The Big Story
The 800-mile Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline, which was a precipitating factor in the escalating conflict that led to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, may now be a casualty of the war. Following initial reports Tuesday that Nord Stream had filed for bankruptcy, the company issued a short statement Wednesday morning that avoided making any explicit denials. “We cannot confirm the media reports that Nord Stream 2 has filed for bankruptcy,” the company wrote, but added that it had “informed the local authorities that the company had to terminate contracts with employees.” The rest of the Nord Stream website had to be taken down, according to the statement, “due to serious and continuous attacks from outside.” Later on Wednesday, one of Nord Stream’s main investors, German energy company Wintershall Dea AG, announced that it would be writing off its $1.1 billion investment in the $11 billion project and would not be financing any new energy projects in Russia. Nord Stream was a centerpiece of Germany’s green energy plan that saw the country shutting down its nuclear power plants while turning to Russia as its main energy supplier, a move that empowered Vladmir Putin but divided Europe. The deal also weakened Ukraine, because while currently much of Russia’s natural gas output flows through the country, the pipeline would have bypassed it by going under the Baltic Sea. The Nord Stream 2 deal was initially greenlit by the Obama administration but subsequently blocked by the Trump White House. President Biden lifted those sanctions early in his presidency, a move that critics said would make aggression by Russia more likely. In January, as Russian troops began massing on Ukraine’s border, Sen. Ted Cruz, a leading opponent of the pipeline, warned, “When Nord Stream 2 goes online, the odds of Russian tanks rolling into Ukraine will have increased dramatically.”
The Back Pages: They Own Your Face, You’re Just Renting it
The Rest
→ Russian forces continued their slow advance on Kyiv Wednesday with an armored column still approaching the city despite logistical problems and Ukrainian counterattacks. In the East, Russia kept up its bombardment of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, with a population of some 1.5 million people. The biggest advances appear to have come in the south, where Russia’s Ministry of Defense claimed that its forces were now in full control of the port city of Kherson—a claim denied by Ukrainian officials.
→ New casualty estimates from Ukrainian and Russian authorities offer a snapshot of the war’s toll so far. An adviser to Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said that over the past week of fighting, some 7,000 Russian soldiers have been killed, while figures released Wednesday by Russia’s Defense Ministry put the number at 498 Russian troops killed and 1,597 injured. Moscow said its forces had killed 2,870 Ukrainian soldiers. Ukraine’s government has not released official casualty numbers for its soldiers but reported that some 2,000 civilians have been killed so far. The casualty figures, while much lower than what might still lie ahead if a cease-fire is not reached and the Russian style of urban siege warfare begins, reflect the far higher tolls inflicted in conventional “force on force” warfare compared to those of the counterinsurgency campaigns the United States has fought over the past two decades.
→ Biden began his State of the Union address with remarks about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine but dedicated nearly 25 minutes of the hour-long speech to a discussion of the economy. With inflation at 7.5%—a 40-year high—the president laid out the steps he would take to bring down costs, including manufacturing more cars and computer chips in the United States, lowering the prices of prescription drugs, and supporting families with childcare expenses. Biden also touched upon a plan to reduce energy costs for homes and businesses by “an average of $500 a year by combating climate change.” The plan was criticized by progressives who felt that it did not go far enough in offering a vision to combat climate change. The speech did not mention any plans to increase nuclear power.
→ Gazprom, Russia’s state-owned energy company, has waged a decade-long propaganda campaign in the West against nuclear power and fracking. By funding NGOs and grassroots organizations that oppose these energies, Russia was trying to ensure that the European energy market, which purchases 70% of its gas and 50% of its oil, wouldn’t maximize its own domestic energy programs. The United States has been aware of these efforts for years. In 2014, then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in a private speech that has since been disclosed by WikiLeaks that the United States was “even up against phony environmental groups, and I’m a big environmentalist, but these were funded by the Russians to stand against any effort, ‘Oh, that pipeline, that fracking, that whatever will be a problem for you,’ and a lot of the money supporting that message was coming from Russia.”
→ Children aged 5 to 11 who get the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine are more likely than their unvaccinated peers to become infected with COVID-19 starting at 35 days after the date of their vaccination, according to new data released by the New York State Department of Health. The report, based on a study of 1.2 million children in New York, showed that after just over a month, the Pfizer vaccine’s effectiveness in preventing infection for children between 5 and 11 fell from 68% to 12%. But the most dramatic finding, that the vaccine’s effectiveness actually goes negative after day 35 and gets progressively worse from that point on, was “left out of the abstract and main body of the study,” the media outlet Just News reported Wednesday. The buried findings come with a footnote that reads, “Negative VE values observed in later timepoints likely reflect estimator instability and/or residual confounding, as opposed to true relatively increased risk for those vaccinated.”
Read it here: https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/pfizers-covid-vaccine-efficacy-goes-negative-younger-kids-government
→ Check out the eminent military analyst and Tablet contributor Edward Luttwak talking about why the war in Ukraine is just getting started, from a talk last night between Luttwak and Tablet’s Ukraine correspondent, Vladislav Davidzon.
→ Sign up here to attend a Zoom talk at 6 p.m. tonight with Tablet columnist Lee Smith and the Pullitzer Prize winning journalist Glenn Greenwald as they talk about “Ukraine and the Deep State” in a conversation moderated by me, Scroll editor Jacob Siegel.
https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_7RUYOVDiST6sxV1I1erbwg
→ Notably missing from last night’s State of the Union address was any mention of the Biden administration’s emphatic ongoing efforts to reach a new nuclear deal with Iran. A thread from former State Department official Gabriel Noronha—who was fired from his government job after tweeting that Trump was unfit for office following the Capitol riots—sheds some light on what is going on with the talks in Vienna.
→ New York City’s Mayor Eric Adams, a former NYPD officer who ran a tough-on-crime campaign, is facing a citywide increase in major crime. According to the NYPD, major crimes are up 38% in 2022 over last year, despite a dip in the city’s murder rate. Particularly worrisome—especially as COVID-19 restrictions loosen and the city seeks to resuscitate its economy and recover a sense of normalcy—is the rise in subway and hate crimes. In January, a woman was killed when she was pushed onto the subway tracks, and last week a man was arraigned for smearing feces on a woman’s face while she waited for her train. Last night, seven Asian American women were punched by one man in a two-hour period in Manhattan; in 2021, the NYPD reported a 361% increase in anti-Asian hate crimes.
→ As the ruble falls to historic lows, dropping 30% on Monday to a value of less than one U.S. cent, Russians are taking to crypto exchanges to find ways of safeguarding or moving their funds. On Sunday, Ukraine’s vice-prime minister asked “all major crypto exchanges to block addresses of Russian users” as trading between the ruble and cryptocurrencies doubled in volume. The United States and the EU nations have joined Ukraine in calling upon the crypto exchanges to block Russian trades, but the exchanges have so far refused. “A unilateral and total ban would punish ordinary citizens who are enduring historic currency destabilization as a result of their government’s aggression against a democratic neighbor,” said a spokesman for Coinbase, a popular currency exchange. This is the second time in less than a month that crypto exchanges have been asked to freeze users’ assets. The Canadian government requested that exchanges freeze the accounts of those supporting the Freedom Convoy in Ottawa last month. In that case, the crypto exchanges complied.
Scroll Editor Sean Cooper on the effort’s by surveillance companies to create a global profile of everybody on the planet
Perhaps you’re one of those smart folks who never really got into social media over the past decade or so; didn’t make social accounts that list all of your friends from high school, college, and work; never posted selfies; and kept your kids, cats, and meals to yourself. You eschewed both fingerprint scan technologies and volunteering your DNA to ancestry databases, creeped out by the potential abuses should that information slip into the wrong hands. No matter—your Global Profile will have all of that information and more, everything from the gait of your walk to the yogurt you eat only in the winter, thanks to clever technologies that gather up the details of your life without any effort on your behalf.
Though no one has outright control of your Global Profile—especially not you—take solace in knowing there are several organizations and institutions working hard to make your Global Profile the best surveillance tool it could be.
There’s the leader in the U.S. facial scan recognition market, Clearview AI, which, per the Federal Procurement Data System, currently services 10 contracts with federal government agencies, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security included, all of which gain access to the proprietary Clearview AI database of 10 billion images of people’s faces. According to a recent pitch deck seen by The Washington Post, that database is growing by 1.5 billion images a month, using algorithms and artificial intelligence to scrape images off of not only social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram but also Flickr, Twitter, LinkedIn, pictures taken by news photographers, mug-shot databases, and anywhere else a picture of a person might appear, all in service of Clearview’s goal of 100 billion images by year’s end, a database equal to more than 14 photos for every one of the 7 billion people on the planet.
Along with the 10 federal clients, Clearview’s client roster includes more than 3,000 law enforcement offices around the nation, and that right now is its target market: criminal justice agencies that use Clearview’s facial database that stores more than just faces. It matches images of a person’s face to what the pitch deck calls a person’s “social linkage” information—the friends you have, your colleagues, your “public source metadata” about where you live or have been—all of which is richly valuable to a law enforcement agent trying to solve a crime. But Clearview and the other custodians of your Global Profile are interested in more applications than just criminal justice.
For Clearview’s part, it’s at the beginning of its “product expansion plan,” as the pitch deck explained to potential investors. Beyond the “lawful investigative processes directed at criminal conduct” it touts as its sole purpose on its corporate Principles Pledge website, Clearview is pegging the future sales of its robust database to clients across the finance and retail sectors. Along with the technology it patented in January 2022, the “first of its kind for a facial recognition company,” Clearview said in the announcement, it’s selling investors on developing tools for its “real-time alert” system, like “gait recognition” and “contactless fingerprints” that identify a person’s walk or unique fingerprints from a faraway camera.
Adding that kind of intimate personal detail to your Global Profile is exactly what the Pentagon is working on right now. In February, the Pentagon awarded a new contract to the conglomerate Philips Healthcare to expand an ongoing testing program of some 11,000 participants who wore a two-part watch and ring set of “predictive bio-wearables” that could detect changes in a person’s oxygen saturation and skin temperature alongside several other metrics to figure out if the person was infected with a virus—in the case of this study, COVID-19. That information was fed into an algorithm that produced a score with an accuracy rate of 82%. “These things that this algorithm is sensing are imperceptible,” Jeff Schneider, a member of the research team, said recently. “You wake up the next morning and see your score jump to a 20, but you feel fine.”
Particularly useful for the next pandemic, bio-wearables could update a person’s Global Profile in real time, so should you cross an undesirable health threshold, you can immediately be placed into quarantine. While Philips pursues the patent for that algorithm, the medical component of a person’s Global Profile will have to be updated the old-fashioned way, with the emerging vaccine passport system. As a member of the Vaccination Credential Initiative (VCI) told Politico last month, the World Health Organization is set to develop a “trust framework” in which vaccines for people all over the world will be entered into a centralized database that can be used to verify if a person has the right type and number of inoculations. Meanwhile, U.S. states continue to roll out their own version of the vaccine passport for various public spaces, with 21 states using the SMART Health Card that’s part of the same VCI program working with the World Health Organization.
Of course, these are disparate technologies, and your Global Profile exists now only as a term of art to describe the increasingly sophisticated digital surveillance systems that track what you look like, where you go, who you interact with, what you eat, how you walk, your general level of fitness and health, and what you do on the internet. Some government officials and civil liberties groups have launched legal and legislative countermeasures against companies like Clearview for infringing on personal privacy. But the genie is out of the bottle. The technology exists, and law enforcement and government offices see great value in the application of the information within our Global Profiles. As Clearview’s CEO Hoan Ton-That wrote to customers earlier this year, he envisioned a type of data collection that protects due process and human rights. “Both China and Russia have implemented real-time surveillance to target minority populations. We should not leave it to those countries to show the way for the world.” Indeed, let America lead the way.
i missed this. any chance for a replay?