The Wire - November 12, 2025

//The Wire//2300Z November 12, 2025//
//ROUTINE//
//BLUF: FORD CARRIER STRIKE GROUP ARRIVES IN CARIBBEAN. APPLE ROLLS OUT DIGITAL ID. JOBS REPORT FOR OCTOBER NOT PUBLISHED DUE TO GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN.//

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-International Events-

Caribbean: Overnight the USS GERALD FORD (CVN-78) arrived in the SOUTHCOM area of responsibility, and is expected to be in position to carry out operations in theatre within a couple of days.

Analyst Comment: Venezuela continues wartime preparations, same as before, with various internal militia and homeland defensive efforts being publicized over the past few weeks. Most of these efforts appear to mostly be just for show, but preparations continue all around nonetheless.

-HomeFront-

Washington D.C. - This afternoon the White House stated that a handful of financial reports for the month of October might not be released due to the government shutdown. Press Secretary Leavitt stated that the Consumer Price Index (CPI) report and various other jobs reports might not ever be released for last month, due to federal employees not being on the job to gather the data at the time in which it was most valuable (the data needed to make the jobs reports accurate must be gathered in real time throughout the month, and not in retrospect).

Analyst Comment: At a time where the White House is facing increased scrutiny, this isn't a great omen since this is extremely important financial data to consider on the general state of the economy. Economic indicators are also a data point to consider even in the world of national defense, to set conditions and expectations on the homefront before a military campaign, for instance. Now, right at the crux of major economic concerns, the data simply isn't available because federal workers stopped doing their jobs during the shutdown. The data probably does exist, but by the time it's compiled and released it will be stale, and we'll be on to the next crisis.

USA: This morning Apple announced the release of a Digital ID product, intended to digitize identification documents such as American passport data. The plan involves partnering with the Transportation Security Administration to integrate Digital ID efforts into air travel around the United States.

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Analyst Comments: Apple's efforts are not to create a universal new identification scheme, but rather to digitize identity documents that already exist. TSA in particular has already had their own varying levels of subscription-based identity-check procedures for a while now, so in the grand scheme of things this has been coming for a long time. Of course, any Digital ID effort requires universal acceptance to work. It is not the ability to save an ID on one's phone that is new...it's the widespread adoption in such a short period of time that is the more concerning detail. This, coupled with the note that this is set up within the Apple Wallet ecosystem, has caused even more eyebrow-raising since it's not a huge jump to speculate that this ID scheme will be linked to finances at some point.

In this case, Apple announced that this plan is already streamlined to work with TSA for air travel at over 250 airports around the nation. This plan was announced about two weeks ago, so in just that time, we've gone from announcement to implementation to full integration with TSA in ways that haven't really been done before. Individual states are also partnering with Apple to integrate their Driver's Licenses into the app, and 12x states/territories have done so already. As such data security concerns have abounded...while Americans have been watching the developments of a Digital ID system being implemented in the United Kingdom, a very similar system was being worked on here at home. But because it's a private company digitizing already-existing documents, less attention has been placed on this practice. However it is worthy to note just how quickly this has all come about, and the very obvious shift toward Digital ID practices being not just a problem for Europe, but for the American homeland as well. It must be noted that this Digital ID effort is not simply the effort of a private company, this is a government project too. This initiative has *only* come about due to partnerships with US governmental agencies (like the TSA), which could be revoked at any time by the White House, since the TSA is nested under the Department of Homeland Security. Apple may be the administrator of this plan, but at the end of the day this is a government program.

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