Despite his reputation as a geopolitical kingmaker, Kissinger was never able to fully impose total U.S. authority upon Israel, but he did seek to leverage U.S. influence — sometimes against what the right-wing Likud party viewed as its interests.

In the 1970s, Kissinger was so hated by the Likud party, which now controls Israel’s far-right coalition government, that some of its members tried to have him assassinated, according to a news report from the time.

“A die-hard clique of Israeli right-wingers has put out a $150,000 ‘contract’ for the assassination of Secretary of State Kissinger,” the New York Daily News reported in 1977, citing senior State Department officials. When reports of a possible hit on Kissinger first came out, it was believed to be the work of Palestinian militants, but senior officials told the paper that they were certain that the threat was emanating from the Likud party.

The Likud hard-liners who put up the money — described as “a small, radical splinter faction within Israel’s Likud opposition bloc” — were reportedly upset at Kissinger’s diplomacy around the end of the 1973 Arab–Israeli War. Kissinger had been instrumental in disengagement agreements with Egypt and Syria that saw Israel withdrawing from territories it had conquered. On the Israeli side, Likud’s rival Labor Party had worked with Kissinger to agree to the compromises.

The 1973 war had also led to a damaging oil embargo by Arab states against the U.S., and Kissinger was said to be willing to cut any deal necessary to turn the spigot back on — which the 1974 disengagement deals accomplished.

Of the hit, the Daily News reported, “The motive was said to be revenge against Kissinger for allegedly selling out Israel during his Mideast shuttle diplomacy.”

The Likud strongly denied the allegation at the time, as did the State Department. (The reported plot to assassinate Kissinger is just one of several instances in which Israelis displayed intense hostility toward their strongest ally, including a 1967 attack on an American spy ship and an espionage operation in the 1980s.)

While Kissinger succeeded in his short-term goal of ending the oil embargo and returning the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt, his efforts at statesmanship intentionally obstructed efforts to find a long-term solution to the permanent occupation of Palestine.

As my colleague Jon Schwarz wrote today, Kissinger went against Richard Nixon’s own directive to find a way for lasting peace when everything and anything was on the table. Kissinger believed that a constant state of conflict and instability granted America an upper hand in the Middle East. “My assessment is a costly victory [for Israel] without a disaster is the best,” Kissinger told his subordinates at the onset of the Yom Kippur War.

Despite his Jewish heritage, Kissinger showed little regard for the Israeli state or Jewish people beyond their utility to the American empire. Helping Soviet Jews escape to the United States to avoid the Russian crackdown was “not an objective of American foreign policy,” Kissinger told Nixon in 1973, “and if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.”

Whatever animosity once existed between the Likud party and the former secretary of state was long past them. Today, the party is led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was first elected to the post in 1996. (That election was prompted by the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, who many believe was the last great hope for enduring peace in Israel.)

Netanyahu has taken a page out of the Kissinger playbook, using unending conflict to cling to power and inviting ever more extremist politicians into the Likud coalition. In September, just weeks before Israel launched its all-out war on Gaza, the pair had an affectionate meeting in New York.

Israel’s bombing campaign on the Gaza Strip in recent weeks rivals the concentrated bombing of Vietnam and Cambodia that Kissinger oversaw decades ago.

The post Members of Israel’s Ruling Likud Party Once Planned to Assassinate Henry Kissinger appeared first on The Intercept.

“There’s an Israel PR blitz happening this week facilitated by a handful of senators,” said a source familiar with the meetings in the upper chamber. “Practically all of the briefings on this issue these last few weeks have been members-only,” meaning congressional staff and the public are not welcome.

One briefing exclusive to members of the Senate scheduled on Monday and organized by Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., involved three senior Israel Defense Forces officers stationed at the Israeli Embassy.

“Sen. Duckworth would like to invite your boss to a last-minute meeting with Israeli Defense officials to discuss Israel’s strategy, how they are waging the war and what to expect in the day after the scenarios,” according to a memo obtained by The Intercept. (Duckworth did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

The briefings are coming as Israel faces an international backlash over its assault on the Gaza Strip. Israel says it is seeking to eliminate Hamas, the Palestinian terror group that killed hundreds of Israeli civilians in its October 7 surprise attack.

The Intercept has learned of around half a dozen events coordinated with Israeli officials during recent weeks. The Intercept reviewed materials relating to four of the briefings. Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, who said he had not spoken with the Israel Defense Forces in recent days, told The Intercept, “I know there are going to be some folks from the IDF here tomorrow or the day after to brief members of Congress.” Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., told The Intercept, “I have had private conversations with IDF officials but I didn’t attend any briefings.” (She declined to comment on her meetings.)

In response to the Hamas attack, Israel launched airstrikes against Gaza and undertook a ground invasion. Israel’s offensive has faced criticisms for its death toll, with more than 14,000 Palestinians dying, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, and enormous damage to Gaza, one of the most densely populated places on Earth. Over the weekend, Hamas and Israel agreed to a “pause” in fighting to allow for the release of Israeli hostages in Gaza in exchange for humanitarian aid for Palestinians. The temporary truce is set to expire, but talks for an extension are ongoing.

“The IDF didn’t anticipate that there would be this much backlash to Israel.”

Calls for a ceasefire on Capitol Hill started slowly but have gained steam in recent weeks. As of Tuesday morning, a total of 43 members from both chambers of Congress had called for a ceasefire. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., a progressive who had publicly sided with Israel after the October 7 attack, said on Tuesday he may put forward a bill conditioning aid to Israel, The Intercept reported.

The shifts spurred the increased pace of congressional briefings with IDF officials, some of which were hastily arranged.

“The IDF didn’t anticipate that there would be this much backlash to Israel,” said the source, who asked for anonymity because they were not authorized to speak. “And, with the prospect of an even longer-term ceasefire, are putting together an all-hands-on-deck PR blitz to keep Senators at bay.”

Frequent and Secret Briefings

While members of Congress and their staff frequently hold meetings with foreign officials, including military officials, the invitations for briefings with current and former Israeli officials have come in rapid succession over recent weeks.

“It isn’t entirely unusual for senators to have member-only meetings or briefings on sensitive or classified issues,” said the source. “What is unusual is the frequency with which they’ve happened recently — especially this week — the secrecy involved, and the single-issue focus.”

Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., appeared to suggest some of the briefings were secret. “My friend, I would not speak about those classified meetings,” Booker told The Intercept when asked about the IDF briefings. (None of the materials reviewed by The Intercept indicated the briefings were classified.)

Briefers in the closed-door meetings were to include several senior Israeli military officials stationed at the embassy, including Maj. Gen. Tal Kelman, former head of the strategic directorate and Iran Division; Col. Itai Shapira, a former senior Israeli Defense Intelligence officer; and Lt. Col. Yotam Shefer of the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, the Israeli military unit responsible for mediating between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. (The Israeli Embassy referred questions to the IDF, which did not immediately respond.)

One briefing was scheduled to take place in-person on Capitol Hill for an hour on Monday evening.

Another briefing, scheduled for Tuesday, is slated to have the former chief of Israeli military intelligence, retired Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin, brief Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M. Yadlin has issued fiery statements following the Hamas attack, saying that Hamas “will pay like the Nazis paid in Europe.” (Heinrich and Yadlin did not immediately respond to requests for comment.)

Another briefing, scheduled for Tuesday morning and organized by Sens. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., and Marco Rubio, R-Fla., is a closed screening of 47 minutes of footage of Hamas atrocities committed on October 7.

“It isn’t a coincidence that these briefings are now happening as public opinion is shifting.”

“It’s important to bear witness in real time,” Sen. Jacky Rosen, D-Nev., who helped arrange the viewing, told reporters. “Sometime in the future, we’ll go — there’ll be a museum, there’ll be a memorial, there’ll be another Yad Vashem or Holocaust museum.”

“It isn’t a coincidence that these briefings are now happening as public opinion is shifting and the pressure to corral lawmakers,” the source said, “and the recipients of their campaign contributions.”

The post With Ceasefire Calls Growing, Israeli Military Launches Closed-Door “PR Blitz” on Capitol Hill appeared first on The Intercept.

Sanders spoke to The Intercept minutes before a Senate Democratic caucus luncheon, where the question of placing conditions on $14 billion in aid to Israel is on the agenda. “Yes,” he replied gruffly when asked if there was a chance he would push for a floor vote. 

Sanders’s comment comes as the death toll in Gaza is around 15,000 — with some estimating it to have exceeded 20,000 — and amid a temporary pause in the fighting between Israel and Hamas. The Vermont senator has thus far refrained from calling for a permanent ceasefire, a key demand of activist groups that has broad support among the American public and has gained traction among members of Congress. He has instead only gone as far as calling for humanitarian pauses in fighting. 

The Department of Defense has already sent a variety of heavy weapons and ammunition to Israel to support its continuing war in Gaza, according to a leaked list obtained by Bloomberg. Congress is now seeking to approve another $14 billion, requested by President Joe Biden, to provide advanced weapons systems, support for artillery and ammunition production, and more projectiles for Israel’s Iron Dome system. 

Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., has also called for restrictions on weapons transfers to Israel. 

“We regularly condition our aid to allies based upon compliance with US law and international law,” Murphy said on Sunday. “I think it’s very consistent with the ways in which we have dispensed aid, especially during wartime, to allies, for us to talk about making sure that the aid we give Ukraine or the aid we give Israel is used in accordance with human rights laws.”

One way the U.S. could place conditions on the aid is through what is known as the Leahy law, named after Sanders’s longtime colleague and former senator from Vermont Patrick Leahy. The Leahy law prohibits U.S. aid to foreign military units that commit human rights violations. 

While the idea faces opposition within the Democratic caucus, and the U.S. has never before placed conditions on its billions of dollars in military aid to Israel, Biden seems to be considering the proposition. He told reporters the day after Thanksgiving — at the start of the temporary truce — that conditioning aid is a “worthwhile thought,” adding that “I don’t think, if I started off with that, we’d [have] ever gotten to where we are today.”

When pressed on whether he might use his position on the Senate Budget Committee to push for reining in the Israeli military’s onslaught, Sanders said, “there are ways we can approach it and that is what we are exploring right now.” 

The post Bernie Sanders May Push Vote on Conditioning Aid to Israel in Coming Weeks appeared first on The Intercept.

The resurrection of the death penalty is a long-standing goal of Israel’s far-right politicians past and present, whose efforts intensified at the beginning of this year with the introduction of a bill that would mandate the death penalty for Palestinians found guilty of terrorism in Israeli courts. 

The bill, which garnered preliminary approval from Netanyahu’s government, defines terrorism as “the purpose of harming the State of Israel and the rebirth of the Jewish people in its homeland,” suggesting it will be applied largely toward Palestinians committing terrorism against Israelis, and not the other way around. While existing law already sanctions state executions, the proposed legislation would make the death penalty mandatory in some cases, and it would also remove safeguards preventing executions being handed down by military tribunals that oversee the administration of laws in the occupied West Bank.

In the wake of Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, right-wing Israeli politicians have trumpeted the bill as a means to execute the Palestinians detained for their role in the assault and to enshrine Israel’s right to execute people who carry out future attacks. At the same time, family members of the hostages taken from southern Israeli kibbutzim have condemned the move as political theater, intended solely to score political points while simultaneously enraging the Hamas militants who control the hostages’ fate. The debate over the bill came amid Israeli negotiations with Hamas over the release of captives in Gaza in exchange for Palestinians who are imprisoned in Israel; the two sides reached a deal, which includes a temporary ceasefire, on Wednesday.

“Now they will add more ways to kill Palestinians, once again, without real due process.”

Given the expansive definition of terrorism adopted by Israeli politicians and military commanders, the bill could have far-reaching consequences. Israel has wielded terrorism as justification for wide-ranging suppression campaigns, including the branding of some half-dozen Palestinian civil society organizations “terrorists” despite repeated failures to demonstrate any basis for their accusations. 

“This is another political escalation toward death, violence, and chaos by the far-right Israeli government,” Raed Jarrar, advocacy director at the human rights organization DAWN, told The Intercept. “They have sentenced thousands of Palestinians to death in Gaza with no due process by dropping bombs on their homes. They have killed hundreds in the West Bank with no due process by gunning them down in the streets. Now they will add more ways to kill Palestinians, once again, without real due process.” 

In March, the Knesset approved a preliminary version of the bill, which requires three more rounds of voting before it can pass into law. On Monday, the national security committee took up the bill for a hearing, and was met with furious opposition by families who claimed the bill would only endanger the lives of their family members held hostage by Hamas. During the hearing, screaming matches erupted between politicians and aggrieved families. 

Gil Dickmann, whose cousin Carmel Gat was taken captive by Hamas, pleaded in the committee to halt the bill. “I asked you already last week and I begged you to stop. I begged you not to make any kind of hay out of us or our suffering,” Dickmann said, according to reporting in the Times of Israel. 

“Please do not have a hearing now on the gallows, please do not have a hearing now on the death penalty. Not when the lives of our loved ones are in the balance, not when the sword is on their necks. I am here in the name of Carmel and for her to remain alive. Please, choose life and ensure they come home alive and whole.” 

After the hearing, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right politician who leads the Jewish Power party, hugged Dickman in a photo-op intended to depict his support for the families. In response, Dickmann wrote online:

“I told you: Don’t hug me but you hugged [me] anyway. I told you: Don’t endanger our beloved ones but you endangered them anyway. All for a picture. Itamar Ben Gvir, you have no boundaries. Everyone sees that you’re making a circus out of the blood of our families. It’s not too late. Stop.”

Yarden Gonen, whose sister was being held in Gaza, told Knesset members that they were “playing along with [the] mind games” of Hamas,” The Guardian reported. “And in return we would get pictures of our loved ones murdered, ended, with the state of Israel and not them [Hamas] being blamed for it. … Don’t pursue this until after they are back here,” she said. “Don’t put my sister’s blood on your hands.”

The proposed legislation would remove an existing requirement that only a three-person panel composed of officials with the rank of lieutenant colonel can hand down a death sentence. Allowing more junior military personnel to hand down such sentences has the potential of putting the determination of who lives and who dies in the hands of more radicalized soldiers. Within the Israeli military, political radicalization tends to follow an inverse relationship with military rank — a dynamic not dissimilar to that of the U.S. military. 

The law would also take away the military chief of staff’s power to commute death sentences, which has occurred multiple times in Israel’s short history. The death sentence has long existed in Israeli law as a punishment for war crimes, but it has not been seen through to completion since 1962, with the execution of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann.

Earlier this year, United Nations experts condemned the legislative push. Contrary to the justification provided by right-wing politicians claiming it will serve as a deterrent, the experts said, carrying out executions in the occupied territories will only fuel hostilities and detract from ongoing peace efforts. 

For years, right-wing politicians like Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich have made inflammatory comments about the death penalty, stoking the bloodlust driving their hyper radicalized base. In 2015, upon entering the Knesset, Smotrich — who now oversees parts of the vast Israeli security apparatus occupying the West Bank — told a news anchor that he was prepared to carry out state-sanctioned executions himself.

“I am willing to be the one who carries out that sentence. It will be difficult for me. It’s not easy. But if this is the right decision, if this is what’s right for the people of Israel and what’s right for the state of Israel, and it passes all the judicial proceedings, I am certainly prepared to be the one,” said Smotrich, amid an effort in the Knesset to pass an execution bill. “You’re ready to be the hangman?” the news anchor asked in disbelief. Smotrich replied, “I am prepared to be the one who carries out this suitable and just sentence.”

The post After Hamas Attack, Israeli Politicians Want to Empower Military Tribunals to Execute Palestinians appeared first on The Intercept.

In the background, Manchin has been propping up a new third-way organization. Along with his daughter Heather Bresch, he has been soliciting funds for a new nonprofit that, according to documents reviewed by The Intercept, is being overseen by the senator’s longtime associates who became significant power players in West Virginia after receiving plum appointments during Manchin’s rise to the top of the state Democratic Party. 

Bresch, a former pharmaceutical executive, registered Americans Together in July as a 501(c)(4), a legal classification that means it is not required to publicly disclose its donors. While the senator’s daughter has said the organization will be set apart from Manchin’s political endeavors, few restrictions exist on how it can spend its money. Should Manchin run for president on the No Labels ticket, Americans Together could work to boost his candidacy or oppose other presidential campaigns through what’s known as an independent expenditure. But the nonprofit could also provide Manchin a financial cushion with few spending restrictions should he leave politics altogether.

Manchin and Bresch did not respond to requests for comment.

Craig Holman, a lobbying and ethics expert at Public Citizen, told The Intercept that dark-money nonprofits “are frequently and almost always set up by someone opening a presidential run intended to provide a means for unlimited contributions from external sources that are frequently used to indirectly benefit a presidential campaign.”

“By having a family member or former colleague set up 501(c)(4), that provides the kind of distance that makes it easy to avoid coordination restrictions,” Holman added, referring to federal election laws that prohibit campaigns from coordinating with nonprofits. “If a daughter or former staffer set it up, it is difficult to prove coordination. These dark-money groups can get away with a lot.”

An independent expenditure, however, is just one way the nonprofit could spend its money. 

“It can be used for lobbying expenditures, for instance,” Holman said. “So if Manchin ends up losing and becomes part of a lobbying firm, the funds can be used for the lobbying activities as long as he’s not a candidate. At no point does the fund have to be dissolved. He can hang on to it forever.”

Manchin and Bresch are seeking to raise $100 million for Americans Together “to change the national narrative and garner support for those willing to prioritize policy and country over party and politics,” according to a solicitation obtained by the Wall Street Journal in August. The nonprofit’s formation follows a record windfall from No Labels, which doubled its fundraising to over $20 million in 2022 and began increasing the six-figure salaries paid to its executives ahead of its planned 2024 presidential stunt.

Manchin’s name does not appear on Americans Together’s paperwork — and Bresch told the Wall Street Journal that the organization will be divorced from her father’s political prospects — but the senator himself was making fundraising pitches for the organization. West Virginia secretary of state filings, meanwhile, show that Bresch has tapped her father’s longtime allies to join her in overseeing the organization. 

Nick Casey, Manchin’s former campaign treasurer, is listed on Americans Together’s filing as treasurer, while Steve Farmer, a Republican lawyer who has known Manchin for decades, is listed as secretary. Other than Bresch, they are the only two individuals listed on the group’s filing. Casey and Farmer, both prominent lawyers in West Virginia, did not respond to requests for comment.

Casey worked for Manchin during his statewide races for secretary of state and governor in the early 2000s. He helped overtake the infrastructure of the West Virginia Democratic Party, which was purged after Manchin assumed control of the political machine, eventually taking the reins as party chair from 2004 until 2010, the year Manchin left state politics for the U.S. Senate. (Casey went on to work for Gov. Jim Justice, who fired him in 2017 after the governor switched his party affiliation from Democrat to Republican. Justice is now seeking the Senate seat that Manchin is set to vacate.)

As governor, Manchin appointed Farmer to the West Virginia University board of governors. In 2008, former WVU football coach Rich Rodriguez accused Farmer of conspiring with Manchin, other members of the board of governors, and university president Mike Garrison, himself appointed by the board, to force him into signing a contract with a clause requiring him to pay out $4 million should he leave before the expiration of his contract. All of the WVU appointees denied Rodriguez’s allegations, and Rodriguez ultimately settled a related lawsuit with the university.

Farmer also served on the WVU board of governors as Bresch was ensnared in a scandal over whether she had completed required coursework to receive an advanced business degree from the university. The scandal resulted in multiple firings and an internal review that determined Bresch’s grades had been “pulled from thin air.” Bresch, who would go on to become CEO of the EpiPen maker Mylan, emerged from the drama relatively unscathed. 

Casey and Farmer have stood by Manchin after he faced his own set of scandals, including probes the FBI and IRS launched into his inner circle and business associates in West Virginia, and as he grew in notoriety on the national political stage. 

In the face of Donald Trump’s broadsides in 2018, Farmer spoke to the Daily Beast about how Manchin should respond. “If Trump wants something positive for West Virginia, Manchin will support it regardless of what the president says about him personally,” Farmer said. “He can’t control the president’s behavior—he can only control his own.”

In 2021, as Manchin faced pressure for his intransigence on helping to pass key parts of President Joe Biden’s legislative agenda, Casey said of the senator, “You’re in the hot seat when you’re a quarterback, but it’s pretty satisfying when you make progress,” adding that Manchin was “the greatest QB who never got to start at West Virginia University — just ask him.”

There is a long history of the Manchin family working to enrich one another through their professional dealings. After assuming the role of CEO of Mylan in 2012, Bresch oversaw the price hike of EpiPens by hundreds of dollars. At the same time, Bresch’s mother and Manchin’s wife, Gayle Manchin, worked to ensure that schools were required to carry, and therefore pay for, EpiPens while she served atop the National Association of State Boards of Education.

Years later, as part of an effort to woo the senator into supporting White House legislative priorities, Biden appointed Gayle Manchin to lead the Appalachian Regional Commission, a federal agency overseeing development efforts for Appalachian states. As The Intercept first reported, the Manchins directed tens of millions of dollars to the Canaan Valley and surrounding wilderness area where the couple own a vacation condo. 

Before his political rise, Manchin founded a coal brokerage firm that has continued to supply his family with significant sums of income to this day. The company, Enersystems, is now overseen by Manchin’s son, Joe Manchin IV. 

The company makes hundreds of thousands every year overseeing waste coal transfers to the Grant Town power plant outside Fairmont, West Virginia. The plant has faced closure repeatedly only to be saved time and time again by rate hikes for consumers. 

American Bituminous Power Partners, or AmBit, the operator of the financially troubled plant, has been locked in a yearslong legal battle with Horizon Ventures, the company leasing the land upon which the Grant Town power plant sits. Last month, a judge ordered AmBit to pay a decade’s worth of back rent to Horizon Ventures, according to legal documents reviewed by The Intercept. 

Horizon could not only drive AmBit into financial ruin, but also evict it entirely if it fails to pay what the court has ordered it to fork over. The closing of Grant Town would deal a fatal blow to Enersystems, which funnels its entire coal supply to the Grant Town plant. 

Horizon is run by Stanley Sears, a longtime business owner and political player in West Virginia who has known Manchin since the start of his political career. The dispute over the plant led to a falling out between Manchin and Sears, as well as his son, Scott Sears, who served as Manchin’s right hand on the campaign trail and in the governor’s office. Scott Sears, who left the Democratic Party to support Trump, said without a serious path to the presidency, and a foreclosed seat in the Senate, it’s time for his onetime friend to exit politics. 

“Since he’s fucked and can’t recover,” Sears told The Intercept, “next best thing is to raise as much money as he can and walk away and be happy.” 

The post As Manchin Prepares Senate Exit, His Friends and Daughter Are Lining Up a No Labels Lookalike appeared first on The Intercept.

“As evidenced by the events of the past month, the terrorist threat landscape is highly dynamic and our country must preserve [counterterrorism] fundamentals to ensure constant vigilance,” said Director of the National Counterterrorism Center Christine Abizaid to the Senate Committee on Homeland Security, after making repeat references to Hamas’s attack on Israel.

She pointed to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which enables the U.S. government to gather vast amounts of intelligence — including about U.S. citizens — under the broad category of foreign intelligence information, without first seeking a warrant.

Section 702 “provides key indications and warning on terrorist plans and intentions, supports international terrorist disruptions, enables critical intelligence support to, for instance, border security, and gives us strategic insight into foreign terrorists and their networks overseas,” Abizaid said. “I respectfully urge Congress to reauthorize this vital authority.”

The controversial program is set to expire at the end of the year, and lawmakers sympathetic to the intelligence community are scrambling to protect it, as some members of Congress like Sen. Ron Wyden push for reforms that restrain the government’s surveillance abilities. According to Rep. Jim Himes, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, plans are underway to prepare a stopgap measure to preserve Section 702 of FISA as a long-term reauthorization containing reforms is hammered out. 

Sean Vitka, senior policy counsel at the civil liberties group Demand Progress, told The Intercept that now is the time to enact lasting and dramatic oversight of the 702 authority. “The government has completely failed to demonstrate that any of the privacy protections reformers have called for would impair national security, all while surveillance hawks in Congress have suffered a series of setbacks, so now we’re seeing people grasping at straws trying to turn everything into an excuse for reauthorization,” Vitka said.

“We’re seeing people grasping at straws trying to turn everything into an excuse for reauthorization.”

He added that “agencies’ refusal to embrace this as a once-in-a generation opportunity to protect Americans’ civil liberties and reform our broken surveillance apparatus” could doom 702 in the long run.

Created in 1978, FISA was vastly expanded in the aftermath of 9/11 to provide federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies enhanced surveillance powers. While it was originally described as a way to collect information on foreign entities, the law enables the targeting of U.S. citizens in contact with foreign nationals.

This loophole makes it easy for federal agencies to target wide swaths of the U.S. population, and it has for years been condemned by civil liberties advocates who view it as a clear-cut instance of governmental overreach. The 702 authority has been abused to such a great extent that President Joe Biden’s own intelligence advisory board recommended curtailing the FBI’s ability to manipulate the authority to investigate and prosecute Americans.

The Brennan Center for Justice last month issued a document noting that the FBI has used the 702 authority to spy on U.S. representatives, senators, civil liberties organizations, political campaigns, and activists. Civil libertarians have proposed various reforms to the authority, including limits on the types of communication the FBI can search, the implementation of stringent warrant requirements to restrict FISA searches, and an end to the loophole that allows federal agencies to surveil Americans by purchasing data from private sector brokers. 

Abizaid’s statements to the Senate Homeland Security Committee followed similar appeals by FBI Director Christopher Wray and Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, who also spoke at the hearing. The push to extend the government’s surveillance powers comes as elected officials call for investigations into pro-Palestine groups — drawing condemnation from numerous civil rights groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union.

Already in Virginia, the attorney general has initiated an investigation into the nonprofit American Muslims for Palestine’s fundraising activities, including allegations that it supports Hamas, a designated terror group. The organization described the investigation as a dangerous and baseless smear.

Meanwhile in Congress, the Senate passed a unanimous resolution condemning students supporting Palestine on college campuses. Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., wrote to the Department of Justice to request an investigation into student groups at various universities that have seen large gatherings protesting the war in Gaza. “There is a long and sordid history of supposedly independent ‘human rights’ groups operating within American borders, that possess longstanding ties to foreign terrorist organizations,” Hawley wrote. “It is entirely possible that many of these student organizations, at some level or another, are enmeshed in similar networks — whether as recipients of funding from these malicious actors or as conduits for it.”

The ACLU lambasted efforts by Hawley and others in an open letter. “A blanket call to investigate every chapter of a pro-Palestinian student group for ‘material support to terrorists’ — without even an attempt to cite evidence — is unwarranted, wrong, and dangerous. It echoes America’s mistakes during the McCarthy era and is counterproductive. We urge college and university leaders to hold fast to our nation’s best traditions and reject proposals to restrict constitutionally protected speech.”

The post Counterterror Director Used Hamas Attack to Justify Mass Surveillance Program Renewal appeared first on The Intercept.

The Louisiana Republican’s proposal for the aid to Israel, which comes as the country continues its unchecked bombardment of Gaza, would strip $14 billion from the Internal Revenue Service, including for a program the agency is developing to allow Americans to file their taxes for free.

AIPAC, for its part, is pushing Congress to provide additional funding to Israel amid the ongoing war. In an ominous statement on Monday, AIPAC tweeted, “We strongly support the measure to fully fund critical security assistance for Israel in its fight to destroy Hamas. We recognize that this is the first step in a process that will continue to unfold. Each step of the process, we will work for overwhelming bipartisan Congressional support for this critical assistance.”

Johnson’s proposal, in its current iteration, faces steep odds in Congress, though it could force Democrats to to choose between voting against aid to Israel and incurring the wrath of the powerful AIPAC lobby, or voting for a bill that will subvert President Joe Biden’s efforts to strengthen the IRS. 

The bill would also slash funding that would bolster the IRS’s tax evasion enforcement and tax filing assistance. The proposal is a nonstarter with Senate Democrats who have decried the strategy and pointed to a Congressional Budget Office score showing that the move would actually increase the federal deficit. It would also likely be dismissed by Biden, who secured $80 billion to boost the IRS through his Inflation Reduction Act.

Biden has called on Congress to pass a $106 billion military assistance package for both Ukraine and Israel. Earlier this week, Secretary of State Antony Blinken reiterated the president’s plea during a Senate hearing, where he was repeatedly interrupted by protesters decrying the administration’s support for the war in Gaza.

Johnson, meanwhile, seeks to decouple the Israel military aid from assistance to Ukraine. A bill that provides funding only to Israel may be a hard sell for Democrats who face increasing calls to support a ceasefire — a humanitarian intervention AIPAC has explicitly rejected. (So far, 18 members of Congress have signed onto a resolution urging a ceasefire in Gaza.)

In response to Johnson’s proposal, a bipartisan group of representatives wrote, “The introduction of offsets, or the potential deferral of our commitments, threatens not only our national interest, but also our long-term fiscal health. It is far better and less costly in blood and treasure to ensure Russia, Iran, and Hamas are defeated in their current wars than it will be if they achieve strategic victories against Ukraine or Israel.”

The post Rep. Mike Johnson’s Largest Donor Was AIPAC. He’s Trying to Cut Free Tax Filing to Send Weapons to Israel. appeared first on The Intercept.

On October 7, however, when thousands of Hamas rockets were launched, Site 512 saw nothing — because it is focused on Iran, more than 700 miles away.

The U.S. Army is quietly moving ahead with construction at Site 512, a classified base perched atop Mt. Har Qeren in the Negev, to include what government records describe as a “life support facility”: military speak for barracks-like structures for personnel.

Though President Joe Biden and the White House insist that there are no plans to send U.S. troops to Israel amid its war on Hamas, a secret U.S. military presence in Israel already exists. And the government contracts and budget documents show it is evidently growing. 

The $35.8 million U.S. troop facility, not publicly announced or previously reported, was obliquely referenced in an August 2 contract announcement by the Pentagon. Though the Defense Department has taken pains to obscure the site’s true nature — describing it in other records merely as a “classified worldwide” project — budget documents reviewed by The Intercept reveal that it is part of Site 512. (The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

“Sometimes something is treated as an official secret not in the hope that an adversary would never find out about it but rather [because] the U.S. government, for diplomatic or political reasons, does not want to officially acknowledge it,” Paul Pillar, a former chief analyst at the CIA’s counterterrorism center who said he had no specific knowledge of the base, told The Intercept. “In this case, perhaps the base will be used to support operations elsewhere in the Middle East in which any acknowledgment that they were staged from Israel, or involved any cooperation with Israel, would be inconvenient and likely to elicit more negative reactions than the operations otherwise would elicit.”

Rare acknowledgment of the U.S. military presence in Israel came in 2017, when the two countries inaugurated a military site that the U.S. government-funded Voice of America deemed “the first American military base on Israeli soil.” Israeli Air Force’s Brig. Gen. Tzvika Haimovitch called it “historic.” He said, “We established an American base in the State of Israel, in the Israel Defense Forces, for the first time.” 

A day later, the U.S. military denied that it was an American base, insisting that it was merely a “living facility” for U.S. service members working at an Israeli base. 

The U.S. military employs similar euphemistic language to characterize the new facility in Israel, which its procurement records describe as a “life support area.” Such obfuscation is typical of U.S. military sites the Pentagon wants to conceal. Site 512 has previously been referred to as a “cooperative security location”: a designation that is intended to confer a low-cost, light footprint presence but has been applied to bases that, as The Intercept has previously reported, can house as many as 1,000 troops.

Site 512, however, wasn’t established to contend with a threat to Israel from Palestinian militants but the danger posed by Iranian mid-range missiles.

The overwhelming focus on Iran continues to play out in the U.S. government’s response to the Hamas attack. In an attempt to counter Iran — which aids both Hamas and Israel’s rival to the north, Hezbollah, a Lebanese political group with a robust military wing, both of which are considered terror groups by the U.S. — the Pentagon has vastly expanded its presence in the Middle East. Following the attack, the U.S. doubled the number of fighter jets in the region and deployed two aircraft carriers off the coast of Israel. 

“My speculation is that the secrecy is a holdover from when U.S. presidential administrations tried to offer a pretense of not siding with Israel.”

Top Republicans like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell have nonetheless castigated Biden for his purported “weakness on Iran.” While some media accounts have said Iran played a role in planning the Hamas attack, there have been indications from the U.S. intelligence community that Iranian officials were surprised by the attack.

The history of the U.S.–Israel relationship may be behind the failure to acknowledge the base, said an expert on overseas U.S. military bases.

“My speculation is that the secrecy is a holdover from when U.S. presidential administrations tried to offer a pretense of not siding with Israel in the Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Arab conflicts,” David Vine, a professor of anthropology at American University, told The Intercept. “The announcement of U.S. military bases in Israel in recent years likely reflects the dropping of that pretense and a desire to more publicly proclaim support for Israel.”

The post U.S. Quietly Expands Secret Military Base in Israel appeared first on The Intercept.

Behind the scenes, however, powerful art dealers and gallerists who control the cultural and monetary tides of the art world began a private campaign to force some of the biggest names on the letter to retract their support, according to a half dozen sources, including letter signatories as well as others informed about the influence campaign. 

Soon after the letter was posted, Martin Eisenberg, a high-profile collector and inheritor of the now-bankrupt Bed Bath & Beyond fortune, began contacting famous art world figures on the list whose work he had championed to express his objections to the letter. 

Eisenberg, who owns millions of dollars’ worth of work by Artforum letter signatories, contacted at least four artists whose work he owns to convey his displeasure at seeing their names on the letter. (Eisenberg did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.)

On Thursday, a week after the letter was posted, Artforum editor-in-chief David Velasco was summoned to a meeting with Jay Penske, the CEO of Artforum’s parent company, according to three sources. The son of billionaire Roger Penske, Jay oversees the conglomerate Penske Media Corporation. (Penske Media did not respond to a request for comment.) Before the day was out, Velasco was fired after six years at the helm of the magazine.

“This magazine has been my life for 18 years and I’ve given everything to it.”

“This magazine has been my life for 18 years and I’ve given everything to it,” Velasco, who rose from being an editorial assistant to the coveted editor-in-chief job, told The Intercept. “I have done nothing but exceptional work at the magazine for 18 years and this is a sad day. It breaks my heart.”

In a statement to the New York Times, Velasco said, “I’m disappointed that a magazine that has always stood for freedom of speech and the voices of artists has bent to outside pressure.”

The pressure campaign against the letter echoes a wave of repercussions faced by writers, activists, and students who have spoken out for Palestinians. Right-wing groups lobbying for Israel, as well as donors to prominent institutions and various other wealthy interests, are condemning open letters and using the lists of signatories as blacklists across cultural, professional, and academic spheres. 

“Anecdotally, I know that a majority of people in the art world are devastated by the genocide in Gaza but many are scared to speak out or even join the call for a ceasefire,” said Hannah Black, an artist and writer who signed the Artforum letter but was not pressured to remove her signature. “It is absolutely McCarthyite and many of the dogmatic anti-Palestinians within the art world have, as Joseph Welch said of McCarthy, ‘no sense of decency.’ They are willing to destroy careers, destroy the value of artworks, to maintain their unofficial ban on free speech about Palestine.”

“They are willing to destroy careers, destroy the value of artworks, to maintain their unofficial ban on free speech about Palestine.”

In a testament to the efficacy of the campaign against the Artforum letter, artists Peter Doig, Joan Jonas, Katharina Grosse, and Tomás Saraceno all withdrew their support. According to an Intercept analysis, the four artists were among 36 names removed from the online version of the letter between October 20 and October 26. (An additional 32 names were added during that period.)

Artforum, a premier international art publication, published the October 19 open letter calling for humanitarian aid to Gaza, accountability for war crimes, and an end to violence against civilians. The letter — which was not commissioned or drafted by Artforum, but published on the magazine’s website as well as in other publications like e-flux — went on to condemn the occupation of the Palestinian territories and reiterate its demands with a call for peace.

“We believe that the arts organizations and institutions whose mission it is to protect freedom of expression, to foster education, community, and creativity, also stand for freedom of life and the basic right of existence,” the signatories concluded. “We call on you to refuse inhumanity, which has no place in life or art, and make a public demand from our governments to call for a ceasefire.”

In a post on the Artforum website before news broke of Velasco’s firing, the publishers Danielle McConnell and Kate Koza wrote that the publication of the letter was “not consistent with Artforum’s editorial process.”

“The open letter was widely misinterpreted as a statement from the magazine about highly sensitive and complex geopolitical circumstances,” the publishers wrote. “That the letter was misinterpreted as being reflective of the magazine’s position understandably led to significant dismay among our readers and community, which we deeply regret.”

Backlash

Critics of the letter said its failure to mention the surprise attack by Hamas on October 7 — in which some 1,400 Israelis, mostly civilians, were killed — was offensive and, according to some, antisemitic. Four days after the letter was published, Artforum posted an update reiterating the letter organizers’ condemnation of the loss of all civilian life, adding that they “share revulsion at the horrific massacres” of October 7. 

The response published in Artforum the day after the original letter came out was signed by three influential gallery owners: Dominique Lévy, Brett Gorvy, and Amalia Dayan. In their critique, the gallerists wrote:

We are distressed by the open letter recently posted on Artforum, which does not acknowledge the ongoing mass hostage emergency, the historical context, and the atrocities committed in Israel on October 7, 2023—the bloodiest day in Jewish history since the Holocaust. 

We denounce all forms of violence in Israel and Gaza and we are deeply concerned over the humanitarian crisis. We—Dominique Lévy, Brett Gorvy, Amalia Dayan—condemn the open letter for its one-sided view. We hope to foster discourse that can lead to a better understanding of the complexities involved. May we witness peace soon.

The authors of the response letter — the joint directors of Lévy Gorvy Dayan, which has gallery spaces and offices in New York, London, Paris, and Hong Kong — curate shows with some of the most prolific and highest grossing artists in the world, both living and dead. Their website lists Jean-Michel Basquiat, Gerhard Richter, Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly, Joel Mesler, and Adrian Piper as representative artists and collaborators. Dayan is the granddaughter of Moshe Dayan, the Israeli politician and military commander who is alleged to have ordered the country’s military to attack the American naval ship the USS Liberty during the Six-Day War of 1967.

Lévy Gorvy Dayan is more than a series of galleries; the venture is a powerful consortium, described by the New York Times as a “one-stop shop for artists and collectors,” representing artists, organizing exhibitions and auction sales, and advising collectors. In 2021, Lévy told the Financial Times, “I grew up feeling that art was freedom and fresh air.” She said she did not believe in gallerists and representatives “controlling them” — the artists — “completely.”

According to two artists who appeared as signatories on the first Artforum post, the Lévy Gorvy Dayan letter was a shot across the bow by powerful art dealers and influencers, warning others to stay in line. One artist who spoke to The Intercept said a collector offended by the Artforum letter returned a work by the artist to a dealer. The collector did not contact the artist prior to returning the work, according to the artist, who asked for anonymity to protect their livelihood. 

Another open letter posted under the title “A United Call from the Art World: Advocating for Humanity” called the original Artforum letter “uninformed.” It offered no criticism of Israel’s onslaught on Gaza, which has killed an estimated 7,000 people in the last 19 days. This letter, issued under the banner of “peace, understanding, and human dignity” garnered over 4,000 signatures. Among them was that of Warren Kanders, who resigned from the Whitney Museum of American Art board following protests over the fact that his companies sell chemical weapons. (The Intercept reported last year that, despite claims of divestment, Kanders remains in the tear gas business.)

“It really shows that they never cared about the art.”

Penske Media Corporation, Artforum’s parent company, drew criticism in 2018 for selling a $200 million stake to Saudi Arabia’s public investment fund. That same year, Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi was brutally murdered and dismembered under orders from Saudi’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Another artist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their livelihood, said the affair with the Artforum letter showed that many of the gallerists and collectors whose money makes the art world turn did not understand artists’ subject matter.

“It really shows that they never cared about the art,” the artist said. “My art, like a lot of the people facing this, has always been political, about oppression and dispossession.”

The post Bed Bath & Beyond Scion Pressured Artists to Retract Gaza Ceasefire Call in Artforum Letter appeared first on The Intercept.

Kasem Raad, a 20-year-old apprentice at the company, was summarily fired last week after questioning the company’s Israel policy through internal channels and posting a video online disputing parts of the Israeli military’s narrative of the brutal Hamas attack on October 7.

“It is one of my rights to ask questions. I wanted to stay at Axel Springer,” said Raad, who was fired just a few weeks into a three-year position at the company. “Unfortunately, I was taken in for questioning by senior management, who told me, ‘We are Germans and we need to do this,’” he added, describing his manager’s explanation for the company’s Israel policy.

Raad’s account of being fired is supported by a termination letter and screenshots of his posts on the company’s internal message board that were reviewed by The Intercept. The letter makes no mention of the reason for his firing, but in an interview, he said his bosses were clear about why they were letting him go. “They explicitly stated that my questioning and video were the reasons for their decision, which had no connection to my performance,” Raad said.

Adib Sisani, Axel Springer’s head of corporate communications, declined to comment on Raad’s specific claims. “As a matter of principle, we never comment on individual personnel matters,” Sisani told The Intercept. “In general, allow me to refer you to German labor law, which has a probation period at the beginning of any work contract for the duration of six months. Within this time period, both the employee as well as the employer can terminate the contract without a reason.”

Even before the start of the most recent Israeli war in Gaza, Germany has long repressed voices critical of Israel, through both governmental and corporate policy. The repression has intensified in the last few weeks: The German government banned most gatherings protesting the Israeli bombardment of Gaza, and police attacked protesters who took to the streets nonetheless. Rights groups like Amnesty International have decried the crackdown in Germany, while organizations in the United States are calling attention to the professional consequences facing Americans who speak critically of Israel’s military campaign. American CEOs, law students, and even Starbucks employees have faced repercussions, including threats of termination, public smear campaigns, and letters of dismissal from their jobs. 

The human rights group Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor reviewed a slate of firings of Arab and Palestinian journalists in German state-owned media in 2021 and issued a prescient warning: “We caution German media groups … from unfairly dismissing Palestinian and Arab journalists because of smear campaigns by pro-Israeli or far-right groups. This would set a dangerous precedent that would only encourage even more discriminatory targeting of public figures of Palestinian or Arab origins or who hold views sympathetic to Palestinian rights and freedom.”

For Raad, that warning hit home shortly after he joined Axel Springer, a private company that is based in Germany but has holdings across the globe, including Politico in the United States. As The Intercept previously reported, one Axel Springer subsidiary, the news aggregator Upday, instructed its employees to downplay Palestinian deaths in its coverage of the ongoing Israeli war against Gaza.

A Lebanese immigrant, Raad moved to Germany after completing the ninth grade in Lebanon. He became fluent in German and, after completing a required certificate course, landed a three-year multimedia apprenticeship at Axel Springer that started in early September at the company’s TV channel, Welt TV. 

He was still settling into his new role when Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel that killed more than 1,400 people. On October 7, Axel Springer’s editorial team posted an internal article titled “We stand with Israel.” Raad sought clarification on the company’s stance by sending a private message to an employee who runs the company’s internal message board on October 11 asking “why does Axel Springer support Israel?” Having received no reply, the next day, Raad posted the same question under the Israel article on the message board, according to screenshots viewed by The Intercept. “I posted a comment asking about why we have a company policy supporting this country,” he said in an interview. “Immediately my question got flooded with angry comments and I was called in for an interrogation.” 

Screenshots reviewed by The Intercept show other Axel Springer employees replying “what kind of question is that??!!!!,” asking whether Raad had read his contract before joining Axel Springer, and wondering how he could ask such a question given “the current, terrible atrocities.” 

The same day, Raad said, he was called into an office and reprimanded by his manager, who oversees the company’s training programs, before a second meeting on October 13 with Sisani, the company spokesperson, who cautioned him from pushing back against the company line. 

After meeting with Sisani, Raad once again posted on the message board, saying his discussion with the executive provided helpful answers to his questions which were “clearly different from the unsatisfactory answers I received from you.” He added: “I strongly believe in open dialogue and finding answers, especially at a time when many people lack knowledge about current social issues.” 

Five days later, Raad posted a video to his personal Youtube channel attempting to debunk a viral narrative that Hamas beheaded babies during its attack that even the Israel Defense Forces could not confirm. He said he heard nothing from company supervisors until two days later, October 20, when he was called into yet another meeting and received a letter informing him of his termination. 

As part of its charter, Axel Springer maintains five “essentials.” These include standing up for “freedom, the rule of law, democracy and a united Europe”; supporting “the Jewish people and the right of existence of the State of Israel”; advocating “the transatlantic alliance between the United States of America and Europe”; upholding “the principles of the market economy and its social responsibility”; and rejecting “political and religious extremism and all forms of racism and sexual discrimination.” 

Raad said that, in his experience, some of the essentials are prioritized above the rest: “I find the whole situation really ironic. One of the essentials of Axel Springer are the tenets of freedom and democracy. They should remove this fucking essential from their code of conduct and they should remove the rejection of political and religious extremism. In my case, they ignored all of their own essentials, and chose their support of Israel over everything else.”

The post Axel Springer Fires Lebanese Employee Who Questioned Pro-Israel Stance appeared first on The Intercept.

Upday, the largest news aggregator app in Europe, handed down directives to color the company’s coverage of the war in Gaza with pro-Israel sentiment, according to interviews with employees and internal documents obtained by The Intercept. 

Leadership at Upday, a subsidiary of the Germany-based publishing giant Axel Springer, gave instructions to prioritize the Israeli perspective and minimize Palestinian civilian deaths in coverage, according to the employees.

“We can’t push anything involving Palestinian death tolls or casualties without information about Israel coming higher up in the story.”

“We can’t push anything involving Palestinian death tolls or casualties without information about Israel coming higher up in the story,” an employee told The Intercept, referring to push notifications, the alerts sent to millions of phones. The employees, who asked for anonymity to protect their livelihoods, said there was widespread discomfort throughout the company over the moves. 

“We strongly contest the indirect allegations you make,” said Julia Sommerfeld, a representative for the German-based Axel Springer. “Neither have we directed our journalists to ignore civilian casualties in Gaza, nor have we asked our editors to manipulate news coverage, nor was corporate management involved in any editorial decisions. Upday’s editorial guidelines are based on journalistic principles and the (publicly available) Axel Springer Essentials” — a reference to a company statement of values. 

Sommerfeld said, “The Upday news coverage follows these principles, and each editorial decision is taken by trained journalists.” 

Top Upday officials’ high regard for Israel was apparent in everyday communications: In the company’s Slack, an Israeli flag appears beside the avatar of Upday’s CEO Thomas Hirsch, according to the employees. (Upday did not respond to The Intercept’s direct request for comment.)

“There is a very absurd media push for really dismissing and invisibilizing any Palestinian sympathy,” said Ahlam Muhtaseb, a professor of media studies at California State University, San Bernardino, when asked about Upday’s internal directives. “The one-sided Israeli victimhood narrative demands buy-in from media institutions and the U.S. government itself.”

In its directives, Upday warned its employees not to publish any headlines that could be “misconstrued” as pro-Palestinian, according to the two employees interviewed by The Intercept. Comments made by Israeli politicians dehumanizing Palestinians were to be couched in language emphasizing the magnitude and brutality of Hamas’s attacks on Israel, which have so far led to more than 1,300 deaths, including many civilians. 

One of the directives was to not quote Palestinian militant groups in headlines.

According to the employees, the company gave instructions to — in line with Axel Springer’s “Essentials” mission statement— support Jewish people and Israel’s right to exist.

Upday and Media Bias

First released in 2016, Upday serves more than 30 countries. The app boasts tens of millions of users thanks to a deal with Samsung that preloads the app onto Samsung devices.

Axel Springer publishes the German newspapers Bild and Die Welt, and the Polish tabloid Fakt, among numerous other European titles. In the U.S. the company holds a majority stake in the news site Insider and purchased Politico in 2021. 

Axel Springer has taken criticism for operating its news empire by conservative principles. Among its well-known stances are its ardent support of the Israeli state, explicitly laid out in the “Essentials” mission statement professing support of a “united Europe,” the “trans-Atlantic alliance,” and “the Jewish people and the right of existence of the State of Israel.”

As principles from Axel Springer’s “Essentials” were applied at Upday during the current conflagration in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, they became directives relevant to tasks like headline writing — which, since it is a news aggregator, the company has editorial control over. 

Upday’s slanted approach reflects a widespread bias among Western media giants that has existed for years but intensified with Hamas’s brutal surprise attack. 

At MSNBC, the American cable news network, three Muslim news anchors were removed from their anchor chairs, according to a report. (MSNBC denied the allegations.) Other news organizations have taken public action to censor or expel reporters who stand accused of violating internal guidelines or violating journalistic ethics. 

The BBC suspended six journalists while it investigates whether they posted purportedly anti-Israel statements on social media. The British network was also forced to apologize to viewers for misleading information depicting pro-Palestinian protests in the U.K. as “pro-Hamas.” The Guardian, a British newspaper, recently fired a decadeslong veteran cartoonist after critics decried a depiction of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as antisemitic.

Muhtaseb, the California State University professor, said the German state’s vociferous pro-Israel stance could play a role in shaping Axel Springer’s pro-Israel line, citing the “decision of the German government to criminalize BDS” — the movement for boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel for violation of Palestinian rights — “and discourse in support of Palestinians and to equate any anti-Zionist critique with anti-Semitism.”

The post Europe’s Largest News Aggregator Orders Editors to Play Down Palestinian Deaths appeared first on The Intercept.

Abed Ayoub, executive director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, or ADC, said that his organization has fielded multiple reports of individuals and mosques being visited by the FBI this week. The Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, a police accountability group, also said it had received reports of federal agents intimidating Palestinians and their supporters. 

The interactions are reminiscent of surveillance and targeting of Muslim and Arab communities in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, and Ayoub told The Intercept that they are contributing to a resurgence of fear among Muslim communities. “Like, ‘Oh my god, this is happening again, how are we going to protect ourselves?’”

The reports come after President Joe Biden issued a warning this week about potential “domestic threats” across America. “This is not some distant tragedy — the ties between Israel and the United States run deep,” Biden wrote on Tuesday. “In cities across the country, local and federal law enforcement partners are closely monitoring for any domestic threats in connection with the horrific terrorist attacks in Israel.”

In a press call Thursday, Department of Homeland Security officials said they do not have any specific credible intelligence indicating a potential threat to the United States, but that they are monitoring “a variety of threat actors who might be driven by anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, or anti-Arab sentiment.” The officials also said they were monitoring potential threats in relation to a video statement by former Hamas political leader Khaled Meshal, who called for a broad, global mobilization in support of Gaza on Friday. Meshal’s statement prompted mass speculation and hysteria about a “Day of Jihad” across the United States, with schools in some places shutting down. 

Ayoub said that the reports that the ADC received included FBI officers visiting a Texas mosque to meet with leadership and ask about any “troublemakers” in the community, and FBI agents seeking to question an individual who was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement two months ago for a green card issue. That individual, Ayoub said, “has never had any issues” prior to his run-in with ICE. Ayoub added that the ADC received a report of the FBI visiting a mosque in a different state from a partner civil rights organization.

The FBI declined to specifically comment on The Intercept’s questions about the reported visits. “The FBI can never initiate an investigation based solely on an individual’s race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, or the exercise of First Amendment rights,” an agency spokesperson wrote in an email. 

ICE deferred questions to DHS, its parent agency, which did not respond to a request for comment.

Human rights attorney Azadeh Shahshahani told The Intercept that greater surveillance and targeting of Muslim and Palestinian community members wouldn’t come as a surprise — and is rather a part of a pattern of federal law enforcement practices. “We get contacted by community members saying that the FBI has come to their house without any type of prior notice or any type of prior suspicion or any reason whatsoever, other than the fact that they’re Muslim or Palestinian or Iranian.” These visits often take place in response to an event happening somewhere in the world, Shahshahani said, or simply because the FBI is engaging in a “fishing expedition.”

Raed Jarrar, advocacy director at Democracy for the Arab World Now, or DAWN, said it was important to consider federal targeting of Palestinians in the context of broader U.S. policy on Israel–Palestine. “The U.S. government is not only sending more weapons to kill Palestinians in Gaza; it is going after Palestinians here at home,” he said. “With thousands of Palestinians killed and injured this week by the criminal apartheid regime in Israel, which treats Palestinians as second-class humans, the U.S. government goes on to treat us like second-class citizens in our own country.” 

Meanwhile, Muslims and Palestinians have reported incidents of discrimination throughout the nation this week. In New York, for example, a group of men waving Israeli flags assaulted an 18-year-old Palestinian in Brooklyn. Numerous individuals at a rally looked directly into a camera as they exclaimed threats including “Kill all Palestinians, all of them!” and “Flatten them like a parking lot … once and for all.” 

On Thursday, when asked what her message is to Palestinians who fear for their loved ones as Israel maintains a siege in Gaza, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul called on “law-abiding Palestinians to reject Hamas,” without addressing the question of Palestinians’ own concerns.

While the FBI has activated resources to investigate Palestinians in the span of just a few days, its track record of successfully investigating crimes committed by Israelis against Palestinian American citizens has proved far less urgent, noted Jarrar of DAWN. 

He pointed to the cases of Alex Odeh, an activist who was assassinated in California in 1985, and Shireen Abu Akleh, a journalist who was killed by Israeli forces in the West Bank last year. “When Palestinian Americans like Shireen Abu Akleh and Alex Odeh are murdered by Israel, the FBI does nothing about it,” Jarrar said. “But when we protest injustice by Israel, the FBI knocks on our doors.”

After the FBI announced an investigation into Abu Akleh’s killing, which multiple organizations reported was premeditated last year, the Israeli government announced that it would not cooperate with the investigation. Israel’s then-Defense Minister Benny Gantz told the press that the FBI’s inquiry represented “interference in Israel’s internal affairs” and that he had “made it clear to the American representatives that we stand behind the [Israel Defense Forces] soldiers, that we will not cooperate with any external investigation.”

Decades earlier, Odeh, who was the West Coast regional director at ADC, was murdered before speaking at Congregation B’nai Tzedek, a Reform synagogue in Santa Ana, California. As The Intercept previously reported, two prime suspects in Odeh’s killing escaped to Israel, where they continue to live public lives. The FBI, meanwhile, continues to list a $1 million reward for information leading to the successful arrest and conviction of Odeh’s murderers.

The post FBI Targets Muslims and Palestinians in Wake of Hamas Attack, Civil Rights Advocates Warn appeared first on The Intercept.

Auchincloss’s Monday comments came in response to Sen. Edward Markey’s calls for deescalation during a rally in Boston. “The United States and the international community must keep pushing for diplomacy and the ending of civilian casualties on all sides,” Markey said. “There must be a deescalation of the current violence.” The audience erupted in boos, prompting Auchincloss to speak up.

“Now is not the time for equivocation,” Auchincloss said. “Hamas is an internationally recognized terrorist organization that is executing and raping civilians. Israel is a liberal democracy with the right and responsibility to defend itself and its citizens. … Deescalation is not possible when they are taking hostages. And Israel did not ask America to deescalate on September 12, 2001.”

Auchincloss participated in the U.S. military response to 9/11 as an officer in Afghanistan. That conflict ended in a bloody defeat for America after tens of thousands of civilian and military casualties. He is angling for a run to replace Minnesota Rep. Dean Phillips, the outgoing co-chair of the Democratic Policy and Communications Committee, a position that would put him on a path for a role in Democratic Party leadership.

During its attack on Saturday, Hamas took more than 100 hostages, some of them believed to be U.S. citizens. The group announced on Monday that it will begin executing hostages if the bombing of civilians in Gaza continues. Already, the Israeli Air Force and Navy have targeted hospitals, mosques, and U.N.-funded schools, leading to hundreds of civilian casualties. With the only border crossing, controlled by Egypt, disrupted by the bombing, Gaza residents’ options for exiting were further limited amid the ongoing bombardment and expected ground invasion.

Auchincloss’s spokesperson Matt Corridoni evaded The Intercept’s questions about whether the lawmaker is aware of the steep price American and Israeli civilians held hostage will pay to further the war in Israel, and whether he believes the U.S. response to 9/11 was a success.

“Congressman Auchincloss is well aware of the horrors of Hamas and the need for the United States to stand up for democracy at home and abroad,” Corridoni wrote in an email. “His comments reflect what the majority of Americans believe to be true: there is no ‘both sides’ to a terrorist organization dragging Jewish people from their homes and murdering them.”

Auchincloss’s apparent willingness to sacrifice American and Israeli lives to retaliate against Hamas mirrors statements made by Israeli far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, one of the extremist pro-settler parliamentarians with whom Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is sharing power. Smotrich declared that Israel must “Hit Hamas brutally and not take the matter of the captives into significant consideration,” during a Cabinet meeting on Saturday. “In war you have to be brutal.”

Auchincloss’s position was echoed by other members of the House, including Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y., who has similarly called for escalating violence against Gaza. “Hamas has announced it will begin murdering civilian hostages, one by one, and broadcasting its barbarity for the world to see. Let there be no confusion about the nature of the war between Israel and Hamas. It is: Good vs. Evil Civilization vs. Barbarism Self-Defense vs. Aggression If you murder civilians and children in cold blood, you do not get to claim the moral high ground. Neither do your enablers, with their endless excuse-making for terrorism,” Torres tweeted on Monday.

Secretary of State Anthony Blinken called for a ceasefire over the weekend, later deleting his tweet amid a sea of backlash. On Sunday night, Blinken tweeted “Turkish Foreign Minister @HakanFidan and I spoke further on Hamas’ terrorist attacks on Israel, I encouraged Türkiye’s advocacy for a cease-fire and the release of all hostages held by Hamas immediately.” By Monday afternoon, the tweet was gone.

Few members of Congress have acknowledged the violence of Israel’s assault on Gaza. Among those who spoke out was Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., who responded to the news of Israel’s imposition of a siege on Gaza in a thread of tweets. “We must learn from the mistakes of our own war on terror,” she wrote, adding that the United States ought to oppose any international law violations if it truly supports a rules-based international order. “Instead of continuing unconditional weapons sales and military aid to Israel, I urge the United States at long last to use its diplomatic might to push for peace.”

Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo., shared similar sentiments on Saturday, mourning the hundreds of Israeli and Palestinians killed and thousands injured, calling for an “immediate ceasefire and de-escalation to prevent further loss of life.” Israel proceeded to escalate its attacks on Gaza that have since led to hundreds of deaths.

Markey did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.

The post Rep. Jake Auchincloss Supports Gaza Bombing Despite Captive American and Israeli Civilians appeared first on The Intercept.

Company officials put out a request last week for volunteers to staff its parts distribution centers across the country, particularly in Michigan. The Working Parents Network, a BRG, forwarded that call-out to its members, noting, “Each BRG will pick a specific day of the week/weekend to volunteer as a team.” The email continued: “Help continue to be the RESOURCE the BUSINESS can count on!” In another email, the parents group wrote that “Stellantis needs your help in running the Parts Distribution Centers (PDC) to ensure a steady supply of parts to our customers while negotiations continue. Working Parents Network has identified Friday, October 13 as WPN’s BRG Day at the PDCs!” 

The initial request — sent by Stellantis’s North America Chief Operating Officer Mark Stewart, and Mike Koval, head of Mopar North America, Stellantis’s parts subsidiary — came three weeks into the 150,000-member union’s strike against Stellantis, General Motors, and Ford. UAW President Shawn Fain has praised Ford for making good-faith progress and announced last week that General Motors had agreed to include battery facilities in the national UAW master agreement — heading off contentious battles over unionizing new electric vehicle facilities. Stellantis’s call for volunteer labor to break up the strike, meanwhile, comes as the company remains intransigent in the face of negotiations.

“Companies are usually not transparent about who is being used when they bring in replacement labor during a strike,” John Logan, director of labor and employment studies at San Francisco State University, told The Intercept. Logan also said companies often resort to using internal, non-union labor to avoid the escalation that hiring private strikebreakers from outside the firm could cause. At the same time, he added, using small factions within the company to man distribution centers could bring about long-term damage to Stellantis.

“If they do things in the course of the strike that does irreparable harm to their relationship with workers and the union, that will have a lasting impact on the company,” Logan said. “Having a productive relationship reduces turnover and increases productivity, but if they’re angering union workers with the replacement labor they bring in, that’s where serious disputes can happen.”

Stellantis did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.

Since September 22, UAW members have been striking at over a dozen Stellantis parts distribution facilities across the country, from Dallas to New York and down to Orlando. The emails obtained by The Intercept focus on facilities in Michigan, the powerhouse of the U.S. auto industry.

The National Labor Relations Act explicitly outlawed company unions, which deflated national labor unions’ power and provided workers with only minimal benefits like pool tables and break rooms. Decades later, companies are forming internal, identity-based organizations that similarly offer marginal benefits. As The Intercept previously reported, some of the biggest union avoidance firms, including Littler Mendelson and Jackson Lewis, have pitched BRGs as a way to Band-Aid over worker concerns while simultaneously heading off unionization attempts. Another major firm, IRI Strategies, has noted that BRGs are a good way to “union-proof” your business by accommodating some of the complaints that would otherwise be brought to a union representative.

On its website, Stellantis touts BRGs as “One of the ways we create, promote and maintain inclusion and diversity. … These groups provide networking opportunities, activities and meetings for our employees who share common interests and work to support greater cultural appreciation among our team.” 

The company’s BRGs, which can be joined by union and non-union members, include Asians Connected Together (ACT), DIVERSE•Abilities Network, First Nations, Latins in Connection, Middle Eastern Employees Together (MEET), Prism LGBTQ+ Alliance, Stellantis African American Network Diaspora (STAAND), Veterans Group, Women in Manufacturing, Women’s Alliance, Working Parents Network, and Society of Women Engineers.

Even as it offers its workers the option to join BRGs, Stellantis has been investigated for its failure to adequately provide required resources for some of the represented workers. In February, the Department of Labor found that Stellantis had failed to provide legally mandated lactation facilities for new mothers — the same demographic represented by the Working Parents Network, whose members are being called on to scab for the company. 

According to the Labor Department’s investigative summary, its wage and hour division had received a complaint about conditions at a plant in Sterling Heights, Michigan. The investigators were told “that a plant employee was expressing breast milk on the factory floor after being denied access to the assembly plant’s lactation rooms” and “also learned of Stellantis’ improper policy of requiring nursing mothers to submit a doctor’s note and the baby’s birth certificate to access lactation rooms.”

Following the investigation, the plant promised to “create additional lactation rooms and correct its break policy to avoid future violations.” 

Stellantis’s efforts to use groups of marginalized employees as scab labor is reminiscent of the steel strikes of the early 20th century, when manufacturers brought in tens of thousands of black and Mexican workers to break strikes. “When the great migration began employers very explicitly began to play groups off of each other and that was a three-way split between African Americans, European immigrants who were one notch above them in the hierarchy, and then native-born skilled workers,” Gabriel Winant, a professor of history at the University of Chicago, told The Intercept. 

“Class division within the workplace between management and labor is often blurred with racial and ethnic divisions,” Winant said, “and American managers have always exploited that.”

The post Stellantis Diversity Groups Mobilize to Provide Scab Labor at Auto Parts Plants appeared first on The Intercept.

National security experts, however, say the indictment’s reference to Egyptian intelligence officials and Menendez’s disclosure of “highly sensitive” and “non-public” information to Egyptian officials suggest that, more than a garden-variety corruption scheme, there may be an intelligence element to the charges.

Egypt’s elicitation of information resembles a textbook recruitment pass, an intelligence operation intended to recruit an asset, four former CIA officers told The Intercept.

According to the indictment, Menendez, chair of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was sometimes asked to supply information to an Egyptian businessman who would then communicate it to Egyptian officials. The most sensitive information Menendez is accused of sharing appears to be about staffing at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo.

“The request could well be one step in testing his willingness to break rules and laws, and therefore possibly assist Egyptian intelligence in more covert and damaging ways.”

“Menendez sharing embassy staffing information is extremely troubling on a number of levels: It assists Egyptian security services monitoring the embassy and, more importantly, may suggest they viewed Menendez as a source,” said John Sipher, a retired CIA clandestine service officer and nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. “The request could well be one step in testing his willingness to break rules and laws and therefore, possibly assist Egyptian intelligence in more covert and damaging ways.”

Michael van Landingham, a former CIA analyst, told The Intercept, “Reading the indictment, it certainly appears like the Egyptian government was using a classic source-recruitment pattern to get Menendez and his wife to spy for them.”

The former officials’ remarks comes amid a report from a local New York news channel that the FBI has opened a counterintelligence investigation into Menendez. (Menendez, who plead not guilty on Wednesday, did not respond to a request for comment.)

“Senator Menendez’s chairmanship of foreign relations puts him in a bullseye position for foreign intelligence services that are looking to have him make decisions in their favor including military equipment and material decisions on funding,” Frank Figliuzzi, a former assistant director for counterintelligence at the FBI, told NBC. “All of that should be looked at from a counterintelligence perspective.” (The FBI did not respond to a request for comment.)

Since spies operate under diplomatic cover, embassies are an attractive target for intelligence services. Former CIA operations officers speaking on condition of anonymity described how recruitment passes tend to work. The requests start out small — often for information that’s not public, but not necessarily classified — in order to establish what’s called “responsiveness to tasking,” or willingness to collect intelligence on their behalf. Once responsiveness is established, a series of increasingly serious taskings culminates in a “spot payment,” or bribe, which cements the illicit nature of the relationship and can be used as blackmail.

The indictment describes Menendez meeting with the Egyptian businessman Wael Hana and, later that day, seeking nonpublic information from the State Department regarding the number and nationality of people working in the U.S. Embassy in Cairo. That information was later passed to what the indictment describes as an “Egyptian government official.” In another case, according to the indictment, Menendez’s wife Nadine, who was then his girlfriend, passed on a request from Egyptian government officials to the senator. And through Hana, Menendez was introduced to Egyptian intelligence and military officials under the auspices of increasing American food aid to Egypt.

Though not classified, the information about staffing in the U.S. Embassy in Cairo is described in the indictment as “highly sensitive because it could pose significant operational security concerns if disclosed to a foreign government or if made public.” Without notifying his personal staff, the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which he chaired at the time, or the State Department, Menendez allegedly transmitted a detailed breakdown of the embassy staff to Nadine, who forwarded the message to Hana, who forwarded it to an Egyptian official.

“Menendez as SFRC chair would have definitely known that you shouldn’t share non-public information about something as sensitive as the make-up of an American Embassy in Cairo,” Ben Rhodes, a former top aide in President Barack Obama’s White House, told The Intercept by email. “He is supposed to oversee in part the safety of our diplomats overseas!”

Intelligence Source Recruitment

The FBI is reportedly trying to ascertain whether Egyptian intelligence played a role in the bribery scheme for which Menendez is being charged. Hana’s lawyer, Larry Lustberg, has denied that Hana is linked to Egyptian intelligence and maintains that Hana and Nadine Menendez had been friends for years. (Nadine Menendez did not respond to a request for comment.)

To the former U.S. intelligence officials that spoke with The Intercept, the events described in the indictment bear the hallmarks of an effort to recruit an intelligence source. “As an analyst, when you receive a human source report, it comes with a sourcing statement that evaluates the source’s relative position, reliability, access to information, responsiveness to tasking, and track record,” said van Landingham, the former CIA analyst.

James Lawler, a former CIA operations officer and counterproliferation chief specializing in the recruitment of former spies, similarly described the events in the indictment as fitting the pattern of source recruitment.

“As a case officer, I would be looking to establish a solid relationship with future tasking potential (i.e. going for the long play) but cognizant that it may be only a one off,” Lawler told The Intercept in an email. “That said, we’re talking about the head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee! Talk about access! If I were the intel officer, I’d be delighted and thinking I’m going to be promoted!”

He added, “It’s how I recruited assets.”

Daniel Schuman, policy director of Demand Progress, said that overseas recruitment attempts are commonplace. For this reason, he explained, members of Congress and even congressional staffers are routinely offered counterintelligence briefings.

Menendez, in one case described in the indictment, sought to travel to Egypt unofficially and without supervision from the State Department. A trip under such circumstances runs contrary to reporting requirements under the Senate Security Manual.

The three-count federal indictment against Mendendez, unsealed on Friday, paints a damning picture of pay-to-play access with a wide cast of characters, ranging from allies of the Egyptian government to an associate of the tristate-area mob. Three business associates and Nadine Menendez are all named in the legal filing, which claims that Menendez used his position of power to influence federal appointments and protect his longtime friend, Fred Daibes, a New Jersey real estate developer, financier, and longtime Menendez fundraiser.

On Tuesday, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy was joined by Menendez’s fellow New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, in calling for his resignation. “The details of the allegations against Senator Menendez are of such a nature that the faith and trust of New Jerseyans as well as those he must work with in order to be effective have been shaken to the core,” Booker said. “I believe stepping down is best for those Senator Menendez has spent his life serving.”

“Due process is a legal right, but nobody has a right to be a senator. Not being in the Senate isn’t a punishment.”

Booker’s comments follow those made by Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., the first Democratic senator to call for Menendez’s resignation. Fetterman said he would try to return campaign donations from Menendez in $100 bills stuffed into envelopes like those discovered in Menendez’s house by federal investigators.

Speaker Emerita Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., called the charges against Menendez “formidable” and has said “it would probably be a good idea if he did resign.” Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., the Senate’s second-highest ranking official, has also called for Menendez to step down. Still, high-ranking officials like Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., have not called for his resignation. In a statement, Schumer said Menendez is “a dedicated public servant and is always fighting hard for the people of New Jersey,” adding that Menendez has a right to due process.

Schuman, of Demand Progress, pointed out that questions around Menendez’s legal proceedings are separate from questions of his position in the Senate. “Due process is a legal right, but nobody has a right to be a senator,” he said. “Not being in the Senate isn’t a punishment.”

Menendez has denied the charges, maintaining that the cash seized by authorities was from his personal savings account that he kept for emergencies “because of the history of my family facing confiscation in Cuba.” Menendez, who was born in New York City, also said, “Those behind this campaign simply cannot accept that a first-generation Latino American from humble beginnings could rise to be a U.S. senator and serve with honor and distinction.”

Update: September 27, 2023, 2:03 p.m.
This story has been updated to include a statement from former top Obama administration adviser Ben Rhodes that was received after publication.

The post Menendez Indictment Looks Like Egypt Recruiting Intelligence Source, Say Former CIA Officials appeared first on The Intercept.

“87 percent of respondents told us they were aware of the strike,” Caliber CEO Shahar Silbershatz told The Intercept. “It’s clear the strike is not just causing commercial repercussions, but reputational repercussions as well.”

The findings from the Caliber survey follow a recent Ipsos poll that found 58 percent of Americans say they support striking autoworkers. Seventy-two percent of Democrats and 63 percent of independents share this sentiment, along with 48 percent of Republicans. The same poll also found that 60 percent of Americans support the Writers Guild of America strike, which appears to be drawing to a close this week after more than 150 days on the picket line. 

The survey results are yet another sign that Americans are aligning themselves with the UAW’s 150,000 members in their fight against the American auto manufacturers, the largest autoworker strike in U.S. history. The union’s central demands include higher salaries, the elimination of a tiered pay scale that divides workers based on seniority, and a restoration of benefits lost in the wake of the 2008 financial crash.

In the run-up to the strike, the Big Three auto manufacturers found themselves scrambling to anticipate the factories workers would target to walk off assembly lines. As The Intercept reported last week, this led to self-inflicted supply chain chaos, with engines loaded and shipped cross-country and paint divisions closed at plants that the UAW never planned to strike. As the carmakers work to address mayhem in their factories, the companies’ conflict with the union is increasingly affecting consumers as well. 

Caliber, a Denmark-based firm, surveyed people in the United States the week of September 18, a few days into the strike, and published the results on Monday. Overall, it found that Stellantis suffered an 8-point decline in its “Trust & Like” score — the firm’s aggregate measurement of brand reputation — as compared to the previous week. Caliber also recorded 4-point declines for GM and Ford for that metric.

The firm also found that Stellantis and Ford saw 14-point drops in their consideration score, which reflects consumers’ willingness to buy products or services. GM, meanwhile, faced a 3-percent drop. 

Stellantis’s recommendation score declined by 19 points, while Ford and GM saw 9- and 7-point drops, respectively. Meanwhile, Ford and GM each saw 9-point drops in their employment scores, which measures respondents’ willingness to consider them as a potential employer, while Stellantis saw a decline of 13 points. 

“We have said repeatedly that nobody wins in a strike, and that effects go well beyond our employees on the plant floor and negatively impact our customers, suppliers and the communities where we do business.” GM spokesperson Kevin M. Kelly told The Intercept. “We will continue to bargain in good faith with the union to reach an agreement as quickly as possible.”

Ford and Stellantis did not respond to requests for comment

Already, UAW workers have garnered unprecedented support. On Tuesday, President Joe Biden — who has long described himself as the “most pro-union president in history” — joined workers on the picket line in Wayne County, Michigan. “This has never happened before,” Erik Loomis, a labor historian at the University of Rhode Island, said to the Courier Journal ahead of the visit. “For all of the history between the Democrats and unions, FDR certainly wasn’t going to show up on a picket line. Harry Truman wasn’t going to. JFK wasn’t going to.”

Even members of the Republican Party, which has long worked to gut workers rights and condemn unions as inherently corrupt organizations, have expressed support for the UAW. Sens. Josh Hawley and J.D. Vance, whose states of Missouri and Ohio are home to plants that are being picketed, both voiced their support for striking workers, while stopping short of endorsing the union movement as a whole. 

Former President Donald Trump, meanwhile, announced he would travel to Michigan to speak to UAW members on Wednesday, a commitment that was roundly denounced by UAW President Shawn Fain. “Every fiber of our union is being poured into fighting the billionaire class and an economy that enriches people like Donald Trump at the expense of workers,” Fain said in a statement last week. 

The union’s negotiations with Ford are slowly thawing, according to UAW leadership, although a deal with the other carmakers seems out of reach. In a statement announcing the expansion of the strike to dozens more plants last Thursday, Fain told workers, “We do want to recognize that Ford is serious about reaching a deal,” but that “Stellantis and GM in particular are going to need some serious pushing.” Fain added, “We will shut down parts distribution until those two companies come to their senses and come to the table with a serious offer.”

The post Big Three Automakers’ Reputations Plummet as UAW Strike Rages appeared first on The Intercept.

The complaint accuses Scott of violating the section of the NLRA that lays out employees rights to participate in labor actions: “Within the past six months, the employer has interfered with, restrained, or coerced employees in the exercise of the rights guaranteed in Section 7 of the Act. On Monday September 18, 2023 Tim Scott threatened employees with adverse consequences if they engage in protected, concerted activity by publicly responding to a question about striking workers as follows: ‘You strike, you’re fired.’”

The complaint was filed against Scott in his capacity as a representative for Tim Scott for America. In addition to being a senator representing the state of South Carolina, Scott is running for president, making him an employer as well. The premise of the complaint is that Scott’s comments could be construed as a direct threat against his campaign staffers, whose right to strike is enshrined in federal law. 

Scott’s comments appear to violate those laws, said Benjamin Sachs, a professor of labor law at Harvard University. “A statement as direct as ‘if you strike, you’re fired’ is textbook unfair labor practice language because workers can’t be fired for striking,” Sachs told The Intercept. “If a reasonable employee could interpret the statement as ‘if I strike, I’m fired,’ then it is without a doubt an unfair labor practice violation.”

Sachs added that the National Labor Relations Board would likely rule that Scott must cease and desist from making similar comments and also inform employees of his violation in writing. “In some cases — and this NLRB general counsel seems more amenable to this — the employer is compelled to read their violation out loud or communicate it verbally to their employees,” Sachs said, referring to the NLRB’s top lawyer Jennifer Abruzzo.

Scott did not immediately respond to The Intercept’s request for comment. He made his remarks on Monday after he was asked at a campaign event about whether he would pick a side in the UAW’s ongoing strike against the Big Three automakers: Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis. In response to the question, Scott referenced Reagan’s 1981 decision to fire over 10,000 striking air traffic controllers. “I think Ronald Reagan gave us a great example when federal employees decided they were going to strike,” Scott said. “You strike, you’re fired. Simple concept to me, to the extent that we can use that once again.”

“Telling workers they’ll be fired for striking is violating federal labor law, and that’s not something becoming of a senator,” Sachs said. 

Scott went on to denigrate the UAW’s 150,000 workers, whose demands include a pay increase, the elimination of tiered pay scales, and the restoration of strong benefits. “The other things that are really important in that deal is that they want more money working fewer hours. They want more benefits working fewer days.” In “America, that doesn’t make sense,” the senator said. “That’s not common sense.”

The UAW strike started last week after the union’s contracts expired on Thursday night. Three auto plants have gone on strike so far, with more slated to join on Friday as the Big Three auto manufacturers continue to refuse to meet workers’ demands. In an interview with Status Coup on Wednesday, Fain told reporters that the strike is about more than just the autoworkers’ current contract negotiations — it’s also about pushing the boundaries of the possible. 

“When I hear the phrase ‘live to fight another day,’ I want to literally beat the shit out of somebody,” Fain said. “It would drive me up a wall when I would hear a leader say ‘live another day.’ Another day came and went over and over and no one fought. This is our time. We call this our generation-defining moment. This is it. … The sky has to be the limit.”

The post UAW Files Labor Complaint Against Sen. Tim Scott for Saying “You Strike, You’re Fired.” appeared first on The Intercept.

In the weeks leading up to the strike, a cat-and-mouse game between the UAW and the companies unfolded, a version of guerrilla warfare between the parties. Through targeted walk-offs, the union aimed to disrupt the companies’ operations with the fewest possible workers, which would allow the union’s strike fund to last longer into the conflict — essentially forcing the companies to pay workers even during the strike period. The companies, meanwhile, sought to anticipate precisely which plants would be struck and reorganize production and distribution to minimize losses. The Big Three guessed badly. 

A spokesperson for Stellantis, which is Chrysler’s parent company, said that it did not shutter any plants in anticipation of the strike and could not speak to component transfers, but that it was aware of “an equipment issue in one of our paint shops that caused some downtime.” A spokesperson for GM also said that the company had “not taken any steps to preemptively close any of our plants,” while Ford did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment. 

“These companies are conducting strikes on themselves.”

Brandon Mancilla, a director for the UAW’s Region 9A, which spans New England and the Northeast, told The Intercept that the auto manufacturers are creating more problems for themselves than they would have faced had they come to an agreement with the union before the contracts for its 150,000 workers expired last week. “Instead of bargaining in good faith and understanding our demands and meeting us at the table,” Mancilla said, “these companies are conducting strikes on themselves.”

The UAW did not announce the plants where it intended to hold work stoppages until just before the strike deadline last Thursday night. The targeted facilities — GM’s Wentzville Assembly Center outside St. Louis, Stellantis’s Toledo Assembly Complex in Ohio, and two divisions of Ford’s Michigan plant — were not among those that workers reported companies making preparations at. So far, some 13,000 workers are on the picket line, affecting the production of classic American cars like the Jeep Wrangler and the Ford Bronco, with more to follow if the union’s contract negotiations are not concluded by week’s end. 

In the run up to the strike, UAW members at auto plants from Georgia to Tennessee to Ohio took to Facebook and Twitter to share accounts of partial plant closures and faulty information from plant managers leading to chaos on shop floors across the country. 

Scott Houldieson, a worker at the Ford assembly plant in Chicago, told The Intercept that company bosses seemed to have no idea where planned strikes were going to take place. “Our local plant management started emptying out vehicles from paint ovens and dip tanks. If they leave cars in there, they get ruined so they start emptying those out and preparing to shut the ovens down. So that’s what was happening here because they thought that our plant was going to be one that was called out,” Houldieson said. “The plant chairman was telling me that ours was the one they were going to strike.”

Houldieson said that other automakers had transferred parts from plants elsewhere in the country, including one in Tennessee. “At GM in Spring Hill, they loaded engines to send to Wentzville because they thought Spring Hill would be the target. Turns out Wentzville was where they struck, so there was a lot of disinformation out there that really put the company on their heels,” he added.

In other words, the company had moved product from a plant that was not striking and to one that did. (The GM spokesperson said that “there’s been no work interruption at Spring Hill as a result of the Wentzville strike.”) 

Stellantis admitted that it was caught off guard and took preparations at plants that were not ultimately affected by the strike actions. 

“Strike preparation and contingency planning is part of our normal process in a contract negotiation year — as a responsible business we have to do that,” a spokesperson told In These Times. “They made it very clear that a strike was possible and we did everything we needed to do to protect the business.” 

Earlier this month, the industry-aligned publication Auto News published an article describing plants that UAW members would likely target, including Ford’s Livonia Transmission Plant in Michigan, its Lima Engine plant in Ohio, and the Cleveland Engine No. 1 facility. The article claimed Stellantis’s engine and transmission plants in Indiana and Michigan as well as three GM plants across three states were also likely strike targets. That list was regurgitated on CNBC, where a reporter said he got the information from “a source familiar with the UAW’s plans.” Not one of those plants ultimately saw a shutdown.

The UAW’s “stand up” strike strategy harkens back to the UAW strikes of the 1930s when workers “sat down” on shop floors, occupying factories and using guerrilla tactics to win the kind of contracts that made auto companies the gold standard for U.S. manufacturing jobs. During the Flint, Michigan, sit-down strike of 1936, workers employed diversionary tactics at a secondary GM plant to draw company security away from their primary target. The workers spread a rumor that they were going to target one plant, and when their employer acted on that false information, they snuck into a different plant that was their target all along. That action led to the union’s first recognition at one of the Big Three.

The strategy the UAW is currently employing is led by the union’s new militant president, Shawn Fain. He was elected in March after the UAW changed its election process from a delegate system to one member, one vote in the most recent leadership election. He has assumed a new posture for the union’s leadership: for example, refusing to endorse Joe Biden for president until he supports the UAW’s efforts to unionize electric vehicle facilities, and rejecting a ceremonial handshake with auto manufacturer bosses before the start of contract negotiations. 

In the critical swing state of Michigan, where tens of thousands of UAW members work, the union holds an outsized influence over state politics and, in turn, nationwide races. That means union support will be crucial for Biden’s reelection chances in 2024. Capitalizing on the Biden administration’s tepid support for the UAW strike, Donald Trump announced he would speak to autoworkers this month, drawing condemnation from Fain. 

Despite the Biden administration’s refusal to strongly support workers, other politicians are joining the fray, announcing their support for the UAW, and calling the president’s pre-strike assumption that workers wouldn’t strike delusional. “Are you out of your fucking minds?” Rep. Debbie Dingell, D-Mich., allegedly screamed at one of Biden’s closest advisers, Steve Ricchetti. 

The UAW’s key demands are shorter work weeks, the return of pensions and benefits, and wage increases to bring salaries in line with past levels. Fain has threatened the companies with even greater disruption should they fail to meet workers where they stand. “We’re going to keep hitting the company where we need to, when we need to. And we’re not going to keep waiting around forever while they drag this out,” Fain said on Monday. “I have been clear with the Big Three every step of the way. And I’m going to be crystal clear again right now. If we don’t make serious progress by noon on Friday, September 22nd, more locals will be called on to Stand Up and join the strike.”

Correction: September 19, 2023, 5:31 p.m. ET
A previous version of this article stated that Houldieson works at a General Motors plant; in fact, he works at a Ford plant.

The post Confused Automakers Braced for Strike at the Wrong Plants appeared first on The Intercept.

At the G20 summit last November, President Joe Biden touted a TechMet project in Brazil to mine nickel and cobalt for electric vehicle batteries. And during her trip across Africa earlier this year, Vice President Kamala Harris announced a U.S.-brokered agreement between TechMet and another company, Lifezone Metals, to mine one of the largest nickel deposits in the world: Tanzania’s Kabanga mine. 

Yet White House chief of staff Jeffrey Zients, whose job involves implementing the administration’s policy, has sidelined himself from the U.S. government’s deepening involvement with TechMet — thanks to what could be perceived as a conflict of interest stemming from his family’s vast wealth.

TechMet’s CEO is Brian Menell, a South African mining baron and the brother of Zients’s wife, Mary Menell Zients. Jeffrey Zients disclosed the relationship when he was brought on as chief of staff, the White House said, and recused himself from all matters related to the company. His recusal, which has not been previously reported, was the appropriate move, as ethics experts agree, but it also means the U.S. is operating without its chief quarterback in its dealings with a major player in the green energy transition.

“Zients informed vetting and ethics lawyers about Techmet as part of the standard onboarding process for his hiring,” White House spokesperson Saloni Sharma told The Intercept. “Even though he was not required to do so under relevant ethics regulations, out of an abundance of caution, he elected to recuse himself from all particular matters involving Techmet to avoid even an appearance of a conflict of interest.”

Securing ingredients like nickel for electric vehicle batteries is a critical part of the green energy transition heralded by the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill, both of which were passed before Zients took over as chief of staff and represent hundreds of billions of dollars in government spending. As part of the administration’s multipronged approach to reduce carbon emissions, federal and executive agencies are working to source these metals away from their primary producer and chief U.S. competitor, China. 

U.S. backing for TechMet dates back to 2020, when the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation put $25 million in the company under President Donald Trump. Last year, the DFC approved another $30 million of investments in the company’s clean energy projects. The Biden administration went on to facilitate a partnership between TechMet and Lifezone in Tanzania, which Harris promoted in March, as part of the Biden administration’s $560 million of support for the East African country. Thanks to U.S. diplomatic and financial coordination, the Tanzanian government partnered with Lifezone to extract nickel from the Kabanga mine in the northwestern part of the country and deliver it to the U.S. and international markets by 2026.

Zients’s relatives, it turns out, had a stake in both sides of the U.S.-brokered agreement around the mine. The Zients Children’s Trust, which was set up for the benefit of Jeffrey Zients’s adult children, owned more than 400,000 shares of Lifezone before it went public on the New York Stock Exchange in July. The company had a successful first day of trading, seeing its shares jump nearly 50 percent. (Zients is not required to disclose the holdings of his adult children. Sharma said that he is not involved with the trust. “He does not have a position with, receive income from, or have a financial interest in the Trust,” she wrote.)

Even as the clean energy revolution marks a much-needed break from the era of fossil fuels, the potential for the family of the chief of staff to profit from the deal around the Kabanga mine illustrates that when it comes to resource extraction from the periphery flowing to the benefit of elites in the center, structurally, much will remain the same.

Before assuming his role as Biden’s chief of staff early this year, Zients flitted between the federal government and an extraordinarily lucrative career in finance and consulting. He worked in the Obama administration in a variety of roles, including two stints as acting director of the Office of Management and Budget. Like his father, who oversaw the privatization of certain veterans health care services, Zients became heavily involved in privatized medicine. In 2015, while he was serving as director of the National Economic Council, Zients’s investment firm Portfolio Logic reached a multimillion-dollar settlement with the Justice Department resolving allegations that its subsidiary health care firm committed Medicare and Medicaid fraud. 

More recently, he sat on the board of Facebook and was CEO of the Wall Street investment firm Cranemere, which he left in 2020 before becoming Biden’s Covid czar, a position he held until April 2022. 

In his most recent ethics filing, Zients disclosed tens of millions in index fund shares, gold bars, gold shares, federal bonds, commercial real estate holdings, and banked cash. All told, his holdings reflect a net worth somewhere between $89 and $442 million, making him one of the wealthiest members of the administration. Jeff Hauser, executive director of the watchdog organization the Revolving Door Project, said that Zients’s wealth and connections are part of a worrying trend in who inevitably rises to power overseeing the federal government.

Jeffrey Zients’s holdings reflect a net worth somewhere between $89 and $442 million, making him one of the wealthiest members of the administration.

“There are many reasons to prefer our government be made up of dedicated public servants rather than members of an international oligarch set whose personal networks are comprised of the rich and powerful,” Hauser told The Intercept. “One of them is that ‘recusals’ and ‘firewalls’ are necessary but imperfect responses to the inextricable problem that people cannot forget what their interests are.” 

He added that the breadth of a chief of staff’s responsibilities makes it impossible to fully separate familial interests from the administration’s policy priorities. “Jobs as all-encompassing as Chief of Staff can never be truly separated from issues as consequential to the Administration as industrial policy, economic rivalry with China, and the Green Transition,” Hauser said. “Almost everything the US does in foreign policy is connected in some way to these goals, but very few of the questions that foreign policy raises will reference a specific mining company by name — even if that company is sprawling and strategically central.”

Brian Menell founded TechMet in 2017 with deep foresight into the change coming to the continent his family had long profited off of. Since then, he has overseen investments in projects tied to the electric vehicle transition across the globe. 

In addition to the nickel mining project in Brazil, that includes investments in a rare earth metals refinery in Norway, rare earth mining in South Africa, tin and tungsten mining in Rwanda, lithium mining in England, geothermal lithium production in California, lithium ion battery production and lithium recycling in Ohio, and a vanadium processor in Arkansas.

“If Tesla is to reach 20 million electric vehicles a year by 2030 that will require two times the current lithium annually mined supply,” he told attendees at the London Indaba conference in July, the trade publication Miningmx reported. “That is before GM, Ford and VW (electric vehicle production) and before the Chinese which already produce two-thirds of the world’s EV batteries.” He then added prophetically, “There is a lull in the artificially depressed market at the moment before a 10-year bull run.”

Under the agreement brokered by the Biden administration this year, TechMet will work to source inputs for Lifezone’s metals processing operation in Tanzania. The agreement was facilitated through the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment, the Biden administration’s G7 plan that seeks to coordinate countries’ foreign energy and infrastructure investments, according to a White House fact sheet and reporting in The Economist. Brian Menell did not respond to The Intercept’s questions.

Other members of the Menell family have also had an interest in the Tanzanian mining project. In 2021, Zients’s mother-in-law, Irene Menell, transferred 7,148 shares in Kabanga Nickel Limited, the corporate entity for the mining project, to her son Rick Menell, according to a filing with Companies House, the U.K. database for British business entities.

Rick Menell and his sister, Mary Zients, are founding co-chairs of City Year South Africa, a youth leadership nonprofit. In April of this year, they jointly visited the White House, along with Rick Menell’s daughter. The trio was welcomed by Nina Srivastava, an adviser to the chief of staff, executive office visitor logs show. Sharma said the family was taking a tour of the White House. Rick Menell declined to comment for this article. 

The Menells trace their lineage back to Slip Menell, who in the 1930s founded the Anglovaal Group, one of South Africa’s major mining conglomerates. Since then, mining has stayed a family business. Brian and Rick Menell helmed the company together through the ’90s and early 2000s, quietly seizing control from encroaching investors through an offshore fund to maintain their familial domination. 

Since his time atop Anglovaal, Rick Menell has held senior roles at a variety of mining and finance firms with large sway over the African continent’s mining operations. He is currently the lead independent non-executive director on the board of Sibanye-Stillwater, a mining company that claims to be the world’s largest primary producer of platinum, second-largest primary producer of palladium, and third-largest producer of gold.

The U.K. corporate records also shed light on Zients’s adult children’s interest in the Kabanga mine. The Zients Children’s Trust held 3,064 ordinary shares in Kabanga Nickel Limited in early 2022, according to the company’s filing. Later that year, Lifezone subsumed Kabanga Nickel through a holding company, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission records show. 

When Lifezone went public in July 2023, the Zients Children’s Trust held just over 403,000 shares in the company, according to its SEC filing. Those shares are estimated to be worth more than $5 million on the date of the filing. 

The address listed for both the Zients Children’s Trust and the vast majority of other Lifezone shareholders is in the Isle of Man, a notorious tax haven. There is not much public information about the trust, though financial records show that it also held shares in Cranemere, the company Zients left to join the White House, during his time there. (The Isle of Man address is also registered to dozens of other companies, including the holding company of the sanctioned Russian oligarch Sergey Generalov.)

Lifezone has marketed its project at Tanzania’s Kabanga nickel mine as the next frontier in the race to provide raw materials for the electric vehicle transition. It touts the mine as one of the largest and highest-grade nickel deposits in the world that will also produce battery-grade copper and cobalt. The project’s refinery site is going to be permitted as a special economic zone, paving the way for a metal processing hub that the company says will yield “economic and social benefits for Tanzania and the East African region.”

Lifezone has highlighted the low emissions technology it plans to use to extract nickel from Kabanga ore in its public materials, in addition to the steps it is taking to ensure compliance with human rights standards, local laws, and community protections. In its required disclosures with the SEC, however, the company notes that these areas may pose a risk to shareholder profits. 

The company flagged a number of potential risks for shareholders related to its projects in Tanzania and elsewhere on the continent: claims filed over negative health effects from mining operations, labor unrest, anti-corruption compliance, and unpredictable politics, including “resource nationalism.” The Tanzanian government holds a stake in Lifezone’s local operation. 

“We are subject to global resource nationalism trends which encompass a range of measures, such as seeking the greater participation of historically disadvantaged or indigenous people, expropriation or taxation, whereby governments seek to increase the economic benefits derived by their countries from their natural resources,” the filing reads. Taken together, the disclosures serve as a reminder that even a project meant to facilitate a transition to green energy will entail the dangerous and often exploitative work that has long accompanied natural resource extraction. 

The post White House Chief of Staff’s Wealth and Connections Collide With Biden’s Clean Energy Strategy appeared first on The Intercept.

The federal government has shelled out at least $22 million in an effort to develop “smart” clothing that spies on the wearer and its surroundings. Similar to previous moonshot projects funded by military and intelligence agencies, the inspiration may have come from science fiction and superpowers, but the basic applications are on brand for the government: surveillance and data collection.

Billed as the “largest single investment to develop Active Smart Textiles,” the SMART ePANTS — Smart Electrically Powered and Networked Textile Systems — program aims to develop clothing capable of recording audio, video, and geolocation data, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence announced in an August 22 press release. Garments slated for production include shirts, pants, socks, and underwear, all of which are intended to be washable.

The project is being undertaken by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, the intelligence community’s secretive counterpart to the military’s better-known Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. IARPA’s website says it “invests federal funding into high-risk, high reward projects to address challenges facing the intelligence community.” Its tolerance for risk has led to both impressive achievements, like a Nobel Prize awarded to physicist David Wineland for his research on quantum computing funded by IARPA, as well as costly failures.

“A lot of the IARPA and DARPA programs are like throwing spaghetti against the refrigerator,” Annie Jacobsen, author of a book about DARPA, “The Pentagon’s Brain,” told The Intercept. “It may or may not stick.”

According to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s press release, “This eTextile technology could also assist personnel and first responders in dangerous, high-stress environments, such as crime scenes and arms control inspections without impeding their ability to swiftly and safely operate.”

IARPA contracts for the SMART ePANTS program have gone to five entities. As the Pentagon disclosed this month along with other contracts it routinely announces, IARPA has awarded $11.6 million and $10.6 million to defense contractors Nautilus Defense and Leidos, respectively. The Pentagon did not disclose the value of the contracts with the other three: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, SRI International, and Areté. “IARPA does not publicly disclose our funding numbers,” IARPA spokesperson Nicole de Haay told The Intercept.

Dawson Cagle, a former Booz Allen Hamilton associate, serves as the IARPA program manager leading SMART ePANTS. Cagle invoked his time serving as a United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq between 2002 and 2006 as important experience for his current role.

“As a former weapons inspector myself, I know how much hand-carried electronics can interfere with my situational awareness at inspection sites,” Cagle recently told Homeland Security Today. “In unknown environments, I’d rather have my hands free to grab ladders and handrails more firmly and keep from hitting my head than holding some device.”

SMART ePANTS is not the national security community’s first foray into high-tech wearables. In 2013, Adm. William McRaven, then-commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, presented the Tactical Assault Light Operator Suit. Called TALOS for short, the proposal sought to develop a powered exoskeleton “supersuit” similar to that worn by Matt Damon’s character in “Elysium,” a sci-fi action movie released that year. The proposal also drew comparisons to the suit worn by Iron Man, played by Robert Downey Jr., in a string of blockbuster films released in the run-up to TALOS’s formation.

“Science fiction has always played a role in DARPA,” Jacobsen said.

The TALOS project ended in 2019 without a demonstrable prototype, but not before racking up $80 million in costs.

As IARPA works to develop SMART ePANTS over the next three and a half years, Jacobsen stressed that the advent of smart wearables could usher in troubling new forms of government biometric surveillance.

“They’re now in a position of serious authority over you. In TSA, they can swab your hands for explosives,” Jacobsen said. “Now suppose SMART ePANTS detects a chemical on your skin — imagine where that can lead.” With consumer wearables already capable of monitoring your heartbeat, further breakthroughs could give rise to more invasive biometrics.

“IARPA programs are designed and executed in accordance with, and adhere to, strict civil liberties and privacy protection protocols. Further, IARPA performs civil liberties and privacy protection compliance reviews throughout our research efforts,” de Haay, the spokesperson, said.

There is already evidence that private industry outside of the national security community are interested in smart clothing. Meta, Facebook’s parent company, is looking to hire a researcher “with broad knowledge in smart textiles and garment construction, integration of electronics into soft and flexible systems, and who can work with a team of researchers working in haptics, sensing, tracking, and materials science.”

The spy world is no stranger to lavish investments in moonshot technology. The CIA’s venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel, recently invested in Colossal Biosciences, a wooly mammoth resurrection startup, as The Intercept reported last year.

If SMART ePANTS succeeds, it’s likely to become a tool in IARPA’s arsenal to “create the vast intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance systems of the future,” said Jacobsen. “They want to know more about you than you.”

The post U.S. Spy Agency Dreams of Surveillance Underwear It’s Calling “SMART ePANTS” appeared first on The Intercept.