Intel Update — May 3 — Blasting Into Summer

Hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground. This is the intel update for April 27th through May 3rd, 2025. It's been a very busy week as usual, so let's get right to it. Starting off on the home front, social tensions are rising. This week we have had more instances of social events kind of creating a lot of tensions than usual. We of course have the Carmelo Anthony trial that is continuing or upcoming at least. We also have the Luigi Manion trial which is in New York and that's kind of in the progress as well. There have been a lot of demonstrations with that one. And of course, over the past few days, we now have the scandal involving the woman in Minnesota who confronted a Somali at a park. All of these events are very, very hot button. There's really no way to even discuss them or even talk about what happened without angering somebody. So really, from a riskmanagement perspective, I did want to touch on these kinds of things even though there isn't that much to to talk about because this does affect threat analysis in the future. Bottom line, the social tensions this week have really indicated how the summer might go. Both from a civil unrest perspective, though that factor is a little bit harder to analyze and and kind of assess, but also because of random acts of violence. peering into the crystal ball into the future for just a moment. It would not take a whole lot of analytical vigor to understand or at least assess that the events of this spring already are very likely to increase the random attacks that we see in society or uh socially motivated, racially motivated, all kinds of one-on-one attacks that are very very likely to to increase in the future over the next few weeks. So despite whatever side anyone wants to take on this issue, the very easy assessment to make is that this is going to increase the risks around the country of just random acts of violence. Right? Of course, these are not really random acts of violence, but uh for the most part, you really just got to kind of watch your back and uh stay on your toes over the next few weeks because these are really just a a litmus test honestly for a lot of social issues, but they're also a barometer for measuring societal pressure. And right now pressure is building. It's it's it's pretty high, right? So, something to keep in mind even as people kind of scream and shout on social media and in public uh and as as very significant things start to move into into play and we start seeing government get involved. I'm I'm sure at some point we're going to start seeing a lot of this uh pressure continue building. So, what it's going to result in, I don't know. I don't think anyone can know. A lot of people say that it's not really organic. It's somebody pulling the strings. That again, I don't know. It's possible. I'm sure there are malign actors that seek to capitalize on a lot of social tensions that ordinarily would just dissipate naturally over time and they, you know, people want to stoke things up again. I don't know. Uh, it's hard to say, but suffice it to say that things are pretty tense in the United States and they're going to probably continue to get more tense as time goes on over the next few weeks and months. Moving around the world, it has likewise been a very busy week. So, starting off first with the Spain power outage that that affected most of the Iberian Peninsula, Spain, Portugal. the power's back on, but uh there hasn't really been any follow- on information regarding what actually happened. So far, speculation is the best that we have, and we have conflicting data. As far as causation, it seems like the main theory that most people are sticking with at the moment is that this was some kind of freak atmospheric interference kind of situation. As we all know, whenever an incident happens around the world, the experts come out of the woodwork, and I have received uh hundreds of emails from theoretical physicists on this issue, uh which is interesting. But anyway, a lot of the government agencies even within Spain seem to be fairly divided. A lot of government agencies, their meteorological services for instance, have come out and kind of thrown the government under the bus or thrown the electrical co-op under the bus and said, "No, we're not detecting anything strange. Uh, it's all normal here." Whereas other people have come out and said, "Yeah, there were a few anomalies, but we can't really pin down what it would be, and the anomalies that were detected were not severe enough to cause any kind of outage like this." So, I don't know. It seems like the main story right now is that, you know, it was some kind of freak accident. Even though the mountain of evidence that I have picked up on my end is that this is probably not the case. I don't know. I'm sure once again that the tens of thousands of experts on the uh electrical grid in Spain will will chime in and let us know exactly what went on. But for for right now, for me, I'm not entirely sold either way. Uh it could just be Spain being Spain. I don't know. But right now it seems like there's a lot of people trying to pass the buck on it and point fingers at each other and there's no real solution, at least not in the public eye. So I guess we'll have to see how it works out. But the lesson learned for for locals in Spain is that your electrical grid is not as secure and uh is not as resilient as you may have thought it to be. So as far as the rest of the world goes, there's largely been no change with the exception of what's going on in Syria at the moment. In Ukraine, the United States is taking a reduced role, or at least they're claiming to take a reduced role in peace talks with Russia and Ukraine. Uh, like I wrote yesterday, Kiev and Moscow are not really uh working with each other as much as you'd expect. And what looked like a a peace deal getting very very close a few weeks ago, it's it's kind of veered away this week. Now, next week it may veer right back to being more uh hopeful for a possible peace deal, but right now it's uh it's not doing super well. So, similar story in India and Pakistan. Really, there's been no change. Uh they're largely both posturing. If you read Indian and Pakistani media, which I would encourage no one to do, the story reads like they've already declared war and hundreds of thousands are dead already, but that's obviously not true. So, uh, we'll get more into the weeds in that in a minute, but for those who might have been concerned about a potential thermonuclear war between India and Pakistan, that looks like that's off the table for the moment and probably for the foreseeable future. In the Middle East, there's been really no change to the bombing campaign in Yemen. It continues on as usual. No real uh change from from last week. In Syria, things are changing uh rather rapidly. The situation in Syria is becoming increasingly more serious as Israel and Turkey use uh Syria as a proxy war battle space. Essentially, Syria is of course being carved up by pretty much anybody and everybody with military force to do so. And Israel is continuing to expand their invasion into Syria. Uh as before, Turkey is doing the same thing. Again, this is very common to Syria. I don't know how important it will be for us to monitor moving forward, but I'm just going to kind of keep a loose eye on it and see. So, with that, let's move over to strategic movement. Really no change from last week. Nothing significant to report. All of the American carriers are still doing their thing. This is speculation, but I think the Indian aircraft carrier is still out at sea cutting circles uh to the south of Pakistan, just uh outside their territorial waters. So, it's pretty much status quo. Uh the only change I did make on the slide is that it's not a carrier strike group as best I can tell. From what I have seen so far, at least in the images of it leaving port, uh and the other uh Indian surface vessels that we know they have. From what I can tell, this is an unescorted carrier. So, it's just out there by itself. Uh which is something that's rather interesting doctrine-wise. But yeah, for the most part, there haven't really been any uh major deployments. The only deployments that there have been have been between again India and Pakistan. They're moving rail around, but I don't know if they're moving tanks and howitzers and whatnot to the front uh the the Kashmir region or if they're just moving them around uh on standard movements. Similar story in Turkey and in Israel. I don't know if either of these forces are conducting any kind of strategic movement in the region other than what they've already been doing. I don't know if there's an increase in the baseline there. As far as aviation goes, both Turkey and Israel have been conducting a little bit of international relations via fighter aircraft in the skies over Syria. So, I guess that can count as a strategic movement, but for the most part, everything's kind of staying the way that it is as far as I can tell. So, let's move over to the kinetic activity tracker here at home. Just a brief update to the mapping project. This is what I've added to my uh main one of my main layers, the kinetic activity tracker. I've updated all of my layers over the past few week pretty much every day. But this is what's happened over the past seven days. One thing to remember though is that a lot of times I'll I'll add stuff to the map that is older than 7 days. So sometimes keeping an eye on the total database, uh, which is shown here, will sometimes be a little bit more helpful. A lot of red on the map, I know. Uh, but this is everything that has occurred this year. So this is the yeartoate total database map with all of my layers turned on. And as we can see, it's been a fairly busy year so far. And just as a reminder, this is just the common intelligence picture. This is not the border crisis tracking map. The the other map has a lot more data on it. That one's much more of a work in progress. I have a lot more data to add to that. Uh retroactively, I'm trying to keep the kinetic activity tracker a little bit more up to date because incidents are happening and it's a rather busy time for sure. So, with that national outlook out of the way, let's look at the actual regions themselves. And starting off in the northeast region, New York is yet again causing me to add more and more icons to my symbology layers for the map. This time we had a possible chemical weapons attack at the New York criminal court in Manhattan. This occurred a couple of days ago and there hasn't really been any follow-up on it whatsoever. An envelope containing white powder was discovered in the mail room and as you might expect, this is kind of a standard procedure sort of thing. So, all of the mail room employees, in this case, seven at the time, were hospitalized and quarantined just in case uh it was something u nefarious, but once again, no follow-up data to figure out exactly what it is or what happened. But who knows, maybe we'll hear something uh this coming week. Similar story across the way at Newark airport. There was yet again another crisis that resulted in a lot of delays and uh rerouting of aircraft. No real indication on what actually happened. A lot of news media reports and very vague public statements have been issued stating that the tower lost radar or had some kind of communications issue. No real specific details as you might imagine for probably for security reasons, but it did cause mass delays for most of the day early this week. That's pretty much it for the northeast. Let's move to the southeast. Really, the story this week has been Mayday. The Mayday uh protests, demonstrations, self-described riots, whatever you want to call them. It has it was really a rather docile Mayday this year. I did put on the map several staging areas and locations that were announced by various um self-described leftist groups who were using various uh event planning websites to cause uh problems. But for the most part, nothing really happened. I just slapped their locations on the map so that uh we can be a little bit more aware next time. Of course, that doesn't mean uh everyone should be complacent. Uh we should definitely be aware of these kinds of things, but uh for the most part, it it wasn't really that big of a deal this year. Moving down to Georgia, there was a rather interesting case this week involving a a domestic dispute that rapidly got out of hand in which uh the individual, in this case, James Blake Montgomery, was being served with divorce papers and it rapidly spun out of hand. As we all know, these kinds of things tend to happen. At the time, he was living in his RV. Deputies serve him papers. He ends up shooting and killing one of them and wounding another quite severely, which spiraled downhill into a chase, which ended on ended up on the interstate. And as we can see here, it uh it caused quite a delay for a long period of time. The reason I wanted to mention this is because one, this was a good tipline report that somebody sent in uh via my ArcGIS tipline system, but also because this individual uh had allegedly uh turned this RV into a mobile IED factory. So apparently he was known to build bombs. He was a local bomb maker and had been known to use them. So, this incident was locked down for quite a while while uh explosive ordinance disposal or EOD guys went to a look at it and allegedly they recovered quite a few homemade devices from that RV. So, just a good reminder of how your your classic everyday domestic situation can turn into a very large public problem very very quickly. Somewhat interestingly, this appears to be a bit of a trend. you know, small town, middle of nowhere America being affected by very large large scale and very kinetic incidents and out west. This has been most certainly a trend this week as well. This is again another tipline report that I received or rather a series of tipline reports I received regarding stickers uh TDA propaganda materials and threatening messages being left and found uh at the courthouse in Okonogan, Washington. So again, very small town, middle of nowhere, very quaint little place uh to be. And uh there are threats being made by uh Trenda Aaragua members or at least people who are trying to cause a fuss with with regards to that organization. So I wanted to mention it because the complaintant in this case, the person who sent me the tip uh wanted to remain anonymous, but they said the locals aren't doing anything about it. They're the local sheriff and the local county are not interested in in investigating this any further. They have been notified, so local authorities are aware of all of the uh evidence that I have as well. Of course, we have to take this kind of stuff with a grain of salt because somebody slapping a sticker on something doesn't necessarily mean that, you know, TDA is is running around with hundreds of people. It could just be one guy, uh, honestly. But it is something to be aware of. And continuing that trend down south a little bit, Oregon has been suffering from roughly the same kind of idea, small town um, places that have been affected by very kinetic incidents. And in this case, Oregon has had not one but two IED incidents. The first and probably most concerning one uh involved a deliberately constructed improvised explosive device being found in Lrand, Oregon. For those of you who don't know, again, Lrand is a very small town. There's not a whole lot going on there. It's kind of a, you know, out of the way place. And just a random passers by uh who who worked in the area found an IED on the sidewalk. Uh so they called the police. authorities showed up and uh dispatched an EOD team from out west and they confirmed yeah no it was a legitimate improvised explosive device. I don't know about the trigger mechanism. It looks like it could have been a fuse or something like that but uh the local authorities or the EOD team uh stated at least to one local media source they stated that it was a pipe bomb that had been improved with uh BB's um you know metal ball bearings to uh be a little bit more lethal. And based on the photographs uh that were taken by a local media group uh regarding where this IED was found, we can geollocated and actually find out that the context of where it was located is very very important. It was found on the sidewalk right next to a church. So once again, something that the media is not really going to want to report on, but we're starting to see more and more of these things tend to happen. So yeah, the second IED incident was actually an I series of IED attacks over in Salem by which an individual decided to use IEDs to set them off in at a residence. Details are sketchier on this one. There's not as much confirmation as what is actually going on. This may have been more of a domestic situation, but either way, an individual was arrested for detonating multiple IEDs at a residence uh down in Salem. So again, the context of that one's a little bit less clear. I'll have to get more amplifying information on that one, but things are fairly kinetic already uh this year. So, switching gears a bit, I wanted to mention that in Wyoming, an illegal alien was released uh by a judge a few weeks ago, and he of course ended up being a no-show in court last Friday. One Ricardo PZ Kenones was arrested following a traffic stop that revealed that not only was he an illegal alien, but he was also trafficking 18,000 rounds of small arms ammunition. Again, just as a reminder, if you are illegal in the United States of America, you're not allowed to possess ammunition or firearms. That's just the way that it is. I'm sure once again, this will be hotly debated, but honestly, at this point, when it comes to myself tracking and trying to get ahead of uh the cartel logistics situation in the United States, when I hear hoof beatats, I tend to think horses, not zebras. So again, when I see an illegal immigrant who's been deported multiple times and they're arrested cons carrying a considerable amount of weaponry and arms, personally, I don't tend to think Second Amendment advocate. I tend to think cartels. That's how I put it on my map, and that's kind of my own assessment on that. People will argue it till they're blowing the face, but I don't really care. These things are now happening in the middle of nowhere, Wyoming. So something to be mindful of for sure. So that's all I have for the United States. Let's jump to the Ukraine mineral deal. As many of you know, the Ukraine Mineral Deal has been signed by the United States and Ukraine to essentially be a way of recouping some of the funding and arms and munitions that we have sent to Ukraine. The short story is we sent Ukraine a lot of money and a lot of arms, a lot of uh expensive hardware, a lot of bullets and bombs, and those have been expended on the battlefield. Ukraine being in a state of war obviously can't pay us back for any of that. So, the idea was concocted a while back to extract as much wealth from Ukraine as the United States could. You can argue about the ethics of this uh for sure, and I'm sure that will be debated for a while. Um, this is most certainly a case of the United States breaking kneecaps because Ukraine can't pay their lone shark back. This is what's happening. So, the United States signed a mineral deal with Ukraine. What that mineral deal is, nobody knows. Uh, it's not been released to the public as far as I have seen. It's probably a total deal, though. it's probably Ukraine can pay back what we gave to them by letting us take as many minerals, rare earth materials as as possible from Ukraine. I did however find it very interesting that from from what I knew uh moving forward before the whole war in Ukraine began, I always thought that most of Ukraine's mineral wealth is in the south and the east of the country. And uh a lot of people are suggesting that perhaps a classic Ukrainian deal has been had. Meaning Ukraine sold a bunch of minerals that they don't actually have in their possession. So I'll just overlay what I have. I don't know if it's going to be helpful. It's up for you to decide whether or not it's true. I don't know. But here's the current front line as best I can gauge. This is the best one that I could find on the internet that was actually seemed like it was kind of accurate. And as you can see, a lot of Ukraine's mineral wealth is indeed in Russian hands right now. So now, of course, this doesn't mean that all of Ukraine's mineral wealth is uh behind, you know, behind the lines in what is probably to become part of Russia officially at least. And of course, we have a data problem as well. These are probably not all of the mines and the the mineral wealth of Ukraine. So either way, I personally am not invested that much in it. And the United States is not that much invested in it either way. The United States clearly is trying to just recoup what they can. So, it's going to be interesting to see how the narrative gets shaped either way. So, that's pretty much it for Ukraine. Again, briefly touching on India for a second. What is going on on the ground does not appear to be echoed very accurately on social media. Both nations are conducting military exercises. They're shelling an awful lot of mountain tops, but they're not really shooting at each other yet. So, I don't know if this is one of those nothing ever happen situations. I highly doubt that. I mean, it it could turn into something very significant, but for right now, I'm just not seeing it. Now, I could be completely all washed out. I could be all wrong and there could be a a very large military campaign about to begin. I don't know. It's hard to say. But it looks like India and Pakistan on a strategic scale. They're just not interested in anything more than posturing at the moment. Of course, Pakistan is going to have to do something. There's going to have to be either a military or diplomatic end because their water situation. That is a very serious development. And one way or another that water is going to have to be turned back on. I don't think Pakistan has a military ability to go up against India and start bombing dams to open up you know water sources again. But I may be wrong. They may be forced into it. Water is a very precious resource in the region and that is a very serious aspect of this whole thing. Right now the whole border dancing around is just it's just the same as always. But if uh if India keeps the water turned off to Pakistan for much longer, then this could get very very serious. So it's not a nothing ever happens situation. It could be a something happens situation, but right now it's uh it's going to be a while before we start seeing any kind of serious activity from either side. So that's pretty much all I have for today. Here are the intercepted Ghostnet reports. It has been a fantastic week for Ghostnet. I don't know if it's the weather, the ionosphere, or whatnot, but I've gotten so many reports this week. I can't fit them all on the slide. So, I heard several people mentioning that they are monitoring the UHF VHF frequencies, which is great. I don't know how useful that'll be. Uh I've been really hesitant to to incorporate uh line of sight options, but for those who only have the bow fang kind of situation, they only have some kind of analog UHF VHF radio. I wanted to provide at least something so that in a absolute worst case scenario, you've got something to work from, right? It's better to have the plan and not need it than, you know, need it and not have it. So even though it is very very remote, I for one have never heard anybody from my present location transmit on the UHF or VHF frequencies I've I've selected for this, it's still there just in case. Again, I've already got a whole lot of content on that. So I just wanted to kind of mention that since somebody did mention it in the Ghostn net reports. So that's pretty much all I have for today. Uh here are the sources as usual. And of course, if you have a tip you want to submit to me, uh the links for the tip line reports are in the description box below. So thank you guys all for watching. Thank you guys all for sticking with me with this one. Kind of all over the place this week. I've been uh running to the ground with a lot of these reports trying to catch up. But but either way, hopefully next week we'll uh we'll be a little bit more calm and we'll see how it goes. So, thank you guys all for watching and we will see you next time. And as always, fight in the shade.