The news emphasizes repeatedly that this Tesla didn’t live in the house, or even the neighborhood, where it crashed. Non-representative? Unauthorized? It seems more like a rogue robot released by Elon Musk, a DOGE “fail fast” loitering munition, suddenly lurching into attacks on innocent Americans.
One minute you’re sitting at home sipping your coffee and reading this blog, the next minute you’re ducking for cover in the front-lines of drone warfare unleashed by the DOGE leader.
Here’s a buried lede about where to focus security, which I’m positive was strategically placed by law enforcement officers signaling a preference for truth in justice.
District Attorney Nathan J. Hochman announced today that felony charges were filed against three individuals — including two siblings — accused of possessing a total of more than 50 pounds of fentanyl with an intent to sell.
“Fentanyl remains the leading cause of death in accidental drug overdose cases in Los Angeles County,” District Attorney Hochman said. “Just 1 kilo of fentanyl has the potential to kill 500,000 people. A 50-pound seizure of fentanyl is greater than all the fentanyl seized at the U.S.-Canadian border in 2024, which was 43 pounds. We will be unrelenting in our pursuit to end this tragedy and bring justice to the countless families who have lost loved ones to fentanyl.
The recent study “Coal Ash Resources and Potential for Rare Earth Element Production in the United States” reveals a novel approach to reduce foreign dependence on critical mineral supply. The source? Burned coal, its ash waste.
Coal ash, the byproduct of coal combustion in power plants, contains concentrated levels of rare earth elements (REEs), the critical components for renewable energy technologies, electric vehicles, and defense systems. The study says approximately 1.87 billion tons of potentially accessible coal ash have been dumped into U.S. landfills and storage facilities, with an estimated REE value of $8.4 billion.
This finding has interesting national security implications. The U.S. depends heavily on imports from China for REEs (e.g. from the DRC), creating an obvious vulnerability in supply chains for advanced technologies. The Department of Energy estimates that while conventional U.S. REE reserves are just 1.4 million tons, unconventional sources like coal could deliver another 11 million tons.
The study found REE concentrations vary significantly by source:
Beyond securing critical minerals, developing coal ash as an REE resource offers environmental benefits to these regions.
Coal ash contains contaminants like mercury, cadmium, and arsenic that threaten local water sources. REE extraction could be sold as a way to offset remediation costs for environmentally vulnerable ash impoundments. Finally a reason to have clean water!
As the U.S. transitions towards more modern ethical energy sources, the strategic development of its massive waste sites full of toxic coal ash resources presents a dual opportunity: strengthening national security through domestic REE production while addressing obvious environmental and health dangers from coal power generation.
This research highlights how garbage in can mean treasure out. A little more health regulation might have helped make the discovery sooner. Innovative approaches, forced by necessity, can transform “garbage” into strategic resources, enhancing health, economic and national security.
As security professionals, we’re tasked with balancing urgent operational needs against fundamental legal and ethical frameworks. The recent deportation case involving the Trump administration’s invocation of the 1789 Alien Enemies Act represents a textbook example of security operations deliberately structured to evade accountability mechanisms. Please recognize a dangerous precedent that directly threatens the rule of law.
Accountability Evasion Game
The administration’s approach appears to have been meticulously designed to circumvent judicial review:
This operational structure mirrors tactics used in some of the most controversial security programs in recent history, where operations are deliberately moved outside normal accountability structures, then justified retroactively through technical legal arguments. It signals the White House was planning from the start to ignore laws it knew would deem its planning illegal.
False Security Dilemma
National security routinely is invoked to justify exceptional measures, but this is a false dilemma. The core question isn’t whether dangerous individuals should be removed from the country, it’s whether executive power can operate beyond judicial review simply by exploiting a race condition — moving quickly and invoking rarely-used wartime authorities.
The “ticking time bomb” scenario (or alternatively, the “boy who cried wolf” dynamic) is frequently invoked as justification for extraordinary measures. Yet it rarely holds up to scrutiny. Here, there was no imminent threat that required bypassing normal legal procedures. None. The rush was based on no justification at all. Rather, this was a calculated test case designed to show how ignoring judges very simply can be achieved, with the goal of expanded executive authority. Whether the deportations happened or not was never the White House concern as much as whether they could undermine rule of law somehow, somewhere. After that, no balance of power exists anymore, opening the flood gates to dictatorship.
Constitutional Ratchet
When security operations deliberately evade judicial oversight, they create what some might call a “ratchet effect.” Executive power expands during perceived emergencies and then rarely contracts afterward. Instead, new precedents normalize previously exceptional powers, in one direction (towards extreme control, away from balance).
The administration’s explicit stated strategy to rush this case to a Supreme Court they expect to rule in their favor reveals the true nature of the operation: never an urgent security matter, but an urgent power grab using deportees as pawns in a larger legal strategy to end the constitution.
Ethical Failure of Process Subversion
From an ethics perspective in National Security, this deliberate design of operations to evade accountability represents a fundamental breach of professional responsibility. Security and law enforcement professionals are bound by both legal and ethical constraints that go beyond mere operational objectives.
The administration’s approach reflects a troubling subversive mindset: that accountability structures are objections to be escaped or ignored rather than essential safeguards and guardrails. This isn’t merely a legal technicality, it’s a direct challenge to constitutional governance and the very concept of authority.
International Water Fallacy
Take the claim that planes in international airspace are beyond the reach of US courts, for example. This represents a clearly flawed theory of authority and boundaries. As with kidnapping or hostage situations, the location of victims doesn’t negate the originating jurisdiction’s authority. The entire operation—from detention to transport to deportation—constitutes a single continuous action that began on US soil under US authority. Imagine the US saying it can’t possibly look for a POW abroad to bring home because they aren’t presently on US soil. It’s nonsensical.
The US routinely asserts jurisdiction over its citizens and assets abroad when it suits government interests, showing the selective nature of this jurisdictional argument.
If this new flawed logic were widely accepted, it would create perverse incentives to rush people across borders, any borders anywhere, specifically to avoid judicial scrutiny. And if you really think about it this is how “America First” falls down most often. They pretend the border is absolute as a barrier to any interest or action, yet they immediately argue they can roll themselves into foreign countries with absolute freedom because anyone back in America can’t go through the wall they say now exists. A wall for thee not for me.
Supreme Court as Rubber Stamp
Perhaps most concerning is the explicit strategy to use these deportations as a Supreme Court softball for appointments setup to expand executive power. The administration welcomed the fight, with officials stating “This is headed to the Supreme Court. And we’re going to win.”
This instrumentalizes both the judiciary and the deportees themselves in a constitutional crisis. Rather than respecting the coordinate branches of government, it treats the courts as obstacles until reaching a favorable judicial forum to undermine the balance of power, strip the judiciary of its role by corrupting the top judges.
Another Way Forward
Security professionals must reject operations deliberately structured to evade accountability. True security requires:
When security operations are deliberately designed to escape scrutiny until they can reach a sympathetic authority such as a corrupted judicial forum, we’ve moved from rule OF law to rule BY law, using captured and controlled legal mechanisms to legitimize actions after the fact rather than constrain them beforehand.
Those are the dictates of a dictatorship.
The security community must stand firm against this dangerous and poorly hidden precedent to end democracy. Our ultimate security comes not from unaccountable unilateral executive abuses, but from the constitutional guardrails that prevent any branch from accumulating so much unchecked power.