The Intercept points out that, while public statements are being made about troop draw down and conflict reductions, an actual increase in secret military operations is happening:

On average, more than 4,000 Special Operations forces — Navy SEALs, Army Green Berets, and Marine Corps Raiders among them — are deployed to the region each week, more than anywhere else in the world.

The logic of burying the data on protracted military engagements is not a very well held secret.

“Already we’re not getting answers to basic questions, like who the U.S. has killed and why it hasn’t better protected civilians, and the more the U.S. role is turned over to Special Operations Forces, the CIA, or contractors, the less information the government is going to provide,” Eviatar told The Intercept. “One has to wonder if that isn’t the reason they’re apparently shifting these roles to secret agents whose actions and their consequences the government isn’t required to disclose.”

The increase comes despite direct opposition from special operations command itself.

The breakneck pace at which the United States deploys its special operations forces to conflict zones is taking a toll, their top commander told Congress on Thursday.

Army Gen. Raymond Thomas, commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, called the rate at which special operations forces are being deployed “unsustainable” and said the growing reliance of the U.S. military on its elite troops could produce a dangerous strain.

“We are not a panacea,” he told the Senate Armed Services Committee. “We are not the ultimate solution to every problem, and you will not hear that coming from us.”

While the special operations numbers have swelled to larger than the entire standing army of Germany, and US military leadership says it opposes overuse of special operations, we’re seeing a return to the Reagan-era mistake of expensive unaccountable albatross with little chance of “winning” anything tangible…which sets the US military up for collision in civil relations.

This poses a special risk to healthy civil-military relations because it allows policymakers to avoid justifying or explaining operations publicly. Reliance on special operations also decreases the likelihood of mission success because special operations forces are not designed to win complex campaigns on their own. As Gen. Mark Milley notes, “The one thing [Special Forces] are not designed to do is win a war.”

It’s only been 44 years since Frank Church created his famous committee on secret wars and alerted the country how they were connected to America spying on Americans.

I’ve also recently given a talk and written about how President Reagan tried to undo and avoid the Church Committee findings, engaging in widespread illegal arms deals for secret wars and perhaps even human trafficking. The lessons from those disasters should not be underestimated, especially as we transition to cyberwar models.

“This cyber environment involves people,” Neal said. “It involves their habits. The way that they operate; the way that they name their accounts. When they come in during the day, when they leave, what types of apps they have on their phone. Do they click everything that comes into their inbox? Or are they very tight and restrictive in what they use? All those pieces are what we look at, not just the code.” […] ISIS was using just 10 core accounts and servers to manage the distribution of its content across the world.

That weakness from lack of segmentation is an efficiency hallmark in small groups. The opposite, funding a market for teams to develop similar tools without allowing them to share resources, is usually considered the kind of model only large organizations would fund.

Very few Americans probably realize how Green Berets were compromising communications networks, including tapping into Internet service providers, to predict movements of suspected political (terror group) leaders and assassinate them.

Even fewer Americans see how that crosses over into the Lyft/Uber business model of surveillance capitalism. And an even smaller group remembers Poindexter well enough to connect the dots here to see a dangerous lack of transparency that should be required as we build new “active defense doctrines” for the Internet.

We can not afford to ignore mistakes of the past on this topic, such as the secret SAS missions, especially when there are emerging opportunities for international security alliances including the Christchurch Call and Monday’s “Joint Statement on Advancing Responsible State Behavior…”.

All members of the United Nations General Assembly have repeatedly affirmed this framework, articulated in three successive UN Groups of Governmental Experts reports in 2010, 2013, and 2015.

Alliances that account for clandestine operations is the smart way to go forward, whereas unaccountable executive-led secret wars would repeat some of the worst past mistakes.

Google has successfully defended a plan to keep links in countries other than where people live, as a court has just ruled a citizen’s national right to delete information does not automatically extend to data stored in another country.

“The balance between right to privacy and protection of personal data, on the one hand, and the freedom of information of internet users, on the other, is likely to vary significantly around the world,” the court said in its decision.

The court said the right to be forgotten “is not an absolute right.”

This ruling allows narrow legal loopholes for Google similar to how they avoid national tax requirements, rotating a global identity among Ireland, the Netherlands, and Bermuda.

While the EU has successfully upheld privacy as a human right (“UDHR Article 12. No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy…”), which is showing signs of being adopted by US states, Google is litigating for ways to delay or deny link deletion as part of that right.

And while I’m not a lawyer, I’m told the Court technically has stated there still can be a global application if ordered by the supervisory authority, but it is no longer considered an “automatism”.

The positive spin for the loophole is that Google doesn’t have to abide by a citizen’s request to be forgotten, even if that citizen has an entire nation backing their request as a legal one. Surveillance capitalism having a lack of responsibility to human rights means more money in Google’s pocket, just like if they avoid paying taxes or walk away from any other social-good contract that local markets require of them. In its most charitable light, a mechanism for preserving information against someone’s wishes could be justified if data loss would cause harms.

This, however, is not that case as the “loss” would be revenues Google wants to realize without getting authorization by owners of assets/data. Google litigates this as a “responsible actor” for preservation of data against censorship to appear interested in freedom of speech, yet there are far better ways to avoid censorship than litigating loopholes and havens for advertising revenue databases.

The negative spin for the loophole is that Google is using its ad-revenue warchest to fund its role as a freeloader, using infrastructure and collecting data in order to create high-walled hiding places where they can charge access. This is not unlike the colonial model designed to embed local “business networks” for exploitation and expropriation (theft) of local assets to remote locations to be held against the wishes of creators and owners.

Did the French or British ever argue its museum collections are really preserving speech against censorship in nations they colonized? Asking for a friend who worries their high salary at Google is dirty money.

…thousands of African cultural artifacts taken during the colonial period to be returned to their respective countries, if requested.

Update September 22:

“Man arrested in Greece had nothing to do with 1985 hijacking and murder, victim’s brother tells Military Times”

The FBI most wanted list since 2006 has included Mohammed Ali Hammadi, a Lebanese member of the Iranian-backed terror group Hezbollah. A $5m bounty was posted in 2007.

A TWA Boeing 727 flight in 1985 was hijacked by him and his associates, who assaulted passengers and crew members for 17 days. They also murdered a US citizen, Navy Diver Robert Dean Stethem.

[Pilot] Testrake’s urgent message to the Beirut control tower was broadcast around the world: “We must, I repeat, we must land, repeat, at Beirut. . . . Ground, TWA 847, they are threatening to kill the passengers, they are threatening to kill the passengers. We must have fuel, we must get fuel. . . . They are beating the passengers, they are beating the passengers.”

These hijackers demanded release of all Arab prisoners, particularly the over 700 Lebanese and Palestinians that were held by Israel in southern Lebanon (related to Reagan’s 1983 “aggressive self-defense” policy and the suicide bombing of US Embassy in Beirut).

Today Greek police announced on the island of Mykonos they had taken action two days ago on September 19th based on a warrant issued by German authorities:

…several Greek media outlets identified the detainee as Mohammed Ali Hammadi, who was arrested in Frankfurt in 1987 and convicted in Germany for the plane hijacking and Stethem’s slaying. Hammadi, an alleged Hezbollah member, was sentenced to life in prison but was paroled in 2005 and returned to Lebanon.

Germany had resisted pressure to extradite him to the United States after Hezbollah abducted two German citizens in Beirut and threatened to kill them.

He disembarked from a Turkish cruise ship and was held at island passport control. It appears to have been the result of a routine database check on tourists, during the peak cruise ship month for Mykonos (handling over 700,000 cruise passengers in 2019).

How could he be free and vacationing freely in Greece? Ronald Reagan, as mentioned earlier, failed in 1987 to convince Germany to extradite Hammadi. Germany instead by 1989 tried and convicted the terrorist of murder among other crimes (he had been caught walking liquid explosives through the Frankfurt airport) and put him away with a life sentence.

Then the sentence ended early in 2005 and Hammadi was escorted by Germany back to Beirut aged 41 (President Bush failed to extradite him). This prompted his placement on the FBI list for a decades-long hunt as he apparently enjoyed his freedom.

Conservative pundits in 2010 promoted a “Pakistani source” that the CIA killed Hammadi with a drone strike. So there’s still a chance reports today are wrong. Greek police news, for example, described the arrested man as aged 65. Hammadi would be 55 now (41 in 2005).