The Wire - March 27, 2025

//The Wire//2300Z March 27, 2025//
//ROUTINE//
//BLUF: VEHICLE RAMMING IN BERLIN, MASS STABBING IN AMSTERDAM. WILDFIRE SEASON RISKS INCREASED DUE TO HELENE DAMAGE.//

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-International Events-

Germany: Overnight a vehicle ramming attack was conducted in the Gesundbrunnen district of Berlin, resulting in multiple casualties. So far 6x people were wounded in the attack, and 1x fatality was reported.

AC: At the moment, the circumstances of this attack are unclear. Some reporting suggests the ramming attack was intentional, other reports state that it was the result of a driver attempting to flee a police checkpoint because he was unlicensed, which resulted in the crash into a crowd of pedestrians. In either case, deliberate action was undertaken by the driver.

Netherlands: This morning a mass stabbing was reported in Amsterdam. 5x victims were stabbed by an assailant in Dam Square, with the attacker being detained at the scene. So far no details on the attacker have been released by authorities.

-HomeFront-

Washington D.C. - Following the Signal group chat scandal, overnight new developments have come to light. Using the data from the group chat as a jumping off point, various old email accounts, friends lists on various accounts, and random other data points have been linked to several of government officials. The media group that originated this digital snooping also claims that passwords were also found on various websites, likely resulting from various data breaches over the years.

North Carolina: Wildfire season is underway, bringing more risks than normal in some areas. For instance, in western North Carolina, the downed trees from Hurricane Helene have resulted in challenges managing wildfires. Similar situations and concerns have been reported in Tennessee and South Carolina.

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Analyst Comments: Even though federal resources have arrived to work cleanup operations in western North Carolina (all of which is greatly appreciated by locals), much of it has been unfortunately too little, too late. All locals know that state leadership has been intentionally dragging feet on their Helene response to the point of being criminally negligent, even though local responders have done and continue to do great work at the local level. Regarding the fire season, responders are doing the best they can but many fires have been burning for almost a week and are still at zero-percent containment.

As one disaster often leads to another, the twist of the knife in this case turns out to be an increased wildfire risk. Downed trees provide fuel, change wind patterns, and provide barriers to vehicle traffic....both for firefighting resources and for those trying to evacuate. In short, firefighting will be a lot harder this year in the areas impacted by Hurricane Helene, so heightened situational awareness would be a great idea this fire season. If an evacuation is called for, evacuating earlier than you might think will be helpful, especially in areas that firefighting resources might have a hard time accessing. Just because a small passenger vehicle will squeeze through hurricane damaged roads doesn't mean that a firefighting rig can too.

Regarding the new developments in Washington, it would seem that various journalists simply conducted a bunch of free online background checks on various people in the original group chat, and since data privacy is a nightmare these days, a lot of links could be made using very little initial data. This isn't really a groundbreaking or scandalous development, it's more akin to just bad data protection practices.

We all have an old email address that we don't use anymore, or an account at a random website that we needed once and never used again, or the infamous data sucked up every single moment of an online existence. It turns out that government officials are people too, and if people are looking, a digital trail of breadcrumbs can easily be found.

In the age of data privacy being very hard to achieve, the various digital breadcrumbs left by those in government is a point of targeting by malign actors. Of course, this problem has existed for a long time and is irrespective of political party. As such a bit of survivability bias is probably in play here...anyone other than Trump's administration gets a free pass on their lax data security, but Trump's team gets examined with a fine-toothed comb. Now that journalists have found a profitable way to target various Trump officials, they will probably continue to dogpile on issues that are really inherent to government at large (and thus not really specific to something Trump or his people have done).

Nevertheless, this does highlight some inefficiencies in the day-to-day operations surrounding various government officials. For example, it has been known for many years that almost all military generals and admirals one-star and above, have a personal assistant solely dedicated to finding negative stories about that general, and shaping the general's image online (known as the Army Protective Services Battalion (APSB)). If a journalist can hop on a "free background check" website and find this data, one might have thought that the NSA would have completed a Personally Identifiable Information (PII) vulnerability assessment for senior government officials. An official getting blackmailed because of an embarrassing email account that they created when they were 12 years old is generally counter productive to the management of a nationstate. Consequently, as this scandal drags on, this might be a point of improvement in the long run.

Analyst: S2A1
Research: https://publish.obsidian.md/s2underground
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