Intel Update - August 22 - Dangerous Freedom

Hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground. This is the intel update for August the 16th through the 22nd, 2026. Around the world has been a pretty light week filled with a lot of random events, but there have been some minor developments regarding the wars overseas. Not much has changed in the Middle East, but as we get closer to month six of the war. The current status quo is settling in for the long haul. Both Iran and the United States have decided to shift into more economic warfare than actual warfare. Although the Iranians continue to target ships within the straight of Hormuz. Of note, this week there have been conflicting reports regarding how much trade is actually transiting the straight. Some companies are stating that more ships are going out through the Omani route, but other sources indicate that the volume of crude exiting the region is lower. Right now, I cannot definitively confirm either narrative simply because there are differences in the nuances of how ships are being counted. But whatever the case, the proof will be in the pudding in about 2 weeks when we get the official oil report for this month. If it turns out that we actually did reduce that 8 million barrel per day deficit that we've been talking about for a while now, that's good. That means that ships did get out through the straight. But if basically nothing changed or if it went down, then well, we know somebody's not really telling the truth, don't we? But I cannot definitively say with any certainty myself until we have uh tallied up the tankers that have actually arrived in port and a cargo of petroleum has been pumped out of them. So trust is very low with this war all around on all sides, but we're going to find out one way or the other how things are going. Otherwise, most nations around the region are hedging their bets, and they're planning on a return to the war at some point in the future. A lot of nations learned how vulnerable they were during this war, and they've tried to take steps to mitigate that for the future. This morning, footage from the UAE hit the timeline, which appears to show the legendary practice of installing rather significant anti- drone cages around some of their oil storage facilities. I do not know the context of this video, but it's honestly quite interesting because the tanks themselves, what they are protecting, are actually the least valuable part of the whole system. I would have expected this surrounding the wellheads or pumping stations or other more sensitive facilities, but not routine storage tanks. But whatever, they clearly think it's worth protecting, and in doing so, they continue to heap evidence on the pile indicating that this war is not going to end anytime soon. Also this week, another point of friction is emerging that is incredibly serious, which is Turkey. This week, the Israelis conducted air strikes within Syria at an air base that the Turks were trying to set up for both their own use, but also probably to lay the groundwork for reestablishing the Syrian military, which right now doesn't really exist in the wake of the collapse of the Assad regime a few years ago. The Israeli strikes took place at Alura Air Base with the runway being cratered and a few of the airport facilities being hit as well. This attack was directly intended for Turkey with Prime Minister Netanyahu directly confirming that's why he did it. A few days before the strikes, a Turkish diplomatic delegation or kind of like an advanced team had visited the base and Turkish soldiers and construction crews were intended to deploy to this location right before the strikes took place. At least that's what the Western media is saying. Turkey denies any involvement and Syria also denies any sort of development at the base. So, they're not talking. Based on the prepoundonderance of evidence, it's almost certain that Turkey was probably trying to set up shop at the air base, and the IDF didn't like that, so they bombed it. As one might expect, this has soured relations between Turkey and the United States, and is the latest escalation that's probably going to get worse. Politicians all around want to show their national strength, and things get a little dicey. So, so as always, uh, we run the risk of running into a more regional conflration every week that goes by. So, situation normal, Israel's bombing stuff here on the home front. The main concerns this week remain in the economic realm. I know, not the most exciting topic, but the situation is beginning to deteriorate further. This week, the White House announced their plan to import 300,000 metric tonses of ground beef, which will be imported from a mystery country, which President Trump has refused to disclose. So, there's not going to be any country of origin required on the packaging for this mystery meat. This ground beef will be sold at a price of 25% below the market rate, but the details of how this is going to work out is not really known. This is not particularly surprising as from what I can read through the agricultural journals. Most farmers uh most cattle ranchers kind of assumed this was going to happen right before the midterms. They were probably going to start uh loosening the import controls on beef to try to drive prices down because uh ground beef has become quite uh expensive uh compared to everything else. So to keep food prices low right before an election season, they're going to try to uh pump the market a little bit and uh do what they can to bring prices down. I'm sure many people who have read history books before uh know that centralized planning of food has worked out super well throughout history. So, I'm sure there will be no problems with this whatsoever. To be honest, I don't really have uh any details on how this is going to work out. We're just kind of having to take a stab in the dark at what they're actually planning to do with this. So, something to keep an eye on for later, especially considering I don't know if they're importing the cattle or the actual finished ground beef product. So, we might actually be finding out why we don't really like to import ground beef from other countries such as Mexico or Argentina, for instance. Generally speaking, ground beef has the highest chance for contamination because churning up cuts of beef into essentially a paste makes it much easier for contaminants to make their way into the product. And when you're eating a hamburger, you're eating the, you know, byproducts of a thousand cows, right? Instead of just one head of cattle. So, that makes point of origin harder to identify and, you know, all the problems that kind of come with that. So if they are planning to import actual ground beef from again Mexico or Argentina or some place in Central America, you might get some bacteria pesticides that are banned in the US or even some groundup cartel member. You never really know what's in your cheeseburger. So again, maybe there are no concerns with this. Once again, the devil's in the details and we're just going to have to wait and see. The fact that the White House and President Trump himself has declined to say where the beef is coming from, that's pretty concerning and that points to deceit, right? So that's, you know, something that they're trying to hide and that doesn't really make people feel really good. So hopefully we'll get some more transparency on this, but we're just going to have to wait and see. Also, within the homeland this week, there have been a few incidents worthy of mention, starting with the alleged terror attack that was thwarted by the FBI. If you are so inclined, I would recommend just reading through the indictment yourself. It's only 21 pages, but it's pretty interesting. The short version for anyone who doesn't want to read through it is that this is a case of the FBI finding a mentally ill individual and setting them up to conduct a terror attack. Jessica Bowie, an extremely mentally ill woman who is the one and only suspect in this case, was shouting at the internet about supporting ISIS. And she was immediately contacted by undercover agents who promptly got her to stage a terror attack such that it was. The problem is she was so mentally ill and unable to actually carry out most of the steps that the FBI agents had to actually coach her along quite a bit along the entire way. She was never actually in contact with any real ISIS faction either at home or overseas. It was purely this lady by herself. And the FBI even admitted in their own indictment that they had to coach her on how to make the pledge to ISIS. They held her by the hand so much that they literally went with her to Home Depot to help her pick out electrical tape and acetone to make an IED with. Like, that's just that's just so embarrassing. Good grief. The biggest problem with this entire case is that before the alleged IED attack was to take place, she got spooked and she was actually planning and theorizing how she would go about stabbing her roommate to death if the roommate were to discover the fake IED that she had in her possession, which was given to her by the FBI. This was not part of the FBI's plan, and they almost got a random person killed trying to entrap a very obviously mentally ill woman into becoming a terrorist. Of course, Bowie herself was not completely innocent in all of this. She went along with every single step of the plan. And she will surely go to prison for a very long time. That is if the case doesn't get dismissed due to the sheer amount of direct FBI involvement that took place at every single step of the way. I mean, clearly this woman needs to be in a padded room for a very long time. But Todd Blanch has been doing the social media circuit just talking about how great he is and how great the FBI is, and everybody's just been popping champagne and firing off confetti about their major bust just like Merrick Garland used to do, just like Biden's DOJ used to do. And most of us who know how investigations work are just cringing with embarrassment on this one. So, so clearly this woman was not the next Osama bin Laden, even though the FBI is trying to make it out to be that big of a case. And because of that, they're demonstrating that they are most certainly not interested in investigating legitimate terrorist organizations. We've got several hundred terrorist organizations within the US who actually openly say they are terrorist organizations, but the FBI is not really interested in ruling them up because, well, we all know why. But you guys get the drift. This case out of New York is an absolute nothing, and it's just embarrassing. But speaking of investigating terrorist organizations, this week I have been digging deep into the Tongen Crypt Gang within Utah, which is a sentence that is a little bit surprising to most people, but the Tongen Crypt Gang within the great state of Utah and their adversaries uh continued to wreak havoc throughout Salt Lake City and various outlying areas. My interest in the case was prompted actually back in January uh when the first Tongen Crypt funeral shooting occurred. But my interest was reignited earlier this week when the second Tongen cry funeral shooting occurred in the same general area. Earlier this week uh they were trying to have a funeral for a Tongen Cry member who uh got blasted by a couple of prepared citizens who shot him as he was trying to murder a gas station clerk who refused to sell him alcohol. This was a pretty good and uh motivating case coming out of Utah. a couple of prepared citizens ventilated a gang member fairly effectively after that gang member was trying to kill an innocent person. So that guy's funeral was actually on Monday and there was a shooting at his funeral. So this shooting resulted in multiple people being shot and this actually in turn was not the end of the story. So after the shooting at the funeral, the wounded people, the wounded family members who were at the the congregation at the funeral, they were taken to Interm Mountain Medical Center, the basically the biggest hospital for several states. And after they got there, the Tongans actually followed the ambulances to the hospital and started causing a riot in the parking lot. So the 911 dispatch or the radio traffic from the police scanners indicates that about 80 or so Tongen Crypt family members were trying to break down the door to the emergency room like they were trying to breach the facility because they were just so upset or something. I don't know. But anyway, they assaulted one uh ER employee. They threw uh threw somebody to the ground and it was such a big deal that they had to actually deploy barecats, armored armored vehicles and snipers to the rooftops uh just to hold off the hordes of tongans. I know this is an insane story coming out of Salt Lake City where you would not expect that sort of thing, but this is a massive can of worms. This is a very deep rabbit hole. So, strap in. I know that this is not something that everyone's interested in because it sounds like a fairly standard gang war in a major American city. not particularly out of the ordinary for this kind of thing. I mean, rushing a hospital is pretty pretty different. Like, you don't see gangs doing that a lot. But anyway, I'm interested in this simply because of how it's being covered up specifically by the LDS church. Now, pumping the brakes right to start with, I have to issue the disclaimer that I have no dog in this fight. I am not addressing the aspects of the faith itself. That's none of my business. I am solely concerned about the Tongan crypts themselves, specifically with regards to them overrunning LDS meeting houses around the city. And the church is not doing anything to stop it. As a matter of fact, they're encouraging it. On my maps, every single one of these TCG points is an LDS church or what what they actually call a meeting house. So, they don't call them churches, they call them meeting houses, which is host to specifically a Tongen ward or a congregation, what we might call a congregation. In many cases, several Tongen wards share the same meeting house. So, there's a little bit of overlap there. You'll have like Tongen ward number 13 being at the same place as, you know, another Tongen ward. So there's a little bit of overlap there between these uh specific sites. When it comes to this specific cultural group itself, the Tongan population in Salt Lake City, as in the people from the island of Tonga who were u Pacific Islanders who were brought to Salt Lake City or they immigrated to California and then immigrated to Salt Lake City, the Tongan population of the state, they consider themselves to be Tongan crypts. like for them even using their own words and their own cultural uh belief system and stuff like that they consider it to be one and the same right I feel like I have to mention that because a lot of the media and a lot of the Tongans who are talking to the media surprise surprise they're not exactly telling the truth and before these shootings it turned out that every Tongan you know is TCG that's what they said on their own you know social media pages and now now the spotlight's on them now suddenly there's this this difference between being Tongan and being TCG when in essence they're really the same thing. So if you were to make a vin diagram of the tongen population of Salt Lake City and the Tongen cry gang, it would be one circle, right? Because there's nearly complete overlap between the two demographics and groups. This matters because these Tongan wards are set up solely for Tongans throughout the city. These are generally and quite entertainingly segregated away from other LDS facilities because these services are held in the Tongan language. If you wanted to find out where to go, good luck because the website for these places is actually in Tongan. It's not even in English. The problem is specific Tongen families that run these wards, they're actually pretty high ranking members of the Tongen crypt gang. A lot of them have ties back to Englewood in California and also Seattle where there's another cell of TCG. So, there's some pretty big movers and shakers uh in Salt Lake City. The reason as to why I'm concerned about this is mostly due to morbid fascination, but also due to the future deaths that are going to occur. The city is on fire and more people are going to get killed because the LDS church doesn't want anybody to know about the problem they have going on inside their churches. So, they lean on the mainstream media to cover it up or soften the language of what's going on. And the gaslighting, ladies and gentlemen, I have not seen gaslighting this significant anywhere else in the world. It is literally insane consuming any kind of media coming out of Salt Lake City right now. For instance, everyone is saying that the shooting at the funeral was just a minor dispute between families. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it sure was. But the families were the tongue and crips and I suspect the Rose Park Bloods. Possibly the baby regulators, though I'm not quite sure about that. It's hard to say who who was actually affiliated with whom. But the gaslighting is so bad in Salt Lake City that even the journalists are pedalling the GoFundMe pages for the alleged victims in this shooting, which is odd because literally everyone involved is either a confirmed gang member or suspected of being one. I found the social media pages for the victim's lieutenant in the in the Tongen gang. So, I mean, I what are we doing here, guys? You know, anyway, let's just say the rabbit hole goes pretty deep on this one. But anyway, projecting out the next couple of weeks. Uh, I'm going to be heavily monitoring the gang situation in the city because I think we have a decent chance of maybe not preventing the next mass shooting, but mitigating it as best we can. Um, this is a situation that we actually do have the ability to do something, right? We know that based on the one casualty that has been reported so far from that funeral shooting that there is going to be another funeral. And with another funeral, there is 100% going to be another shooting at a Tongan ward. And there are only so many places a funeral can be held and only so many days of the week it can be held on. So we are dealing with a workable problem here. We're dealing with a finite list of potential shooting sites, times, locations, stuff like that. So for those in the area, I would strongly recommend being aware of any upcoming Tongen cultural events and funerals because the chances of a shooting taking place are extraordinarily high. When it comes to the specific parts of the city where this is going to be a risk, well, I mean, the whole city is an absolute dystopian hell hole. But if you're concerned specifically about the Tongen Crypt gang shooting you instead of one of the other hundred gangs that are active throughout Salt Lake City, the high-risisk zones for another Tongen Crypt shooting are going to be West Valley City, probably all the way up in Rose Park as well to the north of town. And I also think personally in West Jordan because there are a lot of people who are affiliated with this one particular family at the center of this who are in uh West Jordan. So again, this is kind of like an investigator's dream here because these people are very openly gang members all over their social media pages. They're using their real names. They're not really exercising any kind of OBSC and they've been doing this for well decades, honestly. So if I can narrow down the next mass shooting that's going to occur in a major American city, then, you know, maybe there's a clue there that we should probably investigate this, you know, from the professional side of things a little bit more. Just just a theory there. But but anyway, we'll keep an eye out and hopefully uh hopefully nobody will get killed during the next shooting. Continuing the trend of monitoring the situation, I have decided to begin a new tracker uh detailing the notable abuses this month within the US surveillance state. This map details all of the locations where law enforcement agencies have either fired or suspended employees for misuse of surveillance technologies. And this is just for the month of August. If you want a more clean map, I will link to a group which is compiling these abuse cases on their website. But I wanted to have my own slide just for me so I could track it personally. But as we can see, we are threequarters of the way through August, 3 weeks in, and this is how many violations have been documented. And maybe we can see the scale of the problem. But fear not, it actually gets worse when we start adding in some of the other developments in the world of technology that have come to light over the past couple of weeks. Apart from these more direct surveillance concerns, there are adjacent technologies which are going to be complicating things moving forward. So let me explain. Uh there are already companies which are advertising the ability to alter surveillance footage in real time. Recently the Israeli cyber security firm TOA rolled out a new product which allows customers to remotely access cameras and change the footage of what is being recorded in real time all without leaving a trace. As a reminder, Tokco was created by Epstein's friend and associate, Ahoud Barack, the former prime minister of Israel. And back in 2018, Barack tried to sell Toco products directly to Jeffrey Epstein, specifically for targeting senior officials. Here's the email. You can very clearly see what was trying to happen here. Now, I don't know if Jeffrey Epstein actually was a purchaser of this platform, but TOA does not sell to individual people. Toka only sells to governments and militaries. And this cyber security firm creates a lot of different tools, but the one that is concerning at the moment at least is the commercialization of manipulating camera footage without leaving a trace. Think of this as basically exactly the plot of the movie Oceans 11 where the footage of the vault, you know, inside the Bellagio was altered to conceal what was going on. This company is offering this capability as a service, not a theoretical exercise, not a one-time thing, not a, you know, customuilt tool for one specific purpose. No, no. A universal tool that is mass- prodduced for whichever government or intelligence agency wants to buy it. If you want to learn more about the details of this company and this product, check out the thread on X by Josh Walos, who kind of broke the story a couple of weeks ago. I'll link it in the description box below as well. So, bringing back the cameras that are coming to the end of every single driveway in America. We have to remember affiliation. Toka's lead investment firm. Their main funding source is Andre Horowitz, which is the same firm that is a major funding source for another rather interesting company. Now, this is just my personal opinion, but I don't think it's a very good idea to be viewing uh both of these sorts of companies and agencies in isolation. I think it makes a lot more sense to start viewing them as working within the same ecosystem. Once again, speculation here, but who's to say that this software can't alter the evidence of what the National Camera Network sees? For software packages similar to what TOA offers, they can literally manufacture the evidence they need for whatever crime they want to imagine. But even so, why would this company even need this software? They can manipulate and delete any footage they don't like right now. So for those people who still somehow think that they have nothing to hide, good luck with that moving forward because the tools are already coming together to make this uh nationwide surveillance issue a clear and present danger to the American people. So one of the ways that I think I can help mitigate the effects of this and especially how this is going to work out after the midterms and probably more accurately after 2028 is in the realm of information exchange. like it or not. Uh but a good portion of this effort lies within the realm of communications and being able to coordinate efforts to stay ahead of whatever happens next. This is why some of the stuff I've been working on myself has been to harden and strengthen the flow of information through communications networks. You guys may not see it on your end, at least not yet, but I've been trying to really strengthen some of the ways that I can get information out to the world myself and also help facilitate the flow of information to others. If I can't leave my house because the government mandates a lockdown and the cameras are monitoring the roads, how can I ensure continuity of operations and be somewhat effective even under extreme circumstances? Of course, this is one of the worst case scenarios that's still decently likely, but again, we hope for the best and plan for the worst. These days, with so many nefarious entities out there in the world, it's pretty hard to figure out which ones to focus on and what we can actually do to mitigate the effects of what these some of these companies and agencies are doing. And ever since uh things got pretty serious earlier this year, especially with, you know, the war kicking off, I myself have been doing what I can to harden my own ability to get work done even though it's becoming more dangerous to do so. At a basic level, it does not matter if one person knows the truth if they cannot share it with anyone else in an unrestricted way. Which is why I have been trying to do what I can to make that possible with tools such as the Ghost Net. This week's net was great as always. Summertime thunderstorms rolling in offered me a little bit of challenging conditions to work with, but the network continues on regardless, and it's a very resilient way to stay informed on what's going on around the world. It's not perfect, but it's also incredibly hard to censor without actually drone striking the radio operators. And there are a lot of different methods for integrating HF radio in more interesting ways that allow us to have a lot of capability, even when our overlords do not want us to. And I think we're making good progress on that. So, that's all I've got for today. Thank you for all of your support. Thank you for watching. And I will see you next time. And as always, fight in the shade.