U.S. Air Force Testing New Stealth Drone at Area 51
Update on the global drone arms race.Nicholas WestActivist Post It has been predicted that the development of drone surveillance by the U.S. would spark a global race to develop new drone capabilities, leading to a potentially dystopian future of drone wars where combat and even assassinations can be performed by fleets of insect-like microbots. The Washington Post reported in July, 2011: More than 50 countries have purchased surveillance drones, and many have started in-country development programs for armed versions because no nation is exporting weaponized drones beyond a handful of sales between the United States and its closest allies. The number of countries has now risen toward 90 as Pakistan recently entered into the market, plus the United Nations itself has launched its own fleet of surveillance drones. Perhaps to keep up with an announcement that the U.S. First test flight footage: The race is on to capitalize on the surge in the drone market around the world.
How Partisan Bickering Sabotaged America's Middle East Policy - David Rohde
Fights in Washington have taken priority over stabilizing the region and securing the United States. The furious partisan debate that erupted this week after a New York Times investigation questioned the central tenet of the Republican assault on the White House regarding Benghazi was a fitting end to 2013. The lengthy article revealed that the State Department and CIA’s intense focus on al Qaeda caused officials to miss the threat posed by local militias. David Kirkpatrick’s reporting showed that Libya’s rebels appreciated the U.S. support in helping oust Muammar al-Qaddafi, but were strongly influenced by decades of anger at Washington’s support for dictators in the region. Militants gained strength from Syria to the Sahel over the course of 2013. Neither the American left nor the right has offered a serious strategy for how to respond to the emergence of new types of militant groups across the Middle East. Representative Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) The stakes in Egypt are enormous.
Military Urban Operations Training: "Blacked-out" Helicopters Reported in Several Cities
Chris CarringtonActivist Post Military training exercises are being conducted over a wide area of the United States. Phoenix, Los Angeles and Dallas news stations were inundated with calls about "blacked-out" helicopters flying low over the cities. In Phoenix eyewitnesses said the pilots flew their craft very close to buildings, weaving between them just a few hundred feet above the sidewalks. The Department of Homeland security is stepping up ‘urban warfare’ training, but it’s unclear at this point if the training is because they fear an attack from outside the country, or if they are practicing these maneuvers so they can control American citizens should the need arise. Chris Carrington is a writer, researcher and lecturer with a background in science, technology and environmental studies. If you enjoy our work, please donate to keep our website going.
NSA surveillance and third-party trackers: How cookies help government spies.
Photo by Lili Warren/AFP/Getty Images Snooping on the Internet is tricky. The network is diffuse, global, and packed with potential targets. There’s no central system for identifying or locating individuals, so it’s hard to keep track of who is online and what they’re up to. What’s a spy agency to do? One option is to plant a unique tag on every computer and smartphone, stamp every Internet message with the sender’s tag, and then capture the tagged traffic. Luckily (for the spies) there’s an easier way: free ride on the private sector, which does its own pervasive tagging and monitoring. That’s precisely what the National Security Agency has been up to, as confirmed most recently by a front-page story in Wednesday’s Washington Post.Other countries’ spy agencies are probably doing the same thing. Companies track users for many reasons, such as to remember a login, to target ads, or to learn how users navigate. Which companies are keeping tabs on you? But technical security is not enough.
Texas Students Hijack US Military Drone in Mid Air
When the Department of Homeland security makes bets with the civilian population, perhaps they shouldn’t offer college students $1000. In Austin, Texas, College students said they would take that bet and they did. Texas College Students hijacked a US Military Predator Drone in mid-air in front of DHS!The University of Texas came into it saying that they not only could do it, but that it had been done before. We have seen the reports from Iran that they used a technique to do what they call “spoofing” to bring down a RQ-170 spy plane of the United States and put it on Display. When the US Government and DHS put up the challenge to see if it could be done for less than $1000 to prove it was false, I guess they had forgotten what we in Texas call “Red Neck Ingenuity”. From Popular Science and RT: A group of researchers led by Professor Todd Humphreys from the University of Texas at Austin Radio navigation Laboratory recently succeeded in raising the eyebrows of the US government.
The NSA might know everything but it is not all powerful
Given how similar they sound and how easy it is to imagine one leading to the other, confusing omniscience (having total knowledge) with omnipotence (having total power) is easy enough. It’s a reasonable supposition that, before the Snowden revelations hit, America’s spymasters had made just that mistake. If the drip-drip-drip of Snowden’s mother of all leaks — which began in May and clearly won’t stop for months to come — has taught us anything, however, it should be this: omniscience is not omnipotence. At least on the global political scene today, they may bear remarkably little relation to each other. Let’s begin by positing this: There’s never been anything quite like it. It’s visibly changed attitudes around the world toward the U.S. — strikingly for the worse, even if this hasn’t fully sunk in here yet. So where to start, almost half a year into an unfolding crisis of surveillance that shows no signs of ending? Omniscience Omnipotence A First-Place Line-Up and a Last-Place Finish
Discovery Channel Strange planes Drones, midgets and parasites
Exclusive: Secret contract tied NSA and security industry pioneer
Strange Aircraft 2
Strange Aircraft 3
Strange But Real Aircraft
Planes that u had never seen
Lockheed Martin's first 6th gen fighter concept "Miss February".
Air Force pursuing antimatter weapons / Program was touted publicly, then came official gag order
The U.S. Air Force is quietly spending millions of dollars investigating ways to use a radical power source -- antimatter, the eerie "mirror" of ordinary matter -- in future weapons. The most powerful potential energy source presently thought to be available to humanity, antimatter is a term normally heard in science-fiction films and TV shows, whose heroes fly "antimatter-powered spaceships" and do battle with "antimatter guns." But antimatter itself isn't fiction; it actually exists and has been intensively studied by physicists since the 1930s. During the Cold War, the Air Force funded numerous scientific studies of the basic physics of antimatter. More cataclysmic possible uses include a new generation of super weapons -- either pure antimatter bombs or antimatter-triggered nuclear weapons; the former wouldn't emit radioactive fallout. In that talk, Edwards discussed the potential uses of a type of antimatter called positrons. Why so far off?
