I’m going to shovel out some opinions, here, and I will not be bothering (entirely) to support them with references and argumentation. Let me put that out front, since I am going to make some very negative assumptions about some people, and may even vent my spleen. Or, air it out, anyway.
Back in 2022, I made a dagger blade, when I was out at Dragonfly Forge in Oregon. I posted about it [here] when I got home with it.
Back in the mid 90s I had an unusual experience, in which I was caught in the blast-corona of Operation Sundevil – the Secret Service’s attempt to gain relevance in cybersecurity [wik]. My role was small but it made me realize that the government, at that time, was ignorant enough that they could easily be stampeded into doing stupid things, a form of “terrorism by stupid cop” which I later re-framed as “a denial of clue attack.”
One of the characteristics of secret government programs is that when they’re outed, the name gets changed and that’s about it. “We currently have no program by the name COINTELPRO” does not mean that the program has been anything but renamed.
I used to work for a consultancy called Trusted Information Systems, back in 1990-1994, which was a big contractor for DARPA and NSA. That was how I wound up building security systems in some pretty interesting places including the Clinton White House.
Quoted en bloc from Counterpunch [counterpunch] by Jeffrey StClair.
[Warning: Cops]
Apparently some parts of the “trucker convoy” have evaporated, due to disinterest.
How’s the defunding going?
It’s an interesting problem: if a federal agency claims the authority to regulate something, then they can be sued when they fail to discharge that responsibility effectively. My prediction is that this sort of thing won’t go far: there will be some new findings by the activist supreme court that there’s some theory like “qualified immunity” that applies.