Fourteen-year-old Carolina has been on Roblox since she was 10,
chatting and playing with other gamers on the platform. When the site
rolled out mandatory age checks
at the start of the year, Carolina was afraid she would lose access to
some of her friends and group chats. She needn’t have worried — the
software determined she was 16 or 17.
“Without any makeup, I did what the app asked: turned my head this
way and that for the photo,” Carolina, who lives in São Paulo, told Rest of World. “The app said I was 16 to 17 years old. I was able to go back to my chats.”
Roblox is among the growing number of social media platforms
installing age checks as governments around the world act to keep young
users off social media sites and limit their access to content deemed
inappropriate. The most commonly used methods include verification with a
government-issued identity; estimation through biometrics such as
facial recognition; and inferring the age of the user from their online
behavior.
The methods are not foolproof. Facial recognition technology is known to be less accurate
for women and people of color. On Roblox, the age check is meant to
restrict who users can chat with. The 16 to 17 age group, which Carolina
was assessed as belonging to, can chat with users in their group, as
well as the ones immediately above and below theirs, or those in the
13–15 and 18–20 age groups. Being able to chat with older users exposes
her to the risk of harassment and abuse — something California-based
Roblox has come under scrutiny for. Of its more than 100 million daily users, nearly 40% are under the age of 13, some estimates show.
As a new child safety law
comes into effect in Brazil from March, requiring platforms providing
gambling, pornography, and other such content to verify ages, users are
learning to circumvent the tech, Simone Lahorgue Nunes, founding partner
at law firm Lahorgue Advogadas Associadas in Rio de Janeiro, told Rest of World.
“Age-verification technologies are not infallible,” she said. “Minors
are using increasingly sophisticated techniques, including VPNs
[virtual private networks] and AI-generated deepfakes or selfies.
Conversely, overly stringent measures may drive underage users toward
the dark web or services hosted in so-called digital havens, thereby
exacerbating the very risks such regulation seeks to mitigate.”
Circumventing age verification doesn’t even need much sophistication. In a subreddit
on bypassing the Roblox checks, users recommend fake IDs and
AI-generated photos. “I used a fake ID of [Joseph] Stalin and it got
accepted,” one user wrote. Another user posted a video on X that showed a crude face painted on a thumb going through the age check on Roblox and being assessed to be 13 to 15 years old.
The age check process “is designed for accuracy,” Roblox said in the
statement announcing the rollout. The technology has been “tested and
certified by third-party laboratories,” and the company constantly
evaluates user behavior to determine if someone is “significantly older
or younger than expected,” it said. TikTok’s new age checks use a combination of profile data, content analysis, and behavior to infer whether an account belongs to an underage user.
Since Australia last year barred
those under 16 years from social media platforms such as Facebook,
Instagram, X, and TikTok, at least a dozen countries including Malaysia,
Spain, France, and the U.K. have said they are planning similar rules.
The chief economic adviser in India, one of the biggest markets for
social media companies, has also made a recommendation for such a law.
With the focus
on technology, there isn’t enough discussion around how these measures
can disproportionately harm minorities and others who lack documentation
or prefer anonymity online, Shivangi Narayan, who teaches sociology at
the Thapar School of Liberal Arts and Sciences in Patiala, India, told Rest of World.
“Age verification would end anonymous accounts and anonymity on the
internet as we know it,” Narayan said. “It is a potent tool to kill
dissent and end the last vestige of protection that a lot of
marginalized identities have online — people who cannot express
themselves fully on social media because they could be harassed,
trolled, become a victim of hate speech or in extreme circumstances, even killed.”
Privacy campaigners are also worried that the identification
documents and biometric data used to determine a user’s age could be
compromised, exploited, sold, or used for surveillance.
Last year, San Francisco-based Discord said
the government photo IDs of about 70,000 users worldwide had been
exposed through a third-party vendor. The compromised data included
their names, email addresses, contact information, and payment history.
Earlier this month, Discord — with over 200 million monthly active users
— said it was rolling out
“enhanced teen safety features” for users over the age of 13. These
include deleting identity documents submitted for verification “quickly —
in most cases, immediately after age confirmation.”
Some countries are opting for their own age verification systems
rather than U.S.-based Jumio or Yoti from the U.K. Malaysia has its own technology, and Brazil plans to build one. India’s Signzy and Accura Scan have several global clients.
The focus on age checks diverts attention away from the more pressing
concerns around social media platforms, Apar Gupta, founder-director of
Internet Freedom Foundation, a digital rights organization in India,
told Rest of World.
“Effective child safety online doesn’t require identifying every
internet user,” he said. “Platform design choices around recommendation
algorithms, data harvesting practices, and addictive features cause far
more harm than anonymous access to information.”
In Malaysia, where the government has said it will soon introduce a
law to restrict under-16s from accessing social media platforms,
long-time Discord user Adam is concerned about the security of its
facial recognition requirement, he told Rest of World.
“If your face is compromised, you can’t replace it,” the 17-year-old said. “Imagine having your biometric identity exposed
forever.”
Australia recently became the first country to ban social media use for children under 16, a landmark policy aimed at protecting kids from mental health risks, cyberbullying, and harmful or addictive content.
Earlier this month, my WhatsApp groups and dinner table conversations in Bengaluru quickly turned to whether India should do the same after a horrific event. According to preliminary police reports, three young sisters — just 12, 14, and 16 years old — died by suicide following a parental dispute over access to a mobile phone.
As a parent, I’m deeply worried about the harm that social media can cause to children. As a journalist who has monitored the effects — and inefficiencies — of tech-related bans, I’m also skeptical of how far such measures can go in keeping children safe.
Increasingly, my larger question is: Why does the burden of “fixing” social media fall on children and parents instead of on the companies designing these systems?
Tech lawyer Apar Gupta captured this tension well: “Beneath the fury lies a dangerous impulse: to solve a complex problem with a blunt instrument that absolves platforms of accountability while stripping young people of their digital rights.”
That line stays with me because I cannot comprehend why policymaking isn’t more focused on holding Big Tech accountable. Companies that make billions from young users — and constantly promote how advanced their AI systems are — surely have the technical capacity to design safer feeds, stronger age protections, and less addictive algorithms.
If AI can recommend the next video with eerie precision, why can’t it flag grooming patterns, throttle harmful content spirals, or detect when a teenager is in distress?
Early signals from Australia surface the limits and frustrations. A recent survey found that only 6% of Australians believe online spaces are safer and more age-appropriate since the ban. And many expect young users to simply find ways around the restrictions.
I phoned an old school friend in Sydney to ask how the ban is unfolding in real life. Her children, aged 10 and 12, are still below the social media threshold, but her teenage nephew had to quit Snapchat after the rules took effect. He and his friends quickly improvised.
“They are using WhatsApp groups like Snapchat,” she told me. Unable to maintain streaks on the social media platform, they now exchange daily photos and videos in WhatsApp group chats to keep their record of consecutive days alive.
My friend found other virtual spaces to worry about, too. She said her own children play multiplayer online games like Fortnite and Roblox, where a large number of anonymous players interact simultaneously in shared virtual worlds. These games have become hunting grounds for pedophiles and other criminals in recent years, leading to lawsuits, investigations, and arrests.
Is a ban on children playing in our future?
Social media today is more than dance videos and memes. For many people, it’s the primary source of news, community, and information. For some, it’s also a source of livelihood. Restricting access comes with trade-offs.
The harder — and more necessary — conversation is this: Instead of repeatedly fretting over how to keep children away from platforms, we should be demanding safer platforms.
Until companies are required to redesign systems that reward outrage, addiction, and endless engagement, bans risk becoming a cycle of ineffective whack-a-mole.
Surely, the real test of policymaking isn’t how effectively it can block apps — it’s how it pushes the world’s most powerful tech firms to build better ones. -Itika Sharma Punit, Deputy Editor, https://restofworld.org
Eight
months after Trump insisted that Operation Midnight Hammer "totally
obliterated" Iran's nuclear program, he has deployed the largest
military presence in the Middle East since the Iraq War.
‘President
Donald J. Trump holds a joint news conference at the White House with
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’ in February, 2025.
Joshua Sukoff / Shutterstock
President Trump has spent
two months ordering a rapidly expanding and now-massive military
buildup near Iran, with a focus on the Persian Gulf and nearby permanent
U.S. military bases in close proximity to Iran (Iran, of course, has no
military bases anywhere near the U.S.). The deployment includes
aircraft carriers and other assets that would enable, at a minimum, an
extremely destructive air campaign against the whole country.
The
U.S. under both parties has been insisting for two decades that it must
abandon its heavy military involvement in the Middle East and instead “pivot to Asia”
in light of a rapidly rising China. Yet in the midst of those vows,
Trump has now assembled the largest military presence in the Middle East
since 2003, when the U.S. was preparing to invade Iraq with
overwhelming military force.
One
of the most striking and alarming aspects of all of this is that Trump —
outside of a few off-the-cuff banalities — has barely attempted to
offer a case to the American public as to why such a major new war is
necessary. This unilateral march to war resembles what we saw in the
lead-up to the bombing of Venezuelan boats, culminating in the U.S.
invading force that abducted (“arrested”) the country’s President,
Nicolas Maduro, and took him and his wife to a prison in New York.
In
the weeks preceding the Venezuela operation, we heard a carousel of
rationales. It was all necessary to stop the flow of dangerous drugs
into the U.S. We needed to free the repressed Venezuelan peoples from
their dictator. Trump’s embrace and expansion of the Monroe Doctrine —
now dubbed the Donroe Doctrine — meant that we cannot tolerate communist
regimes in “our region.”
But
as soon as Maduro was removed, all of those claims disappeared.
Contrary to the expectations of many, the U.S. left in place Maduro’s
entire regime rather than replacing it with the pro-US opposition (a
wise move of restraint in my view, but one that negates the “liberation”
rhetoric). Discussions of the drug trade from Venezuela (a source of
drugs for the U.S. that was always minor if not trivial, and did not
include fentanyl) have completely disappeared. The only real outcome
seems to be that the U.S. has more control over that nation’s oil
supply, and barrels of it are now being shipped to Israel for the first time in many years.
In
sum, we were given a low-effort smorgasbord to enable supporters of
Trump’s actions toward Venezuela to mount arguments in favor of the
operation, but there was no systematic attempt to convince the country
at large. There was not even a live television address to the nation
beforehand to explain it. And the role that Congress played was close to
non-existent. All of that is similar to what we are seeing now
concerning a far riskier, more dangerous, and complex war with Iran.
This massive build-up near Iran
also signifies the U.S.’s complete inability — or lack of desire — to
extricate itself from the Middle East and endless American wars there.
In the first year of his second term — 2025 — Trump has already ordered
sustained bombing of Yemen; extensive military deployments to support
Israel’s attacks on Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen;
and Operation Midnight Hammer, which was sold to Trump’s base as a
one-night-only bombing run that is now close to exploding into something
far more protracted.
No
matter how fast China’s power grows, the U.S. — despite emphasizing the
vital importance of doing so over the last four administrations —
simply cannot or will not reduce its massive military commitment to the
Middle East. The real reasons why the U.S. does not sharply deprioritize
the Middle East as a military focus deserve serious examination (oil is
often cited as the reason, but the U.S. is a net exporter of oil, and
multiple oil-rich countries in that region are perfectly eager to sell
the U.S. as much oil as it wants to buy).
In this regard, it is hard not to notice that Trump’s very rapid movement toward war with Iran comes in the midst of yet another visit
to the White House by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It is
not hyperbole to say that Netanyahu’s great dream for decades has been
inducing the U.S. into a regime-change war with Iran to rid Tel Aviv of
its most formidable adversary, and his dream is closer than ever to
being realized.
There
is no way to minimize the gravity of the moment. Trump himself has made
clear that this huge armada on its way to Iran — far larger than the
one deployed to Venezuela — is not for show. He has spent many weeks
ratcheting up his war rhetoric. Trump’s public posture is ostensibly one
of deterrence: he proclaims that his overarching desire is to strike “a
deal” with Tehran in order to avoid the need for war, but he then
quickly adds that the US will impose massive damage and violence on the
country in the event that negotiations fail to produce the agreement he
wants. In sum, he depicts threats of war as motivation for Iran to
accept his terms.
That
may seem to be a cogent theory of deterrence (or extortion) if one
looks at it in isolation. Many world leaders, in general, and Trump,
especially, believe that threats of war and military attack are often
necessary for extracting the best diplomatic solution possible. But thus
far, it has not averted wars.
One reason this tactic is losing efficacy is that it has lost its credibility. As I documented in my report
last Tuesday, Trump’s words and actions about the current situation
with Iran track almost completely his actions and words which preceded
Israel’s surprise attack on Iran in June and the accompanying U.S.
bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Up until the hours before Israel
started a war with Iran by bombing Tehran in June, Trump was repeatedly
trumpeting how great negotiations with Tehran were going, and he
predicted with great confidence that all issues would be resolved
without the need for military action against Iran. Central to this
scheme was the Israeli “reporter” for Axios, Barak Ravid, who — before
his overnight ascension to key reporter in the US for all matters Israel
— served in Israel’s notorious Unit 8200 military intelligence unit as
well as the IDF Reserves until 2024. This former IDF soldier, from his
key perch at Axios and CNN, continuously circulated reports based on
anonymous sources in both governments announcing a growing and virulent
“rift” between the two leaders, all due to Trump’s refusal to allow
Netanyahu to bomb Iran.
That
public theater, by design, created the impression that a U.S. or
Israeli military attack on Iran was highly unlikely because of how
opposed Trump was to it. And that, in turn, manipulated Iran out of
adopting a posture of maximum war readiness, given their belief in the
sincerity of Trump’s assurances that a deal would be made.
But
in the midst of all that, Israel suddenly launched a major attack on
Iran, only to have the U.S. join in, with Trump eventually taking credit
for all of it. This — quite understandably — created a global
perception that Trump’s diplomatic conduct and statements, amplified by
Ravid, were an obvious ruse to lure Iran into a false sense of security,
so that Israel and the U.S. could attack Iran without much resistance.
When
the Israeli attack on Iran was touted in Western media as a success,
Trump instantly proclaimed that he and Netanyahu planned it together. He
heralded Netanyahu (and implicitly himself) as a “war hero” and, on
that basis, demanded that the Israeli president pardon Netanyahu on
pending corruption charges.
When
journalists asked Trump why the U.S. would not simply be in the exact
same situation months from now, when Iran began rebuilding its nuclear
program, Trump insisted that it would and never could happen. The U.S.
“totally and completely obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program, he
insisted, and Iran learned its lesson and knows not to try to rebuild.
Yet
here we are just eight months later, seemingly closer to a full-on war
with Iran than ever before. “Trump appears ready to attack Iran as U.S.
strike force takes shape,” reads the headline in The Washington Post
on Friday morning. The paper cites “current and former U.S. officials”
as saying that “the Trump administration appears ready to launch an
extended military assault on Iran.” While such a war is not yet
inevitable, it is clear that the probability increases each day with
more and more military assets arriving. That the U.K. is thus far refusing to allow
the U.S. to use its military base in Diego Garcia as a launching ground
for air attacks is proof that the U.S. is, at the very least, in
serious, high-level preparation stages.
The obvious, most pressing question
— the key question for any war, but especially for this one — is why?
In order to have the U.S. once again militarily attack a country and
risk a major war, one expects that the American President would provide
clear, consistent, and compelling evidence as to why this war is
necessary to protect the interests of the U.S. and the security of the
American people. The Bush 43 administration spent a full year starting
in 2002 toward laying the groundwork to convince Americans of the need
to invade Iraq, and though it was filled with falsehoods and deceit,
that is the sort of campaign that generally accompanies an attempt to
bring the country into a major new war.
But
none of that is happening: at all. The U.S. has inexorably moved toward
a war with Iran with stunningly little public debate or discussion. If
you ask 10 different Trump supporters, or even 10 different Trump White
House officials, why the U.S. should be aggressively menacing Iran with
full-scale war, you will hear 10 different answers. There is not even a
pretense of involving Congress, and the Democratic Party is in its usual
state of worthless passivity. And the more one looks for such answers
about why this war is even arguably necessary, the more difficult it is
to find them.
The
pretext used for the last U.S. bombing attack on Iran — namely, we have
to stop their nuclear program — was never remotely persuasive for
reasons we and others extensively documented. But whatever is true about
the past, that pretext is less valid now than ever. Trump’s vehement
insistence that the U.S. “completely obliterated” the only nuclear
facilities Iran possesses renders that excuse inoperable. How could Iran
possibly be close to developing a nuclear weapon if Trump’s boastful
claims are even remotely true?
Then
there is the “war justification” based on Iran’s recent, violent
treatment of its domestic dissidents and protesters. I am almost
reluctant to critically evaluate this claim, because it genuinely shocks
me each time I learn that there really still are sentient human beings
living on this planet who earnestly believe that U.S. foreign policy is
based on a desire to liberate the world’s oppressed peoples and give
them freedom and democracy. All presidents since the end of World War II
have proven that “human rights concerns” or “a desire to liberate
people” can often serve as the propagandistic pretext for war or a coup,
but are never the actual motive for U.S. military action.
That
many people continue to believe this self-serving fairy tale about U.S.
foreign policy no matter how much negating proof they see — the U.S.
propping up the world’s most savage and repressive tyrannies (such as in
Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Uganda); the fact that the CIA has far more
often overthrown democratically elected governments and replaced them
with vicious dictatorships rather than the other way around; that “human
rights concerns” find a mainstream platform in the U.S. only for
countries that are adversaries but rarely for countries that are close
U.S. allies — leads me to accept the futility of any efforts at
dissuasion for people who somehow still believe in this mythology.
In fact, Trump’s own 2025 national security strategy
released in December explicitly states that the U.S. is not going to
attempt to stop repression in other countries or lecture them about the
need for democratic and human rights reforms, but instead will deal with
such countries as they are (that policy was designed to justify Trump’s
close relationship with Saudi, Emirati, Qatari, Egyptian and Jordanian
tyrants but the principle applies to Iran as well, which is at most as
repressive and in fact mildly less so than those close U.S. allies).
National Security Strategy of the Trump Administration, 2025
The
willingness of the U.S. to embrace and even support the world’s most
savage regimes has, in fact, been the staple of U.S. foreign policy
since at least the end of World War II; Trump, I guess to his credit, is
the first to candidly admit and describe that reality.
Then
we arrive at the final stated justification for a U.S. war against
Iran: namely, Iran’s refusal to give up conventional weapons such as the
ballistic missiles it used to impose serious damage to Israel in
retaliation for Israel’s surprise attack on Iran. These ballistic
missiles do not have the range to reach the U.S. Even if they did, Iran
has never shown any propensity for militarily attacking the U.S.
homeland, given its knowledge of what would ensue.
Moreover,
every country has a legal right to build up a conventional arsenal:
most countries in the world, including U.S. adversaries, do exactly
that. And few countries have more justification for wanting such weapons
than Iran, which has not only been repeatedly threatened with war by
the most powerful country on earth, and the most powerful country in the
region, but both of those countries have attacked Iran in multiple ways
over the last two decades. Any minimally responsible leader of any
country would, of course, want normal conventional weapons such as
mid-range ballistic missiles to provide a deterrent threat against
adversaries such as Israel from attacking it on a whim.
If
the U.S. goes to war against Iran because of its refusal to destroy or
severely limit its ballistic missiles — weapons that can threaten Israel
and U.S. forces deployed near Iran to protect Israel, but not reach the
U.S. homeland — then that will be one of the clearest signs yet (for
those who still harbor doubts) that the U.S. is fighting wars and
putting American soldiers at risk in order to advance Israel’s interests
in the Middle East.
There
is a reason that Netanyahu has visited Trump in the White House seven
times in the last year, more than any other world leader by far. It is
not because Netanyahu (or Trump’s fanatical top billionaire funder, the
Israeli-American Miriam Adelson, whom Trump has suggested cares more
about Israel than the U.S.) has suddenly developed a keen interest in
building Trump’s “Board of Peace” to spread harmony in the world.
Each
time Netanyahu visits, the U.S. finds itself in conflict, if not
outright war, with Israel’s enemies. One can dismiss that as a
coincidence if one likes, but I defy anyone to find a more likely reason
as to why Trump — who built his movement on a vow to end Endless War as
the defining dogma of the bipartisan DC swamp, yet is now clearly
captive to powerful Israeli power centers — is on the verge of yet
another new war with Israel’s enemies.
A senior Democratic lawmaker with knowledge of some of the U.S. government’s most secretive operations has said he has “deep concerns” about certain activities by the Central Intelligence Agency.
The two-line letter written by Sen. Ron Wyden, the longest serving member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, does not disclose the nature of the CIA’s activities or the senator’s specific concerns. But the letter follows a pattern in recent years in which Wyden has publicly hinted at wrongdoing or illegality within the federal government, sometimes referred to as the “Wyden siren.”
In a statement (via the Wall Street Journal’s Dustin Volz), the CIA said it was “ironic but unsurprising that Senator Wyden is unhappy,” calling it a “badge of honor.”
When reached by TechCrunch, a spokesperson for Wyden’s staff was unable to comment, as the matter was classified.
Tasked with oversight of the intelligence community, Wyden is one of a few lawmakers who is allowed to read highly classified information about ongoing government surveillance, including cyber and other intelligence operations. But as the programs are highly secretive, Wyden is barred from sharing details of what he knows with anyone else, including most other lawmakers, except for a handful of Senate staff with security clearance.
As such, Wyden, a known privacy hawk, has become one of the few key members of Congress whose rare but outspoken words on intelligence and surveillance matters are closely watched by civil liberties groups.
Over the past few years, Wyden has subtly sounded the alarm on several occasions in which he has construed a secret ruling or intelligence gathering method as unlawful or unconstitutional.
In 2011, Wyden said that the U.S. government was relying on a secret interpretation of the Patriot Act, which he said — without disclosing the nature of his concerns — created a “gap between what the public thinks the law says and what the American government secretly thinks the law says.”
Two years later, then-NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the National Security Agency was relying on its secret interpretation of the Patriot Act to force U.S. phone companies, including Verizon, to turn over the call records of hundreds of millions of Americans on an ongoing basis.
Since then, Wyden has sounded the alarm on how the U.S. government collects the contents of people’s communications; revealed that the Justice Department barred Apple and Google from disclosing that federal authorities had been secretly demanding the contents of their customers’ push notifications; and said that an unclassified report that CISA has refused to release contains “shocking details” about national security threats facing U.S. phone companies.
As noted by Techdirt’s Mike Masnick, we may not know yet why Wyden sounded the siren about the CIA’s activities, but every time Wyden has warned, he has also been vindicated.
Black's
downfall — despite paying tens of millions in extortion demands —
illustrates how potent and valuable intimate secrets are in Epstein's
world of oligarchs and billionaires.
One of the few pictures of Jeffrey Epstein and Leon Black together in 2005. Patrick McMullan / Getty Images
One of the towering questions
hovering over the Epstein saga was whether the illicit sexual
activities of the world’s most powerful people were used as blackmail by
Epstein or by intelligence agencies with whom (or for whom) he worked.
The Trump administration now insists that no such blackmail occurred.
Top
law enforcement officials in the Trump administration — such as
Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, and former FBI
Deputy Director Dan Bongino — spent years vehemently denouncing the
Biden administration for hiding Epstein’s “client list,” as well as
concealing details about Epstein’s global blackmail operations. Yet last
June, these exact same officials suddenly announced, in the words of
their joint DOJ-FBI statement,
that their “exhaustive review” found no “client list” nor any “credible
evidence … that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of
his actions.” They also assured the public that they were certain,
beyond any doubt, that Epstein killed himself.
There
are still many files that remain heavily and inexplicably redacted.
But, from the files that have been made public, we know one thing for
certain. One of Epstein’s two key benefactors — the hedge fund
billionaire Leon Black, who paid
Epstein at least $158 million from 2012 through 2017 — was aggressively
blackmailed over his sexual conduct. (Epstein’s second most-important
benefactor was the billionaire Les Wexner, a major pro-Israel donor who
cut off ties in 2008 after Epstein repaid Wexner $100 million for money
Wexner alleged Epstein had stolen from him).
Despite
that $100 million repayment in 2008 to Wexner, Epstein had accumulated
so much wealth through his involvement with Wexner that it barely made a
dent. He was able to successfully “pilfer” such a mind-boggling amount
of money because he had been given virtually unconstrained access to,
and power over, every aspect of Wexner’s life. Wexner even gave
Epstein power of attorney and had him oversee his children’s trusts.
And Epstein, several years later, created a similar role with Leon
Black, one of the richest hedge fund billionaires of his generation.
Epstein’s
2008 conviction and imprisonment due to his guilty plea on a charge of
“soliciting a minor for prostitution” began mildly hindering his access
to the world’s billionaires. It was at this time that he lost Wexner as
his font of wealth due to Wexner’s belief that Epstein stole from him.
But
Epstein’s world was salvaged, and ultimately thrived more than ever, as
a result of the seemingly full-scale dependence that Leon Black
developed on Epstein. As he did with Wexner, Epstein insinuated himself
into every aspect of the billionaire’s life — financial, political, and
personal — and, in doing so, obtained innate, immense power over Black.
The recently released Epstein files depict
the blackmail and extortion schemes to which Black was subjected. One
of the most vicious and protracted arose out of a six-year affair he
carried on with a young Russian model, who then threatened in 2015 to
expose everything to Black’s wife and family, and “ruin his life,”
unless he paid her $100 million. But Epstein himself also implicitly, if
not overtly, threatened Black in order to extract millions more in
payments after Black, in 2016, sought to terminate their relationship.
While
the sordid matter of Black’s affair has been previously reported —
essentially because the woman, Guzel Ganieva, went public and sued
Black, accusing him of “rape and assault,” even after he paid her more
than $9 million out of a $21 million deal he made with her to stay
silent — the newly released emails provide very vivid and invasive
details about how desperately Black worked to avoid public disclosure of
his sex life. The broad outlines of these events were laid out in a Bloomberg report on Sunday, but the text of emails provide a crucial look into how these blackmail schemes in Epstein World operated.
Epstein
was central to all of this. That is why the emails describing all of
this in detail are now publicly available: because they were all sent by
Black or his lawyers to Epstein, and are thus now part of the Epstein
Files.
Once
Ganieva began blackmailing and extorting Black with her demands for
$100 million — which she repeatedly said was her final, non-negotiable
offer — Black turned to Epstein to tell him how to navigate this.
(Black’s other key advisor was Brad Karp, who was forced to resign last week as head of the powerful Paul, Weiss law firm due to his extensive involvement with Epstein).
From
the start of Ganieva’s increasingly unhinged threats against Black,
Epstein became a vital advisor. In 2015, Epstein drafted a script for
what he thought Black should tell his mistress, and emailed that script to himself.
Epstein
included an explicit threat that Black would have Russian intelligence —
the Federal Security Service (FSB) — murder Ganieva, because, Epstein
argued, failure to resolve this matter with an American businessman
important to the Russian economy would make her an “enemy of the state”
in the eyes of the Russian government. Part of Epstein’s suggested
script for Black is as follows (spelling and grammatical errors
maintained from the original correspondents):
you
should also know that I felt it necessary to contact some friends in
FSB, and I though did not give them your name. They explained to me in
no uncertain terms that especially now , when Russia is trying to bring
in outside investors , as you know the economy sucks, and desperately
investment that a person that would attempt to blackmail a us
businessman would immeditaly become in the 21 century, what they terms .
vrag naroda meant in the 20th they translated it for me as the enemy of
the people, and would e dealt with extremely harshly , as it threatened
the economies of teh country. So i expect never ever to hear a threat
from you again.
In a separate email to Karp, Black’s lawyer, Epstein instructs him to order surveillance on the woman’s whereabouts by using the services of Nardello & Co., a private spy and intelligence agency used by the world’s richest people.
Black’s
utter desperation for Ganieva not to reveal their affair is viscerally
apparent from the transcripts of multiple lunches he had with her
throughout 2015, which he secretly tape-recorded. His law firm, Paul,
Weiss, had those recordings transcribed, and those were sent to Epstein.
To
describe these negotiations as torturous would be an understatement.
But it is worth taking a glimpse to see how easily and casually
blackmail and extortion were used in this world...
The man literally laments the outcome of WW2 because it
marked the end of the era during which “the West had been expanding”, a
“path” he “hopes [the US and Europe] walk together again.”
And just to ensure you’re clear about what he means: he wants to
restore the building of “vast empires extending across the globe” and
blames “anti-colonial uprisings” for what they did to “the great Western
empires.”
He also says that “we cannot continue” to allow “abstractions of international law” get in the way of US interests.
Basically the man is openly saying that the whole post-colonial order
was a mistake and he’s calling on Europe to share the spoils of building
a new one.
Some of the dimwits in the room did applaud that revisionist nonsense.
What’s the thinking here? That Trump’s America – “America
first” – would suddenly become magnanimous and share with Europe just
out of sentiment? That’s not how imperialism works: the whole premise of
it is that the strong dominate the weak.
When an imperial power is speaking to you of sentiments, of how much
they like you and how they want to partner with you – the much weaker
party – that’s cause for worry, not applause …
Rubio’s speech was a call up of satraps who are willing to be the
proxy forces fo fight for U.S. global hegemony – just as the Europeans
already are with regards to Ukraine.
But Rubio is living in the past. A past in which the Europeans,
through their supremacy in warfare, could conquer and devastate vast
areas of the planet:
“The West won the world not by the superiority of
its ideas or values or religion […] but rather by its superiority in
applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact;
non-Westerners never do.”
Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order
The West, thankfully, no longer has exclusive access to weaponry. It
can no longer raise the forces needed – the technology, money, people
and ideology – to subjugate the planet. Any attempt to do so will only
end in disaster.
Europe would thereby be well advised to stay away Rubio’s unhinged nonsense.
US empire managers have been making some surprisingly honest admissions in recent days, with Senator Lindsey Graham saying the wars of the future are being planned in Israel and Secretary of State Marco Rubio calling for a return to old-school western colonialism.
During a Monday press conference in Tel Aviv after a meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu, Graham said that “I’ve been coming here every two weeks whether I need to or not.”
Why is a South Carolina senator traveling to Israel every two weeks, rain or shine? The bloodthirsty warmonger answers this question in short order.
“The wars of the future are being planned here in Israel,” Graham said. “Because if you’re not one step ahead of the enemy, you suffer. The most clever, creative military forces on the planet are here in Israel.”
Graham salivated about the possibility of a US war with Iran, acknowledging that such a war could absolutely result in American troops in the region being struck by Iranian missiles but saying the US should go to war anyway.
“Could our soldiers be hit in the region? Absolutely, they could. Can Iran respond if we have an all-out attack? Absolutely, they can,” Graham said, arguing that “the risk associated with that is far less than the risk associated with blinking and pulling the plug and not helping the people as you promised.”
During a speech at the Munich Security Conference on Saturday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio took the mask all the way off in an unsettling rant about the need to return to the good old days when western powers dominated the global south without pretense or apology.
“For five centuries, before the end of the second world war, the West had been expanding — its missionaries, its pilgrims, its soldiers, its explorers pouring out from its shores to cross oceans, settle new continents, build vast empires extending out across the globe,” Rubio said. “But in 1945, for the first time since the age of Columbus, it was contracting. Europe was in ruins. Half of it lived behind an Iron Curtain and the rest looked like it would soon follow. The great Western empires had entered into terminal decline, accelerated by godless communist revolutions and by anti-colonial uprisings that would transform the world and drape the red hammer and sickle across vast swaths of the map in the years to come.”
Rubio, a notoriously anti-communist gusano, is here admitting that socialism played a leading role in pushing back against the abusive colonialism and empire-building of the western world in recent decades. A normal person would take this as a strong argument in favor of socialism, but Rubio says it like it’s a bad thing.
Rubio urged Europeans to join their white Christian brethren in the United States in re-conquering the brown-skinned communists and heathens who have been insisting upon their own sovereignty and the advancement of their own interests:
“Under President Trump, the United States of America will once again take on the task of renewal and restoration, driven by a vision of a future as proud, as sovereign, and as vital as our civilization’s past. And while we are prepared, if necessary, to do this alone, it is our preference and it is our hope to do this together with you, our friends here in Europe.
“For the United States and Europe, we belong together. America was founded 250 years ago, but the roots began here on this continent long before. The man who settled and built the nation of my birth arrived on our shores carrying the memories and the traditions and the Christian faith of their ancestors as a sacred inheritance, an unbreakable link between the old world and the new.
“We are part of one civilization — Western civilization. We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir.”
It takes a special kind of psychopath to look back with fondness upon five centuries of unchecked western colonialism and imperialism and then advocate a return to those horrific days. Mass genocides across entire continents. The African slave trade. The violent subjugation and enslavement of entire populations. That is what Rubio is looking back on and sighing with nostalgia.
And this is of course to say nothing of the savagery his beloved “Western civilization” is perpetrating in the present day.
This is the civilization of the Gaza holocaust. The civilization that cannot exist without constant war, exploitation and extraction. The civilization that is presently strangling Cuba to death and preparing for war with Iran. The civilization that still to this day violently subjugates and robs the global south. The civilization of ecocide. The civilization of Epstein.
Western civilization is the most depraved and abusive civilization that has ever existed. It doesn’t need a return to its prime, it needs to be stopped in its tracks and made healthy. This is obvious from a glance at the deranged empire managers this civilization has been elevating to positions of leadership.
