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DHS’s Terrifying New Database, HART – The Organic Prepper

Posted by M. C. on October 7, 2019

Incidentally, the cloud hosting for HART is being done by none other than Amazon – you know, the ones with surveillance devices like the Ring doorbell and the Alexa home assistant and the Nest home security system. Does anyone see a pattern here?

https://www.theorganicprepper.com/database-dhs-hart/

by Daisy Luther

These days, you can’t really go anywhere without encountering cameras.  Going into a store? Chances are there are security cameras. Getting money at an ATM? More cameras. Driving through the streets of a city? More cameras still. Your neighbors may have those doorbells from Amazon that are surveilling the entire neighborhood.

And many of these cameras are tied into facial recognition databases, or the footage can be quite easily compared there if “authorities” are looking for somebody.

But as it turns out, it isn’t just facial recognition we have to worry about.

DHS has a new recognition system called HART.

Homeland Advanced Recognition Technology system is the alarming new identity system being put in place by the Department of Homeland Security.

DHS is retiring its old system that was based on facial recognition. It’s being replaced with HART, a cloud-based system that holds information about the identities of hundreds of millions of people.

The new cloud-based platform, called the Homeland Advanced Recognition Technology System, or HART, is expected to bring more processing power, new analytics capabilities and increased accuracy to the department’s biometrics operations. It will also allow the agency to look beyond the three types of biometric data it uses today—face, iris and fingerprint—to identify people through a variety of other characteristics, like palm prints, scars, tattoos, physical markings and even their voices. (source)

Incidentally, the cloud hosting for HART is being done by none other than Amazon – you know, the ones with surveillance devices like the Ring doorbell and the Alexa home assistant and the Nest home security system. Does anyone see a pattern here?

Also note that Amazon Web Services also hosts data for the CIA, the DoD, and NASA.

More about HART

As HART becomes more established, that old saying “you can run but you can’t hide” is going to seem ever more true. The DHS is delighted at how much further the new system can take them into surveilling Americans.

And by freeing the agency from the limitations of its legacy system, HART could also let officials grow the network of external partners with whom they share biometric data and analytics capabilities, according to Patrick Nemeth, director of identity operations within Homeland Security’s Office of Biometric Identity Management.

“When we get to HART, we will be better, faster, stronger,” Nemeth said in an interview with Nextgov. “We’ll be relieved of a lot of the capacity issues that we have now … and then going forward from there we’ll be able to add [capabilities].” (source)

The DHS wants to break free of the limitations of the old system with their new and “improved” system. HART will use multiple pieces of biometric data to increase identification accuracy.

Today, when an official runs a person’s face, fingerprint or iris scans through IDENT’s massive database, the system doesn’t return a single result. Rather, it assembles a list of dozens of potential candidates with different levels of confidence, which a human analyst must then look through to make a final match. The system can only handle one modality at a time, so if agent is hypothetically trying to identify someone using two different datapoints, they need to assess two lists of candidates to find a single match. This isn’t a problem if the system identifies the same person as the most likely match for both fingerprint and face, for example, but because biometric identification is still an imperfect science, the results are rarely so clear cut.

However, the HART platform can include multiple datapoints in a single query, meaning it will rank potential matches based on all the information that’s available. That will not only make it easier for agents to analyze potential matches, but it will also help the agency overcome data quality issues that often plague biometric scans, Nemeth said. If the face image is pristine but the fingerprint is fuzzy, for example, the system will give the higher-quality datapoint more weight.

“We’re very hopeful that it will provide better identification surety than we can provide with any single modality today,” Nemeth said. And palm prints, scars, tattoos and other modalities are added in the years ahead, the system will be able to integrate those into its matching process. (source)

HART will also use DNA.

Remember a while back when we reported that DNA sites were teaming up with facial recognition software? Well, HART will take that unholy alliance even further.

The phase-two solicitation also lists DNA-matching as a potential application of the HART system. While the department doesn’t currently analyze DNA, officials on Wednesday announced they would start adding DNA collected from hundreds of thousands of detained migrants to the FBI’s criminal database. During the interview, Nemeth said the agency is still working through the legal implications of storing and sharing such sensitive data. It’s also unclear whether DNA information would be housed in the HART system or a separate database, he said. (source)

Nifty.

The DHS is operating without any type of regulation.

Currently, there’s no regulation or oversight of government agencies collecting and using this kind of data. Civil liberty activists and some lawmakers are alarmed by this, citing concerns about privacy and discrimination. This hasn’t slowed down the DHS one iota, however.

Critics have taken particular issue with the government’s tangled web of information sharing agreements, which allow data to spread far beyond the borders of the agency that collected it. The Homeland Security Department currently shares its biometric data and capabilities with numerous groups, including but not limited to the Justice, Defense and State departments.

In the years ahead, HART promises to strengthen those partnerships and allow others to flourish, according to Nemeth. While today the department limits other agencies’ access to IDENT to ensure they don’t consume too much of its limited computing power, HART will do away with those constraints. (source)

Mana Azarmi, the policy counsel for the Freedom, Security and Technology Project at the Center for Democracy and Technology is one of those people voicing concern.

A person might give information to a single agency thinking it would be used for one specific purpose, but depending on how that information is shared, they could potentially find themselves subjected to unforeseen negative consequences, Azarmi said in a conversation with Nextgov.

“The government gets a lot of leeway to share information,” she said. “In this age of incredible data collection, I think we need to rethink some of the rules that are in place and some of the practices that we’ve allowed to flourish post-9/11. We may have overcorrected.” (source)

You think?

Many people voluntarily provide biometric data.

Many folks provide biometric data without giving it a second thought. They cheerfully swab a cheek and send it into sites like Ancestry.com, providing not only their DNA, but matches to many relatives who never gave permission for their DNA to be in a database.

Then there are cell phones. If you have a newer phone, it’s entirely possible that it has asked you to set up fingerprint login, facial recognition, and even voice recognition. It isn’t a stretch of the imagination to believe that those samples are shared with folks beyond the device in your hand. Add to this that your device is tracking you every place you go through a wide variety of seemingly innocuous apps, and you start to get the picture.

You can’t opt-out.

Back in 2013, I wrote an article called The Great American Dragnet.  At that time, facial recognition was something that sounded like science fiction or some kind of joke. Our drivers’ licenses were the first foray into creating a database but even in 2013, it far exceeded that.

Another, even larger, database exists. The US State Department has a database with 230 million searchable images.  Anyone with a passport or an immigration visa may find themselves an unwilling participant in this database.   Here’s the breakdown of who has a photo database:

  • The State Department has about 15 million photos of passport or visa holders
  • The FBI has about15 million photos of people who have been arrested or convicted of crimes
  • The Department of Defense has about 6 million photos, mainly of Iraqis and Afghans
  • Various police agencies and states have at least 210 million driver’s license photos

This invasion of privacy is just another facet of the surveillance state, and should be no surprise considering the information Edward Snowden just shared about the over-reaching tentacles of the NSA into all of our communications. We are filing our identities with the government and they can identify us at will, without any requirement for probable cause. (source)

Some people don’t even seem to mind that their identities have been tagged and filed by the US government. And even those of us who do mind have no option. If you wish to drive a car or travel outside of the country or have any kind of government ID, like it or not, you’re in the database. Six years ago, I wrote:

The authorities that use this technology claim that the purpose of it is to make us safer, by helping to prevent identity fraud and to identify criminals.  However, what freedom are we giving up for this “safety” cloaked in benevolence? We are giving up the freedom of having the most elemental form of privacy – that of being able to go about our daily business without being watched and identified.  And once you’re identified, this connects to all sorts of other personal information that has been compiled: your address, your driving and criminal records, and potentially, whatever else that has been neatly filed away at your friendly neighborhood fusion center.

Think about it:  You’re walking the dog and you fail to scoop the poop – if there’s a surveillance camera in the area, it would be a simple matter, given the technology, for you to be identified. If you are attending a protest that might be considered “anti-government”, don’t expect to be anonymous.  A photo of the crowd could easily result in the identification of most of the participants.

Are you purchasing ammo, preparedness items, or books about a controversial topic?  Paying cash won’t buy you much in the way of privacy – your purchase will most likely be captured on the CCTV camera at the checkout stand, making you easily identifiable to anyone who might wish to track these kinds of things.  What if a person with access to this technology uses it for personal, less than ethical reasons, like stalking an attractive women he saw on the street?  The potential for abuse is mind-boggling.

If you can’t leave your house without being identified, do you have any real freedom left, or are you just a resident in a very large cage? (source)

When I wrote that, it still seemed far-fetched but remotely possible, even to me. This was before we were really aware of anything like the social credit program in China or how crazy the censorship was going to become or how social media would change the very fabric of our society.

Now, it’s here and it looks like there’s no stopping it.

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DHS Issues RFI for Cloud-Based Biometric Processing System ...

 

 

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What Bernie Sanders Won’t Tell You About Social Democracy – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on October 7, 2019

Despite Hitler’s backpedaling from social democracy, he confided in 1942 that “The only problem for the Social Democrats at the time was that they did not have a leader.”

They have a leader now.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2019/10/lk-samuels/what-bernie-sanders-wont-tell-you-about-social-democracy/

By

Sen. Bernie Sanders is always happy to explain to the public his social democracy ideology, or what he often labels democratic socialism. Despite his enthusiasm, he has never revealed the more infamous past admirers of his brand of authoritarian socialism. Sanders and other Social Democrats always fail to identify one of their most prominent political colleagues— Adolf Hitler. In 1919 the future Führer considered himself a big fan of “national Social Democracy,” and told others that he planned to join the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SDP).

So what caused Hitler to embrace social democracy? After his arrest as a leader of the short-lived Communist-run Bavarian Soviet Republic, Hitler felt pressured to plead innocent to charges of being a radical leftwing communist. During his interrogation by Weimar Republic officials, Hitler confessed that he was moderate leftist, a “Social Democrat,” not a diehard communist.

Most of this evidence comes from the German historians Thomas Weber and Konrad Heiden. According to Heiden, a journalist based in Munich during the 1920s, Hitler “espoused the cause of Social Democracy against that of the Communists.” Since Hitler did not flee or resign his position with the communist Räterepublik, he likely found it necessary to change his tune after fierce street battles that led to over 600 casualties and the capture of Munich by Weimar Republic and Freikorps troops. In fact, within days after the communist republic was overthrown, Hitler decided to turn “informant” against his former comrades to avoid the possibility of being imprisoned or shot.

Later, as a correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung, Heiden wrote that “Hitler had supported the SPD” (Social Democratic Party of Germany) and he “talked about joining the party.” At an early meeting of a political group that eventually turned into the Nazi Party, Hitler told Friedrich Krohn, an early supporter of the party, that he preferred a type of “socialism” he referred to as “national Social Democracy” like that in nations such as Scandinavia, England, and prewar Bavaria. One wonders if Stalin had it right all along when he condemned the Social Democrats and the National Socialists as “twins” birthed by the same socialist mother. By the early 1930s, both Stalin and the Communist International were describing Social Democratic parties as “social fascists.”

In 1921 when Hitler felt compelled to defend an early Nazi supporter, Hermann Esser, from internal Nazi party attacks, he stated, “Everyone was at one time a Social Democrat.” Several news stories detailed Hitler’s endorsement of social democracy. One newspaper, the liberal daily Berliner Tageblatt, wrote in Oct. 29, 1930, that Hitler had identified himself “as a supporter of Social Democracy.”

However, Hitler’s favorable backing of the Social Democrats was short lived. His sudden feelings of animosity was not over socioeconomic theories or a dislike of socialism, but because the SPD was directly responsible for a punitive peace treaty that made Germans realize that they had actually lost World War I. Most Germans were traumatized by this turn of events. During this juncture, Hitler experienced his own road-to-Damascus conversion through the realization of Germany’s total defeat when the newly formed SPD-led government signed and ratified the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. Hitler saw the SPD as traitors to Germany’s national interests and ethnic identity. This signified his political transformation towards a militant racial radicalization and away from the social democracy. Despite Hitler’s backpedaling from social democracy, he confided in 1942 that “The only problem for the Social Democrats at the time was that they did not have a leader.”…

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Difference between Democrats, Socialists, and Communists

 

 

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Markets Rely on Accurate and Honest Information — But Governments Want the Opposite | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on October 6, 2019

In contrast, when governments displace voluntary arrangements with coercive impositions, lies displace truth in two ways. Not only is the competition to get political power based largely on misrepresentations, but government’s coercive impositions also replace the truth revealed in voluntary market behavior with lies. What is the effect on society? It isn’t pretty.

https://mises.org/wire/markets-rely-accurate-and-honest-information-%E2%80%94-governments-want-opposite

…The reason people don’t always communicate truthfully is that our reason serves our self-interest. Sometimes we perceive a strategic advantage at other people’s expense from intentionally deceiving them. Our words are also often ex post rationalizations to ourselves and others of why whatever we chose or did was a good idea. But that often makes what people say a frail reed to rely upon. And when political power is involved, the incentives for such deception and self-delusion are put on steroids, because the payoffs are far greater when backed by government’s coercive power.

As a consequence, accurate information about the issues most important to our ability to co-operate with others is often among the scarcest and most valuable of goods. Making it worse, the unknowably vast amount of potentially useful information—the infinite permutations of who, what, when, where, why and how–exceeds any individual or group’s ability to comprehend and integrate it. But voluntary market arrangements based on private property rights provide a powerful mechanism of cutting that problem down to manageable size.

Most of the time, we don’t really want to know all the details that might affect our productive interactions with others. We mainly want to know “how much”–what are the tradeoffs others are willing to make between goods, services, current versus future consumption, labor versus leisure, etc. The reason is that, regardless of their specific determinants, others’ willing tradeoffs determine our possibilities and constraints in any society that honors members’ self-ownership.

Expanding the mutually beneficial arrangements that are possible by accurately revealing such information is a central aspect of effective social coordination, as the seminal works of Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek have made clear. No central planners knows the tradeoffs each individual would make; only the individuals involved know that information. That requires a process to honestly reveal that information to those who will make choices regarding it, or the information will be effectively thrown away, along with the societal wealth creation it would enable.

Markets provide that honest information. While what people say may often be misleading to themselves and others, people reveal the truth about the tradeoffs they are willing to make when they engage in un-coerced exchange. What you do is often far more truthful than what you say.

Regardless of your words, if you actually buy a product for $10 out of your pocket, you reveal that you believe it is worth at least $10 to you; similarly, if you sell a product for $10, you reveal that what the money could purchase was worth more to you than the product. And those choices reveal valuable information about the real alternatives available to those who might choose to deal with you. In contrast, since politics is based on what people say rather than what they actually do, it often short-circuits our central mechanism for discovering the truth to better enable our cooperative potential.

In fact, a vast array of government interference in individuals’ voluntary exchange relationships substitutes lies for the truth that would otherwise be revealed. And in a world where relative scarcities are frequently the primary things we want to know from others, to combine with our more intimate knowledge of ourselves and our situations, the harm is massive.

Consider price ceilings, like rent controls. In their absence, market rents tell you the prices at which you can find apartments, reflecting the opportunity costs landlords face. But rent controls impose a price divorced from landlords’ opportunity costs, and at which many will often be unable to successfully rent an apartment. That is, it misinforms people that the opportunity costs are cheaper than they really are, and in the process makes knowledge of the terms at which apartments can generally be successfully rented largely disappear.

Price floors, like minimum wages, act in a parallel manner. In their absence, market wages tell you the prices at which you can generally find jobs. But a minimum wage dictates a price divorced from prospective workers’ opportunity costs, and at which many will often be unable to successfully get jobs. That is, it misinforms people that unskilled labor’s opportunity costs are higher than they really are, and in the process makes the knowledge of the terms at which jobs can generally successfully be gotten largely disappear.

Taxes, which are the price of the artificial input, “government permission to produce and sell,” reflecting coercively imposed government burdens rather than opportunity costs of inherently scarce goods and services, tell buyers that products are scarcer than they really are. The same is true of import restrictions, like tariffs and quotas, which raise prices above opportunity costs. The burdens of government regulations and mandates also act like taxes. Government barriers to entry and operation in markets similarly raise prices above what relative scarcity would dictate. All of these result in artificially higher prices, underuse and waste, compared to free markets.

Subsidies act in a parallel manner to taxes, but in the opposite direction. They communicate to prospective buyers that products are less scarce than they really are, leading to artificially low prices to consumers, overuse and waste, compared to free markets.

Not only do voluntary market interactions better reveal the truth about relative scarcities through pricing, they allow more accurate evaluation of other aspects of trading, such as product and service quality, than government.

The key (though often ignored) factor is repeat business. The usual scare stories to justify the “need” for government regulation involve one-time interactions, in which others can gain by “cheating” on what they promise. But the relevant question is not whether they can, but whether it is in their interest to do so. We don’t need government protection against things people will choose not to do, even if they could. And since almost everyone we deal with economically wishes to continue in business, effects on future business (directly, as when current customers refuse to deal with such suppliers in the future, and indirectly, through reputation effects on other current and prospective trading partners) act as a performance bond against misbehavior, leading to far better outcomes than the scare stories imply. As students of game theory recognize, repeated games generate very different strategies than one-shot games.

Consider an example. I can cheat you today by providing lower than claimed quality, and doing so would generate $1 million in increased profits for me. If it would leave my future business relationships unchanged, I have an incentive to do so. However, what if I expect the resulting damage to my reputation will lose me more than $1 in future discounted profits? I can cheat you, but I won’t because I have no incentive to. The problem in this case is solved by markets’ reputation mechanisms. Even if the future losses don’t completely eliminate my incentives to cheat, they sharply reduce them, letting much of the air out of the “we need government regulation to protect you” balloon.

This mechanism, while ignored by “nothing can be done if the state doesn’t do it” acolytes, is far from new. For instance, the famous Maghribi traders of Northern Africa relied on reputations to deal with problems in international trade in the 11th century…

In contrast, when governments displace voluntary arrangements with coercive impositions, lies displace truth in two ways. Not only is the competition to get political power based largely on misrepresentations, but government’s coercive impositions also replace the truth revealed in voluntary market behavior with lies. What is the effect on society? It isn’t pretty. And even though it is an essential aspect of government intrusion into citizens’ affairs, not a single moral or ethical system endorses lying. Lies will not set you free. Not only does the truth set us free, but freedom in our cooperative endeavors reveals truths we have no other way of knowing.

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Thomas Sowell Quote: “Government central planning means ...

 

 

 

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No, Capitalism Doesn’t Threaten Humanity | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on October 6, 2019

Presumably Monbiot would say that past success is no guarantee of future performance, but as a different Guardian article explains, the UN reports that the world has seen “astonishing” improvements in human welfare just since 1990.

https://mises.org/wire/no-capitalism-doesn%E2%80%99t-threaten-humanity

Presumably bolstered by the fiery claims of Greta Thunberg and the general theme of Climate Week, people on Twitter have been declaring that capitalism threatens humanity. This angst rekindled interest in a Guardian article that ran a few months ago, in which author George Monbiot argued that the very nature of capitalism is “incompatible with the survival of life on Earth.” Not only do such claims ignore the obvious progress of humanity staring us in the face—and the environmental activists are supposed to be the empirical ones in this debate—but even if Monbiot’s worries about the climate were correct, capitalism would still be the best social system to deal with the crisis.

Monbiot’s Case Against Capitalism

The following excerpt summarizes Monbiot’s two-pronged argument for why capitalism threatens our entire species:

Capitalism’s failures arise from two of its defining elements. The first is perpetual growth. Economic growth is the aggregate effect of the quest to accumulate capital and extract profit. Capitalism collapses without growth, yet perpetual growth on a finite planet leads inexorably to environmental calamity.

…The absolute decoupling needed to avert environmental catastrophe (a reduction in material resource use) has never been achieved, and appears impossible while economic growth continues. Green growth is an illusion.

A system based on perpetual growth cannot function without peripheries and externalities. There must always be an extraction zone – from which materials are taken without full payment – and a disposal zone, where costs are dumped in the form of waste and pollution. As the scale of economic activity increases until capitalism affects everything, from the atmosphere to the deep ocean floor, the entire planet becomes a sacrifice zone: we all inhabit the periphery of the profit-making machine.

…

The second defining element is the bizarre assumption that a person is entitled to as great a share of the world’s natural wealth as their money can buy. This seizure of common goods causes three further dislocations. First, the scramble for exclusive control of non-reproducible assets, which implies either violence or legislative truncations of other people’s rights. Second, the immiseration of other people by an economy based on looting across both space and time. Third, the translation of economic power into political power, as control over essential resources leads to control over the social relations that surround them.

Monbiot’s critique of capitalism is entirely unfounded. In the first place, it defies all empirical grounding, which is ironic because it’s my side of this debate that’s allegedly composed of unscientific “deniers.” Especially as formerly communist countries move towards freer markets, the world has seen dramatic improvements in living standards, while the relevant availability of “depletable” resources has increased; even climate-related deaths have plummeted over time.

But it gets even worse for Monbiot’s thesis. Even if we imagine a scenario—contrary to reality—where humanity did run into a crisis because of natural resource crunch, the best way to deal with the situation would be reliance on private property and market prices. To blame capitalism for the potential problems of a finite world is like blaming thermometers for the flu.

Just the Facts: It’s Getting So Much Better All the Time

In this section I’ll illustrate some of the basic facts, documenting that human welfare has drastically improved during the same period that we have ostensibly seen the ravages of human-induced climate change.

First, consider a chart from Bjørn Lomberg (and reproduced by Marlo Lewis) that shows climate-related deaths from 1920-2017:

Climate-1-1-768x728.png

It’s hard to see evidence of impending disaster in the above chart.

As the chart shows, U.S. “proved reserves” of crude are at an all-time high at some 39.2 billion barrels (as of 2017), up from 13.6 billion barrels in 1930. The increase in crude reserves has occurred despite the fact that the U.S. has produced an enormous amount of crude oil over this period.

Indeed, as the separate EIA chart shows below, since 1950 U.S. crude production has rarely fallen below 5 million barrels per day, and it’s currently (as of June 2019) at a record high of some 12.1 million barrels per day.

U.S. Field Production of Crude Oil

Cliamte-3-768x284.png

The pattern is similar for world oil reserves and production, but I chose to use U.S. data because it is the most reliable. There’s also a similar pattern for natural gas and coal; as this 2011 IER report shows, North America alone has enough fossil fuels in the broader category of “recoverable resources” to satisfy current consumption rates for literally centuries. And they are growing. According to the Potential Gas Committee’s latest report, U.S. reserves of natural gas increased by the energy equivalent of 100 billion barrels of oil in just the last 2 years.

Now how can this be possible? How can the U.S., for example, have more “proved reserves” of oil now, than it did in (say) 1950? The answer is that it doesn’t make sense for humans to go out and find every last drop of oil (or lump of coal) housed in planet Earth. At any given time, it’s only sensible to have located the precise deposits of a healthy margin of such depletable resources, which is only a small fraction of the physical stockpile.

Yes, since there is a finite amount of crude oil, it must be the case that humanity will eventually have to switch to some other energy source. But humanity—especially in the modern age of relatively capitalistic institutions—has so far had no trouble maintaining consistent increases in total output, notwithstanding the “finite” resources on Earth (or the physical universe, for that matter).

Presumably Monbiot would say that past success is no guarantee of future performance, but as a different Guardian article explains, the UN reports that the world has seen “astonishing” improvements in human welfare just since 1990. Specifically, more than a billion people were lifted out of “extreme poverty,” with “the number of people living on less than $1.25 a day [falling] from 1.9 billion in 1990 to 836 million in 2015.”

What would the data have to look like to vindicate capitalism from the charges of Monbiot?

Even in a Collapsing World, Capitalism Would Be Our Best Defense…

Conclusion

George Monbiot alleges that capitalism, left unchecked, will cause the literal extinction of humanity. His arguments ignore all of the evidence of capitalism’s benefits staring us in the face. Yet even on a theoretical level, private property and market prices help organize human activity so that we can deploy our scarce resources in the most efficient manner. Empirically, capitalism has allowed humanity to flourish with an ever-rising standard of living. But even in a catastrophic scenario where we hit a hard resource constraint, capitalism would still be an important tool in our defense, just as we would badly need math and science to help us cope with the emergency.

Originally published at the Institute for Energy Research

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Critical Thinking Definition: Corruption Scandals ...

 

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Watch “Talking About Stoicism Part 39: Every Situation Has Two Handles” on YouTube

Posted by M. C. on October 5, 2019

Like “Zimmie” said – I gotta change my way thinking…

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Whistleblower accuses largest US military shipbuilder of putting ‘American lives at risk’ by falsifying tests on submarine stealth coating – Task & Purpose

Posted by M. C. on October 5, 2019

Good luck in a naval battle with tech heavy Russia and China.

https://taskandpurpose.com/lawsuit-huntington-ingalls-whistleblower

by James Clark

America’s largest military shipbuilding company has been accused of falsifying tests and certifications on stealth coatings of its submarines “that put American lives at risk,” according to a complaint filed in federal court last month.

Huntington Ingalls Industries, which spun-off from Northrop Grumman in 2011, “knowingly and/or recklessly” filed falsified records with the Navy claiming it had correctly applied a coating, called a Special Hull Treatment, to Virginia-class attack submarines which would allow the vessels to elude enemy sonar, the Sept. 26 complaint alleges.

Instead, the complaint said, Huntington Ingalls’ Newport News Shipbuilding facility in Virginia took shortcuts that allegedly “plagued” the class of submarines with problems, and then retaliated against the employee who spoke up about the issues.

Huntington Ingalls, and Northrop Grumman, are being sued for damages in excess of $100 million for allegedly misleading the federal government on a defense contract to apply the sound-dampening coating to the submarines. The Navy’s Virginia-class attack submarines are manufactured as part of a joint effort by General Dynamics’ Electric Boat and Huntington Ingalls.

The complaint alleges that Northrop Grumman and Huntington Ingalls Industries violated the federal government’s False Claims Act when they “falsified testing and certifications on multi-billion dollar submarine contracts.”

The complaint goes on to note that the companies “induced the government to pay the defendants in-full for submarines with dangerous defects that put American lives at risk.”

The qui tam lawsuit – a type of suit which is brought under the False Claims Act and rewards whistleblowers in successful cases where the government recoups damages due to fraud – is being brought by Ari Lawrence on behalf of the U.S. Government. According to the complaint, Lawrence, a senior engineer at Huntington Ingalls who has worked there since 2001, has provided evidence of the alleged issues at the company’s Newport News Shipbuilding facility in Virginia.

When asked about the lawsuit, the Navy referred Task & Purpose to the Department of Justice, which declined to comment. Northrop Grumman also did not respond.

Duane Bourne, a Huntington Ingalls spokesman, told Task & Purpose that “we fully cooperated with the Department of Justice’s investigation and intend to vigorously defend the lawsuit.”

When pressed for comment on the findings of the investigation both Huntington Ingalls and the Department of Justice declined to elaborate.

“Newport News Shipbuilding remains committed to building the highest-quality warships for the Navy and does not tolerate any conduct that compromises our mission of delivering ships that safeguard our nation and its sailors,” Bourne told Task & Purpose.

The complaint revolves around critical submarine components that Huntington Ingalls was paid to produce; specifically the application of the Special Hull Treatment to Virginia-class attack subs.

The foam-rubber-like exterior coating is designed to absorb sound waves of active sonar so they don’t bounce back to the ship or submarine sending out the signal. It’s essentially glued onto a submarine using a special two-part adhesive coating (TPAC).

However, the complaint claims that “Huntington Ingalls had never obtained proper qualifications and certifications for the use of TPAC on the Virginia-class submarines for any applications.”

Such certifications are “critical to ensure that the personnel used to mix and apply the TPAC are properly qualified and that the procedures are performed correctly,” the complaint said.

The complaint alleges that the sound-dampening coating was improperly affixed – allegedly due to the lack of certified personnel applying the TPAC – which caused the coating to “de-bond” and slip off the submarines while underway. According to the complaint, “since the inception of the program, Virginia-class submarines have been plagued with problems with their exterior hull coating system,” including an incident in 2007 on the USS Virginia, the first submarine of its class.

A 2010 photo of the side of the USS Virginia appears to show that the Special Hull Treatment peeled off while the submarine was underway.(U.S. Navy photo)

“At that time, it was clear that there was a de-bonding problem with the exterior coating,” the complaint reads. “In fact, on the USS Virginia, and subsequently delivered Virginia-class submarines, the exterior coatings tore off submarines while underway, often in large sections up to hundreds of square feet.”

The issue has been broadly reported in recent years, including in 2017, after photos surfaced showing the USS Mississippi returning to its home port in Hawaii with large portions of its Special Hull Treatment coating missing from the sub.

That de-bonding issue was also noted in a memo from the Pentagon’s top weapon system tester, according to a 2011 Congressional Research Service report.

“The [stealth] coating on Virginia-class submarines has been a big issue in the Navy and among Navy submariners,” Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and a retired submariner, told Task & Purpose.

While the stealth coating also came off on older submarines, like the Los Angeles-class fast attack subs, typically it was just a matter of a few individual tiles peeling off, Clark said.

“You’d expect that to happen,” he told Task & Purpose. “You’re driving around, the hull is expanding and contracting, the water temperature is fluctuating, so some of these tiles come loose. It was just kind of expected.”

However, because of how the stealth coating was applied to the Virginia-class submarines — in a continuous layer like paint — it tears off in irregular pieces that may remain partially adhered to the hull, he said.

“If you’re driving around and a chunk of this comes off and is kind of dangling there, that creates a lot of noise,” Clark told Task & Purpose.

And that’s a big problem since a submarine’s greatest strength is its stealth…

The 37-page complaint also claims that Huntington Ingalls’ Newport facility failed to take steps to correct its failings despite multiple complaints, and that Ari Lawrence — the engineer who brought the suit on behalf of the government — was pressured to keep quiet about the issues.

In the complaint, Lawrence claims he had his promotion blocked in addition to being marked as a security risk and having his cell-phone confiscated for four weeks. Lawrence also claimed he was reassigned from his previous duties and sent to “the ‘yard’ to work on his ‘engineering rigor,'” and in 2015, his performance ratings were reduced to the lowest rating he’d received since he began working at NNS.

Neither Lawrence or his attorneys responded to multiple requests for comment from Task & Purpose.

The full complaint can be read here.

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SUBMARINE SOUNDS EFFECTS, SONAR SOUND, Sonar ping, u boat ...

 

 

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Please America, take Meghan Markle back | Spectator USA

Posted by M. C. on October 5, 2019

https://spectator.us/please-america-take-meghan-markle-back/

She has dragged across the Atlantic a garbage truck full of the most emetic US wokeness

…Markle is a nightmare. At the time of her engagement to Prince Harry — hitherto a genial if somewhat dim young man who occasionally enjoyed Nazi dress-up for parties — we were all enjoined to believe that this was Britain’s ‘Obama Moment’: i.e., a rather wonderful thing to behold. It was an Obama Moment because Meghan was — is — of course black and was joining the royal family, which has been pretty resolutely white these last thousand years or so, unless you count Greeks as black. Meghan’s admirable blackness was trumpeted from the rooftops by the liberals who could show you racism in a handful of dust. None of the rest of us cared in the slightest about her skin color or provenance, and still don’t. Truth be told, her skin color is the least objectionable thing about the woman.

It’s the rest of the stuff we don’t like — although when we point this out we are invariably accused of racism. No, what Meghan has done is drag with her, across the Atlantic, a garbage truck full of the most emetic US wokeness and deposited it on our front lawns. She has brought with her the infantile identity politics of Hollywood and US campuses, with all its non sequiturs, its bizarre obsessions, its mutual contradictions and its self-evident hypocrisies. The politics of Taylor Swift and Robert Downey Jr. The sort of stuff which, in the end, convinced your people to vote for Donald Trump, as a kind of blessed relief, a form of deliverance.

She lectures us Brits on poverty and how awful it is. Well, indeed. I say beware of being lectured on poverty by a woman whose engagement ring cost almost $370,000. Beware of being lectured on poverty by a woman whose house was refurbished by the taxpayers at a cost of $30 million so that she could have right-on organic paint on the walls and bring up her child in a ‘gender-neutral environment’, whatever the hell that is. Oh, and also bung in two orangeries and a ‘floating floor’. The two of them then announced with ineffable sanctimony to the world that they would be having no more than two children, because that was the socially responsible thing to do — failing to understand that our birthrate in the UK is stable or actually in decline and that the people who need to be told about family planning all tend to live in sub-Saharan Africa or the Asian third world. But to mention that would be politically incorrect, one assumes.

Then there’s the climate change stuff. She has urged all of us to ‘do our bit’. She’s done hers. Countless trips across the world in private jets — four in 11 days at one point — leaving a carbon footprint equivalent to personally strangling 42,000 polar bears or clubbing to death 500,000 seals. But the sheer hypocrisy does not begin to register with the woman.When the double standards were pointed out in the media we were told that her reaction was to ‘rise above it’. Yeah, in a 19-seater Lear jet, with a lackey pouring you an Aperol with kale juice.

The Duchess of Sussex, to give her the proper title, was invited to guest-edit British Vogue and indulged in a magnificent spate of virtue-signaling. On the cover she chose photographs of ‘inspirational women’ who almost all seemed to have been chosen for their ethnicity, celebrity or progressive opinions and almost all of whom were utterly devoid of talent. There was no room on that cover for her grandmother-in-law, the Queen, who has presided over our nation for nearly 70 years with consummate dignity and reserve, like royals are supposed to do. But dignity and reserve are not part of Meghan’s political lexicon: instead, it’s all about ‘me’,a liberal narcissism dressed up as compassion.

More Meghan? There’s always more Meghan, pouring out of the newspapers on a daily basis. Meghan’s personal team, for instance. She doesn’t need a personal team because the royal family does all that — an established firm, the royals, tend to know their stuff. But presumably as part of the growing feud between Meghan and Harry on the one side and the rather more circumspect (and royal) William and Kate on the other, Meghan has ditched their joint press officer and is now employing American Sara Latham, who did such a brilliant job as Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign adviser. Meanwhile, Harry has been landed with another former Barack Obama aide as his private secretary, Heather Wong.

All of this stuff, this leftish and repulsive political grandstanding by people who are as rich as Croesus, will not be new to you in America. It is a fugue of self-serving imbecility which accompanies you every day, I suppose, from an unimaginably affluent elite which simply has no conception of how ordinary people live their lives.

The extent to which it grates on the populace can be seen by what they do, the thicko voters, once they make their way down to the polls. My suspicion is that for every celebrity video decrying Trump as a white supremacist scumbag, the Republican vote inches up by a few hundred thousand. The message being: we will watch your TV programs and films and listen to your music, but when you lecture us on politics we will either ignore you or use your views as an indication of what not to think.

For Meghan, though, the problem is a little graver. The royal family is supposed to be above the political fray. The Queen of England rarely ends her tweets #MeToo. Indeed, she tends not to tweet. Meghan, though, is palpably not above the political fray, except that I suppose these hyperliberals, as the philosopher John Gray calls them, do not think they are ‘political’ at all, simply that they are totally right about everything and that any and all objections to their vapid pronouncements must come from one or another deeply regrettable condition — racism, for example, or sexism or homophobia. Meghan, in attempting to be the bastard offspring of Rosa Parks and Bono, is alienating the commoners, the very people who are usually most supportive of our monarchy.

Anyway, perhaps we will be in for some respite, sooner or later. Meghan and Harry have let it be known that they are thinking of moving to Hollywood. Good. The woman has already blurred the lines between what she thinks a royal should be and what she knows a celebrity should be. In truth, although there may be some faded, fusty glamour attached to the British royal family, like a slightly foxed first edition smelling faintly of corgi urine, it is light years from Hollywood celebritydom: in a sense it is the very antithesis of it.

Either way, take her back, will you, before we become a republic.

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Prince Harry stood up against homophobia

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Beware Awakening China – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on October 5, 2019

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2019/10/eric-margolis/beware-awakening-china/

By

Special for LewRockwell.com

“China is a sleeping giant.  Let her sleep, for when she wakes she will move the world.”  Napoleon

France’s future emperor never saw China, but he was wise enough to understand its immense latent strength and future importance.  Two centuries after making this prediction, China has proved the Corsican correct.

Last week, China feted the 70th anniversary of the Communist takeover of the mainland.  It was a gala demonstration of the nation’s military and social power.  I recall watching the 60th anniversary celebration in Hong Kong and wondering at how amazingly far China had come since I first went there in the early 1980’s.

At that time, China was a vastness filled with poverty, suffering and primitive conditions.  Red Guards were on the rampage; everything was grim, dusty and backwards.  Today, the ‘Great Leap Forward’ predicted by Chairman Mao Zedong and engineered by the equally great Deng Xiaoping and Zhou Enlai has transformed China into the world’s second economic power and a first rate military force.

Over a decade ago, I wrote in my book, `War at the top of the World,’ that America’s greatest geopolitical challenge would be to negotiate a peaceful withdrawal from the mainland of North Asia. China, I predicted, would never allow the US to continue its total domination of the western Pacific. The Koreas, Japan and the chain of islands stretching south would become the key battlegrounds between the US and China. I also foresaw a major land conflict between India and China over parts of the Himalayas and Burma (today Myanmar).

China showed last week that it has serious offensive military power. Gone are the Korean War days of vast infantry armies launching human wave attacks with bugles and burp guns. Today, China’s ground forces look hi-tech and effective. More important, China’s military aviation looks deadly and very modern, though one can never really judge effectiveness until war is joined.

This is particularly true of China’s rapidly expanding blue-water navy which will one day challenge the mighty and highly proficient US Navy. In naval warfare, experience and tradition are of paramount importance. Even the courageous, well-trained Imperial Japanese Navy was totally defeated by the US Navy in titanic battles across the Pacific. China’s naval forces have not waged a war since 1894 when they were trounced by Japan.

But in a US-China war, the Chinese would be fighting almost at home. The US would have to sustain a major conflict many thousands of miles from its home ports. America is the world’s genius when it comes to logistics and mass operations, but even so great distances are punishing. It would prove a bridge too far.

Most alarming in China’s 70th anniversary display was its new DF-41 ICBM heavy missile.  Solid-fueled, road mobile, and with multiple warheads, this big beast of a missile is said to be able to reach anywhere in North America within 30 minutes from launch.  This means the DF-41 now puts all of the United States at risk.

China’s recently deployed DF-21D anti-ship ballistic missile may be able to hit a moving carrier if targeted by satellites, drones or submarines.  Add to this threat numerous new Chinese high-speed anti-ship missiles fired from air, land and submarines that now pose a significant threat to US aircraft carriers.  They might prove as deadly to capitol ships as Gen. Billy Mitchell’s bombs did to battleships in 1921.

China is a world leader in electronics.  The US should be very concerned that it will develop systems that can interrupt or even block the satellite data that it increasingly uses to target its missiles and detect enemy forces.  Remember how the US Stinger missile put the Soviets on the back foot in Afghanistan.  Today, the US Air Force, Marines and Naval aviation run on electronics.  Jam them and offensive US power would be crippled.

US strategic planning increasingly deals with a Sino-American conflict.  But not sufficiently.  The Pentagon is still too embroiled in petty Mideast and African conflicts to face the Asian music.  The Chinese are coming.  They are the only people to make communism (or a version of it) work.  China has indeed awakened.  Beijing’s next targets will be the US Navy, Taiwan, Japan, Burma and part of India.

While Washington fiddles and burns, Chairman Xi Jinping, the new Chinese emperor, is fast making China great again.

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A slow awakening - Left-behind children

 

 

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What’s Russia to Us? – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on October 5, 2019

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2019/10/angelo-m-codevilla/whats-russia-to-us/

By

Claremont Institute

What 21st-century Russia is in itself, to its neighbors, and to America flows from the fact it is no longer the Soviet Union. As the red flag came down from the Kremlin on Christmas Day 1991, Russian president Boris Yeltsin, when asked what he thought of Communism, nearly wept as he replied: “I wish it had been tried somewhere else.” Vladimir Putin, who famously said that the USSR’s collapse had been a tragedy, nevertheless shares the Russian people’s consensus that their country was Communism’s first and foremost victim, and that no one knows how long it may take to live down its dysfunctions. To its neighbors, this Russia is a rebudding tsarist empire. To Americans, it is a major adversary despite the lack of clashing geopolitical interests.

After Communism

The Revolution of 1917 was possible because socialists, in Russia and throughout the Western world, believed that “present-day society,” as Karl Marx put it, is a jumble of “contradictions,” which could be resolved only by tearing down the pillars of the house. Once that was done, history would end: man and woman, farmer and industrial worker, producer and consumer, intellectual and mechanic—heretofore at odds—would live harmoniously, freely, and prosperously ever after.

Because they really believed in this utopian dream, the socialists gave absolute power to Lenin and Stalin’s Communist Party to wreck and reorganize—to break eggs in order to make a delicious omelette. But Communism, while retaining some of Marxism’s antinomian features (e.g., war on the family and on religion), became in practice almost exclusively a justification for the party’s absolute rule. For example, the economic system adopted by the Soviet Union and by other Communist regimes owed precisely zero to Marx, but was a finely tuned instrument for keeping the party in control of wealth.

The Leninist party is gone forever in Russia because, decades after its leaders stopped believing in Marxism, and after Leonid Brezhnev had freed them from the Stalinist incubus that had kept them loyal to the center, they had learned to make the party into a racket. That, and the residual antinomian features, made Russia into a kakotopia. Russian men learned to intrigue and drink on the job rather than work. Shunning responsibility for women and children, they turned Russian society into a matriarchy, held together by grandmothers. In a thoroughly bureaucratized system, each holder of a bit of authority used it to inconvenience the others. Forcing people to tell each other things that both knew not to be true—recall that “politically correct” is a Communist expression—engendered cynicism and disrespect for truth. The endless anti-religion campaigns cut the people off from one moral system and failed to inculcate another. Alcohol drowned unhappiness, life expectancies declined, and fewer Russians were born.

The Russian people rejected Communism in the only ways that powerless people can—by passivity, by turning to anything foreign to authority, and by cynicism. Nothing being more foreign to Communism than Christianity, Russians started wearing crosses, knowing that the regime frowned on this feature of the Russia that had pre-existed Communism, and would survive it.

No sooner had the USSR died than Russia restored the name Saint Petersburg to Peter the Great’s “window on the West.” Even under Soviet rule, Russians had gone out of their way to outdo the West in Western cultural matters—“nekulturny” (uncultured!) was, and remains, a heavy insult in Russia.

Read it here

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Modern Russia | Others

 

 

 

 

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Facial Recognition for Your Car – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on October 5, 2019

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2019/10/eric-peters/facial-recognition-for-your-car/

By

eric

If you’ve ever wondered why so many new cars have Angry Samurai Face, maybe it’s because they’re annoyed about being watched all the time.

There is something called the Digital Recognition Network – which operates kind of like the fingerprint database the FBI maintains to keep track of criminals. The difference here is it’s our cars that are being kept track of.

Also that we’re not criminals.

This is a distinction of no particular relevance in the “Homeland” (doesn’t the eructation of that word make your right arm want to voluntarily snap outward and upward like a baton?) where the possibility that you might be guilty of something is sufficient to presume you are guilty.

The burden of innocence resting squarely – and perpetually – on our shoulders.

The DRN uses data gathered en masse, continuously and sans warrant or probable cause (two antiquarian ideas that just get in the way of things) by haltingly creepy devices called Automated Plate Readers  – APLRs – which are cameras connected to government computers.

These APLRs are mounted by the side of the road – or fitted to the cars used by armed government workers to harass and collect.

They scan the license plate number of every passing vehicle – very much like a bar code reader at the supermarket – and cross-reference each number with DMV/government data about the vehicle wearing that particular ear tag, ostensibly to make sure its “papers” (e.g., registration, smog/safety certification, insurance) are in order.

Also those of its owner – more on that follows below.

It’s like seine fishing; the trawler drags a huge net behind it that catches practically every fish and turtle and whatever else happens to be in the area; it’s far more efficient from the point of view of the harassers and collectors because it’s much less work and far more profitable.

DNR boasts about “data gathered from over 8 billion nationwide sightings.” They mean scannings – but “sightings” sounds less creepy and is therefore used to keep the cattle complacent.

Vigilant Solutions, which is one of the companies that provides the APRs , states on its web page that it “can offer over 5 billion nationwide detections” – they also mean scannings – and that another 150 million “detections” are added each month.

It’s also an elaboration of the principle established by acceptance in law (but contrary to the law, i.e., the Constitution and its Bill of Former Rights/Now Conditional Privileges) that it’s somehow not an abuse of the Fourth Amendment’s explicit definition – and prohibition as unreasonable – of searches conducted absent probable cause . . . if the search only takes a couple of minutes and is cursory and serves what the Nine Archons styled a “compelling state interest”  . . . though there is no mention of this qualification in the actual law (i.e., the Fourth Amendment).

If the government can lawfully stop and search cars and demand “papers” at “checkpoints” without probable cause or warrant, then why not search them electronically?

But most people have no idea they’ve just been searched – and catalogued – making it even creepier.

If the system detects something not in order then Mobile Hit Hunter comes online. It sends out a “Hut! Hut! Hut! alert to any “active law enforcement” lurking within a three-mile range of the “hit.”

Some will say all to the good. That “scofflaws” will be easier to find and punish. Yes, and the rest of us as well. And leaving aside the unchecked premise about whether laws being scoffed are legitimate laws.

These ALPRs are extremely bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Like the Terminator, they never get tired or hungry and can’t be bargained with. And they are being set up all over the country.

But it’s not just whether your “papers” are in order that these ALPRs are checking – and mulcting for.

They are also keeping track your comings and goings – even though you haven’t scoffed a single law.

Of all our comings and goings.

This is the creepiest part.

At random roadside checkpoints, you’re forced to stop and allow an armed government worker to look you and your vehicle over; compelled to hand over your papers. But that’s usually the end of it.

The APLRs and the data grid they feed do more than merely scan each passing car. They record each passing car. “Time and date stamped and accurate to within a few feet,” boasts the DNR press release.

The  government and whoever else has access to the data mine knows that you passed by that particular location at exactly 3:17 p.m. last Thursday.

When you pass the next ALPR, the government will know that also.

It will soon be – may already be – feasible to pull up data not only about where every driver has been but also where he is, in real time.

Right now.

Obviously, this technology could – and very likely already is – being used for a great deal more than sussing out registration renegades and safety inspection scofflaws.

Being able to track every American driver’s movements all the time opens up all kinds of possibilities for “revenue enhancement” – and enforcement – as well as new opportunities to control the populace by controlling its mobility.

ALPRs could for instance be used to automatically “brick” the cars of political undesirables before the driver even gets a chance to back out of a parking lot. Keep in mind the fact that many cars made since the early 2000s can be shut off and locked remotely – and every electric car has this “feature” – made possible via its “connectivity.”

With 5G almost here, the digital Death Star is practically “fully armed and operational.” But since most people can’t see it up in the sky – because it’s being erected all around them – they have no idea it even exists.

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week 6 – SOCIAL MEDIA & SOCIETY

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