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.
The Prince And The Spy
By Whitney Webb | The Last American Vagabond | May 12, 2023
A TLAV investigation has found that Erik Prince, the man behind the Blackwater mercenary group, recently teamed up with an Israeli spy, creating a front company with her to help Israeli defense technology providers exploit loopholes and sell their products to the American military.
For years, Erik Prince – the founder of mercenary firm Blackwater (now Academi) – has been a major source of controversy. Ever since he left Blackwater over a decade ago, Prince has appeared in the news for pushing to privatize several wars, his ties to former President Donald Trump’s presidential campaigns, his violation of international arms embargoes and his unusually close ties with Project Veritas, among other notable events and connections.
However, some of Prince’s antics in recent years have not yet made it into the news – namely his decision to team up with an Israeli spy to build a very secretive company that has – until now – evaded scrutiny. That company, Comframe Solutions, appears to operate as an intelligence front and explicitly targets parts of the American military involved in highly sensitive combat operations. As this investigation will show, Prince’s partner in Comframe – Lital Leshem – has been tied to a series of apparent, and admitted, Israeli intelligence front companies, several of which have a focus on technology. Yet Prince and his close associate Chris Burgess – Comframe’s supposed president – have done everything they can to hide their association with the incredibly secretive company. Why might that be and what exactly is Comframe up to?
From “Army Brat” to Cyber Spy
Lital Leshem was raised as an “army brat” in Reut, Israel and Pennsylvania, USA. She later enlisted in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) as she was “truly devoted to safeguarding the State of Israel.” She quickly rose in the ranks, becoming Operations Officer in the IDF of the besieged Gaza Strip and later becoming a Major, a position she continues to hold to this date through her “reserve duty activities.” According to her LinkedIn, she served in Israeli military intelligence from 2005 to 2011 and, more specifically, served in its signals intelligence unit – Unit 8200. She later attended IDC Herzliya, an Israeli university deeply tied to its military and intelligence apparatus. There, she met Amir Elichai and the two would co-create the company Reporty, which later became Carbyne911 – today known only as Carbyne.
Carbyne was originally founded as Reporty in 2014 by Leshem, Elichai and Alex Dizengof. Leshem and Elichai are Unit 8200 veterans, while Dizengof previously worked for Israel’s Prime Minister’s Office. Before it was revealed that Jeffrey Epstein had poured at least 1 million dollars into the company at the behest of his close associate Ehud Barak, Cabryne’s board of directors – which Barak chaired – included the former commander of Unit 8200, Pinchas Buchris, as well as Epstein associate turned venture capitalist Nicole Junkermann. In the wake of the Epstein scandal, Buchris, Barak and Junkerman, among others, were removed from the board and were largely replaced with veterans and former heads of American intelligence and law enforcement agencies. Leshem had left the company in 2017, but has continued to own shares in the company.
Carbyne is a Next-Generation 9-11 (NG911) platform and the explicit goal of NG911 is for all 911 systems nationwide to become interconnected. It is currently active throughout the United States, its main target market. Its software has been criticized due to “serious privacy concerns” about the amount of information it harvests from smartphones that call a 911 call center running Carbyne’s software. For instance, Carbyne’s smartphone app extracts the following information from the phones on which it is installed:
“Device location, video live-streamed from the smartphone to the call center, text messages in a two-way chat window, any data from a user’s phone if they have the Carbyne app and ESInet, and any information that comes over a data link, which Carbyne opens in case the caller’s voice link drops out.”
The potential for Carbyne as a tool for mass surveillance has been extensively reported by Narativ, MintPress News and other outlets. In addition, Carbyne stores all data on past calls and events in order to “enabl[e] decision makers to accurately analyze the past and present behavior of their callers, react accordingly, and in time predict future patterns.” As a result, Carbyne – along with other Israeli intelligence-connected companies seeking to dominate the American “public safety” market – has the potential to facilitate controversial “predictive policing”, i.e. pre-crime, policies.
In addition to Carbyne, Leshem also worked for Black Cube, which has since been removed from her LinkedIn. There, she had been the firms Director of Marketing. Black Cube was specifically outed as an Israeli intelligence front organization in a 2019 article published by Calcalist Tech. That same article also contains the stunning revelation that many Israeli companies, including Black Cube, have been founded as fronts for intelligence operations since 2012. It states that “since 2012, cyber-related and intelligence projects that were previously carried out in-house in the Israeli military and Israel’s main intelligence arms are transferred to companies that in some cases were built for this exact purpose.” The article also adds that:
“In some cases, managers of development projects in the Israeli military and intelligence arms were encouraged to form their own companies which then took over the [military and/or intelligence] project.”
With Leshem having worked for one company already known to be a product of this deliberate policy, it is worth scrutinizing Carbyne as being one such front, especially considering the common tie of Ehud Barak to both companies. In addition, Leshem has also worked for another company tied to Barak that has been described as worse than the NSO Group, which produced the notorious Pegasus software. Called Toka, its top executives – like Carbyne – are largely veterans of Israeli’s Unit 8200, where Leshem also served, or former commanders of Israeli military cyber operations.
Toka, which Ehud Barak founded in 2018, is very, very likely to be one of the front organizations produced as a result of the aforementioned 2012 Israeli intelligence policy. The company is directly partnered with Israel’s Ministry of Defense and other Israeli intelligence and security agencies since its founding and the company only sells its products to countries that are considered allies of Israel. It purports to be able to hack, not just smartphones, but any device with internet connectivity, such as doorbell cameras and other “smart” devices. As will be noted later in this article, Leshem herself has noted that Toka has a relationship with the CIA.
After being involved with a series of Israeli intelligence fronts and her enduring ties to Israeli military intelligence through her “reserve duty activities”, Leshem was courted by a surprising figure – Erik Prince, war profiteer and founder of the controversial mercenary outfit Blackwater.
Partnering with Prince
Leshem says that she met Prince after she “randomly stumbled across his path and joined his team.” There, per her website, she “managed his business portfolio and his global investments.” Her LinkedIn lists her as serving as the executive director of global business development of Frontier Resource Group (FRG) from 2018 to 2021. Frontier Resource Group was founded by Prince and is “an Africa-dedicated investment firm partnered with major Chinese enterprises, including at least one state-owned resource giant that is keen to pour money into the resource-rich continent,” according to the South China Post. It not only operates in Africa, but also other countries due to its contracts to support China’s One Belt One Road initiative, which were signed in 2019.
FRG is a subsidiary of Frontier Services Group (FSG), which Prince also founded. In 2013, he sold a majority share of FSG to the China International Trust Investment Corporation (CITIC), a state-owned Chinese investment company that is among the largest of the country’s state-run conglomerates. CITIC, during the mid-1990s, was chaired by Wang Jun, who doubled as China’s chief arms dealer and was a key figure in the “Chinagate” scandal of the Clinton White House. As detailed in One Nation Under Blackmail, that scandal involved the illicit transfer of American military technology to China and the illicit transfer of Chinese weapons, whose sale in the US was banned during this time, into the United States. Mark Middleton, a White House aide, and Jeffrey Epstein are some of the names apparently involved with those activities. “Chinagate” appears to have been a joint venture between factions of the CIA and Israeli intelligence and has never been properly investigated by federal authorities. It seems that Prince, who was (and may still be) a CIA asset, and Leshem have engaged in similar activities via FRG/FSG. For example, TRTWorld reported that Leshem is “speculated” to have transferred Carbyne’s technology to China via her role at FRG and her connection to Prince. China launched an app that was nearly analogous to Carbyne, but more explicitly focused on surveillance, at the same time that Carbyne launched its first 911 call system in the United States.
In addition, TRTWorld notes, the company DarkMatter, a UAE surveillance and intelligence group that employs former US intelligence operatives, attracted the attention of Chinese officials at a smart cities conference in 2015. DarkMatter, which was launched to modernize Emirati intelligence and military operations, signed a Global Strategic Memorandum of Understanding with Huawei, the Chinese tech giant. The middle man in this sale was none other than Erik Prince. Leshem and another Prince associate, Dorian Barak, also have business ties to the UAE via their prominent roles at the UAE-Israel Business Council.
As TRTWorld concluded:
“With similar technology being used, and the same mercenary middle-man between Carbyne and China who brought together UAE’s DarkMatter surveillance technology with China, indications point to a likely transfer of surveillance technology from Epstein’s Israeli company [Carbyne] to China.”
Comframe – Secretive Company or Intelligence Front?
Prince’s and Leshem’s joint activities after Leshem left FRG suggest that this pattern of behavior has not only continued, but deepened. According to Leshem’s website, a year and a half after she started working for Prince, she and Prince “joined forces to found Comframe, a company that takes the best of Israeli defense technology providers, and helps them penetrate the American market by bridging prevalent gaps.” Leshem also says Comframe was assisted by her “premier integrator and business development platform for deploying advanced military, special operations, public safety and HLS solutions in the United States, and a wide network of partnership, both government and civilian.”
In discussing Comframe elsewhere, Leshem writes that the company she co-founded with Prince “is led and staffed by Special Operations and defense procurement veterans with billions of dollars of successful sales to USG and foreign government to their names.” She says that Comframe has a “track-record of success implementing complex procurement and integrations programs from intelligence gathering & analysis, to contracting, program sales and personnel deployment, is exceptional.”
What Leshem says of the company clashes with Comframe’s threadbare public presence. For instance, its website, which is notably short on content, lists the following companies as partners – TomCar, BlueBird Aero Systems, General Robotics, SafeStrike, Ops-Core (now part of Gentex Corp) and Axon. On its partners page, Comframe says that this is “a small sampling of our current partners we have chosen to work with.” Most of these companies were created by Israeli military/military intelligence veterans.
Aside from the partners page, there is little other information available on the Comframe site. It describes its mission as “to source cutting-edge, innovative technologies that safely and securely solve articulated U.S. government problems” and touts its “get it done” commitment and how its employees “wake up every morning wanting to find solutions that keep the U.S. government safe and more lethal.” It lists the company’s president as Chris Burgess. Burgess, a former NAVY Seal who trained with Erik Prince, does not list Comframe on his LinkedIn or in any other site discussing his work history. He is currently the CEO of military contractor Regulus Global. Burgess previously ran a mercenary firm he founded, Greystone Ltd., that was previously affiliated with Prince’s Blackwater and was originally intended to be Blackwater’s “sister company.”
Both Blackwater (now Academi) and Greystone have been accused of sending mercenaries to fight in the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Both companies deny this. The accusations came after Prince had planned to create a “private army” in Ukraine, something he has attempted to do (and sometimes succeeded) in various conflict zones, such as Afghanistan. Prince has also attempted to offer “lethal services” to Russia’s Wagner group.
Aside from Burgess’ apparent unwillingness to associate himself publicly with Comframe, there is also the fact that the only employee publicly associated with Comframe at all is Lital Leshem. Indeed, even Erik Prince has declined to publicly affiliate himself with the company. Another oddity is the fact that Comframe’s website has an “Industry News” page that contains several blog posts with titles discussing oil markets and geopolitics. However, the content of the posts themselves are all filler generated by WordPress. Was Comframe also intended to work in commodities markets? The odd and sparse nature of the website seems to clash with Leshem’s characterization of the company.
So, what is Comframe exactly and what is it intended to do? Why are the only people associated with the company two professional mercenaries, one of whom is a known CIA asset, and an Israeli spy? A 2020 article published in the Jerusalem Post seems to highlight Comframe’s mysterious inner workings and likely purpose.
That article notes that Comframe acted as a middleman in forging an agreement to create an assembly line in El Paso, TX in order for the Israeli company Tomcar to “offer its latest models to the US Armed Forces.” The agreement was made between Tomcar and Prince Manufacturing, a major contract manufacturing company that works with Ford, General Motors and Tesla, among others. Prince Manufacturing was notably founded and run for many years by Edgar Prince, Erik Prince’s father. Notably Tomcar, its founder – Yoram Zarchi – and his son (works for Tomcar) – Ram Zarchi – appear in the Panama Papers as does the former holding company that owned Tomcar from 2004 to 2011.
The article notes that Comframe “is focused on recognizing needs in the US defense industry and matching them to possible solutions, usually involving innovative Israeli companies.” However, the article notes, “to meet the demands of American security needs, one must have an American entity.” Leshem is then quoted as saying, “Ram [Zarchi of Tomcar] had been living in Phoenix for 15 years, but he can’t do that [sell to the American military because he is not a US citizen]. We can.”
In other words, per Leshem, Comframe utilizes Prince and presumably Burgess to sell Israeli defense technology and products to the American military that would otherwise not happen due to national security concerns around buying foreign-made products for sensitive defense and military operations. Leshem goes on to state Comframe sells “to the US Special Forces and other branches of the service [i.e. US military],” noting that Comframe is specifically targeting Special Ops. She also suggests that, aside from the US military, another intended market for the company is NATO – she told the Jerusalem Post that the US “controls 70% of NATO’s defense industry.”
The article ends by stating that, for Comframe, when sales are related to national security, one still has to have “boots on the ground,” suggesting why Comframe has such a minimal web and online presence. This is similar to another company Leshem has been working for while at Comframe, Ehud Barak’s Toka. Notably, at the end of this very article, Leshem uses Toka as an example regarding Comframe’s “boots on the ground” sales approach. She states:
“Hi-tech companies like Toka with clients like the CIA, can’t discuss what they do using Zoom.”
A New Pattern for Prince
Comframe is a very suspect company – it is highly, highly secretive, targets sensitive American military agencies with foreign technology, and its known employees are apparent spooks and intelligence-linked mercenaries. Not only that, but the history of Israeli espionage in the United States – from Jonathan Pollard and PROMIS to Comverse and beyond – shows a concerted effort to target the American military and security agencies, often with bugged or “backdoored” technology.
In addition to the above, Prince has also recently engaged in efforts to market a very suspect smartphone to MAGA Republicans as being “unhackable” and “unsurveillable.” That phone was “designed in Israel” and the company that produces it is called Unplugged. According to reports, Unplugged’s “day-to-day technology operations are run by Eran Karpen, a former employee of CommuniTake, the Israeli start-up that gave rise to the now infamous hacker-for-hire firm NSO Group.” Karpen, like Leshem, is also a veteran of Unit 8200.
Notably, DarkMatter, the UAE private intelligence company that was mentioned earlier due to its association with Prince, once marketed an “ultrasecure” phone called Katim, only to be later outed for hacking dissidents and journalists. In addition, Prince debuted Unplugged’s phone on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” program. Both Prince and Bannon have controversial relationships with exiled Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui, also known as Miles Guo.
That Prince would help market this phone specifically to MAGA Republicans is disturbing given that his associate Leshem and other Israeli intelligence veterans and operatives have played a major role in developing the infrastructure for the US’ “War on Domestic Terror,” which is mainly targeted at the political right and has already utilized mass surveillance through smartphones and other technologies to justify arrests, including “pre-crime” arrests. Given the content of this investigation, Prince’s ties to foreign governments and intelligence agencies should be heavily scrutinized, especially Comframe – whose secretive activities may be drastically undermining American national security.
MISSOURI VS BIDEN: “ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT LAWSUITS OF OUR LIFETIME”
The Highwire with Del Bigtree
HighWire Editorial Contributor and Editor-in-Chief at UncoverDC, Tracy Beanz, describes Missouri vs. Biden as, “one of the most important lawsuits of our lifetime.” Attorney General of Missouri, Andrew Bailey, and Attorney General of Louisiana, Jeff Landry, take on the Office of the President and other federal offices for colluding with social media to suppress speech countering their narrative regarding COVID-19.
Crimea referendum result was ‘legitimate’ – Le Pen
RT | May 25, 2023
The 2014 referendum accurately reflected the will of the people living in Crimea to join Russia, Marine Le Pen said on Wednesday, addressing an inquiry before the French National Assembly.
“I fully support the referendum,” Le Pen told the lawmakers. “I think that Crimea’s residents expressed their will freely by a vote, in order to reunite with Russia. I think that it was absolutely legitimate.”
Le Pen explained that her position on the peninsula has consistently remained that it was Russian long before it was “given away” to Ukraine “at the whim of a dictator” for sixty years, in reference to the decision of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to redraw internal borders in 1954. The Russian Empire had acquired Crimea from the Ottomans in the 18th century.
She also pointed out that there were no refugees from Crimea after the referendum, that Crimean residents themselves freely told her their preference when she visited, and that the West never offered to organize another plebiscite to verify the result of the one they challenged.
Crimeans organized a referendum in March 2014, shortly after a US-backed coup installed a government of Ukrainian nationalist in Kiev. The result showed overwhelming support for rejoining Russia, which Moscow accepted. Meanwhile, the Kiev government violently crushed dissent in Odessa and Kharkov regions, and sent troops against Donetsk and Lugansk.
The National Rally leader appeared before a parliamentary commission investigating “Russian influence” in France, to address accusations that her party took two loans from a Russian bank. Le Pen explained that she turned to Russian banks because no French or EU banks wanted to work with her party, and that the purely business arrangement did not make her an agent of Moscow.
President Emmanuel Macron brought up the loans to attack Le Pen during the 2022 re-election campaign. She lost the runoff by a 17-point margin, but last month’s polls showed her 10 points ahead of Macron in a hypothetical rematch.
Le Pen’s insistence that the Crimean return to Russia was not an “illegal annexation,” expressed in January 2017 to France’s BFMTV and in February to CNN, earned her a ban on entering Ukraine by the government in Kiev.
The current government has vowed to ban the Russian language and expel anyone suspected of “collaboration” with Moscow once it seizes Crimea, which Kiev has announced as one of its war aims.
“As soon as we enter, we must eradicate everything Russian in Crimea,” Mikhail Podoliak, a senior aide to Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, told the US government-controlled RFE/RL last month.
First COVID Vaccine Injury Lawsuit in U.S. Targets U.S. Government, Social Media Giants
By Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D. | The Defender | May 23, 2023
Five people injured by COVID-19 vaccines, along with a father whose 16-year-old son died from vaccine-induced cardiac arrest, are suing the Biden administration and top U.S. public health officials.
In a lawsuit filed Monday, the plaintiffs — including Brianne Dressen who suffered severe nerve damage after taking the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine — allege the U.S. government colluded with social media companies to censor them when they posted stories about their personal vaccine injury experiences.
Defendants include President Biden and top-ranking White House officials, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
This is the first lawsuit brought by U.S. citizens injured by the COVID-19 vaccines.
Dressen — a preschool teacher from Saratoga Springs, Utah — volunteered to participate in AstraZeneca’s clinical trial for its COVID-19 shot. Now, she says, she is “collateral damage of the pandemic.”
Dressen co-chairs React19, a “science-based non-profit offering financial, physical, and emotional support for those suffering from longterm COVID-19 vaccine adverse events globally.”
After receiving the AstraZeneca shot, Dressen experienced extensive adverse effects — including doubled and blurry vision, severe sensitivity to sound and light, heart and blood pressure fluctuations and intense brain fog — that worsened over time.
She said Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, GoFundMe, Reddit and Instagram removed content she posted about her injuries.
According to Dressen, the plaintiffs’ experiences of censorship “pale in comparison to the thousands of Americans we know who all have experienced the same thing.”
“There is nothing scarier than reaching out for help only to be silenced,” Dressen told The Defender. “It was as scary as the vaccine reaction itself.
“Our constitutional freedoms must be protected, regardless of whether or not we are in a national emergency,” Dressen added.
Dressen — who now experiences “permanent disability” with “ups and downs” — said she and the other plaintiffs are “not fighting this fight for a select few” but are fighting on behalf of the “tens of thousands who are experiencing the same kind of censorship.”
The New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA) filed the suit on behalf of Dressen and the other plaintiffs, who include Kristi Dobbs, Nikki Holland, Suzanna Newell and Ernest Ramirez.
All but Ramirez experienced COVID-19 vaccine-related injuries. Ramirez received the Moderna vaccine with no adverse effect — but his 16-year-old son died of vaccine-induced cardiac arrest five days after receiving the Pfizer vaccine.
Newell is a former triathlete from St. Paul, Minnesota, who was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease after she got the vaccine and who now relies on a walker or cane to get around.
Case challenges ‘shocking’ government mass-censorship
According to the complaint, the plaintiffs experienced “heavy and ongoing censorship” on social media platforms — including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, TikTok and GoFundMe — “when they attempted to share “ their personal experiences after they, or a loved one, were medically harmed after taking the vaccine.”
For instance, TikTok on multiple occasions removed Holland’s video posts in which she shared her personal experiences related to her COVID-19 vaccine-related injuries and recovery process.
TikTok said the videos violated “Community Guidelines” for posting “violent and graphic content” and for “integrity and authenticity” concerns.
According to the complaint:
“This case challenges the government’s mass-censorship program and the shocking role that it has played (and still plays) in ensuring that disfavored viewpoints deemed a threat to its agenda are suppressed.
“This sprawling censorship enterprise has involved the efforts of myriad federal agencies and government actors (including within the White House itself) to direct, coerce, and, ultimately, work in concert with social media platforms to censor, muffle, and flag as ‘misinformation’ speech that conflicts with the government’s preferred narrative — including speech that the government explicitly acknowledges to be true.”
Kim Mack Rosenberg, the Children Health Defense’s (CHD) acting outside general counsel, said the new lawsuit is important because it exists “at the intersection” of COVID-19 vaccine injury and COVID-19 censorship.
“The complaint here alleges — as have other cases — a massive censorship program to control the narrative and promote the government’s COVID-19 propaganda,” Mack Rosenberg told The Defender.
She added:
“Silencing those who have been injured, like the plaintiffs in this case, by the very product promoted — and in some cases mandated — by the government is particularly egregious and causes further, albeit, different injury to those individuals, whose First Amendment rights have also been violated.
“Moreover, censoring these injured individuals injures the public, depriving them of important information and discourse on these issues.”
Missouri and Louisiana in May 2022 filed a landmark lawsuit against top-ranking Biden administration officials for allegedly colluding with social media giants to suppress free speech on topics like COVID-19 and election security.
Former Missouri attorney general Eric Schmitt alleges the Biden administration led “the largest speech censorship operation in recent history” by working with social media companies to suppress and censor information later acknowledged as truthful.”
In March, CHD Chairman on Leave Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and CHD filed a class action lawsuit against Biden, Dr. Anthony Fauci and other top administration officials and federal agencies, alleging they “waged a systematic, concerted campaign” to compel the nation’s three largest social media companies to censor constitutionally protected speech, including facts and opinions about the COVID-19 vaccines.
Commenting on the new lawsuit, Peggy Little, senior litigation counsel for NCLA, said in a statement:
“Americans injured by experimentally approved Covid vaccines are being deplatformed, silenced, suppressed, defamed and cancelled by their own government for reaching out to others simply to share and receive information critical to their physical and mental well-being.
“Government actors have bullied, threatened and coerced social media companies to strip these plaintiffs of their First Amendment rights of association and speech. Suppression of speech critical of the government by the very government actors mandating the vaccine is frightening.
“NCLA’s lawsuit seeks to restore these plaintiffs’ civil liberties and the free flow of information guaranteed by the First Amendment for all Americans. We must never again lose our constitutional bearings in a pandemic.”
Casey Norman, one of the NCLA lawyers representing Dressen and the other plaintiffs, agreed. He said that the government claims it suppresses “so-called misinformation” for the sake of “public safety and welfare.”
“Fortunately,” Norman added, “the First Amendment says otherwise: the government may neither censor our clients nor induce others to do so.”
Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D., is a reporter and researcher for The Defender based in Fairfield, Iowa. She holds a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Texas at Austin (2021), and a master’s degree in communication and leadership from Gonzaga University (2015). Her scholarship has been published in Health Communication. She has taught at various academic institutions in the United States and is fluent in Spanish.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
A Pfizer Document the FDA Tried to Hide Shows LNPs from COVID-19 Vaccine Travel Everywhere in the Body
By Aaron Siri | Injecting Freedom | May 23, 2023
When the Covid-19 vaccines rolled out, public health officials took great pains to downplay how the vaccines spread from the injection site. Articles with language like this were common: “Most of the mRNA vaccine stayed in the injection site muscle—where you get the shot.”
We now know the truth. The lipid nanoparticles, or LNPs, travel widely throughout the body. These LNPs carry the Frankenstein mRNA that causes the cells to produce spike proteins.
We initially got tissue biodistribution data from Japan which showed that significant lipid concentrations were found in the adrenal glands, bone marrow, liver, ovaries, spleen (and more) for at least 48 hours after injection.
Then we saw the same study data show up in a document from the Australian Department of Health.
And from the lawsuit that we brought against the FDA demanding the release of the Pfizer documents, we now know that this same data was also provided to the FDA. What is really troubling, however, is that this document was dated November 9, 2020—meaning, prior to any Emergency Use Authorization or public use of Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine.
Having LNPs release their cargo into the cells of critical organs is very concerning. This is because many scientists will tell you that the spike protein produces an immune response, including inflammation. It is one thing to have inflammation in one’s bicep, but it is quite another to have it in your heart muscle, liver, ovaries, etc.
This is again why the government should not be in the business of promoting, let alone mandating, any product. It becomes impossible to acknowledge safety issues without self-incrimination. How often do you hear the government say, “Oops, you know that thing we told every American to inject into their body? Well, it actually can cause serious harm to a lot of people—our bad!” No. That rarely happens.
CONCLUDING REMARK
As I have written in the past, the lack of respect for individual and civil rights has wrought more harm on humanity than anything else. The American experiment was a rebellion against the idea that you must cede your rights to some overseers who know better and will make decisions on your behalf.
To that end, as I also often repeat, please send the following proposed legislation to your legislative representatives:
No law may require or coerce a person to receive or use a medical product, or impose a penalty or deprive a benefit for refusing a medical product or refusing to disclose whether a person has received a medical product.
Medical freedom is freedom. If you cannot get a job, go to school, or otherwise participate in civil society because you refuse a medical product, you are not free. What good are your rights if you can only exercise them at home by yourself? That is why medical freedom is a fundamental right that must be permanently fixed into the law of every civilized nation.
We are, as provided in the Declaration of Independence, indeed “endowed by [our] Creator with certain unalienable Rights” and to safeguard those rights “we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.” We must never yield to the tyranny of permitting others to dictate what can or must be placed, administered, or injected onto or into our bodies. For once that right is ceded, none truly remain.
It’s Good News Week
Joe Biden is creating enemies everywhere
BY PHILIP GIRALDI • UNZ REVIEW • MAY 23, 2023
Well, if you thought the American Civil War ended back in 1865, you are apparently wrong. No less an authority than President Joe Biden, in a May 13th commencement speech to historically black Howard University’s graduates, told the overwhelmingly black students and their families that “The most dangerous terrorist threat to our homeland is white supremacy. And I’m not saying this because I’m at a Black HBCU, I say it wherever I go.” Indeed, both Biden and his inert Attorney General Merrick Garland nee Garfinkel have delivered that same message on a number of occasions, but this was the first time it was employed in such a racially charged environment. It was clearly a pre-electoral call to arms against white people in America, placing government sanctioned targets on the backs of whites who are generally peacefully struggling to retain their communities, identities, religion, heritage and culture, all of which are being engulfed by the White House’s tidal wave of self-serving and politically motivated “woke” promotions.
Five days later, on the 18th, the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government released an 80 page report revealing that the FBI had deliberately miscategorized its investigations into the events surrounding the January 6th Capitol Hill violent demonstration to substantially inflate the numbers suggesting a dramatic increase in domestic terrorism in the United States. The GOP report, based largely on whistleblower testimony, stated that “whistleblowers assert that the FBI pressured agents to reclassify cases as domestic violent extremism (DVE), and even manufactured DVE cases where they may not otherwise exist, while manipulating its case categorization system to feign a national problem.” The FBI’s Washington Field Office deliberately categorized its Capitol disturbance cases to make the rise in DVE cases look more like a national problem than a one-time post-electoral incident.
The report includes “According to whistleblower information, the FBI has manipulated the manner in which it categorized January 6-related investigations to create a misleading narrative that domestic terrorism is organically surging around the country.” The manipulated statistics, based on regarding every individual even peripherally or allegedly involved in an incident as a terrorist suspect rather than as part of a group interaction, were then used to support the Biden Administration’s increasing rhetoric about “domestic terrorism.” One whistleblower explained how “By opening a separate case for each individual as opposed to one case with however many subjects are involved, they’ve turned one case into a thousand cases… And by spreading them to the field, they’ve given the impression that those domestic terror cases are around the country…”
Using the new parameters, the FBI Director Christopher Wray was able to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee in August 2022 that “the number of FBI investigations of suspected DVEs has more than doubled since the spring of 2020.” The FBI was, in fact, conducting approximately 1,400 pending domestic terrorism investigations at the end of fiscal 2020, a number that jumped to 2,700 domestic terrorism investigations by the end of fiscal 2021. The Bureau arrested approximately 180 domestic terrorism subjects in 2020, a number that increased to 800 such subjects in 2021.
And then there was the May 15th release of the long-awaited Durham Report on the shenanigans engaged in by Team Clinton in 2016 to use the nation’s security apparatus to make it appear that Donald Trump was being directed by the Russian government. Predictably, there will likely be no political or legal consequences relating to the revelation. No one in the FBI or CIA , or even in the Clinton campaign, will be held accountable for efforts made to influence the outcome of the 2016 election and to denigrate Trump personally using what they knew to be lies. The FBI leadership has reportedly apologized and says it will not engage in such activity in the future, but many are skeptical, particularly as there was something of a repeat performance in 2020 involving the letter signed by 51 members of the intelligence and national security community claiming that the Hunter laptop allegations were nothing more than a Russian disinformation operation. “Will it ever end?” one might ask.
And there’s more. Nina Jankowicz, who made the news briefly back when she was about to assume the post of the Department of Homeland Security Disinformation Czar in April last year before she abruptly resigned three weeks later on May 18th is now, one year later, suing Fox News. She claims the network has been “waging a campaign of ‘vitriolic lies’ against her that amounts to a threat to democracy [by] damaging her reputation as a specialist in conspiracy theories and disinformation campaigns.”
Biden simultaneously got cold feet about systematically criminalizing what Americans were saying and writing and shut down The Disinformation Governance Board abruptly in the wake of attacks by Fox and others that the new DHS division Jankowicz led was itself part of a conspiracy to censor rightwing comment spearheaded by President Biden. Janowicz is claiming that no less than Tucker Carlson, the news channel’s then primetime ratings star fired by Fox recently in the wake of the Dominion settlement, led the charge. In his opening monologue on April 28th 2022, Carlson described Jankowicz as a “moron” and said that what she was doing constituted a “full-scale attack on free speech.” He also referred to the disinformation board as “the new Soviet America”.
Finally, what would the week be like without hearing more about the Biden Administration’s endless war against anti-Semitism? There were predictably numerous anti-Semitism developments during the week but the most compelling was the demand by Deborah Lipstadt, the US government’s renowned holocaust expert who serves as Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, that one of the world’s richest men Elon Musk must be taken to task for daring to criticize George Soros. Lipstadt elaborated how “You can criticize George Soros — many people do — for his economic policies, even for his political programs, for his foundation. But when you turn him into the Rothschild of the 21st century, then you’re engaging in antisemitism. When you link his activities to his Jewish identity, when you disparage his activities — some of which I may disagree with — and when you turn him into this villainous character, which has antisemitic overtures, you’ve crossed the line.”
Lipstadt was responding to Musk’s tweet “Soros reminds me of Magneto.” He was comparing Soros to a Marvel supervillain/hero character named Magneto, who is also Jewish like Soros and, also like him, a claimed holocaust survivor. Lipstadt believes that even mentioning the Jewish globalist Soros, or referring to someone as a “globalist” or “cosmopolitan,” just might be considered as “invoking antisemitic tropes,” as it implies that they are Jews. Per Lipstadt, “What you’re saying is Jews do not have loyalty to the country in which they live in, that they have loyalty one to the other and that they are out to destroy the countries in which they live in.”
And you will be hearing more from Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt, who also states flatly that “Antisemitism is not a niche issue… it is an existential threat to democracy,” possibly later this week when President Biden will be unveiling the first-ever national plan to counter “anti-Jewish bigotry.” She explains how “America has never done something like a national plan to fight antisemitism, which involves most of the major agencies of the US government. There will be some things that people will disagree with. But when I see the time and effort that has gone in by White House, by high-ranking individuals, it’s a message that we take this seriously.”
The plan was developed in recent months by an interagency task force created by Joe Biden last December. It incorporates claimed conversations with more than 1,000 Jewish community leaders across denominations in the United States. President Biden, at May 9th’s White House celebration of Jewish American Heritage Month, said it will “include more than 200 measures that government agencies, social media platforms and elected officials can adopt to counter rising antisemitism.”
There is considerable irony in all of this much ado about little based on deliberately inflated numbers promoted largely by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) claiming that antisemitism is surging. Neither the hideous Jonathan Greenblatt of ADL nor Dr. Lipstadt has suggested to their Israeli friends that the sometimes negative perception of Jews in America might improve if the self-declared Jewish state were to stop killing Palestinian children. Indeed, real antisemitic prejudice that produces negative consequences is hard to identify as American Jews have notably become the best educated and wealthiest demographic in the United States. Though only two per cent of the population, they dominate in key economic and social sectors to include finance, entertainment, the media and education. They occupy many if not most of the key policy making positions in the Biden Administration and are greatly overrepresented in Congress and in government in general. They constantly seek and regularly obtain benefits that accrue only to them, like the 90% of Homeland Security discretionary grants that go to them for “security.”
That new “measures” are being implemented to give Jews even more enhanced protected status that directly limits free speech might be considered ridiculous if it were not so downright dangerous, one more step in handing the keys of the kingdom over to an autocratic and self-centered tribe that describes itself as “chosen” by God. We will no doubt be hearing a lot more about their victimhood over the summer to justify what repressive new measures will be put in place. Will criticizing the so-called holocaust and the apartheid state of Israel become hate crimes with large fines and jail time attached? Stay tuned!
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
RFK Jr Slams ‘Political Weaponization Of The FBI To Destroy A Sitting President’
By Steve Watson | Summit News | May 23, 2023
Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has charged that a “matrix of lies” was used by a “weaponised” FBI in an attempt “to destroy a sitting president.”
RFK Jr. was responding to journalist Matt Taibbi’s reporting on the Durham report, which effectively exonerated President Trump once and for all from bogus charges of Russian collusion, concluding that the FBI had no grounds at all to open an investigation.
“This is no partisan skirmish,” Kennedy tweeted, adding “It is about the political weaponization of the FBI to destroy a candidate and then a sitting President. It’s about a matrix of lies so elaborate as to make a mockery of the democratic ideal of an informed citizenry.”
Kennedy also got the knives out for the media for being complicit in perpetuating the Russian collusion nonsense for years.
“Maybe most alarming of all, the Durham investigation reveals the abject complicity of the mainstream press, which has yet to admit they were taken in by the big lie, propagated it, and now continues to permit those lies to stand as truth,” Kennedy stated.
Former Deputy Nat’l Security Adviser: FBI, CIA & DOJ Will Rig 2024 Election
By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | May 22, 2023
Former Deputy National Security Adviser K.T. McFarland, who served for the first four months of the Trump administration under Michael Flynn, says that the deep state is going to rig the 2024 US election following their success in 2020.
“We now have black-and-white evidence that the FBI interfered in the 2016 election. When they failed to elect Hillary Clinton, they set out to destroy the Trump administration,” she told Fox Business’ Maria Bartiromo.
“Go back to 2020. This time, the CIA got involved in the election with those 51 former intel agents who said the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation. So they’ve gotten away with it for two elections. They will surely try and get away with it in 2024, right?
Because there are no consequences…
“There is now hard evidence that there was election interference by the U.S. intelligence agencies and the Department of Justice. Those individuals must be terrified that a Republican president comes in with a Republican Attorney General, investigates them, and charges them with all of the crimes they have committed over the last eight years. Take it to the bank.
They will absolutely interfere in 2024…
These people are selling us out. Not only to foreign leaders, but they are interfering in our elections.
They are tearing up the Constitution… This is just a gut punch to the American people.”
‘Patriot Act on Steroids’: Bill to Ban TikTok Could Lead to ‘Sweeping Surveillance and Censorship’ in U.S., Critics Say
By Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D. | The Defender | May 19, 2023
U.S. lawmakers are considering a bill that would grant the U.S. government vast new powers to surveil and censor U.S. citizens.
The RESTRICT Act — the Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Technology Act, or Senate Bill 686 — would give the federal government new powers ostensibly to mitigate national security threats posed by technology products from countries that the U.S. deems adversarial.
The bill would grant the U.S. secretary of commerce the authority to “identify, deter, disrupt, prevent, prohibit, investigate, or otherwise mitigate” national security risks associated with technology linked to a foreign adversary.
There are only six countries on the foreign adversary list — China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Russia and Cuba — but the bill allows the secretary and Congress to add any other country “if it became necessary.”
The bill does not stipulate the criteria for adding a country.
Additionally, the bill would give the commerce secretary the power to negotiate, enter into, impose and enforce “any mitigation measure” in response to national security risks.
The bill’s “broad” and “vague” language puts a great deal of power into the hands of the executive branch, according to critics, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a “leading nonprofit organization defending civil liberties in the digital world.”
The EFF called the bill a “dangerous substitute for comprehensive data privacy legislation.”
Meanwhile, the White House “applauded” the bill, stating that it would “empower the United States government to prevent certain foreign governments from exploiting technology services operating in the United States in a way that poses risks to Americans’ sensitive data and our national security.”
The bill — which has yet to be scheduled for a vote — would create a legal framework through which the U.S. government could ban TikTok.
TikTok is regarded as a national security risk by some U.S. lawmakers who fear that its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, might share sensitive information from the more than 150 million U.S. TikTok users with the Chinese Communist Party.
U.S. Big Tech companies including Facebook’s parent company, Meta, and Google’s parent, Alphabet, are expected to benefit from an expanded market share if the U.S. government bans the Chinese-owned TikTok.
‘Mechanism for a massive, sweeping surveillance and censorship overhaul’
However, according to investigative reporter Jordan Schachtel, “This bill is no mere ‘TikTok ban,’ it is a mechanism for a massive, sweeping surveillance and censorship overhaul.”
Michael Rectenwald, Ph.D., author of “Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom,” agreed. He told The Defender :
“The RESTRICT Act is not only aimed at the activities and expression of companies and individuals from nations deemed inimical to U.S. interests; it is a backdoor means through which the federal government can oversee the opinions and activities of all U.S. citizens, increasing the state’s powers of surveillance and abrogating citizen’s first amendment rights.”
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) also had harsh words for the proposed legislation:
Many on both the Left and Right have criticized the bill, calling it the “Patriot Act on steroids” or the “Patriot Act 2.0.”
Weeks after the September 11 attacks, the U.S. government passed the USA PATRIOT Act, which the American Civil Liberties Union said was “an overnight revision of the nation’s surveillance laws that vastly expanded the government’s authority to spy on its own citizens, while simultaneously reducing checks and balances on those powers like judicial oversight, public accountability, and the ability to challenge government searches in court.”
Critics fear the RESTRICT Act would expand those powers even further.
EFF condemned the bill’s potential threats to free speech, noting that the bill doesn’t require the executive branch to justify its restrictions on expressive technologies like TikTok and that it limits lawsuit challenges to the restrictions it sets.
“Due to undefined mitigation measures coupled with a vague enforcement provision, the bill could also criminalize common practices like using a VPN or side-loading to install a prohibited app,” EFF said. “There are legitimate data privacy concerns about social media platforms, but this bill is a distraction from real progress on privacy.”
Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), who co-sponsored the bill, said in remarks on the Senate floor that the bill would not allow the government to “surveil Americans’ online content” or “access any American’s personal communications device.”
However, the RESTRICT Act’s broad language could potentially be interpreted to address satellite and mobile networks, cloud services and storage, internet infrastructure providers, home internet gear, commercial and personal drones, video games and payment apps, CNN said.
“Instead of passing this broad and overreaching bill, Congress should limit the opportunities for any company to collect massive amounts of our detailed personal data, which is then made available to data brokers, U.S. government agencies, and even foreign adversaries, China included,” EFF concluded.
Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D., is a reporter and researcher for The Defender based in Fairfield, Iowa. She holds a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Texas at Austin (2021), and a master’s degree in communication and leadership from Gonzaga University (2015). Her scholarship has been published in Health Communication. She has taught at various academic institutions in the United States and is fluent in Spanish.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
Second largest Swedish party wants Stockholm to prepare for ‘Swexit’
By Drago Bosnic | May 19, 2023
As if the European Union didn’t have enough major problems already, now the troubled bloc is faced with the nontrivial prospect of a “Swexit”. Namely, senior officials of the second largest political party in the Scandinavian country, the Sweden Democrats, are now openly saying that their country needs to be prepared to leave the EU. This includes the party leader himself, Per Jimmie Akesson, who stated that “only by making the necessary preparations for ‘Swexit’ can the government maximize its bargaining power in Brussels”. The right-wing Sweden Democrats have long been frustrated by the power that the unelected bureaucrats in Brussels wield over their country, so this is hardly a surprising development.
However, even Eurosceptic Swedish parties usually refrain from such open anti-EU declarations, meaning that the bloc is gradually losing its power, even in previously somewhat pro-EU member states. On May 15, Akesson authored an article along with his Sweden Democrats fellow member Charlie Weimers, who also represents his party and his country as a Member of the European Parliament (MEP). The op-ed was published by the Stockholm-based Svenska Dagbladet daily, in which the authors explicitly stated that their intention is to ensure Sweden “maximizes its influence” in the EU, specifying several legal measures the country’s government must take to accomplish the stated goals.
First, the Swedish government must insist on making constitutional changes that would make it possible to introduce what Akesson and Weimers called a “referendum lock”. According to the authors’ reasoning, this would enshrine into law the requirement of a nationwide referendum before any further national powers can be renounced by Sweden and transferred to the unelected EU bureaucrats. The goal is to ensure that any further erosion of the Scandinavian country’s sovereignty is prevented if the Swedish people choose not to comply with it. The authors cited the examples of the United Kingdom and Denmark as an inspiration, as both London and Copenhagen previously adopted similar legal mechanisms.
“Only the knowledge that every decision on the transfer of power must be submitted to the citizens would slow down the worst abuses from Brussels,” Akesson and Weimers wrote in the op-ed.
Second, the country’s government must make the necessary preparations to leave the EU, as the troubled bloc should not take Sweden’s national interests for granted. The authors insist that the government must ensure it’s ready in case such a decision is ever made by the Swedish people and to formally legitimize any threat to withdraw from the EU in future negotiations with the troubled bloc. They further added that to accomplish this, Sweden needs to remove the clause that it’s an EU member from its constitution, as well as study the example of the UK during Brexit, while also training civil servants to ensure the process runs without any major issues. As previously mentioned, Akesson and Weimers see this as instrumental for improving the country’s negotiating position.
“In order for preparedness to be credible, it’s necessary that we remove the writings in the constitution that state that Sweden is a member of the EU … In addition, we should train a cadre of civil servants with the expertise to negotiate trade agreements and other things that we have delegated to the EU and study how Brexit could have been implemented better. The better we are prepared to leave, the more we will gain in future negotiations,” the authors added.
Akesson and Weimers believe these are the bare minimum requirements that will provide a solid backstop against any possible power-grab attempts by Brussels. In addition, the leader of the Sweden Democrats also wants an investigation to be launched into how the negative aspects of the Scandinavian country’s membership in the EU can be alleviated. Among other things, this also includes the issue of immigration, a major problem that the Sweden Democrats see as crucial for the country’s future. The right-wing party is the largest member of the country’s governing bloc, providing virtually all of its confidence-and-supply votes in the Riksdag (Swedish Parliament), although the Sweden Democrats are not directly taking part in Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson’s administration.
As per the Tidö Agreement to which all coalition parties agreed, Stockholm is to adopt a more restrictive immigration policy in return for support of the Sweden Democrats, something the more liberal-leftist opposition, informally supported by Brussels, staunchly disagrees with. And while Euroscepticism is still not the view of the majority of the Swedish electorate, it has steadily been growing in recent years, particularly as the disastrous policies supported by the EU have drastically eroded the well-being of the Scandinavian country’s citizens. Although Akesson himself acknowledges the fact that the majority still doesn’t support Sweden’s withdrawal from the EU (which has been the long-standing policy of his party), he certainly wants to capitalize on the growing support it’s been getting.
Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.
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UN declares war on ‘dangerous’ conspiracy theories
‘World is not secretly run by elites’
Free West Media | August 5, 2022
UNESCO says it is seriously concerned about the increase in “disinformation” and “conspiracy theories”. And they plan to put an end to it through a network of informants.
“Conspiracy theories can be dangerous,” the UN agency warned. “Often they ignore scientific evidence and polarize society with dire consequences. This has to stop.”
Unesco’s director-general warned that “conspiracy theories” could cause damage to people as well as to their health. “They reinforce misconceptions about the pandemic, reinforcing stereotypes that can fuel violence and violent, extremist ideologies,” said Audrey Azoulay.
The UN agency has launched a campaign to help people identify, debunk and report “conspiracy theories” to prevent them from spreading further.
This campaign is being carried out in collaboration with the European Commission, Twitter and the World Jewish Congress. The UN has created a toolkit to “debunk” such theories and smear anyone who dares to claim that governments are not fair and transparent.
The UN also warned that George Soros, the Rothschilds and Israel should not be linked to “alleged conspiracies”.
World events “are not secretly manipulated behind the scenes by powerful players with malicious intent,” the UN agency maintained.
And if anyone therefore comes across someone who believes that the world elite is plotting to consolidate power or direct events, then that person needs to take action. According to the UN agency, when meeting a “conspiracy theorist”, under no circumstances should one enter into a discussion. … continue
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