Intel Update — Jan — 23 — Pandora s Box

Hello again everyone, and welcome back to the underground. This is the intel update for January 18th through the 23rd, 2026. Yes, you heard that correctly. I'm a day early because I'm right in the path of some pretty gnarly winter weather, and I fully expect it to be needed for other stuff tomorrow. I may end up doing a standard wire report tomorrow just to keep coverage, but I haven't decided yet. It really just depends on how this weather system develops. Either way, it's been a busy week like always, so let's get to it. Around the world, the general focus has been on the boring world of diplomacy, mostly centered around the World Economic Forum, which has taken place this week. As most world leaders have taken part in this event, not much else has been scheduled, and it will take a while to comb through all of the speeches of what's been covered at the summit this year, but it's always a good idea to keep an eye on what the Bond villains of the world are planning, so more on that later. Separately, American aspirations for Greenland continue amid the Europeans getting a little squirrely about the entire affair. There has been a lot of rhetoric back and forth on the issue, and Denmark is getting a little annoyed that they aren't being taken seriously, but if they didn't want that to happen, they probably shouldn't have been Danish in the first place, but anyway, the United States is looking to either purchase Greenland outright or bring the landmass under some sort of American ownership situation in exchange for something, probably NATO funding or some such. Either way, the talks continue, so we'll see how this develops because the United States is getting Greenland one way or another. The question is what we give up in return and how this will impact the relationship with NATO. Otherwise, around the world, the attentions in the Middle East remain the same as before as demonstrated by the strategic movement for this week. Generally speaking, it's not a terrible idea to keep an eye on the massive forces that are staged around the world, and in this case, the United States is moving a carrier strike group into the region of the Arabian Sea, which is pretty standard, but if the United States wants to conduct strikes in Iran, this will be something to keep an eye on. As far as strategic aviation for this week, it's pretty much the same as last week, a steady increase of forces in the region, but nothing really major to be worried about at the moment. Now, moving back to the United States this week, again, the focus is once again on Minneapolis, but mostly in the context of how things are going to develop in Maine. And in Minneapolis, there are many different things that are helpful for assessing what's going to go on in Maine, at least when it comes to funding and organization. Some of you have asked me to cover some of the groups in play in Minneapolis, which are driving much of the unrest, which I'll cover today. Now, right up front, this is a much taller order than you might think because there are dozens of groups in Minneapolis alone which are driving a lot of this unrest. Even if I had a whole team of 100 people, I couldn't even scratch the surface, so here is a brief overview of some of the groups that are more kinetic than others. One of the biggest groups in play is actually the local government of Minneapolis and the state of Minnesota at large. And we have to be very specific with our language here because this is not a case of the local city and state government simply not enforcing laws or something like that. This is happening, to be sure, but we must be aware that this is not simply intentional negligence. City officials are directly driving a lot of this unrest and chaos. They are not simply standing back, fanning the flames, and refusing to arrest anyone. They are directly on the ground participating in these events themselves. For example, one of the individuals who conducted the raid on City's Church is also a government employee. Jamal or Jamaal Lundy was identified as one of the members who occupied the church, and he actually identified himself in the footage of the incident because he is currently running for public office. Currently, Lundy is not only married to a city councilor, Anika Bowie, but he is also currently an employee of the Hennepin County Attorney's Office, the same law enforcement organization that is in charge of the investigation of the crimes that took place at City's Church. This is why no arrests have been made by local law enforcement. Their own employees took part in the attack, and the attorney general himself was interviewed on the ground a short distance away from the church itself on the day of the incident. And in interviews after the incident, he gave his approval for this type of targeting. So, in short, the direct and self-admitted involvement of government officials specifically now makes the targeting of City's Church, for example, a textbook case of state-sponsored terrorism as per the current definition of terrorism set forth by US Code Title 18, Section 2331, which specifically includes acts that, quote, intimidate or coerce a civilian population. Per the law that was passed, which in this case is actually the Patriot Act, ironically, terrorism does not have to include the use of violence. Coercion or the threat of violence is good enough to get a criminal charge. I know before everybody jumps in the comments, this is probably going to be a Pam Bondi special where nothing of substance is going to be done. You may get two or three arrests like we've seen already, but it's really going to be for show, and probably 6 months down the line, the charges going to be dropped. That's my personal guess. But, government employees themselves being directly involved in the crimes that they are committing and also being responsible for investigating themselves, you know, this is a bit of a sticky situation now. But, government agencies and government personnel and elected officials aside, what about the other groups that are not explicitly controlled by government agencies? The two main lines of effort in Minneapolis that are organizing the more regular and routine protests are the Defend the 612 and ICE Watch organizations. Now, it must be noted that tracking these groups is easier than most because they all use their real names and post openly on social media, but when it comes to categorizing insurgent groups in general, it's like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall most of the time. These are really amorphous blobs of organizations, and they're not really as solidified as we might want to think that they are. They're more organized than you think, but they're also not organized enough to make this easy. In the case of the Defend the 612, these guys are responsible for the Soylent grade efforts to follow around ICE and directly interfere with arrest operations. ICE Watch is the more overarching national level initiative to do the same, but because it's more of a strategic effort, ICE Watch focuses mostly on intelligence and reconnaissance, such that it is. So, chances are if you see an overweight pronoun user blowing a whistle on the street, it's because they're linked up with ICE Watch and feeding information into their databases. Again, it may be laughable to call a lot of these efforts reconnaissance and intelligence collection, but that's really what it is, even if it is kind of silly and a little bit laughable in in most cases. Definitely don't underestimate these groups. They can definitely learn a lot, and they are learning a lot every day that goes by, so don't underestimate that for sure. On the political fronts, no domestic insurgency would be complete without a political arm, and in the case of Minneapolis, this is mostly the Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA. Under normal circumstances, this organization is again a complete joke. They don't have a physical address, and all of their meeting locations are basically just public libraries where a dozen or so members get together to muse about communism and not showering. However, with the unrest ticked up a notch throughout the city, these groups are capitalizing on the labor unions, which are also quite upset about ICE conducting operations throughout the city. So, whenever you see a labor union strike in Minneapolis, take a closer look at the photos because I guarantee you you'll find a DSA representative there or some signage promoting a communist revolution. So, when we say that these are liberal commies, that is quite literally their own description. Their main campaign goal is to seize power, eradicate capitalism, and put most of us in labor camps. That's what they say themselves. But again, as amateurish and silly as it is, one of their main ways of doing this is to link up with the Socialist Rifle Association, or SRA. Once again, under normal circumstances, this is kind of a laughable effort, but this is the main communist firearms organization that works to promote firearms training in more leftist areas and among leftist groups. Now, I know that many people, mostly libertarians, are inclined to see rifle and think friend, but rest assured, these people openly state that they want to kill you. This is not a Second Amendment group. They are wanting to get firearms to commit terrorist attacks with them. This is a lot different than 2A advocacy or, you know, gun rights in general. Their goals are violent, and I'm personally rather interested in why this group has not been designated as a terrorist organization by now. But anyway, these guys are the ones linked to most of the attacks on ICE facilities because nine times out of 10, whenever some redditor shoots up a school or an ICE facility, you look at their social media accounts, and they're usually a member of the SRA. Once again, this group is generally goofy most of the time, but this organization is also the recruiting pool for more deliberate terrorist attacks around the United States, so that's something to keep in mind. Separately, but importantly due to the recent arrests, Black Lives Matter is also a substantial force on the ground in Minneapolis, but this is mostly due to funding. BLM is a very large organization that dominates the NGO scene throughout the city and has gained positions of power in most government agencies after the George Floyd bend the knee years, right? However, BLM has a big caveat. They don't get along so well with the other demographic in the city, the Somalis. It may be surprising to those who have been living under a rock, but turns out just because they're black doesn't mean that they get along. And in Minneapolis, the population of African Americans does not get along at all with the Somalians. So, that's always a point of friction because in most cases, they are competing for the same fraud money via aid programs. This is demonstrated by the rather sketchy businesses owned by the people who have been arrested so far, the BLM activists who were arrested in conjunction with the City's Church incident, so yeah, they're all kind of trying to get their piece of the pie, and in a lot of cases, they don't really get along so well. And this isn't made any better because as of late, the BLM movement in Minneapolis has been kind of sidelined as a voting block because the politicians have realized that they can just import Somalis and have an easier time in laundering tax dollars back to their own re-election campaigns. But this is a whole other abyss of corruption, so suffice it to say for now that when it comes to the civil unrest in Minneapolis, there are a lot of competing interests. And there's also a pretty good chunk of the black population in Minneapolis that doesn't like either side. The Somalis are generally well disliked because they are turning the city into a moot issue, but also, a lot of black citizens in Minneapolis don't like BLM because of how they burned the city down after George Floyd, which, as we all know, turned out to largely be for nothing, so there's plenty of friction all around. And of course, on a national scale, we cannot forget to mention the overarching organization that has their talents in everything, Antifa. Now, for the most part, Antifa's presence in Minneapolis is purely on an individual level. Unlike in Portland and Seattle, Antifa does not have sections of the city that are their turf. They don't dominate the terrain here like they do in Seattle and Portland. However, their presence is growing and like all the other groups mentioned so far, they are trying to take advantage of the crisis to get a bigger foothold in the city. Now, that wraps up the more foot soldier efforts that are present in the city. There are a bunch of other smaller groups and clubs that are active such as student organizations at the university, but really the biggest player in all of this by a long shot are the NGOs or non-government organizations. In Minneapolis, there are thousands of NGOs and these are the big ones to watch because the NGOs are the ones that handle nearly 100% of the funding for these unrest operations. So, we have a deadly combo here. They provide nearly all of the funding, personnel, and organization, but they are also basically immune from prosecution because no politician or government agency wants to go after NGOs because of who is running most of these NGOs. And in the case of Minneapolis, turns out there are a lot of different groups. As a matter of fact, if you go to my border crisis map and zoom all the way out. If you're wondering what all these yellow diamonds are, these are safe houses and organizations that are actively working to conceal illegal immigrants and protect them from detention. That's why the icon for these is a suspected safe house, right? Because these uh locations need to be investigated. And it turns out almost all of these points are also trying to help fund a lot of the unrest when it comes to targeting ICE. So, they're not just providing resources and benefits and stuff like that to illegals in the area. They're also funding and helping to provide manpower for a lot of the demonstrations against ICE. So, tracking these thousands of groups like this is is just so pervasive throughout the country that it's just too much for one person to log. So, please don't think that this is the complete picture. I have really just scratched the surface and I've got almost 2,000 on my list so far. So, the situation is much worse than it seems by just looking at the map even though all these icons are literally covering the land mass of this country, I'm still only scratching the surface. So, this truly is a case of opening Pandora's Box in that tackling these NGOs is such an insurmountable task that no one wants to even acknowledge that it's a problem. The budget for the coffee machine at most of these agencies is more than I make in a whole year and they have whole teams of attorneys on retainer that have funding akin to the GDP of Greenland just for the city of Minneapolis alone. And another concern is just how pervasive this is nationwide. Minneapolis is no special case. They're not even the worst when it comes to the cities that are uh helping to conceal people from ICE. New York City is probably among the top. Uh Los Angeles is another one. But these are just the cities that I've started to to look into a little bit more uh a little bit more intensely. And as DHS surge operations move to Maine, these Norman Rockwell small towns throughout America tend to be host to a significant uh counter ICE operations. Just like I wrote yesterday, I found one immigrant aid group, one NGO, which has a network of other NGOs and on their own website, they have a list of 112 different partners and members within just this one organization for just the state of Maine. There are only 32 Starbucks coffee shops in the whole state. So, there are three times more immigration support centers than there are Starbucks, which are on every street corner in America. So, we've got a bit of a pickle here, don't we? Uh we have a bit of a data problem and just typing out the names of all these groups is just too much data. It's just too much. There's not one, there's 10,000, right? And we also have a policing problem because these groups have been allowed to develop doctrine that rivals even a lot of military units, right? At least in terms of scale. Now, we may be tempted to look at these activist groups and chuckle at how they view the world through the lens of Reddit, but make no mistake, these NGOs are one of the biggest problems that the United States faces today and so far, no one left or right has wanted to even mention the problem because it would implicate very powerful donors. So, that's the strategic wave top overview of the organizational situation as it stands right now. In terms of the tactical situation on the ground in Minneapolis, it's pretty much status quo. I'll have to uh summarize the more uh kinetic events in a wire report, but strategically, for me this week, it's been incredibly data heavy as I've been putting a lot of man-hours into working on my maps. So, for those of you who want to take a look at the more boring side of what I do pretty much every day, check out my mapping products at the links below. I have two main maps on ArcGIS, the common intelligence picture, which is probably what most of you want, and I also have a separate map called the border crisis map, which is solely dedicated to tracking immigration issues. I would like to have all of this data on one map and just call it, you know, the map, uh but there are so many data points that it's actually kind of hard to load in a web browser sometimes. So, I've had to keep it separate for now. And of course, for those of you who might like to bring this data into ATAC, uh such as for conducting your own risk assessments and analysis and stuff like that for your local area, I have KMZs on my GitHub page for those who want them. Now, these KMZs are not auto-updating. They're not network link KMLs uh for now. So, I would say maybe once a week or so, if you want to get a fresh KMZ, uh just go into GitHub and download it and throw it into ATAC if you want. I know GitHub is not the easiest thing to use for the layperson. It's kind of it's kind of dumb if you're just trying to use it for downloads, but it works for me really well because sometimes I'm updating these KMZs several times a day and it's easier for me to just uh push the updates to the website. So, so that's pretty much what I have for now. I'm sorry if this isn't as uh in-depth as I wanted to go today, but I've run out of time and uh you know, we've got storm preparations to make here. So, with that, let's wrap up today with this week in history and I need to come up with a catchier name than that, but anyway, this time last year, we were still working through quite a few issues that kind of just fizzled out. So, firstly, we were working through the Palisades fire crisis and President Trump was being inaugurated. So, it's been 1 year since President Trump assumed office and it has been a crazy year, hasn't it? All the way around. So, looking back to 2025 around the world, much more sinister plots were unfolding such as the coup that never was, which was uh continuing in South Korea. There was a little bit of a spat there for a couple of months. It looked uh pretty dicey, but South Korean politics is pretty crazy as usual and uh this this case was no exception. So, that was kind of exciting to track for a little while last year. And also, a little bit more sinisterly, the trial of the Southport killer was ongoing and at the time, the gag orders on the details of that trial were just coming to light for the very first time and in hindsight, that was a watershed moment which changed the fate of the United Kingdom forever. So, we were just starting to figure out just how bad that um murder spree was back then and things have kind of snowballed from there, haven't they? Over the past year. So, personally, I find it quite interesting that 2026 started off much the same as 2025 did. A lot of very, very horrific things coming to light, but also a lot of hope to change things for the better. And that's a good way to look at things, I think. Acknowledge the challenges, but always end on what you can do to change things even if that's just changing yourself. And with that, let's finish up with the Ghost Net reports for today. This week was a really good net. I got a lot of messages, saw a lot of new check-ins, a lot of uh message traffic back and forth, a lot of news reports being exchanged, which is fantastic to see. And this week is a little bit more important than usual because at least for those of you who are in the same region as myself, we have some once-in-a-lifetime winter weather that is supposed to sweep across the nation from Texas to Virginia. So, a good chunk of the country and I would imagine that most of us will be losing power for quite a while. So, we've got a lot of snow and ice scheduled to descend on the region on Saturday, but also next week, temperatures are supposed to not get above freezing for most of the region for many days. So, the snow and ice won't be melting anytime soon. Oh, and high winds are also forecasted too, at least for where I'm at. So, definitely be safe out there. This storm is no joke this time. Uh I know the local media chop at the bit to sensationalize this kind of thing, but I've been looking at the raw data myself and this looks like a big one. So, definitely do what you can, remain as flexible as possible, and uh for the Ghost Nets specifically, I myself I'm going to be leaving my radios on and running throughout the whole uh crisis just in case uh anybody needs to send a message or exchange some information. I'll I'll be monitoring the whole time. Uh so, otherwise, other than radio stuff, I have the capability to stay online in some way no matter what happens. So, I I plan to keep wire reports flowing as best I can, but it'll be pretty annoying to be snowed in for a couple of weeks, I think. So, I guess we'll have to see how it all works out. It might be nothing or it might be calamity. There's really no telling, but personally, I'm making the last-minute preparations for a more widespread disaster situation. So, and staying prepared is always a good thing. So, that's all I have for today. Thank you again, everyone, for your support. I don't say that nearly enough. I really do appreciate it as it's what keeps me going and able to build all these daily reports, products, and maps, and stuff. So, could not do it without all of you, that's for sure. So, thanks again and I'll see you next time. And as always, fight in the shade.