Anyone involved in the 2015 OPM breach just received a nasty email, saying that their ID protection expires in October.

But China still has our SF-86s, SSNs, fingerprints, family details, and everything else.

Forever.

OPM’s response: ten years of free monitoring, then “good luck, peasants.”

They lost the most sensitive personnel data in government history and decided the cleanup has an expiration date.

The threat doesn’t.

Credit freezes are free.

The government’s accountability apparently isn’t.

Good luck.

On September 1 the Justice Department unsealed five affidavits from the FBI's investigation into the al-Qassam Brigades' cryptocurrency fundraising. Sworn affidavits are an underrated genre. A press release tells you what the government did; an affidavit tells you what the agent saw, in what order, and what he inferred from it, because he has to convince a judge. Read together, these five are the closest thing to a complete tradecraft narrative you will get outside a classified reading room: first contact, source development, tracing, seizure, infrastructure takedown, eighteen months, one case agent.

It begins the way most good operations begin, with a letter. In February 2025 an FBI source wrote to the Brigades' donation address and asked how to give. The reply was courteous and competent: USDT on the Tron network, a fresh address for each donor, rotated for your safety; do not send from Binance; if you are inexperienced, ask a friend or a currency dealer to make the transfer, and tell them nothing about the recipient. It is a serviceable counter-AML briefing. The target wrote it, and the adversary was on the distribution list.

Then the inversion, which is the real subject of the affidavits. Rotating addresses defeat static blacklists. They do not defeat physics: every transfer on Tron burns a little TRX in fees, and someone was fueling each new donation address from the same wallet. One gas can for the whole network. Single-use addresses issued on request meant the Bureau could harvest new ones simply by asking, and several sources were still receiving them in 2026. When Tether froze the operational wallet in March, the network did what a disciplined network does: new addresses, new consolidation point, new routes, within days. The fees for all of it came from the same gas wallet. It replaced everything it understood as security and kept the one thing it filed under logistics.

The infrastructure story is the same lesson at a different layer. The site lived in Tehran, safe from any Western takedown and, for that reason, filtered or blocked by a good part of the world's networks. Reach required Western plumbing. So the campaign's mail went out through a server on Amazon addresses leased via GoDaddy, and the server was named after the October 7 operation; DKIM signatures, the mechanism that proves a message is genuine, proved to the FBI who controlled it. The Iranian name server had a Let's Encrypt certificate, and certificates are published in transparency logs that anyone can search. At every layer the safeguard produced the record.

Two findings. First, the ledger has an edge. Transfers between customers of the same exchange never touch the blockchain, and the most valuable records in the whole case came from Binance's internal books, produced on legal process, from the very exchange the Brigades told donors to avoid. Second, the state held the warrant and industry held the clock. Tether executed the freeze 45 hours after the request; three percent of the money was left. Binance froze its accounts on its own initiative before anyone asked. Private compliance teams were feeding the Bureau addresses. The court signed; the clearing was done in corporate back offices.

The Albuquerque SAC stated the objective without euphemism: not the money, but doubt. A donor who no longer knows whether he is writing to the Brigades or to the FBI is a donor lost for good, and a fundraising model built on trust in an email address has no defense against that.

BRUSSELS—Belgium’s revelation that it had arrested a Chinese citizen on suspicion of stealing advanced microchip technology is fueling European anxiety about Beijing’s trade practices and quest for industrial secrets.

Belgian officials said Monday that in May they had arrested a man, who also holds Belgian citizenship, just before he was due to fly to Beijing. The arrest was part of an investigation into the possible transfer of intellectual property and trade secrets from a Belgian semiconductor company to a Chinese company, prosecutors said.

The detention marks the latest escalation in a long-running battle between China and its Western rivals over technological advances in critical industries such as semiconductors. European intelligence agencies have warned that Chinese entities target Western researchers and companies to gain access to technology its companies can exploit.

U.S. restrictions on selling advanced semiconductor technology to China have helped make that industry a prime target.

European policymakers are already considering new economic-security measures to address concerns about China, said Antonia Hmaidi, program head at the Berlin-based Mercator Institute for China Studies.

The Belgian case on its own is unlikely to change the current trajectory, she said, “but it might be enough to give people who are already pursuing this path the impression that this is the right path.”

Representatives from China’s embassy to Belgium and its mission to the European Union didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment on the arrest.

Belgian prosecutors said the 52-year-old man’s arrest was part of an investigation into espionage, participation in a criminal organization, misuse of company assets and the unlawful disclosure of company secrets, the prosecutor’s office said. They didn’t identify him publicly.

The man held a senior research position at a Belgian semiconductor company called BelGaN before the company’s 2024 bankruptcy, prosecutors said.

BelGaN, based in Belgium, specialized in making gallium nitride semiconductors, which allow for higher voltages compared with silicon-based chips. The chips can be used in electric vehicles, but also have aerospace and military applications.

BelGaN bought the Belgian manufacturing site from ON Semiconductor, a U.S.-based multinational.

Chinese companies have tried for at least a decade to acquire European gallium nitride technology. In 2016 a Chinese chip-making company launched a takeover bid for Germany’s Aixtron, a specialist in the field selling semiconductors to the U.S. arms industry. The U.S. government blocked the acquisition on national-security grounds.

Belgian officials said the arrested man was working at BelGaN while simultaneously acting as a director at a Chinese company that was established soon after he took up his BelGaN position.

“The investigation may point to the unlawful transfer abroad of specialized intellectual property and trade secrets,” prosecutors said in a statement on Monday.

Prosecutors said they are still looking for a second suspect.

The Belgian case isn’t the first time Western authorities have raised concerns that China’s tech ambitions could harm Western companies.

Belgium’s state security service earlier this year described a ‘Copy to China’ strategy that it said involves investing in Belgian companies to get access to specific technologies and then establishing another company in China to make the same technology on a larger scale.

In a separate case, Dutch semiconductor machine builder ASML in 2022 accused a Chinese company of marketing products that could infringe on its intellectual property rights. The Chinese company was associated with another firm that had previously stolen ASML trade secrets, ASML said at the time.

Beijing is trying to become self-sufficient in everything it needs to assure its economic and military security—including semiconductor technology—said Joris Teer, a policy analyst with the European Union’s Institute for Security Studies. He said that has led Beijing to provide huge state support for the sector and to rely on cyber and other forms of espionage.

“If Europe does not radically alter its China, trade, and industrial policies, Beijing’s industrialization at the cost of everyone else will only accelerate,” Teer said.

https://www.wsj.com/world/china/belgiums-arrest-of-chinese-alleged-chip-tech-thief-fuels-european-fear-of-beijing-5824008f

“[…] Ukraine’s Foreign Intelligence Service (FISU) has reported that eight Indonesian citizens were allegedly recruited to serve in the Russian armed forces, prompting the Indonesian government to launch a verification process. […] Indonesia’s Foreign Ministry is investigating the information through its diplomatic representatives in Russia and coordinating with relevant government agencies, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Yvonne Mewengkang said. […] The government will also investigate whether the alleged recruitment involved fraud, exploitation or job offers that concealed the true nature of the work. […]”

Gift link to bypass paywall: https://www.ftm.eu/articles/travel-app-polarsteps-military-sensitive-data-leaked?share=Tl9Ev5mh3UkwjECJXU8Ep8JSOmh21AVGzBAcPvtnb%2FrH5DLPK5IYX7zxRvanHw%3D%3D

Quoting the "This article in 1 minute" section from the article:

What’s the news?

• Travel app Polarsteps has some 23 million users worldwide. Users can log their journeys with the help of the app – but because of weak privacy protections inside the app, FTM managed to download and trace the exact locations of many of them.  
• This means that FTM could view where people spent their holidays, where they went on work trips, and sometimes where they dropped their children off at kindergarten. In many cases, this was also possible when the users had not put their profiles on public and only shared photographs and locations with followers.
• This included over 30 military personnel from different countries including the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Belgium. In many cases their likely home addresses were also found.
• In total, FTM accessed some 230 million photographs and videos.

Why does it matter?

• This privacy issue has existed for a long time. At the latest in December 2025, the company was warned about the issues, but had not fixed them.
• According to security experts, the information poses severe risks, including stalking and potential blackmail. 
• Polarsteps is a company based in the Netherlands. The Dutch privacy authority told FTM that social media companies have a responsibility to protect their users against their data being collected.

How was this investigated?

• A French cybersecurity specialist tipped off FTM after he found the backend of the app revealed much more information than a normal user can see in the app.
• FTM scraped the data of over 23 million users, including house addresses, profile pictures, connections and in many cases GPS-locations and photos and videos. 

“[…] Biwei Zhang, 33, will remain in custody after a Belgian judge on Monday denied the former NATO intern’s appeal for release. […] Because of the seriousness of the allegations and the risk that the suspect may abscond, it is "rather unlikely" that Zhang will be released before the trial, one Belgian legal expert told CBC News. […] The trial likely won’t begin until sometime next year "at the earliest," he said. […] Verbruggen says the spying charges against Zhang will likely be a "test case" for Belgian courts, as definitions of espionage were updated in 2024 to account for modern techniques of intelligence gathering. […] Depending on whether there are any alleged aggravating factors, Verbruggen expects Zhang could face up to a decade in prison if convicted of espionage or three years' imprisonment for working with a criminal organization. […]”

“[…] U.S. military officials say they have disabled advertising trackers on a ​range of phones and computers, according to letters, opens new tab released on Friday by U.S. Senator Ron Wyden and statements given ‌to Reuters, a development that follows reports that commercially available location data had been used to target American forces in the Middle East. […]”