Intel Update — Dec — 20 — Attacks Past — Present — and Future

Hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground. This is the Intel update for December 14th through the 20th, 2025. As usual at this point, the insanity continues and we have a lot to cover this week. So, let's hop to it. Overall, like last week, this week has been busier than usual with multiple terror attacks taking place around the world. First up, we have the Brown University shooting here in the homeland, as well as several arrests of terror cells such as the Turtle Island Liberation Front planning to conduct attacks. Down in Australia, we have the Bondi Beach mass shooting and also the follow-up terror attack that was halted a few days after that initial incident, which we'll get to in a moment. And finally, yesterday, we had a mass stabbing attack in Taiwan. A comparatively rare form of terror attack in Taipei, but still one that caused a few casualties nonetheless. Considering the elevated terrorism threat risk globally, many nations have canceled their New Year celebrations out of fear of things like vehicle ramming attacks and the inability to maintain security for large crowds. It's not entirely clear as to what these threats are. Most nations aren't really citing a specific threat. So, this could be a case of major cities just not wanting to hold celebrations and so they're using terrorism as an excuse. Or it could be that there are so many insurgent groups implanted throughout the Western world that the risks of vehicle ramming attacks are simply too high. Now that it's become clear that mass migration is directly and clearly linked to an increase of violence, it's likely that certain politicians don't want an attack to happen in their city, which would rile up the populace even more against mass migration. So that's the kind of unfortunate flavor this week. Attacks past, present, and future. And before we get into some of this stuff a little bit more in depth, let's talk about strategic movement for this week. Not much to report on the Caribbean front. Things are mostly the same as before. The Uima is still in port in the US Virgin Islands where she is conducting a port call. She's been there for a while now, I think. Otherwise, there have been a few minor positioning updates. A few ships moving around here and there, but nothing major. The Ford is still cutting circles in the ocean off the coast of Puerto Rico as of this morning, so no major updates there. Perhaps the biggest update has been the increase in strategic aviation in the Caribbean. There has been an observable increase in intelligence aircraft conducting flights off the coast of Venezuela. So, that very much needed intelligence preparation of the battle space is being conducted on a national scale down there. They're probably collecting imagery of the coastline, but more likely they're probably collecting sigant on whatever forces Maduro can muster. They're not exactly hiding uh their presence. They're obviously leaving their transponders turned on so that the whole world can see exactly where their spy aircraft are flying. So, other than that, no major change. Uh tensions remain high and most people watching this kind of expect war to break out any day or week now, especially since Venezuela has allegedly starting escorting tankers through the blockade. Now, on that front, again, no major news. Uh, Venezuela hasn't actually tried to escort a sanctioned vessel out of their waters yet. Most of the rhetoric pertaining to Venezuela escorting ships, you know, in their territorial waters has pertained to nonsanctioned vessels. So, they're kind of escorting the vessels that don't actually need an escort. But there will inevitably be a point at which Venezuela decides to run the gauntlet. So, that's going to be a pretty big international flash point that could uh kick things off from there. So, maybe the US wants that to happen to provide justification to invade Venezuela. I don't know. But that's kind of the next point of friction that's likely to come about in the next couple of weeks. Moving to the United States, this week has been very kinetic and multiple incidents have taken place that are worthy of consideration. First up, we have the Brown University shooting and the murder of the MIT professor, which are two incidents that the authorities state are related incidents, so we'll dig into that in just a bit. Otherwise, the FBI has now finally become involved in the horrific acid attack that took place in Savannah, Georgia almost 2 weeks ago, which is why I've left this one on the slide for now. And out west, four wouldbe terrorists were arrested as they were planning to conduct attacks in Los Angeles during New Year's celebrations, which is probably why many nations around the world have exercised caution during New Year's events and canceled fireworks and stuff like that. There are quite a few different groups in the United States and internationally, which are uh trying to increase the rhetoric when it comes to New Year's targeting for some reason, mostly because New Year's celebrations usually involve large crowds, but it's also not a really big political holiday or a big religious holiday. So for the different types of terrorists which just cause to seek mass mayhem and not necessarily want to conduct terrorism for a political goal, uh New Year's is a pretty good holiday for them to choose, uh which is why a lot of New Year's attacks tend to happen. But there are some very interesting considerations when we talk about that terrorism label, which we'll get to in just a minute, because it's kind of interesting to examine these threats as they come about and why they come about. That's the more important part which helps us identify when and where future attacks may take place or at least where the risk is a little bit more elevated. Now breaking out into the regions for this week, I wanted to briefly mention the Epstein file release which took place last night. This was a very uh hotly contested document release that was very much hyped up. So I wanted to mention that it did occur. However, roughly 90% of the documents look exactly like this completely uh redacted from the top of the page all the way to the bottom. So, I don't think very many people were expecting much, but I know this was kind of in the news and Congress even passed a special law. The uh Epstein Files Transparency Act to force the removal of redactions from documents like this. And the DOJ just released black pages like they always tend to do with this sort of stuff. So, from what I can tell so far, there really aren't any new revelations when it comes to the actual text. I expect a bit more information and a bit more context on exactly what was released over the next few days as people kind of get into it and start examining some of these documents, but for the most part, it's just complete redactions uh from top to bottom. So, again, not entirely unexpected, but I did want to mention it because it was it was kind of being talked up all this week. So, moving down to Georgia, I wanted to offer a brief update on the acid attack that took place near Foresight Park in Savannah a couple of weeks ago. So, the FBI uh yesterday announced that they are actually seeking all of the doorbell cameras and any security camera footage that anyone might have who live in this giant rectangle in downtown Savannah. So, if you live in downtown Savannah inside this rectangle, the FBI would like any kind of security camera footage that you have that features the suspect in that case. Now, of course, the big elephant in the room is that this took the FBI nine full days to actually start the investigation. Now, we can argue about this case all day long. However, one specific argument that I saw uh online this week pertaining to this exact case really motivated me to kind of clear the air on the topic and clarify uh the nature of counterterrorism doctrine in general. So, one of the arguments that I have seen is that the reason that the FBI took so long to start investigating this specific gruesome crime is because this is a local law enforcement issue. Right? That's the argument that's being stated is that well this was really the job of the Savannah Police Department. The FBI doesn't normally investigate crimes involving a single person and it doesn't meet the criteria for the feds getting involved and so on. However, this is incorrect. This is not how uh the world of counterterrorism works. And here's why. Let's first examine the nature of terrorism in general. We throw around this word terrorism a lot and we don't really kind of get to the meat of the matter of what is actually classified as a terror attack. So, let's go ahead and go to the FBI's website. They're the ones who make the doctrine, right? And here are the definitions. So, the FBI has two definitions for terrorism. International terrorism and domestic terrorism. Now, the international one is quite an easy definition to wrap our minds around. It is a lot more clear-cut because international terrorism as per the FBI is defined as violent criminal acts committed by individuals and/or groups who are inspired by or associated with designated foreign terrorist organizations or nations. state sponsored, meaning that you're a part of an FTO, a foreign terrorist organization. Again, this is why this uh rhetoric has been in the news lately of designating TDA, Trendy Aragua, as a foreign terrorist organization and so on and so forth, right? These labels mean things in the international arena. Well, maybe not in terms of international relations, but for the United States, if you are a part of an FTO, well, you're going to get slotted right into the FBI's investigative process automatically. you don't necessarily have to do anything. Just by being affiliated with some of these groups, you are now, by the FBI's definition, a terrorist. The other definition, which is the one that we're going to focus on today, is a lot more loosey goosey. I'll say domestic terrorism, as per the FBI, is defined as violent criminal acts committed by individuals and/or groups to further ideological goals stemming from domestic influences such as those of a political, religious, social, racial, or environmental nature. Now again, this may come as no surprise to many of you out there. However, this definition will more or less cover every single thing that happens under the sun. So, this is a very broad definition and the FBI is known to quite liberally apply this definition to lots of different things that they want to classify as terrorism. However, the last part of that sentence is what matters. at political, religious, social, racial, or environmental nature. That part of the sentence, if we crack open a few older counterterrorism manuals, those five categories are the traditionally accepted motivations for carrying out a terror attack. It's not exactly perfect, but it's it kind of gets us across the line with regards to most kinds of terror attacks. Once again, this is highly subjective. This is like the ultimate game of semantics as to what is defined as terrorism, right? If you read two different textbooks, you may come out with two different views of what a terrorist attack actually is. Obviously, there's going to be a lot of variation here. So, please don't get hung up on the exact words in this this definition because it's going to vary quite a bit depending on which textbook you read, depending on which uh professors you had teaching you counterterrorism topics. It's going to vary on what you would consider to be a terrorist attack. I will say though, however, that if we go back to say the early Giwat era where the word terrorism started being used a lot more often by governments and agencies and things like that, what was the definition back then? Well, honestly, it it's not it wasn't very much different than what it is today. However, what they tried to make it seem like is that well, it's in the name. What is terrorism? It's in the name. It's an it's an attack that is intended to cause fear. That's not really true. In most cases, terrorist attacks are not meant to get you to do something differently. They're really just attacks that are coming from a certain range of ideiations. In this case, political, religious, social, racial, or environmental. It's not about causing fear so much as it is carrying out an attack for a certain reason, one of these five reasons. I know it may not make a whole lot of sense, or maybe it does make a lot of sense in retrospect, but this is something that we have to understand. And this is why I wanted to talk about what is terrorism because this applies to the Savannah case. So going back to our initial question, right, the thing that got me interested is people saying, "Well, this guy was just one guy. He attacked one person. He threw acid on this woman. It was horrible, but it was kind of an isolated attack. So not really terrorism, right? Wrong. The reason why he did this is what dictates it being a terror attack. He did not throw acid on this woman to steal her wallet. Right? That's not what happened. If that were the case, you would have an argument, right? You would have an argument to say, "Well, he just used a very brutal attack as part of a mugging and this was a financially motivated attack and thus not terrorism." But that's not what happened. He randomly threw acid on this lady and calmly walked away. This is why the feds should have been involved in this case early on because we don't know what the person's ideiation is. We don't know what the person's ideology is. We don't know why they conducted the attack in many cases until we catch them, right? So, it's better to air on the side of caution and assume that this guy conducted this attack for terroristic reasons. And then once the guy's in jail, once the suspect is captured and they are no longer a threat to the public, we can conduct a further investigation to determine what charges would be appropriate for this particular crime. Right? It sounds very simple, but once you start laying it out, you realize what's going on here. So, so again coming back to this specific attack in Savannah here. Did this guy throw acid on this woman just because he's crazy and mentally ill? Or did he throw acid on this woman because she was a white woman? If it is the latter, then that would mean that this is meeting the definition of a terror attack and the feds are now the lead investigative authority. Or at least that's the way it should work, right? We don't know why he did this attack. So, it would be best to assume that he did this because he saw a white woman in the park, threw acid on her because she he didn't like the way she looked, and we can go from there. Now, is this definitive proof? No. That's just a theory. However, remember, investigations are not courtrooms, right? The investigative process is not a jury. We can think whatever we want to during an investigation. That's what investigations are all about. In terms of investigations, we don't really have to have a reason to do anything at all except for things like probable cause. and throwing acid on a woman randomly is definitely a probable cause to, you know, search the individual or something like that. That's what we tend to think of in terms of probable cause. But if I've got a whiteboard in my office, I can say, "Yeah, this guy probably targeted this woman because he saw a white woman in a park and he didn't like that and he targeted her because of that." Because th those types of attacks are becoming very common around the United States. I don't need to prove anything to a jury to put that on my whiteboard, right? Once the guy is caught and you can start working through the judicial process and prosecutorial charges and things like that, that's for later on. But I'm talking about right now, this guy's not caught yet. So, this is why investigative tools have to be unlocked early on. It would have made sense for the Savannah PD to say, "Look, we can't handle this. FBI, can you come involved because it sure looks like another black guy just randomly attacked a white girl in a park. You guys take it and run from there." But that's not what happened. So, this is a good reminder of understanding how the motivations for something really do factor into that terrorism label. And that terrorism label matters because of the tools and assets that are going to be available for the investigative process. The FBI and the feds in general are not going to spin up a bunch of resources, right, when it's just a regular street crime. The issue here is is that terrorism tends to be policed very differently than every other crime in the United States because it has a potential to affect other people. Of course, we can argue about semantics all day long, but a say a serial check casher, right? somebody who's committing check fraud like every other day, right? That type of person is going to be policed a lot differently than somebody who's a serial stabber, right? Somebody who's committing check fraud every single day is a lot different type of person than is going out there and stabbing people every day. The urgency by which we police the stabbing person is going to be a lot more important than say going after the financial crimes. So this is why that terrorism label matters so much and why we have to be aware of this because of things like the Providence shooting and also some of the other terrorist attacks that have occurred or taken place around the around the country. Right? So let's go ahead and jump to the Providence shooting for a minute and and talk about this absolute disaster. So the general overview of the story is very hard to summarize actually because the details don't really make a whole lot of sense. So please forgive me for this extremely wavetop overview of what went on. So the general story for how this was carried out is that this individual, Clauddio Neves Valente, decided to commit a mass shooting at his old school, Brown University. He went to the university and decided to loiter around the north side of campus for a few hours before eventually making contact with a student, a former student who was actually secretly living in the basement of the Baris and Holly Engineering building some hours before the shooting took place. From there, some sort of scuffle or altercation or argument ensued between the two and the two parted ways. The homeless student kind of left the area or went back to whatever they were doing. It's not clear. And the shooter hung around the general area. What happens between the this point in the story and the shooting is unclear, but eventually some hours later, Valente allegedly entered a classroom in the Aaris and Holly Engineering building and conducted the shooting. Who he was targeting, we don't know. Why he was targeting, we don't know. None of the witnesses have been interviewed. We just don't know anything more than that. But once the shooting was complete, he eressed from the building uh at a rather slow pace. Uh he managed to just kind of walk around the campus on the north side. And from there, at some point after that shooting, he got into his rental car, which was parked nearby the uh engineering building, and he drove all the way to Boston. Once he was in Boston, uh he transited to the outskirts of Boston where he found his uh old colleague, a professor at MIT now, and shot him in his home, murdered him right then and there. And once that murder was complete, Valente drove all the way to a storage unit, a a mini storage unit in Salem, New Hampshire. From there, he is alleged to have taken his own life inside a storage unit there. And this is where his remains were found a couple of days ago. That is the official story as it stands right now. Many details, including especially the timeline of all of this, is very sketchy and has changed by the hour. So, please forgive me if by the time this comes out, something else has changed. Suffice it to say, this is probably one of the most sketchy shootings that has taken place in the US over the past year or so. And I say that rather hesitantly because I know that throughout internet land at large, there's this growing trend of people wanting to be contrarian just for the sake of it or wanting to say that, yeah, something's fishy here. there's some conspiracy on this that or the other just for the sake of like engagement farming or you know stirring up content generation ideas or whatever. I know that it's really popular to do that these days but in this case man this whole case stinks. It is really really sketchy all of it. And honestly I don't even know where to begin. I had originally written out like several pages worth of like all the little details that I picked out that are uh really just kind of not making any sense. But I'm just going to kind of leave it short for today because probably the most egregious thing that I can find so far is the fact that as this investigation was ongoing and as all of these little blunders were occurring from the FBI kicking snow to having like their junior guys out there and failing to secure crime scenes, failure to secure evidence, failure to interview even a single witness to the crime, right? All of these blunders started adding up. But what really got me was congressmen and political officials getting on TV and saying, "Shut up. Don't talk about this. Don't question anything." And what do you think that makes me do? It makes me question things. Especially considering the fact that this investigation was blundered so much that a man lost his life when I think it was probably quite preventable. At the same exact moment that the FBI and the Providence Police Department were getting on TV and telling us that there's no further threat to the community, the killer was in his car on his way to murder somebody else. Okay, that is disgraceful and there's no amount of well investigations are hard that you can hide behind to save yourself from that sort of thing. They have to own up to that. And what really got me paying attention with that is they they did what what I call the beltway demeanor. This is a thing that happens in the world of intelligence, but it's really just kind of a Washington DC thing. And uh what it is is this this demeanor, this um perspective of just condescension just out of nowhere, right? Like how dare you suggest that XYZ is probably a more likely theory. Like why don't you let the experts handle it? you know, the the uh classic, well, we just need to have a conversation about this and we need to discuss this and we need to manage this situation using the most uh boilerplate HR language we can sort of surmise. Personally, I'm more attuned to this, I think, because I got this throughout most of my career. And this is really one of the main reasons why I stopped doing this this kind of work professionally because it's a very interesting form of condescension mixed with a little bit of gaslighting. Like almost like you're somehow inferior for thinking that there may be a further threat to the community. That's what they did. That's the mentality that they had. It's like gaslighting mixed with condescension. Like, oh, you're just super stressed. You need to you need to take a break. uh because you know there's no threat to the community. You know, you're you're crazy for even thinking that. Don't worry about it. We've got it covered. And then meanwhile, there's somebody who's actually got a gun and he's going to kill somebody else while they're actually saying this during the live press conference. Like it's it it's so hard to describe. I'm not doing a super great job of it, but you know it when you see it. It's this this condescension mixed with like elitism. So elitism uh condescension and gaslighting all rolled into one. When you start to see that sort of thing in a press conference, when there's an ongoing criminal investigation, watch out because they're hiding something. And then when they add in this like twinge of almost like pity, like they're like they pity you. They're they're pitying you for thinking that there might be a further threat, like you're inexperienced or something like that, you know, that that really starts to starts to add up a lot of indicators that some sort of deception is going on here. And in this case, it turned out to be correct because what happened? We find out a couple of days later that exactly what the authorities told us was explicitly not happening actually happened. Somebody else got killed. So yeah, that's something that I hope to maybe think about a little harder and kind of encapsulate a little bit better to to to describe it a little bit more accurately because it is a very unique phenomenon and for me who you know I worked in Intel professionally for about 10 years or so. Whenever I would see that, I would know somebody's lying about something. But it most people, it would just go right over their heads. Like the junior guys who hadn't been in been in it long enough to know, they wouldn't be able to determine like, ah, okay, they're trying to skew something here. It's it's almost like um the difference between somebody telling a white lie and then like a professional, you know, um pathological liar. There's a big difference between the two, right? It's the same kind of idea. It's like condescension, elitism, gaslighting, but on steroids. And it's a very very unique perspective that you see some of these people uh use when they're making statements about something is a very big indicator for deception. And in this case we the deception was quite clear. The killer was indeed a further threat to the community and he actually ended up doing the worst case scenario. Ended up killing again. So not only did they fail at stopping a mass shooter, but they failed at apprehending a mass shooter and they failed at stopping a mass shooter from committing another shooting. Right? At least that's by their own story. Now, all of that being said, there is also, I have to mention, a quite high likelihood that the details of how all of this unfolded are simply not true. The timelines are not matching up. By their own admission, they're saying their timelines are not matching up. So, it's very hard to trust anyone as part of the official investigation with this because, well, by their own admission, they're saying their stories are not adding up, right? There's a lot of details that just don't add up. And it's not made any better when you've got the Providence police chief getting on TV struggling to speak English somehow after living in Rhode Island for 41 years. This guy still can't speak English very well. And he's answering extremely pertinent questions in Spanish without translating it for the rest of us. So, I've got to go into Google Translate to see what a police chief just said about a mass shooting in the United States of America. That's a that's a pretty big problem. But also, the attorney general was sitting there, you know, urging the public that they were being foolish. She's being foolish for thinking that there's a further threat to the community when there actually was a further threat to the community. Yeah, this is not a good case. The outcome of this is not good. Uh not only do we not have any sort of justice for the victims of this case, but also we can't really be sure that the incident has reached a point of conclusion now, can we? The official story is that these two cases are linked. The the official story is that this one man, Clauddio Nevice Valente, had some kind of personal grievance which caused him to conduct a mass shooting at Brown University, his old school, and also uh to take out one of his former colleagues that apparently he didn't like or something like that. So officially, that is the link between the two. Again, coming back to our definitions of terrorism, this appears to be or at least what the authorities are stating this to be is a personal dispute. As in he did not conduct this attack for ideological reasons. It was a social reason. it was a personal uh mental health reason or something like that. Now, even using the FBI's own very broad and vague definition of terrorism, we're still in kind of a gray area here, too. Because normally, generally speaking, I mean, there are outliers, but generally speaking, if a person has a dispute with someone else, they're not going to conduct a mass shooting, they're going to take their anger out on the person that they don't like, right? Or the person that they wanted to to remove from society, right? If they have a personal grievance with somebody, they're not going to conduct a mass shooting. Likewise, if they have if they want to conduct a mass shooting, the type of person who's going to be in the frame of mind to conduct a mass shooting generally isn't going to want to settle scores either. I mean, it's either one or the other. So, this if this is what actually happened, and I'm not saying it's not what happened. I'm just saying that if it is what happened, if the official story is true, this is a novel case. This is a very novel case, and I think that we're going to need more time. We're going to need more information. The Providence Police Department is going to have to interview witnesses and um I'm going to be looking into this a little bit further. So, it's odd. I also think it's odd. That's why I wanted to talk about it. So, moving out west, another very strange one, but also not really surprising. Strange, but not surprising. That's probably the West Coast in general these days. This took the form of four members of the Turtle Island Liberation Front being rolled up for attempting to create IEDs to detonate throughout Los Angeles this New Year's Eve. Once again, this series of arrests is what has prompted a lot of international uh responses in the form of cancelling fireworks and crowds and things like this. This is interesting because these four individuals were not the only people in the Turtle Island Liberation Front. This is a larger movement uh which is well, let me see, how should I describe this group? The Turtle Island Liberation Front is more like an offshoot of Antifa. They're all kind of in the same realm. See, one thing you have to understand about the far-left groups is that they love their labels, right? So, they love their names. They love their splinter groups because everybody has to have a title, right? Everybody has to have some kind of authority. That's what this is really uh one of the big uh traits of some of these far-left groups is that they're they're nested within groups within groups within groups. And in this case, these people are part of a smaller Splinter Cell within the Turtle Island Liberation Front, which is affiliated with Antifa and other far-left groups. It's a nightmare of names and acronyms. So, just suffice it to say that these four people are not the entire group. These are just four people who were rolled up uh for blowing up or trying to create IEDs to blow up stuff in Los Angeles. So that's how they were rolled up. They were creating IEDs out in the desert. They had been under surveillance for some time because of course they were. I mean, look at their mug shots. You can tell these guys would of course be on a government watch list rather quickly. And why is this, you might ask? Well, because they weren't exactly hiding uh their behavior. These people use their real names on social media. They published very violent rhetoric openly, not even in closed groups, just openly on Facebook, right? Where this stuff can flourish. So while the FBI is patting themselves on the back for rolling these people up, this is a case that Mr. Magcoo could crack, right? So even the most incompetent uh person could see that these people were a clear and present danger to society. Why? Because that's what they said about them their own selves. So as you might expect, most of the ideology on these people's web pages is very contradictory. So Turtle Island, just for instance, is a reference to what they claim Native Americans referred to America as. which is not really historically true. That's something that was really just kind of created recently, but you know, revisionist history is kind of the way that it works with a lot of these groups. But either way, the Turtle Island reference is more of a uh Native American kind of thing. And pardon me for saying so, but these four mug shots don't exactly look like Native Americans. But anyway, you've got that uh sort of thing going on. The whole like, you know, you're on stolen land kind of ideology. So, there's that. Plus, most of the rhetoric that they have on their web pages is um pro Palestine, but also like pro whatever acronym you want to say for gay issues nowadays. So, again, very contradictory ideology, but a lot of their stuff is uh very sympathetic towards uh Hamas in general. So, you know, there's that that'll get you on a watch list pretty quickly uh anywhere in the world these days. But the interesting part of this whole story, the reason why going on this rant is worthwhile is because these people are not the only people in their group. And the FBI is patting themselves on the back after they arrest the weirdest looking people in the group when there are other groups out there. They could have arrested like 500 people that are part of these groups or at least questioned a lot of these people. You hop in these Facebook groups with these people. They're not even Facebook groups. They're just Facebook pages. and you look at the people and look at the people making comments and it's like, all right, you got the four weirdest looking people in the group, but you still got a hundred other insurgents out there who openly state they're trying to conduct IED attacks. So once again, pardon me for not exactly trusting the FBI to stop terrorist attacks this New Year's Eve, but I guess we'll have to see. I mean, head on a swivel, right? That's the that's the moral of the story these days. Keep your head on a swivel. That is for sure. So, and speaking of keeping your head on a swivel, let's move over to Taiwan and talk about the Taipei terror attack that took place the other day. This is, of course, the unfortunate stabbing attack that took place at the Jean Jehan subway station in downtown Taipei. Now, this attack meets the criteria for being classified as a complex coordinated attack or CCA. We used to call these complex attacks or just complex terrorist attacks. What makes this a complex attack or the modern term complex coordinated attack or CCA? Well, there are usually two criteria. either multiple people involved in the attack or multiple weapons systems involved in the attack. And in this case, it was a lone attacker. However, he did switch weapons and he did target multiple venues. So, that does make it a complex coordinated attack, which is a little bit more than just your uh average garden variety terrorist attack these days. The general overview of how the attack began is very interesting because it shows a very high level of planning for how the attack was to be carried out. So, the attacker began at the main subway station to the south uh in which he threw a few smoke grenades inside the subway station. Now, at the time, this was treated as a prank and nobody really knew what was going on. So, they evacuated the station because it's a big station. It's the main train. It's the main subway station for Taipei. And uh in the process, they kind of started figuring out what was going on. Well, by then, the asalent had moved on to the other attack site. But at this first attack site before he moved on, he apparently had made contact with a citizen who was trying to stop him. And this citizen attempted to stop the attacker at this first site. But again, this all happened within the span of just a few minutes. So it took some time before people figured out exactly what was going on. The truth of the matter is that the individual, the attacker in this case, threw smoke grenades at the main subway station as a diversion. And when those smoke grenades were going off, he transited north to the Jean Shan subway station to conduct his actual stabbing attack. Now, we don't know if he took the subway to that station or if he went uh on surface roads on foot. Either way, what he was planning to do is have a diversion at the main subway station and or potentially detonate some IEDs there. So, uh like I said, reports are conflicting, but it looks like he actually had IEDs staged at the main subway station as well. So again, Taiwanese authorities are not exactly being forthcoming about this one, but from what we can piece together, it looks like he wanted to ignite a bag full of Molotovs at the main subway station in addition to using smoke devices at that main subway station attack site. And from there, he he transited north to the Zan station where he conducted the stabbing phase of his attack. Again, using even more smoke obscurance to cause mass pandemonium. So this guy was on a roll. he was really trying to cause a bunch of mayhem. But it turns out that unfortunately these types of attacks are just so rare in Taipei that not a whole lot of people even noticed. And we can see this in the video of the attack. I'm sure many of you have have have seen this and uh commented on it. I'm not going to show the full clip because it does show the attack uh taking place, but when this guy is in the middle of the street in downtown Taipei at a heavy intersection, right, he starts throwing smoke grenades and takes out this huge, you know, Bowie knife, right? or like miniature machete. Most of the people around him just can't can't believe their eyes. They're just frozen or they they're not even paying attention, right? So, this is um something that is it's unfortunate. Uh I don't necessarily know that you can really blame anybody. Uh because these kinds of attacks are extremely rare in Taipei. I think the last attack like this was over 10 years ago in Taipei. They just don't have this sort this thing sort of thing just doesn't happen in Asia that often. So, I guess the lesson learned here is, you know, head on a swivel. You know, you may be standing on the street one day and you may see a terrorist attack getting ready to to take place. And I can tell you, I I know it is going to be very hard to come to the conclusion or come to the assessment while standing on a street corner that you're witnessing a terrorist attack. It is a very hard thing to wrap your mind around. You've got to run through a whole lot of thoughts really quickly to come to this kind of conclusion. But this is something that you have to kind of be aware of because these kinds of things is definitely a case of you never think it can happen to you, right? And when we have a whole society who thinks that well it could never happen to me. Well, what do we call that in the in the sciences? We call that the bystander effect, right? And unfortunately, not to point fingers or or, you know, blame anybody with this, the bystander effect was definitely in in play here. Now once the once the attacker conducted the stabbing attack after the first few people were stabbed you know all bets were off right people realized oh my gosh this guy's attacking people now so from there you know the response was quite proper we don't really know what the police response was though all we know is that somehow he got up into a high-rise building and jumped. Uh that's that's all we know. Uh there's really nothing much more than that. Uh we don't have any conclusion. We don't know why he did this. There's no manifesto been released to my knowledge, at least not yet. And that's basically it. Uh so, you know, one of those things where we're just going to have to wait and see what the details are of this because this again, this kind of thing doesn't happen in Taiwan very often. So, again, please keep your head on a swivel. And of course, another segue into keeping your head on a swivel is the Bondi Beach terror attack that took place last Sunday. Again, a mass shooting striking a nation that is not really known for mass shootings. Uh this is something to be aware of. So the official story is that this attack was carried out by two people, not three that we first uh first surmised or first assessed based on the video. It was actually a father-son team who decided to carry out a uh jihadist style attack at a public venue, Bondi Beach Park in Sydney. There's a lot of information warfare going on about this one, so I'm trying not to to say anything inaccurate here, but it looks like they were probably targeting uh either a Hanukkah event at that was being held at the park or because it was a nice uh Sunday, they could have just been targeting everybody there. I don't know. The official uh Australian government story is that they were specifically targeting the Hanukkah event that was there. I cannot verify that. But again, this goes back to that terrorism doctrine that I mentioned earlier. We have to understand what was the motivation for this. Did these attackers attack this venue because it was hosting a Jewish event, the the Hanukkah event. Did they specifically choose that target because of that or did they just show up to any crowded venue? Right? Because there were a lot of people there and it's a Bondi Beach Park is a very popular park on the weekends. So the answer to that question is going to provide indications and warnings of future attacks. That's why even though it may be politically incorrect, we have to get to the truth. And in this case, I just I just don't know. And this distinction matters. We need to get to the truth right now. This is a time-sensitive issue because this story is not over yet. A couple of days after this main shooting took place, seven militants were arrested by counterterrorism police in two separate vehicles in Liverpool, just on the outskirts of Sydney. And per the authorities, they were arrested because they were transiting to Bondi Beach to conduct another terror attack at that same location and or in a general in the general vicinity of Bondi Beach. Now, as if the alarm bells were not ringing in your head loud enough already, it turns out the next day after these guys were detained, most of which, by the way, were on terrorist watch list per the government sources. They the the government says that they were on terrorist watch list. They were known terrorists. They were let go. All seven of these militants who are described as militants by the government, they are described as terrorists by the government have been released. So, not to cause a mass panic or anything, but the situation is a little bit risky in Sydney right now. So, yeah. Uh I mean, I'm sorry. I don't really have much more for you on that. I'm I'm struggling to contain my incredility here because I mean you've got a very very bad mass shooting taking place at Bondi Beach and that's bad enough, right? That's that's that's horrible enough. And then on top of that, you've got your counterterrorism agencies telling you, "Hey, we rolled up two two vehicles here. They're full of uh military age males. We've got seven MAMS in lockup. We are holding them on suspicion of terrorism because we had this intelligence which has not been made public. Of course, it's not going to be made public. Uh but we're holding them because they're terrorists. Here, uh you guys do something with them. And then they let them out, you know. Um now, the the obvious rebuttal to all of this uh insanity is that, okay, well, maybe they let him maybe they let him go to uh see where they're going to go, right? To to follow them and and spy on him more. To that, I would say uh the world is not an episode of Jack Ryan as much as we may want it to be. Generally speaking, if you were to leaf through really any counterterrorism book, pamphlet, uh, Wikipedia entry even, you would find that once a terrorist cell has made the, uh, decision to commit to the attack, you should probably intervene at that point. They already had them under surveillance and not just uh, just general surveillance like all of us on the world are subject to. Now, they had a team following them. That's how they were able to actually detain two separate vehicles at the same exact time. These guys were not just getting passive surveillance. They were getting active surveillance. And why did they intervene? They intervened because they thought they had guns in the car and they were going to Bondi Beach right then, right there. And they were going to uh conduct a mass shooting. That's why they intervened because they had pretty good intelligence. Some analysts somewhere, probably a whole team of analysts said, "Hey, look, we got to get them now. We're watching them. We think they're going to conduct a terror attack, but you got to get them right now." That's why they did that. And it turns out they hadn't picked their guns up yet because that's how terrorists work. They don't tend to roll around with a trunk full of AKs. This ain't Baghdad anymore. These people are going to probably go to a safe house in Sydney, pick up their rifles from wherever they had them stashed, and then conduct the attack. They jumped the gun a little early and there we go. Now we've uh blown blown cover. So either way, uh I hate to be again alarmist. So, I hate to sound alarmist in any form or fashion, but look guys, at a certain point, we got to be serious here and uh this is a pretty serious threat and I just hope that uh authorities in Sydney can can definitely keep an eye on these guys and anybody else who they may be talking to so that we can prevent a another tragedy from occurring. So, so yeah, sorry to be such a downer this week. I just realized that this is probably one of the more serious intel updates that we've had in a while because of just the the threats remaining palpably high. I don't mean for it to be, but you know, I'm not going to sugarcoat things either. So, sometimes it is quite serious. We'll do the best that we can. There's no need to doom and gloom about it. Don't do that. No black pilling. We don't do that, right? We can definitely do the best we can, keep our head on a swivel, and uh not let this stuff get to us too much. So, even though it may not seem like we're ending on a high note, we really are because we have the chance to actually do some good. though I think that's a very positive outcome. Even though we have very palpable and very clear present and future risks right on the horizon, we now know about it. We know enough information to make decisions based off of it and we have a chance to do the right thing at the right time. And I think that's the best that we can hope for. So that's all I have for today. Let's go ahead and roll things up with the intercepted ghost net reports. This week was a little bit sparse because I chose a different SDR. So, the SDR that I normally listen to was uh down for maintenance. So, I chose one right smack dab in the middle of the country and it turns out I didn't hear very much uh because there was a lot of static and there were a lot of people using uh other modes. But, I did want to put this screenshot in there uh for those who are just kind of tangentially interested in this ghost net radio plan. Uh when it comes to jamming and things like that, it's actually far more resilient than even I thought it would be. Uh because as you can see here, all of these uh vertical lines on the waterfall here, this blue image, uh you can see that the yellow bits on that uh image were coming through just fine. So somebody was transmitting while somebody else was transmitting. Normally that washes you out. It it's like trying to speak over someone who has a megaphone, right? It's hard to do. That's what jamming is. Is just talking louder than the next guy. And it turns out that sometimes in radio, we accidentally jam ourselves or we jam each other by talking over each other. And the JS8 call program that we use for the ghost net turns out is quite resilient for even stuff like that. So somebody who is speaking over someone else turns out we can still hear that little voice too which makes it very resilient for things like intentional jamming. So I thought that was kind of an interesting note. It's not perfect. You know nothing is jamming proof but it is quite resilient even when uh even when there's a lot of people talking at once. So I thought that was pretty neat. So I wanted to share that. But that's all I have for today. Uh, thank you guys for sticking with me. Sometimes it's a it's a tough day and I think this has been kind of a long week for everybody, but the good news is is that this is the last Intel update before Christmas. I hope all of you are just as excited as I am. Uh, I have not decided on what my holiday schedule is going to be. I'm probably going to take Christmas day and the 26th off, but I haven't decided yet. So, of course, I will be monitoring the situation uh no matter what happens. And I may or may not push out a wire here and there. Uh we're going to see. I'm going to try to, you know, stick to my regular routine schedule as best I can, but hopefully nothing happens that would require me to push out a priority wire, but just in case if something happens, I will push out a priority just for you guys uh who want to be aware of what's going on around the world. So, thank you guys for all of your support. I really do thank all of you uh for your support this year. It really has meant a lot. I never really would have imagined being able to do all of this stuff uh without you guys supporting me. So, I thank you all for that very, very much. It really does mean the world. So, thank you, thank you, thank you. And with that, that's all I've got for today. So, thank you guys again and I'll see you next time. And as always, fight of the shade.