The U.S. government has no more important duty than defending the nation. However, providing for the “common defense,” as the Constitution puts it, is remarkably easy. America has vast oceans east and west and peaceful neighbors to the north and south.

Today only Russia, with an arsenal of nuclear-tipped missiles, could launch a serious attack on America. However, Moscow has no incentive to do so, since the result would be devastating retaliation. China’s military is expanding but directed at preventing Washington from dominating the People’s Republic of China at home and in its neighborhood.

Terrorists abound but mostly result from maladroit U.S. policies that create enemies and make other people’s conflicts America’s own. Moreover, while such attacks are atrocious, they do not pose an existential threat. Nor do America’s conventional forces and nuclear arsenals offer the best response; promiscuous war-making around the world is more likely to accelerate than diminish terrorism. The better option would be to do less militarily, especially in the Middle East.

Why, then, is Washington spending $717 billion in fiscal year 2019 to maintain vast armies, fleets, and air armadas around the world? Not for defense, of America, anyway. It is to protect allies, assert influence, remake failed societies, dictate behavior, promote values, and more. All of these may have some value, though rarely as much as asserted. And none have much to do with protecting America’s territory, people, constitutional system, and prosperity.

Unfortunately, attacking is far more expensive than deterring. Most of America’s Pentagon outlays go to project power, which is why the United States has an outsize military budget, equal to that of the next dozen or so nations combined. None of them, or any combination of them, could defeat America. Rather, Washington wants the ability to target them. The so-called “defense” budget is the price of America’s aggressive foreign policy. Playing global gendarme — is not cheap.

Although Americans should be prepared to pay any price necessary for their defense, not so with remaking the globe. Sending Americans to fight and die for tasks of peripheral importance always was foolish. Even if America once felt wealthy enough to squander its financial resources in such pursuits, those days have ended. Washington is effectively bankrupt, with massive unfunded liabilities. Its fiscal future will only worsen as Baby Boomers continue to retire.

Last year the Republican Party, once the self-proclaimed guardian of the treasury, used control of both ends of Capitol Hill to simultaneously hike federal spending and cut taxes. The result was a deficit approaching $779 billion, up $114 billion from the previous year. The last time Uncle Sam generated as much red ink was 2012 when recovering from the financial crisis.

Unfortunately, the numbers will only go up

The Congressional Budget Office figured the president’s 2019 budget proposal will push the deficit to nearly $1 trillion — without another financial crisis. And the numbers will continue to rise, to $1.527 trillion in 2028, or nearly twice last year’s level. There will be an extra $12.4 trillion in red ink over the coming decade.

AMERICANS ARE LOSING THE MEANING OF LIFE

This debt increase would be accompanied by rising interest rates, which already have begun their inexorable rise as the Federal Reserve begins unwinding its radical expansionary policy dating back to the financial crisis. CBO figured “net interest,” which disguises federal costs by subtracting interest paid to Uncle Sam, will rise from $315 billion last year to $819 billion in 2028.

That would roughly double the share of GDP devoted to interest from 1.6 percent to 3.1 percent of GDP. At that level, interest would be Washington’s third-largest program, smaller only than Social Security and Medicare. In another two decades, interest payments would match Social Security, currently the most expensive federal program. Interest payments would then consume 6.3 percent of GDP, the highest ever.

Alas, the numbers probably will be worse

The president’s budget targets domestic discretionary spending, as have most presidents, with little result, since Congress is not prepared to shut down the Washington Monument, furlough congressional staffers, and kill politically popular grants. More important, that area is not where the money is, accounting for just 15 percent of outlays. Zeroing out such expenditures would still leave a deficit.

Washington could stumble along and hope for better than expected economic news: higher productivity, lower interest rates, and faster economic growth, all of which would ease fiscal pressures on Washington. However, the reverse also is possible. In fact, the president’s trade war increases the chances of negative changes, while escaping a recession during the next decade will require more than a little luck. To combat the latter policymakers likely would hike outlays to “stimulate” the economy, adding to a deficit already expected to exceed a trillion dollars annually.

Of course, Congress could cut domestic expenditures. To achieve anything approaching a responsible budget requires addressing the four big domestic boulders, which along with military outlays make up 85 percent of the budget: interest, which cannot be reduced without repudiating debt; Social Security, the traditional “third rail” of U.S. politics; Medicare, the equally popular elder health care program; and Medicaid, the perennially under-funded promise of medical services for the poor. Spending pressures are inexorable. Entitlement outlays automatically rise as the population ages — both a larger percentage of the population is older and people on average live longer — so Social Security and Medicare will drive the budget.

More likely, Congress will act like, well, Congress, and both spend more and collect less than under current law. If so, the “Extended Alternative Fiscal Scenario” predicts that the deficit as a percentage of GDP will rise from 78 percent last year to 105 percent in 2028, 148 percent in 2038, and an astonishing 210 percent in 2048. Even the CBO’s best case, under “Extended Baseline,” which simply runs out existing law, including expiration of tax cuts, forecasts 152 percent of GDP in 2048. That is higher than in Greece at the onset of its fiscal crisis, which generated economic hardship, social dislocation, and political disruption. America’s average over the last half-century was just 41 percent; only during World War II and in its immediate aftermath did the federal debt exceed 70 percent, peaking at 106 percent in 1946.

With larger deficits and debts, interest rates likely would be higher and GDP growth lower. Once the spiral starts it will be difficult to stop. First, warned CBO, “rising interest rates and increased federal borrowing boost net interest costs substantially.” Net interest costs rose 20 percent last year alone. No surprise, noted the agency, “the higher the government’s interest costs, the more difficult it would be to achieve any particular target for deficit reduction.” Indeed, CBO observed, “Rising interest costs would boost deficits and debt and rising debt would push up interest costs.” The latter would be “a major contributor to that growing gap” between outlays and revenue in the coming years.

Second, noted CBO: “Large federal budget deficits over the long term would reduce investment, resulting in lower national income and higher interest rates than would otherwise be the case. If the government borrowed more money, a greater amount of household and business saving would be used to buy Treasury securities, thus crowding out private investment. Both the government and private borrowers would face higher interest rates to compete for savings.” This would cut savings, and private investment, including in capital goods. Which, in turn, would cut productivity and real wage growth, and hence economic output.

The crisis might not stop there, however

DEATH OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

Such circumstances, concluded CBO, would increase “the chance of a fiscal crisis.” The spiral toward disaster could be rapid: “Higher interest rates would increase concerns over repayment, which would continue to raise interest rates even further. Even in the absence of a full-blown crisis, such risks would lead to higher rates and borrowing costs for the U.S. government and private sector.” Rising Treasury rates would lower the securities’ value, undermining the stability of financial institutions. Large-scale Federal Reserve purchases could accelerate price inflation and/or dollar depreciation.

Such a situation “would ultimately be unsustainable,” CBO observed politely. Imagine a 2008-style crisis, but with the debt burden twice as great.

Of course, Congress could raise tax hikes, but they are no more popular than spending cuts. Moreover, the growing deficit is mostly a result of increased spending. Over the coming decade, CBO estimates that outlays will rise faster than revenues, $2.2 trillion compared to $1.9 trillion. The disparity grows even greater in future years, as “revenues would grow faster than the economy but more slowly than spending,” according to CBO. Under the so-called “Extended Baseline,” revenues will average 19.8 percent and outlays 29 percent of GDP by 2048. Over the last fifty years, these numbers averaged 17 and 20 percent, respectively.

In this world, what happens to the Pentagon, which spends so much money and time, and so many Americans’ lives, protecting other nations, most of which are populous and prosperous?

Cuts are inevitable

The obvious place to start is overseas contingency operations, funded by supplementals to the base-budget appropriations. OCO monies peaked in 2007 and 2008 at 28 percent of Pentagon outlays. From 2001 to 2018 they averaged about a fifth. These funds mostly go for wars of choice, social engineering, and other dubious ventures without much to do with America’s “common defense.” (This practice creates another problem, obscuring military spending and its purpose. As CBO, explained, use of OCO “creates an inaccurate picture of what future defense spending might be in the absence of military conflicts.”)

However, far more serious reductions are required. The base-budget underwrites a system of guarantees, alliances, and deployments which are not sustainable—and wouldn’t be in America’s interest even if they were. The starting point, though, is to revise foreign policy. That is, cutting expenditures without trimming tasks risks creating a dangerous mismatch, forcing Washington to either abandon commitments made or uphold them without the necessary force. Instead, the administration should drop obsolete alliances, adjusting its force structure accordingly. That requires a serious debate over America’s role in the world and the inevitable trade-off between military adventurism, domestic social programs, and private incomes.

Uncle Sam is like the congenital wastrel who keeps buying rounds at the neighborhood bar. As long he can run a tab — or his credit card charge goes through — he keeps going, heading toward inevitable disaster. The longer Washington waits to reform its ways, the bigger and more disruptive changes ultimately will have to be. Approving future cuts now, even with the effects delayed, would provide greater certainty and lower long-term interest rates. Moreover, people could begin to adapt—at home to income cuts, abroad to burden-shifting.

To stabilize Washington’s finances, all programs need to be addressed. However, military outlays deserve an especially thorough review. America First, as the president proclaims, should not mean ignoring the needs and rights of others. But it should recognize that the U.S. government’s highest duty is to its own people. America First also means that war, given the unique costs—lives lost, risks taken, money wasted—is a last resort undertaken only for the most serious, even vital purposes.

The post THE UNITED STATES CAN NO LONGER CONTROL THE WORLD first appeared on Global Policy.

In the conversation, the expert stated that the main threat to Russia is the loss of sovereignty, traditional values ​​and civilizational code. The loss of sovereignty is manifested in the fact that we depend on Western banks and buy American bonds. Fursov’s lecture was devoted to the realities of capitalism, which invariably leads to crises. He appreciated the situation in Russia today – in his opinion, we are still “eating away” the legacy of the USSR, but in foreign policy there are already a number of steps towards independence:

“They are modest for now – this is Crimea, this is Syria. The steps are modest, but they are very different from how we surrendered our positions under the late Gorbachev and Yeltsin.”

In his lecture, Andrei Fursov tried to explain why it was the destruction of the USSR that became the trigger for the collapse of the capitalist system, which has nowhere else to spread. He spoke about the course “Three D” – deindustrialization, depopulation and derationalization of consciousness, which includes the environmental movement and the minority rights movement. He also explained how music was used to control large masses of people.

Crisis

The word “crisis” has become a code word for the modern era. We constantly talk about the crisis: about the financial crisis, about the education crisis, about the economic crisis. But it turns out that we have a crisis of everything. The crisis of everything is a systemic crisis. A crisis of what system? It is a crisis of modern society, a crisis of the market economy, a crisis of the industrial system. And at the same time we get by with one word – when we parted with Marxism after 1991, this word not only became indecent, not to mention abusive, but somehow it is avoided. The word is very simple – “capitalism”.

Unfortunately, since the late 1950s in the Soviet Union, capitalism has ceased to be seriously studied the way it was done in the Comintern times. In the late 1950s, we first began to translate Western communists, then leftists, then liberals, then we rolled down to neoliberals. And so they missed a whole series of important moments – they missed the formation of a new predatory faction of the bourgeoisie after the Second World War – the “corporatocracy”. The struggle between the corporatocracy and state-monopoly capital began in the West itself.

In the USA, this took a very acute form – it took the form of a creeping coup, which began with the assassination of Kennedy and the removal of Nixon as a result of impeachment, and by the mid-1970s the corporatocracy had firmly established itself in power. First, they brought a man unfit for power – Carter. But then Reagan came. And from that moment on, it was possible to launch a very serious offensive against the Soviet Union, especially since it had taken a defensive position – not a leap into the future, but a reaction to the situation. Especially since, apparently – this is my guess, I have no direct evidence – there was an exchange of a number of our technical areas in which we were ahead of the West. For example, in computer technology: The Politburo Resolution of 1968 and 1973 – that we will not develop computer technology – the subtext is “we will steal everything that is needed”. But at that moment we were ahead of the West by 10 years, and then we fell behind. What happened in exchange? In the late 60s, the projects of Soviet banks abroad began to become more active in the West. The transfer of funds from the nomenklatura to Western banks began. In other words, apparently, an “exchange” took place.

Capitalism is expansion

I do not agree with those who believe that the capitalist system is an absolute triumph. The capitalist system is a complex system that limits capital in its holistic and long-term interests, otherwise, if it is left to itself, it will eat itself, society and the biosphere. And secondly, it ensures expansion in space. That is, the capitalist system is what holds capital in space and time. When there is no space and time left, the capitalist system ceases to exist, but capital exists. They often say, well, why are you telling us again about the crisis of capitalism? They have been talking about the crisis of capitalism since Lenin, but capitalism still exists. Or, as our rebellious intelligentsia liked to say in Soviet times, returning from abroad, when asked “well, how is capitalism?” they answered: “It is rotting, but it smells great.” In fact, systems die longer than people. There are no eternal systems – systems are born, arise and die, and the crisis phase, the dying phase, lasts approximately 100-150 years.

Capitalism and anti-capitalism

By the end of the 19th century, there were more non-capitalist structures in the capitalist system than in the 16th and 17th centuries. In theory, it should be the other way around – capitalism created pre-capitalist forms on its own where it was not opposed by hired labor. For example, they came to the south of the United States when the USA did not yet exist, and to the Caribbean – they created plantation slavery there, which had not existed there before. They came to South America and created a quasi-feudal latifundium economy, they came to Bengal and created something like private property there, but without capitalism. Without capital. And it turns out that capitalism, unlike all social systems, creates other social systems on its own. This is the first thing. The second thing that is completely incomprehensible is that capitalism is the only system (I once wrote a lot about this in my work “The Bells of History”, 1996), which can exist with a “plus” sign and with a “minus” sign. And this “minus” is an indicator of the health of capitalism. “Minus” is systemic anti-capitalism, which Zinoviev called “real communism”, we call it socialism, the Soviet system, I prefer to talk about systemic anti-capitalism. That is, the “plus” sign and the “minus” sign.

Supranational groups for global coordination and management

There are two more things, two features of capitalism, which are very important for us now to understand the dynamics. First: under capitalism, supranational groups of global coordination and management arise – what Ivan Ilyin called “behind the scenes”, and what, as soon as you start talking about this, they brush it off as “ah… it’s a conspiracy theory”.

THE SECOND CIRCUIT OF POWER IN THE WEST AND CAPITALISM

There are all kinds of conspiracy theories. When you ask, “What do you mean by conspiracy theories?” a swim begins with cannonballs on their feet. Why should these groups exist under capitalism? The fact is that one of the basic contradictions of capitalism is that capitalism is an economically unified and integral world system, but politically it is a sum, not a whole. A sum of states – this has been the case since the Peace of Westphalia. The Westphalian system flowed into the Vienna, the Versailles, the Yalta. The Yalta did not grow into the Malta, but, for better or worse, the Westphalian system still exists in a broken form. And the world politically is still not a whole, but a sum. A contradiction arises at the level of politics-economics, state-capital, whole-sum. But the fact is that the bourgeoisie, especially the financial, especially the large one, has interests outside their states. And they can realize these interests only if they violate the laws of their state and a foreign state. The upper layer of the bourgeoisie has a historical need for organizations: a) supranational; b) closed (but not secret, then we would not know about them at all); c) long-term. At the moment when the bourgeoisie had this need at the end of the 17th, beginning of the 18th centuries, they did not have any of their own bourgeois structures. And then they – as the song goes “I molded him from what was” – began to look, and what is there? And there are Masonic organizations. And in 1717, the already existing lodges of England united and created the Grand Lodge of England. And then the development of these structures began. For some reason, we either demonize the Masons, or say that this is all nonsense, everything is wrong.

Freemasonry was the first closed structure, then new ones appeared, and one of the problems of the world capitalist elite is that those structures that emerged at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s to solve a number of problems, including strangling the Soviet Union in an embrace, have served their purpose, and new structures are needed. And how can new structures be created in a crisis? The house is burning, and I start making a stool? In other words, the presence of closed supranational structures of world coordination and management is the norm of capitalist development, its political economy. This does not mean that there were no closed structures before. The Templars were one and a half generations short of creating the first European Union, they had to wait for Hitler, the father of the European Union. But they didn’t create it, did they? Because they didn’t have a world market.

Capitalism ate itself in 400 years

Immanuel Wallerstein once said in a lecture, I wonder how we will remember capitalism in a thousand years? As a brief moment of a spurt, exponential growth in contrast to the asymptote of pre-capitalist development, or as something else? It is absolutely clear that capitalism is a historical conspiracy, it is a crime. But at the same time, capitalism is also fantastic inventions, a colossal population growth. Dismantling these institutions is the dismantling of the capitalist system. As soon as the world rate of profit in the capitalist system decreased, capitalism snatched a part of the non-capitalist zone and turned it into a capitalist periphery, solving the problem of cheap labor and a source of raw materials. In this regard, colonial expansion went in such spurts – now colonial expansion, then everything is quiet, it was connected with the world rate of profit. And what happens in 1991? That’s it, the non-capitalist zones are over. Capitalism can no longer develop extensively; there is nowhere to go, except into space.

CAPITALISM AS A REALITY – SOCIAL NATURE, MAIN STAGES OF DEVELOPMENT, MODERN WORLD CRISIS

What’s next – an excess of democracy in Western societies?

In 1973, the work “The Crisis of Democracy” was written (Huntington, Croisier and Watanuki), where it is written that the main problem, the main challenge and the danger of the West is not the Soviet Union. It is the excess of democracy in Western societies. It is necessary to remove this excess, it is necessary to apathize the population, especially active political groups, and instill in the population that democracy is not so much a value as a principle. But there are other principles – hierarchy. From this moment on, the process of dismantling many institutions that limit capital begins. The neoliberal revolution or counterrevolution with the faces of Reagan and Thatcher begins. But first, preparations had to be made for this. And this dismantling is the crisis.

The crisis did not begin in 2008, the crisis began at the turn of the 70s and 80s, when they began to remove what hinders capital. But it is precisely what hinders the capitalist system that makes it. Deindustrialization was invented in order to degrade the working class. Formally, it has an economic “excuse” – if we transfer the automobile industry from Detroit to South Korea – production will cost us less, South Korea has weak trade unions, we can pay people less. And we will show the workers of Detroit a fig – if you do not want to work for less money, then do not. The result is the bankruptcy of Detroit. But the main thing was that deindustrialization weakened the social force that could, ultimately, politically challenge the top. I call this course “Three D” – deindustrialization, depopulation and derationalization of consciousness.

Cut down the “cultural optimism” of the 1960-s

Deindustrialization had to be prepared. That is why in 1962 an environmental movement was created with Rockefeller money, which began to explain all the harmfulness of industrial development – it is bad from the point of view of ecology. Then the Club of Rome was created and in the very first report it was stated that “zero growth” is needed, that is, 50% for industrial development, 50% for leveling out environmental damage. In fact, it was about stopping technical progress. Note that at the turn of the 1960-1970s, space programs were curtailed, industrial development was curtailed, and the Tavistock Institute for the Study of Man was given the task of cutting off the “cultural optimism” of the 1960s. In what form did cultural optimism develop? In the form of science fiction. Since the late 1970s, it has been replaced by fantasy. How is fantasy different from science fiction? Fantasy is the future, like the past: these are dragons, these are lords, this is the world of magic. And this is a very important point. Magic power. Because magic is what opposes religion.

Music as a way to influence the masses

The expansion of English-language music begins. I really love the music of the 30-70s, and if you watch any disc, French and Italian music will dominate. From the mid-1970s, or more precisely with the Beatles phenomenon, completely different music begins. And it is very interesting – when it was necessary to launch the process of the revolution of 1968, rock music worked – 160 beats per minute. And therefore, when it was necessary to dampen it down, the disco style began, Italian music. And the disco style is exactly 72 beats per minute. This is a great psychophysical manipulation of large masses. In the 1960s, a youth subculture was created: “rock, sex, drugs”.

The environmental movement, the women’s movement. And, finally, the movement of sexual minorities. The movement of minorities is what undermines civil society. A minority is a collective. Civil society consists of individuals. Archaization began in this form. It doesn’t matter what kind of minority it is – ethnic, sexual, what matters is that it is the dominance of the collective over the individual. Europe is returning to the pre-capitalist past, and the entire system is returning to this past. True, the “dismantlers” had one problem – the USSR. The thing is that while the USSR existed, it was impossible to put pressure on its middle classes, it was impossible to put much pressure on the periphery. And it was necessary to somehow solve the Soviet problem – to strangle it in an embrace.

The post CAPITALISM IS A HISTORICAL CRIMINAL CONSPIRACY first appeared on Global Policy.

The acronym RAND is an acronym for Research and Development. In May 1948, RAND began its independent existence when it separated from the Douglas Company and became an independent, private, non-profit, non-partisan organization. Since then, RAND’s mission has been to help shape policy and decision making. One of RAND’s primary goals remains ensuring U.S. national security by conducting research and analyzing the most pressing issues facing the U.S. government. The corporation closely cooperates with the Pentagon and also conducts research on social and international issues.

During the first decades, RAND was mainly engaged in solving technical problems – designing aircraft, rocket technology and satellites. In the early 60s, RAND specialists were actively engaged in computer technology and programming. But already from the early 50s, RAND began to work on orders from other American government organizations, conducting research on national security issues. At first, exclusively on military-technical, and then on strategic aspects. At the same time, RAND remained a non-profit organization, its entire budget was and is spent on current projects.

Over time, the research center acquired specialists in the social sciences — political science, economics, sociology, psychology, etc. — and RAND began to fulfill orders from the U.S. government on an ever-widening range of issues. Today, RAND publishes reports on a wide range of topics — from health care and drug control to labor market research, regional integration, ecology, international relations, and security issues in both the U.S. and other countries.

The corporate headquarters are still located in Santa Monica, California (corporate headquarters), but over time RAND has opened offices in New York (Council for Aid to Education), Washington (Arlington, Virginia (just outside Washington, D.C.)), Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and, since the early 1990s, outside the United States — in Leiden, The Netherlands (RAND Europe headquarters), the United Kingdom (Cambridge, United Kingdom), Germany (Berlin, Germany), and Qatar (Doha, Qatar). In addition to its branches, RAND also has three field sites: in Langley (home to the CIA), in Boulder, Colorado, and, most recently, in Moscow.

The RAND Corporation has 11 research departments: the Washington Defense Research Office, management sciences, resources analysis, engineering sciences, environmental sciences, social sciences, physics, systems science, mathematics, computer science, and economics (i.e., the departments correspond to academic disciplines rather than to research nomenclature; the divisions are professional rather than functional).

The main organizational principle of RAND is a high degree of decentralization

The department has considerable freedom of action not only in selecting employees, but also in determining the research program. It is also an independent unit in financial terms – each department has an independent budget, annually approved by the management of the corporation; from these funds the work of any employee of the department is paid, regardless of whether he performs work within the department or participates in an interdisciplinary project.

The work of the RAND Corporation is carried out either within a department or in an interdisciplinary group created specifically for the implementation of a particular project. Work on a project begins with the appointment of a group leader. The leader works alone for some time, trying to formulate a clear statement of the problem, the purpose of the research, and the means of achieving it. Having completed the preparatory work, he begins to select a group, and this selection is mainly on a voluntary basis. The size of the group may vary – from one or two people to several dozen. A fairly typical case is when a group includes three or four specialists in different fields of knowledge.

The result of work on any task is a report. Initially, the group develops a draft report for internal use only (sometimes at this stage a decision may be made on the inappropriateness of further work on the topic and the dissolution of the group). Then the material is finalized and sent to the customer in the form of a final report, and each report is traditionally considered an expression of the personal opinion of its authors, and not of the entire corporation as a whole (the corporation is responsible only for the overall professional level and deadlines for completing the work). Only in particularly important cases – when it comes to either a problem of vital importance to the country or an extremely controversial issue – can RAND management make an official recommendation to the customer on behalf of the entire corporation.

Цели и задачи

Officially, the RAND Corporation is “a nonprofit institution dedicated to improving the policies of [American] society through research and analysis.”

The organization’s goals are defined briefly but broadly – to advance and promote scientific, educational, and charitable activities in the interests of the public welfare and national security of the United States.

RAND also sets the task of developing and identifying new methods for analyzing strategic problems and new strategic concepts.

To achieve its goals, the corporation organizes conferences (international and national), symposia and seminars, briefings; issues press releases; participates in the creation of radio and television programs; organizes briefings and presentations for members of the government, opposition political forces, political and industrial organizations, and conducts educational and training programs.

Rand also has a “fully accredited” graduate school, which has the right to award a doctorate (Ph. D.) in social and political science.

History of RAND’s development

During the war, the United States mobilized a large group of civilians, primarily scientists and engineers, to fight on the “technological front.” In a relatively short time, this group created such innovations as the atomic bomb, radar, and the proximity fuse. It also developed and refined a new analytical method, operations research, which was successfully applied to improve the effectiveness of air defense, bombing, and naval operations.

At the end of the war, when this team began to disintegrate, the War Department decided to retain some of the most talented employees so that they would continue to develop military technology in the coming years, and in particular to continue their work in the field of operations research. It was with this in mind that General H. H. Arnold, Commander-in-Chief of the Army Air Forces, submitted to higher authorities a proposal for an agreement between the Air Force and the Douglas aircraft manufacturer. The proposal was approved, and in accordance with it, a unique experimental institution was created, which received the name “Project RAND”. The acronym RAND was composed of the first letters of the English words Research and Development. “Project RAND” was created as a division of the Douglas firm under a contract worth $ 10 million.

The organization began operations in 1946 with the stated goal of conducting “a broad-based research program devoted to intercontinental warfare in all aspects except ground operations.” The stated mission also included recommending to the Air Force “preferred methods and means.” Project RAND personnel were immediately tasked with examining new and unexplored possibilities that might interest the military.

His first major work was a study entitled “Preliminary Design for an Experimental Earth-Circling Spacecraft.” Although artificial satellites were then considered mostly the stuff of science fiction, this 1946 document provided a detailed assessment of the prospects for scientific satellites and space exploration by 50 scientists. Because the study proved remarkably prescient, it later contributed greatly to RAND’s prestige. (RAND’s space studies were not the only ones to prove prescient. When the proposed launch date for Sputnik I was announced in mid-1957, it later turned out to be off by only two weeks.)

Other early RAND research covered such entirely new areas as the use of rocket engines for strategic weapons (missiles), nuclear propulsion, game theory as applied to warfare, new air defense concepts, new aircraft design, metal fatigue, and high-energy radiation.

In its first year, RAND began adding policy experts, economists, and psychologists to its staff so that its theoretical research would not be limited to the hard sciences.

As the RAND Corporation grew, it became clear to its founders that the experiment had been a success

Not only was the talented scientific staff created during the war partially preserved, but the War Department also had at its disposal a creative apparatus of a scale and scope that would have been impossible to create in any other way at any price. The RAND Corporation provided long-term theoretical research in a wide variety of fields, recommendations that could not have been developed in the offices of official government agencies whose employees had adapted their thinking to the needs of the day and the solution of narrow problems.

It also became apparent that an organization like the RAND Corporation was more flexible and manageable than any university center, where there were too many problems associated with security and departmental boundaries in recruiting large research teams to study problems across disciplines.

The RAND Corporation did a great deal of work on nuclear proliferation, analyzing the economic, political, and technical aspects of developing nuclear capabilities in various countries.

The Corporation also carried out a number of secret programs to develop military technology, including a rotating scanning camera for aerial reconnaissance, over-the-horizon radar, a “silent” aircraft for night aerial reconnaissance, and new methods of bombing.

The Corporation did a great deal of work for the Atomic Energy Commission on nuclear weapons design and performance. At least one of the new, high-yield nuclear bombs now in the U.S. arsenal was created using ideas that arose from research conducted by the RAND Corporation.

Another computer-based technique developed by the RAND Corporation is electronic modeling, or creating a computer-based system that simulates the operation of another system, which could be anything from a model of the human heart to a planned weapons system.

The RAND Corporation has developed a number of very complex and subtle mathematical methods, in particular linear programming, dynamic programming, problem sequencing, nonlinear programming, the Monte Carlo method, game theory, etc. The RAND Corporation is also the developer of the concept of “flexible response”, “counterforce”, etc. RAND also develops new approaches in the field of futurology and technical forecasting methods. The most famous method is known as “Delphi”.

Indeed, this organization can be designated as a phenomenon among all specialized research centers. It stands out sharply in the intellectual abilities of its employees, providing long-term theoretical research in various fields, and these recommendations cannot be developed in the offices of official government agencies, since the unique methodology of the RAND corporation allows finding non-standard and the most effective solutions to various problems in a short time. Thus, we can give a fairly simple example: RAND received a request from a certain administrative agency to solve a problem that consisted of an insufficient number of elevators in the building. Consequently, employees constantly complained that they had to wait for the elevator for a long time. Increasing the number of elevators implied high costs. Therefore, RAND specialists came to the following solution. They proposed hanging mirrors on each floor. Thus, women could look at themselves while waiting for the elevator, and men, in turn, had the opportunity to look at women in the mirrors. Such an unconventional way out of the situation. Thus, the problem was solved by changing the goal, which was not to reduce the waiting time, but to create the impression that it had become shorter. As for more serious problems, it is also possible that completely new means are developed, which are not at all new goals are achieved. For example, the data from one of the war games, which was conducted to study the military capabilities of the United States, served to adopt a number of measures to delineate powers between law enforcement agencies and national security agencies, which, in turn, ensured a higher quality defense of the country in the future.

The post RAND CORPORATION first appeared on Global Policy.

This is a banal demolition of buildings, for some Mercantile interests that have ceased to suit the owners of these buildings (“Owners of owners”). But such a “Grand show”, how could it not be used for other, global purposes. And they took advantage of it and even try to continue using the “effects”as time passes.

The fact that “9/11” is not a terrorist attack, but an industrial demolition of buildings, has long been no secret for experts in the field of architecture and construction. But for those who are far from these specialties, the question remains unclear to this day. Biased media – both Western and Russian-contribute to this. The price of truth in this case is too high – at stake is the legitimacy of all US foreign policy activities in recent years, not to mention the moral aspect.

Conspiracy practices: the 9/11 Nuclear demolition

The official story of September 11 is like a bag full of lies, and this seems to be a proven fact for the alternative community. So what really happened? A new series of revelations by a former Russian nuclear intelligence officer is shocking even those who believe they have a clear idea of what is going on behind the scenes.

When ordinary people saw how two planes hit the twin Towers of the world Trade Center in new York on September 11, and how the Twin Towers collapsed in clouds of dust, they were too shocked by these events to criticize the events themselves. And so since then, strange ideas have been imprinted in their heads: that hollow aluminum planes can allegedly punch through steel buildings, while completely disappearing into them, and that aviation fuel (kerosene) allegedly can “melt” these steel buildings into microscopic volatile steel powder…

Sooner or later, these ridiculous delusions had to be discarded. The destruction of the Twin Towers has absolutely nothing to do with” planes”, as well as with the fire allegedly caused by”planes”. This is an obvious fact that has occupied the minds of millions of Americans who are dissatisfied with the official interpretation of the destruction of the world Trade Center for the past 6 years, at least. When the initial shock caused by the events of September 11 passed, many people began to realize that there were simply too many inconsistencies in the official version.

The first thing that caught their attention was that the order of destruction of the Twin Buildings did not coincide with the order of their destruction by aircraft. The South Tower, which was hit by the second plane, collapsed first. While the North Tower, which was hit by the first plane, collapsed the second. This means that the “fires” took 1 hour and 42 minutes to destroy the first tower and only 56 minutes to destroy the second. Given that the fires in both Towers were caused by approximately the same amount of kerosene, and given that the towers were Twin (i.e. absolutely identical in strength), this discrepancy was the first clear indication that their destruction had nothing to do with the fire.

The next realization came when researchers on September 11 began to consider the fact that building 7 of the world Trade Center (an exceptionally strong modern 47-story skyscraper on a steel frame) also collapsed in a similar way in the early evening of the same day, but it did not hit any aircraft. If the destruction of the Twin Towers was officially blamed on kerosene, which was brought by “planes”, the destruction of WTC-7 was inexplicable to such an extent that the official Report Of the Commission of inquiry on September 11 preferred not to mention the destruction of building 7 at all – as if the fact of the destruction of a 47-story modern skyscraper did not deserve even mention.

A comparison of all these events and the many absurdities surrounding the destruction of the WTC led the first researchers on September 11 to realize that the authorities were just fooling them and that the destruction of the world Trade Center had nothing to do with kerosene or “planes”, because planes were simply not needed. The very fact that building 7 of the WTC collapsed in the early evening of September 11, 2001, successfully proved that the terrorist planes were unnecessary and that the destruction of the world Trade Center would have happened in any case – regardless of the “planes”. Someone just wanted the world Trade Center to collapse, and that’s why it collapsed. From this moment, the so-called “movement for the truth about September 11″was born.

People began to accuse the US government of deliberately destroying the world Trade Center in a method that is widely used in the construction industry and is known as “demolition.” More and more people in America are beginning to blame their own government for being the main culprit behind the September 11 attacks, and in the end, more than 65% of the US population expressed their disbelief at the official explanation for the September 11 attacks and the destruction of the world Trade Center.

In fact, anyone who watched the news videos of that time closely enough will be able to remember these freeze-frames where the “third explosion” is mentioned»:

CAPTIONS ON THE SCREEN: “SIENEN 10.03 BREAKING NEWS – THE THIRD EXPLOSION SHATTERED THE WORLD TRADE CENTER IN NEW YORK” AND ” SIENEN 10.13 BREAKING NEWS – THE THIRD EXPLOSION DESTROYED THE WORLD TRADE CENTER IN NEW YORK»

Here it is-the same seditious video report by CNN, which showed lines of text claiming that there was a “third explosion” that first “shattered” and then “destroyed” the South Tower of the world Trade Center. The North Tower (the one with the antenna) had not fallen by then – it would fall a little later from the “fourth explosion” – but CNN would already have received a severe reprimand from “good people” by then and would no longer mention such seditious things as “explosions”. The twin towers of the world Trade Center will be declared “destroyed by kerosene”, and the building of the WTC number 7 (which did not hit any aircraft of the so – called “terrorists”) – “destroyed by diesel fuel” (the stock of which was stored in the building for emergency diesel generators).

For obvious reasons, most people who disagree with the official “kerosene” theory accuse the US government of deliberately demolishing the world Trade Center.

However, these people do not have a sufficient understanding of the industrial processes of demolition of buildings in General, and the actual demolition of the world Trade Center in particular. For this reason, a certain number of “conspiracy theories” have emerged, which range from claims that the WTC was allegedly “booby-trapped with conventional explosives”, to claims that it was allegedly demolished using the so-called “nano-termite” (some mystical and hitherto unheard-of substance), which was allegedly used in the form of “spraying” on every metal part of the supporting structures of the Twin Towers.

There are also more bizarre conspiracy theories – the theory of WTC demolition using laser beams from space, for example. Of course, the authors of these various conspiracy theories cannot yield to each other, and thus they spend precious time not only accusing the US government of being the main culprit of September 11, but also accusing each other of trying to “muddy the waters of truth”. The common problem with all these conspiracy theorists is that they simply don’t know what really happened to the world Trade Center, and most importantly, they don’t know why it happened.

The author of this article tried to present the reader with something different. Instead of offering another “conspiracy theory”, he offers his expert opinion, in addition to his testimony, which goes along with his personal experience and knowledge gained as a result of serving in the relevant post in the Soviet Army. I hope that as a result of this approach, the reader will get a much better explanation about the demolition of the WTC, compared to what he could get on some Internet forum specializing in conspiracy theories about September 11.

«Ground Zero» and «ground zero»

First, I would like to remind everyone that the site of the former world Trade Center in new York is called “Ground Zero” in English [“ground zero” or “epicenter” in the understanding of the Russian-speaking reader]. Many people don’t seem to realize exactly what the words “ground zero” mean or how important evidence they are.

Many people seem to think of” Ground Zero ” as a proper name – as if it were the name of a city or a ship. However, few people remember today that the strange name ” ground zero “was assigned to the site of the former WTC too quickly to be a”Proper Name”. Almost immediately after the Twin Towers collapsed (a few hours before the WTC building 7 collapsed)-that is, around noon on September 11, 2001 – almost all officials and some reporters already began calling the site of the former WTC the strange words “ground zero”. All the newscasts that were printed the next day also referred to the site of the former WTC as “ground zero”, and these strange words were still written in lowercase letters at the time.

This use of the term “ground zero” in reference to the area of the former WTC continued throughout September 12, 2001. And some news outlets continued to use the lowercase term “ground zero” throughout September 13, 2001. And only then, as if someone realized their mistake, the status of this strange name suddenly suddenly increased to “Ground Zero” with Capital Letters and as such, it finally turned into a Proper Name. But what did the words “ground zero” mean while they were still written in lowercase letters – that is, in English? at the moment when they have not yet acquired the status of a Proper Name?

Why, almost immediately after the destruction of the Twin Towers, were these strange words used to refer to the place of the WTC? Was this a mistake caused by the confusion in the midst of the unprecedented events of September 11? I would say Yes. This was undoubtedly a mistake caused by the General confusion and confusion.

However, this was not a mistake in the sense that an inappropriate name was chosen to mark the site of the WTC’s demolition – if only because it was too early at the time to choose a proper proper name at all. In fact, Civil Defense experts were absolutely right when they designated this zone with the words “ground zero”. There was absolutely no mistake about it. It was, in fact, “ground zero” in the very sense that civil Defense experts understand The term. However, this was a mistake in the sense that these strange words “ground zero” were inadvertently “leaked” to journalists, and through them – to the General public. After that, it was too late to try to hush up the widespread use of this strange designation for the Civil Defense service. And so desperate American officials simply had no other chance than to “Title” these seditious words and thus transform this own definition of the Civil Defense service into a Proper Name.

First, I would like to quote something about one of the heroes of September 11-police detective John Walcott (John Walcott), one of the volunteers of “Ground Zero”. He had spent a fair amount of time in that very spot, sorting through the wreckage of the world Trade Center. He spent enough time there to earn a strange disease: myeloma in the last stage. Just two paragraphs of his statements, published in an article with the frightening title “Death by Dust”, managed to contain and show us all these strange and” inexplicable ” things – which the reader will need as a basic prerequisite for understanding the main points of this article – both about dust and about radiation:

“…Due to the fact that Walcott was a detective, he spent five months of his life not only at Ground Zero, but also at Fresh Kills [new York city’s main landfill located on Staten island]. And as much as the air of Lower Manhattan suffocated him, he was terrified of the Staten island dump. Walcott knew that all the contents of the towers had collapsed with them – tables, lights, computers. But with the exception of occasional steel beams, the detritus he sifted consisted entirely of tiny particles of dust – it contained no pieces of furniture, no lighting fixtures, not even a computer mouse.

Sometimes detectives took shelter in wooden sheds, in an attempt to escape what Walcott calls “all that weird bad air.” One day, he was sitting in such a shed with his colleagues over a meal of cookies and soft drinks when some FBI agents entered. They were dressed in full chemical protection kits, complete with gas masks, which they also gave extra tightness by gluing them with adhesive tape to protect them from fumes. As Walcott surveyed the scene, comparing highly protected FBI agents to new York cops wearing respirator masks, the question flashed through his mind: what exactly was wrong with this picture?…”

Yes, Mr. Walcott, unfortunately, there was something really “wrong”, quite “wrong” in this strange picture…

The FBI agents, who did not hesitate to appear in full chemical protection kits, and even additionally taped, in the face of unprotected “plebs”, knew the truth. That is why they do not suffer from leukemia or any other type of cancer in the last stage. These FBI agents will clearly live a long and happy life, despite their brief visit to ” Ground Zero»…

If you had opened a modern dictionary and looked at what exactly this strange term meant then, you would not have needed to ask your question; you would have understood immediately what was “wrong” with this ” Ground Zero»:

GROUND ZERO-A POINT ON THE GROUND VERTICALLY BELOW – OR VERTICALLY ABOVE-THE EXPLOSION POINT OF AN ATOMIC OR THERMONUCLEAR BOMB

All possible meanings of the term “ground zero ” described by Webster’s New international Comprehensive Dictionary of the English Language (encyclopedia Lux 1999, ISBN 1-888777796), page 559.

It should be noted that John Walcott finally managed to survive, unlike many of his colleagues who also worked on “Ground Zero”, but who were much less lucky… on December 17, 2007, a brief news flashed on the Internet that John Walcott had finally undergone a truly strange (and extremely painful) operation-a bone marrow transplant. From this point on, he can really live on (on immunosuppressants that will prevent rejection of the transplanted bone marrow; and without the ability to leave their home because their immune system has ceased to exist and the slightest infection can become fatal for them).

In case you don’t know what “bone marrow transplant” means, I have to explain

Bone marrow transplantation is required for patients who have suffered from heavy doses of penetrating or secondary radiation (or both) and whose bone marrow (the bone marrow responsible for blood regeneration) has been completely killed by this radiation. Radiation has a strange property – it always affects the bone marrow cells to the greatest extent in comparison with all other cells of the body. This is why the vast majority of radiation victims suffer from leukemia. The higher the dose of radiation that affected them, the more bone marrow cells were killed and the more severe their leukemia. John Walcott was clearly suffering from the most severe form of leukemia. Because until the moment when he was lucky enough to receive a bone marrow transplant, he lived solely on constant infusions of donor blood, due to the fact that his own blood was not regenerated completely.

In addition to the fact that radiation kills or very seriously damages the bone marrow, it also causes various forms of cancer that affect different organs or even several organs at the same time – especially in cases where the victim was exposed to radioactive dust that got into the respiratory or digestive organs. However, in the latter case, it is very easy for dishonest doctors and other health officials to find plausible “explanations” for these cancers. They can easily claim that this is allegedly the result of exposure to” asbestos dust”,” toxic fumes”,” toxic dust particles ” and the like. But when it comes to bone marrow damage, these liars are caught red-handed. Bone marrow damage can only be caused by radiation.

And that’s why those same FBI agents were given full chemical protection kits, along with gas masks, and additionally taped “to protect against fumes” during their visit to “Ground Zero”. Because they chose not to suffer later from leukemia and other cancers. And so when they also covered their outfits with duct tape, they didn’t do it to “protect themselves from fumes,” as John Walcott thought. They did this in order to protect themselves from flying radioactive dust and, especially, from radioactive vapor, which they did not intend to inhale or swallow.

VOLUNTEERS ON “GROUND ZERO” AMONG THE WRECKAGE OF THE TWIN TOWERS AND AMONG THE CLOUDS OF RADIOACTIVE VAPOR RISING FROM THE WRECKAGE ABOUT FIVE WEEKS AFTER THE EVENTS

Yes, I suspect that many readers will be shocked by this revelation and may not believe me – assuming that I am simply speculating on unproven facts. However, the above-mentioned story of John Walcott and the FBI agents dressed up in chemical protection during a visit to ground zero has nothing to do with me personally. They exist on the Internet as a fact, and they exist completely independently of the modest personality of the author of these lines. They exist as independently of it as the legal definition of the term “ground zero”, which in pre-9/11 dictionaries was as follows

GROUND’ ZE’RO” – A POINT ON THE SURFACE OF THE EARTH OR WATER DIRECTLY BELOW -, DIRECTLY ABOVE -, OR WHERE AN ATOMIC OR HYDROGEN BOMB EXPLODED

Webster’s unabridged Encyclopedia of the English Language (1989 edition, printed in 1994, ISBN 0-517-11888-2).

“GROUND ZERO” = A POINT ON THE GROUND DIRECTLY BELOW THE EXPLOSION PRODUCED BY A NUCLEAR WEAPON

Dictionary of Military Terms (Peter Collins publishing, 1999, ISBN 1-901659-24-0).

“GROUND ZE-RO”/,. ’ .. / NOUN [UNCOUNTABLE] THE PLACE WHERE THE NUCLEAR BOMB EXPLODED, WHERE THE GREATEST DESTRUCTION OCCURRED

“GROUND ZERO” NOUN 1 [A NOUN; USUALLY SINGULAR] THE EXACT LOCATION WHERE A NUCLEAR BOMB EXPLODED

Cambridge advanced Learner’s Dictionary, 2nd Edition. (2nd Edition 2006, ISBN-13 978-0-521-60499-4 is the post-9/11 edition, widely available).

Above were full, unabridged interpretations of the term “ground zero”. This was the only definition and the only one that carried its true meaning…

However, if you do not believe your eyes and prefer to rush to the nearest bookstore to buy some English dictionary, then take your time. When you run into the store, you will be even more surprised, because it is no longer possible to find any dictionary containing the only and only correct interpretation of this strange term. Those dictionaries that were published before September 11, such as those mentioned above, and that contained a single definition of the term “ground zero”, were long ago removed from the bookshelves and replaced with new editions. Unfortunately, the English language itself was one of the earliest victims of September 11…

The six photos below were not in the original version of the article in Nexus, but for clarity, I decided to add them to the online version. These photos compare similar dictionaries of the same firms printed before and after the name “ground zero” was inadvertently assigned to the site of the nuclear demolition of the world Trade Center:

INTERPRETATION OF THE TERM “GROUND ZERO” IN THE MICROSOFT ENCARTA DICTIONARY-1999 RELEASE

INTERPRETATION OF THE TERM “GROUND ZERO” IN THE ENCARTA DICTIONARY OF MICROSOFT -2001

Above is the Microsoft Encarta dictionary, released in 1999 and 2001

INTERPRETATION OF THE TERM “GROUND ZERO” IN THE ADVANCED DICTIONARY OF AMERICAN ENGLISH LONGMAN FIRST 2000 ISSUE

INTERPRETATION OF THE TERM “GROUND ZERO” IN THE ADVANCED DICTIONARY OF AMERICAN ENGLISH LONGMAN FIRST 2007 ISSUE

Above-the Advanced Dictionary of American English Longman first and second editions (2000 and 2007) respectively

MERRIAM-WEBSTER STUDENT DICTIONARY 1999

MERRIAM-WEBSTER LEARNER’S DICTIONARY 2010

Above is the 1999 Merriam-Webster Dictionary and the 2010 Merriam-Webster Learner’s Dictionary. (the first dictionary was not reissued, and the second dictionary was not published before the events of September 11, but the two dictionaries are approximately equal in status and in the number of words and pages).

So don’t be surprised that almost all new English dictionaries printed after September 11 have started to interpret “ground zero” as supposedly having more than one meaning. At least three to five new meanings have been assigned to this term, which range from the alleged “greatest destruction”, “great disorder”, and “fuss” to the alleged “base level” and “starting point”. Others preferred a different approach: the publishers of the new Dictionary of Modern English Longman, for example, describe ” ground zero “as” the place where the bomb exploded”, without specifying that the” bomb ” in this case would have to be exclusively nuclear or thermonuclear. In addition to all this, now almost all dictionaries – both large and small-have begun to include this (or rather “these”) interpretation. Previously, before September 11, the term “ground zero”, because of its specificity, existed only in very large dictionaries of English – such as Webster’s Unabridged, full of Collins, full of American Heritage, and the like (and in them it had a single definition). This term was not previously included in smaller dictionaries – such as those intended for students and advanced learners (the only exception was the Longman Dictionary of American English – mentioned above). For example, “ground zero” was not included in the Oxford advanced Learner’s Dictionary 4th, 5th, and 6th issues published before September 11, 2001. Even the special 4th “encyclopedia” edition of this dictionary, which was 50% larger than the regular edition, did not include a definition of the term “ground zero”. It was only the 7th edition of the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, first published in 2005, that finally began to define the term.

After 9/11, the Macmillan Advanced English Dictionary and the Longman Modern English Dictionary, all kinds of new Meriam-Webster dictionaries, most of The new American Heritage dictionaries, the new Collins English dictionaries, the Microsoft encart dictionary, and many other new dictionaries, as well as encyclopedias – all of them, after the events of September 11, began to include the term “ground zero” and interpret it as if it had more than one meaning, trying their best to distract their readers from the former nuclear (and only nuclear) nature of this term.

By the way, the publishers of the last Cambridge advanced Learner’s Dictionary mentioned above deserve praise for not deceiving their readers. They had the courage not to include the confusing definitions of “ground zero” in their post-9/11 dictionary. This is in sharp contrast to the behavior of publishers of all other dictionaries who have entered the service of those who lie to the people about September 11. There were even attempts to “prove” that the name “ground zero” was allegedly used to describe the area [where the WTC stood] even before the events of September 11. All these linguistic attempts concerning “ground zero” are actually easy to explain. This strangely transparent name, which was hastily given to the site of the demolition of the former world Trade Center in new York, was too transparent to leave its former only interpretation directly “as is” in the new English dictionaries…

Nuclear demolition of the WTC

The author of these lines was a career officer in the Soviet military unit 46179, which was also known as the”Special Control Service of the 12th Main Directorate of the Ministry of Defense of the USSR”. The 12th General Directorate, in turn, was the organization that was responsible in the USSR for the safe storage, production control, routine maintenance, etc.of the entire nuclear Arsenal of the country. While the Special Control Service was responsible for detecting nuclear explosions. It was also responsible for monitoring compliance with international treaties related to nuclear testing. This is particularly important in light of the existence of the so-called “Treaty on Peaceful Nuclear Explosions” of 1976 between the USSR and the United States of America [known in the USSR as the “Treaty between the USSR and the United States on Underground Nuclear Explosions for Peaceful Purposes of 1976”]. In accordance with the provisions of this Treaty, the parties were obliged to inform each other of all nuclear explosions for non-military purposes.

During my service with the aforementioned organization in the late ‘ 80s, I learned of the existence of a so-called “nuclear emergency demolition system” built into the twin Towers of the world Trade Center in new York. The actual “nuclear demolition system” was based on powerful thermonuclear charges (about 150 kilotons in TNT equivalent), which were located at a depth of 50 meters below the lowest point of the Foundation of each of the Towers. At the time, it seemed strange to me, to be honest, because it was hard to believe that the US authorities could be crazy enough to demolish buildings in the middle of a populated city using underground nuclear explosions. However, if I understood this correctly, no one was actually going to demolish the world Trade Center. It was just a way to avoid certain bureaucratic obstacles. The terrifying imaginative nuclear demolition system was built into the Twin Towers not to demolish them in reality, but simply to get permission to build them at all.

The problem was that the new York city building code at the time (as well as the Chicago building code) did not allow the Department of Buildings to issue permits for any skyscraper until the designer also provided the Department with a satisfactory way to demolish such a structure, both for future demolition and for demolition in the event of an emergency. Since in the late 60s (when the construction of the Twin Towers was first proposed), this type of steel-framed building was a fundamentally new concept, no one knew how to demolish such buildings. Traditional (“normal”) demolition methods were only applicable to buildings of the old type. Something new was needed for the incredibly strong steel Twin Towers, Something new that could convince officials From the Department of Buildings to grant permission for their construction. And this “something new” was finally found: nuclear demolition.

Brief history of the concept of nuclear and nuclear demolition

The initial idea of using nuclear charges to demolish various structures was born almost simultaneously with the appearance of nuclear weapons themselves in the early 50s. In the beginning, nuclear weapons were not called “nuclear”, but “atomic”, and therefore the concept of demolishing buildings using these weapons received the appropriate name – “atomic demolition”. These words managed to survive half a century and, despite the renaming of the former atomic weapons to “nuclear weapons”, these words have remained in the language to this day. They are still found in the names of special engineering devices – “SADM” and “MADM”. [That there are portable nuclear charges, also known in the USSR as “nuclear suitcases”, “nuclear mines” and”nuclear satchels”.] The first of the two stands for “Special Atomic Demolition Munitions” (“Special Atomic demolition Munition”), the second – as “Medium Atomic Demolition Munitions” (can be translated into Russian as “medium-Caliber Atomic Demolition Munition”). Many people mistakenly believe that the first of them is the so – called “new world”. “SADM” – allegedly means “Small Atomic Demolition Munitions”, not “Special…” (that is, “Small Atomic demolition Munition”, not “Special…”).

In fact, this is not a particularly big mistake – to call this device “small” instead of” special”, since the so – called” SADM ” is really very small-its explosive power does not exceed 1 kiloton in TNT equivalent. Given that all modern portable nuclear devices have a variable power, which can be set to the lowest level of 0.1 kilotons, and in some products even 0.01 kilotons (equivalent to 100 and 10 tons of TNT, respectively), they really have every right to be called “small” ammunition.

Other popular names for these “Special Atomic Demolition Munitions” are: “mini-nuke “(it is difficult to translate it into Russian verbatim, but let’s translate it as” nuclear mini-charge”) and” suite-case nuke “(“nuclear suitcase”), although the second is probably a logical misnomer. In reality, most of these weapons are similar to large pots that weigh about 50-70 kilograms, and are designed to be carried on your back – like satchels. Therefore, it is unlikely that such devices will fit in a suitcase. However, there are also modern portable nuclear weapons that are made from plutonium-239 instead of uranium-235. As a result of a much smaller critical mass of plutonium, their dimensions can be significantly reduced – some of the later portable nuclear charges based on plutonium can actually fit in a “briefcase”.

“Medium-caliber Nuclear Demolition munitions” (“MNDM”) are much larger in both size and explosive power. Their power can reach up to 15 kilotons in TNT equivalent [translator’s note: 15 kilotons is the power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima], weight – up to 200 kilograms, and size – approximately the size of a large gas cylinder used in a household.

Any of the above-mentioned “atomic demolition munitions” can be successfully used to destroy large objects that cannot be destroyed with a reasonable amount of conventional explosives – especially in the event of an emergency, when there is neither time nor opportunity to carefully prepare a” normal ” demolition procedure using conventional means. For example, it can be bridges, dams, tunnels, underground structures, large buildings of high strength, and so on.

However, the Efficiency (efficiency coefficient) of such demolition using “SADM” and “MADM” is very low. As you probably know, the main purpose of demolition (controlled destruction) of buildings by the “implosion” method is not just to destroy these buildings with explosions so that their fragments fly around, but to collapse them as clearly and accurately as possible, and with the minimum possible damage to extraneous structures.

[Translator’s note: “implosion” – as opposed to” explosion ” – is when the explosive energy is directed inwards, not outwards. To make it clearer, the grenade explodes because it is torn apart by the explosives inside it. While a typical plutonium-based nuclear charge contains a plutonium core, around which conventional explosive charges are located, which, when simultaneously detonated, “compress” this core from all sides, transferring plutonium by increasing the density of the material from a sub-critical state to a super-critical one at the same mass of plutonium. If in the case of a grenade we are dealing with an” explosive charge”, then in the case of the atomic bomb described above, we are dealing with an”implosive charge”. In the West, the word “implosion” is used not only to describe the construction of an atomic bomb, but also in the construction industry: demolition explosives is so that the debris of the buildings are not scattered in different directions, and Vice versa, as if they “evolved” into the building so that the building collapsed vertically and to mount the debris would take less space.]

Therefore, engineers who calculate the demolition of buildings must clearly identify the points of load-bearing structures on which to place explosive charges – in order to break these load-bearing structures in the right places. In almost all cases, explosives are attached at more than one point, since it is almost impossible that such structures have only one load-bearing beam or a single load-bearing column.

Demolition workers who are supposed to use nuclear weapons to demolish structures in an emergency cannot have sufficient time or engineering training to perform such complex calculations as in the case of conventional demolition of buildings with explosives. The maximum that such bombers can have is basic sapper training and basic skills in the use of nuclear weapons in General. The use of nuclear weapons in such cases is not intended to destroy the structure as carefully as possible, but to destroy it at all, and to destroy it at any cost.

The explosive power of an atomic munition used for such purposes will in any case be superfluous, and most of its explosive energy will be wasted – as in the case of any other nuclear explosion. Therefore, most of the energy released by a nuclear explosion of such an “atomic demolition device” will be spent on well-known factors of the nuclear explosion, such as light radiation, shock wave, penetrating radiation, and electromagnetic pulse.

As you can probably guess, none of these known damaging factors of an aerial nuclear explosion has the slightest relation to the actual task of demolition and can not contribute to it in the slightest way. However, all these destructive factors of a nuclear explosion will certainly contribute to the destruction of the surrounding area of the building being demolished – and the damage they will cause to the surrounding area can be very significant, most likely exceeding the cost of the actual demolition procedure.

Therefore, it is safe to say that nuclear demolition in the above sense will have a significantly lower Efficiency Compared to a well-calculated demolition using conventional explosives. Since in the case of the latter, almost all the energy of the explosion will be spent on interrupting the supporting structures, and not on creating a shock wave or light radiation.

In addition, an atomic demolition munition is quite expensive in itself. The cost of such a mini-device based on uranium is at least a couple of million us dollars, if not more (a similar device based on plutonium will cost much more). It is obvious that a thousand tons of TNT will cost less than a kiloton of nuclear ammunition. And at the same time, it is possible to use this thousand tons of TNT to demolish at least several buildings, while using a nuclear mini-charge can destroy a single building (and at the same time damage many others around).

Given all this, it can be concluded that it is not a reasonable solution to use small – or medium-caliber nuclear weapons to demolish any civilian infrastructure in peacetime, that is, in conditions where there is enough time to prepare for their demolition by conventional means. And in any case, “normal” demolition of buildings will cost less than nuclear. Nuclear charges can only be used to demolish structures in extreme circumstances.

So why was this most ancient concept of nuclear demolition, despite its low Efficiency compared to demolition with conventional explosives, and despite its high cost, finally brought back to life and used in the World Trade Center nuclear demolition system?

This was due to the emergence of a new generation of buildings that appeared in the late 60s. Namely, buildings on a steel frame. Despite the widespread misconception, there has never been a single case of a steel-framed skyscraper being demolished by a conventional “implosion” anywhere in the world. At least, before the destruction of the WTC Towers. Because almost all skyscrapers are relatively new buildings and their time to be demolished for uselessness has not yet come.

The tallest building ever demolished was the singer building in new York city, which was built in 1908 and demolished in 1968. This building was very stunted compared to the improbably strong modern skyscrapers, which used hollow steel beams in their supporting structure.

Therefore, despite the widespread misconception, it is actually impossible to destroy such a building on a steel frame using typical demolition methods. In the past, when buildings were brick or panel, their supporting structures were concrete pillars and concrete supporting beams. Sometimes these concrete supporting structures were reinforced by inserts of metal reinforcement, sometimes they were purely concrete. But in any case, it was possible to calculate the necessary amount of explosives that should be attached to these supporting structures in the right places (or explosives that should be placed inside holes drilled in such structures) in order to ensure that all these carriers are interrupted simultaneously, and thus ensure the collapse of the building exactly down and within the outline of its perimeter.

However, all this is no longer possible when it comes to modern buildings on a steel frame – such as, for example, the Twin Towers of the world Trade Center in new York, or the building number 7 WTC, or the Sears tower in Chicago.

Here is what the steel structure of one of the WTC Twin Towers looked like, for example:

STEEL STRUCTURE OF ONE OF THE WTC TWIN TOWERS UNDER CONSTRUCTION

There are no “load-bearing structures” in the former sense of the word – the tower Itself, as such, is a “load-bearing structure”. The steel frame in the shopping center consisted of exceptionally thick double-walled steel columns located in the center and around the perimeters. This so-called “hollow beam pattern” was a fundamentally new approach in construction, which allowed for spacious floors in which the ceilings were no longer supported by internal columns, traditionally used in previous structures. The Twin towers consisted of supporting hollow steel columns (square in cross-section) located on all four facades at a distance of one meter from each other and thus forming an exceptionally strong structure that also withstood all horizontal loads (for example, due to winds) and which took part in maintaining the weight of the Towers themselves on a par with the Central columns.

The structure of the Towers perimeters consisted of 59 such columns on each of the four facades. The Central core of the Towers consisted of 47 rectangular steel columns, which were a single unit from the granite base of Manhattan to the tops of the Towers. What all these columns looked like, you can see in the photo below, which shows the remains of such columns found on “ground zero” after the demolition of the WTC, following the September 11 attacks:

REMAINS OF STEEL COLUMNS FOUND ON “GROUND ZERO” AFTER WTC DEMOLITION

Note that these Central (rectangular in cross-section) and external (square in cross-section) columns clearly did not belong to the lower parts of the Twin Towers, but to the upper parts. So they were spared the strange process of pulverizing the steel into a powder, which was subjected to the lower parts of the structure of the Towers, of which nothing remained but microscopic steel dust.

And here is another photo-this is from the published report of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (“NIST”) – about September 11. This photo clearly shows how the steel columns of The towers perimeters looked during their construction:

STRUCTURE OF ASSEMBLIES OF PERIPHERAL COLUMNS OF LOAD BEARING WALLS OF WTC

These steel columns were improbably thick-walled – each wall was 2.5 inches (6.35 cm) thick, so the total thickness of each of the columns was 5 inches (12.7 cm).

WTC STEEL COLUMNS: EACH WALL IS 2.5 INCHES (6.35 CM) THICK. THE TOTAL THICKNESS OF EACH OF THE COLUMNS WAS 5 INCHES (12.7 CM)

To imagine how much this is, here is a good example for comparison: the frontal armor of the best of the world War II tanks – the T-34-was only 1.8 inches (4.5 cm) and it was single-wall.

However, at that time there was practically no artillery armor-piercing projectile that could penetrate this armor. Of course, no explosive will ever be able to break through the front armor of a tank (with the exception of only shaped charges; but even shaped charges will not be able to break through such armor in the sense in which we are considering it here – such charges will only be able to burn a narrow hole in the armor plate).

Taking into account that the steel frames of the Twin Towers consisted of double-walled columns that were almost three times thicker than the frontal armor of the T-34 tank, it is safe to say that it was impossible to find any way to simultaneously break such columns in many places to ensure the effect of “implosion” – which is the main goal of controlled destruction of buildings (demolition).

Of course, it was technically possible to destroy some of these columns in certain places, using exceptionally large shaped charges attached to each column, but even this improbable solution would never have led to the desired result. The towers were simply too tall and too strong – their steel frames would have to be broken in too many places on each of their floors – a solution that no one could afford. And even if someone could afford it, there would be no guarantee that such a high-rise structure would collapse right within the outline of its perimeter. Its wreckage could easily have been scattered for half a mile in the vicinity, given the sheer height of the buildings themselves [415 meters]. Therefore, it was absolutely impossible to demolish these buildings using traditional methods of demolition.

The same can be said of the WTC building 7 and the Sears tower in Chicago

Both buildings were constructed using similar thick double-walled steel frames, which were impossible to break at the same time in many places for the reasons discussed above. However, according to US laws governing the construction of skyscrapers, their architects must submit a satisfactory demolition project in order for the construction project to be approved by the Department of Buildings at all. No one can be allowed to build a skyscraper that cannot be demolished in the future. This is the main reason why such nuclear demolition systems are generally built into skyscrapers. This may sound ironic, but such systems of nuclear demolition of skyscrapers were not designed to demolish these very skyscrapers in fact, especially given that no one yet has practical experience in such an industry. The nuclear demolition systems were designed simply to persuade the Buildings Department to allow the construction itself. Apparently, the developers and apologists of such systems sincerely hope that their bold plans will not be put into practice during their own lives.

Как это работает?

First of all, the modern nuclear demolition system has nothing in common with the former idea of atomic demolition, which uses the “SADM” and “MADM” devices described above. This is a fundamentally new concept. In the process of modern nuclear demolition, a charge designed to destroy a building does not produce an atmospheric nuclear explosion – with its well-known atomic mushroom, light radiation, shock wave, and electromagnetic pulse. It explodes quite deep underground – almost exactly like a nuclear charge explodes during a typical underground nuclear test. Therefore, its explosion produces no shock wave, no light radiation, no penetrating radiation, no electromagnetic pulse. It can only cause relatively small damage to the environment due to subsequent radioactive contamination, which, however, the developers of such projects consider an insignificant factor that can be ignored.

What is the main difference between atmospheric and underground nuclear explosions?

At the initial stage of any nuclear (as well as thermonuclear) explosion, all its energy is released in the form of so – called “primary radiation”, which for the most part (almost 99%) is in the x – ray spectrum (and its remaining part-about 1% – is represented by gamma radiation, which causes radiation damage, plus radiation in the visible part of the spectrum, which produces a white flash).

Therefore, almost all the energy of a nuclear explosion, represented by x-rays, is spent on heating the air within a radius of tens of meters around the epicenter of the nuclear explosion. This is because x-rays cannot travel far in the air, due to the fact that they are quickly absorbed by the air.

Heating such a relatively small area of air around the epicenter leads to the fact that there is a known fireball, which is nothing but hot air. This luminous ball is the cause of the main striking factors of a nuclear explosion-light radiation and shock waves, since both of these factors occur exclusively due to high temperatures around its epicenter.

When it comes to an underground nuclear explosion, the picture is completely different. Since there is no air around the “end box”, all the energy instantly released at the moment of a nuclear explosion in the form of x-rays will be spent on heating the surrounding rock.

As a result, the rock will overheat, melt, and evaporate. The disappearance of the vaporized rock will cause the appearance of an underground cavity, the size of which directly depends on the explosive power of the nuclear munition used.

You can get an idea of how much rock can evaporate in an underground nuclear explosion from the table below, where the amounts of evaporable and molten rock of different types are represented by the principle of “tons of rock per kiloton of explosive power»:

Example: an explosion of a 150-kiloton thermonuclear charge placed deep enough in a granite rock will cause an underground cavity about 100 meters in diameter – similar to the one shown in the figure below

THE MECHANISM OF THE EXPLOSION OF A 150-KILOTON THERMONUCLEAR CHARGE AND THE CREATION OF AN UNDERGROUND CAVITY WITH A DIAMETER OF ABOUT 100 METERS

All skyscrapers have a Foundation, the lower point of which is located at a depth of 20-30 meters below the surface of the earth. Therefore, it is possible to calculate the position of the “end box” so that the nuclear explosion creates an underground cavity, the upper border of which would not reach the surface of the earth, but would reach the lower border of the Foundation of the skyscraper that is to be demolished.

For example, In the specific case of the twin Towers of the world Trade Center in new York, their foundations were located at a depth of 27 meters. While the 150-kiloton thermonuclear charges intended for their demolition were located at a depth of 77 meters (counting from the surface of the earth), or 50 meters below the underground bases of the Towers.

Such a thermonuclear explosion at a depth of 77 meters will create an exceptionally super heated underground cavity, the upper border of which will just reach the bottom point of the base of the Tower to be demolished. However, it will not reach the surface of the earth, which is still 27 meters away – so the surrounding buildings will not be exposed to the known damaging factors of a nuclear explosion (with the possible exception of only radioactive contamination). The demolished tower should lose its support point due to the disappearance of the Foundation, and sink into an overheated cavity, the temperatures inside of which should be high enough to melt the Tower building completely. The nuclear demolition systems for building 7 of the world Trade Center and the Sears tower in Chicago were also designed in a similar way.However, there is another factor that must be taken into account when calculating the system of nuclear demolition of skyscrapers

This is actually evaporated rock (in this case, granite), which is located inside the underground cavity. Where should all this former rock, converted to a gaseous state, go? The picture of physical processes in an underground nuclear explosion is very interesting. Let’s look at it.

Typical physical processes during a perfectly deep underground nuclear explosion:

TYPICAL PHYSICAL PROCESSES DURING AN IDEALLY DEEP UNDERGROUND NUCLEAR EXPLOSION

1) a Nuclear explosion begins to heat the rock around the epicenter.

2) the Rock evaporates. As a result of the disappearance of the evaporated rock, a so-called “primary cavity” appears, filled with former rock that has passed into a gaseous state. Exceptionally high gas pressure inside the cavity tends to expand it. The expansion of the cavity is due to the surrounding layer of still solid rock.

3) the Cavity reaches the final “secondary” size due to the fact that high gas pressure expands the cavity from its primary size (shown by the dotted line) to its secondary size. Since the expansion was due to the surrounding rock layer, this surrounding rock layer is very tightly compressed.

4) the Final picture: white shows the cavity (its secondary size); blue – the so – called “crumple zone” – i.e., the rock completely turned into a microscopic powder with a particle size of about 100 microns [comparable to the diameter of a human hair]; green – the so-called “crushing zone” – i.e., the zone of partially or completely crushed rock.

The diagram above shows all the important physical processes in a perfectly deep (i.e. located at a sufficient distance from the earth’s surface) underground nuclear explosion. It shows that the exceptionally high pressure of the vaporized rock inside the cavity does at least two important things. 1) it expands the cavity itself from the “primary” size to the “secondary” size. 2) because the expansion is due to the surrounding layers of solid rock, it produces two damage zones around the cavity; each of these two zones represents a different degree of damage to this rock.

The area immediately adjacent to the cavity is called the “crumple zone” in nuclear jargon. The thickness of this zone can be compared to the diameter of the cavity, and this zone itself is filled with a very strange material: rock completely crushed into powder. The powder is microscopic, with an average particle size of about 100 microns [slightly less than the thickness of a human hair]. Moreover, this state of matter inside the “crumple zone” is unique – it is not found anywhere in nature except after underground nuclear explosions.

If you pick up a stone from this area, but do it very carefully, it will still stick together as a whole and will resemble a stone in shape and color. However, it is only necessary to squeeze this “stone” with your fingers and it will immediately crumble into the microscopic powder that it consists of. The area next to the “crumple zone” is called the “crushing zone” in professional jargon. This zone is filled with rock, broken into various pieces-from very small (the size of millimeters), to relatively large fragments. The closer to the border of the “crumple zone”, the smaller such pieces will be, and the further away from the epicenter – the larger. Finally, there is almost no visible damage to the surrounding rock beyond the boundaries of the “crushing zone”.

However, above we have considered the physical processes that are true for a “perfectly deep” underground nuclear explosion. When the nuclear charge is not buried deep enough, the picture will be slightly different. The zones of “crushing” and “crumpling” will no longer be perfectly round, as in the previous case. They will be more elliptical – that is, comparable in shape to an egg, the sharp end of which is aimed up, or even more elongated up in comparison with the egg. This is due to the fact that the pressure of the vaporized gases meets less resistance towards the earth’s surface (because in this case the surface is too close), and therefore both the “crumple zone” and the “crushing zone” extend upwards much further than in any other direction.

ILLUSTRATION OF THE RESISTANCE OF THE SURROUNDING ROCK IN THE CASE WHEN THE CAVITY IS AT A SHALLOW DEPTH

The figure above is an illustration of the resistance of the surrounding rock when the cavity is at a shallow depth. It is obvious that the resistance of materials from the surface of the earth will be less than the resistance of materials in any other direction. And since everything always spreads only along the path of least resistance, it becomes clear why such a cavity extends mainly towards the earth’s surface and why it will never be perfectly round. The shape of such a cavity will always be elliptical.

When the upper boundaries of the “crushing zone” and “crumple zone” extending upwards meet the Foundation of the demolished Tower, the picture will differ even more. Because the materials that make up the Tower differ from the surrounding granite rock in terms of material resistance. In addition, there is a lot of empty space inside the Tower itself, while the granite rock in any other direction (to the sides and down) is solid. Therefore, the distribution of the upper boundaries of the zones of “crushing” and “crumpling” on the body of the Tower will be the greatest. In the case of the Twin Towers and the Sears tower ,the ” crushing zone “may well extend to a height of 350-370 meters, while the” crumple zone”, which moves immediately after, may reach 290-310 meters. However, in the case of the shorter building # 7 of the WTC, it completely falls into the” crumple zone ” – that is, it turns into powder completely. The ability of a nuclear explosion to pulverize steel and concrete is equally one of its unique features.

AN EXAMPLE OF THE FORMATION OF A MICROSCOPIC POWDER THAT COVERED THE WHOLE OF MANHATTAN AFTER THE DEMOLITION OF THE WTC

The photo above shows an example of this same microscopic powder that covered all of Manhattan after the WTC was demolished. Many mistakenly believed that it was supposedly “concrete powder”. No, it wasn’t concrete powder. It was the “powder of everything” – mostly represented by steel powder. Despite a common misconception, concrete was almost never used in the construction of the WTC. Concrete was used in very limited quantities in the very thin concrete slabs of the floors of the Twin Towers and nowhere else. The WTC Twin towers were mostly steel, not concrete.

And that’s why this tiny powder was mostly made of steel. Although, of course, it was not purely “steel powder” – there was also “furniture powder”, “wood powder”, “carpet powder”, “computer parts powder” and even “human powder”, since the people who remained in the Towers were just as much reduced to powder as steel, concrete and furniture.

Many people wonder why building 7 collapsed straight down quite neatly and completely, while each of the Twin Towers collapsed, scattering not only powder, but also quite large debris in a significant radius around. This question is quite easy to answer – if you look at the distribution of zones of “crumpling” and “crushing” on the buildings of the Twin Towers and building 7, the answer is obvious:

APPROXIMATE DISTRIBUTION OF DAMAGE ZONES IN CASE OF NUCLEAR DEMOLITION OF A SKYSCRAPER USING A 150-KILOTON THERMONUCLEAR CHARGE LOCATED AT A DEPTH OF 50 METERS BELOW THE FOUNDATION BASE

The figure above shows the approximate distribution of damage zones in the case of a nuclear demolition of a skyscraper using a 150-kiloton thermonuclear charge located 50 meters below the base of the Foundation. Don’t forget that the demolition charges in this particular case were buried not “ideally deep”, and therefore form zones of “crushing” and “crushing” would not “perfectly round” – they are elliptic, with a sharp point directed upwards, i.e. in the direction of least resistance of materials. From this it is easy to understand why building 7 fell completely into the “crumple zone” and why in the case of the demolition of building 7 there was no heavy intact top, which could cause an effect similar to what we see in the case of the fall of the Twins.

WORLD TRADE CENTER RUINS WITH COLLAPSED OUT CENTER OF FOUNDATION

The distribution of damage to the buildings of demolished skyscrapers can be understood much better if you view the details of the destruction of Gemini and WTC-7 on the corresponding video clips, which are available in a variety of YouTube.

The North Tower started falling a moment ago

These two photos show how the North Tower fell (it fell the second in a row). It is clearly visible that the Tower has turned into the smallest dust. At the bottom right, you can clearly see that building 7 (a beautiful brown glossy edition) was not damaged in the least. In the photo above, it seems that the WTC-7 is “shorter” than the one in the photo below, but this is not because the building was allegedly destroyed, but simply because the helicopter with the photographer was in motion, and the second photo was taken from a different angle and from a greater distance. The building of WTC-7 in reality will fall only 7 hours after this moment.

VIDEO:

Video (taken from three different points) of the fall of the North Tower of the world Trade Center. In this video, it is very clear that the intact top of the tower suddenly began to fall down, almost without encountering any resistance in its path – as if there were no fragments of steel structures under it, but a fine powder that could not resist more than just air. In fact, it was – the top of the tower here falls at a speed equal to the speed of free fall.

Video of the fall of the South Tower of the world Trade Center. This video also clearly shows the details of the fall – the intact top of the tower falls down at the speed of free fall, not meeting any fragments of structures in its path, but meeting only fine steel powder, which it throws on all sides as it falls.

This is a video of the fall of the North Tower. Here it is very interesting to notice a strong earthquake exactly 12 seconds before the start of the fall of the tower, which consisted of one main shock and one “aftershock”. According to the degree of concussion, it is clearly visible that the magnitude of the earthquake clearly exceeded five and a half points on the Richter scale – which indicates that this earthquake itself was caused by at least a 100-kiloton underground explosion. In fact, the magnitude of this earthquake was much higher – it was close to 5.8 on the Richter scale, since the earthquake was caused by the explosion of a 150-kiloton nuclear charge. In addition, after the fall of the Tower on the right side of it (after passing the truck) it is clearly visible as one of the surviving peripheral load-bearing assemblies (which looks like a steel “peak”) is crumbling into powder, which was missed by the falling top of the Tower

A DETAILED VIEW OF THE SAME SURVIVING STEEL BEARING PERIPHERAL ASSEMBLY, WHICH CRUMBLES INTO POWDER, BUT SHOT BY ANOTHER VIDEO CAMERA AT A SLIGHTLY MORE FAVORABLE ANGLE

And this is a well-known video recording of the fall of the North Tower made by Etienne Sauret, which, if you look closely, clearly shows the shaking of the top of the Tower exactly 12 seconds before the start of its fall. This is the same earthquake caused by the explosion of a 150-kiloton nuclear charge deep underground, which is seen in the previous video. These 12 seconds were needed for a nuclear explosion deep underground to vaporize enough rock and create the necessary gas pressure in the cavity, which eventually overcame the “ultimate strength” of the materials surrounding the cavity, and created a “wave of crumpling” that spread with supersonic speed through the body of the tower, turning it into a powdery structure.

THE “WAVE OF CRUMPLING” SPREAD AT SUPERSONIC SPEED THROUGH THE BODY OF THE TOWER, TURNING IT INTO A POWDERY STRUCTURE

To see the moment when the tower is shaken, try to fix your gaze fixedly on the tower itself and not be distracted, otherwise you may not pay attention to this shake

TURNING THE SOUTH TOWER INTO POWDER

And these are the details of turning the South Tower into powder (it fell first in a row, despite the fact that it was hit by the second “plane” of the so-called “terrorists” and the fire in it lasted for a much shorter period of time).

It should be added that, despite the obvious insufficiency of a 150-kiloton charge to pulverize the tallest skyscrapers to the top (as can be seen from the drawings and photos above, the Twin Towers were pulverized only at 80% of their full height, and their tops were intact and heavy), nuclear charges of greater power cannot be used in the nuclear demolition industry for purely legal reasons. The problem is that according to the “Soviet-American Treaty on Peaceful Nuclear Explosions of 1976”, the power of nuclear charges used for non-military purposes is limited to 150 kilotons for each individual explosion and one and a half megatons [1500 kilotons] of aggregate power for group explosions.

Therefore, the nuclear demolition industry had to fit into this legal framework: in the case of the world Trade Center demolition, as many charges as necessary could be used, but each of the charges should not exceed 150 kilotons. Therefore, the WTC nuclear demolition system consisted of three such charges – with an aggregate capacity of 450 kilotons. Those readers who have a hard time imagining how powerful a 150-kiloton charge is, may be reminded that the power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 was less than 20 kilotons.

«Planes»

Now, since I think the reader has already realized how strong the Twin Towers were, which could not be demolished by conventional explosives, but only by an underground thermonuclear explosion of high power, it seems to me that it will be very interesting to consider another question. Could aluminum passenger planes have pierced through these Twin Towers, as shown to us on TV?

VIDEO:

This is one of the most famous videos showing the ease with which an aluminum plane breaks into a steel tower – without slowing down and without the slightest detail of the plane falling back into the street

A PERSON ACCIDENTALLY CAUGHT IN THE FRAME DOES NOT REACT TO THE SOUND OF AN ALLEGEDLY “APPROACHING PLANE”

The most telling thing about this particular video is that a person who accidentally gets caught in the frame does not react to the sound of an alleged “approaching plane” or to the sound of an [aluminum] “plane” breaking through the [armor] of the South Tower [like a knife through butter]. This person begins to react only to the explosion itself inside the Tower.

By the way, in this video, although not as clearly as in the last video at the end of this article, but we still see the same external aluminium cladding, blown out and flying off to the outside, just ahead of the fireball, and flying off in the direction diametrically opposite the direction of motion struck Tower “plane”.

THE SECOND “PLANE” OF THE TERRORISTS AN INSTANT BEFORE IT [WITHOUT EVEN SLOWING DOWN] BREAKS THROUGH THE THICK DOUBLE-WALLED STEEL PERIMETER AND DISAPPEARS WITHOUT A TRACE INSIDE THE SOUTH TOWER OF THE WTC

Therefore, many thinking researchers on September 11 began to question the claims of the US government that there were any “planes” that allegedly hit the Twin Towers. Many of their works are available on the Internet (in particular, the popular series ” September clues “and” FOXED OUT “available on YouTube), which contain detailed analysis of various videos for September 11, showing”planes”. These works more than satisfactorily prove that “planes” were digital.
The author of these lines, however, prefers a different approach. Instead of criticizing the absurdities of the videos mentioned above (since the very attempt at such an analysis will undoubtedly cause a lot of criticism), the author of these lines prefers to immediately take the bull by the horns: aluminum can not break through steel. Point.

To believe that aluminum Boeing 767s could actually break through the thick double-wall steel perimeters shown in the photos above is the same as to believe that the laws of physics decided for no reason to take a day off on the eleventh day of the month of September, two thousand and one of the year of Christ…

Some might think that because aircraft, even if they are made of aluminum, fly at almost 500 mph [~805 km/h], because of their huge mass and speed, they have enough kinetic energy to punch through the Twin Towers, even though the latter are made of steel.

However, this is an illegal approach. Yes, purely intuitively, it seems that a huge fast-moving plane carries a huge amount of energy, and someone may think that the plane can actually cause damage to the building it crashes into. But what do you think will happen – hypothetically-if the plane is stationary in the air, while some giant takes an exceptionally massive steel tower of the WTC swings it properly and hits it with a swing at 500 mph on such a stationary [aluminum] plane? Will such a blow flatten this very plane? Or do you think that the plane will pass completely through the building – so that not a single detail of this aircraft will remain outside the shell of the Tower (which is twice as thick as the frontal armor of the tank)?

To make it even easier for you, imagine that you are hitting a stationary fly with a fly swatter at a speed of 1 meter per second, then 10 meters per second, and then 100 and 200 meters per second. Can you achieve such a” necessary ” speed at which the fly, instead of flattening out, suddenly passes unharmed through the fly swatter, leaving a hole in the latter corresponding to its silhouette? No? And now imagine all the same, but a stationary fly swatter, which crashes into a flying fly consistently at speeds-1 meter per second, 10 meters per second, and finally – 100 and even 200 meters per second. Can it happen that a fly will break through the fly swatter?

Think about this hypothetical question, because whether it is a moving plane crashing into a stationary Tower, or, conversely, someone crashes a Tower into a stationary plane, the physics of this event remains identical. Therefore ,the” purely intuitive “opinion about the alleged armor-piercing capabilities of a” fast-moving aircraft “is not so “intuitive” in the light of the above example.

DAMAGE CAUSED BY PERIPHERAL ASSEMBLY FROM THE UPPER FLOORS OF THE COLLAPSED WTC NORTH TOWER TO THE OUTER WALL OF THE NEIGHBORING VERIZON SKYSCRAPER (“VERIZON-BUILDING”)

The photo above shows the damage caused by peripheral Assembly from the upper floors of the collapsed North tower of the WTC to the outer wall of the neighboring Verizon skyscraper (”Verizon-building”). Please note that the damaged wall of the neighboring skyscraper was not “decorative” at all.

Look at the photo above and imagine that this steel peripheral Assembly would collapse from above onto a Boeing-type plane parked under the building. What happened to this plane? Correctly. It would have flattened. There is no doubt about it. You will lose all doubts about how passenger planes are flattened.

Many of those who at first did not pay due attention to the actual design of the Twin Towers and initially believed that the outer facades of the Towers were made of only window glass (which, of course, would allow aircraft to break in), later learned, to their great dismay, that the Twins were actually made of thick steel columns-which did not differ from the inner steel columns, and were located in a palisade around the perimeters of the Towers. And as soon as it became obvious, something else became obvious. That no plane could ever crash its entire body (including even the tips of its wings and tail, let alone the huge turbines under the wings) through such a steel palisade and disappear completely inside the Towers so that not a single part of the plane would remain outside and fall back into the street.

Those readers who are older in age will probably be able to recall the effect of Japanese kamikazes hitting American battleships, if such an aircraft hit the battleship in the side: the plane simply broke apart (without breaking through the side of the battleship) and fell down. And in the case of an unarmored ship, the maximum that could get inside was the steel engine of the aircraft, but never any other part of it – whether it was the wings, tail, or fuselage.

PHOTOS FROM THE SECOND WORLD WAR. THE RESULT OF A KAMIKAZE HIT ON BOARD AN UNARMORED AMERICAN SHIP

Note that the armored side of a typical battleship could not be penetrated by an aircraft at all.

Well, now make up your own opinion by looking at these columns of the WTC:

PROFILES OF THE PRESERVED CENTRAL COLUMNS OF THE WTC, FOUND ON “GROUND ZERO”

Profiles of the preserved Central columns of the WTC found on “Ground Zero”; their thickness can be easily estimated: they were 2.5 inches [6.35 cm] in thickness. Such thick-walled columns made of steel were used both in the construction of cores and in the construction of the perimeters of Towers. Although, be sure to mention (to avoid confusion and attacks decoy ducks of the American FBI) that in those places, anywhere planes, the profiles of the peripheral steel columns were not “square”, and H-shaped so that one side (the crossbar of the H) was perpendicular to the course “aircraft”, but two walls (stand H) – just as in the case of “square” cross-section of the column was parallel to the flight path of aircraft. The thickness of all the walls of these H-shaped steel columns in the places of explosions was still 2.5 inches (6.35 centimeters) – as in the case of the Central columns at the same height (closer to the ground, the walls of both the peripheral and Central steel columns were thicker

THE OFFICIAL DIAGRAM ALLOWS YOU TO SEE HOW THICK STEEL COLUMNS WERE LOCATED IN REALITY NOT ONLY IN THE MIDDLE OF THE TOWERS, BUT ALSO ALONG THEIR PERIMETERS

In this official diagram, you can see how these thick steel columns were located in reality – not only in the middle of the Towers, but also along their perimeters.

Are there those who are ready to seriously believe that an aluminum Boeing can actually break through the entire (along with the tail, wings and engines) through the steel columns shown below? Located a meter apart on the facades of the Towers?

STEEL COLUMNS LOCATED A METER APART ON THE FACADES OF THE TWIN TOWERS

It may seem difficult for some to understand that aluminum can’t break through steel. Therefore, just to understand this, here is a small hint – as a basic premise: it is known that artillery armor-piercing shells are made of materials that are stronger than the armor they are designed to penetrate. Usually they are made of tungsten (the Americans, instead of expensive tungsten, also use depleted uranium-238, which is a useless material, although it is quite capable of piercing armor due to its large specific gravity and density, which exceeds the density of steel).+

Armor-piercing projectiles made of aluminum do not exist – this is obvious. Just as there are no aluminum sabers, as well as other piercing and cutting objects made of this metal. The idea that an aluminum tool can supposedly cut steel is somewhat “strange”, if not crazy.

It should also be noted that armor-piercing projectiles fired at armored targets fly towards them at a speed at least three times the speed of sound. Because the fact that they are made of tungsten is not enough to ensure their armor-piercing ability – high speed is also required as a second factor.

The speed of a typical armor-piercing shell fired from an anti – tank gun is at least three times the speed of sound-it is at least 1000 meters per second, and usually much more. While the speed of a passenger Boeing is subsonic-less than 250 meters per second, at best.

It will be useful to take another look at these columns. And imagine that to break through the thick double walls of these columns will be quite a difficult task for an armor-piercing shell fired at point-blank range from a long-barrelled anti-tank gun.

But the most interesting thing is that such an example (the concept of a “double-walled column” that needs to be pierced through) is true for an armor-piercing projectile. Since the task of a tungsten armor-piercing projectile is to break through two walls of armor one after the other, located perpendicular to the direction of flight of this projectile. However, the aluminum plane faces a much more difficult task. In addition to the two walls of armor that are located perpendicular to the course of its flight, the aircraft also needs to break [or “cut” their aluminum wings] two more walls of armor-located parallel to the course of its flight. We somehow forgot that the steel columns of the WTC actually had four walls, not two. And these two walls, which are located parallel to the plane’s flight path, will obviously have a much greater “thickness” than two and a half inches.

OFFICIAL DIAGRAMS SHOWING THE PROFILES OF TWO TYPES OF PERIPHERAL COLUMNS OF TWIN TOWERS AND THE THICKNESS OF THEIR WALLS AT HEIGHTS CORRESPONDING TO THE HIT OF SUPPOSEDLY “PLANES”, WITH ARROWS ADDED BY ME ILLUSTRATING THE THICKNESS OF THE PIERCED/CUT STEEL ALUMINUM AIRCRAFT WING AND ARMOR-PIERCING PROJECTILE FOR COMPARISON

The image above shows official diagrams showing the profiles of the two types of peripheral columns of the Twin Towers and the thickness of their walls at altitudes corresponding to the hit of the alleged “planes”, with arrows added by me illustrating the thickness of the pierced/cut steel by the aluminum wing of the aircraft and the armor-piercing shell for comparison.

Now, it seems to me that the reader will be somewhat easier to reflect on the notorious armor-piercing capabilities of aluminum Boeing-767 – after comparing the latter with artillery armor-piercing shells.

We can only wonder why the infamous “Commission of inquiry on September 11” or those “engineers” from the aforementioned “National Institute of Standards and Technology”, do not want to put such an armor-piercing experiment using a decommissioned passenger Boeing-767 and several similar steel columns? Such an experiment would be a great way to convince some doubters that these were indeed “terrorist planes” that destroyed the world Trade Center.

The realization of all this has led many people to believe that if the aluminum type of aircraft could not have been involved in such a feat, then it must have been a digital type of aircraft that managed to break through the very steel double-wall perimeters of the now-deceased Twin Towers…

A DETAILED VIEW OF THE DAMAGE CAUSED BY THE ALLEGED “PASSENGER BOEING-767” TO THE STEEL COLUMNS OF THE PERIMETER OF THE NORTHERN TOWER OF THE WTC

A detailed view of the damage caused allegedly by a “passenger Boeing-767” to the steel columns of the perimeter of the Northern Tower of the WTC.

Here it is very clear that the outer columns were cut by several absurdly straight lines, moreover, parallel to each other, so that the shape of the “hole punched by the plane” does not even remotely correspond to the silhouette of the plane.

In principle, the explanation for this ridiculous phenomenon is very simple. As you can see in this photo, the perimeters of the Twins did not consist solely of steel columns. They consisted, in addition to them, of an aluminum coating that was attached to the outer sides of the columns. But unlike the steel columns themselves (which were one from the granite base of Manhattan to the tops of the towers), these aluminum linings consisted of much shorter vertical segments.

If you look closely, then in the photo above you will see some horizontal lines parallel to each other, which are repeated at regular intervals. These lines are visible on undamaged parts of the Tower’s facade. These lines are nothing more than the joints of aluminum linings. They show us the actual size of the vertical segments of these very aluminum linings.

The problem with September 11 criminals was that they needed to place shaped charges (designed to simulate holes from aircraft hits – i.e., silhouettes of planes) OUTSIDE of the Towers, rather than inside them. That is, the shaped charges had to be positioned so that their explosive energy was directed inside the buildings – so that the very idea looked plausible. Because if they placed the charges inside the buildings, then the entire section of the Tower, “knocked out by the plane”, would fall not inside the building, but outside. It would have been blown out from the inside and so, instead of those “landing gear” and “airplane engines”, the dupes would have found parts of the facades of the Towers themselves lying on the streets of Manhattan.

Of course, this could not be allowed. It was also impossible to attach charges to the outside of The tower facades – they would be visible. Therefore, the clever organizers of September 11 placed shaped charges between the outer aluminum coating and the actual steel columns. Their explosive energy was directed inward to cut through the steel columns in exactly the right places. And it really worked.

Of course, this could not be allowed. It was also impossible to attach charges to the outside of The tower facades – they would be visible. Therefore, the clever organizers of September 11 placed shaped charges between the outer aluminum coating and the actual steel columns. Their explosive energy was directed inward to cut through the steel columns in exactly the right places. And it really worked.

You can see it for yourself-the internal steel columns (which seem “rusty” in color as opposed to the shiny bluish aluminum linings) were actually cut in the right places so that the hole exactly matches the silhouette of the aircraft. Moreover, the cut ends of these steel columns are slightly bent inward – that is, exactly as it should be logically. But, unfortunately, the organizers of September 11 did not calculate something. Although most of the explosive energy of these shaped charges was directed inward-toward the steel, a small portion of the energy of the explosion was directed in the opposite direction-creating the effect of “recoil”. And it was this recoil that tore out the aluminum cladding. However, instead of carefully cutting the aluminum linings in the right places, the uncontrolled explosion simply tore out solid pieces of aluminum along the length of the vertical segments and threw them out into the streets.

P.S. (this insert was not in the original magazine article in the “Nexus” – and two photos of flying aluminum linings below with explanations were added only for its online version). You can see in detail how these aluminum linings fly out in the most recent video, which is located at the end of this article and aims to demonstrate the absence of turbulence from aircraft turbines – at the very beginning of that video, you can clearly see these numerous aluminum linings that fly out, slightly ahead of the fire cloud from the explosion caused by the alleged “hit of the plane” in the North Tower of the WTC. Here is a freeze-frame from the same video, which shows flying off aluminum pads of the same length:

FREEZE FRAME FROM THE VIDEO, WHICH SHOWS THE FLYING ALUMINUM PADS OF THE SAME LENGTH

In addition, on July 16, 2011, I accidentally came across an issue of the English-language magazine “Life” called “Brought to JUSTICE” (“Appeared before JUSTICE”), entirely dedicated to the infamous propaganda “operation” for the alleged “murder” of Osama bin Laden. In addition to several high-quality portraits of Osama himself and several openly propagandistic photos, pages 8-9 of this magazine contained a remarkable high-quality image of the explosion in the South Tower of the WTC, belonging to a certain Naomi Stock. I can’t deny myself the pleasure of putting here a color scan from the pages of this magazine, because this unique picture is much better than all the others shows in detail the same flying aluminum plates of the same length. Some of these overlays can be seen on it in great detail. It is also interesting that the pads here fly off in both directions – both to the right (i.e. according to the direction of the flight course of the “plane”, which allegedly hit the Tower “at an angle”), and to the left – i.e. directly towards the direction of approach of the “plane”. Note that if the first photo (freeze frame from the video) showed the flying pads in the case of the North Tower, then here we are talking about the second steel tower of the WTC – the South – the one that entered like a knife into oil [and without even slowing down] the “second” aluminum plane of the so-called “terrorists”. Here’s a photo

THE EXPLOSION IN THE SECOND STEEL TOWER OF THE WTC – YUZHNAYA – THE ONE INTO WHICH HE ENTERED LIKE A KNIFE INTO BUTTER (AND WITHOUT EVEN SLOWING DOWN) THE “SECOND” ALUMINUM PLANE OF THE SO-CALLED “TERRORISTS”

In this photo, by the way, you can also clearly see the same parallel lines on the undamaged parts of the perimeter of the Tower, repeated at the same intervals – they are especially noticeable in the shadow fall zone. These lines show the length of vertical segments aluminum plates – those already flying away from the explosion that you see on the foreground, where they have much larger because it is closer to the camera lens.

Let’s go back to the first photo above, which shows a detailed view of the damage and a hole punched by an alleged aluminum plane in the North Tower of the WTC, showing a strange “stepped” structure and even “slits” punched by the tips of aluminum wings. Or even here is another photo of the same place, even clearer:

A DETAILED VIEW OF THE DAMAGE AND THE HOLE ALLEGEDLY PUNCHED BY AN ALUMINUM PLANE IN THE NORTH TOWER OF THE WTC

Since we have already understood all about the aluminum linings (arranged in segments of the same length) and the solid steel columns under them, we can now clearly understand what really happened. Depending on the vertical position of the shaped charges (located between the aluminum and steel, but directed towards the steel), in some places one vertical length of the segments of the aluminum plates was torn out, in other places-two such lengths, in other parts-three such lengths, etc. That is why the “holes punched by planes” look so idiotic because of their stepped shape instead of the ideal profile of the “plane”, which could have turned out if there were no aluminum linings, and there would only be one steel column:

EDNA CINTRON DESPERATELY HOLDING ON TO ONE OF THE PROTRUDING COLUMNS, WHO DIED DURING THE FALL OF THE NORTH TOWER

In addition, this photo clearly shows a woman holding on to one of the protruding columns in desperation. She was later identified as Ms. Edna Cintron. The woman clearly hoped to be saved at this very last moment before the building collapsed. Unfortunately, she was killed when the North Tower fell. However, in these last moments of her life, she demonstrated to the whole world (by the very fact of being in a supposedly ” hot ” spot – where steel was supposed to “melt”) that the American government was blatantly lying to the people.

Of course, many innocent people reading these lines will ask a reasonable question: but what about the witnesses who saw “planes” with their own eyes? The answer is: that the number of witnesses who did not SEE any PLANES is approximately equal to the number of witnesses who allegedly “saw” these “planes”.

Note: On my personal YouTube channel, there are several “seditious” news videos related to the very first minutes of the 9/11 tragedy. These videos show that none of the earliest witnesses saw or heard any planes, and only saw and heard explosions on the upper floors of the Twin Towers. Here are direct links to these videos (all of them in English, of course):

However, the media preferred to include in their reports for the most part only those “witnesses” who allegedly saw “planes”.

It should be realized that the presentation of September 11 was the greatest deception. And if someone managed to create video images of “planes” cutting the steel perimeters of the Twin Towers with the same ease as if the planes were made of steel and the Towers were made of oil, and even managed to feed these videos to all the media, would it not be reasonable to assume that he also took care in advance and that a sufficient number of ” witnesses “declared that they” saw “these” planes ” with their own eyes? Of course, we must assume that this “someone” did just that. All these “witnesses” who saw with their own eyes how aluminum planes pierced the double-walled steel columns of the Twin Towers were just ordinary actors hired by the organizers of September 11, in order to deceive the media and the public.

How numerous aluminum linings of the same length fly out during an explosion in the North Tower of the WTC (and these linings fly off in the direction diametrically opposite to the direction of movement of the “plane”). We were talking about these very external aluminum linings a little higher – when we were analyzing the strange “stepped” structure of holes from “aircraft hits” and a freeze frame was also given there.

The laws of physics did not take a day off on September 11, 2001. However, it seems that the common sense of people who somehow trust the TV decided to take the same day off…

However, the old English dictionaries printed before September 11 that defined the strange nuclear term “ground zero” may serve as the best means to overcome the illusory nature of September 11 and recall common sense from an illegally taken vacation…

OLD ENGLISH DICTIONARIES PRINTED BEFORE SEPTEMBER 11, WHICH DEFINED THE STRANGE NUCLEAR TERM “GROUND ZERO”»

Along with old English dictionaries, these photos can be used for the same purpose, showing how and where the molten granite flowed. The photos were taken after the underground cavities left by nuclear explosions under the three buildings of the world Trade Center finally cooled down, and were finally cleared of the remaining radioactive materials

MELTED GRANITE IN THE FOUNDATION OF THE WORLD TRADE CENTER

MELTED GRANITE IN THE FOUNDATION OF THE WORLD TRADE CENTER – ANOTHER ANGLE

The picture of September 11 that I have drawn in this article is likely to be incomplete without mandatory formal testimony. Probably, the testimony of at least one witness is really needed. There are many testimonies available, but I have chosen the most important and most convincing ones available.

There is a notable article called ” Rudy Tuesday “published by the new York times magazine. This article is notable not so much for the fact that the term ground zero in relation to the Manhattan “Ground Zero” is used in it without any quotation marks and without capital letters – that is, exactly as it would be used in a textbook on civil defense, but thanks to the statement of former new York mayor Rudolph Giuliani.

It seems to me that this is such a valuable copy of the September 11 evidence, and such important witness testimony, that I must quote this part of this article in its entirety, without omitting anything.

The most important points that should never escape your attention are highlighted in bold. Be sure to note that immediately after the unprecedented “kerosene-pancake collapse” of the world Trade Center, the mayor of new York city, for no apparent reason, fell into nuclear speculation and began his speech with feeble-minded comments about nuclear reactors and continued it with claims that he KNEW WHAT EXACTLY the ground zero volunteers were standing on top of (which he himself sent to clear ground zero, forgetting to give them full sets of chemical protection):

The picture of September 11 that I have drawn in this article is likely to be incomplete without mandatory formal testimony. Probably, the testimony of at least one witness is really needed. There are many testimonies available, but I have chosen the most important and most convincing ones available.

“…Yes, 9/11. In the dining room, after the salads are served, Delaware Congressman Mike castle takes the microphone. He talks about Rudy and the cleaners. The black Barry [a type of phone with scrolling and a mini keyboard often used by journalists] continues to beep. But then castle started talking about the ground-zero tour that the mayor had arranged for him and other congressmen a few days after the terrorist attacks. The people are beginning to listen. ”He was present at almost all funerals; he was there, which was just in time,” says castle. “I don’t think we can Express enough gratitude for what he did.”And here comes Rudy on the podium. The audience rises. Jackets at cheap tables stand up, and a man who looks like a banker puts his fingers in his mouth and lets out a loud whistle. At first, Giuliani wastes the goodwill with which he is greeted. First he talks nonsense about immigration. He notes that China has built more than 30 nuclear reactors, while we have built just one. “We should probably emulate China.”What? You can already see bubbles of perplexity over the heads of listeners: could this be the same guy we see on TV? The guy who looked so much like the President when our real President went missing? But, finally, Rudy begins to feel at ease…… And here he States this: Iraq led to September 11, which, in turn, led to a sacred picture – construction workers raising the flag over ground zero. “I know what they were standing on top of,” Giuliani says. “They were standing on top of the cauldron. They were standing on top of a 2,000-degree fire that had raged for a hundred days. And they risked their lives raising that flag.”The hall fell silent. Not a single fork clattered on the plate, not a single gold bracelet rattled. “They raised this flag to say, ’You can’t beat us because we are Americans.'” The mayor paused and, as if on purpose, a woman sniffed. He continues. “And we don’t say it arrogantly, or rattling our weapons, we say it spiritually: Our ideas are better than yours.”»

I am not sure, of course, about whether “their ideas” are “better than ours”, because I am not sure that it was at all smart to demolish skyscrapers in the center of the city with thermonuclear explosions, each of which exceeded the power of the Hiroshima bomb by 8 times, but, in principle, I agree with Mr. Giuliani. The poor ground zero volunteers were actually standing on top of the cauldron, and they were actually risking their lives – as you might have guessed, this may be the case when trusting people visit the epicenter of a recent nuclear explosion without wearing personal protective equipment.

From this point on, I think the reader has a more or less complete picture of events – what actually happened on the Manhattan “Ground Zero”, and what exactly the term” ground zero ” meant in English before September 11, and this is now confirmed by the testimony of an important witness.

BEFORE OUR VERY EYES FAKE WARS AND BIG LIES FROM 9/11 TO DONALD TRUMP

I think many readers will have a lot of questions. What got into the Pentagon? If the planes didn’t hit the Twin Towers, where did the planes go? What happened to their passengers? What happened to the alleged “hijackers”? What happened to Flight 93? Why was the so-called “doomsday Plane” in the air on September 11? Why couldn’t the North tower be demolished before the South Tower? Why did American officials demolish the Twins and building 7 in the first place? Why were there not so many cases of acute radiation sickness among ground zero employees? Who sent the anthrax letters and why? Why did the monitoring services of other countries – for example, Russia, India, or China-choose not to “notice” that the US government demolished the world Trade Center with three thermonuclear 150-kiloton explosions and this action has nothing to do with either Afghanistan or Iraq? Why did the IAEA choose to remain silent? And, most importantly, who organized September 11 and why?

As you can probably guess, September 11 was such a complex operation, and its various aspects are so intertwined, that it is simply impossible to describe the whole thing “in brief”, paying a little attention to each of the aspects. I did not have the slightest chance to fit a more or less lucid explanation of the entire September 11 scenario into such a small volume as this article offers.

In September 2009, I created a video presentation that runs for more than four hours and explains all the events of September 11 as a whole, and makes it very clear. This video presentation can be found on the Internet by searching for the keywords “Dimitri Khalezov video”. In addition, I have written a book that is more than 500 pages in A4 format. I explain all this just to make it clear that it is really impossible to explain in a clear manner everything that happened on September 11 in such a small article. It is likely that explaining the technical details of the missile attack on the Pentagon and all the circumstances of this attack will require about the same length of the article. However, I hope that this story can be continued in the pages of this magazine.

And of all the potential questions listed above, I will answer only the most recent: September 11 was organized by those who wanted to plunge the United States, along with other countries, into an absurd war against Afghanistan and Iraq. And those who wanted to deprive the citizens of all these States of their last remaining civil liberties and human rights. It should be remembered that neither al-Qaeda nor any other Muslim organization could afford to feed falsified videos of  “planes” to the American media, and even hire false witnesses who “saw” how aluminum planes pierce through steel, and simultaneously demolish the world Trade Center with three 150-kiloton thermonuclear explosions, each of which was 8 times more powerful than the first atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

AFTERWORD

The diagram you see below was not in the original article published in nexus magazine. Still, I can’t deny myself the pleasure of putting this stupid diagram here for the last time. There is nothing particularly “secret” in it – it is publicly available on the Internet, because it was used by the authors of the article about nuclear tests in Wikipedia.

What you see below is the most common diagram of the early 70s-i.e., the time when nuclear explosions were not yet declared so-called “evil” and it was considered quite acceptable to use them for both military and industrial purposes.

DIAGRAM OF types of NUCLEAR EXPLOSIONS SINCE the EARLY 70s

Here you can see (if you look clockwise): typical air nuclear explosion (1), high-altitude nuclear explosion in the stratosphere (3), an underwater nuclear explosion (4)… and an underground nuclear explosion (2). The uniqueness of this chart is that in the 70s the system of nuclear demolition of skyscrapers was a secret as of now and therefore, in the case of (2) underground nuclear explosion depicted sending some waves in the surrounding rock, and directly above the epicenter on the surface (aka “ground zero”) is shown, Oh, the horror, the skyscraper.

Dmitry Alekseyevich Khalezov-a career officer of the “military unit 46179″, also known as the ” Special Control Service of the 12th Main Directorate of the Ministry of Defense of the USSR»

Author: Dmitry Alekseevich Khalezov, former citizen of the USSR, former career officer of the so-called “military unit 46179”, also known as “Special Control Service of the 12th Main Directorate of the Ministry of Defense of the USSR”. The Special Control service, also known as the Soviet atomic (later “nuclear”) intelligence service , is a secret military unit designed to detect nuclear explosions (including underground nuclear tests) of various opponents of the former USSR, as well as to monitor compliance with various international treaties in the field of nuclear tests and nuclear explosions for peaceful purposes. After the events of September 11, Khalezov conducted an extensive 9/11 study and proved that the Twin Towers of the world Trade Center, as well as its building #7, were demolished by three underground thermonuclear explosions – which, in fact, earned the name “ground zero” for the WTC demolition site. Moreover, he testifies that he knew about the existence of the so-called “nuclear emergency demolition system” of the Twin Towers long ago – back in the 80’s, i.e., when he was a soldier of the Soviet Special Control Service.

The post INDUSTRIAL DEMOLITION OF “9/11” – AS IT WAS IN NEW YORK first appeared on Global Policy.

The American system is the oldest, largest and most developed. It is based on the unconditional technological leadership of the United States. The key goal of the American strategy in the technology sector is to maintain the initiative in the field of innovation, prolong its own dominance and prevent the emergence of comparable competitors in the global market. To do this, active personnel work is being carried out, preferential conditions are being created for the development of the startup ecosystem, and methods of competition that are far from economic are being used.

The market capacity and favorable internal conditions allowed the United States to bring to the market the largest technology and Internet giants whose intellectual property rights are legally protected. An indirect but significant factor of the American techno-economic system is the creation of numerous common goods. All this allows American companies to provide a trial version of their own products to the whole world, which gives the user the opportunity to access one of the most advanced technologies without excessive costs. The principles of openness and freedom in the digital sphere proposed by the United States are captivating. However, there is no doubt that at the moment when Americans doubt their own hegemony in the technological environment, these principles will be immediately revised. There will be insurmountable borders and barriers aimed at deterring competitors and protecting American leadership.

Even within the United States itself, the decisions of tech giants to block and delete more than 70 thousand accounts, including the pages of President Donald Trump, are similar to open attempts to seize management tools from the authorities. In this case, the companies played for the political establishment against the objectionable “spoiler” of the system. It is likely that in the coming years, a team of political, financial and technological globalists will continue to work together to counteract the national industrial agenda in America and other countries. At the same time, there are concerns from the camp of Democrats that, no matter how convenient the technologies offered by corporations, the strengthening of the influence of tech giants is dangerous both because of their accumulation of “unprecedented economic power” and because of the increase in “control over political communication and communications.” The dominance of tech giants in the dissemination of information and their ability to politically mobilize the masses already pose a threat to democratic governments.

The Chinese techno-economic platform is smaller than the American one, although even here the claims to technological leadership are obvious. A significant amount of financial and human resources allows the Chinese ecosystem to be self-contained and administratively redistribute resources to those areas of technological development that the CPC Politburo considers the most promising. The Chinese were the first in the world to experiment with the autonomization of a number of services and services, building the “Great Chinese Digital Wall” (The Great Firewall of China). And if the Americans provide the whole world with a trial version of their product, then the competitiveness of the Chinese model is based on the cheapness of their offer and participation in financing advanced developments in other countries. At the same time, China relies on waiting tactics and does not respond to US provocations. In China, America is rightly regarded as a more significant and strong player in this area. However, the growth rate of the Chinese technology industry allows Beijing to count on the fact that achieving a market position comparable to the United States is a matter of time. It is unlikely that the Americans will be able to stop this process. There is a demand for pragmatism in world politics. Responding to it, an increasing number of American allies (including Europeans) favorably perceive China’s proposals for cooperation in the digital sphere.

The growing awareness by European countries of the importance of digital sovereignty may be potentially interesting for Russia. Key European countries – Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands – are afraid of dependence on Americans and Chinese. The need to develop a national technology platform is particularly emphasized by the French. Europeans are afraid of losing their subjectivity in the global technological environment and eventually find themselves in a situation where their voice will not be taken into account.

Russia and the Europeans are united by fears of becoming dependent on leading players and losing their own autonomy. At the same time, Russia, like some other European countries, has the competence to form an independent pole of power in the digital sphere. Russian arguments about the development of a data compatibility standard are more likely to be heard in Europe than in China and the USA.

The latter two States themselves have a significant amount of data and are not ready to share it with third countries. However, Moscow’s political differences with the Europeans may become an insurmountable obstacle to full-fledged collaboration, which is an additional motivating factor for Russia in forming its own technological platform.

Global trends in the development of the digital environment

The global digital revolution has led to a radical transformation not only of technological and economic structures, but also of social relations, the very philosophy of human life. These changes have fully manifested themselves in the sphere of international relations. The current situation in the world is similar (albeit at a fundamentally new level) since the invention of nuclear weapons and the beginning of space exploration, when technological changes have significantly changed the international behavior of States. It is already possible to identify a number of trends launched by new technologies that will determine the directions of further evolution of the system of international relations.

The rapid development of science and technology has created prerequisites at the national and global levels for reducing socio-economic inequality. However, it also increased the vulnerability – and suspiciousness – of society in the face of new (or old, new-faced) challenges and threats. New channels and methods of communication have significantly increased the information connectivity of the world. But they also contributed to the atomization of states that seek to protect such channels from foreign interference. The explosive growth of technologies and ways to use them continues to blur the line between the virtual and real world, fact and fiction. This multiplies the uncertainty in international relations and strengthens their anarchic state.

This uncertainty is compounded by the growing gap between the dynamics of development and implementation of innovations and the speed of reflection of these changes in the regulatory fabric. Phenomena that are not regulated by international law become a challenge to the classical system of international relations. Thus, the absence of codified agreements to limit the use of artificial intelligence or supercomputers and cloud computing in the military field involves powers with such technologies in a vicious circle of a constant arms race, which diverts resources and attention from the development of their civilian applications. Despite the fact that in the new conditions it is the Internet that is becoming a key source of new dangers, world governments do not have unified approaches to defining the concept of “sovereignty in cyberspace”, work is not yet underway to develop international agreements similar to the outer space treaty, the Antarctic treaty or sovereignty in airspace.

The all-encompassing nature of digital transformation processes leads to the fact that they fall into the focus of attention of an increasing number of international organizations – both specialized (ITU) and non-core (UNESCO, UNCTAD, PACE). This disperses the international digital agenda and multiplies mutually exclusive approaches to its issues. The lack of a unified and clear conceptual and categorical apparatus in this area exacerbates contradictions and disputes.

On more technologically-oriented international platforms – governmental and non-governmental – the struggle is unfolding for universal recognition of technical standards created by states or large corporations. The most successful lobbyists from among governments and businesses receive a significant market advantage in the case of codification of their proposed standard: the whole world begins to consume their products, and they get the opportunity to significantly influence the further development of the chosen technology. Such a struggle for standards also has far-reaching international political consequences. Taking into account the continuing rapid penetration of “figures” into public life, the countries that supply digital technologies firmly “bind” the client states to themselves, “getting them hooked” on certain standards and types of solutions, increasing the dependence of such countries on their exports – by analogy with the export of weapons or energy resources.

The seriousness of this problem is vividly illustrated, for example, by the situation faced by the EAEU member states when implementing digital integration. The creation of a unified system of electronic exchange of legally significant documents has been greatly hampered by the fact that different EAEU states use different cryptographic standards, not all of which are recognized as secure. The lack of coordination in their implementation, albeit for objective reasons, has led to the emergence of a technical barrier to the development of integration processes, which at the same time has long-term political and economic consequences.

Global digitalization has significantly increased the international legal personality of non-State participants in international relations. Initially, the technical NGO “Corporation for the Management of Domain Names and IP Addresses”, created with the participation of the US government to regulate issues related to domain names, IP addresses and the functioning of the global network, has turned into a leading institute of “Internet governance”, where states do not have a dominant role.

Multinational giants – Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Huawei, TikTok, Alibaba, YouTube – are already talking on equal terms with national and foreign governments. It is impossible to ignore them as a factor of national security. On the one hand, the information accumulated by such ecosystems and the advanced solutions implemented by them are of great interest to the competent authorities. On the other hand, their ability as information resources to broadcast certain information messages to a huge audience, directly or indirectly – through controlled search results – becomes a factor in national political life. These properties of such corporations give them the “right to vote” in the international arena and at the same time make them objects of strict national regulation. The understandable desire of States to control their information activities and gain access to the data they have leads to the erosion of liberal values – freedom of speech, secrecy of correspondence, privacy – and raises the question of their applicability in the changed digital age.

A separate point in the confrontation between corporations and states remains the issue of their fair taxation, especially if their services operate in a foreign jurisdiction. It is important to avoid double taxation of such platforms in order to avoid deterioration of the situation of consumers and the products and services they receive.

Perhaps for the first time, ordinary citizens have gained the ability to directly influence international relations on such a scale as today. Social networks, instant messengers and Internet television have practically won the competition with traditional media, made each smartphone owner a potential journalist and endowed him with the ability to instantly make his “news” for millions of people. Such a seemingly gratifying manifestation of freedom to speak and be heard is overshadowed by the fact that in the era of “post-truth” verification of a fact is no longer a requirement for our trust in it. At best, unintentional subjectivism or a thirst for the attention of an “amateur reporter” who is not bound by professional journalistic ethics or the politics of the publication, and at worst, the dissemination of deliberately false information can have devastating consequences for society and the state.

At the same time, the example of deleting Trump’s Twitter account demonstrates another trend. During the four years of Trump’s presidency, Twitter has been an important resource of his power and the main tool for fighting political opponents. With his help, Trump set the information agenda, dictated the political will, appointed to positions and dismissed yesterday’s like-minded people in disgrace. For millions of supporters of the president, Twitter has become a mouthpiece of dissatisfaction with Washington. With his help, it was possible, while remaining misunderstood, to be at least heard by the elites. Therefore, the president’s tweets amused some, frightened others, and irritated others.

At the symbol level, the removal of Trump’s account – even after he backed down and called on his supporters to peaceful protest – is much more demonstrative and sudden his “liquidation” as president two weeks before the end of his term than through a court or impeachment. But more importantly, this “liquidation” mission was carried out not by Congress, not by the military and not by the Supreme Court, but by the head of the Twitter technology company.

This case, most likely, on the one hand, will raise the request of third countries for “digital sovereignty” from American tech giants, on the other hand, it will strengthen the intention of these states to protect themselves from the dominance of their own and foreign technology companies by stricter legislative regulation of their activities on their territories. In the long run, this may strengthen the political fragmentation of the world.

The further development of cognitive technologies, primarily deepfake, gives attackers unlimited opportunities to create toxic content, which by the strength of its impact can already be classified as weapons of mass destruction.

Thus, the growth of the freedom of society and the strengthening of the instruments of its realization paradoxically develops in parallel with the strengthening of the police power of the state, and this becomes the new norm of everyday life. The strengthening of the second trend is also happening for objective reasons: the desire of states to ensure the safety of citizens, including by restricting their access to the “darknet” and uncontrolled elements of the network, can hardly be called a dictatorial whim of governments. The degree of deanonymization of users in the network will continue to increase.

The absence of institutions of arbitration or investigation of cyber incidents and cybercrimes recognized by all players, as well as the still weak development of digital forensics tools makes it almost impossible to reliably determine the party responsible for the incident. Which, in turn, increases the level of distrust and conflict between countries. At the same time, in the context of the development of new technologies – primarily the Internet of Things and autonomous intelligent systems – it is enough for attackers to have a powerful enough household computer or even a smartphone to hack the security system of a critical infrastructure facility and cause a disaster or seize sensitive information, and a hacker does not necessarily turn out to be a saboteur or a terrorist, it may be technically gifted “a teenager.”

The attempt of countries to protect themselves from such penetration has a number of consequences. First of all, states seek to limit the vulnerability of the network by stimulating import substitution and deep localization – it is easier to trust “their” controlled manufacturer of equipment or solutions. This leads to the disintegration of international production chains and a certain erosion of the principles of the international division of labor. In an environment where everyone who can start producing their own critical equipment and “software” (servers, operating systems, antiviruses and security systems), economic specialization loses its appeal. In addition, the definition of authorized operators, the restriction of competition in the market inevitably leads to a slowdown in the development of technologies, forcing states to live in a dilemma: progress or security. Here, as in many other aspects of the global digital economy, there is a contradiction between information exchange as a global phenomenon and physical infrastructure that has a territorial binding, which means that it is under a certain sovereignty.

This contradiction is evident in the issue of storing, processing and moving information through Internet channels. Historically, there has been a serious imbalance in the geographical distribution of the basic infrastructure and the nationality of the main Internet players. More than 60 percent of the total number of domains are managed by American players (Verisign, Afilias), more than 50 percent of content delivery networks belong to American companies (Amazon, Akamai, CloudFlaire), all major first-tier providers are residents of the United States, and ten of the thirteen DNS servers are located in the United States. It is not surprising that with such an “Internet geography” and awareness of the US readiness to take unilateral sanctions to very extreme measures, states that are not direct allies of Washington seek to create an alternative protected contour of the “national, sovereign Internet” – and the number of such states is increasing. On the other hand, according to experts, satellite Internet can displace cable Internet no later than the middle of this century – and in a new round the struggle will move into space or the upper atmosphere, but its nature, consisting in the unwillingness of states to leave key infrastructure outside their sovereign control zone, will remain.

The desire for sovereign control of an increasing number of States is reflected in their attitude to the issue of storing personal data of citizens. Both the European GDPR and the Russian so-called “Spring package”, with all the nuances of each approach, postulate the need for all Internet market operators to store personal data on servers located in national jurisdiction. This approach is aggressively opposed primarily by the Anglo-Saxon states participating in the “five eyes system” (USA, Great Britain, Canada, New Zealand, Australia), pointing to this measure as excessive and suppressing rights and freedoms. Taking into account the imbalances described above in the Internet space, the position of the United States and its allies is understandable. Nevertheless, as the digitization of a person’s identity increases, the possibility of his digital identification, moving all his personal data to cloud storage, the price of an error in protecting such information increases many times. In case of violation of the information storage security circuit, the identity of a citizen can not just be taken over by attackers – it can be completely erased, and such a digital death will cut off the victims of the attack from the possibility of realizing basic social rights. That is why the increasing strictness of national data storage requirements is becoming the dominant requirement of the era.

Two major issues arise for nation States in the coming years

The first question is to what extent they are able to guarantee the viability of their critical information infrastructure in the face of cyber warfare and the growth of network piracy. Cyberattacks or system failures in networks can permanently shut down entire industries and cities with unpredictable consequences for the country and its population, but the relevance and magnitude of such threats are still far from being realized.

The second question is how well governments understand the principles and methods of ensuring the security of personal data and how the procedure for the turnover of depersonalized big data will be regulated. Mastering such data by another state will allow it to build a reliable picture of the development of the economy and industry, the vulnerabilities of agriculture, the epidemiological situation, consumption profiles and adjust its political, military or economic strategy accordingly. Obviously, the accelerated development of national legislation regulating the principles of the circulation of national big data and access to interstate negotiations on this issue is a matter of the near future.

States and the future digital world: Duopoly or oligopoly?

Even today, the presence of states in the top league of world politics is unimaginable without a development strategy in the global digital environment, the availability of resources, their own ideas and products in this area. The very category of “great power” in the XXI century implies the creation of its own technological platforms, and ideally – the formation of a techno-economic block. Mandatory attributes of such a block are a significant chunk of the world market controlled by it, its own currency zone with an emission center, its own development model, a set of resources, technologies and scientific competencies that allow the block to be independent from others, at least in such key areas as defense and critical infrastructure.

The attempt of each of the blocks to exclude the influence of competitors on its critical infrastructure inevitably leads to the politicization of technologies and technological wars. Digital technologies, being end-to-end for the entire modern economic and socio-political space, are becoming the main field of a new war. Cyberattacks on digital critical infrastructure can be no less destructive than nuclear or biological weapons.

Against the background of the dominance of a number of developed countries in digital technologies and the emergence of global monopolies controlling network infrastructure and data flows, there is a threat of digital inequality and digital colonialism. Digital technological sovereignty is becoming a necessary condition for the sovereignty of political and national independence.

The restructuring of the principles of functioning of international economic relations and the entire model of global geo-economics provides new opportunities to the leading techno-economic blocs, a kind of “digital neocolonialists” of our time. The gap, now digital, continues to widen between global digital technology providers and recipient countries, which are gradually becoming increasingly dependent on technologically advanced states.

At the current stage, the “digital neocolonialist” countries offer exclusively preferential conditions for the objects of economic development to create the infrastructure necessary for the transition to the digital future. Thus, they immediately ensure their binding to their own solutions – from payment systems to data storage systems and electronic document management. But most importantly, they provide themselves with unlimited and practically free access to big data, getting from this not only an immediate economic effect and an additional advantage in the development of their own artificial intelligence tools and neural networks, but also effective tools for controlling their digital colonies.

Digital colonialism will continue to strengthen, and it is impossible to exclude the revival of the UN Trusteeship Council – already with new, digital functions and powers. At the same time, the canonical borders of the countries of the first, second and third world have already undergone enormous changes and will continue to change. Former third world countries get the opportunity to conditionally jump “from feudalism to socialism, bypassing the stage of capitalism” – the creation of advanced infrastructure of a new generation without the need to maintain the functioning of the old infrastructure (in its absence).

In this sense, it is possible to foresee the digital breakthrough of the richer states of the Middle East and Africa and their entry into significant roles in the digital arena. Finally, international financial and labor relations are also changing – digital assets move to more comfortable jurisdictions even more easily than financial ones, and practically leave no traces of such movement. The emergence of cryptocurrencies deprives the monopoly states of another sovereign right – the right to issue. The concepts of “brain drain” and “labor emigration” are also changing: now national “digital proletarians” should not move abroad – it is enough for them, staying at home, to work for a foreign corporation, alienating all their intellectual property, and vice versa – talented hipsters can move to more comfortable climatic conditions, while continuing to at the same time to develop the national economy.

At the same time, digital technologies, which form both the daily life and the information space of each person, are beginning to have an increasingly noticeable impact on his psyche and decision-making practices. An individual not only becomes a slave to the digital platforms of global monopolies, but is also really placed in a framework where his entire existence is tied to devices – a mobile phone, tablet, smartwatch. Under the guise of providing amenities, they restrict a person’s choice in decision-making and manipulate his behavior, including by pushing him to follow a “certain route”. In these unequal relations, digital monopolies expropriate and uncontrollably exploit personal data and even creative content on pain of exclusion from the social environment.

The widespread introduction of digital technologies, including the digitalization of industry and government agencies, the introduction of 5G networks, forms an imperative to ensure the security and sustainability of the entire digital critical infrastructure. Without solving this problem, digitalization may turn out to be the construction of a “house on the sand”.

In order to eliminate the “barricades” and “minefields” on the path of the digital economy, the state must guarantee both the security of citizens and businesses, as well as clear legal relations in the digital environment. This is especially true for the ownership and use of personal and “depersonalized” data and created content.

The ownership and cost of data is just one of the problems that have accumulated in the digital environment that urgently need to be solved. No less urgent is the need to resolve the contradiction between the requirements of national or local data storage and global transparency of technological and corporate processes, where data on engine operation on an aircraft owned by an airline of one country and flying over another country is processed in real time in a third.

As techno-economic blocks are formed, the competition in the digital space takes the form of a war of platforms and standards. At the same time, a number of countries and regional associations that have neither control over a large part of the global digital market nor dominant platforms (for example, India, Brazil, Japan, Russia or the European Union) will be forced to look for common ways to preserve independence and competitiveness, including by creating common platforms based on an open architecture and open source.

Russia on the digital agenda: Opportunities and limitations

Russia is one of the few countries with technological reserves and human competencies to build its own technological ecosystem. The powerful engineering and mathematical school inherited by Russia from the Soviet Union remains a source of a key resource for digital development – qualified personnel. Russia has most of the features of a sovereign technology platform. A national search engine has been developed and continues to develop. Instagram Facebook and Vkontakte are still more popular than Russian social networks VKontakte and Odnoklassniki, not only in Russia, but also in most CIS countries. Own cloud technologies are developing, domestic processors are being created. Digital solutions of Russian companies have significant export potential – primarily cognitive and self-learning systems, solutions in the field of cybersecurity, secure electronic document management and platforms for providing services to the public. Launched two years ago, the national Digital Economy program will provide 97 percent of all national households and all social infrastructure facilities (schools, hospitals, police stations) with access to high-speed broadband Internet by 2024. This will radically change the opportunities for the development of entrepreneurship, telemedicine and distance education, and will allow Russia to overcome the “digital divide”. Russia is already among the top 10 countries in terms of the number of Internet users, and the website “Gosuslugi” with its two trillion annual transactions is the most popular website of public services in the world.

The share of the digital economy in the country’s GDP is growing. Despite the vagueness of the term itself, it is already about 4-5 percent of GDP, but it continues to grow rapidly at a pace comparable to the digital leaders. In addition, Russia has an impressive satellite and radio frequency resource, which is the key to the successful development of new generation networks.

The challenges that Russia faces in the field of digital development cannot be underestimated. Some of them are only a “digital” consequence of “analog” problems and threats. Others have a fundamentally new, original nature. In particular, Western sanctions not only restrict, among other things, access to foreign technologies, but also increase the risks of maintaining dependence on such technologies to an unacceptable level. The case related to the refusal of Siemens to supply turbines to the Crimea jeopardized plans to provide the peninsula with heat. If we extrapolate this incident to the digital sphere, a similar failure of SAP, Oracle, CISCO or Microsoft to ensure timely updating of their solutions operating in Russia can cause failures – even collapse – in the operation of critical systems, including public administration and the banking sector.

These and other trends in the development of world politics in the last few years have actualized for Russia the task of forming reliable protection of its own digital critical infrastructure. The fulfillment of this task depends both on the effectiveness of a phased and gradual transition from imported software and hardware complexes, and on the creation of an effective command vertical from the regulator to the executor throughout the country.

The decision of the Russian government to create registers of domestic software and electronic equipment is designed to reduce such risks. Without being included in these registers, companies cannot count on delivering their solutions to Russian state corporations and public authorities. Such measures have a long-term positive effect on the development of Russia as a sovereign technological power.

Building a counteraction in the field of information security is complicated by conceptual uncertainty – the fuzzy separation of two close, but different spheres related to information flows. Both the security of signals in a physical network carrying information and malicious ideological content in Russian practice are defined by the same concept of “information security”. In the practice of Russian competitors in digital leadership, the security of signals and networks is defined as cybersecurity. Countering threats in these two areas requires different competencies. While in Russia there is a sufficient understanding of how to deal with cyber threats, in the field of information content, the Russian strategy requires separate reflection and development.

Moscow’s accusations of cyber interference in the internal affairs of a number of states were used as a pretext to increase sanctions pressure and undoubtedly damaged Russia’s international image. However, this campaign had consequences for a number of large Russian enterprises and firms. They faced problems and discrimination in the markets of some Western countries. Perhaps even more significant than the reputational and even economic consequences are the risks that these accusations will be used by the United States and its allies as arguments for conducting “cyberstrikes of retaliation” or even “preventive cyberstrikes” against Russia.

In the information space, Russia’s vulnerabilities are obvious due to the dominance of American monopolies in the domestic segment – Google and Facebook. These monopolies exploit Russian data for free and are increasingly trying to influence the information field and the political situation in Russian domestic politics. Including through manipulation of content and restrictions on Russian users’ access to information and means of communication. Other non-Western countries face similar challenges. It makes sense to establish a more active dialogue with them about the principles of legislation of the digital age, especially in terms of data ownership rights, rules for their storage and use, joint fight against online piracy, general rules of conduct for states and businesses on the Internet. The fundamental challenge for Russian legislation in the digital sphere is to keep pace with the development of technologies and practices themselves as dynamically as possible, especially in such important areas for society as cybercrime and digital finance.

Another problem today is the low ability of Russian companies and the government to compete with global corporations for the best personnel. At the same time, formally, “brain drain” may not occur – Russian talents continue to remain in Russia, but give all the intellectual added value to foreign companies. Taking into account the disparity of the economic potentials of Russian and transnational business, the solution of this problem is possible only within the framework of the administrative or conceptual (but in any case state) plane of relations.

Also, Russia and Russian companies practically do not work on international platforms to introduce technological standards and regulations that are favorable for the functioning of Russian developments. This is partly due to Russia’s lack of a doctrinal document outlining its own international priorities in this area by analogy with the National Security Strategy or the Concept of Foreign Policy. In the future, this omission may cause technological isolation or actual coercion of Moscow to work with internationally recognized standards and protocols, in the development of which Russia actually did not take an active part.

The Roadmap of Russian Leadership in the digital Environment

DIGITAL TOTALITARIANISM: HOW IT IS DONE IN RUSSIA

The Russian digital agenda should reflect the position of our country as one of the main forces in the global system, as an exporter of security and stability. Russia’s global role in the digital world is the role of the leader of the “digital non-aligned movement” for those countries that would like to avoid the technological dictates of “digital neocolonialists”.

It is important that the development of the digital sector of the Russian economy, including electronics and information technology, is accompanied by expansion into global markets. Only in this case will Russia be able to recoup investments in breakthrough technologies, conquer key technological platforms of the next generation economy and build large, competitive businesses.

Spread over eleven time zones, Russia (even in a world where distances are dramatically reduced) continues to play the role of a safe link between Europe and Asia. This applies equally to the global energy infrastructure needed to support the highly energy-intensive digital economy of the future, and to the network of quantum communications necessary for secure data transmission. The cold climate of the northern regions of Russia, coupled with cheap electricity, gives our country a competitive advantage in the location of large data storage and processing centers.

One of the most important challenges for Russia today is the implementation of the EAEU digital integration program. It is necessary in a short time to provide an opportunity for government agencies and businesses of the member states of the Union to exchange legally significant documents through the integrated information system of the EAEU (AIS of the EAEU). This will increase the speed of transit of goods through the territory of the EAEU, increase the economic effects of this process and improve the quality of integration in the Union.

In addition, Russia, as the main “shareholder” of this process, should contribute to ensuring the interoperability of the EAEU AIS with the information systems of the CIS member states that tend to integrate, as well as states with which the EAEU has or is planning a free trade agreement. Digital integration here can and should outpace physical integration. Another important tool may be a special (for example, with the Eurasian Development Bank) program for the implementation of national e-government standards in interested partner countries.

The task of expanding the Russian economic and digital space acutely raises the question of finding strategic allies in the digital world and using existing political mechanisms for this purpose. In this regard, it is worth using the positive potential of our relations with the leading economies of the future – India, Indonesia, Brazil and others.

Equally important is the work on digital dialogue with the European Union. Firstly, digital transport corridors with seamless transit experience for businesses will become possible only if the EAEU AIS is interoperable with the information systems of Europe and China. Secondly, closer coordination is needed in the European direction regarding the use of the radio frequency spectrum – so far there are many contradictions with the EU border states on this issue. The solution to this problem is especially important if in the foreseeable future goods between countries will be moved by unmanned transport. In this case, both Russia and the EU will need a single standard for new generation networks and a single frequency range allocated to them. Thirdly, Russia and the European Union have adopted comparable (at least in terms of principles) regulatory requirements for the storage and transfer of personal data. It is important to harmonize these requirements for business convenience.

In addition, Russia and the EU are drawn closer by the desire to tax foreign digital giants, primarily American companies, with fair taxes. The formation of a consensus on the principles of such taxation will help Russia and the EU to act more effectively on multilateral platforms dealing with this issue. In the medium term, the issue of creating a single cross-border “pool” of big data, marked up in a unified way and accessible (including for a fee) to third parties, primarily American and Chinese companies, is also becoming important

Collaboration with the EU is important, if only because the Russian and European integration blocks are squeezed between two very self-sufficient information platforms – American and Chinese, each of which is already a “bigdata monster”. To become an additional center of gravity, Russia and the European Union, relatively small in terms of population and data generation, simply need to join forces.

At the same time, uniform rules and principles for the functioning of national data management systems, clearly establishing to whom and under what conditions this data may or may not be available, will ensure the national security of Russia and the EU. It is obvious that the entire volume of accumulated big data of a state or group of states is of exceptional intelligence, political, economic and military value, and ensuring their safety is one of the key tasks of national security. But there is also a more immediate political argument in favor of starting cooperation between Russia and the EU in the digital sphere. The progressive degradation of Russian-European relations has exhausted the bilateral agenda for substantive topics. The issues of developing the digital economy and jointly confronting common threats in the digital environment that really bring us closer together can provide fundamentally new areas for non-confrontational interaction.

A separate point for Russia is relations with the leading digital powers – China and the United States. Unlike the European and Eurasian tracks, joint economic projects with Moscow are extremely unlikely in both cases. Nevertheless, the political situation dictates different logics in relations with Washington and Beijing in this area.

With the PRC, it is necessary to continue to coordinate their positions on international platforms regarding issues of Internet regulation and data security. Our approaches are similar, although the Russian one seems to be more liberal and does not imply the creation of an analogue of the “Great Chinese Digital Wall” in our country. But there are two other sensitive issues that need to be discussed with Beijing, putting aside the awkwardness.

The first is China’s technological penetration into the EAEU states within the framework of the “digital Silk Road” doctrine. As in the case of Eurasian integration in general, it is important to interface, coordinate the actions of Chinese business and the state with the activities implemented within the framework of the EAEU – 2025 Digital Agenda.

The second is the development of rules of conduct for Chinese companies in the Russian market of highly qualified personnel and startups. Currently, Huawei is conducting large-scale work on the purchase of Russian technology companies and on attracting Russian specialists to its R&D units. At the same time, salaries in the company are significantly higher than the market, which leads to a flow of specialists from domestic companies. Obviously, in conditions of market rules and freedom of choice, this is a natural process, but it is also necessary to discuss compensatory actions for the national economy with the Chinese side. The Chinese side would never allow similar behavior of third-country companies in its market. The expansion of work with universities, localization of not only I&O departments, but also production, the transition to the creation of joint products, and not the “cannibalization” of startup solutions should become requirements for digital companies operating in our country.

Cooperation on political issues with the United States is even more relevant, despite the confrontational nature of bilateral relations. First of all, it is the development of confidence-building measures in cyberspace, the discussion of restrictions on the military use of digital technologies, the convergence of approaches to Internet regulation. Russia and the United States could initiate negotiations on the creation of new instruments for controlling new types of military technologies. It is also necessary to jointly understand the terminology: speaking of “Russian hackers”, Americans most often give examples of “social engineering”. It is necessary to make every effort to return pragmatism to Russian-American relations, even if Washington’s interest in this is not visible now. We are not talking about giving the United States a new credit of trust. Rather, it is about considering Washington’s every move carefully and assessing its possible consequences, without considering it as a priori hostile to Russian interests.

Russia needs a coordinated, clearly articulated and structured agenda to work in multilateral associations – the ITU, the Digital Twenty, the OECD. It is hardly reasonable to spend all the time pushing through exclusively Russian approaches and engage in fierce diplomatic battles with partners. Instead, at least two groups of “digital truths” should be recognized internally.

First. The location of DNS servers and the main Internet highways really did not work out in favor of Russia. Russia is not a first-level provider. In matters of shaping the digital agenda, Russia is a major regional power, not the second pole of this system. Individual digital corporations have become so powerful that they talk to states on an equal footing.

The second. The world tends much less towards “digital bipolarity” than it may seem. This is especially significant at the level of cyberspace regulation. Despite the proclaimed freedom of information movement, most countries seek to localize data storage in one form or another. In matters of digital regulation, all countries are authoritarian. There are areas that require strict regulation, even in more democratic countries. On the other hand, it is irrational to completely deny the concept of “multistakeholderism” – the plurality of those responsible – in the development of any decisions concerning regulation and further ways of developing new technologies. The regulator must inevitably conduct a dialogue with technology owners, and this is most often a business. Having realized these realities, Russia will be able to act as a conciliatory state in multilateral associations, determined to find a compromise.

Russia also has a chance to become an exponent of the interests of states that want to preserve their digital sovereignty and are not set up to be part of the Chinese or American digital empire, but do not have sufficient “subjectivity” for this. Both lines of behavior will expand our opportunities to realize our leadership potential, our “gravitational core”. This will make it possible to promote Russian candidates for leadership positions of such multilateral associations as, for example, ITU.

Another important step in the restructuring of Russian work in international organizations should be a more thorough selection of members of our delegations, ensuring their versatility. Today, the reality is that Russian diplomats are not always sufficiently aware of the technical aspects of the issues under consideration, while specialized technical specialists do not have enough knowledge of the art of negotiations. A separate role should be assigned to lobbyists – business representatives, who are, in fact, the ultimate beneficiary of most of the decisions taken. This kind of “digital realism”, instead of distractions to provocations and foreign policy “noises”, orients Russia to extremely pressing issues of ensuring the country’s digital interests in the world.

The recognition that in terms of creating 5G networks, Russia has completely lost the initiative or the ability to actively influence the agenda should push Moscow to focus on preparing our proposals for the 7G network standard (or is it 6G?), to step up work to neutralize the threat of isolation of Russia in matters of the radio frequency range allocated for the needs of a new generation of communications spectrum. On this issue, Russian views do not coincide with the overwhelming majority of countries in the world. The peculiarity of the regulatory regulation of the digital sphere is that the new laws will be written by those who write the codes, that is, the technical content of the innovation will largely determine its regulatory framework. Therefore, it is important to intensify the participation of Russian specialists in the development of standards and protocols for tomorrow’s technologies.

Conclusion

Against the background of the virtualization of all aspects of social life, the militarization of the information space is taking place. Taking advantage of the absence of borders in the digital space and generally recognized rules of conduct in it, states and organizations controlled by them distribute biased and disinformation content in order to promote their own interests and values. New technologies of virtual reality formation, such as deepfake, leave almost no chance for an ordinary person to separate lies from reality and are able to provoke religious and ethnic conflicts with impunity, destroy families, destroy the reputations of politicians and innocent people.

In the coming years, the question of the structure of regulation of the entire global Internet will inevitably arise. Under the pressure of block technological confrontation – mainly between the United States and China – and ideological and political struggle, it is already divided into digital “enclaves”. The basic value of the Internet as a worldwide equal and democratic environment (web neutrality) is also undermined by attempts, promoted, in particular, by the United States, to make the quality and speed of network traffic dependent on the client’s wallet. The inclusiveness of the Internet is becoming the key to reducing digital inequality, and with it the guarantor of global economic growth and social development.

Big data as the “new oil” of the digital age should have an understandable owner and an understandable value for the individual, business and the state. Only if a person and a citizen become the center of services and services in the digital environment, a balance of human rights, national priorities and business interests will be ensured, and it will be possible to regulate the currently uncontrolled global digital monopolies for the benefit of the whole society. The removal of the pages of President Trump and his supporters, as well as the “deplatforming” of the Parler social network, popular among Republicans, clearly outline the prospect of actions by tech giants to eliminate economic and political competitors if these tech giants decide to operate outside the United States. Since it is so tough and relatively easy to crack down on ideological opponents in the United States, why can’t this practice be made extraterritorial? Moreover, there are already precedents.

For Russia, the minimum task is to preserve sovereignty when making decisions affecting the main areas of national security. The maximum task is to create your own competitive technological ecosystem, become the leader of the techno-economic block and a key participant in the process of developing new rules of the game in this area. In this sense, gaining economic sovereignty is a simpler task than gaining informational sovereignty. But it seems that the survival of states in the future depends on its solution.

The export of technologies and competencies for the protection of sovereign critical infrastructure to countries wishing to ensure their independence and defense capability can and should become one of the most important political and foreign economic priorities of Russia. This will provide the country with a significant financial inflow and international influence. It is along this path that the powers claiming leadership positions in this area are already following.

Currently, the implementation of the critical infrastructure technology export strategy is hindered by the lack of experience of Russian high-tech companies in creating integrated platform solutions, their weak presence in the markets of potential partners, as well as insufficient financial capacity to work on large long-term projects.

As the civilizational and ideological confrontation escalates, examples of subversive information activity become more frequent, more and more countries are paying attention to the need for more careful control over malicious and subversive content on the Internet. In the United States, where an information war is unfolding between hostile political forces – as the 2020 presidential campaign showed – digital monopolies resort to outright censorship and manipulation in favor of their ideological supporters.

Russia should think about the mechanisms of active formation of the information space, which would allow it to lead in terms of relevance and quality of content and thereby limit foreign influence in its information space.

The challenge of the new time is the “impatience of the spirit”: a short clip or a post on a social network “wins” a full-fledged news report or an analytical article, the variety of multimedia experience distracts a person’s attention, and the speed of changes turns life into a race against time. The conservative, traditionally unhurried sphere of interstate communication is forced to change, “to run very fast in order to at least stay in place.” States that will be able to quickly rebuild clumsy foreign policy mechanisms faster than others have every chance to take a leading position in this rapid “new brave world”.

The post INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION AND LEADERSHIP IN THE DIGITAL ENVIRONMENT first appeared on Global Policy.

After the Watergate scandal, a Congressional committee and other related investigations found that the country’s intelligence services had extensive surveillance powers and were involved in a number of illegal or unconstitutional actions.

They secretly undermined and killed foreign leaders. They have engaged hundreds of journalists and many media outlets around the world to spread false narratives. They spied and infiltrated political and human rights groups. And they manipulated public discourse to protect and expand their powers.

Senator Frank Church himself warned that the power of the intelligence community could at any moment “turn against the American people, and no American will have any privacy left, such is the ability to monitor everything… there will be nowhere to hide.”

Since then, the technological possibilities for invading privacy have increased dramatically, and the capabilities of the intelligence services, especially after September 11, have expanded in ways that Church could never have foreseen.

That’s why it’s high time to create a new church committee. And finally, in the most contradictory circumstances and for the most biased reasons, some kind of revival can finally happen.

The protracted struggle within the Republican Party over the election of Kevin McCarthy as the new speaker of the House of Representatives last month forced him to yield to the demands of the right wing of his party. Last but not least, he agreed to create a committee on what is called “arming” the federal government.

It held its first meeting last week. The group said its task would be to address “the politicization of the FBI and the Department of Justice and encroachments on American civil liberties.”

Earlier, in his speech to the House of Representatives about the new committee, Republican Representative Dan Bishop said it was time to cut out the “rot” in the federal government: “We pay attention to the deep state. We’re coming for you.”

Democrats have already condemned the committee as a tool that will be used in the interests of Donald Trump and his supporters, saying that right-wing Republicans want to discredit the security services and hint at abuses in the treatment of the former president.

A snowball of power

But while the committee will almost certainly end up being used to settle political scores, it could still shed light on some of the appalling new powers that the security services have acquired since the Church Committee report.

The extent to which these forces have grown should be obvious to everyone. Documents released by whistleblower Edward Snowden ten years ago testify to illegal mass surveillance at home and abroad by the NSA. And Julian Assange’s transparency organization Wikileaks has published dossiers revealing not only US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also a huge global hacking program of the CIA.

It is noteworthy that both Assange and Snowden have suffered terrible consequences, which may be a sign of the ability of security agencies to retaliate against those who challenge their might.

Snowden was forced to leave Russia, one of the few jurisdictions where he cannot be extradited to the United States and locked up in custody. Assange has been jailed because the US authorities are seeking his extradition, so he can disappear in a maximum security prison for the rest of his life.

THE DEMOLITION OF “9/11” – AS IT WAS IN NEW YORK…

Now, in an unexpected turn of events, the billionaire has opened another window for covert manipulation by the security services — this time in relation to social media platforms and the electoral process in the United States. The key players this time are the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), created by the administration of former President George W. Bush after the September 11 attacks.

After Elon Musk bought the social network Twitter last year, he gave several independent journalists access to its corporate archives. In an ongoing series of investigations called “Twitter Files”, published as long streams on the platform, these journalists found out what happened under the previous owners of Twitter.

The bottom line is that after Trump’s election, the US security services — with the help of political pressure, especially from the Democratic Party — aggressively penetrated the decision-making processes on Twitter. It seems that other major social media platforms have taken similar measures.

“Nothing burger”?

The Twitter files suggest a rapidly emerging but covert partnership between government intelligence agencies, Silicon Valley, and traditional media to manipulate the nationwide dialogue in the U.S. as well as much of the rest of the world.

WESTERN MEDIA POWER AS IT IS: ROCKEFELLERS, ROTHSCHILDS AND MORGANS

The sides of this alliance justify to each other their interference in US politics — hidden from public view — as a necessary response to the rapid growth of a new populism . Trump and his supporters began to dominate the Republican Party, and a left-wing populist led by Senator Bernie Sanders made limited penetration into the Democratic Party.

The special services were particularly concerned about social networks, as they were seen as a means of causing this wave of popular discontent. According to the Intercept, one of the FBI employees last year noticed that “subversive information on social networks can undermine the support of the US government.”

It seems that the national security state viewed the alliance with the big tech private sector as an opportunity to protect the old guard of politics, especially in the Democratic Party. Figures such as President Joe Biden and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi were considered a reliable pair of hands capable of preserving the legitimacy of turbocharged neoliberal capitalism and eternal wars, which were the lifeblood of the intelligence community.

CENSORSHIP IN THE AMERICAN WAY: THE MAIN CONSPIRACY THEORIST OF THE UNITED STATES WAS REMOVED FROM THE NETWORK

This partnership has served all parties well. Silicon Valley has been the chosen career for many liberals who believe that progress is best achieved through technological means dependent on social stability and political consensus. Populism and the polarization it generates naturally cause them discomfort.

And both intelligence agencies and more centrist politicians in the Republican and Democratic parties understand that they are in the firing line in populist politics due to years of failures: the growing polarization of wealth between rich and poor, the creaking US economy, depleted or non-existent social security services, the ability of the rich to buy political influence, the constant loss of treasure and lives in seemingly meaningless wars that are being waged in distant countries, and the media, which rarely touch on the problems of ordinary people.

Instead of focusing on the real causes of the growing anger and sentiment against the establishment, the security services offered politicians and Silicon Valley a more comforting and convenient narrative. Populists — both on the right and on the left — did not express dissatisfaction with the failure of the US political and economic system. They worked to sow social discontent in the interests of Russia.

Or, as recorded in the minutes of the DHS meeting last March, a new emphasis was placed on curbing “subversive data used to drive a wedge between the population and the government.”

This strategy reached its climax with Russiagate, years of unsubstantiated hysteria promoted by the intelligence community and the Democratic Party. The main claim was that Trump was able to defeat his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election only because of collusion with Moscow and Russian influence operations through social networks.

As in the game “Hit the Mole”, any signs of illegal actions or criminal actions on the part of the special services or systemic failures of the US political class were now regarded as “Russian disinformation”.

POVERTY AS A SYMPTOM

Snowden’s expulsion to Russia — the only choice left to him — was used to discredit his denunciations of the NSA. And the disclosure by Assange and Wikileaks of war crimes and violations of the law by the intelligence community was actually negated by the alleged collusion with “Russian hackers” in uncovering corruption in the Democratic Party during the 2016 elections.

In practice, statements about “Russian disinformation” simply further polarized US policy.

The key issues raised by the Twitter files — the collusion of the state with the technology and media industry, interference in elections, as well as manipulation and distortion of the narrative — were classified as political bias and obscured by them.

Interest in Twitter files has been mostly limited to the right. Reflexively, the Democrats mostly dismissed the revelations as “nothing burger.”

Climate of fear

Perhaps coincidentally, after taking over Twitter, Musk turned from a liberal favorite—because of his Tesla electric cars -into almost an outcast. In October, the Biden administration denied reports that it was considering vetting his business for national security in the face of Musk’s “increasingly friendly stance.” His status as the richest man in the world quickly collapsed along with his reputation.

The irony is that the same special services that fanned the hysteria around the “Rashagate” are now being exposed in Twitter files as guilty of the very interference they accused Moscow of.

DEATH OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

It was reported that during the 2016 presidential election, Russia colluded with Trump and helped him, using social networks to sow discord and manipulate the American electorate. The subsequent official investigation by Robert Mueller did not confirm these allegations.

Instead, I believe that the Twitter files indicate that not Russia, but the FBI, DHS and CIA — the very agencies claiming that Russia threatens the political order in the United States — aggressively and secretly sought to influence American public opinion.

The Twitter files suggest that the real threat to democracy in the US is the US security state, to a much greater extent than Russia. The atmosphere of fear fueled by these agencies over alleged “Russian disinformation” not only influenced public opinion, but also gave the intelligence community even more leverage over social networks and an additional license to accumulate more power. Whether it’s Russiagate, Skripal or Syria, the media has lost touch with reality

Statesmen are increasingly responsible for deciding who is allowed to be heard on social media — even Trump was banned when he was president — and what can be said. These decisions are often made not to prevent crimes or enforce laws, or even for the public good, but to tightly control political discourse in order to marginalize serious criticism of the establishment.

The fact that the collusion between the social media platforms and these agencies was secret in itself indicates the nefarious nature of what is happening.

Latent pressure

The Twitter files open a window into a phenomenon that seems to be playing out across all social networks. Traditionally, liberals have defended the use of censorship on social media on the grounds that these platforms are private companies that can do whatever they want. Their behavior allegedly is not a violation of the First Amendment to the protection of freedom of speech.

However, the reality revealed by the Twitter files is that networks have often responded to covert pressure either directly from the federal government or through its intelligence agencies by limiting what can be said. As it was repeatedly noted in the Files, Twitter, like other social networks, began to function not so much as a private company, but as “a kind of subsidiary of the FBI.”

In 2017, at the height of the panic around the “Rashagate”, the FBI created a Task Force to study foreign influence, the number of which soon increased to 80 agents. His alleged job was to keep in touch with various networks to stop alleged foreign interference in the election.

Soon, Twitter executives began meeting and communicating regularly with senior FBI officials, while receiving an endless stream of demands for the removal of content to prevent “Russian disinformation.” It seems that the CIA also attended the meetings under the pseudonym OGA or “another government agency.” Although the task of the task force was foreign influence, it reportedly became “a channel for many internal requests for moderation, from state governments and even from local police.”

It is reported that under growing behind-the-scenes pressure from intelligence agencies and publicly from politicians, social networks have begun to compile secret blacklists using information from security services to restrict access to accounts or stop the appearance of topics. The effects were often hard to miss since Trump said he was investigating the practice in 2018.

In response, Twitter executives publicly denied that they practiced a “shadow ban” — a term denoting when posts or accounts are difficult or impossible to find. In fact, Twitter just came up with another phrase for exactly the same speech suppression mode. They called it “visibility filtering.”

Such censorship was applied not only against accounts suspected of bots, or those who spread obvious misinformation. Even prominent public figures who had the right to speak on the topic were secretly persecuted if they challenged the key narratives of the establishment.

Stanford epidemiologist Jay Bhattacharya, for example, suffered from “visibility filtering” during the Covid-19 pandemic after criticizing blockages for harming children. He was put on the “black list of trends”.

Due to recent mass layoffs on Twitter, Middle East Eye was unable to contact the company for comment on these and other allegations made in Twitter files. The CIA had not responded by the time of publication, while the FBI sent a response stating: “The correspondence between the FBI and Twitter shows nothing but examples of our traditional, long-standing and ongoing obligations of the federal government and the private sector… As can be seen from the correspondence, the FBI provides important information to the private sector so that they can protect themselves and their clients.”

The files found that other leading doctors who questioned the government’s orthodoxy were also suspended from Twitter, often under direct pressure from the White House or lobbyists for vaccine companies.

But the most notable victim of the Twitter censorship regime was Trump himself. He was banned on January 8, 2021, although employees reportedly agreed behind the scenes that they could not base such a decision on any direct violation of their rules.

Russian “influence”

The consequences of the “Rashagate” further dragged Twitter into the arms of the special services. In early 2018, Republican Representative Devin Nunes submitted a secret memo to the House Intelligence Committee detailing alleged abuses by the FBI while monitoring a figure associated with Trump.

The FBI allegedly relied on the so-called Steele dossier, which was partially funded by Clinton and the Democratic Party, but was initially presented to the media as an independent intelligence investigation confirming collusion between the Trump team and Moscow.

The news of the memorandum provoked a storm on social media among Trump supporters, giving rise to a viral hashtag: #ReleaseTheMemo. Nunes ‘ allegations were confirmed almost two years later by a Justice Department investigation . However, at that time, Democratic politicians and the media were quick to ridicule the memorandum, describing any demand for its publication as a “Russian influence operation.”

The heat was scored on Big Tech. Twitter’s own investigations failed to reveal any Russian involvement, suggesting that the hashtag was trending naturally thanks to VIT – very important tweeters.

But Twitter executives weren’t in the mood for a fight. Instead of engaging in a fight with the Democratic Party — and, most likely, the FBI, concerned about the revelations of the memorandum — Twitter followed a “slavish scheme not to challenge Russia’s statements in the protocol,” said Matt Taibbi, one of the journalists who worked on this report. Twitter files.

Soon, major media outlets blamed Russia for all the embarrassing hashtags that went viral, such as #SchumerShutdown, #ParklandShooting and #GunControlNow. As Russiagate’s campaign of statements intensified, Twitter came under increasing pressure to act. In 2017, he manually checked about 2,700 accounts marked as potentially suspicious. The vast majority have been cleared. Twitter blocked 22 accounts as possible Russian, and another 179 were found with “possible links” to these accounts.

Democratic politicians were outraged, apparently relying on intelligence sources to confirm their claim that social networks were flooded with Russian bots. Twitter responded by creating a “Russia task force” to investigate further, but again found no evidence of a Russian influence campaign. All that was discovered were a few lone posters who spend limited money on advertising.

Nevertheless, Twitter plunged into a PR crisis, and politicians and official media accused it of inertia. Congress has threatened to pass draconian legislation that would deprive Twitter of advertising revenue. Twitter’s inability to find accounts of Russian influence led to an accusation from Politico: “Twitter deleted data potentially important for investigations against Russia.” Twitter’s initial investigation of 2,700 accounts sparked ridiculous claims in the media that a “new network” of Russian bots had been discovered.

In the midst of this firestorm, Twitter suddenly changed course, publicly stating that it would remove content “at our sole discretion,” but in fact it was much worse. As Taibbi reported in one of the Twitter files, this happened when the company privately decided to “take off board” everything that was “identified by the US intelligence community as a state-sponsored organization conducting cyber operations.”

Twitter was increasingly under siege. A Twitter file published last month claims that a well-known online lobby called Hamilton 68, with ties to the intelligence community, committed “fraud” against Russian disinformation.

The site caused endless headlines in the American media after a report that it revealed a campaign of Russian influence on social networks, in which hundreds of users participated. The media published these claims as proof that social networks are flooded with Russian bots. Hamilton 68 employees were even invited to testify before senior Congressional politicians.

However, despite this furore, Hamilton 68 has not released a list of bots that, according to her, were discovered. Internal Twitter investigations revealed that almost all of those on the list were regular users.

The Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD), which hosted Hamilton 68 and its successor Hamilton 2.0, published a “help” in response to Twitter files refuting the allegations and suggesting that its data was “constantly misunderstood or misrepresented” by the media and lawmakers, despite “extensive efforts to correct misconceptions at that time.” ASD noted that they never assumed that all the bots were Russian, but tracked some of them.

It is noteworthy that Hamilton 68 was headed by a former senior FBI official. Twitter executives did not publicly resist the pressure of the media and faced being brushed off when they tried to privately express their concerns to journalists.

FBI “navel”

In a sign of how close the relationship between the FBI and Twitter has become, Twitter has hired James Baker, the former chief lawyer of the FBI, as legal counsel. Baker has been one of the central figures in attempts to paint a picture — now discredited again — of collusion between Trump and Moscow.

Many others who left the FBI went straight to Twitter. Among them was Dawn Burton, the former deputy chief of staff of the head of the FBI James Comey, who initiated the investigation of the “Rashagate”. In 2019 , she became Twitter ‘s director of strategy .

Similar connections existed with the British special services. Twitter has hired Gordon McMillan as its chief editorial adviser on the Middle East. This was a part-time position, as at the same time he was serving in the psychological warfare unit of the British Armed Forces, the 77th Brigade.

By 2020, when the pandemic broke out, other government agencies saw their chance to launch a parallel campaign against Twitter, focused on China’s alleged efforts to spread misinformation about Covid-19. The State Department’s intelligence arm, the Global Engagement Center, used federal government data to claim that 250,000 Twitter accounts were amplifying “Chinese propaganda,” once again sowing unrest. These accounts included the Canadian military and CNN.

Correspondence between Twitter executives shows that they had their own views on the goals of the campaign. State Department officials wanted to “fit in” with a consortium of agencies like the FBI and DHS that were allowed to delete Twitter content.

Significantly, Twitter objected to the inclusion of the State Department—and in terms that strongly contrasted with their approach to the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. Executives viewed the staff as more “political” and “Trumpian.”

In the end, it was proposed that the FBI serve as a “navel” through which Silicon Valley would inform other government agencies. As a result, according to the Files, Twitter “accepted requests from every conceivable government agency,” often en masse. The platform has almost never refused to respond to requests to delete accounts accused of being Russian bots.

As Twitter became increasingly passive, even senior US politicians tried to intervene. Adam Schiff, then the head of the House Intelligence Committee, asked a journalist he doesn’t like to de-report. Although Twitter has been reluctant to agree to such requests, it is “deamplifying” some accounts.

As the 2020 election approached, the flood of security demands turned into a torrent that threatened to overwhelm Twitter. Many of them had nothing to do with foreign influence — an obvious target of the FBI task force. Instead, the submissions often concerned internal accounts. They rarely detailed threats of lawbreaking or terrorism, which appear to be the FBI’s primary area of interest, but instead focused on much less clearly defined violations of Twitter’s “terms of service.”

Often accounts were subjected to “digital execution” not because what was said was verifiable disinformation, but because the tweets crossed political red lines: noting the neo-Nazi problem in Ukraine or being too sympathetic to Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro or Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Laptop Revelations

It is reported that after the introduction of Big Tech, the security services used their powers to secretly form a nationwide dialogue around the 2020 presidential election.

Perhaps the biggest revelation so far, confirming the suspicions of the right, is that social networks and state security agencies played a role in hiding the so-called Hunter Biden laptop story a few weeks before the 2020 election.

On the eve of the vote, the FBI task force prepared the ground by telling Silicon Valley executives that Russia would try to “dump” hacked information in order to damage Democratic presidential candidate Biden. Presumably, this was a repeat of the 2016 election, when the publication of internal Democratic Party emails damaged then-candidate Hillary Clinton.

After Trump’s election, much of the “Rashagate” narrative grew out of unsubstantiated claims by the security services that these embarrassing emails pointing to political corruption in the leadership of the Democratic Party were hacked by Russia.

HOW DEMOCRATS LAUNDER MONEY IN THE USA AND UKRAINE

Evidence suggesting a different explanation— that the emails were leaked by a disgruntled insider—has been widely ignored. The furor caused by this story overshadowed the fact that the emails and their damning revelations about the Democratic Party were all too real.

Based on warnings from the intelligence community, social media platforms hastily blocked the Hunter Biden laptop story, which alleged problematic ties between the Biden family and foreign officials in Ukraine. Joe Biden’s officials denied any wrongdoing on the part of the then presidential candidate, and Hunter himself evaded the question.about whether the laptop belonged to him. The story, which was published by the right-wing New York Post newspaper, was immediately declared a Russian influence operation by dozens of former intelligence officers.

But in fact, the FBI knew almost a year before this story became public that the laptop belonged to Hunter Biden and that the information contained in it was unlikely to have been tampered with or hacked. The owner of a computer store in Delaware, whom Hunter Biden asked to repair his laptop, reported his concerns to the FBI. The agency even subpoenaed the device.

This chain of events raises questions about whether the FBI decided to pre-empt the impact of the laptop story, which threatened Joe Biden’s chances in the 2020 election, before the right-wing press could publish the information. It appears that they manipulated the media, including social media, to suggest that any story harming Biden before the election is Russian disinformation.

At the time, Big Tech had other reasons to believe that this story was probably true. The New York Post conducted the usual checks. Other reporters soon confirmed that the information came from Hunter Biden’s laptop.

However, Twitter hastily accepted the statement that this story violates its policy regarding the publication of hacked materials, repeating the FBI’s statement that this is Russian disinformation. Others, like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, agreed with the FBI’s demands for trust too, as he later admitted.

Social networks have taken the unprecedented step of blocking attempts to share this story on their platforms, which could affect the outcome of the 2020 election — something that most right—wing Republicans consider a crime against democracy, and many supporters of the Democratic Party consider a crime against democracy.

Psychological warfare

Collusion between social media platforms and the US security service over the “Rashagate” was not a deviation from the norm. According to the files, Twitter gave the Pentagon special permission, in violation of its own policy, to create accounts to conduct a “digital execution.”

Twitter helped the military to whitelist 52 fake accounts in Arabic in order to “expand certain messages.” These accounts promoted U.S. military objectives in the Middle East, including reports of attacks on Iran, support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen, and claims that U.S. drones are striking Iran.

ROBERTO QUAGLI: IS A MULTIPOLAR WORLD POSSIBLE IN A UNIPOLAR INFORMATION ENVIRONMENT ?

By May 2020, Twitter had discovered dozens more accounts that the Pentagon had not disclosed, which wrote in Russian and Arabic on topics such as Syria and the Islamic State. According to Li Fang, one of the journalists who worked on the Twitter files: “Many emails sent during 2020 show that high-level Twitter executives were well aware of the extensive network of fake accounts and covert propaganda [of the Ministry of Defense] and did not suspend the accounts.”

Another study revealed the Pentagon’s extensive propaganda network in other social media apps such as Facebook and Telegram.

Twitter’s leniency towards these secret Pentagon accounts stands in stark contrast to its treatment of the media and individuals accused of having ties to countries the US government considers hostile states. They are widely known as such, including Western dissident journalists and academics who allegedly worked with Russian, Chinese, Iranian or Venezuelan media.

According to a study by the FAIR media monitoring group, Twitter continues to conceal the nationality of accounts funded by the US government, including those that promote its propaganda goals in Ukraine and other countries. FAIR was unable to find any examples of accounts identified as “US state media” or accounts labeled as such in the UK or Canada.

The group concluded: “Twitter allows American propaganda agencies to maintain the appearance of independence on the platform, tacit approval of US soft power and influence operations… Twitter acts as an active participant in the ongoing information war.”

A dense veil of secrecy

After the Twitter files began to be dumped in December, the FBI responded not by verifying the authenticity of the documents, but by playing the same game as before. He accused the journalists of spreading “conspiracy theories” and “disinformation” aimed at “discrediting the agency.”

Hillary Clinton, an elder of the Democratic Party establishment, continues to blame Russian disinformation for her country’s troubles.

The truth is that both the security services and the political establishment have invested too much in their current secret arrangements with social networks to agree to changes.

And it is unlikely to increase while the United States continues to rush from crisis to crisis: from the “war on terror” to the Trump presidency, the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. All these crises — it should be noted that in different ways — are the legacy of political decisions made by the same actors, who now reject control and supervision.

These crises serve as a pretext not only for inaction, but also for ever closer and tighter control of the state over the digital public space — and not transparently, but under a dense cover of secrecy.

As Church warned almost half a century ago, the biggest threat facing the United States is the possibility that its security services will direct their huge forces inward, against American society. And this process is exactly what the Twitter Files document is.

They show that the intelligence community has come to reconsider its main role — protecting American society from external threats — and has included American society itself in this threat.

THE STUDY OF SOCIAL NETWORKS IN THE INTERESTS OF US INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES

In 2021, one of the first priorities of the Biden administration was the promulgation of a National strategy to Counter domestic terrorism. It says the loss of faith in the government and extreme polarization is “fueled by a crisis of disinformation and misinformation, often channeled through social media platforms.”

It seems that the growth of discontent among US citizens is not the fault of a failed political leadership or an arrogant deep state. Instead, the same failed establishment considers the negative reaction of the population and discontent with voters solely for selfish purposes, as proof of foreign interference.

In the Twitter files, Musk opened a small window to show a little what’s going on behind closed doors. But even that window will close again soon. And then the darkness will return—unless the public demands their right to know more.

The post HOW SOCIAL NETWORKS BECAME THE “DAUGHTER” OF THE FBI AND THE CIA first appeared on Global Policy.

But how is Joe Biden connected with this and where did his family’s investment activity come from in general? To begin with, the current American leader is not directly involved in commercial affairs, only his youngest son appears in the contracts. At the same time, Hunter Biden organized transactions not alone, but together with his friends: the adopted son of former Secretary of State John Kerry and the heir to the billion-dollar fortune of the Heinz family food company Christopher Heinz, as well as the financial adviser of the Kerry family Devon Archer. All these people were familiar from the time of studying at Yale University, which they graduated from in 1995 – 1996.

FORMER US SECRETARY OF STATE JOHN KERRY (RIGHT) WITH HIS ADOPTED SON CHRISTOPHER HEINZ (LEFT)

And if everything is very clear with Biden and Heinz, then Archer took his place in the nascent money laundering scheme not by chance. At Yale, Archer was not only an athlete (the best player on the varsity lacrosse team in 1994), but also a good student. Having gained experience in serious law firms, in 2004, he passed the test when, on Heinz’s recommendation, he helped organize the presidential election campaign of then-Democratic Senator John Kerry.

JOHN KERRY SPEAKS TO VOTERS DURING THE 2004 PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN

Despite the failure in the 2004 elections, where Republican George W. Bush wins, Devon still enters the trusted circle of the Kerry family and becomes their financial adviser. And here the time comes for the second act of this theatrical production.

Rosemont Capital Group of Companies

In 2005, Christopher Heinz and Devon Archer founded Rosemont Capital LLC. It becomes the so-called “family office” (family office), that is, a private company providing services for the management of family property and other assets. The assets of the Kerry and Heinz families are transferred to her jurisdiction.

ROSEMONT CAPITAL’S NEW YORK OFFICE IS LOCATED ON THE 47TH FLOOR OF THE PRESTIGIOUS CARNEGIE HALL TOWER IN THE HEART OF MANHATTAN

The name Rosemont was not chosen by chance – the Heinz estate of the same name is located near the city of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania. Christopher spent part of his childhood there.

THE ESTATE OF THE HEINZ FAMILY ROSEMONT FARM IN PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA

In 2007, Heinz and Archer register Rosemont Capital Management LLC, a subsidiary of Rosemont Capital, designed to manage companies and firms owned by the Heinz family.

In turn, in August 2008, Hunter Biden founded Seneca Global Advisors, a “boutique consulting firm” that was supposed to help small and medium-sized companies enter the markets of the United States and other countries. This is not Hunter’s first experience in business. Before that, he had already tried to create his own business, but failed because of his addictions.

After the victory of Barack Obama in the presidential election in 2008, the political weight of Joe Biden, who becomes vice president of the United States, has grown noticeably. His party colleague, Senator John Kerry, becomes Biden’s successor as chairman of the Senate Foreign Policy Committee. Realizing the opening prospects of earning easy money, Hunter and the company begin to act.

In 2008 – 2009, Hunter Biden, Christopher Heinz and Devon Archer agree to create a joint business with far-reaching goals.

On June 25, 2009, just six months after the inauguration of Barack Obama and Joe Biden, they register the firm Rosemont Seneca Partners LLC, which is 50% owned by Rosemont Capital, and 50% by Biden (combining the names Rosemont – Heinz and Archer, Seneca – Bidens). A month later, on July 29, 2009, another joint firm, Rosemont Seneca Advisors LLC, opens.

The firm is doing very well and in January 2010, to promote their interests, the partners open an office in Washington, DC, just a few blocks from the White House.

THE WATERFRONT CENTER BUILDING IN WASHINGTON, DC, WHERE ROSEMONT SENECA PARTNER RENTS SPACE ON THE TOP FLOOR, IN OFFICE 705

In addition, in 2010 Hunter receives a stake in Rosemont Realty LLC, founded by Christopher Heinz and Devon Archer. At that time, another graduate from Yale, Daniel Barrel, was already working there. He is a very good manager and with his direct participation in 2010 Rosemont Realty LLC acquired BGK, which owns 135 commercial buildings in 22 states.

PARTNER OF THE ROSEMONT GROUP OF COMPANIES DANIEL BARREL

In 2011, Biden, Heinz and Archer opened the firm Rosemont Seneca Technology Partners LLC, which also became a subsidiary of Rosemont Capital LLC. Moreover, the addresses of the branches of Rosemont Seneca Partners LLC and Rosemont Seneca Technology Partners LLC in Washington are the same. The company has been investing in the technology sector and in biotechnology. Hunter Biden holds the position of Managing Director of the RSTP branch in New York.

All these organizations have become a platform for the Rosemont Capital Group of companies. It is worth noting that the companies opened by Hunter and partners were registered in the state of Delaware. There are several reasons for this:

1. Low tax rates in the state. All registered organizations by structure are LLC (Limited Liability Company) – a limited liability company. This form of business allows for greater flexibility in terms of taxation. In addition, LLC, unlike corporations (Corp.), has a less standardized and rigid operating structure, as well as fewer reporting and accounting requirements.

2. Strict corporate rules (data on beneficial owners are not collected, which allows politicians to maintain their anonymity).

3. Joe Biden was a senator from Delaware from 1973 to 2009 before being elected vice president.

4. Hunter’s older brother, Beau Biden, served as Delaware Attorney General from 2007 to 2015.

Rosemont Seneca Technology Partners and Metabiota

In 2013, the management of Rosemont Seneca Technology Partners LLC decided to invest in the biotech company Metabiota Inc., as a promising company, whose founder Nathan Wolf has a reputation as a serious scientist, virologist and infectious disease specialist, has repeatedly received grants from foundations and US government agencies.

THE FOUNDER OF METABIOTA IS VIROLOGIST NATHAN WOLFE

On March 20, 2014, a round of investments is taking place, following which Metabiota company attracts at least $3 million.

Metabiota is becoming such a well-known company that the Government of Sierra Leone and the World Health Organization at the end of March 2014 appealed to Metabiota for help in connection with the outbreak of the Ebola epidemic in West Africa.

A FIELD HOSPITAL IN WEST AFRICA EQUIPPED IN CONNECTION WITH THE EBOLA OUTBREAK

Metabiota responded to the help and immediately got to work. As the witnesses of those events note, questions immediately arose about the work of Metabiota employees. So, there were a large number of questions about their compliance with safety requirements, as well as the work regulations. Moreover, as WHO Ebola Coordinator Philippe Barbosa noted in an email dated August 2014, Metabiota employees “systematically hinder any attempts to improve the existing epidemiological surveillance system.” He even said that WHO should withdraw its staff from the city of Kenema, writing that he was “very concerned about the potential risk to the reputation of WHO.”

The logical continuation of the work in Sierra Leone was that Metabiota employees “messed up with Ebola.” This was stated by a medical historian from the University of Paris, Diderot Guillaume Lachenal, who followed the epidemic in West Africa. Surprisingly, the activity of Metabiota was eventually marked for the better. The company is publicly thanked by the WHO leadership, and in December 2014, the company even received a grant from the European Union to develop new methods of treating Ebola.

According to sources familiar with the situation, the management of Rosemont Seneca Technology Partners, through its considerable connections, put pressure on officials of the World Health Organization so that all complaints and accusations remain unanswered. Moreover, the company even managed to participate in the development of the federal budget and received even more contracts.

Interestingly, in the same year 2014, the company receives carte blanche for full-scale activities in Ukraine, related, as it turned out later, not only to the biotechnological sphere. So, on April 4, 2014, the vice-president of Metabiota, Merry Gutteri, writes Hunter a famous email thanking him for organizing the meeting and offering to continue discussing how they could “defend the cultural and economic independence of Ukraine from Russia.” The company turned out to be extremely useful for the Biden clan and the pro-Ukrainian lobby in the American establishment. Moreover, it was quite easy and not expensive to organize activities in Ukraine: by that time, connections had already been established through Burisma, in which Hunter Biden was on the board of directors.

Moreover, to consolidate the success in Sierra Leone, Metabiota planned to carry out research in Ukraine. This is evidenced by the proposal of the Ministry of Health of Ukraine to the Ukrainian Scientific and Technological Center (USTC) with a proposal to finance measures to improve laboratory diagnostics of particularly dangerous pathogens in Ukraine, including the Ebola virus disease.

THE MAIN DIRECTIONS OF RESEARCH ACTIVITIES OF THE UKRAINIAN SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNOLOGICAL CENTER (USTC)

The study was planned to be conducted at the only laboratory suitable for studying such a dangerous disease in Odessa, on the basis of the Anti-plague Institute. Mechnikov. It was during this period that Metabiota was actively involved in Ebola. It was at this time that Metabiota, with the help of Hunter Biden’s connections, actively enters Ukraine.

COORDINATION OF BIOLOGICAL LABORATORIES AND RESEARCH INSTITUTES OF UKRAINE WITH THE USA

It seems that the Ukrainian officials bribed by Metabiota once again intended to conclude a cooperation agreement on the study of Ebola without any reason. The disease has never been recorded on the territory of Ukraine. In addition, the Ukrainian authorities were not confused by the “stunning” successes of Metabiota in Sierra Leone. Most likely, the priority was their own enrichment, and not concern for the population, which may face a new epidemic due to the fault of Western experts who are not quite competent in this matter. Ukraine has miraculously avoided an epidemic of the Ebola virus in its country.

Rosemont Seneca and companies from China

In 2013, Hunter Biden, Devon Archer and Christopher Heinz, together with the largest Chinese funds, create the BHR Partners investment fund or Bohai Harvest RST Equity Investment Fund Management Co., Ltd. In this very long name, the abbreviation RST stands for R – Rosemont (Heinz and Archer), S – Seneca (Biden) and T – Thornton Group (consulting company of the son of the ex-chairman of the Massachusetts Senate). Hunter Biden “magically” becomes a member of the foundation’s board.

It is noteworthy that all the agreements were concluded against the background of the official visit to China of the American delegation headed by Joe Biden. According to some rumors, rich and influential offspring arrived in China on the same board of Air Force Two with the American vice president. To make settlements with the Bohai Foundation, Archer, Biden and Heinz found the company Rosemont Seneca Bohai LLC.

DEVON ARCHER WITH CHINESE PARTNERS

In 2015, the Chinese investment fund Gemini Investment, which has long intended to enter the American real estate market, acquires 75% of the shares of Rosemont Realty LLC, and the company is renamed Gemini-Rosemont Realty LLC. At the same time, 20% goes to Daniel Barrel, and 5% remains to managers from Rosemont.

In 2016, BHR Partners, on whose board Hunter sits, facilitated the purchase of one of the largest cobalt mines in the world, Tenke Fungurume in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, by the Chinese state-owned company China Molybdenum. The deal amounted to almost $4 billion. Cobalt is one of the strategic materials for the US industry, so the deal caused a negative reaction in the United States. However, there was no responsibility for such a strategic mistake for anyone. Attempts to investigate this case and the role of Hunter Biden were severely suppressed.

TENKE FUNGURUME DEPOSIT IN THE DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO

The public rift between Hunter and Christopher

In 2015, Hunter Biden leaves the post of a member of the board of directors of Rosemont Seneca Partners. A number of media outlets claim that Hunter’s removal from the management of the company was due to a positive test for cocaine in February 2014, after which he was discharged from the US Navy reserve.

However, at that time, more than a year had passed since the incident, and this version looks unconvincing. Officially, the reason was not named, but it probably happened due to excessive media attention to Hunter’s appointment to the board of directors of the Ukrainian company Burisma. Then many representatives of the American establishment saw this as a conflict of interest. The fact is that the United States promoted Ukraine’s independence from Russian gas, as well as the fight against corruption. But at the same time, the son of the current vice president held a post in the company of a Ukrainian oligarch, which was regarded in society as double standards.

Interestingly, in the same 2015, Christopher Heinz also stated that he has not been on the board of directors of Rosemont Seneca Partners since 2014 and has no business relationship with Hunter Biden. There is nothing strange in this, if you understand that corruption scandals were already gaining momentum and none of the management of Rosemont Seneca planned to tarnish their name.

Moreover, by 2016, the management of Rosemont Seneca Technology Partners, paying attention to possible reputational risks, is rebranding, changing the name to Pilot Growth Equity.

In 2017, Seneca Global Advisors, as well as the Rosemont Seneca Partners office in Washington, DC, will be liquidated. However, a legal entity registered in Delaware continues its activities to this day. Moreover, it is reliably known that from 2014 to 2016 Hunter Biden, through the Rosemont Seneca Bohai company, received financial contributions from Burisma, which he probably gave to strengthen the reputation of the US Democratic Party.

Results

Despite the fact that according to the laws of the state of Delaware, information about the shareholders of the Rosemont group of companies is not collected and cannot be found in the public domain, Hunter Biden clearly maintained contacts with his former partners after 2014. As the owner of shares in various LLC related to Rosemont, he could influence the transactions being conducted. At least the financial transfers in the period from 2014 to 2016 testify to his continuing ties with the Rosemont group of companies.

He also influenced the management of Metabiota and, accordingly, was involved in the military biological activities of the United States. Moreover, using his father’s connections, he participated in promoting the interests of Metabiota and helped conceal negative information about the results of its work in Sierra Leone.

There is also a completely conspiratorial theory that indicates that Hunter did not receive money from participating in Metabiota projects, since he extracted exclusively political dividends from the company’s activities and contributed to the development of biological weapons in the interests of the special services and the US Defense Ministry.

The public rift in the relationship between Biden Jr. and Rosemont is nothing more than a PR move designed to reduce possible reputational risks for the company and personally for Christopher Heinz. This is evidenced by the fact that Heinz did not declare the termination of working relations with Devon Archer. At the same time, they were preserved between Archer and Hunter, as indicated by accounts and correspondence, kindly merged from laptops.

From all that is available, it can be unequivocally concluded that Joe Biden’s activities as a senator, vice president and president of the United States to this day have signs of a conflict of interest, since his son was a member of the board of directors in Chinese and Ukrainian companies located in foreign jurisdiction.

HUNTER BIDEN’S CONNECTION WITH THE ROSEMONT GROUP OF COMPANIES, WHICH ALLOWS HIM TO MAKE A PROFIT AT THE PRESENT TIME (OF ALL THE COMPANIES REPRESENTED IN THE SCHEME, ONLY ONE HAS BEEN LIQUIDATED)

The post HOW DEMOCRATS LAUNDER MONEY IN THE USA AND UKRAINE first appeared on Global Policy.

I quote: “In the US state of Georgia, a monument was demolished, which was called the American Stonehenge”, Business Insider reports.

THE DESTROYED “GEORGIA TABLETS”THE DESTROYED “GEORGIA TABLETS”

The six-meter granite monument “The Tablets of Georgia” was installed in Albert County in 1980 by order of an unknown client hiding under a pseudonym. This fact, as well as mysterious inscriptions in twelve languages, four of which are ancient, contributed to conspiracy theories arising around the monument.

THE TABLETS OF GEORGIA ON RUSSIAN LANGUAGE

The message called on the inhabitants of the Earth to limit their number to half a billion people – in order to live “in constant balance with nature. Conspiracy theorists believed that the monument was proof of an elite conspiracy calling for the violent depopulation of the planet. The monument also served as an astronomical calendar: every day at noon sunlight penetrated through a narrow hole in the structure and illuminated the engraved dates.

Two-sided vertical plates with inscriptions in eight active languages contained the ten “commandments” of the so-called “Age of Reason”, which should come after certain shocks that will cover all of humanity. Languages were distributed on the plates in pairs: Russian and Chinese, English and Spanish, Hindi and Swahili, Arabic and Hebrew. The upper plate, on the ends of which there were inscriptions in four dead languages — Babylonian, ancient Greek, Sanskrit and ancient Egyptian, contained a call to recognize and accept these “tablets” as the covenant of the “reasonable age”. These are, so to speak, the “commandments”:

First: let the earth’s population never exceed 500 million, being in constant balance with nature.

Second: intelligently regulate the birth rate, increasing the value of life preparation and diversity of humanity.

Third: we will find a new living language capable of uniting humanity.

Fourth: show tolerance in matters of feelings, faith, traditions and the like.

Fifth: let fair laws and an impartial court stand up for the protection of peoples and nations.

Sixth: let each nation solve its own internal affairs by bringing national problems to the world court.

Seventh: avoid petty litigation and useless officials.

Eighth: maintain a balance between personal rights and public responsibilities.

Ninth: above all, value truth, beauty, love, striving for harmony with infinity.

Tenth: don’t be a cancer for the Earth, leave a place for nature!

The monument was blown up on Wednesday at dawn by unknown vandals

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation tweeted a video of the explosion captured by a surveillance camera and footage of a car driving away from the scene.

DEMOLITION OF THE “GEORGIA TABLETS”

The rest of the structure was demolished by the decision of the authorities later that day for security reasons, since the restoration required too much money.

DISMANTLING OF THE “GEORGIA TABLETS” BY AN EXCAVATOR

A local politician, a former candidate for governor of Georgia, Candice Taylor made the dismantling of the monument part of her election platform, promising to demolish it if she won. After the news appeared that the “Tablets” were blown up, Taylor wrote in social networks: “God is God in Itself. He can do WHATEVER he wants. This includes destroying satanic landmarks.” The monument was located 666 km from the UN building. It weighed 119 tons, consisted of 6 granite slabs, on which the same inscription was made in 8 modern languages. The message about the explosion was made by the local FBI, the footage from the video cameras was posted on Twitter. The monument was under round-the-clock video surveillance from all sides.

There are a lot of incomprehensible things in this story, but let’s try to analyze it

The date of July 6, 2022 is very difficult from the point of view of the gematria used by Satanists to calculate the dates of key events. Firstly, July 6 is the 187th day of the year (188th in leap years) according to the Gregorian calendar. There are 178 days left until the end of the year.

In the XX and XXI centuries, it corresponds to June 23 according to the Julian calendar, and 236 (239) is a very popular code among THEM, as we already know. And it means something like “Events with our (Satanic) participation”, or you can also say “We had a hand here”. This is my own interpretation based on my observations.

Secondly, there are several more bundles for this date considered by gematria researchers:

GEMATRIA OF THE “GEORGIA SPIRALS”

The language of “anti—Western” is very close to the ideas of “sustainable development”, although the monument appeared on the vernal equinox, March 22, 1980, and the term “sustainable development” – in 1987, in the report of the UN Commission on Environment and Development “Our common Future” (Gru Commission Harlem Bruntland). This indicates that such ideas have been wandering in globalist circles for a long time, long before their conceptual design. Actually, it is no secret that for the first time the question of “regulation”, but in fact restrictions and population reduction was raised back in 1972 in the first report to the Rome Club “Limits of Growth” (the authors are the Dennis Meadows group from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology). It was said about the need to freeze the volume of industrial production and the birth rate at the level of 1975 — no more than two children in a family. In order not to interpret it freely, we will give the justification for these actions directly from the text of the “Limits of Growth”. “Excessive population growth is a recent phenomenon, the result of a decrease in mortality. …There are only two ways to correct the imbalance that has arisen — either to reduce the rate of population growth and bring them into line with the low mortality rate, or to allow the mortality rate to rise again.” As they say, no comment! At the same time and in the same report, the term “global equilibrium” was first used, subsequently replaced by “sustainable development”.

Informally, it is also known that since 1952, the topic of population reduction has been actively developed by the Population Council, a global NGO that is closely linked, on the one hand, with the Rockefeller Foundation, and on the other, has consultative status with the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC).

At the same time, high-ranking sources in the Masonic order, periodically revealing some stories related to it, claim that we are talking about compensating filling in certain “gaps” of knowledge and norms of behavior of people and humanity as a whole, due to the alleged “insufficiency” of state and religious commandments. It follows from this that the “anti-Western beliefs” of the destroyed “tablets” were opposed to states and traditional religions. If we turn to the trends, documents and institutions of modern globalism, then, indeed, it is easy to make sure that their sum is aimed at the erosion of states that are listed in the UN documents on “sustainable development” in the list of subjects of global change separated by commas with global business and global civil society. Judging by what is written in these texts, it is the last two forces united by the imperatives of globalism that are assigned the role of replacing state influence with some private one.

The globalization project itself contains two components — civilizational and geopolitical

The first is associated with “fragmentation” — a combination of fragmentation with integration. We are talking about the destruction of civilizational identities with their religious foundations and the integration of the society atomized in this way into a new global community, a set of “citizens of the world” devoid of ethnic and confessional roots. Or, according to Jacques Attali, “new nomads”. The geopolitical part of the project calls for “glocalization” — a combination of global and local. That is, the transfer of state powers and subjects of competence up to global and regional structures, and down to provincial (regional) and municipal (local). It should be noted that the term “regional” in globalism has a different interpretation than in state constitutions. Here he appeals to the principle of regionalism — the division of humanity into ten regions with appropriate specialization, headed by REC — regional economic commissions included in the structure of the aforementioned ECOSOC, one of the main UN bodies (see Report to the Club of Rome by Michael Mesarovich — Eduard Pestel “Humanity at a Crossroads”, 1974). The entire UN system and other international organizations included in its structure are built on the basis of the regional principle.

A small digression

Why exactly ten regions? The answer is simple: the mythological Atlantis was divided into ten kingdoms, which the collective West considers its sacred ancestral homeland. Atlantis — Atlanteans — Atlantic — Atlantic civilization — all this is a single logical and understandable series that forms the real foundations of the West, not Christian, but occult. For Atlantean mythology, having migrated through ancient Egypt to Ancient Greece, formed one of the foundations of hermetic philosophy, from which Freemasonry then emerged. Modern geopolitical projects of the world order are built according to ancient myths.

The close connection with the UN is also not accidental

The customers of the Georgia Stonehenge, whose real names were known only to the contractor who signed the relevant contract and the banker who carried out the transaction of payments, located it by buying land from a local farmer, exactly 666 km in a straight line from the skyscraper of the UN Secretariat in New York. John Rockefeller II bought the land for it in Manhattan at one time and allocated it to the UN. This is the only offspring of the founder of the John Davison Rockefeller dynasty, the creator of Standard Oil, from which came the multicolored half of modern American oil companies. He himself actively participated in the creation of the Fed. He is the father of five Rockefeller brothers, with whom, like their cousins, the Dulles, a significant part of the American history of the XX and even the XXI centuries is connected (the most successful in politics, David Rockefeller, died in March 2017 at the age of 102). John Rockefeller II got into history with a famous correspondence polemic with V. I. Lenin: “If ideas become a material force, mastering the masses, then the task is to create masses incapable of perceiving any ideas.”

In connection with all this , several hypotheses arise:

Hypothesis 1: The explosion was made by the “Forces of Good” to warn Satanists building a “New World Order”. This is the most pleasant version, and then the silence of the mainstream media, which has been working for these conspirators for a long time and without alternative, becomes logical. But here it looks suspicious that the FBI cannot, allegedly, find the attacker and asks for help from eyewitnesses. And it is also suspicious that the monument was completely demolished so quickly, although the destruction was not so significant, and it was easy enough to restore it. Well, for me, the most weighty argument against this version is the code 239 in the date of the event (“We have a hand in this”).

Hypothesis 2: The explosion was made by the conspirators themselves. The code 239 in the date shows this to all “his”. But why was it blown up? Perhaps to conceal evidence, since this monument has already played its role, and there is no need for this evidence to exist further. The silence of the media is just so that those who are not in the know will continue to remain out of the know. And then they will begin to show interest, but they will understand something.

The post WHO AND WHY BLEW UP THE “GEORGIA TABLETS” first appeared on Global Policy.

And this is really very, very interesting. Russia has a lever of pressure on the “shining hail on the hill”. It seems to me that with such a case, you can easily dictate your terms to the United States in almost everything. Even Biden simply won’t be able to say and do anything – no one will listen to him, because the United States, no matter what, is very dependent on Russian fuel. They have 93 nuclear reactors operating in 2021. It seems to me that they will not work without Russian nuclear fuel…

URANIUM-235 IS AMERICA’S ACHILLES HEEL

Let’s try to understand this situation

This agreement was concluded not because Russia had extra capacity, and our country decided to engage in altruism. But if you look at the year (and it was 1993!), then a lot becomes clear, doesn’t it? Who “ruled” the country there, bending under the USA in everything? What did he say then? “God save America”? Agree that this is a shame for the President of Russia! And this agreement was signed so that Russia could not have large quantities of weapons-grade uranium, which is suitable for atomic weapons. Nuclear weapons, as you know, should definitely be in civilized countries, not in Russia! At least, that’s what the Americans themselves thought.
And, as they say, everything would be fine, but…

“In accordance with the HEU-LEU agreement in the 1990s-2000s, the United States undertook to buy Russian uranium. In the USA, the consequence of this was a slowdown in the development of technologies for the separation of uranium isotopes at the level of 1991”

If we translate this into normal language, then the United States cannot enrich its own uranium as well as Russia. That is, now the United States is precisely that it depends on Russia in this matter. Given the current relations between our countries, this becomes especially very piquant.

Will Russia be able to stop enriching it for the United States and what does this threaten for Russia?

I am now referring to profits, jobs and things like that. It’s just that if the whole story of uranium enrichment for the United States does not bring harm to Russia, then maybe it makes sense to abandon this case? After all, if the United States does not have the capacity to enrich uranium in the right quantities on its own, then maybe it should be done? Put them on a hungry energy ration. Maybe after a few months without electricity and other excesses, the US will become more adequate?

USA ENERGY DEPENDENCE ON RUSSIAN URANIUM

Well, in general, I wonder what they were thinking there, in the USA, handing over such an important matter (in fact, you know, strategic!) to a country with which relations can deteriorate at any moment. Moreover, in fact, if you look into it, it wasn’t Russia that spoiled relations with the United States – they themselves made every effort to spoil them. That is, the United States is asking Russia to enrich uranium (sorry, I could not put it so simply), without which their nuclear power industry will simply stand up. Meanwhile, they themselves are simply losing capacity for this business, and they are not even developing them, but at the same time they are diligently doing everything to spoil relations with Russia. The United States has recently been trying to do everything to harm the United States – and after all, it can be seen, as they say, with the naked eye. But do the residents of the United States really care to such an extent? Or don’t they see it? Or are people in the United States trying to bring to an emphatically bestial state?

It’s just that the more I look at what is happening in the United States, what their politicians say and write, who they put in certain positions, the more I want to ask: “People, what are you doing at all?”. For the sake of the “agenda”, they put obviously incompetent people in some posts, make decisions that can ruin a lot of things. And I can’t understand in any way – why do they need all this? As a rule, a politician – if he is in his right mind, of course, first of all wants prosperity for his country. I can understand the behavior of “Euroleaders” who are directly controlled from the White House, like glove dolls. But what are the “American leaders” themselves doing? They are not only destroying Europe, they are also destroying their country! “Green” energy has already shown itself “in all its glory” at the beginning of this year. Have the Americans learned any lessons from this?

Uranium Needle

The nuclear capacity of the United States is one and a half times higher than that of France, and by this indicator the Americans are world leaders. However, they are also extremely dependent on the supply of nuclear fuel – by 90%. Moreover, half of these supplies account for Russia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Therefore, when the Biden administration began to impose the first sanctions against Russia back in February, American nuclear scientists begged and asked to exclude uranium from them. The fact is that they account for about 20% of the total electricity generation in the country. The accumulated reserves will be enough for a year of work, and then there will be a national blackout.

RUSSIA HAS A CONTROLLING STAKE IN NUCLEAR ENERGY

The politicians listened to the opinion of the engineers, and they did not impose sanctions on Russian uranium. However, even now congressmen are constantly demanding to immediately stop the purchase of uranium from Russia, so nothing lasts forever.

US NUCLEAR POWER INDUSTRY IN FACTS AND FIGURES

And as for Uranium²³⁵ …

Something tells me that a lot of people need uranium 235, which is mined by Russia. And it seems to me that spoiling relations with a country that not only produces uranium, but also enriches it, and has a full cycle for this business is not the best idea.…

The post PROSPECTS FOR ENERGY PROBLEMS IN THE US NUCLEAR POWER INDUSTRY first appeared on Global Policy.

The American system is the oldest, largest and most developed. It relies on the undisputed technological leadership of the United States. The key goal of the American technology strategy is to maintain the initiative in innovation, extend its own dominance and prevent the emergence of comparable competitors in the global market. For this purpose, active personnel work is being carried out, preferential conditions are being created for the development of the startup ecosystem, and competition methods that are far from economic are being used.

The market capacity and favorable domestic conditions allowed the United States to bring to the market the largest technology and Internet giants, whose intellectual property rights are legally protected. An indirect but significant factor in the American techno-economic system is the creationof numerous common goods products.All this allows American companies to provide the entire world with a trial version of their own products, which gives the user the opportunity to get access to one of the most advanced technologies without excessive costs. The United States ‘ proposed principles of openness and freedom in the digital sphere are fascinating. However, there is no doubt that at the moment when Americans doubt their own hegemony in the technological environment, these principles will be immediately revised. There will be insurmountable borders and barriers designed to deter competitors and protect American leadership.

Even within the United States, the decisions of tech giants to block and delete more than 70,000 accounts, including the pages of President Donald Trump, are similar to open attempts to seize control tools from the authorities. In this case, the companies played for the political establishment against the unwanted” spoiler ” of the system. It is likely that in the coming years, a team of political, financial, and technological globalists will continue to work together to counter the national industrial agenda in America and elsewhere. At the same time, from the camp of Democrats, there are still concerns that, no matter how convenient regardless of the technologies offered by corporations, increasing the influence of tech giants is dangerous both because of their accumulation of “unprecedented economic power” and because of increasing “control over political communication and communications”[1]. The dominance of tech giants in the dissemination of information and their ability to politically mobilize the masses are already a threat to democratic governments.

The Chinese techno-economic platform is smaller than the American one, although the claims to technological leadership are also obvious here. A significant amount of financial and human resources allows the Chinese ecosystem to be self-contained and administratively redistribute resources to those areas of technological development that the CPC Politburo considers most promising. The Chinese were the first in the world to experiment with the autonomy of a number of services and services, building the “Great Firewall of China” (The Great Firewall of ChinaWhile the Americans offer a trial version of their product to the whole world, the competitiveness of the Chinese model is based on the cheapness of their offer and participation in financing advanced developments in other countries2. At the same time, China relies on wait-and-see tactics and does not respond to US provocations. America is rightly viewed in China as a more significant and powerful player in this area. However, the growth rate of the Chinese technology industry allows Beijing to count on the fact that it is only a matter of time before reaching a market position comparable to the United States. It is unlikely that the Americans they will be able to stop this process. There is a demand for pragmatism in world politics. Responding to it, an increasing number of American allies (including Europeans) are favorably accepting China’s proposals for cooperation in the digital sphere [3].

The growing awareness among European countries of the importance of digital sovereignty could potentially be of interest to Russia. Key European countries-Germany, France, Italy, and the Netherlands-fear dependence on Americans and Chinese. The need to develop a national technology platform is particularly emphasized by the French. Europeans are afraid of losing their subjectivity in the global technological environment and ultimately find themselves in a situation where their voice will not be taken into account [4].

Russia and the Europeans are united by the fear of becoming dependent on leading players and losing their own autonomy. At the same time, Russia, like some other European countries, has the competence to form an independent pole of power in the digital sphere. Russian arguments about developing a data compatibility standard are more likely to be heard in Europe than in China and the United States.

The latter two countries themselves have a significant amount of data and are not ready to share it with third countries. However, Moscow’s political differences with the Europeans can become an insurmountable obstacle to a full-fledged collaboration, which is an additional motivating factor for Russia in forming its own technology platform.

Global trends in the development of the digital environment

The global digital revolution has led to a radical transformation not only of technological and economic structures, but also of social relations and the very philosophy of human life. These changes are fully reflected in the sphere of international relations. The current situation in the world is similar (although at a fundamentally new level) over time of invention nuclear weapons and the beginning of space exploration, when technological changes significantly changed the international behavior of states. It is already possible to identify a number of trends launched by new technologies that will determine the direction of further evolution of the system of international relations.

The rapid development of science and technology has created prerequisites for reducing socio-economic inequality at the national and global levels. However, it also increased the vulnerability – and suspiciousness-of society in the face of new (or old, re-imagined) challenges and threats. New channels and methods of communication have significantly increased the information connectivity of the world. But they also contributed to the atomization of States that seek to protect such channels from foreign interference. The explosive growth of technologies and how they are used continues to blur the line between virtual and real the world, fact and fiction. This increases uncertainty in international relations and reinforces their anarchic state.

This uncertainty is compounded by the growing gap between the dynamics of development and innovation and the speed at which these changes are reflected in the regulatory fabric. Phenomena that are not regulated by international law become a challenge to the classical system of international relations. For example, there are no codified agreements to restrict the use of artificial intelligence or supercomputers and cloud computing in military region engages the Powers that possess such technologies in a vicious cycle of a constant arms race, which diverts resources and attention from the development of their civilian applications. Despite the fact that the Internet is becoming a key source of new threats in the new environment, world governments do not have common approaches to defining the concept of “sovereignty in cyberspace”, and work is not yet underway to develop international agreements similar to the outer space Treaty, the Antarctic Treaty, or the airspace sovereignty Treaty.

The all-encompassing nature of digital transformation processes leads to the fact that they fall into the focus of attention of an increasing number of international organizations – both specialized (ITU) and non-core (UNESCO, UNCTAD, PACE). This disperses the international digital agenda and multiplies mutually exclusive approaches to its issues. The lack of a single and clear conceptual and categorical apparatus in this area exacerbates contradictions and disputes [5].

On more technologically-oriented international platforms – governmental and non – governmental-the struggle is unfolding for universal recognition of technical standards created by states or large corporations. The most successful lobbyists from among governments and businesses get a significant market advantage in the case of codification of their proposed standard: the whole world begins to consume their products, and they get the opportunity to significantly influence the further development of the chosen technology. A similar struggle for standards is far from over ongoing international political implications. Given the continued rapid penetration of digitalization into public life, digital technology suppliers are firmly tying their client states to themselves, making them more dependent on certain standards and types of solutions, making them more dependent on their exports-similar to the export of weapons or energy resources.

The seriousness of this problem is clearly illustrated, for example, by the situation faced by the EAEU member states in implementing digital integration. The creation of a unified system for electronic exchange of legally significant documents was greatly hampered by the fact that different EAEU states use different cryptographic standards, not all of which are recognized as secure. The lack of coordination in their implementation, albeit for objective reasons, has led to the emergence of a technical barrier to the development of integration processes, which has long-term political implications. and the economic consequences.

Global digitalization has significantly increased the international legal personality of non-State participants in international relations. Initially, the technical NGO “Corporation for Domain Names and IP addresses Management”, created with the participation of the US government to regulate issues related to domain names, IP addresses and the functioning of the global network, has become a leading institution of “Internet governance”, where states do not have a dominant role [6].

Multinational giants – Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Huawei, TikTok, Alibaba, YouTube – they are already talking to national and foreign governments on equal terms. It is impossible to ignore them as a factor of national security. On the one hand, the information accumulated by such ecosystems and the advanced solutions implemented by them are of great interest to the competent authorities. On the other hand, their ability as information resources to broadcast certain information messages to a huge audience, directly or indirectly – through controlled search results – becomes a factor in national political life. Specified values the properties of such corporations give them a “voice” in the international arena and at the same time make them subject to strict national regulation. The understandable desire of States to control their information activities and gain access to the data they hold leads to an erosion of liberal values – freedom of speech, secrecy of correspondence, secrecy of private life – and raises questions about their applicability in the changed digital age.

A separate issue in the confrontation between corporations and states remains the issue of their fair taxation, especially if their services operate in a foreign jurisdiction [7]. It is important to avoid double taxation of such platforms in order to avoid deterioration of the situation of consumers and the products and services they receive.

Perhaps for the first time, ordinary citizens have gained the ability to directly influence international relations on such a scale as today. Social networks, instant messengers, and Internet television almost won the competition with traditional media, turned every smartphone owner into a potential journalist and gave him the ability to instantly make his “news” for millions of people. This seemingly gratifying display of freedom to speak and be heard is overshadowed by the fact that in the era of “post-truth” verification of fact is no longer a requirement for our trust in it. In the best case scenario unintentional subjectivism or craving for the attention of an” amateur reporter ” who is not bound by professional journalistic ethics or publication policies, or at worst, spreading deliberately false information, can have devastating consequences for society and the state.

At the same time, the example of deleting Trump’s Twitter account demonstrates another trend. During the four years of Trump’s presidency, Twitter was an important resource of his power and the main tool for combating political opponents. With its help, Trump set the information agenda, dictated political will, appointed to positions and ignominiously dismissed yesterday’s like-minded people. For millions of supporters of the president of Twitter he became a mouthpiece of dissatisfaction with Washington. With its help, it was possible, while remaining misunderstood, to be at least heard by the elites. So some people were amused by the president’s tweets, others were scared, and others were annoyed.

At the symbolic level, the removal of Trump’s account – even after he has already backed down and called on his supporters to protest peacefully – is much more demonstrative and sudden “elimination” of him as president two weeks before the end of his term than through a court or impeachment. But more importantly, this mission to” eliminate ” was carried out not by Congress, not by the military, not by the Supreme Court, but by the head of the technology company Twitter.

This case is likely to raise the demand of third countries for “digital sovereignty” from American tech giants, on the one hand, and on the other hand, it will strengthen the intention of these states to protect themselves from the dominance of their own and foreign technology companies by more stringent legislative regulation of their activities in their territories. In the long run, this may reinforce the political fragmentation of the world.

Further development of cognitive technologies, primarily deepfake [8], gives attackers unlimited opportunities to create toxic content that can already be classified as weapons of mass destruction by its impact [9].

Thus, the growth of public freedom and the strengthening of tools for its implementation paradoxically develops in parallel with the strengthening of the police power of the state, and this becomes a new norm of everyday life. The second trend is also growing for objective reasons: the desire of states to ensure the safety of citizens, including by restricting their access to the darknet and uncontrolled elements of the network, can hardly be called a dictatorial whim of governments. The degree of deanonymization of users in the network will continue to increase.

The lack of institutions for arbitration or investigation of cyber incidents and cybercrime recognized by all players, as well as the still weak development of digital forensics tools, makes it almost impossible to reliably determine the party responsible for the incident. This, in turn, increases the level of distrust and conflict between countries. At the same time, in the context of the development of new technologies – primarily the Internet of Things and autonomous intelligent systems – it is enough for attackers to have a sufficiently powerful home computer or even a smartphone to crack the security system the hacker may not necessarily be a saboteur or terrorist, but it may also be a technically gifted “teenager”.

Countries ‘ attempt to protect themselves from such infiltration has a number of consequences. First of all, states seek to limit the vulnerability of the network by stimulating import substitution and deep localization – it is easier to trust “their” controlled manufacturer of equipment or solutions. This leads to the disintegration of international production chains and a certain erosion of the principles of the international division of labor. In an environment where everyone who can is starting to produce their own critical hardware and “software” (servers, operating systems, antivirus and security systems), the economic situation is growing. specialization loses its appeal. In addition, the definition of authorized operators, limiting competition in the market inevitably leads to a slowdown in technology development, forcing states to live in a dilemma: progress or security. Here, as in many other aspects of the global digital economy, there is a contradiction between information exchange as a global phenomenon and physical infrastructure that has a territorial connection, and therefore is under a certain sovereignty.

This contradiction is evident in the issue of storing, processing and moving information through Internet channels. Historically, there has been a serious imbalance in the geographical distribution of the basic infrastructure and the nationality of the main Internet players. More than 60 percent of the total number of domains are managed by American players (Verisign, Afilias), more than 50 percent of content delivery networks are owned by American companies (Amazon, Akamai, Cloudflare), all major first-level providers are residents of the United States, and ten of the thirteen DNS servers are located in the United States-servers. It is not surprising that with such an “Internet geography” and the awareness of the US readiness to take very extreme measures in unilateral sanctions [10], states that are not Washington’s direct allies are trying to create an alternative protected contour of the “national, sovereign Internet” – and the number of such states is increasing. On the other hand, according to experts, satellite Internet may displace cable Internet no later than the middle of this century , and the struggle will move to space or the upper atmosphere in a new round [11], but its nature consists in the reluctance of states leaving key infrastructure outside the zone of its sovereign control will continue.

The desire for sovereign control of an increasing number of States is also reflected in their attitude to the issue of storing personal data of citizens. And the European GDPR The Russian so-called “Spring package”, despite all the nuances of each approach, postulate the need for storing personal data by all internet market operators on servers located in national jurisdiction. This approach is aggressively opposed primarily by the Anglo-Saxon member states of the “five eyes system” (USA, Great Britain, Canada, New Zealand, Australia), pointing out this measure as excessive and suppressing rights and freedoms. Given the imbalances in the Internet space described above, the position of the United States and its allies is understandable. However, as the price increases digitization of a person’s identity, the possibility of his digital identification, moving all his personal data to cloud storage, the cost of an error in protecting such information increases many times. In the event of a breach of the information storage security loop, the identity of a citizen can not just be taken over by intruders – it can be completely erased, and such a digital death will cut off the victims of the attack from the possibility of exercising basic social rights. That is why the increasing strictness of national data storage requirements is becoming the dominant requirement of the era.

For nation-states in the coming years, two crucial questions arise

The first questionis how much they can guarantee the viability of their information-critical infrastructure in the face of cyberwarfare and growing online piracy. Cyber attacks or system failures in networks can permanently shut down entire industries and cities with unpredictable consequences for the country and its population, but the relevance and magnitude of such threats are still far from being realized.

Second question – how well governments understand the principles and methods of ensuring the security of personal data and how the procedure for the turnover of depersonalized big data will be regulated. Mastering such data by another state will allow it to build a reliable picture of the development of the economy and industry, agricultural vulnerabilities, epidemiological situation, consumption profiles, and adjust its political, military, or economic strategy accordingly. Obviously, the accelerated development of national legislation regulating the principles of circulation national big data and entering into interstate negotiations on this issue is a matter of the near future.

States and the future digital world: duopoly or oligopoly?

Even today, the presence of states in the top league of world politics is unimaginable without a development strategy in the global digital environment, the availability of resources, their own ideas and products in this area. The very category of “great power” in the XXI CENTURY this means creating your own technology platforms, and ideally forming a techno-economic block. Mandatory attributes of such a block are a significant chunk of the global market it controls, its own currency zone with an issue center, its own development model, and a set of resources, technologies, and scientific competencies that allow the block to be independent of others, at least in key areas such as defense and critical infrastructure.

The attempt of each of the blocks to exclude the influence of competitors on their critical infrastructure inevitably leads to the politicization of technologies and technology wars. Digital technologies, being end-to-end for the entire modern economic and socio-political space, are becoming the main field of a new war [12]. Cyber attacks on digital critical infrastructure can be no less destructive than nuclear or biological weapons [13].

Against the background of the dominance of a number of developed countries in digital technologies and the emergence of global monopolies that control network infrastructure and data flows, there is a threat of digital inequality and digital colonialism. Digital technological sovereignty is becoming a necessary condition for the sovereignty of political and national independence.

Perestroika of the principles of functioning of international economic relations and the entire model of global geoeconomics provides the leading techno-economic blocks, a kind of” digital neo-colonialists ” of our time, with new opportunities. The gap – now digital-continues to widen between global digital technology providers and recipient countries, which are gradually becoming increasingly dependent on technologically advanced States.

At the current stage, the “digital neocolonialist” countries offer only preferential conditions for creating the infrastructure necessary for the transition to the digital future for objects of economic development. Thus, they immediately ensure that they are linked to their own solutions-from payment systems to data storage systems and electronic document management. But most importantly, they provide themselves with unlimited and almost free access to big data, receiving from this not only an immediate economic effect and an additional advantage when developing their own tools. artificial intelligence and neural networks [14], but also effective tools for controlling their digital colonies.

Digital colonialism will continue to strengthen, and we cannot rule out the revival of the UN Trusteeship Council – already with new, digital functions and powers. At the same time, the canonical borders of the first, second and third world countries have already undergone enormous changes and will continue to change. Former third world countries are given the opportunity to make a conditional leap “from feudalism to socialism, bypassing the stage of capitalism” – creating a new generation of advanced infrastructure without the need to maintain the functioning of the old infrastructure (in its absence).

In this sense, it is possible to foresee the digital breakthrough of the richer states of the Middle East and Africa and their entry into significant roles in the digital arena. Finally, international financial and labor relations are also changing – digital assets move to more comfortable jurisdictions even more easily than financial ones, and leave virtually no traces of such movement. The emergence of cryptocurrencies deprives states of a monopoly on another sovereign right – the right to issue. The concepts of “brain drain” and “labor emigration” are also changing: now national “digital proletarians” do not have to move abroad -they have enough, staying in their home borders, working for a foreign corporation, alienating all their intellectual property, and vice versa-talented hipsters can move to more comfortable climatic conditions, while continuing to develop the national economy.

At the same time, digital technologies that shape both everyday life and the information space of each person are beginning to have an increasingly noticeable impact on their psyche and decision-making practices. The individual not only becomes a slave to the digital platforms of global monopolies, but also really put in a framework where his entire existence is tied to devices – a mobile phone, tablet, “smart watch”. Under the guise of providing convenience, they restrict a person’s choice in decision-making and manipulate their behavior, including by pushing them to follow a “certain route”. In this unequal relationship, digital monopolies expropriate and exploit personal data and even creative content without control, under the threat of exclusion from the social environment.

The widespread adoption of digital technologies, including the digitization of industry and government agencies, and the introductionof 5G networks, creates an imperative to ensure the security and sustainability of the entire digital critical infrastructure. Without solving this problem, digitalization can turn out to be the construction of a “house in the sand”.

In order to eliminate “barricades” and “minefields” on the path of the digital economy, the state must guarantee both the safety of citizens and businesses, as well as clear legal relations in the digital environment. This is especially true for the ownership and use of personal and “depersonalized” data and created content.

Ownership and cost of data is just one of the problems accumulated in the digital environment that urgently need to be addressed. No less urgent is the need to resolve the contradiction between the requirements of national or local data storage and global transparency of technological and corporate processes, where data on engine operation on an aircraft belonging to an airline of one country and flying over another country is processed in real time in a third country.

As techno-economic blocks are formed, competition in the digital space takes the form of a war of platforms and standards [15]. At the same time, a number of countries and regional associations that do not have control over a large part of the global digital market or dominant platforms (for example, India, Brazil, Japan, Russia or the European Union) will have to find common ways to maintain independence and competitiveness, including by creating common platforms based on open architecture and open code.

Russia on the Digital Agenda: Opportunities and Limitations

Russia is one of the few countries that has the technological reserves and human competencies to build its own technological ecosystem. The powerful engineering and mathematics school inherited from the Soviet Union remains a source of a key resource for digital development – qualified personnel. Russia has most of the attributes of a sovereign technology platform. A national search engine has been developed and continues to develop. Russian social networks VKontakte and Odnoklassniki are still more popular than Facebook and Instagram not only in Russia, but also in most of the CIS countries. Our own cloud technologies are being developed, and domestic processors are being created. Digital solutions of Russian companies have significant export potential – primarily cognitive and self-learning systems, solutions in the field of cybersecurity, secure electronic document management, and platforms for providing services to the public. Launched two years ago, the national Digital Economy program will provide 97 percent of all national households and all social infrastructure facilities (schools, hospitals) by 2024., police stations) with access to high-speed broadband Internet. This will radically change the opportunities for developing entrepreneurship, telemedicine and distance education, and allow Russia to bridge the digital divide. Already, Russia is among the top 10 countries in terms of the number of Internet users, and the Gosuslugi website, with its two trillion annual transactions, is the most popular public service site in the world.

The share of the digital economy in the country’s GDP is growing. Despite the vagueness of the term itself, it is already about 4-5 percent of GDP, but it continues to grow rapidly at a pace comparable to the digital leaders. In addition, Russia has an impressive satellite and radio frequency resource, which is the key to the successful development of new-generation networks.

Thechallenges that Russia faces in the field of digital development shouldnot be underestimated. Some of them are only a “digital” consequence of” analog ” problems and threats. Others have a fundamentally new, original nature. In particular, Western sanctions not only restrict, among other things, access to foreign technologies, but also increase the risks of continuing dependence on such technologies to an unacceptable level. A case related to the refusal of Siemens to supply turbines to Crimea, jeopardized plans to provide the peninsula with heat. If we extrapolate this incident to the digital sphere, a similar failure of SAP, Oracle, CISCO or Microsoft to ensure timely updates of their solutions operating in Russia can cause disruptions – even collapse – in the operation of critical systems, including public administration and the banking sector.

These and other trends in the development of world politics over the past few years have made it more urgent for Russia to form a reliable protection of its own digital critical infrastructure. The implementation of this task depends both on the effectiveness of a gradual and gradual transition from imported software and hardware complexes, and on the creation of an effective command vertical from the regulator to the performer throughout the country.

The decision of the Russian government to create registers of domestic software and electronic equipment is designed to reduce such risks. Without being included in these registers, companies cannot expect to supply their solutions to Russian state corporations and state authorities. Such measures have a long-term positive effect on the development of Russia as a sovereign technological power.

Building counteraction in the field of information security is complicated by conceptual uncertainty – an indistinct separation of two close but different areas related to information flows. Both the security of signals in a physical network carrying information and malicious ideological content in Russian practice are defined by the same concept of “information security”. In the practice of Russian competitors in digital leadership, signal and network security is defined as cybersecurity (cybersecurity) [16]. Countering threats in these two areas requires different competencies. While in Russia there is a sufficient understanding of how to deal with cyber threats, in the field of information content, the Russian strategy requires a separate understanding and development.

Moscow’s accusations of cyber interference in the internal affairs of a number of states were used as a pretext for increasing sanctions pressure and undoubtedly damaged Russia’s international image. However, this campaign also had consequences for a number of large Russian enterprises and firms. They faced problems and discrimination in the markets of some Western countries. Perhaps even more significant than the reputational and even economic consequences are the risks that these accusations will be used by the United States and its allies as arguments for conducting “cyber strikes retaliation” or even “preemptive cyberstrikes” against Russia.

In the information space, Russia’s vulnerabilities are obvious due to the dominance of American monopolies in the domestic segment – Google and Facebook. These monopolies exploit Russian data for free and are increasingly trying to influence the information field and the political situation in Russian domestic politics. This includes manipulating content and restricting Russian users ‘ access to information and communication tools. Other non-Western countries face similar challenges. It makes sense to establish a more active dialogue with them about the principles of digital era legislation, especially in terms of data ownership rights, rules for their storage and use, joint fight against online piracy, and general rules behaviors for governments and businesses on the Internet. The fundamental challenge for Russian legislation in the digital sphere is to keep pace with the development of technologies and practices as dynamically as possible, especially in such important areas for society as cybercrime and digital finance.

Another problem today is the low ability of Russian companies and the government to compete with global corporations for the best personnel. At the same time, there may not be a formal “brain drain” – Russian talents continue to remain in Russia, but provide all the intellectual added value for foreign companies. Given the disparity between the economic potentials of Russian and multinational businesses, the solution to this problem is possible only within the framework of administrative or conceptual (but in any case state) relations.

Also, Russia and Russian companies practically do not work on international platforms to introduce technological standards and regulations that are favorable for the functioning of Russian developments. This is partly due to Russia’s lack of a doctrinal document outlining its own international priorities in this area, similar to the National Security Strategy or Foreign Policy Concept. In the long run, this omission may lead to technological isolation or de facto compulsion of Moscow to work with internationally recognized standards and protocols, including: which Russia did not actually take an active part in.

Roadmap for Russian leadership in the Digital Environment

The Russian digital agenda should reflect the position of our country as one of the main forces in the global system, as an exporter of security and stability. Russia’s global role in the digital world is the role of the leader of the “digital non-aligned movement” for those countries that would like to avoid the technological dictates of the”digital neo-colonialists”.

It is important that the development of the digital sector of the Russian economy, including electronics and information technology, is accompanied by expansion into global markets. Only in this case will Russia be able to recoup its investment in breakthrough technologies, conquer key technology platforms of the next-generation economy, and build large, competitive businesses.

Spread across eleven time zones, Russia (even in a world where distances are dramatically reduced) continues to play the role of a safe link between Europe and Asia. This applies equally to the global energy infrastructure needed to support the highly energy-intensive digital economy of the future, and to the quantum communications network needed for secure data transmission. The cold climate of the northern regions of Russia, coupled with cheap electricity, gives our country competitive advantages in the location of large data storage and processing centers.

One of the most important challenges for Russia today is the implementation of the EAEU digital integration program. It is necessary to ensure that state bodies and businesses of the Union member states can exchange legally relevant documents through the integrated information system of the EAEU (AIS EAEU) in a short time. This will increase the speed of transit cargo passing through the territory of the EAEU, increase the economic effects of this process and improve the quality of integration in the Union.

In addition, Russia, as the main “shareholder” of this process, should contribute to ensuring the interoperability of the EEU information system with the information systems of the CIS member states that tend to integrate, as well as states with which the EEU has or is planning a free trade agreement [17]. Digital integration here can and should outpace physical integration. Another important tool may be a special program (for example, with the Eurasian Development Bank) for implementing national e-government standards in interested countries. partner countries.

The task of expanding the Russian economic and digital space raises the urgent question of finding strategic allies in the digital world and using existing political mechanisms for this purpose. In this regard, we should use the positive potential of our relations with the leading economies of the future – India, Indonesia, Brazil and others.

Equally important is the work on digital dialogue with the European Union. First, digital transport corridors with the experience of seamless transit for business will become possible only if the EEU information system is interoperable with the information systems of Europe and China. Secondly, in the European direction, closer coordination is needed in terms of the use of the radio frequency spectrum – so far there are many contradictions with the EU border states on this issue. The solution to this problem is especially important if in the foreseeable future goods will be moved between countries by unmanned vehicles. In this case, both Russia and the EU you will need a single standard for new-generation networks and a single frequency range allocated to them. Third, Russia and the European Union have adopted comparable (at least in terms of principles) regulatory requirements for the storage and transfer of personal data. It is important to harmonize these requirements for business convenience.

In addition, Russia and the EU are drawn closer by the desire to impose fair taxes on foreign digital giants, primarily American companies. Forming a consensus on the principles of such taxation will help Russia and the EU to act more effectively at multilateral platforms dealing with this issue. In the medium term, the issue of creating a single cross-border “pool” of big data, marked up in a unified way and accessible (including for a certain fee) to third parties, primarily American and Chinese companies, also becomes important [18].

Collaboration with the EU is important, if only because the Russian and European integration blocs are squeezed between two very self – sufficient information platforms-the American and Chinese, each of which is already a “bigdatamonster”. To become an additional center of gravity, Russia and the European Union, which are relatively small in terms of population and data generation, simply need to join forces.

At the same time, common rules and principles for the functioning of national data management systems, which clearly define who and under what conditions this data may or may not be available, will ensure the national security of Russia and the EU. It is obvious that the entire volume of accumulated big data of a state or group of states is of exceptional intelligence, political, economic and military value, and ensuring their safety is one of the key tasks of national security. But there is also a more immediate political argument in favor of starting cooperation between Russia and the EU in the digital sphere. The progressive deterioration of Russian-European relations has drained the bilateral agenda of substantive topics. The issues of developing the digital economy and jointly countering common threats in the digital environment that really bring us together can provide fundamentally new areas for non-confrontational interaction.

A separate point for Russia is relations with the leading digital powers-China and the United States. Unlike the European and Eurasian tracks, joint economic projects with Moscow are extremely unlikely in both cases. Nevertheless, the political situation dictates different logics in relations with Washington and Beijing in this area.

With China, it is necessary to continue to coordinate their positions on international platforms regarding Internet regulation and data security issues. Our approaches are similar, although the Russian one seems more liberal and does not involve creating an analog of the “Great Digital Wall of China”in our country. But there are two other sensitive issues that we need to put aside the awkwardness and start discussing with Beijing.

The first is China’s technological penetration into the EAEU states within the framework of the “digital Silk Road” doctrine. As in the case of Eurasian integration in general, it is important to link and coordinate the actions of Chinese business and the state with the activities implemented within the framework of the EAEU 2025 Digital Agenda.

The second one is thedevelopmentof rules of conduct for Chinese companies in the Russian market of highly qualified labor and startups. Currently, Huawei conducts large-scale work on buying Russian technology companies and attracting Russian specialists to its R & D divisions. At the same time, the company’s salaries are significantly higher than the market, which leads to an influx of specialists from domestic companies. It is obvious that under the conditions of market rules and freedom of choice, this is a natural process, but it is also necessary to discuss compensatory actions for the national economy with the Chinese side. The Chinese side would never allow similar behavior of third-country companies in its market. Expansion of work with universities, localization Not just me&The transition to the creation of joint products, rather than the “cannibalization” of startup solutions, should become requirements for digital companies operating in our country.

Cooperation on political issues with the United States is even more urgent, despite the confrontational nature of bilateral relations. First of all, it is the development of confidence – building measures in cyberspace, discussion of restrictions on the military use of digital technologies, and convergence of approaches to Internet regulation. Russia and the United States could initiate negotiations on the creation of new tools for controlling new types of military technologies. It is also necessary to jointly understand the terminology: when talking about “Russian hackers”, Americans most often cite examples of ” social engineering» [19]. Every effort must be made to restore pragmatism to Russian-American relations, even if Washington is not currently interested in doing so. We are not talking about giving the United States a new credit of trust. Rather, it is about considering each move of Washington carefully and assessing its possible consequences, without considering it as a priori hostile to Russian interests.

Russia needs a coordinated, clearly articulated and structured agenda for work in multilateral organizations such as the ITU, the Digital Twenty, and the OECD. It is hardly reasonable to spend all your time pushing exclusively Russian approaches and engaging in fierce diplomatic battles with your partners. Instead, two groups of “digital truths”should be recognized at least internally.

The first. The location of DNSservers and the main Internet highways really did not work out in favor of Russia. Russia is not a first-level provider. When it comes to shaping the digital agenda, Russia is a major regional power, not the second pole of this system. Individual digital corporations have become so powerful that they talk to states on equal terms.

Second. The world tends much less towards “digital bipolarity” than it might seem. This is especially significant at the level of cyberspace regulation. Despite the proclaimed freedom of movement of information, most countries strive to localize data storage in one form or another. When it comes to digital regulation, all countries are authoritarian. There are areas that require strict regulation, even in more democratic countries. On the other hand, it is irrational to completely deny the concept of “multistakeholderism” – the multiplicity of responsible people – in the development of any decisions, related to regulation and further development of new technologies. The regulator must inevitably engage in a dialogue with technology owners, and this is most often a business. Having realized these realities, Russia will be able to act as a conciliatory state in multilateral associations, determined to find a compromise.

Russia also has a chance to become a representative of the interests of states that want to preserve their digital sovereignty and are not in the mood to be part of the Chinese or American digital empire, but do not have sufficient “subjectivity”for this. Both behaviors will expand our ability to realize our leadership potential, our ” gravity core.” This will make it possible to promote Russian candidates for leadership positions in such multilateral organizations as, for example, the ITU.

A more thorough selection of the members of our delegations and ensuring their versatility should be another important step in restructuring Russia’s work in international organizations. Today, the reality is that Russian diplomats are not always sufficiently aware of the technical aspects of the issues under consideration, while specialized technical specialists do not have enough knowledge of the art of negotiations. A separate role should be assigned to lobbyists – business representatives who are, in fact, the ultimate beneficiary of most decisions made. This kind of ” digital realism” instead of distractions to provocations and foreign policy “noises” orients Russia to exclusively pressing issues of ensuring the country’s digital interests in the world.

Recognizing that the 5G networking plan Russia has completely lost the initiative or the ability to actively influence the agenda, which should push Moscow to focus on preparing our proposals for the 7G network standard (or 6G after all?), to step up efforts to neutralize the threat of isolation of Russia in the issues of the radio frequency spectrum allocated for the needs of a new generation of communications. On this issue, Russian views do not coincide with the vast majority of countries in the world. The peculiarity of digital regulatory regulation is that new laws will be written by those who write the codes, that is, the technical content of the innovation will largely determine its regulatory framework. Therefore, it is important to increase the participation of Russian specialists in the development of standards and protocols for tomorrow’s technologies.

Among the technology markets of the future, the market for platforms for sovereign critical infrastructure – cybersecurity systems, communications, energy management, transport, financial flows and urban management systems, biosecurity and food control-stands out in particular. In the face of increasing tensions and uncertainty in the world, States are forced to pay increasing attention to their security and strengthen national control over their critical infrastructure.

The sovereign critical infrastructure market, which represents many trillions of dollars of orders for decades to come, is much like the global arms market. Decisions about technology partnerships are made at the sovereign level on the “friend – or-foe” principle, sales are made by systems, not components, implementation implies a high level of trust with localization of some technologies and forms a long-term political influence.

As in the arms market, Russia has its own “niche” in the market of sovereign critical infrastructure, estimated at 2030 percent of the total global market [20]. An important factor is that Russia positions itself as one of the leaders in the security systems market and has engineering schools with extensive experience in creating complex systems.

For Russia, the critical sovereign infrastructure market may become the most promising export destination. Recognized unique competencies in creating complex systems make Russia one of the leading potential suppliers of such systems – along with the United States and partly China. The independent software and hardware environment created in Russia is also an obvious competitive advantage. The “cold war” situation between the United States and China hypothetically opens up markets for Russia in the countries of Greater Eurasia, the Middle East, Latin America and Africa, which will try to reduce their technological infrastructure. and political dependence on the warring parties.

Having established itself as a “security exporter” in Eurasia, Russia can become a guarantor of its partners ‘ technological sovereignty. The presence of a trillion-dollar market of potential partners and unique competencies can help build a high-tech export strategy for years to come [21]. Thus, the country will have the opportunity to ensure its own security, increase international influence and try its hand at advancing technological development.

However, the conquest of sovereign critical infrastructure markets is impossible without the creation of breakthrough integrated platform solutions. Similarly, the implementation of such a strategy is impossible without creating strong ties with technological partners, without creating Russian educational and technological bases abroad [22].

Conclusions

Against the background of virtualization of all aspects of social life, the militarization of the information space is taking place. Taking advantage of the lack of borders in the digital space and generally accepted rules of conduct in it, states and organizations under their control distribute biased and disinformation content in order to promote their own interests and values. New technologies for creating virtual reality, such as deepfake They leave virtually no chance for the average person to separate lies from reality and can provoke religious and ethnic conflicts, destroy families, and destroy the reputations of politicians and innocent people with impunity.

In the coming years, the question of the regulatory structure of the entire global Internet will inevitably arise. Under the pressure of the block technological confrontation-mainly between the United States and China – and the ideological and political struggle, it is already divided into digital “enclaves”. The basic value of the Internet as a global equal and democratic environment (web neutrality The attempts promoted, in particular, by the United States, to make the quality and speed of network traffic dependent on the client’s wallet, also undermine it. The inclusiveness of the Internet is becoming the key to reducing digital inequality, and with it, the guarantor of global economic growth and social development.

Big data as the” new oil ” of the digital age should have an understandable owner and an understandable cost for the individual, business and the state. Only if a person and a citizen become the center of services and services in the digital environment, a balance of human rights, national priorities and business interests will be ensured, and it will be possible to regulate the currently uncontrolled global digital monopolies for the benefit of the entire society. Deleting the pages of President Trump and his supporters, as well as “deplatforming” the popular social network Parler among Republicans They clearly outline the prospect of actions by tech giants to eliminate economic and political competitors if these tech giants decide to operate outside the United States. If ideological opponents can be dealt with so harshly and relatively easily in the United States, why can’t this practice be made extraterritorial? Moreover, there are already precedents.

For Russia, the minimum task is to preserve its sovereignty when making decisions affecting the main areas of national security>. The maximum goal is to create your own competitive technological ecosystem, become the leader of the techno-economic block and a key participant in the process of developing new rules of the game in this area. In this sense, gaining economic sovereignty is a simpler task than gaining informational sovereignty. But it seems that the survival of states in the future depends on its solution.

Export oftechnologies and competencies for protecting sovereign critical infrastructure to countries that want to ensure their independence and defense capability can and should become one of the most important political and foreign economic priorities of Russia. This will provide the country with a significant financial inflow and international influence. This is exactly the path that the powers claiming leadership positions in this area are already following.

Currently, the implementation of the critical infrastructure technology export strategy is hindered by the lack of experience of Russian high-tech companies in creating integrated platform solutions, their weak presence in the markets of potential partners, and insufficient financial capacity to work on large long-term projects.

As civilizational and ideological confrontation escalates and examples of subversive information activity become more frequent, more and more countries are paying attention to the need for more careful monitoring of malicious and subversive content on the Internet. In the United States, where an information war is being waged between hostile political forces – as the 2020 presidential campaign showed-digital monopolies are resorting to outright censorship and manipulation in favor of their ideological supporters.

Russia should think about mechanisms for actively forming the information space, which would allow it to lead in terms of relevance and quality of content and thereby limit foreign influence in its information space.

The challenge of the new age is ” impatience of the spirit»: a short clip or post on a social network “wins” a full-fledged news report or analytical article, the variety of multimedia experiences distracts a person’s attention, and the speed of changes turns life into a race against time. The conservative, traditionally unhurried sphere of interstate communication is forced to change, ” run very fast in order to at least stay in place.” States that can quickly rebuild clumsy foreign policy mechanisms faster than others have every chance to take a leading position in this area. a fast-paced “brave new world”.

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