Presenting the NJ.com Top 50, July 2023: N.J.’s premier list of high school football recruits (Full list)
“Small” concluded one of the quietest, could have been more high-profile New Jersey high school football recruitments of the past few years when he picked the Blue Devils over 20 other offers on June …
How Britain’s Secret Cyber Unit Targets Russia And China Online
How Britain’s Secret Cyber Unit Targets Russia And China Online
Authored by Patricia Devlin via The Epoch Times,
Details of how Britain’s most secretive disinformation unit has been targeting “hostile states” such as China and Russia online have been revealed in a new report.
The National Cyber Force (NCF), staffed by the intelligence services and the Ministry of Defence (MoD), has been carrying out “cyber operations on a daily basis” to not only stop threats to the UK, but also to “further the UK’s foreign policy.”
According to the latest Defence Command Paper (pdf), the NCF has been using covert internet and technology techniques to “sow distrust, decrease morale, and weaken” the abilities of overseas “adversaries.”
That includes disrupting online platforms or messaging services, preventing the publication of extremist material and “countering” foreign state disinformation campaigns.
The MoD report also revealed how the NCF has been working closely with super secret global surveillance group the Five Eyes, and NATO.
It said:
“Our ability to both learn from events and hunt forward to find threats will generate strategic advantage for our personnel and partners in conflict.
“This involves close collaboration with our cross-government partners, including the National Cyber Security Centre, and our international partners, in particular through Five Eyes and NATO.”
While the NCF’s work is “covert” and details of individual operations are not disclosed, the paper stated that over the past three years, the NCF has delivered operations to protect military deployments overseas, disrupt terrorist groups and counter “sophisticated, stealthy and continuous cyber threats.”
Propaganda Distribution
The unit, set up in 2020, is also set to expand its operations, with plans to hire more MoD and intelligence staff over the next number of years.
The report said:
“Over the coming years we will expand the capacity and reach of the NCF to keep pace with adversaries. We will operate more dynamically within the international information environment and improve the coordination of defence strategic communications activities.”
“We will make more sophisticated use of information to explain our approach, to build coalitions, to change the behaviours of our adversaries, and to influence a wide range of audiences.”
In April, the highly secretive group published its one and only report (pdf) detailing some of the defence operations its carried out in the digital sphere since 2020.
“This has included disrupting terrorist command and control and propaganda distribution, supporting military objectives on the battlefield, and disrupting the activities of hostile actors seeking to do us harm,” the report said.
It said it recruits and runs agents, alongside delivering clandestine operational technology, with the help of the MoD’s “operational and planning expertise” and GCHQ’s “global intelligence.”
The intelligence services—which includes MI5 and M6—also have an input into the cyber unit, along with the Defence Science & Technology Laboratory (Dstl).
The NCF says its objective is “to change adversary behaviour by exploiting their reliance on digital technology.”
It also carries out operations targeting paedophiles using the internet to download child abuse images and videos.
Photo-illustration of web flash pages for GCHQ, the British government’s communications and electronic surveillance headquarters, and The Security Service (MI5), the government’s internal security service, on a computer and smartphone in London, on Nov. 25, 2016. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant)
Counter Disinformation Unit
It is the second secret group that has been used by the government over the past two years to combat disinformation.
The Counter Disinformation Unit (CDU) was part of the Department for Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport, which leads the UK government’s operational response to “domestic disinformation threats online.”
In February it moved to the Department of Science, Innovation, and Technology after it was revealed the CDU had been monitoring lockdown critics on social media.
The government confirmed in January the CDU had monitored COVID-19 pandemic critics, including Conservative MPs and journalists, on social media platforms via the CDU and other misinformation units.
Documents obtained by the civil liberties group Big Brother Watch revealed that well-known figures including Tory MP David Davis, Lockdown Sceptics founder Toby Young, talkRADIO’s Julia Hartley-Brewer, and Mail on Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens were all monitored by the groups.
Last month The Telegraph reported that one of the CDU’s main functions was “passing information over” to companies such as Facebook and Twitter to “encourage … the swift takedown” of posts.
Earlier this week, Britain’s intellectual property minister faced calls to shut down the “secret institution”.
Viscount Camrose defended the CDU in the Lords, claiming most of its work focused on hostile state threats to the UK.
Tory peer Lord Lilley told the minister, “Surely it is the job of politicians to put forward the truth and dispute what they consider to be unreasonable or disinformation with facts, reason, logic, and ridicule, not to have a secret institution, which should be closed down.”
Tyler Durden
Fri, 07/21/2023 – 04:15
Santa stops by Coney Island to celebrate Christmas in July
Santa Claus will be making a stop at Coney Island Friday, July 21 to celebrate Christmas in July before heading back to the North Pole for the Holidays. Santa’s stopping at Sunlite Water Adventure …
Santa stops by Coney Island to celebrate Christmas in July
Santa Claus will be making a stop at Coney Island Friday, July 21 to celebrate Christmas in July before heading back to the North Pole for the Holidays. Santa’s stopping at Sunlite Water Adventure …
Santa stops by Coney Island to celebrate Christmas in July
Santa Claus will be making a stop at Coney Island Friday, July 21 to celebrate Christmas in July before heading back to the North Pole for the Holidays. Santa’s stopping at Sunlite Water Adventure …
Santa stops by Coney Island to celebrate Christmas in July
Santa Claus will be making a stop at Coney Island Friday, July 21 to celebrate Christmas in July before heading back to the North Pole for the Holidays. Santa’s stopping at Sunlite Water Adventure …
10 most expensive homes sold in Monmouth County, July 3-July 16
A house in Spring Lake that sold for $6.4 million tops the list of the most expensive residential real estate sales in Monmouth County between July 3 and July 16.
In total, 210 residential real estate sales were recorded in the area during the past two weeks, with an average price of $705,435. The average price per square foot ended up at $371.
Ex-deputy blames anti-law enforcement ‘bias’ after jury acquits man who beat, shot at her: ‘Knife in the back’
A former California sheriff’s deputy says anti-law enforcement bias is to blame after a jury acquitted a man seen on video beating her to the ground and trying to shoot her with her own weapon.
Former San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputy Meagan McCarthy told “Fox & Friends First” Thursday that recent reforms to California’s jury selection process allowed jurors with an “expressed bias” against law enforcement to decide her case.
“If you express an implicit bias towards law enforcement, you are allowed to sit on a jury. And that has never been the case before,” McCarthy said. “So in my situation, we had many jurors who expressed this bias towards law enforcement, and they were still allowed to decide guilty or not guilty on my suspect.”
CALIFORNIA MAN WHO PUMMELED, SHOT AT FEMALE DEPUTY FOUND NOT GUILTY DESPITE VIDEO OF ATTACK
The attack happened in 2019 after McCarthy responded to a frantic 911 call from suspect Ari Young’s mother, saying, “Oh, my God, oh, my God! Get my son out of here” before going quiet on the line.
Video shows Young pummeling McCarthy repeatedly after she arrived on the scene and struggling with her for her gun. Once Young had possession of the firearm, he proceeded to fire several shots before the gun jammed, according to McCarthy.
A jury found Young not guilty of attempted murder and assaulting a peace officer, instead finding him guilty of the lesser charge of negligent discharge of a firearm, and failed to reach a verdict on several other allegations, including resisting arrest.
Young’s defense team called the video an “illusion” and argued self-defense, saying McCarthy had no right to pat down the schizophrenic suspect.
LOS ANGELES MAN WHO AVOIDED PRISON FOR NEAR-FATAL STABBING NOW CHARGED WITH NEIGHBOR’S MURDER
“I was heartbroken,” McCarthy said of the decision. “You know, I’ve spent nearly four years healing from this incident and to be told ‘You’re not a victim. You don’t get to speak. You don’t get to have that closure.’ That was kind of the knife in the back that I was hoping I wouldn’t have.”
“I don’t know how you can see a video of a crime and allow this person to enter a community. It’s heartbreaking, and it’s devastating for the people.”
California Assembly Bill 3070, which focuses on the “unfair exclusion” of potential jurors, went into effect in 2022. According to the bill’s language, among the peremptory challenge grounds now considered invalid for juror dismissal, are “expressing a distrust of or having a negative experience with law enforcement or the criminal legal system” and “expressing a belief that law enforcement officers engage in racial profiling or that criminal laws have been enforced in a discriminatory manner.”
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California State Assemblyman Bill Essayli, R-Riverside, a former federal prosecutor and deputy district attorney in nearby Riverside County, said the case should have had enough evidence to secure a conviction.
“[The defense] argued that she didn’t have a lawful authority to detain him, and therefore, he’s free to defend himself and do whatever he wants to get away from her, including beating her up and shooting at her,” Essayli told Fox News Digital. “That’s not correct. That’s not the law. And I don’t think the judge should have allowed that argument to be presented in that manner.”
The county sheriff also expressed frustration with the lack of “meaningful consequences” in the case.
“The video speaks for itself, and more importantly it demonstrates the increasing violence the public and our deputies experience,” San Bernardino County Sheriff-Coroner Shannon Dicus told Fox News Digital. “I share in the frustration at the lack of accountability for these brazen and violent crimes, crimes perpetrated by a criminal who created a situation where law enforcement help was requested, a criminal who repeatedly and brutally attacked, disarmed, and tried to murder a deputy sheriff.”
McCarthy said the justice system and state of California not only let her down but set a “damaging” precedent for police officers and victims.
“You go to work, especially being a cop, to serve and protect the community that you swore to do. That’s exactly what I did that day… To say that somehow I’m not a victim and I’m not righteous of the closure of the justice system, is just very damaging to not just cops but people.”
The mom of two told Fox News Digital she was forced to retire from the job she loved due to post-traumatic stress. She said Thursday the attack has saddled her with “a lot of guilt and emotion.”
“I was hoping for closure. I was hoping for justice. I was hoping for peace. And I never saw that.”
Fox News’ Michael Ruiz contributed to this report.
MSNBC guest calls Florida’s standards on teaching African-American history ‘akin’ to defending the Holocaust
After the Florida Department of Education (DOE) updated its standards for teaching African-American studies, Vanderbilt Prof. Michael Eric Dyson compared the changes to teaching “good things” about the Holocaust.
“This would be akin to saying that Native American people when we teach their history, we should not only talk about the smallpox blankets that were distributed by the pilgrims but the attempt of Native Americans to defend themselves–that was equally violent,” Dyson said Thursday on MSNSC’s Ana Cabrera Reports. “This would be like teaching the Holocaust saying that there were some good things that Jewish brothers and sisters picked up in those death camps that should they survive it would be helpful for them to make their way in life.”
“This is ludicrous. This was an institution of enslavement,” he added.
This came after Florida DOE’s new standards received backlash for what critics said teaches that slaves “benefited” from slavery.
After the standards were made public, major groups such as the NAACP and Florida Education Association (FEA) took aim at Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
The FEA claimed that the new standards “are a disservice to Florida’s students and are a big step backward for a state that has required teaching African American history since 1994.”
Among the FEA’s “concerns,” they took issue with middle school students being required to be taught that the experience of slavery was “beneficial to African Americans because it helped them acquire skills.”
Following the Florida Board of Education approving the updated standards, the NAACP President & CEO Derrick Johnson on Wednesday released a statement calling the new standards “an attempt to bring our country back to a 19th century America where Black life was not valued, nor our rights protected.”
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“It is imperative that we understand that the horrors of slavery and Jim Crow were a violation of human rights and represent the darkest period in American history. We refuse to go back,” Johnson wrote.
The Florida DOE pushed back on the criticisms, telling Fox News Digital that the new standards will address the “good, the bad and the ugly.”
“There have been questions raised about language within a benchmark clarification of standard SS.68.AA.2.3, which says ‘Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit,” the department said in a statement.
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“The intent of this particular benchmark clarification is to show that some slaves developed highly specialized trades from which they benefited. This is factual and well documented. Some examples include: blacksmiths like Ned Cobb, Henry Blair, Lewis Latimer and John Henry; shoemakers like James Forten, Paul Cuffe and Betty Washington Lewis; fishing and shipping industry workers like Jupiter Hammon, John Chavis, William Whipper and Crispus Attucks; tailors like Elizabeth Keckley, James Thomas and Marietta Carter; and teachers like Betsey Stockton and Booker T. Washington,” the statement continued. “Any attempt to reduce slaves to just victims of oppression fails to recognize their strength, courage and resiliency during a difficult time in American history. Florida students deserve to learn how slaves took advantage of whatever circumstances they were in to benefit themselves and the community of African descendants.”
The statement accused critics of taking “isolated expressions” out of context.
IRS whistleblowers reveal who’s really to blame for shocking Biden corruption
In Wednesday’s marathon House hearing, Oversight Committee Democrats ran into a buzzsawtwo IRS whistleblower agents – Gary Shapley, the supervisor on the investigation who went public a few weeks ago, and Joseph Ziegler, the lead investigator on the case, who was publicly identified for the first time at the hearing.
In gory detail, the agents outlined how President Joe Biden’s Justice Department quashed the Biden corruption investigation from within while publicly pretending that it was being conducted with independence and integrity.
When Committee Democrats tried to poke holes in the testimony, they ended up on the receiving end of what they hadn’t bargained for: fusillades of fact – damning data about the millions raked in by the president’s son and family members from apparatchiks of corrupt and anti-American regimes.
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The agents’ stellar performance did not surprise anyone who has ever participated in a criminal tax investigation. In nearly 20 years as a prosecutor, I was – as the lawyer on my cases – better versed in the criminal law applicable to, say, racketeering, international terrorism, money-laundering, admissibility of evidence, and standards of proof, than the agents from the FBI and other agencies with whom I worked, a sizable majority of whom were non-lawyers. Tax enforcement was an exception.
The tax code is an esoteric area of the law. Experienced investigators know a lot more about it than most prosecutors – I learned a lot more from my IRS agents than they learned from me. In fact, tax enforcement is sufficiently abstruse that prosecutors from around the country need approval from the Justice Department’s Tax Division in Washington to file charges. In almost all other cases, they may indict without main Justice’s supervision.
In this very specialized area, it turns out that the very best tax-enforcement agents were assigned to the Biden case. Shapley and Ziegler have combined decades of education and experience in tax law and financial bookkeeping practices.
They have been involved in some of the most significant tax investigations, including international schemes, ever conducted in the United States. They held critical positions and were trusted to run big cases because they knew their stuff.
And because they’ve been investigators for such a long time, they know how to testify – how not to get intimidated (especially when you know much more than the people asking the questions do) and how not to accept the premise of questions loaded with inaccuracies and misimpressions.
It showed. The ranking Democrat on the panel, and thus the first in the minority to ask questions was Jamie Raskin, of Maryland, a tireless progressive partisan and former law professor who never tires of posing as a legal titan. But his questions were rife with disinformation and the witnesses called him on it.
He began, for example, trying to make the point that prosecutors and agents often disagree on whether felony charges ought to be brought. Rather than simply accept that proposition, which is true, Shapley explained why it is irrelevant – in this instance, the case agents and line prosecutors agreed that felony charges were appropriate; it was higher-ups in the Justice Department who slammed the brakes on the case.
On this point, it is vital that Committee Republicans keep their eye on the ball.
Ohio Republican Jim Jordan, who besides being on yesterday’s panel is chairman of the Judiciary Committee with oversight over DOJ, took pains at the hearing to point out that, while the whistleblowers have been completely consistent, Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss has repeatedly changed his story.
The agents stress that they were being ordered by prosecutors not to follow leads that could have garnered evidence against Joe Biden. Despite all the obstacles, they managed to make a strong case against Hunter Biden, but they couldn’t get it charged because Weiss told them he was not the ultimate decisionmaker – he was being stymied by the Biden Justice Department.
But Attorney General Merrick Garland has publicly claimed that Weiss was in charge and was assured that he would have all the authority he needed to bring any charges in any jurisdiction – all he needed to do was ask.
Initially, Weiss backed that story. But then, when Shapley became the first of the whistleblowers to go public, Weiss changed his tune, struggling to back Garland while not contradicting Shapley, whose account is richly corroborated.
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First Weiss said he had the authority. Then he conceded that he lacked authority to file charges outside of his district of Delaware (i.e., in districts where Hunter had allegedy committed tax crimes), but vaporously added that he had consulted with the Justice Department about that problem. Then he claimed that he had not asked to be designated a special counsel, which would have given him authority to file charges anywhere.
Meantime, Shapley’s account was never shaken: Weiss had told a room full of agents that the Justice Department had refused to grant him special counsel authority, and that he was being blocked from filing felony tax charges against Hunter by Biden-appointed U.S. attorneys in Washington, D.C., and California.
Jordan is right that Weiss is a weasel. But Weiss is the wrong target here. He is just the fall-guy for Garland. Contrary to what the attorney general would have the country to believe, it was not Weiss’s job to ask for special counsel authority. It was Garland’s duty to appoint a special counsel the moment he realized there was a conflict of interest that prevented DOJ from investigating in the normal course.
There could be no more profound conflict than the Biden Justice Department’s being in the position of investigating the President Biden’s son and other family members in an international corruption probe in which the president himself is deeply implicated.
Biden’s attorney general did not appoint a special counsel because he made protecting his boss, the president, his highest priority. That is why the case the whistleblowers so compellingly described at the hearing was sabotaged. The culprit here is not Weiss. It’s Garland.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM ANDREW McCARTHY