This is why you should never talk to the police.

In this episode of The Free Thought Project podcast, Jason and Matt sit down with Marc and Craig Wasserman, better known to the world as the Pot Brothers at Law. Quick note before diving in: you may notice some brief audio issues in the opening minutes. We cleaned up everything we could, and while a little roughness remains, the conversation is absolutely worth sticking through.

Practicing law in California for decades, Marc and Craig specialize in criminal defense and cannabis business licensing, compliance, and regulations. They skyrocketed to internet fame in 2015 and now boast over 3 million followers across social media. They are most famous for teaching the public their signature 29-word “Shut the F Up” (STFU) script—a practical, bulletproof guide designed to help citizens peacefully engage with law enforcement while fiercely protecting their constitutional rights.

The conversation dives deep into the realities of the modern justice system and the psychological traps police use to trick individuals into waiving their rights. The discussion dismantles the dangerous myth of having “nothing to hide,” detailing how even innocent people can accidentally talk themselves into a cage, and clarifies what legal “cooperation” actually looks like during a traffic stop. The episode also tackles the perverse, revenue-driven incentives of modern policing, the reality that cops are legally allowed to lie to secure an arrest, and how the recent federal rescheduling of cannabis to Schedule III is less about freedom and more about protecting state-enforced corporate monopolies. Ultimately, the show serves as a powerful masterclass in legal self-defense, offering listeners a massive “white pill” on how to outsmart the system, maintain their sovereignty, and use the sound of silence to take their power back. (Length: 1:01:36)

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The post Pot Brothers At Law – Shut the F Up: The 29-Word Script That Saves Lives appeared first on Activist Post.

The FDA fired Tracy Beth Høeg, the agency’s top drug regulator and a staunch advocate for vaccine safety. It’s the latest in a string of high-profile exits from the agency, many of which followed the appointment of Chris Klomp as HHS’ No. 2 official, Reuters reported. TrialSite News suggested the departures were “associated” with the “COVID-era dissent class” — and that Klomp may have directed the changes on behalf of the White House. The Defender could not verify that claim.

Tracy Beth Høeg, M.D., Ph.D., an epidemiologist and sports physician who supported studying — and reducing — the recommended childhood vaccination schedule, was fired by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Høeg was acting director of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER).

In a post on X last Friday, Høeg wrote that she “learned so much” and is leaving the FDA “with no regrets.”

And in an interview with MD Reports published shortly after her firing, Høeg said she first learned about the agency’s plans to fire her earlier in the week, through media reports.

On May 15, two unnamed FDA officials offered her the choice to resign or be fired. When she refused to resign, she was fired on the spot.

“I said I didn’t want to resign,” Høeg told MD Reports. “I said I’m not signing a letter of resignation if it’s not my choice.”

During her time at the FDA, Høeg was involved in several research initiatives broadly tied to the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) agenda. According to The New York Times, this included work on an “intense investigation” last year that linked the COVID-19 vaccines to “at least” 10 child deaths.

Høeg also authored a report recommending that the number of diseases covered by the recommended childhood vaccination schedule be reduced from 17 to 11.

In January, U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. implemented these recommendations. However, in March, a federal court issued a stay pausing adoption of the new schedule.

According to The Associated Press, Høeg was most recently involved in the FDA’s review of a petition to add new warnings to antidepressants about risks to pregnant women, “including fetal abnormalities that could lead to autism and other disorders.”

Høeg’s ouster comes amid a broader shakeup at the FDA. Last week, Dr. Marty Makary resigned his FDA commissioner post following rumors that he would be fired. Last month, Dr. Vinay Prasad resigned from the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER) — for the second time in less than a year.

Høeg “worked closely” with Makary and Prasad, STAT News reported. She was first hired in April 2025 as a special assistant to Makary before taking the lead at CDER in December 2025.

Michael Davis, M.D., Ph.D., CDER’s deputy director, was promoted to acting director. Høeg did not respond by press time to The Defender’s request for comment.

Høeg ‘refused to bow’ to political, lobbyist pressure

Høeg told MD Reports that the two FDA officials who told her she was fired “were both actually quite sad” — and made it clear that “it wasn’t their decision.”

They told her the decision came “from someone above them, from someone way above their pay grade,” Høeg said, adding that she suspects her firing is connected to Makary’s departure.

“I think they didn’t want to have the people there who were closest to him anymore,” Høeg said.

During her time at the FDA, there was frequent “political pressure and … pressure from lobbyists to do things in order to keep our jobs or protect our reputations,” Høeg said. But she, Makary and Prasad “refused to bow” to the pressure.

“I was really proud of what we did in CDER — that we held our ground,” Høeg said. “If we didn’t feel like [a drug] met the level of evidence for approval, we didn’t give in to those pressures.”

She said working conditions inside the FDA were not chaotic, contrary to media reports. The environment inside CDER was “incredibly fulfilling.” She “wouldn’t have resigned from it,” she said.

Jeffrey Tucker, president and founder of the Brownstone Institute, described Høeg as “a breath of fresh air at the FDA” — and “as a scientist” during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“She is responsible for a great deal of excellent research over these six hard years, from masking to vaccine effectiveness and safety. She is a voice of sanity and clarity, exactly the kind of person we need to help guide us out of this crisis of confidence,” Tucker said.

‘Ideological cleansing disguised as bureaucratic housekeeping’

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) spokesperson Emily Hilliard told NBC News that the Trump administration is “actively searching for strong candidates for key leadership positions across HHS, including the FDA, with a focus on experienced individuals who can strengthen agency operations, continue to advance significant reforms, and maintain public trust.”

“In the meantime, the FDA and HHS continue to operate under solid leadership and respond aggressively to immediate public health situations,” Hilliard said.

HHS did not respond to The Defender’s request for comment.

TrialSite News described HHS’ statements as “polite euphemisms for violent institutional events” which mask “something far more unsettling” now underway at the FDA — “an ideological cleansing disguised as bureaucratic housekeeping.”

“This no longer looks like ordinary bureaucratic turnover inside the FDA,” Daniel O’Connor, founder and CEO of TrialSite News, told The Defender. “What TrialSite News is documenting increasingly resembles a political and ideological realignment of federal health power — where dissent tolerated during the COVID era is now becoming incompatible with operational control inside the administrative state.”

Steve Kirsch, founder of the Vaccine Safety Research Foundation, said Høeg’s firing “should decimate trust in the FDA,” as it “sends a clear message that scientific integrity is not tolerated at the FDA.”

“It also sends a message to the public that honest scientists who seek truth are expunged from the FDA for no reason. For the foreseeable future, you should not trust any scientific statements from the FDA,” Kirsch said.

‘High-profile departures’ of members of ‘COVID-era dissent class’

In recent weeks, a growing number of key FDA officials have been fired or resigned:

• Makary resigned last week, after it was rumored that the Trump administration would fire him. Kyle Diamantas, the previous FDA deputy commissioner for food, replaced Makary as acting director of the FDA. Donald Prater will replace Diamantas in his former position, Bloomberg reported.
• Katherine Szarama, CBER’s acting director, left following Prasad’s departure. Reuters reported that Karim Mikhail replaced Szarama. According to STAT, Mikhail was previously a senior adviser in the FDA’s Office of the Commissioner. Szarama will remain at the FDA “to assist with product issues.”
• TrialSite News reported last week that Rich Danker, “HHS’s top spokesman,” resigned shortly after Makary’s resignation.
• Jeremy Walsh, the FDA’s chief AI officer, resigned last week, STAT reported.

Many of the moves followed the appointment of Chris Klomp as HHS’ No. 2 official, Reuters reported. Klomp “has since ⁠helped bring in new nominees for top health positions.”

But according to TrialSite News, several of the people involved in these “high-profile departures” were “associated — directly or symbolically — with the COVID-era dissent class” — and Klomp directed the personnel changes on behalf of the White House.

“Klomp has been helping orchestrate a quieter restructuring campaign designed to replace controversial reform-oriented figures with more conventional administrative personnel,” TrialSite News reported.

According to TrialSite News, it’s all part of a battle over whether MAHA “was ever truly intended to govern the federal health apparatus — or merely useful as a populist insurgency during campaign season.”

The Washington Post suggested the changes are related to Trump administration concerns over the looming congressional midterm elections.

“More than a year into Kennedy’s tenure, Trump officials have increasingly swapped out his handpicked deputies for people with more traditional experience, seeking to tamp down the health agencies’ controversies ahead of this year’s midterm elections,” the Post reported.

HHS: White House remains ‘fully aligned’ with MAHA

Hilliard told the Post that HHS and the White House remain “fully aligned” on MAHA. But Høeg told MD Reports she fears recent personnel changes may signal an FDA shift toward a stance more favorable to Big Pharma. “I think that’s probably one of the strategies,” she said.

Dr. Clayton J. Baker, an internal medicine physician, said Høeg’s removal may be related to growing dissatisfaction within the FDA’s ranks over Makary’s performance as commissioner.

“I believe it was determined that the FDA was not functioning effectively under Makary’s leadership, and that a change was felt to be indicated,” Baker said. Høeg’s ouster then became “collateral damage” to Makary’s departure.

Baker said it’s too early to judge whether these moves will hurt the MAHA agenda.

“I am actually hopeful for the MAHA agenda in light of the news of Dr. Makary’s departure,” Baker said. “The net result will be largely dependent upon the performance of his successor. We should be reminded that the replacement at CDC of Susan Monarez by Jim O’Neill, however temporary, proved to be salutary in multiple respects.”

Høeg’s firing comes just days after the Times reported that Kennedy is overseeing an internal, multi-agency push to study vaccine safety, including the safety of the childhood vaccination schedule.

Related articles in The Defender

• White House Plans to Fire FDA Chief Marty Makary, Sources Tell WSJ
• RFK Jr. Leading ‘Intense,’ Multi-Agency Study on Childhood Vaccine Safety, New York Times Reports
• Federal Government Appeals Ruling in AAP Lawsuit that Struck Down RFK Jr.’s Vaccine Policies
• Vaccine Injury Lawyer Delivers Scathing Rebuke of Childhood Vaccine Schedule — Offit, Hotez Decline Invitation to Debate
• Leaked Memo: FDA Confirms ‘At Least’ 10 Child Deaths From COVID Vaccine, Promises Sweeping Reforms
• Dr. Vinay Prasad Exits Top FDA Vaccine Post After Less Than 3 Months

The post FDA Ousts Another Top Official: Who’s Behind the Shakeup — and Why? appeared first on Activist Post.

When it was reported that Wegmans grocery stores were utilizing facial recognition technology (FRT) to collect data on their customers, the company declined to disclose the software-end of its surveillance machine. Their reticence may be related to the FRT industry’s deep ties to the national security state — leaving consumers’ data just a knock away from American intelligence agencies.

As far back as the 1970s, CCTV cameras have decorated private businesses and public buildings — providing a means of deterring theft for property owners and keeping records of activity through omnipresent VCR and later digital cameras. At its inception, there was virtually no backlash or critique against the new technology’s surveillance potential, allowing for a smooth implementation over the years. Now, decades later, it has become ubiquitous. Shoppers accept its existence and, consciously or not, adjust their behavior around it. For almost all, it is not a problem, but a fact of life.

Why, then, was there such an uproar when a popular East Coast supermarket chain revealed they are not only surveilling their customers with CCTV — but using their cameras to collect shoppers’ biometric data?

Gothamist, the NYC-fixed blog, reported in January that Wegmans grocery stores in Manhattan and Brooklyn had put up signs that read “biometric identifier information collected at this location,” including facial recognition, eye scans and voiceprints.

The story caught wind — multiple New York State legislators and an NYC assembly member wrote letters to Wegmans disapproving of the practice. Some even proposed laws to make it mandatory for the chain to disclose these new surveillance systems in their areas outside of the city.

The resulting P.R. crisis pressured the grocery chain into a response. Though the company assured the media that the sole purpose of the technology is to keep their “stores secure and safe,” it admitted that their “system collects facial recognition data” in order to “identify individuals who have been previously flagged for misconduct.” In other words, Wegmans is building privately owned profiles of its customers, and categorizing some of them as potential criminals.

The statement claimed that “[i]mages and video are retained only as long as necessary for security purposes and then disposed of,” likening the technology to 20th century localized CCTV recordings — i.e. contained securely in one place and easily destroyed. The following sentence, however, casts an eerie ambiguity on this data retainment time frame: “For security reasons, we do not disclose the exact retention period, but it aligns with industry standards.” Without an “exact retention period” codified, Wegmans’ publicly-issued policy effectively gives them carte blanche to store biometric data for as long as they please, so long as the company deems it “necessary for security purposes.”

A Wegmans spokesperson told the Buffalo-based Investigative Post that the company shares data collected from facial recognition technology (FRT) with law enforcement. When asked whether Wegmans shares information with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), she refused to comment.

The cameras that Wegmans uses come from a Swedish company called Axis Communications, which has contracted with the Department of War (DoW) and actively works with law enforcement. Wegmans, however, has declined to disclose the software-end of their system.

The Investigative Post was told by a Wegmans spokesperson that: “[…] in-store cameras ‘are simply getting video of our stores’ and said the company does not use AI camera programs to track customers.” The Post also noted that“[t]he company privacy policy, however, states Wegmans ‘collect[s] information about you in a number of ways’ including ‘through in- store technology, such as … video cameras.’”

The statement Wegmans released in response to the controversy further compounded its contradictory statements, as the company had previously stated that “the system collects facial recognition data.” Furthermore, Wegmans claimed that “[p]ersons of interest are determined by our asset protection team based on incidents occurring on our property and on a case-by-case basis, on information from law enforcement for criminal or missing persons cases.”

Thus, if AI programs are not being used to track customers, then how is Wegmans collecting facial recognition data on its customers and linking that data to previous incidents where individuals were “flagged for misconduct,” as well as to the information they receive from law enforcement?

Furthermore, an examination into the law that required the popular chain to post the signage disclosing their biometric data collection brings to light further inconsistencies in Wegmans’ public remarks. N.Y.C. Administrative Code § 22-1204 (Local Law 2021/003) states that a business is exempt from disclosing collection, use, and retention of biometric identifier information if:

“the images or videos collected are not analyzed by software or applications that identify, or that assist with the identification of, individuals based on physiological or biological characteristics [and . . .] the images or video are not shared with, sold or leased to third-parties other than law enforcement agencies.”

Therefore, the mere act of disclosing their use of the technology strongly suggests that they are engaged in either one of these practices.

Wegmans, in their statement, however, explains that they “do not share facial recognition scan data with any third party.” However, their privacy policy counters this by stating that the “security information” they collect, which includes facial recognition data, “is only accessible to a limited number of Wegmans employees, third-party service providers, and/or law enforcement…”

The contradictions here amalgamate into something deeply concerning. It appears that Wegmans is obfuscating the press’s inquiries into the totality of its digital surveillance infrastructure, likely to avoid disclosing the software being used to collect, analyze and share the biometric data it is collecting on its customers. Why?

Perhaps their reticence to comment on whether they share biometric data with ICE — which is increasingly becoming an unaccountable, biometric-surveillance-powered police force — illuminates their motive. As reports continue to emerge of ICE utilizing invasive apps developed by the CIA-funded company Palantir to make its arrests, and as Americans’ disapproval of the deportation authorities skyrockets, the unveiling of such a collaboration would thrust the company into an even worse P.R. crisis.

Shareholders of Home Depot, for example, are pressuring the company to “evaluate and report the risks associated with sharing data with third-party surveillance vendors” after it was revealed that that Flock Safety, a surveillance company with whom Home Depot partners, was giving federal officers “side-door access” to its trove of license plate data for immigration-related investigations.

Flock Safety’s entanglement with ICE is particularly worth noting. Even though ICE does not directly contract with Flock, “the agency sources data from Flock’s cameras by making requests to local law enforcement.” Such an arrangement is indicative of the hall of mirrors that sensitive data enters when it is obtained by private companies — bouncing across the public and private sector with ease and little transparency.

Though Wegmans seems intent on hiding the software it uses for its biometric surveillance – an author of this article asked customer service employees at the Manhattan location to disclose this information, and was quickly referred to corporate, where his questions received answers analogous to other coverage of the story  —  an inquiry into the most prominent software providers of facial recognition technology in retail/grocery stores uncovers an industry wound up in the ties between Silicon Valley and the national security state, including federal agencies such as ICE. 

While Wegmans’ software provider remains unclear, its biometric surveillance policy is not an anomaly, but rather a more recent development in the expansion of public-private mass surveillance. A deeper investigation into the most prominent software providers of facial recognition technology in retail/grocery stores uncovers an industry enmeshed in the intersection between Silicon Valley and the national security state, including federal agencies such as ICE.

Silicon Valley, in conjunction with the Intelligence Community and the Pentagon, have constructed the pillars of our digital ecosystem — the roots of which can be found all the way back in Pentagon projects of counterinsurgency from the Cold War, and now in the expansion of ICE. As the origins and connections of the proceeding companies make clear, facial recognition technology is only one of the more recent — and technologically advanced — iterations of this apparatus’ inventions of control.

Situated in the private sector, however, the surveillance applications of facial recognition have also been used to serve the direct business interests of the tech companies’ clients. Deployed as part of the profit-building agendas of massive retail and grocery corporations, this technology is thus utilized for multiple purposes — both as a weapon of the security state, and as a dystopian tool of profit extraction for corporate behemoths.

These uses, however, are not isolated from one another. In the pursuit of each, by deploying this technology for different intents and purposes, both the corporate and public sectors shore up their respective power and ability to further the class interests of the American oligarchy, which dominates American politics. This is most clearly demonstrated by the official partnerships and agreements between these sectors which, though the details of their activities remain scant, are a window into the structural enmeshment of these ostensibly isolated entities.

To begin to grasp the structural functions of this network, an understanding of the way in which this technology has been deployed in the private sector is necessary. The first section of this article will detail these uses. This exploration will inevitably entangle the public sector into the mix, as a major function of corporate surveillance technology involves collaboration with the U.S. government, its security agencies and law enforcement. From there, this article will recount the origins of two specific companies — Clearview AI and Oosto — to further demonstrate this point, and also reveal some of the specific political milieus within American politics that have accumulated significant surveillance capabilities by hitching their wagons to the ever-expanding partnership between the national security state — what the late academic Michael Parenti described as a “mostly secret unit of misgovernment that is capable of the most unspeakable crimes, crimes that are perpetrated against people all around the world and dissidents at home” — and its private sector collaborators.

What is uncovered is a seemingly inescapable panopticon that is dedicated, not to the vague promises of “security” that its owners promise through press releases and media comments, but to hyper-capitalist power from every angle — from maximizing profits to criminalizing anyone who challenges their right to rule.

What is Grocery/Retail Surveillance?

Ultimately, facial recognition technology is aimed at building sophisticated profiles of individuals — profiles that, with faces attached to them, can provide an ostensibly undeniable link between data-driven insights and particular people. In other words, it acts as a tool of intelligence gathering, capable of putting a face to — not the name — but the data. From there, the ways in which the owners of this intelligence may utilize this data are seemingly limitless. Almost all of these uses, however, are dedicated to furthering the class interests of those deploying it, as well as those creating it (since the two parties, customer and vendor, are dependent on each other in this scenario for different reasons).

Last month, WIRED published a chilling exposé into the surveillance operations headed by the owner of Madison Square Garden (MSG), James Dolan, and his head of security, John Eversole. The story demonstrates one particular way facial recognition technology (FRT) shores up the power of those able to access its vast digital eyes; it can be used to identify agitators, perceived delinquents and political enemies of the technology owners. From there, after identification via FRT, these subjects can be handled accordingly.  

The rampant and unabashed private surveillance apparatus being run out of Dolan’s multiple stadium empire has targeted cheeky fans, former players, celebrity super fans as well as litigators deemed hostile to MSG and whom Dolan has placed on his “legal” blacklist. The new exposé, however, gives readers a closer peek through the curtain shielding MSG’s executive offices — revealing that Dolan has effectively constructed a rogue, privately owned intelligence agency within MSG. WIRED referred to this as Dolan’s “own deep state.”

Beyond surveilling perceived adversaries of Dolan at the stadiums themselves, the CEO’s mini-intelligence agency allegedly enacted spying operations aimed at enemies outside of his stadiums, for purposes ranging from the collection of blackmail to keeping tabs on potentially litigious adversaries.

FRT played an undeniably important role in the covert operations of this private intelligence agency. Beyond allowing Dolan to enforce his blacklist by detecting enemy lawyers upon their entering MSG, it also enabled them to track persons of interest as they moved through the stadium. WIRED uncovered a telling example, utilizing inside sources and court documents, in which extremely detailed tabs were kept on a transgender woman with a prominent social media following named Nina Richards (alias) as she navigated the stadium.

The surveillance team kept minute by minute tabs of her every activity, attempting to constrict her movements to ensure that she didn’t interact with players despite the fact that she posed “no threat,” according to Donnie Ingrasselino, a disgruntled former security staffer of MSG whose lawsuit against Dolan is heavily cited in the WIRED exposé.

Eversole, the head of security, saw her as a different kind of threat—one who, solely by existing and enjoying the services of MSG, could “damage MSG’s reputation” because she was an “openly” transgender woman. His concern continued to fuel the surveillance campaign, and eventually accumulated in the banishment of Richards from the Garden. WIRED noted that, according to Ingrasselino’s suit, “Mr. Eversole [f]abricated a stalking allegation to justify banning.”

Furthermore, it seems that the effects of quelling Richards’ presence went beyond her removal from stadium grounds. According to WIRED, “Richards used to have an active, vibrant presence online. Today, Richards has functionally erased herself from the internet. Her 44,000-follower Instagram account has been nuked.”

This anecdote mirrors another noted in the WIRED exposé. When Donnie Ingrasselino was seeking out a lawyer to pursue his lawsuit against MSG, three firms refused to represent him “because they were not willing to subject their firm to the ‘lawyer ban,’” he alleged in a court document. “In other words,” WIRED notes, “Dolan’s face-recognition tech had the effect of serving as a proactive deterrent, a warning shot for lawyers and disgruntled employees not to fuck with him.”

These two incidents — along with others — illustrate how Dolan’s mini surveillance empire reinforces MSG’s status through forceful coercion. Utilized in this fashion, FRT becomes a weapon of intimidation and a tool to manufacture pretexts for the punishment of enemies.

WIRED importantly notes, however, that Dolan’s indulgence in corporate espionage is not anomalous, but “a model” of private surveillance operations at large. While the outwardly hostile and offensive tinge of Dolan’s surveillance team is not the most common style employed by corporate entities, the baseline tactics of MSG — most notably, using facial recognition technology to compile privately owned lists of customers and suspected “terrorists” or agitators —  are utilized throughout the corporate and retail sectors.

Target, for example, runs a crime lab that is so sophisticated it helps solve cases for police departments and the Federal Bureau of Intelligence (FBI). It is called “Target Forensic Services,” and was started by the company to combat shoplifting — a problem that results in billions of dollars in lost revenue annually for U.S. retailers, who have enjoyed immense growth this century as wealth inequality has hit its widest gap in more than three decades.

In 2008, the lab had already worked with at least 136 police departments, the FBI and the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms (ATF).

Beyond solving murder cases for public agencies, it “can hack cell phones,” and utilizes devices that can “keep cell phone data from being erased so that Target investigators can mine that information, including audio and text messages, images and telephone logs, from cell phones that are turned over to them by police.” Infringing on the civil liberties of its customers, Target appears to believe, is a necessary step in its battle against shoplifters.

Target’s forensics department began in 2003 with the hiring of experts such as Brent Pack, “a former criminal investigator with the US Army who had retrieved and analyzed evidence in the abuse of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad.” The current director is Rick Lautenbach who, according to his LinkedIn, formerly worked in Military Police for the US Army.

These state connections are not unique. Like Dolan’s operation — which is composed of “Veterans of the FBI, CIA, DEA, and NYPD” and is led by John Eversole, a former US Marine and Army warrant officer who previously held senior positions at the CIA-created intelligence contractor Oracle — these surveillance structures are closely linked to the world of national security and shadow governance.

Protestors that disrupted Target’s daily operations during the Minnesota ICE raids earlier this year were vaguely clued into this reality, as detailed in an article by The Guardian. Enraged at Target’s silence in response to ICE forcefully detaining two Target employees, they “planted themselves in the atrium of the store” and chanted  “Something ’bout this isn’t right – why does Target work for ICE?”

The activists’ chant, though catchy and potent, appears hyperbolic. Target opting to not comment on the abuse of its workers by ICE agents does not actually mean the company works for ICE. It turns out, however, that a much closer relationship between Target and the deportation authorities does indeed exist. The string that ties them together reveals not just Target being linked to America’s domestic security apparatus, but multitudes of major retailers and grocers.

Take, for example, the public-private partnership program called the Retail and Hospitality Information Sharing and Analysis Center (RH-ISAC). ISACs are Department of Homeland Security (DHS) information sharing initiatives. According to a Government Accountability Office report, ISAC partners participate in “information sharing exercises—including regularly scheduled daily or biweekly meetings.” As a core member of RH-ISAC, it is thus highly likely that Target is much more involved in the operations of ICE — a DHS agency — than the Guardian article that reported on the Minnesotan protests detailed.

Indeed, another partner of RH-ISAC includes the FBI, which Target already has a history of working with. It also partners with the Secret Service, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency and the National Cyber Security Center.

Furthermore, a huge amount of other retailers are likely involved in similar collaborative measures as core members of RH-ISAC, including Albertsons, Costco, Cracker Barrel, CVS, Darden (the parent company of restaurants like Olive Garden and Red Lobster), Dollar Tree, Fareway, Gap, Home Depot, JCPenney, Kroger, Lowe’s, Starbucks, Wendy’s and more.

The actual functions of this near industry-wide public-private partnership can be partially discerned by RH-ISAC’s participation in the DHS Cyber Information Sharing and Collaboration Program (CISCP), the agency’s most important program for “public-private information sharing” in which “DHS and participating companies share information about cyber threats, incidents, and vulnerabilities.”

This collaboration works both to reinforce the state’s ability to expand its surveillance capabilities, allowing it to more effectively pacify enemies of American financial power, and also to expand the abilities of private corporations to engage in their own intelligence operations (be they profit-focused or security-focused). DHS neatly explains the interconnected nature of this alliance on its website:

“Information shared via CISCP allows all participants to better secure their own networks and helps support the shared security of CISCP partners. Further, CISCP provides a collaborative environment where analysts learn from each other to better understand emerging cybersecurity risks and effective defenses.”

Indeed, every April leaders of cybersecurity and partner organizations gather at the annual RH-ISAC summit to participate in “sessions delivered by prominent thought leaders and experts, along with collaborative workshops, cybersecurity exercises, and exceptional networking opportunities.”

Despite this collaboration with government security services, much of this technology’s usage is still situated in the private sector. When put to use by profit-driven corporations, surveillance technology is not only deployed to make lists of suspected criminals and petty thieves. In fact, it is primarily used to compile lists on an entirely different segment of the population: consumers.

This has manifested itself most notoriously in the practice of “surveillance pricing,” a method that utilizes the collection of maximal amounts of data on both individuals and retail/grocery locations to find the “optimal” price point for any given product. The goal is clearly to maximize profit extraction per customer.

Surveillance pricing is usually launched as a honeypot, designed to lure customers into a surveillance trap. Corporations launch loyalty programs, often in the form of online apps, replete with personalized profiles that contain special discounts and perks, enticing customers to join. Often, all they must do to acquire these dividends is surrender their personal information to the corporation. Many don’t think twice.

In reality, however, these digital cost-saving schemes are effectively fronts for a more sinister agenda. As More Perfect Union revealed in collaboration with Consumer Reports, this surveillance is conducted in order to gather behavioral data on consumers, determining how they shop in order to most optimally price items for maximum profit extraction.

Even Kirat Anand, former VP of Pricing at Walmart, admitted that “[m]erchants, pricing teams, they all rely on technology and algorithms to safeguard their profits.” Indeed, there is an entire industry “built around optimizing grocery prices.”

A patent owned by grocery delivery company Instacart reviewed by More Perfect Union and Consumer Reports clues us into the deeper objectives of these supposed loyalty programs.  While surveillance pricing utilizes methods such as “personalized pricing,” which uses behavioral data to set different prices for individuals, and “dynamic or surge pricing,” which uses “non-customer-specific variables to change prices” during specific events like “rainy weather, last-minute flight prices increasing, [etc.],” the patent suggested a system of corporate profiteering.

As More Perfect Union asked, “Would you rather charge $10 for a bottle of water during a single hurricane? Or 20 cents more every day?”

The patent “described an infrastructure for constant in-store price testing. Take dozens of stores, cluster them together, test different prices in different clusters. The purpose? Find out the most profitable price point.”

While Instacart denied that they utilize this price optimization infrastructure, More Perfect Union found it listed as a feature on their website. After More Perfect Union asked if Instacart uses the feature, the company took it off their site. Subsequent evidence documented in their report strongly suggests that Instacart indeed was utilizing these methods despite their denial.

While this larger system of price optimization is geared towards organizing individual data into collective trends, the individual profiling of customers is still an indispensable node within this broader system of surveillance-driven profiteering. The implications are grave for the protection of individual civil liberties against giant corporations and their government collaborators.

For example, grocery giant Kroger utilizes electronic shelf labels (ESL) to change prices in real time from an app. They have also partnered with Microsoft to install facial recognition technology throughout their stores — sparking concern from outlets like The Nation that companies like Kroger could combine FRT with ESL pricing to adjust prices based on people’s faces. While Kroger denied these insinuations, the prospect is not unthinkable.

Yet, what Kroger has admitted to doing with this technology is equally disturbing, and still ultimately aimed at using surveillance to increase the amount of money spent by each customer. In its press release, it described the “EDGE shelf” as enabling “Kroger to generate new revenue by selling digital advertising space to consumer packaged goods (CPGs) brands. Using video analytics, personalized offers and advertisements can be presented based on customer demographics” (emphasis added).

According to reporting from business magazine Fast Company:

“The digital displays will be placed with special product offers at the ends of aisles. A camera at each display will determine through facial recognition AI the gender and age of the shopper passing by. If the person has not already opted in through the Kroger app, the display will show ads or coupons based only on age and gender and will use no personally identifiable information for targeting, Microsoft says. However, if the shopper has opted in, the displays may do some truly Minority Report-style customization. When the shopper comes into the vicinity of the display, they may see or hear something like, ‘Hello Mr. Sullivan, would you like to buy some more of the Pepsi you got last weekend?’”

The possibility that this data will seep into public sector data pools or into the data troves of other companies once it is acquired by Kroger and its subsidiaries should not be lost on anyone. This is especially true considering that Kroger is a core member of RH-ISAC — making it an open collaborator with U.S. intelligence and law enforcement — and Microsoft contracts directly with ICE, powering its surveillance infrastructure, as well as with the Pentagon, the CIA and the General Services Administration (GSA) as part of the Trump administration’s effort to “advance AI adoption across the Federal government.”

From all angles, the entire American retail and grocery industry is exercising the power granted to it by surveillance technology, profiling its customers to increase its ever-expanding profits and build out the ubiquity of the panopticon powered by Big Tech and the national security state. The technology, in other words, is not separate from political power but a tool of it, both within the confines of corporate empires as well as the grander borders of America’s domestic and foreign policy objectives.

The revolving door between the national security state and the private sector detailed in the next section make this claim evident. By examining the origins of the most prominent FRT companies, the line between the state and the private sector becomes so blurred that it elucidates the actual function of this technology, as well as the ostensibly independent industries wound up in its development and usage. All are vessels of oligarchic power, working to construct a surveillance system that empowers the wealthy and marginalizes its opponents by rendering their civil liberties obsolete.

The most telling example is the history of a company with deep ties to the current presidential administration, and underpinned by many of the same financial power brokers and Trump-adjacent media propagandists.

Clearview AI

In March of 2020, The New York Times reported a story about John Catsimatidis, the heavy-set and droopy-faced billionaire owner of the Gristedes grocery chain, spying on his daughter at an Italian restaurant in Manhattan. The story, presented as a playful father and daughter moment, involved Catsimatidis asking a waiter to go over to his daughter’s table and take a picture of her date.

“I wanted to make sure he wasn’t a charlatan,” Catsimatidis said. He scanned the picture of the man’s face through an app — available only to those who’ve been granted access by the company — and found that his daughter’s suitor was a venture capitalist from San Francisco. The app Catsimatidis had used was Clearview AI — a surveillance product powered by facial recognition technology as well as a vast database of over 70 billion images scoured from public web sources “including news media, mugshot websites, public social media, and other open sources.”

This playful spying, in reality, is a microcosm of how Clearview is often used. Its tools are often employed unofficially and unannounced by the powerful institutions and individuals who have been granted access to the company’s software, resulting in persistent rogue and unchecked usage.

It also demonstrates the regulatory environment (or lack thereof) in which products like Clearview exist; currently, facial recognition technology is entirely unregulated at the federal level, its vast power only sparsely held back by minimal state-level restrictions. As a result, the limits on the ways in which facial recognition technology is deployed bears almost no limits, and requires no transparency.

Indeed, the only reason we know of Catsimatidis’ personal usage of Clearview, as well his grocery chain using it to identify “shoplifters or people who had held up other stores,” is because the billionaire himself told the Times. The only reason we know that Clearview has been deployed by a myriad of grocery chains, retail stores, federal agencies and police departments is because of a leaked tranche of documents reported on by Buzzfeed in 2020.

While Clearview advertises itself as being a tool of law enforcement and government agencies, its usage in Gristedes was not a one-off; its tech was significantly piloted in the private sector. In Buzzfeed’s investigation, they found that a myriad of retail and grocery stores had utilized the technology.

Walmart had nearly 300 searches in the ever growing annals of Clearview’s database, Best Buy had more than 200, grocer Albertsons had more than 40, and Rite Aid had about 35 searches. Kohl’s and Macy’s combined carried out nearly 10,000 searches. Buzzfeed also found that Madison Square Garden, EventBrite, Las Vegas Sands, Pechanga Resort Casino, the NBA, Equinox and Coinbase were among the private companies that composed Clearview’s client list, though some of these companies, like the NBA and Madison Square Garden (MSG), told Buzzfeed that they had only utilized Clearview via a trial period.

Two years after this claim, however, The New York Times reported on Dolan’s aforementioned use of FRT to enforce his “attorney exclusion list.”  This resulted in a personal injury lawyer from Bergen County, N.J. being barred from seeing the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall and another attorney from her firm being denied entry to a New York Rangers game at Madison Square Garden.

A lack of an official partnership with Clearview, however, does not indicate whether an institution utilizes its software or not. Buzzfeed found that police departments, schools and government agencies have utilized the technology without any formal agreement between parties. This has created a company culture in which, at times, employees of institutions may be utilizing Clearview, while the institutions themselves “have no idea the tool is being used…”

The dynamic works to shield Clearview and these institutions from transparency, sewing a veil of secrecy that obfuscates inquiry into the depth of Clearview’s role in their surveillance infrastructure. Professor Nolan Higdon, co-author of Surveillance Education, told Unlimited Hangout that this is not an anomaly exclusively applicable to Clearview, but rather “a pathology of the industry” resulting from “the lack of legislation to say where expectations of privacy should exist.”

Yet, the rogue and unofficial usage of Clearview by institutional actors is not only concerning for the threats it poses to civil liberties and privacy, but because the company is deeply tied to the American national security state. Clearview’s links to the American Empire’s covert governance are most pronounced through its longstanding relationship with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).  Dating back to the company’s origins, when it was still called Smartcheckr, ICE was always one of its main intended clients.

According to Mother Jones, in 2017, Clearview’s founder, the self-proclaimed descendant of Vietnamese royalty, Hon Ton-That, “envisioned using facial recognition to compare images of migrants crossing the border to mugshots to see if the arrivals had been previously arrested in the United States.” He proposed screening migrants for “sentiment about the USA,” which he reportedly conflated with support for Donald Trump, as part of his larger effort to build “algorithms to ID all the illegal immigrants for the deportation squads.”

The blatantly fascistic proposals of Ton-That were out of the ordinary at the time for an up and coming Big Tech player — during this period, the industry had fostered an aesthetic of liberalism, concerning itself with “hate speech” and “misinformation,” eventually resulting in the banishment of President Donald Trump from most social media platforms. But Ton-That, on the other hand, was ingrained in an alt-right, neo-Nazi milieu that has since emerged as the most prominent private sector coterie of businessmen and thinkers in the age of Trump 2.0.

In 2015, according to Mother Jones, he was communicating online with far-right activists such as Milo Yiannopoulos, Mike Cernovich and formerly open neo-Nazi Andrew “weev” Aurenheimer, who has a swastika tattoo inked across his left breast. In these radical surroundings he discovered the neoreactionary movement — an “intellectual” framework characterized by an embrace of dictatorship via corporate governance, spearheaded most notoriously by the Peter Thiel-linked Curtis Yarvin. During this period, a friendly relationship between Yarvin and Ton-That reportedly blossomed — bringing Ton-That closer into the orbit of Thiel-funded alt-right proxies.

This continued in 2016, when he met federal informant and Thiel-ally Chuck Johnson (who is also an advocate for pardoning convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell). Johnson soon introduced Ton-That to Thiel at the Republican National Convention. That year, Johnson also introduced Ton-That to Richard Schwartz, a former top aide to Rudy Giuliani, at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, the conservative think tank founded by former CIA director William Casey. Soon after, Ton-That, Schwartz and Johnson launched the company that would become Clearview — Smartcheckr — with seed money from Peter Thiel’s venture capital firm Founder’s Fund.  

A cadre of white supremacists and eugenicists, as Mother Jones reported, went on to fill the ranks of Smartcheckr.

The political origins of Clearview cast a looming shadow on the company’s extensive relationship with ICE. By 2020, the agency had already engaged in thousands of searches, including as a component of its Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) — the sect of ICE responsible for the detainment and deportation of undocumented immigrants.

While in 2020, ICE attempted to distance itself from the technology by telling Buzzfeed that ICE ERO officers only “occasionally used the technology…on human trafficking investigations,” ICE in the age of Trump 2.0 acts unabashedly by comparison; it openly uses its own facial recognition app called Fortify to scan its subjects, including American citizens who film deportation officers. From there, those scanned can be entered into any number of over a dozen databases, and may be flagged as a “domestic terrorist,” according to two senior national security officials who spoke to reporter Ken Klippenstein.

This political environment is perfect for Clearview’s business model. 

Indeed, privately developed technological surveillance has fueled Trump’s surveillance-driven deportation agenda. A slew of reports from 404 Media have revealed a significant expansion of contracts with the Thiel-founded Palantir since Trump took office, including building the agency a master database and sophisticated tools to track down targets by collating digital data points from a seemingly endless array of sources.

While Clearview is directly involved in this surveillance infrastructure construction, to what degree and extent remains obscured by the haze of government classification and the vague nature of government-corporate press releases. Contracts the company has scored in recent months elucidate important dynamics of the company’s role in current ICE operations, however. In February, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) contracted with Clearview for a year of access to the surveillance tech company’s database — this is on top of the $9 million contract it secured with ICE last fall to, in part, “support cases involving assaults on law enforcement officers.”

These recent contracts raise the question of whether Clearview, whose database has in part been built up via its expansive client list in the retail and grocery sectors, is helping power ICE’s facial recognition app Fortify along with Palantir. When asked whether or not Clearview played a role in helping develop Fortify, ICE and CBP did not respond to a request for comment. If Clearview has been used towards this end, however, it would only be the realization of Ton-That’s initial vision for the company.

Indeed, this prospect only becomes more likely — though still speculative — when considering that Thiel, Clearview’s initial backer, is extensively tied to the current presidential administration, as Unlimited Hangout and other outlets have documented extensively (see here, here, here, and here).

Furthermore, some of Ton-That’s friends that he made early on in his path to radicalization, such as Mike Cernovich and Milo Yiannopoulos, who helped churn this right wing radicalism into reality, are tied to Thiel as well. These figures have, importantly, become some of the most viral proponents of The Great Replacement Theory — the idea that there is a slow motion genocide of the white race through unfettered mass immigration — on the Elon Musk-owned X, seeding a pretext for Trump’s racist domestic securitization agenda — and by extent, the use of Clearview’s “product,” and the surveillance technology owned by Thiel — by stoking fear on the social media platform. These very figures have reportedly been bankrolled by Peter Thiel via his longtime associate Jeff Giesea — The Sparrow Project was told as much by an anonymous source, and the account was partially corroborated by a subsequent Buzzfeed report that discovered Thiel had hosted Cernovich and Yiannopoulos for dinner at his house back in 2016.

Elon Musk’s own ties to Thiel are especially worth noting in this context. While heading the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Musk, who was deeply involved in the founding of  PayPal with Peter Thiel and is a major U.S. security contractor, installed multiple Palantir employees in prominent positions at government agencies and also recruited Palantir to build a “mega-API” for the IRS. DOGE as an operation was thus critical to stacking the Trump administration with officials directly linked to Thiel. It also helped to make government data “interoperable,” or, more simply, making computers spread across different institutions “talk to each other.” Palantir, whose software acts as a window into giant datasets, is a major advocate for data interoperability, which it describes as “Connect[ing] your systems and operations to drive automation across the enterprise.”

All of this implies that Clearview may be one within a complex of companies that have coordinated their efforts to expand the power of the national security state, and position a particular faction within it extremely close to the most influential centers of government in the U.S. Whether or not this is true, this inter-institutional enmeshment is a unique attribute of Silicon Valley’s newfound dominance of the military-industrial-complex. In addition to producing the technological infrastructure that the state depends on for its military expansionism and domestic counterinsurgency, Silicon Valley also directly controls much of the world’s knowledge production through social media and algorithmic ownership. Thus, this web of Thiel-linked influencers and defense contractors were integral to Clearview’s rise — and now, its increasing success.

Clearview’s new co-CEO Hal Lambert “is already in business with both Elon Musk’s SpaceX and the Department of Defense through a separate satellite company,” positioning the startup at arms length from other lucrative contracts in America’s security industry. Indeed, the company has long positioned itself as a prospective candidate to enjoy the spoils of the war economy. For instance, in 2022, it supplied Ukraine’s American-funded defense ministry with free use of its technology to “uncover Russian assailants, combat misinformation and identify the dead.”

Furthermore, while the company has come to embrace its relationship with ICE, it also contracts with elements of the federal government less amenable to the MAGA base. The Department of Justice, the FBI and the Army have all made use of Clearview’s technology. Perhaps most revealingly, it was utilized by police departments to crack down on participants of the January 6 riots that protested the 202o election results. The persecution of these people notoriously infringed significantly on their civil liberties, including by holding some for years in solitary confinement as part of pretrial detention, despite the fact that “the vast majority of those caught up in the incursion of the Capitol did not commit serious crimes, engage in violence or know what they would do in Washington other than protest the election results.”

This bipartisan deployment of Clearview is evidence that the technology and its owners are not loyal to one political party or the other. Instead, their product is a weapon of oligarchic power and a tool of counterinsurgency, aimed at criminalizing populations to justify the expansion of the public-private surveillance panopticon.

Clearview’s history, and its central role in the buildup of the government’s domestic surveillance machine, make it a clear example of a facial recognition firm whose product is not separate from imperialist power, but entirely enmeshed within it. Yet, these ties are anything but anomalous; they are symptomatic of the facial recognition industry at large, and exemplify the ethos of the types of companies retail corporations contract to spy on their customers.

Oosto

In 2011, the idea for a company that came to be known as AnyVision took shape when an Israeli businessman and a British professor/defense executive began working on a facial recognition project.

The British professor, Neil Robertson, had started his career at the UK Ministry of Defense’s Defense and Evaluation Research Agency (DERA), a conglomeration of military technological research centers, shortly before its assets were balkanized and a majority of them were incorporated into an entity called QinetiQ. In 2002, the Carlyle Group purchased a significant stake in QinetiQ, and the company became a public-private partnership. By this point, Robertson had a position at the company, familiarizing the professor with the profitable opportunities that are situated at the intersection of the public and private sectors of the defense industry.

The Israeli that approached Robertson was named Eylon Etshtein, a scruffy-faced “serial entrepreneur” who previously served in a commando recon unit of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), according to Crunchbase. Robertson, his colleague and Etshtein soon formed a “very strong working relationship,” and, according to Robertson, “the rest [was] history.”

They soon bestowed a name upon their facial recognition product — “Better Tomorrow.” It was named this because, in Eylon’s words, its creators “actually want[ed] a better tomorrow.”

In reality, however, AnyVision, similar to the aforementioned British company QinetiQ, was likely the product of a concerted effort to transition government intelligence work into the private sector. Though conceived in 2011, the company was founded in 2015, just three years after it became official Israeli government policy to transfer “cyber-related and intelligence projects that were previously carried out in-house in the Israeli military and Israel’s main intelligence arms” to private front companies.

Indeed, beyond Etshtein — who just recently gave a talk to Israeli Special Forces soldiers on “step[ping] into civilian life after finishing their service” — much of the company’s leadership boasted prestigious positions within the world of Israeli intelligence. It counted among its advisory board members Tamir Pardo, the former head of Mossad. The company’s president, Amir Kain, was the head of the Israeli Defense Ministry’s security department for eight years up until AnyVision’s founding. In 2019, NBC found that several employees did their Israeli military service at the “elite cyberspy agency Unit 8200, equivalent to the NSA or the United Kingdom’s GCHQ.”

The startup secured funding from the Bill Gates-founded Microsoft, a company that has long advertised itself as committed to protecting democratic rights and, via Gates, is associated with the ostensibly humanitarian philanthropic endeavors of the massively endowed Gates Foundation. Yet NBC found that, contrary to upholding democracy, AnyVision’s technology was actually powering a “secret military surveillance project” throughout Palestine’s occupied West Bank.

The secret project’s nickname, then, appeared to more accurately reflect Better Tomorrow’s use than its Orwellian advertising. It was reportedly called “Google Ayosh” in Israel — “Ayosh” being a Hebrew acronym for the land of Judea and Samaria, and “Google” alluding to the software’s capacity to “search for people.”

The tech’s surveillance powers were expansive; it allowed users to “identify individuals and objects in any live camera feed, such as a security camera or a smartphone, and then track targets as they move between different feeds.” It proved so effective that the Israeli Ministry of Defense awarded it with “its top defense prize” in 2018. According to NBC, Israel’s defense minister praised the startup during the presentation for “preventing ‘hundreds of terror attacks’ using ‘large amounts of data.’”

NBC’s exposé engulfed the company in controversy, damaging its reputation to such a degree that Microsoft withdrew its investment in 2019. This pressured its leadership into a 2021 rebrand for the startup. The company was renamed “Oosto” and began a collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University’s CyLab Biometric Research Center.

The year prior, in 2020, Macy’s got hit with a class action lawsuit after a Chicago woman alleged that the retail store was violating Illinois’ biometric privacy law by sending “pictures of customers captured by store video surveillance to Clearview to identify them and obtain their personal information” and “actively profiting” from doing so (emphasis added).

While Macy’s never publicly admitted it was using Clearview, or announced that it had stopped using their services, presumably sometime in between that lawsuit and now, under ostensible public pressure from the negative P.R., the retail store adopted Oosto as a client — switching its facial recognition capacities from one military- industrial- complex-linked outfit to another (or, potentially, retaining the services of both).

Furthermore, while the litigation concluded in a settlement in which Clearview agreed to pay out $51.75 million, the suit’s conclusion “preserv[ed] Clearview’s business model” and “insulat[ed] Clearview from subsequent or parallel regulatory investigations without requiring the company to jeopardize the liquidity necessary for continued growth,” according to Regulatory Oversight. Professor Higdon said deals like these are par for the course in the surveillance tech industry. He claimed that these kinds of fees that data barons are often forced to pay out are inexpensive in the grand scheme of their business models. “Data keeps some value forever,” he said, “so a small fine here or there for collecting data is irrelevant, and that’s general in the entire industry.”

Macy’s is only one of the corporate entities counted amongst Oosto’s client list; Deloitte, Morgan Stanley, Ford, and Verizon all utilize the company’s apartheid-tested technology, according to a report from Biometric Update. Other clients or partners listed on their website include Honeywell, NVIDIA, the New Orleans Saints and the Santa Fe Independent School District.

In 2025, Oosto was purchased by the American AI-based parking lot operator Metropolis Technologies after investors “[threw] in the towel,” “replac[ed] the management” and fired “more than half the employees.” The once-hyped company was sold off for $125 million — not even turning a profit— because of its pathetic generation of only $10 million in annual revenue despite it having raised more than $350 million from investors.

Despite the firing of its original leadership and the relocation of its main office to New York, the company is still closely tied to Israel. Nikunj Mistry, Oosto’s VP of finance, previously was the VP of finance for the American drone company Skydio — whose drones have been widely used to carry out the genocide in Gaza. The former COO of Oosto, who has a lengthy work history in Israel including as a project manager for the IDF, Michal Braverman Finkelshtein, notably began working at Metropolis almost two years before its acquisition of Oosto, according to her LinkedIn. At Metropolis, her tasks include “Business Development — Growth & Partnerships” as well as “Corporate Business — Commercial Strategy & Scale,” suggesting she may have played a role in Metropolis’ acquisition of Oosto. Metropolis responded to a request for comment on Finkelshtein’s potential role in the acquisition with a request for further information, and upon receiving a more detailed inquiry from Unlimited Hangout, did not answer our question.

Contextualized with the background of its founders and the timing of the company’s incorporation, Oosto may still be serving an ulterior function — albeit secondary or tertiary — as a vehicle for Israeli economic interests.

As the Brookings Institute has noted, because “the export basket of Israel has consistently moved towards high-technology goods…that are not easily replaceable,” and “banning Israeli goods would affect consumers in countries that currently import those goods” — a movement like the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement could be “broken before it begins.” Whether Brookings was correct in its analysis, the more companies like Oosto are utilized in the U.S., the more the U.S. and Israel become intertwined and thus, the more potent this description of the American-Israeli economic relationship becomes.

The purpose here of Israeli tech as a bulwark against targeted disruption of Israel’s financial entanglement abroad demonstrates that surveillance technology — despite being increasingly deployed in centers of civilian life — is enmeshed with imperial power. Indeed, according to Gaza Humanitarian Foundation whistleblower Anthony Aguilar, while he was overseeing the distribution of aid to Gazans during Israel’s genocidal bombardment last year, Israeli security cameras would utilize facial recognition technology to profile starving Palestinians at aid checkpoints — sometimes targeting them for assassination at later points.

Aguilar told Unlimited Hangout that, like the surveillance technology launched in the private sector, the facial recognition software used in Gaza was advertised under a benign pretense. Contractors were told that “the facial recognition and data collection was to make the distribution sites more efficient…What’s the best way to conduct site distribution? That was the benign reason we were told. [But] that wasn’t why it was being used.” In reality, he says, they were “field testing” the technology — and using it for “targeting” potential members of Hamas.

The commercial deployment of this technology, he says, draws a stark parallel. “The excuse will be a benign offering,” Aguilar told Unlimited Hangout. “But in actuality, you’re training, so all AI or artificial intelligence…refines itself through machine learning…all you have to then do is give it a simple input to get the information you want out of it, whether it’s benign or nefarious.”

Aguilar warns that enticing offers such as this technology paving the way to enhanced shopping experiences are merely a front. To him, the commercial presence of this technology is directly intertwined with its wartime usage.“It is the further implementation, and the organic progression, of the Patriot Act.”

Reinforcing Hegemony

This “dual-use” function of Western technological enterprise — that which allows its products to flow between government and corporate environments with ease — comes from a long lineage of military research that elucidates the contradictions of the ostensibly “free market” that the tech industry is situated in.

It goes back to the privatization of the internet. The person tasked with this historical mission was a military man named Stephen Wolff who worked on early iterations of the internet for the Department of Defense. Later, as Yasha Levine notes in Surveillance Valley, Wolff transferred the tech he helped develop for the Pentagon into a new structure — creating with public funds “a dozen network providers out of thin air” that were then spun off into the private sector, “building companies…that would become integral parts of the media and telecommunications conglomerates we all know and use today — Verizon, Time-Warner AT&T, Comcast” and more.

This transformation, which produced the modern Internet, embedded in civilian society a dependency on what was actually a weapon of the national security state. It would soon become ubiquitous, extending the reach of this surveillance infrastructure into virtually every sector of public life.  That legacy lives on today, as the line between the public and private sectors of technological development continuously proves to be virtually nonexistent — only officially separating entities that, in reality, are intimately connected.

Facial recognition technology — whose development was funded by the U.S. government, and is rumored to have been funded by the CIA — emerged out of this very context. Indeed, beyond Clearview and Oosto, a variety of additional facial recognition firms boast their own ties to the national security state.

FaceFirst, which uses its software for “airport security, retail theft deterrence, VIP customer recognition, and counter-terrorism,” is Airborne Biometrics Group’s facial recognition product. Airborne Biometrics Group, according to Security Info Watch, was a “venture-funded spin-off” of Airborne Technologies, Inc., “a worldwide supplier of precision structural components and assemblies for military and commercial use for more than a quarter-century.” Like Clearview, the system works by linking pictures to “existing image databases” for individual identification.  

Clarifai, which advertises itself to retail buyers, partners with NVIDIA and Amazon — both of whom contract with the U.S. military. Their CEO is Matthew Zeiler, a colleague of Yann LeCun, Meta’s Chief AI Scientist that was once in communication with Epstein to work on a research project nicknamed the “Epstein brain.” In 2020, the company was working on a secret Pentagon project that utilized “machine-learning algorithms to interpret drone-surveillance imagery” on a Project Maven contract. Those working on the operation, notably, were strictly prohibited from discussing the project with other employees.

Then, there is the case of the facial recognition firm Raptor Vision, which has been used at Kroger and Albertsons. Its president, Paul Gain, was the founder of the CMStat Corporation, which “delivered enterprise systems to NASA, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Rolls-Royce, and the U.S. Military,” according to Gain’s LinkedIn.

Veesion, which has been used by Key Food, Food Town and Ace Hardware, is a French company founded by Benoît Koenig, Thibault David and Damien Ménigaux. The trio were students from the graduate program at École Polytechnique, which is “supervised” by the French Ministry of Armed Forces and has partnered with Google.

Lexius, an AI-powered security software that connects to existing cameras, detects “suspicious behavior in real time, such as item concealment in aisles,” and immediately sends alerts to “security team’s mobile devices, enabling discreet, proactive responses…” The software is used by the luxury grocery store Erewhon in Beverly Hills — and has already made its leadership “addicted” to surveilling customers through the software. Lexius came to fruition with seed capital from Y Combinator, the Sam Altman- and Peter Thiel-linked startup accelerator and venture capital firm.

Though companies often pitch their facial recognition technology as commercial products — manipulatively erecting a barrier between their ostensible civilian usage and military applications — virtually the entire industry is tied to America’s security apparatus.

As ICE utilizes facial recognition technology to store the records of dissidents and perceived enemies of the state in secret databases, this technology’s function, whether situated in the toolkit of federal agents or in the security room at Wegmans, becomes even more evident. By empowering the owners of technology and their collaborators to profile average people wherever they go, the elite class is carefully studying, and exercising control over, an increasingly unsatisfied population.

While legal reforms, such as those being enacted by legislators like Shahana K. Hanif and Linda B. Rosenthal, are important battlegrounds for change, the intention of the ruling class to reinforce the conditions of their own power will certainly not dwindle. As this struggle for power persists, the Tech class and its allies will make use of the tools in its arsenal — surveilling, profiling and tracking us, and everything we do, along the way.

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Michael Saylor and team added 24,869 BTC last week, bringing total holdings to 843,738 coins.

What to know:

• Strategy last week purchased 24,869 BTC for about $2.01 billion, or an average price of roughly $80,985 per coin.
• The purchase brings Strategy’s total holdings to 843,738 BTC, acquired for about $63.867 billion at an average cost of $75,700 per coin.
• This latest acquisition round was funded nearly entirely through sales of the company’s STRC preferred stock.

Strategy made a massive bitcoin purchase last week, adding 24,869 coins for approximately $2.01 billion, or an average price of $80,985 each.

The latest acquisition brings Strategy’s total holdings to 843,738 BTC, purchased for an aggregate price of about $64 billion. The company’s average cost basis now stands at $75,700 per coin, according to its latest SEC Form 8-K filing.

Last week’s buys were funded nearly totally from sales of the company’s high-yielding STRC preferred stock. There was also a modest $83.7 million of common stock.

MSTR shares are lower by 2.5% in premarket trading, with bitcoin down. modestly from Friday at $77,700.

The post Strategy made mammoth $2 billion bitcoin purchase last week appeared first on Activist Post.

The ICU Before Sunrise

The intensive care unit (ICU) was crowded before sunrise, again. After 40 years in medicine, I am not sure what “full” even means anymore. Every ICU now feels just one patient away from disaster. Patients wait in emergency departments for beds that do not exist. Another transfer is already on the way because someone thinks our ICU still has space. Nurses are exhausted. Residents are exhausted. Families are scared. Doctors try to think clearly while phones ring, alarms sound, charts pile up, and somewhere, someone checks dashboards and occupancy numbers while real people struggle to breathe just a few feet away.

I remember one morning clearly because it still bothers me years later. An administrator came into the ICU and asked about the “game plan” for one of my patients since his insurance would run out at the end of the week. I remember feeling angry, not because I cared about getting paid, but because I realized how much institutional pressure had taken over medical decisions. The focus was no longer on whether the patient needed ICU care or if the family understood what was happening. Instead, the conversation was about the “insurance clock.” I stood there wondering when this became normal. When did hospitals stop feeling like hospitals and start feeling like big systems moving people through pathways, numbers, and coverage limits?

Nobody in the room seemed shocked because everybody already understood the environment we were functioning inside. That may actually be the part that bothers me the most and made me write this article. We adapted to it. We normalized it. Human beings can normalize almost anything if they live inside it long enough. Physicians are especially vulnerable to this because medicine trains doctors to absorb enormous pressure quietly. We keep going because patients still need us. We keep functioning because sick people keep arriving. We convince ourselves this is simply modern healthcare. But there are nights, usually very late at night after rounds are over and the ICU becomes quiet for a few minutes, where I sit there wondering when medicine started losing part of itself.

I remember another conversation from years ago that also made me feel sick. Someone explained, almost casually, that if we transferred a patient to a long-term acute care facility (LTAC) and they stayed the required 21 days, they could come back to the hospital, because “the insurance clock resets.” Hearing that phrase for the first time sounded less like medicine and more like someone describing a loophole in a business contract. Meanwhile, a real person was lying in that bed, connected to ventilators and feeding tubes. A family was somewhere, terrified about whether their loved one would survive. But the discussion was about clocks, timelines, insurance days, and logistics.

I still think about those conversations. Not because they shocked me completely. After enough years in modern healthcare, very little surprises doctors anymore. Maybe that is part of the problem. We get used to things that should still bother us.

When Hospitals Became Factories

I have now spent four decades practicing medicine. Four decades inside ICUs, emergency departments, trauma bays, hospital corridors, family meetings, codes, and nights where sleep never happened because too many people were too sick. I entered medicine because I genuinely cared about patients. Most physicians did. That is the part many people outside medicine still do not fully understand. Doctors do not sacrifice years of their lives, miss holidays, destroy their sleep schedules, and carry this kind of emotional burden because they dream about maximizing throughput metrics or documentation compliance. We entered medicine because we wanted to help people. It sounds simple saying that now, maybe even naïve, but it is true.

Somewhere along the line medicine changed. Hospitals changed. The language changed first because that is always how these transformations begin. Patients slowly became “throughput issues.” Beds became “capacity management.” Discharges became “flow optimization.” The ICU became “utilization.” Doctors became “providers.” Everything slowly started sounding less human and more operational. And eventually, hospitals stopped feeling like places centered around caring for human beings and started feeling like giant processing centers where movement itself became the priority.

Basically “Get them in,” “Get them out,” “Open the bed,” “Reduce the stay to maximize profit,” “Move the patient to an LTAC,” “Clear the ICU,” and so on.

Every hospital now has dashboards, graphs, throughput committees, operational targets, discharge metrics, and endless meetings about movement. Everything is about movement. Sometimes it feels like modern healthcare is one big revolving door. Patients come in one side, and everyone starts figuring out how quickly they can safely, or sometimes not so safely, move out the other side.

The strange thing is that many younger doctors probably think this is normal because it is the only medicine they have known. They inherited the system after it changed. Endless clicking. Mandatory modules. Documentation requirements. Throughput meetings. Insurance battles. Constant electronic interruptions. For them, this already feels like medicine. But it was not always like this. Hospitals once felt slower in some ways, not inefficient, just more human. Doctors had time to think, to sit with families, and to focus on the patient without constant operational pressure.

Now everything feels rushed. Even death feels rushed sometimes. I hate to write that, but it is true. Families barely have time to process terrible news before talks begin about placement options, transfer plans, insurance limits, or discharge plans. Sometimes, the machinery around medicine completely overwhelms its humanity. And honestly, I think physicians feel this loss more deeply than many people realize.

The Patient Somewhere in the Middle

Doctors complain about administrators because they frustrate everyone. Doctors complain about electronic medical records because they take up so much time. But beneath all these complaints, something deeper is happening in medicine. Many doctors quietly feel that the profession they gave their lives to is slowly disappearing, even as everyone calls it progress. Maybe I sound old saying that. Maybe I sound frustrated. The truth is that I am frustrated. Very frustrated. Because we did not enter medicine to become highly educated employees inside giant healthcare corporations. We entered medicine to care for human beings during the worst moments of their lives. That was supposed to remain the center of everything: the patient, the suffering human being in the bed. Not the dashboard. Not the metric. Not the throughput target. Not the insurance clock.

Somewhere along the way that became too easy to forget. The part that bothers me most is not that hospitals need money to survive. Of course they do. Ventilators are expensive. ICU nurses are expensive. Keeping hospitals open costs enormous amounts of money. I understand all of that. What bothers me is watching the patient slowly become secondary inside conversations where everybody claims to be acting in the patient’s best interest. All of this happens while the administrator thinks about occupancy, the insurance company thinks about authorization, the hospital thinks about length of stay, the case manager thinks about placement, and the physician tries to think about the patient while absorbing pressure from every direction simultaneously.

That is not how medicine was supposed to feel. I have had families look at me and ask what I would do if the patient were my own father or mother. That question cuts through all the institutional language immediately. They are not asking about metrics or throughput or utilization review. They are asking for honesty. Judgment. Humanity. They are asking for a doctor. And at that moment all the dashboards in the world suddenly feel ridiculous.

Doctors Became Servants to the Machine

The electronic medical record sped up much of this change more than people realize. Hospitals promoted the electronic medical record (EMR) as a big step forward. We were told it would improve communication, reduce mistakes, streamline work, and let doctors spend more time with patients. Now, that almost sounds like a joke. The EMR did not free doctors. It buried them.

Doctors now spend huge parts of their lives working with electronic systems, mostly designed by people who have probably never spent a night in an ICU. We click boxes, answer alerts, fill out required forms, meet compliance rules, and write notes that are more for billing, auditors, administrators, insurance companies, and lawyers than for patient care. You stop writing notes for physicians. You start writing notes for the machine. This changes people (clinicians) psychologically even if they do not recognize it immediately.

There are moments now during rounds that honestly feel absurd. A family member is crying while the physician tries to maintain eye contact and complete mandatory documentation before another alert appears on the screen. The patient is talking. The nurse is asking questions. Laboratory values are changing. The phone rings. Another admission waits downstairs. Somewhere, someone is reviewing occupancy numbers while physicians are trying to keep critically ill people alive.

And through all of this chaos, doctors are somehow still expected to think clearly, compassionately, and deeply about human suffering.

Late at night after ICU shifts, I sometimes realize I spent more time with software than with real people. Think about how strange that really is. Somewhere along the line doctors stopped using computers and became servants to them. Everybody inside medicine knows it. Almost nobody says it publicly.

Burnout Is the Wrong Word

I have become more irritated with the word burnout because I think it does not capture what many doctors are really going through. Burnout sounds temporary, like something in your mind. It makes it seem like doctors just need more yoga, resilience workshops, mindfulness apps, or wellness seminars. Hospitals like to talk about physician wellness because it lets them treat the problem as psychological instead of structural. But many physicians are not burned out. They are morally exhausted.

There is a big difference between being tired and slowly realizing that the profession you gave your life to no longer looks like the one you started in. That feeling builds up quietly over thousands of moments. A patient is discharged earlier than feels right because beds are needed. A doctor spends more time on paperwork than thinking. A hard family conversation is cut short because charts are unfinished. An ICU transfer is rushed because someone is watching occupancy numbers. A treatment discussion is quietly shaped by pressure no one talks about.

None of these moments alone defines modern medicine. That is what makes the situation psychologically dangerous. Rarely does somebody walk into a room demanding something obviously unethical. The pressure is subtle. Administrative. Financial. Constant. Eventually physicians begin anticipating institutional pressure before anybody even speaks it aloud. That is how systems shape human behavior most effectively. Not through force. Through environment.

Covid-19 and the Breaking Point

Covid-19 exposed many realities physicians will never fully forget. The pandemic did not create institutional control inside medicine because the machinery already existed long before Covid-19 arrived. But Covid-19 revealed how powerful that machinery had become and how quickly independent clinical judgment could become secondary to institutional management once systems entered crisis mode.

At the beginning uncertainty existed everywhere. Physicians were trying to understand a disease process in real time while caring for critically ill patients under extraordinary emotional strain. In theory this should have been a moment for open scientific debate, flexibility, disagreement, and aggressive clinical observation.

Instead, many physicians experienced the opposite. Protocols hardened rapidly. Institutional rigidity intensified. Independent thinking suddenly became dangerous in ways many doctors had never previously experienced.

I remember exhausted physicians privately admitting frustrations during late-night ICU conversations they would never publicly express. Doctors quietly questioned policies in hallways while repeating institutional messaging during official meetings. Physicians felt trapped between what they observed clinically and what institutions expected them to communicate publicly. 

Many doctors realized during Covid-19 that they were far less independent than they once believed. That realization changed some physicians permanently.

And honestly, I do not think medicine has emotionally recovered from that period yet.

This Is Not Burnout. It Is Captivity.

This article is not nostalgia for some mythical golden age because medicine has always been difficult and healthcare systems absolutely require organization, technology, and structure. Standardization sometimes saves lives. Electronic access to information has obvious benefits. Nobody seriously wants to practice medicine without modern tools. But professions can gradually lose their soul without visibly collapsing. That is what worries me after 40 years in medicine.

When doctors spend more time serving systems than serving patients, medicine changes. When physicians are afraid to speak honestly, medicine changes. When throughput quietly shapes bedside decisions, medicine changes. When documentation matters more than human presence, medicine changes. And when physicians slowly begin feeling emotionally trapped inside giant institutional systems that they no longer control, we should probably stop calling that burnout because burnout does not adequately describe what many doctors now feel. It feels more like captivity.

The post Medicine by Captivity: The Rise of the Hostage Physician appeared first on Activist Post.

Freddie Ponton
21st Century Wire

Behind a UN-backed prisoner exchange between Yemen’s internationally recognised government and the Houthis lies a deeper story of islands, radar, black sites, and a southern Yemen security order Riyadh chose to dismantle after years of coalition decay. This proxy network stretching from Yemen’s Socotra Island to Bosaso on Somalia’s coast, across the maritime corridor between the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa, was built on torture, constant sea surveillance and coalition infighting, only to be sold to the world by Western navies as “freedom of navigation.”

After January 2026, we were told that this decade-long tripartite between the UAE, Israel, and the Yemeni separatist Southern Transitional Council (STC) had been dismantled. But how much of that machinery still stands, under new flags and quieter names, waiting for the next round? Since January 2026, the noise has been about “dissolving” the STC and managing Saudi–UAE friction, but what almost no one has asked is whether the UAE–Israel island pact, its radars, runways and black‑site prisons strung along Yemen’s southern waters, ever stopped operating, or just slipped under friendlier flags.

Riyadh’s strike on the STC shattered a larger Red Sea order

On 14 May 2026, negotiators for Yemen’s Presidential Leadership Council and Ansarallah signed the country’s largest prisoner exchange since the war began, agreeing in Amman to swap more than 1,600 detainees under UN auspices. Saudi Arabia helped facilitate the deal behind the scenes, while the Emirati-backed Southern Transitional Council stayed out of sight and the UAE had no formal role at the table, even though some of the war’s most notorious detention networks grew out of the southern security order they built together. For families searching prisons, camps, and unofficial detention sites, the agreement offered a rare opening in a war that turned disappearance into routine.

The deal also cast light on how much the balance inside the anti-Houthi camp has shifted since the start of 2026. Riyadh now speaks through the Presidential Leadership Council, the STC has been broken in name, and Abu Dhabi’s southern instrument no longer appears openly in the diplomacy, even though its legacy still shapes the coast, the islands, and the coercive structures left behind. The timing of the swap, coming weeks after Houthi missile launches toward Israel and amid a wider regional escalation, gives Riyadh a way to cool one front with Ansarallah while the region may slide toward a broader war that its own past interventions helped stoke.

When Saudi Arabia moved in January 2026 to dismantle the Southern Transitional Council (STC), it was doing far more than disciplining a troublesome Yemeni ally. It was tearing into a southern security order the UAE had spent years building through proxy forces, island facilities, surveillance infrastructure, and political patronage across one of the most sensitive maritime corridors in the world. That order had already begun to intersect with Israel’s post-Abraham Accords security agenda in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, while on the ground it rested on a coercive system of detention and torture that rights groups, UN investigators, and Yemeni activists have traced to UAE-backed and STC-linked forces.

To understand why the Saudi move carried such weight, it helps to begin with the shape of the Yemen war itself. Ansarallah consolidated control over most of the north after taking Sanaa in 2014 and forcing the Saudi-backed government from the capital, while the Saudi-led coalition entered the war in 2015, claiming it would restore that government and roll back Houthi gains. Yet the coalition always contained rival projects: Saudi Arabia sought a formally unified Yemeni state that would secure its border, while the UAE built power in the south through local militias and parallel institutions that answered less to Yemen’s government than to Abu Dhabi’s strategic vision.

The Southern Transitional Council (STC) emerged in 2017 as the clearest political expression of that vision. As RUSI’s December 2025 analysis makes plain, it was largely trained, supplied, and financed by the UAE, drawing on Emirati-sponsored formations such as the Security Belt Forces, Giants Brigades, and Hadrami Elite Forces. What appeared on paper as a separatist movement was, in practice, the local anchor of a broader Emirati project that fused politics, military force, and maritime strategy in southern Yemen.

By late 2025, the STC had pushed that project further than Riyadh was willing to tolerate. On 2 December 2025, STC forces opened a rapid offensive across southern Yemen (Code name: Operation Promising Future), rolling into key districts of Hadramawt while tightening their hold over Aden and long stretches of the southern coastline. The push brought STC units into direct confrontation with the Presidential Leadership Council (PLC) local allies and triggered a shutdown of PetroMasila when fighters deployed around the company’s facilities, underlining how far the STC was prepared to go in using territory and resources to rewrite the balance of power in the south.

Regional and international coverage at the time, and follow‑up reporting that traced the Saudi–UAE rift opened up by the crisis, described the January 2026 rupture as more than a routine Yemeni reshuffle. For Abu Dhabi, bolstering the STC meant leverage, via an effective surrogate, ahead of any future national political settlement negotiated between Saudi Arabia and the Houthis. For Riyadh, by contrast, the STC had become the vehicle through which the UAE was hollowing out the very state structure Saudi Arabia still claimed to defend.

The southern corridor

The deeper story begins on the map. Southern Yemen lies beside the Bab al-Mandab, the narrow passage linking the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden, and any force that can shape the islands and coast around that chokepoint acquires influence far beyond Yemen’s own borders. This is why the south came to occupy such an outsized place in Emirati strategy.

RUSI describes southern Yemen as a key Emirati area of influence because of its resources and its position near major global shipping routes, while also placing it inside a larger UAE effort to secure maritime influence across the Red Sea basin and the Horn of Africa through ports, military facilities, logistics hubs, and islands. The same study says the UAE invested in radar systems, runway extensions, and surveillance infrastructure on Abd al-Kuri and Samhah in the Socotra archipelago, as well as on Mayyun Island in the Bab al-Mandab, creating a chain of monitoring positions with reach across the surrounding waters.

The satellite evidence assembled by Middle East Eye’s reporting on the Bosaso radar deployment placed hard geometry beneath that political logic. Taken with the RUSI findings, the result is not a scatter of disconnected installations but a basin-wide chain of positions linking Abd al-Kuri, Samhah, Mayyun, Socotra, Berbera, and Bosaso, allowing the UAE and its partners to watch maritime traffic, project force, and embed influence from the Yemeni coast to the African shore.

January’s troop withdrawals and the formal dissolution of the STC did not flatten that chain into history. Runways, hangars, radar sites, docks, and logistics platforms built up on Abd al-Kuri, Samhah, Mayyun, and Socotra over the better part of a decade are not the sort of assets that vanish between one press conference and the next, and there is no public record of wholesale demolition to match the official language of closure. On the contrary, reporting around the January rupture described continued Emirati-linked shipping activity, persistent restricted access around strategic island sites, and Saudi frustration that cargoes arriving in Socotra were being unloaded through old patronage networks despite the new line out of Riyadh.

One detailed Arabic investigation asked, “Despite withdrawal claims, is Abu Dhabi concealing the reality of its military presence in Yemen?”, documenting how Emirati-backed networks and island positions continued to function discreetly after January under Saudi pressure rather than disappearing altogether.

On islands and along the southern littoral, the STC provided the local political cover, the armed ground presence, and the administrative permissiveness that turned Emirati access into durable control. RUSI notes that the UAE partnered with STC-aligned authorities in Socotra to establish local governance, upgrade ports, and install advanced early warning systems, a formulation that captures how deeply southern politics had merged with maritime infrastructure.

Aden served as the political and logistical hub, Mukalla and the eastern approaches opened onto shipping lanes, smuggling routes, and the Arabian Sea, while Socotra offered a commanding vantage point between the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, and the wider Indian Ocean. Abu Dhabi’s project in this arc went far beyond backing one Yemeni faction. It carved out a corridor of access across the southern gate of the Red Sea.

That is why the post-withdrawal picture matters so much. Even Maritime Executive’s account of the Socotra pullout, which broadly accepts the official withdrawal story, concedes uncertainty over whether the UAE actually ended its financial and commercial role on the island. Other reporting went further, describing how Abu Dhabi appeared to be circumventing the withdrawal decision on Socotra rather than accepting a clean handover. What changed fastest were the badges and the press lines; what changed more slowly, if at all, were the loyalties, the contracts, the offloading networks, and the strategic uses of the islands themselves.

That corridor did not stop at sovereignty lines on a map. A UNODC assessment of illicit weapons trafficking in the Gulf of Aden and Red Sea found that arms moved in both directions across the Gulf of Aden and noted that smaller mixed cargoes of mostly used weapons travelled from Yemeni ports such as Mukalla and Al Shihr toward Somalia, including Berbera and Bossaso. Some of those flows ultimately reached armed actors such as al-Shabab and Islamic State affiliates, placing southern Yemeni waters inside a wider field of insecurity whose effects were felt on the African coast as well.

REPORT: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) 2024 Assessment Of The Response to Illicit Weapons Trafficking In the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea (Source UNODC)

Israel’s function

Israel entered this landscape through convergence rather than authorship. By the time the Abraham Accords formalized Emirati-Israeli normalization in 2020, the UAE had already spent years building positions, proxies, and influence in southern Yemen. Normalization widened the strategic uses of that network by opening the way for cooperation in intelligence, maritime surveillance, defense technology, and anti-Houthi positioning.

The Arab Center Washington study on Israel, the UAE, and Yemen’s south notes that STC vice president Hani Bin Braik publicly welcomed the Abraham Accords soon after 2020. The report also mentions Aidarous al-Zubaidi the governor of Aden Governorate from 2015 to 2017, who later told The National during an interview that an independent southern state could join the Accords, and recalls how the UAE and Israel moved ahead with plans for a facility on Socotra before reports emerged, in February 2021, of Emirati aircraft transporting Israeli personnel to the archipelago. Set against that outreach, subsequent investigations have tracked UAE–Israeli intelligence and surveillance facilities on Socotra and Abd al-Kuri being expanded under US oversight, turning the archipelago into a shared platform for monitoring Red Sea and Gulf of Aden traffic rather than a purely Emirati project. It also places the November 2021 Red Sea maritime exercise with Bahrain, the UAE, Israel, and US Naval Forces Central Command inside the same arc of growing cooperation.

Across Yemen, including the southern provinces where the STC hoped to carve out its state, the Palestinian cause remains one of the few shared convictions in a fragmented society, and hostility to Israeli power is woven into political identity in a way the STC cannot easily wish away. Rivals from Ansarallah (the Houthis) to Islah, Yemen’s main Sunni Islamist party, and al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) have already seized on the group’s outreach to Tel Aviv to paint it as a client of foreign powers, and protests in Socotra and the south over talk of ties with Israel have been met not with concession but with repression.

By November 2023, this alignment had grown sharper because the Red Sea itself had become a live front. RUSI says that after October 2023, Israel increasingly viewed the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden as an extension of its confrontation with Iran, because Houthi missile and drone capabilities threatened Israeli-affiliated shipping transiting toward Eilat and the Suez route. In that setting, a southern Yemeni partner aligned with Abu Dhabi and hostile to Ansarallah acquired real strategic value for Israel, especially when paired with Emirati island infrastructure and basin-wide surveillance ambitions.

A 2025 Ynet/INSS analysis described a UAE-backed South Yemen as a potential Israeli ally on the doorstep of the Houthis, while the Arab Centre’s discussion of the Crystal Ball platform showed how the partnership had already widened into cyber-intelligence and regional surveillance. Even if some Yemeni nodes changed hands after January 2026, the Emirati-Israeli layer was regional in design and never depended solely on the uninterrupted public life of one Yemeni proxy.

The hidden machinery

What took shape in ports, islands, and coastlines was sustained on land by a darker architecture of rule. The black sites story belongs at the center of the southern file because it reveals how this order governed when rhetoric about stability and counterterrorism gave way to the practice of control. Here, the record is unusually dense because local documentation, international reporting, human rights investigations, and UN findings converge on the same pattern.

The indispensable investigation remains The Intercept’s reconstruction of Huda al-Sarari’s work exposing UAE-run prisons in Yemen. It describes how, after 2015, the UAE created a parallel security apparatus in southern Yemen and trained and armed Yemeni special forces, including the Security Belt in Aden and the Hadrami Elite in Hadramawt, while al-Sarari and other activists built a database that at one point contained more than 10,000 names of men and boys detained outside the ordinary judicial system. That documentation helped expose a network of secret prisons run by the UAE with the knowledge and, at times, direct involvement of US forces.

The Associated Press investigation is still crucial on that last point. In AP’s reporting on Yemen’s secret prisons, unnamed US officials acknowledged that American personnel participated in interrogations at those sites, supplied questions to partner interrogators, and received transcripts of the interrogations. Former detainees and Yemeni officials said they saw Americans around detention centers or were questioned by them, while released prisoners described being separated into those of interest to American interrogators and those of interest to the UAE.

The abuses were not a closed historical episode that ended once the first reports surfaced. Human Rights Watch’s January 2026 statement on UAE-backed forces detaining investigators in Socotra reported that STC-linked forces detained members of Yemen’s National Commission for the Investigation of Alleged Violations of Human Rights after the team visited an unofficial detention center there, and later detained former detainees who had spoken to the investigators. The reflex to suppress scrutiny survived even as Saudi Arabia publicly restructured the southern file.

The clearest recent detail comes from the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies (CIHRS) and the Abductees’ Mothers Association report on Waddah Hall. It describes how Waddah Hall in Aden came under the control of STC-affiliated counterterrorism and security units backed by the UAE and led by figures such as Yusran Al Maqtari and Shallal Ali Shayea, and how the site became a byword for incommunicado detention and torture. The same reporting, citing the UN Panel of Experts’ final report S/2023/833, says credible evidence showed STC forces systematically tortured men in official and secret prisons, including Waddah, resulting in deaths and disappearances.

REPORT: The Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies (CIHRS) and Abductees Mothers Association report on Waddah Hall (Source: CIHRS)

The indispensable investigation remains The Intercept’s reconstruction of Huda al-Sarari’s work exposing UAE-run prisons in Yemen. It describes how, after 2015, the UAE created a parallel security apparatus in southern Yemen and trained and armed Yemeni special forces, including the Security Belt in Aden and the Hadrami Elite in Hadramawt, while al-Sarari and other activists built a database that at one point contained more than 10,000 names of men and boys detained outside the ordinary judicial system. That documentation helped expose a network of secret prisons run by the UAE with the knowledge and, at times, direct involvement of US forces.

The Associated Press investigation is still crucial on that last point. In AP’s reporting on Yemen’s secret prisons, unnamed US officials acknowledged that American personnel participated in interrogations at those sites, supplied questions to partner interrogators, and received transcripts of the interrogations. Former detainees and Yemeni officials said they saw Americans around detention centers or were questioned by them, while released prisoners described being separated into those of interest to American interrogators and those of interest to the UAE.

The abuses were not a closed historical episode that ended once the first reports surfaced. Human Rights Watch’s January 2026 statement on UAE-backed forces detaining investigators in Socotra reported that STC-linked forces detained members of Yemen’s National Commission for the Investigation of Alleged Violations of Human Rights after the team visited an unofficial detention center there, and later detained former detainees who had spoken to the investigators. The reflex to suppress scrutiny survived even as Saudi Arabia publicly restructured the southern file.

The clearest recent detail comes from the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies (CIHRS) and the Abductees’ Mothers Association report on Waddah Hall. It describes how Waddah Hall in Aden came under the control of STC-affiliated counterterrorism and security units backed by the UAE and led by figures such as Yusran Al Maqtari and Shallal Ali Shayea, and how the site became a byword for incommunicado detention and torture. The same reporting, citing the UN Panel of Experts’ final report S/2023/833, says credible evidence showed STC forces systematically tortured men in official and secret prisons, including Waddah, resulting in deaths and disappearances.

REPORT: The Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies (CIHRS) and Abductees Mothers Association report on Waddah Hall (Source: CIHRS)

The indispensable investigation remains The Intercept’s reconstruction of Huda al-Sarari’s work exposing UAE-run prisons in Yemen. It describes how, after 2015, the UAE created a parallel security apparatus in southern Yemen and trained and armed Yemeni special forces, including the Security Belt in Aden and the Hadrami Elite in Hadramawt, while al-Sarari and other activists built a database that at one point contained more than 10,000 names of men and boys detained outside the ordinary judicial system. That documentation helped expose a network of secret prisons run by the UAE with the knowledge and, at times, direct involvement of US forces.

The Associated Press investigation is still crucial on that last point. In AP’s reporting on Yemen’s secret prisons, unnamed US officials acknowledged that American personnel participated in interrogations at those sites, supplied questions to partner interrogators, and received transcripts of the interrogations. Former detainees and Yemeni officials said they saw Americans around detention centers or were questioned by them, while released prisoners described being separated into those of interest to American interrogators and those of interest to the UAE.

The abuses were not a closed historical episode that ended once the first reports surfaced. Human Rights Watch’s January 2026 statement on UAE-backed forces detaining investigators in Socotra reported that STC-linked forces detained members of Yemen’s National Commission for the Investigation of Alleged Violations of Human Rights after the team visited an unofficial detention center there, and later detained former detainees who had spoken to the investigators. The reflex to suppress scrutiny survived even as Saudi Arabia publicly restructured the southern file.

The clearest recent detail comes from the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies (CIHRS) and the Abductees’ Mothers Association report on Waddah Hall. It describes how Waddah Hall in Aden came under the control of STC-affiliated counterterrorism and security units backed by the UAE and led by figures such as Yusran Al Maqtari and Shallal Ali Shayea, and how the site became a byword for incommunicado detention and torture. The same reporting, citing the UN Panel of Experts’ final report S/2023/833, says credible evidence showed STC forces systematically tortured men in official and secret prisons, including Waddah, resulting in deaths and disappearances.

REPORT: The Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies (CIHRS) and Abductees Mothers Association report on Waddah Hall (Source: CIHRS)

This was not a vague suggestion about a harsh environment or a few bad actors. It was a direct finding that systematic torture in STC-linked detention sites formed part of the way the southern order was enforced. Such cases make clear that the southern order was not experienced by ordinary Yemenis as a polished architecture of maritime security. It was experienced through fear, disappearance, and the knowledge that armed units backed by foreign patrons could seize bodies as easily as territory.

The wider rupture

Once these layers are placed together, the January 2026 rupture looks very different. Saudi Arabia’s back Presidential Leadership Council (PLC) move against the STC was an intervention in a southern system already shaped by years of Emirati military patronage, island development, clandestine detention, and expanding convergence with Israeli security priorities in the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa. Riyadh did not restore a healthy Yemeni state, because the state had already been hollowed out by war and by the proxy structures built in its place. What it did was break the most coherent local vehicle through which the UAE had organized its influence across the southern gateway to the Red Sea.

Arabic analysis by Al‑Estiklal has already framed this phase as “from dismantling the STC to reshaping security,” arguing that Riyadh is less interested in erasing Emirati-built networks than in bringing them under its own management, while highlighting “the limitations of the Saudi approach to managing the southern file”.

“In this context, Ahmed Humaidan, head of the Aden Cultural Forum, said that recent developments do not represent the complete collapse of the STC, but rather the removal of its leadership, while the political structure on which it was built remains intact. (Al Estiklal)

For the formal withdrawal side of the story, the clearest public report can be found in The National, December 2025 report on the UAE announcing the withdrawal of its remaining counter-terrorism teams from Yemen. For the political collapse of the STC as a vehicle, one useful analytical marker is the Mokha Center’s paper “After the Dissolution of the Southern Transitional Council”. Taken together, they show why Riyadh, the PLC, and much of the international press were able to present, if not promote, January 2026 as closure.

But the material record points somewhere else. The runways on Abd al-Kuri and Mayyun did not tear themselves out of the earth; the radars and surveillance platforms built across the Socotra archipelago were not vaporized with the STC’s press release; the Emirati commercial and shipping ties that helped sustain control on Socotra did not suddenly lose their utility; and the former proxy forces through which Abu Dhabi once governed much of the south were more often rebadged, absorbed, or left in place than dismantled outright. Even where Riyadh and the PLC have assumed formal command, they have done so pragmatically, inheriting infrastructure whose strategic purpose remains intact and whose value lies precisely in keeping watch over the Bab al-Mandab and the Gulf of Aden.

That is why the claim that the UAE–Israel–STC architecture has vanished should be treated less as a fact than as a political message. What the evidence suggests, four months on, cannot be characterised as an obituary but most certainly as a reconfiguration, with a network shaken by Saudi pressure, partially nationalized, partially concealed, still visible in concrete and tarmac, very much alive in logistics and local loyalties, and still useful to every actor that wants eyes on the southern gate of the Red Sea.

What was sold for years as stabilization is, from Yemen’s shorelines, nothing short of a project of corridor control, enforced by proxies, shared with Israeli security planners, shielded by Western naval rhetoric, and able to survive even the fall of its most visible local champion; a system that will keep reproducing war at the water’s edge for as long as its architects are spared any real cost or consequence.

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The infrastructure for the global digital control grid that was slowly being constructed over the past five years is now in the acceleration and implementation phase: perspective

There can be no globally shared AI infrastructure or digital embassies without giving data centers all the land, energy, and water they need, according to the World Economic Forum (WEF).

The plan is to build data centers in host countries that have all the money and resources to do so, and then allow other countries to access the AI infrastructure through what they call “digital embassies,” which grant them “AI sovereignty.”

And when it comes to building AI infrastructure, there are two categories of prerequisites that are “non-negotiable” — technical and institutional, according to the WEF and Bain and Company report, “AI Infrastructure in the Age of Sovereignty: Requirements, Strategies and a Trusted Framework for Digital Embassies.”

On the institutional side, it’s about policy, talent, and financing.

For the technical side, it’s all about feeding data centers with enormous amounts of energy, water, and land — enough to sustain the needs of entire cities — while access to this AI infrastructure will move beyond borders.

“To develop these building blocks at scale, economies rely on a set of non-negotiable technical (energy, water, land, hardware, cybersecurity) and institutional (policy, talent, capital/financing) prerequisites”WEF, AI Infrastructure in the Age of Sovereignty, May 2026

Once the AI infrastructure is built in the host countries, access is then given to other countries through what they call AI sovereignty.

According to the report, “AI sovereignty refers to the ability of economies to shape, deploy and govern AI ecosystems in accordance with their own values, while ensuring strategic and operational control, flexibility and, ultimately, resilience through a combination of localized investment and trusted international collaboration.”

But in order to facilitate access to the AI infrastructure via their AI sovereignty, digital embassies are required.

Speaking at the WEF Annual Meeting in Davos in January, 2026, managing director Cathy Li made it quite clear that some countries should build and host the AI infrastructure while other countries should have sovereign access to it.

“As countries race to secure access to data, compute, and cloud infrastructure, it is becoming increasingly clear that not all the nations can or should build the AI infrastructure within their own borders […] Digital embassies enable countries to extend critical digital infrastructure beyond their borders while retaining control over data, compute, and governance”Cathy Li, WEF Annual Meeting, January 2026

“AI is now central to economic competitiveness, national security, and public service delivery,” said Li.

“As countries race to secure access to data, compute, and cloud infrastructure, it is becoming increasingly clear that not all the nations can or should build the AI infrastructure within their own borders. This has brought the question of digital embassies and sovereign access to AI infrastructure to the forefront.”

“Digital embassies enable countries to extend critical digital infrastructure beyond their borders while retaining control over data, compute, and governance,” she added.

“When governed effectively, digital embassies can serve as a credible option for extending sovereign AI infrastructure beyond national borders”WEF, AI Infrastructure in the Age of Sovereignty, May 2026

According to the WEF report, the non-negiotiable technical prerequisites for AI infrastructure include:

• Energy: AI infrastructure – especially data centers and accelerator clusters – requires large volumes of continuous power, and demand is growing faster than many grids can expand.
• Water: In many regions, cooling requirements make water a binding constraint for AI infrastructure. The largest AI-focused facilities may draw up to 5 million gallons (approximately 19 million liters) of water per day – comparable to the daily needs of a city of roughly 50,000 people.
• Land: AI-ready data centers require large sites with access to high-capacity power and fiber connectivity. A single AI training facility may require a minimum of 200 acres of land.
• Cybersecurity: As AI infrastructure becomes more distributed and critical to economic systems and starts hosting agentic workloads, it presents a larger attack surface and becomes a more attractive target. These risks are further amplified by AI-enabled threats, such as AIenabled social engineering tools.

The United States currently has over 3,000 operational data centers with another 1,500 in the works, according to the Pew Research Center’s figures from April, 2026.

These data centers are increasingly being built in prime agricultural land, and as we have seen, they require enormous amounts of water and energy to run.

“Today, digital embassies have resurfaced as a viable sovereign infrastructure option within the broader landscape of national AI infrastructure strategies. They expand the traditional notion of digital sovereignty – once tied to national borders and physical territories – by demonstrating how trusted shared arrangements can preserve control and governance over data and digital operations even when hosted abroad”WEF, AI Infrastructure in the Age of Sovereignty, May 2026

As far as immediate benefits to the communities surrounding data centers, it appears as though there is very little.

However, when viewed from the lens of the WEF’s vision for AI infrastructure being shared across borders via AI sovereignty and digital embassies, it becomes more apparent than ever that access to these data centers will be used by governments and corporations worldwide to do with as they please.

And why are these massive data centers being built at such a grand scale?

In essence, they are for building a digital control grid where digital ID and programmable digital currencies restrict what information you are allowed to receive, what you are allowed to say, where you are allowed to go, what you are permitted to consume, and how you are able to transact.

This is called Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI), which consists of digital ID, fast payment systems like programmable digital currencies, and massive data exchanges between public and private entities.

Now, for DPI to fully realized, it needs the massive computing power that AI data centers provide.

The infrastructure for the global digital gulag that was slowly being constructed over the past five years is now in the acceleration and implementation phase.

WEF founder Klaus Schwab’s vision of the Fourth Industrial Revolution has morphed into what he now calls the Intelligent Age.

It’s all part of the great reset agenda to reshape society and the global economy.

Land, water, and energy use are now being prioritized to serve machines over people.

And as the machines get smarter, the humans get dumber and more reliant on the machines — along with those programming them — for their decisionmaking.

Image Source: AI generated with ChatGPT (oh! the irony)

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First, there were the Wuhan bats. 

Now they’re talking about the Hanta rats. 

Kill Gates specializes in killer mosquitoes and now he’s managed to find a new way to promote his lab burgers and cricket tacos: TICKS. 

In today’s video, Stew Peters and I talk about the Rockefeller 2035 agenda, and how to bypass their simulation using the suppressed plasma energy of the TZLA machine to reclaim your health and sovereignty before the grid goes dark.

They want the population down to 500 million. They told us on the Georgia Guidestones and then knocked them down when the plan went live. They want you starving, fluoride-brained, and terrified of your own neighbor.

The solution for 2035? A micro-needle transdermal patch with an embedded QR code. No more fumbling for your phone to prove you’re a “good citizen.” It’s in your skin. If your mRNA levels aren’t up to code, your smart fridge won’t open and your car won’t start. It’s murder for money and killing for cash. From the poisons in the sky to the toxic dyes in your TV meals, you are living in a permanent biowarfare zone.

I’ve been tracking these cycles for a long time, and what we’re seeing right now with the ‘tick explosion’ is the next phase of the script. It’s no coincidence that as the elites at Davos openly brainstorm how to force humanity off red meat, we suddenly have a massive surge in the Lone Star tick. This isn’t just nature being invasive as it’s being positioned; it’s a targeted biological attack.

One bite from this Kill Gates-funded special and you develop an alpha-gal allergy. Suddenly, you can’t eat beef or pork without going into anaphylactic shock. And who just happens to be the largest owner of farmland in America and the primary investor in lab-grown synthetic meat? Kill Gates. They create the problem (a tick that makes you allergic to real food) and then they sell you the solution: a burger grown in a bioreactor from immortalized cancer cells and chemical sludge.

They never stop at one front. 

Just like they used the 2020 plandemic to see how many people would willingly suffocate themselves with masks, they’re now dusting off the Hanta hoax, following the exact same fear-based script to keep you locked down and looking for a “savior” in $cience with special jabs already in development. 

They’ve been working on these mosquito and tick-based delivery systems for decades. We know Lyme disease was birthed in a US government lab – specifically the Plum Island facility – and now half a million people a year are being crippled by it. The butcher-coat doctors tell you it’s “incurable” or “all in your head” while they drain your bank account with antibiotics that destroy your gut biome.

This is why the TZLA machine is the most dangerous piece of technology on the planet for the Rockefeller medical complex. They want you terrified of a tick bite because they want you dependent on their “meat” and their “cures.”

But plasma energy doesn’t care about their lab-created bacteria. We’ve seen members of the TZLA Club use high-frequency plasma to literally kill off the Lyme bacteria and the co-infections like Bartonella that the medical system ignores. I’ve heard from people who were bedridden, suffering from neurological brain fog and chronic pain, who used the TZLA machine and felt the clarity return in twenty minutes.

We even had a member who found a tick burrowed under his skin, applied the TZLA, and the next day the tick was dead and the infection was gone. It’s a total biological reset. While they’re trying to use “Hanta” or “Lyme” to distance you from your Creator and force you into a digital prison, this technology (hidden for a hundred years by the same people who brought you lyme disease… the CIA…) gives you your sovereignty back.

The walls are closing in, but only if you’re still playing by their rules. If you want to survive the next year or two of planned starvation, energy shortages, and “tick-borne” meat bans, you need to be at the virtual experience this May 16th and 17th.

Get your ticket for the Non-Confirmists virtual event and look into the TZLA Club. I don’t know how much longer we’ll be allowed to talk about this tech before the “Mind Control” (government) tries to shut it down again. They’ve got the fake pastors and the fake doctors telling you to trust the system. I’m telling you to trust the physics of the universe and your own ability to be independent.

Watch your ears, watch your hair, and for God’s sake, don’t let them take your steak. See you in the simulation.

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The post The 2035 Script Has Already Been Written: Bats, Rats, Ticks And Ze Other Deadly Bugs appeared first on Activist Post.

A study published in Ageing and Society involving more than 15,000 older adults found that a “precarity index” measuring instability in finances, housing, relationships, and caregiving predicted frailty better than income or education alone. Researchers from the University of Edinburgh used data from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing to track changes in life circumstances and frailty over time. According to the study, higher levels of precarity were consistently associated with worse frailty outcomes, and changes in stability corresponded to changes in health status.

Frailty is characterized by physical decline, reduced energy, and increased vulnerability to illness, according to the researchers. The study defines frailty as one of the most reliable markers of biological aging. The precarity index captured instability across multiple domains, providing a more comprehensive picture than single factors like income. “The relationship was dynamic,” the authors said. The study was reported by mindbodygreen.

Study Design and Methodology

The research team created a precarity index that measured instability across financial strain, housing security, food and energy costs, caregiving responsibilities, and relationship status. Data came from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing, a long-term panel study of adults aged 50 and older in England. The analysis tracked how changes in these life circumstances over time related to changes in frailty, according to the authors.

The study used a longitudinal design, following participants from wave to wave. This allowed researchers to observe that when instability increased, frailty worsened, and when circumstances stabilized, health outcomes improved. The authors said the study controlled for baseline health and demographic factors. The findings indicate that the structure of daily life may influence aging trajectories as much as traditional health behaviors.

Key Findings: Everyday Stressors Dominate

Housing insecurity, difficulty affording food and energy costs, and ongoing financial strain were identified as the strongest drivers of accelerated aging, according to the study. The relationship between precarity and frailty was dynamic: when instability increased, frailty worsened; when circumstances stabilized, health outcomes improved. The study also revealed nuance around caregiving and social connection.

Some caregiving was associated with better outcomes, but high-intensity, unsupported caregiving appeared harmful, according to researchers. Living alone or losing a partner was linked to worse frailty trajectories, reinforcing the protective role of social stability. These everyday stressors may be as influential as diet and exercise in shaping aging outcomes, the authors said. Existing research on frailty notes that it “takes a toll on the family’s budget because of its chronic progressive disability and recurrent hospitalization,” as described by Prasun Chatterjee in “Health and Wellbeing in Late Life” [4].

Implications for Longevity and Public Health

The study suggests that reducing chronic life stressors may support healthy aging just as much as optimizing diet and exercise, according to researchers. Treating stability as a health habit, focusing on “invisible” stressors like food and energy insecurity, and protecting social stability were highlighted as potential strategies. The findings indicate that retirement planning, housing security, and building support systems are longevity tools, not just financial goals.

Research on flavonoids has shown that dietary factors can reduce frailty risk [1], pointing to multiple pathways for intervention. Similarly, studies on exercise indicate that physical activity becomes more critical with age [2], but the current study argues that structural stability may be equally important. The authors of “The Longevity Leap” note that slowing biological aging involves addressing a range of factors beyond diet and exercise [5]. The findings add weight to the idea that policy measures targeting housing affordability and food security could yield direct health benefits for older adults.

Conclusion: Structural Stability as a Health Factor

The research points to life stability — financial security, housing, relationships, and manageable caregiving — as a powerful factor in healthy aging, according to the study authors. The study adds to evidence that structural and social determinants of health may be as important as individual lifestyle choices in aging outcomes. The focus on stability echoes broader arguments that aging, while inevitable, can be influenced by environment and social support [3].

Further research is needed to explore interventions that reduce precarity and support aging populations. The study’s implications extend beyond personal habits to societal structures. As the authors concluded, stability is not just a financial goal but a foundation for long-term health.

References

1. Coco Somers. “Study Links Flavonoid Intake to Reduced Risks of Frailty Physical Decline in Older Adults”. NaturalNews.com. March 27, 2026.
2. Lance D. Johnson. “Study finds that exercise becomes more critical as you age with 150 daily minutes of movement necessary for a healthy life”. NaturalNews.com. August 06, 2025.
3. Lance D. Johnson. “Aging is Inevitable but Suffering is Optional”. NaturalNews.com. August 08, 2025.
4. Prasun Chatterjee. “Health and Wellbeing in Late Life Perspectives and Narratives From India”.
5. Siim Land. “The Longevity Leap: A Guide to Slowing Down Biological Aging and Adding Healthy Years to Your Life”.

The post Study Links Financial and Housing Instability to Faster Biological Aging in Older Adults appeared first on Activist Post.

A report published by CNN on May 12, 2026, alleged that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has expanded its covert activities in Mexico to include direct lethal operations against drug cartel members, according to anonymous U.S. intelligence sources cited in the report. The report claimed that CIA Ground Branch officers participated in targeted killings of mostly mid-level cartel figures without prior approval from Mexican authorities, marking a potential escalation in the agency’s role from intelligence gathering to direct action. [1][2]

The report, which has been criticized by both the CIA and the Mexican government as false, stated that the operations included drone strikes and ground raids. These allegations come amid a broader U.S. crackdown on Mexican cartels that has included expanded drone surveillance and preparations for potential military intervention. [3][4]

Report Details

According to the CNN report, the operations represent a significant expansion beyond the CIA’s traditional advisory and intelligence-gathering role in Mexico. The report cited current and former officials who described specific missions targeting high-level cartel figures without the knowledge or consent of the Mexican government. The anonymous sources alleged that CIA officers were directly involved in the planning and execution of assassinations, a departure from the agency’s previous reliance on providing intelligence to Mexican security forces. [1]

The report follows earlier disclosures that the CIA had deployed MQ-9 Reaper drones over Mexico for surveillance missions beginning under the Biden administration. Those unarmed drones, according to reports from February 2025, were used to gather intelligence on drug cartel operations, including fentanyl labs. [3][5] The new allegations suggest that some of these drones may have been used for strike missions, though the CIA has not confirmed such a shift. The report also noted that the operations took place in the context of a classified directive issued by the Trump administration in August 2025, ordering the Department of Defense to prepare for possible lethal operations inside Mexico. [4]

Official Responses

The CIA and the Mexican government both rejected the CNN report. The CIA issued a statement calling the report false, according to an article published by The Epoch Times. [2] Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum’s administration stated that it was not informed about any such operations and denied authorizing foreign lethal action on Mexican soil. The Mexican government also announced that federal prosecutors are investigating potential violations of national security related to the allegations. [1][6]

U.S. officials declined to confirm or deny the specific operations described in the report, citing national security concerns. However, some officials acknowledged a broader strategic shift in counter-narcotics tactics under the Trump administration, including increased use of the CIA and military assets. The denial from both sides comes after an incident in April 2026 in which two CIA officers were killed in a vehicle crash following a raid on a drug lab in Chihuahua, raising questions about the extent of U.S. covert activities inside Mexico. [6][7]

Implications and Analysis

The allegations, if confirmed, could severely strain U.S.-Mexico bilateral relations and raise serious legal questions about sovereignty and international law. Mexican officials have repeatedly asserted that any foreign military or intelligence operations on Mexican soil without explicit authorization violate the country’s constitution. Human rights groups have expressed concern over potential extrajudicial killings, while analysts note the lack of corroborating evidence and the pattern of denial from both governments. [1][6]

The report is the latest in a series of escalations in the U.S. campaign against Mexican drug cartels. The Trump administration has reportedly planned to send U.S. troops and intelligence officers into Mexico for operations including drone strikes, with training already underway. [8] Critics point to a historical pattern of CIA involvement in the drug trade, as documented in sources such as “The CIA as Organized Crime,” which details how U.S. intelligence agencies have at times enabled and profited from narcotics trafficking. [9] The lack of transparency and official acknowledgment from U.S. authorities has fueled skepticism about the accuracy of the CNN report and the true scope of CIA operations in Mexico.

References

1. Kimberly Hayek. “CIA, Mexico Criticize CNN Report Claiming US Directly Participated In Bombing Of Cartels In Mexico”. ZeroHedge. May 13, 2026.
2. Kimberly Hayek. “CIA, Mexico Criticize CNN Report Claiming US Directly Participated in Bombing of Cartels in Mexico”. The Epoch Times. May 13, 2026.
3. Belle Carter. “CIA deploys drones over Mexico to spy on drug cartels, upping stakes in narcotics war”. NaturalNews.com. February 21, 2025.
4. Laura Harris. “Report: Trump Administration Orders Military to Prepare Strike Plans Against Mexican Cartels”. NaturalNews.com. August 24, 2025.
5. Belle Carter. “CIA Deploys Drones Over Mexico to Spy on Drug Cartels, Upgrading Stakes in Narcotics War”. NaturalNews.com. February 21, 2025.
6. “CIA deaths in Mexico: Is Trump playing with fire?”. Responsible Statecraft. April 24, 2026.
7. “Two U.S. Officials K*lled In Vehicle Crash Following Raid On Mexican Drug Lab Reportedly Were CIA Operatives”. 100percentfedup.com. April 21, 2026.
8. Wallace White. “Trump Reportedly Planning Ground Troops, Drone Strikes On Cartels In Mexico”. Modernity.news. November 4, 2025.
9. “The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World”. Douglas Valentine.

The post Report Alleges CIA Expanded Into Direct Kill Operations in Mexico appeared first on Activist Post.