‘Forever chemicals’ may pose a bigger risk to our health than scientists thought
Growing evidence of PFAS’ danger prompts new guidance for safe drinking water and health care
Most people in the United States are exposed to PFAS in their drinking water.
NOVEMBER 29, 2022 AT 7:00 AM
For decades, chemicals that make life easier — your eggs slide out of the frying pan, stains don’t stick to your sofa, rain bounces off your jackets and boots — have been touted as game changers for our busy modern lives. “Better things for better living … through chemistry,” was the optimistic slogan coined by DuPont, the company that invented the widely used chemical coating Teflon.
But this better living has come at a cost that is getting new attention. These chemicals — dubbed forever chemicals for their ability to last in the environment — are proving to have a lasting impact on human health. A growing body of research links the group of chemicals broadly known as PFAS, short for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, to conditions from unhealthy blood lipid levels to pregnancy complications to cancer.
Alarm about the health impacts of these chemicals has sparked a recent flurry of action from U.S. public health and regulatory officials. Warning that PFAS pose a greater health risk than previously thought, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in June dramatically lowered its recommended safe levels of the chemicals in drinking water.
“The updated advisory levels are based on new science, including more than 400 recent studies which indicate that negative health effects may occur at extremely low levels, much lower than previously understood,” Radhika Fox, assistant administrator of the EPA’s Office of Water, said in June at the Third National PFAS Conference, held in Wilmington, N.C.
Soon after, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine released the first clinical guidelines quantifying blood concentration levels of PFAS that could put someone’s health at risk. The 300-page report urges clinicians to recommend regular blood tests for anyone exposed to high levels of the chemicals and to provide information on how to limit exposure, such as installing special filters known to reduce PFAS in drinking water.
In the United States alone, by one measure, the tally in medical care costs and lost productivity from PFAS exposure linked to five medical conditions adds up to at least $5.5 billion annually, researchers at New York University reported July 26 in Exposure and Health. Those conditions include low birth weight, childhood obesity, hypothyroidism in women, and kidney and testicular cancers.
“We only looked at two of the more than 9,000 chemicals in the PFAS family, so we’re just seeing the tip of an iceberg,” says Leonardo Trasande, a pediatrician and environmental health expert at NYU Langone Health.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/pfas-forever-chemicals-health-risk-water
https://www.inverse.com/science/biden-pfas-legislation
Operation Rubicon (German: Operation Rubikon), until the late 1980s called Operation Thesaurus, was a secret operation by the West German Federal Intelligence Service (BND) and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), lasting from 1970 to 1993 and 2018, respectively, to gather communication intelligence of encrypted government communications of other countries.[1][2] This was accomplished through the sale of manipulated encryption technology (CX-52) from Swiss-based Crypto AG, which was secretly owned and influenced by the two services from 1970 onwards.[1] In a comprehensive CIA historical account of the operation leaked in early 2020, it was referred to as the "intelligence coup of the century" in a Washington Post article.[1]
The origins of Crypto AG go back to the Swedish engineer Arvid Damm; the company was founded in Switzerland in 1948 by the Swede Boris Hagelin. Crypto AG was considered one of the leading manufacturers of encryption technology. The company supplied to about 130 states; Operation Rubicon is said to have affected about 100 states.
According to The Washington Post, the nuclear powers India and Pakistan as well as the Vatican and several other countries, mostly from the global south, used devices from Crypto AG.[2][3] However, the manipulated devices from Crypto AG also allowed the National Security Agency (NSA) and BND to read the military and diplomatic communications of allied EU or NATO countries such as Ireland, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Turkey across the board. According to German government media ZDF, there were repeated disputes between the CIA and BND about this: German intelligence did not want allies to be spied on, while the CIA wanted to spy on basically every government.[2]
According to ZDF, the contract for the operation was signed on the German side by the then head of the Federal Chancellery and Federal Minister for Special Tasks Horst Ehmke.[4] In this respect, it can be assumed that the Federal Chancellery, as the superior authority, was informed about the operation. When the BND and CIA began operations in 1970, the two intelligence agencies each became half owners of Crypto AG. Within Operation Rubikon, Crypto AG was given the code name Minerva. The ownership structure was concealed.[5] They bought Crypto AG because Boris Hagelin retired and they had no confidence in Hagelin's son Boris Jr. The latter was sales manager for North and South America. He died in a car accident the same year. His father had the cause of the accident investigated and did not believe it was an accident. Crypto AG profited externally from Swiss neutrality and the image of the country's integrity.[2] Through encryption technology sold as secure, but in reality manipulated, messages transmitted could be read by the CIA, NSA and BND intelligence agencies involved.
The Munich-based Siemens AG worked closely with Crypto AG and, among other things, manufactured the teleprinters for them. Siemens provided the management of Crypto AG for 20 years and had a five percent share of the profits. Siemens engineers helped develop the application equipment.
According to reports by Deutsche Welle (DW), the two owners, BND and CIA, shared Crypto AG's profits, which in 1975 amounted to 51 million Swiss francs (about 48.6 million German marks; in 2018, taking inflation into account, the equivalent of 42.6 million euros). According to DW, BND employees allegedly handed over their share to the CIA in cash at secret meetings in underground garages.[5]
In 1992, Hans Bühler, a Swiss employee of Crypto AG, was detained in Iran. After nine and a half months in custody, he was released on January 4, 1994, on payment of 1.4 billion rial bail (about 925,000 euros or 1.5 million Swiss francs), after originally being asked for $1 million.[citation needed] The amount was paid by the German BND, but Bühler was fired by his employer shortly after his release. It later emerged that Bühler had not known about the tampered devices and had begun to make critical comments about the operation to the media.[6] According to CIA accounts, the Hydra affair, the internal code name for what happened to Bühler, was "the most serious security breach in the history of the program."
In 1993, the BND sold its shares in Crypto AG for $17 million.[7] According to former Chancellery Minister under Helmut Kohl Bernd Schmidbauer, the Chancellery decided to pull out of the operation because the political risks were now rated much higher after Bühler's arrest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Rubicon
Crypto AG MINERVA
Hagelin-Cryptos · 1950-2019
Crypto AG was a manufacturer of cryptographic and communications equipment, based in Steinhausen (Switzerland), with a world-wide customer base and offices in several countries. It was established in 1952 1 by Russian-born Swede Boris Hagelin, who gradually moved the activities of his Swedish company AB Cryptoteknik to Switzerland after restrictive laws had been proposed in Sweden. As a tribute to its founder, the company logo was based on his name. Crypto AG was liquidated on 31 October 2019 after its activities had been taken over by Crypto International AG.
➤ Crypto AG (Hagelin) cipher machines
Click to see the cipher machines
As Switzerland is a neutral country, Crypto AG could do business througout the entire world, with virtually no restrictions. The company's ownership has always been a mystery, supposedly even to the management [1]. In the past, the company has often been accused of providing backdoors to make their devices readable for foreign intelligence agencies. Crypto AG has always denied this.
It has meanwhile become clear that from 1951 to 1960 a Gentleman's Agreement (GA) existed between Boris Hagelin and the US National Security Agency (NSA), and that from 1960 to 1970, Crypto AG had a licencing agreement with the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) [12].
Ownership of Crypto AG – click for further information
But the most striking discovery was that, in 1970, Crypto AG had secretly been purchased by the German BND and the American CIA, in a project known as Operation THESAURUS — later renamed RUBICON. In 1994, the CIA became the sole owner, and in 2019 the company was dissolved, after the product range and some personnel had been taken over by Crypto International AG [12]. On 3 July 2020, following actions by the Swiss Government, Crypto Internal fired its entire staff [15].
https://www.cryptomuseum.com/manuf/crypto/index.htm