Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

Major oil producer fears ‘apocalyptic’ impact of Russia sanctions

RT | May 26, 2023

The stability of oil supplies from Kazakhstan to the global market relies on transit through Russia, the country’s ambassador to the US, Yerzhan Ashikbayev, has stated. He added that any disruption to flows caused by sanctions could trigger a dire scenario.

“We proceed from the mutual interest of all parties, the interest in the stability of the global market, in the stability of supplies. This is vital both for the functioning of our [Kazakh] economy and for the entire global economy,” the envoy told RIA Novosti on Thursday on the sidelines of the Trans-Caspian Forum in Washington.

When asked whether he sees any risk that sanctions could make it difficult or impossible for Kazakhstan to transit oil, the diplomat described it as “some kind of apocalyptic scenario.”

Kazakhstan supplies oil to the global market via one of the world’s largest pipelines, the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC).

A multinational project, the CPC involves Russia, Kazakhstan and a consortium of leading oil companies. The pipeline system mainly collects crude from the large oil fields of western Kazakhstan, but also from Russia. Its total capacity is over 1 million barrels of oil per day, which is 2.3% of global seaborne crude trade.

The CPC delivers around 1.2 million barrels of crude oil daily from Kazakhstan to Europe, and for subsequent shipment to the US. The pipeline’s operations were interrupted last year by storm damage to equipment at a Black Sea terminal, with the disruption sparking concerns of a global supply crisis.

According to Ashikbayev, the CPC remains an important project for Kazakhstan, accounting for 80% of the country’s crude oil exports.

Kazakhstan has strengthened its oil and gas ties with Russia despite the threat of secondary sanctions from the US and EU.

May 26, 2023 Posted by | Economics, Russophobia | , , | Leave a comment

US might use credit default to attack competitors

By Ahmed Adel | May 26, 2023

On May 22, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned that the country may be unable to service its debt by June 1 unless Congress raises its ceiling or suspends it. In turn, President Joe Biden ruled out the declaration of default. At the same time, despite all the predictions of doom and gloom, the US could benefit from a default, especially to wreak havoc on the international economy and competitors.

In the US, the amount of public debt is limited by law. Currently, it has reached $31.4 trillion. It is up to the US Congress to raise the national debt ceiling, but this year the issue became a major contention between Republicans and Democrats. The Republican party, with a majority in the House of Representatives, set a condition: it will vote to raise the ceiling if the Democratic government accepts significant cuts in budget spending.

Specifically, the Republicans propose cutting tax credits for the purchase of electric cars and the installation of solar panels, as well as reducing public spending on the repayment of educational loans. For Democrats, if they want to win the 2024 presidential election on their terms, these conditions are unacceptable.

No economic reasons for default prevent raising the public debt ceiling. Still, there are political reasons. The Republican majority in the US House of Representatives want to bring greater accountability to the Biden Administration, which has been making economic decisions without consulting Congress. The Republicans hope to catch the Biden Administration, the Federal Treasury, the State Department, and the Defense Department violating American law.

There is a low chance of default in Washington, but this does not rule it out entirely because a default can be used as a financial weapon capable of unleashing a global economic crisis which will also affect the US’s main competitors. It is much easier and more politically legitimate to default in the context of increasing global military and political tensions. For this reason, it cannot be entirely ruled out that Biden will pursue such a path.

Likewise, the US could use default to influence other countries. Despite the enormous debt figure of $31.4 trillion, the external debt is only $7 trillion. Consequently, some countries —which Washington will want to target economically and geopolitically— may be the victims of this default.

Even so, the main thing for the US is not to let doubts about the sustainability of its economy and debt loom. If a default occurs, it will be more difficult for the US to obtain loans.

For this reason, the probability of default is low because many tools exist to avoid it. Article 14 of the Constitution could be invoked, which states that the US debt cannot be called into question. Also, the Federal Reserve could easily double its balance sheet and buy all foreign debt.

On May 24, the US House of Representatives speaker, Kevin McCarthy, acknowledged that the Republicans and the White House maintain substantial discrepancies on the increase in the public debt limit requested by the Biden administration. The senior official expects to negotiate with the president daily until an agreement is reached.

Even if Republicans and Democrats overcome the impasse, it is recalled that in 2011, the last time the two parties had such fiscal odds, the most severe turmoil happened after a deal was struck, which saw shares fall the most steeply since the 2008 financial crisis. This was also amid worries about the impact of the spending cuts made to get the agreement and the implications of a downgrade in America’s bond rating by one credit rating agency.

Fitch Ratings on May 24 put the US on a negative watch – the first step toward a downgrade in the country’s rating by the major credit ratings firm. The credit agency cited “increased political partisanship” and weak governance compared to other countries that hold its top rating.

“The brinkmanship over the debt ceiling, failure of the US authorities to meaningfully tackle medium-term fiscal challenges that will lead to rising budget deficits and a growing debt burden signal downside risks to US creditworthiness,” the company said.

All this signals that the US is on the economic brink. What is most alarming, though, is that if the US was to default, it might not do so quietly and calmly but instead use an opportunity to bring down the world economy to hurt enemies and partners alike.

Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.

May 26, 2023 Posted by | Economics | | Leave a comment

IRS Opened Investigation Into Journalist Matt Taibbi On Christmas Eve, Following Government Censorship Reporting

By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | May 25, 2023

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) examined independent journalist Matt Taibbi’s 2018 tax returns on December 24, 2022, which was a Saturday and Christmas Eve. It was soon after Taibbi published the first batch of Twitter Files, internal Twitter documents exposing how federal government agencies pressured Twitter to censor content.

The timing raised eyebrows and many believed it to be an act of retaliation for sounding the alarm on government-backed censorship.

The House Judiciary Committee obtained the details after the IRS was criticized for visiting Taibbi’s home in March about the tax filing, on the same day the journalist testified before Congress about the Twitter Files.

In a letter to IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel, chair of the Judiciary Committee Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) said the documents the agency provided “raise more questions than they answer.”

The IRS defended the review by saying it was trying to determine that Taibbi was not the victim of identity fraud. It further claimed that in 2019, it wrote to Taibbi to explain that there was a discrepancy in his 2018 tax return. However, the documents obtained by the committee show that the IRS opened a review of the tax return on Christmas Eve last year.

Additionally, Taibbi did not owe the IRS. In fact, he was owed a refund, according to the documents obtained by the Committee.

“The IRS asserted to the Committee that it sent a letter to Mr. Taibbi on October 24, 2019 — nine days after Mr. Taibbi filed his 2018 tax return — asking Mr. Taibbi to verify his return because it met identity theft criteria and could not be processed until he confirmed,” Jordan wrote.

“The IRS alleged that it sent a second letter to Mr. Taibbi on March 23, 2020.

“However, according to Mr. Taibbi, neither he nor his accountant received either of these letters or any other notification that there was an issue with his 2018 tax return — that is until the IRS conducted a field visit at Mr. Taibbi’s home three years later.

“The IRS also failed to produce these purported letters to the Committee.”

Jordan added: “The IRS’s production shows that the IRS opened its examination of Mr. Taibbi’s 2018 tax return on December 24, 2022. Not only was this date Christmas Eve and a Saturday, but it also happened to be three weeks after he published the first Twitter Files detailing government abuses and the same day that Mr. Taibbi published the ninth segment of the Twitter Files, detailing how federal government agencies ‘from the State Department to the Pentagon to the CIA’ coordinated to censor and coerce speech on various social media platforms.”

In March, Taibbi said that an IRS agent visited his home in New Jersey and left a note telling him to contact the agency.

May 25, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

Eurasian countries need own rating system – Putin

RT | May 25, 2023

The Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) member states should establish a rating agency to provide adequate assessment tools for the region’s growing economic activity, Russian President Vladimir Putin has said.

The proposal was made during a meeting of the Supreme Eurasian Economic Council in Moscow on Thursday.

Currently, the market for international credit ratings is dominated by three US-based agencies: Moody’s Investor Services, Standard and Poor’s (S&P), and Fitch Group. Countries outside the West have accused them of economic and political bias when it comes to assessing their markets.

“It would be useful to establish the Eurasian rating agency,” Putin stated, adding that principled approaches and strict criteria are needed. “It is important to guarantee that the work is absolutely objective. This is its whole value. If this is not the case, then there is no point in it,” the Russian leader stressed.

In addition, the president called for the development of industrial cooperation and an increase in the number of new joint ventures under the common trade mark “Made in the EEU.”

“It is important that such a new brand become recognizable and gain popularity among consumers in all our countries as soon as possible, and the Eurasian quality mark on goods manufactured in the territory of the five countries means that products meet the highest standards,” he stressed.

Additionally, the Russian leader called on participants at the EEU summit to develop common priorities for technological development, and create technological alliances with the involvement of third countries. Such associations could help set up new science-intensive and high-tech industries in the region, according to Putin.

The EEU, which is based on the Customs Union of Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus, was established in 2015. It was later joined by Armenia and Kyrgyzstan. This year, Iran sealed a memorandum on free trade with the bloc. The union is designed to ensure the free movement of goods, services, capital, and workers between member nations.

May 25, 2023 Posted by | Economics | | Leave a comment

False Covid-19 Vaccine Claims by Lancet: A Call for Retraction

Due to the importance of the issue of Covid-19 vaccinations to society, PANDA calls on Lancet to retract a seminal paper that is demonstrably incorrect in its assumptions.

BY THOMAS VERDUYN | PANDA | 22 MAY 2023

To the Editor of The Lancet

On June 23, 2022, the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases published an article by Watson et al. entitled Global Impact of the first year of COVID-19 vaccination: a mathematical modelling study.[1] The authors of this paper “estimated that vaccinations prevented 14.4 million deaths from COVID-19 in 185 countries and territories between Dec 8, 2020 and Dec 8, 2021.” This estimate is so impossibly high that this article should be retracted by The Lancet. The obvious impossibility of their estimate may be demonstrated by any of the following five relatively simple calculations.

First, the WHO reports that as of Feb 17, 2023 there were “756.5 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 including 6.84 million deaths.”[2] This gives an overall case fatality rate (CFR) of 0.9%. At this rate, had the Covid vaccines prevented 14.4 million deaths in the space of one year, then they would also have needed to prevent 1.59 billion confirmed cases in that same year. But this is more than twice the total number of cases in three years, meaning it would require a six-fold increase in the number of confirmed cases since the beginning of the Covid era. Therefore, based on the overall CFR it is impossible that the vaccines saved 14.4 million deaths.

The situation is unchanged if we use data from before the vaccines were rolled out. The WHO reports that on December 28, 2020 there had been 84.9 million cases and 2.0 million deaths. This gives a CFR of 2.4%. To save 14.4 million deaths at this rate would require preventing 611 million cases, meaning it would require a 7 fold increase in infections and deaths in 2021 from Covid.

Second, it is well established that the infection fatality rate (IFR) of Covid is age-dependent. For instance, the BMJ published an article on Oct 26, 2020 which noted that “the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention has said that eight in 10 Covid-19 related deaths reported in the country have been among people aged 65 years or over.”[3] Therefore, for vaccinations to have prevented 14.4 million deaths, they would need to have prevented 11.52 million deaths among those over 65 years of age. According to the UN, the world population is about 7,954 million, of which about 10% are over 65.[4] That means that there are 795 million people in this age group. To have prevented 11.52 million of them from dying would have required the following things to have happened during that one year:

  1. All 795 million people over 65 are vaccinated,
  2. None of these people contracted Covid while waiting to be (fully) vaccinated.
  3. The vaccines are 100% effective (absolute risk reduction) against death,
  4. Without vaccination, all 795 million would have contracted Covid, and
  5. The average IFR of Covid for those over 65 and unvaccinated is at least 1.45%.

In an earlier article in The Lancet it was estimated that the IFR of Covid (before vaccination) for those over 60 is 1.0035%.[5] Thus, all five of these requirements are either incorrect or impossible. Therefore based on age-specific mortality rates it is impossible that the vaccines prevented 14.4 million deaths.

Third, on Mar 10, 2022, The Lancet published an article in which it was estimated that between Jan 1, 2020 and Dec 31, 2021 about “18.2 million people died worldwide because of the COVID-19 pandemic.”[6] If the vaccines had successfully prevented another 14.4 million deaths, then 32.6 million deaths would have occurred without the vaccines. For this many people to have died, it would have required all eight billion people in the world to have been infected with Covid, and a global average IFR of at least 0.41%. But a bulletin published by WHO estimates the IFR to be at most 0.23%, and it “might even be substantially lower than 0.23%.”[7] One must conclude from this that either the Lancet article claiming 18.2 million people died in the first two years of Covid is incorrect, or the Lancet article claiming that 14.4 million deaths were prevented in the first year of the vaccines is incorrect, or both Lancet articles are incorrect. Therefore, based on published average IFRs, it is impossible that both Lancet articles are correct.

Fourth, on Jan 25, 2023, the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) published a report that estimated the number needed to vaccinate (NNV) to prevent a Covid hospitalisation. In Table 4 of Appendix 1, they say that 2,500 people over 70 must be vaccinated to prevent one severe hospitalisation in that age group.[8] This is the smallest NNV figure in the table. If we apply this number to the entire world population, and assume both that the entire population is over 70 years of age and that every last soul was vaccinated, according to the UKHSA data, only 3.2 million severe hospitalisations would be prevented. Therefore, it is clearly impossible for the vaccines to have prevented 14.4 million deaths.

Fifth, according to the published results of Pfizer’s Phase 3 clinical trials, of the 21,728 volunteers who received the placebo shot, 162 contracted Covid. Conversely, of the 21,720 volunteers who received the BNT162b2 injection, eight contracted Covid.[9] This means that the Pfizer shot may have prevented about 154 infections per 21,720 persons receiving the vaccine. According to Our-World-In-Data,  about 4.5 billion people received at least one dose of a Covid vaccine during the first year of the roll-out.[10] Although not all received the Pfizer product, the majority did in many countries, and the Pfizer shot is generally held as the superior option. Thus, using Pfizer’s own results, at most 31.9 million infections might have been prevented in the first year of the vaccines. Using the IFR of 0.23% mentioned earlier, the maximum number of deaths prevented by the vaccines after one year is 73,384. This is almost 200 times less than the 14.4 million estimate put forward in the Lancet article.

It may be worthwhile to point out that Watson et al. inadvertently provide at least some of the reasons why their estimate is so obviously incorrect. In the first place, the authors expressly state that “excess all-cause mortality … [was] used to quantify the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.” However, so many health variables were altered in 2020 and 2021 that it is certain that multiple factors contributed to excess mortality, not just Covid. Thus, they overestimated how lethal Covid was. And secondly, the authors testified that they assumed the vaccines were effective: “Vaccination was assumed to confer protection against SARS-CoV-2 infection and the development of severe disease requiring hospital admission, and to reduce transmission from vaccine breakthrough infections (i.e. we assumed vaccinated individuals who develop infection would be less infectious than unvaccinated individuals).” Since all of these assumptions are false (as Pfizer’s own clinical trial results testify), it is certain they overestimated the effectiveness of the vaccines.[11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16]

In conclusion, by overestimating the mortality caused by Covid, and by overestimating how effective the vaccines were, Watson et al. came up with obviously incorrect conclusions about how many deaths were prevented by the Covid vaccines. Whether one looks at the average CFR, or the age-specific IFR, or the average IFR, or the NNV, or Pfizer’s own data, it is quite impossible that the Covid vaccines prevented 14.4 million deaths in the first year. Since this is a tremendously important issue to society at large, it is requested that the editors at The Lancet retract this obviously flawed paper.

References

  1. Watson, Oliver, et al, “Global impact of the first year of COVID-19 vaccination: a mathematical modelling study,” June 23, 2022 DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/S1473-3099(22)00320-6
  2. Anonymous, “WHO Coronavirus (COVID-19) Dashboard,” World Health Organization, 2023, https://covid19.who.int/ 
  3. Mahase E. “Covid-19: Why are age and obesity risk factors for serious disease?” BMJ 2020; 371 :m4130 doi:10.1136/bmj.m4130
  4. Anonymous, “World Population Dashboard,” United Nations Population Fund, 2023, https://www.unfpa.org/data/world-population-dashboard
  5. Covid-19 Forecasting Team, “Variation in the COVID-19 infection–fatality ratio by age, time, and geography during the pre-vaccine era: a systematic analysis,” February 24, 2022 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(21)02867-1
  6. Wang, Haidong, “Estimating excess mortality due to the COVID-19 pandemic: a systematic analysis of COVID-19-related mortality, 2020–21,” March 10, 2022 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(21)02796-3
  7. Ioannidis, John P A. (‎2021)‎. Infection fatality rate of COVID-19 inferred from seroprevalence data. Bulletin of the World Health Organization, 99 (‎1)‎, 19 – 33F. World Health Organization. http://dx.doi.org/10.2471/BLT.20.265892
  8. Anonymous, “Appendix 1: estimation of number needed to vaccinate to prevent a COVID-19 hospitalisation for primary vaccination, booster vaccination (3rd dose), autumn 2022 and spring 2023 booster for those newly in a risk group,” 2023, UKHSA, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1131409/appendix-1-of-jcvi-statement-on-2023-covid-19-vaccination-programme-8-november-2022.pdf
  9. Polack, Fernando et al, “Safety and Efficacy of the BNT162b2 mRNA Covid-19 Vaccine,” December 31, 2020 N Engl J Med 2020; 383:2603-2615 DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa2034577
  10. Anonymous, “Number of people vaccinated against COVID-19, World, Dec 30, 2021,” Our World in Data, 2023, COVID-19 Data Explorer – Our World in Data
  11. Pritchard et al, “Impact of vaccination on SARS-CoV-2 cases in the community: a population-based study using the UK’s COVID-19 Infection Survey,” medRxiv 2021.04.22.21255913; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.04.22.21255913
  12. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, USA, “Rates of Covid-19 Cases and Deaths by Vaccination Status,” 2022, https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#rates-by-vaccine-status
  13. Yasmin Tayag, “Why has the CDC stopped collecting data on breakthrough Covid cases?,” 2021, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/06/cdc-covid-coronavirus-data-breakthrough-cases
  14. Wang, Lindsey et al, “Increased risk for COVID-19 breakthrough infection in fully vaccinated patients with substance use disorders in the United States between December 2020 and August 2021,” Wiley Online Library, 2021, https://doi.org/10.1002/wps.20921
  15. Marking, Ulrika et al, “High rate of BA.1, BA.1.1 and BA.2 infection in triple vaccinated,” medRxiv 2022.04.02.22273333; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.04.02.22273333
  16. Pfizer confidential data released by FOIA, “Cumulative Analysis of Post-Authorization Adverse Event Reports of PF-07302048 (BNT162B2) Received Through 28-Feb-2021,” 2021, https://www.scribd.com/document/543857539/CUMULATIVE-ANALYSIS-OF-POST-AUTHORIZATION-ADVERSE-EVENT-REPORTS-OF-PF-07302048-BNT162B2-RECEIVED-THROUGH-28-FEB-2021#

May 25, 2023 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

So where did flu go during the ‘pandemic’?

By Professor Martin Neil | TCW Defending Freedom | May 25, 2023

Everyone ‘knows’ that flu disappeared in the winter of 2020-2021. The popular explanation for this is ‘viral interference’, whereby one virus replaces another in circulation, as often happens with different strains of flu. The assumption is that flu was outcompeted by SARS-CoV-2 and hence largely vanished.

However, the stark juxtaposition of its absence and its replacement by the ‘novel and deadly’ SARS-CoV-2 virus remains an open question, given that flu vanished only from Westernised countries yet remained prevalent in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Haiti and Bangladesh in the winter of 2020/21.

Tracking the prevalence of any virus relies not only the quality and extent of testing, but also on the protocols, procedures and the public health bureaucracy that govern when the test should be administered and how the test result is validated, interpreted and reported. Therefore a systematic assessment of the effects of seemingly unrelated policy decisions is needed to determine whether policies were enacted – wittingly or unwittingly – which brought about a particular result as a kind of ‘spooky action at a distance’ that caused flu to appear to vanish from some countries but not others.

By now we are all familiar with the problems associated with SARS-CoV-2 PCR testing. Ultimately clinical judgement regarding Covid-19 was delegated from the physician to a diagnosis based solely on the PCR test. The possibility of false positives and negatives was entirely absent from clinical decision-making, despite the now well understood issues where false positives can be caused by high cycle thresholds, cross reactivity, and the use of single genes to declare positive results. In other words: ‘it was all about the test’.

If we have good reason to mistrust the testing regime for SARS-CoV-2, why should we trust the testing and surveillance regime used for flu?

Quarantines were promoted as measures to reduce spread of SARS-CoV-2 and are also paradoxically claimed to have prevented the spread of flu (even though they did not prevent transmission of SARS-CoV-2). There is the possibility that what they actually did was dramatically reduce the chance of receiving a positive flu test result. If you don’t have a positive flu result, there was little possibility of being diagnosed with flu in the presence of a contradictory explanation – SARS-CoV-2. Given that PCR tests for SARS-CoV-2 were mandated (when not enthusiastically and voluntarily performed by a populace terrified by propaganda) there was therefore a very high chance of being diagnosed with Covid-19 instead of the flu.

Flu tests are recommended to be administered within four days of symptom onset. If they are administered after four days, they would likely produce a false negative result for someone with flu (flu tests are rarely administered routinely anyway). Mandatory Covid-19 tests, run at high cycle thresholds and suffering from cross-reactivity with other pathogens (amongst other operational issues), may well have resulted in false positives for Covid-19, when in fact the pathogen causing symptoms may have been flu. Therefore, people with flu would have been wrongly categorised as having Covid-19, and as a result quarantined for a period sometimes up to 14 days. Hence any flu test given after quarantine ended would inevitably result in a negative for flu even if that was the causative agent, because it was given later than the four days needed for the flu test to be accurate.

Compared with Covid-19, diagnosing flu ‘out of season’ is fraught with tricky clinical and bureaucratic barriers, which also served to depress the likelihood of reporting flu cases. According to CDC (the US Centers for Disease Control) algorithms for diagnosing flu ‘out of season’, in the event of a positive flu test the clinician is asked to pause and consider if this is a false positive. Furthermore, they also need to justify any decision to support the positive result and diagnose flu with an assessment of whether there is evidence of an epidemiological link between this case and others (i.e. link to existing circulation in the community). Likewise, the clinician would also have to consider the signs and symptoms of flu, but given that these will heavily overlap with Covid, which the authorities are proclaiming as an epidemic, it looks as if the cards are stacked against them.

There is an elegant logical circularity at play here that a physician needs to consider. The CDC say you need an outbreak and an epidemiological link to help justify a positive flu test, but surely you only know there is an outbreak, and can determine an epidemiological link, if you and others, in coordination, have already accumulated enough positive test results. It’s a chicken and egg situation. Who determines whether there is an outbreak? None of the CDC documents says.

Therefore, even if a physician was armed with a positive flu test result the chances of this overruling an all-pervasive prior belief in Covid-19 being the cause of all respiratory illnesses, encouraged by powerful incentives directed by a centralised bureaucracy, would have been close to zero.

In combination it is possible that these primary mechanisms, rather than ‘viral competition’ between flu and SARS-CoV-2 or ‘effective lockdowns’, could partially or wholly account for the disappearance of flu. If flu did not disappear then what might then have been the primary cause of those who died with symptoms of a respiratory virus in 2020/21?

This article is based on an original article co-authored with Professor Norman Fenton and Jonathan Engler. The extended version of the article is available from the substack Where are the Numbers?

May 25, 2023 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

Congress To Investigate WHO Plans To Use “Listening Surveillance Systems” To Identify “Misinformation”

Rep. Chris Smith wants an investigation into the World Health Organizations plans to surveil speech and more

By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | May 25, 2023

If you’ve been following our reporting on the issue, you’ll already know that the new World Health Organization (WHO) pandemic prevention initiative, the Preparedness and Resilience for Emerging Threats (PRET), recommends using “social listening surveillance systems” to identify “misinformation.” But as more people are learning about how unelected bodies are being used to suppress speech and potentially override sovereignty, it’s starting to get more pushback.

According to documents from the UN agency, PRET aims to “guide countries in pandemic planning” and work to “incorporate the latest tools and approaches for shared learning and collective action established during the COVID-19 pandemic.”

The PRET document describes misinformation as a “health threat,” and refers to it as an “infodemic.”

“Infodemic is the overabundance of information – accurate or not – which makes it difficult for individuals to adopt behaviors that will protect their health and the health of their families and communities. The infodemic can directly impact health, hamper the implementation of public health countermeasures and undermine trust and social cohesiveness,” the document states.

However, it continues to recommend invasive methods of countering the spread of misinformation.

“Establish and invest in resources for social listening surveillance systems and capacities to identify concerns as well as rumors and misinformation,” the WHO wrote in the PRET document.

“To build trust, it’s important to be responsive to needs and concerns, to relay timely information, and to train leaders and HCWs in risk communications principles and encourage their application.

Communication should be tailored to the community of interest, focusing on and prioritizing vulnerable groups.

“New tools and approaches for social listening have been developed using new technologies such as artificial intelligence to listen to population concerns on social media (such as the Platform EARS developed by WHO).”

The document also recommends testing these tactics during “acute respiratory events including seasonal influenza.”

“Develop and implement communication and behavior change strategies based on infodemic insights, and test them during acute respiratory events including seasonal influenza. This includes implementing infodemic management across sectors, and having a coordinated approach with other actors, including academia, civil society, and international agencies,” it explains.

Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) is holding a Congressional hearing on the WHO’s pandemic accord.

The Secretary of Health and Human Services, Xavier Becerra, recently met with Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the Director-General of the WHO, to discuss the accord and the “critical role” of the US “in global health security.”

In his opening remarks at the World Health Assembly, Ghebreyesus said: “I urge you to deliver the pandemic accord on time, as a generational commitment. The next pandemic will not wait for us. We must be ready.”

The Accord’s preliminary document, zero draft, was first published in February.

In March, the Biden administration’s envoy at the negotiations, Pamela Hamamoto, said that the administration is “committed to the Pandemic Accord, to form a major component of the global health architecture for generations to come.”

“The American people have a right to know exactly what the Biden Administration is negotiating at the WHO, especially as the President remains silent and fails to reassure us that he will protect our Constitution from bureaucrats at this troubled United Nations body,” Rep. Smith said.

Smith is particularly concerned that the Accord could undermine the sovereignty of the US over its healthcare infrastructure.

“The zero-draft WHO pandemic treaty starts off with very harsh criticism of the United States and the international community by calling it a ‘catastrophic failure of the international community in showing solidarity and equity in response to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic,’” Rep. Smith noted. “Article 4 of the treaty pays lip service to sovereignty and then completely overcomes that lip service by saying, ‘provided that activities within their jurisdiction or control do not cause damage to their peoples and other countries,’ which empowers the WHO to step in and prescribe what each country would do.”

During the hearing, Smith plans to ask Secretary of State Antony Blinken about the contents of the accord’s zero draft.

“Under absolutely no circumstances should the Biden Administration surrender American sovereignty to the World Health Organization and allow the voice of the American people and consent of the governed to be subjugated to dictates of an agenda-driven global administrative bureaucracy,” Smith insisted.

May 25, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

Google Renews Its Partnership With The WHO

By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | May 25, 2023

Google has renewed its partnership with the World Health Organization (WHO) to provide what it calls “factual” information about different diseases and conditions. The partnership is positioned as a way to combat what it says is the spread of medical “misinformation” observed during the pandemic.

On Google search, there are already Knowledge Panels at the top of results when users search for certain conditions and diseases.

Soon, the Knowledge Panels will include more conditions and illnesses like depressive disorder, Ebola, COPD, malaria, hypertension, diabetes, Mpox, and others, all using information verified by the WHO.

In a previous partnership, Google awarded more than $320 million to the WHO in Ad Grants to help spread its medical information. In the new partnership, Google awarded the global public health organization an additional $50 million to continue the efforts.

The WHO has been criticized more in frequent years for calling for censorship while itself putting out information during the pandemic that turned out to ultimately be untrue.

Google’s YouTube was criticized for censoring anything that went against the WHO during the pandemic, even if independent commentators ended up being correct.

May 25, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

Jack Teixeira, the Deep State, and ‘Captured Media’

By Thomas Eddlem | The Libertarian Institute | May 25, 2023

Suspected Pentagon documents leaker Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old Dighton, Massachusetts Air National Guardsman, allegedly released classified documents without permission about the sobering U.S. intelligence assessment of Ukraine’s prospects in the Russo-Ukrainian War (i.e., Ukraine can’t win, despite public official pronouncements about their imminent battlefield victories). Those documents he allegedly leaked also revealed several dozen U.S. soldiers were operating in the war zone (the equivalent of two special ops teams), despite official denials, along with CIA operatives already known to be calling missile and artillery strikes in the war.

Just days after his April 13 arrest, local Boston television news stations were broadcasting Teixeira’s high school disciplinary record. He was suspended in high school for “threatening” language, don’t-cha know?

It’s like the old joke about the principal telling a kid that “this is going on your permanent record,” except it’s now reality. If only Teixeira could have cut a deal like Bart Simpson, we wouldn’t have to be having this discussion right now.

What does Teixeira’s high school disciplinary record have to do with his revelations about official lies and secrets about America’s involvement in a war with the world’s other nuclear superpower?

Nothing at all. Zip. Zero. Nada. A whole number between -1 and 1.

There’s no journalistic value in the story that Teixeira was suspended in high school for “threatening” language (he said he was describing a video game at the time). It has no relationship to the story about Ukrainian war lies, and has as much journalistic value as my own high school disciplinary record (or yours). Such dirty laundry in decades past used to be relegated to discussions of celebrity divorces in supermarket tabloids.

But it has a lot of value if your goal is to engage in a general character-assassination using compliant media.

So it brings up a couple of questions: Why is the news media reporting this? And how did they get this information?

The second question is the easiest to answer: The U.S. government’s executive branch careerists gave it directly to them. It was part of the official filing by (now former) U.S. Attorney Rachael S. Rollins asking the federal district court to keep Teixeira in jail until trial.

And one must wonder how that made it into the official filing. How is this relevant to the legal need to deny Teixeira bail and keep him in jail until trial, if the worry was that he wouldn’t return to court for his trial or would publicly reveal more official state secrets?

Again, it doesn’t. At all.

The purpose of including Teixeira’s high school disciplinary record—one that was confidential and which could only be obtained through court warrants or Intelligence Community (IC) surveillance—in the filing was to engage in a deliberate and planned public character-assassination of Teixeira through compliant media organs.

Rollins—or more likely, her handlers in Washington—wanted to destroy this young man publicly by unnecessarily releasing his private sins to the press in an attempt to distract the media from exposing the official lies that Ukraine can win its war against Russia and that U.S. combat troops are not present on the ground. Plus, as a bonus, it serves the double-purpose of poisoning the available pool of unbiased jurors in advance of trial and making a public example to deter future whistle-blowers.

Say what you will about Rollins, the Feds assigned this role to someone who has hands-on experience in this specific task. Rollins resigned Friday, May 19 from her role as U.S. District Attorney for Massachusetts because an Inspector-General Report by the U.S. Department of Justice revealed she’d done the same thing to a candidate for Suffolk County District Attorney (an elected state position).  According to the Inspector General report on Rollins, “Rollins assisted a candidate in a partisan political election and sought to influence the election by, among other things, disclosing non-public, sensitive DOJ information to the press.”

In other words, she conspired to engage in a media smear of a public person using confidential, non-public information.

Sound familiar?

But there’s an important difference between both the Teixeira case (and the Trump-Russia collusion hoax) and the local candidate Rollins was accused of smearing. Disclosing private information to defame a candidate in a local election is a no-no, unless he is an enemy of the Deep State. But if the Deep State wants to character-assassinate someone, whether holder of the highest office in the land or all the way down to some lowly Air National Guard private, then that’s just spiffy.

Rollins suffered no negative consequences from smearing Teixeira. Only when smearing someone who wasn’t an enemy of the Deep State did she face an inquiry.

Now back to the original question about CBS-Boston and other media reporting that Teixeira was suspended during high school. Why are they reporting something that has no news value? Because word was put out to destroy his character in order to distract from his revelations about the Russo-Ukrainian War, and they used compliant media networks to do just that.

Some time after the defection of Soviet spy Anatoliy Golitsyn in 1962, the former KGB officer suggested to his CIA handler that National Review founder and syndicated columnist William F. Buckley help edit the book he was working on, and that it be serialized in Reader’s Digest. It was a logical request. Conservative icon Buckley was known to be a CIA veteran (and had formed National Review around his Langley friends), and with circulation in the millions Reader’s Digest was probably the highest circulation periodical with CIA assets on staff. The late 1960s and early 1970s were the height of the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird, where agents infiltrated and controlled hundreds of media corporations and journalists, respectively, toward the CIA’s stated goals of fighting the Cold War against the Soviet empire. Operation Mockingbird is a campaign still officially denied by the CIA, so its activities can be said to have never been completely shut down, even if they were suspended for a few years.

The reforms of the 1970s imposed some nominal restraints via executive order upon the rogue CIA (along with the FBI) in the reforms of the post-Vietnam era. After the contentious Church and Pike Committee hearings, CIA officials publicly promised they weren’t infiltrating media and poaching journalists as spies and influence-peddlers. But even by the mid-1980s, CIA chiefs were publicly stating they might have to do so again in the future.

The restraints came off the IC (“Intelligence Community”) in the wake of the 9/11 attacks with Congress passing the USA PATRIOT Act. It’s hard to say when the IC began to focus more upon the U.S. domestic media than foreign media, but it’s safe to say it was having a measurable impact upon domestic media by the early 2010s. It was at that point even media traditionally antagonistic to government power had been transformed from watchdogs into Deep State lapdogs.

The “Deep State” can be loosely defined as executive branch careerist bureaucrats and their nominally private sector but government-funded “NGO” contractors who don’t have to face elections or the voters, and who make policy outside of directives from elected officials in the legislative branch and the president.

During the Cold War, the U.S. government used to curate a list of the “Captive Nations” who were under the thrall of the Soviet empire based upon subservience to the Soviet imperial interests. Today, much of the U.S. corporate media is obviously captive to the American empire’s intelligence behemoth in its recent expansion of Operation Mockingbird. I’ve come to call it the “captive media,” in homage to the Cold War-era “Captive Nations” terminology.

The last hurrah of journalistic independence and antagonism to power for The Washington Post was the Edward Snowden affair in 2013. After Snowden’s revelations, the Post never seriously challenged the Deep State again, including its Big Pharma subsidiary, nor have they engaged in any significant actions against the government’s other alliances with giant corporations. The New York Times had been captured by the Deep State as early as 2002 when Judith Miller was acting as stenographer for lies about Iraqi WMDs. The Times and Post both became de facto state assets, along with the five giant U.S. media conglomerates (ABC-Disney, NBC-Comcast, CBS-Viacom, CNN-TimeWarner and Fox-Newscorp), and all today routinely condemn enemies of the national security state and Big Pharma rather than expose the excesses of those powerful special interest groups within the executive branch of government. Likewise, many social media and tech corporations have been revealed by the #TwitterFiles to be adjuncts of what journalist Matt Taibbi accurately labels the “Censorship Industrial Complex.”

One key “tell,” to use a poker term, to identify a likely captive media organ is to observe media character-assassination of a person threatening the primacy of the military-industrial complex. This label of captive media is all the more likely to be accurate when the character assassination doesn’t even address the newsworthy revelations or political positions of that person, and when all the other captive media organs are chiming in chorus with the same condemnation.

The Teixeira case is instructive on the Deep State’s penetration of U.S. media. The modus operandi of the Deep State is to distract from their own corruption by smearing anyone who exposes them or opposes them, and to publicly ruin someone in a key government position who expresses intolerable levels of heterodoxy from the official narrative. The latter was the reason for smearing presidential candidate Donald Trump with the gamut of their arsenal: he was an apex-level racist, a Russian asset, probably an anti-Semite, a threat to democracy, etc.

All this is not to say that Donald Trump was a good president. He wasn’t, and his politics were seriously deficient from a libertarian perspective on many fronts. But he wasn’t enough on “Team Deep State” to avoid the careerists in the executive branch conspiring with the Hillary Clinton campaign to bring him down with multiple lies, as the Durham Report makes eminently clear.

None of the Russia-collusion hoax lies against Trump were true, but truth—like the words coming out of Trump’s own mouth—was immaterial to the issue. One of my favorite podcasts used to be Unfilter, and one of the libertarian hosts revealingly noted back before the podcast went dark, “Trump is not a liar. He’s a bullshitter.” This distinction is highly significant. A liar expects you to believe his lies, but to a bullshitter both the truth and your level of belief in his lies are irrelevant. A bullshitter doesn’t care if you believe him; the only important thing is how you react to his lies. Trump was—and remains—an expert-level bullshitter. He can trigger the corporate media into giving him free press coverage constantly; the CNN Town Hall spectacle with Trump serves as the most recent hilarious example. Everything he says is to get a reaction, not to reveal some truth.

That’s the Deep State’s working model right now. They don’t care if you believe them. All that matters is your emotional reaction: to hate Donald Trump, to hate Jack Teixeira, and to hate anyone else they believe is a threat to their power and their agenda. They’re confident they can dig up dirt on every person with their surveillance panopticon, and can find enough sin on anyone to ruin any heterodox person publicly. They’ve taken the Orwellian “two minutes of hate” and perfected it, treating Nineteen Eighty-Four as a roadmap rather than a warning.

That’s why my working thesis on media corporations is that any company which focuses upon personal attacks rather than the relevant issues to journalism and public policy, especially if the personal attacks coincide with the official Deep State narrative (and they usually do), they’re likely among the captive media.

This also works to some degree for individuals, even if they’re not explicit agents of the Deep State. Anyone who hates a political figure—whether Donald Trump, Ron Paul, or Joe Biden—based upon personal characteristics rather than public positions and routinely resorts to baseless smears of being a racist, an anti-Semite or a foreign agent is probably compromised (or at the very least, a toxic person) whose opinions are worth ignoring entirely.

It should go without saying Americans can’t trust the captive media, of whom it could be accurately said that truth and factual accuracy are irrelevant. The long-running Russia-collusion hoax is but the latest example exposed. There’s a long list of official lies: cloth masks stop transmission of COVID-19, the vaccine stops transmission of the virus, gas attacks in Syria, Ghaddafi’s imminent genocide in Libya, all the way back to Judith Miller. And those are just a handful of hundreds of examples.

The good news is that The New York Times and Washington Post‘s circulation reach new lows every month, as do the ratings of CNN, Fox and MSNBC. CNN’s ratings hilariously fell below NewsMax last week.

Lies don’t sell well.

So look for the Deep State to infiltrate ever-more media outlets in the future as their lies and captive media platforms lose audience and, as a result, the impact of the captive legacy media wanes. Those of us opposing the surveillance panopticon and the perpetual warfare state will need to use both the patterns described above and leaked truths to reveal the captive media, as they are taken over.

The Jack Teixeira and #TwitterFiles revelations are but the latest in a line of exposures of official lies beginning with Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and Reality Winner. There will be others.

It’s also encouraging to hear the U.S. House of Representatives is holding at least some tentative hearings on the weaponization of the executive branch in the election cycle. Liberty-loving individuals need to encourage more of those hearings, and a much deeper-dive into revealing their secrets, followed by legislation that would (if not outright abolish) at least re-impose some limits upon the “Intelligence Community.”

Thomas R. Eddlem is a freelance writer published in more than twenty periodicals, holds a master degree in economics from Boston College and is communications director for the Libertarian Party of Massachusetts.

May 25, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Black Lives Matter hitting hard times

RT | May 24, 2023

Black Lives Matter is spending money at double the rate it takes in revenue as donations to the activist group plummet and management costs rise, causing its asset base to shrink.

Donations to BLM’s Global Network Foundation tumbled to less than $9.3 million in its latest fiscal year, ended on June 30, down a staggering 88% from the preceding 12 months, according to state tax filings. Revenue was even lower, at $8.5 million, amid investment losses. The group’s spending totaled over $17 million, or twice as much as it took in.

The documents were first obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, showing that the financial bonanza that BLM reaped during its 2020 protests against police brutality is now dwindling. Net assets dropped 28% in the latest fiscal year, declining to $30.2 million.

Part of the problem is that even as the foundation throttles back its activities – expenses for “program services” plunged 65% from a year earlier, to $11.5 million – it’s spending even more on management. Those costs rose 36% last year to $5.1 million.

The group’s leaders have also been accused of siphoning off donations for their personal gain. A sister organization, Black Lives Matter Grassroots, claimed in a lawsuit that foundation leader Shalomyah Bowers diverted $10 million for his own use. His predecessor, co-founder Patrisse Cullors, resigned in May 2021 after being accused of living a lavish lifestyle on BLM’s wealth. She reportedly purchased four homes for a combined $3.2 million while heading the group.

The Cullors family continues to benefit financially from BLM. The documents showed that her brother, graffiti artist Paul Cullors, received $140,000 in compensation last year in his role as “head of security.” In addition, his security firm was paid more than $750,000. Filings for the previous fiscal year showed that the foundation paid a company owned by Damon Turner, father of Patrisse Cullors’ child, nearly $970,000 for “live production, design and media” services.

An auditors’ review of the group’s finances reportedly found that Bowers’ company had been paid nearly $1.7 million over the preceding two years for “management and consulting services.”

Cicley Gay was brought in as the BLM foundation’s chairwoman in April 2022, at least partly to help sort out the group’s finances. She reportedly had difficulties managing her own finances, filing for bankruptcy protection from creditors three times between 2005 and 2016.

Cullors and two other activists launched the BLM movement in 2013, following the acquittal of George Zimmerman, who killed black teenager Trayvon Martin during a February 2012 scuffle while serving as a neighborhood watchman in Sanford, Florida.

BLM raked in donations from Microsoft, Amazon and other corporations in the summer of 2020, after the killing of black Minneapolis resident George Floyd by police sparked a wave of protests around the country and overseas. Cullors referred to the huge cash influx as “white guilt money.” Many of the demonstrations escalated into riots, leaving many Americans injured and dead and causing billions of dollars in property damage.

May 25, 2023 Posted by | Corruption, Deception | , | Leave a comment

LinkedIn Locks Out Presidential Candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, Censors Him For “Misinformation”

By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | May 25, 2023

In yet another development that raises serious questions about the suppression of election candidates during a presidential campaign, presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has announced he has been locked out of his LinkedIn account for his comments on climate change and President Biden’s relationship with China.

“I was a bit surprised to get an email noting that my LinkedIn account had been shut down,” Ramaswamy said in a video. “I wondered why, ‘cause actually a number of friends texted me saying they follow me on LinkedIn. That’s how they keep up. They weren’t able to find me anymore. And so when I had my team get in touch with LinkedIn, here’s the response that we got.”

Ramaswamy, went on to explain the excuse that LinkedIn gave: “Your account was restricted for sharing content that contains misleading or inaccurate information,” Ramaswamy said. “They said that it was one video, a video where in the video I said the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] is playing the Biden administration like a Chinese mandolin. China has weaponized the woke pandemic to stay one step ahead and it’s working.”

Ramaswamy said his second offense was saying, “if the climate religion was really about climate change, then they’d be worried about shifting oil production from the US to places like Russia and China. Yet the climate, religion and its apostles and the ESG movement have a very different objective.”

And Ramaswamy’s third offense on the Microsoft-owned platform was saying that, “the climate agenda is a lie. Fossil fuels are a requirement for human prosperity.”

Ramaswamy, a notable biotech entrepreneur turned political candidate, is no stranger to controversy and was little fazed by the censorship for himself. But he talked about how he’s more prominent and other people likely won’t be so lucky when they get censored by tech giants.

“Now, I gotta kick out of this, I’m gonna be honest. I’m sure that we’re gonna get this escalated because I’m a US presidential candidate,” he said. “We have the connectivity to the people that we need to talk to to be able to get my LinkedIn account back. But I’m not bringing this about because it’s about me. I’m bringing this up because if they can do it to me, they can really do it to anybody for making statements about the climate change movement and agenda in this country that are grounded in fact, and then express an opinion based on those facts to make a statement about Biden’s relationships with China and criticize his China policies as a result.”

Ramaswamy’s outspoken views on issues such as big tech, and identity politics have drawn both criticism and support. However, it’s his commentary on climate change that has landed him in hot water with LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional networking platform.

Microsoft is currently facing scrutiny for its lack of transparency with its partnership with the Global Disinformation Index, a controversial censorship network with state ties. Microsoft is dragging its feet regarding requests for transparency about how it operates its censorship practices and what ties it has to state-backed groups when doing so.

May 25, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | | Leave a comment

EXPOSED: Biggest FBI Spy Scandal of the Year

By Jim Bovard | The Libertarian Institute | May 25, 2023

A Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court opinion released last week revealed that the FBI violated the constitutional rights of 278,000 Americans in 2020 and 2021 with warrantless searches of their email and other electronic data. For each American that the FISA court permitted the FBI to target, the FBI illicitly surveiled almost a thousand additional Americans. This is only the latest federal surveillance scandal stretching back to the years after 9/11.

The FISA law was enacted in 1978 to curb the rampant illegal political spying exposed during the Richard Nixon administration. After the 9/11 attacks, the George W. Bush administration decided that the president was entitled to order the National Security Agency to vacuum up Americans’ emails and other data without a warrant. After The New York Times exposed the surveillance scheme in late 2005, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales announced that “the president has the inherent authority under the Constitution, as commander in chief, to engage in this kind of activity.” Gonzales apparently forgot the congressional impeachment proceedings against President Nixon. The Bush White House also asserted that the September 2001 “Authorization to Use Military Force” resolution Congress passed entitled Bush to tap Americans’ phones. But if the authorization actually allowed the president to do whatever he thinks necessary on the homefront, Americans had been living under martial law.

Federal judges disagreed with Bush’s prerogative to obliterate American privacy. The result was a 2008 FISA reform that authorized the feds to continue commandeering vast amounts of data. But under Section 702 of that law, the FBI was permitted to conduct warrantless searches of that stash for Americans’ data only to seek foreign intelligence information or evidence of crime.   

President Barack Obama responded to the new law by sharply expanding the NSA’s seizures of Americans’ personal data. The Washington Post characterized Obama’s first term as “a period of exponential growth for the NSA’s domestic collection.” Obama’s Justice Department thwarted court challenges to the surveillance, thereby permitting the White House to claim that it was respecting Americans’ rights and privacy.

Edward Snowden blew the roof off the surveillance state with his disclosures starting in June 2013. But there was no reason to presume that federal crime sprees were not occurring before Snowden blew the whistle. Professor David Rothkopf explained in 2013 how FISA’s Section 702 worked:

“What if government officials came to your home and said that they would collect all of your papers and hold onto them for safe-keeping, just in case they needed them in the future. But don’t worry… they wouldn’t open the boxes until they had a secret government court order… sometime, unbeknownst to you.”

The 2008 FISA amendments and Section 702 snared vast numbers of hapless Americans in federal surveillance nets. The Washington Post analyzed a cache of 160,000 secret email conversations/threads (provided by Snowden) that the NSA intercepted and found that nine out of ten account holders were not the “intended surveillance targets but were caught in a net the agency had cast for somebody else.” Almost half of the individuals whose personal data was inadvertently commandeered were U.S. citizens. The files “tell stories of love and heartbreak, illicit sexual liaisons, mental-health crises, political and religious conversions, financial anxieties and  disappointed hopes,” the Post noted. If an American citizen wrote an email in a foreign language, NSA analysts assumed they were foreigners who could be surveilled without a warrant.

Snowden also leaked secret court rulings that proved that the FISA Court had “created a secret body of law giving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans,” The New York Times reported in 2013. FISA judges rubberstamped massive seizures of Americans’ personal data that flagrantly contradicted Supreme Court rulings on the Fourth Amendment. The Times noted that the FISA court had “become almost a parallel Supreme Court, serving as the ultimate arbiter on surveillance issues,” and almost always giving federal agencies all the power they sought.

Unfortunately, Snowden’s courageous disclosures did not stop the outrages. The heavily-redacted 2022 opinion finally released Friday revealed that the FBI wrongly searched almost 300,000 Americans’ online lives. And this was on top of the roughly 3.4 million warrantless searches of Americans in 2021 via Section 702 that the FBI conducted that the Justice Department claimed was justified.

The latest disclosure from the FISA court signals that the FBI presumed that any American suspected of supporting the January 6, 2021 protests forfeited his constitutional rights. Roughly 2,000 pro-Trump protestors (including an unknown number of undercover agents and informants) entered the Capitol that day. But an FBI analyst exploited FISA to unjustifiably conduct searches on 23,132 Americans citizens “to find evidence of possible foreign influence, although the analyst conducting the queries had no indications of foreign influence,” according to FISA Chief Judge Rudolph Contreras. The court ruling did not disclose the standards (if any) the FBI used for its warrantless January 6 searches. Did Twitter retweets suffice?

The FBI exploited FISA to target 19,000 donors to the campaign of a candidate who challenged an incumbent member of Congress. An FBI analyst justified the warrantless searches by claiming “the campaign was a target of foreign influence,” but even the Justice Department concluded that almost all of those searches violated FISA rules. Apparently, merely reciting the phrase “foreign influence” suffices to nullify Americans’ rights nowadays. (In March, Rep. Darin LaHood (R-IL) revealed that he had been wrongly targeted by the FBI in numerous FISA 702 searches.)

The FBI conducted secret searches of the emails and other data of 133 people arrested during the protests after the killing of George Floyd in 2020.

The FBI conducted 656 warrantless searches to see if they could find any derogatory information on people they planned to use as informants. The FBI also routinely conducted warrantless searches on “individuals listed in police homicide reports, including victims, next-of-kin, witnesses, and suspects.” Even the Justice Department complained those searches were improper.

Judge Contreras lamented: “Compliance problems with the querying of Section 702 information have proven to be persistent and widespread.” The FBI responded to the damning report with piffle:

“We are committed to continuing this work and providing greater transparency into the process to earn the trust of the American people and advance our mission of safeguarding both the nation’s security, and privacy and civil liberties, at the same time.”

In 2002, the FISA court revealed that FBI agents had false or misleading claims in 75 cases and a top FBI counterterrorism official was prohibited from ever appearing before the court again.

In 2005, FISA chief judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly proposed requiring FBI agents to swear to the accuracy of the information they presented; that never happened because it could have “slowed such investigations drastically,” the Washington Post reported. So FBI agents continued to have a license to exploit FISA secrecy to lie to the judges.

In 2017, a FISA court decision included a 10-page litany of FBI violations, which “ranged from illegally sharing raw intelligence with unauthorized third parties to accessing intercepted attorney-client privileged communications without proper oversight.”

In 2018, a FISA ruling condemned the FBI for ignoring limits on “unreasonable searches.” As The New York Times noted, “F.B.I. agents had carried out several large-scale searches for Americans who generically fit into broad categories… so long as agents had a reason to believe that someone within that category might have relevant information. But [under FISA] there has to be an individualized reason to search for any particular American’s information.” The FBI treated the FISA repository like the British agents treated general warrants in the 1760s, helping spark the American Revolution.

In April 2021, the FISA court reported that the FBI conducted warrantless searches of the data trove for “domestic terrorism,” “public corruption and bribery,” “health care fraud,” and other targets—including people who notified the FBI of crimes and even repairmen entering FBI offices. If you sought to report a crime to the FBI, an FBI agent may have illegally surveilled your email. Even if you merely volunteered for the FBI “Citizens Academy” program, the FBI may have illegally tracked all your online activity. As I tweeted after that report came out, “The FISA court has gone from pretending FBI violations don’t occur to pretending violations don’t matter. Only task left is to cease pretending Americans have any constitutional right to privacy.” FISA court Chief Judge James Boasberg lamented “apparent widespread violations” of the legal restrictions for FBI searches but shrugged them off and permitted the scouring of Americans’ personal data to continue.

The FISA court treats the FBI like liberal judges treat serial shoplifters. Going back more than 20 years, FISA court rulings have complained of FBI agents lying to the court and abusing the law. As long as the FBI periodically promises to repent, the FISA court entitles them to continue decimating the Fourth Amendment.

Federal intelligence agencies refuse to even estimate how many Americans’ private data has been rounded up in government databases. There is no reason to presume that the feds have disclosed all their FISA wrongdoing. Prior to Edward Snowden’s leaks, the feds probably admitted less than 1% of federal surveillance abuses.

Section 702 will expire this year unless Congress reauthorizes that provision of the law. But the FBI’s perpetual crime wave has created a hornet’s nest on Capitol Hill. Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) asked: “How much longer must we watch the FBI brazenly spy on Americans before we strip it of its unchecked authority?” Rep. Mike Garcia (R-CA) declared, “We need a pound of flesh. We need to know someone has been fired.” Even Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, opposes reauthorizing Section 702 without fundamental reforms.

But will Congress finally stop the federal spying spree on Americans? As I tweeted on December 27, 2012, “FISA Renewal: Only a fool would expect members of Congress to give a damn about his rights and liberties.” Without radical reform, FISA should be renamed the “Trust Me, Chumps!” Surveillance Act.

Jim Bovard is the Junior Fellow for The Libertarian Institute. He is the author of Public Policy Hooligan (2012), Attention Deficit Democracy (2006), Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty (1994), and 7 other books.

May 25, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , , | Leave a comment

« Previous Entries     Next Entries »