The theft of Native American children...

Deb Haaland is investigating the history of hundreds of boarding schools that tried to “Kill the Indian, save the man.”

Reckoning with the theft of Native American children
By Fabiola Cineas
Vox, Jul 27, 2021

Last month, Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland announced that she will lead a national investigation into the more than 365 American Indian boarding schools that forced Native children to “assimilate” to American culture. Between 1869 and 1978, the federal government removed hundreds of thousands of Native children from their families and placed them in schools where they were stripped of their language, subjected to harsh punishments, and forced to adopt Christianity and its values.

By 1926, nearly 83 percent of Indian school-age children were attending boarding schools across the country.

Haaland’s investigation into the “generational impact” of these schools comes as children’s remains were recently found at former boarding school sites in Canada — the Cowessess First Nation found 751 unmarked graves at the site of a former school in Saskatchewan; the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation found the remains of more than 200 people, mostly children, at another school in British Columbia. In the US this month, the remains of nine children from the Carlisle Indian School, the notorious Pennsylvania boarding school that housed some 10,000 students, were finally returned to their South Dakota tribe.

Haaland, whose grandparents were taken from their families as children and placed into these schools, sees the investigation as an opportunity to uncover history at a time when some in America want to reckon with the truth of our country’s institutions and others want to obscure it. “To address the intergenerational impact of Indian boarding schools and to promote spiritual and emotional healing in our communities, we must shed light on the unspoken traumas of the past no matter how hard it will be,” Haaland said.

Whether Haaland’s investigation will be able to bring healing to Native American families that have suffered as a result of the US government’s forced displacement is left to be seen. “As a Native person who’s grown up in the system, I don’t know what the secretary of the interior can do to give me my life back,” Jacki Thompson Rand, a professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, told Vox. “But it’s a start.”

Thompson Rand talked to Vox about America’s tragic boarding school history, its irreparable harm to Native families, and the promise she sees in Haaland’s announcement. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Fabiola Cineas

Many people are saying Haaland’s investigation is a first step toward actually reckoning with a washed-over history in the US — how the federal government took Native American children away from their families and forced them into boarding schools. What’s your reaction to that?

Jacki Thompson Rand

What Haaland is doing right now is focusing on the tangible — can we find children’s graves? And that’s completely laudable. It’s sort of an obvious first step, especially since the Indigenous communities in Canada have taken it upon themselves to find these graves. No one did it for them. They are doing it with their own equipment and labor, going around these old schools and using ground-penetrating radar and making these discoveries by themselves.

In the US, Haaland is going to scoop up all the federal records related to the boarding schools and start going through those, and they’ll be very revealing. They will tell us a lot more than even someone like myself knows. But it will also show us a picture of US-Indian relations in the late 19th century at a particular time as United States-Indian policy enters the phase of assimilation.

US-Indian relations was first about removal, then it was about the Plains Wars in the 19th century [the series of conflicts between Native Americans and the US over control of land], then it was about creating reservations, which were horrible places. And then it was about starting the assimilation policy, a period which continued into the 20th century. “Starving the Indian to save the man,” as Richard Henry Pratt, who founded the Carlisle Indian School, said.

Assimilation is sometimes used by non-Native people in a benign sense. But when you’re talking about destroying people, identity, and cultural practices to somehow absorb them into white society, nothing seems benign about that.

Fabiola Cineas

A key part of the country’s assimilation policy for Native Americans was stealing kids and placing them in boarding schools. What kinds of conditions did the children face at these schools?

Jacki Thompson Rand

I know from studying this and from my family’s oral history that there were all kinds of violence taking place against these children. My mother and her siblings came from a family of Choctaw speakers. But in her generation, the language was lost because within the walls of the boarding school you were prevented from speaking your language.

There’s sexual abuse. Violence by children upon children was encouraged. I know specifically of an instance where a boy in one of the boys’ schools was made to run a gauntlet composed of other boys. So you can just imagine what this did to their mental health — the punishment, the shaming — and if you were a child who had any spirit at all, they made it their business to take it right out of you.

Fabiola Cineas

The remains of thousands of children have been found at the sites where these schools existed. Most recently, remains have been found in Canada, but remains have been found at the sites of US schools as well. Why were children buried at the boarding schools to begin with?

Jacki Thompson Rand

Illness was one thing. And I’m totally not on firm ground here, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were some suicides happening. The forms of punishment were so extreme that you can imagine children died as a result. For example, at Hampton Institute in Virginia, which was kind of the first Indian boarding school (though they don’t call it this because it was established for free Black students), they used to punish children by putting them in the basement in isolation.

I think the record would show that these schools weren’t receiving sufficient resources for the children. I can imagine children going hungry, children not getting medical care, and children suffering really unspeakable consequences of sexual abuse. I can imagine children being killed.

Children weren’t always on school grounds, either. They had something called a “letting out.” In the summertime, they would farm children out to white households and boys out to workplaces. They would be in the hands of other people without any kind of accountability as free labor. Girls would work in the house as servants and domestic help; boys would work in some kind of work environment like farming where they’re not being protected in any way. They were exposed to lots of vulnerabilities. And remember, the whole time they really are being taught that being Native was a source of shame.

Fabiola Cineas

Can you speak to how global this is?

Jacki Thompson Rand

To paint a global picture, this whole boarding school thing was repeated in Australia to the Aborigines, in Canada, and in New Zealand with the Māori. It’s kind of like the colonialist playbook. But I think what I would say is that, as people have cited, the Native suicide rate is really high. It’s astronomical across all the different populations.

Mental health issues are very big in our community. People like to talk about alcohol, but actually there’s a really strong wave of sobriety in Native communities now. When I look at these suicide figures, though, I see historical continuity. I don’t see it as a manifestation of something modern. I see it as something that’s a manifestation of deep historical trauma.

People need to make the connection. This isn’t some kind of isolated history chapter — that it happened and now it’s better. It’s not better. We’re all still paying for it. But you can see that the pattern over time is disappearing Native people; they’re disappearing our nations. It’s literally a physical intervention in our population to break us up and damage tribal nations.

Fabiola Cineas

Is America ready to hear about what Haaland finds?

Jacki Thompson Rand

What Haaland finds will be a history lesson for people who don’t know it yet. This will be a history lesson about how the United States took Native people’s land. How they destroyed or attempted to destroy their autonomy, including political autonomy, and made the effort to destroy their culture. What could be more basic than to take the children?

What could be more harmful than taking the children?

Sometimes people will say to me, “Oh, my god, I didn’t know this happened in our country.” Well, this is what colonialism is. This is what it takes to subdue a people. And this is what it takes to carry out ethnocide. This is what it takes to take hold of a territory.

Haaland’s plan is a starting point. But as a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma who has grown up in the system, I don’t know what the secretary of the interior could do to give me my life back. My mother and her siblings are from Oklahoma and were all taken from their family and placed into the boarding school system starting in the late 1920s, and they remained there throughout their childhood.

I don’t know what anyone could do to have given my mother her life back. She died. In fact, all her siblings are dead now. When my cousins and I get together, we still have conversations about these three siblings and the really deep sadness that they all carried and how much we wanted things to be different for them. We tried to give our parents happiness and wellness. We all tried really hard to make them proud of us.

Fabiola Cineas

That hits really hard, this idea that the government that inflicted harm upon your community can’t undo the terror they caused.

Jacki Thompson Rand

Yeah, and there’s a deeply embedded resistance to this story or to having any kind of accountability for it. We have never received a full-on no-equivocation serious apology for all the destruction that came from establishing the United States. By the end of the 19th century, there were 250,000 Native people left in this country. If that isn’t genocide, I don’t know what is.

We have never even had a profoundly serious acknowledgment that the United States is built on stolen land and the free labor of Black people. This little capitalist miracle would not have taken off without free labor and free land.

I was not really supposed to be here. But all along the way I’ve had access to resources — because by crazy circumstances I was able to go to college and then get a PhD. But many Native people don’t have that. There’s this idea that you “stay stuck.” You feel stuck and you try to figure out where you can get help. I can relate to that.

Fabiola Cineas

You told me about you, your mother, her siblings, your tribe. How does what they experienced impact you and your children? How does this trauma continue to show up?

Jacki Thompson Rand

I was reading a news article about the graves found in Canada in which someone commented that “everybody pays for this.” And that’s true because these children were institutionalized and they weren’t shown how to have fully human relationships. They didn’t have models for adulthood or for parenting. When they took children from a family, they frequently split them up between schools, as in the case of my mother and her siblings. The impact was really quite devastating.

The damage was profound, and it shows up in different ways. They get on with their lives — they have accomplishments and they get things done — but there’s also fallout. In my mom’s case, severe alcoholism and mental health issues.

But then at the same time, my Uncle Tony became a Marine and he served in three wars. He was a highly respected person. And my Aunt Rosalie remained in Oklahoma and raised her family in severe poverty.

They all have different stories, but I think to answer that question of how do you come back — it’s through the next generation. Their children experienced being reared by people who were not taught how to be parents, neither in the traditional way or in any kind of healthy way. That’s why we talk about intergenerational trauma. We were raised by people who are fundamentally injured and carry that forward.

We, the children, come to the realization that we don’t have to be ashamed to be American Indians. We know that there’s something wrong. We learn our histories and see that what our family is going through is about something bigger. It is a part of history and a long emotional and psychological journey that we can see in retrospect.

Ultimately, we come to understand the context in which our parents were injured and come to a place where it’s more about forgiveness and compassion for our parents, each other, and ourselves.

Fabiola Cineas

Is there anything bringing you hope right now and making you feel like we’re moving in the right direction?

Jacki Thompson Rand

Oh, yeah. I look at Native people of a certain age now, and I can see how my experiences as a child are not the experiences that these young Native people have. The politics of the younger people sometimes don’t entirely match up with my sensibilities — and that’s not at all a criticism; there is so much political action among Indigenous students, Indigenous young people.

More and more of us are getting college degrees and going into various fields, and we carry our indigeneity into those fields. We’re starting to have people in Congress and in state politics. Our tribes are just much more savvy than the tribes of even 50 years ago. They’ve learned a lot since the era of self-determination [the process in which Native people formed their own governments], which started in the late 1960s.

All of these things are very complicated because you’re working with US institutions. It’s hard to be very optimistic about anything that comes out of Washington right now because of the state of our politics. I hope the government will recognize the significance of these boarding schools in the history of American Indian communities, but also in the history of US-Indian affairs.

What I’m really all about right now is changing the national narrative to one that helps us understand the United States in a fuller way. Let’s move away from this valorous story of nation-building to one that takes in everything. Let’s get rid of feel-good stories that gloss over all the pain, tragedy, exploitation, and destruction. I’m here to tell you that students can take it.

Olympic Medal Table Explains The World...

Note: This story was originally published during the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro and has been updated for the Tokyo Olympics this summer.

How The Olympic Medal Table Explains The World
Greg Myre
NPR, July 28, 2021

Imagine a Martian trying to make sense of this world, and the only available data are the Summer Olympic medal tables from the past century.

How much would that explain? Quite a lot, it turns out. In fact, it would be challenging to find anything else so concise that says so much about the past century as the tables below.

The four bar charts show the countries that usually win the largest share of medals — the United States, China, Russia and Germany — and how they have performed since 1912.

The charts pinpoint the highs and lows of each nation not just inside the Olympic arena, but in terms of wars won and lost, economic growth and decline, and a nation's overall standing in the world.

And much more. For starters, you can tell instantly when the two world wars were raging, forcing the cancellation of the Olympics in 1916, 1940 and 1944.

Another point that leaps out is the remarkable consistency of the U.S. compared with other leading nations. The U.S. routinely won 15% to 20% of the medals awarded during most of the 20th century.

That figure has been edging down over the past few decades, a reflection that the Games have gone from a Western-dominated event to a more globalized competition featuring the rise of many developing nations.

In other words, a lot like world politics and the global economy in general.

Still, U.S. athletes have taken home at least 10% of the medals in every Summer Olympics in which they took part, and they're expected to be above 10% again in Tokyo. The Americans won 12% of the medals (121 of 971) in Rio de Janeiro in 2016, more than any other country, as has been the case since 1996.

Two U.S. performances broke the mold — 1980 and 1984 — and they also signaled the political turmoil of those Cold War years. In 1980, the U.S. boycotted the Moscow Games because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan a year earlier.

And in 1984, the U.S. had a huge medal haul in Los Angeles, in part because the Soviets and their communist allies returned the favored and boycotted the U.S.-hosted Games.

China's absence from the Olympics for most of the 20th century reflects a nation roiled by political upheavals for decades, followed by an inward-looking communist government. But China began opening to the world around 1980 and took part in its first Summer Olympics in 1984, where it made a strong initial impression.

China's performance has continued to surge dramatically, and it now takes home close to 10% of the medals. When Beijing hosted the Games in 2008, China won more golds than any other country (48), though not as many total medals as the U.S. (100 for China, compared with 112 for the U.S.).

Starting from zero three decades ago, China now has the second-strongest Olympic team — and the world's second-biggest economy — trailing only the U.S. on both counts.

Czarist Russia and its successor, the Soviet Union, were Olympic nonentities until the Cold War commenced after World War II. The Olympics then became an all-out competition between the Soviets and the Americans, with athletics as a proxy war. The stakes were international prestige, and winning more medals buttressed claims of a superior political and economic system.

The Soviets invested enormous resources in Olympic sports and quickly surpassed the U.S., winning the most medals at every Summer Games from 1956 to 1992, except for 1968, when the Americans edged them (and in 1984, when the Soviets stayed home).

The "Soviet Union" even topped the charts in 1992, though the country had collapsed and ceased to exist a year earlier. Twelve of the 15 newly independent former-Soviet states were allowed to compete as the Unified Team in those Games.

The Russians have come down a few notches since then, and the 2016 Games in Rio de Janeiro reflected this. Nearly 120 Russian athletes — close to a third of the team — were banned because of a doping scandal. Nonetheless, Russia had the fourth-largest medal haul, with a total of 56.

One footnote: If you add the medals won by the 15 former Soviet states, they still top every other country these days, though they also send many more athletes than any one country.

Germany was an Olympic powerhouse until World War I knocked it out of the Games after 1912, and the country didn't return until 1928. It came back with a vengeance in 1936 as Adolf Hitler turned the Games into a Nazi propaganda spectacle.

But after that, Germany was gone again until 1952 as it rebuilt from the ashes of World War II. The Germans then made a second roaring comeback as two nations, East and West Germany.

Communist East Germany built something akin to a sports factory, winning an astounding number of medals with performances that were eventually shown to be heavily fueled by doping.

Still, when Germany reunited in 1990, the conventional wisdom was that the country would win so often that the German national anthem would become the Olympic theme song.

It didn't work out that way. Germany still performs well and is a leader among Western European nations. However, its share of medals has steadily declined — a lot like Europe's political and economic clout on the world stage.

So there you have it, a century of world history in four charts.

But there's more. As we pored over the tables, we were intrigued by the overachievers and underachievers around the globe.

The chart is self-explanatory, but it's so striking we'll reinforce it here.

New Zealand and Jamaica clearly punched far above their weight at the 2016 Games, just as they have done in the past.

In Jamaica's case, its blazing sprinters brought them Olympic glory, led by Usain Bolt. The country of just 2.9 million people won 11 medals.

New Zealand took home medals in a wide range of sports, including rowing, sailing, track and field, canoeing, cycling, golf, rugby and shooting. With a population of just 4.7 million, the country claimed 18 medals.

If you combine these two countries with three other smallish nations that excelled — the Netherlands (19 medals), Azerbaijan (18 medals) and Denmark (15 medals) — you have five nations with a combined population of 40 million that won 81 medals. If those five were a single, medium-size nation, they would have had the second-highest medal count.

At the other end of the scale, five of the world's most populous countries (India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Nigeria and Bangladesh) have more than 2.1 billion people — almost 30% of the world's total — and won just six medals combined in Rio.

Better luck in Tokyo, guys.

True cost of shipping across the ocean...

 Walmart and other retail giants import millions of goods on polluting cargo ships.

What’s the true cost of shipping all your junk across the ocean?
Maria Gallucci
Grist, July 23, 2021

Take a look around your home and you’ll likely find plenty of goods that traveled by cargo ship to your doorstep. A set of IKEA plates made in China. A dresser full of pandemic-era loungewear, ordered on Target and made in Guatemala, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam. Tracing the impact on the environment from shipping any of these goods is incredibly tricky to do. The data — if you can find it — involves many companies, countries, and cargo carriers. Such obscurity makes it hard to count the full cost of our consumption. But a recent report helps unravel some of the mystery.

Two environmental groups, Pacific Environment and Stand.earth, worked with prominent maritime researchers to track goods imported by the 15 largest retail giants in the United States. They then quantified the greenhouse gas emissions and air pollutants associated with those imports, usually ferried across the oceans on cargo ships running on dirty bunker fuel. In 2019, importing some 3.8 million shipping containers’ worth of cargo generated as much carbon dioxide emissions as three coal-fired power plants. These shipments also produced as much smog-forming nitrous oxide as 27.4 million cars and trucks do in a year, according to the report.

“Our report affirms that these retail giants’ dirty ocean shipping is fueling the climate crisis,” said Madeline Rose, climate campaign director for Pacific Environment and the study’s lead author.

The study is the first to trace retailers’ shipping-related emissions, and it used data from a separate, larger project to track the industry’s emissions that’s set to launch in October. The findings are likely just a snapshot of the true environmental toll: Researchers said they could only verify emissions for one-fifth of shipments by the 15 retailers, owing to a lack of data and the companies’ use of shell companies and franchises.

The largest retail company in the United States, Walmart, was also the biggest polluter of the bunch. In 2019, Walmart imported enough goods to equal 893,000 shipping containers, resulting in some 3.7 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions.

Maritime shipping is a crucial part of the global economy. About 80 percent of everything bought and sold travels on oil-burning, seafaring freighters at some point. All that shipping activity accounts for nearly 3 percent of the world’s annual greenhouse gas emissions, as well as a significant share of air pollution in coastal communities. The International Maritime Organization, which regulates the industry, has recently adopted measures to curb cargo ship emissions and reduce fuel consumption. But experts say stronger regulations and bigger investments are needed to steer the industry away from fossil fuels and toward cleaner technologies, such as hydrogen fuel cells, batteries, and wind-harnessing devices.

Another way to spur companies to action is through accounting — figuring out how many emissions are produced by which activity, from which company, at which location. In the world of ocean freight, a shipment of cargo can pass through many hands and even owners between the time it leaves a factory and reaches a warehouse on the other side of the planet. The goal of the new research, Rose said, is “to bring baseline environmental and public health accounting oversight to this incredibly murky issue.”

For the report, the environmental groups commissioned University Maritime Advisory Services, or UMAS, a well-regarded research consultancy in London. UMAS has developed a proprietary tool for estimating fuel consumption and emissions from individual ships and is also a partner in the SEA-CASE project at the Stockholm Environment Institute. That initiative has gathered billions of records on vessel movements, detailed shipment lists, import and export data, and other information from big economies like the United States, Brazil, and China.

“Once you combine all of that data, it’s a very powerful thing,” said Javier Godar, a senior research fellow at the Stockholm Environment Institute, who was not directly involved in writing the July report. “You can really start looking at responsibility for those emissions.”

After Walmart, the next top polluter in the report was Ashley Furniture, which imported 270,000 containers and generated over 2.2 million metric tons of CO2. Next up was Target, with some 600,000 containers and over 2 million metric tons of CO2. Researchers could only track some 123,000 container imports for Amazon, a company whose 2019 revenues topped $280 billion. Those imports were responsible for more than 390,000 metric tons of emissions.

Representatives from Walmart and Amazon didn’t comment directly on the study but provided information on their companies’ efforts to curb emissions from their supply chains. In response to a request for comment, a Target spokesperson said the company is committed to “reducing our shipping carbon footprint,” as it works toward becoming a “net zero enterprise” in its operations and supply chain by 2040.

A spokesperson from IKEA, which came in seventh place for CO2 output, said addressing emissions from cargo ships is “a significant topic” for the Swedish furniture giant. Ocean shipping accounts for about 40 percent of IKEA’s total carbon emissions from transportation. The spokesperson said the company is working to reduce its carbon footprint from every shipment by 70 percent on average by 2030. To that end, IKEA participated in a 2019 pilot project to test biofuels in an ocean-going container ship.

Researchers who worked on the retail-focused report said it took them months to scour and analyze data. And it’s taken years to develop the statistical models and build the database that underpin the recent findings.

Godar said his ship tracking efforts began in 2014 with the launch of Trase, an online database that follows the flow of agricultural commodities that are driving deforestation in tropical countries. A United Nations report might show the total amount of soy shipped from Brazil. With Trase, however, the idea is to discern whether that soy came from, say, illegal logging in the Amazon rainforest or a legal farm elsewhere, and then follow that to the final customer.

Researchers are increasingly able to access such valuable information as more companies keep records in digital form, Godar said, and as the ability to “scrape” data from the internet improves. Still, there are limits. Most data isn’t publicly available, and it’s expensive for researchers to buy. Godar hasn’t been able to get a hold of shipping-related data from the European Union and other countries, which leaves an informational black hole.

A beta version of the SEA-CASE platform will launch this fall and be free for anyone to access. A preview over Zoom showed a flurry of yellow lines connecting continents, each one revealing a detailed breakdown of a particular voyage in 2019. A casual user could, for example, trace coffee imports by Starbucks into the United States, then see the carbon emissions associated with the shipments.

Ultimately, this kind of information could help consumers push retailers to cut carbon emissions from their suppliers, said Gary Cook, the global climate campaigns director for Stand.earth. Cook previously led Greenpeace campaigns challenging tech giants like Facebook and Apple to stop powering their data centers with coal-fired electricity and replace it with renewable energy.

“Companies can move very fast when motivated,” he said. “It’s to their advantage to show their loyal customers they care about the climate and are taking action.”

United States is the single biggest hacker on the planet...

Absolutely the biggest hacker is the US. They stage these ransomware attacks, collect the money and blame China and Russia, without evidence! With its spies everywhere, the US has an army of hackers and enlisted Israel to aid it with its spyware attacks on journalists, politicians, businessmen and activists! Total surveillance across the globe! Real dictatorship!!!

The United States is still far and away the single biggest hacker on the planet – Pegasus or no Pegasus

29 Jul, 2021

 

Yet another digital espionage scandal has conveniently diverted attention away from the activities of the world’s busiest online spies. Does that explain the US media’s propaganda against the malicious exploits of a core US ally?

It’s that time of year again. When the world loses it over a spy scandal, it gets endless wall-to-wall coverage, pundits shout at each other on TV, governments release boilerplate statements that use words without saying anything – and in a few days or weeks, it all blows over, and everyone goes home.

This time, it is spyware called Pegasus, by Israeli company NSO Group, which can apparently provide the attacker access to everything inside a phone. Even back in 2017, security firm Kaspersky called it “the most sophisticated attack ever seen on any endpoint.” 

Apple, in particular, prides itself on its security. So much so that it doesn’t even allow antivirus apps[M3] on its app store, since the built-in security of iOS is apparently supposed to be enough. Whoops:

“Pegasus can collect emails, call records, social media posts, user passwords, contact lists, pictures, videos, sound recordings and browsing histories, according to security researchers and NSO marketing materials. The spyware can activate cameras or microphones to capture fresh images and recordings. It can listen to calls and voicemails. It can collect location logs of where a user has been and also determine where that user is now, along with data indicating whether the person is stationary or, if moving, in which direction.”

It seems there is almost nothing this weapon cannot collect. Or as Kaspersky put it: “We’re talking total surveillance.”

This time, even countries like India and Morocco, not exactly known for public hacking adventures, have been implicated as customers of the spyware. It has morphed into a huge public scandal in India, quickly becoming the top news story. Indian pundits are livid, lamenting the loss of India’s ‘democracy’. Some are concerned about how the revelations and India’s ‘authoritarian turn’ will affect ties with the US, a key ally. That the US itself is the most warmongering regime on the planet and provides military support for 73% of the world’s dictatorships doesn’t seem to affect the argument.

Hypocrisy Über Alles 

It is perhaps not surprising that the US – a nation that otherwise loves giving its opinion on everything under the sun – is keeping mum about the whole affair, preferring instead to work behind the scenes. Few nations conduct more cyberwarfare than the superpower itself of course – with even the most ardent US propagandists thumping their chests about its capabilities. 

The superpower is as much the top dog of cyberwarfare as it is of physical warfare. According to studies, the US has been at war for 226 of its 244 years of existence – and has killed millions of people just since WWII. The nation itself was of course founded on the near-complete annihilation of indigenous people – a genocide so massive that it literally altered the planet’s climate. In the last 20 years alone, the US and its allies have bombed the Middle East/North Africa region at the rate of 46 bombs per day – that’s almost two every hour, every single day, for 20 years. The brutality is mirrored at home: US police forces murder an average of 2.7 civilians every day. 

If the US regime can care so little about committing massacres and genocides against human beings – it will hardly have second thoughts about hacking computers and mobile phones. 

US savagery is matched by its hypocrisy. Two-facedness and psychological projection remain central to its foreign policy – as central as violence and coercion. Yet, it portrays itself as the world’s policeman, lecturing other nations on human rights and holding them ‘accountable’. It is aided by the world’s most sophisticated propaganda network – also known as the US media – which remains its greatest weapon. 

The US frequently accuses Russia of hacking everything under the sun – from its electrical grid to its elections. These hypocritical accusations increased in frequency after the Snowden revelations in 2013, since they exposed the extent of America’s own hacking efforts. 

The hypocrisy often gets comical. The US has been hacking Chinese networks for decades – so it accuses China of hacking US networks. The US spies on Huawei – so it accuses Huawei of spying on the US. The US exploits backdoors – so it accuses Huawei of exploiting backdoors. The US hacks Microsoft – so it accuses China of hacking Microsoft. All with little or no evidence of course. 

The ‘democratic’ regime frequently lies to its own people about the extent of its surveillance. The internet itself started decades ago as a US military project. Google was born from the US regime’s surveillance requirements. Even today, the regime exercises control over much of the global internet, including the .com domain – a power it is all too happy to abuse. It recently seized three dozen websites it didn’t like, including well-known Iranian broadcaster Press TV, forcing it to switch to the .ir domain instead. No wonder China and Russia keep talking about cyber sovereignty; you never know when the US-controlled internet will be weaponized against you. 

With nations like these, who needs hackers?

The Snowden revelations of 2013 revealed the heavy price the US regime is willing to pay for control – both over its people and over the narrative. Apparently, America not only spies on Americans, it has backdoor access to the most commonly used internet platforms and telecommunications networks. It doesn’t hack them because it doesn’t need to. 

Sometimes it is a backdoor in the code itself, and sometimes it is a metaphorical backdoor where tech companies secretly cooperate with the US regime (while peddling woke PR about ‘freedoms’ and ‘privacy’). Of course, none of these companies’ public statements can be trusted or verified. 

For example, the infamous Gmail hack of 2009-10, which was blamed on Chinese hackers and led to Google’s exit from China, was due to a backdoor that Google had created for the NSA to spy on its users. Amusingly, it was this same backdoor that the hackers exploited to gain the same access. 

This is not uncommon. US tech giants are constantly in bed with US intelligence – but they are forbidden from talking about the extent of their relationship due to gag orders. Even more amusing is that the surveillance tools and opportunities created by US intelligence often end up being used by its enemies – just like its physical weapons. 

One backdoor closes, another opens

The recent Pegasus revelations must be seen in this context. Israel and the US are often partners in crime – both digitally and physically. The US regime has few problems or qualms spying on not just its own people, but other nations and their leaders as well (including its own allies). But what explains the recent Western propaganda push against Pegasus and the Israeli NSO Group? 

It is unlikely that the US media would openly criticize NSO Group and demonize it without the US regime’s consent or direction. It is even less likely that Amazon, of all companies, would immediately shut down its infrastructure without a nod from the regime. Equally unlikely is that Israel itself would order a highly unusual probe into the company without US pressure. 

One reason could be that the US is no longer willing to allow downstream access to sophisticated hacking tools. In essence, Pegasus ‘democratizes’ spying for any nation willing to pay for it. Israel has no reservations in allowing NSO to sell Pegasus to just about anyone (it must approve all sales since Pegasus is classified as a ‘weapon’; companies such as NSO Group are technically weapons manufacturers). 

It is possible that the US asked Israel to stop the weapon’s sales and it refused; after all, it earns millions of dollars from selling it. This would not be the first time Israel has defied its benefactor’s wishes – only for the US to often double down and show the Zionist regime its place in the pecking order. The relationship between the US and Israel is far more complicated than the simplistic clichés espoused by Western propaganda. 

At least US leaders will be happy that, for once, other nations are in the crosshairs for hacking, and not the US itself (another reason it could have subtly encouraged the propaganda). As usual, the regime has seized on the scandal to portray itself as the savior. It has already started weaponizing the revelations; an anonymous regime official leaked to the gullible Indian media that there was “growing concern” in Washington about India’s authoritarian turn. This is increasingly becoming a common talking point among Indian pundits. Apparently, the nation that kills millions in wars and spies on the whole planet is concerned that another nation is becoming too authoritarian. 

The scandal has global ramifications – 24 countries have been caught up so far. Morocco is even suing the NGOs that spearheaded the original story. More revelations will likely be forthcoming. Pegasus is clearly not done neighing – which should give Western pundits much more to bray about.

Maitreya Bhakal is an Indian commentator who writes about China, India, the US, and global issues. Follow him on Twitter @MaitreyaBhakal

The Military Origins of Facebook

Facebook’s growing role in the ever-expanding surveillance and “pre-crime” apparatus of the national security state demands new scrutiny of the company’s origins and its products as they relate to a former, controversial DARPA-run surveillance program that was essentially analogous to what is currently the world’s largest social network.

The Military Origins of Facebook
by Whitney Webb
April 12, 2021

In mid-February, Daniel Baker, a US veteran described by the media as “anti-Trump, anti-government, anti-white supremacists, and anti-police,” was charged by a Florida grand jury with two counts of “transmitting a communication in interstate commerce containing a threat to kidnap or injure.”

The communication in question had been posted by Baker on Facebook, where he had created an event page to organize an armed counter-rally to one planned by Donald Trump supporters at the Florida capital of Tallahassee on January 6. “If you are afraid to die fighting the enemy, then stay in bed and live. Call all of your friends and Rise Up!,” Baker had written on his Facebook event page.

Baker’s case is notable as it is one of the first “precrime” arrests based entirely on social media posts—the logical conclusion of the Trump administration’s, and now Biden administration’s, push to normalize arresting individuals for online posts to prevent violent acts before they can happen. From the increasing sophistication of US intelligence/military contractor Palantir’s predictive policing programs to the formal announcement of the Justice Department’s Disruption and Early Engagement Program in 2019 to Biden’s first budget, which contains $111 million for pursuing and managing “increasing domestic terrorism caseloads,” the steady advance toward a precrime-centered “war on domestic terror” has been notable under every post-9/11 presidential administration.

This new so-called war on domestic terror has actually resulted in many of these types of posts on Facebook. And, while Facebook has long sought to portray itself as a “town square” that allows people from across the world to connect, a deeper look into its apparently military origins and continual military connections reveals that the world’s largest social network was always intended to act as a surveillance tool to identify and target domestic dissent.

Part 1 of this two-part series on Facebook and the US national-security state explores the social media network’s origins and the timing and nature of its rise as it relates to a controversial military program that was shut down the same day that Facebook launched. The program, known as LifeLog, was one of several controversial post-9/11 surveillance programs pursued by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) that threatened to destroy privacy and civil liberties in the United States while also seeking to harvest data for producing “humanized” artificial intelligence (AI).

As this report will show, Facebook is not the only Silicon Valley giant whose origins coincide closely with this same series of DARPA initiatives and whose current activities are providing both the engine and the fuel for a hi-tech war on domestic dissent.

DARPA’s Data Mining for “National Security” and to “Humanize” AI

In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, DARPA, in close collaboration with the US intelligence community (specifically the CIA), began developing a “precrime” approach to combatting terrorism known as Total Information Awareness or TIA. The purpose of TIA was to develop an “all-seeing” military-surveillance apparatus. The official logic behind TIA was that invasive surveillance of the entire US population was necessary to prevent terrorist attacks, bio-terrorism events, and even naturally occurring disease outbreaks. The architect of TIA, and the man who led it during its relatively brief existence, was John Poindexter, best known for being Ronald Reagan’s National Security Advisor during the Iran-Contra affair and for being convicted of five felonies in relation to that scandal. A less well-known activity of Iran-Contra figures like Poindexter and Oliver North was their development of the Main Core database to be used in “continuity of government” protocols. Main Core was used to compile a list of US dissidents and “potential troublemakers” to be dealt with if the COG protocols were ever invoked. These protocols could be invoked for a variety of reasons, including widespread public opposition to a US military intervention abroad, widespread internal dissent, or a vaguely defined moment of “national crisis” or “time of panic.” Americans were not informed if their name was placed on the list, and a person could be added to the list for merely having attended a protest in the past, for failing to pay taxes, or for other, “often trivial,” behaviors deemed “unfriendly” by its architects in the Reagan administration. In light of this, it was no exaggeration when New York Times columnist William Safire remarked that, with TIA, “Poindexter is now realizing his twenty-year dream: getting the ‘data-mining’ power to snoop on every public and private act of every American.”

The TIA program met with considerable citizen outrage after it was revealed to the public in early 2003. TIA’s critics included the American Civil Liberties Union, which claimed that the surveillance effort would “kill privacy in America” because “every aspect of our lives would be catalogued,” while several mainstream media outlets warned that TIA was “fighting terror by terrifying US citizens.” As a result of the pressure, DARPA changed the program’s name to Terrorist Information Awareness to make it sound less like a national-security panopticon and more like a program aiming specifically at terrorists in the post-9/11 era. The TIA projects were not actually closed down, however, with most moved to the classified portfolios of the Pentagon and US intelligence community. Some became intelligence funded and guided private-sector endeavors, such as Peter Thiel’s Palantir, while others resurfaced years later under the guise of combatting the COVID-19 crisis. Soon after TIA was initiated, a similar DARPA program was taking shape under the direction of a close friend of Poindexter’s, DARPA program manager Douglas Gage. Gage’s project, LifeLog, sought to “build a database tracking a person’s entire existence” that included an individual’s relationships and communications (phone calls, mail, etc.), their media-consumption habits, their purchases, and much more in order to build a digital record of “everything an individual says, sees, or does.” LifeLog would then take this unstructured data and organize it into “discreet episodes” or snapshots while also “mapping out relationships, memories, events and experiences.”

LifeLog, per Gage and supporters of the program, would create a permanent and searchable electronic diary of a person’s entire life, which DARPA argued could be used to create next-generation “digital assistants” and offer users a “near-perfect digital memory.” Gage insisted, even after the program was shut down, that individuals would have had “complete control of their own data-collection efforts” as they could “decide when to turn the sensors on or off and decide who will share the data.” In the years since then, analogous promises of user control have been made by the tech giants of Silicon Valley, only to be broken repeatedly for profit and to feed the government’s domestic-surveillance apparatus.

The information that LifeLog gleaned from an individual’s every interaction with technology would be combined with information obtained from a GPS transmitter that tracked and documented the person’s location, audio-visual sensors that recorded what the person saw and said, as well as biomedical monitors that gauged the person’s health. Like TIA, LifeLog was promoted by DARPA as potentially supporting “medical research and the early detection of an emerging epidemic.”

Critics in mainstream media outlets and elsewhere were quick to point out that the program would inevitably be used to build profiles on dissidents as well as suspected terrorists. Combined with TIA’s surveillance of individuals at multiple levels, LifeLog went farther by “adding physical information (like how we feel) and media data (like what we read) to this transactional data.” One critic, Lee Tien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, warned at the time that the programs that DARPA was pursuing, including LifeLog, “have obvious, easy paths to Homeland Security deployments.”

At the time, DARPA publicly insisted that LifeLog and TIA were not connected, despite their obvious parallels, and that LifeLog would not be used for “clandestine surveillance.” However, DARPA’s own documentation on LifeLog noted that the project “will be able . . . to infer the user’s routines, habits and relationships with other people, organizations, places and objects, and to exploit these patterns to ease its task,” which acknowledged its potential use as a tool of mass surveillance.

In addition to the ability to profile potential enemies of the state, LifeLog had another goal that was arguably more important to the national-security state and its academic partners—the “humanization” and advancement of artificial intelligence. In late 2002, just months prior to announcing the existence of LifeLog, DARPA released a strategy document detailing development of artificial intelligence by feeding it with massive floods of data from various sources. The post-9/11 military-surveillance projects—LifeLog and TIA being only two of them—offered quantities of data that had previously been unthinkable to obtain and that could potentially hold the key to achieving the hypothesized
“technological singularity.” The 2002 DARPA document even discusses DARPA’s effort to create a brain-machine interface that would feed human thoughts directly into machines to advance AI by keeping it constantly awash in freshly mined data. One of the projects outlined by DARPA, the Cognitive Computing Initiative, sought to develop sophisticated artificial intelligence through the creation of an “enduring personalized cognitive assistant,” later termed the Perceptive Assistant that Learns, or PAL. PAL, from the very beginning was tied to LifeLog, which was originally intended to
result in granting an AI “assistant” human-like decision-making and comprehension abilities by spinning masses of unstructured data into narrative format. The would-be main researchers for the LifeLog project also reflect the program’s end goal of creating humanized AI. For instance, Howard Shrobe at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and his team at the time were set to be intimately involved in LifeLog. Shrobe had previously worked for DARPA on the “evolutionary design of complex software” before becoming associate director of the AI Lab at MIT and has devoted his lengthy career to building “cognitive-style AI.” In the years after LifeLog was cancelled, he again worked for DARPA as well as on intelligence community–related AI research projects. In addition, the AI Lab at MIT was intimately connected with the 1980s corporation and DARPA contractor called Thinking Machines, which was founded by and/or employed many of the lab’s luminaries—including Danny Hillis, Marvin Minsky, and Eric Lander—and sought to build AI supercomputers capable of
human-like thought. All three of these individuals were later revealed to be close associates of and/or sponsored by the intelligence-linked pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, who also generously donated to MIT as an institution and was a leading funder of and advocate for transhumanist-related scientific research.

Soon after the LifeLog program was shuttered, critics worried that, like TIA, it would continue under a different name. For example, Lee Tien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation told VICE at the time of LifeLog’s cancellation, “It would not surprise me to learn that the government continued to fund research that pushed this area forward without calling it LifeLog.”

Along with its critics, one of the would-be researchers working on LifeLog, MIT’s David Karger, was also certain that the DARPA project would continue in a repackaged form. He told Wired that “I am sure such research will continue to be funded under some other title . . . I can’t imagine DARPA ‘dropping out’ of a such a key research area.” The answer to these speculations appears to lie with the company that launched the exact same day that LifeLog was shuttered by the Pentagon: Facebook.

Thiel Information Awareness

After considerable controversy and criticism, in late 2003, TIA was shut down and defunded by Congress, just months after it was launched. It was only later revealed that that TIA was never actually shut down, with its various programs having been covertly divided up among the web of military and intelligence agencies that make up the US national-security state. Some of it was privatized.

The same month that TIA was pressured to change its name after growing backlash, Peter Thiel incorporated Palantir, which was, incidentally, developing the core panopticon software that TIA had hoped to wield. Soon after Palantir’s incorporation in 2003, Richard Perle, a notorious neoconservative from the Reagan and Bush administrations and an architect of the Iraq War, called TIA’s Poindexter and said he wanted to introduce him to Thiel and his associate Alex Karp, now Palantir’s CEO. According to a report in New York magazine, Poindexter “was precisely the person” whom Thiel and Karp wanted to meet, mainly because “their new company was similar in ambition to what Poindexter had tried to create at the Pentagon,” that is, TIA. During that meeting, Thiel and Karp sought “to pick the brain of the man now widely viewed as the godfather of modern surveillance.”

Soon after Palantir’s incorporation, though the exact timing and details of the investment remain hidden from the public, the CIA’s In-Q-Tel became the company’s first backer, aside from Thiel himself, giving it an estimated $2 million. In-Q-Tel’s stake in Palantir would not be publicly reported until mid-2006. The money was certainly useful. In addition, Alex Karp told the New York Times in October 2020, “the real value of the In-Q-Tel investment was that it gave Palantir access to the CIA analysts who were its intended clients.” A key figure in the making of In-Q-Tel investments during this period, including the investment in Palantir, was the CIA’s chief information officer, Alan Wade, who had been the intelligence community’s point man for Total Information Awareness. Wade had previously cofounded the post-9/11 Homeland Security software contractor Chiliad alongside Christine Maxwell, sister of Ghislaine Maxwell and daughter of Iran-Contra figure, intelligence operative, and media baron Robert Maxwell. After the In-Q-Tel investment, the CIA would be Palantir’s only client until 2008. During that period, Palantir’s two top engineers— Aki Jain and Stephen Cohen—traveled to CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia, every two weeks. Jain recalls making at least two hundred trips to CIA headquarters between 2005 and 2009. During those regular visits, CIA analysts “would test [Palantir’s software] out and offer feedback, and then Cohen and Jain would fly back to California to tweak it.” As with In-Q-Tel’s decision to invest in Palantir, the CIA’s chief information officer during this time remained one of TIA’s architects. Alan Wade played a key role in many of these meetings and subsequently in the “tweaking” of Palantir’s products.

Today, Palantir’s products are used for mass surveillance, predictive policing, and other disconcerting policies of the US national-security state. A telling example is Palantir’s sizable involvement in the new Health and Human Services–run wastewater surveillance program that is quietly spreading across the United States. As noted in a previous Unlimited Hangout report, that system is the resurrection of a TIA program called Biosurveillance. It is feeding all its data into the Palantir-managed and secretive HHS Protect data platform. The decision to turn controversial DARPA-led programs into a private ventures, however, was not limited to Thiel’s Palantir.

The Rise of Facebook

The shuttering of TIA at DARPA had an impact on several related programs, which were also dismantled in the wake of public outrage over DARPA’s post-9/11 programs. One of these programs was LifeLog. As news of the program spread through the media, many of the same vocal critics who had attacked TIA went after LifeLog with similar zeal, with Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists telling Wired at the time that “LifeLog has the potential to become something like ‘TIA cubed.’” LifeLog being viewed as something that would prove even worse than the recently cancelled TIA had a clear effect on DARPA, which had just seen both TIA and another related program
cancelled after considerable backlash from the public and the press.

The firestorm of criticism of LifeLog took its program manager, Doug Gage, by surprise, and Gage has continued to assert that the program’s critics “completely mischaracterized” the goals and ambitions of the project. Despite Gage’s protests and those of LifeLog’s would-be researchers and other supporters, the project was publicly nixed on February 4, 2004. DARPA never provided an explanation for its quiet move to shutter LifeLog, with a spokesperson stating only that it was related to “a change in priorities” for the agency. On DARPA director Tony Tether’s decision to kill LifeLog, Gage later told VICE, “I think he had been burnt so badly with TIA that he didn’t want to deal with any further controversy with LifeLog. The death of LifeLog was collateral damage tied to the death of TIA.”

Fortuitously for those supporting the goals and ambitions of LifeLog, a company that turned out to be its private-sector analogue was born on the same day that LifeLog’s cancellation was announced. On February 4, 2004, what is now the world’s largest social network, Facebook, launched its website and quickly rose to the top of the social media roost, leaving other social media companies of the era in the dust. A few months into Facebook’s launch, in June 2004, Facebook cofounders Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz brought Sean Parker onto Facebook’s executive team. Parker, previously known for cofounding Napster, later connected Facebook with its first outside investor, Peter Thiel. As discussed, Thiel, at that time, in coordination with the CIA, was actively trying to resurrect controversial DARPA programs that had been dismantled the previous year. Notably, Sean Parker, who became Facebook’s first president, also had a history with the CIA, which recruited him at the age of sixteen soon after he had been busted by the FBI for hacking corporate and military databases. Thanks to Parker, in September 2004, Thiel formally acquired $500,000 worth of Facebook shares and was added its board. Parker maintained close ties to Facebook as well as to Thiel, with Parker being hired as a managing partner of Thiel’s Founders Fund in 2006.

Thiel and Facebook cofounder Mosokvitz became involved outside of the social network long after Facebook’s rise to prominence, with Thiel’s Founder Fund becoming a significant investor in Moskovitz’s company Asana in 2012. Thiel’s longstanding symbiotic relationship with Facebook cofounders extends to his company Palantir, as the data that Facebook users make public invariably winds up in Palantir’s databases and helps drive the surveillance engine Palantir runs for a handful of US police departments, the military, and the intelligence community. In the case of the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal, Palantir was also involved in utilizing Facebook data to benefit the
2016 Donald Trump presidential campaign.

Today, as recent arrests such as that of Daniel Baker have indicated, Facebook data is slated to help power the coming “war on domestic terror,” given that information shared on the platform is being used in “precrime” capture of US citizens, domestically. In light of this, it is worth dwelling on the point that Thiel’s exertions to resurrect the main aspects of TIA as his own private company coincided with his becoming the first outside investor in what was essentially the analogue of another DARPA program deeply intertwined with TIA. 

Facebook, a Front

Because of the coincidence that Facebook launched the same day that LifeLog was shut down, there has been recent speculation that Zuckerberg began and launched the project with Moskovitz, Saverin, and others through some sort of behind-the-scenes coordination with DARPA or another organ of the national-security state. While there is no direct evidence for this precise claim, the early involvement of Parker and Thiel in the project, particularly given the timing of Thiel’s other activities, reveals that the national-security state was involved in Facebook’s rise. It is debatable whether Facebook was intended from its inception to be a LifeLog analogue or if it happened to be the social media project that fit the bill after its launch. The latter seems more likely, especially considering that Thiel also invested in another early social media platform, Friendster. An important point linking Facebook and LifeLog is the subsequent identification of Facebook with LifeLog by the latter’s DARPA architect himself. In 2015, Gage told VICE that “Facebook is the real face of pseudo-LifeLog at this point.” He tellingly added, “We have ended up providing the same kind of detailed personal information to advertisers and data brokers and without arousing the kind of opposition that LifeLog provoked.” Users of Facebook and other large social media platforms have so far been content to allow these platforms to sell their private data so long as they publicly operate as private enterprises. Backlash only really emerged when such activities were publicly tied to the US government, and especially the US military, even though Facebook and other tech giants routinely share their users’ data with the national-security state. In practice, there is little difference between the public and private entities.

Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower, notably warned in 2019 that Facebook is just as untrustworthy as US intelligence, stating that “Facebook’s internal purpose, whether they state it publicly or not, is to compile perfect records of private lives to the maximum extent of their capability, and then exploit that for their own corporate enrichment. And damn the consequences.”

Snowden also stated in the same interview that “the more Google knows about you, the more Facebook knows about you, the more they are able . . . to create permanent records of private lives, the more influence and power they have over us.” This underscores how both Facebook and intelligence-linked Google have accomplished much of what LifeLog had aimed to do, but on a much larger scale than what DARPA had originally envisioned.

The reality is that most of the large Silicon Valley companies of today have been closely linked to the US national-security state establishment since their inception. Notable examples aside from Facebook and Palantir include Google and Oracle. Today these companies are more openly collaborating with the military-intelligence agencies that guided their development and/or provided early funding, as they are used to provide the data needed to fuel the newly announced war on domestic terror and its accompanying algorithms.

It is hardly a coincidence that someone like Peter Thiel, who built Palantir with the CIA and helped ensure Facebook’s rise, is also heavily involved in Big Data AI-driven “predictive policing” approaches to surveillance and law enforcement, both through Palantir and through his other investments. TIA, LifeLog, and related government and private programs and institutions launched after 9/11, were always intended to be used against the American public in a war against dissent. This was noted by their critics in 2003-4 and by those who have examined the origins of the “homeland security” pivot in the US and its connection to past CIA “counterterror” programs in Vietnam and Latin America.

Ultimately, the illusion of Facebook and related companies as being independent of the US national-security state has prevented a recognition of the reality of social media platforms and their long-intended, yet covert uses, which we are beginning to see move into the open following the events of January 6. Now, with billions of people conditioned to use Facebook and social media as part of their daily lives, the question becomes: If that illusion were to be irrevocably shattered today, would it make a difference to Facebook’s users? Or has the populace become so conditioned to surrendering their private data in exchange for dopamine-fueled social-validation loops that it no longer matters who ends up holding that data?

Part 2 of this series on Facebook will explore how the social media platform has grown into a behemoth that is much more extensive than what LifeLog’s program managers had originally envisioned. In concert with military contractors and former heads of DARPA, Facebook has spent the last several years doing two key things: (1) preparing to play a much larger role in surveillance and data mining than it currently does; and (2) advancing the development of a “humanized” AI, a major objective of LifeLog.
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Whitney Webb has been a professional writer, researcher and journalist since 2016. She has written for several websites and, from 2017 to 2020, was a staff writer and senior investigative reporter for Mint Press News. She currently writes for The Last American Vagabond.

Toka : the Most Dangerous Israeli Spyware Firm

The mainstream media’s myopic focus on Israel’s Pegasus spyware and the threats it poses means that other companies, like Toka, go uninvestigated, even when their products present an even greater potential for abuse and illegal surveillance.

Meet Toka, the Most Dangerous Israeli Spyware Firm You’ve Never Heard Of
by Whitney Webb
July 24, 2021

This past Sunday, an investigation into the global abuse of spyware developed by veterans of Israeli intelligence Unit 8200 gained widespread attention, as it was revealed that the software – sold to democratic and authoritarian governments alike – had been used to illegally spy on an estimated 50,000 individuals. Among those who had their communications and devices spied on by the software, known as Pegasus, were journalists, human rights activists, business executives, academics and prominent political leaders. Among those targeted political leaders, per reports, were the current leaders of France, Pakistan, South Africa, Egypt, Morocco and Iraq.

The abuse of Pegasus software in this very way has been known for several years, though these latest revelations appear to have gained such traction in the mainstream owing to the high number of civilians who have reportedly been surveilled through its use. The continuation of the now-years-long scandal surrounding the abuse of Pegasus has also brought considerable controversy and notoriety to the Israeli company that developed it, the NSO Group.

While the NSO Group has become infamous, other Israeli companies with even deeper ties to Israel’s intelligence apparatus have been selling software that not only provides the exact same services to governments and intelligence agencies but purports to go even farther.

Originally founded by former Israeli Prime Minister and Jeffrey Epstein associate Ehud Barak, one of these companies’ wares are being used by countries around the world, including in developing countries with the direct facilitation of global financial institutions like the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and the World Bank. In addition, the software is only made available to governments that are “trusted” by Israel’s government, which “works closely” with the company.

Despite the fact that this firm has been around since 2018 and was covered in detail by this author for MintPress News in January 2020, no mainstream outlet – including those that have extensively covered the NSO Group – has bothered to examine the implications of this story.

Worse than Pegasus

Toka <https://www.tokagroup.com> was launched in 2018 with the explicit purpose of selling a “tailored ecosystem of cyber capabilities and software products for governmental, law enforcement, and security agencies.” According to a profile of the company published in Forbes shortly after it launched, Toka advertised itself as “a one-stop hacking shop for governments that require extra capability to fight terrorists and other threats to national security in the digital domain.”

Toka launched with plans to “provide spy tools for whatever device its clients require,” including not only smartphones but a “special focus on the so-called Internet of Things (IoT).” Per the company, this includes devices like Amazon Echo, Google Nest-connected home products, as well as connected fridges, thermostats and alarms. Exploits in these products discovered by Toka, the company said at the time, would not be disclosed to vendors, meaning those flaws would continue to remain vulnerable to any hacker, whether a client of Toka or not.

Today, Toka’s software suite claims to offer its customers in law enforcement, government and intelligence the ability to obtain “targeted intelligence” and to conduct “forensic investigations” as well as “covert operations.” In addition, Toka offers governments its “Cyber Designers” service, which provides “agencies with the full-spectrum strategies, customized projects and technologies needed to keep critical infrastructure, the digital landscape and government institutions secure and durable.”

Given that NSO’s Pegasus targets only smartphones, Toka’s hacking suite – which, like Pegasus, is also classified as a “lawful intercept” product – is capable of targeting any device connected to the internet, including but not limited to smartphones. In addition, its target clientele are the same as those of Pegasus, providing an easy opportunity for governments to gain access to even more surveillance capabilities than Pegasus offers, but without risking notoriety in the media, since Toka has long avoided the limelight.

In addition, while Toka professes that its products are only used by “trusted” governments and agencies to combat “terrorism” and maintain order and public safety, the sales pitch for the NSO Group’s Pegasus is remarkably similar, and that sales pitch has not stopped its software from being used to target dissidents, politicians and journalists. It also allows many of the same groups who are Toka clients, like intelligence agencies, to use these tools for the purpose of obtaining blackmail. The use of blackmail by Israeli security agencies against civilian Palestinians to attempt to weaken Palestinian society and for political persecution is well-documented.

Toka has been described by market analysts as an “offensive security” company, though the company’s leadership rejects this characterization. Company co-founder and current CEO Yaron Rosen asserted that, as opposed to purely offensive, the company’s operations are “something in the middle,” which he classifies as bridging cyber defense and offensive cyber activities — e.g., hacking.

The company’s activities are concerning in light of the fact that Toka has been directly partnered with Israel’s Ministry of Defense and other Israeli intelligence and security agencies since its founding. The company “works closely” with these government agencies, according to an Israeli Ministry of Defense website. This collaboration, per Toka, is meant to “enhance” their products. Toka’s direct IDF links are in contrast to the NSO Group, a company that does not maintain overt ties with the Israeli security state.

Toka’s direct collaboration with Israel’s government is also made clear through its claim that it sells its products and offers its services only to “trusted” governments, law enforcement agencies and intelligence agencies. Toka’s Rosen has stated that Russia, China, and “other enemy countries” would never be customers of the company. In other words, only countries aligned with Israeli policy goals, particularly in occupied Palestine, are permitted to be customers and gain access to its trove of powerful hacking tools. This is consistent with Israeli government efforts to leverage Israel’s hi-tech sector as a means of countering the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions (BDS) movement globally.

Further evidence that Toka is part of this Israeli government effort to seed foreign governments with technology products deeply tied to Israel’s military and intelligence services is the fact that one of the main investors in Toka is Dell Technologies Capital, which is an extension of the well-known tech company Dell. Dell was founded by Michael Dell, a well-known pro-Israel partisan who has donated millions of dollars to the Friends of the IDF and is one of the top supporters of the so-called “anti-BDS” bills that prevent publicly employed individuals or public institutions in several U.S. states from supporting non-violent boycotts of Israel, even on humanitarian grounds. As MintPress previously noted, the fact that a major producer of consumer electronic goods is heavily investing in a company that markets the hacking of that very technology should be a red flag.

The government’s initial admitted use of the hi-tech sector to counter the BDS movement coincided with the launch of a new Israeli military and intelligence agency policy in 2012, whereby “cyber-related and intelligence projects that were previously carried out in-house in the Israeli military and Israel’s main intelligence arms are transferred to companies that, in some cases, were built for this exact purpose.”

One of the reasons this was reportedly launched was to retain members of Unit 8200 engaged in military work who were moving to jobs in the country’s high-paying tech sector. Through this new policy that has worked to essentially merge much of the private tech sector with Israel’s national security state, some Unit 8200 and other intelligence veterans continue their work for the state but benefit from a private sector salary. The end result is that an unknown – and likely very high – number of Israeli tech companies are led by veterans of the Israeli military and Israeli intelligence agencies and serve, for all intents and purposes, as front companies. A closer examination of Toka strongly suggests that it is one such front company.

Toka — born out of Israel’s national security state

The company was co-founded by Ehud Barak, Alon Kantor, Kfir Waldman and retired IDF Brigadier General Yaron Rosen. Rosen, the firm’s founding CEO and now co-CEO, is the former Chief of the IDF’s cyber staff, where he was “the lead architect of all [IDF] cyber activities,” including those executed by Israeli military intelligence Unit 8200. Alon Kantor is the former Vice President of Business Development for Check Point Software, a software and hardware company founded by Unit 8200 veterans. Kfir Waldman is the former CEO of Go Arc and a former Director of Engineering at
technology giant Cisco. Cisco is a leader in the field of Internet of Things devices and IoT cybersecurity, while Go Arc focuses on applications for mobile devices. As previously mentioned, Toka hacks not only mobile devices but also has a “special focus” on hacking IoT devices.

In addition to having served as prime minister of Israel, Toka co-founder Ehud Barak previously served as head of Israeli military intelligence directorate Aman, as well as several other prominent posts in the IDF, before eventually leading the Israeli military as minister of defense. While minister of defense, he led Operation Cast Lead against the blockaded Gaza Strip in 2009, which resulted in the deaths of over 1,000 Palestinians and saw Israel illegally use chemical weapons against civilians.

Toka is the first start-up created by Barak. However, Barak had previously chaired and invested in Carbyne911, a controversial Israeli emergency services start-up that has expanded around the world and has become particularly entrenched in the United States. Carbyne’s success has been despite the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, given that the intelligence-linked pedophile and sex trafficker had invested heavily in the company at Barak’s behest. Barak’s close relationship with Epstein, including overnight visits to Epstein’s now-notorious island and apartment complexes that housed trafficked women and underage girls, has been extensively documented.

Barak stepped away from Toka in April of last year, likely as the result of the controversy over his Epstein links, which also saw Barak withdraw from his chairmanship of Carbyne in the wake of Epstein’s death. Considerable evidence has pointed to Epstein having been an intelligence asset of Israeli military intelligence who accrued blackmail on powerful individuals for the benefit of Israel’s national security state and other intelligence agencies, as well as for personal gain.

Another notable Toka executive is Nir Peleg, the company’s Vice President for Strategic Projects. Peleg is the former head of the Research and Development Division at Israel’s National Cyber Directorate, where he led national cybersecurity projects as well as government initiatives and collaborations with international partners and Israeli cybersecurity innovative companies. Prior to this, Peleg claims to have served for more than 20 years in leading positions at the IDF’s “elite technology unit,” though he does specify exactly which unit this was. His LinkedIn profile lists him as having been head of the IDF’s entire Technology Department from 2008 to 2011.

While at Israel’s National Cyber Directorate, Peleg worked closely with Tal Goldstein, now the head of strategy for the World Economic Forum’s Partnership against Cybercrime (WEF-PAC), whose members include government agencies of the U.S., Israel and the U.K., along with some of the world’s most powerful companies in technology and finance. The goal of this effort is to establish a global entity that is capable of controlling the flow of information, data, and money on the internet. Notably, Toka CEO Yaron Rosen recently called for essentially this exact organization to be established when he stated that the international community needed to urgently create the “cyber” equivalent of the World Health Organization to combat the so-called “cyber pandemic.”

Claims that a “cyber pandemic” is imminent have been frequent from individuals tied to the WEF-PAC, including CEO of Checkpoint Software Gil Shwed. Checkpoint is a member of WEF-PAC and two of its former vice presidents, Michael Anderson and Alon Kantor, are now Vice President for Global Sales and co-CEO of Toka, respectively.

Toka’s Chief Technology Officer, and the chief architect of its hacking suite, is Moty Zaltsman, who is the only chief executive of the company not listed on the firm’s website. Per his LinkedIn, Zaltsman was the Chief Technology Officer for then-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Last January, when Toka was covered by MintPress News, his profile stated that he had developed “offensive technologies” for Israel’s head of state, but Zaltsman has since removed this claim. The last Toka executive of note is Michael Volfman, the company’s Vice President of Research and Development. Volfman was previously a cyber research and development leader at an unspecified “leading technology
unit” of the IDF.

Also worth mentioning are Toka’s main investors, particularly Entrèe Capital, which is managed by Aviad Eyal and Ran Achituv. Achituv, who manages Entrée’s investment in Toka and sits on Toka’s board of directors, was the founder of the IDF’s satellite-based signals intelligence unit and also a former senior vice president at both Amdocs and Comverse Infosys. Both Amdocs and Comverse courted scandal in the late 1990s and early 2000s for their role in a massive Israeli government-backed espionage operation that targeted U.S. federal agencies during that period.

Despite this scandal and others in the company’s past, Comverse subsidiary Verint was subsequently contracted by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) to bug the telecommunications network of Verizon shortly after their previous espionage scandal was covered by mainstream media. The contract was part of Operation Stellar Winds and was approved by then-NSA Director Keith Alexander, who has since been an outspoken advocate of closer Israeli-American government cooperation in cybersecurity.

In addition to Entrèe Capital, Andreessen Horowitz is another of Toka’s main investors. The venture capital firm co-founded by Silicon Valley titan Marc Andreessen is currently advised by former Secretary of the Treasury Larry Summers, a close friend of the infamous pedophile Jeffery Epstein. Early investors in Toka that are no longer listed on the firm’s website include Launch Capital, which is deeply tied to the Pritzker family — one of the wealthiest families in the U.S., with close ties to the Clintons and Obamas as well as the U.S.’ pro-Israel lobby — and Ray Rothrock, a venture capitalist who spent nearly three decades at VenRock, the Rockefeller family venture capital fund.

In light of the aforementioned policy of Israel’s government to use private tech companies as fronts, the combination of Toka’s direct Israeli government ties, the nature of its products and services, and the numerous, significant connections of its leaders and investors to both Israeli military intelligence and past Israeli espionage scandals strongly suggests that Toka is one such front.

If this is the case, there is reason to believe that, when Toka clients hack and gain access to a device, elements of the Israeli state could also gain access. This concern is born out of the fact that Israeli intelligence has engaged in this exact type of behavior before as part of the PROMIS software scandal, whereby Israeli “superspy” Robert Maxwell sold bugged software to the U.S. government, including highly sensitive locations involved in classified nuclear weapons research. When that software, known as PROMIS, was installed on U.S. government computers, Israeli intelligence gained access to those same systems and devices.

The U.S. government was not the only target of this operation, however, as the bugged PROMIS software was placed on the networks of several intelligence agencies around the world as well as powerful corporations and several large banks. Israeli intelligence gained access to all of their systems until the compromised nature of the software was made public. However, Israel’s government was not held accountable by the U.S. government or the international community for its far-reaching espionage program, a program directly facilitated by technology-focused front companies. The similarities between the products marketed and clients targeted by Maxwell during the PROMIS scandal and currently by Toka are considerable.

World Bank, IDB aid Toka in targeting Palestine’s allies

While the ties between Toka and Israel’s national security state are clear as day, what is also significant and unsettling about this company is how its entry into developing and developed countries alike is being facilitated by global financial institutions, specifically the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank. Notably, these are the only deals with governments that Toka advertises on its website, as the others are not made public.

Several projects funded by one or another of these two institutions have seen Toka become the “cyber designer” of national cybersecurity strategies for Nigeria and Chile since last year. Significantly, both countries’ populations show strong support for Palestine and the BDS movement. In addition, Toka garnered a World Bank-funded contract with the government of Moldova, an ally of Israel, last September.

The World Bank selected Toka in February of last year to “enhance Nigeria’s cyber development,” which includes developing “national frameworks, technical capabilities and enhancement of skills.” Through the World Bank contract, Toka has now become intimately involved with both the public and private sectors of Nigeria that it relates to the country’s “cyber ecosystem.” The World Bank’s decision to choose Toka is likely the result of a partnership forged in 2019 by the state of Israel with the global financial institution “to boost cybersecurity in the developing world,” with a focus on Africa and Asia.

“Designing and building sustainable and robust national cyber strategy and cyber resilience is a critical enabler to fulfilling the objectives of Nigeria’s national cybersecurity policy and strategic framework,” Toka CEO Yaron Rosen said in a press release regarding the contract.

Given Toka’s aforementioned use of its technology for only “trusted” governments, it is notable that Nigeria has been a strong ally of Palestine for most of the past decade, save for one abstention at a crucial UN vote in 2014. In addition to the government, numerous student groups, human rights organizations, and Islamic organizations in the country are outspoken in their support for Palestine. With Toka’s efforts to offer its products only to countries who align themselves with “friendly” countries, their now intimate involvement with Nigeria’s cyber development could soon have consequences for a government that has tended to support the Palestinian cause. This is even more likely given Toka CEO Rosen’s statements at an April 2021 event hosted by Israel’s Ministry of Economy, where he emphasized the role of cyber in developing countries specifically in terms of their national defense and economic strategy.

Three months after the deal was struck with Nigeria through the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) selected Toka to advise the government of Chile on “next steps for the country’s national cybersecurity readiness and operational capacity building.” As part of the project, “Toka will assess the current cybersecurity gaps and challenges in Chile and support the IDB project implementation by recommending specific cybersecurity readiness improvements,” per a press release. Toka claims it will help “establish Chile as a cybersecurity leader in South America.” Regarding the deal, Toka’s Rosen stated that he was “thankful” that the IDB had “provided us with this opportunity to work with the Government of Chile.”

Israel signed consequential agreements for cooperation with the IDB in 2015, before further deepening those ties in 2019 by partnering with the IDB to invest $250 million from Israeli institutions in Latin America specifically.

Like Nigeria, Chile has a strong connection with Palestine and is often a target of Israeli government influence efforts. Though the current far-right government of Sebastián Piñera has grown close to Israel, Chile is home to the largest Palestinian exile community in the world outside of the Middle East. As a result, Chile has one of the strongest BDS movements in the Americas, with cities declaring a non-violent boycott of Israel until the Piñera administration stepped in to claim that such boycotts can only be implemented at the federal level. Palestinian Chileans have strong influence on Chilean politics, with a recent, popular presidential candidate, Daniel Jadue, being the son of Palestinian immigrants to Chile. Earlier this year, in June, Chile’s congress drafted a bill to boycott goods, services and products from illegal Israeli settlements.

While Toka frames both of these projects as aimed at helping the cyber readiness and economies of the countries it now services, Israeli media has painted a different picture. For instance, Haaretz wrote that Israel’s partnerships with development banks, specifically those made in 2019 that resulted in these Toka contracts, were planned by an inter-ministerial committee set up by then-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “to realize the potential of international development to strengthen the Israeli economy, improve Israel’s political standing and strengthen its international role.” One source, quoted by Haaretz as being close to this undertaking, stated that “development banks are a way to help advance Israel’s interests and agenda in the developing world, including Latin America. But it’s not philanthropy.”

Given these statements, and Toka’s own modus operandi as a company and its background, it seems highly likely that the reason both Nigeria and Chile were chosen as the first of Toka’s development banks contracts was aimed at advancing the Israeli government’s agenda in those specific countries, one that seeks to counter and mitigate the vocal support for Palestine among those countries’ inhabitants.

The spyware problem goes far beyond NSO Group

The NSO Group and its Pegasus software is clearly a major scandal that deserves scrutiny. However, the treatment of the incident by the media has largely absolved the Israeli government of any role in that affair, despite the fact that the NSO Group’s sales of Pegasus to foreign governments has been approved and defended by Israel’s government. This, of course, means that Israel’s government has obvious responsibility in the whole scandal as well.

In addition, the myopic focus on the NSO Group when it comes to mainstream media reporting on Israeli private spyware and the threats it poses means that other companies, like Toka, go uninvestigated, even if their products present an even greater potential for abuse and illegal surveillance than those currently marketed and sold by the NSO Group.

Given the longstanding history of Israeli intelligence’s use of technology firms for international surveillance and espionage, as well as its admitted policy of using tech companies as fronts to combat BDS and ensure Israel’s “cyber dominance,” the investigation into Israeli spyware cannot stop just with NSO Group. However, not stopping there risks directly challenging the Israeli state, particularly in Toka’s case, and this is something that mainstream media outlets tend to avoid. This is due to a mix of factors, but the fact that NSO’s Pegasus has been used to spy on journalists so extensively certainly doesn’t help the matter.

Yet, Israel’s weaponization of its tech industry, and the global use of its spyware offerings by governments and security agencies around the world, must be addressed, especially because it has been explicitly weaponized to prevent non-violent boycotts of Israel’s occupation of Palestine, including those solely based on humanitarian grounds or out of respect for international laws that Israel routinely breaks. Allowing a government to engage in this activity on a global scale to stifle criticism of flagrantly illegal policies and war crimes cannot continue and this should be the case for any government, not just Israel.

If the outlets eagerly reporting on the latest Pegasus revelations are truly concerned with the abuse of spyware by governments and intelligence agencies around the world, they should also give attention to Toka, as it is actively arming these same institutions with weapons far worse than any NSO Group product.

Originally published at MintPress News