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Palestinian student Ameer Hazboun sentenced by Israeli military court for campus activism

Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network | November 10, 2020

Palestinian student prisoner Ameer Hazboun was sentenced by an illegitimate Israeli military court on Monday, 9 October to 16 months in Israeli prison and a fine of 3000 NIS ($890 USD/$750 EUR). He has been detained since 11 September 2019 and his military court hearings have been repeatedly delayed and postponed.

He was subjected to severe torture under interrogation at al-Moskobiyeh interrogation center before being charged with, essentially, being a Palestinian student activist: he was accused of membership in the Progressive Democratic Student Pole, a leftist student bloc at Bir Zeit University recently labeled a “prohibited organization” by the Israeli military occupation command, attending student events and organizing student activities on campus. In fact, distributing flyers for a student election campaign was labeled “aiding an illegal organization.”

A fourth-year engineering student at Bir Zeit University, Ameer was seized by soldiers in his dormitory on 10 September 2019 as they invaded his room at 1:00 a.m. He was brutally kicked beaten by the soldiers with their guns while being transported to the Moskobiyeh interrogation center. He arrived at the center with bruises all over his body and informed the prison doctor that he has a platinum plate in his left hand for a previous injury. He was interrogated for weeks on end for 22 hours a day. Due to severe sleep deprivation, he would sometimes fall asleep during interrogation and was shaken awake by the interrogators. He was forced into multiple stress positions, including being forced to stand on his toes with his hands cuffed overhead to the wall, placing severe stress on his feet, arms and injured hand.

November 10, 2020 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | , , , | 2 Comments

Joe Biden and Kamala on Israel, Palestine

Palestine Chronicle TV

Pakistan Today, an English language newspaper headquartered in Lahore, features the following satirical commentary in its section The Dependent:

Former US Senator Kamala Harris, who was promoted to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s (AIPAC) Deputy National Coordinator two days ago, is going to hold the office of Vice President of the US in an ex-officio capacity.

“Yes, as is the norm, Senator Harris will also be holding down the office of VP,” said AIPAC CEO Howard Kohr. “This side office is often overlooked because the bulk of a DNC’s responsibilities are AIPAC-related and the US VP slot is only for the occasional tie-breaker vote in the US Senate.”

“It’s usually a surprise. Here at AIPAC, it is a tradition to let the interns have a lottery where the winner gets to tell incoming Dy National Coordinators that they also get the VP slot. Seeing that look on their faces is priceless.”

“It’s a pleasant surprise, always. It means an extra paycheck, some extra security detail, if one is into that sort of a thing,” he said. “I think their credit score also goes higher.”

“Not bad for not much extra work, eh? Just signing some documents here and there and the ceremonial ribbon-cutting ceremonies in Tel Aviv and of course, the ceremonial inaugural Village Flattening Ceremony in the West Bank.”

“No, she doesn’t do it herself,” he said, laughing. “She just presses a button. It’s symbolic. Our guys do the rest.

 

The Palestine Chronicle

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu:

“I welcome the fact that my friends Joe Biden and Kamala Harris blessed these accords,” Netanyahu said referring to the normalization agreements between several Arab countries and Israel, which were brokered by the Donald Trump Administration.

“I have had a warm relationship with Joe Biden for many years, who I met as a young senator. Since then we have met many times,” Netanyahu was quoted by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz as saying.

“Every time I am at the Capitol I meet leaders of the two parties, and when they come to Israel I also meet with them. Republicans, Democrats, there’s no difference,” the Israeli prime minister added. …

November 10, 2020 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , , | 5 Comments

State of Texas Refused to Certify Dominion Voting Systems for Its Elections in 2020

21st Century Wire | November 10, 2020

We’ve now learned that recently embattled voting technology provider, Dominion Voting Systems, could not get certified by the State of Texas after failing to meet the state’s election standards for efficiency, accuracy, and safety from “fraudulent or unauthorized manipulation” – according to a report completed by the Office of the Secretary of State.

In the report, signed by Texas Deputy Secretary of State, Jose A. Esparza, the findings of several data communications experts and voting system examiners found Dominion’s “Democracy Suite 5.5-A” to be not “suitable for its intended purpose”:

The examiner reports identified multiple hardware and software issues that preclude the Office of the Texas Secretary of State from determining that the Democracy Suite 5.5-A system satisfies each of the voting-system requirements set forth in the Texas Election Code. Specifically, the examiner reports raise concerns about whether the Democracy Suite 5.5-A system is suitable for its intended purpose; operates efficiently and accurately; and is safe from fraudulent or unauthorized manipulation. Therefore, the Democracy Suite 5.5-A system and corresponding hardware devices do not meet the standards for certification prescribed by Section 122.001 of the Texas Election Code.

The voting and tabulation machines made by Dominion caused problems and raised doubts about the accuracy of 2020 election results in at least two key swing states, Michigan and Georgia, according to multiple reports.

Antrim County, Michigan, traditionally a Republican stronghold, had the Democrat, Joe Biden, beating Donald Trump by roughly 3,000 votes – inaccurately reported while using Dominion’s technology, and later corrected by election officials, eventually netting Trump a 2,500 vote advantage in the final results.

In Georgia, other ‘glitches’ stopped voting in both Morgan and Spaulding Counties – caused by a software update that was uploaded to voting machines the day before the election. Gwinnett County also experienced delays in reporting voting results due to a ‘software issue‘ with machines counting absentee ballots.

Dominion is also facing political scrutiny for its support of Democratic Party aligned organizations, including the Clinton Foundation, donating to it in 2014 and also partnering with it for The DELIAN Project – a transnational voting technology initiative valued at over $2 million.

A full breakdown of the voting system examinations conducted by the State of Texas on Dominion software and hardware can be found on the Secretary of State’s website.

November 10, 2020 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception | | Leave a comment

Safety, effectiveness, transparency: What we still don’t know about the Pfizer vaccine

RT | November 10, 2020

Global markets surged and politicians and the public rejoiced online as Pfizer announced its Covid-19 vaccine was 90 percent effective, but not everyone is fully convinced, with a number of critical questions remaining unanswered.

On Monday, US drugmaker Pfizer and German partner BioNTech announced their “interim analysis” of a 43,538-person study of their two-dose vaccine regimen having proved 90 percent effective in preventing Covid-19.

Just 94 cases of the disease were observed in the large-scale trial, and early indications are that the fight against the coronavirus may be shifting in humanity’s favor at last. Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine had already boasted similar rates of effectiveness.

However, with all the market surges, breathless news coverage, and political messaging about the vaccine, a number of serious caveats, concerns, questions, and a distinct lack of detail remain.

We don’t yet know if the Pfizer vaccine entirely prevents infection, or whether asymptomatic carriers might still be a cause for concern in the years ahead. The study was also rather limited in scope, testing only whether there were fewer cases of symptomatic Covid-19 among vaccine recipients than those given the placebo.

In other words, without this information, we have no way of knowing whether this vaccine would actually stop the pandemic or not, or merely change its complexion.

The study also did not distinguish between the severity of Covid-19 cases among participants, nor did it provide demographic information on those who fell ill, so we still do not know whether vaccine recipients can fall critically ill or just develop a milder form of the disease.

There was no information given on the frequency or severity of side-effects, nor were key details shared about the vaccine’s safety profile.

Furthermore, there was no discrimination of data among different subgroups, so it remains unclear whether at-risk groups in society will necessarily benefit from the vaccine or whether targeted lockdowns and protections may still be required to protect the elderly or immunocompromised.

Pfizer’s Monday press release did not contain any data on how many participants got sick from the vaccine versus those who received the placebo.

This data is expected to be released “in the coming weeks,” according to Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, as these questions, and more, will need to be comprehensively answered in order to overcome widespread vaccine hesitancy among the global population.

Indeed, taking the US as an example, according to one survey, some 62 percent of Americans worry that the Food and Drug Administration will fast-track vaccine approvals, and therefore just 21 percent of respondents polled say they “definitely plan to get vaccinated” and 49 percent probably or definitely will not.

Concerns are rife that there will be insufficient regard for both safety and effectiveness, given what is at stake politically and economically when it comes to a potential Covid-19-free future.

I am worried about the safety, efficacy, manufacturing quality, distribution, and administration of anti-Covid-19 vaccines. Read more here about STAT’s must-read overview of some of what the public needs to know regarding vaccine development…https://t.co/5SltkeBuwX

— William Haseltine (@WmHaseltine) November 9, 2020

Some, such as US biotech executive and infectious-diseases expert William Haseltine, claim that such proclamations by vaccine developers “are an inadequate assurance” and are “as full of holes as Swiss cheese.” They are calling for more open access to data and independent review to improve public trust in Covid-19 vaccine candidates, including the Pfizer-BioNTech holy grail.

November 10, 2020 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

Ninety per cent

Dr Malcolm Kendrick | 10th November 2020

‘Ladies and gentlemen, roll-up, roll-up, roll-up. My new product, just brought to the market this very day, prevents ninety per-cent, yes ninety per-cent of all known things happening to you. Yes, a remarkable ninety per cent. Not sixty per cent, not seventy per cent, no… not even eighty per cent. But ninety of your finest American per cent – of things’.

‘What is a thing, madam? What a very good question, and by the way your child is a most beautiful young girl, is she not. And your hair, someone did a most fantastic job on that. You must have paid a fortune for such magnificent styling… you sir.’

‘You are asking how much it costs. Cost sir, now cost doesn’t come into it. I can promise that I will never make a penny from selling this product, this year… Not a penny, as I promise on my mother’s grave sir, my mother’s grave.’

‘Lady at the back there what was that …you say that my mother is still alive, you met her for coffee last week. Gracious, she does get about doesn’t she.’

‘Back to you sir. Cost, this product … it does have to be kept at a very low temperature, so valuable is it sir. The cost of the refrigeration unit. Now, that is pricey sir very pricey. Pricey indeed.

‘How pricey sir. I can tell you are a very clever man, there is no way I could fool you, is there. But pricey sir…made by top scientists, and they do not come cheap, no they do not. I wish with all my heart it were otherwise, but you cannot buy the product without the refrigeration. It would not make sense otherwise, would it sir. But you know, my good fellow, how can anyone quibble about the costs of keeping this remarkable product cold, when it will prevent ninety per cent…. of things.’

‘But do not simply take my word for it. No. Here is a young lady who was injected with this product just the other day. Yes, just the other day. And do you know what… Well, don’t listen to me. Here she is…. big round of applause for this very brave young lady. Now Miss Fauci, for that is your name is it not… yes it is. You were injected with this very product seven days ago and what has happened to you?’

Miss Fauci: ‘Nothing.’

‘Yes, absolutely nothing happened to young Miss Fauci. Nothing at all. When you think of all the things that could have happened, and yet none of them did, did they. Well, this is remarkable, truly remarkable. No fevers, no loss of smell, no cough…?’

Miss Fauci: ‘Yes, nothing at all.’

‘Ladies and gentlemen, can you believe it. Nothing happened to this young lady at all after seven whole days.’

‘What was that madam, nothing happened to you either. Goodness me, you have been lucky haven’t you. You must be one of the lucky ten per cent. Here, have a free PCR swab to celebrate. Yes, keep it madam, its yours. Your day just got even better. Yes, have two, one could be positive, the other negative, we never really know do we. Ha, ha… my little joke.’

‘You sir, you still want to know what a thing is. Goodness me, you’re not one of those anti-product protestors are you. Our products undergo the most rigorous testing for safety, the most rigorous. How many, why, at least thirty people sir. We are not one of those fly-by-night organisations.’

‘You still want more information on things? Have I not just told you everything you could possibly need to know sir? Our product can prevent ninety per cent of things. If that is not enough to convince you sir, then I have not idea what else I can say.

‘Roll up, roll up. Only twenty billion for you, Mr Johnson – you know a bargain when you see one, don’t you. You’re certainly no mug, are you.’

November 10, 2020 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | 2 Comments

The huckster and the hack: UK govt report undermines stars of Cambridge Analytica-Russiagate scandal

By Alexander Rubinstein · The Grayzone · November 2, 2020

Self-styled whistleblower Christopher Wylie and The Guardian reporter Carole Cadwalladr earned film deals and flashy awards by blaming Brexit and Trump on a sweeping conspiracy between data firm Cambridge Analytica and Russia. A British government investigation shatters their claims to fame.

Two years after the stunning June 2016 passage of the Brexit referendum, affirming the British public’s desire to withdraw from the European Union, and the equally unexpected November 2016 election of Donald Trump to the White House, a scandal erupted that seemed to explain these rogue right-wing victories as the handiwork of an especially devilish data-mining scheme.

In 2018, a hipster techie named Christopher Wylie emerged as a supposed whistleblower from the UK data firm SCL-Cambridge Analytica. Wylie claimed inside knowledge of how his former employer illicitly harvested the personal data of British and American voters through Facebook to conduct micro-targeting operations in favor of Brexit and Trump. Further, and most memorably, he asserted that “known Russian agents” were involved in the right-wing plot.

“Here is what I know,” Wylie tweeted, “when I was at Cambridge Analytica, the company hired known Russian agents, had data researchers in St Petersburg, tested US voter opinion on Putin’s leadership, and hired hackers from Russia – all while [former Trump Chief of Staff Steve] Bannon was in charge.”

As soon as Wylie went public, his accusations against Cambridge Analytica became a central pillar of the Russiagate narrative, bridging Trump-Putin across the Atlantic to Brexit and the rise of Euroscepticism.

Wylie, a self-proclaimed progressive Eurosceptic, has since published a book, “Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America,” and inspired an Oscar-shortlisted Netflix documentary about the supposed scandal called “The Great Hack.” In 2018, Wylie’s supposed revelations earned him a spot on Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People. A film based on the rebel techie’s interview with The Guardian is on the way.

Wylie has boastfully described himself as “the gay Canadian vegan who somehow ended up creating ‘Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare mindfuck tool,’” who enjoys a wild ride “from fashion to fascism to fashion.” (After starting out as a fashion school student, he said he was hired by H&M in 2018.)

The hipster whistleblower was cultivated over the course of 2017 and 2018 by The Guardian’s Russia-obsessed correspondent Carole Cadwalladr. Operating as Wylie’s de facto publicist and churning out a stream of reports based on his spectacular claims, Cadwalladr has won admiring media profiles, an array of journalism awards, and a finalist nomination in the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting.

In July 2018, Cadwalladr issued a bold prophesy that stirred liberal audiences across the Atlantic: “From [former FBI director Robert] Mueller’s most recent indictments [of Trump officials], it is clear that the data trail must be coming soon: the chain of evidence that is required to understand how the Russian government’s influence operation targeted American voters.”

She pointed to a forthcoming report by the British Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) and its commissioner, Elizabeth Denham, on the role of SCL-Cambridge Analytica in Brexit and 2016 US elections: “And here is the clue and where it is believed Denham comes in – what data it was based on.”

Her self-styled whistleblower source, Wylie, has also praised Denham: “I want to point out this Russia/Facebook/[Cambridge Analytica] investigation is being led by women like Elizabeth Denham, the UK Information Commissioner, and Carole Cadwalladr at the Guardian. When the tech bros looked away, these women paid attention and put in the hours to investigate.”

But the data trail promised by Cadwalladr never arrived. Instead, Denham and the British ICO produced a report that contradicted virtually ever major prediction and assertion that Wylie and Cadwalladr made about SCL-Cambridge Analytica and its role in UK politics. Published this October, the ICO report reinforces a British parliamentary investigation into Brexit that found no evidence of Russian meddling.

With the release of the ICO report, the Cambridge Analytica-Russiagate bombshell that erupted two years ago has been exposed as another dud. Now, there are serious questions about the credibility of the figures who inspired the debunked narrative.

Another Russiagate plot point reaches a revealing denouement

The United Kingdom’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) spent over two years investigating Cambridge Analytica (CA) and associated entities, including its parent company, Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL); the Canada-based Aggregate IQ (AIQ); and the research facility Global Science Research (GSR).

Strategic advisory firms like Cambridge Analytica work with political campaigns, governments, and corporate clients, offering them a variety of services from public relations to black operations. The ICO report, for example, found that Cambridge Analytica purchased large amounts of commercially available data on US citizens. The data was then used to build profiles on American voters so that they could be targeted with election advertising tailored to them.

After examining Cambridge Analytica’s role in the 2016 presidential election in the United States, the 2016 Brexit referendum in the UK, and allegations of ties to Russian government influence operations, the ICO found a chaotic, largely ineffectual operation with no connection to the Kremlin. The closure of the investigation marked yet another anti-climactic denouement of a key Russiagate plot point.

Elizabeth Denham methodically discredited the baseless allegations of collusion between the data firm, the Russian government, and the Trump campaign. Further, her report poured cold water on the influence of Cambridge Analytica in Brexit, demonstrating the company’s negligible impact on the vote.

The ICO even concluded that Cambridge Analytica’s widely touted psychographic micro-targeting of voters was mostly hype. Its tactics were neither new nor particularly effective.

“The scale of the investigation I conducted was unprecedented for a data protection authority,” declared the ICO commissioner in her 18-page report. “It highlighted the whole ecosystem of personal data in political campaigns.”

“During my investigation a large amount of material and equipment was reviewed including; 42 laptops and computers, 700 TB of data, 31 servers, over 300,000 documents, and a wide range of material in paper form and from cloud storage devices,” Denham said.

The Guardian reported “40 full-time investigators working on the case, 20 specialist contractors, and they have an interview list that numbers 264 people.”

“The ICO has conducted a reverse engineering exercise to try to identify and confirm as far as possible, how SCL/CA processed the personal data they held… my findings were also informed and corroborated based on accounts obtained from witness interviews and the contents of statements taken during the investigation,” Denham said.

The methodically detailed investigation’s findings were a damning commentary on the Western media that opportunistically painted SCL-Cambridge Analytica as a batcave command center for Putin and the Bannonite far-right.

Reaching for the Russia ruse

In March 2018, failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton pointed to Cambridge Analytica’s alleged work with Russia in order to deflect from her loss to Trump in 2016. “You’ve got Cambridge Analytica… and you’ve got the Russians. And the real question is how did the Russians know how to target their messages so precisely?” she posed to the UK’s Channel 4 News in an interview for the network’s documentary on the data scandal.

“If they were getting advice from let’s say Cambridge Analytica or someone else, about, ‘ok, here are the 12 voters in this town in Wisconsin…’ that indeed would be very disturbing,” Clinton declared.

Cadwalladr seized on the statement as confirmation of her own reporting.

 

That same month, Rep. Adam Schiff, the Democratic congressional point man on allegations of Trump-Russia collusion, had invited Wylie to testify as a part of “ongoing investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.” In the Senate, Richard Blumenthal called to have Cambridge Analytica investigated over its “ties to Russia” and “services for Russians.”

The uproar that ensued from Wylie’s testimony resulted in Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg being dragged before Congress to apologize like a whimpering puppy for his role in enabling the British data firm to meddle in elections.

Corporate media leapt on the salacious story, devoting copious air time to the topic. One journalist noted dozens of tweets about Cambridge Analytica written in 2018 by CNN congressional correspondent Manu Raju, the network’s media critic Brian Stelter, and its primetime host Jake Tapper.

 

When Wylie testified behind closed doors to members of the Democratic-controlled House Judiciary Committee and an Oversight and Government Reform panel in April 2018, he stunned the lawmakers with claims that Cambridge Analytica had tested messaging with American voters about Russian President Vladimir Putin and his policies in Eastern Europe.

Wylie claimed that people who worked on the US and UK campaigns had connections to two Russian intelligence outfits, as well as to Russians and Russian companies which were in turn linked to the Kremlin itself. According to the self-styled whistleblower, Cambridge Analytica hired “known Russian agents.” He painted a sprawling, conspiratorial portrait of a hostile foreign information warfare operation that seemed almost custom made for a US media and Democratic Party eager to impeach Trump and wage a new cold war against Putin.

“There was a lot of relationships and a lot of communications with different fairly senior Russian officials,” Wylie told NPR. He has claimed that a Russian gas company with alleged ties to the Kremlin named Lukoil inquired about political, non-commercial online targeting in the United States to the company.

“Wylie also revealed Cambridge Analytica’s links to Russia. Wylie had the documents and tapes to back him up,” NPR reported.

Strategic Communications Laboratories (SCL) has said it discussed working with “Lukoil Turkey [to] better engage with its loyalty-card customers at gas stations,” but that nothing came from the meeting. Tellingly, Lukoil received not one mention in the short section on Russia in the ICO’s report.

While the ICO report mentioned “possible Russia-located activity” – referring to Russian IP addresses found in some data – the information was ultimately referred to the National Crime Agency, which has not taken any action. “These matters fall outside the remit of the ICO,” the report says.

In July 2018, Wylie claimed this information was also in the FBI’s hands, and that he had “been helping their investigation.” However, the reported DOJ-FBI investigation that ran parallel to the ICO has offered nothing to corroborate his remarkable assertion.

The ICO’s Russiagate section concluded as follows: “We did not find any additional evidence of Russian involvement in our analysis of material contained in the SCL / CA servers we obtained.”

In other words, virtually everything Wylie told US Congress and the media about Cambridge Analytica’s role as a secret Russian weapon – the entire basis of his fame – has been discredited by the ICO report he helped to spur.

Blustery claims of influence exposed as hot air

UK Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham’s report also surgically dismantled many of the most sensational claims about Cambridge Analytica advanced by Christopher Wylie’s promoters in the media, like Cadwalladr.

In one of the report’s most revealing sections, its authors found:

The methods that SCL were using were, in the main, well recognised processes using commonly available technology. It was these third-party libraries which formed the majority of SCL’s data science activities which were observed by the ICO… We understand this procedure is well established within the wider data science community, and in our view does not show any proprietary technology, or processes, within SCL’s work.

However, it is important to stress that the output was only a prediction… the real-world accuracy of these predictions – when used on new individuals whose data had not been used in the generating of the models – was likely much lower.

As in so many previously misreported Russiagate stories, the subjects of the controversy may have been a victim of their own self-promotional bluster. In a press release following Trump’s victory in 2016, for example, Cambridge Analytica claimed it was “instrumental in identifying supporters, persuading undecided voters, and driving turnout,” and bragged that it had “informed key decisions on campaigning communications, and resource allocation.”

“We are thrilled that our revolutionary approach to data-driven communications played such an integral part in President-elect Donald Trump’s extraordinary win,” CEO Alexander Nix boasted at the time.

The ICO report, on the other hand, noted “evidence that [SCL’s] own staff were concerned about some of the public statements the leadership of the company were making about their impact and influence.”

“SCL’s own marketing material claimed they had ‘Over 5,000 data points per individual on 230 million adult Americans.’ However, based on what we found it appears that this may have been an exaggeration,” the report stated.

The investigation not only exposed SCL-Cambridge Analytica’s claims of driving tectonic shifts in global politics as hot air; it also found the company’s data protection was almost comically sloppy, “with little thought for effective security measures.”

Widespread data manipulation tactics painted as uniquely evil Republican mind-weapons

Yet as recently as September of this year, media outlets like Channel 4 have continued to milk the scandal, using Cambridge Analytica data to fuel its investigative exposés on the 2016 election. Like reporting over the previous years, the coverage was premised on the dubious notion that Cambridge Analytica’s impact was meaningful.

When the scandal broke, few journalists penned anything counter to the prevailing narratives on Cambridge Analytica. Among the very few skeptics at the time was Yasha Levine, author of “Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet.” In March 2018, Levine panned media coverage of the firm’s activities.

“This story is being covered and framed in a misleading way,” Levine wrote. “So far, much of the mainstream coverage, driven by the Times and Guardian reports, looks at Cambridge Analytica in isolation—almost entirely outside of any historical or political context.”

“Everyone” working in contemporary data-driven politics employs the tactics employed by Cambridge Analytica, Levine explained to The Grayzone.

“The Koch brothers have their own firm that sucks in data from Facebook and a million other sources to micro-target voters,” he said. “The Democratic Party has its own software that does exactly the same thing. Facebook has a whole team that works with campaigns to utilize data and profile voters. It’s a huge business with billions slushing around. Everyone promises huge results, way overselling their capability. If you knew even a little bit about the way political campaigns use data, it was clear that the whole thing was a sham the moment this scandal hit.”

While Wylie has claimed that SCL conducted “counter-extremism” information operations in the Middle East on behalf of the British government, and suggested that Bannon sought to deploy these tools to foment extremism in the US, the reality is that the technology was hardly limited to the 2016 election, or to one party.

This May, for example, Fox News reported that technology that received initial funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) was deploying AI-driven information warfare tools originally meant to fight ISIS propaganda in order to target pro-Trump voters.

An award-winning narrative collapses

According to Elizabeth Denham’s ICO report, SCL-Cambridge Analytica’s targeted advertising was “likely the final purpose of the data gathering.” However, it “has not been possible to determine from the digital evidence reviewed” whether the firm’s online tactics influenced any political campaign.

In March 2018, Christopher Wylie testified to the UK parliament that Cambridge Analytica had shared surreptitiously obtained Facebook data with AggregateIQ (AIQ), a firm that was contracted by several pro-Brexit campaigns including Vote Leave. Wylie claimed AIQ was the Canadian front for SCL. However, the ICO report referred to AIQ merely as “a company associated with SCL/CA.”

The ICO report concluded that SCL had only a negligible impact on Brexit: “From my review of the materials recovered by the investigation I have found no further evidence to change my earlier view that SCL/CA were not involved in the EU referendum campaign in the UK – beyond some initial enquiries made by SCL/CA in relation to [the UK Independence Party] data in the early stages of the referendum process,” Denham wrote. “This strand of work does not appear to have then been taken forward by SCL/CA.”

The ICO report went on to state that the data harvested by SCL from Facebook could not have been used by anyone in the course of Brexit campaigns:

It was suggested that some of the data was utilised for political campaigning associated with the Brexit Referendum. However, our view on review of the evidence is that the data from GSR could not have been used in the Brexit Referendum as the data shared with SCL/Cambridge Analytica by Dr. Kogan related to US registered voters.

In one revealing finding laid out in the report, GSR “shared subsets of the data harvested by the App” with Eunoia Technologies Inc, among other companies.

Unmentioned in the report was that Eunoia Technologies was founded by none other than Christopher Wylie after he left Cambridge Analytica in 2014.

To be sure, there were real connections between the Donald Trump operation and Cambridge Analytica. Trump’s then-campaign manager, Steve Bannon, was a vice president at Cambridge Analytica before he joined the Trump campaign. Top Trump moneyman Robert Mercer had funded the firm, along with Bannon’s assorted media projects and the Trump campaign. Anti-Trump forces exploited these ties to try to frame Cambridge Analytica as a non-existent bridge between Trump Inc. and “the Russians.”

There is also no doubt that there was illicit data that was likely misused in the course of political campaigns by Cambridge Analytica. But Western media once again crossed the line from mundane fact into Russiagate fiction by alleging that the Kremlin exploited data non-consensually harvested by Cambridge Analytica to micro-target US and UK citizens with political messaging meant to sway the presidential election and the Brexit referendum.

These conspiracy theories were amplified and seemingly legitimized by Wylie, who was touted as an experienced company insider who came forward out of a commitment to democratic values. But was he truly who he said he was, or was he another opportunist seeking to exploit the paranoid atmosphere of Russiagate for fame and fortune?

A Wylie web of deceptions and suspect associates

Throughout the Cambridge Analytica pseudo-scandal, a series of conflicting narratives raised questions that were conveniently overlooked by US and UK media. Was AIQ, the Canadian firm, truly part and parcel of SCL? Was Christopher Wylie a co-founder, a contractor, or a mere intern? Questions about the provenance of the data Wylie blew the whistle on have not been posed.

While Wylie focused on the most seemingly explosive connections, such as former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski’s meetings with Cambridge Analytica prior to Trump’s announcement that he was running for president, he omitted crucial pieces of evidence that undermined the conspiracy theories the media feasted on.

For example, Wylie neglected to mention that his own company, Eunoia, met with Lewandowski at about the same time in an attempt to retain the soon-to-be campaign as a client, offering them services similar to Cambridge Analytica’s.

Reporting from Buzzfeed indicated that Eunoia pitched the Trump campaign – a Cambridge Analytica client – on micro-targeting services. Wylie told the website that he deleted the illicit data in 2015. According to BuzzFeed, Wylie “bragged to associates about meetings he had with potential corporate clients, including Walmart, Monsanto, the American Petroleum Institute, Burberry, DKNY, Ford, and Virgin.”

That was before Wylie “blew the whistle.”

According to the former campaign director for Vote Leave, Dominic Cummings, who today serves as Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s chief advisor, “Wylie tried to sell me the same crap he accuses Cambridge Analytica of doing.”

While Wylie claimed that after leaving Cambridge Analytica he was subjected to lawsuits from the company in order to make it impossible for him to ever “work in any kind of political thing again or data thing again,” and to keep quiet about the data, Buzzfeed’s reporting and Cummings’ account of his apparent attempts to poach Vote Leave and the Trump campaign from his former employer corroborates accusations against him in a report commissioned by Cambridge Analytica.

Wylie claims he was appalled at the direction of the company following Bannon’s takeover, however, he has been credited with personally developing the illicit data harvesting tactic, and likely exploited it while at Cambridge Analytica before leaving the company to start his own firm – which also had access to the data. He then allegedly attempted to court the very same right-wing clients with essentially the same services. It was only after the failure of his private company that Wylie began sounding the alarm.

It is not clear exactly when Wylie experienced a change of heart. Cadwalladr says she first approached him on LinkedIn in 2017. Years earlier, in 2013, Wylie was discussing plans to found Eunoia Technologies and build it into “the NSA’s wet dream.”

Buzzfeed noted that Wylie approached SCL colleagues about joining his Palantir-like data firm. Promotional materials later produced by Eunoia pitched the targeting of voters for political clients, just as SCL did.

Wylie has also claimed to be a founder of Cambridge Analytica. “I got recruited to join a research team at SCL Group, which, at the time, was a British military contractor based in London. Most of its clients were various ministries of defense in NATO countries,” he boasted to NPR.

However, the report Cambridge Analytica commissioned in the aftermath of Wylie’s emergence as a supposed whistleblower claimed he was little more than an intern on a student visa who only worked two days per week.

That record stands in stark contrast to the claim by The Guardian’s Cadwalladr that Wylie was the man who “came up with an idea that led to the foundation of a company called Cambridge Analytica.”

Coupled with the damning conclusions of the UK ICO report, the conflicting accounts of Wylie’s background seem to shatter his credibility, along with that of the Western press that accepted his spectacular claims at face value.

So was his most enthusiastic promoter, Cadwalladr, acting purely as a journalist, or as a partisan advancing an ulterior Cold War agenda?

At around the same time Cadwalladr was spinning out the now-discredited Cambridge Analytica story, she was listed by a covert, UK Foreign Commonwealth Office-funded, anti-Russian propaganda operation, the Integrity Initiative, as part of a UK-based cluster of journalists that operated under its watch. In fact, Cadwalladr participated in a November 2018 Integrity Initiative conference with other members of the cluster called “Tackling Tools of Malign Influence.”

Cadwalladr also appears to have enjoyed some form of relationship with the dubious former British spy and author of the discredited Steele Dossier, Christopher Steele. Beyond repeatedly hyping Steele and his dossier, the Guardian writer appears to have meet with the British spook. In fact, Steele spoke about “imminent and urgent threats to democracy” at a screening of “The Great Hack,” the documentary about Cadwalladr and Wylie. His comments, however, were off the record.

 

On Twitter, the Guardian writer has spun out unfounded conspiracies, declaring that “Trump = Brexit = Russia.” She has also decried being “mocked as a crackpot conspiracy theorist for pursuing Cambridge Analytica. Let’s hope I’m as [sic] wrong about Brexit’s centrality in Trump-Russia axis.”

 

Wylie, for his part, enjoyed a speaking gig alongside Cadwalladr and Bill Browder, the vulture capitalist fugitive from Russian justice whose distortion-laden tale of persecution by the Kremlin inspired the US government’s Magnitsky Act and helped fuel the anti-Russian politics that now dominate Washington.

 

Since the UK’s ICO report demolished the claims that were central to Wylie’s hipster-whistleblower persona, and which provided the basis for Cadwalladr’s award-winning reporting, one has gone off the radar while the other has gone into apparent damage control mode.

Wylie and Cadwalladr ignore, dismiss a report they had eagerly anticipated

On Twitter, Christopher Wylie has chosen to ignore the damning ICO report that he once predicted would validate his explosive allegations.

Carole Cadwalladr, for her part, has pumped out a series of Tweets attacking outlets that claimed the ICO report undermined her award-winning reporting. In apparent hopes of shielding her reputation from scrutiny, she linked to a commentary by The Guardian Observer’s editorial board which bizarrely insisted “this newspaper’s exposé of the exploitation of private data has been vindicated [by the ICO report].”

The column highlighted certain aspects of the report that seemed to corroborate the paper’s reporting. However, it dismissed the meat of the investigation, declaring that “it stretches credulity to present [the ICO investigation] as a full investigation into potential Russian influence on Brexit.” Like Cadwalladr, it attacked other publications for misreporting the story.

“The ICO report confirmed massive mishandling of private data and its exploitation for political campaigning. The Observer is proud of its role in the exposure of these abuses,” the article proclaimed.

The editorial is correct about one thing, at least: the ICO investigation has resulted in a number of penalties. Cambridge Analytica was fined before it shuttered; Facebook was fined for allowing applications to harvest data from friends of users; Vote Leave and other campaigns and companies were also hit with fines for data crimes relating to the Brexit campaign – including pro-Remain entities.

But the high-tech huckstering hipster Wylie and his media muse Cadwalladr have faced no consequences for the hyperbolic bluster and now-debunked hype about foreign infiltration they spun out to win fame, film deals, and flashy journalistic awards. No matter the evidence, the Russiagate show must go on.

November 10, 2020 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

Ex-CIA Director Urges Palace Coup Against President Trump to Stop Declassifications

By James Tweedie – Sputnik – 10.11.2020

Former Spy Chief and long-time foe of Donald Trump John Brennan told CNN’s Chris Cuomo he feared the president could declassify sensitive information or give military orders that would undermine US “national security interests” – and urged Vice-President Mike Pence to seize power.

US ex-spy chief John Brennan has urged a palace coup against President Donald Trump before presumed election winner Joe Biden takes office in January.

The former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director told CNN News’ Chris Cuomo – brother of Democrat New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo – that Vice-President Mike Pence and Trump’s cabinet should invoke the 25th constitutional amendment to oust him as a risk to “national security.”

“I’m very concerned what he might do in his remaining 70 days in office,” said Brennan on Monday’s edition of Cuomo Prime Time. “Is he going to take some type of military action? Is he going to release some type of information that could, in fact, threaten our national security interests?”

​​Trump embarrassed both Brennan and the opposition Democratic Party in October when he declassified a memo written by the ex-CIA director revealing that 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton planned the since-debunked ‘Russiagate‘ allegations against Trump.

“If Vice President Pence and the cabinet had an ounce of fortitude and spine and patriotism, I think they would seriously consider invoking the 25th Amendment and pushing Donald Trump out because he is just very unpredictable now,” Brennan added.

And the former spy chief claimed Trump had fired outgoing Defence Secretary Mark Esper on Monday for refusing to carry out his orders.

“If Mark Esper has been pushed aside because he is not listening to Donald Trump, carrying out these orders, who knows what his successor, this acting secretary Chris Miller’s going to do if Donald Trump does give some type of order that really is counter to what I think our national security interests need to be,” Brennan said.

Esper’s predecessor General Jim Mattis dissuaded Trump from his first bid in 2017 to end the 19-year war in Afghanistan, instead sending more troops to the Asian nation. But it was under Esper that Trump’s order to withdraw troops illegally occupying northern Syria was reversed.

Brennan also echoed Cuomo’s speculation that Trump would pursue “vendettas” against current FBI Director Christopher Wray and CIA Director Gina Haspel – who oversaw torture of prisoners at an agency ‘black site’ in Thailand in 2002 – although he did not say what for.

Brennan was given the top job at the CIA by then-president Barack Obama, serving from March 2013 to January 2017, when Trump took office. US-supported regime change efforts during his tenure included the 2014 Maidan Square colour revolution in Ukraine, the Guarimba riots against Venezuelan socialist president Nicolas Maduro the same year and the long-term CIA programme of training and arming anti-government militants in Syria.

In 2016 he collaborated with then-FBI director James Comey to set up the ‘Crossfire Hurricane’ investigations into unfounded Democrat allegations of Russian collusion in Trump’s election campaign – a probe that involved intelligence surveillance of Trump aide carter Paige.

Since leaving the agency, Brennan has been harshly critical of Trump, labelling his government a “kakocracy” following Brennan’s firing. Trump eventually revoked Brennan’s security clearance in August 2018.

Brennan opposed the 2016 Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, passed by Congress over Obama’s veto, which allowed US citizens to sue the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia over its alleged role in the 2001 World Trade Centre attacks.

November 10, 2020 Posted by | Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | 1 Comment

Suspect AI Software Verified Mail-In Ballots With Little Human Oversight in Key Battleground States

By Whitney Webb | Unlimited Hangout | November 9, 2020

Though accusations of election fraud in the 2020 US presidential election have been swirling across social media and some news outlets for much of the past week, few have examined the role of a little known Silicon Valley company whose artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm was used to accept or reject ballots in highly contested states such as Nevada.

That company, Parascript, has long-standing cozy ties to defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin and tech giants including Microsoft, in addition to being a contractor to the US Postal Service. In addition, its founder, Stepan Pachikov, better known for cofounding the app Evernote in 2007, is a long-standing and 2020 donor to Democratic presidential candidates.

Parascript’s AI software was used during this election in at least eight states for matching signatures on ballot envelopes with those in government databases in order to “ease the workload of staff enforcing voter signature rules” resulting from the influx of mail-in ballots. Reuters, which reported on the use of the technology, asked the company to provide a list of counties and states using its software for the 2020 election. Parascript, however, declined to supply the list, replying, instead, that their clients “included 20 of the top 100 counties by registered voters.”

Despite not receiving the official list from Parascript, Reuters was able to compile its own partial list, which revealed that several counties in Florida, Colorado, Washington, and Utah, among others, utilized the AI software to determine the validity of ballots. Reuters also reported that Clark County, Nevada, which is one of the hotspots of litigation between the Trump and Biden campaigns and fraud allegations, was one that used the software. Reuters was able to determine how the software was used in some counties, with many counties allowing the software to approve anywhere from 20 to 75 percent of mail-in ballots as acceptable. For several counties included in the Reuters list, staff reviewed 1 percent or less of the AI software’s acceptances. Figures were not available for Clark County, Nevada.

Prior to the election, concerns were raised regarding the efficacy of AI signature-verification software for use on mail-in ballots. For instance, Kyle Wiggers, a journalist who covers AI for Venture Beat, noted that the accuracy of such systems is believed to vary between 74 and 96 percent. However, he also stated that “we don’t have benchmarks from the systems that are in use to verify signatures on these mail-in ballots. We basically have to go by what the manufacturers of the systems are telling us, which is that the systems are accurate.” Given that states and counties have relied on companies themselves for information on the accuracy of their algorithms, it becomes important to take a deeper look into Parascript, their partners, and their software.

An Untested “Xpert”

This May, Parascript announced a new version of its automated signature-verification software, called SignatureXpert, which the company said was able to “evaluate ballot signatures and compare them with voter record signatures pulled from driver’s licenses,” adding that “with advanced machine learning image perfection, even low-resolution driver’s licenses can be used.”

At the time of the announcement, Parascript’s vice president of marketing and product management, Greg Council, stated:

“We did a lot of research with our partners and found oftentimes the most efficient way for municipalities to create voter signature databases was to pull them from signatures on driver’s licenses. . . . But we found that these images are often stored at lower resolutions. With our new advanced machine learning image processing, we can take lower resolution images and improve them to high levels of quality that enable automated signature verification to be used on more ballots.”

What Council did not state is that most driver’s license signatures are acquired via an electronic tablet or signature pad, which often results in a very different signature than one written on a paper ballot.

Regarding the use of their new SignatureXpert software in the 2020 election, the company stated in a blog post that “ASV [automated signature verification] is used today in the vote-by-mail processes of many states to provide solid assurances that each vote is treated fairly and thoroughly reviewed. For this election, some of the larger cities and counties in America are deploying ASV software from Parascript to assist their verification teams to produce accurate results.”

Parascript’s October 30 blog post on its software also noted that that the algorithm had yet to be verified for use on mail-in ballots, but it attempted to obfuscate this fact. In response to the question “Is this proven technology?” the post responded:

“In the case of Parascript, the answer is yes. The AI that powers SignatureXpert has been field-proven in the banking industry for over a decade and is trusted to produce reliable voting results. States such as Oregon, Colorado, Washington and Utah use it to ensure that every election is efficient, legitimate and secure. Voters can also be assured knowing SignatureXpert is always used to assist, not replace, election officials so there is no worry that the ASV bots will secretly throw the election!”

While the AI that powers SignatureXpert was tested for use in the banking industry, it has not been tested for use on mail-in ballots. Furthermore, the statement that several states use the software “to ensure that every election is efficient, legitimate and secure” omits the fact that the version of SignatureXpert to be used on mail-in ballots was not announced until this May and had yet to be tested for mail-in ballots, having only been previously used in Colorado to verify signatures on petitions. In addition, the claim that SignatureXpert only assists and does not replace election officials varies by county, as each county decides if there is human oversight and to what extent. As previously mentioned, Reuters found that several counties only have humans review 1 percent or less of ballots accepted by Parascript’s software.

Also notable is Parascript’s concluding statement regarding its promotion of the use of its AI software for mail-in ballots in the presidential election. The company states that “no matter which candidate wins the 2020 election, the voting process will have changed forever. AI such as that provided by Parascript will become more commonplace in the never-ending battle to keep our elections safe and secure from fraud.”

Parascript Post

Today, Parascript boasts clients in numerous sectors, including finance, health care, logistics, and the public sphere, with one of their most prominent clients being the US Postal Service. Since 2011, Parascript has provided the USPS with automated and bundled mail-sorting equipment that utilizes the company’s optical character recognition (OCR) technology.

In addition to their multimillion-dollar contracts with the USPS, Parascript is partnered with another major USPS contractor, Lockheed Martin. While best known as a weapons manufacturer and a key fixture of the military-industrial complex, Lockheed Martin has also long been the contractor for the USPS’s remote-computer-reader system, which utilizes Parascript’s software. Through its partnership with Lockheed, Parascript’s software has been a component of USPS’ automated mail sorting process since at least 2003.

A Parascript press release stated the following regarding the Lockheed Martin–Parascript relationship as it relates to this USPS system:

“Parascript was recognized [by Lockheed Martin], in particular, for providing highly advanced and reliable Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software for handwritten address recognition and interpretation on letter mail pieces with its AddressScript technology. The primary purpose of the AddressScript OCR system is to work closely with Lockheed Martin’s advanced mail processing technology to meet and exceed requirements of the USPS.”

Since 2017 Lockheed Martin has also provided the USPS with its “next generation” processing systems for packages and mail. These processing machines “are capable of automatically separating mail pieces, reading printed and handwritten addresses, and sorting packages, priority and bundled mail,” according to a Lockheed Martin press release. Parascript’s AI software automatically identifies and sorts the addresses.

Notably, Lockheed Martin is one of the leading investors in the intelligence-linked cybersecurity firm Cybereason, which, for well over a year, has simulated various chaotic scenarios for the 2020 US election. Cybereason’s various simulations ended with Americans’ faith in the electoral process being utterly destroyed and subsequent declarations of martial law. Despite Cybereason’s clear and enduring ties to the intelligence apparatus of a foreign power (Israel) with a history of using backdoors in software to spy on the US government, Lockheed Martin has served as the key conduit that allowed Cybereason’s cybersecurity software to gain access to some of the United States’ most classified systems. This election cycle, Lockheed Martin affiliates donated heavily to both candidates but gave nearly $27,000 more to Biden than to Trump.

In addition, Parascript is also partnered with Pitney Bowes, a private “work-share partner” that sorts and processes an estimated 15 billion pieces of mail annually on behalf of the USPS. Pitney Bowes is also one of the leading companies that has pushed for the privatization of the USPS, even funding a report authored by the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) that laid out a roadmap for transforming the USPS into a “public-private hybrid” in which all retail and processing components of the USPS would be privatized. Pitney Bowes “Exemplar Mail Sorting Solution” utilizes Parascript’s software, according to the company’s promotional material. More recently, Pitney Bowes has become heavily focused on e-commerce, developing a very close relationship with eBay, which is owned by Silicon Valley billionaire and Democratic Party donor Pierre Omidyar.

Pitney Bowes has long offered an automated mail-in balloting system for elections, called Relia-Vote, which was used to sort mail-in ballots during the 2020 presidential election. However, Relia-Vote is now owned by Bluecrest, a spin-off of Pitney Bowes that has operated independently of its parent company since 2018. Bluecrest is currently owned by Platinum Equity, an investment firm founded and headed by Tom Gores. Gores donated $100,000 to Hillary Clinton in her unsuccessful bid for the presidency in 2016. It is unclear if the latest version of Relia-Vote, which was used in the 2020 presidential election, employs Parascript’s AI software.

Given the use of Parascript’s unproven AI software for the verification of signatures on mail-in ballots during this year’s highly contested election, the near ubiquitous presence of this company’s software on automated mail-sorting machines and its long-standing ties to the USPS and other prominent USPS contractors is worth noting.

Parascript’s Powerful Partners

In addition to Lockheed Martin, Parascript enjoys partnerships with other prominent companies with long-standing ties to US intelligence. For instance, Parascript is a partner of Hewlett-Packard, a company whose close ties to the CIA and its venture capital arm In-Q-Tel, particularly under the leadership of Carly Fiorina, is an open secret.

Parascript is also partnered with IBM. Just last year, the CIA hired IBM Federal vice president Juliane Gallina to serve as the intelligence agency’s chief information officer. In that position, Gallina oversees “the CIA’s modernization efforts as well as making better use of the massive amount of data it possesses.” In addition, IBM is a major corporation driving the push to create “smart cities” in the United States and globally, but to date they have focused much of their smart city efforts on China and have long-standing ties to China’s political and economic elites. In addition, IBM is one of the four sponsors of the Center for Presidential Transition, which issued a statement on Sunday (November 8) urging President Trump to concede to his rival Joe Biden. IBM had previously sponsored Biden’s cancer initiative for the Department of Veterans Affairs when he was vice president and, this election cycle, donated $640,801 to Biden, compared to $139,373 to Trump.

In addition to its partnerships with HP and IBM, Parascript is also a “gold” application development partner of Microsoft and has a long-standing relationship with the tech giant. Parascript’s previous iteration as a company, Paragraph International, developed the first handwriting-recognition technology employed by Microsoft in the 1990s. When Paragraph International transformed into Parascript the partnership continued through application development, with Microsoft fully integrating Parascript’s image-recognition technology into its SharePoint software in 2014.

Notably, the two former Parascript software leads for developing USPS mail sorting now hold prominent positions at Microsoft. The development lead for Parascript’s automated address-reading software, Mikhail Parakhin, is now Microsoft’s corporate vice president of technology. Max Lepikhin, who worked directly under Parakhin in overseeing the development of Parascript’s mail-sorting–related software, currently works at Microsoft as a principal software engineer.

Stepan Pachikov, Parascript’s founder, with Bill Gates in 1990

Microsoft executives have shown obvious support for Biden during this election cycle, with nearly $2 million donated to him in his bid to oust Trump. In addition, the wife of former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer donated the maximum amount for an individual to the Biden campaign, while Microsoft’s current president, Brad Smith, hosted fundraisers for Biden. Microsoft chief technology officer, Kevin Scott, also donated over $50,000 to support Biden’s election efforts, and Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn founder who sits on Microsoft’s board, was one of Biden’s largest donors in this campaign cycle, funneling over half a million to Biden, the DNC, and related PACs. Microsoft affiliates have donated to the RNC during this election cycle, but those donations are dwarfed by contributions to the DNC and Biden.

Currently, US election infrastructure is overseen by the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), headed by Chris Krebs, who was a top Microsoft executive before taking on his current role. Under Krebs’s leadership, CISA’s 2020 election operations center includes representatives from major Silicon Valley companies, including Google, Facebook, and Twitter, as well as unspecified “election technology” companies. The center also works with the Center for Internet Security, which is funded by eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar’s Democracy Fund and has several members of the Obama administration’s cybersecurity team and/or National Security Council on its board. Microsoft directly partnered with the Center for Internet Security’s efforts related to the 2020 election this past June and IBM is also partnered with the center.

Krebs, in his capacity as CISA director, has advocated for the implementation of Microsoft’s controversial ElectionGuard software nationwide. ElectionGuard was co-developed by Microsoft and Galois, a cybersecurity contractor for the national security state whose only investors are the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Office of Naval Research. Over the past two years, Microsoft has finalized agreements or is in the process of drafting agreements with the main voting-machine manufacturers in the United States. Microsoft has publicly stated on several occasions in just the past week that it expects ElectionGuard to be widely adopted nationwide for the 2024 presidential election and ostensibly all subsequent presidential elections. ElectionGuard recently received a glowing review from the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute.

Stepan Pachikov and the DNC’s “Russian Interference” Double Standard

Given its partners, it should be unsurprising that Parascript’s founder and many employees have close ties to prominent Silicon Valley billionaires and are known for their support of the Democratic Party and their rejection of President Trump.

Paragraph International, it should be noted, was founded by a team of immigrants from the Soviet Union led by Stepan Pachikov and funded by American venture capitalists. As Paragraph International, it made several big deals with Apple and Microsoft in the 1990s before becoming Parascript in 1996. Most of Parascript’s top executives are Russian citizens who have been with the company for decades, starting when it was Paragraph International.

Pachikov, as mentioned, is better known as a co-founder of Evernote. Evernote’s founding CEO and current chairman, Phil Libin, has developed close ties to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman. Pachikov, like many in Silicon Valley, is an avid transhumanist who continues to promote the use and development of brain implants to “improve memory” and “dreams of immortality by uploading all memories to artificial intelligence.” In fact, Pachikov’s original vision for Evernote was of a brain-machine interface that would allow a user to “remember everything.” In a piece for Evernote’s blog written by Pamela Rosen, Pachikov denotes his belief that “future technology [will exist] as a literal physical extension of the human brain, perhaps as an embedded chip,” with Pachikov adding that “we have no choice” when it comes to merging the human body with machines. “It’s just another type of integration,” he asserts.

In addition to his embrace of transhumanism, Pachikov is a long-time donor to Democratic Party candidates, having contributed to Obama in his presidential campaigns, Hillary Clinton in her unsuccessful 2016 presidential campaign and previous senatorial campaigns, and to the Democratic Party in this election cycle. Pachikov’s distaste for Donald Trump was the subject of his 2016 Bloomberg op-ed entitled “Russian-Americans Don’t All Back Trump.”

Given this background, one thing that is particularly odd about Parascript’s role in the 2020 election is that there were no complaints from the Democratic National Committee or any prominent “Russiagaters” regarding a company that is founded and staffed largely by Russian citizens. Russians having such intimate involvement in the verification of mail-in ballots in a highly contested presidential election, especially when such technology has been accused of being biased against ethnic minorities and immigrants for whom English is a second language, is something one would think would evoke distress from those espousing concern about foreign interference in our electoral process.

The DNC and many prominent Democrats have put forward claims (discredited) of Russian election interference on behalf of Donald Trump (and against Hillary Clinton) during the 2016 election, with many warning in recent months that “Russians” would seek to meddle in the 2020 contest between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Indeed, highly contested parts of the country, including Clark County, Nevada, used Parascript’s software and were subsequently accused of election fraud, something that would presumably spark the ire of Russiagaters everywhere. Yet, since proponents of Russiagate are by and large supporters of Biden and critical of Trump, it appears that prime opportunities to breathe new life into the discredited Russiagate narrative are readily cast aside when it benefits their preferred candidate.

November 10, 2020 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception | , | Leave a comment

The book that dared to ask if COVID-19 really wasn’t a super-deadly pandemic…

Much Ado About Corona

In Corona, False Alarm? Facts and Figures, German researchers Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi and Dr. Karina Reiss provide an easy-to-read summary of the (often ignored) facts and figures that have emerged during the first six months of the coronavirus narrative. The book is divided up into short and to-the-point sections written in plain (translated) English.

Here’s just a sample of the contents:

  • How dangerous is the new “killer” virus?
  • Why were people really dying in Italy, Spain, England and the USA?
  • Why did Germany declare a pandemic and extend its lockdown?
  • Were hospitals overburdened? Ventilators on short supply?
  • Does the science support mandatory mask-wearing and social distancing?
  • A look at the collateral damage of lockdowns to the elderly, the economy, children and the world’s poorest.
  • Did countries (like Sweden) that avoided lockdowns fare better?
  • Does the race for vaccine development make sense? What are the chances of success? Will the vaccine be safe? Will people accept it?
  • Why has the media lied to us and politicians betrayed us?

You can order a copy of Corona, False Alarm? from the publisher, Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, Amazon.co.uk or your local, struggling bookstore.

November 10, 2020 Posted by | Book Review, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | | 6 Comments

Don’t Fall For The Psyop! Biden’s Not Officially The President-Elect, At Least Not Yet…

By Andrew Korybko | One World | November 8, 2020

An Unprecedentedly Intense Psyop

Most of the world fell for the massive psyop that was launched over the weekend after the Mainstream Media “projected” that Biden will become the President-Elect. This dramatic declaration is factually false and deliberately ignores the legal process for deciding the presidency as stipulated by the Constitution, instead relying on the masterful manipulation of carefully cultivated perceptions to craft the impression of a fait accompli despite the coup plotters’ desired outcome not yet being legally certified. It’s of the utmost importance to explain the latest development in the decades-long Hybrid War of Terror on America since the “perception management” method that’s presently being perfected will almost certainly be employed in future regime change operations across the world for the purpose of delegitimizing targeted incumbent governments and demoralizing their supporters after disputed elections.

The Election College Reigns Supreme

First things first, it’s actually the Electoral College — and not the media or even the popular vote like many folks (both Americans and especially foreigners) wrongly believe — which legally decides the presidency as per the Constitution. Each state’s electors are expected — but not always legally obligated — to vote for the candidate who wins the popular vote in their state when this institution meets in mid-December. The existing and forthcoming litigation from the Trump team might change the final tally in key battleground states, however, which could in turn influence the outcome of this process. There’s also the possibility of so-called “dueling slates of electors” being nominated by the governor and legislature of some contested states, especially given the legally unresolved outcomes there, the scenario of which was described in detail by Reuters in their informative article on the topic from last month.

Edward Bernays Is Back

It’s for this reason why the Mainstream Media’s claim about Biden becoming the President-Elect is factually false, yet it’s nevertheless being propagated far and wide for the purpose of manipulating the masses. Psychological operations, or psyops for short, aren’t anything “conspiratorial” like self-deluded or dishonest critics might claim, but are part and parcel of human history, having become all the more ubiquitous in everyday life as a result of the relatively recent revolution in information-communication technology which brought most of the planet online through internet-connected cell phones with social media apps. Never before have Edward Bernays’ teachings about “Propaganda” and “The Engineering Of Consent” been more relevant, which is felt by all folks across the world, even if only subconsciously for most of those who still remain unaware of these techniques’ very existence.

The Gaslighting Game

What the coup plotters want to have happen — and make no mistake about it, this is definitely a coup because of the credible claims that fraud was committed in several key battleground states — is to manipulate Trump’s supporters into becoming defeatist so that they don’t employ “Democratic Security” strategies such as exercising their constitutionally enshrined right to stage peaceful rallies in his support while the litigation process continues. They’re also unsure of what the legal outcome will be, especially if the Supreme Court’s new conservative supermajority is ultimately forced to rule on one or some of the cases, hence why they want everyone to wrongly believe that the issue is already decided so that they can then gaslight their targeted audience into thinking that the election was stolen from them instead of them being the ones who are actually trying to steal it from Trump.

The International Community’s Self-Interested Reaction

There are also several international dimensions at play as well. By prematurely “projecting” the victor with the strategic motivation of misleading the masses, the anti-Trump members of the US’ permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies (“deep state”) expected that sympathetic foreign officials will fall for their Mainstream Media proxies’ psyop by following suit and congratulating Biden before the results are legally certified, as most of them ended up doing since it conformed with their “wishful thinking” expectations. Others, however, might not necessarily have been supportive of this “deep state” coup, but simply thought to safeguard their national interests in the (likely?) event that it succeeds, hence why they took a calculated risk congratulating Biden in order to get on his team’s good side. Polish President Duda was probably the most measured, however, since he wisely wrote that “we await the nomination by the Electoral College”.

Perfecting The Syrian & Venezuelan Precedents

“The Anti-Trump Regime Change Sequence Is Worthwhile Studying” for other reasons as well. As the author warned in his latest piece about how “Schadenfreude Towards The US Is Acceptable, But Don’t Sacrifice Your Principles!” which he wrote for The Iranian Council For Defending The Truth, a new Iranian think tank, the “perception management” method that’s presently being perfected in the final stage of the four-year-long psyop against Trump is intended to be used in other regime change operations across the world for delegitimizing targeted incumbent governments after disputed elections and demoralizing their supporters. It’s actually not all that novel of a method either since it was earlier employed against Syrian President Assad and Venezuelan President Maduro but to no avail, though its use against Trump is unprecedentedly intense and carries with it globally significant consequences considering the US’ fading superpower status.

The Future Victims Tie Their Own Infowar Noose

Those in general society and the halls of foreign governments who sympathize with this rolling coup for whatever their reasons may be might eventually find themselves on the receiving end of these “political technologies”, except they’ll be applied even more intensely and arguably more convincingly since the “deep state’s” Mainstream Media proxies could present evidence of those targeted leaders tacitly endorsing the anti-Trump regime change psyop which was later used against them. The carefully cultivated impression of hypocrisy that would then be on full display could deal enormous damage to the morale of those leaders’ supporters and could even result in other governments once again ignoring constitutional processes to congratulate their target’s opponent on their so-called “victory” instead. The de-facto establishment of “dueling governments” partially recognized by the international community could worsen any political crisis as seen in Venezuela.

#NotMyPresident?

With the psyop reaching its crescendo towards what might ultimately end up being Trump’s official capitulation (although no such concession on his side is constitutionally required), the question on his supporters’ minds is whether or not they should recognize the contentious results even if the Electoral College certifies them. That’s a personal decision that every person must make for themselves, though it should be said that everyone should abide by the law and not burn, loot, riot, and even murder in rare instances like the “deep state’s” de-facto street militias of Antifa and “Black Lives Matter” have done for nearly the past half-year with practical impunity when expressing their rage against the system. Nevertheless, consent is purely personal and doesn’t have to be given even if one goes through the motions of abiding by the certified outcome in order to avoid the possible consequences of being placed on the “enemies list” that the dictatorial Democrats are currently compiling.

Concluding Thoughts

The “deep state’s” Mainstream Media proxies launched a massive psyop against the world by prematurely declaring Biden the President-Elect despite the outcome still being litigated and the Electoral College not yet having cast their ballots for the Democrat puppet. Many average folks and foreign governments fell for it either out of innocent ignorance or willing hypocritical complicity with the coup due to their political sympathies for Trump’s opponents. In any case, just like “The Connection Between World War C & Psychological Processes Is Seriously Concerning”, so too should the widespread manipulation of global perceptions be equally concerning for all those are aware of what’s happening. Biden’s possible presidency is already off to an ominous start after he’s on the brink of being installed through a superficially “democratic” coup that his handlers felt compelled to defend by launching a worldwide psyop in the (unlikely?) event that the Supreme Court saves Trump.

November 10, 2020 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception | | 1 Comment