Tenth person linked to US government secret projects confirmed missing
Steven Garcia, the missing person who disappeared in August 2025 after leaving his Albuquerque home on foot carrying a handgun was a government contractor working for the Kansas City National Security Campus, a source has told The Mail.
☢️ Garcia had top security clearance at the advanced nuclear weapons engineering facility, linked to Honeywell and the National Nuclear Security Administration, and worked at a “very high-level,” in charge of “hundreds of millions of dollars in equipment and assets,” some classified, per the source.
Garcia is at least the tenth high-ranking official with ties to advanced technology and engineering to have gone missing.
1️⃣ Frank Maiwald: aerospace engineer who died inexplicably in his home in 2024. Linked to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab and work on detecting biomarkers on other planets
2️⃣ Carl Grillmair: renowned astrophysicist and NASA researcher killed in a ‘carjacking gone wrong’ earlier this year. Work focused on finding evidence of water vapor on other planets
3️⃣ Michael David Hicks: another JPL research studying near-Earth asteroids, dying mysteriously in 2023 at age 59
4️⃣ Melissa Casias: Los Alamos National Lab researcher who went missing in New Mexico in 2025, last spotted walking along a road, leaving her car, purse, wallet and keys at home
5️⃣ Anthony Chavez: another LANL researcher who went missing in 2025, last seen leaving his home on foot, not taking his wallet or car keys with him
6️⃣ Monica Reza: JPL aerospace engineer and superalloys materials scientist who went missing in 2025 while hiking the Mount Waterman Trail with two companions
7️⃣ William McCasland: retired US Air Force general and astronautical engineer from LANL who went missing in early 2026, again leaving his personal items including cell phone, glasses and wearable devices at home, but taking hiking boots and a handgun
8️⃣ Jason Thomas: 45-year-old chemical biologist at Novartis who went missing in late 2025 -leaving phone and wallet at home. His body was found in March in Lake Quannapowitt, Massachusetts
9️⃣ Nuno Loureino: leading Portuguese-born plasma physicist working as director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center. Killed at her home in December 2025
Monday, April 13, 2026
High ranking US scientists going missing...
Saturday, April 11, 2026
Mobile phone's blue light myth busted...
The blue light from your phone isn't ruining your sleep
Thomas Germain
BBC, Apr 06, 2026
For a decade, we've been told our screens are wrecking our sleep. The real culprit is far bigger than the glow from your phone.
I have spent the last few weeks strapping on a pair of special orange safety goggles three hours before bed. They're made of thick, uncomfortable plastic that casts the world in a dull amber glow, making it hard to see anything blue. But I don't stop there. I cover the windows with blackout curtains and switch off all my lamps, one by one. In their place, I exclusively light my apartment with candles. My sleep routine is deranged, but it's for an experiment. I found out what happens when you banish blue light.
The world has grown increasingly panicked about this photochromatic fiend over the past 10 years. We're told that our phones, TVs, computers, tablets and LED light bulbs expose us to a perverse amount of blue light. Supposedly, this ruins our sleep by disrupting the natural rhythms of daylight that influence our internal body clock. There's science to back some of this up, but recent studies and analysis suggests that things are a lot more complicated. In fact, chances are good that you've fallen for some serious misconceptions on this subject. Experts tell me it's unlikely that light from your phone is ruining your sleep.
The research is mixed. Those features designed to dial down blue light on your phone at bedtime, for example, are probably doing very little to improve your sleep. But the lighting of modern life really can have a huge effect on your sleep.
What would it take to make a change?
I wanted the truth. So, I called the experts and dove into the science.
And to see if I could spot the difference, I've plunged myself into the most extreme, blue-free evenings I could muster. I landed on practical advice that you can use – no dorky tinted goggles required. It could be the secret to a good night's sleep.
The blue screen of death?
The public freakout about blue light started with a study in 2014. Half of the 12 participants read on an iPad before bed.
The rest read physical books. The iPad users took longer to fall asleep, felt groggier the next day and produced less melatonin. The researchers said the culprit was the glow emitted from the iPad's LED screen, which produces a disproportionate amount of light in the upper, bluer end of the spectrum. Under specific circumstances, blue-enriched light disrupts the daily circadian rhythm – our body's natural pacemaker – that uses daylight to help determine when we start to feel tired. Subsequent research seemed to support the findings. Sounds simple, right? It's not.
"This was an incredibly deceptive piece of work," says Jamie Zeitzer, a professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences at Stanford University, who studies the effect of light on the circadian system. The science wasn't bad, he says, the problem is it brought people to bad conclusions.
It's true that our screens are bluer. Modern screens and light bulbs use LEDs, which cannot produce pure white light.
Instead, they use blue LEDs and cover some of them with a chemical called yellow phosphor. The blue and yellow mix together and trick your brain into seeing white, but extra blue always leaks out.
And blue light really can influence your sleep. Zeitzer says that's mostly because you have a light-sensitive protein in your eyes called melanopsin which plays a key role in your sleep system. "And melanopsin is a blue sensitive protein, which basically means that it is most sensitive to blue light," he says. Melanopsin reacts to other colours of light too, the effect of blue is just a bit stronger.
"But the amount of light emitted from our screens is really inconsequential," says Zeitzer. Your life doesn't match the conditions of many blue light studies. "We bring someone into the laboratory, and they are exposed to very dim light all day long. And then they are given a bright light stimulus," he says. Under those circumstances, blue light makes people go haywire, but it doesn't reflect typical experience of human life.
After years warnings and millions of people flipping on the blue light filters built into their phones, the latest science suggests screens are not the main culprit here after all. For example, a recent review of 11 different studies and found that the light from screens only delayed sleep by about nine minutes, at worst. Not zero, but not life altering, either.
The amount of blue light emitted by the screens of phones, laptops and tablets has also been shown to be tiny compared to the blue light we receive from the Sun – 24 hours-worth of blue light from digital devices totted up to less than one minute spent outdoors, according to one study. Other studies have shown it's not enough to affect levels of the hormones that control our sleep.
So why am I so tired all the time? Zeitzer and others told me there are lots of other ways that light, blue and otherwise, could be ruining my bedtime. If I really wanted to tackle the blue monster, it was going to take a serious lifestyle change.
Kind of blue
I was out for dinner as the Sun went down on day one of my experiment. Around 20:30, I said I needed to head home. It was time to hide from the light. Based on the advice I was getting from sleep specialists, my extreme bedtime prepping started long before I get under the covers.
My routine starts with an absurd pair of glasses. If you wear normal glasses, you've probably been offered special clear coatings that promise to filter blue light. Studies suggest they don't do much. Real blue-blocking glasses aren't sexy. Frankly, they aren't a realistic solution for most people, either.
The good ones have deep orange, red or amber lenses that wrap all the way around your eyes so light can't get in from the sides. Serious manufacturers offer a spectrum report that shows how much blue light gets in. "You shouldn't be able to see much blue," says Håvard Kallestad, director of the sleep and chronobiology research group at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
The special blue-light googles I have were made for people who work with lasers that need eye protection. I put them on and looked out the window. There's a store with a blue neon sign down the street. With my glasses on, the light from the sign vanished. Bullseye.
I sat down on the couch, thinking about the sacrifices I make for journalism. I scrolled through Instagram. It looked… orange. The whole point of what I'm doing is to see how light affects my sleep, so I didn't change anything about my phone, TV or computer habits. But the glasses are just the beginning.
"I think you need to turn your apartment into a cave," Kallestad says. "Just block light from entering and use candlelight."
Modern LED lights produce a ton of blue light. Old school incandescent bulbs make much less, but candles are almost blue-free.
It's never really dark where I live in New York. So I covered my windows with blackout curtains, with only my phone and a couple of flickering candles standing between me and the inky darkness. I wasn't sleepy yet. It was going to be a long couple of weeks.
How to un-blue yourself
Experts agree that what really matters is the dose of light of light you're getting through the day. For optimal sleep, you want lots of light in the morning and much less at night. Blue light counts more, but it's your total exposure that makes the real difference.
It turns out the solution starts the moment you wake up. Every morning during my test, I sat in front of a lamp that looks like a prop from a 1980s science fiction movie. It blasts bright light straight into my face while I drink my coffee. The lamp is small, so Kallestad says I need to sit as close to it as possible. It was not fun. The lamp is designed to treat seasonal depression, and the clinical temperature of the light is especially blue, which has been shown to increase alertness when you get it earlier in the day. But it's also priming my eyes to fend off the blue later that night.
"The more light that you get during the daytime, the less impact the light in the evening has," Zeitzer says. The pre-pandemic world exposed people to a lot more light than they realised. There's the Sun during a commute, the piercing fluorescent bulbs of an office, a walk to lunch. Now, so many of us roll out of bed and sit under the same lighting conditions until we go to sleep. Our bodies can't tell the difference between day and night.
Leaving the house will fix that faster than any lamp. Even on a grey overcast day, Zeitzer says you're probably getting around 10,000 lux (the measure of light intensity). A bright sunny day can hit 100,000 lux. By comparison, your living room it's probably around 100 lux. (And your phone tops out around a measly 50-80 lux, Zeitzer says, and it's less when you have the brightness down.)
"Go outside if you can, use the lamp if you have to," says Kallestad. Even a 30-minute walk in the morning makes a real difference (just don't forget sunscreen). And if you can get outside again after 15:00, Zeitzer says that's also surprisingly useful. It further anchors your body clock and directly reduces how sensitive you are to light in the evening.
If you work from home, another tip you can try is a bit counter-intuitive. Turn your lights up bright during the day and start switching them off in the evening. "The real key with light exposure is contrast," Zeitzer says.
So, if being glued to your screens keeps you stuck inside all day, away from the sleep-promoting glare of natural sunlight, that's bad news. But the blue light coming from those screens contributes little to the wider issue of our lifestyles. The real problem, Zeitzer says, is what we spend our time doing on our phones and laptops before bed.
"It is much more the content, rather than the light, that is keeping people awake from these devices," Zeitzer says. It can also depend on how sensitive you are to light in the first place – I might be more or less sensitive than you.
My blue period
I use a sleep tracker to monitor my rest. It's not good enough for real science, but it's a rough indication. The quality of my sleep didn't seem to change much during my experiment. But I did notice some differences. Towards the end of the
second week, I found myself a little more motivated to get into bed on time and it seemed easier to fall asleep. The amount of time I spent asleep didn't change in any meaningful way by the end of my experiment, but the time I feel asleep and got up in the morning was a little more consistent. Was this because I blocked blue light? Hard to say, but it felt like a big victory.
What I can tell you is I started to look forward to my candle evenings. It's possible this in itself could make a difference.
When something "becomes part of the pre-bed process, it can act as a very strong psychological cue to help remind your body of what you're supposed to be doing next", Zeitzer says.
The same goes for the auto-dimming features that limit some blue light on your phone. "It doesn't really work that well, but the one thing that it can do is that when you have one of these filters, or if you wear blue blocking glasses in the evening,
is that acts as kind of like a Pavlovian conditioning cue for some people. When the screen colour changes, or you put on your glasses, your brain starts to understand it is time to get ready for bed."
If you come by for a sleepover, you won't see me in the blue blocking glasses. It was a huge relief to give them up, but I might keep the candles.
Wednesday, March 25, 2026
Honoring Brandy Vaughan's Birthday
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Monday, February 23, 2026
Can social media age verification really protect kids?
As countries start enforcing new age-limit laws, platforms like Roblox use facial technology — but critics warn of privacy leaks and surveillance.
- Governments worldwide are requiring social media platforms to check the age of young users.
- Age verification methods are often inaccurate, and can easily be bypassed with VPNs and fake IDs.
- Age checks can compromise user privacy, increase surveillance, and exclude marginalized users.
Can social media age verification really protect kids?
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.”
Does social media ban under 16 work?
Does social media ban under 16 work?
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
Saturday, February 21, 2026
US on the brink of a major new war !
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.
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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).
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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.
Thursday, February 19, 2026
Secret US government surveillance sounds new alarm
Senator, who has repeatedly warned about secret US government surveillance, sounds new alarm over ‘CIA activities’
Zack Whittaker
Feb 6, 2026
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.