky in a video address. "And so we see that in the third month of a full-scale war, Russia is trying to find its 'wonder weapon'... this all clearly shows the complete failure of the mission."

There is at least one country which has developed a laser weapon though, notes the BBC. Earlier this year, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett unveiled prototype laser-based interceptors that would use lasers to super-heat incoming drones or rockets.

"Within a year already the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) will bring into action a laser-based interception system, first experimentally, and later operationally, first in the south, then in other places," he said in a speech to Tel Aviv University's Institute for National Security Studies. "And this will enable us, as the years advance, to surround Israel with a wall of lasers which will protect us from missiles, rockets, UAVs and other threats."

The U.S. Navy also deployed the world's first active laser weapon in the Persona Gulf in 2017. "It operates in an invisible part of the electromagnetic spectrum so you don't see the beam, it doesn't make any sound, it's completely silent and it's incredibly effective at what it does," said Lt. Cale Hughes, laser weapons system officer, at the time.

Two satellites recently exchanged more than 200 gigabits of data over a distance of about 60 miles (100 kilometers) using laser communication in space. Gizmodo reports: Satellites generally don't communicate directly with each other. Instead, they use radio signals to transfer data down to a ground station on Earth, which then relays this data to another satellite. Optical terminals between satellites are considered to be faster and more secure. CACI International -- the company that developed the optical terminals for the space lasers -- announced the achievement on Tuesday in a press release. The two satellites, named Able and Baker, were launched last summer by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency as part of its Blackjack project. DARPA is seeking to build a constellation of small satellites in low Earth orbit for the purpose of supporting military operations.

The two satellites successfully pulled off the 40-minute laser communications experiment on April 14, during which time Able and Baker used CACI's CrossBeam free-space optical terminals. Infrared lasers transmit data by encoding the message into an optical signal, which is then carried to a receiver. The experiment, known as Mandrake 2, was funded by the Space Development Agency (SDA) and the Air Force Research Laboratory. Mandrake 2 launched on June 30, 2021 as an early risk-reduction flight for DARPA's Blackjack constellation project. The Blackjack constellation aims to deploy an initial batch of 20 small satellites in low Earth orbit, which will connect with each other to form a mesh network in space.

The idea is not to rival commercial satellite constellations such as SpaceX's Starlink, but rather to have a government-owned constellation that the military can use to connect to its bases, sensors, and weapons across the world. The SDA is planning to launch the 20 satellites this fall and then launch an additional 126 satellites by 2024, according to SpaceNews. The agency is seeking to create a full constellation that would include somewhere between 300 and 500 satellites in low Earth orbit. The satellites are being developed by Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and York Space.

Two senior U.S. defense intelligence officials said on Tuesday the Pentagon is committed to determining the origins of what it calls "unidentified aerial phenomena" -- commonly termed UFOs -- but acknowledged many remain beyond the government's ability to explain. From a report: The two officials, Ronald Moultrie and Scott Bray, appeared before a House of Representatives intelligence subcommittee for the first public U.S. congressional hearing on the subject in a half century. It came 11 months after a government report documented more than 140 cases of unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAPs, that U.S. military pilots had observed since 2004. Bray, deputy director of naval intelligence, said the number of UAPs officially cataloged by a newly formed Pentagon task force has grown to 400 cases. Both officials chose their words carefully in describing the task force's work, including the question of possible extraterrestrial origins, which Bray said defense and intelligence analysts had not ruled out. Bray did say that "we have no material, we have detected no emanations, within the UAP task force that would suggest it is anything non-terrestrial in origin."

Task and Purpose reports on "a new and somewhat unnerving recruiting pitch from the U.S. Army's 4th Psychological Operations Group" that asks viewers one simple question: "Have you ever wondered who's pulling the strings?" The three-and-a-half minute, movie trailer-esque video was released by the 4th PSYOP Group on Youtube on May 2. Since then it's brought in 329,396 views, and it's not hard to see why: This is not your father's recruiting commercial. Complete with eerie whistling in the background and suspenseful music, the video is far from the sometimes-cheesy Army recruiting commercials we often see on television. It's dark and palpably tense, the clips of old cartoons and radio segments from world events combining perfectly to create something that is both intriguing and unsettling.

It accomplishes exactly what psychological operations soldiers set out to do: Influence an audience. As one commenter on Youtube pointed out: "Everything is a weapon. Even this video." Col. Chris Stangle, commander of 4th PSYOP Group, told Task & Purpose on Friday that the video was created in-house, both as a recruitment effort but also to literally show people what they can do — part of psychological operations is creating persuasive media.... Throughout the world, Stangle said, psychological operations are occurring "literally everywhere, every day, in every component of our lives." We're seeing it play out in real-time in eastern Europe, where Ukraine is proving much more successful in the information war than the Russians.

That's no coincidence. Stangle said after the annexation of Crimea in 2014, the U.S. PSYOP community, along with other NATO allies and special operations communities around the world, got to work helping Ukraine build their own abilities.... "We've helped through [military-to-military] partnerships, us as well as more than 12 allies and partners. And what we've been able to do is just sit and watch how amazing their arguments are ... Ukraine has done a masterful job, they've taken the training and the work we've done with them, as well as their own inherent skill, and have just really blown it up...."

U.S. Army PSYOP soldiers are working daily with over 40 countries around the globe, according to Stangle. And those partnerships will be critical to success both in preventing future conflicts, and in future conflicts as they unfold.

As the video says: "Warfare is evolving, and all the world's a stage."
Thanks to Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the link!

An anonymous reader quotes Business Insider: Wrecked Russian fighter jets are being found with rudimentary GPS receivers "taped to the dashboards" in Ukraine because their inbuilt navigation systems are so bad, the UK's defense secretary, Ben Wallace, said.... "[W]hilst Russia has large amounts of artillery and armor that they like parading, they are unable to leverage them for combined arms maneuver and just resort to mass indiscriminate barrages," he added....

Last month, Ukrainian troops paraded what they said was a Russian drone that had been covered in duct tape and fitted with a generic plastic bottle top for a fuel cap. In March, Ukrainian troops found what appeared to be Russian army bandages dating to 1978 discarded on a battlefield. In his Monday speech, Wallace said Russian vehicles "are frequently found with 1980s paper maps of Ukraine in them" and that soldiers were using "pine logs as makeshift protection on logistical trucks" and attaching "overhead 'cope cages' to their tanks."

"Ukraine is using facial recognition technology to identify bodies of Russian soldiers killed in war," reads the chyron on CNN's latest video report. It explains how Ukraine is using the technology "both to help with this difficult task and help advance their aims in the propaganda war with Moscow." And it may even help identify suspected war criminals.

But first Ukraine's chief civil-military liaison officer tells CNN that Geneva Convention rules mandate storing the bodies of the enemy (to be exchanged after the end of active combat) -- but also that they make an attempt to first identify the dead.

From CNN's report: This is where the Ministry of Digital Transformation comes in. "We have identified about 300 cases," says Mykhailo Fedorov [Ukraine's vice prime minister and Minister of Digital Transformation]. They do it by using a myriad of techniques, but the most effective has been facial recognition technology. They upload a picture of a face, the technology scrubs all the social networks... Once they have a match, they go one step further. "We send messages to their friends and relatives."


CNN: These are often gruesome photos of dead soldiers. Why do you send them to the families in Russia?

Fedorov: There are two goals. One is to show the Russians there's a real war going on here, to fight against the Russian propaganda, to show them they're not as strong as shown on TV, and Russians really are dying here. The second goal is to give them an opportunity to pick up the bodies in Ukraine.


They do get responses from Russian families.


CNN: They're responding with, basically saying "You will be killed. I will come and I will also take part in this war."

Fedorov: 80% of the familes' answers are, We'll come to Ukraine ourselves and kill you, and you deserve what's happening to you.

CNN: What about the other 20%?

Fedorov: Some of them say they're grateful, and they know about the situation. And some would like to come and pick up the body.


The technology is not just being used on the dead. It is also being used to identify Russian soldiers who are alive, some of whom are being accused of war crimes.


Ukraine chief regional prosecutor Ruslan Kravchenko: We have established the identity of one military man.


"We have a lot of materials - irreputable evidence," this prosecutor says. [Kravchenko] says he was caught on video in Belarus trying to sell items he had looted from Ukrainian homes. But his alleged crimes go far beyond that. The soldier is accused of taking part in the execution of four Ukrainian men, with their hands bound behind their backs.... Prosecutors say the soldier was first identified by the technology, and then by a Ukrainian citizen who said the soldier tortured him after entering his home.


Kravchenko: We showed these photos to the witnesses and victims.


They identified the specific person who was among other Russian military personnel who killed four people in this particular place, the prosecutor said. The end result of all their investigations, they hope, will be a full record of what happened in Ukraine. And the proof they need to prosecute those who committed crimes against its pepole.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Sky News: The UK, US and EU have formally accused Russia of being behind a cyber attack targeting a satellite communications network used in Ukraine. Businesses and individuals using routers made by Viasat, an American business that provides broadband-speed satellite internet connections, were knocked offline just before tanks began to roll into the country.

"The cyberattack took place one hour before Russia's unprovoked and unjustified invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, thus facilitating the military aggression," the EU said in its statement. "Although the primary target is believed to have been the Ukrainian military, other customers were affected, including personal and commercial internet users," the Foreign Office added. As a result of the attack 5,800 wind turbines in Germany were knocked offline as they depended upon Viasat routers for remote monitoring and control. The company said in total tens of thousands of its terminals were effectively destroyed and needed to be replaced. UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said: "This is clear and shocking evidence of a deliberate and malicious attack by Russia against Ukraine which had significant consequences on ordinary people and businesses in Ukraine and across Europe. We will continue to call out Russia's malign behavior and unprovoked aggression across land, sea and cyberspace, and ensure it faces severe consequences."

The attack was described as "yet another example of Russia's continued pattern of irresponsible behavior in cyberspace, which also formed an integral part of its illegal and unjustified invasion of Ukraine," in the EU's statement.

"Such behavior is contrary to the expectations set by all UN member states, including the Russian Federation, of responsible state behavior and the intentions of states in cyberspace. Russia must stop this war and bring an end to the senseless human suffering immediately," the EU added.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Russian troops stole almost $5 million worth of farm equipment from a John Deere dealer in the occupied city of Melitopol, Ukraine, only to discover that the machines have been shut down remotely, making them inoperable, according to a report from CNN. Some of the equipment, which comes with a remote locking feature and a built-in GPS, was tracked over 700 miles away in the Zakhan Yurt village of Chechnya.

A source close to the situation told CNN that Russian troops gradually began taking machinery away from the dealer following their occupation of Melitopol in March. It reportedly started with two combine harvesters worth $300,000 each, a tractor, and a seeder, until troops hauled away all 27 pieces of equipment. Some of the equipment went to Chechnya, while others reportedly landed in a nearby village. "When the invaders drove the stolen harvesters to Chechnya, they realized that they could not even turn them on, because the harvesters were locked remotely," CNN's source told the outlet. Although the pieces of equipment were remotely disabled, CNN's source says that Russian troops may be trying to find a way around the block, as they're in contact with "consultants in Russia who are trying to bypass the protection."

CNN cites a local source imagining the surprise of the looters of a Ukranian farm equipment dealership who'd transported some heavy machines over 700 miles to Russia. "They realized that they could not even turn them on, because the harvesters were locked remotely."

CNN adds that "The equipment now appears to be languishing at a farm near Grozny." Over the past few weeks there's been a growing number of reports of Russian troops stealing farm equipment, grain and even building materials — beyond widespread looting of residences. But the removal of valuable agricultural equipment from a John Deere dealership in Melitopol speaks to an increasingly organized operation, one that even uses Russian military transport as part of the heist. CNN has learned that the equipment was removed from an Agrotek dealership in Melitopol, which has been occupied by Russian forces since early March. Altogether it's valued at nearly $5 million. The combine harvesters alone are worth $300,000 each....

The contact said the process began with the seizure of two combine harvesters, a tractor and a seeder. Over the next few weeks, everything else was removed: in all 27 pieces of farm machinery. One of the flat-bed trucks used, and caught on camera, had a white "Z" painted on it and appeared to be a military truck. The contact said there were rival groups of Russian troops: some would come in the morning and some in the evening.

Some of the machinery was taken to a nearby village, but some of it embarked on a long overland journey to Chechnya more than 700 miles away. The sophistication of the machinery, which are equipped with GPS, meant that its travel could be tracked....
The end result? "After a journey of more than 700 miles, the thieves were unable to use any of the equipment — because it had been locked remotely."

While Russia's "relentless digital assaults" on Ukraine might seem less damaging than anticipated, the attacks actually focused on a different goal with "chilling potential consequences," reports the Associated Press. "Data collection."

Even in an early February blog post, Microsoft said Russia's intelligence agency had tried "exfiltrating sensitive information" over the previous six months from military, government, military, judiciary and law enforcement agencies.

The AP reports: Ukrainian agencies breached on the eve of the February 24 invasion include the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which oversees the police, national guard and border patrol. A month earlier, a national database of automobile insurance policies was raided during a diversionary cyberattack that defaced Ukrainian websites. The hacks, paired with prewar data theft, likely armed Russia with extensive details on much of Ukraine's population, cybersecurity and military intelligence analysts say. It's information Russia can use to identify and locate Ukrainians most likely to resist an occupation, and potentially target them for internment or worse.

"Fantastically useful information if you're planning an occupation," Jack Watling, a military analyst at the U.K. think tank Royal United Services Institute, said of the auto insurance data, "knowing exactly which car everyone drives and where they live and all that."

As the digital age evolves, information dominance is increasingly wielded for social control, as China has shown in its repression of the Uyghur minority. It was no surprise to Ukrainian officials that a prewar priority for Russia would be compiling information on committed patriots. "The idea was to kill or imprison these people at the early stages of occupation," Victor Zhora, a senior Ukrainian cyber defense official, alleged.... There is little doubt political targeting is a goal. Ukraine says Russian forces have killed and kidnapped local leaders where they grab territory....

The Ukrainian government says the Jan. 14 auto insurance hack resulted in the pilfering of up to 80% of Ukrainian policies registered with the Motor Transport Bureau.
But the article also points out that Ukraine also "appears to have done significant data collection — quietly assisted by the U.S., the U.K., and other partners — targeting Russian soldiers, spies and police, including rich geolocation data." Serhii Demediuk [deputy secretary of Ukraine's National Security and Defense Council] said the country knows "exactly where and when a particular serviceman crossed the border with Ukraine, in which occupied settlement he stopped, in which building he spent the night, stole and committed crimes on our land."

"We know their cell phone numbers, the names of their parents, wives, children, their home addresses," who their neighbors are, where they went to school and the names of their teachers, he said.

Analysts caution that some claims about data collection from both sides of the conflict may be exaggerated. But in recordings posted online by Ukrainian Digital Transformation Minister Mikhailo Fedorov, callers are heard phoning the far-flung wives of Russian soldiers and posing as Russian state security officials to say parcels shipped to them from Belarus were looted from Ukrainian homes.

In one, a nervous-sounding woman acknowledges receiving what she calls souvenirs — a woman's bag, a keychain.

The caller tells her she shares criminal liability, that her husband "killed people in Ukraine and stole their stuff."

She hangs up.

According to Breaking Defense, the head of machine learning at Lyft, Craig Martell, has been named the Pentagon's Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer. From the report: The hiring of a Silicon Valley persona for the CDAO role is likely to be cheered by those in the defense community who have been calling for more technically-minded individuals to take leadership roles in the department. At the same time, Martell's lack of Pentagon experience -- he was a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School for over a decade studying AI for the military, but has never worked in the department's bureaucracy -- may pose challenges as he works to lead an office only months old. In an exclusive interview with Breaking Defense, Martell, who also worked as head of machine learning at Dropbox and led several AI teams at LinkedIn, acknowledged both the benefits and risks of bringing in someone with his background. [...]

As CDAO, Martell will be responsible for scaling up DoD's data, analytics and AI to enable quicker and more accurate decision-making and will also play an important role in the Pentagon's Joint All-Domain Command and Control efforts to connect sensors and shooters. "If we're going to be successful in achieving the goals, if we're going to be successful in being competitive with China, we have to figure out where the best mission value can be found first and that's going to have to drive what we build, what we design, the policies we come up with," Martell said. "I just want to guard against making sure that we don't do this in a vacuum, but we do it with real mission goals, real mission objectives in mind."

His first order of business? Figuring out what needs to be done, and how to best use the $600 million in fiscal year 2023 dollars the CDAO's office was marked for in the Pentagon's most recent budget request. "So whenever I tackle a problem, whenever I go into a new organization, the first questions that I ask are: Do we have the right people? Do we have the right processes? Do we have the right tools to solve the visions [and] goals?" Martell said. To tackle that, Martell wants to identify the office's "marquee customers" and figure out what's "broken in terms of... people, platform, processes and tools" -- a process that could take anywhere from three to six months, he added. "We really want to be customer-driven here," Martell said. "We don't want to walk in and say if we build it, they'll come."

The US Army could end up wasting much as $22 billion in taxpayer cash if soldiers aren't actually interested in using, or able to use as intended, the Microsoft HoloLens headsets it said it would purchase, a government watchdog has warned. The Register reports: In 2018, the American military splashed $480 million on 100,000 prototype augmented-reality goggles from Redmond to see how they could help soldiers train for and fight in combat. The Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) project was expanded when the Army decided it wanted the Windows giant to make custom, battle-ready AR headsets in a ten-year deal worth up to $22 billion. The project was delayed and is reportedly scheduled to roll out some time this year. But the US Dept of Defense's Office of the Inspector General (OIG) cast some doubt on whether it was worth it at all.

"Procuring IVAS without attaining user acceptance could result in wasting up to $21.88 billion in taxpayer funds to field a system that soldiers may not want to use or use as intended," the Pentagon oversight body wrote in an audit [PDF] report this month. In other words, the Army hasn't yet fully determined if or how service members will find these HoloLens headsets valuable in the field. Although the heavily redacted report did not reveal soldiers' responses to the prototype testing, it said feedback from surveys showed "both positive and negative user acceptance." The Army plans to purchase 121,500 IVAS units from Microsoft while admitting that "if soldiers do not love IVAS and do not find it greatly enhances accomplishing the mission, then soldiers will not use it," the report disclosed.

At least six different Kremlin-linked hacking groups have conducted nearly 240 cyber operations against Ukrainian targets, Microsoft said Wednesday, in data reveal a broader scope of alleged Russian cyberattacks during the war on Ukraine than previously documented. From a report: "Russia's use of cyberattacks appears to be strongly correlated and sometimes directly timed with its kinetic military operations," said Tom Burt, a Microsoft vice president.

The Microsoft report is the most comprehensive public record yet of Russian hacking efforts related to the war in Ukraine. It fills in some gaps in public understanding of where Russia's vaunted cyber capabilities have been deployed during the war. Burt cited a cyberattack on a Ukrainian broadcast company on March 1, the same day as a Russian missile strike against a TV tower in Kyiv, and malicious emails sent to Ukrainians falsely claiming the Ukrainian government was "abandoning" them amid the Russian siege of the city of Mariupol. Suspected Russian hackers "are working to compromise organizations in regions across Ukraine," and may have been collecting intelligence on Ukrainian military partnerships many months before the full-scale invasion in February, the Microsoft report says.

World military spending continued to grow in 2021, reaching an all-time high of $2.1 trillion. This was the seventh consecutive year that spending increased. From a report: "Even amid the economic fallout of the Covid-19 pandemic, world military spending hit record levels," said Dr Diego Lopes da Silva, Senior Researcher with SIPRI's Military Expenditure and Arms Production Programme. "There was a slowdown in the rate of real-terms growth due to inflation. In nominal terms, however, military spending grew by 6.1 per cent." As a result of a sharp economic recovery in 2021, the global military burden -- world military expenditure as a share of world gross domestic product (GDP) -- fell by 0.1 percentage points, from 2.3 per cent in 2020 to 2.2 per cent in 2021. US military spending amounted to $801 billion in 2021, a drop of 1.4 per cent from 2020. The US military burden decreased slightly from 3.7 per cent of GDP in 2020 to 3.5 per cent in 2021. US funding for military research and development rose by 24 per cent between 2012 and 2021, while arms procurement funding fell by 6.4 per cent over the same period. In 2021 spending on both decreased. However, the drop in R&D spending (-1.2 per cent) was smaller than that in arms procurement spending (-5.4 per cent).

78-year-old rancher Ed Butcher has, for 60 years, lived with a nuclear missile as his closest neighbor — an active U.S. government nuclear missile, buried just beneath his cow pasture.

"Do you think they'll ever shoot it up into the sky?" asks his wife Pam, during a visit from the Washington Post.

"I used to say, 'No way,' " Ed said. "Now it's more like, 'Please God, don't let us be here to see it.' " The missile was called a Minuteman III, and the launch site had been on their property since the Cold War, when the Air Force paid $150 for one acre of their land as it installed an arsenal of nuclear weapons across the rural West. About 400 of those missiles remain active and ready to launch at a few seconds notice in Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, Colorado and Nebraska. They are located on bison preserves and Indian reservations. They sit across from a national forest, behind a rodeo grandstand, down the road from a one-room schoolhouse, and on dozens of private farms like the one belonging to the Butchers, who have lived for 60 years with a nuclear missile as their closest neighbor.

It's buried behind a chain-link fence and beneath a 110-ton door of concrete and steel. It's 60 feet long. It weighs 79,432 pounds. It has an explosive power at least 20 times greater than the atomic bomb that killed 140,000 people in Hiroshima. An Air Force team is stationed in an underground bunker a few miles away, ready to fire the missile at any moment if the order comes. It would tear out of the silo in about 3.4 seconds and climb above the ranch at 10,000 feet per second. It was designed to rise 70 miles above Earth, fly across the world in 25 minutes and detonate within a few hundred yards of its target. The ensuing fireball would vaporize every person and every structure within a half-mile. The blast would flatten buildings across a five-mile radius. Secondary fires and fatal doses of radiation would spread over dozens more miles, resulting in what U.S. military experts have referred to as "total nuclear annihilation."

"I bet it would fly right over our living room," Ed said. "I wonder if we'd even see it."

"We'd hear it. We'd feel it," Pam said. "The whole house would be shaking."

"And if we're shooting off missiles, you can bet some are headed back toward us," Ed said... "I guess we'd head for the storage room," Ed said.

"Make a few goodbye calls," Pam said. "Hold hands. Pray."

Ed got up to clear his plate. "Good thing it's all hypothetical. It's really only there for deterrence. It'll never actually explode."

"You're right," Pam said. "It won't happen. Almost definitely not."

CNN profiles Bellingcat, a Netherlands-based investigative group specializing in "open-source intelligence". And investigator Christo Grozev tells CNN that authoritarian governments make their work easier, because "they love to gather data, comprehensive data, on ... what they consider to be their subjects, and therefore there's a lot of centralized data."

"And second, there's a lot of petty corruption ... within the law enforcement system, and this data market thrives on that." Billions have been spent on creating sophisticated encrypted communications for the military in Russia. But most of that money has been stolen in corrupt kickbacks, and the result is they didn't have that functioning system... It is shocking how incompetent they are. But it was to be expected, because it's a reflection of 23 years of corrupt government.
Interestingly there's apparently less corruption in China — though more whistleblowers. But Bellingcat's first investigation involved the 2014 downing of a Boeing 777 over eastern Ukraine that killed 283 passengers. (The Dutch Safety Board later concluded it was downed by a surface-to-air missile launched from pro-Russian separatist-controlled territory in Ukraine.) "At that time, a lot of public data was available on Russian soldiers, Russian spies, and so on and so forth — because they still hadn't caught up with the times, so they kept a lot of digital traces, social media, posting selfies in front of weapons that shoot down airliners. That's where we kind of perfected the art of reconstructing a crime based on digital breadcrumbs..."

"By 2016, it was no longer possible to find soldiers leaving status selfies on the internet because a new law had been passed in Russia, for example, banning the use of mobile phones by secret services and by soldiers. So we had to develop a new way to get data on government crime. We found our way into this gray market of data in Russia, which is comprised of many, many gigabytes of leaked databases, car registration databases, passport databases. Most of these are available for free, completely freely downloadable from torrent sites or from forums and the internet." And for some of them, they're more current. You actually can buy the data through a broker, so we decided that in cases when we have a strong enough hypothesis that a government has committed the crime, we should probably drop our ethical boundaries from using such data — as long as it is verifiable, as long as it is not coming from one source only but corroborated by at least two or three other sources of data. That's how we develop it. And the first big use case for this approach was the ... poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in 2018 (in the United Kingdom), when we used this combination of open source and data bought from the gray market in Russia to piece together who exactly the two poisoners were. And that worked tremendously....

It has been what I best describe as a multilevel computer game.... [W]hen we first learned that we can get private data, passport files and residence files on Russian spies who go around killing people, they closed the files on those people. So every spy suddenly had a missing passport file in the central password database. But that opened up a completely new way for us to identify spies, because we were just able to compare older versions of the database to newer versions. So that allowed us to find a bad group of spies that we didn't even know existed before.

The Russian government did realize that that's maybe a bad idea to hide them from us, so they reopened those files but just started poisoning data. They started changing the photographs of some of these people to similar looking, like lookalikes of the people, so that they confused us or embarrass us if we publish a finding but it's for the wrong guy. And then we'll learn how to beat that.
When asked about having dropped some ethical boundaries about data use, Grozev replies "everything changes. Therefore, the rules of journalism should change with the changing times." "And it's not common that journalism was investigating governments conducting government-sanctioned crimes, but now it's happening." With a country's ruler proclaiming perpetual supreme power, "This is not a model that traditional journalism can investigate properly. It's not even a model that traditional law enforcement can investigate properly." I'll give an example. When the British police asked, by international agreement, for cooperation from the Russian government to provide evidence on who exactly these guys were who were hanging around the Skripals' house in 2018, they got completely fraudulent, fake data from the Russian government....

So the only way to counter that as a journalist is to get the data that the Russian government is refusing to hand over. And if this is the only way to get it, and if you can be sure that you can prove that this is valid data and authentic data — I think it is incumbent on journalists to find the truth. And especially when law enforcement refuses to find the truth because of honoring the sovereign system of respecting other governments.
It was Bellingcat that identified the spies who's poisoned Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny. CNN suggests that for more details on their investigation, and "to understand Vladimir Putin's stranglehold on power in Russia, watch the new film Navalny which premieres Sunday at 9 p.m. ET on CNN."

The movie's tagline? "Poison always leaves a trail."

The Associated Press files this report from Chernobyl, where invading tanks in February "churned up highly contaminated soil from the site of the 1986 accident that was the world's worst nuclear disaster..."

"Here in the dirt of one of the world's most radioactive places, Russian soldiers dug trenches. Ukrainian officials worry they were, in effect, digging their own graves." For more than a month, some Russian soldiers bunked in the earth within sight of the massive structure built to contain radiation from the damaged Chernobyl nuclear reactor. A close inspection of their trenches was impossible because even walking on the dirt is discouraged.... Maksym Shevchuck, the deputy head of the state agency managing the exclusion zone, believes hundreds or thousands of soldiers damaged their health, likely with little idea of the consequences, despite plant workers' warnings to their commanders. "Most of the soldiers were around 20 years old," he said....

The full extent of Russia's activities in the Chernobyl exclusion zone is still unknown, especially because the troops scattered mines that the Ukrainian military is still searching for. Some have detonated, further disturbing the radioactive ground. The Russians also set several forest fires, which have been put out.

Ukrainian authorities can't monitor radiation levels across the zone because Russian soldiers stole the main server for the system, severing the connection on March 2. The International Atomic Energy Agency said Saturday it still wasn't receiving remote data from its monitoring systems. The Russians even took Chernobyl staffers' personal radiation monitors....

When the Russians hurriedly departed March 31 as part of a withdrawal from the region that left behind scorched tanks and traumatized communities, they took more than 150 Ukrainian national guard members into Belarus. Shevchuck fears they're now in Russia. In their rush, the Russians gave nuclear plant managers a choice: Sign a document saying the soldiers had protected the site and there were no complaints, or be taken into Belarus. The managers signed.
The article includes more stories from Chernobyl's staff: Even now, weeks after the Russians left, "I need to calm down," the plant's main security engineer, Valerii Semenov, told The Associated Press. He worked 35 days straight, sleeping only three hours a night, rationing cigarettes and staying on even after the Russians allowed a shift change. "I was afraid they would install something and damage the system," he said in an interview....

Another Ukrainian nuclear plant, at Zaporizhzhia in southeastern Ukraine, remains under Russian control. It is the largest in Europe.
Long-time Slashdot reader MattSparkes also notes reports that researchers at Chernobyl "had been looking for bacteria to eat radioactive waste — but they now fear that their work was irreparably lost during the Russian invasion of the facility."

New Scientist reports (in a pay-walled article) that scientist Olena Pareniuk "was attempting to identify bacteria that could consume radioactive waste within Chernobyl's destroyed reactor before the Russian invasion. If her samples are lost it will likely be impossible to replace them."

The New York Times reports: Images such as Ukrainian tractors towing away a disabled Russian tank and helicopter, although unverified, have not only helped fight Russian disinformation, but also helped support Ukrainian charities and even the Ukrainian military. The merchandise sales they have generated in the United States and elsewhere are surprising given that many people buying the T-shirts, stickers, coffee mugs and chocolate bars would never have thought about the Eastern European country before the conflict.
One example? Toronto-based Christian Borys, who decided to launch a site selling stickers of the Virgin Mary hoisting an antitank missile (adapted from a painting by the American artist Chris Shaw.) In eight weeks Borys' "Saint Javelin" site "has raised so far almost $1.5 million to assist the Ukrainian charity Help Us Help, which has branched into multiple services, and to provide protective equipment for journalists covering the war, he said." Mr. Borys, who had worked for the e-commerce platform Shopify before turning to journalism, said he created a website in half an hour, hoping to raise money to send to a charity for Ukrainian orphans. That night, he made 88 Canadian dollars in sales. By the time he added T-shirts at the end of February, the threat of war had turned into a full-scale invasion, and he said sales grew to 170,000 Canadian dollars a day — most coming from the United States. "The internet speaks in memes and it just became this crazy, viral sensation," he said. "I think it's because people were looking for a symbol of support, a way to support Ukraine, because they saw the whole injustice of everything...."

Three weeks ago, Mr. Borys, a Canadian of Ukrainian Polish origin, turned Saint Javelin from an all-volunteer effort to a full-time staff of four to keep up with demand. His website has branched out from the Virgin Mary to other saints: Saint Carl Gustaf wears a gas mask, while "Saint Olha, the Warrior Queen of Kyiv" wears a crown and hoists a bazooka over her camouflaged shoulders. "People on Instagram demand we make things basically," Mr. Borys said. "We get messages from people in Spain who say, 'Hey, we just shipped the C-90,' a shoulder-fired rocket propelled grenade launcher," he said. "And they'll say, 'Hey we want a saint for Spain' or a saint specific to that type of system."

Writing for the New Yorker, Ronan Farrow reports on Pegasus, "a spyware technology designed by NSO Group, an Israeli firm, which can extract the contents of a phone, giving access to its texts and photographs, or activate its camera and microphone to provide real-time surveillance — exposing, say, confidential meetings." Pegasus is useful for law enforcement seeking criminals, or for authoritarians looking to quash dissent.... In Catalonia, more than sixty phones — owned by Catalan politicians, lawyers, and activists in Spain and across Europe — have been targeted using Pegasus. This is the largest forensically documented cluster of such attacks and infections on record. Among the victims are three members of the European Parliament... Catalan politicians believe that the likely perpetrators of the hacking campaign are Spanish officials, and the Citizen Lab's analysis suggests that the Spanish government has used Pegasus....

In recent years, investigations by the Citizen Lab and Amnesty International have revealed the presence of Pegasus on the phones of politicians, activists, and dissidents under repressive regimes. An analysis by Forensic Architecture, a research group at the University of London, has linked Pegasus to three hundred acts of physical violence. It has been used to target members of Rwanda's opposition party and journalists exposing corruption in El Salvador. In Mexico, it appeared on the phones of several people close to the reporter Javier Valdez Cárdenas, who was murdered after investigating drug cartels. Around the time that Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia approved the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a longtime critic, Pegasus was allegedly used to monitor phones belonging to Khashoggi's associates, possibly facilitating the killing, in 2018. (Bin Salman has denied involvement, and NSO said, in a statement, "Our technology was not associated in any way with the heinous murder.") Further reporting through a collaboration of news outlets known as the Pegasus Project has reinforced the links between NSO Group and anti-democratic states.

But there is evidence that Pegasus is being used in at least forty-five countries, and it and similar tools have been purchased by law-enforcement agencies in the United States and across Europe. Cristin Flynn Goodwin, a Microsoft executive who has led the company's efforts to fight spyware, told me, "The big, dirty secret is that governments are buying this stuff — not just authoritarian governments but all types of governments...." "Almost all governments in Europe are using our tools," Shalev Hulio, NSO Group's C.E.O., told me. A former senior Israeli intelligence official added, "NSO has a monopoly in Europe." German, Polish, and Hungarian authorities have admitted to using Pegasus. Belgian law enforcement uses it, too, though it won't admit it.
Calling the spyware industry "largely unregulated and increasingly controversial," the article notes how it's now impacting major western democracies. "The Citizen Lab's researchers concluded that, on July 26 and 27, 2020, Pegasus was used to infect a device connected to the network at 10 Downing Street, the office of Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.... The United States has been both a consumer and a victim of this techÂnology. Although the National Security Agency and the C.I.A. have their own surveillance technology, other government offices, including in the military and in the Department of Justice, have bought spyware from private companies, according to people involved in those transactions."

But are the company's fortunes faltering? The company has been valued at more than a billion dollars. But now it is contending with debt, battling an array of corporate backers, and, according to industry observers, faltering in its long-standing efforts to sell its products to U.S. law enforcement, in part through an American branch, Westbridge Technologies. It also faces numerous lawsuits in many countries, brought by Meta (formerly Facebook), by Apple, and by individuals who have been hacked by NSO....

In November, the [U.S.] Commerce Department added NSO Group, along with several other spyware makers, to a list of entities blocked from purchasing technology from American companies without a license. I was with Hulio in New York the next day. NSO could no longer legally buy Windows operating systems, iPhones, Amazon cloud servers — the kinds of products it uses to run its business and build its spyware.