All posts by Davi Ottenheimer

W Stands for WTAF? EU State Surveillance as Social Media

It’s a tone-deaf message coming out of the EU right now (pun not intended)

First, right-wing extremist politicians pushed a literal detention center campaign of 1940 Nazi Germany (Madagascar Plan to detain non-citizens in relocation hubs in Africa). Somehow this passed: it’s unmistakably rooted in the 1931 leaked Nazi plan, as stated in 1940, coming to be in 2026. The UN documented in Australia this mindset as a clear violation of international human rights and refugee law, and yet the EU just shouted “Deportation Camps are Great Again” from their bully pulpit.

Second, a very shadowy group of Swedish investors abruptly launched a closed-source fork of the BlueSky surveillance system that they named W (perhaps as a joke it can compromise communities who won’t get on the fascist X and Z platforms).

Anyone claiming to know W’s full ownership is guessing, while W is pushing absolute identification as a requirement for participation in society. At best we know from Svenska Dagbladet that a primary investor of W used Greta Thunberg’s name more than eleven times in promotional material for a November 2018 share issue that raised close to 10 million kronor, after putting her on a youth advisory board, with a prospectus telling investors the venture could be “extremely profitable” through viral climate content and digital ads, while channeling only 10 percent of profits to a charitable fund. Thunberg’s father said the family was never told her name would be used.

CEO, Anna Zeiter, is the persona being attached to this new centralized top-down secret investor controlled form of public communication. Zeiter’s prior role? She oversaw data protection and artificial intelligence policy during the notoriously unsafe years of eBay.

Perhaps you remember:

…eBay lobbyists found to be writing EU data protection law in copy-paste legislation scandal…

Or, then there was this announcement last year:

Levi & Korsinsky, LLP’s investigation indicates that legally protected data may have been unlawfully intercepted during visits to eBay’s website

If you haven’t heard the one about a wolf in sheep’s clothing, I’ll give you a big hint. Look for evidence like attending Stanford Law School with a Master of Law (LL.M.) in Law, Science & Technology. Or if you don’t want to scrutinize Stanford’s known unethical tech pipeline, look at her jump into a record-setting breach failure (May 21, 2014), followed by two distinct surveillance scandals on her watch as global chief, and then an active interception case.

Her handling of the privacy 2014 breach was really bad, but her next two giant scandals are truly unbelievable.

First, remember her 2019 corporate-run cyberstalking? As global CPO, she oversaw eBay’s senior director of Safety and Security and six other staff targeting Ina and David Steiner, the editors of EcommerceBytes. Why? Independent coverage frustrated eBay executives. Surveillance and terror methods were unleashed by eBay: live spiders and cockroaches, a funeral wreath, a bloody pig mask, and a book on surviving the loss of a spouse mailed to their home, their address posted online, plus physical following.

The Justice Department charged eBay with stalking, witness tampering and obstruction. eBay admitted the facts, paid a $3 million criminal penalty, the statutory maximum for six felony offenses, and accepted an independent corporate compliance monitor for three years. Seven employees and contractors were convicted; the eBay fall-guy drew 57 months. As privacy chief what punishment did she get while her own security apparatus ran covert surveillance to silence two journalists? Apparently not enough.

Second, by 2020 her command of privacy at eBay was implicated in port-scanning. Researchers found eBay’s site probing every visitor’s own machine over WebSocket, looking for remote-desktop and remote-access ports, via LexisNexis ThreatMetrix, with the script re-obfuscated on each page load and results exfiltrated to a lookalike domain, ebay-us.com. Security researcher Jeroen Opdenakker called it the default deployment without clear notice or opt-out, a serious infringement of privacy regulations, with CCPA, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and GDPR all cited as exposure.

Third, I know I said two, but her track record is so toxic we shouldn’t stop. There are so many examples of personal and professional disasters, let’s do one more at least. She claims to be on Flo’s Privacy and Security Advisory Board since 2022.

Developer of Popular Women’s Fertility-Tracking App Settles FTC Allegations that It Misled Consumers About the Disclosure of their Health Data

That means she joined the board of the app, perhaps from some prior relationship, behind the most notorious femtech privacy enforcement in the US, a company that paid into a landmark 2025 health-data settlement. The violations were so severe, it was the first time the FTC ordered a company to notify consumers of a privacy action, and Commissioners Chopra and Slaughter argued the conduct also violated the Health Breach Notification Rule, which the complaint left out.

So as we say in America, she has three massive strikes, and therefore she’s out. This is someone flogging identity-verified, privacy-first European speech centralized surveillance infrastructure, with a doctorate on free speech, who has been repeatedly intentionally overseeing the exact opposite of what is on the box.

Now, are you ready to sign up for her to use her mysterious “Nordic” framing about her investors to control your communications? Who wants a three-strike CEO in charge of anything to do with privacy? Please tell me, seriously.

Her company choosing to build on top of the BlueSky ATproto in fact fits the very troubled persona, with sketchy investors. She is standing up a choke-point model of total control, which is a repetition signal from every one of the above abuse findings.

Here’s the administrator manual that we should be handing out to any engineers identified as working for Zeiter:

Publisher: BookSurge Publishing; Illustrated ed.
Date: July 7, 2009
Paperback: 162 pages
ISBN-10:‎ 1439229961
ISBN-13: ‎ 978-1439229965

In other words, something smells rotten in Denmark.

Who will the be first W-histleblower?

Already we see the fail unsafe mistakes bubbling up from under this CEO. When W scrubbed the Bluesky branding from its staging site to hide their forking plan, the login page lost its SSL certificate, so credentials typed into it would travel as plaintext. The platform whose entire pitch is verified identity and government ID upload. Cleartext.

The scrubbing was implicated in brand deception as well. A staging page still had the Bluesky login clone and a dev PDS page showing the AT Protocol logo. For a week the European press reported EU backing, until Euronews fact-checked it and a Commission spokesperson denied the EU was launching, funding or operating any platform. Supposedly no European-backed project called W exists, and yet everyone seems to see it as such, while W stays silent and issues no correction on the messaging they fed into the public.

That’s not the kind of mistake anyone with a basic clue could make. Tom Casavant doubled-down on the problem by reporting W’s Kubernetes management software used GitHub SSO without identity (lock to single org). For a company asking for state ID, they didn’t even turn on the most critical infrastructure identity themselves.

Zeiter says the ID check works like a club door, confirms human and over-18 through a third party, then deletes the data, and that she has no interest in holding ID data because it can only become a breach. Uh, no. The verification app is built by Neuro from Trust Anchor Group, and if nothing is retained, what stops one person from registering many accounts across devices, which implies some persistent identifier or hash is kept after all? Impersonation already has been demonstrated: Zeiter tagged advisor Yariv Adan, who had registered the username homersimpson, so a verified account can choose any display identity, including that of a head of state. Verified person? More like arbitrary persona.

Who is her homersimpson advisor really? He spent 17 years at Google, co-founding Google Assistant and Google Lens. He is surely why Zeiter says she will “maybe train European AI models with our data”.

I mean, should this rollout be called the EUWWWWWW? Who understands the technology, the branding, yet really wants this, other than the Palantir and Putin crowd?

I’ve written here before about the inherent “Room 641A” design mistakes of BlueSky. It’s simply put an insecure and unsafe protocol. Nothing is secret about the decisions to lower privacy. It seems likely that it was meant to be that way, because anyone doing secure protocol design since the 1970s knows how and why to avoid the centralized surveillance vulnerability using the data “migration hubs” that define BlueSky.

Speaking of which, the only thing WhatsApp really added to the Signal Protocol was a plaintext exposure Signal refused: pervasive metadata harvesting, and a reporting pipeline that ships flagged messages in the clear to a thousand-plus Meta moderators. Imagine being a spy agency and knowing you can get someone hired to read WhatsApp chats. Again, not a secret. The EU is for some reason big on people using WhatsApp, despite it being a foreign surveillance model. This has been repeatedly documented. And look at how well-heeled lobbyists were pushing misstatements/disinformation like this that do harm to public safety.

Source: Twitter

I guess, I expected better of the EU. They argue wine, cheese, beer… has to be high quality, authentic sourced integrity. And then tech is just this sloppy imitation of bad fascist code preying on hype cycles? But then again, elitist violent seizure of power was quite popular just two generations ago. Latent thirst for political garbage is manifesting.

Anyone promoting W today may as well drop in a Mussolini, Franco, Hitler, Szálasi, Mosley, Salgado… portrait to achieve the WTAF avatar. They would go with Szálasi to bridge with the EU return to a 1940 Madagascar Plan, since he led Hungary’s Arrow Cross and 1944 government that rushed to deport and murder Hungarian Jews before the Allies could liberate them.

And if you’re wondering where Sweden fits, the answer may surprise you. Aside from “neutrally” enabling Hitler with iron ore, financial help, ball bearings and troop transit, Sweden ran a state institute for racial biology (founded 1922 in Uppsala), among the first national, state-funded race-science bodies anywhere. Their forced-sterilization program started, not coincidentally, from 1934 into the 1970s. That’s how they define democracy, because their racist thinking never needed a fascist coup.

Windmill Economics 101: When Trump Hates Something, You Know It Must Be Good

I didn’t pay much attention to windmills, to be honest, but all this whining and complaining by Trump has me wondering what’s so good about them.

Well, it turns out a lot. They are cheap at the margin, stable on contract, strongest when the grid is most stressed, and bank tax revenue and jobs while leaving the land working. The economics are entirely sound. The thing fighting them is jealousy and greed, not price. Trump can’t corner a wind market.

Cold snaps already have proven when wind earns its keep. Ocean winds peak in the coldest months, exactly when the New England grid is most constrained and gas is most expensive. Because the East Coast leans so heavily on volatile natural gas, adding cost-stable wind raises supply and holds bills down, and the value shows up clearly during winter electricity crunches. Vineyard Wind’s built portion saved the region roughly $2 million a day during the December 2025 cold snap, per the EDF.

That’s the spot price. The long contract makes it undeniable. Massachusetts says the power purchase agreements will save ratepayers about $1.4 billion over 20 years. And the winter case isn’t a one-off: the Acadia Center estimated offshore wind would have saved New England ratepayers at least $400 million in the winter of 2024–25 by cutting wholesale prices 11% and reducing reliance on volatile gas.

The economics scale because the fuel is free. Onshore wind and solar are among the cheapest new power sources in the US even without subsidies, per Lazard, and once a turbine is built the wind costs nothing, so wind farms undercut gas and coal on wholesale price and pull prices down for everyone. Wind already carries real load: 464.4 terawatt-hours in 2025, about 10.5% of US electricity, the largest renewable source since it passed hydro in 2019.

On the ground it pays rent and wages. Land-based wind delivered nearly $2.7 billion in state and local tax and land-lease payments last year and supports over 383,000 jobs across direct, indirect, and induced roles, with wind turbine technician the fastest-growing job in the country at 50% over the decade. Direct wind employment already runs ahead of oil and gas extraction. The land takes little: turbines and roads occupy about 2% of a project’s area, leaving 98% for farming and ranching.

What’s not to like?

Juneteenth 2026: Germany Says Nazi Slavery Reparations Turn 25

The German government yesterday, along with the EU, announced that it was approving large “black sites” and “migration hubs” that disappear people for months, or perhaps forever if history is any guide.

…text notably enables nations to open deportation centers outside the EU’s borders, where migrants with no right to stay could be sent…

That means inhumane detention for “up to two years”, using home searches and seizure of belongings, with intentionally cruel and far away destinations under discussions that rhyme with Auschwitz.

A State party cannot escape its human rights responsibility when outsourcing asylum processing to another State… [where] minors have suffered from deterioration of physical and mental well-being, including self-harm, depression, kidney problems, insomnia, headaches, memory problems and weight loss.

January 1933, after months of collapsing public support, Hitler seized power by appointment and by March 1933 the first concentration camp opened at Dachau. It held political prisoners, ended opposition, and cleared the path to a one-party state within months. The deportation machinery of Nazis setup “migrant” processing hubs for anyone they deemed “stateless”, which is the exact sequence the EU now rebuilds as if everyone just forgot the Holocaust.

A German minister named Dobrindt, infamous for his hand stopping fiber in Germany until the country fell to the bottom in broadband speed, seems to be the man trying most to stop thought and drag his country backwards in time. In his attempt to “report” on “left-wing” extremism, he literally claimed the threat “increase” went all the way from 11,200 to 11,200.

“Dobrindt cites incorrect figures on extremists”. Source: Berliner Zeitung

He’s not being dumb. He’s very cynically and intelligently asking that everyone just NOT SEE.

His intentional blindness to human tragedy has become so obvious, even in German, I don’t know how or why the many national level failures of Dobrindt qualify him to any public office, let alone this latest concentration camp counselor role for the EU.

Meanwhile, another branch of government clearly wants us to see on Juneteenth 2026 that Germany has for 25 years been paying reparations for 26 million people forced into slavery.

…forced labor was used for the purpose of physical extermination: it was especially concentration camp prisoners, including many Jews, Sinti and Roma as well as Soviet prisoners of war and civilian laborers…

Source: Stiftung EVZ

The Missing 1993 Mogadishu Little Bird After Action Report

October 3, 1993. Most know it as “Black Hawk Down”. Now, a new report using the “Little Bird” Night Stalkers perspective sheds light on a long forgotten and missing After Action Report.

Source: “Guns Over Mogadishu: AH-6 Story”, Carpe Noctem, June 2026

American forces launched rapidly in Somalia at 15:32, because the two target lieutenants had just been located an hour earlier at a known residence. This is how the daylight deployment window was set.

And then a deadly analytic mistake was made in the plan. During daylight in a dense city, the discrimination and survivability objectives were placed in direct opposition. To put fire down that spares noncombatants, aircraft must engage low and slow enough to see what they would be shooting at. Low and slow in a daytime Bakara Market is the maximally exposed profile, and the minimum of survivability. One orbit could never achieve both the civilian protective order and the soldier survival requirement.

Source: “Guns Over Mogadishu: AH-6 Story”, Carpe Noctem, June 2026

This was especially true because, as was well known at the time, Mohamed Farrah Aidid’s forces were trained on RPG shots at low and slow moving helicopters. It’s a tragically obvious mix, and not just today in retrospect.

The MH-60 were the wrong platform, pushed into the wrong orbit ring. And daylight should have made the entire protection decision incoherent. Any shoot down of one converts any rapid extraction force into a prolonged urban battle and siege warfare subjecting hundreds of civilians to heavy automatic weapons, cannons and rockets. And that’s exactly what happened.

Ordering very discriminate fire eroded the conditions for survivability of those teams, which is how top professionals were forced into a mass casualty disaster. The high volume of indiscriminate fire, from surrounded forces trying to hold out for rescue, was the result. Estimates are that around 300 people were killed, with more than double that wounded. The exact opposite of task force doctrine, was created by a simple error made in task force doctrine.

The Little Bird perspective coming out now proves that the controlled raid should have been a fixed duration and a fixed footprint, nothing else. The Black Hawk deployment into clear skies filled with RPGs is what converted it to a crash recovery with open-ended battle that sprawled across blocks of housing and pulled crowds toward the wreckage, with an expanding urban firefight; generating the worst possible environment for civilian survival.

The impossible choice that was pushed on troops, clearly meant to spare civilians, instead only raised the probability of the one event that guaranteed mass civilian death. Self-defeating at the second order.