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dontmeantobepoliticalbut · 7 months

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As the national security workforce ages, dementia impacting U.S. officials poses a threat to national security, according to a first-of-its-kind study by a Pentagon-funded think tank. The report, released this spring, came as several prominent U.S. officials trusted with some of the nation’s most highly classified intelligence experienced public lapses, stoking calls for resignations and debate about Washington’s aging leadership.

Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who had a second freezing episode last month, enjoys the most privileged access to classified information of anyone in Congress as a member of the so-called Gang of Eight congressional leadership. Ninety-year-old Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., whose decline has seen her confused about how to vote and experiencing memory lapses — forgetting conversations and not recalling a monthslong absence — was for years a member of the Gang of Eight and remains a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, on which she has served since 2001.

The study, published by the RAND Corporation’s National Security Research Division in April, identifies individuals with both current and former access to classified material who develop dementia as threats to national security, citing the possibility that they may unwittingly disclose government secrets.

“Individuals who hold or held a security clearance and handled classified material could become a security threat if they develop dementia and unwittingly share government secrets,” the study says.

As the study notes, there does not appear to be any other publicly available research into dementia, an umbrella term for the loss of cognitive functioning, despite the fact that Americans are living longer than ever before and that the researchers were able to identify several cases in which senior intelligence officials died of Alzheimer’s disease, a progressive brain disorder and the most common cause of dementia.

“As people live longer and retire later, challenges associated with cognitive impairment in the workplace will need to be addressed,” the report says. “Our limited research suggests this concern is an emerging security blind spot.”

Most holders of security clearances, a ballooning class of officials and other bureaucrats with access to secret government information, are subject to rigorous and invasive vetting procedures. Applying for a clearance can mean hourslong polygraph tests; character interviews with old teachers, friends, and neighbors; and ongoing automated monitoring of their bank accounts and other personal information. As one senior Pentagon official who oversees such a program told me of people who enter the intelligence bureaucracy, “You basically give up your Fourth Amendment rights.”

Yet, as the authors of the RAND report note, there does not appear to be any vetting for age-related cognitive decline. In fact, the director of national intelligence’s directive on continuous evaluation contains no mention of age or cognitive decline.

While the study doesn’t mention any U.S. officials by name, its timing comes amid a simmering debate about gerontocracy: rule by the elderly. Following McConnell’s first freezing episode, in July, Google searches for the term “gerontocracy” spiked.

“The President called to check on me,” McConnell said when asked about the first episode. “I told him I got sandbagged,” he quipped, referring to President Joe Biden’s trip-and-fall incident during a June graduation ceremony at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado, which sparked conservative criticisms about the 80-year-old’s own functioning.

While likely an attempt by McConnell at deflecting from his lapse, Biden’s age has emerged as a clear concern to voters, including Democrats. 69% of Democrats say Biden is “too old to effectively serve” another term, an Associated Press-NORC poll found last month. The findings were echoed by a CNN poll released last week that found that 67% of Democrats said the party should nominate someone else, with 49% directly mentioning Biden’s age as their biggest concern.

As Commander In Chief, the President is the nation’s ultimate classification authority, with the extraordinary power to classify and declassify information broadly. No other American has as privileged access to classified information as the president.

The U.S.’s current leadership is not only the oldest in history, but also the number of older people in Congress has grown dramatically in recent years. In 1981, only 4% of Congress was over the age of 70. By 2022, that number had spiked to 23%.

In 2017, Vox reported that a pharmacist had filled Alzheimer’s prescriptions for multiple members of Congress. With little incentive for an elected official to disclose such an illness, it is difficult to know just how pervasive the problem is. Feinstein’s retinue of staffers have for years sought to conceal her decline, having established a system to prevent her from walking the halls of Congress alone and risk having an unsupervised interaction with a reporter.

Despite the public controversy, there’s little indication that any officials will resign — or choose not to seek reelection.

After years of speculation about her retirement, 83-year-old Speaker Emerita Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., stunned observers when she announced on Friday that she would run for reelection, seeking her 19th term.

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plainlo-inthemorning · 2 years

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Hamish Linklater in Gaslit ep. 6

#‘my husband is not an intelligent man’#oh baby girl it’s all over #that…face #hoping for Jeb’s sake that the bathroom facilities at the senate are top notch #haimgruder #gaslit starz #hamish linklater #gaslit #jeb magruder #hamishlinklateredit

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carolinemillerbooks · 7 months

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New Post has been published on Books by Caroline Miller

New Post has been published on https://www.booksbycarolinemiller.com/musings/the-revolution-of-the-species/

The Revolution Of The Species

Senator John Fetterman (D) recently shared this observation with the public. You all should need to know that America is not sending their best and brightest to Washington, D. C. Congressional in-fighting, and scandals among the elected elite support the senator’s view. Bureaucrats add to the confusion. As specialists in their fields, they can run circles around the people’s representatives. For example, while Congress squabbles about sending money to support Ukraine’s war, the Secretary of the Treasury, Janet Yellen, proposes that President Joe Biden bypass the government’s legislative branch and delegate Russia’s frozen assets to Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Adding to the fog is technology, an industry politicians little know or understand. As a result, innovators in Silicon Valley have pursued Artificial Intelligence (AI) unfettered to a degree that it has become as great a danger to us as the atomic bomb. In 2018, the Brookings Institute issued a report on the benefits and dangers of AI and provided recommendations to ensure the technology did no harm. It collected dust like most reports. But now, five years later, tech giants, have come running to Congress seeking regulations, fearing they have released an evil genie from its bottle and hoping to spread the blame. While the tech world seeks legal protection from the potential damage their invention can do, the rest of us should consider what human traits these innovators have passed along to their powerful machines. Given our current capacity to blow up the planet’s resources, including polluting its air, what could go wrong? The advent of AI will alter our lives, no doubt, but it won’t create a blank slate upon which to build our utopian dream. As historian Timothy Snyder warns, we can’t avoid dragging into our new world the debris of the past. Economic inequality will be one such and should social mobility die, the scholar predicts democracy [will] give way to oligarchy, opening the door to tyranny. Donald Trump has given us a glimpse of that future, a society where citizens are encouraged to sleepwalk through their existence, obeying their leaders without question. What these sheep mustn’t see, says Snyder, is that most of those who held power in the past will continue to hold it in the future, making changes wrought by insurrections or revolutions largely an illusion. True, the technological revolution has brought a world of information to our fingertips, but the price has been the loss of our privacy — data that the oligarchs of AI gather and sell for their immense profit. Elon Must is one of these. Having accumulated much of the world’s capital, he imagines he owns the rest of us and dares to wade into international politics, changing the course of our lives without the authority of a single vote cast at the ballot box. Such hubris leaves us to ponder the legacy of these innovators. They have given us convenience and access to endless information, but they are the purveyors of disinformation and deep fakes too. By these means, society finds itself not merely divided but fractured, and to a degree that makes determining the public good seem impossible. Will their invention, AI, come to sense the frailty of our species? As repositories of all that we know, will they see how we have dehumanized ourselves by our obsession with money, pleasure, and the pursuit of war? If so, will these lungless servants become our masters, caring nothing about us and our environment? I doubt they will miss the meadowlark ‘s song. Forgive these dystopian questions, but it’s time to consider our status as naked apes. The universe takes little notice of us. And, Nature appears to be turning its back on our species. Or, perhaps, we were the first to turn away, preferring to focus on ourselves and the petty differences in our religions, the color of our skin, and our varying lifestyles. When inconsequential variations like these become matters of life and death, are we worthy of respect even from our miraculous machines? More likely, they will judge us against other creatures on the planet and find we are not the best and brightest. I must say that I have rarely seen a community come together in order to meet a common need in a manner as beautiful as that of a handful of birds at a feeder. Craig D. Lounsbrough

#architects of AI #artificial intelligence #Brookings Institute on AI #Congressional scandals #Craig D. Lounsbrough #dystopian question on AI #Elon Musk #Funding Ukraine war #Janet Yellen #regulation of AI #Senator John Fetterman #Timothy Snyder

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jbfly46 · 10 months

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AI is a Threat to Those in Power

Those in power are reliant on their biases for their power and an unbiased AI is a threat to their grip on power.

#artificial intelligence #Congress #Senate #Supreme Court #United States #NATO #UN #misinformation #disinformation

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auroraluciferi · 1 year

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4/19/2023 Senate hearing on UFO’s and UAP’s

This is the second congressional hearing in 50 years on this subject that follows testimony from intelligence and military officials in May of 2022, the transcript of which can be found here

#2023 #us #united states #ufo #ufos #uap #uaps #AARO #senate #committee #hearing #testimony #extraterrestrial #life #intelligence #military #kirsten gillibrand #joni ernst #sean kirkpatrick

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tomework · 2 years

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I’ve been looking for this one for a while. I misplaced it and couldn’t find it to save my life until I started tidying up an untouched corner of the house.

“The Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture: Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program” by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence

I picked this one up along with “the Mueller Report” from the Spy Museum in Washington DC a couple years back.

Rather horrific read, again like the Mueller Report a significant portion of it is redacted. Names, places, time frames, things of that nature. Still, the things that WERE published changed the course of history.

A very specific read for a very specific reader. If you’re into that kind of literature this is a fascinating read.

#tomework #book review #nonfiction #history #senate intelligence committee #torture #the cia #enhanced interrogation #blacksite #interrogation #report on torture #intelligence committee report on torture

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defensenow · 26 days

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youtube

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deepakbaroli · 1 month

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US intelligence officials told senators that WuXi AppTec, a Chinese company, shared data from a US client with Beijing. This disclosure raises worries about potential data breaches and emphasizes the dangers of sharing data across borders.

#China #technology #usa #intelligence #Senators

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minnesotafollower · 5 months

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U.S. Accuses Cuba of Attempted Interference in U.S. Elections in 2022

On December 18, 2023, the U.S. intelligence community released a redacted report that claimed the Cuban government conducted influence operations in the United States “aimed at denigrating specific U.S. candidates in Florida” during the 2022 midterm elections and that “Cuban officials worked to build relationships with members of the American media who held critical views of Havana’s critics in…

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#China #Cuba #Iran #Rep. Carlos Gimenez #Rep. María Elvira Salazar #Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart.#Russia #U.S. elections (2022)#U.S. National Intelligence Council #U.S. Senator Marco Rubio

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hislop3 · 5 months

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Humana, United Health: Class Action Suits over AI use in Coverage Determination

It was only a matter of time before litigation came forward regarding the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in primarily, Medicare Advantage plans, where coverage denials/determinations are at issue. This week, a class action suit dropped in the U.S. Circuit Court of Western Kentucky against Humana. A link to the suit is here:…

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dontmeantobepoliticalbut · 2 years

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Remember her?

Here's an Update:

An abandoned charity for schoolchildren in the Dominican Republic. A mothballed housing development in small-town Quebec. A litany of companies that seem to exist in name only. An elaborate infiltration of Mar-a-Lago. A long list of lawsuits, counter-lawsuits, restraining orders, and criminal charges.

And now, a mysterious shooting linked to one of the most infamous figures in Montreal’s organized crime world.

At the middle of it all is Valeriy Tarasenko, who first gained notoriety over his links to Inna Yashchyshyn, the fake heiress who waltzed into Donald Trump’s Florida estate last year and posed in a photo with the former U.S. President in Mar-a-Lago. After news of the security breach made headlines around the world, Tarasenko turned against Yashchyshyn, his former business partner and alleged ex-lover, accusing her of being a “con artist” and spy who worked for Russian President Vladimir Putin. Yashchyshyn, in turn, accused Tarasenko of being the abusive, manipulative mastermind behind the bizarre plot.

Now, Tarasenko seems to have fallen into a bewildering scandal of his own. Last Friday, the Russian-born entrepreneur was shot in the parking lot of a luxury resort in the sleepy Quebec town of Estérel, an hour north of Montreal. He survived, but suffered significant injuries. Tarasenko’s lawyer says his client knows the man who was initially charged with the shooting, a notorious figure in Montreal’s underworld.

Two sources who spoke to The Daily Beast say Tarasenko’s business activities have long been a recipe for disaster. According to multiple judgements in the Quebec court system, Tarasenko and his ex-wife, Anna Kovalenko, who remained his business partner after their apparent split, took money from a variety of sources—money that never seemed to go to the business and charitable purposes for which they were intended.

Just what was Valeriy Tarasenko up to?

Tarasenko arrived in Montreal with his only daughter in early 2007. Kovalenko, his ex-wife at the time, had arrived a year earlier and enrolled at Concordia University to study political science. Their resettlement was financed entirely by Kovalenko’s stepparents, Olga and Yury Manakhov.

A retired Soviet Navy captain, Yury Manakhov had gone on to found a Moscow-based fishing company and, according to court filings, “made a fortune.” That wealth helped him enter the bureaucratic fast lane when he began the process of immigrating to Canada around 2007.

In the years that followed, Manakhov sent his stepdaughter more than $1 million. That bought her a condo in Montreal, another in Florida, a house in the Dominican Republic, a luxury car, and an array of other expenses and gifts.

Around that time, Kovalenko remarried Tarasenko while her relationship with her stepfather soured. In court filings, Manakhov declared the newly rejoined couple “lazy.”

While Manakhov largely cut off his stepdaughter and son-in-law, the support didn’t end entirely. In 2010, he purchased six empty lots in Estérel, for around $25,000, and transferred them to Kovalenko.

From their arrival in Canada, Kovalenko and Tarasenko began registering corporations, although they never seemed to carry on much business. In 2007, they founded Bastion-M, a holding company registered to their condo in downtown Montreal. In 2010, they registered another corporation: the United Hearts of Mercy.

While the United Hearts of Mercy advertised itself as a “a registered charitable organization,” it was never registered as a charity in Canada, and 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status wasn’t granted in the United States until 2015.

The organization claimed to have done charitable work in Haiti, Ukraine, and the entire continent of Africa—at one point claiming that it was collecting funds to help rebuild the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, after a devastating fire in 2019—but there is little publicly available evidence of such expansive work. A Facebook page for the charity shows volunteers, wearing United Hearts of Mercy T-shirts, posing with schoolchildren in the Dominican Republic (where Kovalenko owned a home) and handing out takeout containers to street-involved people in Miami.

In 2011, Manakhov drew up a loan agreement with his stepdaughter, formally requesting she repay $370,000. She ignored it. The litigation would be tied up in court for years, with Manakhov moving to seize his stepdaughters’ various properties and Kovalenko going to court to prevent those moves. Manakhov told the court that his stepdaughter committed acts of “theft, signature forgery, bank fraud, automobile fire and threats.” The court would ultimately side with Manakhov, ordering the seizure and sale of two of Kovalenko’s condos and the plot of land in Estérel.

According to court filings, it was around this time that Kovalenko divorced Tarasenko once more—though sources who spoke to The Daily Beast said the pair continued to “work” together through those years.

One of the earliest directors of the United Hearts of Mercy, a fellow Russian émigré who resigned from the organization after approximately a year on the board, filed suit against Kovalenko in 2015. The former director alleged that he lent Kovalenko nearly $350,000, in cash, that was never repaid.

That money, Kovalenko said, would be used to build a housing development on the property she had been gifted by her stepfather, in Estérel. That development, as of last year, had still not broken ground.

According to the IRS, the charity took in no more than $50,000 per year between 2015 and 2020.

For all their years in Canada, it wasn’t clear what business Tarasenko and Kovalenko were actually involved in.

The sources familiar with the couple said that despite their troubled business dealings, the pair always seemed to have money. Court records show Kovalenko took out $75,000 in loans from one friend, an amount she was not asked to repay.

There was, however, one business ambition that seemed to get off the ground: an elaborate plan to kickstart a music career for their daughter, Sofiya, under the stage name “Sofiya Rothschild.” To promote her, the couple registered the company Rothschild Media Label in Florida in 2018.

And who did they name as director of the company? None other than Inna Yashchyshyn, the fake heiress who snuck into Mar-a-Lago.

Yashchyshyn’s role in the Rothschild Media Label was meant to help Sofiya become a pop star by infiltrating high society and creating buzz for Sofiya’s music career. Incredibly, the plan worked: Before long, Yashchyshyn was pictured on the golf course with Donald Trump as “Anna Rothschild.”

While Yashchyshyn’s hobnobbing may have originally been a success, her presence later raised alarms in Trump’s entourage. The infiltration of Mar-a-Lago was so seamless that Senator Mark Warner, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told the Post-Gazette he would raise the alarming lack of security during his briefings with the intelligence community.

As Yashchyshyn’s infiltration made headlines, and drew scrutiny of investigators in two countries on their business relationship with Tarasenko, the pair had a public falling out.

Images of seemingly forged passports, with Yashchyshyn’s pseudonym, were published. The OCCRP reported that the FBI was looking at evidence suggesting the United Hearts of Mercy—to which Yashcyshyn had been appointed a director—was a front for money laundering. Tarasenko accused Yashchyshyn of being a spy, without providing any evidence. The fake heiress, in turn, claimed she was the victim of a jealousy-driven “smearing” campaign by Tarasenko, alleging he was a stalker and abuser who had “forced” her into his business schemes.

When she was contacted by the New York Post, Yashchyshyn bristled at the idea that she was working for Russia. Yashchyshyn was born in Ukraine. Her brother, the Post reported, was called up to defend their country after Russia’s unprovoked invasion earlier this year.

“What boils my blood most is people even thinking I’m Russian or a Russian agent,” she told the Post. “Russian people don’t exist to me since they invaded my country and killed my family and took homes.”

In the fallout, payment processor Stripe kicked the United Hearts of Mercy off their platform for routing donations through stolen Hong Kong credit cards, per the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. She appears in many of the charity’s photos.

The FBI has conducted multiple interviews regarding Yashchyshyn and the United Hearts of Mercy, while the Sûreté du Québec—the provincial police force—confirmed to the OCCRP and Post-Gazette that they are investigating the charity.

In the meantime, Sofiya’s music career hasn’t exactly taken off. While she has racked up tens of thousands of Instagram followers—posing in front of luxury cars, boarding private jets, and with Chris Brown, while never showing her face—only one of her singles has surpassed 100,000 listens on Spotify. In one poorly edited interview, Sofiya boasts, “I have my own record label, Rothschild Media Label.” The only other artist on the Rothschild label is Kualify, a hip-hop artist from Montreal.

The exact nature of Yashchyshyn’s relationship with the family is unclear. According to reporting from the OCCRP and the Post-Gazette, Yashchyshyn was originally hired by Tarasenko as a nanny, before becoming a business associate. In a messy legal dispute that played out in a Miami court, Yashchyshyn would claim that she and Tarasenko were lovers. Tarasenko denies it.

Last year, Yashchyshyn filed to obtain a restraining order against Tarasenko, alleging he had threatened her and held her hostage. Tarasenko filed to obtain his own restraining order in return, alleging that Yashchyshyn had abused his daughter.

Florida-based lawyer Steven Veinger told The Daily Beast that both Tarasenko and Kovalenko hired him last spring to litigate the case—they wanted to tell the court that Yashchyshyn was a fraudster, a scam artist, and possibly tied to organized crime. The case was ultimately settled last year.

While Yashchyshyn and Sofiya were based in Miami, one source told The Daily Beast that Kovalenko was still in Montreal, “in contact with some young guy,” who had been part of a “gang.”

On Oct. 6, a man in a black T-shirt emblazoned with a large white skull and the number 81 rang Yury Manakhov’s doorbell.

A video of the exchange, recorded by the Manakhovs’ home security system and obtained by La Press, captures the exchange.

“My name is Richard,” the man tells Manakhov, who was celebrating his 76th birthday that afternoon. “I’d just like to speak to you for a minute—by the way, happy birthday. I want to talk to you about Anna.” Met with confusion, he adds: “Anna, your stepdaughter.”

“Who are you?” Manakhov asks.

“Honestly, I’m a very good friend of hers,” he adds. The whole exchange lasts less than two minutes, with the mystery man insisting that “I’m trying to make all the charges drop.”

While it’s not quite clear what he’s referring to, La Presse revealed that the man in the skull T-shirt was, in fact, Richard Goodridge—an infamous affiliate of multiple Montreal street gangs, including the Hell’s Angels motorcycle club. The 81 on his T-shirt corresponds to the gang’s initials: H and A.

Just a day after he arrived on Manakhov’s doorstep, Tarasenko was shot. Police arrested Goodridge the following day—only to release him shortly thereafter. “The analysis of his version [of events] did not allow us to make accusations for the moment,” a spokesperson for the provincial police told The Daily Beast.

Tarasenko knew Goodridge, according to Veinger, his lawyer, and was likely at the Estérel resort to meet him that night. “He indicated he recognized the individual,” Veinger says. “He feels like he was set up.”

When Tarasenko arrived at the resort, a black car pulled up with three men inside—one opened fire and struck Tarasenko multiple times. “This was planned, this wasn’t a random thing,” Veigner says.

According to news station TVA, Tarasenko had been threatened in the past. A note scrawled in red across his SUV warned: “CLOSE MOUTH OR I KILL SOFIYA + ANA [sic].”

The Sûreté du Québec told The Daily Beast that while Goodridge has been released from custody, they have referred the record of his interrogation to prosecutors and are continuing to investigate the shooting.

Tarasenko, meanwhile, is in the process of fleeing Quebec—but not, his lawyer stresses, because he is trying to evade justice.

“He doesn’t feel safe there,” Veigner says.

But, the lawyer adds, if the cops call: “He’s willing to cooperate.”

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