Security

Australian Court Slams Facebook Lawyers as “divorced from reality”

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Facebook has tried to hide from obvious crimes against humanity by rebranding “Meta” and allegedly has been pushing a product that entices its consumers and investors to leave reality behind (the virtual and augmented reality division lost $10.2 billion dollars in 2021).

Is it just me or… does being divorced from reality (above the law) sound like the Facebook business plan?

Australia’s federal court has now called this out formally, basically slamming Facebook lawyers as lacking any clue.

…installation of cookies on the physical devices of Australian users was enough to show it was carrying out business in Australia. […] “Further, it is clear that Facebook Ireland’s use of cookies (installed and removed by Facebook Inc) forms an important part of the operation of the Facebook platform. “It is not an outlier activity. It is one of the things ‘which makes Facebook work’.”

The court documents are an excellent read.

Micro-surgery is not undertaken by the physical, manual manipulation of a scalpel by the hand of a surgeon upon the body of a patient. The surgeon may be at an instrument, physically separated from the patient, controlling the minute device that effects the surgery. The act is taking place at both places: where the surgeon is and where the patient is. It can be characterised or conceived of as one act. There is no reason of logic or conceptual appreciation as to why the conclusion must be different depending upon the distance of separation between the two locations.

Exactly right.

Facebook was on a mad hiring spree for the last few years to recruit legal teams to find legal loopholes and cheats, rather than hiring ethicists to fix the obvious and fundamental safety flaws in their platform.

If Facebook was a hospital, their CEO would be claiming zero accountability for malpractice causing high death rates.

The big spend on lawyers apparently has manifested in Facebook appeals becoming a total clown show and making baseless arguments like Facebook doesn’t really exist, or that trying to hold Facebook accountable is dangerous, or that Facebook amounts to nothing more than sending paper mail.

The Guardian puts all this nonsense to rest in a simple paragraph.

…Cambridge Analytica harvested the personal data of millions of Facebook users without their consent using a personality test app called This is Your Digital Life. The information was then used predominantly for political advertising, including to assist the Brexit campaign and Donald Trump. Only 53 people in Australia installed the This is Your Digital Life app, according to court documents, but it was able to harvest the data of about 311,127 people.

Right away you can see Facebook is operating in Australia, Facebook is dangerous and needs regulation, and Facebook is far more harmful than other media because of the “realities of securing big data” (my book).

Energy, Food, Security

U.S. Marines Learn How to Shop at Local Gas Stations

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“Only time we can have to much fuel is when we’re on fire. Let’s roll…”

I keep telling myself this is a real story in the news and not a clever Duffel Blog or Onion writer trying to make fun of Americans.

Marines are being taught how to buy gas at local gas stations…

That is real, I swear. It comes from a piece called “Butchering pigs, foraging water and fuel ― the future of Marine logistics”

Someone clearly has the right idea here, it’s just being reported very awkwardly (e.g. nothing brings up a history of colonial violence and religious intolerance like butchering pigs).

When numerous local insecurities and large-scale anxieties threatened the empire, hunting pursuits involving the wily Indian pig, it was said, made soldiers out of boys; the attendant spectacles of masculinity aimed to exert symbolic dominance over the restive Indian masses.

It’s no coincidence that the legendary anti-war novel “Lord of the Flies” has a tragic hero named Piggy.

Anyway, back to the article, among all the noise it’s trying to bring up important topics like this one:

…they are reliant on a long supply chain that stretches from the South Pacific or northern Europe all the way back to the U.S.

Supply chains are indeed wasteful and full of vulnerabilities, not to mention crazy loopholes (e.g. Canadian Navy escapes environmental safety regulations while refueling Americans).

I particularly liked the following bits.

The first thing Marines need in those future distributed environments is learning to need less, said then-Lt. Gen. Eric Smith… “That’s insane, why would I move food?” Smith has since been promoted to general and now serves as the Corps’ assistant commandant. […] Eventually Tsukano [commander of Marine Corps Detachment Fort Lee, Virginia] sees the Corps bringing back field mess kits for certain style of deployments, replacing the disposable paper cups, plates and plastic utensils Marines use to eat most of their meals while on deployment. In addition to reducing the logistical burden that comes with transporting millions of disposable products to the front line, the metal plates, bowls and utensils would reduce the trash those units produce, making it easier for them to hide from the enemy.

Need less! Sounds like something out of WWII training manuals, or some 1970s hippie concert.

And then there’s this.

“All the cammie paint, the cammie netting, all the operating at night, that is all for naught if your logistics is loud and screaming in on these large trucks,” [Maj. Patrick Fitzgibbons, with Warfighter Instructor Battalion] added. The foraging techniques, if done right, will improve the Marines’ relationship with the locals around their base, turning the Marines’ housing into a local economy boon rather than a burden, he added.

“Hello I ditched my loud and screaming loud trucks and I’m here to create a local economy boon. Who wants to give me cheap gas or be shot to death?”

To be fair, putting pressure on local populations to cough up their food for a foreign military doesn’t have the optimal sound to it. Is it really an economy boon when the Americans arrive in large numbers pointing guns and saying they’re very hungry because food no longer is being moved to them? Wars have literally started (1859 Pig War) due to American hostility negotiating the price of one pig.

Very interesting reading, and far too late unfortunately for all those soldiers whose lives were destroyed by decades of toxic logistics such as “burn pits” and abject failures to integrate with local communities.

History, Security

Kansas Missile Silo For Sale: $380K

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A 7,000 square foot missile silo under wide-open acreage in rural Abiline, Kansas (near the childhood home of President Eisenhower, and just north of Eisenhower Highway 40 — Interstate 70) is up for sale on Zillow.

Built on 11 acres of land, this property is home to a decommissioned Atlas F missile silo complex. The underground complex was designed to withstand a nuclear strike and has water, electricity and a forced sewage system to the ground surface. There is 6,900 square feet in the complex with the upper two levels consisting of approximately 1,200 feet of space. This area was used for the Launch control center and living quarters for the crew. The main missile silo is located at a depth of 170 feet. Also on the property is a 4,000 square foot Quonset building with water, sewer and electricity. and a one room building for office or storage. This facility has lots of potential in whatever way you choose to go. A home, apartments or a Bed and Breakfast are just some ideas. If you want something offering security and uniqueness, then this property is for you.

All of this rusting and leaky mess built by 1961 (no bedroom and just one bathroom, designed to withstand nuclear attack) at 2432 Fair Rd, Abilene, KS 67410 can be yours for a measly $380K.

It was listed in 2020 for $420K. It may be linked to some kind of weird Wall Street hi-jinks, since it was listed by someone in Manhattan (NY, KS…?) on December 27th, 2021 for $380K, then “sold” January 25th, 2022 and immediately re-listed for $380K again. If it was sold, why is it for sale?

Source: Realtor.com

Tax is allegedly only $1,753/year, which seems somehow wrong considering what taxpayers put into the construction costs ($12.8 million — equivalent to over $100 million in 2022). Despite the big spend, this site formally known as the 550th SMS, Schilling AFB, Operational Site 2 was decommissioned within five years (when LGM-30 Minuteman missiles made them “obsolete”).

The front door is easy to find and very inviting.

Source: Zillow

The rest, naturally, is neither.

Lack of accommodations for five men living underground is likely related to how shifts were operated.

Crews included two officers and three enlisted members, a missile maintenance, ballistic missile analyst and power production technician. Crews were on alert for 24 hours, with a new crew departing the main base each morning to replace the crew on duty.

Probably important to consider that this silo was in no way designed to be livable; it served just to increase the chances of a vulnerable and slow missile actually being launched withing a very short window (as little as 5 minutes). Human survival? Not really on the table.

You could probably dig 100 feet underground and pour concrete into it today for a lot less than $380K, or apply that amount to making a rural home safe from dangers. Most importantly you could design your perfect spot to have protection against actual threats unlike this pile of leaky rubble with its spotty record.

The launch rate of success for an Atlas F was what you might call not great (success/fail allegedly was 53/17) with two even recorded as “fell back onto the pad at liftoff“. Four silos were totally destroyed by the Atlas F exploding underground, emphasizing again a lack of suitability for human survival.

Zillow conveniently shows us (zooming out) that a four bedroom house in Abilene, Kansas today might cost as little as $100K. This perhaps means the silo price tag has more to do with some real-estate mogul probing tax loopholes and playing financial games than actually trying to value or sell a property.

It’s also not the only specimen in this region of Kansas. Twelve sites designated “SM-65F” (Atlas F) — some of the initial intercontinental ballistic missiles developed by the U.S. — are near each other.

I bring up that footnote because the density of these silos in Kansas infamously led to Cold War jokes among the rural communities; excited to become notable even though it was “ground zero” for nuclear attack.

In other words flogging overpriced bunkers to bury valuable assets might have the repeat effect of making them into the first sites to be targeted in any major crisis — the opposite of survival.

Security

Navy SEAL: “Real Brothers Don’t Chase Medals”

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A new article about U.S. Navy war crimes, written by Special Operator 1st Class Josh Vriens, stars with the sentence “Uncompromising integrity is my standard”… and then buries this important lede.

Many have asked, “How could you turn in a brother?” Let me clarify something: Gallagher was our Chief. He made the tactical decisions and we carried them out. Gallagher repeatedly sent us to positions where SEALs and our Iraqi partner forces were wounded or killed by small arms and rockets. These weren’t SEAL tactics. These were part of Gallagher’s effort to get a SEAL injured or killed so that we would, in his words, “make it a great deployment.” In the end, Gallagher showed us he wasn’t our brother. Real brothers don’t needlessly put their men at risk. Real brothers don’t chase medals. And they certainly don’t murder unarmed prisoners or terrorize civilian populations.

Real brothers don’t chase medals.