Intel Update - May 24 - Outages and More Outages

Hello everyone, this is the Intel update for May 18th through the 24th, 2025. So, let's get right to it. Right, to start with, probably the biggest annoyance for today and honestly really just the rest of uh this previous week has been the widespread outages at Twitter. Many of you have been affected by these outages. So, I'm sure that's been a little bit of a frustrating point for uh today, Saturday morning, but my account has actually been suffering from problems and issues really throughout the week. So, on the down detector website, you can kind of see the huge spike this morning of people reporting outages. But as you can see along the bottom there, there have been a few people who have been unlucky enough to be affected by that throughout the week. And I am unfortunately one of those unlucky customers. So, I haven't been able to access notifications for 5 days now. I've been able to access messages for about an hour a day this week, so, yeah, uh, not great. And it's unfortunately made uh things rather difficult to find out exactly what's going on because as it turns out a lot of the mainstream media sources for what uh what has transpired this week simply just don't exist because a lot of the stories that have been very important uh to be aware of have not been covered by mainstream media. So that's been kind of annoying. But in terms of actual events going on around the world here on the home front there has been a lot of recovery efforts ongoing throughout the Midwest. A lot of severe weather continuing this time of year. This is a seasonal thing. So, it's certainly uh not a new development by any means. This time of year, the storm season always kicks up. Unfortunately, this year uh the weather season appears to be a little bit more kinetic than it has been in years past. And unfortunately, that is coinciding with a lot of infrastructure problems and experienced problems with people who may be responsible for emergency management kind of things. So, there are a few cases around the country, most notably in St. Louis, uh where there appeared to have been a problem with their tornado siren system. Now, uh, the story is still developing, so I don't want to comment on it too much. However, a lot of claims are being made that the system was actually fine. It it worked just just, uh, the way it's supposed to. The person who was responsible for activating it either did not know or forgot how to do it. So, this is, of course, an investigation that is ongoing. We'll have to definitely see what's uh, what comes of it over the next few days, but the past few weeks have certainly not been uneventful on the weather front throughout most of the central United States. Similarly, around the country, there have been various concerns with civil aviation, most notably in Newark, which we'll get to in a moment. But it's hard to gauge and convey exactly how serious uh some of these things are. Sometimes they get blown out of proportion by the media, such as a minor unused frequency going down for an airport that doesn't really get a whole lot of traffic, an outage of a couple of seconds while somebody flips a switch to transfer to a new system. That's not really as big of a crisis as radio traffic being lost for the entire airport for many minutes. It's not the same kind of thing, but it's been kind of hard to convey exactly which uh situations are are worth being concerned about. But more generally speaking, at the wavetop level, we can most certainly be aware of uh a lot of these vulnerabilities as they come about. So, it's not all doom and gloom. It's not as bad as I'm sure some people may want to make it out to be. There are people fixing some of these problems, but there are some other problems that are becoming a lot more pertinent as we figure out exactly where these vulnerabilities lie. So, we'll have to revisit this in a few weeks, of course, but for right now, it's just something to be mindful of is, you know, infrastructure problems do not magically go away uh simply because an election occurs. So, a lot of hard work is definitely needed and will be needed in the future. Switching gears over in Europe, there have been a rather sharp increase or at least a reporting increase in violent attacks throughout the continent. Most notably in Germany, there were three in a day uh yesterday. So, that was a rather big concern. I don't know if this is more of a seasonal thing or if this is any kind of increase in in the baseline of activity. To me, it seems like it's an increase in the baseline, i don't know. So, there's going to be a lot of speculation, especially throughout Europe, where it's very much impossible in some cases to find out if an event actually took place or if there's any record at all of any kind of stabbing. So, we're really shooting from the hip when it comes to these attacks in Europe a lot of the time. And unfortunately, there's not a whole lot we can do about it. So, we have to be mindful of it, weigh the information as it comes in, take things with a grain of salt, but ultimately be aware of what's going on. On the diplomatic front this week, there have been a lot of developments, but mostly just rhetoric back and forth. From what I can see, again, this is very speculative, but from what I can see, there are two main lines of effort that are going on throughout the Middle East at least. And that is narrative shaping operations to make it seem like the Iranian talks are going well and that an agreement will be reached soon and information operations that are being conducted to suggest the opposite that the talks are on the cusp of failing and that war is imminent. Honestly, I don't know which side of the story to believe. To me, there haven't really been enough details released to gauge either way how the situation's going. No news is good news and we'll just have to wait and see if there's anything big that comes from it. So, that's the wave top view for this week. Let's move over to strategic movement. Once again, not a whole lot of change this week. This this slide doesn't get a whole lot of movement change to be honest, but it's good to to be aware of where our resources are going. Of course, this is always going to be stale by several days, sometimes a couple of weeks, but for the most part, not a whole lot of movement. I have been keeping an eye on Diego Garcia for those of you who are wondering. There has not been any good coverage, a lot of cloud coverage over the past, well, few weeks, honestly. So, whatever is going on there is still going on. Uh, I'm definitely keeping an eye on it because that's a good indicator for diplomacy overseas, I suppose. But not a lot of change overall. The the Truman carrier strike group is headed home, I believe. She was spotted in the med a few days ago, so uh thankfully her rather tough deployment is is coming to an end, and uh we can kind of move on past that. So hopefully she makes it home. Okay, moving over to the kinetic activity tracker. This week has been rather kinetic honestly, but it doesn't look like it on the map. Uh mostly because a lot of the things that have happened have been either nationwide and not pinned down to a specific grid coordinate or it's just been a continuation of things that I don't think are worth putting on the map like routine street crime. But uh we'll cover some of these pucks here in a moment. And uh here is the total database. Again, this is just the kinetic activity tracker, the border crisis tracker, and all the immigration related stuff. That's really really data heavy. So I've separated that out entirely to be its own separate map. So if you want to go see my work on that, definitely uh check that out. For this week, it seems like most of the pucks that I've put on the map have fallen in Europe, of course, within Germany, which we'll get to in just a moment. So yeah, for all the European viewers out there, please forgive me if I'm not able to stay up to date as much as I'd like to with all the happenings throughout Europe, but I'm starting to get caught up now that I've got a lot of templates made for things and I'm trying to develop a lot of data sources and things like that. That I'll be able to more uh more accurately plot what's going on throughout Europe. It'll get better with time, though. And speaking of improvements, I'm starting to publish semid I'm going to say daily, but I don't think I'm going to publish it every day. Uh semi-aily KMZs of both of these maps. So, I have the common intelligence picture, the online map that you guys see with all of my RGIs layers that I've I've created, and also the border crisis map as well. So, as a separate KMZ. So, for those of you who are looking for ATAC integration, uh, fear not, that's coming. For right now, though, I'm just uh going to start publishing these KMZs, it's fairly easy for me to do on my end. So, I figured why not why not do it. So, if you guys want a KMZ of all my databases, there you go. I'm still working on a way to automate this a little bit better. Uh, but for right now, this is kind of what I've got. It may look like the uh online maps are linked to this somehow. This is not a pull of what is being put online. This is a pull of what's on my computer. So sometimes the data may not match. One may be a little bit more upto-date than the other. But basically when I'm running ARJS on my computer, I can publish to the internet and I can publish to a KMZ for in in layman's terms, right? I try to publish these at the same time every day, but you know how it goes, things happen. So um I'm working on the automation to make this more streamlined and to kind of take me, you know, the human weak link out of the system. But but for now this is what I've got. So let's move into the regions for this week. Uh a lot of tenuous topics to cover honestly up in the northeast region. For instance in New Jersey the scandal surrounding the Delaney detention facility has continued. The US attorney has dropped the charges against the mayor of Newark who was originally charged with a couple others for trespassing. Uh those charges have been dropped with no no real explanation as to why, so that's interesting. However, the the state representative Lam Monica Macyver who was criminally charged for assaulting uh ICE personnel. Uh those charges are still going, but I'll be willing to bet in a couple weeks they're probably going to be dropped. But anyway, something to be mindful of. Also, in New Jersey, the New York airport situation has really just continued. Um there's been a lot of rhetoric about this one, and I'm not entirely certain as to what's true or not. However, from the outside looking in, uh from the very wavetop level, this place is still pretty risky. Now, how how and whom we want to point the fingers to uh is going to vary. Um but just from the very tiptop wave level, it appears that the repairs and efforts are still ongoing at Newark. They're still they're trying to do uh from what I can tell, they're trying to fix things, but it's still a fairly risky time for communications outages in and out of the airport. So the FAA has reduced the aircraft going in and out of not just this one airport, but I'm fairly certain they've reduced what's what's coming in and out of this entire sector. So that kind of shows you how serious it is. And out of an abundance of caution, uh just kind of keeping an eye on this would be a good idea. Moving down to the southeast region, just wanted to mention what's going on in Washington DC. It's been rather busy as you guys probably have seen over the past few days in DC. First of all, there was the murder of two Israeli embassy staffers by one suspect who has since been detained and identified as Elias Rodriguez. Now, the media blitz over this has been absolutely insane. So, I'm not going to comment on this too much other than to say this is probably going to be a very important event to be aware of because of what's about to happen over the next two to three weeks. My guess is that this will be a very good means uh and opportunity for a lot of um federal intelligence collection to kind of spool up um even more so than they already are and a lot of um uh crackdowns one way or the other to occur. So, it's a very dangerous topic to talk about. This is a very high-profile instance that I I think it would be wise to just wait and see how this pans out because the the international ramifications are very serious. Uh anytime an embassy staffer gets killed anywhere in the world, that's that's going to have an international, you know, ramification, they're they're diplomatically, you know, protected more or less personnel. But considering the context of this situation, um I I think that that this could get very serious. So, we're just going to wait and see, be mindful of it, and we're going to have to see how this pans out, not just in the international space, but also in the domestic space, right? This is a very big high-profile event and I don't think that it's going to turn out super well when it comes to federal agencies being involved over the next few weeks. So, we'll just have to see. Similarly, and rather interestingly, there was also a gate ramming at the CIA headquarters on the same day. I can't figure out if it was before or after this uh initial instance. I know that initially people thought that or there was some speculation that thought that okay, well, maybe this is linked together. At the moment, I don't think they're linked. So, this may have been a DUI situation, considering that the woman who was detained uh she was shot uh and detained at the scene for trying to run the gate at Langley. But most of the mainstream media articles that have written about this story claim that local authorities claim that she has a history of drunk driving. So, it doesn't look like it was a terrorist attack. I mean, it may be. It may be a cover up, who knows? Uh something to be mindful of. Anytime a gate ramming occurs, these things are very serious. But in this case, of course, the CIA headquarters being involved, it's going to be very, very secret squirrel. So, I would venture a guess as to say that very few details, if any at all, will come out of that. And speaking of very little information this week, let's move over to Western Europe. I don't know about anybody else, but I have had a rather challenging time trying to figure out exactly what's going on in Europe these days. And I think it has to do a lot with an increased effort in media suppression. For instance, throughout Germany, there were three uh stabbing instances. There was a mass stabbing attack in Hamburg that uh got a lot of media attention. So, that one's a little bit more clear. The asalent themselves, uh who they are and what their deal is is a little bit more unclear. So, that's challenging to get some information on. However, there are many mainstream media sources which of course have a lot more going to say credence, but they're they're a little bit more um accessheavy, in Europe. There's not as much independent media in Europe as there is here in the United States. I'll say it that way. But anyway, this mass stabbing in Hamburg, there were a lot more details made public rather quickly. Whereas the other two stabbing instances are almost impossible to find any details on. It's so hard to find details on these two stabbing attacks that I for the longest time I really questioned as to whether or not they actually happened or if it was just a a straightup, you know, made up from the ground up false story. You guys can do the research on your own. Check out the sources as usual. But from what I can tell, these stabbings actually did occur, but the reason they're not talked about is because they involved juveniles in mutual combat. So, so at an elementary school in Remshine and at an elementary school in Berlin, there were two separate but still very serious stabbing instances where students were fighting each other and one pulls a knife and stabs the other very seriously. So, again, schoolyard fights are not what they used to be. Uh these days this should be fairly obvious uh for anyone in the world nowadays but nevertheless uh these kinds of things tend to happen. Uh what I found to be most interesting is the fact that I just couldn't find any information on it at all. Similar story with the case down in France. There was a an axe murder at a grocery store uh at a town I think an hour or two north of Paris, small town. Uh axe murder tends to be not something you hear about super often. And for the longest time, I again thought that this story was fake because there was only one like local French language independent media sort of thing talking about it, but now a few more sources have kind of confirmed that it did occur, you know. Um, yeah, pretty pretty violent. I I haven't been able to find out hardly any details on either the victims or the perpetrators in any of these attacks. The one in France, I think, was a case of mutual combat. Locals were stating as in allegedly eyewitnesses who saw the attack take place. Once again, you always have to take eyewitness testimony with a grain of salt, but it's the best we've got, so we'll have to go with it. Eyewitnesses stated that both the victim and the perpetrator were Turkish and they were settling a personal dispute is what it seemed like. I don't know if that's true or not. Makes sense, but just because it makes sense doesn't mean it's true. I'm afraid the old classic standby of we'll have to wait and see doesn't really work in cases like this because we almost never get any follow- on information. So, I guess the best we can do is plot it on the map, be aware that it occurred. If it didn't occur and it was a total fabrication, all right, at least we've, you know, made a risk assessment uh from a more um conservative perspective, right? A little bit more uh cautious. You know, that's that's never a bad thing. And at the end of the day, if we get more information, good. If we don't, well, at least we we won't let this be a memory hold. So, as a side note, just from a research perspective on this, I will be talking a lot more often in the next few weeks once I organize my notes a little bit better, uh, I will start to incorporate some of these stories that we may have forgotten about, right? May call it like out of the memory hole or something like that, i don't know. But anyway, that's going to be the goal is to to bring up, you know, some of these stories that kind of fall by the wayside and they're very important to remember because a lot of times something very serious happens and then we just forget about it, right, i know I do. So, now that I've gotten a lot more organization to my notes, this should be a little bit easier for me to do and uh because I think it's important, I'll pass it along to you guys as well. But give me a little bit more time to work on that. That's pretty much all I have for today. Uh this week's Ghost Net was very, very good. I've seen a lot of people transmitting throughout the week uh throughout the comm window as well. Also on Saturdays, I've seen a lot of people trying to use the data bridge to talk to Europe, especially on days like today where surprise surprise I go to start recording this update today and find out, oh, there's a power outage in K down there in southern France, just south of southwest of Nice, I think. Yeah, you know, fortuitous that a blackout occurs right more or less right during our communications window for the data bridges to Europe. But again, uh this will become a lot more um clear as to how it helps in the future. I know for a lot of you out there, most of you who are watching this probably won't give won't give a hoot about the radio stuff or uh won't be able to kind of put together why it's helpful or you know, I understand that there's also a very very big uh learning curve for this stuff, don't worry, it's okay, we'll we'll get there. I'll uh I'll figure out how to make a lot of this easier in the future, especially with some of the stuff I'm working on that should come out next week or so. But for now, things are going very, very well uh with the ghost net. A lot of information exchange, a lot of stories that I have not heard about, including things like a Noah radio outage uh in New Jersey. So, for those of you who are in the Allentown, Pennsylvania area, uh somebody was reporting that a message was sent out over the Noah weather radio that their transmitter was down. So, I haven't found any kind of way to corroborate that, but I did want to mention it because again, I got this via radio. Uh and I think that's pretty cool. So, that's pretty much all I have for today. Here are the sources as usual. And of course, there are clickable links everywhere. Uh they're on the link tree page. They're on down in the video description. Depending on where you're watching this at, uh there will be a lot of options open to you. I'm sorry I'm not entirely organized on the link front just yet. Uh most of the links that I have are posted on my Obsidian page. So, you just go to the Obsidian link at the end of every single wire report. And pretty much everywhere I can post just one link, I've posted my Obsidian link. And from there, you'll be able to find a few pages with different links depending on what you're looking for. So, there's a lot of resources out there, they're open to you. I've already done the hard work to make them, so you might as well uh might as well use them. So, so that's all I have for today. Thank you again for all of your support that allows me to to keep on doing this work. And we will see you next time. And as always, fight in the shape.