Category Archives: Security

History, Security

From the Monstrosity of Lee to the Magnificent Eight: After a Century of Oppression Black Women Sweep Georgia

Leave a comment

Georgia elected eight Black women to statewide office on Tuesday. It matters not least of all because of the disinformation in America that it overcomes; the century of Robert E. Lee propaganda and myths that it shatters. Every statewide race on the ballot went to a Democrat, and every Black woman who ran statewide won. Keisha Lance Bottoms will be the first Black woman to serve as governor of any American state.

The first Black woman ever elected to a partisan statewide office in Georgia took her seat eleven months ago. Alicia Johnson joined the Public Service Commission in December 2025, a body over a century old. She said it was a shame to be the first anything on it.

Some have commented that Trump targeted Blacks for removal from their federal government seats, as Wilson did starting in 1913 under the “America First” banner he ran on in 1916, and thus they are winning all the races at the state level now. Notably, when the GOP ran Trump against a Black woman for President on an “America First” platform, Trump had already called Lee “the greatest strategist of them all” as the 1890 Richmond statue came down, and said Lee would have won Afghanistan. The name at the root of “America First” is specific.

Robert E. Lee.

Wilson, before he was President, delivered the Lee birthday address at Chapel Hill on January 19, 1909, presenting a traitorous “monster” who ran a school of rapists as a model for the whole nation. Four years later Carr stood on the same campus to unveil a Confederate statue, as Wilson used his election mandate to purge Black federal workers.

Lee had died in 1870 in almost total obscurity. He should have been hanged in 1865, but Grant intervened to stop the trial. After that Lee wanted to be unknown, by design, so that he could die of natural causes instead of being hanged for treason let alone killed for his many crimes against humanity (including his own men). Barely a thousand people attended his funeral, most of them students and cadets from the two schools in Lexington. His own students had to be called in to carry his body, perhaps for school credit. Fifteen years later 1.5 million people turned out for his sworn enemy President Grant, who had the Confederate generals he had defeated as his pallbearers. By any honest measure of the two men they could not be farther apart.

Grant was a military genius, a General who captured three whole armies and pioneered modern combined army and navy operations. Lee took three decades to make colonel, known for blunders and brutality including denying aid to the wounded and murdering prisoners. Grant won the presidency twice, created the DoJ and the first National Park, and initiated Civil Rights enforcement. Lee ran a college whose students were known for raping Black schoolchildren in the area and other racist violence including attempts at lynching.

Then the myth about the two men was built by racist propagandists who lost the Slaveholder Rebellion, and Georgia moved that mythology into actual law.

1889. Georgia makes Lee’s birthday a paid state holiday by statute.

1906. Hoke Smith runs for governor on Black disfranchisement. On September 22 the Atlanta papers print four alleged assaults on white women by Black men, none ever substantiated. The massacre follows that night. The 1908 amendment delivers the literacy test and grandfather clause. The invented Black rapist is the license for the real white one.

1913. Julian Carr dedicates a Confederate monument at Chapel Hill and tells the crowd he horse-whipped a Black woman until her skirts hung in shreds, one hundred yards from the statue. The crowd approves.

1915. Helen Plane of the United Daughters of the Confederacy hires Borglum to carve Lee into Stone Mountain and writes asking for Klan figures on the carving. The Klan refounds itself on the summit that November.

1919. Georgia is the first state to reject the Nineteenth Amendment, then uses a six-month registration rule to keep women out of the 1920 election. White women vote in 1922. Black women stay out under the 1908 rules. Georgia ratifies in 1970.

1924. Lee’s head is unveiled on Stone Mountain on Lee’s birthday before 5,000 people.

1954. Fifty-seven days after Brown v. Board, Marvin Griffin points at the mountain and promises to finish the carving. He adds the battle flag to the state flag in 1956 and buys the mountain in 1958. The carving finishes in 1972.

1965. Grace Towns Hamilton becomes the first Black woman in the Georgia legislature. One century after Appomattox.

2001. The price of removing the battle flag from the state flag is Georgia Code 50-3-1(c), which protects the Lee carving by statute.

2015. Governor Deal renames Lee’s birthday “State Holiday.” The day stays on the calendar.

2022. Secretary of State Raffensperger cites that holiday to block Saturday early voting in the Warnock runoff. Keisha Lance Bottoms posts that Lee’s birthday is blocking the vote. The Georgia Supreme Court overrules him.

2025. Alicia Johnson. The first.

2026. Eight. The woman who posted about the Lee holiday in 2022 is now governor.

Research published in PNAS in 2021 found Confederate monuments concentrated in the counties with the most lynchings. The SPLC data shows the monuments went up in two waves, one with the Jim Crow constitutions after 1900 and one with the backlash to Brown after 1954. Georgia hit both waves with the same mountain, and the mountain is protected by the same Republican majority that just lost the state House.

Lee’s name was a holiday, a mountain, a flag, a statute, and a voting calendar. Each one was a mythological fixation turned into a legal instrument specifically deployed for denying Black women any power.

Tuesday’s result is what Georgia looks like once the Lee disinformation bubble is popped.

Energy, History, Security

Nuclear Bombs All Wrong in “The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist”

Leave a comment

I was invited to a group viewing of the Focus Features film called The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist. It was released March 2026, as a documentary by Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell built on interviews with the heads of OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind.

For someone formally trained as a historian who has been on the forefront of AI security research for over 15 years, I found it difficult to watch. For example, partway through, a famous voice in the film reaches for a particular standard analogy. He says Germans were working on the bomb in the 1940s and…

so it’s not so easy to tell Robert Oppenheimer then, “slow down.”

Record scratch. I almost walked out of the film at that moment.

The line sounds like history. It is NOT. That is propaganda. Mythology at best.

On every point I can refute it. The German threat was a belief, the belief was exposed as such and thus failed before the bomb existed. People told Oppenheimer to slow down, in writing, and he was the one who refused to listen.

It’s a FACT that Oppenheimer was told to slow down. And this AI “documentary” tries to push total propaganda that Oppenheimer had no choice but to speed up?

The failure of the film is simple to explain. It takes people who are purported experts in one area, and then pushes them into a discussion outside their expertise.

At one point a man presented as some kind of AI theorist in ethics is allowed to go on-and-on about military tactics where he clearly has zero clue and should be shut down. Imagine an artist inviting an accountant to sit in a hot-seat under intense lights to explain how brain surgery works.

Let’s dig in deeper to this Oppenheimer mistake, because it’s so easily disproved. It shows the kind of fact checking devoid from the film. There is a notable lack of integrity and quality that should have gated its release. Unless you call it an art film. Then, ok, fine it’s just one guy’s anxiety project. But a documentary?

Nope.

Albert Einstein signed the famous letter to Roosevelt of 2 August 1939 because he believed Germany was ahead. His belief was mistaken. The letter warns that Berlin had stopped uranium sales from the Czech mines it had seized and that German physicists were repeating the American experiments. That belief is the entire basis of the letter, meaning we now know conclusively it wasn’t based in fact. Fifteen years later Linus Pauling visited Einstein at Princeton and wrote down what he heard. Einstein called the letter the “one great mistake in my life“, with the single excuse that the Germans theoretically could have built a weapon first. It was anxiety that drove him to press a fear and he regretted it once the fear disproved.

Oppenheimer himself rated that fear low. In a 1965 interview he said that when he went to New Mexico he worried more about the campaigns in Africa and Russia than about a German bomb, and that belief in the German threat varied from person to person. Wigner kept it until there were no Germans left.

Today there’s no doubt about the Germans falling out of any bomb race by the summer of 1942. Albert Speer met the physicists at the Harnack House in Berlin on 4 June 1942 and Heisenberg told him a bomb was beyond reach within the war. To be fair, the Nazis had lost the war by 1943, meaning the later years are best described as German genocide and suicide while refusing to surrender a lost war. The project in this context was reduced to reactor research. Heisenberg put it plainly to Der Spiegel in 1967:

There never was a race for the atomic bomb.

Three years before Trinity, the race didn’t exist. Put THAT in your AI “documentary”.

The Allies found this out while the bomb was still eight months from completion. Samuel Goudsmit, scientific head of the Alsos intelligence mission, wrote that at the fall of Strasbourg in November 1944 his team found “irrefutable documentary evidence that Germany did not have atomic weapons” and was far behind on reactors. The same month James Chadwick told Joseph Rotblat at Los Alamos that intelligence showed the Germans were off the bomb. Rotblat asked to leave at once and was home before Christmas. He had already heard General Groves say at a dinner in March 1944 that “the real purpose in making the bomb was to subdue the Soviets”.

One scientist did what the AI “documentary” calls unthinkable. He told the bomb project to stop, and he stopped.

The others told it to slow down. Do you see yet how far from documenting actual technology this “documentary” is?

The Interim Committee met on 31 May 1945, three weeks after the German surrender, and settled on use against a Japanese city without warning. The scientists at the Chicago laboratory replied within days. The Franck Report of 11 June 1945 asked for a demonstration before any use on a city and warned that a surprise attack would start an arms race. Gee, that seems an important detail for an AI film. Leo Szilard’s petition of 17 July 1945 carried 70 signatures and asked the President to withhold the bomb until Japan had been given terms and refused them.

Oppenheimer is the guy who blocked the petition at Los Alamos. He refused to be told to stop or slow down.

Szilard sent it to Edward Teller to circulate there. Teller recalled that Oppenheimer talked him out of it on the grounds that scientists had no business applying political pressure, and the petition collected no signatures at the laboratory. Oppenheimer had already signed, for the Scientific Panel, the recommendation of 16 June 1945 that disposed of the demonstration idea:

we see no acceptable alternative to direct military use.

Then it was used, twice, by the military on a country that had nothing to do with the bomb development. The order of 25 July 1945 authorised the first bomb after 3 August and added that “additional bombs will be delivered on the above targets as soon as made ready”. The second strike needed no further decision. Hiroshima was 6 August. The Soviet Union declared war on Japan on 8 August. Nagasaki was 9 August.

The steps are important, especially since Americans never learn this correctly. The Japanese Supreme War Council was called on the morning of 9 August in response to the Soviet attack, before the second bomb fell. The Soviet entry weighed at least as heavily as the bombs on the surrender decision, and the bombs added little to what conventional raids had already done: Tokyo, Kobe and Yokohama were each more than half burned out by August 1945. The atomic bomb was a demonstration aimed at the Soviets, not so much at the Japanese.

After the Soviet test of August 1949 the question became the hydrogen bomb, and Oppenheimer, chairing the General Advisory Committee, finally gave the advice he had refused in 1945. The committee’s report of 30 October 1949 recommended against a crash programme, and the majority annex he signed called the weapon one of genocide. Bit late, no?

Truman overruled him on 31 January 1950. Four years later the Atomic Energy Commission stripped his clearance. In December 2022 the Department of Energy vacated that decision and found the 1954 process had been driven by a wish to discredit him in the public debate over nuclear weapons policy.

When Oppenheimer finally said slow down in a way that counted, the time he waded into politics as he had told others not to, the state ended his career for it. Think about that political reason for not saying slow down, versus the actual risks from technology.

So the AI “documentary” has its technology history exactly backwards.

Telling Oppenheimer to slow down was easy and it was done, repeatedly. Done by Franck, by Szilard and 69 colleagues, by Rotblat with his feet, and in the end by Oppenheimer himself. The German justification was a belief dated to 1939, which had to be abandoned in Berlin in 1942, and was disproved in Strasbourg by 1944. The project ran straight through all three dates to a different objective entirely. That is the Oppenheimer story told properly.

When an AI executive says the big scary adversary makes slowing down big scary technology impossible, the historical question is what the project did on the day the fear of a big scary bear turned out to just be a little chihuahua (reactor experiment in a cave).

Energy, Food, History, Security

Not Cool: Russia Out for Blood, Thaws Europe’s Fridges in Ten Countries

Leave a comment

Russia is attacking Europe. If you balk at that phrase, instead of accepting it, the attack methods are working as designed. The infrastructure of refrigeration is in danger, which on the night of 1 to 2 November meant disruption directed at France’s blood supply.

Why blood? We could ask the same question of the “hospital trains” disrupted by Russia in the weeks after NATO announced they would roll from the Netherlands all the way to the Russian border as proof of wartime capabilities.

I think by now everyone knows about refrigeration controllers being warmed. Fridges and freezers at night, connected to networks, are being popped at supermarkets in Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Ireland, Portugal and Italy. Danfoss confirmed its equipment was involved, just like it was in France on 11 October. But let’s talk for a moment about the refrigeration contractor for the Établissement français du sang, which lost control of cold rooms holding blood products.

Le Canard enchaîné reported on 3 November that the setpoint on containers maintained by Coolworld, including sites in Bourgogne-Franche-Comté, was changed from minus 30°C to 110°C. That’s a lot of Fahrenheit. A technician on night duty saw the temperature in the cold rooms rising. The Health Ministry says the simple detection prevented any operational consequence. The EFS first described the contents as donor samples kept for transfusion monitoring, then confirmed that frozen plasma for transfusion was among the products in the targeted units.

Again, that’s a specific target of Russia for a particular reason. Transfusion centers are one of the puzzle pieces of NATO defense capabilities.

The October post here had brought up ANSSI searching for other exposed companies before the attack spread, and it highlighted two gaps: scan history, and Danfoss sites outside France. I think we have answers now.

Country Company (stores)
Belgium, Luxembourg Delhaize (several dozen), Carrefour (15), Intermarché (10 to 15), Spar (5), IKEA Mons (1)
Netherlands 17 businesses including butchers
Germany Edeka Reisbach, stores in North Rhine-Westphalia
Sweden ICA (limited number), Coop (6 or 7 of about 800)
Finland Kesko (a few smaller stores)
Estonia Selver (1)
Ireland Musgrave SuperValu (13 of 223)
Portugal Intermarché (7)
Italy Coop, Radenza Group (at least 4, Sicily)

Answers? Let me be clear. Every country on that list supports Ukraine, and all but neutral Ireland send it weapons. The map of the second wave is the map of European support for Kyiv, minus France, hit three weeks earlier.

Reuters established in July 2025 that Elon Musk ordered Starlink coverage cut over part of Kherson in late September 2022, in the middle of Ukraine’s counteroffensive, which left units without communications and let Russian positions escape encirclement. Every day Russia holds Ukrainian ground is a day of Russian strikes on Ukrainian civilians, and every one of those strikes is a demand on a transfusion service. See the connection?

The attack method in question here is the one from France. Sabcobel, which runs refrigeration for Delhaize, said units were simply switched into a defrost mode. An ICA store in Sjöbo found its fridges and freezers set to 50°C. A Selver freezer in Estonia was set to 50°C on an older Danfoss controller and caught within ten minutes. A butcher in Hove near Antwerp found his fridges at 18°C and lost about 15,000 euros of meat.

The door was the one from France too, and it was a cheap door. Flimsy, weak, to a point we shouldn’t even call it a door. ANSSI director Vincent Strubel told the French Senate on 21 October that the agency’s assessment of the October cases pointed to exposed administration interfaces and trivial passwords, and that the vulnerabilities Claroty published earlier in the year were absent from the path. The October post spoke to those vulnerabilities and the firmware that fixed them. The attackers needed a login page on the public internet and a bad password that nobody changed. Danfoss told NOS the Dutch systems that were hit sat on open networks with default passwords, that most targets had locked down after the French attack, and that the few who had not were the ones hit. Sabcobel said many but not all of its customers had secured their connections. Selver said the store that was hit was the last one it had yet to move to a new system. Three weeks of public warning had sorted targets into two groups, meaning the victim list is a discrete second group. The breach-of-duty argument from October has a clear control group.

The vendor was well aware of this attack for at least the past four years. A Danfoss application note from 2022 documents attacks on sixteen Russian supermarkets and forty Israeli stores, and records that the Israeli installations lacked firewall or VPN protection.

I’ll say that again. Russian supermarkets are on the 2022 list.

The Danfoss security advisories page listed nothing about either 2026 wave as of 3 November. CERT-FR alert CERTFR-2026-ALE-012 was last updated on 16 October. It covers the Danfoss AK-SM and AK-SC series and the Copeland and Dixell xweb lines, says the campaigns are probably still underway, and advises operators to check their insurance contract before cutting the data feed to their refrigeration contractor.

The blood case is interesting because it differs from the stores in two ways.

The first is a degree. Every store that reported a setpoint had reported 50°C. Hot! But the EFS containers were set to 110°C, and that figure is a programmed instruction rather than a measured temperature. A different temperature ceiling points at a different controller, and the controller vendor in the Coolworld case is still unnamed.

The second is a detection. Most stores found out late, from staff opening doors in the morning or from alarms. The EFS found out during the early moves, because someone on night shift had a job to observe the thermometer.

The identical attack already carries a Russian name on a US indictment. The US Justice Department announced on 9 December 2025 charges against CyberArmyofRussia_Reborn and NoName057(16), alleged Russian government backing for both, and attributed to CARR a November 2024 intrusion at a Los Angeles meat-processing plant that spoiled the meat and caused an ammonia leak. The joint advisory published the same day by the FBI, CISA, NSA and allied agencies describes these groups selecting operational-technology victims on availability and existing exposure. A refrigeration controller on a public address with a default password is such an obviously bad idea, do I even have to say it fits? Eleven months later the Russian TTP ran across ten European countries in one night. EU Agriculture Commissioner Christophe Hansen called it a deliberate attempt to disrupt the food supply chain.

Food supplies, blood supplies. What do you think nations tell their citizens to have ready during a war? Not a coincidence that Britain has recently been telling people to stockpile food in case of… well, they haven’t said exactly.

The officials reading logs have chosen words carefully. Belgium’s Centre for Cybersecurity told reporters on 2 November that the identity of the attackers was unknown and “it may never be determined”, while the federal prosecutor opened a criminal investigation. Sweden’s National Cybersecurity Centre is sharing information with Nordic and European agencies. Danfoss said the Dutch attacks were the same kind as in France, Sabcobel said the same method was used in Belgium, and Kitman Coldtech said the method in Estonia was similar. A shared method across ten countries on one night, three weeks after a rehearsal in one country, is a campaign.

The lack of EU preparedness for integrity breaches is incredibly frustrating to me, as I’ve been banging the gong on this since at least 2012.

A Russian campaign of breaching integrity of control systems succeeds when the case stays open. The Belgian statement started out that way on day one. “May never be determined” is the Russian operational objective, as stated by the victim.

The same agencies attribute, so let’s think about the difference. The Dutch military intelligence service MIVD reported in April 2025 that a Russian hacker group had carried out a cyber sabotage attack on the digital control system of a public facility in the Netherlands, the first known case in the country, and that a second Russian operation against Dutch critical infrastructure looked like preparation for sabotage. Norway’s PST said in August 2025 that pro-Russian hackers had taken control of the Risevatnet dam in Bremanger in April through a weak password on a web-accessible control panel, opened a valve for four hours, and posted a video of the panel on Telegram the same day. A dam valve and a freezer setpoint belong to the same target class: an internet-facing industrial controller behind a weak credential, in a state that arms Ukraine.

The target class is Russian doctrine, to put it simply. Colonel Chekinov and Lieutenant General Bogdanov published a series in Military Thought from 2010 to 2017; their 2010 article on asymmetrical actions lists the civilian infrastructure where Russia should be able to inflict unacceptable damage in nonmilitary security areas, and their 2013 article on new-generation war names dams, nuclear plants and other infrastructure facilities as targets in the opening period of a conflict. UK Defence Intelligence read the strikes on Ukraine’s grid from October 2022 as the first attempt to run the Strategic Operation for the Destruction of Critically Important Targets, a doctrine built on hitting a state’s civilian infrastructure in place of its army to force its leaders to capitulate. The International Criminal Court issued warrants for Shoigu and Gerasimov in June 2024 for that same campaign, strikes on electric infrastructure from 10 October 2022 to at least 9 March 2023, as war crimes and the crime against humanity of inhumane acts. Food is absent from the target lists in the doctrine. Food is what spoils when the targets on the list go down, and a fridge controller is the shortest path to that result.

Food as the weapon itself was announced at the level of the Security Council. Medvedev wrote on 1 April 2022, five weeks into the invasion, that the food security of many countries depends on Russian supplies, that this is “a quiet but formidable weapon”, and that Russia would supply food and crops only to its friends. The Black Sea blockade followed, and the strikes on Ukrainian ports and grain storage after Russia left the grain deal in July 2023.

Logistics is where the Europeans get even more specific. Czech police concluded in April 2024 that officers of GRU Unit 29155 blew up the two ammunition depots at Vrbětice in October and December 2014, stock reported to be on its way to Ukraine. Polish prosecutors said in October 2024 that the parcels which ignited at the DHL hub in Leipzig on 20 July and the DHL warehouse near Birmingham on 22 July were sent to test a transfer channel for devices bound for the United States and Canada, and the head of MI5 described the GRU as on a sustained mission of arson and sabotage on British and European streets. That campaign ran on locally recruited disposable agents. A refrigeration campaign that needs a default password and a shopping list of exposed hosts runs on far less, and the December advisory says the groups pick targets exactly that way.

The threats we are talking about have a name in Russian military history. On 14 July 1943 the Central Headquarters of the Partisan Movement ordered Operation Rail War. It opened on the night of 3 August 1943 with tens of thousands of partisans striking the occupied rail network at once, which the Belarusian state war museum defines as simultaneous mass destruction of the enemy’s communications to disorganize his transport, timed to the Red Army offensive at the front. The second stage, Concert, began on 19 September and cut German rail transport in Belarus by 40 percent by the end of the year. The doctrine is one coordinated night, many cheap strikes, against supply, timed to something else. The night of 1 to 2 November has that shape across ten countries, and one of its strikes was aimed at a blood supply.

The evidence establishes a Russian state-aligned campaign against the civilian cold chain of states that are supporting survival of civilians in Ukraine.

The open question is the unit, and the agencies holding the logs will answer it when they decide the cost of saying so is lower than the cost of the next Russian victims. The October attack spoiled food. The November attack reached blood, although it was stopped by one technician who was awake. Or dare I say, woke.

Energy, Security

Algeria Should Force Sahara Nuclear Cleanup With or Without France

Leave a comment

France is getting itself in hot water because of its seventeen nuclear detonations in the Algerian Sahara.

More than scientific experiments or Cold War posturing, France’s nuclear tests in Algeria were a form of colonial risk externalization: the deliberate transfer of existential danger onto a colonized land and its people. The colonial administration exported the catastrophic potential of its nuclear program far from its own population, offloading the risks of fallout and long-term contamination onto a colony deemed expendable.

The controversy is now whether French colonial records are still meant to be a secret. The reality is that Algeria can and should force a cleanup forward regardless of what Paris declassifies or admits in the open.

Here are the four steps to a better world.

  1. Ratify the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Algeria signed in 2017 and has yet to deposit ratification. Entry as a State Party places Reggane and In Ekker under Article 6, which obliges the affected state to remediate and entitles it to technical, material and financial assistance from every other party in a position to provide it. The Meeting of States Parties then becomes a standing forum where French failure is formally recorded year after year. Article 6(3) preserves every claim Algeria holds against France under general international law.
  2. Publish Algeria’s own baseline. The IAEA assessment of 2005 was released as preliminary, built on a single 1999 mission and on summaries France chose to supply. Algeria created a national agency for rehabilitation of the sites in 2021. That agency can commission an independent survey, publish its own coordinates and dose maps, and define in writing what remains unknown, despite France. A documented gap generates a demand France would need to answer. An undocumented one is what France toys with.
  3. Ask Paris for the Polynesia order. Macron ordered declassification of French nuclear archives in 2021 after the Toxique investigation. The same applies to the Sahara. Nine French deputies have already asked the Élysée to publish the burial maps. Algeria can put a dated request through the joint working group formed in 2008 and file the French answer, or their cynical refusal, as the public record.
  4. Invite the IAEA back with a mandate. The 2005 report recommended further study. A second mission, requested by Algeria as an IAEA member state and funded under Article 7, produces a current radiological map under international signature. French experts can join it or decline it. Either outcome will move the argument a step forward towards France being forced to account for their harms.

Each of these works without Paris being expected to end colonialism, as it should have decades ago. What time is it? Each step makes the next document that France fails to produce a matter of formal records. And Algeria can press forward with cleanup in a manner that France will have to answer for eventually.