Category Archives: History

Trump Orders Military to War Against America

Institutional Capture and the Presidential Declaration of American Civil War

After President Grant had crushed the slaveholders at war he dismantled their political platform. It rebranded as Christian nationalist “America First”, which Trump has put into the White House

Contemporary analysis reveals a coordinated strategy to dismantle the very institutional safeguards designed to prevent extremist infiltration by America First, using democratic processes to systematically eliminate democratic accountability.

The current systematic reversal of post-World War II accountability mechanisms in particular represents more than conservative policy preferences. It mirrors Hitler’s strategic pivot after 1928, when he demonstrated how the Nazi movement abandonment of direct revolutionary tactics could shift into legal, institutional capture. This is core to understanding the “cowboy hat” corruption of America today.

Source: Skousen manual for white militias

Hitler’s Strategic Transformation: From Revolution to Institutional Capture

Following electoral failures in the mid-1920s, Hitler fundamentally altered Nazi strategy. Rather than direct confrontation with democratic institutions, the movement pursued “legal revolution” by working within existing systems while systematically undermining them from within. This approach involved maintaining plausible deniability while coordinating institutional capture across multiple sectors simultaneously.

America First worked to spread and defend Nazism before, during and even after WWII

The strategy proved devastatingly effective because it exploited democratic tolerance and legal processes to dismantle democracy itself. By 1933, institutional capture had progressed sufficiently to enable the Enabling Act, which legally abolished legal constraints on Nazi power. The transformation occurred through existing channels, making resistance difficult to organize and justify.

Anyone promoting America First surely knows this history far better than most, because Hitler was their man.

The Semantic Battlefield Carpet Bombed With Reality Inversions

Pete Hegseth, as a self-declared Secretary of War, may be seen as a very particular appointment; one who operates from a background of documented instability that undermines any claimed authority.

  • In 2015, he threw an axe on live television that missed its target and struck West Point drummer Jeff Prosperie, who later sued for what he called “obvious negligence.”
  • A sworn affidavit submitted to the Senate documented that Hegseth’s alcohol abuse was so severe his second wife developed an “escape plan” involving a texted safe word to alert family when she felt unsafe, hiding in her closet on at least one occasion.
  • Witnesses reported him chanting “Kill All Muslims!” while drunk at a bar in Ohio, being carried out of a Minneapolis strip club while intoxicated and in military uniform during a National Guard drill weekend, and regularly passing out or vomiting at family and work events.
  • He paid $50,000 to settle a sexual assault allegation from a 2017 incident where, according to police reports, he was visibly drunk and blocked a woman from leaving his hotel room.
  • Fox News colleagues confirmed his drinking was an “open secret,” with beer cans regularly found in his office trash.

His reckless behavior, substance abuse-fueled volatility, and disregard for safety—whether throwing axes near people or abusing those closest to him—explains the man systematically inverting reality through linguistic manipulation precisely because his actions cannot withstand scrutiny.

“Divisive” Inversion: Hegseth divided the troops by calling women’s inclusion in military service “divisive;” divisively removing women from positions while calling it inclusion. His acts of exclusion come with calling inclusion divisive. The person who separates and removes, claims integration is separation. This isn’t policy disagreement, it’s white supremacist inversion language.

“Woke” Awareness: The systematic attack on “wokeness” targets consciousness itself. “Woke” means awake, aware, accountable—precisely the institutional vigilance that emerged from confronting fascism. Programs designed to identify extremist infiltration become the threat. Diversity initiatives that monitor exclusionary ideologies become “divisive.” Accountability mechanisms are reframed as persecution, another white supremacist talking point.

“Warrior” Aggression: The elevation of “warrior ethos” over “defensive” posture explicitly rejects legal and ethical constraints. When Hegseth declares “maximum lethality, not tepid legality,” he positions legal frameworks as weakness. The semantic shift prepares military leadership for operations unconstrained by the accountability standards that distinguish defense from war crimes, a white supremacist platform foundational to over 150 years of domestic terrorism.

The KKK in 1921 used bi-planes to firebomb Tulsa, OK. They also dropped racist propaganda leaflets across America. The swastika was their symbol, and the X.

“Legacy” Supremacy: The restoration of Confederate base names is justified through “legacy” and “tradition.” But whose legacy? The legacy of armed rebellion against the United States to preserve slavery becomes “heritage.” The systematic reversal eliminates the accountability that confronted this history. The KKK could have printed his speeches.

America First has meant white nationalist xenophobia consistently since the late 1800s

This linguistic inversion serves institutional capture by white nationalism, making resistance to hate appear unreasonable while positioning the divisive hateful actions as unity. The person creating division calls integration divisive. The person eliminating accountability calls accountability oppressive. The semantic manipulation enables systematic exclusion while blaming inclusion for the conflict that exclusion creates.

The Department of War is a Reversal: Symbolic Centerpiece of Institutional Capture by Enemies of America

Can you imagine a neighborhood developed today in Germany with streets all named to Nazi generals? America still allows developments where every street spreads militant racist propaganda for capture from “within”.

The renaming of the Department of Defense to “Department of War” serves as the symbolic centerpiece of this institutional reversal, explicitly rejecting the post-fascist commitment to defensive rather than aggressive military posture.

The 1947 transformation from “War Department” to “Department of Defense” represented calculated rejection of militaristic imagery associated with defeated fascist regimes. The name change aligned with UN Charter principles, supported narratives of American restraint, and helped justify unprecedented peacetime military expansion as defensive necessity rather than aggressive ambition.

The current reversal directly contradicts post-war institutional arrangements to Defend America, thus signaling it has lost its defenses against crime and corruption.

When Trump declares “Defense is too defensive” and Hegseth promotes “maximum lethality, not tepid legality,” they explicitly reject the legal and ethical frameworks designed to distinguish legitimate defense from war crimes. The semantic shift prepares both military leadership and legal frameworks for different accountability standards.

The Economist/The New Yorker weren’t wrong

The Campaign Lies: The irony becomes stark when considered against Trump’s 2024 campaign messaging. Throughout the election, Trump positioned himself as the peace candidate while denigrating opponents as warmongers. Yet his first major military initiative explicitly rebrands the Pentagon to emphasize warfare over defense. This contradiction reveals calculated manipulation—campaign rhetoric promised restraint while actual governance immediately signals aggressive military posture that contradicts electoral promises.

Hegseth’s “We’re Back” Means Pre-Accountability Military Culture

When Defense Secretary Hegseth declares “this War Department, just like America, is back,” the historical context becomes crucial. The statement references not merely traditional military culture, but specifically pre-accountability military culture—the institutional arrangements that existed before the military developed systems to identify and counter extremist infiltration.

Systematic Symbolic Restoration: Hegseth’s comprehensive rebranding campaign extends far beyond the Department of War renaming. He has systematically restored Confederate-era names to military bases through bureaucratic manipulation, circumventing federal law by finding soldiers with matching surnames. He removed the name of Harvey Milk, the gay rights activist and Navy veteran, from a naval vessel. He terminated the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services, calling it “divisive.”

Personal Symbolic Alignment: Hegseth’s documented history with extremist-associated symbolism reinforces this interpretation. His Crusades-era tattoos—the Jerusalem cross and “Deus Vult”—led to his removal from presidential security duty as a potential “insider threat.” These symbols have been widely adopted by white nationalist movements and were present at the January 6 Capitol attack. His 2024 addition of an Arabic “kafir” (infidel) tattoo demonstrates escalating symbolic messaging.

Pete Hegseth’s tattoo explained. Source: Princeton

Elimination of Accountability Mechanisms: Under the banner of fighting “wokeness,” Hegseth has systematically eliminated the oversight mechanisms that emerged from historical reckonings with extremism. Programs designed to identify extremist infiltration are characterized as persecution. Diversity initiatives that monitor for exclusionary ideologies are terminated as “divisive.” The very accountability structures developed to prevent institutional capture are being dismantled by those they were designed to monitor.

The Assessment Function: Military Purge Through Loyalty Testing

The unprecedented gathering of hundreds of military leaders served its true purpose on September 30, 2025, when Trump explicitly told assembled generals they would be deployed for “war from within” against American citizens in major US cities. But the event revealed something more disturbing: the commander-in-chief’s evident mental deterioration and the generals’ stone-faced response to both his incoherence and his unconstitutional orders.

Source: Encyclopedia of Alabama, 1 Sept 1868 Tuscaloosa Independent Monitor. The KKK threatened that March 4, 1869 — first day of Presidential rule by avowed racist Horatio Seymour — would bring lynchings of white Americans (“scalawags” and “carpetbaggers”). Instead the Presidency was won in a landslide by Civil War hero and civil rights pioneer Ulysses S. Grant)

The Threatening Order: “Last month, I signed an executive order to provide training for a quick reaction force that can help quell civil disturbances,” Trump told the generals. “This is gonna be a big thing for the people in this room because it’s the enemy from within and we have to handle it before it gets out of control.”

If history means anything at all then American soldiers soon can expect to be put in front of a firing squad by colleagues loyal only to a dictator

Trump named specific cities for military deployment—San Francisco, Chicago, New York—then added ominously: “We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military—National Guard, but military—because we’re going into Chicago very soon. That’s a big city with an incompetent governor. Stupid governor.”

Armed National Guards and African American men standing on a sidewalk during the “red summer” of white supremacist mob attacks in Chicago, Illinois, 1919.

The Constitutional Crisis: As predicted and warned, this gathering and directive directly violated the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which bars the military from civilian law enforcement unless expressly authorized by law. The Constitution’s 10th Amendment reserves policing powers to states. Trump is ordering military officers to take up arms against fellow Americans, violating federal law and constitutional principles, to rapidly shift military leadership into a comply or die state.

Redacted page one headline of the “Austin American-Statesman” in Austin, Texas. Mon, Oct 6, 1919.

The Mental Deterioration: But according to The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols, who documented the event, Trump’s performance revealed something equally alarming. The president “seemed quieter and more confused than usual,” following Hegseth’s speech by immediately noting “I’ve never walked into a room so silent before” as officers refused to provide the applause he expected.

Trump rambled incoherently, claiming the Department of War was renamed “in the 1950s” (it was 1947-49), that “the Atomic Energy Commission” confirmed his Iran strike destroyed their nuclear program (the AEC hasn’t existed since the 1970s, and Iran still has a nuclear program), and that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has lasted “three thousand years” (it began in the early 1900s). Perhaps most revealing of his serious mental failure was telling the Navy to use steel because modern ships have “aluminum that melts if it looks at a missile coming at it. It starts melting as the missile is about two miles away.” It’s one thing to be ignorant of history, common in America, but telling the Navy to use steel is unmistakably Hitler-level of military ignorance.

The Authoritarian Double-Bind: Most disturbing was Trump’s opening statement, which encapsulated totalitarian logic in a single breath:

Just have a good time. And if you want to applaud, you applaud. And if you want to do anything you want, you can do anything you want. And if you don’t like what I’m saying, you can leave the room. Of course, there goes your rank; there goes your future.

This is authoritarianism, explicitly:

You have freedom, but exercising it destroys you. You can choose, but only one choice is permitted.

The laughter that rippled through the room wasn’t amusement—it was the nervous recognition of threat delivered as joke. Officers understood immediately the reason for being summoned, they now served under a dictator: compliance masked as freedom, coercion presented as choice.

The Loyalty Test Revealed: The gathering’s dual purpose becomes clear. Military officers must now navigate a commander-in-chief who is both mentally unstable and ordering unconstitutional domestic military deployment. Do they follow constitutional oaths prohibiting such operations? Or obey orders from a president who threatens their careers for dissent while demanding they wage “war” against American civilians?

The Officer Response: The stone-faced silence throughout both Hegseth’s and Trump’s speeches provided its own answer. As Nichols observed, officers “could mostly tune out the sloganeering” of a beardless Hegseth, but “could not ignore the spectacle that President Donald Trump put on.” The question Tom said was haunting the room:

How can I know that an order I receive to launch my missiles came from a sane president?

It was the question that cost Air Force Major Harold Hering his career in 1973.

The Assessment Mechanism: By physically consolidating military leadership while simultaneously delivering incoherent, threatening, unconstitutional orders, Trump and Hegseth identified who will implement illegal directives from a commander-in-chief showing signs of mental deterioration. The silence itself becomes data—revealing officers’ recognition that they face both constitutional crisis and command instability simultaneously.

Advice from Walt Disney on the appropriate reaction to dictators

Hitler Pattern Recognition: Why 1928 Parallels Matter

The 1928 Nazi pivot succeeded because democratic institutions failed to recognize institutional capture while it occurred through legal channels. The strategy exploited democratic tolerance and procedural legitimacy to systematically dismantle democratic accountability.

Contemporary institutional capture follows remarkably similar patterns:

  • Working within existing legal frameworks while systematically undermining institutional safeguards
  • Maintaining plausible deniability through bureaucratic interpretation and semantic manipulation
  • Coordinating elimination of oversight mechanisms across multiple sectors simultaneously
  • Framing accountability itself as oppression requiring resistance

The systematic nature of symbolic reversals—from Department of War to base names to extremism monitoring—suggests coordinated institutional strategy rather than isolated policy preferences. The comprehensive elimination of post-WWII accountability mechanisms targets precisely the safeguards designed to prevent extremist infiltration.

Democratic Resilience Against Dictator Donald

“Donald in Nutziland”. Source: Disney.

The critical question becomes whether democratic institutions retain sufficient resilience to recognize and counter institutional capture that operates through legal channels while systematically dismantling accountability mechanisms. The 1930s demonstrated that even established democracies remain vulnerable to extremist infiltration, particularly when economic anxiety combines with sophisticated propaganda operations.

The contemporary moment presents similar vulnerabilities: the systematic elimination of institutional memory, the coordination of symbolic reversals across multiple sectors, and the exploitation of democratic processes to undermine democratic accountability.

Understanding these patterns requires neither conspiracy theorizing nor partisan interpretation, but rather careful attention to documented evidence, historical precedents, and institutional analysis. The 1928 pivot demonstrates how democratic societies can be systematically undermined through legal channels when accountability mechanisms are eliminated and institutional memory is erased.

The Department of War renaming represents more than nomenclature—it embodies the systematic reversal of America’s post-fascist institutional arrangements, occurring alongside documented elimination of accountability mechanisms and coordinated symbolic restoration of pre-integration military culture. When considered within the broader pattern of institutional capture, Hegseth’s declaration that “we’re back” takes on historical significance that warrants serious attention from anyone still committed to preserving democratic governance against militant white supremacists seizing control from “within”.

Each red dot represents a local Klan chapter, known as a Klavern, that spread across the country between the 1915 “America First” Presidential campaign and 1940. Source: Virginia Commonwealth University
Source: Griot
Source: Tulsa Historical Society
Tulsa officials in 1921 immediately moved to erase all records of mass shootings by “America First” militias, building a giant “Klavern” headquarters directly over the firebombed Black businesses and homes.

Trump Orders Shock Troops Into Oregon to Protect Loyalists and Crush Political Dissent

Today marks another page ripped straight out of fascist history. Those familiar with Mussolini know he promoted state violence not primarily to maintain order, but to protect his own political instruments deployed to intimidate opposition.

Trump is clearly inverting state protection, just as Mussolini would.

Instead of the state protecting citizens from violent groups, the state protects the violent groups from citizens. Mussolini used the army and police to shield the Blackshirts as they attacked socialists, trade unionists, and political opponents. Trump today announced deploying troops to protect ICE operations (which have been conducting aggressive raids) from protesters.

Of course the tactic is based on abuse patterns, which are known well by those allegedly on the Epstein list of abusers. Victims of aggression are labeled as the aggressors, to strip away protections.

…people have kicked tear gas canisters back at them. […] Court documents also show federal officers have been impacted by their own use of chemical munitions. In one case, a person knocked loose an officer’s gas mask, causing the officer to “suck in a large amount of OC spray and pepperball dust.” The agent later vomited and dry-heaved for half an hour.

Mussolini chaos agents were presented by him as defenders of order against “Bolshevik chaos,” just as Trump falsely frames federal agents attacking protesters as him handling “domestic terrorists”. Local officials meanwhile describe Portland as “safe and calm” with declining protests, even during violent federal escalations.

Lawmakers cited recent incidents, including the detention of a father outside his child’s preschool and a wildland firefighter who was arrested while battling fires in the Olympic National Forest. They also pointed to a statistic… that 65% of people detained by ICE had no criminal convictions.

Mussolini normalized the use of state power against political opposition. Similarly, Trump is regularly deploying troops to multiple politically targeted cities – Los Angeles, Washington D.C., and Portland despite clear local opposition and questionable legal authority.

As an aside, the economics of militancy also are terrible. In 2020 Trump spent almost 10X more on troops to police a court house than it would have cost to improve the space itself.

The estimated cost of the federal action in Portland was $12.3 million, according to the report. Damage to Mark O. Hatfield United States Courthouse in Portland was about $1.6 million.

That was the kind of lesson from back in 2020, which in theory could itself prevent a repeat through basic fiscal responsibility. It shows how wasteful federal militancy can be, begging the real motives.

Mussolini circumvented logic of parliamentary processes. Trump is also proceeding without proper congressional notification or local consent, with Pentagon officials reportedly surprised by the deployment announcement. Mussolini loved to announce faits accomplis that his subordinates had to scramble to implement, symptomatic of how he would force the center of attention onto himself by being chaotic and unreliable. It turns leadership upside down by destroying direction and purpose, shifting everyone into excessive, unsustainable whimsy that by design only a few could survive.

The headline news, in other words, is describing America experiencing 1930s Italy and the actual mechanics of how democratic institutions are dismantled from within by fascism.

A state apparatus is obviously weaponized to protect the ruling party’s enforcement mechanisms and criminalizing all resistance. This is a textbook case of authoritarian progression presented by MAGA. Knowing about violent and chaotic descent of Italian life under the shadow of Mussolini (let alone Somalia under Siad Barre) is essential for understanding the pattern.

What makes it particularly dangerous is that Americans infamously lack historical literacy to the point that they think Nazism boldly on display is proof of healthy freedom.

“Skokie was chosen as the hub for American Nazis in 1977 and 1978 because of the number of Holocaust survivors who called it home.” ABC News

People are looking for Blues Brothers simplistic depictions of goose-stepping soldiers marching around with swastikas waving, instead of recognizing far more dangerous rhetoric about invasion, gradual institutional capture and political targeting with state violence. Look at Italy on this chart:

The mechanics of using troops to protect violent political enforcement agents in ICE while criminalizing resistance, all bypassing normal governance through unitary executive chaos, are… unmistakable five-alarm sirens telling you that authoritarian consolidation in America happening right now and fast.

Simple Hacks Kill Police Robots: Dumb Software Flaws Made Overpriced Hardware Useless

Unitree robots in the dog house
Urinary poor password hacked
Unmarking poo-lice territory

The news story today about a police robot is really a story about the economics of hardware safety, and why the lessons of WWII are so blindingly important to modern robotics.

Picture this: Police deploy a $16,000 Unitree robot into an armed siege (so they don’t have to risk sending any empathetic humans to deescalate instead). The robot’s tough titanium frame can withstand bullets, its sharp sensors can see through walls, and its AI can navigate complex obstacles like dead bodies autonomously. Then a teenager with a smartphone intervenes and takes complete control of it in a few minutes.

Cost of the zero day attack?

Zero dollars.

Are we still blowing a kid’s whistle into payphones for free calls or what?

This economic reality in asymmetric conflict reveals a fundamental dysfunction in how the robotics industry approaches risks. The embarrasing UniPwn exploit against Unitree robots has exposed authentication that’s literally the word “unitree,” hardcoded encryption keys identical across all devices, and complete absence of input validation.

I’ll say it again.

“Researchers” found the word unitree would bypass the Unitree robot security with minimal effort. We shouldn’t call that research. It’s like saying scientists have discovered the key you left in your front door opens it. Zero input validation means…

This is 1930s robot level bad.

For those unfamiliar with history, the design flaws of the Nazi V-1s are how we remember them. Yet even Hitler’s dumb robots had better security than Unitree in 2025 – at least the V-1s couldn’t be hijacked mid-flight by shouting “vergeltungswaffe” on radio frequencies.

WWII Spitfire “tipping” the flawed Nazi V1 in flight, because ironically Hitler’s robots couldn’t properly calculate their axis

WWII military technology had more sophisticated operational security than modern robots. Think about how genuinely damning that is for the current robotics industry. Imagine a 1930s jet engine with a fundamentally better design than one today.

It is a symptom of hardware companies treating their vulnerabilities in software as an afterthought, creating expensive physical systems that can be compromised for free. Imagine going to the gym and finding a powerlifter who lacks basic mental strength. “Hey, can someone tell me if the big and heavy 45 disc is more or less work than this small and light 20 one” a tanned muscular giant with perfect hair pleads, begging for help with his “Hegseth warrior ethos” workout routine.

The Onion reveals Pete’s tragicomedy status as the least capable or qualified military leader in history

French military planners spent billions pouring concrete for a man named Maginot, after he dreamed up what would have worked better for WWI. His foolish “impregnable” static defensive barrier was useless against coming radio-controlled planes and trucks and tanks using network effects to rapidly focus attacks somewhere else. The Germans needed only three days to prove the dynamic soft spots need as much attention or more than the expensive static hard ones. Robotics companies are making the identical strategic error, pouring millions into unnecessary physical hardening while leaving giant squishy digital backdoors wide open.

Unitree’s titanium chassis development costs over $50,000, military-grade sensors run $10,000 per unit, advanced motors cost $5,000 each, and rigorous testing burns through hundreds of thousands in R&D. So fancy. Meanwhile, authentication was literally fixed as “unitree,” while encryption was copy-pasted from Stack Overflow, and input validation… doesn’t exist.

This pattern of inverted priorities by safety engineering ignoring the past extends far beyond Unitree. Just weeks ago in September 2025, Tesla influencers attempting a coast-to-coast “Full Self-Driving” trip crashed their Model Y within the first 60 miles when the car completely ignored a metal girder lying in the road.

The Tesla robot stupidly barreled into disaster at 76 mph and bounced dramatically into the air, causing an estimated $22,000 in damage and cancelling the trip before they even left California. This is the same company that has promised coast-to-coast autonomous driving by 2017 yet still can’t detect the most obvious and basic road debris. It was NOT an edge case failure. It was proof of Tesla flaws still being overlooked, despite extensive documentation of more than 50 deaths since the first ones in 2016.

ISACA 2019 Presentation

Robots being marketed for special police use have been disappointing similarly for over a decade, as I’ve spoken and written about many times. In 2016, a 300-pound Knightscope K5 ran over a 16-month-old toddler at Stanford Shopping Center, hitting the child’s head and driving over his leg before continuing its patrol. The robot “did not stop and kept moving forward” according to the boy’s mother. A year later, another Knightscope robot achieved internet fame by rolling itself into a fountain at Georgetown Waterfront, prompting one cynical expert’s observation: “We were promised flying cars, instead we got suicidal robots.”

That’s being generous, of course, as the robot couldn’t even see the cliff it was throwing itself off.

These incidents illuminate a critical historical insight to economics of security: hardware companies systematically undervalue software engineering because their own mental models are flawed. Some engineers are so rooted in physical manufacturing they can’t see the threat models more appropriate to their work.

Traditional hardware development means you design a component once, manufacture it at scale, and ship it. Quality control means testing physical tolerances and materials science. If something breaks, you issue a recall. It’s bows and arrows or swords and shields. Edge cases thus can be waved off because probablity is discrete and calculated like saying don’t bring a knife to a gun fight (e.g. Tesla says don’t let any water touch your vehicle, not even humidity, because they consider weather an edge case).

Software is fundamentally different economics. We’re talking information systems of strategy, infiltration and alterations to command and control. It’s constantly attacked by adversaries who adapt faster than any recall process. It must handle infinite edge cases injected without warning, that no physical testing regime can anticipate. It requires ongoing maintenance, updates, and security patches throughout its operational lifetime. Most importantly, software failures can propagate instantaneously across entire fleets through network effects, turning isolated incidents into rapid systemic disasters.

A laptop without software has risks, and is also known as a paperweight. Low bar for success means it can scope itself towards low risk. A laptop running software however has exponentially more risks, as recorded and warned during the birth of robotic security over 60 years ago. Where engineering outcomes are meant to be more useful, they need more sophisticated threat models.

The UniPwn vulnerability exemplifies all of this and the network multiplication effect. The exploit is “wormable” because infected robots would automatically compromise others in Bluetooth range. One compromised robot in a factory doesn’t just affect that unit; it spreads to every robot within wireless reach, which spreads to every robot within their reach. A single breach becomes a factory-wide infection within hours, shutting down production and causing millions in losses. This is the digital equivalent of the German breakthrough at Sedan—once the line is broken, everything behind it collapses.

And I have to point out that this has been well known and discussed in computer security for decades. In the late 1990s I personally was able to compromise critical infrastructe across five US states with trivial tests. And likewise in the 90s, I sent a single malformed ping packet to help discover all the BSD-based printers used by a company in Asia… and we watched as their entire supply chain went offline. Oops. Those were the kind of days we were meant to learn from, to prevent happening again, not some kind of insider secret.

Hardware companies still miss this apparently because they don’t study history and then they think in terms of isolated failures rather than systemic vulnerabilities. A mechanical component fails gradually and affects only that specific unit. A software vulnerability fails catastrophically and affects every identical system simultaneously. The economic models that work for physical engineering through redundancy, gradual degradation, and localized failures become liabilities in software security.

Target values of the robots in this latest story range from $16,000 to $150,000. That’s crazy compared to an attack cost being zero: grab any Bluetooth device to send “unitree”. Damage potential reaches millions per incident through production shutdowns, data theft, and cascade failures.

Proper defense at the start of engineering would cost a few hundred dollars per robot for cryptographic hardware and secure development practices. Unitree could have prevented this vulnerability for less than an executive dinner. Now it’s going to be quite a bit more money to go back and clean up.

The perverse market incentive in security is that it remains invisible until it spectacularly fails. Hardware metrics will dominate purchasing decisions by focusing management on speed, strength, battery life, etc. while software quality is dumped onto customers who lack technical expertise to evaluate it in downscoped/compressed sales cycles. Competition then rewards shipping fast crap over shipping secure quality because defects manifest only after contracts are signed, under adversarial conditions kept out of product demonstrations.

The real economic damage of this loophole extends beyond immediate exposure of the vendor. When the police robot gets compromised mid-operation, the costs cascade through blown operations, leaked intelligence, destroyed public trust, legal liability, and potential cancellation of entire robotics programs, not to mention potential fatalities. The explosive damage could slow robotics adoption across law enforcement, creating industry-wide consequences from a single preventable vulnerability. Imagine also if the flaws had been sold secretly, instead of disclosed to the public.

It’s Stanley Kubrick’s HAL 9000 story all over again: sure it could read lips but the most advanced artificial intelligence in cinema was defeated by a guy pulling out its circuit boards with a… screwdriver. The simplest attacks threaten the most sophisticated robots.

2011 a cloud odyssey
My BSidesLV 2011 presentation on cloud security concepts for “big data” foundational to safe intelligence gathering and processing

Hardware companies need to internalize that in networked systems the security of the communications logic isn’t a feature. It’s the foundation of the networking. Does any bridge’s hardware matter if a chicken can’t safely cross to the other side?

All other engineering rests upon the soft logic working without catastrophic soft failure that renders hardware useless. The most sophisticated mechanical engineering becomes worthless where attackers can take control via trivial thoughtless exploits.

The robotics revolution is being built by companies that aren’t being intelligent enough to predict their own future by studying their obvious past. Until the market properly prices security risk through insurance requirements, procurement standards, liability frameworks, and certification programs, customers will continue paying premium prices for robots that will be defeated for free. The choice is stark: fix the software economics now, or watch billion-dollar robot deployments self-destruct.

And now this…

  • 2014-2017: Multiple researchers document ROS (Robot Operating System) vulnerabilities affecting thousands of industrial and research robots
  • 2017: IOActive discovers critical vulnerabilities in SoftBank Pepper robots – authentication bypass, hardcoded credentials, remote code execution
  • 2017: Same vulnerabilities found in Aldebaran NAO humanoid robots used in education and research
  • 2018: IOActive demonstrates first ransomware attack on humanoid robots at Kaspersky Security Summit
  • 2018: Academic researchers publish authentication bypass vulnerabilities (CVSS 8.8) for Pepper/NAO platforms
  • 2018: Alias Robotics begins cataloging robot vulnerabilities (RVD) – over 280 documented by 2025
  • 2019-2021: Multiple disclosure attempts for Pepper/NAO vulnerabilities ignored by SoftBank
  • 2020: Alias Robotics becomes CVE Numbering Authority for robot vulnerabilities
  • 2021: SoftBank discontinues Pepper production with vulnerabilities still unpatched
  • 2022: DarkNavy team reports undisclosed Unitree vulnerabilities at GeekPwn conference
  • 2025: CVE-2025-2894 backdoor discovered in Unitree Go1 series robots
  • 2025: UniPwn exploit targets current Unitree G1/H1 humanoids with wormable BLE vulnerability
  • 2025: CVE-2025-60250 and CVE-2025-60251 assigned to UniPwn vulnerabilities
  • 2025: UniPwn claims to be *cough* “first major public exploit of commercial humanoid platform” *cough* *cough*
  • 2025: Academic paper “Cybersecurity AI: Humanoid Robots as Attack Vectors” documents UniPwn findings

Shout out to all those hackers who haven’t disclosed dumb software flaws in modern robots because… fear of police deploying robots on the wrong party (them).

Trump Turkey Talk: Abrupt Summons of Military Like Stalin

This week Trump openly praised Erdoğan’s expertise in “rigged elections” while simultaneously ordering all U.S. military leadership to gather at Quantico with no stated purpose.

…he quipped during a White House meeting that his counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, “knows about rigged elections better than anybody.”

“Are we taking every general and flag officer out of the Pacific right now?” a U.S. official told the Post. “All of it is weird.”

Complimenting Turkey’s President while planning a sudden “weird” military gathering could be:

  • Assessment: Who shows reluctance or concern?
  • Warning: Demonstrate consequences of disloyalty to this man who wants to be king
  • Preparation: Ready to move against officers if they remain loyal to the constitution

This has the hallmarks of telegraphed intentions, as Trump is known for being unable to hide his thoughts. The open praise for Erdoğan’s election manipulation expertise is especially relevant to any highly unusual military consolidation. Such a particular combination of events suggests we may be witness to the late steps of American military dictatorship through a massive power consolidation effort.

When Turkey “summoned” it’s military in 2016 over 45,000 officials, police, judges, governors and civil servants were arrested or suspended, including 163 generals and admirals (45% of the military leadership): 1,524 out of 1,886 staff officers were purged (81%), and one-third of the entire officer corps.

Some experts who read these signals, such as retired U.S. Army Commanding General Ben Hodges, have called attention to examples much further back in history.

July 1935 German generals were called to a surprise assembly in Berlin and informed that their previous oath to the Weimar constitution was void and that they would be required to swear a personal oath to the Führer. Most generals took the new oath to keep their positions.

Of course what really comes to mind is just two years later in the 1937-38 purges by Stalin, the textbook case of authoritarian consolidation.

Stalin used meetings and conferences to systematically eliminate military leadership, removing three of five marshals, 13 of 15 army commanders, eight of nine admirals, 50 of 57 army corps commanders, and 154 out of 186 division commanders.

The most competent leaders were especially targeted. Marshal “Soviet Bonaparte” Tukhachevsky, for example, found his usual parade spot blocked by security guards on May Day, was demoted 10 days later, then arrested and thrown into Lubyanka Prison. Stalin called an emergency meeting to justify eliminating his best leaders, branding the strongest and most intelligent military officers as mere “puppets” to be executed. The entire military leadership was forced to participate in prosecuting and then murdering their own colleagues.

What’s particularly notable about Stalin’s method is how he used gatherings to identify targets, conduct secret trials where defendants were tortured into confessions, immediately sentenced to death, and shot within an hour. Within two years, over 30,000 military officers had been executed, shipped to the gulag, or dismissed from service.

Perhaps a more direct parallel comes from the 1979 Baath Party purge in Iraq. Saddam Hussein convened an emergency party meeting on July 22 where he calmly read names from a prepared list while armed guards escorted each named official out of the hall. The remaining members were forced to applaud each arrest, creating complicity through participation.

Within days, 68 high-ranking officials had been executed, including five Revolutionary Command Council members and 21 cabinet ministers. What made this purge especially effective was how Hussein used the meeting itself as both assessment and trap by observing who hesitated to applaud, who showed concern, who might harbor divided loyalties.

The gathering that promised party unity became the mechanism for its complete subjugation. Hussein’s method demonstrates how a single well-orchestrated meeting can identify, isolate, and eliminate institutional opposition while forcing survivors to become active participants in their colleagues’ destruction.

Trump’s actions thus suggest potential elimination of constitutional military leadership in favor of personal loyalty to a dictator. Once military leadership is replaced with his loyalists, other institutions fall rapidly in sequence. The venerable Posse Comitatus guardrail, theoretically preventing the military from extrajudicial killing of domestic civilians, could become meaningless in a month.

In related news, Trump’s sudden expansion of ICE mirrors Mussolini’s transformation of the “Blackshirts” from an irregular mob into legitimate state apparatus of violence.

Mussolini rapidly expanded his paramilitary forces with state funding while demanding personal loyalty over institutional oaths. Similarly, Trump has allocated $175 billion to hire 10,000 new ICE agents who California’s governor warns appear to have “sworn an oath to Donald Trump, not the Constitution.”

Trump has conscripted FBI and DEA agents into ICE operations while granting them “Total Authorization” to use “whatever means necessary”, the exact extralegal authority Mussolini gave his Blackshirts.

And last, but not least, Trump’s appointment to lead the military was himself barred from serving on duty at the inauguration of Joe Biden after a guardsman flagged Pete Hegseth as an “insider threat”, due to hate group tattoos such as the words deus vult. Hegseth quit the Individual Ready Reserve in January 2024, publishing his grievance in a book he called The War on Warriors.

Rapid assembly of a Blackshirt-like ICE, combined with the simultaneous military assembly by Hegseth at Quantico, means the news reads like a classic authoritarian playbook: build loyal militant enforcement apparatus while rapidly neutralizing potential opposition within existing security institutions, in a war on warriors.

History shows clearly, from multiple angles, that once military leadership is replaced with personal loyalists and a parallel enforcement apparatus is established, representative government dies. The fact that Trump repeatedly and openly admires dictators for their authoritarian tactics, and has telegraphed a Turkey/Iraq-like summons to the military, suggests we are watching his implementation of a well-established playbook to destroy freedom.