Free Republic

Three former U.S. intelligence and military officials have agreed to pay $1.7 million to the U.S. government and admitted to providing hacking technology to the United Arab Emirates, the Department of Justice announced on Tuesday.Marc Baier, Ryan Adams, and Daniel Gericke made the admission as part of a first-of-its-kind deferred prosecution agreement, under which they are also to pay $1.68 million, cooperate with the Justice Department’s investigation, cut ties with UAE intelligence and give up their security clearances. The Justice Department agreed to drop the prosecution if the three men comply with the terms for three years.Lawyers for Adams and...

Neuroscientists have tried to map various categories of mental function to specific regions of the brain, but recent work has shown that the definitions and boundaries of those regions are complex and context-dependent. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________ Neuroscientists are the cartographers of the brain’s diverse domains and territories — the features and activities that define them, the roads and highways that connect them, and the boundaries that delineate them. Toward the front of the brain, just behind the forehead, is the prefrontal cortex, celebrated as the seat of judgment. Behind it lies the motor cortex, responsible for planning and coordinating movement. To the...

Why does government seem to control so much of our lives now? What significant changes happened in the past 15 years that created a social shift and allowed government to influence almost every facet of our activity? Why has the previously ordinary become so complex? Why is it more difficult to be comfortably invisible and just live out the creed of pursuing ‘life, liberty and happiness’? What is behind all this? We were not sleeping, we were wide awake. Perhaps distracted, yes; but we were wide awake when something shifted. A Fourth Branch of Government was quietly created, and technology...

The 17-agency U.S. intelligence community announced it reached an inconclusive assessment regarding the origins of COVID-19, including whether the virus leaked from a Chinese lab, following a 90-day investigation that was ordered earlier this year by President Joe Biden, according to a summary of the findings.Agency officials said (pdf) the Chinese regime is still unwilling to cooperate in their probe to obtain answers about the origins of the virus. The regime would need to fully cooperate with a U.S. investigation in order to determine whether the virus came from a laboratory or not.“China’s cooperation most likely would be needed to...

The world will witness a Chinese-anointed Afghan Government led by the 'New Taliban' -- a manufactured and packaged product of China Kabul has fallen to Taliban all over again. The 20 years of effort in importing democracy from the United States of America has failed, as expected. None can be blamed for Afghanistan to be in this situation today, except its own incumbent government, political leaders and trained armed forces, who were not sincere in delivering their assigned roles for the nation. The Afghan military and political leadership have given up without a fight. It highlights the nature of the...

The FBI had knowledge that a second laptop had been stolen from Hunter Biden and that laptop contained material making the Biden family a national security risk, subject to Russian influence. ======================================================================================= The FBI knew as early as December 2019 that Hunter Biden believed Russians had stolen his laptop, which he believed made him vulnerable to blackmail because of compromising evidence on the laptop combined with his father’s presidential ambitions. This explosive revelation establishes that either Joe Biden lied to the American public, or the intelligence community lied to him. When The New York Post went public in October 2020...

Top U.S. General Mark Milley stated Wednesday “There was nothing that I or anyone else saw that indicated a collapse of this [Afghan] army and this government in 11 days.” Milley, who has been very concerned about a lack of wokeness in the military as of late, said in a prepared statement that intelligence assessments revealed the quickly approaching collapse of the Afghan U.S.-backed government was only a possibility, but those assessments ranged from weeks to months to even years following America’s absence.

As a field, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence suffers from some rather significant constraints. Aside from the uncertainty involved (e.g., is there life beyond Earth we can actually communicate with?), there are the limitations imposed by technology and the very nature of space and time. For instance, scientists are forced to contend with the possibility that by the time a message is received by an intelligent species, the civilization that sent it will be long dead. Harvard astronomers Amir Siraj and Abraham Loeb tackle this very question in a new study that recently appeared online. Taking their cue from the...

At least one official in the Biden administration failed to comply with federal law when they unmasked Tucker Carlson’s name after it was inadvertently (allegedly) collected by our intelligence community monitoring the communications of third parties. And the unnecessary unmasking of his name, followed by the inevitable leak, alerted foreign adversaries that their communications were being collected. On July 7, 2021, Axios' Jonathan Swan reported, “Two sources familiar with Carlson's communications said his two Kremlin intermediaries live in the United States, but the sources could not confirm whether both are American citizens or whether both were on U.S. soil at...

President Joe Biden has “legalized corruption” by placing more than 15 former WestExec members in key places within his administration, the Intercept revealed Wednesday. “It’s a remarkable march through the revolving door” for the more than 15 former WestExec members to be selected for such powerful positions, “especially for a firm that only launched in 2017” according to the report. “WestExec’s consultants are so connected and pedigreed that they often hold down multiple jobs, appointments, and titles,” the Intercept wrote. *** The notable individuals who previously worked at WestExec are as follows: Jen Psaki, White House press secretary Tony Blinken,...

House speaker Nancy Pelosi has made a big deal about President Trump supposedly spying on his political opponents. In the most recent case, a slew of leaks to top media organizations over Russia collusion leaks has got her and her sidekick, Rep. Adam Schiff, hopping.According to the New York Times:Mr. Schiff called the subpoenas for data on committee members and staff another example of Mr. Trump using the Justice Department as a "cudgel against his political opponents and members of the media."It is increasingly apparent that those demands did not fall on deaf ears," Mr. Schiff said in a statement....

The Democratic Party’s Stasi The Biden Justice Department is “the shield and the sword”—the motto of East Germany’s Stasi—for the Democratic Party, protecting its own corrupt ranks while terrorizing any and all detractors. While reading emails in his bedroom last Wednesday morning, Paul Hueper heard a loud commotion inside his house. Still clad in pajamas, the Alaska business owner ran to his dining room to see what was happening.Hueper found himself face-to-face with several armed FBI agents, guns drawn, barking orders to him and his wife, Marilyn. The agents had kicked down the front door of their home in Homer,...

The Biden administration is considering using private firms to track the online activity of American citizens in order to get around the Fourth Amendment and other laws that protect Americans from unreasonable searches and seizures and surveillance. The report says that the Biden administration wants to monitor “extremist chatter by Americans online” but can’t do so without a warrant, and thinks private firms can get around the legal restrictions. Federal authorities “can only browse through unprotected information on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook and other open online platforms,” according to CNN. The plan being discussed inside DHS, according...

Beijing’s top intelligence agency has rolled out a new anti-espionage regulation, subjecting institutions and companies to tighter surveillance, including on students and scholars going abroad from China. This announcement was made on the same day that the United States announced that in the national interest it will allow entry for students and scholars from certain countries, including China, Iran, Brazil, and South Africa. They will be exempt from existing travel bans. The Chinese regime’s first anti-spy regulations, which were announced and took effect on April 26, allow the Ministry of State Security, the intelligence agency, to compose a list identifying...

Among the far-right groups whose members are suspected of planning the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol are the Proud Boys. In March, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s director told the Senate Judiciary Committee that he “absolutely” wished the agency had penetrated the group beforehand, or knew its plans. “I do not consider what happened on January 6th to be an acceptable result,” Director Christopher Wray said. “We are focused very, very hard on how can we get better sources, better information, better analysis.” The FBI had deeper insight into the group than Wray disclosed, however. Bureau agents maintained...

A report from the U.S. intelligence community suggests that a minority of intelligence officials believed that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) did, in fact, attempt to hinder former President Donald Trump’s chances in the 2020 election, while reporting that the CCP did not “deploy interference efforts.”A report from the National Intelligence Council (pdf) released March 10 stated that Russia sought to denigrate President Joe Biden and boost Trump during the 2020 election, and that China “did not deploy interference efforts and considered but did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the U.S. presidential election,” adding: “We...

The “attack” on the Capitol started well before then President Trump finished his speech at the rally at The Ellipse. This attack was no spontaneous event as alleged by Democrats, the Media, and the Radical Left. It is evident to any police officer who has been on a police line this attack was preplanned when coupled with the intelligence compiled by the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) and other agencies. From the videos, this is self-evident, e.g., coordination, tactics in engaging the police lines, hand signals, gas masks, bear spray, goggles, helmets, knee pads, improvised weapons, and milk to...

There is currently a lot of attention being paid to new Democrat-proposed gun control laws, particularly House Bill 127, which would require national registration and licensing of all firearms, would ban broad categories of semi-automatic weapons, ban most ammunition magazines, and so on. One of the most frequent replies to these proposed laws is that there are not enough local or federal SWAT Team door-kickers to go house to house on gun confiscation raids, and if they tried, they would 1. soon run out of door-kickers and 2. instigate Civil War Two. But in the modern digital era, I...

Uzra Zeya nominated for undersecretary of civilian security, democracy, and human rights President Joe Biden's nominee for a top State Department position played a key role in assembling a book on the nefarious influence of the "Israel lobby" while working for an organization that promoted claims about Jewish media control and dual loyalty to Israel. As a staffer at the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Uzra Zeya compiled research for a book that argues that "the Israel lobby has subverted the American political process to take control of U.S. Middle East policy" by establishing a secret network of "dirty...

Recent studies have shown that I.Q. scores have been declining in Western nations for decades. Evan Horowitz, director of research and communication at FCLT Global, wrote a post for nbcnews.com in which he stated: “A range of studies using a variety of well-established IQ tests and metrics have found declining scores across Scandinavia, Britain, Germany, France and Australia.” Horowitz added that this plunge in cognitive ability could well lead to “fewer scientific breakthroughs, stagnant economies and a general dimming of our collective future.” Duh.And there are others.These findings have led some to issue dire predictions of a general dumbing down...