August 22 Update: German murder charges for 764; Meta's pedophile AI; How 'sanctuary' cities feed ICE's datamining; DoD gets into deportation; SFPD, surveillance & the crypto mogul; CA economy suffers under immigration sweeps; Transnational crime omnibus
How far we've fallen as a country. No, I'm not talking about the Texas legislature holding Democrats hostage inside their own chamber to force through a gerrymandering effort that Republicans hope will stave off a massive wave of dissatisfied voters during next year's midterm elections. No, I'm not talking about the Governor of California's remarkably committed social media trolling of Donald Trump, the Israeli-born United States Attorney of Nevada allowing an Israeli official arrested in a Las Vegas child trafficking sting to flee the country, nor the desperate federal attempt to occupy Washington D.C. with federal law enforcement and the National Guard in order to distract from widespread outrage about Trump's close (some say 'intimate') ties to Jeffrey Epstein.
I'm talking about a red envelope stuffed with $200 in crumpled bills, shoved inside a bag of sour cream and onion chips (gross). That said bag of chips was proffered by a key Eric Adams aide and official on his re-election campaign to a local reporter on Wednesday evening. We used to be a real city, where five-figure bribes came in designer handbags. It's so disappointing.
And of course, within 24 hours, yet another Adams confidant catches new bribery charges from the Manhattan District Attorney related to her successful derailing of a bike line in Brooklyn at the behest of local business interests - who paid her off in cash and gave her a bit part in one of their films as compensation. Zohran Mamdani, if you can't see off the challenges of this clown and a wildly perverted former governor, I don't know what to tell ya.
Meanwhile, evictions in the Five Boroughs are at a six-year high, with a tightening rental market, a stagnant job market and landlords eager to force out long-term tenants before Mamdani's proposed rent freeze kicks in all amongst the contributing factors.
Not much publishing on my end the past month and change, as I've been deep in book research and doing my best to work outside while the sun is warm. But I did take some time to question the Mamdani campaign's perplexing decision to stay quiet on the NYPD's catastrophic state of affairs, particularly at the top of the department. It's an absolute slam dunk with city voters to go after an agency that hoovers up massive amounts of taxpayer money with questionable results, particularly when the people running it have been enriching themselves, running roughshod over civil liberties, and perpetuating an internal culture that enables, protects and promotes sexual predators. [For paid subscribers only]
I did speak with a reporting team from Sweden's public broadcaster SVT for a segment examining the recent arrest of a young Neo-Nazi accused of explosives possession. The suspect is affiliated with The Base, an extreme right wing guerilla organization that popped up in 2018 as an Atomwaffen Division clone and turned out to be a Russian active measure directed by a former American intelligence and military contractor I helped out for the BBC in 2020.
That's enough navel-gazing from the Greatest City on Earth, where you can could experience everything from a plane crashing into the World Trade Center to a person who's celebrating a new business (Eric said that, I shit you not).
Let's get to it.
BLEEDING EDGE JOURNALISM
-Der Spiegel was one of the original partners on my WIRED investigation into 764 back in Spring 2024, which brought the CSAM/child abuse cult to broad public attention and coincided with a massive law enforcement push to bring this network of sadists to justice. Earlier this summer, they went back into one of the culprits confronted during their own investigation, a German man living in Hamburg who went by the alias 'White Tiger.' This person is now charged with homicide for inducing one of the young people he and other 764 members exploited into killing themselves - an incredibly disturbing development that makes clear why authorities consider the cult to be a terrorist entity. Put this into a translator, the article is in German.
Roman Lehberger, Roman Höfner, Max Hoppenstedt, DER SPIEGEL
-While we're on the topic of child abuse, a timely remind to get your kids off any Meta property. Mark Zuckerberg's increasingly reckless company has, in its pursuit of Artificial Intelligence dominance, allowed their autonomous chatbots to engage in romantic conversations with minors. No harm, no foul! Reuters' investigation from last week has rightfully raised hackles around the world, and is undoubtedly part of the chill about artificial intelligence that is starting to sweep through the financial markets.
-Any police department that claims they have a 'sanctuary policy' that prevents them from cooperating with ICE is lying to you. Thanks to more than two decades of data deconfliction and interconnection driven by the post-9/11 reforms to intelligence-gathering and law enforcement (all in the same of anti-terrorism, mind you), Homeland Security, the FBI, ICE, the Border Patrol and other federal law enforcement routinely receive large dumps of criminal data, arrest records, fingerprints, vehicle location information and cellphone metadata. I mapped all this out for The Intercept back in 2017, but it's worth revisiting the topic, as the Los Angeles Times did in the context of the Trump Administration's made-for-TV immigration enforcement campaign in SoCal.
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-Not content with an enormous budgetary windfall thanks to a pliant Congress, ICE wants to supplement its 10,000 person hiring spree over the next few years with civilian employees of the military. 404 Media obtained emails .. Meanwhile, immigration detentions have spiked over the first six months of the year, led by ICE's Miami field office, to levels not seen since Barack Obama's two terms in office. It's clear Steven Miller is in charge of both DHS and the Justice Department, and this has been his burning ambition since the ghoul's miserable adolescence as a bigoted provocateur in Santa Monica.
Jason Koebler
-In its further quest to sanitize the Great American Unwashed, the U.S. Customs and Immigration Services will now consider the 'moral character' of immigrants applying for full citizenship, per the BezosCorp Post (I don't make the rules, that's what it's called now). Couple this with recent "presidential" remarks about deporting 'homegrowns' and broader attempts to rewrite unappealing aspects of American history, and you end up with a vision of society that is far closer to North Korea or China than what's been crafted on these shores since 1783.
-What happens when a right-wing billionaire bankrolls a police department's surveillance programs? San Francisco is about to find out, as CCTV cameras, drones, facial recognition software and other technologies bankrolled by cryptocurrency mogul Chris Larsen start to come online. Tim Redmond, the former investigations editor of the dearly-missed San Francisco Bay Guardian and the founder of local news site 48 Hills asks the very important question of why Larsen is doing this, while pointing out the SF press corps' seeming indifference to this state of affairs.
Tim Redmond
-California's economy, the fourth-largest in the world and a massive engine of growth for the United States, is getting hammered by the Trump Administrations immigration crackdown. Industrial workers, day laborers, field hands and other workers are all staying away from their jobsites as Immigration and Customs Enforcement continues to defy a federal court injunction against their blanket, Latinos-only sweeps in the greater Los Angeles area. Meanwhile, ICE are now shooting at unarmed people who flee their checkpoints while the Border Patrol conducts random sweeps outside speeches by California Governor Gavin Newsom. Lovely state of affairs.
-Lastly, I recommend diving into the FT's ongoing series about the evolution of narcotics trafficking around the world. While it may seem a played-out topic, the permutations of an enormously corrosive and deadly illicit trade is worth paying attention to, particularly regarding its impact on governance and social structure in some of the world's 'weaker' states. In Latin America, the cartels are stronger than ever, driven by Europe's huge increase in appetite for cocaine and the attendant bonanza. Across the world, Syria's new Al Qaeda-led ruling junta has a hell of a task ahead of them dismantling the Assad family's lucrative captagon manufacturing operation that helped the pariah state stay afloat until the government collapsed late last year. I'm very much looking forward to the following installments in this series beyond the third portion about cartel-linked illegal gold mines.
BOOK - I can never get enough Mike Davis (RIP), and thanks to the sections of Imperial Feedback that will deal with both the Battle of Algiers and the Provisional Irish Republican Army, I had the pleasure of revisiting his concise but brilliant Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (2008).
Written during the pit of the second Iraq War (the one that Dubya and the NYT sold us) when insurgents were detonating more than a hundred car bombs in Baghdad each month, Davis works back through the history of the 'poor man's air force' from the horse-drawn cart dynamited on a time delay by an Italian anarchist in front of JP Morgan's Wall Street offices in 1920 through the Twentieth Century, spanning Palestine during the brief post-WWII British Mandate, French-controlled Algeria, Vietnam, Northern Ireland, Latin America, Oklahoma City, Lower Manhattan and more.
FILM - Because Spike Lee decided, in his increasingly senile and commercially-driven dotage, to remake it, this week I'm going to plug Japanese master Akira Kurasawa's High and Low (1963). Widely considered to be one of the best police procedurals ever filmed, the narrative tracks a successful business executive who tries to track down his son's kidnapping.
Many Western directors have ripped off Kurasawa, including George Lucas (large portions of Stars Wars: A New Hope were taken wholesale from The Hidden Fortress), John Sturges (The Magnificent Seven is a straight copy of the Seven Samurai) and Quentin Tarantino (Rashomon inspires major point of both Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. Spike has been pretty quiet about his Japanese predecessor during this summer's publicity tour, so I figured it's a good time to resurface the original. Oh and Toshiro Mifune beats the brakes off Denzel Washington
MUSIC - I declined to mention the ongoing genocide in Gaza this week earlier in the newsletter not out of neglect, but because the final element would deal with that incredibly depressing topic in an unexpectedly positive way. The inestimable folks over at TrueAnon had Jake Romm from the Hind Rajab Foundation on earlier this month to discuss their volunteer-driven efforts to document the war crimes committed by active-duty Israeli soldiers over the past two years, with the intent of holding them to account for crimes against humanity. In a particularly interesting twist, the legal pressure is placed on the IDF soldiers in countries where they travel on vacation (as some of the world's most loathed tourists). Give it a listen, and consider donating to the Foundation to support their work if you'd like to help try and bring a modicum of justice to the victims in Gaza.