Intel Update - October 18 - Das Bote

Hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground. This is the intel update for October 12th through the 18th, 2025. This week has been kind of a mixed bag. There have been a lot of kinetic things going on around the world, but most of those kinetic things have also been taking place over the past few months. So, this week has been a little bit more nebulous in terms of world events, which has possibly tempted us to be a little bit more complacent. Rest assured, there's plenty of activity going on around the world. So, let's get right to it. First up here in the homeland this week has been a continuation of the civil unrest in places like Portland and Chicago and New York, iCE operations continue, counter ICE operations continue. This morning, as I'm recording this, the No Kings protests are supposed to be underway nationwide. It's pretty much the same story as before, but again, it would not be a good idea to be complacent with these things. So, if you look at the map on their own website, they're clearly using or reusing the same map as before. So, all of these uh listings that I have clicked around and found are the same as the first round of No King's Protest. So, they're clearly doing the same thing over again. They're trying to make it look like there are demonstrations in places where there aren't. If we recall from the very first round of uh No King's Protests, most of these events never happened because why? It was a SCOP the first time. I know we suspected this the first time and we kind of said there's no way these events are going to happen or if they are, you can look and see that they're scheduled at different times. So they've got the same group of people, the same group of paid demonstrators being busted around from from event to event to event in an area. So instead of one big protest that takes place all day, you've got 15minute protests that occur in 30 different places. So it looks like there's 30 different protests on their own little map here. So again, this is very much manipulation of of information. And so because of that, we might be tempted to be a little bit more, you know, lax, especially considering that the last time I I kid you not, they emptied out a lot of retirement homes so as to pad their protest numbers. Now, again, we can be complacent with even this idea, too, because you might be tempted to think, "Oh, well, these, you know, these people are elderly. They're living in an old folks home, and they don't know what's going on, right? They just, you know, they just like the chance to get out, right?" Unfortunately, many of these people actually are quite cognizant of their belief systems and actions. And a lot of them, you know, even the elderly, very much endorsing of this behavior. So, you know, there's give and take. There's a little bit of, well, they're they're taking advantage. They're exploiting the elderly for to pad their protests. And then there's also the other side of things where the only people that agree with these people are, you know, the extreme elderly, right? So, it's kind of a mixed bag. It doesn't really look good for their cause. I mean, a lot of people are expecting mass pandemonium from these no kings things, but it it just turns out to be mostly the elderly uh on the street a lot of times. That doesn't mean that things can get pretty kinetic in some areas. Like I wrote yesterday, it's it's pretty likely that some small local groups, particularly in the usual places, Chicago, Portland, uh these people will take advantage of the chaos or rather the attention and uh try to cause some problems. So, for the most part, there's this very unique blend this week of legitimate terroristic kind of concerns, but also there are events that aren't really that big of a deal, but they're trying to make them a big deal. So trying to discern which one's which is uh pretty challenging sometimes, but generally speaking, you can look at the demonstration and see if this is going to be a low-level thing or is this going to be more of a highle thing. So it's going to vary widely uh across the country. So speaking of variation, moving down south in South and Central America, the war continues as before with Venezuela. A full-blown war has not yet been declared. However, the United States has sunk two vessels this week. One of which was the typical fastboat, but the other one was a narco submarines. Either way, the United States is certainly not backing down from Venezuela. There's been some rhetoric on whether or not this is a posturing thing and this is uh Trump's classic style of trying to, you know, bully a foreign nation uh into doing what the United States wants. That tends to be uh the way things work out sometimes. And honestly, that would probably not be a bad tactic to use against uh Maduro and Venezuela because that's just kind of the thing that Central American nations and South American nations tend to respond to the most. Some have made the argument that the decision's already been made to launch a ground invasion of Venezuela to replace Maduro. I don't know about that. There's really no way to know. All I know is that it ain't over until the fat lady sings. And so far, everything that we have down in South and Central America can be moved right back to the United States fairly easily. But also, the United States could invade Venezuela pretty easily. So, clearly there's a there's a lot of bluffing going on, but I think it's probably more strong arm and less bluffing than anything else. But, I guess we'll have to see. I'm continuing to build products and work on the IPB or the intelligence preparation of the battle space for Venezuela, just in case things start getting pretty spicy because around the northern part of South America, things are not looking so great. Uh such as in Ecuador. Ecuador is currently on fire mostly in many different ways. So Ecuador has been pretty hot for a while now, but nobody cares cuz it's a small nation. It doesn't really have that much impact on things except things like the drug trade. So either way, we'll get into that in a bit. Over in the Middle East, the ceasefire between Hamas and Israel has reached ceasefireish territory. It is still holding for the most part, but we have to remember how things work in the Middle East. There's no such thing as a ceasefire or a peace agreement. There's just temporary halts in the fightings. And even still, when there are ceasefires, there really aren't ceasefires. So, there are skirmishes back and forth. Israel has done a couple of air strikes. They've uh shot a few people with sniper uh and sniper attacks. Same thing with Hamas and Gaza. So, you know, the the crossber fires between the two continues. It's just that the major bombings and the major assaults have stopped for now. Probably the best we can hope for at the moment uh in terms of regional stability, but we'll see if it lasts, right? That's the classic phrase being uttered around the Middle East, we'll see. Over in the United Kingdom, the digital ID roll out has begun with uh a small sample group. So, they're starting to roll the ID out with veterans. We'll get into that more in just a bit, but suffice it to say, people are not very happy. Perhaps equally as irritated are the Afghans and Pakistanis who are currently at war with each other. They have taken on the classic south or western Asian mentality of conducting an attack, bombing their enemy, and then immediately withdrawing and declaring a ceasefire. And they both have done this. So the Taliban and Afghanistan will get their convoys. They'll get their whatever rockets or mortars or whatever we left them, roll up to a Pakistan checkpoint, shoot it up, immediately withdraw, and then 5 seconds later say ceasefire, right? We'd like to agree to a ceasefire. And then Pakistan does the same thing. They bomb cobble and say ceasefire, right? So depending on which news source you read, which honestly I don't trust any news source with this particular war because they're they're both insane. Uh but the general story has been bomb ceasefire, bomb ceasefire, bomb ceasefire. So like there's there's no telling what's going on. Each one of them wants to engage in tit fortat warfare right before the ceasefire. It's you know it's kind of like they always want to get the last word in. So my guess is that this will probably continue for a while. India has also been poking the bear quite a bit and encouraging the Taliban to attack their mortal enemy Pakistan. So, same story as always pretty much. But either way, India and Pakistan engaging in a bit of a proxy war using the Taliban as the intermediary is a little concerning considering India and Pakistan both allegedly have nuclear weapons. Always something to keep an eye on. I know nobody cares about India or Pakistan. Uh but still something to be mindful of when they're engaging in a ground war with an insurgency. Down in Africa, the nation of Madagascar has entered into a state of well, a failed state, their government has collapsed, a military ruling council. Honestly, really just the general of a small military unit that happened to be in the capital at the time has seized power more or less. And the president has fled on a French military jet. Uh although he still tries to maintain some kind of control over the country, but good luck with that. Either way, Madagascar is not doing so hot. It has been the latest in the African nations to fall. Uh but again, it's a fairly standard African coup, so we'll see how it works out. And finally, the trade war between the United States and China is utterly confusing, especially with regards to the flip-flop of the White House becoming rather concerning uh when it comes to the will they won't they status of tariffs. First, the tariffs are on at 100% hardline strong arm kind of position, and then 5 minutes later in an interview, uh everything's fine, everything's reversed, we're not doing anything. So, I don't know what's going on, but we'll get into it a little bit anyway because there's a couple of things in the world of finance that may be interesting for this week. When it comes to strategic movement this week, it's pretty much status quo. A pretty good chunk of the US Navy is still parked off the coast of Venezuela preparing for whatever they have in mind down there. And that's really uh the big bulk of concern for this week. Uh same as always, pretty much. And for kinetic events here in the homeland, again, uh Portland and Chicago unrest continue as before. It's just that it's settled into a kind of a slump of uh complacency, I think, and people are just kind of accepting the fact that these very dangerous times have have settled upon many major US cities when it comes to immigration. Speaking of insurgency, this week, a Hamas fighter, an alleged Hamas fighter. Really, he wasn't really a member of technically a member of Hamas. He was a member of a splinter group, so it's just easier to call him a Hamas fighter. But this dude was picked up in Louisiana by the DOJ uh for taking part in the October 7th attacks in 2023. So again, I thought that was kind of an interesting thing. Yes, the FBI does have a task force for investigating these sorts of things. So there may be more, who knows? But I find it kind of interesting that a Hamas fighter turned up here in the US. I don't think very many people are surprised, but I think it's kind of interesting. And also, like I mentioned, the No Kings protests are taking place today around the country. We'll see how it turns out. My guess is there will probably be a shooting or two at random events around the country, possibly due to accidents or misidentifications like last time, who knows, but we'll see. I don't have much to touch on in the US this week except for one kind of interesting item of note, which is the world of finance has been very interesting this week. I am personally not a finance guy. I'm only looking at this through the lens of international stability and trying to use the financial markets and what's going on there as a way of gauging how uh international sentiment is kind of flowing, right? You can kind of tell these things sometimes and it looks to be like a pretty big period of uncertainty, right? That's kind of the theme this week in finance is uncertainty and there have been a few things that have kind of exacerbated that. So, first of all, the the tariff threats last Friday uh caused the markets to crash quite a bit, especially uh the crypto market. So, Bitcoin took a dive after that as as you could probably imagine, which a lot of finance guys have have commented on. But I found it interesting that insider trading appears to be a fairly good constant, i know, shocking, right? Somebody in the president's circle having insider knowledge and making financial decisions on that. I'm shocked, shocked, I say. But anyway, this whale uh closed a $127 million short on Bitcoin just a few minutes before President Trump announced the tariffs on China. So yeah, not super great, looks pretty suspicious. I find it very very interesting that that all of this kind of happens within the past week or so, especially in conjunction with what happened in the world of crypto a couple of days ago. The Department of Justice announced a few days ago that they conducted the largest Bitcoin seizure in history. At the time of the seizure, it was roughly 15 billion US dollars worth of Bitcoin, just for perspective. So, a pretty big seizure, the current Dr. Evil mastermind behind this is Chen Xi. And this was this was not a small thing. This was a uh pretty big seizure of crypto. And the reason that this was such a big seizure of crypto is because they were making a lot of crypto off of this. Uh it was a pretty big scam. They had created a large large Fortune 500 company style organization for scamming people over the internet. So for those of you who don't know what pig butchering scams are, it's this is basically like a combination of your Nigerian prince and a honeypot scam. So what they'll do is they'll find people, they'll target people in mass uh on places like Tinder or other dating apps. It's usually where they kind of hang out and they're playing the long game. Uh they will befriend someone, start start an online relationship with someone and eventually get them to invest crypto. We see where this is going. Invest crypto in this fake company and they'll make it look real slick. They'll make it real good. They'll even provide some return on investment. You know, like, oh, you've made so much crypto today, look at this. Put more in and put more in and put more in. And they're fattening the pig up, as we can see the name of this scam. And then eventually one day once they've decided they've fattened this pig up as much as they can, they disappear. They cut and run because it's crypto, not your keys, not your crypto, right? So they make off with a lot of money. Interestingly enough, the DOJ, to the best of my knowledge, I will I'm going to dig dig more into this, but to the best of my knowledge, they have not exactly stated how they seize this crypto. My suspicion, this is pure speculation, my suspicion is they found the seed phrases uh that this company was using to store all their crypto on these various wallets. So once you have the seed phrase, you've got the crypto and that's probably what they did. Found that to be very interesting especially in the context of crypto being kind of in the news and also President Trump creating the national strategic Bitcoin reserves whereas previously the previous uh policy was to whenever the FBI or the DOJ were able to actually gain access to seized Bitcoin the policy was to just sell it for US dollars. Well, now the US government now holds this crypto. So they're not selling these 100,000 plus Bitcoin, right? Which is interesting because it now means that the US government is now a major holder of crypto. Uh, and the crypto world right now is very volatile as it always is, but especially lately. So, what does all this mean? I have no clue, but I thought I'd mention it anyway because even though it looks like nothing's happening in the world or nothing happening in Washington, it's pretty busy and there's some pretty significant uh indicators of global instability all around the planet, very interesting stuff though. Now, let's move down to Ecuador for a minute and and briefly touch on what's going on there. Sorry, I haven't made a map for Ecuador just yet. Ecuador is, like I mentioned earlier, on fire. Uh, in some cases, quite literally, there have been quite a few IED attacks to strike Ecuador. These IED attacks have mostly been carried out, I don't know if how how coordinated they are, but they've mostly been carried out by a lot of mining groups, or rather gangs affiliated with illegal mining of natural resources and minerals throughout Ecuador. The government's uh declared a lot of military immobilizations to crack down on this illegal mining which is of course used to fund narco trafficking and things like that. So it's a very complicated web of of dissatisfaction down in South America. I know same story as always but still the people of Ecuador have not been very happy with the uh president Nabboa. A lot of people, a lot of locals are saying that he has conducted a lot of false flag attacks against himself to make it look like people are attacking him so that he has justification to lock down the country and deploy the military. I don't know how true that is. I mean, it seems like it's a fairly chaotic situation down there. The times they are a changing. Destabilization is the name of the game in South America. I think it probably always has been, but still. And speaking of Venezuela, it has again been very kinetic this week. We now have a total of six sunk vessels. Five fast boats sunk and one submarine sunk. Venezuela seems to certainly be quite convinced the US Navy and the US Marine Corps is going to go in and wreck their country. So Venezuela has shut down most of the uh crossber checkpoints and crossings around their country. Granted, it's not like they had a particularly high amount of crossber traffic anyway, but they've they've started fortifying things and they've started uh putting a lot of blockades up to make it hard to transit around the country. Whether or not the United States is going to go into Venezuela remains to be seen. However, Venezuela seems fair fairly convinced the threat's real enough uh real enough for them to do drills, not like it's going to help them that much. Uh but still, they're preparing for the worst, which, you know, may be a goal. It may be all a scop to get them to exhaust their resources, but still the tensions remain high regardless. Similarly, switching gears all the way over to jolly old England, the situation in the UK has not gotten any better. As a matter of fact, it's gotten quite a bit worse with regards to the digital ID. One of the interesting things that a lot of uh citizens in the UK have noticed is every day that goes by, they add some mysterious thing that the digital ID will be required for. So, initially it wasn't for anything. It was the digital ID was for things like voting and to have a job and that was basically it. Well, over time the government says, "Oh, well, it's going to be required for this and this and this and this and this." And suddenly they've just added a new thing every day. So, uh, yesterday they added alcohol purchases. So, now if you want to get a pint, you know, at your local pub, you've now got to have a cell phone on you and scan your digital ID, you know. So, that's that's not gone over super well. There's been a pretty good mass uprising with regards to protests over the digital ID. Doesn't matter one one bit in the UK. I'm sorry to say protesting in the street does not do one lick of good because the government is just doing whatever they want to do. There is absolutely no concern for anyone, even their own constituents whatsoever. The only thing that protesting does in the UK right now, and I think this is why people continue to protest, uh, is that it shows the public just how many people are on their side. Because one of the big things is when you ban protests and people don't protest, even if they they don't agree with something, protests are demonstrations in the street of the sheer number of people that may be on your side. So if the protests were not happening, people might be sitting in their home alone, you know, just like during COVID and they and they may be thinking to themselves, man, I don't agree with X, you know, I don't agree with this issue, but because they don't see people in the street, they think that they may be alone in their idea. But the British people have made it quite clear that this is a something that the majority of the population does not want. Most people do not want this ID thing and doesn't matter. They're doing it anyway and they've actually started rolling it out already. So the British government yesterday said they're starting to roll out uh the digital ID with veterans. So 300,000 veterans uh will be issued with digital IDs. And I'm sure that will go over swimmingly, but we'll see. My guess is that it's going to be pretty disastrous because it's a government app and well it doesn't matter if you're the UK or the US. Government apps don't tend to work super well. So I guess we'll see how that works. But my guess is that it's going to go over not very well at all. But they are moving towards this at breakneck pace. If you recall they first mentioned this digital ID thing just a couple of weeks ago and now it's being implemented. Now granted, digital ID and well, a national ID of some sort has been in the works for decades now, but really it's kind of interesting how how much they've stomped on the gas with regards to implementing this around society. And once again, for the Americans who don't really care what's going on in the UK, here's the link to you. The news stands this week have been full of articles on a wide array of topics. Everything from Denver signing contracts with Flock to use their AI uh flown drones around the city without a warrant or anything like that. Same thing with judges ruling that police departments can now use Flock cameras out of the warrant in Virginia. Then of course we have the recent news which broke last night that Flock is going to be partnering with Ring, Amazon's Ring services, so that all Ring cameras are now going to be Flock cameras. So even though we in the United States don't really have anything at all to do with a national ID system in the UK, you might actually be indirectly involved due to the intelligence sharing agreements between the United States and Britain. So something to be mindful of. Not a whole lot you can do about it anyway, but I try to keep an eye on these sorts of things just so that we don't become complacent. So we'll keep our eyes open. We'll keep an eye on all these uh things going on around the world and we'll try to do the best we can to not be complacent. And though I may be quite a bit biased on this, one of the ways that you can do that is, you know, working on basic skills like communications. How's that for a segue into the Ghostnet Reports for this week? I know radio is hard and it kind of sucks a lot of the time, but it's it's something that's going to be pretty helpful. I think it's already proven its utility and this week is no exception. A lot of reports, a lot of news, a lot of people sharing information completely off-grid. You do not need internet access for this and this is a good way for people to exchange information over long distances. I am quietly working on improving this uh quite a bit to integrate it so that it works with a few other things, not just JSA call, but some of you already know about the projects I'm working on uh that are uh in the world of communications and battle tracking and stuff like that. So hopefully I'll be able to tie a lot of this stuff together in due time. But for now, the Ghost Net is a great way to exchange information with each other, keep our skills sharp, not get complacent, and continue moving forward. That's all I have for today. Thank you guys all for watching. Thank you for all of your participation and support over the years. I really do appreciate it's what it's what keeps this project going. So, thank you all for that. Here are the sources for this week as usual. And you can always find my research on my Obsidian page if you want to double check any of the uh reports throughout the week. So, that's all I have for today. Thank you guys again and I'll see you next time. And as always, fight in the shade.