Someone must have noticed Hegseth’s seaborne operation against Yemen was an historic blunder.
Shooting down your own aircraft, colliding with merchant ships, losing jets to maintenance failures, a billion-dollar campaign that ended in a ceasefire that the Houthis called a victory and mercilessly mocked Trump.
America!
Seriously, Hegseth is unfit and an embarrassment to any military. The costly feckless operation, launched as deterrence to secure the Red Sea, not only failed to weaken Houthi power but also led to a ceasefire that exposed Trump’s diplomatic and military weakness.
Israel is therefore pivoting to strikes on Yemen from a military base in an unusual way, from a neighboring state it just unilaterally created. Well, more like from a contested territory it recognized.
The Somaliland government in 2017 accepted an Emirati bid to establish a military base in Berbera. Satellite imagery shows the naval base has been transformed into a near-completed facility, with advanced infrastructure including a modern military port, a deep-water dock and an airstrip with hangars and support facilities. The runway at Berbera is 4km long, allowing it to receive heavy transport aircraft and fighter jets. Israel has of course been monitoring the whole thing.
Once the UAE built the infrastructure, Israel bought access with a signature. In a very controversial move, Israel recognized the state of Somaliland. Recognition is traded for strategic partnerships. This is the second time Israel has traded recognition of contested territory for strategic access under the Abraham Accords banner. Morocco got Western Sahara recognition; now Somaliland gets independence recognition. The simple calculus is sovereignty as currency.
Berbera sits directly across the Gulf of Aden from Yemen, like maybe 150 miles. For context, that’s closer than Gaza to Tel Aviv. It’s the obvious new forward operating position for sustained attacks on Houthi operations without having to fly everything from Israel or from sea.
This presents a functional solution to the Red Sea problem that doesn’t require the US military under Hegseth to embarrass itself further. That could be the reason Netanyahu is off to meet with Trump three days after recognition… although it also could be a resettlement deal. Earlier this year, the US and Israel reportedly had contacted Somaliland about jets of forcibly displaced people landing in Berbera, such as Palestinians from Gaza.
The Somaliland president has of course only made statements about “regional peace and security”. That’s almost certainly code for “airstrikes on Yemen.”
Back in 2014 I gave a talk about autonomous microscale surveillance including “smart dust” to an IoT audience. Last week, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and University of Michigan published the technical specifications in Science Robotics.
Microscopic robots that sense, think, act, and compute
The press coverage I’ve seen emphasizes medicine. “Guardians of cellular health,” says ScienceAlert. Ok, ok, let’s get real. The actual paper describes something different: a general-purpose programmable computer, 200 by 300 micrometers, that can sense its environment, execute conditional logic, coordinate in swarms, and operate autonomously for months.
Tiny Computer
The device fits on the ridge of a fingerprint. It runs on 16 nanowatts harvested from ambient light. It carries a custom 11-bit processor with conditional branching, arithmetic operations, memory addressing, and loop control. It’s not a sensor that wiggles. It’s a Turing-complete microprocessor that happens to be smaller than a grain of salt.
Current constraints are a fluid-only operation (electrokinetic propulsion requires ions), optical-only programming (no RF—too power-hungry), and limited memory (a few hundred bits due to leakage current). The researchers are explicit that these are seen as generation-one limitations, and not fundamental barriers.
Follow the Money
The collaboration began at a DARPA presentation five years ago. Funding sources are listed in the paper:
National Science Foundation (lead billing)
Air Force Office of Scientific Research
Army Research Office
Fujitsu Semiconductors
NSF gets listed first. The defense money built the platform.
The Michigan lab that built the onboard computer has received over $16 million through DARPA’s Electronics Resurgence Initiative. The same lab builds “injectable computers that can broadcast from inside the body.”
That’s defense money doing defense research for defense.
Tiny Countermeasure Problem
So let’s say you are worried about surveillance dust being deployed soon by the military.
We know high-power microwave weapons can fry microscale electronics. The U.S. military has stuff like CHAMP, THOR, and the Epirus IFPC-HPM system. Detection and destruction of smart dust is a solved problem for those who can deploy microwaves.
For everyone else, the countermeasure architecture is TBD. No consumer detection equipment. No regulatory framework. No international treaty. No public discussion of deployment implications.
Offense currently scales to university labs and penny-per-unit manufacturing. Defense remains… classified.
How We Got Here
My 2014 talk showed a slide listing Israeli surveillance exports that had been dismissed as regional paranoia: rock listening devices in Lebanon (confirmed real), Mossad-trained sharks in Egypt (ridiculous), tagged vultures in Saudi Arabia (a Tel Aviv University research bird, actually).
My slides from the 2014 Things Expo, NYC
The pattern I was warning about was exotic surveillance accusations get labeled conspiracy theory until the technology becomes undeniable.
Smart dust followed the same trajectory. DARPA funded the concept in 1997. Berkeley built early prototypes. Regional paranoids made accusations. Fact-checkers debunked. Meanwhile, the engineering continued and is now published and headed to production.
Science Robotics reports 17,768 downloads in two weeks. That’s not casual academic interest. That’s procurement offices pulling specifications.
What Next
The paper’s final line:
These results pave the way for general-purpose microrobots that can be programmed many times in a simple setup and can work together to carry out tasks without supervision in uncertain environments.
It’s important context for August 2025, when Glenn Greenwald called Nick Fuentes a “generational talent” with “really smart insights grounded not in sensationalism or blind ideology, but lots of reading, and thinking.”
Greenwald’s framing was erasure.
What he constructed for Fuentes was a martyrdom narrative of the Nazi persecuted for “questioning the power of the Jewish lobby.” The Hitler praise, the Holocaust denial, the stated desire for white nationalism was spun and reduced to “provocative rhetoric” and “rhetorical excess.”
This is known as fascist inversion: erase the ideology, present the aggressor as victim. Hitler didn’t run on “let’s murder your neighbor”; he ran on false victimhood. Greenwald runs this playbook for Fuentes.
Moreover, this is not defending someone’s right to speak. This is highly targeted, careful rehabilitation of Nazism to normalize it into power again.
Greenwald Covered Himself a Long Time
In 2017, after Charlottesville, Greenwald wrote an Intercept piece defending the ACLU’s representation of white supremacists.
He floated what appeared as a principled argument: odious speech can be defended as speech without endorsing it. He claimed state censorship backfires, so civil liberties must apply especially to those we despise.
He knew the distinction.
He articulated it explicitly.
Ten years prior in 2007, Greenwald wrote in Salon that he condemned use of “Nazi” and “Hitler” as political insults.
He claimed that calling out Nazism ran too much risk of error because it “trivializes Nazism and the Holocaust.” He had deployed a no true Scotsman fallacy: the label should require impossibly high proof to prevent application. A shred of doubt is all the Nazi would need to evade detection.
He knew that distinction too, and he weaponized it. He was gatekeeping the label to protect the people who should have been called out instead.
Same move with Fuentes.
The man says “I don’t hate Hitler” and “I believe in a Jewish conspiracy” and Greenwald says that’s not real Nazism, it’s just “provocative rhetoric” about “questioning the Jewish lobby.”
No true Nazi.
It’s the same operation, all the way from 2007 through Hale through Fuentes. Greenwald always has been in the business of trotting out impossibly high standards to prevent a Nazi getting labeled, while defending actual Nazis.
When he launders Nick Fuentes by erasing “I don’t hate Hitler” to create the narrative that he “questioned the Jewish lobby,” he does it again with full knowledge of what he’s doing and more openly than ever.
Early Fascism Warning
Quillette in 2015 published a piece titled “Glenn Greenwald: Fascism’s Fellow Traveller.” At the time, Greenwald was wrapping himself in ACLU-style camouflage. It was effective enough that calling him out for “fascist sympathy” was a tough sell to the liberal media embracing him.
Greenwald is never less than proud to acknowledge the considerable time he has spent as a litigator and writer defending the right of neo-Nazis to air their views.
Ten years later, however, that Quillette analysis reads like a job description.
The accusation that seemed shrill in 2015 became the clear endpoint by 2025. Not because someone was prophetic, but because terminal contrarianism has a logic of its own. When angry opposition to a certain “deep state” is your only fixed principle, you eventually find common cause with those inherently positioned against it.
Nazis hate intelligence, because it exposes the truth.
There’s also an even simpler explanation. Before the Snowden leaks, before the Guardian byline, before the civil liberties positioning, Greenwald spent five years as pro bono lawyer for white supremacist Matt Hale.
Five years.
Greenwald was a self-assigned defender of the leader of the World Church of the Creator, a militant hate organization with the stated goal of eliminating “mud races.” When one of Hale’s followers went on a shooting spree targeting minorities, Greenwald defended them and explained his motivation:
I find that the people behind these lawsuits are truly so odious and repugnant, that creates its own motivation for me.
The people behind those lawsuits, the people Greenwald wanted to fight, were the 1999 shooting victims and their families:
Ricky Byrdsong, Black former Northwestern basketball coach, shot dead in front of his children
Won-Joon Yoon, Korean graduate student, murdered
Two Orthodox Jewish teenagers shot in Rogers Park
Rev. Stephen Tracy Anderson, a Black pastor shot three times
A Nazi drove a light blue car through Chicago shooting at Blacks, Asians and Jews. Police said they weren’t sure the Skokie area shootings were a hate crime.
“At this point we’re not jumping to the conclusion that it’s a hate crime,” said Patrick T. Camden, a spokesman for the Chicago Police Department. “All of the elements appear to be there, but until we get the offender, we won’t know.”
No true Nazi.
Greenwald wasn’t just insulting the victims personally. He was actively opposing the right of these shooting victims to seek justice.
A single police officer in 1994 killed the AWB (Nazis) who had been driving around shooting at Black people. It was headline news at the time, because AWB promised civil war to forcibly remove all Blacks from government and instead ended up dead on the side of a road. By comparison, five years later a Nazi in a light blue car started shooting Blacks in Chicago. Glenn Greenwald defended the Nazi and attacked the shooting victims.
Greenwald even told the LA Times that civil rights groups suing white supremacist organizations into bankruptcy was “an abuse of the court system.”
How? Why? Isn’t that the whole point of the court system?
Matt Hale’s white supremacist gun violence to Nick Fuentes’ hate speech is the true and straight line. Everything in between appears as positioning.
Functioning Fascism
Whether Greenwald is a conscious operative, a useful mule, or simply someone whose authentic contrarianism was identified and cultivated, his output has been consistent in targeting: damage to US intelligence capabilities (Snowden), damage to US diplomatic relationships (the leaks that went far beyond domestic surveillance), and now damage to US-Israel alignment.
He seems to never criticize Russia for censorship, for example. Perhaps he hopes to retire there like Snowden.
The extreme American civil liberties framing confused many who saw activities that would otherwise be recognizable as proto-fascist. His appeal with a Guardian byline did work that a direct leak to the Russian media never could. And so in 2025 when it came time to rehabilitate and promote a Holocaust denier, Glenn was ready.
The Reveal
Greenwald didn’t change. He stopped hiding.
The cover pulled in an audience of mainstream liberals who needed civil liberties framing. That audience is gone now, or irrelevant to the Trump administration’s grip on the news. His current chase of viewers needs no pretense—Fuentes followers would be alienated by it anyway.
So the mask comes off.
A Holocaust denier becomes a martyred truth-teller. “I don’t hate Hitler” becomes “provocative rhetoric.” And the man who spent 2007 condemning the trivialization of Nazis by those trying to stop them, now trivializes actual Nazis to ensure they rise to power.
The 2015 Quillette profile turned out to be right.
Extreme right.
You don’t spend five years defending Nazis pro bono, call Nazi shooting victims “odious and repugnant,” fight to protect a Nazi whose follower murdered people in front of their children, and then twenty-five years later pivot to celebrate a Nazi and Holocaust denier as a “generational talent.” Greenwald is as he always was.
Officers responding to a two-car crash on Cornwall Street just south of Hebron Street around 9:20 p.m. found the occupants of a Toyota Camry trapped and injured and a black Tesla Cybertruck with no one inside, according to Hartford Police Lt. Aaron Boisvert.
A teen in the Toyota was pronounced dead, and police are still searching for the Tesla driver who they say fled on foot.
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
