Ben Vidgen

The Deadline Report – Ben Vidgen Investigates

Broadcast: Sunday 1.00pm and Friday 7.00pm Category: Ethics, News and Politics

Investigative journalist, author, and Consulting ‘Oartistic’ Dyslexic Detective Ben Vidgen, presents a 30 minute show offering quality alternative media backed by quality documented information on the issues not hitting the headlines, but that should be. A double shot of reality, always educational if never pretty.

DEADLINE TV

TERMINATOR MEETS BATTLE FOR NEW YORK – THE NEXT 911 ?

“Drones are not tomorrow’s weapons of mass destruction. They’re here today, and the technology required to fashion such a device is only getting cheaper, smarter and more accessible… With the explosion of this seemingly innocent innovation has come a rise in nefarious usage… described as ‘an emergent threat’.” — U.S. Military Official via Newsweek Report, Could the Next 9/11 Be Caused by Drones?

“It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear! And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead!” – The chilling description of the Terminator, spoken by Kyle Reese

Who’s into opposing a moratorium on killer autonomous drones?? Bet, you have guest the answer already or at least three of the nations e.g., four of the most ruthless nations. Correct. The US, the UK, Russia, and ….er…Australia disagreed. (Ukraine hadn’t gotten into drones at that time.)

The US is developing flying killer robots called “Goalkeeper” and jet ski-style killer robots called “Whiplash.” Both are AI-powered and have the power and ability to destroy humans of their own choosing.

In February this year, Anthropic, one of the world’s top AI companies, told the US government that it did not want its tech to be used for autonomous weapons that kill humans. The US Department of War immediately blacklisted Anthropic—and found an alternative partner, OpenAI, on the very same day. Here is Shipping New on AI autonomous drones, which come as a wave of missing military scientists and whistleblowers all increasingly raise the issue of AI drones gone rogue and or psychopatic elite who would stand to gain finacially from such chaos in terms of acumulating wealth and power.

The real-world integration of military AI and autonomous weaponry has accelerated dramatically, drawing direct public comparisons to fictional automated threat elimination such as the automated mass-surveillance and targeted-assassination program in Captain America: The Winter Soldier and the “Battle of New York”—the pivotal 2012 alien invasion where the Avengers (Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, Hulk, Black Widow, and Hawkeye) defended Midtown Manhattan from Loki and the Chitauri drone army.

Fiction is accurately predicting the global rush toward lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS) and the absene of regulatory friction surrounding them.

Elon Musk and President Donald Trump have in the past few years fundamentally reshaped U.S. military policy around autonomous warfare, utilizing AI-driven “killer” drone swarms as a cornerstone of national defense and frontline engagement. Musk’s companies, including SpaceX and AI, have entered a secret race to secure classified Pentagon contracts under the U.S. Special Operations Command. The goal is to develop autonomous drone swarm technology capable of executing “fire-and-forget” lethal missions. This development highlights a major policy reversal for Musk, who previously campaigned heavily against autonomous killer robot.

The Ukraine Autonomous Drone Disclosures

• Operational Reality: On battlefields like Ukraine, heavy electronic warfare and signal jamming routinely sever radio connections between human operators and drones. To bypass this, developers have integrated computer vision algorithms directly into the edge processors of “one-way attack drones” (loitering munitions). [1]
  
• Shift from Vehicles to Infantry: While AI targeting was initially restricted to heavy equipment like tanks or artillery via automated thermal/shape recognition, these systems have been scaled to identify and execute strikes on individual human combatants without a “human-in-the-loop” to clear the shot. [1]
  
• ‘CLEARLY VISIBLE CORPSES’—”We just launch it and we know everything will be dead—everything that will be found there in this particular area will be dead,” drone-maker Alexander Kokhanovskyy told the publication. “There is no connection to the drone at all; you cannot see the video, nothing… Everything it sees will be killed.” Afterwards, the Ukrainians sent regular drones—fitted with cameras and piloted by humans—into the same area to see if the AI had killed people. It had. There were clearly visible corpses and a disabled truck.
  
• Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems (LAWS), colloquially called “killer drones,” are unmanned aerial vehicles designed to independently search for, track, and execute lethal strikes on targets based on programmed algorithms and sensory data—bypassing the need for direct human intervention.
  

The Anthropic Blacklisting and OpenAI Partnership are marching to a weaponized robotic future. The scenario regarding the U.S. Department of Defense and major AI labs unfolded directly in February 2026. [1]

• The Stand-Off: Anthropic refused the Pentagon’s demands to remove strict contractual prohibitions against using its technology (such as its Claude language models) for fully autonomous lethal operations and domestic mass surveillance. Anthropic maintained that current frontier models are too unreliable for autonomous lethal applications. [1, 2]
  
• The Penalty: The Trump administration designated Anthropic a “supply chain risk” and ordered all federal agencies to cease using its tech. [1, 2]
  
• The Alternate Deal: Within hours of sidelining Anthropic, the Pentagon finalized a massive deployment contract with OpenAI. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman defended the partnership, asserting that technical safeguards are in place, though critics highlight that the contract grants the military sweeping flexibility for defense integration. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] Sam Altman has been a featured participant at the secretive, elite Bilderberg Meetings in 2016, 2022, and 2023. 2023 meeting was stacked heavy with robotics and AI oligarchs and NATO personnel. Altman attended the invitation-only conferences alongside top political figures, intelligence directors, and tech executives to discuss major global issues—primarily focusing on the future and issues of regulation surrounding artificial intelligence.

Global Policy and Future Weapons

International efforts to establish binding treaties against “killer robots” have repeatedly stalled at the United Nations. Major powers advancing autonomous drone technology—including the U.S., the UK, and Russia, Australia —have consistently opposed strict bans. They argue that autonomous systems are necessary to fight in “contested environments” where communications are completely blocked, or to counter rapid drone swarm tactics deployed by adversaries like China.

A U.S. F-15 fighter pilot shot down over Iran described seeing an interconnected swarm of Iranian drones moving as a single body, which he called “real alien s*”.** [1, 2]

The allegations of the unnamed pilot shotdown over Iran comes after weeks of numerous reports casting scepticism on the Trump ever changing story of the down ‘hero’. Which came along side report of US trying to obtain uranium samples from Iran that could later be used to finger print an ‘Iranian’ attack.

According to a June 2026 report initially published by CNN, the incident occurred during a conflict in April. The pilot recalled seeing multiple drones hovering and moving together in a highly coordinated, multi-tiered structure that resembled a jellyfish, featuring smaller drones suspended beneath larger ones like hanging legs. [1, 2, 3]

Meshed Networking: Military analysts reviewed by The Times of India suggest the sight could point to advanced “one-to-many meshed networking”. This technology allows a single operator or program to control an integrated drone swarm collectively. [1, 2]

THE DRONE WHISTLE BLOWER

Iran not the only place drone swarms claims have been raised.

The driver who blew up a rented Tesla Cybertruck outside the Las Vegas Trump International Hotel on New Year’s Day 2025—identified as 37-year-old Matthew Livelsberger, an active-duty Army Green Beret 10th Special Forces Group—left behind a digital manifesto containing bizarre claims that he was under surveillance because of his knowledge of advanced covert military technologies and Chinese drones launched from submarines. Police records and obtained documents revealed that before driving from Colorado where he had being stationed to Las Vegas, Livelsberger where he had actively planned to meet with a Navy SEAL to purchase military-grade drones on the black market.

Days before the explosion, Livelsberger his manifesto to retired U.S. Army intelligence officer Sam Shoemate. Shoemate, along with popular military podcaster Shawn Ryan, posted portions of these messages on X (formerly Twitter) and discussed them publicly. The manifesto contained Livelsberger’s claims of being heavily tracked and his own emails been hacked. The Gateway Pundit also suggesting Livelsberger didn’t write all the message or sections had being altered. The FBI under Trump reign dismissed the claims.

The 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne) completed an Fort Carsons Colorado to integrate next-generation small unmanned aerial systems (UAS) into large-scale combat operations. Led by instructors from the 4th Battalion, 10th SFG (A), the course ran alongside the 4th Infantry Division. The United States military, including U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) and operators tied to installations like Colorado’s Fort Carson, is aggressively integrating AI-powered kamikaze drones and hive-mind swarming capabilities . These autonomous systems use advanced software to locate, track, and engage targets with minimal human intervention. Colorado’s [Fort Carson] serves as a primary tactical proving ground for integrating AI-enabled and attritable drone hardware into frontline units

Black Swift Technologies: Based in Boulder Colorado, specialises in custom autopilot hardware and machine-learning software. They design unmanned systems capable of autonomous navigation in high-stress, dangerous environments

The mystery of Colorado’s drone and UFO swarms remains officially unsolved, as multiple task forces and federal investigations have concluded without identifying a definitive operator. The skies over Colorado have been the epicenter of high-profile, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) across two major operational waves—primarily the massive rural grid-flying wave in winter 2019–2020 and subsequent localized flare-ups extending into late 2024 and mid-2026.

The Sightings: Hundreds of residents and law enforcement officers across northeastern Colorado (and parts of Nebraska) reported synchronized formations of large, silent aircraft. [1, 2]

Behavior: The craft moved in precise grid-like search patterns, flying in groups of 6 to 19 vehicles at a time. They emerged consistently between 6:00 PM and 10:00 PM. [1, 2]

Physical Attributes: Witnesses described them as possessing high-speed capabilities (estimated up to 100 mph), carrying bright flashing lights, and having wing spans up to six feet across.

Official Denials: The U.S. Air Force, DARPA, the DEA, and the U.S. Army Forces Command explicitly denied any involvement or testing in the area. The FAA’s investigation ultimately closed with no conclusive answer.

Winter 2024: Fresh waves of low-flying, erratic drones sparked community concern in cities like Aurora and Elizabeth, Colorado. Witnesses observed single bright lights or strange configurations of lights that flew very low to the ground, stopped, and accelerated at extreme speeds. [1]

Spring 2026: A rash of illegal drone sightings was reported hovering directly inside restricted airspace during the Colorado Rockies’ early-season homestands.

June 2026 Cheyenne Mountain Incident: Beyond standard drone mechanics, military personnel at the ultra-secure Cheyenne Mountain, the setting for the fictional Stargate, complex reported an entirely bizarre, non-drone UFO/UAP sighting. Five soldiers documented a strange, “potato-shaped” craft with articulating, fish-scale-like surfaces moving through the airspace.

The 2024 New Jersey Drone Mystery

• The Incident: Late in 2024, residents and local law enforcement across multiple New Jersey counties reported massive, quiet, “car-sized” drones flying in V-formations at night. The sightings occurred over sensitive infrastructure, including the Picatinny Arsenal military base and Donald Trump’s Bedminster golf course, sparking local panic and widespread conspiracy theories. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
  
• The Resolution: In early 2025, the White House and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) officially clarified that the aircraft were fully authorized flights conducted for research and law enforcement tracking. A later industry report in late 2025 revealed that an aerospace company had been conducting capability testing of a large, 20-foot, four-winged autonomous aerial craft over the state. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

MONKEY MONEY & KILLER ROBOTS.

“We are all just monkeys with money and guns” Tom Waites Blood Money 2002.

“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but Worls War IV will be fought with sticks and stones” Albert Eisntein

So we now were talking about 6G to cook our brains silly and suck up finite energy while we build very carbon-unfriendly AI databases and consume massive amounts of raw material, all while polluting our waterways. So much for the UN’s 17 goals of sustainability. That’s a special kind of stupid. At the beginning of the 1849 gold rush, the majority of weapons were single-barreled, muzzle-loaded black-powder firearms that, for the most part, hadn’t changed since the 1500s, when firearms began to become portable.

By the end of the Civil War, 30 years later, shell-loaded revolvers and breech-loaded carbines had pretty much stopped evolving until another 50 years, when the Colt 1911. 45 came with a magazine, and belt-fed machine guns kicked in.

Ironically, handheld arms haven’t really changed a lot with the exception of assault rifles and weapons with faster velocity and larger calibers due to the leaps and bounds made by heavy weapons, artillery, armored vehicles, aircraft, and now AI-powered weapons of unbelievable firepower.

But here’s the thing: as these weapons have increased in firepower, their efficiency has plummeted and the amount of rsources they consumed have sky rocketed.

Back when I was a kid, even before I was an army reservist in artillery intelligence (call sign ‘General Baldrick’ in deference to the turnip-loving sidekick of Rowan Atkinson’s Black Adder), I could rattle off the ratio of rounds per fatality. That, however, is one of the things that got deleted from my RAM as it filled up with other useless data over the years.

However I can still see the red bowling pins that represent actual kills and the black pins that represent resources used. The musket was basically one red pin and a big patch of nothing filled the rest of the football field. By the time of Vietnam, you had a few red pins and a football field of solid black, representing modern small arms and light support weapons. And as soon as you got into things like fighter jets, you started to see football fields, plural, but the kill ratio barely moved and so on and so on.

Once we fought wars to gain precious metals. Now we fight wars so we have the metals to fight more wars. It’s all so retarded. Seriously, this is the best we can do in the 21st century with our know-how and technology? We’re heading fast to a backward variant of neo-feudalism for the simple reason that the few expects the many to live with nothing because they cant possibly live with less?

In fact it’s worse than that.

At least in feudal times the Baldricks could rely on their lords leading from the front. Now we are ruled by men-children who are so sad they pay others to cheat for them on fictional video games; such is their disconnect with reality. We are just monkeys wasting money on killer robots and AI. Modern technology risk blowing us right back to the stone age.

Epstein Downunder 2.0 – Follow The Money Honey.

Public scrutiny over the past several years has revealed that many initial dismissals of systemic abuse claims were premature. The timeline below connects the entities, investigations, and financial trails mentioned: For example Australian Jacqueline Pearce claims banks were helping bikers and child trafficking rings in Australia where widely written off by many Epstein researchers. And yet hindsight has highlighted many of her claims do in fact repeat what we now know was in fact occuring; interms of bitcoin scams link to Australian bikers, narco traffickers and the role of mainstream banks in Australia played in permitting such fraud to occur in relation to child exploitation and narco trafficking.

1. The Jeffrey Epstein & Brock Pierce Links

• Cryptocurrency Connections: Department of Justice documents and leaked email troves show that Jeffrey Epstein’s involvement in cryptocurrency went significantly deeper than previously acknowledged by industry publicists. [1, 2]
  
• The Coinbase Funding: In 2015, Epstein utilized his connection with Brock Pierce to coordinate a secret $3 million investment into Coinbase’s Series C funding round. A trust linked to Epstein later flipped this equity to Blockchain Capital in 2018 for a recorded $15 million payout. [1, 2]
  
• Personal Interactions: While Pierce’s public relations teams initially claimed his interaction with Epstein was limited to occasional industry networking events, unsealed records reveal that the two frequently exchanged personal and financial advice. Emails show Epstein attempting to orchestrate a visa arrangement and proposing that Pierce marry Epstein’s personal assistant to resolve her immigration status. [1, 2, 3, 4]
  
  2. The Digital Entertainment Network (DEN) Cases
  
• Core Entities: Marc Collins-Rector, Chad Shackley, and Brock Pierce. [1]
  
• Historical Facts: In the late 1990s, Collins-Rector and Shackley founded the internet startup Digital Entertainment Network (DEN). Pierce, a former Disney child actor, was brought in as a minor stakeholder and executive. [1, 2, 3, 4]
  
• The Legal Outcomes: The company collapsed right before its planned $50+ million IPO in 2000 when multiple former underage employees filed civil lawsuits alleging sexual abuse, drugging, and death threats. The plaintiffs won a $4.5-million default judgment in Los Angeles County Superior Court after the founders failed to respond to the charges. [1, 2, 3]
  
• The Spanish Arrests: In 2002, Interpol arrested Collins-Rector, Shackley, and Pierce at a villa in Marbella, Spain. Spanish police discovered unlicensed weapons and child pornography on the premises. Pierce and Shackley were released without criminal charges. Collins-Rector fought extradition but eventually returned to the U.S., where he pleaded guilty to felony charges of child enticement and luring minors. He was ordered to register as a lifetime sex offender. [1, 2]

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3. Production Context: Directed by Oscar-nominated filmmaker Amy Berg, the 2014 documentary An Open Secret exposes a systemic architecture of sexual abuse, manipulation, and exploitation targeting young male actors in Hollywood.

Focus on DEN: A substantial portion of the film explicitly details the drug-fueled pool parties and underage grooming pipelines operated out of the Encino mansion owned by Collins-Rector and Shackley during the height of DEN’s funding boom.

Distribution Suppression: Despite critical acclaim and a high Rotten Tomatoes score, the film faced severe distribution suppression, legal threats from Hollywood talent management circles, and internal friction. It was ultimately released independently via streaming video platforms. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]

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4. The Westpac Regulatory Breaches

• Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase made a much-anticipated debut as a public company, former Westpac chief executive Brian Hartzer was said tp be pleased. Through its venture capital fund Reinventure, Westpac windfall? An  estimated at up to $300 million, from its 2015 investment in Coinbase, listed on the NASDAQ on Thursday, Australian time. Reinventure bought the minority stake in 2015, a move Hartzer describes as “pretty prescient.”
  
• The AUSTRAC Penalty: In 2019–2020, Australia’s second-largest bank, Westpac, was hit with a record $1.3 billion AUD fine after the financial intelligence regulator, AUSTRAC, uncovered over 23 million systemic anti-money laundering law violations. [1, 2]
  
• The Child Exploitation Vulnerability: A critical component of the prosecution proved that Westpac management deliberately “batched” low-cost international fund transfers through a program called Light Pay to save money, bypass individual SWIFT validation protocols, and avoid mandatory reporting requirements This allowed a dozen customers to send funds to Southeast Asia (predominantly the Philippines) to pay for the live-streaming of child sexual abuse and human trafficking. One customer was a convicted child sex offender whose account remained unmonitore[1, 2]
  
• The Executive Fallout: The automated batching process allowed high-risk entities to funnel capital to international locations notorious for child tourism. AUSTRAC explicitly identified 12 repeat customers using these unmonitored systems to systematically fund child exploitation rings in the Philippines and Southeast Asia. The resulting scandal forced the immediate resignations of Westpac’s CEO Brian Hartzer and Chairman Lindsay Maxsted. [1, 2, 3]
  
• Parallel to the Westpac revelations, police forces in Australia and New Zealand executed targeted operations (such as Operation Nova) targeting the Comanchero motorcycle gang for laundering millions in drug money through mainstream financial and professional services channels using it coin.

Separating Fact from Conspiracy Narratives When looking at internet theories linking these cases to Pizzagate, the Podesta emails, or the Madeleine McCann case, it is essential to distinguish between substantiated corporate/criminal records and speculative networks. That said where there is smoke there also a tendency for their to be fire, as the the above case studies show which also support many of Pearce’s key claims.

BENS BY HOKI HOKITIKA @ A Glance.

” The cool little town everyone’s falling in love with” – West CoAST iSITE.

BRIEFS –news stories of interest.

Nudging cyclones – more geoengineering technology emerges after being told for decade no such technology existed or was being studied.

New High-Resolution Satellite Imagery Shows A US Military Aircraft Buildup Deployed at the Chania (Daskalogiannis) International Airport in Crete, Greece, the presence of refueling aircraft and electronic warfare surveillance at the site highlights Crete’s growing role as a key operational hub for monitoring the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East amid ongoing tensions in the region

Chinese spaceplane known as Shenlong (“Divine Dragon”) has apparently released an unknown object into orbit around Earth — and nobody outside a small circle of experts knows exactly what it is.The object was first detected on June 22 by the orbital tracking company LeoLabs, who have operations in New Zealand, which confirmed the spacecraft currently circling our planet. China has revealed almost nothing about the mission’s objectives.

Port Unions Warn Tōnui Proposal Opens Backdoor To Global Port Monopoly — The Maritime Union of New Zealand (MUNZ) and the Rail and Maritime Transport Union (RMTU) have responded to the unsolicited “Tōnui” consortium proposal submitted to Christchurch City Holdings Limited (CCHL) regarding Lyttelton Port. Maritime Union of New Zealand (MUNZ) National Secretary Carl Findlay says while the port unions respect iwi aspirations, the choice of global logistics giant DP World as a partner introduces severe risks. He says an operational lease of this nature amounts to privatisation by another name. “We have absolute respect for local rūnanga, but the inclusion of DP World raises serious concerns for workers, ratepayers, and democratic accountability,” says Mr Findlay.