//The Wire//2300Z July 30, 2025// //ROUTINE// //BLUF: EARTHQUAKE STRIKES WESTERN PACIFIC, TRIGGERING TSUNAMI CONCERNS. AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL OUTAGE CAUSES LONDON AIRPORTS TO GROUND FLIGHTS. WHITE HOUSE ANNOUNCES NEW AI-DRIVEN HEALTHCARE INITIATIVE.//  -----BEGIN TEARLINE-----   -International Events- Pacific: A major earthquake was reported yesterday afternoon off the coast of Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula, reaching an estimated 8.8M and becoming tied for the 5th strongest earthquake recorded since records began in the 1960's. Due to this earthquake's severity, Tsunami Advisories were issued for most of the Pacific Rim, to include Hawaii, Alaska, and most of the American west coast. These concerns prompted mass evacuations for millions of people seeking refuge on higher ground. As of this morning, tsunami waves did hit Russia and Japan, though minimal damage was reported. No tsunami materialized in Hawaii or the west coast. United Kingdom: This morning the airspace over most of England was closed due to a technical issue at an air traffic control center in Stanwick. Aircraft at Stansted, Gatwick, and Heathrow were grounded for about 4 hours while the issue was being resolved. Analyst Comment: Details on the outage are hard to verify, however this outage occurred at the same facility that was involved in the infamous outage at Heathrow Airport in 2023. This has caused much fingerpointing and consternation among airlines due to the lost revenue as a result of the outage. United Kingdom: Data security concerns remain paramount as the effects of the Online Safety Act become more clear. Most websites are now locked down and everything from Wikipedia to medical publications have been affected by the act. Analyst Comment: Though it's tough to verify (and possibly fake), at least one user reported that they had to show identification papers for using a food delivery app. While this testimony can't be independently verified, what is true is that the crackdown on the concept of privacy continues to grow. Several politicians have mentioned the possibility of targeting VPN users who try to evade scanning their identity documents and their face to access most of the internet. Meanwhile, children are using certain video games to bypass the face-scanning requirements. Most of the people who wrote the Online Safety Act are of the Atari generation, and do not understand how good the graphics are in most modern video games. Hyper-realistic video games which use motion-capture technology to put the faces of real actors in the game have been extremely effective at tricking apps and websites. Most of the games that rely on this technology also have modes or settings menus for customizing characters...which allow users to strike funny poses with the character on screen...this providing the realistic head and mouth movement that is used by most AI-driven websites requiring a face scan. -HomeFront- Virginia: This afternoon an arson attack was reported in Danville, at the offices of Showcase Magazine. Local authorities have identified the attacker as Shotsie Michael Buck Hayes, who was arrested a short time after the attack. Locals have stated he was targeting Lee Vogler, a local city councilman for the town of Danville. The attacker reportedly broke into the councilman's office, and doused him in gasoline before setting him on fire on the street outside. Vogler has so far survived the attack, and is currently hospitalized with severe burns. Analyst Comment: Locals state that the attack was not due to a political issue, but rather a personal dispute as the attacker and victim knew each other. Whether or not this is true is anyone's guess. Nevertheless, this kind of high-profile (and brutal) attack vector does not occur that often in a small town such as this, so the details that are hard to verify now may become more clear over time. Washington D.C. - This afternoon the Federal Reserve decided to keep interest rates the same as before, with markets not reacting much to this news (as this was the expected outcome). Separately, the White House announced a new initiative to increase the use of AI in healthcare. This effort will unite Google, Amazon, OpenAI, Apple, and other companies to more heavily integrate into the healthcare industry. -----END TEARLINE----- Analyst Comments: Exactly what this AI initiative is designed to do is largely a mystery as no solid technical details have been provided as to exactly how the federal government is involved in Big Tech companies integrating into the HIPPA-protected world of patient data. Supporters of this plan have applauded the idea as advertised, however critics of this initiative point out that this is more or less a Social Credit system for healthcare as designed directly by the World Economic Forum in a policy letter just last year. In January of 2024, the WEF produced an article titled "How to harness the power of health data to improve patient outcomes". This article largely revolved around the monetization of data mining as "97% of health data goes unused". This article also highlighted the importance of total surveillance of the human body, using a person's smartphone to surveil their health habits, tracking a person's location at all times, and so on. The plan as announced by the White House today sounds nearly identical to the plan proposed by the WEF, based on the details as made public so far. This has drawn the exact same privacy concerns of the past few years as President Trump's policies become more clear six months into his Presidency. For additional context, Palantir also recently announced a partnership with TeleTracking, an AI-driven analytics company already integrated into many healthcare companies and medical facilities. Considering that a major part of the White House's plan is for all of these companies to share data with each other to build a digital profile of a person, concern is warranted. Reducing paper intake forms for convenience at the doctor's office is a lot different than a person's health insurance company handing over their entire medical record to Facebook for advertising purposes. For all of the touted benefits of this initiative, overcoming the data security and privacy concerns will be a hard sell when/if people start paying attention to what is going on. Analyst: S2A1 Research: https://publish.obsidian.md/s2underground

//The Wire//2300Z February 16, 2026// //ROUTINE// //BLUF: CONCERNS ARE GROWING FOR TWO CAPTURED AMERICAN PILOTS DETAINED IN WEST AFRICA. UNITED STATES SEIZES OIL TANKER IN INDIAN OCEAN.//  -----BEGIN TEARLINE-----   -International Events- Indian Ocean: Over the weekend the United States seized the M/T *VERONICA III*, one of the tankers which fled Venezuela in the wake of the fall of the Maduro government. The vessel was boarded and seized due to carrying oil in violation of American sanctions. West Africa: Concerns are growing concerning the safety of Two American pilots who were illegally detained by authorities in Guinea almost 6 weeks ago. On December 29th, Brad Schlenker and Fabio Espinal Nunez were piloting a private charter flight when they diverted to Guinea to refuel. They were given permission to land, and upon taxiing to the terminal, were greeted by armed soldiers. Both pilots have been detained since the incident. -----END TEARLINE----- Analyst Comments: As of right now, the issue of the pilots in Guinea is still in the realm of diplomacy, as the families of the captives have been working with the Embassy to secure the pilots' release. Since this line of effort has not yielded any progress, the families have gone to the media with the hope that a media blitz will pressure the White House to speed along their release. All of this can probably be handled with a phone call, but just in case a more active response is called for, an understanding of the terrain might be helpful. So far, many details remain unknown as the initial circumstances of the detention are hard to verify. Flying for a regional charter airline in Africa is one of the most dangerous jobs a pilot can take, simply due to the corruption that is rampant throughout the continent. As such, it was an odd choice to choose to land in this country in particular, which has led many to assess that there is more to the story than meets the eye. The status of the original charter itself is also not known; some reports state that this flight was a ferry flight moving an aircraft that was recently sold (i.e. no passengers on board), whereas other reports state that they were flying a Brazilian family to Dubai. In any case, taking the story at face-value, the pilots diverted to Guinea for fuel and upon landing probably did not have enough cash on hand for the required bribes. Verbal permission to land is not good enough in Africa, and every stage along the way involves greasing palms, which always demand more. In this case, these pilots are currently serving as a bargaining chip, having chosen to land in Guinea at the worst possible time...during a state of military coup. General Mamadi Doumbouya is currently running the country after "winning" the election one day before these pilots landed. Doumbouya was the leader of the 2021 coup that overthrew the previous government, and over the past few years, the beleaguered nation has been host to the standard West African experience of poverty and violence while under military rule. Now that he's made his warlord status official, his government is probably looking to increase his standing. Nothing pads the ego of an African warlord quite like snatching a couple of Americans so as to get the attention of the United States (the mere dialog with the US alone will increase the legitimacy of his government). However, Doumbouya might find that his little stunt gets the wrong kind of attention from the United States if the pilots are not released immediately. Whatever the pilots did (if anything) to get detained is not a good enough excuse to avoid American involvement; the United States has proven over the past year that the US military will bomb a country back to the stone age for nothing more than a Klondike bar, so Doumbouya would be wise to correct this issue immediately. Local media reports (such that they are) indicate that the courts have actually declined to press charges against the pilots as they have done nothing wrong, but the military council running the administration of the country has refused to release them. On the ground, the situation is not great. Schlenker and Nunez have been allowed access to a phone semi-regularly, and have been making contact with family after their detention. State Department officials have also reportedly visited the prisoners in person, confirming that they are still alive. The exact facility that the pilots are being held in is not known, however they have stated that they are located in Conakry, so they are probably being held somewhere inside Conakry Central Prison (also known as Maison Centrale in French), which is the only known detention facility in the area. It is possible the pilots are being held elsewhere, however historically most leaders of African nations tend to keep a close eye on their political prisoners, and Guinea's history is no different, with the main prison being located a short distance from the Presidential Residences. This is important as if this is where the pilots are being held, they probably will not survive much longer. This facility is nestled in the heart of heavily urbanized terrain at the southwestern end of the peninsula which contains Guinea's capital city of Conakry. As far as prisons go, this facility is a standard example of the typical African prison, and conditions inside the compound are horrific at best and non-survivable at worst due to extremely harsh living conditions brought on by overcrowding, as well as the brutality of the guards who frequently torture prisoners. The terrain surrounding the compound is dense urban city, with little open ground. The target compound itself is encircled by slums to the North and East, and protected by a mud-brick wall approximately 8 feet tall, and 1-2 feet thick. Inside the perimeter sits a scattered array of one-story buildings, most of which are of cinderblock construction. Otherwise, defenses throughout the peninsula are sparse, with most weapons systems being centered around the standard Technical with a mounted crew-served weapon. It is likely that no MANPADs or other more sophisticated air defenses are located in the area. Most military forces are scattered sporadically, with the main bulk of somewhat-organized forces being concentrated at the Airport 7 miles to the northeast. All in all, if Doumbouya wants to take his chances, he's certainly welcome to do so, however it would be wise for him to seek a diplomatic solution immediately. Analyst: S2A1 Research: https://publish.obsidian.md/s2underground Disclaimer: No LLMs were used in the writing of this report.

//The Wire//2100Z July 22, 2026// //ROUTINE// //BLUF: IRANIAN TARGETING OF AMERICAN BASES REMAINS SIGNIFICANT. MISSILE THREAT ISSUED FOR LA GUARDIA LAST NIGHT, REPORT QUICKLY DEEMED NOT CREDIBLE.//  -----BEGIN TEARLINE----- -International Events- Kuwait: Strikes on American positions continue to degrade American capabilities. The logistical hub at Camp Doha in Kuwait City was struck overnight, along with possible strikes at the remote HIMARS launch sites in near the Iraqi border. Iran also claimed to have struck the AN/FPS-117 Early Warning radar array at Ahmed al-Jaber Airbase. Analyst Comment: Unlike all of the other strikes, this site cannot be independently verified or geolocated using current satellite imagery, so it might be a newly constructed site or the Iranians got the names of bases mixed up. Saudi Arabia: Iranian missile strikes were reported throughout the morning, with unknown success. The oil terminals at Yanbu as well as American positions at Prince Sultan Airbase were targeted, with unknown effect. Jordan: American positions continue to be struck at Muwaffaq al Salti Airbase, in the vicinity of the strike that killed 3x service members last week. In central Jordan, King Faisal Airbase was targeted as well, with satellite imagery confirming that as of this morning, one of the structures targeted was still on fire. Down south, the American positions at King Hussein International Airport were targeted, as the Iranians attempted to strike the American refueling aircraft that have been parked on the apron for several days. Israeli citizens across the border observed smoke over the mountain ridge in the vicinity of this airport. Analyst Comment: Now that the Iranians know that their targeting is effective at Muwaffaq, they will continue targeting the same location over and over again. Same with Tower 22, the far-flung base in Jordan's northeastern quadrant, where extensive damage has been noted. Also, the Iranians claim to have unveiled a comparatively new missile system during this wave of attacks; Iran used many of their low-grade missiles during the early days of the war, and now they are occasionally pulling out the newer missiles which have more advanced maneuverability during the terminal phases of the warhead's flight. This might be a contributing factor for why missile interceptions are completely non-existent during some attack waves. -HomeFront- New York: Last night, a security incident was reported at La Guardia after a MANPAD alert was issued for the airport. Port Authority Police alerted the tower regarding a threat they had received regarding the potential use of a shoulder-fired Surface-to-Air missile launcher being used to target a civilian airliner. The report was deemed to be not credible almost immediately afterwards, but the alert was still sent out over the radio to all aircraft in the vicinity. -----END TEARLINE----- Analyst Comments: Sometimes, a few seconds of radio traffic is very illuminating. Listening to the very brief radio exchange between the tower and a Delta flight explaining the issue in New York, perhaps the most telling and concerning detail is that La Guardia possibly has a "MANPAD alert" procedure now. From a counterterrorism perspective this is a good thing, but it's also very disconcerting that this contingency is something that is not only actively being planned for...but already has a procedure drawn up for it. Granted, there's not a whole lot that a commercial airline pilot can do with that information while trying to land, and the rather nonchalant affirmation that no issues have been reported "yet" is only slightly reassuring. But this does go to show that threats within the homeland don't take a break just because eastern Europe and the Middle East are on fire, and the threats to commercial aviation are always on the menu even if most of the concerns are not credible. However, it only takes one credible threat for a very bad day to occur, and this target vector is the epitome of the old counterterrorism saying: We have to be successful in defending ourselves every single time, but the terrorist has to succeed only once. Analyst: S2A1 Research: https://publish.obsidian.md/s2underground NomadNet: 5fa68c88be727a0e1a250a75e5e79269 Disclaimer: No LLMs were used in the writing of this report.

//The Wire//2100Z July 22, 2026// //ROUTINE// //BLUF: IRANIAN TARGETING OF AMERICAN BASES REMAINS SIGNIFICANT. MISSILE THREAT ISSUED FOR LA GUARDIA LAST NIGHT, REPORT QUICKLY DEEMED NOT CREDIBLE.//  -----BEGIN TEARLINE----- -International Events- Kuwait: Strikes on American positions continue to degrade American capabilities. The logistical hub at Camp Doha in Kuwait City was struck overnight, along with possible strikes at the remote HIMARS launch sites in near the Iraqi border. Iran also claimed to have struck the AN/FPS-117 Early Warning radar array at Ahmed al-Jaber Airbase. Analyst Comment: Unlike all of the other strikes, this site cannot be independently verified or geolocated using current satellite imagery, so it might be a newly constructed site or the Iranians got the names of bases mixed up. Saudi Arabia: Iranian missile strikes were reported throughout the morning, with unknown success. The oil terminals at Yanbu as well as American positions at Prince Sultan Airbase were targeted, with unknown effect. Jordan: American positions continue to be struck at Muwaffaq al Salti Airbase, in the vicinity of the strike that killed 3x service members last week. In central Jordan, King Faisal Airbase was targeted as well, with satellite imagery confirming that as of this morning, one of the structures targeted was still on fire. Down south, the American positions at King Hussein International Airport were targeted, as the Iranians attempted to strike the American refueling aircraft that have been parked on the apron for several days. Israeli citizens across the border observed smoke over the mountain ridge in the vicinity of this airport. Analyst Comment: Now that the Iranians know that their targeting is effective at Muwaffaq, they will continue targeting the same location over and over again. Same with Tower 22, the far-flung base in Jordan's northeastern quadrant, where extensive damage has been noted. Also, the Iranians claim to have unveiled a comparatively new missile system during this wave of attacks; Iran used many of their low-grade missiles during the early days of the war, and now they are occasionally pulling out the newer missiles which have more advanced maneuverability during the terminal phases of the warhead's flight. This might be a contributing factor for why missile interceptions are completely non-existent during some attack waves. -HomeFront- New York: Last night, a security incident was reported at La Guardia after a MANPAD alert was issued for the airport. Port Authority Police alerted the tower regarding a threat they had received regarding the potential use of a shoulder-fired Surface-to-Air missile launcher being used to target a civilian airliner. The report was deemed to be not credible almost immediately afterwards, but the alert was still sent out over the radio to all aircraft in the vicinity. -----END TEARLINE----- Analyst Comments: Sometimes, a few seconds of radio traffic is very illuminating. Listening to the very brief radio exchange between the tower and a Delta flight explaining the issue in New York, perhaps the most telling and concerning detail is that La Guardia possibly has a "MANPAD alert" procedure now. From a counterterrorism perspective this is a good thing, but it's also very disconcerting that this contingency is something that is not only actively being planned for...but already has a procedure drawn up for it. Granted, there's not a whole lot that a commercial airline pilot can do with that information while trying to land, and the rather nonchalant affirmation that no issues have been reported "yet" is only slightly reassuring. But this does go to show that threats within the homeland don't take a break just because eastern Europe and the Middle East are on fire, and the threats to commercial aviation are always on the menu even if most of the concerns are not credible. However, it only takes one credible threat for a very bad day to occur, and this target vector is the epitome of the old counterterrorism saying: We have to be successful in defending ourselves every single time, but the terrorist has to succeed only once. Analyst: S2A1 Research: https://publish.obsidian.md/s2underground NomadNet: 5fa68c88be727a0e1a250a75e5e79269 Disclaimer: No LLMs were used in the writing of this report.

//The Wire//1900Z February 23, 2026// //ROUTINE// //BLUF: SECRET SERVICE NEUTRALIZES GUNMAN AT MAR-A-LAGO. BUILDUP CONTINUES IN MIDDLE EAST AS MASS EVACUATIONS BEGIN. CONFLICT REMAINS INTENSE IN MEXICO.//  -----BEGIN TEARLINE-----   -International Events- Mexico: Following yesterday's intense fighting in Jalisco, most airlines have canceled flights out of Guadalajara and Puerto Vallarta. The main hospital in Guadalajara was evacuated for a few hours, after CJNG forces threatened to attack the facility due to rumors that wounded Federal forces were being treated there. The National Guard base in San Juan de Los Lagos was attacked with explosives (possibly RPGs), which resulted in several casualties. Far to the north, schools throughout Baja and Tijuana have been cancelled for all levels of education until further notice, and various Cartel-affiliated social media pages have declared a 10:00pm curfew for civilians, announcing that anyone caught outside after this hour will be shot. Concerning casualties sustained so far, Government forces report a total of 25x KIA as of this morning, most of which occurred as a result of the attack on the National Guard base. For CJNG, casualties are not known, as they usually withdraw with their wounded/dead without disclosing casualty figures until much later (if at all). Analyst Comment: Officially, the position of the Federal government is that absolutely nothing is happening whatsoever. This morning, President Sheinbaum stated several times that no blockades were in place, no engagements took place at all this morning, and everything is perfectly calm. This is mostly a lie, as multiple arson attacks have been reported this morning, but it's the story that the federales are sticking to. It is true that the knee-jerk response yesterday was an intense flash-in-the-pan, however much more substantial resources are staging throughout the nation, as many different cartels get ready for a protracted fight, if that is the chosen course of action. At lower levels of government, officials are not taking any chances. Authorities being concerned enough to cancel classes and close businesses in Baja is interesting as most people thought that this state was entirely controlled by the Sinaloa Cartel...not CJNG. This also means that conflict is likely to spread throughout the country, not just Jalisco where the violence first began. Cross border-conflict has not yet been observed in American border towns just yet, however with the speed at which hostilities have developed, a hot, shooting war can break out in any location at any time. -HomeFront- Florida: Over the weekend, a suspected assassination attempt was reported at Mar-a-Lago, after an assailant armed with a shotgun and incendiary materials breached the inner perimeter of the compound. Sunday morning, the US Secret Service posted a press statement confirming that one suspect had been killed at Mar-a-Lago after breaching a perimeter fence. Analyst Comment: Due to the sensitivity of the site, zero details have been provided on where the suspect breached the fence, or where the individual was engaged within the compound. No information has been posted regarding the shooter's identity or motive for the attack. -----END TEARLINE----- Analyst Comments: In the Middle East, wartime preparations continue as before. Meanwhile on the diplomatic front, negotiations between the United States and Iran are scheduled to resume in Geneva on Thursday. Over the weekend, the Iranian diplomatic delegation was presented with a letter from the United States, outlining the proposals for limits on the Iranian missile program. As the Iranians have stated from the very start that their missile program itself is not up for discussion in any way, they returned the letter, reportedly unopened. At the time, most surmised that this was the last chance the Iranians had in avoiding war, and considering that negotiations are back on for Thursday, it's quite possible that future diplomatic endeavors are just efforts to stall for time. The USS *FORD* CSG arrived in the eastern Mediterranean Sea this morning, and if her mission is to provide air defense for the Israeli's she should be in position to do so by this afternoon. Similarly, logistical aircraft have continued pouring into the region. Embassy evacuations continue as well, with American diplomatic stations in Lebanon being evacuated of non-essential personnel overnight. Similar drawdowns have been observed at Al Udeid Airbase, though Sentinel satellite imagery from yesterday indicates there are still many aircraft at this installation. This will very likely change by the next time a satellite pass is conducted, and more aircraft maneuver throughout the region without transmitting their position to the ADS-B feeds that the Pentagon knows everyone is watching. Some of the aircraft that were supposed to be at Al Udeid, were observed on the ground in a completely different location this morning, so the shell game is taking place. There are already enough resources in theater to carry out a protracted air campaign, and every hour more resources are being flown into the region. Analyst: S2A1 Research: https://publish.obsidian.md/s2underground Disclaimer: No LLMs were used in the writing of this report.

//The Wire//2300Z February 19, 2025// //ROUTINE// //BLUF: WAR EXPANDS IN THE CONGO. TENSIONS BUILD BETWEEN THE US AND UKRAINE FOLLOWING ZELENSKY BEING SIDE-LINED DURING PEACE TALKS.//  -----BEGIN TEARLINE----- -International Events- Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC): The advance by M23 rebels in the eastern districts of the country has continued, with the rebels capturing the city of Bukavu yesterday. Separately, in the northeastern region of Bunia, Uganda launched an invasion of their own, deploying special forces soldiers throughout the region. AC: The flimsy attempt to conceal the M23 "rebels" as an independent group has largely fallen away, as the military uniforms that the "rebels" are now wearing more or less confirm that these forces are in fact mercenaries slow-walking a Rwandan invasion of the DRC. Uganda now wanting a piece of the action is very likely to escalate the situation further, and probably marks a new era of the decades-long conflict. Europe: Tensions remain elevated between the United States and Ukraine, with Ukrainian leader Zelensky expressing a variety of hostile sentiments towards the United States for himself not being invited to the peace talks conference currently underway in Saudi Arabia. -HomeFront- USA: The arrival of winter weather conditions throughout much of the central and eastern parts of the nation has caused significant travel delays. Many airlines have issued ground stops for much of the central United States due to poor weather conditions. In Kentucky, the casualty figure has risen to 14x fatalities resulting from the recent flooding disasters throughout much of the state. Arizona: This morning an aircraft collision was reported at the Marana Regional Airport, which resulted in the destruction of two small planes. Two fatalities were reported as a result of the collision. AC: As the focus remains on aviation mishaps nationwide, it will be up to the individual to conduct their own analysis to determine if these events are happening more often, or if the increased media coverage is skewing the overall risk assessment. Washington D.C. - Various Presidential actions continue, with a handful of cartels being formally designated as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs) this afternoon. AC: This decision was made weeks ago, and already in practice as evidenced by the significant intelligence collection efforts recently undertaken by the United States in Mexico. As the formalization of this decision is solidified in policy, the ball is now in the court of the various cartels to determine what their reaction will be. On the diplomatic front, relations between the United States and Russia have improved significantly over the past few days, at the expense of rapidly deteriorating relations with Ukraine and most of Europe. Russian President Vladimir Putin announced an official restoration of diplomatic relations between the United States and Russia, as part of ongoing conversations pertaining to peace talks. -----END TEARLINE----- Analyst Comments: As has long been theorized since the start of the war (and as the conflict in Ukraine draws to a close), a lot of things are going to happen in very rapid succession. Perhaps most frustratingly, a lot of things are going to happen that may seem to be nonsensical to some. This is due to the rabid censorship efforts over the past few years that have painted a specific picture...the vast majority of those in the west have largely been looking at the war through a lens that is completely one-sided. This is nothing new, however, reality is often a great equalizer in the realm of information warfare...at a certain point all of the propaganda and gaslighting falls away to reveal the reality of the situation. In the case of Ukraine, there are many people who likely still believe everything they have heard about the war, the motivations for the conflict beginning, and so on. As such, when the lies are increasingly more and more detached from the truth, the more damage is done; the bigger the lies are, the harder they fall. Over the next few weeks, the American taxpayer is going to learn a lot of inconvenient truths, and as a result may feel a level of betrayal as the situation does not turn out the way that it has been portrayed for years. More specifically, harsh statements will very likely continue to be traded between the United States and Ukraine as it becomes more clear that ever since the West became involved in the conflict Ukraine has had very little agency or leeway to decide their own fate. Ukrainian leaders may even seek to bite the hand that feeds them, as that hand starts feeding them less. Likewise, many European nations which have been involved in the war will probably continue to express hostile sentiment toward the United States (as Germany already has), for a variety of reasons: some probably justifiable, some not so much. Either way, the rapid pivot away from the policy of the past four years is likely to cause issues domestically among Americans who have differing (and often combative) opinions on the war. Analyst: S2A1 Research: https://publish.obsidian.md/s2underground

//The Wire//2300Z March 11, 2026// //ROUTINE// //BLUF: MULTIPLE SHIPS TARGETED BY IRANIANS IN STRAIT OF HORMUZ. IRANIAN DRONE STRIKES REPORTED IN OMAN. POSSIBLE TERROR ATTACK OCCURS IN SWITZERLAND.//  -----BEGIN TEARLINE-----   -International Events- Middle East: Drone attacks throughout the Persian Gulf continue as before, with significant strikes being reported at the port city of Salalah in Oman this morning. Several drones targeted the oil storage tanks near the port, which have been burning throughout the day. Strait of Hormuz: This morning three merchant vessels were struck by Iranian munitions in the vicinity of the waterway. Two vessels were struck off the coast of Dubai and Ras al Khaymah, one of which was a containership that sustained unspecified damage. To the northeast, another vessel (the M/V MAYUREE NAREE) was struck while attempting to transit the Strait, which caused a fire that has since been extinguished. The crew of this vessel has reportedly abandoned ship in the hours after the strike, and three crew members remain missing. Analyst Comment: In addition to the threats posed by drones and missiles, concerns are growing regarding the possibility that the Strait may have been mined. President Trump indicated that the Iranians may have attempted to target vessels with naval mines over the past few days, however statements by American officials so far have have been inconclusive as to whether or not any mines have actually been laid. Due to this uncertainty, it would be wise for shipping companies to assume that at least some asymmetric naval capability exists within the Iranian Navy. Switzerland: Yesterday evening an attack was reported onboard a city bus in the town of Kerzers. One assailant set himself on fire while sitting on the bus, killing 6x people during the attack and wounding 5x others. Analyst Comment: So far, very little information has been released regarding this attack. The assailant has not been identified, and it may take some time for any potential motive to emerge. Due to the mass casualties that were caused by this incident, this incident should be considered a terror attack until more information comes to light. -HomeFront- Washington D.C. - This morning a vehicle ramming incident was reported at the White House, which involved an SUV attempting to ram through the barricades at the corner of Connecticut and H Street. No injuries were reported and the driver was arrested at the scene. No word yet on what caused the incident, or if this was a deliberate attack. -----END TEARLINE----- Analyst Comments: Indications and warnings are mounting that missile defenses throughout the Middle East may be dwindling. Over the past few days, civilian aircraft have been repositioned from airports around the region, and several airlines have canceled flights throughout the region, such as KLM which has halted flights to Dubai until March 28th. As airspace opens up between waves of drone attacks, many commercial and private aircraft owners are taking the opportunity to get their airframes out of harms way. As a result of these developments, many locals believe this an indicator of interceptor missiles running dry, and thus what seemed like a fairly tepid war (by comparison) might suddenly get more active if the interceptions of drones become less common. This is obviously pure speculation based on an unknown factor; the true number of air defenses any nation has is a closely guarded secret. The same theory applies around the region, from Israel to Kuwait, with nearly all nations involved heavily suppressing any social media posts referencing successful Iranian targeting efforts. Nevertheless, the truth eventually gets out and what can be observed is that the drones still fly and interceptions are not always successful. And that success rate may be decreasing, if the data provided is accurate. Using the UAE as an example, it is true that drone attacks targeting the nation have decreased over the past two days. From the start of the war, Dubai has fended off about a hundred drones and roughly a dozen ballistic missiles each day. Over the past couple of days, the total number of reported drone attacks have dwindled to about one-third of what has been normal since the start of the war. However, the number of successful interceptions have dwindled too: Of the 35x drones detected yesterday, only 26x were intercepted...with 9x drones impacting within the country. Whether or not they hit their intended targets is unknown, however this many drones making it through defenses on D+11 is substantially important. This also confirms that Iranian forces maintain enough operational effectiveness to conduct Over-the-Horizon targeting, causing just enough trouble to make the fight costly in the long run. Analyst: S2A1 Research: https://publish.obsidian.md/s2underground Disclaimer: No LLMs were used in the writing of this report.

Hello again, everyone, and welcome back to the underground. This is the intel update for May 10th of 2016 2026. Things are getting crazier by the day, and we're going to be a little bit more spicy today with the topics we have to cover, so let's get right to it. This week, the more serious consequences are starting to emerge as we arrive at today 77 of the war in the Persian Gulf. Shortages of petroleum products and distillates are beginning, and multiple companies are issuing warnings of impending supply chain outages. Throughout Europe, the migration crisis has come to a head once again with high-profile murders and new migration centers being implanted throughout the continent to the sharp disapproval of native populations. Right now, as I'm recording this, throughout the United Kingdom, large-scale protests and counter-protests are underway throughout the nation as the United Kingdom demonstrations bring large crowds to London. Within our own hemisphere, Cuba is on the menu once again, and high-profile diplomatic endeavors have taken place this week just off the coast of Florida. And within the homeland itself, the governance situation is not going super well, and disapproval is high on a variety of issues. All the while, violence from the usual suspects continues to be the norm around the country. Moving to strategic movement for this week, most major deployments continue from last week, with the biggest change being that the Ford Carrier Strike Group has arrived home in Virginia from her long deployment. Just as a bit of context for how long the Ford has actually been at sea, I'll have to check the actual numbers, but I think she's been at sea for well over 300 days, which is the longest deployment that any American aircraft carrier has seen since Vietnam. So, she was definitely stressed beyond her max, and she suffered a lot of catastrophic damage from the toilet situation in Venezuela to the laundry fire situation in the Middle East, the Ford has had one very arduous deployment. So far, the Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group is slated to replace her in the Middle East. I don't know if they've departed port yet and formed up or not. It is interesting, though, that the Ford did not wait for the Ike to get on station. Usually, they conduct handover in region, but I guess the Ford said, "We've had enough," so they came on back early a little bit, or rather late, because this was a long deployment. But But any case, the Eisenhower is uh to take up station somewhere in CENTCOM. However they want to work that out is up to them. But either way, there will be a total of three aircraft carriers in the region once again in a week or so. Bottom line, there has been no cessation of American assets in the Middle East at the present time. Everything has been in a state of resupply, reconfigure, all that kind of stuff. And everything is still in place and ready to resume fighting if that is the chosen option moving forward. Around the homeland this week, there are several items of note to be aware of from a risk management perspective. A lot of the time we may be tempted to ignore a security concern because we don't want to get called names or get slapped with a label or some kind of ist or ism or whatever. And since nobody else wants to talk about this stuff in public, I will because it has very real security implications. You know when I caveat stuff like that, we have to read between the lines quite a bit. And this week there have been many potential flash points that may or may not escalate into something more serious over the next few weeks. But nobody in the counterterrorism or security space wants to talk about it. For one, we have the Chud the Builder scandal, which took place in Tennessee a few days ago. For those of you who don't know what this is all about, fear not. I'm also late to the party, but Chud the Builder is the screen name for Dalton Eatherly, who is a social media influencer, content streamer sort of figure who is infamous for conducting what is being described as like rage bait style content, street interviews, confrontations, uh stuff like that. A lot of his content is either political or mostly racial in nature or focused on that issue. So, a few days ago he was involved in a defensive shooting outside the Clarksville Courthouse in Tennessee after a black man attacked him, resulting in Eatherly shooting the individual. And let me just say, details on the whole incident are really sketchy. I don't think that any content was being made at the time, so I don't think this was one of those confrontations gone wrong kind of situations, but again, I don't know. Right up front, nobody wants to say whether this was a good shoot or not because of the kind of content that this individual makes, I guess. I don't really know. I don't really watch live stream stuff myself. So, I'm kind of in the normie camp myself with this, I guess, but I haven't seen the evidence, but I can guess because of what happened afterwards. So, the judge set the bail really high despite the fact that Eagley did not kill the guy and the courthouse surveillance tape of the incident has not been released. There was also a police officer right there during the entire incident and his body cam is apparently not available or something like that. I don't know. So, regardless of anyone's feelings on Eagley personally or on the style of content he creates, this is now a huge racial thing that's kind of in society now. So, and I think that the multiple videos of the incident not being leaked yet is quite telling because, well, we all know how this goes, right? It's also a free speech sort of thing now. Uh there's that angle to it as well because this is now an issue to answer the question of whether or not insulting speech justifies a physical attack. That's the question that's being asked. So, the risk assessment part of this trial is to decide whether or not minorities have the right to attack someone because they thought they overheard a racial slur. That's really what we're dealing with here. Nobody wants to say it. Again, people get offended by everything nowadays. Even conservatives get really offended about stuff like this, but that's kind of the issue that's on the table and the court's going to have to decide that and I don't think it's looking super great, but again, this just happened a couple of days ago. The complicating factors are his own social media posts, which are going to make it very, very easy for the prosecution to put him away or secure a conviction. So, in effect, if you want to think of it simply, this is like a very high stakes version of the Shiloh Hendrix case. The issue here is that we're not entirely certain that this guy, Chud the Builder, did anything wrong. He might have just been randomly attacked. We just don't know. He also could have instigated the thing. Again, we don't know. There's 15 different video angles of this and nobody seems to have any of them, and the the one video that has leaked is extremely blurry. It's like a Bigfoot video, right? So, I think we know how this is going to work out, but the bottom line that I wanted to mention this today is because it's setting conditions. So, this is going to set conditions for a lot of rhetoric, a lot of tensions, a lot of other problems that are going to compound this summer. This is also just the first landmine that we have to know about today because in a similar vein, there are two other big trials on the menu for the next few weeks. In North Carolina, the De Carlos Brown Jr. situation remains unresolved for the time being after Brown has been found incompetent to stand trial for the murder of Irena Zaretska. No hate crime charges have been filed, and Brown has been determined to be incompetent to stand trial on the charges that do remain. So, it's not really clear as to what's going to happen to him. There are still a few competency hearings, and the next one I think is on June 9th, but it's not really clear how this is going to work out because the defense is literally trying to get him released from custody into psychiatric care. I don't know if that's going to happen, but this is the uncomfortable truth that we seem to be living in right now in the United States, and from a risk management perspective, people might scowl and click their teeth, but the fact of the matter is that if you're a minority in this country, you can kill a white guy or a white girl on a train, a judge labels you incompetent to stand trial, and then you just get out. That seems to be a very common thing from murder one all the way up at the Irena Zaretska level all the way down to smaller crimes. So, this whole trend of oh, they're too mentally unwell to go through a trial, well, let's just let them out. You know, that's the alternative solution that's selected, and I think they're trying to go for it. I think they're trying to go for it with this situation in Charlotte. I think they're going to do it. I don't know if they're going to succeed, but I think they're trying for it, and if that occurs, if De Carlos Brown gets off for the murder of Irena Zaretska because he's too mentally ill to stand trial, I think that's going to be kind of like an O.J. Simpson situation times a million. So, once again, is another political topic that nobody wants to talk about, but look man, I I got to warn you guys if your city is going to be burning down here, and I think that that might actually happen if some of these trials end up with a lot of these criminals walking even after conducting very brutal murders. And I say that not because the victims in this case are going to riot or anything like that, but because when these criminals get off, when they're let off by a judge or, you know, something you know, you you basically get away with murder, other murders are going to happen because now they know that murder is legal as long as you say you're crazy first. That's the kind of situation we find ourselves in, and we're just kind of tiptoeing around it, you know? Uh and sometimes we just got to got to say it like it is, and this is the way that it is, especially with the situation in Texas. In a couple of weeks, the Carmelo Anthony trial is set to begin, and this one is also not looking good, either. So, this is the trial for the murder of Austin Metcalfe, who was murdered by Carmelo Anthony, who stabbed him in the heart during a track meet at Memorial High School in April of last year. Note that I did not say allegedly murdered, because Anthony has confessed to the crime. He himself specifically said, and I quote, "I'm not alleged, I did it." Even though his lawyers have claimed self-defense on his part, so this is now a self-defense trial to begin in a couple of weeks. And we'll see how it goes, because once again, this is a huge racial thing at this point, with Anthony's family setting up a massive GoFundMe campaign for him, the killer. A lot of very high-profile and prominent attorneys and social media figures in the black community have rallied behind Anthony, saying that that this was a good thing, and supporting him for killing this kid at the track meet. So, I've covered all of this abhorrent behavior before, trying to be as neutral as possible, but this was a very public event. It's captured on video. There's a thousand witnesses to this crime, and the killer confessed to it right then and there. Again, seems fairly open and shut, you know, at face value on a societal level. Again, that's what trials are for, to, you know, iron out things that are not so open and shut, but still, this one's pretty pretty clear as to what's really the driving factor behind this. So, that's on the menu to be aware of over the next few weeks because this has really stirred up a lot of racial hatred all around, and of course, that drives up risk. Since we're basically jumping on top of landmine topics today, I also wanted to mention that many states have revamped their food stamp programs over the past 2 months to delist a lot of foods and products from what is eligible to purchase by EBT cards. Now, this is another hot-button issue, and I'm not bringing this up to examine the entire program itself. The whole, um, idea of welfare in the United States, that's a big issue. I'm specifically talking about one component of it because this could be a factor moving into the summertime. So, we've got the perfect storm for what I'd call cultural violence, uh, because a lot of people are being told that they can't buy certain foods with their EBT cards, which is a problem for a major fraud scheme that many people might not be aware of, which is the selling of plates on Facebook. Many of you may have seen this parenthetically or seen people talk about this. This has been going on for quite literally decades. Uh, it's not all fraudulent, but a lot of it is because this is a major way of laundering EBT money. The scam works by someone going to the grocery store and buying a lot of food with their EBT card, and they take it home, they package it up, and they resell it for a profit. Once again, the scale at which this is occurring is staggering. One woman in Michigan was arrested on fraud charges a few months ago because she was using her EBT card to literally buy supplies for her professional brick-and-mortar bakery. She was running an entire storefront where the stock and supply for her business was paid for by EBT. It's pretty easy to be a small business owner when you have exactly zero overhead and free supplies being provided by the taxpayer. And now that a lot of goods have been delisted from EBT in the first place, this is now a major income source that has taken a huge hit over the past few months. So, in isolation, this doesn't really matter a lot, right? But you couple this with gasoline prices getting super high and you've got the perfect storm for crime because a lot of this income is fixed, but gas prices take money out of the pockets of Americans universally. But at the state level, you might say, "Okay, you're getting a thousand dollars worth of EBT per month and because you're delisting a lot of products, now you're saying that that person can only launder half of that, so $500. And now you're spending double the money that you normally would on gas to ride around town." So, again, gas prices complicate everything. Same with drug dealers and human traffickers, high gas prices are serving as an unofficial tax on everybody. And now that we have not one but three high-profile, highly racially motivated criminal trials on the menu, things are not looking super great on the civil unrest front and the natives are a bit restless, if you get my meaning. Once again, I want to add another closing caveat. There's always going to be this angle to push a lot more of the societal division and a lot of this is being done intentionally, I think. I think that the the the tensions are intentionally being stoked by a lot of people, parties, media figures, stuff like that. So, I don't want to don't want to make this out to be like a complete apocalyptic Armageddon here for the summertime, but I'm saying that the conditions are starting to line up for that eventuality. Some of it's organic, though. Some of it's just tensions that have been there for a very long time. Some of it is probably being stoked. I don't know. All I can say is that the dominoes are stacking up. Will the Will those dominoes fall over? I don't know. I can just tell you that the dominoes are stacked up, right? So, it's up for you to decide what to think about this sort of stuff from a planning perspective. So, So, bottom line, everyone's asking, "Does this mean we're going to have another summer of Floyd again or another summer of love?" I don't know. I don't think so unless something major happens. It's more likely that a lot of these gas prices are just going to drive people crazy and you're going to have a lot more low-level crime, organized stuff like the whole BLM riots of the past few years. That's going to take a lot more organizational effort and that's That's not materialized just yet. But, for those of you guys who have to rely on public transit or you have to walk, you know, to work through a city and it's not a super great area, uh keep your head on a swivel. Just be careful. All right? So, you know, situation normal. Just be careful. So, yeah, I'll just leave it at that. Talked about this too much already, but this does lead into another growing concern that is becoming more realistic with every passing day, which are the supply chain disruptions that are coming about from the war in the Middle East cutting off a good chunk of the global energy supply. This week, several companies and automotive groups have warned that they are having to cut back on oil changes because there is a growing shortage of certain weights of motor oil. Some companies are dealing with a 40 to 50% drop in the availability of some petroleum products, which is staggering. It is far too early to panic, but it would not be a bad idea to start thinking about what your needs might be if this conflict continues for much longer, which I think it will. You all know how panic buying sets in super quickly and in this case, once the word gets out to the normies, it's going to be on like Donkey Kong, possibly quite literally, and store shelves are very likely to be wiped out by people who think that they need to buy 10 years worth of oil changes all at once. So, that's going to be fun to deal with over the next few weeks, but the petroleum sector is is slow to change and shortages take a very long time to materialize because we're dealing with a slow drip problem set. 20% of the world's energy supply being offline due to the war is a big deal, but it's also not 100%. So, that means that there's a bit of elasticity to the markets, and the biggest impact that the war is having right now is high prices for everything. But, motor oil and other distillates coming into short supply is definitely a canary in the coal mine for more serious logistical problems later on. Right now, it's still in the early stages, though. Another canary in the coal mine to be aware of on the forefront over the next few weeks is Cuba. Since the war in the Middle East slipped into more of a long-term problem, increased rhetoric has been issued by the White House regarding American aspirations for Cuba. In short, a lot of talk was circulating, mostly originating from remarks made by President Trump himself, indicating that the US might seek to conduct some sort of military operation in Cuba to obtain control over the nation in a similar manner as to how the operation in Venezuela worked out. Maybe not the operation itself, but the follow-on effect, as in Venezuela becoming a puppet state for the United States. Well, the United States wants the same thing for Cuba. Weeks ago, this was just talk, and nobody really took it seriously, kind of like the Greenland aspirations. Um, and right now, it still looks fairly unlikely, but less unlikely than before. American delegations of diplomats have visited Cuba to conduct talks, and the American blockade of Cuba is a very strong move to tighten the screws on the Cubans. Once again, the United States has completely, full stop, shut off all the energy supply to Cuba. That is not an embargo, that is a straight-up blockade. If you want to be doctrinally correct, you can crack open your textbook and say that this is an act of war, but we don't really care about terms and words and things anymore, so I guess that doesn't really matter. Either way, the Cubans are hurting right now. Most of that is being done by their own government over the past few years, but a lot of that is now starting to be more directly uh, result of American action. So, the Leeden Doctrine is most certainly at play with Cuba, which is the idea that every 10 years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall just to show the world we mean business. At least that's the quote, which is the origin of the doctrine. So, whether you agree with it or not, this is most certainly a good chunk of President Trump's mentality towards foreign policy, especially when it comes to smaller nations. It's what we did in Venezuela. It's what we're trying to do in Cuba. It'll have to look a lot differently, but in any case, just want to set the groundwork for me dropping a lot of red diamonds on Cuba in the next few weeks because as we all know, Sun Tzu always said that when you're in a war with multiple nations on multiple fronts, it always helps to open up another front. And that definitely seems like our plan. So, we'll definitely see how it goes, but I'm going to start preparing for that like I said a couple of weeks ago. I'm going to actually do it for real this time. Going to start preparing for Cuba just in case the United States seems to be interested in that sort of thing. So, moving overseas to the United Kingdom, tensions remain rather high due to the revelation of a rather grizzly murder that took place a couple of years ago coming to light this week. So, what happened back in 2023 and why is this case both so interesting and also so incredibly tragic? In December of 2023, Henry Noack was stabbed by Vikram DeGua on the street in Southampton. At first glance, this appeared to be a rather routine uh, stabbing attack with neither the victim nor the perpetrator knowing or really interacting with with each other before the incident. Noack, being stabbed with a ceremonial Sikh dagger, was severely wounded and called for police while trying to escape. DeGua continued to pursue the victim. He followed him down the street, stabbing him multiple times, and eventually when police arrived, DeGua, the stabber, told police that the victim had made a racial comment toward him. The responding officers promptly arrested Noak, who was still bleeding rather profusely from the stabbing and placed him in handcuffs. Over a period of several minutes, Noak bled out on the street. The entire attack was captured on video on the victim's phone, which had been found in Deeg's pocket as he robbed the victim after stabbing him. Due to the nature of the British legal system, in nearly all high-profile cases, the fact that a crime occurred in the first place is obscured so the general public is not aware of crimes when they take place, and in this case, the crime occurred 3 years ago, but the details are just being known now. The reason for talking about this incident now, years after the fact, is twofold. For one, if we don't talk about it now, then we never will, and this could be another Southport moment, and more unrest is possible due to the horrific details of the crime. Secondly, this crime is bringing about very specific cultural considerations that are tough to talk about, but must be noted purely from a threat analysis perspective. This information is useful for you if you live in the United Kingdom, but it also will benefit you if you live in Canada or the United States. So, the Sikh community has a very particular reputation around the Western world, as the Sikh culture is not just a religious sect or movement, but there is also a very strong nationalist movement which seeks to use violence to achieve their goals, or at least it has since the 1980s. Within India itself, many major terror attacks have been conducted by the Sikh community, and many notable Sikh political leaders have actually been exiled from India, having been convicted of terrorism at some point during the Khalistan uprising incidents back in the 1980s. These guys did pretty much everything. They brought down civilian airliners with explosives, small arms attacks, hostage stuff, all kinds of violent attacks throughout India, mostly in their own region they were trying to seek autonomy within. So, this is kind of like India's version of the PLF. If you guys remember that from the 1960s and 1970s, all that violence and the airline hijackings and bombings and all kinds of stuff like that that was occurring in Europe and the Middle East. Well, India was dealing with that within India itself from the Sikh community. Cut to today and many of this organizational leadership has actually ended up settling down in the Western world such as in Canada and the United Kingdom, both of which are nations that require this back pocket knowledge to be conveyed in hushed tones because it's in effect illegal to know this information in public. It is unfortunate to talk about because it's a very complicated issue and because you're dealing with this sort of religious aspect to it. You don't want to re- you know, insult somebody's religion, right? That really gets you nowhere, but this information is critical for one's survival because as angry as Britons are about this case, the Sikh community is starting to rally around their own flag. Tensions have been growing among the Sikh community throughout Europe for a while and the details of this case are likely to cause further confrontations and incidents. Also, the officers which helped to murder Noac, if you want to phrase it like that, which I certainly would, it's possible these guys are still on the police force and therefore public interest remains in figuring out if the officers who handcuffed a man and let him bleed out to death were of the same national origin and culture as the attacker because if that's the case and it may be, I don't know, it's speculation, but if that's the case, if there's a link there, yeah, this could get even more ugly than it already is. Unfortunately, these cultural aspects are a major part of the case because in the United Kingdom, Sikhs have been granted a religious exemption for the ban on carrying knives and Kirpan, the murderer in this case, was open carrying an 8-in ceremonial knife at the time at which he used to conduct the murder. So, while everyone else in the United Kingdom has to go to extreme lengths to comply with UK knife law, the Sikhs have been granted permission under a religious exemption that allows them to carry long daggers known as kirpans. That alone would be a very, very hot button topic in British society and even in like Canadian society where the same kind of crackdown on, you know, weapons and stuff like that is a big concern there, too. The other issue, and I think the main issue, is why does this religious exemption exist? Again, this is one of the articles of the Sikh faith because all Sikhs are required to carry a blade on their person. And in their religion, this dagger is exclusively intended to be used as a weapon. To put this in context, imagine if Pope Leo said that all Catholics had to carry around a Beretta and shoot anyone who is perceived to be in violation of the Vatican's policies. To us, the first part sounds kind of entertaining, but the second part, the idea of carrying around a weapon for the exclusive purposes of hurting people for religious reasons, that's absolutely insane. We don't do that here in Western society, but within the Sikh faith, which is heavily centered around violence, and since the 1980s, they have linked their cultural aspirations with their religious aspirations, to them this is normal. So, if you Google this, they try to say that it's for self-defense and that the five K's of Sikhism are all about defending the weak or something like that. But, if you scratch away the paint, you see that this is really just a bit of word play because they have the concept of Dharam Yudh, which loosely translates to holy war or war for justice. This concept within Sikhism is the reason for why India has had a problem with counterterrorism in Punjabi territory. And if you read a lot of internal Indian politics, I know nobody really wants to do that, but it's very interesting from a counterterrorism perspective. If you read a lot of their internal news about internal counterterrorism and and policing stuff, they're having a really big problem with this, and they've had a big problem with this over the years because the Sikhs use this belief system to justify terrorism as part of the Khalistan independence movement. So, in the West, this {quote} defending the weak and self-defense aspect of their faith, these guys are not the Mandalorian, okay? These guys are not just trying to immortalize like the second amendment in their faith. This is really just a cover that allows them to carry knives and be ready at all times to carry out attacks against anyone who they subjectively perceive to be against them. So again, anytime we talk about defense and self-defense, it gets kind of cagey because everybody has a bunch of different views on that sort of topic, which is understandable. However, we have to look at this through the context of this specific region on earth and the belief system that came from this region, which again is not it's not universal to all Indian people. It is not It is not Hinduism. This is Sikhism. This is a different thing. And again, even in the United States, this is a big deal because many of you may have been familiar with Sikh culture through our kind of problems we've been having with trucking. So trucking in the United States, Indian dude, you know, runs off the road, kills somebody. There have been a few high-profile crimes like that occur over the past couple of years, which have gotten a lot of attention on the Sikh community and occasionally, as in nearly 100% of the time, what you will do is look at the cab, look at the the photos from the actual crime scene itself, and you'll see the same guy on all the trucks. So again, I went down this rabbit hole a while ago. So just to digress for a bit because this kind of matters in the context of talking about Sikhism. If you see this on the highway, this is what this is. A lot of times you'll see this on a lot of more Sikh truck drivers. They have these decals all over their trucks of this guy this guy with a turban carrying an AK-47. So what is this about? This is a decal. These are images of a guy called Sidhu Moose Wala. He is as a Sikh rapper who was killed in a gunfight a few years ago, and since then he's become kind of a musical or artistic expression of Sikh nationality, ethno-nationalism, that sort of thing. So, that's what this is all about. If you're kind of confused as to why you're seeing do pictures of do the same guy with an AK on the side of a trailer or a truck, you know, a big rig going down the highway, this is probably what you're dealing with. So, think like the Punjabi version of like the Crips and the Bloods kind of arrangement. This is what's going on within India politics. Again, nobody cares. Nobody should have to care about internal Indian politics in a small region in Central India. But, because this culture is literally in governance in a lot of the world now, it's worth being aware of. I've been looking at this for a while now, and again, I have to put the boilerplate statement on there. I don't know if everybody's like this. This could just be a cultural thing. It's kind of foreign to the United States, but it's here now, and you know, it's here to Western Europe. The United Kingdom is, of course, having to deal with it more strongly than the than the United States does. The context from which we're talking about this. And again, I can't say that all Sikhs of, you know, all 20 million Sikhs or however many there are, I don't know if everyone in this culture is on board with this kind of ethno-religious nationalism violence kind of mentality. I don't I don't know if everyone's on board with that. I'm sure there are probably varying degrees of it. However, when it comes to the United Kingdom knife laws and the kid that got stabbed to death on the street, I cannot speak to anything but the data. And the raw fact is that in the United Kingdom, 100% of Sikhs have been granted an exemption to carry weapons in the UK, and 100% of Sikhs are required to do so by their religion. It's not a personal, it's not an insult, it's just a fact that this particular belief system is completely alien to the West. And by their own admission, they do not assimilate, nor are they compatible with Western culture. Because if they were compatible and they wanted to assimilate, they would not get laws changed to accommodate them, and those laws would not involve them being able to carry a weapon everywhere they're going to go so they can kill their political enemies if they so choose. You can bring this into the self-defense space if you wish. I'm not taking it there. I'm just saying that the Sikhs somehow have the right to carry weapons, daggers, machetes on the streets without any question whatsoever. And if you question that, you're going to get arrested. And the ethnic Britons have they they can't even get a Swiss Army knife, right? That's the reasoning before the censorship in this case. It has everything to do with the knife itself, the religious aspect to it, the culture behind all of this, the political stuff, the decals on the trucks. It's all one big mess. This was not a random stabbing attack. It was a Sikh using his kirpan as intended. These weapons are carried by Sikhs for them to kill people with it. So we have hostile intent and hostile action. And they have been allowed to do so via the religious exemption in the UK. Coming back to the actual case itself, which is why I've spent so much time on this today, is there's another factor to this as well, which is honestly the least surprising detail of the case, which is that Diguva is not the only person on trial. His mother took the bloody knife and hid it in the family home, aiding Diguva in covering up the crime. So she's on trial as well for aiding and abetting the murder. Several other family members on that night were also arrested and initially charged, but these charges were dropped over the past 2 years. So you've got people who probably knew about the crime, were trying to cover it up, but they couldn't stick them with anything and they're just walking around. This involvement with the Sikh community closing ranks to protect one of their own, this is likely to exacerbate tribal violence on the streets of Britain for the foreseeable future because right now the Punjabi communities of London are trying to figure out how to keep that kirpan exemption. And as a result, even more adversarial perspectives are likely to emerge. I would expect many Sikhs to start carrying larger kirpans in public throughout the United Kingdom to dominate and flex on the laws being tailored specifically to them. That's just kind of their style. And once again, I'm not trying to dunk on anybody's religion. I really don't want to do that because again, it gets you nowhere. But if your gurus require you to carry a long knife and that you are to use that long knife to carry out a holy war and I also cannot carry a knife myself to defend myself from you, we're going to have a problem. And that problem has manifested in this case for the British people. I know ethnic Britons, everyone who lives in the UK who listens to me are probably fuming about that because you may not know this as an American, but in the UK, intent is a huge part of British knife law. If you're carrying a plastic fork in your pocket and you tell a police officer that you intended to carry that plastic fork to defend yourself with, you go straight to jail because it's extremely, extremely, extremely illegal to carry anything expressly for the purposes of self-defense. If you have a potato in your pocket and you say that's for self-defense, straight to jail. Do not collect $200. You are toasted. But if you're a Sikh and you say that my religion says that I have to carry this machete so that if I think a holy war is justified, I can murder people, the British police will arrest anyone who disagrees with you. That's the That's the level of of seriousness we're dealing with here. So, this case completely revolves around cultural and religious lines and also line of action on the part of the police. And all of this is why this case was buried for as long as possible, years in fact. So, now that the truth is out, tensions will remain palpable while Deegol's trial continues, which is why it's worth getting to the bottom of this cultural issue. Once we go down into the weeds, we can see that there are really four completely separate issues which have a high potential of driving unrest and violence moving forward. For one, we've got the Sikhs being allowed to carry weapons, but ethnic British citizens not being allowed to do the same. So, there's thing one. Secondly, the British police instinctively sided with a murderer who was covered in blood and arrested the 18-year-old kid who was actively bleeding to death. That's your second issue. Thirdly, the reason for why the Sikhs even carry the blade in the first place is very concerning because there's a lot of history and cultural violence behind it. And fourthly, the British government covered all of this up for years. So, once again, many different aspects four flashpoints to emerge, all of which are really tough concerns to even talk about in the first place. So, enough of Punjabi land. I know everyone's tired of of it, but I wanted to get that out there because this is kind of a complex uh canary in the coal mine, I should say, for a lot of the issues going on in the United States as well. So, worth talking about in a long-form format anyway. So, finally, I wanted to wrap up today with a few notes from the recent presidential state visit to to China. As with all diplomatic visits, 99% of this trip was useless banter and tourism, but that last 1% can get pretty interesting. First of all, the objective of the trip itself is not entirely clear. The State Department can church it up with flowery language all they want, but it's not really clear as to why the president and a huge delegation would take a trip abroad while their nation is at war. To me, that alone is pretty interesting because it implies there is a reason as to why a trip to China is more important than the war that we're actively fighting, but anyway, whatever that reason is, I don't know, but it's still interesting. Secondly, by far the most interesting part of the trip came from an offhand remark made by President Trump on board Air Force One as they were heading back to the US Thursday night. I will play the clip just in its entirety because it touches on the Taiwan issue, and this is probably one of the more interesting parts of the diplomatic endeavor, so here's the clip. Would the US defend Taiwan if it came to it? I don't want to say that. I'm not going to say that. There's There's one person that knows that. You know who it is? Me. I'm the only person. That question was asked to me today by President Xi. I said, "I don't talk about that." He asked you today. He asked you if you would send troops, if you would defend He asked me if I'd defend them. I said, "I don't talk about that." He told him that. I know it's a little hard to hear. I'm sorry about that. The audio was not great when it was being recorded, but the gist of the conversation kind of came out. Now, obviously, we cannot put a whole lot of weight on one short clip. That's really a bad idea when it comes to President Trump because he himself is not exactly a man who has hard and fast positions on anything. But, in this clip, a couple of things happened. For one, President Trump stating that he will not reveal as to if the US will defend Taiwan. That's completely normal. In fact, this is a continuation of the very long train of China policy, which back during the Kissinger era was referred to as strategic ambiguity. Meaning that the United States would not reveal whether or not we will militarily back Taiwan. So, we're going to leave that as a question for China to figure out. Will they, won't they? Will they defend? Will they Will they will not defend? If we If the Chinese do this, will the United States do that? Again, strategic ambiguity. No real hard red lines in the sand or in the island chain, so to speak. Anything to deal with Taiwan in the diplomatic spaces has been handled incredibly delicately over the years. And, like him or not, it is undeniable that President Trump often, and rather ironically, acts like a bull in a china shop on pretty much everything he does, for better or for worse. And so, he let slip that there would be a war if China invaded Taiwan. Whether he means that or not, I don't know. It could be a lie. It could be a genuine thing. I don't know. He changes his mind a lot and doesn't really speak plainly on stuff like this, which is fair enough, I guess, but it's still interesting. However, the most interesting part about this short exchange on Air Force One is that President Trump said that Xi asked him the same question directly. And kind of hilariously, you can even see the journalist who asked him the question kind of taken aback by this because if this is true, and I want to stress that this is a big if, this is very surprising. The Chinese, just as a matter of cultural and diplomatic policy, they absolutely never ask direct questions like this, let alone President Xi. So, if this actually happened, we might be closer to Taiwan kicking off than we might think. Granted, this is a huge debate right now, so some say the timeline is for 2027 invasion, others say that China is never actually going to invade. Uh they're actually not going to use military force at all, but rather take over diplomatically, and all of the military force that we're seeing them use is actually for other aspirations throughout the maybe second and third island chains. Hope not on that front, but I, you know, that that's the argument anyway. I don't know what to think personally on that front. It's all in the international space, and it's kind of hard to figure out who's going to do what because there's so many factors to consider, but the bottom line is that the Far East is not looking to stay in their period of peace and tranquility for too much longer. And President Xi directly asking Trump to his face, "Hey, are you guys going to get involved in Taiwan if we go take it?" If he's asking that directly, mhm, that's not a very good sign. But again, we're placing a lot of weight on a very short exchange and personal testimony from one person, not something that we can make a whole lot of decisions off of, but again, indications and warnings are stacking up. So, knowing how the American involvement in Iran has worked out, the Chinese have been taking a lot of notes on that endeavor. They have been very, very interested in how our war has gone out gone on in the Middle East, and this uh situation becoming a little bit of a fiasco here has maybe emboldened them to think that they might have a chance against the United States in the Pacific now since we've depleted our stockpiles for the moment. Their whole defense policy is hundreds of thousands of anti-ship cruise missiles and they already know that the Iranians who only launched a few hundred missiles at us, you know, all total throughout this conflict directly at our ships. China with hundreds of thousands of munitions is that's pretty significant and they know that they probably have the upper hand at least to when it comes to Taiwan. So, so they might attack before we can rebuild our own military stockpiles because they know without a doubt that we cannot defend Taiwan. Taiwan is off the table. It just is. You may not like it. I don't like it, but it is. Uh based on how the war in Iran has gone. But, on the other hand, the Chinese are also looking at how the most technologically advanced military in the world is having a really tough time winning a war against a vastly inferior foe or at least a foe that is vastly inferior on paper. And that imbalance is taking place mostly due to terrain. If Iran looked like Iraq, we would have won the war 5 minutes into it, right? But, it's not. Iran is nothing in the world but hundreds of trillions of tons of granite. So, maybe the Chinese are second-guessing the success that their own operations might have in Taiwan. Other than these very tiny aspects of the trip, not much else came out of the state visit from what I can see. No real commitments to anything were achieved on either side, just very coy statements from the Chinese as you would expect. I'd expect nothing less. And right now, the trip mostly appears to be a giant pile of nothing other than buying a bit of time to focus on things other than the current war that the US is fighting in the Middle East. So, that's where we stand for today. Flashpoints all around both overseas, in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, and also here at home with a lot of domestic unpleasantness being plopped on our plates this week. And our friendly redcoats across the seas having to deal with a lot of complicated issues as well. Thankfully, all of this uh rather unfortunate topics that we have to cover sometimes, these have given us some idea of what to prepare for and how important it is to remain situationally aware and keep your head on a swivel. High gas prices make people do crazy stuff all around and right now it is a very high risk time for any of the dozen or so bubbling tensions to reach another flash point. We don't have to do them in gloom, don't ever do that, don't ever black pill, no black pilling allowed, but we have to be aware, we have to be attentive, we have to talk about unfortunate things sometimes even if it's a little embarrassing or culturally inappropriate or we have to talk about it just purely because you need the information to be able to survive walking down the street sometimes. So with that, let's roll it up for today and talk about the Ghost Net reports for this week. Once again, this radio net that we use to exchange information around the world is very, very helpful sometimes. And it was a good net all around from everyone. Now that the summertime weather has arrived for most of us, a lot more people are joining the party, which is always good to see. The more mundane weekly testing and practice sessions are not always super high speed. They're just not. But in our case, this isn't just practice, this is also practical utility, right? So we can find some interesting information that many of us might not have heard before, which is always good to see. It's already been a pretty crazy year and with hurricane and wildfire season upon us once again, it's a good time to dust off the comms gear and make sure everything works. Even if you are not into the world of HF radio or Meshtastic, if you don't want to get into anything like that, if it's too much of an investment, there's always free or low-budget ways to get into this stuff, but even then the the educational barrier is pretty high. Working on that, going to bring that barrier down. There's a lot of other dudes out there doing good stuff to make sure that radio is more accessible to more people. Even so, you can always make sure that your own radios work, make sure that you have good communications plan put together, even if you don't have radios at all. Just make sure that if you haven't heard from somebody in a while, make sure you have a plan for that. Just so that you have a way to know how how get in touch with friends and family just in case regular lines of communication fail. Cyber attack season is also here and constant. That's a yearly thing. It's always going around, but these things always tend to come around when there's times of international tension and conflicts and stuff like that. And you never really know when a server is going to go down somewhere just due to some random hacking group getting a hold of things. So, again, just being prepared, doing the bare minimum to make sure that you know what to do and you have some kind of plan ahead of time. That's going to help out quite a lot. That's all I have for today, everyone. I know things are getting a little heavy out there in the world, but it's going to be okay. We're we're going to take things one day at a time and do the best we can. That's all we can do, anyway. So, thanks for sticking with me and all of my research and geospatial data is all available, all for free at the links below along with all of my source material that I use throughout the week. I'm still working on the A-TAC series. It's It's a lot of work a lot of work to get this stuff done, but I'm going to try to power through a lot of this more A-TAC and communications kind of doctrine and tutorials and educational stuff this summer time and we'll see how it works out. I hope it I hope it helps a lot. So, if you're interested in using A-TAC or communications or stuff, check out the playlist on my YouTube channel and you will be able to find all of the prior content I've made on that in addition to the new stuff that I'm trying to make. So, thanks again, everyone, and I'll see you next time. And as always, fight in the shade.

//The Wire//2300Z April 6, 2026// //ROUTINE// //BLUF: RESCUE MISSION OF DOWNED AIRMAN CONDUCTED IN IRAN AS MAJOR ESCALATIONS OF THE WAR EXPECTED ON TUESDAY. UNITED AIRLINES BEGINS CANCELING FLIGHTS DUE TO EXTREMELY HIGH COSTS OF AVIATION FUEL.//  -----BEGIN TEARLINE-----   -International Events- Iran: A large scale rescue operation was conducted over the weekend with the goal of rescuing the Weapon Systems Officer (WSO) who ejected from the F-15 which was shot down over Isfahan on Friday. The pilot was rescued quickly that same day, however the WSO was unable to be recovered. A large-scale ad hoc bombing campaign was conducted throughout Saturday morning and afternoon, as airstrikes were used to protect the downed airman until dark. Due to how far the rescue operation had to be conducted behind the lines, two MC-130 aircraft were used to set up a makeshift Forward Arming and Refueling Point (FARP) at a small agricultural airfield. During the operation the two MC-130's were unable to take off (some reports from local Iranians indicate it may have been due to mud or sand), and another rescue team was deployed to the same FARP to rescue the rescuers. By sunrise on Sunday morning, everyone (including the downed airman) was off the ground and back within friendly airspace. After their departure, the MC-130's were destroyed via airstrike to prevent them from falling into Iranian hands intact. Throughout the region, American bombing of targets within Iran intensified in the southwest over the weekend, as more assets were dedicated to supporting rescue operations. A handful of power plants and/or electrical substations were struck throughout Iran over the past few days as well. Iranian forces have continued to carry out attacks on American installations in Kuwait and the UAE, all of which have had some level of success. France: Counterterrorism patrols have increased following multiple arrests in Paris, which resulted from an attempted IED attack last week. Over the weekend French officials stated that at total of 4x individuals had been arrested after attempting to conduct an explosive attack at the Bank of America building in Paris back on March 28th. Initially, three of the suspects (all juveniles) were arrested either at the scene or shortly after the incident. An additional suspect (an adult) was arrested over the weekend, who has admitted to recruiting the juveniles to carry out the attack, with himself also being a middleman and someone else providing the IED to him. Analyst Comment: This attack failed due to the IED malfunctioning, and as a result the story did not get much traction in the media. The details provided by the fourth suspect reignited interest in the case, along with the strong indicator that the motive in this attack was terrorism (which came about after pro-Iranian terror groups claimed the attack). Considering the testimony from the adult who was arrested, it is very likely that this case is a continuation of the classic trend of a terrorist network being much larger than originally theorized. -HomeFront- Washington D.C. - Following a series of strange and concerning posts on social media, President Trump stated that the targeting of civilian energy infrastructure in Iran will begin on Tuesday if the Strait of Hormuz is not opened to the United States. USA: Around the nation, economic impacts of the war continue to be felt, as the average national gas price remains over $4.00 per gallon. Commercial airlines are also beginning to feel the impacts of the fuel crisis, with United Airlines canceling some lower-priority flights over the next few months due to the rising costs of jet fuel. Analyst Comment: For additional context, United's CEO Scott Kirby stated that if fuel prices remained as they are right now, United would need to raise prices by $11 billion. According to Kirby, this is more than double the total revenue ever generated by United, which turned approximately $5 billion in profit during their best year. -----END TEARLINE----- Analyst Comments: Strategically, the war in Iran has become host to many pyrrhic victories. Rescuing the downed WSO in what was probably the most daring rescue mission of modern memory was a great success. However, with every success in this war comes a larger perspective. The United States lost 2x MC-130's, 3x MH-6 helicopters, and sustained damage to at least two HH-60 Pavehawks during the mission to recover the WSO. To be clear, there was never any consideration of NOT conducting this mission; the United States would of course trade the loss of equipment to recover one man. This has been the standard ever since Vietnam, and there was never any question of not sacrificing some expensive planes if needed. However, this rescue mission provides critical combat data for how an invasion of Iran might go, if the decision is made to launch a ground invasion that begins with a Helicopter Assault Force (HAF). If an Air Assault is conducted into some location in Iran, the United States will probably face more significant resistance than is currently being expected. Analyst: S2A1 Research: https://publish.obsidian.md/s2underground Disclaimer: No LLMs were used in the writing of this report.

Hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground. This is the intel update for April 20th through the 26th, 2025. It's been a busy week as usual, so let's get right to it. Starting off with the global overview here on the home front. Most of the concerns this week have been really related to various immigration issues such as a couple of judges who are arrested for aiding and abetting illegal operations. And the fallout from that will probably be a little bit more concerning as time goes on, but we'll get to that in a moment. Overseas, various diplomatic efforts continue via the pen and the sword, depending on where you're at in the world. Diplomatic negotiations continue with regards to the war in Ukraine. As things are happening rather quickly with that conflict, higher and higher levels of diplomatic activities are being conducted. For instance, President Trump met with Ukrainian leader Zalinski at the Pope's funeral and American diplomat Steve Woodco has been taking part in various peace talks and uh negotiation efforts in Moscow over the past few weeks. Nothing really solid either way though. It it does look like we're entering the final stages of the war when diplomatic activities are starting to become a little bit more common and the restrictions and face saving activities of the past few years have kind of fallen away. Now we're just getting essentially down to brass tax with this. It will probably take a couple of more weeks for things to reach a good point of stability, but right now Russia is at the table, Ukraine is at the table, and the United States is kind of facilitating the whole thing. NATO is keeping quiet as they probably should at the moment and we're actually starting to make good progress by getting all of the belligerents involved in this. So when it comes to things like this, peace is very very close, but it can also be very very far away. So we will have to see how things shake out. But right now things are tenuous at best, but it's uh it's continuing. Diplomacy is continuing which is probably a good thing. Similar story with the Iranians. really nothing of of note has come from the past few weeks of talks, negotiations, rhetoric, all that kind of stuff. There have been some casual remarks and rumors, but for the most part, there really hasn't been any major development there. Same thing in Yemen. The United States is continuing to bomb pretty much everything there is in Yemen. I will mention that there are local rumors uh or at least there are statements being made that the actual Yemeni government as in not the Houthis like the actual elected quote unquote legitimate if you want to call them that government of Yemen is attempting to take on the Houthis with the sort of passive help of the United States along with Saudi Arabia and all the other nations that are involved in this conflict. I don't know how legitimate that is. We're talking maybe 30,000 20,000 at best of uh Yemeni citizens who are not Houthi who are not ethnically Houthi and they don't really control hardly anything. They're just out in the eastern part of the country whereas the capital city all the major ports they're all controlled by the Houthis who control the country. So this really gets way down into the weeds and it's not super critical to understand the the minute details of this to understand the larger picture which is that conflict continues in Yemen. The United States is losing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of drones because of Houthies keep shooting them down. So, you know, the United States military is learning a lot of defense lessons here and I would be very curious from a more doctrinal standpoint the lessons that are being learned in Yemen. But so far, the status quo remains more or less in the Far East. The various retaliatory actions undertaken by China with regards to American trade and the tariffs that they are potentially facing. These efforts continue. This situation deserves a lot more time than I can give to it today, but both the United States and China might be speaking past each other and not necessarily to each other with with regards to what's actually happening in the diplomatic space on this one. What I mean by that is the United States is speaking to China and is approaching this issue purely from an economic situation, purely from a fairness, from a tax, from a tariff perspective, whereas China is speaking a different language on on their outlook on the world. So the Chinese economy while it is not purely a communist sort of Soviet Union style economy, it's not that it's definitely something different. However, we always have to remember that China is in fact a communist nation. The Chinese Communist Party is running the country, right? So you can't entirely say that the Chinese economy is a free economy. It's most certainly not. Now, it may not be as strict as the Soviet Union was back in the day, but still it's uh it's hard to get any sort of reliable economic data out of China because again, they are a very much closed society. They have a lot of closed cities. It's, you know, they've they've brought the era of secrecy to their modern economy and it's really hard to determine how an economic trade dispute will impact China. People will argue about this till they're blew in the face, but the bottom line for now is that things are not as simple as they seem. I'll just I'll just leave it like that. That China may be approaching this whole trade dispute from a more military angle than the United States is, even though the United States is most certainly trying to treat this tariff situation as a sort of soft embargo. So, there's a little bit of military uh tactics going on here, a little bit of military strategy sprinkled over the top of what most people seem to think is purely an economic thing. And it's not a purely economic thing. And because of that, it's uh complicated. And it's really hard to describe both what is actually happening and what is going to happen. So something to keep in mind for the future, but for now we're just going to have to leave it there. And finally, in India and Pakistan in the Kashmir region, it would seem that war is most certainly on the menu at the moment. Whether or not straightup hostilities will commence again like in 2019 is hard to determine at the moment. But right now the diplomatic situation definitely seems worse than in 2019 when the fighting flared up in Kashmir after a period of lull and a sort of tepid peace. Right now the diplomatic situation is much worse. India and Pakistan have traded much u more increasingly serious rhetoric over the years. So now we're kind of at the moment where we're just kind of waiting to see how India and Pakistan go at it. So that's pretty much all I wanted to focus on this week for the global overview. Let's move over to the strategic movement. Again, very little change. The Truman carrier strike group is still uh cutting circles in the Red Sea along with the Carl Vincent in the Gulf of Aiden. And the Nimits is somewhere in the Pacific just like usual. No change from last week. Everyone's still kind of doing their their thing. The new addition this week is of course the Indian aircraft carrier, the Vicrant. I'm not sure if it would qualify as a carrier strike group. It it appears to doctrinally be so, but I'm not entirely sure about their capabilities. Either way, they're off the coast of Pakistan right now. We could see them via satellite imagery and but yeah, it seems like there are military drills, very serious military drills underway in Pakistan and India along the border. That's kind of how this conflict has worked out for the most part over the past few years. So, I'm not entirely certain if the Vicrant is on an operational deployment or if this is just a show of force. So, it's one of those things where India can easily one up Pakistan in that regard with regards to military force. So, that's pretty much it for strategic movement. Moving to the kinetic activities tracker for the past seven days. I'm just going to start covering the past week or so we don't overload with all of the icons on the map. For those of you who have not uh checked it out so far, if you're wanting a deeper dive into what I'm doing with this mapping project, I just put out last night a video explaining all of the little details or at least most of the major details that I'm kind of working on with regards to this mapping project. Those of you who watch the video will also know that I launched a tipline system so that you can contribute to this data project if you wish. There are a series of tip lines. If you want to submit a report of something, you can do so. It's very easy to do. It may be a little bit longer than you you might be used to. But for those of you who want to send me something, make me aware of a situation or maybe something that I didn't see or didn't cover. You know, I'm I'm only one person here, right? So, I can't have eyes and ears everywhere. So, if you see something that I maybe missed or think I might be interested in, you can certainly submit it to me via the tip lines. But again, a longer explanation is in that video I dropped last night. For this week, most of the new icons are clustered in New York City, specifically Manhattan. So, let's go ahead and jump to the specific regions and let's talk about what happened in New York this week for a bit. It's been fairly kinetic. It's again protest season, so we're starting to see some of these uh climate groups, these uh anti- Doge or anti-Eon Musk groups come out. Uh I don't know how well funded they are, but they are starting to conduct a few more operations this time of year. And this week is no exception. And in this case, it's rather interesting. Something to to take note of is that a lot of these protest movements are not entirely easy to determine what exactly they are protesting. So just running down the list, the Trump Tower was vandalized by a guy going in spray painting something, getting his picture taken as usual. There was a protest on Billionaire's Row, specifically outside of Bill Aman's apartment building. He has been targeted by a few groups over the past few weeks. It's been more along the lines of a long-term siege kind of thing, but every now and then they'll go and they'll protest at his uh his residence along with a few other people. It's a much larger effort than just one guy, but he's kind of the the main face of this. And finally, in Midtown Manhattan, there was a Tesla showroom that was vandalized in a variety of ways for a variety of means. Like I mentioned, all of these incidents are kind of tied together, and you can see this based on the graffiti that they leave behind. The vandalism at the Tesla showroom was not simply just an anti-D Doge, anti-Eon Musk thing, but it was also a climate thing and also a anti-Trump thing. So, all of these things are kind of getting lumped together. The climate issue, the anti-Trump thing, the at this point, I'm just going to have to call it pro-corruption because they're it's very hard to argue against the Doge idea. And now people can argue about how it's like being done, but anti-corruption efforts in government are very I mean it's a hard thing to to protest against, but they're making an effort, right? So a lot of these groups are protesting multiple things. They're they're bundling all these ideas up together in a general uh political left bubble kind of thing. And a lot of times it doesn't necessarily make a lot of sense. And a lot of times when it comes to some of these demonstrations, you'll see people target each other at the same event. So we saw this more palpably when it when it came to the whole Israel Palestine thing a few months ago when it kind of heated up at some of these places after you know before it got shut down really you would have protesters showing up to like say a climate protest you know to protest against global warming or climate change or whatever right and they would want to bring in their like support for Gaza and then the other people who are pro-Israel would clash at the same event so they're there to protest some sort of climate issue but their other interests are conflicting. So, we're starting to see that a little bit more with regards to some of the protests and things that are kicking up. But, you know, whenever you bundle together a lot of very different issues into the same protest crowd, it's a hard cell uh to kind of get everybody on the same page when you've got radically different ideas all the way around. So, all of that is to say, this will be a very interesting summer for kinetic activities. Also in the northeast region, the New Jersey wildfire, the Jones Road fire, has reached 60% containment as of I think last night. The cause of the fire has been announced as arson and one arrest has been made. One Joseph Clling, a local who lived in the area. So, this does highlight the risks that arson brings this time of year especially. One detail I wanted to mention because I'm seeing a lot of conflicting information on this and this pertains to the nuclear power plant. So, Oyster Creek nuclear power plant is well, it was in the fire zone. So the fire uh went right up to this nuclear power plant. This is a defunct power plant. It's not used anymore. So it's it's shut down, but there is a lot of nuclear material at the side. There are spent storage pools there. So there was a concern at a certain period of time that this facility would be at risk for this wildfire. So saw a lot of hysteria about that, but it was mildly concerning for a little bit there. But of course, firefighters prioritized defending this particular structure and this this compound really. So, it was never really in any very serious danger, but it is something to think about. You know, some crazy guy uh setting fire to the woods can cause a very severe incident or complicate things quite a bit. So, something to keep in mind. Moving to the Midwest, a comparatively rare instance this week of a judge being arrested was reported in Milwaukee. A Milwaukee County judge was arrested on charges of obstructing justice for her role in helping an illegal alien escape custody. Details of this incident are hard to verify, but the general gist of the story and and perhaps hinting as to why this arrest took place. This was a little bit more brazen than normal, especially considering the context of what actually happened that day. So, once again, details hard to verify, but the general gist of what happened is she had an illegal alien in her courtroom who was facing charges of assault. A guy who uh beat his roommate, his roommate's girlfriend, and one other person. He put three people in the hospital uh by beating them so severely. and he was subsequently arrested on assault and battery charges and that's what he was doing in the courtroom. So, it wasn't any kind of uh immigration thing. However, the feds found out about it and showed up with a lawful warrant to arrest him in the courtroom on federal charges. This is a very standard thing for the feds to show up and and and nab somebody in court. U it's just a common place for arrest to take place. Either way, uh once the judge learned that the feds were outside, uh she had what can only be described as a mental episode. So, she took it upon herself to leave her courtroom and started verbally abusing the federal agents out in the hallway, shouting at them and forcing them to leave out, you know, leave the hallway. She went back into the courtroom and took the defendant back into her private chambers and allowed the defendant to escape from the facility down a hallway that led to an outside door. So, once again, this is a trial taking place, right? So the prosecution had no idea what happened. The defendant just disappeared along with his attorney. And once everybody figured out what was going on, the judge had let this guy escape. Uh the guy was uh on foot. So there a foot pursuit took place outside the courtroom and the feds ended up nabbing him immediately anyway. So he didn't get very far, but this is one of those situations where left, right, or center, this is very, very illegal. So this is probably why the charges took place. This has happened several times before in the past by several other judges as I've noted before, but this one was a little bit more brazen and of course there's new uh leadership in town with regards to the federal agencies. So these are starting to be cracked down on a little bit more. Similar story down in the southwest this week. The infamous judge Keno, Joseé Luis Keno, he goes by Joel Kano, but his real name is Joseé Luis. He and his wife were arrested on federal charges for again aiding in abetting not just an illegal uh who they let they let an illegal alien stay at their guest house. So he was living at the at their home with them but also he was a known uh trenda member or TDA member and they also provided uh this individual with firearms. So the local uh neighbors uh report that the known TDA member was observed handling firearms several times on social media and also by neighbors. So most citizens who live in these areas are not surprised in the slightest. My guess and this is just just pure speculation, but my guess is that the feds probably have something on this judge with regards to his own membership in some sort of organization. So it's probably not just because he harbored an illegal alien, even though that is of course illegal. can't do that sort of thing even though you're a judge. I find it very very hard to believe and most people who uh are in the region find it very hard to believe that a judge would get rolled up for something like that. Now maybe forced into retirement, sure, removed from the bench even that might happen. Sure. But getting rolled up and arrested is something that would only normally happen if there's a little bit of a story that we have not seen yet. So it may be surprising for some, it may be completely unsurprising for others, uh such as myself. It's not surprising at all. The most surprising part for me is that he actually got arrested, which makes me think that there's probably a little bit more to this story than meets the eye. But either way, we will see. So that's all I have for the United States. Let's move over to India and Pakistan and briefly discuss what's going on there because as one might imagine there there's a lot of information flowing and not a lot of it is particularly helpful. Anyone who has spent any time on social media anytime soon, especially on uh platforms like Twitter, will know that a substantial portion of internet traffic on these platforms comes from India. Right? So since that is the case, it is very hard to determine what is true and what is untrue. Uh but I can generally uh use statements by officials, government officials in both nations, both India and Pakistan to determine essentially what has happened so far. So earlier this week, there was a terror attack in Pahogam up in the Kashmir region. This is a resort town, if you want to call it that. I'm not sure it qualifies as a resort town, but either way, it's it's definitely a tourist destination for Indians in particular. So, there was a small arms skirmish. I have not been able to pin down exactly where the skirmish took place. Again, we're seeing a little bit of manipulation of information here, which may be a clue as to what's going on. But what is relatively certain is that government agencies and government officials have stated that 26 people are dead from the attack and there are many uh wounded. There were quite a few survivors from this attack and uh the testimony has been hard to verify. So verifying any of this is challenging. Similar story with figuring out who actually conducted the attack. There are several insurgent groups at this point who have claimed to have conducted the attack. Some of these groups are more traditionally Muslim terror groups. Some of them are Kashmir groups that are solely uh really supportive of Kashmir independence from both nations. Some of them are Indian groups which are ethnically Hindu but they don't like other uh casts. So it's a cast system thing. So I don't know who actually conducted the attack. Pakistan claims that it's a false flag attack that this really was the Indian government who shot up their own people as a way of justifying a war with Pakistan. Again, I don't know if that's true or not, but it's it's it's impossible to verify either way at the moment. In a larger sense though, in this part of the world, it it honestly really doesn't matter who started it or who's legitimately behind it because what's happening is happening. Very significant events have taken place on both sides of the border. So here are the things that I have been able to track down and verify that both nations have done to each other. Both nations have closed their borders to each other. There have been some exceptions on both sides for the seek population which is kind of an interesting development. Both nations have closed their airspace to each other's commercial airlines which is kind of a big deal because there's a lot of aviation traffic between India and Pakistan. Uh commercial aviation that is when that tends to happen it's not necessarily for a trade thing but it's to keep civilian airliners out of the way in case missiles start flying. Likewise, both nations have canceled all of the visas for each other's population, and they have issued deportation orders for each other's population. How likely are they to carry this stuff out? I very strongly doubt they're going to deport each other's citizens. There are just too many Pakistanis in India and there are too many Indians in Pakistan for this to occur like reliably. But either way, they've issued the order. So, we'll see how it works out. Likewise, both nations have ordered their own citizens back to each other. So Pakistan has ordered Pakistanis to return to Pakistan. India has return has ordered Indians to return to India. Same song and dance as always. And continuing the fairly standard tradition in the region. Pakistani and Indian border guards have been shooting at each other with rifles fairly regularly since this thing began really. So that's pretty much what both nations have done to each other. Uh India has has oneuped Pakistan as usual. For those who are not familiar with the region, India is generally considered by most military experts around the world to be the superior uh military fighting force. They've got a larger military, more technologically advanced. They're supported by the west uh such as the United States and Israel. So you can see how they would have the technological upper hand and also India has terrain on their side. So one of the things that India has done specifically that Pakistan can't really do anything about is they have uh cancelled the Indis waters treaty of 1960. Anyway, India has shut down uh the slle gates on roughly a dozen or so maybe 18 or so rivers that flow into Pakistan. For those that are unaware of the geography of the region, India is uphill of Pakistan or at least Kashmir is the Indian uh administered parts of Kashmir and Pakistan is very heavily reliant on the water that flows down from the Himalayas, the Anaperna range into Pakistan. That's where they get most of their water for agriculture. So India just by closing a few sloo gates has shut down 80% of the water used for irrigation purposes in Pakistan which is going to be very devastating. Of course Pakistan has vowed to bomb those slle gates to open them back up again but it's debatable as to whether or not they can they can actually do that. The Indian Air Force isn't actually any better. Uh so far there has been one reported casualty on all sides from this and this came from an Indian aircraft dropping a drop tank a fuel tank from a fighter jet. Uh they dropped it over a city and uh fuel tank landed in someone's house and killed an Indian. So that's why you'll see a lot of proakistan accounts saying that India bombed themselves. That's not entirely true. That's just Pakistan kind of, you know, poking at India. One of the Indian Air Force pilots who's been doing patrols in the area just dropped their drop tank at the wrong moment and that tank landed in an Indian village and killed an Indian. So India is negative one in terms of casualties so far in this conflict. So for those of you who don't know or don't understand why this is both a very serious situation but also not that serious and why a lot of the claims of open war uh on Twitter are probably not entirely that accurate. Let me just explain some of the common tactics that are used. I I'll just call them standard third world warfare tactics. These are things that a lot of these lesser capable militaries to include India and Pakistan tend to do to each other when they go to war. One of the major things that is occurring right now is both sides are shelling random uninhabited areas. So this is something that both nations tend to do. The even the US army tends to do this. we call it terrain denial fires, meaning you're just shelling a random mountaintop to make sure the enemy doesn't go there or in some cases just shelling the a random mountaintop for deception purposes or to confuse an enemy or something like that. Right? So when the western world does it, you know, when when more traditionally western militaries do terrain denial fires, it's more of a doctrinal process. However, India and Pakistan are very well known for the past well since artillery has been invented. Both of these nations will lob artillery rounds at each other, but not really at each other. They'll they'll pick an uninhabited area and just shoot randomly. They're not even they're not even plotting where the shells go most of the time. And this is just something that's very very common. It's you'd only know unless you're like familiar with how these militaries kind of operate, but I I'm not entirely certain if you would classify that as a serious war. But it sure does look good when they video uh themselves, you know, firing artillery rounds. Well, where did that round go? Well, you know, and you can verify that this is what's happening because both India and Pakistan have been shelling each other for 3 days and not a single person has reported a casualty yet. A lot of villages up in Kashmir. They're reporting, man, serious fighting going on, but there's not even any wounded. That's cuz they're not really shooting at each other. They're just shooting at random areas. So, similar story with uh fighter aircraft. So both Pakistan and India are very well known for taking their own, you know, air force and flying their own air force over their own villages to make it look like, you know, from the ground locals look up and see, oh wow, you know, Indian fighters in a dog fight or something like that. And really, they're just doing low passes over their own villages to make it look like they are fighting the, you know, Pakistanis or they're fighting the Indians. So again, it's more of a show of force to their own people than anywhere else. Another common tactic that is going on right now, which is very, very common throughout this half of the planet, is belligerent, soldiers, border guards, whatever, shooting at each other. But they're shooting at each other from so far away that it doesn't matter. Anybody who's deployed to the Middle East knows exactly what I'm talking about here because this is something that happens in a lot of these nations very, very routinely. And I'm seeing this or seeing reports of this occurring up in Kashmir right now. So they will get uh several miles away from each other and just spray and prey the air and they will claim that they got into an engagement with the enemy, but they're so far away that they couldn't possibly hit each other. So this tends to happen very very commonly like on a regular Tuesday up in Kashmir. It's happened like that for decades now. So it's not out of the ordinary. But would you call that a skirmish? I don't know. You know, two, you know, two platoon shooting at each other, you know, five, six miles away from each other. like that's that's not really war. That's just, you know, very dangerous uh uh power projection and things like that. But either way, both sides shoot at each other. They'll loose a few belts of, you know, HMG fire or heavy machine gun fire towards each other miles away. They'll fire off a few, you know, AK mags at each other and both sides will go home and claim they killed the entire enemy force, but in actuality there were no casualties. So, this appears to be going on right now in Kashmir. Now, of course, this isn't to say that at some point this could actually be a legitimate war, but right now it's it looks like it's just a standard power projection. There haven't really been any reports of any casualties yet, and they've been, you know, fiercely fighting. If you follow what, you know, Indians and Pakistanis are saying on Twitter, they've been fiercely engaging in an open war with each other for 2 days now. And there's there no reports of any casualties. So, I don't know. The reports may flow in. It's a very tense time. It's way more tense than in 2019 when they when they engaged in in Kashmere and there were casualties then. So, I don't know. It's probably just going to take a few days for for information to trickle down out of the mountains. But I I just um I'm seeing this really panicking style of uh rhetoric being pushed all over social media because the third world monetization of places like Twitter has really kind of destroyed the ability uh for us to get accurate information sometimes. So one of the bigger impacts which does matter and the reason why I talk about this is that the various diasporas of these populations around the planet are protesting too. So you're going to start seeing because India and Pakistan start fighting each other. You're going to start seeing Indians and Pakistanis in various western nations start fighting each other and that's exactly what's happened. So there were various riots uh outside the Pakistani and Indian embassies in London this morning and it's it's just a mess. So that's something that's going to definitely take place over the next few days and weeks. How bad it will get is anybody's guess, but we all know how this goes. So I guess we'll have to keep an eye on it. So that's pretty much all I have for today. This week I've been really focusing on some of the more historic data, so I haven't had time to dig in as much as I'd like. But uh let's go ahead and roll up today with the intercepted ghost net reports. very good week for Ghostnet. Uh it was fantastic to see a lot of really good information coming out of a lot of different places. People talking about things that I haven't that I haven't seen anywhere else. So very very interesting. Um I'm going to try to start looking at plotting a lot of this information on uh specific mapping layers, but don't want to uh spoil it for when I come out with with something on that front. So yeah, fantastic. Really appreciate all of you who contribute to the ghost net. Uh even if you're just one of the guys who just listens, uh that's a really good step in using one of the more reliable tools that we have just in case there's some sort of communications outage. I know it's not entirely the most entertaining thing in the world and it's not easy to understand a lot of times, but this is a very powerful capability that I hope to improve on in the future. So that's all I have for today. Thank you again everyone for watching. Here are the sources. If you want a slightly easier to click link, you can of course go to my Obsidian page and find all of these links underneath all of the daily wire reports that I have made throughout the week. So, it's already shaping up to be a very busy summer. So, I hope that uh some of these more organizational efforts will will pay off in the future when things start getting a little bit more crazy than they already are. So, that's all I have for today. Thank you all for watching and I will see you next time. And as always, bite in the shade.

Hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground. This is the intel update for April 19th through the 25th, 2026. Once more into the breach, dear friends, we find ourselves at the end of another rather busy week both at home and overseas. So, let's get right to it. The focus this week has mostly been crime in the United States, the war in the Middle East, and the shadow war that might be playing out quietly around the world. And this week that shadow war has been brought above the fold by the White House acknowledging the mysterious deaths and missing persons cases that have taken place among the scientific communities that feed the defense industry. This has taken the internet storm couple of weeks and various committees in Congress have now begun the investigation into these strings of missing and deceased scientists or senior military technical staff. The high-profile murder of Karl Grillmeyer at his home a few months ago and the extremely suspicious details of that case prompted a lot of closer attention and the disappearance of retired General William McAskilland, also under mysterious circumstances, widened the spotlight even more and once the internet started looking for other links, it turns out that a suspiciously high number of people affiliated with top secret research projects have gone missing or were discovered deceased under very suspicious circumstances over the past two to three years. As it stands, the DOJ and the Pentagon are investigating these cases and that's really pretty much it. Not much else has been made public. Due to this lack of information, various media groups have just speculated on most of these links and they've also included a lot of people in the total count of missing scientists that are very loose links or otherwise not really a link. Again, when we're getting into these shadow warfare side of espionage, murder, and very classified strategic programs and cutting-edge research and stuff like that, it's a very dangerous game and most media groups don't have the inside baseball knowledge to know which deaths or missing persons that really are suspicious and which ones are just coincidental. A custodian who worked at Los Alamos 10 years ago is not the same as the director of NASA's materials processing group going missing. So, from a data analysis perspective, we really have to wait a lot of these missing persons reports, but overall, I think we can read between the lines to figure out what's really going on here. More to come on this later though. I'm I'm working through my own investigation on these missing persons and suspicious deaths and right now I'm focusing on the four that appear to be the most suspicious, at least to me. The full list is much longer, but these are the four I'm focusing on right now, so we'll see what links come out of it. Creating a link analysis chart of the entire defense industry takes a little bit of time and if at least some of these people are being murdered or being disappeared, it's pretty obvious that very serious things are happening. It is going to take some care and deliberation to dig into. So, more on that later. This is a very complex and time-consuming investigation and now that the feds and the media are on it, the water becomes more muddy when it comes to finding out other potential targets for mysterious incidents happening to them. If these people are being targeted, we need to get ahead of this and prevent the next incident instead of just being retroactive and that takes a lot of time, in some cases time we don't have. Moving to the Middle East for this week, the surge continues as before. This most clearly illustrates the sharp discrepancy between the statements and vibes in Washington and what is really happening on the ground. The general attitude throughout Washington is that this is now more of a business deal kind of arrangement because the ceasefire is still on and it has been extended and it feels like the war is winding down. Rhetoric on all sides has focused on this simmering down with Trump supporters stating that he's won and is looking to wind things down and everybody else saying that he's looking for a sort of slow speed off ramp for the war and he has been looking for that off ramp for some time. This gets into the political realm and opinions are going to vary widely. It's kind of a knife fight these days with regards to what's actually going on, so not really helpful to wade into, honestly, but the general sentiment on all sides is drawdown. That's what is being put out there in the media by the White House, by everybody involved. However, the truth of what is actually happening on the ground is vastly different. Both the United States and Iran have been rearming and resupplying to an extreme degree. Iran has continued to mine the strait, which has been confirmed by President Trump himself. There's been a lot of speculation on whether or not the Iranians have actually laid mines in the strait as in maybe the Iranians are just pretending that they have laid mines so as to create fear instead of a genuine threat, but no, this is not a deception operation. The Iranians have absolutely mined the strait and even the Pentagon is confirming this at this point. How many mines, nobody knows, but satellite imagery confirms that the Iranians do retain a lot of naval capability. Despite President Trump stating that their navy is completely and totally destroyed every other day, this is only a half-truth. Iran has two navies and the United States has severely degraded their blue water navy, the IRIN. The IRGCN, the fast boat navy that is the main force that would mine the strait, this navy is largely intact. There are hundreds of small boats in the strait every day and even though it's debatable as to how much sea power this equates to, you can you can debate that all day long. What is undeniable is that the Iranians control the strait. They just do. Concerning the American blockade, the US Navy is starting to get more organized with the Indian Ocean now serving as one big interdiction zone for Iranian tanker ships. The United States has begun the more indirect targeting of Iranian-linked vessels in addition to sanctioning about 40 different Chinese companies that are helping Iran export their oil to the global market. That's a big deal and we're going to have to see how that works out because the Chinese becoming a little bit more directly harmed by this is going to be a big deal as this drags out. The Strait of Hormuz, otherwise known as Schrödinger's Strait at this point, is both open and closed depending on who's asking. Local traffic continues to sail through without any problems just as it has since the start of the war and the flow of non-Western aligned ships transiting through the Rock Island route has increased over the past few days. Some of these vessels have been caught by the American blockade and compelled to turn around, but others have been allowed through. It's really a case-by-case basis as to who the Iranians are letting through and who the Americans are letting through at the moment. Otherwise, the situation remains pretty tough for any Western or American-aligned shipping companies throughout the region. These companies like Maersk and MSC, they're going to be settling in for the long haul over the next few weeks and most of this is being demonstrated in the grand and fantastical world of money and the economics of what's been happening is pretty crazy. Over the past month, crude oil futures have experienced a sharp departure from the physical delivery price of the oil that is being sold and this is going to matter quite a bit when it comes to gas prices in the long term. Normally, there is some discrepancy between futures trading and the price of oil upon delivery, which is normally more than when it leaves port to be sold on the international market. Futures prices are for predicting, you guessed it, the future. So, the future prices of oil are going to be based on what the oil is speculated to be in about a month's time or so. So, normally under the best of times during peacetime, there is a a bit of a discrepancy between the two because ships take a few weeks sometimes to get to the far-flung regions of the earth with their cargo. However, these discrepancies have become extremely out of touch with reality. For example, upon the announcement of the ceasefire in the Persian Gulf a couple weeks ago, oil futures plummeted to about 80 to 90 dollars per barrel, so we were doing pretty good. However, in Singapore, some distillates were actually being pumped off of tankers and sold at a price of approximately 290 dollars per barrel. Granted, this is the worst-case example from the IEA's April report, which they just put out earlier this week and therefore it's a bit like comparing apples to oranges. We don't really have a perfect comparison here, but this does illustrate how serious the difference is between the on-paper economics and reality. Major geopolitical events that are shaping the future of humanity are underway right now with a land war in Europe being fought alongside a regional war in the Middle East, which has choked off a large percentage of the global energy supply and like I mentioned in the wire a few days ago, now refineries are catching fire all around the world and because all of this, the markets are barely reacting at all. One of the main theories for this is that the futures markets are expecting the war to end soon and since futures are going to be speculating on the price of oil in a month or so, the whales are expecting the war to end before then and everything's all fine and dandy, right? But in reality, the current pace of production just cannot keep up with the loss of the Middle East and it doesn't look like things are going to even out anytime soon. From the very, very wave top level, this definitely looks like a case of if a tree falls in the woods and nobody hears it, does it make a sound sort of thing. If a war happens in the Middle East and everybody pretends that there isn't a war in the Middle East, does that affect oil prices? Like does that just mean that oil's going to stay fine forever? I don't know. I find it very hard to believe that oil is ever going to hit like 300 dollars a barrel like President Trump said his advisors told him would happen before he launched the war, but there is some elasticity in the petroleum sector, meaning that when something catastrophic happens, it takes some time for the effects to be felt and this is most certainly a variable factor. It's not like we have a firm date where, oh okay, if the Strait of Hormuz gets closed for 62 days, we're going to have complete, you know, gasoline outages in the United States. It's not going to work like that. How much of a timer we have, that's going to be anybody's guess and of course, some places are going to be hit harder than others much more quickly. Europe, for example, is hurting when it comes to fuel prices and airlines around the world are tightening their belts and canceling tens of thousands of flights simply because they can't afford the fuel. Does this mean that all air travel stops overnight? Of course not, but it does mean that the impacts are becoming much more substantial with each passing day. Looking to the future to attempt to look past the short-term impacts, right? So, we don't just doom and gloom on the present, right? What does this mean for the future? This also means that it's going to take some time to return to normal whenever the crisis reaches a conclusion, which in this case might not happen for a very long time or even at all. It is possible, this is speculation, but it is possible that the Iranians never open the strait again, at least not in the way that it was open. At the very minimum, it's quite likely that unless something major happens, the world is not going back to the way things were on February 27th. That seems to be the general mass consensus, no matter what side you're on in this conflict, that seems to be the general assessment moving forward. We're not going back to February 27th. We live in a new world now when it comes to the way trade works around the Middle East and how this works out is going to vary and it can take many different avenues of approach, but we're not going back to the way things were. One potential theory for how this is all going to work out is that in the long term this may result in a sort of Hormuz DMZ situation, similar to what happened in Korea, where the conflict was never really settled formally, and the situation is tense all the time, and both sides are pointing guns at each other, but life continues kind of around them nonetheless. Right now that seems to be the most likely outcome for at least the next few months. The Pentagon has already alluded to it taking probably 6 months or so to de-mine the Strait of Hormuz, and that's after the war ends or after they are able to get into the strait. The International Energy Agency is saying that the impacts of this will be felt potentially at least within the next year or two. Various think tanks are assessing that depending on which facility you're talking about, the whole Middle East might take 6 months to 2 years to come back to normal production levels simply based on the damage that has been sustained. It's hard to factor in repair times for stuff like this because repairs are are happening. It's not like these these sites were destroyed and we just left them. No, we're actually repairing a lot of this stuff during the ceasefire for sure, but you can't fix decades worth of damage in 2 weeks, and it's going to take a lot more time to return to normal even if peace were to happen spontaneously right at this moment. Iran has learned that they have way more power than they thought they did, and most of that power lies with their control of the strait. It's kind of morbidly ironic, but to the Iranians the Strait of Hormuz is probably more valuable than a nuclear weapon because it's serving as a form of mutually assured destruction. You mess with us and we'll nuke the global economy, so to speak. I doubt that even the Iranians themselves would have known how effective this would be before the war began, but we're here now and they know what power they have, and there's not a whole lot the US can do about it because even if the US walks away, which the US might have already tried to do, the Iranians will still have power. Even if both sides pull up their blockades, let's just assume for a moment that we can magically make all those mines disappear, the Iranians stop charging a toll, everything goes back to the normal shipping lanes, and everybody's free to come and go as they please. Even if they do that, both sides know that the Iranians control the strait, and they can shut it off again whenever they want. That is the proverbial grenade pin that has been pulled. You can't put that pin back in the grenade because now we know. It has been theoretical for a very long time as to whether or not the Iranians could actually control the strait. A lot of the US Navy's technical and tactical drills and exercises have been focused on that sort of eventuality, and every time a carrier in the years past went through the Strait of Hormuz, that's what all the transit briefings focused on. You know, swarm ships, the Iranians are trying to, you know, poke and prod, but we still control this this waterway. Well, now it's quite clear the Iranians through their little gunboats are able to control this body of water, whether we like it or not. The Iranians might not be able to do much more than that, but they can certainly project power within their own sphere of influence and make everything more costly for the United States than we thought it would be. China and other BRICS nations, which are also on the hook for this conflict, are probably perfectly fine with this arrangement as long as their own cargo can get in and out of the Persian Gulf. This was most clearly illustrated last week when the Chinese state media claimed that Xi Jinping called the Saudi Crown Prince, which was probably an indirect message to the Iranians, to urge an immediate and comprehensive ceasefire along with an opening of the strait. Obviously, this is a complicated web of diplomacy, but we can see that China is getting involved, and a statement this forthcoming is honestly shocking for Xi, who basically never makes a direct statement like this. So, how all of this is going to work out is anyone's guess. It's not entirely terrible news after all, a ceasefire is going on, and ceasefires are good for putting peace on the table at some point. But, things are also not going super well, and we're tightening our belts, and a lot of big fish like China are starting to become more actively involved in reaching some level of stability. The world can probably adapt to the loss of a major shipping route being heavily impacted in the long term, but until we get there it's going to be very very tenuous if this goes on for the long term. Remember, it's not just up to the United States. It's not even totally up to Israel, either. In warfare, the enemy gets a vote, and the Iranians have proven that just because the United States might back away, they will be there to stay simply based on the fact that geography makes it hard to root them out. So, once again, another week passes where the world is in a pickle, and there's no easy way out. And on that foreboding note, that's all I've got for today. So, let's wrap things up with the Ghost Net reports for this week. It was a great week for getting messages out to the world, and I saw a lot of people exchanging information in an off-grid manner so that we can be prepared no matter what crazy stuff happens around the world. Perhaps it is fate that my Windows 11 desktop computer seems to be disintegrating around me at the exact moment that I get JS8Call working on Android, but I think this is pretty slick, and I have much more content and tutorials planned that is going to make the Ghost Net even more practical for field use. We can now take our radios outdoors, plug our phones into the radios, and send the news reports or tactical reports around the world no matter what happens. No more heavy laptops required, so we can streamline comms quite a bit. Fear not, more to come on this later along with the other secret projects I have surreptitiously been working on slowly while trying to also manage the daily reports. Now that the war has settled down for a couple of weeks, I've made a lot of progress on the other stuff I've been trying to build, so hopefully I'll have that stuff finished up within a couple of weeks. Lots of cool stuff coming this summer, that's for sure. All that remains is for us, ourselves, to keep at it, do the best we can every single day, and to get a lot more serious about what we are doing and how we can help keep civilization on the rails through these crazy times. So, thank you all for watching, and thanks for sticking with me through these shorter reports while I'm trying to work on far too many things simultaneously, and I'll see you all next time. And as always, fight the good fight.

hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground so today we've got the launch of a new mini series and uh today we're going to kick that off with the first part of that mini series so this is kind of a a branch off on on the topic uh the american troubles that we've talked about a couple of times before we've had a podcast on it a youtube video on this subject and now we're going to be talking about part three which will branch off into its own series on escape and concealment so as everyone knows usually we like to start off with the why or the mentality or philosophy behind why we're trying to talk about this topic but this time around we're going to start off with a disclaimer so of course we have to have this kind of disclaimer on this topic because this is kind of a little bit more gray area than we have talked about before so let me just go ahead and read this out so this information is provided only for legal lawful use the ester general project cannot be held liable for any misuse of this information currently the concept of sharing knowledge is a constitutionally protected right and as such no further reason is needed to explain why we are sharing this information in short the first amendment talks about covers our ability to talk about this information there's no such thing as protected information uh the only thing that kind of comes close to this is the concept of classified information but once again nothing in this series will be classified none of this information will be proprietary and none of this information will be derived from any federal state or governmental force this is all just our own private knowledge and experience gained over years of of dealing with this stuff in the field so despite the fact that we have the disclaimer we have to have another one the disclaimer to the disclaimer essentially what we mean is don't be stupid don't break laws our constitutionally protected rights are infringed on every day by various groups agencies and entities so we fully expect that certain entities will attempt to stop us from sharing this information but if they do they're going to have to take down every other lock sport enthusiast in the us lock picking is a hobby is very large in the united states and around the world to be honest and there really aren't that many laws that cover it especially what we're going to talk about today which is illegal restraints so i know that's kind of boring i know that people really don't like when we have to do disclaimers but honestly to ensure the survivability of this video series we have to kind of put this disclaimer in there to say that look this is for illegal restraints i will caveat that and say that that this is the third time we have filmed this we have 37 slides of the why behind this sort of project but we decided not really to to go down that road and just simply say look it's all right to talk about this stuff so we're going to talk about it because we think it's information that people need to know and we're just going to leave it at that now when we talk about the concept of restraint escape we really jump to the only field and the only doctrine and the only subject area in the world that really talks about this sort of thing from a practical standpoint sure as we mentioned the whole lock sport entity is is great and and the whole lock lock-picking hobby is great um but to be honest that that hobby doesn't really encompass too many um people talking about restraint escape and that's uh that's sort of what we're kind of gearing towards today which is restraint escape really the only thing that talks about you know someone's got you locked up be it a terrorist or a foreign government or something like that someone's got you locked up and get you tied down how do you get out of that and get back home well there's one field of study that is specifically meant for that and that seer the survival evasion resistance and escape doctrine from the us military um all branches have some version of this there's all different kinds of courses from the you know the you know two hour long uh online course that everybody has to take before they deploy to the actual like you know several day long you know like the week-long course uh that actually puts a lot of this stuff into practice now there are also a lot of people out there who talk about restraint escape and um they build like survival kits like sear kits like google the term sear kit and you will find a lot of companies out there a lot of small companies out there that are building these surrogates with all kinds of little goodies inside them to help get you out of an illegal restraint situation now that's great and we think that a lot of these you know private companies doing this sort of thing they you know this technology would not be available to civilians were not for private civilian companies coming up with this stuff but we also have to remember that seer as a concept isn't quite the same as escaping from a restraint situation as a civilian so let's talk about that for a little bit and i know a pretty text heavy slide but in short cyr assumes a lot of factors that are not not exactly applicable to civilians so i'll just go down the list here first of all you know sear assumes that a nation state will use every possible resource to recover a single person so in other words in the concept of seer the whole overarching dark doctrine is there will be a nation helping you um we're you know an entire military group an entire military division an entire command has been set up specifically for recovering personnel right we have satellites in space that are meant specifically for helping our you know downed aviators lost troops captured capture soldiers and and whatnot get back to civilian or get back to you know their own military's lines civilians don't have this civilians have zero resources the only resources a civilian has when it comes to escaping an illegal restraint situation is yourself right there is no team coming to get you um usually there's going to be no like nation state that's going to try to you know help you escape from these situations uh and sort of to go along with that uh seer the you know military doctrine allows for personnel to have classified military gear there are whole radios out there like the the c-cell radio is the newest one i think and other rfid tags and tracking devices and things sewn into clothing and stuff like that that the military and service members can have access to which can aid in recovery whereas civilians don't have this the civilian civilian infrastructure you know does not have the ability to classify technology from the government whereas the government can of course classify things from us so there's no such thing as owning a secret technology right the government is going to know about it one way or another another factor is that seer is a doctrine it is very heavy on assuming the capability of an aerial recovery i.e a helicopter coming to get you civilians almost never have this capability i'm sure it's possible but you know there's it's just so remote of a chance it's not even worth considering in your plan also sort of along those lines is seer as a doctrine assumes a vastly superiori superior firepower capability during recovery right so when we think of syria in the military we kind of maybe have this over romanticized viewpoint of like you know an owen wilson behind enemy line situation where the you know good guys swoop in with you know five or six helicopters and just you know lay waste to all the enemy bad guys where the you know good guy makes a jump to recovery right well civilians don't have this capability at all you know granted you know that's not exactly a realistic example but during you know a hostage recovery or during it you know some kind of you know hostage rescue team sort of incident there's they're going to be vastly out gunning the captors usually in that situation civilians can't begin to compete there's no way that civilians now in the year 2020 can outgun the government uh or or any other sort of source right civilians can barely outgun each other right as we keep finding out in the news but so if you're assuming that your rescuers are going to be able to outgun your you know captors well that's not going to happen even if it's you know like a terror cell or something another thing that people tend to tend to ignore is the criminality aspect to this so in seer if you know no criminal activity or mistakes to be charged for afterwards basically if you are in or if you are a lawfully sort of uh captured combatant in a foreign nation you know serving under you know your nation's military and you escape from that situation and you kill a guard during the escape well guess what your host nation is not going to kill you it's not going to um charge you for killing that guard right your your own nation now the nation you escaped from might but the uh your own country is not going to charge you for murder for killing a guard during an escape good luck doing that in the united states even if it's in a sort of self-defense situation even if you're being held against your will by another civilian guess what you're probably going to get some kind of charge against you the whole idea nowadays in 2020 the whole idea the whole concept the whole ideology of self-defense is up for debate right so especially from you know everybody from you know governmental agencies to uh the general public right everybody is trying to debate what this what this term self-defense really means so we don't have that luxury of you know civilians of being able to escape from a situation and causing harm to somebody else to do so another uh situation is that uh civilian or military forces have the ability for a diplomatic recovery civilians don't have that luxury uh you know no amount of negotiating with a a a domestic terrorist no amount of negotiating with say a rogue governmental agency is going to result in your release once any kind of sort of rogue governmental agency or or group gets their hands on you your there's no way they're going to let you up also there's no there will be no oversight by agency such as the red cross i mean think about from the normal criminal aspect how many times does the international red cross come in and inspect our you know disaster camps like you know after a hurricane well they don't how many times does the red cross go into canada and uh check out their sort of their uh quarantine camps right not really that many you know we can't find any documentation uh suggesting that's ever happened another aspect of you know formal cr doctrine is that it focuses on avoiding urban centers and avoiding pretty much all contact civilians basically you read any seer sort of handbook from sort of the 1970s when the concept of sir was created until today the whole chapter is basically going to say look you know avoid urban areas because if you come in contact with civilians they're probably going to turn you in or it is going to be a very rare situation that you're going to come across another human being in a serious situation and it's going to work out in your favor in the civilian sector we don't have that option usually if there's going to be a seer type of situation you know most most people in america live in or near a heavily urbanized area you know we don't have the luxury of being able to walk for for um you know tens and and you know tens and dozens of miles without seeing a road right in certain areas of the nation certainly you can like out in the midwest now you know pacific northwest and places like that you can walk for days and not see another road or another sign of a human being but on the east coast where we're located just as a concern for us personally you can't walk you know five or six miles in any direction without walking across three or four roads so even the most remote areas of the united states are having this impact come in and you know syria kind of it kind of doesn't really provide any information for that also and lastly and most importantly by far is the concept that seer as a formal doctrine relies on the ability to escape and evade back to friendly territory seer assumes you are in a hostile area and you can cross a line and be suddenly behind friendly lines right in the civilian sector in the united states we don't have anywhere else to go civilians simply don't have anywhere else to defect to there is despite all the all of the shortcomings in the united states right now there is nowhere else to defect to the united states is still the freest and it's really not that free to be honest as we all really know by now um you know civilians are going to have to make the choice of do i need to escape from my home right you're not talking about someone's you know having to eject over hostile nation halfway around the world and you know having that hope factor of driving themselves to get home well guess what civilians are home what do they do now right so this is kind of a lot of things to think about when it comes to seer and you know despite all of this sort of bad stuff that we've just talked about seer is not a perfect solution but the overarching doctrine you know might not be a good solution to the problems we face but the individual skills are sound really the only factor that that kind of changes with sierra for the civilian sector is that for civilians everything is going to be significantly more difficult require much more preparation require much more money at practice and gear so uh basically it's just going to be that you know sear is going to be a lot harder for civilians to do in or or even for service members to do while conus you know that's going to be that's going to be very hard to do because the sierra jogstream is is focused around a hostile nation and getting back to friendly lines or getting back to a point where you can be extracted well in the civilian sector who's going to extract us and where we're going to go right so these are just some things to think about that when we talk about this sort of seer stuff when you see all these seer kits online is it like yeah i mean that's all well and good essentially it's just restraint escape when we're talking about this stuff because you know where are you going to go right so before we get into restraint escape here's a few other things to think about that not a whole lot of people are thinking about right now when they talk about seer first one is money like i mentioned before if you're ever in a situation where you find yourself uh needing to use your seer skills conus you're going to need a lot of money because the money and money and funds funding is going to get you uh 99 of the way right you're also going to need a long-term support network you know it's not like we can evade for a couple weeks at the max until we can get back to a friendly or even a neutral nation in the united states we might have to wait months before any kind of thing calms down you know we're also going to have to need if we have to use these skills conus is the ability to leave everything behind you might not be able to return home you know if you find yourself sort of imprisoned in your house right and you need to escape or else something bad's going to happen to you right you also have to have the ability to have really no family or friends or the ability to bring them with you and that's a huge clincher for a lot of people you know another thing you're going to need is a new identity the the thing is is that like look you cannot be a person in you know really most nations without an extensive identity not just some cheap you know plastic fake id you know fake driver's license that high schoolers you used back in the day right we're talking about an entire identity an entirely new person new social security number new a passport new driver's license a a a career a whole set of really a whole life right and that's going to be impossible for 99.999 of everybody out there the people that can afford it probably not going to be watching this video so that's just something to keep in mind as well and then lastly which is kind of something that we're very really hesitant to talk about is the legality of all of this stuff right if you find yourself in a situation where you are going to have to escape from a situation what would a jury think and we we must remember that at the how do i put this at the at the risk of going off the deep end and sort of losing credibility immediately we have to remember that history matters right and if we look back over history we must remember that the things that human beings have done to each other the atrocities on a mass scale right pretty much every every example of genocides over time every example of totalitarianism authoritarianism basically the worst parts of every dystopian fiction novel you could possibly imagine those scenarios coming true if you know when they have come true in the past guess what that's all been legal right everything that happened during you know in in germany and poland during world war ii that was all legal under the german law because they made it so everything that was done in rwanda during the genocide there in the 90s guess what that was also all legal you know same thing with some of the crimes going on you know right now in belarus with um uh you know uh president lukashenko uh locking down and you know torturing his own civilians and things like that you know guess what it's legal because he's a dictator he's declared himself to be so so we must remember that if you're going to be using these skills you're probably going to be breaking the law and that's where we kind of get into a very gray area and that's why not a whole lot of people out there are talking about what we're about to talk about normally what people talk about is just simple restraint escape like duct tape zip ties handcuffs you know your basic handcuffs right that's pretty much all they leave it at because that's pretty much you know they don't want to offend anybody or get on anybody's radar screen by talking about something more serious but we think and this is the whole crux of this sort of video series is that like look talking about how to escape from duct tape is is drastically under representative of the skills the situations the the tools and the the circumstances that are out there in the world today right it's not like we're talking about you know a 1970s airline hijacking where they just duct tape everybody on board you know those days are gone these tools that we're going to be talking about today all of these tools were purchased by us using civilian credentials which is to say an email address and you know paypal or a credit card or something and they're all shipped right to our house none of the things we bought today and most importantly none of the knowledge that we've learned today is any remotely controlled so if we can buy it bad guys can buy it too and that's why we wanted to talk about this is because not a whole lot of people are talking about some of these more extensive restraint type systems so without further ado let's go talk let's start talking about illegal restraint escape and some of the themes and things we need to think about when preparing for this kind of situation so the themes that we're going to talk about today there are really four main points one is that preparation is crucial now some of these restraints we're going to be talking about are pretty much impossible to get out of unless you have prepared for prepared for them ahead of time most of these are like that some of these you can get out of them a few different ways but mostly if you don't prepare ahead of time you're not going to be able to get out of any of this stuff so preparation is crucial right and we're going to be talking about preparation in a separate video following this talking about all the gear you need so i know that everybody's probably going to be tuning into that one more because we all like gear don't we um but this one is the how to and the next video is going to be the gear just so you guys are aware and number two is take advantage of vulnerabilities we must remember that we're plo you know restraint escape a lot of times is like a poker game right you're not you're not necessarily playing the cards you're not necessarily playing against the tools you have you're playing against the person using them right so when we get into a lot of these restraints we're going to talk about how the human factor can sometimes be used and most importantly the laziness and complacency factors can be used to our advantage against an illegal restraint situation and then lastly think outside the box now this is something that is kind of hard to teach well i would think that's probably very impossible to teach but hopefully we're going to encourage people to sort of think outside the box when it comes to these restraints because a lot of times you've got to be very creative with how you get out of them and let's see here number four creating space during application now this one is crucial when it comes to restraints that aren't necessarily like handcuffed type restraints so uh when it comes to things like uh the first set we're going to talk about flex cuffs duct tape zip ties rope all that kind of stuff you can create space during the application process and that will aid in your release because if you're able to the way just the way you're holding your hands will prevent you from being tightened up to the point where you can't move at all you want a little bit of wiggle room inside all that and we'll talk about that here in just a second and we also have to remember the goals of the restraints themselves what are the restraints trying to do and really temporary control as any routine police officer really in any nation in the world will tell you uh restraints are temporary all restraints are temporary that's why usually there's a lot of things that go into restraints and the number one thing is never leave anybody in restraints alone it's because restraints all of them can be overcome with time and if they can't be overcome with time goals can still be accomplished so for instance even some of the most high security handcuffs in the world that cannot be picked that while you're wearing them at least they cannot be gotten out of while you're wearing them uh guess what you can still use them to assault someone and that can be uh be a goal for someone in restraints right so all restraints are temporary right we also have to remember that one of the main goals of restraints is really not to completely stop someone from escaping that's not their goal at all their goal is to slow down and escape so that by the time a subject has figured out how to escape from restraints they're already in a higher security area or they've already got higher uh they've already been swapped out for higher security restraints right um so that's something that we have to remember um as well and this is what we call uh um progressive security i'm not sure if there's an actual term for this but this is kind of the term that we think of it as it's kind of the thing we've coined ourselves so let's talk about that concept of progressive security for a second now when we're going to talk about progressive security we're going to use for an example these style standard police handcuffs now these are the smith wesson model 100 handcuffs by far the most popular and widespread uh most common commonly used handcuffs in the united states they can be bought for about 20 to 30 bucks on amazon they can be bought pretty much anywhere and shipped anywhere and they're used by pretty much every police department in the united states now these handcuffs are probably some of the least secure on the market when it comes to the features that they have and the ways to overcome them but this concept of progressive security can make these small handcuffs these cheap non-uh high security run-of-the-mill standard handcuffs uh completely unescapable and we'll go by talking about the different ways that you can escape from these handcuffs there are five main ways i'm sure there are more but these are the five that we have come up with and these are the five we have personally tested and can confirm work for this particular model so first up is a bobby pin you can simply take a bobby pin and use that as sort of like a the ability to disengage the locking pole right we'll talk about that a little bit more in depth when we get to the how to escape from these specific handcuffs but a bobby pin being used can simply be uh really discouraged by a double lock right so of course bobby pins can be used to defeat the double lock as well but guess what it's now you've doubled the things you have to do rather than using the bobby pin to sweep one way to open the locking pole you have to sweep the other way first to disengage the double lock then sweep back and and disengage the locking pawl that doubles the time that's required to get out of those handcuffs so next up is a hidden key and this is probably one of the easiest ones to identify is that guess what you know if you have a hidden key on your person which all of us do pretty much 24 7. really the easiest way to make sure that nobody has a key on them is a search right so if you search a person you search them thoroughly you do a a very thorough strip search and all that kind of stuff you can detect most hidden keys especially considering that a lot of these like you know people that are prepared for escaping from illegal restraints that people are going to have the plastic handcuff keys and things like that guess what usually they're not prepared they're usually not staged in scenarios so you're going to have all your escaping of asian equipment in a nice little plastic box or a nice little plastic bag in your pocket and all you know somebody has to do is stick your hand in your pocket oh look those are 100 of your escape tools nobody usually has them layered on their person day-to-day they only do it when they're in a situation which they might get taken right so we have to remember that even though we may have all this gucci gear we've got to take steps to make sure it's not found during a search immediately right at least by an adversarial force is not going to search that hard also being a hidden key can be overcome by putting you in a secure vehicle if you're thrown in the back say somebody's got like a like an old police car or something right and they're able to uh you know slap you in handcuffs put you in the back like even a criminal right let's just think of it in terms of a criminal trying to escape look even if they get out of the handcuffs in the back of a police car which happens by the way all of the time even if they're able to get out of the handcuffs in the back seat they still can't get out of the vehicle so so that's you know something to keep in mind as well is that like look you know and one of the reasons why progressive security just is one of those things that's easy to do uh up next is a chain break right breaking the chain and and um we'll of course talk about more talk about this more when we get to it but breaking the chain between the handcuffs is fairly easy to do especially after if you're handcuffed in front um you're gonna be able to do that about two seconds flat but an easy way to get around that is a blue box and we'll talk about that in a minute or really at the end of the series out here so that's one way to clearly make sure that nobody can break the chain and also placement if you put the handcuffs on behind somebody's back it's a little harder to do the chain break thing and all it's about is making it a little bit harder so if you double lock the cuffs put somebody in a vehicle put a handcuff behind their back you know you're really starting to to increase the security of these simple little old podunk you know really easy to get out of handcuffs another thing are shims right well shims can easily be defeated by double locks end of question there's no way to get around that right and another thing is these little these cool little micro escape saws that they can like you know they're either made of diamond or like a little tiny saw blade they can cut through even the hardest metal on the planet yeah those work and those can cut through these cuffs but it takes time and that's one of the things that you when you start adding all these things up if you slap some if somebody were to illegally detain you slap some cuffs on you double lock them put a blue box on them put you in the back of a secured vehicle and then watch you guess what you're not going to be able to get out of there because you also have to remember that being put in the back of a vehicle right impacts that as well and then also like i mentioned earlier the concept is you're never alone in handcuffs and we also have to remember that other things can be added as well putting a hood over your head like how many people out there practice restraining escape with uh with you know their eyes closed you know not that many and then how many people also have you know even own a set of like leg irons right those can be easily purchased online but not many people have them because well different reasons i guess i just don't think it's worth it but guess what instead of having to pick two locks or really just one lock if you're like us and if you're in this real situation where you have to escape you're not going to bother with doing the other handcuff just you know hang up handcuff it to your own wrist right uh so that you can get away uh who's going to go out and and do another set of leg irons right it takes time it's all about increasing the amount of time required to get out of the restraints that's all really these high security devices do is increase the time that it takes for you to get out of them increase the time so much so that by the time you figure out how to do it you're in another situation you're in a different set of restraints you're in a different holding area or whatever right because we must remember that most of these restraints are made with criminals in mind right but they can be used and are often used against regular civilians illegally as well alright so we finally arrive at our first type of restraint and these um this this is a sort of um category of restraint really that's not really worth breaking out and talking about separately because honestly these are are um while some of the most common improvised restraints honestly you can get out of these with enough time and with zero skill and zero practice so some of the things that a lot of people online and a lot of other far more qualified people in this subject area have talked about before are there strengths such as duct tape zip ties and rope those are the three most commonly used restraints by like home invaders or or terror groups or things like that and of course it is worth practicing getting out of these however once you've sort of figured out how to do this and once you've taken steps to prepare and you and and chances are if you're going to be taken captive by a group or an entity that is going to only use these tools to restrain you well then chances are they're not going to conduct a thorough search of your person and you can have so many tools at your disposal so that's why this this genre this category of escape restraints not really worth talking about far more people have already covered it already and honestly it's pretty simple to do so one thing that is slightly more worth talking about are things like heavy duty police grade military grade or whatever words you want to choose to describe very tough flex cuffs now we had originally talked about trying to demonstrate this but honestly it's really not worth it because trying to get out of these even the most um police grade uh commercially produced uh flex cuffs are still quite susceptible to this just using a buzz saw type action that pretty much every quote unquote seer expert on the internet has already shown everyone how to do this is such a common way to get out of this you can also use the popular v cutters which we'll talk about when we get into the actual kit building part of this series you can even use your boot laces you don't even really need kevlar cord if you have strong enough boot laces and they're thin enough like a normal set of military style boot laces that'll work as well paracord the the inner strands of paracord works astoundingly well even against the most thick of flex cuffs so that's kind of why it's like you know we wanted to dedicate our time to figuring out and showing how to get out of more tough to get out of restraints that hasn't quite been covered in such detail before so while yes we do use use these tools and and practice getting out of flex cuffs and things like that uh one must remember that that's once again the easiest restraint to get out of so if you're practicing the easiest thing all the time well how are you going to face the more difficult restraints so that's why we move on to more handcuffed style restraints which we're going to be talking about next all right so before we move on to regular handcuffs we must talk about kind of what i alluded to before we showed how to get out of flex cuffs is that there are a lot of different ways you can restrain somebody with handcuffs in fact just using the smith wesson model 100s or the peerless model 700s as an example there are eight different ways that these handcuffs either one of these handcuffs can be used to restrain someone and by far the most difficult one is the eighth one where you have them locked behind your back the cuffs are double locked and the key way is facing away from your hand right so up towards your arm away from like your palms and that is by far the hardest way to get out of really any handcuff and we must remember though that even though this is the hardest way that's the way we're going to show how to do it there are easier ways right people are lazy that's just a general rule out there so if you can take advantage of people being lazy and like i don't know not double locking the handcuffs well guess what your escape just became that much easier and chances are if anybody is going to be using this information that we were talking about if anybody is going to be using that information to escape an illegal type restraint chances are your person who's going to take you going to be taking you captive is not going to be looking at you with a um you know with a microscope right they're going to be probably going to be rounding up a lot of people at once and not exactly concerned about one person in particular right so that's just something to keep in mind so even though we're going to talk about the hardest way to get out of all of these there is still going to be a a good chance you're going to have the easier way of getting out and also before we move into it some of these ways you can't like with any pair of handcuffs there are eight different ways to get eight different ways to lock them on your person but for instance if you have a set of rigid handcuffs that are locked to the rear they're double locked and the key was facing away from your hand guess what there's no way you can get out of that so there are certain ways that you know unless you are a gymnast and are exceptionally flexible and unless you're able to get those cuffs to the front of your body which is what we recommend there's some ways you can't quite get out of them at all right and we'll talk about that when we get to those more high security handcuffs but right now we're talking about smith and wesson model 100s and peerless model 700s and this is what they look like so the smith and wesson on the left and the peerless on the right now we're only going to we're talking about these both at the same time because they're essentially both the same exact handcuff the only difference being kind of the general shape and the fact that peerless keyhole is in the center of the cuff and not on the on the side right with smith and wesson's now this is interesting because on the smith and wesson's that keyhole placement makes it a lot harder to get out of that keyhole being over here on the side and this other hole over here for the double lock that makes it so much harder to get out of because you can't just put your finger on the cuff and then feel around in this one area because on a peerless cuff guess what you put your finger in the center of the cuff and you're either going to feel something or you're not going to feel something right and that means okay if you don't feel anything if the side of the cuff is smooth guess what there's no keyhole there flip it over you feel on the other side oh i feel a little bump right in the middle that means or you know a little jagged piece a little a little depression in the metal guess what that's the keyhole on smith and wesson it's a lot harder to do because for one that double lock window is on both sides it goes all the way through the cuff so you've got holes on both sides and let me tell you unless you've practiced with this a lot when you're feeling around for the keyhole there is that double lock hole and that keyhole feel a lot alike you have to practice many many many hours before you're able to determine and feel the difference between the two once you've once you've practiced enough and you keep practicing you're able to feel it instantly and know instantly what it's which what is one but i remember all of us here looked like complete idiots because we spent hours trying to shove a key into that little uh double lock hole so uh that's why we're not going to talk we're not going to show you how to get out of the peerless ones or for the sake of time we're just going to go right after the hardest ones to get out of which are the smith wesson model 100s and the position that we're going to be using is a handcuff to the rear like normal right they're going to be double locked so it requires two key turns to to open them and we're also going to have the keyway facing away from the hand thus making it even harder to get that grip with a very tiny plastic key so let's go take a look at that video and i'll narrate through that all right welcome back everyone so here we are on the tabletop and we're going to be taking a look at the smith and wesson model 100s so like i said before these are some of the most commonly used handcuffs in north america by everyone from criminals to your local police department as it stands these are also some of the easiest to get out of so a lot of people get kind of caught up in the trap of trying and practicing to get out of these handcuffs and which is why you see these tutorials all over youtube and all over the internet talking about how to get out of these specific handcuffs and we're going to start off with that but the reason that we had this whole series is because these while they are the most common they are not the only ones and also they're some of the easiest to get out of so we run into kind of the sort of trouble that a lot of people in the sort of lock sport or beginning to get into the hobby of lock picking get into but like to buy their first lock pick set they'll they'll buy their first padlock and they'll start to pick it and then they'll they'll realize they'll figure out how to pick it and they'll be like oh cool this is awesome i can now pick locks well if you're practicing on a master lock which is the most common you know padlock to practice on well that's actually one of the most you know easiest padlocks as a really easiest brand as a as a company to get around in terms of lock picking they're basically the easiest locks to get out of so you know we all know the sort of analogy of you know you train to your you know lowest level you perform to your lowest level of training so uh meaning that if you could pick the easiest lock well what about the harder locks so same thing with this if you can pick these that does not necessarily mean you know how to get out of handcuffs or illegal restraints at all it just means that you you're good at one of the easiest ones now we're talking about now that that being said what we're talking about the smith and wesson model 100s because they are of the two most common handcuffs in america uh the peerless and these uh these are harder than the peerless so we're not even going to show the peerless because it's easy the differences between the two let me grab a shim right quick and i'll show you the differences uh the differences between the two is that on the pureless the key is right here key is right there in the center and that's what makes it easier because as i mentioned earlier you don't have this double lock slot here confusing your fingertip with the keyhole so that's what makes them easy and the peerless locks they uh double lock here with a with a pin so that you can take the back of the key [Music] and poke it and that will lock double lock the peerless handcuffs it also makes it harder to figure out if you've actually succeeded in picking the double lock because now right here on on this with the lessons you have a nice little window and you've got that nice little slot right there that shows you that little piece of metal that shows you uh these handcuffs are not double locked as you can see they're not double locked so like i mentioned uh before the easiest way by far to get out of handcuffs is with a key and there are many different ways of getting out of these um and uh the way we're going to show today is with the bobby pin so this is one of the most common ways to do it here's the thing with bobby pins uh with handcuffs in general um a lot of people get bent out of shape trying to figure out how to do handcuffs with these and this is of course a valuable skill that's why we're going to show it today but you also have to remember that look at what handcuff keys look like now look how small they have become this is a titanium one since the delta key of course this is the tiny inconspicuous handcuff key our personal favorite here and this is another generic [Music] i think this is a shomertech key plastic key that's been cut down it was circular but it's been cut down to be even a little bit more small so if you can get away with having this you can absolutely have this uh there's no reason why if you're able to retain a bobby pin on your person and your kidnapper or captor or whatever doesn't take this or any other small piece of metal paper clip or whatever there's a reason that they can't find this plus you've got to remember this is metal these or at least these two are plastic and don't uh cannot be found by metal detector they can only be found by physical search so honestly when it comes right down to it all of us here sure these are good to have on your person not only because they can get out of handcuffs with them but because they are can be used to fashion other tools as well but honestly if you get out of handcuffs just keep the key there's no reason to to work harder when you don't have to especially in times of duress and trust me getting out of these handcuffs with them behind your back and double locked with a hood over your head where you can your breathing is restricted guess what this is going to take a while whereas this is going to be a lot quicker so um yeah let's just go ahead and show some of the methods we could use to get out of this handcuffs so obviously the first method is using a key right so plastic key now one thing you must note about plastic keys and this is actually kind of an interesting exception right here the showmertech key here on these particular handcuffs is kind of sticky as you can see there it's a little i'm trying to push up my thumbnail it's a little sticky it's kind of hard to convey because you can't quite feel it but as you can see i'm running past a little bump there whereas if i take it's even hard to get out a little bit if you take the tiny inconspicuous handcuff key it goes in smooth but there's also a little bit of resistance right there if you take the delta key here let's just put that in there there's no resistance at all swings really smoothly [Music] and does that really well so one must that one thing you must keep in mind this is not a factor for the delta key at all but with these plastic keys you've got to be careful of the torque so if you torque that key too hard you could snap it off in the keyway that's something nobody talks about if you snap a key off in the keyway like in a in an emergency or you're trying to escape these illegal restraints uh you're gonna be in some serious trouble uh you're gonna be in some serious trouble if you're just practicing and break a key off in the keyway which we have done uh several times but yeah that's something to to keep in mind is your key strengths you're going to want to practice this kind of thing you're going to want to practice it's all based on touch and feel how how much effort is required but you know obviously you guys didn't come here to figure out how to use the key for the lock because that's not exactly getting out of it that's just bypassing really honestly or not even really bypassing just using the key for the lock you came to figure out how to use one of these bobby pins and this one i've already pre-made so let's go ahead and grab one here all right so here i have our brand new right out of the package bobby pin sorry if that's a little blurry for you guys the focus doesn't sound those cameras aren't that great so what we're going to do is separate it like this now you don't want to bend it all the way back because then it'll just snap and you need this little bit right here to hang on hang on to because you're going to have a considerable amount of leverage now i left this one like this because as you can see here there are little plastic bits on the end to protect people who use this for their hair right well if you see you've got to get those off right at least on this the straight side here and i'm just doing this and i can't using my fingernail i cannot pull that off so i have to use my teeth or another tool here so uh that is something to take in mind because guess what if you've got these behind your back can you you can't you're gonna be able to put this in your mouth to um uh use your teeth to do that so that's just something to keep in mind you might want to pre-stage these and practice this ahead of time so what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna turn this a certain way because i know that this way works a lot better for me i'm going to insert this thing into the lock now a lot of people screw this up and they'll put this in and they'll push it all the way in no no no don't push all the way in just just a little bit and we're going to bend it just like that that right there that is perfect i don't know if you can see how much that bent or not but that bend is perfect let's see i've got a couple others over here this is too much this one also works but it's not perfect this one is perfect so i'm going to stick it back in there and bend it just a tad bit more there we go and basically we're turning the handcuff into our own tool to help us bend that by doing that so what we're going to do is we're going to sweep the lock we're basically putting this in trying to get it to where it's like that and then slowly sweep this way right and until we feel that locking pawl disengage so i'm going to do put it right in there and look at that just that easy that's what happens when you have the right tool in the job for instance i can try this one over here and you know this like i'm doing this i'm able to look at this handcuff keyway imagine not being able to imagine having to do this with your eyes closed with this behind your back it's going to be very very difficult to do a lot of people think i'm just going to keep bobby pins in my waistband and i'm i'm good to go right no it's going to take you half an hour to figure out how to do it so having the luxury of sight just for the demonstration here you can see how easy this works just come back in here of course it's not going to work the second time you go in there you sweep there you go locking paul disengaged and just to show you what's going on inside the lock here see if i can do this easily yep there we go i'm going to push this in sweep around and you see how that locking ball drops that locking pole disengages let's go with the teeth and there you go so that's how you get our handcuffs with a bobby king bobby pin i'm sure there are dozens of others that have shown this on youtube and easier how to do it oh before i forget uh the double lock so let me grab the key [Music] somewhere around here i've got one because you have to have the key to engage the double lock so [Music] ah here it is all right so same way with the double lock so as you can see here i'm gonna put in the background so you can see there's a little piece of steel right there that means these are single locked i'm going to put that in there and push that feeling you hear that big click and then now that piece of metal has been moved into here that shows that these keys these cuffs are in fact double locked right so go in and they won't go out so what you're going to do is the same exact motion but on the opposite side so if you're double locked you've got to sweep this way all right towards the outside of the cuff you got to do it with a pretty good amount of force okay almost all right boom so i swept all the way around the edge of the cuff and as y

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