Panicked members of the elite are buying luxury bomb-proof underground survival bunkers because they fear mass civil unrest might be on the horizon.
The company behind the construction of the sprawling complexes, Vivos, says the facilities are for the “protection of high net worth individuals” in the event of apocalyptic-style scenarios during which “millions will perish or worse yet, struggle to survive as victims”.
“Where will you go when pandemonium strikes?” asks a promo for the luxury shelters.
The biggest facility, called Europa One, is located in Germany and is “one of the most fortified and massive underground survival shelters on Earth, deep below a limestone mountain” and is “safely secured from the general public, behind sealed and secured walls, gates and blast doors”.
Journalist Lynn Parramore said she also visited another facility in Indiana which is a former Cold War communications facility.
“Built during the Cold War to withstand a 20 megaton blast, within just a few miles, this impervious underground complex accommodates up to 80 people, for a minimum of one year of fully autonomous survival, without needing to return to the surface,” states a promo for the bunker on the Vivos website.
The main selling point is the location of the facility, which is a “safe distance away from the New Madrid fault line” and therefore a good hideaway to escape a “tsunami-type event”.
“You go underground and it feels like you’re in a very nice hotel,” said Parramore.
“This is for wealthy people who are concerned about various disaster scenarios, but a common theme among them is a fear of civil unrest, a fear of an uprising from the 99%,” she added.
Units in some of the underground shelters, which also come with a year’s supply of food and water, start at around $35,000 dollars but the largest ones sell for upwards of $3 million dollars.
“There is no assurance that our race will continue, therefore it is our responsibility to do everything we can to survive,” warns the Vivos website, which invites elitists to contact them for further information that is on a “need to know” basis only.
As we reported last week, millionaires are fleeing Chicago and other major cities due to concerns over racial tensions and rising crime rates.
“About 3,000 individuals with net assets of $1 million or more,” left Chicago in just the last year alone according to the Chicago Tribune.
Paris and Rome are also seeing a mass exodus of millionaires, while wealthy elites are also installing panic rooms in their big city apartments due to fears over potential civil unrest and skyrocketing crime.
OPM is conducting market research to find companies that can perform automated social media tracking and other types of Web crawling as part of the background investigation process, according to an April 8 request for information posted online. Responses from interested companies are due by April 15.
OPM is looking for companies that can automatically browse “publicly available electronic information,” which includes information posted to news and media sites; Facebook, Twitter and other social media postings; blog postings; online court records, updates to photo and video-sharing sites; and information gleaned from online e-commerce sites, such as Amazon and eBay.
OPM is interested in companies that have fully automated capabilities -- “with no human intervention,” according to the RFI -- with the ability to search for information “in the parts of the World Wide Web whose contents are not indexed by standard search engines.”
Companies should also have a “robust identity matching algorithm” that won’t get tricked by similar names and return irrelevant results.
The pilot project tests the feasibility of obtaining social media tracking from commercial vendors and will be a joint effort between OPM, which is responsible for performing most federal employee background checks, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, according to an OPM spokesman.
Testing of the new tech will be conducted on a population of 400 investigations, the spokesman said, although there’s still no word on when the pilot project is set to get underway.
The new solicitation is the latest in a series of government initiatives to explore the use of social media in the background investigation process. Some of these efforts have been stymied by missed deadlines and unclear policy.
Pentagon and intelligence officials are leading an effort to establish “continuous evaluation” of clearance-holders using automated data checks to replace periodic reinvestigations that currently occur only once every five or 10 years.
Intelligence officials had planned to have a continuous evaluation capability in place for the most sensitive clearance holders by December 2014 but missed the deadline, according to progress updates posted on Performance.gov. Officials now plan to roll out the new program in phases, with at least 5 percent of top-secret clearance holders being continuously evaluated by March 2017. As of December, about 225,000 personnel undergo the automatic checks.
A public-records continuous evaluation project is also currently underway at the State Department, according to the Performance.gov update.
At a hearing in February, federal officials told lawmakers they were still working out the kinks in government policy for more widespread use of social media in the clearance process.
Last June, OPM awarded a sole source contract to California-based tech company Social Intelligence for a preliminary pilot program examining social media in the clearance process.
Under the terms of the contract, Social Intelligence, which has also participated in DOD social media pilots, was to provide 400 reports of publicly available online information over the following six to nine months.
The security clearance process has been rocked by controversy in recent years.
Last summer, OPM announced it had fallen victim to a massive data breach affecting millions of background investigation records. Even earlier, critics raised questions about OPM’s handling of background checks, pointing to potential missed red flags in the backgrounds of National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden and other so-called “insider threats.”
In January, the Obama administration announced plans to overhaul the process, establishing a new National Background Investigations Bureau and tasking the Defense Department with the responsibility for storing and securing sensitive files.
http://www.nextgov.com/cio-briefing/2016/04/opm-seeking-social-media-tracking-background-checks/127380/
Land and remote homes in places like New Zealand are also popular with the global 1%, with realtors citing the threat of worldwide financial instability and domestic disorder as motivating factors behind the purchases.
OPM Seeks Social Media Tracking for Background Checks
OPM is conducting market research to find companies that can perform automated social media tracking and other types of Web crawling as part of the background investigation process, according to an April 8 request for information posted online. Responses from interested companies are due by April 15.
OPM is looking for companies that can automatically browse “publicly available electronic information,” which includes information posted to news and media sites; Facebook, Twitter and other social media postings; blog postings; online court records, updates to photo and video-sharing sites; and information gleaned from online e-commerce sites, such as Amazon and eBay.
OPM is interested in companies that have fully automated capabilities -- “with no human intervention,” according to the RFI -- with the ability to search for information “in the parts of the World Wide Web whose contents are not indexed by standard search engines.”
Companies should also have a “robust identity matching algorithm” that won’t get tricked by similar names and return irrelevant results.
The pilot project tests the feasibility of obtaining social media tracking from commercial vendors and will be a joint effort between OPM, which is responsible for performing most federal employee background checks, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, according to an OPM spokesman.
The new solicitation is the latest in a series of government initiatives to explore the use of social media in the background investigation process. Some of these efforts have been stymied by missed deadlines and unclear policy.
Pentagon and intelligence officials are leading an effort to establish “continuous evaluation” of clearance-holders using automated data checks to replace periodic reinvestigations that currently occur only once every five or 10 years.
Intelligence officials had planned to have a continuous evaluation capability in place for the most sensitive clearance holders by December 2014 but missed the deadline, according to progress updates posted on Performance.gov. Officials now plan to roll out the new program in phases, with at least 5 percent of top-secret clearance holders being continuously evaluated by March 2017. As of December, about 225,000 personnel undergo the automatic checks.
A public-records continuous evaluation project is also currently underway at the State Department, according to the Performance.gov update.
At a hearing in February, federal officials told lawmakers they were still working out the kinks in government policy for more widespread use of social media in the clearance process.
Last June, OPM awarded a sole source contract to California-based tech company Social Intelligence for a preliminary pilot program examining social media in the clearance process.
Under the terms of the contract, Social Intelligence, which has also participated in DOD social media pilots, was to provide 400 reports of publicly available online information over the following six to nine months.
The security clearance process has been rocked by controversy in recent years.
Last summer, OPM announced it had fallen victim to a massive data breach affecting millions of background investigation records. Even earlier, critics raised questions about OPM’s handling of background checks, pointing to potential missed red flags in the backgrounds of National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden and other so-called “insider threats.”
In January, the Obama administration announced plans to overhaul the process, establishing a new National Background Investigations Bureau and tasking the Defense Department with the responsibility for storing and securing sensitive files.
http://www.nextgov.com/cio-briefing/2016/04/opm-seeking-social-media-tracking-background-checks/127380/
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