December 2 Update: Cartels Prefer Crypto; U.S. Universities in the Crosshairs; Private Prisons Gear Up for Deportation Windfalls; ALF Fugitive Collared in Wales; Dirty Developers & 'Affordable' Housing; Hegseth Gets the Jane Mayer Treatment

Lake Erie's snow wall over Thanksgiving weekend. Pray you're on the right side of it.

Thanksgiving is behind us, we're into the last month of the year, the leaves are almost all off the (deciduous) trees here in the Northern Hemisphere and your workplace is almost certainly not going to produce much from here through January 1st. And no matter how dark and cold it might be - you could be on the wrong side of that wall of Lake Effect snow that's hammering Upstate New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

That's not to say things have slowed down, with the regime of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad on the verge of collapse following a major offensive by Salafist rebels last week - a stick with shit on both ends, as the old Turkish saying goes. Who knows what sort of broader knock-on effect will come from Syria's further collapse, but it's likely to lead to a Turkish offensive against the PKK-affiliated region in the country's northeast.

In the media world, we're seeing a bit of a reckoning with networks of influence, as prominent press critics take swings at billionaire tycoons who put their boot on the necks of their newsrooms in order to cozy up to Trump ahead of his victory. Mark my words: there will be an exodus from the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post in the next twelve months. There's an appetite for solid, trustworthy reporting out there that's free of corporate influence (ahem), and now is the time for those writers to make the jump.

Speaking of influence, there's another development in journalism that sent a chill down my spine. An investigation published by Mediapart, Drop Site News and two other partner organizations revealed the American State Department wields major control (not just power of the purse, but vetoes over personnel) over the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, which has done terrific work over the years on eponymous topics. It wouldn't be the first time the United States surreptitiously backed media properties - but there's a deeper and potentially more dangerous issue at play here: OCCRP developed Aleph, a phenomenal investigative platform that digests and cross-references massive amounts of public records, documents, datasets, and images. It's open-source and in use by a number of other journalism outfits and transparency organizations. Are there backdoors in Aleph, like the way the FBI built an entire 'encrypted' communications platform to honeypot cybercriminals, drug cartels, smugglers and other malfeasants? Could be tin foil territory, but it's an open question at the moment.

I'm rambling on because I've not published anything this week - have a few things in edits or early reporting stages, but they won't be out til later this week/next week. No complaints on my end.

Let's get to it.

BLEEDING EDGE JOURNALISM

-Cryptocurrencies serve three roles, in my book: to enrich the creators of the digital tulips, to build a giant pyramid scheme, and to launder money. One particular currency, Tether, is so widely used by Mexican drug cartels that is is now worth significantly less in Mexico than other digital currencies, per Joseph Cox's excellent report over at 404 Media. Yet another notch on the 'finding out' column for Silicon Valley's push for financial independence and political clout.

-'Cultural Marxism' (meaning anything that isn't Christian Nationalism or militant heterosexuality) is squarely in the firing line of the Project 2025-fueled Trump Redux Administration. Of course, that means it's time to break the campuses, put an end to all those irritating pro-Palestine demonstrations, only have bathrooms for TWO GENDERS and purge the universities of faculty that teach anything to the left of Ayn Rand or Samuel Huntington. The Financial Times pored over potential consequences for American higher education under a returning president who loathes learning, free speech, and fact-based decision making. It could be a rough ride to say the least.

-Another campaign promise that is almost certainly going to cause mayhem and cost billions is the planned mass deportations of undocumented migrants (there are currently an estimated 11 million people without papers in the United States). It's going to require a vast expansion not only of the gargantuan Immigration Customs & Enforcement agency, but the commensurate technological apparatus to identify, track and process the mass removals. And of course, private prisons stand to profit massively from the whole boondoggle as they did during the first Trump Administration. The Lever's Katya Schwenk has the story.

-After more than twenty years on the run, alleged Animal Liberation Front member Daniel Andreas San Diego was arrested in Wales by British law enforcement for bombing two Northern California scientific laboratories suspected of testing products on animals. It's unclear how San Diego made his way from North America to Northern Wales, how he supported himself, or how he was able to purchase a house for £425,000 under the alias Danny Webb. More will come out once he's extradited back to the United States, but this brings to a close the last major open case from the FBI's 'green scare' period of the early 2000s when 'eco-terrorists' were allegedly America's number one domestic terrorism threat.

-Another Bay Area story out of the much-diminished San Jose Mercury News is Kate Talerico's thorough investigation into a brazen but wildly common scam: the abuse of affordable housing tax breaks by developers. California's 'essential housing program is being manipulated by real estate firms to purchase market-rate residential buildings with taxpayer-funded bonds. However, instead of providing rental units with reasonable, affordable prices, the developers have actually raised rents at the properties examined by Talerico. Seems like a pretty clear case of wire fraud - but will California Attorney General Rob Bonta bite the hands that feel him?

-After defenestrated Attorney General nominee Matt Gaetz, it looks like Secretary of Defense nominee and Christian Nationalist Pete Hegseth will be the latest to fall. Jane Mayer, the New Yorker's investigative legend who knows where all the skeletons are buried in the Beltway, went for the gut with her feature this week that lays out Hegseth's history of alcoholism, sexual assault, and wild mismanagement at veterans nonprofit groups. That's on top of the rape allegations leveled at him last month. Even his own mother thinks her golden boy is a world class piece of shit. But hey, he'll fit right back in at his old Fox News workplace

BOOK OF THE WEEK - With the exception of WIRED's Andy Greenberg, I don't particularly like tech books. There's always either a bit too much corporate intrigue (boring unless we're talking Wirecard), spirals on technical aspects of hacking or programming, or the attendant ideological/biographical factors that motivate the protagonists. Joseph Cox's gripping Dark Wire (2024) is nothing like that: it focuses on the Anom network, a purportedly encrypted and hyper-secure communications platform which turned out to be a whole-cloth creation of the FBI.

As one would expect, the Bureau's creation attracted drug smugglers, hitmen, scam artists, hackers, child abusers and the other attendant horsemen of the internet apocalypse. Careers were made off the sheer volume of arrests and prosecutions stemming from Anom. But as is often the case with malware, zero days and other cyber weapons, the creators seldom retain control. A rollicking read.

FILM/TV - I've previously plugged Patrick Radden Keefe's epic account of Dolours Price, the Provisional Irish Republican Army and Britain's counterinsurgency campaign during The Troubles. The television adaption of 'Say Nothing' on FX does not disappoint. High quality acting, terrific locations, fidelity to the dress, look, soundtrack, and realities of the period in both Ireland and England, and a meticulous attention to detail.

There was one scene in Brigadier General Frank Kitson's office that made me stop and rewind - if you've read Caroline Elkins' magisterial A Legacy of Violence or her other work on the British counterinsurgency against the Mau-Mau in Kenya, you may pick it up as well. It does not disappoint.

MUSIC - Winter music also includes sounds from warmer climes to set the mind wandering and get beyond the chill and absence of color. The soundtrack to the Brazilian film classic Black Orpheus (1958) has long been a fixture of my December-March rotation. Give it a spin and you'll see why this record is a modern classic.