Air Force, FBI raid homes in probe of Area 51 website
reviewjournal.com
reviewjournal.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mApBa2qKVDM&list=PL4ugKP-T4L...
Through all of this, our constitutional rights to freedom of expression, and freedom of press, has stayed sound. We have had multiple instances where journalists reported on some nefarious action and were intimidated or even legally threatened by authorities. However, our courts have, for the most part, sided with our freedom of expression and press rights. The South African government has had quite a couple of punches on the nose in our courts ;-).
I have read most of the comments in this thread. I think I understand most of the viewpoints, and I always try and have an open mind. I am also not an American citizen. However, like every Earth citizen I have a keen interest (possibly forced...) on USA issues. "If America sneeze the world catches a cold".
This is clearly a very contentious topic, and I will reply with some specific thoughts on specific comments. I just wanted to give the perspective of a citizen in a country where this is a serious history of government abuse. We cannot take these things likely. Now that I think about it, I think the Germans feel the same way (living through the Gestapo and Stasi years could not have been fun....).
"How'd you find your way to the desert?" Phoenix was half-way between the labs in Los Angeles, the labs in New Mexico, and the testing sites in Nevada.
For a young single man, life on the secret bases in Nevada was pretty sweet. All the meals were the same price (steak, lobster, etc), ammunition was cheap, etc. The married guys didn't like it so much, but he was not married at the time.
Ooohhhh... Interesting. There are rumors on the internet about the federal government having extensive underground infrastructure in the western United States. This made sense to me: if you want to hide something, you put it underground. So I asked my passenger about this.
"Oh yeah, but there's way more stuff underground at Area 12 [0], than at Area 51."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Area_12_(Nevada_N... (Redirect is to "Rainier Mesa", "one of four major nuclear test regions within the Nevada National Security Site (NNSS)".)
I'm partial to the idea that nothing important happens at Area 51 anymore, just your average everyday testing of the latest thermodynamics-compliant military hardware. All the interesting R&D is now done somewhere else.
Ingo Swann [1] said in his Art Bell interview (iirc), w.r.t. his self-published book [2], that the secret program he was involved with, which he couldn't prove, never even got to the point where it needed to be 'classified'.
[1] my earlier comment about Swann: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33295488
[2] Penetration: The Question of Extraterrestrial and Human Telepathy - https://books.google.com/books/about/Penetration_the_Questio...
[edit: added [1] & renumbered links] [edit2: added clarification to wikipedia's redirect link.]
It’s kinda law of nature, actually. If all media attention is on some spot, you can bet that much more “interesting” things are happening elsewhere. Like:
- college girl suffer less sexual abuse than non-college girls;
- Catholic kids suffer less sexual abuse from figures of authority than non-Catholic kids (by some probably biased reports - 10 times less);
- Uber implemented more safety features in their app than Lyft (which was recently sued by some women exactly for that) - here the causality link is obvious: with media attention on them, Uber was forced to try harder.
But less people would click on “Area 12”, than on “Area 51”, so it goes.
Mr. Crawford had aspirations to solve all the world's problems, and sometimes had a messiah complex. Mr. Crawford was brilliant (dropped out of CalTech), but troubled, on account of his poorly-treated mental illness. I visited him in the San Louis Obispo County Jail [1], because I was in the area and it was something B.J. (Biblical Jesus) said to do.
My old kuro5hin.org [RIP] diaries and stories were reposted at https://www.TaxiWars.org/
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=MichaelCrawford
[1] My comments on Michael Crawford's obituaries: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19489570 / https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=30747&cid=819975
If you were a research scientist doing classified research, and invented anti-gravity, would the powers behind the scenes allow this technology into circulation? Our guys certainly wouldn't want to let the Soviets know anti-grav is a possibility.
All the U.S. military-industrial complex's best toys are certainly still classified.
The first time I ventured into the Nellis Ranges was on a flight from Tonopah to Rachel via R4807A where I went down to the edge of that side of 4808A [also known as "The Box"] and got some good views of Groom [Area 51] from the north. After departing Rachel, I was given permission to enter R4806W enroute to Henderson and proceeded to fly the perimeter of The Box and R4808N basically to Yucca Lake.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/32919/pilot-takes-amaz...
For example, by reducing the carbon footprint of the military.
If you really want to cut back on flights, it would be more efficient to cut back on luxury travel. Tax flights to tropical islands at 1000%. That wouldn't be very popular, but Janet airlines is utterly inconsequential compared to casual vacation travel.
But, Janet Airlines also exists solely for the convenience of a very small number of people.
Well yeah that was my point already.
Make silicons, do nuke tests, operate heavy machineries, indulge in vehicle races, in satellite scale cylinders up there in heliocentric orbits, and if anything goes wrong in one of them, just throw it out of the system or into the Sun, to whichever preferred.
That was the future that the humanity envisioned in the 60s-70s, that we stopped following almost altogether(due to radiation hazard and lift capacity problems with assumed manufacturing on Earth surface). We should get back to that.
There seems to be a pervasive belief that we can just eject huge quantities of mass from the very strong, very isolated gravitational well we are bound to. To say nothing of the possibility of building such a cylinder, the realities and consequences of the situation are far more dangerous than people yet consider.
I make this point while recognizing that I agree national security has acceptable carbon footprint costs, while at the same time not liking arguments in support of that cost based not the premise that other policies are worse.
I would even say it's conceivable that having permanent housing in the middle of the desert might be worse than flying them in from elsewhere, but considering they're flying in from Vegas, living there probably isn't much better.
The carbon footprint is not something that is ever going to factor into this arrangement, at least not until there is a very green plane available. I'm all for reducing carbon footprint, but there are about 100,000 flights/day so these two flights (there/back) make up 0.002% of daily air traffic -- it's a drop in the bucket from a carbon footprint standpoint.
I’ve read more about celebrity attendance and private jets and the replacement for those photo ops seems similarly not relatable to this example.
"Have to", according to the opinions of the people working on this project, who were not elected, and whose initiatives have not been signed off by the citizens of this "democracy".
> The most sensible way to do that is by air.
According to some people's opinion. It is surely more convenient though for the subset of people who benefit from such programs.
> The carbon footprint is not something that is ever going to factor into this arrangement, at least not until there is a very green plane available.
If the country was more democratic, what "factorsd into" various things may change dramatically. But as luck would have it, the truth of what going on here is a secret, and most citizens are not just ok with it, but seem to consider it a very good thing.
> I'm all for reducing carbon footprint, but there are about 100,000 flights/day so these two flights (there/back) make up 0.002% of daily air traffic -- it's a drop in the bucket from a carbon footprint standpoint.
What other flights and harms happen as a consequence of this research is causally related, but the unknown tends to appear as nonexistent (and thus "is" "nonexistent").
Precisely. And that’s as good as it gets. There won’t be another group able to make the decision.
The initiatives were signed off in that citizens elect representatives, representatives vote on and allocate funds to programs, programs make decisions. There is legislative oversight. It’s also top secret though.
There’s no way for a citizens panel to evaluate these kinds of details due to their secrecy.
One way to improve it would be something like directing the entire portfolio to reduce carbon by 10% or something. But that would probably result in planting lots of trees or something.
As long as those running the show in this "democracy" continue to have their way...which I suspect is the case as long as people run on a cognitive model where they are unable/unwilling to distinguish between predictions about reality (for example: the future) and reality itself.
> The initiatives were signed off in that citizens elect representatives....
The election of representatives is not an agreement with all the subsequent decisions made by those representatives, but if the minds of the public can be conditioned appropriately, it can cause it to appear that way to them (and: they will typically defend this clearly false belief passionately, if the conditioning is adequately powerful).
> There’s no way for a citizens panel to evaluate these kinds of details due to their secrecy.
I agree that there is no current way, but that was true for many current human capabilities prior to humans figuring out how to achieve them. But if you never even try to figure something out, there's a decent chance it will never be figured out.
> One way to improve it would be something like directing the entire portfolio to reduce carbon by 10% or something. But that would probably result in planting lots of trees or something.
Agreed. And I suspect there are many, many more opportunities for improvement. A plausibly decent way to come up with a shortlist of ways of more: utilize the human mind's capacity to think, ideally: free from all constraints (conditioning, censorship, etc). Easier said than done perhaps, but the true difficulty can only be discovered if one tries. If we continue to refuse to try (or even think about trying), then we may be stuck at this local maxima forever.
Lol. Talk about cognitive dissonance. Count me in as someone who approves of military research. Seems like an incredible amount of humanities achievements come through military research and I quite like some of them. So, keep doing it please.
On a more realistic note, I'd much prefer democracies have the most advanced weapons in the world . And I think that the USAF protects most democracies in the world. So I'm pro a strong USAF.
Yes.
Human beings are extremely illogical, prone to bias, etc - if the topic of this thread was directly about that abstract(!) idea (like in a thread about human psychology) this would not be controversial or difficult to realize/perceive, but since the topic of discussion is a specific object level matter, minds tend to not have access to that knowledge.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-dependent_memory
https://www.victoriaadvocate.com/blogs/reader/politics_plus/...
> Lol.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Na%C3%AFve_realism_(psychology...
https://ehyde.wordpress.com/2013/12/14/freud-on-humor-and-so...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heuristic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness
> Talk about cognitive dissonance.
In the field of psychology, cognitive dissonance is the perception of contradictory information, and the mental toll of it. Relevant items of information include a person's actions, feelings, ideas, beliefs, values, and things in the environment. Cognitive dissonance is typically experienced as psychological stress when persons participate in an action that goes against one or more of those things. According to this theory, when two actions or ideas are not psychologically consistent with each other, people do all in their power to change them until they become consistent. The discomfort is triggered by the person's belief clashing with new information perceived, wherein the individual tries to find a way to resolve the contradiction to reduce their discomfort.
I would enjoy to actually talk about cognitive dissonance, if you are willing, and able (and the conversation is not censored for being inconsistent with site guidelines, both explicitly stated and non-explicit/de facto enforced caps like: be curious, but not too curious).
Do you perceive yourself to be both willing, and able? I guess, there may be only one way to find out, considering cultural norms.
> Count me in as someone who approves of military research. Seems like an incredible amount of humanities achievements come through military research and I quite like some of them. So, keep doing it please.
During your contemplation of the matter, did you consider this (as well as the links above):
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causation-counterfactual/
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/knowledge-analysis/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_thinking
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_war_crimes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War
If not: why not? (I ask this question both rhetorically, and literally.)
Might it be possible that you lack substantial desire to hold beliefs that are necessarily true (or in other words: to have a default (or even occasional) cognitive state other than that which is outlined in my "naive realism" link above)?
> On a more realistic note, I'd much prefer democracies have the most advanced weapons in the world . And I think that the USAF protects most democracies in the world. So I'm pro a strong USAF.
"Each to his own" as the saying goes. Personally, I would much rather people have goals that are more balanced between the dominance of the country they live in with the well-being of all of humanity, regardless of one's culture or geographical location. Do you think that would be a bad idea, or that it is unrealistic, or that such thinking is (in fact*) an example of "cognitive dissonance"?
Note: this comment contains many juicy "baits" that might attract the mind's attention and invoke pre-conditioned behavior (rhetoric, ad hominem, etc)....it will be interesting to see if that is how you will respond, especially now that I have explicitly made reference to that common human cognitive behavior. Sometimes I will "inb4" specific common sub-perceptual intuitive behaviors (leveraging the phenomenon whereby humans tend to have an aversion to behaving in a way that was explicitly predicted before they do it), but in this case I think I will leave those not mentioned.
I wonder: is this (laughing, and only laughing, in response to ideas that challenge your own) the extent of your capabilities, intelligent human?
There is what claims (explicit or implied) one makes about their capabilities, there is one's ability to demonstrate claimed abilities, and then there is "laughing it off", or downvoting &/or silence.
Los Alamos started out as exactly that. A secure lab, with a secure town built around it, housing all the engineers and scientists working on the bomb.
Not disagreeing, but adding a few steps:
The most sensible way to bring in talent from a non-secure location is to construct the secure facility right next door to a fantastic place to live for that talent. The second most sensible way is to locate it within a commute-able distance of such a place.
When neither of those are options, then the sensible thing is to facilitate the commute.
Extensive flooding in multiple countries that didn't have such extremes before; sea level rising around smaller island nations (ok, maybe this one isn't so obvious yet but many nations are vocally concerned); wildfires across unprecedented range in time and area in multiple countries. In my own country (UK), we've had a noticeable shift over the past 10 years from four defined seasons to a smear of weather conditions across the traditional boundaries (particularly spring and autumn), significantly higher peak temperatures and the lows moving later through the year, shifted rain patterns (and worsening flooding).
I did a data science project to show that the earth was warming (no cause implied) to counteract arguments that it wasn't. There is good research out there - use it.
So yeah feel free to keep trying to gatekeep legitimate conversations. Just don't pout when these conversations continue to be had whether you like them or not.
Climate change is significant, but “considering the carbon footprint” of commuter airplanes for a multi-billion dollar project that creates world ending weapons is kind of missing to point, I think.
People have lived in the desert for millennia. These people don't want to live in the desert.
And the work is required. Thus the plane commute.
No expert, but chartering a 737 looks to be about $200k per month. Capacity’s about 200, so it’s not a tremendous extravagance. I wonder if the staff have to pay a fare?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_active_United_States_A...
> Each home was searched by 15-20 agents in full riot gear, causing further damage in both homes besides the broken front doors
> I was very surprised how forceful the search warrant was executed and how rough we, both unarmed senior citizens, were treated.
> Even my phone was taken, leaving me in Rachel with two broken doors and no way to communicate or call for help.
I don't care what the hell he did, this kind of abuse is not acceptable. It's no wonder Americans have lost respect for law enforcement: the people enforcing the law are often committing worse crimes than the supposed criminals.
Taking his electronic shit I get. But not letting the poor woman get dressed? That's just a bunch of thugs having a playday with their toys.
And if said human is like the Riddler and has rigged the place to blow should the wrong t-shirt be picked up, well then that's called the risk of being a law enforcement field agent... it's in the job description
As a citizen, I don't want some cop jumpy on fear and adrenaline holding me at gun point waiting to see if I'm going to pull a snub nose out of my jeans pocket.
As a cop, I don't want to find out if someone putting on their pants is going to shot me or my partner in that split second when they appear to lose balance and fall into the night stand that has a gun under the pile of clothes.
Do you have any source for this absurd claim? The data show otherwise:
>In 2019, the estimated number of murders in the nation was 16,425.[0]
and police was about 1,000 for the same year.[1]
[0]https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
[1]https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de...
There are many countries in the world where police wouldn't treat you this way.
US police are basically an extremist group.
You are going to be very upset when you find out what police have done to citizens while they were sleeping in their homes. [1]
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/article/breonna-taylor-police.html
If one wanted to stick with a police-on-minority action, the Fred Hampton case is a real helluva situation.
They falsified the warrant, then tried to cover that up. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/former-louisville-detect...
Please avoid extremist talking points that avoid and obscure the truth, this is a site for discussion.
Breonna Taylor was listed on the warrant, not only her boyfriend.
Of the agents involved, the majority were innocent of any wrong-doing. The agent that plead guilty did so for a clerical error.
There's virtually zero chance of them paying for those doors. They can burn your house down with tear gas, and not pay for shit, even if you're innocent.
Not even when they made a mistake?
"Just let me get dressed"
pulls gun from the dresser
Police shouldn't have to risk their life for this kind of thing
>the people enforcing the law are often committing worse crimes than the supposed criminals.
Source?
>In 2019, the estimated number of murders in the nation was 16,425.[0]
How many tens of thousands of innocent people did police kill that year?
[0]https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
Are people whose houses are raided typically convicted ahead of time?
There were 1020 fatal police shootings in 2020.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de...
What did you mean by this? It isn't clear if you mean what you said or "the evil police's narrative."
You implied tens of thousands of innocent people are killed by police each year. The actual statistics say that police kill around 1000 people a year with no mention of guilt or innocence. Your implication is flat out wrong.
The media perpetuates an idea that police are evil, murderous bastards and everybody should hate them. It is false and dangerous rhetoric. Spreading it in ignorance makes you a "useful idiot". Arm yourself with knowledge. In many cases the media is flat out lying to your face.
Yes, I do have offline backups. I _should_ be able to recover my data, but should it be so hard? Millions of people don't think about this, and are at risk.
I realise that flying drones over restricted airspaces is not allowed. At the same time it doesn't feel like this kind of treatment was justified. Wouldn't three or four police officers (and no riot gear) be enough?
Most civilized places the only thing coming through his door would've been a letter informing him about his upcoming appointment at a local police station.
Between Snowden, Assange, Manning and this guy the US government message is very clear: "Don't stir my shit or you're gonna be sorry for the rest of your life"
It seems very excessive from the outside, because we have full knowledge of the situation at the outcome. When you go into these situations, you're essentially blind, so you're exposing yourself to the entire risk profile.
I mean, don't get me wrong I think going after a news site is bull shit and I think we should all rally around this guy, but it was not these officers' decision to arrest them and I don't think it was excessive, it was safe (for everyone).
In other countries we wouldn't hear anything about excessive force (because the jaw of the one being arrested would have been broken).
Anyways, to get back on topic: having an old woman stand in front of her house in underwear while the neighbors watch is completely unnecessary but totally unsurprising. Moves like this contribute to the ongoing breakdown in policing legitimacy, and we shouldn't settle for a world where we have to choose the least bad unaccountable organized gang.
Just to put a finer point on it: this kind of humiliation would never happen during a home invasion, and for most people the humiliation is a larger harm than losing some computer equipment.
https://scontent-lax3-2.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.18169-9/1012350_10...
I like how you imply this would be disqualifying, only to follow it up with "i haven't".
If you amputate the wrong leg, I don't need to be a doctor to tell you "that's not great".
Literally every type of crime involves arrest. It's that some crimes are custodial arrests and others are not. You can be arrested and in custody for going 26mph over the speed limit. That's a pretty low bar.
Yes, I know people in law enforcement and the military as well. Many of them disagree with the types of actions you see in these high profile raids.
Let's not forget that some of the very agents involved in things like Ruby Ridge and the Branch Davidians have shown harsh criticism of how inappropriately the leadership handled the strategy for those.
Also, would anyone risk not cooperating? Wouldn’t that in itself be a more serious offense?
Nah, doesn't convince me. They can perfectly stalk the house for a few days and even listen to conversations, and have a realistic assessment of risk.
It's simply a display of violence to intimidate everyone into not using drones and not trying to find anything about these areas.
In fact, it's simply a display of violence, as many other law enforcement people use, when it is not needed.
And this doesn't have anything to do with Area 51 in particular either. If someone did this to any Air Force base, the same thing would happen. Drones are banned from all bases for obvious reasons.
So long as the areas are either public lands, or he has permission from the owners, and follows FAA regs on drone operations, nothing wrong with it.
Even if in plain view, it can be very illegal [0].
Never assume that your own "common-sense" expectation of how the law or taxes works is the way it actually works. You are almost always guaranteed to be wrong [1]. In this case, your error could have seriously bad consequences,and your ignorance would be no excuse
>> "(a) Whenever, in the interests of national defense, the President defines certain vital military and naval installations or equipment as requiring protection against the general dissemination of information relative thereto, it shall be unlawful to make any photograph, sketch, picture, drawing, map, or graphical representation of such vital military and naval installations or equipment without first obtaining permission of the commanding officer of the military or naval post, camp, or station, or naval vessels, military and naval aircraft, and any separate military or naval command concerned, or higher authority, and promptly submitting the product obtained to such commanding officer or higher authority for censorship or such other action as he may deem necessary.
(b) Whoever violates this section shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both."
[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/795
[1] Married to a top attny, the first thing said about almost any question is "go read the actual contract or the actual code" before even bothering to start reasoning about the thing. Even an attny's inital assumptions are very often wrong. We'd (at least should) be saying the same thing about any software system.
They go back to George Washington, before the founding of the country.
The rights and freedoms we have are not absolute. They are also tempered by responsibility to maintain, sometimes by force, the ability to have those freedoms.
Of course, all of us would like to live without the need for police or military. But the fact of the actual (not ideal) world is that there are always bullies and authoritarians who are happy to take what they want and rule how they like, not by assent or fairness, but by deceit, force, and violence. Anyone who wants to live a self-determining life or live in a democracy must be better armed than the bullies and expansionist autocracies, or they will soon be ruled by them.
Military and technological secrets are a key part of maintaining an advantage over expansionist autocracies, and are at least as American than Apple Pie.
So, NO, people claiming that we should not have a military or secret technologies are not making us better off — they are literally helping undermine the only force that keeps us from being ruled by the likes of Putin or Xi. Ask any Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Estonian, Latvian, or Taiwanese. They did not enjoy the privilege of growing up well-enough protected to be ignorant of the threat. Consider that before posting that ignorance.
This tension has also been there the whole time. Leaking classified information is a crime, while propagating information that has leaked into the public domain is not. For good reason - those with deliberate access to classified information have been entrusted to keep it secret, whereas the public and the press have not.
As far as military advantage, we are made stronger by the military needing to stay ahead of the investigations of an open society. Because if private citizens can discover things from mere curiosity then foreign spy agencies most certainly can. If you care about military strength, attempts by the military to maintain superiority by lazily asserting control over civil society should concern you very much.
Seeing something, vs taking a photograph, vs publishing a set of photographs are very different things.
Assembling a set of information, making a drawing, documenting in a more digestible form, analysis, those are all actions more related to leaking classified information than publishing info someone else found.
That distinction is what the laws are about. Plus, the legal conventions surrounding prior restraint are strong, but not absolute.
So, if you're talking about publishing a picture of the front of the Pentagon building, which thousands walk/drive by every day, fine. Using dozens of visitors to compile an architectural drawing of the interior locations of guarded rooms and publishing that? Not so much.
Inhibiting the compilation and free exchange of information is absolutely an inhibitor to adversaries. Even if they could technically see any of it publicly, it becomes insurmountable to see all of it publicly, or enough to compile an accurate picture.
That is why information is highly compartmentalized and distributed only on a need-to-know basis. I'm literally now working on components to a Navy machine that I can only guess what are the other parts and how they fit together. My parts aren't classified, but fall under CUI, Confidential Unclassified Info".
There's a very good reason that. E.g., even though you and I could walk to the door of every data center and power substation in the country, these things are kept obscure. Every data center I've seen is extremely nondescript. If you start assembling the exact location and configuration of every such installation, you'll soon and rightly see some friendly guys with FBI badges.
No professional pretends that this is an absolute protection, anymore than any professional pretends that an uncrackable safe can be built.
Of course a foreign spy agency could discover anything a curious citizen might. But they can't discover everything that every curious citizen might. The point is to increase the workload and uncertainty for the adversaries.
Permitting open information compilation and publication at all times would dramatically reduce that workload, especially with the internet. So, look and be curious all you want. Just don't start compiling and publishing it.
And in this case, using drones to look "over the fence" into a USAF secret testing grounds should indeed get you targeted for investigation real quick, just as it would any foreign adversary's agent doing the same thing.
And no, it is not an argument that "stay[ing] ahead of the investigations of an open society" 'makes us stronger'. That is no more of an argument that curious hackers digitally wandering around some org's network will make them stronger. Yes, it is the responsibility of both to keep themselves secure, including employing white-hat hackers and such, but that doesn't mean that randos should be tolerated.
I'll refrain from expressing my opinion on what a load of horseshit the mere existence of this law is.
Many people have been prosecuted for this sort of thing, and it hasn't been declared unconstitutional.
Maintaining the edge over expansionist authoritarian govts is essential to maintain democracy.
Maintaining that edge will necessarily involve controlling significant amounts of information.
The only horseshit I smell around here is an ignorant opinion loudly stated. But go right ahead and take some pics and publish them. Be sure to report back on the results.
Okay, so I did and it says this:
> Whenever, in the interests of national defense, the President defines certain vital military and naval installations (etc)
Has a President defined Area 51 as a protected installation under this rule? If so, where?
If it goes to trial under this statute, the prosecution would presumably provide this evidence (or be challenged by your defense attorney).
Ex. Ord. No. 10104. Defining Certain Vital Military and Naval Installations and Equipment as Requiring Protection Against the General Dissemination of Information Relative Thereto
Ex. Ord. No. 10104, Feb. 1, 1950, 15 F.R. 597, provided: WHEREAS section 795 of title 18 of the United States Code provides: [Omitted.] AND WHEREAS section 797 of title 18 of the United States Code provides: [Omitted.] NOW, THEREFORE, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the foregoing statutory provisions, and in the interests of national defense, I hereby define the following as vital military and naval installations or equipment requiring protection against the general dissemination of information relative thereto: 1. All military, naval, or air-force installations and equipment which are now classified, designated, or marked under the authority or at the direction of the President, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of the Army, the Secretary of the Navy, or the Secretary of the Air Force as “top secret”, “secret”, “confidential”, or “restricted”, and all military, naval, or air-force installations and equipment which may hereafter be so classified, designated, or marked with the approval or at the direction of the President, and located within: (a) Any military, naval, or air-force reservation, post, arsenal, proving ground, range, mine field, camp, base, airfield, fort, yard, station, district, or area. (b) Any defensive sea area heretofore established by Executive order and not subsequently discontinued by Executive order, and any defensive sea area hereafter established under authority of section 2152 of title 18 of the United States Code. (c) Any airspace reservation heretofore or hereafter established under authority of section 4 of the Air Commerce Act of 1926 (44 Stat. 570; 49 U.S.C. 174) except the airspace reservation established by Executive Order No. 10092 of December 17, 1949.
Yes, there is are very large amounts of things that the US Mil does in secret to maintain it's edge in the ability to fight off expansionist autocracies and be the arsenal of democracy. This is a very good thing, as without it, we'd be ruled already by the likes of Putin, Xi, or Un. People with a clue do NOT want access to TS+ info outside their role. But fools rush in ...
[0] https://i.pinimg.com/originals/5f/35/bb/5f35bbf3b13988451ce9... [1] https://www.reviewjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/125...
[...] there's dozens of others
The signs are also probably not needed.
Disclosure, that's why. Look at the continuously delayed congressional report. Bet many of you haven't heard of that.
There are people in the highest levels of the US Military who don't want it to happen. There are people who do. We can only wait and see if Full Disclosure happens.
Add to that that the FBI is back in red scare mode and suddenly you have a situation where the authorities are willing to bend and break a few rules in order chase various paranoid conspiracy theories about how every non-aligned outlet is a secretly working for The Kremlin.
- Secret aircraft and drones (F117, HavBlue)
- Testing of Soviet aircraft and equipment (Red Flag)
- Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars) projects, such as laser tagging of satellites
It's also a active USAF bombing range used by Nellis AFB.
- What is "range 72"? I know of a Range 75 and 76. I haven't heard of a Range 72.
- The F-117 and HAVE BLUE aircraft, while similar looking, are substantially different in both design and size. And HAVE BLUE doesn't exist anymore. Both crashed.
- Red Flag is an USAF exercise. You probably meant the Red Hats squadron.
- SDI/Star Wars, as civilians know it, is dead and was never really a thing in the first place. It's a whole other ball game now. Hint: a player just landed this week.
What?
https://qz.com/secret-us-space-plane-china-xi-biden-cold-war...
Otherwise the comment is unnecessarily aggressive for no reason, and I think I detect a tone of condescension, which is unwarranted.
This is why I downvoted.
F-117 and HAVE BLUE testing primarily occurred at Area 51, not some place called "range 72". They were developed and built at Lockheed in California.
I don't believe I was particularly aggressive. The commenter posted a bunch of incorrect information. I called them out. That's how it should work. I see far worse on HN when it comes to programming language/editor wars.
"You don't know what you're talking about" is aggressive and rude; like you're calling them stupid. "Actually, I don't think that's right", along with some, "Can you clarify?" is not aggressive, and welcomes them into a conversation.
>I called them out. That's how it should work.
There's a way to do that constructively. See above.
Thanks to civil forfeiture, he’ll likely never get his stuff back from the Government MAFIA’s attempt to terrorize him into silence.
Maybe, but I suspect the Streisand effect will be strong here, and there will be some enterprising lawyer willing to enhance the brand.
If a person doesn't understand the importance of secret military bases and that all us power and influence in the world (and dollar purchase power) is like 70% resulted form their military, then I don't even know what to say.
Show me where that rule is written. Typically the rules on state level are called laws and are published, so it should be easy for you to point out the law that forbids you to take pictures of "restricted objects" (how would you even know they are, do they have signs?) when they are in public places.
Note I am assuming here that he followed the restrictions around where to fly drones considering he urges others to do so:
https://www.dreamlandresort.com/area51/drones.html
> If a person doesn't understand the importance of secret military bases and that all us power and influence in the world (and dollar purchase power) is like 70% resulted form their military, then I don't even know what to say.
Ah yes the US military bullies other countries so we can be rich so let's not criticise it, when it does unjust/illegal things. I don't consider that a very ethical argument.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/795#
You might argue that it is a bad law, or potentially even unconstitutional, but for now it is the law.
That said maybe if you're going to poke the dragon pick your battles. There are a lot better 1A issues to focus on, but I guess you do you Area 51 man.
How about this for a "super simple rule", the gov can keep secret whatever they pay for. As long as they're taking taxpayer $$$ *we own it*, and have all the rights to utilize that technology for our collective benefit.
Silly proposal for a rule.
US black programs are full of advanced tech that could unlock all sorts of improvements in people's daily lives, tech we paid for.
(Is my example any less stupid than the assertion that anybody be allowed to walk into the testing facility for new military planes?)
It is beyond stupid, and an absolute affront to the First Amendment, that it is against the law for a US Citizen to even draw a picture of something they can see with their own eyes, while standing or flying outside of a restricted area.
If the military doesn't want people to see stuff, then don't leave it outside where it is visible.
Maybe you can say instead that executive branch is too powerful by inference, and special services are just their instrument projecting this power, but I think that’s not the whole picture. By design, such services become a semi-independent branch themselves, and iirc they are not really rotated, at least on low-to-middle levels.
What I meant was more like a world-wide WMD ban, some multilateral agreement, and I used UN more as a proxy of “international level”.
The only plausible route I imagine is if the non-WMD states put massive resources into countermeasures (e.g. missile interceptors or thwarting nuclear terrorism).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_weapons_of_mass_destru...
And the big boys with the nukes will sit on you hard.
And if one country keeps their nuclear program, who's going to do the punishing? Sanctions don't work. Saying you're going to ban nukes is pointless dreaming. Why stop there? Why not endeavor to ban wars as well? Just wave your magic wand and ban all the bad things out of existence.
This is the same argument that gun nuts use, despite massive evidence to the contrary.
(And one of them appeared to oops while juggling a sockpuppet account on HN to help promote -- which was a little suspicious because that tactic seemed incongruent with the goal they claimed. I suppose, with that project, the non-US intel value could've been intentional. It's much easier to imagine a lot of people being motivated to follow Area 51, just out of curiosity and the mystique, and not seeing any harm in it.)
Which prompts the thought: with all sorts of geopolitical tensions going on right now -- as much as we Internet-age techies can be global citizens who extend fellowship (through HN, open source, research communities, companies, etc.) -- maybe we should try to be aware when actions we are considering doing would stray into delicate global balances that we don't understand. We don't know enough to know everything to avoid, but maybe sometimes we can guess, so it seems worth the occasional thought.
If I’m paying for it with my tax money, I should be able to read reporting on what it’s being spent on. This goes doubly so for people doing reporting who have no obligation whatsoever to keep US government secrets.
Security through obscurity is not a sound enough principle that resources should be expended and freedoms curtailed to attempt to preserve it.
I’m not (here) saying the USG has a duty to disclose, just that they have a duty to not raid and otherwise persecute journalists. (I also separately think they have a duty to disclose precisely what the tax money is being spent on, but that is a different discussion.)
The point here is that is in most cases a "de facto" contract between a citizen and his/her government. As this is a contract, the citizen has rights to oversight on how his/her money is being spent.
If they are that fragile they’re hugely susceptible to bad actors and we’re fucked anyway.
Let's say some new social networking startup wants to appeal to teens by being edgy/counterculture, and doing automated crowdsourced real-time tracking of local police, as one of the features of their app. (Because casually affecting a hint of teen revolutionary operator, with power over authorities, is easier and more appealing than producing videos of eating laundry detergent.)
If people at that startup stopped to consider unintended effects of that, when used by people they don't want to help (burglars, violent criminals, etc.), I think they'd modify or abandon the idea, before very bad things happened.
- What you mean Paul?
- Well you know...All these thousands of people we fly in every day, the random events, its an expensive facade to maintain! But the department demands it!.
- I see Paul. I guess it's worth it no? Anything to keep their attention focused on it. Last thing we want is them finding out about Areas 52 and 53!
"I am Joerg Arnu, owner and webmaster of the Dreamland Resort web site (www.DreamlandResort.com). The subject of the web site is Area 51. I have operated that web site since 1999.
Last week Thursday (11/3/22) in the early morning my homes in Rachel (just outside of Area 51) and in Las Vegas were searched by a joint force of FBI and AF OSI. This happened without any warning. The doors were broken open and I in Rachel and my girlfriend in our Las Vegas home were detained and treated in the most disrespectful way. My girlfriend was led out into the street barefoot and only in her underwear in full view of our neighbors; I was led outside, handcuffed and only in t-shirt and sweats in sub-freezing temperatures.
Each home was searched by 15-20 agents in full riot gear, causing further damage in both homes besides the broken front doors. Despite my repeated requests for an explanation, I was only told that the search was related to images posted on my Area 51 web site.
I was very surprised how forceful the search warrant was executed and how rough we, both unarmed senior citizens, were treated. I have to believe that someone gave them bad information about us. All my laptops, phones, backup drives, camera gear and my drone were seized. With the equipment I lost all my medical records, financial and tax records, passwords, email and phone contacts, photos etc. Even my phone was taken, leaving me in Rachel with two broken doors and no way to communicate or call for help.
Not counting my expected legal expenses my losses so far include over $20k in equipment taken and over $5k in damage.
There are 40 pages missing from the search warrant I received and the case records are sealed. So, I cannot look up the reason for the search and I do not want to speculate. I left several messages with the FBI agent in charge but he has not returned any of my calls. At this point I have no choice but to take legal action to try and get my equipment back and to seek reimbursement for the damage.
In an effort to defuse the situation I have removed some material from my Dreamland Resort web site although I believe that it was legally obtained and legal to publish. I am not sharing anything on my web site that cannot be found on dozens of other web sites and news outlet publications. Considering how this went down I have no intention of removing any more material unless ordered to do so by a federal judge.
I believe the search, executed with completely unnecessary force by overzealous government agents was meant as a message to silence the Area 51 research community. The question now is: How far will they go?
"
This should serve as a gentle reminder that the police, the FBI, and other law enforcement are not your friends and that you should run encryption on all of your devices.
Also backups make data loss less likely but don't eliminate the chance. The FBI can still raid your house, your friend's house, your safe deposit box, and freeze your cloud storages all at the same time.
Why would he do that? He was already searched, they didn't seize the website, and they didn't order him to do anything. Worst-case is they eventually do, charge him, and use that as evidence he knew he was breaking the law. Best case is ... nothing? It's the government, not a friend he's in a tiff with. I don't see how the concept of "defuse" applies here.
Quite often it will be the defenses own lawyers telling the accused to remove particular pieces of information from public view.
Yep, that’ll work.
I'm sure lines get blurred on this front at times, but the FBI is entirely capable of running a raid on their own; they may be less capable of the "is this the classified document y'all were looking for?" confirmation that needs to come from the Air Force.
Quotes like "The FBI had not returned his phone calls, he added" would seem to indicate he's primarily dealing with the FBI, as is proper.
"The Air Force Office of Special Investigations and FBI entered homes owned by Joerg Arnu in Las Vegas"
"seized potential evidence for an undisclosed joint agency probe"
Note, for example, the U.S. Army isn't allowed to do things like direct vehicle traffic around a house that's being raided. Being consulted on the side about specific items to look for, etc, that's much less direct than the quotes above.
I'd also be cautious assuming journalists are carefully parsing their wording specifically to avoid confusion about somewhat obscure aspects of federal law.
Its like they're not even trying intellectual discourse anymore, its just here's your logical fallacy and we outnumber you now so obey.
> [the guy's site] features YouTube videos taken from drones flown over places around Area 51, satellite images of the base
Yeah, dude, you can't do that.
Judging by what was written on your link I assume he was very careful to stick to what was allowed.
"Oh nothing,just walking around my apartment " - me
"You're outside your apartment walking the perimeter?" - you
"Wha..." - me
https://www.faa.gov/documentLibrary/media/Order/2022-02-16_O... (search for R-4808N)
https://skyvector.com/?ll=37.22343947130071,-115.74522399506...
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Groom+Lake,+Nevada/@37.275...
this is the part that would make google culpable in both the "youtube" part and the "satellite imagery" part, regardless of who took the photos.
If i find a youtube video and link/embed/whatever it to my website, and the government is mad about that, how is this my problem?
Put another way, if i take a satellite image of my neighbors house, print it, and put up flyers around my neighborhood...
It's not clear to me which of these happened.
Why did you want to believe the government was doing something wrong?
However I don't consider it giving someone a hard time. I think of it as calling out people who decrease the quality of the conversation. You could throw that accusation back at me for my mistake but it is just that, a mistake.
Anyway, if the problem is the videos are of places around Area 51, isn't the appropriate action to enlarge the restricted area to contain the places that are sensitive?
And satellite images don't have too many sources either. So either you shoot down the satellites or contract with the operators not to sell pictures over Area 51 (or perhaps the greater Area 51 area).
None of this requires raiding a site that meerly collects these existing resources.
How much did he make from his online presence? How much can he make from a legal settlement or GoFundMe campaign? Can he parlay these events into a bigger online presence and fame in the conspiracy sphere?
As unpleasant as the experience has been, it could prove to be beneficial to him in the longer term.
The differences between how these two warrants were carried out are staggering. The idea that the law treats everyone equally in the U.S. is so manifestly falsified by this that I don't see how anyone can continue to claim it with a straight face.
This is wild though, wish I knew more. It’s rare they are this heavy handed.
This is like if I said the government had aliens in the white house, I jumped the fence, and then while getting arrested said "they are trying to stop me!"
Anyone who will look at the clickbait and reads twitter version of a summary will immediately assume that he was raided, because whatever he put in there was true/accurate and government decided to shut him down.
And just in case it is not clear, it will be twitter summary if the person is a consummate consumer of today's media. A minority will skim the article. Even fewer people will actually read the whole thing. Even less will review for key words tracing bias and evaluating it in any given way.
Unless you are not familiar with Area 51 symbolic meaning in US culture, I am not sure how else I can explain it.
Which I took to mean above locations within Area 51. Like "I'm walking around Wal-Mart" or "I took some done footage over places around Disney World"
There's multiple definitions when it's used as a preposition
If you move around a place, you travel through it, going to most of its parts. If you look around a place, you look at every part of it.
OR
"To be positioned around a place or object means to surround it or be on all sides of it. To move around a place means to go along its edge, back to your starting point."
On the contrary, it says "videos taken from drones flown over places around Area 51".
This looks like flying in public airspace, even if close to the limit of the restricted airspace.
One argument is that their discoveries set a floor for what a well equipped actual spy would be able to easily glean. The easy counter argument is that the actual spy should _also_ be investigated by the FBI in riot gear. Protecting classified information isn't just a defensive game of hoping no one will see and distribute the information. It also involves preventing people from doing so.
I don't like that mindset. The US Gov steals trillions of dollars a year from the public to fund all sorts of stuff. These black projects alone represent hundreds of billions of R&D dollars, that tech should *belong to the public*.
We pay for it, they work for us (don't they?), we should collectively benefit from it. Instead valuable advancements are locked away in secret hangars. Entire industries are left un-disrupted, all so we can have some edge for a hypothetical war we shouldn't even be fighting anyways.
As a US tax payer, would I rather the US use my tax money to keep a competitive edge against would-be competitors? I sure do. Particularly in a world where competitors are authoritarian dictators. If all the other world powers were pacifists and merely had gentlemen's disagreements over minor stuff, perhaps I'd share your views.
The argument here is essentially security through obscurity. If our countries defense is ultimately reliant on some info/tech never leaking then our military has failed us.
Our systems should be so strong, so robust that even if an enemy had the damn bluprints and operational knowledge it would still be foolish to attack us.
Here's an example, the navy has some really cool tech involving highly precise measurements of gravity vs known gravitational maps of the earth so that subs can navigate underwater without GPS. I don't expect the government to publish exactly how it works on some fancy nuclear submarine, but all the research and knowledge gained during R7D should be publicly available.
Are you naive or just being misleading on purpose? In lieu of the reality in the here and now your comment is just as hyperbolic as the one you are deriding for being hyperbolic.
The ACLU defended the KKK a generation ago. People have retired and been replaced. Organizational priorities have shifted. Things have changed. That's not the kind of hill that organization will risk dying on in 2022.
That said, the guy here is a lot less onerous than the KKK so maybe they will help him, but I sure wouldn't bet on it.
https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-em-defends-kkks-rig...
Regardless some guy who's schtick is "the government is up to wacky shit" is not going to have the modern ACLU banging on his door. They tend to pick cases where the government is more overtly in the wrong (basically cases where case law lags public sentiment) and where the person getting the shaft is more disadvantaged.
Gamergate and the rise of Trump have taught us very important lessons about the scope of free speech and the real effects hate speech has on society.
That’s a huge no no for any military installation, much less one that has all the aliens. I mean “research planes”.
18 U.S. Code § 795(a) )Photographing and sketching defense installations): Whenever, in the interests of national defense, the President defines certain vital military and naval installations or equipment as requiring protection against the general dissemination of information relative thereto, it shall be unlawful to make any photograph, sketch, picture, drawing, map, or graphical representation of such vital military and naval installations or equipment without first obtaining permission of the commanding officer of the military or naval post, camp, or station, or naval vessels, military and naval aircraft, and any separate military or naval command concerned, or higher authority, and promptly submitting the product obtained to such commanding officer or higher authority for censorship or such other action as he may deem necessary.
I'm not sure whether protected airspace would count as an installation, but the military base itself certainly would. Per the article,
>> Dreamland Resort, at dreamlandresort.com, started by Arnu in 1999, features YouTube videos taken from drones flown over places around Area 51, satellite images of the base, a discussion forum with posts on the topic, articles on test flights, “black projects” and UFOs, and what it says are photos of new vehicles such as the so-called “super secret” Northrop Grumman RQ-180 unmanned stealth aircraft shown flying in 2021.
Which leaves open also the possibility that they are investigating someone else; eg, someone with clearance getting an ego boost by posting info on the forums, which isn't unprecedented.
These activities could be
It's worth noting that news agencies will often give the government a chance to explain why they should not publish the files in truly important cases. If that's likely to be "if you publish the plans for D-Day, many people will die. So please don't"
This is not the 1950s or something where 99% of the public didn't have a camera at all and someone would have had to make a big effort to go out of their way to photograph a secret aircraft... More like they are expecting to fly the craft over 1M+ cameras and think it's not going to be captured, which is astoundingly ridiculous.
Citizens have no right to privacy from being photographed in public in the US, the government should not have a double standard.
You’re trying to reduce both “I took a picture of a sunset and a top secret drone happened to zip by and appear in my picture” and “I routinely fly drones next to top secret military installations to photograph their goings on” to the same thing.
But I am pretty sure that is not how it works.
The article doesn't really provide any information about what specific material on the site they took objection with, but it seems unlikely that it was just a photos of classified aircraft operating in the open, as that material exists in lots of places that don't get raided by the FBI.
Espionage is a squishy word, term and action. Dislike some reality being publicly discussed - voila its espionage.
Some SciFi author, gamedev creates some fictional weapons system that looks like a real one and has the same capability. Espionage.
Military Intelligence.
For example, if you "guess" that a certain type of lens would be better for certain types of infrared imaging, and publish this, you have potentially violated the US export control / international traffic in arms regulation (ITAR) by "exporting" that design to the wider public.
It's easy to complain about that, but widely publishing information on highly effective weaponry is (I hope) clearly a bad idea, lest some rogue actor start shooting down airliners for fun.
That’s how our legal system works. Waxing poetic with no authority to enforce the poetry risks implanting false reality in readers heads.
Are we at war? When did it start? When will it end?
Somehow you have claimed that a war we're not fighting with people who couldn't benefit from knowledge of information that isn't secret justifies charging this guy with espionage. One would marvel that anyone could be so incoherent, except this is the typical result of consuming American corporate war media content.
I think modern technology has made things a bit less clear-cut in some ways, because advances in technology have made a lot of things that were previously military secrets (e.g. troop movements) arguably not secret anymore (the enemy obviously already knows where that army is, it's clearly visible by their satellites). I think aircraft hidden in Area 51 definitely don't fall into that category though.
The only exceptions are material covered under the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, which has never really been legally tried (it would probably fall apart — how is anyone supposed to know they have a duty to protect a document that says "Restricted Data"?), and the identities of undercover intelligence officers.
Mishandling of classified documents you had clearance to see, or aiding a foreign adversary are related crimes.
Forbidding drone overflight of military installations is another matter.
Two points: First, the general public has no duty to protect almost all classified data. If you've never had a clearance and signed the NDA, you can take TS/SCI material you found on the ground and publish it (you'd want to be real careful about not lending support to terrorists etc., because the gendarmes would likely be looking for anything to nail you on).
Second, we do have a public register of no-no topics (more accurately, topics you have an affirmative duty to protect even without a security clearance): the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, and the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1981.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/jul/31/d-notice-syste...
Throw them in ADX like the rest.