Intel Update — March 15 — Pyrrhic Victories

hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground this is the Intel update for March 9th through the 15th 2025 before we get into it I wanted to issue the the brief disclaimer that today is going to be a little bit more informal a lot more opinion-based a lot more dis digression and discussion on some of these things because unfortunately uh we are squarely in the time period where it's very very challenging for me to talk about anything in a purely neutral fact-based way uh when it comes to anything that the White House or the Trump Administration might do that is not entirely a good thing everyone is human everyone makes mistakes and I I personally really do genuinely wish uh president Trump and the Trump Administration well however at some point we're going to have to talk about some things that aren't so great and unfortunately a lot of people just can't handle that uh they just can't do it I I think that in terms of viewership the overwhelming majority of people who uh who listen to my work are conservatives uh which is fine this is you know I I guess I'm even though I consider myself to be politically homeless I guess I'm generally uh more conservative uh for sure but as much as we might want to remove politics from things like this as the old adage goes you may not care about politics but politics certainly cares about you and right now especially in the current news cycle almost all of the issues that we're going to have to talk about are going to be political in some way and right now I get the impression that I'm expected to bite my my tongue and just not say anything about some of the less than ideal things that President Trump does uh from a lot of the people who are kind of in my circle so either way sorry for digressing quite a bit right to start with I just wanted to kind of get that out there right to start with and not bury it deep into the briefing because uh over the next few months I'm going to have to increasingly start talking about more issues that may be a little bit more controversial uh than I personally want to talk about but uh we may have to uh as time goes on either way with that out of the way let's actually get to to the meat of the matter today and let's start off with the Southeast region so as many of you know we are still awaiting any sort of development whatsoever with regards to the Jeffrey Epstein documents same thing with the JFK files uh the RFK files and the MLK Jr files yeah I have really kind of scoured the internet really tried to figure out if there's anything new that's been released and so far I haven't seen anything uh new that has been released since the whole binder Scandal has just kind of been dropped forgotten there has been a lot of rhetoric back and forth between attorney general Pam Bondi and the FBI and various agencies and officials and things like that however really nothing that we can sink our teeth into has been uh released so this Scandal kind of continues I know that a lot of people are are right now in kind of making excuse mode for for this decision and and this in these developments but once again uh just purely going off of what these official government agencies have stated they're they're not uh they're not meeting their end of their own agreement so similarly deportations are down uh in terms of the numbers that have been released now granted there's a lot of misleading information out there when it comes to immigration data and numbers one of the things that has complicated the issue quite a bit is ice and the department of homeand security not entirely being forthcoming with their statistical data so if you scour their websites and you look at their press releases and things like that there really isn't that much information to go off of and as we all know when government agency doesn't tend to release that much data we know well we get a particular feeling about that don't we so trying to be as Fair as humanly possible it was probably a very ill-advised move for ice to start publishing daily deportation numbers because deportations criminal investigations these things take time and you're you're not exactly going to be able to get this many people per day and and categorize it it's going to be hard to do it's it's better served as has been indicated over the past few years uh ice was already doing it kind of the best way which is well roll up at the end of the month and tell us how many people you uh successfully found detained and deported right going through this whole process so ice did not do that uh they wanted a little bit of a PR kind of campaign right to start with which is which is fair if that's their goal but it has made it very challenging because when you present daily deportation numbers and then you take that away people tend to be a little bit uh skeptical about that so I'm not entirely sure how the situation is going deportations are continuing criminal investigations are continuing but in terms of the Big Data big data is hard to analyze on a small scale so we have to have a little bit more time before we can draw an assessment on that now granted president Trump has been president for almost two months now so I think next month will be two months so we'll have that 60-day window uh coming up in a couple of weeks or or in a week or so and uh we'll be able to draw a little bit more conclusion from that so once again it's not fair to make an assessment on day one uh you know coming at Donald Trump and the Trump Administration on January 21st saying why haven't you deported 5 million people that's not a fair expectation but we are starting to get into the land of fair expectations okay 60 days has elapsed what have you done in terms of deportation numbers right so uh and if the numbers aren't uh particularly overwhelming if they're a little bit underwhelming then why why is that are there mitigating circumstances that we the American people the taxpayer who is paying for all this uh or are there mitigating circumstances that we can kind of uh lean on for that now back at the doj the FBI is also investigating uh the recent swatting incidents which I I will talk about in more detail in just a moment but I didn't want to mention it here because we're kind of in the Washington DC region also down in Florida I briefly wanted to mention that the marago airspace incursions continue from what I can tell in my limited research this seems to be more along the lines of a just general AV ation Pilots not paying attention to notam changes down there however we do need to kind of keep this in mind because this is more of a national security issue especially when Trump flies down there for the weekend or spend some time at Mar Lago it's a congested airspace already so it's a little it's a little bit understandable you know a notam expands the T the temporary flight restriction expands uh in a Noam that Pilots don't catch because it drops an hour before their flight and they didn't check it that morning so it's a little bit more understandable however again when it comes to National Security a little bit more of a heightened awareness would probably be a good idea for any general aviation Pilots down there in Florida in Palm Beach moving to the southwestern region I briefly wanted to mention an incident that occurred yesterday that I that occurred before I could put it in the wire and this was an incident involving a drunk driver the driver of a semi-truck was drunk and driving on I35 causing a pileup uh which ended up killing five people and injuring 11 more people so very significant crash uh these things are becoming a lot more I did want to briefly mention this because it is a horrific crash something to to most certainly be be on the lookout for be mindful of uh this has been a problem for a very long period of time so I don't want to make this out to be like it's a new issue but I haven't talked about it myself at Great length yet but I but I have been thinking about it uh with regards to commercial Trucking and both uh immigrant drivers drunk drivers people who don't necessarily speak great English for instance this this uh driver here at the scene when he was arrested uh he didn't speak English uh very well at all so once again it's a big issue but it's been around for a long time I remember even when I was a kid this was a problem and kind of in my local community as well but I did want to mention it because this again was a more horrific crash than normal and it is once again another call for increased vigilance moving over to the western region as many of you have already noted throughout the country but mostly centered in Seattle a lot of Tesla dealerships and Tesla Vehicles cyber trucks or just regular uh Tesla models that have been parked in public have been assaulted attacked um vandalized set on fire uh you name it so the standard standard Seattle kind of demonstration tactic this is once again not particularly new this has been happening really ever since Elon Musk uh kind of started having a little bit more of an active role in the Trump Administration however it's intensified over the past week uh with regards to the targeting of Elon Musk and his platform so for instance Twitter or X was also hit with a pretty big Cyber attack uh on Monday I believe which took the website down for a few hours uh again Elon Musk himself stated that the website was uh targeted via a nation state level actor or someone who dedicated a lot of funding to launch a DDOS attack both of these incidents both the targeting of Twitter and the targeting of uh Tesla vehicles and cyber trucks this is definitely a textbook case of low intensity conflict however it it might become more of a problem as time goes on right now it's just something easy for low-level activists independent malign actors to lash out it's you know Molotov cocktail doesn't doesn't take much uh brain power or funding to to do so it's going to be one of those things that probably continues for a while Switching gears significantly like I mentioned in the wire there was an incident involving American Airlines flight 106 in which an engine uh caught fire upon landing at the airport there in Denver so far there hasn't really been any word on what caused the fire or what caused the mechanical issue that led to the fire upon landing and thankfully everyone was able to evacuate and there were only a few people who got minor injuries from from egressing the aircraft I knew that it's not that interesting of a topic to talk about however I think that it is a good case study for you know paying attention being situationally aware we say these things all the time and sometimes it just gets kind of drowned out because people say oh we're going to you know talk about risk assessment safety again but look at what's happened you know it it tends to be very very important they there's a reason that the flat attendant say when we're going to erress this aircraft leave all your stuff behind because people have died uh because people were trying to get their bags out of the overhead bin instead of trying to evacuate the aircraft and even though this turned out great in this case you know seeing a a lot of people get off the aircraft with their bags is not particularly a a good thing in terms of survivability so thankfully once again everyone survived this crash however this could have gone uh very very badly uh but either way it worked out in the end I guess before we move overseas I briefly wanted to to talk about some of the swatting incidents that have occurred over the the past few days few weeks a few months really since the election because this has become an increasingly significant problem for a lot of conservative influencers out there which is is kind of an interesting development interestingly enough when I wrote the wire on this the other day uh I like an idiot realized after the fact that a lot of you especially those of you outside the United States might not know what swatting is so I got a lot of messages from from people asking what swatting is because a lot of people didn't understand the classically quintessential American phenomenon of swatting so let me briefly explain what this is because only after I've thought about it for a minute I realized how absolutely insane this whole idea is kind of like when you go to explain something you realize how crazy it is this is one of those times so so for those of you who don't know swatting is the act of a Mali actor out there calling in a fake police report to our Emergency Services phone number 911 to report some kind of horrific crime in progress usually some kind of kidnapping or mass shooting or something like that and the entire goal of doing this is to try to get the Police SWAT unit this is where it comes from uh to come and kick the door in at that location and and maybe kill someone so that's the kind of gist of how this works so someone calls in a fake uh oh my gosh there's a mass shooting going on at this location or a kidnapping or something like that some brutal crime is going on at this address the police of course freak out and respond in force uh to this address and kick in the door drag people out and and it just increases the potential for something bad to to happen at this at this location so when I was trying to figure out a way to to explain this really the elephant in the room for again the non-americans out there is why would a malign actor use this as an attack Vector why would this why is this even a thing surely if a false police report is made this should be easily resolved by a quiet knock at the door and a you know happy and polite we're just checking on things because we got a call so sorry to bother you have nice day kind of thing but no it's it's called swatting because in many jurisdictions the potential is extremely high for SWAT to kick in your door without a warrant and without knocking all based off of a fake 911 phone call so we can see how this has become kind of a Threat Vector for malign actors it's not really a prank or an inconvenience it's it's quite literally a an attempt to get the police to kill someone on someone else's behalf so just think about it for a second you're you hear someone trying to kick in your door or bashing on your door really loudly at 2: in the morning you roll out of bed you're groggy you're half dressed you're not thinking clearly you maybe grab a firearm to see you know what the noise is cuz you may you may think it's a robber or or someone trying to break in right and there you go you answer the door with a gun in your hand and you're instantly shot by police with no questions asked so in the United States answering a bump in the night is very risky uh not because it may be a criminal but because it might be the police so unfortunately this is I know it seems really biased to explain it like this but from a risk management perspective this is the truth we may not want to think about it but it is the truth so the name alone swatting should not be possible it's it's it should not be a thing that happens but it's so common now that it's become a hugely popular way of uh usually uh political conservatives being targeted I haven't actually ever heard of a politically liberal like commentator journalist or something like that being swatted which is kind of interesting really this brings about a larger question uh which is the the whole idea kind of boils down to you're telling me that we we live in a time where falsely calling the police on someone might actually get them killed instead of a minor inconvenient knock at the door you know that that's really the real question that kind of goes unanswered here I personally don't like it I really don't and I and I don't like the fact that I have to phrase it this way and I don't like the fact that I have to put so many disclaimers in front of an opinion on this kind of thing because as we all know the issue of law enforcement in America has been been a very very contentious IC over the past few years for many good reasons and for many not so good reasons and it's hard to tell those reasons apart sometimes so I don't have an answer for you uh but this is the way that it is uh malign actors know they're trying to induce a a a situation where a police officer can possibly make a bad decision now does this happen in every case no a lot of major cities which get swatting calls all the time these jurisdictions have a plan for this they have officers have discretion they're making good decisions in a lot of these Squad in cases but the fact is is that in some jurisdictions a lot of police take the bait and they roll up thinking they're going to stop a mass shooting not thinking that they are being used as a pawn not thinking critically not thinking that the phone number did not match the place where they're saying they're calling from you see how we can kind of go down this this rabbit hole and and they immediately go into react mode and it the it's just complacency just kind of compounds things so the fact that the FBI director the new director cash Patel the fact that he even acknowledge that this is possible confirms this is your confirmation everyone this is your confirmation that sometimes police do go in guns blazing now again it's a tough thing because if there was a mass shooting in progress you would hope that the police would come in and you know respond rather rapidly right you would hope that would happen unfortunately in a lot of cases it's hard to to strike that right balance of critical thinking and uh the speed of which a response is necessary very tough question I don't I don't envy anyone who has to make that decision for sure but it is a it is a problem so but that being said and taking all of this into consideration I don't want to beat down I don't want to beat down law enforcement uh without offering Solutions so there are a few very easy things that can be done to prevent swatting and to eliminate this completely or mostly as a Threat Vector uh reduce the risk for both the citizen population and the police it's all reducing the risk for both of these demographics would be great instead of just relying on reducing ring the risk for one of them so local law enforcement especially smaller less well-funded jurisdictions really do need to have a swatting plan in most jurisdictions all 911 calls indicating a very severe uh crime in progress have to be followed up on uh but there are some ways to make this as safe as possible for everybody so in short communication is the entire solution really that's that's it that's just improving communication would solve this problem completely you can even create what we in in the Intel World call Eis or essential elements of information essentially a a list of things to double check before we get all kind of spun out of control on something and it doesn't it can be done automatically as a software solution in most of the uh software packages and software Suites that are used by law enforcement or especially 911 dispatchers so for instance if a person is calling from a number outside of the zip code for where the call is allegedly taking place that should be an indicator that something's not quite right here so if a person is claiming that they are getting ready to shoot up a a school or something like that and they're outside the school right now but 911 call dispatchers can geolocate that 911 call is taking place five or six states away uh do you see how we can automatically with software Solutions identify the potential for a swindling taking place same thing with a very simple shift change briefing right one of the big problems with swatting is that the the people doing the swatting these Mali actors they know the shift change for a law enforcement jurisdiction right they know a police department shift change procedure and a lot of times what they'll do is they'll call during one shift and get somebody swatted during one shift and then they'll wait for a shift change to occur knowing that that Police Department is not going to mention the swatting incident and so the next shift gets on gets on board they you know start their shift and that second shift doesn't know that a swatting incident took place so they SWAT him again so now you see how we're going around the clock if there is a shift change briefing and no one mentions the swatting well every single shift can be hit with a swatting incident and this can happen for for many many times in a row and this usually does happen this happens quite a lot because the swatters know that most in most cases with most shift changes they're not going to mention the swatting but it would be very very easy for a shift Captain to basically say look guys hey just be aware we got a fake report at this house it's a prominent conservative influencer if you get a Call of a violent you know crime taking place at this house just be mindful that it's probably another swatting incident you know we have to respond anyway but still just be mindful don't go their guns blazing kind of thing and that would neutralize it right that would neutralize most of it it would still be inconvenient for the homeowner but you don't need to get out there and slam somebody on the ground every single shift change you know every single shift throughout the day doesn't need to involve a person you know being treated like they's some kind of criminal in their own home but this would be very very easy to do and these are very these are solutions that could be affected at the very lowest levels possible now speaking of higher level things when we're talking about the FBI getting involved well we all know that the NSA and the FBI and the CIA and all these federal agencies spend hundreds of thousands of manh hours to track down Grandma you know at the capital building on j6 but they don't seem to be very interested in figuring out where these highly traceable highly investigable crimes are taking place with regards to swatting right it's very it would be extraordinarily easy to isolate someone who swatted someone else but the demand hasn't been there so hopefully uh the demand for this kind of of crime Vector taking place uh can be addressed uh by the FBI we will certainly give them the chance and we will hold them accountable uh if nothing seems to be done on that front so of course it's a very controversial issue it's a very controversial topic but sometimes we've got to talk about these things and uh get this out in the open so that we can get towards a solution right so hopefully we can isolate this and stop this from happening to to Really anyone at this point I forgot to mention all of the people who this has happened to over the past couple of days have been largely conservative influencers uh honestly I just as a disclaimer I don't know most of these people I think at least 80% of the people on this list have me blocked personally on social media so it's very interesting that a lot of the people who are being swatted are not I I would personally not classify them as being particularly inflammatory a lot of them are uh not I I personally I know inflammatory but I personally wouldn't even classify them as being conservative so Centrist at best so it's very interesting that it it doesn't necessarily seem to be aligned so much with political ideology so much as just an alignment with President Trump so a long a lot of the time it's it's really going to be impacting the people who are writing positively or speaking positively on social media about uh president Trump so again that seems to be the in this particular case the most common uh Vector for targeting uh I guess we'll have to see if this expands to include more people but really the the more politically conservative people who I would have expected this to happen to are not really being targeted at least not yet so I guess we'll have to see how that all works out Switching gears significantly let's move to the North Sea for a moment again tensions are high on the high seas as I noted in The Wire the captain of the merchant vessel soong has been arrested he at least British media has seemed to confirm whatever that means seem to confirm that he is a Russian national and he has been charged with manslaughter as one of the crew members uh involved in this Collision incident uh was has been lost at sea uh and presumed dead at this time so criminal investigation is ongoing just like Aviation it takes a very long time for any kind of investigation report to come out and a lot of the people in the maritime space tend to walk on eggshells around Maritime issues involving very large uh companies a lot of times because there's a lot of uh there's a lot of legal implications for saying what caused this or what caused that it's so so you tend to see a little bit more risk aversion when it comes to assessments on things like this everybody's suddenly well we need to wait and see you know that's the kind of thing uh that tends to happen now of course from my perspective I am not in the maritime Community uh I am in the world of of intelligence and and threat assessment and things like that so just for me personally when a commercial tanker vessel gets struck by a container ship and it looks to me like it's a very deliberate Collision I'm personally going to treat it like it's a deliberate Collision until we can maybe excuse that behavior later on especially during a time of heightened heightened awareness and and heightened uh International tensions it seems like they're they're treating this as more of a negligence kind of thing but it's hard to say we're proba not going to get that much more information on this is one of those things that's very very hard to prove uh even with the data recorders on on both vessels it's going to be very very hard to prove but generally speaking when one vessel sitting at anchor gets T-boned by a cargo ship that could have seen them for a very long distance away we have to assume that there's some level of either extremely gross negligence or an INT intentionality Behind these actions for now that's kind of how the investigation is sitting and like clockwork I guess just going to have to wait and see how it works out moving over to Eastern Europe let's talk about Ukraine I know it's been a long winding and very contentious road to get here but we may be and I don't wish to speak too soon but we may be able to taste a little bit of a peace deal very very soon diplomatic efforts are ongoing you can see this with the even tracking the Diplomatic planes of of diplomats flying around throughout Western and Eastern Europe so far nothing said in stone uh it seems like Putin is very much in a good uh bargaining position he has either achieved for himself or been granted by the West A very handsome position diplomatically for instance the NATO Chief has granted him the concession of saying verbally in a media interview that Ukraine is not going to join NATO now whether that's true that's going to be up for Putin to to make the decision on no one else it's just it's his personal decision alone so I don't know if it's true or not NATO has certainly been very untrustworthy on the same claims before but again it is a good diplomatic concession to make to get Russia to even come to the table same thing with the kers defensive this is something NATO didn't really have a hand in stopping uh but the kers defensive the ill- fated foray into the Kur region of Russia is is largely over the conflict is mostly boiled down to largely nothing at this moment or very very little operations I don't wish to make light of the issue at all or or sound insulting but if we're going to use a doctrinal term to describe what's going on we might call it mopping up operations so Russia is mopping up the last uh bit of UK Ukrainian presence inside the the Border region of Russia the K region whereas most Ukrainian forces have have already kind of withdrawn back into Ukraine so again may be distasteful to to describe it in that manner but that's the doctrinal term Russia will continue clearing their territory over the next few days but now that this offensive and this kind of thorn in Russia's side is largely over Russia is in a better position uh a little bit more favorable of a position to to come to the negotiating table from Ukraine's perspective Ukraine really doesn't have that much negotiating room at all uh granted Ukraine is not really going to be negotiating for herself it's going to be the United States really negotiating on Ukraine's behalf because as we all know this is how this war has gone really from the from the get-go there have been a couple of times over the past few years really right when the when the invasion started uh right when uh Russian troops were kind of on the outskirts of Kiev there were uh Talks Of Peace at that time uh however it's um it's a very contingent topic that people would had a much higher pay grade than me you're going to be talking about for many many years the bottom line right now is that we we may have the first real genuine chance for peace in Ukraine in many many years and it's really going to largely be on the diplomats involved as to whether or not this is going to happen things happen very quickly in the Diplomatic space and all it takes is a phone call all it takes is one off-hand comment or remark and uh you know years of progress is set back so hopefully diplomats can kind of keep this going and we can we can actually achieve peace in Europe for for a while at least so that's pretty much all I have for this week I know it's not particularly helpful sometimes a lot of waight and sees I'm sorry about that sometimes that happens but let's talk about the intercepted ghostnet reports uh this week was really good I think the weather kind of helped out a lot of people even though uh the time zone changed and I don't think a lot of people remembered that it did uh for for transmitting either way that's okay a lot of people tend to operate for 3 or 4 hours instead of just the you know 30 minute or hour window that that the uh radio network is set up for so I got a lot of messages from a lot of people a lot of people were testing not so much news uh but a lot of uh a lot of people testing back and forth sending messages sending emails so it's it's a good uh Network that is is constantly growing every every week uh that goes by and I am still working on it I'm still working on improving it I've got a lot of Publications that I'm working on I have two separate uh supplementary Publications that I'm working on right now uh they're going to take me a while so uh just please bear with me while I I work on of the stuff that will help improve the ghost net in time so that's all I have for today thank you guys all for sticking with me thank you all for your all of your support and uh thank you for sticking with me again through some of these more contentious issues unfortunately I wish it wasn't the case I would like to talk about nothing but sunshine and rainbows but uh sometimes we have to get to the meat of the matter not necessarily uh in terms of dwelling on the bad stuff but by you know discussing it and and trying to get to Solutions right that's what we're trying to do here so it's all in good faith I know that's not a thing that happens on the internet too much uh these days but it's all in good faith trying to do the best we can and I think there's a lot of value in just trying to uh keep moving forward so we'll try to keep doing that and I guess we'll see what next week brings so again thank you all for watching thank you for your support and I will see you next time and as always fight in the shade