Tag Archives: telegraph

‘A Crime Against Democracy Itself’: Zelenskyy Condemns Russia for Abducting Mayor

March 13, 2022 Creative Commons

“They have moved to a new stage of terror in which they are trying to physically eliminate representatives of legitimate local Ukrainian authorities,” said the Ukrainian president.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Saturday accused Russia of committing “a crime against democracy itself” by abducting the mayor of Melitopol, a city in southern Ukraine that Russian troops seized in the early days of the invasion.

“This is obviously a sign of weakness of the invaders,” Zelenskyy said during a press conference, praising Melitopol Mayor Ivan Federov as someone “who bravely defends Ukraine and the members of his community.”

Russian forces, Zelenskyy warned, have “moved to a new stage of terror in which they are trying to physically eliminate representatives of legitimate local Ukrainian authorities.”

“The capture of the mayor of Melitopol is, therefore, a crime, not only against a particular person, against a particular community, and not only against Ukraine,” he continued. “It is a crime against democracy itself.”

According to Ukrainian officials, Russian soldiers “put a plastic bag” on Fedorov’s head and abducted him from the Melitopol city center on Friday, outraging local residents who turned out to protest the alleged kidnapping.

“Return the mayor!” townspeople shouted during a demonstration on Saturday. “Free the mayor!”

The New York Times reported that “nearly as soon as people gathered, the Russians moved to shut them down, arresting a woman who they said had organized the demonstration, according to two witnesses and the woman’s Facebook account.”

Locals in Melitopol, a southern Ukrainian town captured by Russia, protest against the reported kidnapping of their mayor. Video via Zelensky’s office pic.twitter.com/139ld4KKly
— max seddon (@maxseddon) March 12, 2022

Across Europe on Saturday, thousands of people took to the streets to protest Russia’s deadly assault on Ukraine, which shows no sign of abating after entering its third week.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and French President Emmanuel Macron both spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin by phone on Saturday, urging him to broker an immediate ceasefire and move toward a diplomatic resolution in Ukraine—but there was no indication that Putin was prepared to heed their demands.

“The conversation is part of ongoing international efforts to end the war in Ukraine,” a spokesperson for the German government said in a statement.

The Elysée, meanwhile, described the phone conversation with Putin as “very frank and difficult.”

The call came as Ukrainian officials braced for a potentially massive Russian assault on the capital city of Kyiv, which has thus far fought off Russia’s incursion attempts. The Associated Press reported that fighting “raged in the outskirts of the capital” as Russian forces continued bombarding and shelling other Ukrainian cities, including the strategic port of Mariupol.

“In Irpin, a suburb northwest of Kyiv, bodies lay out in the open Saturday on streets and in a park,” according to AP.

The U.K. Ministry of Defence has assessed that “the bulk of Russian ground forces” are now roughly 25 kilometers from the center of Kyiv. Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Zelenskyy, declared Friday that Kyiv is “ready to fight.”

Zelenskyy himself said Saturday that “if there are hundreds of thousands of people, who are now being mobilized by Russia, and they come with hundreds or thousands of tanks, they will take Kyiv.”

“We understand that,” he continued. “How Ukrainian people have resisted these invaders has already gone down in history. But we have no right to reduce the intensity of defense, no matter how difficult it may be for us.”

Originally published on Common Dreams by JAKE JOHNSON and republished under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

Check out Lynxotic on YouTube

Enjoy Lynxotic at Google News and Apple News on your iPhone, iPad or Mac.

Find books on Music, Movies & Entertainment and many other topics at Bookshop.org

Lynxotic may receive a small commission based on any purchases made by following links from this page

News, Observation, Politics, Tech

Technology is revolutionizing how intelligence is gathered and analyzed – and opening a window onto Russian military activity around Ukraine

February 17, 2022 Creative Commons

Above: Photo / Collage / Lynxotic / Adobe Stock

The U.S. has been warning for weeks about the possibility of Russia invading Ukraine, and threatening retaliation if it does. Just eight years after Russia’s incursion into eastern Ukraine and invasion of Crimea, Russian forces are once again mobilizing along Ukraine’s borders.

As the U.S. and other NATO member governments monitor Russia’s activities and determine appropriate policy responses, the timely intelligence they rely on no longer comes solely from multimillion-dollar spy satellites and spies on the ground.

Social media, big data, smartphones and low-cost satellites have taken center stage, and scraping Twitter has become as important as anything else in the intelligence analyst toolkit. These technologies have also allowed news organizations and armchair sleuths to follow the action and contribute analysis.

Governments still carry out sensitive intelligence-gathering operations with the help of extensive resources like the U.S. intelligence budget. But massive amounts of valuable information are publicly available, and not all of it is collected by governments. Satellites and drones are much cheaper than they were even a decade ago, allowing private companies to operate them, and nearly everyone has a smartphone with advanced photo and video capabilities.

As an intelligence and information operations scholar, I study how technology is producing massive amounts of intelligence data and helping sift out the valuable information.

Open-source intelligence

Through information captured by commercial companies and individuals, the realities of Russia’s military posturing are accessible to anyone via internet search or news feed. Commercial imaging companies are posting up-to-the-minute, geographically precise images of Russia’s military forces. Several news agencies are regularly monitoring and reporting on the situation. TikTok users are posting video of Russian military equipment on rail cars allegedly on their way to augment forces already in position around Ukraine. And internet sleuths are tracking this flow of information. https://www.youtube.com/embed/F6uiXdAiIig?wmode=transparent&start=0 Popular social media platforms like TikTok have become valuable sources of intelligence.

This democratization of intelligence collection in most cases is a boon for intelligence professionals. Government analysts are filling the need for intelligence assessments using information sourced from across the internet instead of primarily relying on classified systems or expensive sensors high in the sky or arrayed on the planet.

However, sifting through terabytes of publicly available data for relevant information is difficult. Knowing that much of the data could be intentionally manipulated to deceive complicates the task.

Enter the practice of open-source intelligence. The U.S. director of national intelligence defines Open-Source Intelligence, or OSINT, as the collection, evaluation and analysis of publicly available information. The information sources include news reports, social media posts, YouTube videos and satellite imagery from commercial satellite operators.

OSINT communities and government agencies have developed best practices for OSINT, and there are numerous free tools. Analysts can use the tools to develop network charts of, for example, criminal organizations by scouring publicly available financial records for criminal activity.

Private investigators are using OSINT methods to support law enforcement, corporate and government needs. Armchair sleuths have used OSINT to expose corruption and criminal activity to authorities. In short, the majority of intelligence needs can be met through OSINT.

Machine learning for intelligence

Even with OSINT best practices and tools, OSINT contributes to the information overload intelligence analysts have to contend with. The intelligence analyst is typically in a reactive mode trying to make sense of a constant stream of ambiguous raw data and information.

Machine learning, a set of techniques that allows computers to identify patterns in large amounts of data, is proving invaluable for processing OSINT information, particularly photos and videos. Computers are much faster at sifting through large datasets, so adopting machine learning tools and techniques to optimize the OSINT process is a necessity.

Identifying patterns makes it possible for computers to evaluate information for deception and credibility and predict future trends. For example, machine learning can be used to help determine whether information was produced by a human or by a bot or other computer program and whether a piece of data is authentic or fraudulent.

And while machine learning is by no means a crystal ball, it can be used – if it’s trained with the right data and has enough current information – to assess the probabilities of certain outcomes. No one is going to be able to use the combination of OSINT and machine learning to read Russian President Vladimir Putin’s mind, but the tools could help analysts assess how, for example, a Russian invasion of Ukraine might play out.

Technology has produced a flood of intelligence data, but technology is also making it easier to extract meaningful information from the data to help human intelligence analysts put together the big picture.

[The Conversation’s science, health and technology editors pick their favorite stories. Weekly on Wednesdays.]

Craig Nazareth, Assistant Professor of Practice of Intelligence & Information Operations, University of Arizona

This article is republished from The Conversation by Craig Nazareth, University of Arizona under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Check out Lynxotic on YouTube

Find books on Music, Movies & Entertainment and many other topics at our sister site: Cherrybooks on Bookshop.org

Enjoy Lynxotic at Apple News on your iPhone, iPad or Mac.

Lynxotic may receive a small commission based on any purchases made by following links from this page

Breaking News, Observation, Politics

Trump’s planned Disruptions for January 6th in Washington DC, at the US Capitol and in the Streets

January 5, 2021 Eric Cho

The D.C. showdown, from all angles, appears unlikely to be the start of Trump’s “revenge”, but rather the beginning of the end for him

His law suits crashing left and right, his own party “rebelling” against the endless repetition of unsubstantiated fraud claims, and then he pressures his own VP to reject the electoral college vote on January 6th, something that he has no legal power to do.

All in all it’s not been going well recently for Trump. The trend is very likely to continue as the various desperate and potentially illegal tactics play out in what appears to be building to some sort of crescendo on or before the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden on January 20th.

No, sir, he does not:

The Vice President has the power to reject fraudulently chosen electors.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 5, 2021

The Constitution does not give the vice president any such power, period.

“Proud Boys” leader Enrique Tarrio was arrested on destruction of property charges. The judge ordered him to stay out of Washington D.C. and then released him on his own recognizance. Unless he defies the judges orders, he will therefore not be present for the planned “wild” demonstrations that Trump has called for in Washington DC on January 6th.

Since carrying a gun is already against the law in Washington D.C., and Washington DC’s mayor has called in the the National Guard to help local authorities, as needed there is a concerted effort to minimize any potential for violence. According to various local officials, the troops will not be armed and they will be there to assist with crowd management and traffic control.

To borrow a phrase from Trump himself, this, most likely, will add up to a “nothing burger” and a lot of flag waving and yelling and swearing. Meanwhile the electoral count may be delayed by the various objectors but the outcome, a “landslide” win for Joe Biden, does not appear to be in any doubt.

And, although the Right has talked in terms of a “civil war” either in the larger sense of violently pitting Trump “forces” against the entire rest of the US population, and in another sense, between one wing of the Republican party and another, it remains unlikely that either one will be much of a “war” at all in the scariest sense of the word.

Looking at the most extreme opposing view, there is also the fact that all 10 living former secretaries of defense, both as Republicans and Democrats, issued a statement , in the form of an opinion article in The Washington Post questioning, implicitly, Trump’s willingness to follow his Constitutional duty to peacefully relinquish power on Jan. 20. Although they did not mention him by name, they referred to his failed law suits and attempts to overturn the election results.

This warning is meant, it appears, to also be a tacit rebuke of any current pentagon officials that may be considering aiding Trump’s possible plan to engage the armed forces or declare martial law, at any time before January 20th, if there is indeed such a plan in the works. The rumors and evidence, that there may indeed have been consideration of such a plan, involving ideas credited to Retired Lt. General Michael Flynn, former national security advisor and newly pardoned admitted felon, has been discussed in the media and by political insiders, and roundly rejected as both unconstitutional and alarming.

Needless to say, any election related actions involving the military, in any form whatsoever, domestically or internationally, potentially as some sort of distraction or diversion, would be highly dangerous and shocking, to say the least.

Trump tweeted an invitation to his followers to come to Washington D.C. on January 6th for a “wild time”. There are many tweets and a social media barrage to make this into a public spectacle, ardently in the hope that a large turn-out will somehow have an effect on the official counting of the electoral votes. It won’t.

https://twitter.com/TheRightMelissa/status/1343233186692820992?s=20

In typical Trump style, the plausibly-deniable-adjective “wild” is meant to imply, depending on which way you spin it, to be harmlessly “high-energy” or a kind of veiled threat of violence by the militant fringes of the far-right.

Many are on edge ahead of this attempt to turn the 6th into something dangerous sounding – and it is right to remain vigilant with all the bizarre twists that have already happened.

As we have stated before, in previous articles, whatever “malarky”, to use Joe Biden’s go to phrase, Trump and his wacko band of followers are planning they will fail and fail miserably.

The telegraphed, scheduled-coup attempt has awoken counter-measures, you can be certain

The massive failures can be easily predicted for one simple reason: everything beyond a “peaceful” and benign protest is against the law and we still have laws and a constitution. For each illegal act the response by the “state” will be 100 times larger and more consequential. And, of course, it won’t take more than a tiny response by law enforcement to quell this fake unrest.

”The massive failures can be easily predicted for one simple reason: everything beyond a “peaceful” and benign protest is against the law and we still have laws and a constitution.”
— D.L.

Trump will whine and bellow that it is not the sate, but rather the “deep-state” that is against him, as it has been (in his mind) all along. He will try to turn himself into some bizarre kind of martyr- hero who is at the same time also a carnival-barker clown.

In his mind, just as with the original run for the presidency, it’s a no lose situation. Either he somehow manages to succeed beyond all reason, or he can continue to monetize the chaos and his position as King of Fools, a world where his marks are, at the same time, his most ardent followers.

There will be no need for him to end up like Mussolini, or to be taken seriously with his tin-pot army. It’s highly likely now, actually, that the military, FBI, CIA and all the rest of the national security apparatus is receiving two messages, related to this publicly telegraphed “coup” attempt.

Be on heightened alert for any activities inspired by Trump’s, basically ridiculous, stunt, and at the same time, do not say or do anything to draw attention to its existence.

Even if there are small disruptions and illegal acts by his most crazed “supporters” these will be small, not-coordinated and local. Washington D.C. will be, as we have seen in Portland and elsewhere, a lot of pick-up trucks with waving flags and people wearing silly red hats.

There is no reason not to be on guard, considering the statements and thinly veiled threats that have been made by so many

This is not to say don’t remain alert. It is truly sad that this kind of behavior is being drummed up by Tump and the least informed and most gullible amongst the population. At the extreme edge, of course, organizations such as Qanon and Proud Boys are very deranged and should not be excused or tolerated in any way.

But the veiled threats that some kind of uprising to bring down democracy and execute a coup by a deluded minority is about to take place , both in the general population and among lawmakers, is just wishful thinking by a deranged man that still, technically, remains president for a few more weeks.

More likely, we will all be witness to Trump’s greatest day of failure in his entire life. Bigger than his 6 chapter 11 bankruptcies, bigger than his many humiliating business and personal defeats, this will be the day that every hope he has to milk some kind of benefit out of losing the 2020 election will die.

And, afterwards, starting on January 7th, 2021 he will have to decide wether he should flee the country and go into exile, or stay and try to avoid the arrests, convictions and incarcerations that are likely in his near future.

Subscribe to our newsletter for all the latest updates directly to your inBox.

Find books on Politics and many other topics at our sister site: Cherrybooks on Bookshop.org