The Wire - July 30, 2025

//The Wire//2300Z July 30, 2025//
//ROUTINE//
//BLUF: EARTHQUAKE STRIKES WESTERN PACIFIC, TRIGGERING TSUNAMI CONCERNS. AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL OUTAGE CAUSES LONDON AIRPORTS TO GROUND FLIGHTS. WHITE HOUSE ANNOUNCES NEW AI-DRIVEN HEALTHCARE INITIATIVE.//

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-International Events-

Pacific: A major earthquake was reported yesterday afternoon off the coast of Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula, reaching an estimated 8.8M and becoming tied for the 5th strongest earthquake recorded since records began in the 1960's. Due to this earthquake's severity, Tsunami Advisories were issued for most of the Pacific Rim, to include Hawaii, Alaska, and most of the American west coast. These concerns prompted mass evacuations for millions of people seeking refuge on higher ground. As of this morning, tsunami waves did hit Russia and Japan, though minimal damage was reported. No tsunami materialized in Hawaii or the west coast.

United Kingdom: This morning the airspace over most of England was closed due to a technical issue at an air traffic control center in Stanwick. Aircraft at Stansted, Gatwick, and Heathrow were grounded for about 4 hours while the issue was being resolved.

Analyst Comment: Details on the outage are hard to verify, however this outage occurred at the same facility that was involved in the infamous outage at Heathrow Airport in 2023. This has caused much fingerpointing and consternation among airlines due to the lost revenue as a result of the outage.

United Kingdom: Data security concerns remain paramount as the effects of the Online Safety Act become more clear. Most websites are now locked down and everything from Wikipedia to medical publications have been affected by the act.

Analyst Comment: Though it's tough to verify (and possibly fake), at least one user reported that they had to show identification papers for using a food delivery app. While this testimony can't be independently verified, what is true is that the crackdown on the concept of privacy continues to grow. Several politicians have mentioned the possibility of targeting VPN users who try to evade scanning their identity documents and their face to access most of the internet. Meanwhile, children are using certain video games to bypass the face-scanning requirements.

Most of the people who wrote the Online Safety Act are of the Atari generation, and do not understand how good the graphics are in most modern video games. Hyper-realistic video games which use motion-capture technology to put the faces of real actors in the game have been extremely effective at tricking apps and websites. Most of the games that rely on this technology also have modes or settings menus for customizing characters...which allow users to strike funny poses with the character on screen...this providing the realistic head and mouth movement that is used by most AI-driven websites requiring a face scan.

-HomeFront-

Virginia: This afternoon an arson attack was reported in Danville, at the offices of Showcase Magazine. Local authorities have identified the attacker as Shotsie Michael Buck Hayes, who was arrested a short time after the attack. Locals have stated he was targeting Lee Vogler, a local city councilman for the town of Danville. The attacker reportedly broke into the councilman's office, and doused him in gasoline before setting him on fire on the street outside. Vogler has so far survived the attack, and is currently hospitalized with severe burns.

Analyst Comment: Locals state that the attack was not due to a political issue, but rather a personal dispute as the attacker and victim knew each other. Whether or not this is true is anyone's guess. Nevertheless, this kind of high-profile (and brutal) attack vector does not occur that often in a small town such as this, so the details that are hard to verify now may become more clear over time.

Washington D.C. - This afternoon the Federal Reserve decided to keep interest rates the same as before, with markets not reacting much to this news (as this was the expected outcome). Separately, the White House announced a new initiative to increase the use of AI in healthcare. This effort will unite Google, Amazon, OpenAI, Apple, and other companies to more heavily integrate into the healthcare industry.

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Analyst Comments: Exactly what this AI initiative is designed to do is largely a mystery as no solid technical details have been provided as to exactly how the federal government is involved in Big Tech companies integrating into the HIPPA-protected world of patient data. Supporters of this plan have applauded the idea as advertised, however critics of this initiative point out that this is more or less a Social Credit system for healthcare as designed directly by the World Economic Forum in a policy letter just last year.

In January of 2024, the WEF produced an article titled "How to harness the power of health data to improve patient outcomes". This article largely revolved around the monetization of data mining as "97% of health data goes unused". This article also highlighted the importance of total surveillance of the human body, using a person's smartphone to surveil their health habits, tracking a person's location at all times, and so on. The plan as announced by the White House today sounds nearly identical to the plan proposed by the WEF, based on the details as made public so far. This has drawn the exact same privacy concerns of the past few years as President Trump's policies become more clear six months into his Presidency.

For additional context, Palantir also recently announced a partnership with TeleTracking, an AI-driven analytics company already integrated into many healthcare companies and medical facilities. Considering that a major part of the White House's plan is for all of these companies to share data with each other to build a digital profile of a person, concern is warranted. Reducing paper intake forms for convenience at the doctor's office is a lot different than a person's health insurance company handing over their entire medical record to Facebook for advertising purposes. For all of the touted benefits of this initiative, overcoming the data security and privacy concerns will be a hard sell when/if people start paying attention to what is going on.

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