STAYING OUT OF THE LINE OF FIRE: The Dead Drop generally tries to steer clear of politics for oh so many reasons. Actually, just one really important one though: if we can’t all come together on national security issues – regardless of our politics - then we’re only playing the game half as well as we could and that’s just un-American. That’s why we’re not gonna even comment on the megaton of nominees who were announced this week for national security-related positions in the next administration (though our cheekier side could’ve had a field day with a couple of them). What we couldn’t’ resist though, was calling out something we saw that desperately needs a fact check. The Washington Times reported that the President-elect’s nominee to run the CIA, former DNI John Ratcliffe, was expected to target ‘politicization within the Agency’ as a priority and (here’s the surprising part) – that Ratcliffe would “replace Gina Haspel, who has been the agency’s director since 2018.” This will come as news to many – including that Bill Burns guy. Or maybe Haspel has been running the ‘deep state’ version of the Agency for the past few years.
DECODING NSA’S FOIA COMPLIANCE: Jason Leopold, an investigative journalist with a long history of filing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to government agencies, now works for Bloomberg News. He reported last week of successfully prying out of the National Security Agency some inspector general reports as part of a 20,000-page data dump he got from NSA as the result of some lawsuits. Among the nuggets he found was an investigation into an employee’s “side hustle” in which they tried to justify using the agency’s unclassified computer system to support a separate (apparently private sector) job. The person reportedly “spent about 20% of their time on their second job. NSA investigators found they sent 233 non-work- related emails, printed 17 documents and worked on 52 others between September 2021 and February 2023 using the NSA’s unclassified system.” At least they weren’t using the classified system for the side gig, eh? The employee was reportedly unhappy about being investigated saying he/she did not “see this as any different than if I’m going to the restroom.” Spending 20% of your workday in the restroom? Probably not the best career move, either.
NOT IN THE BATHROOM BUT STILL LIKE CLOCKWORK: It happened once again – as it does just about every patriotic holiday. Someone posts a well-meaning image expressing thanks to military personnel and they pick a photo that is – well, not what they think it is. Sometimes they show troops that are Russian and try to pass them off as Americans – or other times they post photos of foreign weapons systems and mistake them for those of the U.S.of A. Also like clockwork, Dave Brown of Politico calls them out on it. It happened again on Veterans Day. The good news is that the erroneous well-wisher did not use images of enemy forces to portray Americans. The bad news is that in a social media post, the F-35 Lightning II Joint Program Office honored “all who served” and included an image of an airplane flying under a stars and stripes banner. The problem was that the plane was not an F-35. We’re pretty sure it was an F-22 but if the F-35 Joint Program Office doesn’t know – who are we to question them? The F-35 JPO took down the image – but lots of folks took screenshots of the original screwup – just to make sure the stealth social media posting survived.
SLOW RECOURSES: The seemingly belated British inquiry into the aftermath of the Novichok poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in 2018, continues to produce some interesting nuggets. We’ve shared a few over the past few weeks. In the newest installment, thanks to the BBC, we learned that local police looking into what was later shown to be a Russian government assassination attempt initially contacted “Special Branch” and were told there were no ex-Russian spies living in their area and that they were over reacting. But the local cops – not taking their word for it - resorted to using Google to find out that Skripal was indeed a former Russian intelligence officer. But even armed with that information, local authorities apparently hadn’t seen enough spy movies – so their first guess was that Skripal had OD’d on fentanyl. Bloody hell.
MI-8 INBOUND: The Dead Drop told you a little over a year ago that the eighth edition of the Mission Impossible films had been slowed down by the SAG-AFTRA strike. Well, the strike was settled and Tom Cruise rolled out the two-minute long “teaser trailer”. The film is scheduled to be in theaters May 23, 2025. Spies tell us that at one point, the plan was to call the movie “Dead Reckoning Part Two” since Part One came out in 2023 – but now it has been dubbed “Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning.” The release date is Cruise’s 63rd birthday. He was 33 when the first Mission Impossible film came out, so maybe he is reckoning that he’s finally had enough. We kinda hope not. We don’t wanna know what happens when he finally chooses not to accept the mission.
HERMIT KINGDOM SOLDIERS’ RISQUE BUSINESS: The troops that Kim Jong Un is renting out to Vladimir Putin are continuing to make quite an impression – and not just by chowing down on canned dog meat. There are rumors that the Pentagon refuses to confirm or deny – that North Korean troops deployed to Russia - and having access for the first time in their lives to a relatively open internet - have discovered online pornography. A Financial Times reporter posted on social media that “unusually reliable” sources say Kim’s troops “have never had unfettered access to the internet before” and “as a result, they are gorging on pornography.” Task & Purpose asked the Pentagon to confirm that report. After all, they were under the impression that DOD was carefully monitoring all communications from the region – but if DOD has — ahem –“uncovered” any porn intelligence, they are refusing to tell.
POCKET LITTER: Dead Droplets and bits and pieces of interesting /weird stuff we discovered:
LOTTA LISTICLES: One common tactic among news organizations, social media sites, and other outfits is to attract eyeballs by rolling out clickbait in the form of lists. Apparently, a lot of folks find it irresistible to compare notes with whomever created a list. So, recently, while doom scrolling through Facebook, (hey, it’s like spending 20% of your work time in the bathroom) we stumbled across a posting by someone listing the “Top 50 Navy Seal Team Movies.” Our immediate thought was: there have been FIFTY Navy Seal Team movies? We might have guessed 50 books – or 15 movies, but 50 movies? Some of the flicks sounded kind of suspicious and now it looks like someone was padding the list. The 2015 movie Navy Seals vs Zombies appears on the list twice – at #9 and also at #27 and some of the “movies” are TV shows…but the clickbait worked. How do we know? Cause we clicked.
THAT’S A WRAP: While there are still about six weeks left in 2024, we think we have a winner in the best prank of the year contest. The Moscow Times reports that a Belarussian prankster by the name of Vladislav Bokhan fooled a bunch of schoolteachers in and around the city of Veronezh in southwestern Russia by sending them what appeared to be an official order telling them that “evil NATO troops are going to irradiate the Russian people. Our teachers must learn to resist this impact with simple means of protection, such as a tinfoil hat.” Some gullible teachers crafted such headgear and proudly posed wearing their pointy hats and waving Russian flags. We’re guessing these may not have been science teachers – but you never know.
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