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NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch is Turning New York City into a Surveillance Colony

By Matt Wolfson | The Libertarian Institute | October 29, 2025

In a recent report for the Libertarian Institute, I investigated Zionists’ role in creating the crisis point at which New York City now finds itself: caught between a colonial elite which has commandeered government and a progressive-socialist backlash to that elite which proposes to expand government. In this report, I will trace how, in response to the progressive-socialist threat to their power, Zionists and their allies are expanding government in new and frightening directions. The leading player in this operation, like in all good intelligence ops, is not a colorful or charismatic character. But she has all of the subtler qualities—connections, management prowess, presentational understatement—that the city’s minders look for in those who hold actual power.

Jessica Tisch, the New York Police Department Commissioner since 2024 who will definitely stay on if either Zohran Mamdani or Andrew Cuomo wins the mayoralty according to public statements made by both men, is the third generation of the billionaire Zionist family that has had prominent roles in shaping the city since the 1980s. Her grandfather, Laurence Tisch, bought CBS in the 1980s not long before his brother Robert bought the New York Giants, establishing the family, which had started in hotels and movie theaters, as the owner of two of the city’s landmark organizations. In the 1990s, Laurence Tisch was a member of The Study Group, the informal philanthropic Zionist gathering co-founded by Leslie Wexner and Charles Bronfman, which led directly and indirectly to the foundation of Taglit Birthright, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and various other projects for Zionist continuity. Laurence’s son and Jessica’s father, James Tisch, is the chairman of the Board of Leows Corporation, the family’s flagship business. James’ wife and Jessica’s mother, Merryl, was the chancellor of the New York State Board of Regents, responsible for supervising all educational activities in the state; and is the chair of the State University of New York Board of Trustees, responsible for supervising the state university system.

Within this context of a family involved in media, finance, philanthropy, and part-time politics, Jessica Tisch, who is now 44, charted her own specific path: from security to administration to the cusp of politics with the backing of money. She started in the NYPD in the decade of the September 11 attacks; continued in the department in the 2010s; moved in the first half of the 2020s to the Sanitation Department, arguably New York’s most important after police and fire. She has returned in the mid-2020s to the NYPD as its commissioner, while also widely being considered a potential future mayor. Like Mamdani, Tisch is a product, this time a direct one, of the decades of Zionist influence that preceded her rise. Like Mamdani, rewinding Tisch’s career shows how she is the capstone to a project of military policing that began in the 1990s and 2000s but that has sharpened under pressure into a full-blown project of social control.

That project began when crime rose in New York in the 1980s and 1990s in response to displacement and homelessness facilitated by WASPs, Zionists, and their allies co-opting city government to the benefit of finance and real estate. In response, Eric Breindel, the neoconservative Zionist editor of the New York Post who had extensive connections to Wall Street, arranged for the Post to back the then-longshot Rudolph W. Guiliani as a tough-on-crime candidate, delivering him Staten Island and so the city.

At the same time, Michael Steinhardt, the Zionist financier who was integral in the reinvention of Wall Street in the 1980s, became the major donor for the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), which in turn was the major backer of President Bill Clinton, who shepherded to passage in Congress as his main legislative priority the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. This act provided newly elected Mayor Giuliani and his police commissioner William Bratton federal funds for law enforcement, with certain conditions attached that increased local spending on policing as well as the size of the NYPD. The NYPD’s budget increased from $1.7 billion to $3.1 billion between 1993 and 2000, also leading to increased city spending, since, under the terms of the Clinton crime legislation, to receive federal funds the city had to spend funds of its own.

During this period, “crime”—defined as everything from murder to unlicensed street vending—fell in response to across-the-board enforcement. After 2001, Raymond Kelly, Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s police commissioner, pushed this practice to its limit with the aggressive practice of “stop and frisk” in minority neighborhoods: a daily distillation of the broader disenfranchisement the black and Latino communities of New York had been experiencing since the 1970s.

Kelly also made sure that the NYPD would benefit from post-9/11 funding of counter-terrorism measures, measures which hinged heavily on techniques for surveillance. And it was by channeling this new priority for social control that Jessica Tisch made her career beginning in 2000s. Fresh out of Harvard, she took “an analyst position available in what was then the counterterrorism bureau” of the NYPD. According to a recent profile in The New York Times:

“Kelly…did not normally meet with applicants for such entry-level jobs, but he ended up interviewing her. ‘Probably because she was a Tisch,’ he said, adding that he had been impressed with her three Harvard degrees.”

“Probably because she was a Tisch” seems like a fair assessment of why the supervisor of 55,000 employees took the time to meet a twenty-something about an entry-level position. But Kelly and Tisch also shared the promising ground of a professional focus: Kelly was committed to surveillance-as-policing, and Tisch’s main interest was data and surveillance. At the NYPD, she began “developing the Domain Awareness System, one of the world’s largest networks of security cameras, including handling contracts to build and expand it.” According to a description of this work in a recent profile of Tisch in New York Magazine, she was Domain’s driving force and Domain her career-maker:

“… Tisch, 27, was tasked with figuring out what to do with more than $100 million in unspent grant money from the federal Department of Homeland Security, which had just built a surveillance network to prevent another terror attack downtown. What if, she asked, the Domain Awareness System went citywide? And what if, instead of trying to stop a suicide bomber, the system tried to spot all kinds of crooks? What if it included the NYPD’s trove of arrest reports and criminal histories? When Tisch sent the privacy guidelines for the system to the lawyers at the New York Civil Liberties Union, they retched…The bosses had the opposite reaction: ‘No, you’ve made it. Congratulations,’ the former colleague recalls them saying.”

Based on an initial grant of $350 million from the Department of Homeland Security and developed with Microsoft technology, the System consists today of “a surveillance network of more than 18,000 interconnected cameras—including those in the private sector—as well as law-enforcement databases.” The system, in one description, “assimilates data from several surveillance tools—license plate readers, closed-circuit television streams, facial recognition software and phone call histories—and uses it to identify people.” As these descriptions suggest, private corporations and nonprofits, for example Rockefeller University in Midtown East Manhattan, can buy in: providing their own cameras then linking them to the surveillance system run out of the NYPD. “And,” according to one report, “when Microsoft turns around and sells the technology to other cities, New York gets a cut.”

Tisch was not only one of the developers, if not the developer, of the system; she also so impressed Kelly with her tenacity dealing with the various technology sub-vendors put in play by the project that he moved her up through the ranks. (She also may have impressed Kelly with her access to funds; the nonprofit the New York Police Foundation, which her uncle chaired and where two of her family members still sit on the board, provided some of the early contributions for testing her surveillance system.) Within a decade, “she became the city’s first information technology commissioner… and within months she was in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, struggling to create a contact tracing system and then a vaccine distribution system.” Throughout this time, Tisch was working with at least one like-minded colleague from a similar background. This was fellow Harvard graduate Rebecca Ulam Weiner, the granddaughter of the Zionist nuclear scientist Stanislav Ulam of the Manhattan Project, whose view of her grandfather’s work is instructive:

“As someone whose job it is to keep secrets, I often wonder whether such an experiment [as the Manhattan Project] would be possible today, scientifically or socially.”

Fast forward to November 2024, and an embattled Mayor Eric Adams, whose allies in the black community have increasingly moved away from him even as powerful Zionists have edged closer, appointed Tisch Commissioner. He did this despite vocal concerns from civil liberties advocates that, in the words of one, “It’s really alarming to see a commissioner who built her career on the infrastructure of mass surveillance.” Weiner is Tisch’s deputy commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism, and has let it be known that her department “relies on a mind-boggling suite of assets that Americans might otherwise assume are controlled by the CIA, FBI, DHS, Secret Service, or other agencies.” These include:

“… a legion of intelligence analysts, counterassault and dignitary-protection teams, a flotilla of boats…surveillance aircraft, the nation’s biggest bomb squad, a counter-drone unit, a remote contingent of NYPD detectives… and a network of multilingual undercover operatives…”

Among this “remote contingent” is NYPD Detective Charlie Benaim, “[whose] office could be any squad room in Brooklyn, but for years [has been] an Israeli police station near Tel Aviv,” where “Benaim’s been feeding an endless stream of information, in real time, to his bosses back at One Police Plaza.” According to Weiner, Benaim’s function is “asking the New York question, when something is happening, what would it look like it if it were to happen in New York City, and more importantly than that, how do you prevent it?” A new model for Benaim in answering these questions, apparently, is the Hamas uprising of October 7. This suggests either that the NYPD expects a coordinated attack from foreign operators; or that New York’s security leaders see the city as potentially under siege by its own displaced and ghettoized underclass and plan to respond accordingly.

Telling in this regard is the fact that Tisch’s top priority as commissioner is “doubling down on data-driven policing and surveillance,” an aim which has “sparked fierce criticism from watchdog groups that New Yorkers are living in a surveillance state.” According to New York Magazine, Tisch’s proposed reforms fall along four lines. First, she wants to expand actual surveillance capacities by expanding the city’s camera network “to include more privately owned cameras.” Second, she wants to extend the contract of one of Domain’s less reliable components, “the ShotSpotter gunshot-detection system” which “may result in confirmed shootings only less than 15 percent of the time, according to the comptroller’s office,” a fact which Tisch dismisses, “arguing that something is better than nothing.” Third, she wants to use data collected “to surge police resources down to a single block,” allowing for the department to deploy overwhelming force to tackle individual incidents in small areas. (This means essentially treating city policing as counterinsurgency warfare, and it’s not too different than the LAPD tactics that led to the abuse of Rodney King and the fallout that followed.) Finally, “perhaps the biggest change is that she wants to use those same systems and processes to fight ‘chaos,’ not just crime,” meaning that minor noise disturbances or unusual behavior could qualify for police enforcement via surveillance and surges. (Again, this is a retread of the 1990s: “Giuliani-style crackdowns, only with better gear.”)

More instructively still, she feels this way despite at least one recent controversy suggesting that her policies have adverse effects on the very communities historically at the blunt end of militarized policing. According to The New York Times, in an August report, the NYPD used Domain Awareness System’s facial recognition software to identify and arrest for indecent exposure in April a 230 pound 6-foot-2 black man, Trevis Williams. The arrest was made even though a witness said that the offender was about 160 pounds and 5-foot-6 and even though “location data from [Williams’s] phone put him about 12 miles away at the time.” According to the Times, the fact that “a facial recognition program plucked his image from an array of mug shots and the woman identified him as the flasher was enough to land Williams in jail.” This is despite the fact that “other police departments… require investigators to gather more facts before putting a suspect identified by facial recognition into a photo lineup,” and despite advocacy from groups like the American Civil Liberties Union to “ban… the use of facial recognition by the police because of the risk of misidentification.”

“In the blink of an eye, your whole life could change,” Williams told the Times about his experience, adding that he still gets panic attacks since his April arrest and subsequent imprisonment. The Times investigation did not report asking for a comment from the NYPD or its Commissioner. Nor did it report that, as early as 2019, 11,000 cases per year were being investigated by the NYPD with the help of facial recognition software.

Despite collateral damage from her policies, positive media profiles of “Commish Tisch” and her subordinates have been plentiful since her accession. In an April 2025 report in The News section of The New York Times, the paper had the following to say about her: She has “an unlikely and remarkable career”; is “the daughter and granddaughter of two strong women, neither of whom came from money”; “learned hard work by example”; is “talkative and purposeful, but circumspect”; is a “no-nonsense technocrat” and “incredibly competent”; commands “a huge amount of respect”; is “very businesslike,” “[takes] no guff,” and should run for mayor. New York Magazine, the city’s go-to venue for fashion and culture commentary, had run an equally complimentary profile in March of 2025 that included the same political prediction.

And, the month before New York Magazine’s profile of Tisch, Vanity Fair ran a profile of Tisch’s deputy Weiner titled “NYPD Confidential.” Headed by a black-and-white photo of Weiner flanked by members of her squad that seemed ripped from a promotional poster of Captain America, the article’s text gave its subject an equally marquee treatment, describing her as “laser focused,” “unfazed,” “poised, cultivated, pin-sharp, convivial, boundlessly curious, charmingly profane,” and “a lightning-quick study” who had “a wicked sense of humor.” All three of these profiles also emphasized, as The New York Times’ editorial board regularly emphasizes, a recent rise in crime in the city without honing in on its obvious causes: financialization, gentrification, and displacement.

The Times is owned by the Sulzberger Family, whose members are ambivalent about Zionism but who have deep connections to Zionists. (Their executive editor, Joseph Kahn, is the son of a committed Zionist corporatist and runs in the billionaire Zionist milieu; their editorial page is dominated by Jewish Zionists of all political persuasions; and the former head of the Sulzberger family wealth office now heads Bill Ackman’s.) Vanity Fair is still owned by the Newhouse Family, which, as I reported in my recent investigation on the rise of Zionist power in New York, was vital to that project thanks to its ownership of Conde Nast. New York Magazine is dependent for its scoops on access to the city’s financial and philanthropic elite, many of them Zionists—its recent profile subjects include not just Jessica Tisch but Barry Diller and Diane Von Furstenberg and Bill Ackman. The message from these media venues seems clear: the Zionist financial powers of New York are squarely behind Jessica Tisch, and want their readers to know it.

It is not, in this context, a coincidence that the Times ran an article soon after Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the Democratic mayoral primary citing anonymous sources to report that Mamdani was being urged to keep Tisch on if he wins the mayoralty as a “steady pair of hands.” It is also not a coincidence that this story came during a period when Dan Loeb and Bill Ackman, younger Zionist financial-philanthropic operators, were attacking Mamdani as soft-on-crime almost daily and shifting their funding focus to Mamdani’s Independent mayoral competitor, Mayor Eric Adams, to the point of personally vetting Adams’s campaign manager before the position was filled. What this suggested at the time was a pincer movement, in which attacks by Loeb and Ackman pressured Mamdani into keeping Tisch on as a sign of faith in the establishment and détente with Zionism.

And, in late October, with Mamdani still attacked by connected Zionist players for purportedly making Jews feel unsafe despite the fact that he has attracted significant Jewish support, this is exactly what occurred. On October 22, Mamdani announced, four days after Andrew Cuomo had announced the same, that he would ask Tisch to stay on should he win the election. The reported terms on which this “ask” was made are not encouraging when it comes to Mamdani’s leverage over Tisch if he is elected mayor. Details in The New York Times painted a scenario in which Mamdani had publicly (and factually erroneously) made Tisch the poster child for safety in the city without extracting any concessions from her camp in return. According to the Times,

“… Mr. Mamdani confirmed his decision during the final televised debate before the Nov. 4 election. ‘Commissioner Tisch took on a broken status quo, started to deliver accountability, rooting out corruption and reducing crime across the five boroughs,’ Mr. Mamdani said at the debate. “I’ve said time and again that my litmus test for that position will be excellence’… Ms. Tisch’s allies have signaled for months that she would want to stay in the job regardless of the election’s outcome. [Mamdani] campaign officials declined to detail any conversations between the candidate and the commissioner, but said they were confident she would accept. Delaney Kempner, a spokeswoman for Ms. Tisch, referred a reporter back to an earlier statement from the commissioner stressing that ‘it is not appropriate for the police commissioner to be directly involved or to seem to be involved in electoral politics.’”

Tisch’s strategic mix of aggressive behind-the-scenes lobbying and Olympian public detachment sends a message: as New York Magazine put it less than twenty-four hours after Mamdani made the announcement, she is “the Heiress Who Could Make or Break the Socialist Mayor.” Not long after this article ran, Hakeem Jeffries, the New York Democratic leader of the U.S. House of Representatives, ended five months of ostentatious non-endorsement of Mamdani with a statement endorsing Mamdani—specifically praising his willingness to keep on Tisch. Already, then, thanks to a series of private maneuvers and public feints, Tisch has been placed in the driver’s seat: the establishment’s cooperation with Mamdani is clearly conditioned on Mamdani’s continued acceptance of her.

One difficulty of critiquing moves like these is that the conflation of “Jewish power” and New York is an old trope, in part because New York has been since the early twentieth century a Jewish city. So it should be emphasized, as I have emphasized in my previous report on this topic, that New York’s problem is not a problem of Jewish power. It is a problem of government-tied financialization at the hands of a small number of WASPs and then a small number of Zionists, and it has come at the expense of the people who live in the city, among them many Jews. Now, with a direct threat to Zionists’ influence in the person of Zohran Mamdani, the operation is out front. Zionist financiers have sent one of their own to occupy the most powerful security position in the city, and they are intent on keeping her there. If they fail to install their ally Andrew Cuomo in the mayoralty, which will give Tisch carte blanche, the prospect of them working to sabotage a Mamdani mayoralty in the lead-up to a Tisch For Mayor campaign in 2029 is a very real one.

They will likely do this much like they managed the securance of Jessica Tisch’s job: with media attacks meant to maximize pressure on Mamdani; followed by private assurances to Mamdani that the attacks will stop if concessions follow. These public-private feints, in turn, will push Mamdani into concessions which will make him lose face with his base, isolating him between an unfriendly establishment and a disillusioned electorate. (This trend is already occurring, albeit at the edges, after Mamdani’s public commitment to keeping Tisch, whom many Mamdani voters see as a threat to civil liberties.) Tisch’s allies will manage these plays with the help of The New York Times and other organs of influence (the Conde Nast publications, New York Magazine, the New York Post) which by their own admission are pining for technocratic government predicated on what they call “effective management.”

But there is another equally bad outcome that could accrue should Mamdani win the mayoralty and Tisch stay on as police commissioner. This is the fusion of the most dangerous potential aspect of socialism, total government direction of the economy, with the most dangerous potential aspect of Zionism: total techno-military colonial control. It doesn’t take a great deal of imagination to see how, under a de facto power-sharing agreement between Mamdani and Tisch (Mamdani in charge of domestic welfare, Tisch in charge of security) the worst impulses of both systems will merge to create a city government which is totalistically involved in every aspect of its citizens’ lives, Singapore transfused with Sweden. This outcome for a city which for a century has been read as a triumph of American individualism would be, to understate the case, a seismic shift.

October 30, 2025 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , , | Leave a comment

Kyiv wants land, not people: former US State Department adviser warns

By Uriel Araujo | October 29, 2025

James Carden, former US State Department Russia Policy Adviser has faced criticism in certain circles over his otherwise underreported comments during a recent interview  to Australian Sky News — especially for mentioning some hard truths about the ethnopolitics of Ukraine.

In that interview, Mr. Carden noted that, like HIMARS or F-16s, Tomahawks won’t be a gamechanger, and argued that Putin’s proposal — EU but not NATO membership — was a fair enough bargain. When the host replied that, in this case, that would involve land concessions as part of a land-for-peace deal, the former State Department Adviser argued that the land Kyiv would be ceding is a land that: “they themselves have been attacking since 2014. The Ukrainians are being a bit disingenuous here… They claim to want the land in the Donbass, Eastern Ukraine. But they don’t want the ethnic Russian citizens on that land. So they’ve been doing everything that they can to disenfranchise those people.”

These comments are not ill-informed or dishonest and they merit some attention. In fact, they are quite accurate.

For years, Kyiv’s policies have systematically sidelined a significant chunk of Ukraine’s population. According to the country’s last census in 2001 — the only one since independence in 1991 — “ethnic Russians” accounted for 17.3 percent of the populace, which is over 8 million people. The numbers don’t catch all the nuance here: Ukraine is, pure and simple, a deeply bilingual society, with Russian as the native language (in other surveys) for at least 29 percent nationwide, a percentage that gets far higher in the east and south.

It is true that a 2024 study by linguist Volodymyr Kulyk shows a decline in everyday Russian use in Ukraine since 2022, with streets renamed, statues of Russians taken down and “Russian literature taken off the shelves of bookshops”, as Lancaster University PhD researcher Oleksandra Osypenko  puts it. While in 2012 only 44% Ukrainians primarily spoke Ukrainian and 34% Russian, by December 2022 Ukrainian had risen to 57.4% and Russian had fallen to 14.8%, with the remaining 27.8 percent reporting employing both. This means that 42.6% of Ukrainians (that is 14.8 plus 27.8) still use the Russian language routinely, even after three years of open war, with censored media, and all “pro-Russian” parties having been banned; and after at least 11 years of Ukrainization policies.

High rates of intermarriage blur the lines even further; and, from a social science perspective, many folks toggle between “Russian” and “Ukrainian” identities depending on the context, as I’ve noticed myself during fieldwork in 2019.

Yet, back in August 2021, President Volodymyr Zelensky told Donbass residents who ‘feel russkiye [ethnic Russians]’ to move to Russia. At the time, I argued that this was one of the most russophobic statements from a high-ranking Ukrainian official since World War II; which is an  ironic enough twist, considering the fact that in 2019 Zelensky (a Russian speaker himself) was widely described as a candidate courting the Russian and pro-Russian minority, and rode to power on promises to protect precisely these Russian-identifying folks in the east.

The 2014 ultranationalist Maidan revolution, backed by Washington (despite its far-right elements), has ushered in a surge of Ukrainian chauvinism that verges on negationism about the country’s pluri-ethnic realities. Language laws tell part of the tale. The 2017 education reform made Ukrainian the sole public-school language; by March 2023, Ukraine expanded media censorship and raised TV Ukrainian-language quotas to 90% by 2024, while banning non-Ukrainian languages in key areas.

Oleksiy Danilov, then secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, put it starkly in a 2023 interview: “The Russian language must completely disappear from our territory.” No wonder Ukrainian philosopher Sergei Datsyuk warned that such moves could spark an “internal civil war” worse than the external one, and even Oleksiy Arestovich, Zelensky’s former adviser, echoed the alarm.

The truth is that such “internal civil war” kicked off nearly a decade ago in Donbass, as scholar Serhiy Kudelia frames it, under artillery barrages that turned it into Europe’s “forgotten war” until 2022. Kyiv has been bombing Russians (in Donbass) for a decade, while disenfranchising them.

This is no hyperbole: experts like Nicolai N. Petro, a US Fulbright scholar in Ukraine in 2013-2014 and ex-State Department specialist on the Soviet Union, have documented how Ukrainian policies erode civil rights for ethnic minorities, especially Russian speakers.

The Venice Commission, Europe’s go-to body for democratic standards, criticized Ukraine’s 2022 Law on National Minorities for restricting publishing, media, and education in minority languages, urging revisions to meet international standards. Despite this, Deputy PM Olga Stefanishyna dismissed it all by claiming: “there is no Russian minority in Ukraine.”

Moreover, for many, Ukraine’s history is inextricably tied to Russia’s; a 2021 survey, taken six months before the full-scale escalation, found over 40 percent of Ukrainians nationwide — and nearly two-thirds in the east and south — agreeing with Putin that Ukrainians and Russians are “one people”.

Yet Ukraine’s rigid unitary state, with its top-down nationalism, clashes hard against Russia’s matryoshka model of multinational autonomy — with 22 ethnic republics within the Russian Federation. Granting Donbass similar autonomy, for instance, could have eased tensions, but it would have demanded a constitutional overhaul.

In the broader post-Soviet mess, Ukraine’s woes look less unique. Frozen conflicts across the region — Transnistria, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Nagorno-Karabakh — show how borders remain volatile. In this context, Crimea and Donbass have been hot topics for decades.

The hard truth is that if Kyiv won militarily (unlikely), more Donbass shelling and displacement would likely follow. Carden’s point stands: without addressing internal ethnopolitics, Ukraine cannot secure peace; for peace means embracing all its people, not just the land they stand on.

Uriel Araujo, Anthropology PhD, is a social scientist specializing in ethnic and religious conflicts, with extensive research on geopolitical dynamics and cultural interactions.

October 29, 2025 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Russophobia | | Leave a comment

Zelensky says he ‘doesn’t care’ if claim used to oust Odessa mayor is fake

RT | October 28, 2025

Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky has said he is unconcerned about whether the evidence used to oust former Odessa Mayor Gennady Trukhanov was fake.

Zelensky fired the mayor of the southern city earlier this month over accusations that he holds a Russian passport. The allegations have reportedly since been shown to contain false information, with the passport number that Ukrainian investigators claimed was Trukhanov’s actually belonging to a woman from Siberia who recently crossed the Russian border.

Zelensky defended his decision to journalists on Tuesday, admitting he did not question the evidence presented by investigators.

”How many passports he has, which are real, which are fake, who made them? Frankly speaking, I do not care,” Zelensky said, as quoted by Ukrinform. “Is it 100% true that he is a Russian citizen? [Investigators] tell me ‘yes’.”

Trukhanov was one of several people stripped of Ukrainian citizenship earlier this month under Zelensky’s decree targeting individuals accused of secretly holding Russian passports. His administration has since been replaced by one appointed directly by the central government.

Trukhanov has said the allegations against him are based on fabrications and that he is the victim of a political purge. In an interview following his removal, he compared his situation to the Stalin-era repressions, arguing that there is no viable path for appeal under Zelensky’s rule.

International media outlets have also criticized the move. The Spectator described it as “a step too far,” suggesting it served as a warning to other local leaders that dissent would not be tolerated.

Reports have pointed to growing friction between Zelensky and prominent mayors, including Kiev’s Vitaly Klitschko, who accused the Ukrainian leader of consolidating power and edging toward a dictatorship.

Zelensky’s presidential term expired last year, but he continues to govern under martial law, after declining to transfer authority to the speaker of parliament as required by the Ukrainian Constitution.

October 28, 2025 Posted by | Civil Liberties | | Leave a comment

Israeli military company establishes first branch in UAE

MEMO | October 27, 2025

The Hebrew newspaper Maariv reported on Sunday that the Israeli government has approved the establishment of a branch of Controp Precision Technologies Ltd in the United Arab Emirates. The move has been described as an “unprecedented security and economic step” since the signing of the normalisation agreements in 2020.

Controp Precision Technologies Ltd specialises in designing and manufacturing EO/IR systems used for intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and targeting missions across air, land, and maritime domains. The company provides its solutions to the defence, homeland security, and other related sectors.

According to the newspaper, the new company, named Controp Emirates Ltd, will operate within Abu Dhabi’s free trade zone (ADGM). It will be fully owned by the Israeli parent company and will operate under strict security supervision from Israel’s Ministry of Defence.

The purpose of the new branch is to enable the company to manufacture and market its advanced electro-optical systems locally in the UAE, as well as to provide maintenance and technical support services.

The total investment in the first phase is estimated at around 30 million US dollars, funded through Controp shares and owner loans. The branch will be managed by an Israeli chief executive, while full control will remain with the parent company.

October 27, 2025 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

The Cameras Were the Goal Not the Solution

By Cam Wakefield | Reclaim The Net | October 24, 2025

If you live in Greater London, chances are you’re being watched right now. Not by MI5. Not by your nosy neighbor. No, it’s far more mundane than that. You’re being monitored by Mayor Sadiq Khan’s army of always-watching number plate cameras, installed under the noble banner of cleaning the air.

And here’s the twist: the air hasn’t changed. But the surveillance? That’s permanent.

When the Ultra Low Emission Zone was expanded in 2023 to cover the entire city, 579 square miles of roads, driveways, and backstreets, the stated goal was to reduce pollution. 

What it actually achieved was the creation of one of the most comprehensive, always-on vehicle tracking systems in the country. Possibly the continent.

Thousands of cameras now scan and record every single vehicle, every single day, across every borough. And according to new research from the University of Birmingham, all of this has achieved virtually nothing significant in terms of environmental impact.

The emissions stayed. The cameras stayed. And the idea that this was ever about clean air is beginning to look like a fig leaf for something else entirely.

ULEZ cameras were sold to the public as environmental guardians. But what they actually do is log your number plate, check it against a central database, and charge you if your vehicle doesn’t meet emissions standards. 

It doesn’t matter if your car is powered by sunshine and tofu. You’re still being recorded, timestamped, location-mapped, and uploaded into Transport for London’s data system. And the longer it runs, the harder it becomes to believe this is just about exhaust fumes.

Let’s be blunt: if this were a police surveillance network, the civil liberties brigade would be chaining themselves to lampposts. But because it’s got a green sticker on it, few blinked. It’s surveillance by stealth, a policing movement dressed up as progressive policy.

And the worst part? The public is paying for it.

The expansion cost Londoners £155 million ($206M). Not for scrubbing the air. Not for planting trees. For cameras. Lots of them. The kind of city-wide, high-resolution, automatic number plate recognition system that intelligence agencies dream about.

Within a week of going live, it was generating £5.3 million in revenue. And unlike actual policing or healthcare, this system runs itself. 

London’s government insists it’s working. They point to drivers upgrading vehicles before the expansion. Which is a bit like saying the fire alarm is a success because someone already put the fire out before it rang.

Even the study’s co-author, Dr Suzanne Bartington, admitted the current ULEZ setup fails to tackle the core public health risks like PM2.5 pollution, the stuff that actually gets into your lungs and bloodstream.

“The current ULEZ approach does not fully address significant traffic-related public health issues,” she said.

So if it doesn’t result in cleaner air, what does it do? It tracks people. Relentlessly. Quietly. In real time.

Let’s not kid ourselves. A surveillance grid this large, this well-funded, and this politically untouchable isn’t going to stay limited to emissions fines forever.

Privacy groups have already warned that the ULEZ system could be repurposed for just about anything. 

From catching speeding drivers to enforcing low-traffic neighborhoods. From congestion pricing to vehicle bans. Or, if the mood strikes City Hall, tracking “suspicious patterns of movement.” After all, the tech’s already in place. It would be a shame not to use it.

And let’s not forget: this all happened without a real public debate. There was no referendum. No opt-out. No serious oversight. Just a green slogan and a lot of money.

“This is just further evidence that the ULEZ expansion was about raising money rather than improving air quality,” said Thomas Turrell, of the City Hall Conservatives.

“Yet again, Sadiq Khan is ignoring the evidence when it doesn’t suit his agenda.”

Even Bromley Council leader Colin Smith weighed in with a dose of brutal clarity:

“Had it been about air quality, Mayor Khan would have started where the air in London is dirtiest – in his own tube network. But no, there were no motorists to fleece there.”

So here we are. The air is still dirty. The cameras are still on. And millions of journeys are now quietly logged by a system that was never designed to turn off.

We were told this was about health and climate. It’s really about control. A system that tracks your car is a system that tracks you. And once it’s normal to be watched everywhere you go, it’s very hard to roll that back.

ULEZ may have been introduced as an environmental policy. But its real legacy will be this: the normalisation of mass surveillance, hidden behind a green curtain.

Because in the end, the emissions weren’t the target.

The people were.

October 25, 2025 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

The Constitutional Fight Over New Jersey’s Baby DNA Stockpile

By Cindy Harper – Reclaim The Net – October 22, 2025

A constitutional battle in New Jersey over the state’s newborn screening program has intensified, as parents now cite the government’s own words to argue that officials pierce newborns’ skin to “seize their blood, analyze the information contained within it, and keep that blood and information for potential later use and sharing with third parties, all without parents’ consent or a warrant.”

The amended class action complaint, filed October 6 in federal court, challenges what it calls “nonconsensual and warrantless blood collection, screening, and retention practices,” claiming that state officials continue to “puncture the skin of every child born in New Jersey to seize blood for testing without parental consent” despite recent policy revisions.

We obtained a copy of the lawsuit for you here.

According to the filing, the issue is not the screening itself, which checks newborns for dozens of serious genetic and metabolic conditions, but what happens afterward.

“Despite getting test results within two weeks, New Jersey kept the remaining portion of each baby’s blood for 23 years—or at least it did until Plaintiffs sued,” the complaint says.

“Before Plaintiffs sued, New Jersey did not ask parents if the state could seize or analyze their newborn’s blood, nor did New Jersey inform parents that it would keep any remaining blood after initial testing.”

The plaintiffs, represented by the Institute for Justice, say their demands are straightforward: “Just ask parents for consent.” They even proposed a template consent form to the Department of Health, but say the agency refused to implement it.

“Defendants cannot sidestep the Constitution just because they think some parents will make, as Defendants see it, the ‘wrong’ choice,” the complaint states.

One mother, Rev. Hannah Lovaglio, said she was “appalled” to discover the practice, noting that “New Jersey punctured the skin of both of [her] boys and physically manipulated their heels to collect their blood” without ever asking permission. The lawsuit adds that she “worries that New Jersey is abusing its nonconsensual, continued possession of her children’s remaining blood.” Another parent, Erica Jedynak, described the state’s storage system as “a creepy database,” calling the collection of baby blood “immoral.”

The complaint alleges that “New Jersey does not just keep children’s remaining blood for itself,” but has “been caught giving that blood to third parties,” including law enforcement.

Citing public records, it notes that state police obtained samples on at least five occasions “without a warrant,” and that officials have “given or sold blood from its baby blood stockpile to other third parties, including, but not limited to, researchers, companies, and other government agencies.”

While the state in 2024 shortened the storage period to two years for healthy infants and ten years for those with positive test results, parents say this “voluntary and non-binding” policy change is missing the one thing that matters: consent.”

The filing adds, “Nothing prevents Defendants, or the Attorney General, from rescinding, amending, or changing their policy changes tomorrow.”

The parents argue that both the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments are being violated.

The Fourth, they write, protects the “right to be secure in their persons,” which includes “the right to be free from intrusion into, and removal of material from, the human body.”

The complaint continues, “People’s property and privacy interests in their blood and associated genetic material do not dissipate when that blood is taken physically from inside their bodies by state action.”

The Fourteenth Amendment claim centers on parental autonomy. “Parents, on behalf of their children—not New Jersey—control whether and how the state may intrude into their children’s bodies for medical testing,” the document states.

“A simple and less-restrictive alternative exists: Simply obtain voluntary consent from parents to keep their baby’s remaining blood for specific disclosed purposes prior to its storage, use, and potential sharing with third parties.”

If granted class-action status, the suit could cover more than 100,000 families each year. The plaintiffs seek a court order requiring the state to “either obtain parental consent to retain their children’s blood for purposes other than testing, or return or destroy the blood spots and all associated data.”

The case is a test of how governments handle genetic information in the age of AI and predictive DNA analysis.

The families’ attorneys argue that, as “artificial intelligence has begun transforming the interpretation of genetic data,” there is “a particularly heightened need to maintain privacy and control over blood and the genetic information contained within.”

The outcome could reverberate far beyond New Jersey, reshaping how states manage newborn blood repositories that now contain samples from hundreds of millions of Americans.

The New Jersey blood spot case exposes a growing privacy crisis rooted in genetic data and AI.

Every drop of blood collected from a newborn carries the entire code of that person’s identity, a permanent signature that cannot be altered or replaced.

If those samples or their digital genetic profiles were ever leaked, copied, or shared without consent, the damage would be irreversible. DNA cannot be revoked or reset. Once it escapes state custody, control over it is gone forever.

In the age of artificial intelligence, the risk compounds. Modern AI systems can take raw genetic data and predict traits ranging from disease risk to ancestry and physical appearance. They can draw links between relatives, reconstruct family trees, and even identify individuals from what was once thought to be anonymous genetic material.

A database of newborn DNA, if accessed by the wrong entity or merged with commercial or law enforcement records, could enable surveillance on a scale never before possible. It would turn what began as a health initiative into a lifelong system of biological tracking.

The concern is not only that data could be stolen or misused but that it could be quietly repurposed. A genetic profile kept for testing today could be mined tomorrow for research, insurance assessments, or law enforcement searches.

The New Jersey lawsuit warns that “people’s property and privacy interests in their blood and associated genetic material do not dissipate when that blood is taken physically from inside their bodies by state action.”

That principle matters now more than ever, because once a government or third party gains access to DNA, the line between health protection and population monitoring begins to blur.

October 23, 2025 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Palestinian activist vows to keep fighting Trump administration’s bid to re-detain him

MEMO | October 22, 2025

Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil accused the Trump administration of seeking to silence pro-Palestine voices by trying to re-detain him, after his attorneys appeared Tuesday before the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia to challenge the legality of his detention, Anadolu reports.

“We just finished a long hearing,” Khalil told reporters outside the court. “I feel confident, of course. The Trump administration is still trying to re-detain me. They’re trying to stop the federal court from looking at my case because they know they don’t have a case against me.”

Khalil, 30, a Palestinian activist and Columbia University graduate, is a lawful permanent resident married to a US citizen. He was detained in March without a warrant by immigration officers in New York City and transferred to a detention facility in Louisiana, where he was held for months.

The Trump administration claimed his presence threatened US foreign policy without providing evidence, but a lower court ordered his release on bail in June and barred the government from detaining or deporting him.

“This case is not about Mahmoud Khalil,” he said. “This case is about every single person in this country, whether they are citizens or not — this case is about their freedom of speech and their ability to dissent, and their ability to speak up, especially about Palestine and the genocide that’s happening in Gaza.”

“They want to break me because they want to deport me to be out as soon as possible, so that others would fear speaking out. That’s why I’m continuing to fight,” he added.

Khalil’s legal team appeared before the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, asking judges to uphold lower court rulings that found the government’s actions likely unconstitutional and ordered his release on bail.

His attorney, Ramzi Kassem, co-director of the CLEAR project, said the court heard oral arguments on the government’s appeal challenging both Khalil’s release and the lower court’s decision striking down the administration’s deportation order.

“We’re continuing to press forth — in this court behind me, in the district court in New Jersey, and in immigration court in Louisiana — to vindicate Mahmoud’s constitutional rights and his right to remain here with his family as a lawful permanent resident,” Kassem said.

“What’s at stake is not just his right to speak up in defense of Palestinian human rights and his ability to stay here in this country with his US citizen wife and child, but everyone’s First Amendment rights and due process rights.”

October 22, 2025 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

UK police arrest NHS doctor for denouncing Israel, supporting Palestine

Press TV – October 21, 2025

A British-Palestinian National Health Service (NHS) doctor has been arrested in the United Kingdom for denouncing Israel’s atrocities in Gaza and expressing support for Palestine.

Rahmeh Aladwan was taken into custody on Tuesday following her recent post on X, in which she criticized the Israeli occupation and voiced support for Palestine at a rally.

“The arrests relate to an ongoing investigation, led by the Met’s Public Order Crime Team, into allegations that comments made at a protest and online in recent months were grossly offensive and antisemitic in nature,” the Metropolitan Police spokesperson said.

During the demonstration held in Whitehall on July 21, Dr. Aladwan articulated the “Palestinian principles of liberation,” emphasizing the right to resistance, the right to self-determination, Al-Quds as the capital of Palestine, and the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and lands in what is now the occupied territories.

She also described Israel as “a terrorist entity that sits on top of Palestine,” and committing genocide against the oppressed residents of Gaza.

In her X post, Dr. Aladwan stated, “October 7. The day Israel was humiliated. Their supremacy [was] shattered at the hands of the children they forced out of their homes … The children who watched [Zionists] execute their loved ones, rape their land, and live on their stolen soil.”

Before her arrest, UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI), a pro-Israel advocacy group, had accused Dr. Rahmeh Aladwan of anti-Semitism, claiming her social media posts and public appearances made her “unfit to practice medicine.”

However, on September 25, the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service (MPTS) ruled that Dr. Aladwan is fit to practice, rejecting the anti-Semitism allegations.

Despite this, the UK General Medical Council (GMC) has referred her to another interim orders tribunal scheduled for Thursday, October 23, as it continues its investigation into the claims made by UKLFI.

The Al-Aqsa Flood operation, launched by Palestinian resistance groups on October 7, 2023, was a response to decades of oppression of the Palestinians by the Israeli regime.

Following the operation, Israel launched a genocidal war on Gaza, killing at least 68,229 people and wounding 170,369.

October 22, 2025 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , | Leave a comment

Pashinyan’s war on the Armenian Church signals a deepening national crisis

By Lucas Leiroz | Strategic Culture Foundation | October 22, 2025

The authoritarian spiral of Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has entered a dangerous new phase: a systematic campaign of repression against the Armenian Apostolic Church — one of the world’s oldest Christian institutions and the cornerstone of the Armenian national identity. In a desperate attempt to consolidate his crumbling political legitimacy and strengthen alignment with the Western liberal order, Pashinyan has now turned his sights on religious leaders and sacred institutions, undermining the spiritual and historical foundations of the Armenian state.

In recent weeks, state-led persecution of religious figures has reached alarming levels. The arrest of Bishop Mkrtich Proshyan, head of the Diocese of Aragatsotn, marks just the most visible example of a broader, coordinated crackdown. Alongside him, five other clergymen were detained on vague and politically motivated charges, including “fraud” and “abuse of power.” The allegations, notably lacking in credible legal grounding, reveal the instrumental nature of the operation — a political purge disguised as law enforcement.

This assault on the Church is not an isolated event. Months earlier, Archbishop Mikael Ajapahyan was sentenced to two years in prison for allegedly “inciting a coup” — a vague accusation increasingly used as a catch-all label for dissent. What is unfolding appears to be a deliberate campaign to silence religious voices that challenge the government’s ideological alignment with Brussels and its Western patrons.

Behind Pashinyan’s rhetoric of “fighting corruption” and “institutional modernization” lies a far darker reality: the calculated dismantling of Armenia’s last bastion of traditional resistance. With roots tracing back to the early 4th century, the Armenian Apostolic Church is not merely a religious authority — it is a symbol of moral unity, historical continuity, and cultural cohesion. For many Armenians, the Church is the guardian of the national soul — a role that naturally places it in opposition to a regime advancing policies that many view as anti-national and externally imposed.

The conflict is also ideological in nature. By attempting to reshape Armenian society in accordance with secularist, progressive values favored by the European Union, Pashinyan inevitably comes into conflict with the conservative and patriotic worldview still prevalent among the Armenian population. In such a context, any institution that resists this forced social transformation becomes a target — and the Church, as the most prominent voice of cultural continuity, is perceived as the primary obstacle.

The deeper backdrop to this crackdown is the widespread public disillusionment with Pashinyan’s leadership following the catastrophic military defeat to Azerbaijan and the total loss of Nagorno-Karabakh. The dissolution of the Republic of Artsakh not only represented a strategic failure but served as a powerful symbol of Pashinyan’s political project collapsing under its own contradictions. In the wake of that defeat, his administration has increasingly relied on authoritarian tactics and scapegoating internal “enemies” — including the conservative opposition and the Church — in an effort to deflect from its failures.

The arrest of Russian-Armenian businessman and vocal government critic Samvel Karapetyan further illustrates the broader context of political persecution. However, unlike typical political repression, the offensive against the clergy reveals something deeper: a systematic attempt to reengineer the Armenian national identity along foreign lines, disregarding the popular will and erasing centuries of religious and cultural continuity.

The mass demonstrations erupting in Yerevan since October 18 are a direct response to this rupture. Opposition movements like Mer Dzevov (Our Way) are channeling a growing national anger that transcends the arrests of individual figures — it reflects a public rejection of a government that has positioned itself as an adversary of Armenia’s historical institutions and spiritual heritage. The presence of thousands in the streets, demanding not only the release of political and religious prisoners but also the end of state hostility toward the Church, suggests that the divide between the regime and the population may now be irreversible.

Pashinyan continues to rely on international backers to maintain his grip on power, but even his Western sponsors may soon realize they cannot indefinitely prop up a government that has lost all domestic legitimacy. Meanwhile, the Armenian Apostolic Church retains the moral authority of history, faith, and national identity — forces that no imported ideology or political alliance can replace.

If internal stability is to be preserved, the Armenian government must immediately halt its campaign against the clergy and initiate dialogue with the legitimate representatives of civil and religious society. Failing to do so risks not only further loss of authority but a slide into institutional collapse — with unpredictable and potentially irreversible consequences.

The forced replacement of Armenian heritage with foreign ideological frameworks is a blueprint for national ruin — and in attacking the Church, Pashinyan is not merely repressing dissent; he is waging war on the very soul of his people.

October 22, 2025 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | | Leave a comment

‘Welcome to the war casino’: veteran German politician ridicules conscription plans

RT | October 21, 2025

Veteran German politician Sahra Wagenknecht has condemned Berlin’s plans to boost its army through a lottery-based recruitment system, ridiculing what she described as the government’s obsession with an imagined war against Russia.

German lawmakers have been debating ways to strengthen the Bundeswehr as Chancellor Friedrich Merz has called to turn it into the “strongest conventional army” in Europe. The government aims to expand the country’s armed forces by around 80,000 servicemen. Some have proposed activating a lottery-based selection system if not enough people volunteer. Continued shortfalls could trigger the return of compulsory conscription, which has been suspended since 2011.

In a TikTok post on Tuesday, Wagenknecht, who previously served as a member of the European Parliament and sat in the Bundestag from 2009 until earlier this year, mocked the lottery idea.

“Welcome to the war casino where the stakes are your life,” she said, going on to criticize the Merz government’s rhetoric that Germany is partly “at war” with Russia and its calls for an army “ready for battle, that prevails, that wins.”

“I have to be honest, this is all just too much to handle. Maybe someone should explain to our great chancellor that Russia is a nuclear power and a war with a nuclear power will not be decided by the number of soldiers,” she said.

She further stressed that the hysteria over a supposed Russian offensive was absurd given that NATO has three times more soldiers than Russia. “With these power dynamics, is Putin supposed to roll over us if we don’t conscript 80,000 young people for military service? They really want to sell us for fools,” Wagenknecht said.

Russia has consistently denied any hostile intent toward NATO or EU members and has described Western alarm over an impending war as baseless propaganda. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has accused European governments of pursuing dangerous militarization and claimed Berlin is “slipping into a Fourth Reich” through its rearmament drive.

October 21, 2025 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Militarism, Russophobia | , | Leave a comment

Armenian opposition mayor detained in government crackdown

RT | October 20, 2025

Armenian law enforcement has detained the mayor of the country’s second-largest city along with several municipal staff and dozens of locals, sparking protests.

Gyumri Mayor Vardan Ghukasyan and seven others now face corruption charges. The arrests come amid an ongoing political standoff in the country between the government and opposition.

Ghukasyan, elected from the Communist Party of Armenia in April 2025, is a known critic of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s pro-Western foreign policy shift. Pashinyan previously threatened to “throw him out of the politics,” vowing to “resolve” the issue.

Video circulating online showed Ghukasyan being escorted by security forces into a vehicle, reportedly bound for questioning in the capital, Yerevan. When his supporters blocked the exit, armed police used force in an operation involving over 100 officers.

The situation prompted an immediate public backlash, with angry residents gathering outside the city hall, whistling at police and chanting “shame.” Law enforcement effectively locked down the area, blocking streets and dispersing the crowds. Twenty-three people were detained, among them a member of the opposition Mer Dzevov (Our Way) movement, led by jailed businessman Samvel Karapetyan. The movement had expressed unconditional support for Ghukasyan.

Pashinyan has been previously accused of targeting his opponents. In June, Russian-Armenian billionaire Karapetyan was arrested on charges of inciting a coup and money laundering. The businessman had publicly condemned the prime minister’s crackdown on the clergy of the Armenian Apostolic Church, which the government accuses of corruption and political meddling.

Tensions between Pashinyan and the church began in 2020 when the nation’s top cleric, Catholicos Garegin II, called on the prime minister to resign amid mass protests over territorial concessions to Azerbaijan.

Last week, police detained Bishop Mkrtich Proshyan, the head of the Diocese of Aragatsotn, and five other clergymen on charges of abuse of power and fraud. Earlier this month, Archbishop Mikael Ajapahyan was sentenced to two years in prison for inciting a coup, a case he described as politically motivated.

October 21, 2025 Posted by | Civil Liberties | | Leave a comment

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