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US is world’s ‘greatest propagator of disinformation’ – Senator Paul

Samizdat | May 5, 2022

Due to its long track record of disinformation, the US government has no right to tell the American people what the truth is, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul has stated. He went to list a number of examples of where Washington had lied to its own people, and the rest of the world.

During a Senate hearing on Wednesday, Paul grilled Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas over the so-called ‘Disinformation Governance Board’ his agency has announced to supposedly help social media platforms filter out ‘fake news.’

“Here’s the problem: we can’t even agree what disinformation is,” the Republican Senator pointed out. “You can’t even agree if it was disinformation that the Russians fed information to the Steele dossier.”

He was referring to the controversial and largely discredited report that relied on info from anonymous sources to allege collusion between the Donald Trump campaign and Moscow ahead of the 2016 presidential election in the US.

“If you can’t agree to that, how are we ever going to come to an agreement on what is disinformation, so that you can police it on social media?” Paul wondered.

“Do you know who the greatest propagator of disinformation in the history of the world is? The US government!” he insisted.

In order to back his claim, the Senator mentioned several examples of false information being deliberately spread by Washington over the past decades.

Among them were the so-called Pentagon Papers, which revealed that the US government had been misinforming the public about the scale of its military operations during the Vietnam War. The documents were officially declassified in 2011, but the media had been reporting on them since 1971.

Paul also mentioned “George W. Bush and the weapons of mass destruction,” referring to American claims that Saddam Hussein’s regime had been in possession of WMD, claims that were used by the US to justify the invasion of Iraq in 2003, but were never confirmed by findings on the grounds.

His other example was the Iran–Contra affair, which saw top US officials secretly organizing the sale of weapons to Iran in violation of an arms embargo between 1981 and 1986 in order to obtain money to fund the Contras insurgent group in Nicaragua.

“I mean, think over all the debates and disputes we’ve had over the last 50 years in our country. We work them out by debating them. We don’t work them out by the government being the arbiter,” the Senator said.

“I want you to have nothing to do with speech… You think the American people are so stupid they need you to tell them what the truth is?” Paul added.

The creation of the Disinformation Governance Board was announced in late April. According to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the new body would help counter disinformation, which is being spread by “foreign states such as Russia, China and Iran,” and by human traffickers operating on the US-Mexico border, among others.

The DHS gave assurances that it won’t be targeting US citizens. But critics were quick to nickname the board ‘The Ministry of Truth,’ after a fictional organization from George Orwell’s iconic dystopian novel ‘1984’.

May 5, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

Is Australia a sovereign nation or just a state of Pfizerland?

Don’t mention the Australian vaccine: The TGA bans Aussie Professor from talking about his work

Australia has a mini Ministry of Truth already. It’s called the TGA.

JoNova | May 3, 2022

Australians can probably still get a Pfizer vaccine in chemists and carparks across Australia, but they still need to fly to Iran to get an Australian-made vaccine. The good news is that at least this week it’s legal for Australians to finally fly to Tehran without taking Pfizer or Moderna shot first — as long as they don’t fly on an Australian airline. (Not mentioning any names, Qantas!)

The people mostly responsible for this situation are the TGA (Therapeutic Goods Association). They’re supposed to be looking after Australians health but somehow all their decisions happen to be exactly what a Pfizer CEO would want. Spooky eh?  The TGA rushed the approval for the Pfizer vaccines, but still, millions of doses later, won’t release the procurement contracts, even under FOI. Signed on our behalf, and for our own good, yes? Did they even read the documents that Pfizer AND the FDA tried to hide for 75 years?

Now meet Professor Nikolai Petrovsky from Flinders University, Australia, who had already developed protein based vaccines against the original SARS in 2003 and MERS in 2012, so he was the obvious choice to develop an old fashioned protein based vaccine in Australia. (Hey, but it’s not like we want to develop our own vaccine industry, eh?).

So he went on to make a protein vaccine against SARS-2 and has got approval to use it in Iran. Last I heard (months ago) they had sold 6 million doses to Iran, apparently with great results.

With all the makings of a Great Banana Republic Australia promptly sacked Petrovsky for taking his own vaccine instead of one of the foreign ones approved by The Sacred T.G.A committee. We can’t have vaccine experts at uni picking their own vaccines can we?

Somehow the Australian government spent something like $6 billion on foreign vaccines but asked the small Australian company to pay $300,000 to get approved here. So Petrovsky ran a GoFundMe, and it was so popular it raised a million dollars.  Finally he has permission and funding to run Australian trials, but now he doesn’t have permission to talk about it. Who knew he needed that? Apparently the TGA says it will fine him $13,000 or maybe one million (convenient, eh?) if he does. (Updated: I hear it’s an $11m threat now).

If only Australians were smart enough to hear the words of Professors without “protection” by unaccountable committees?

Unfortunately, Australians can’t take the Australian vaccine in Australia, and if they fly to Iran to get it, they still can’t return to their jobs in Victoria or WA. Who voted for the TGA? This committee controls what every doctor and medical professor can say in Australia. But doctors don’t even vote for them.

For those who are interested —  Petrovsky’s “Spikogen” vax has no RNA or DNA — just protein, and there’s no Furin cleavage site, or TMP (Trans Membrane Protein) either. Those are two parts of the spike that might make it less likely to get into our cells, or to stick in the cell-membrane of our cells  and poke out. (When our cells have those viral spikes displayed they will attract the attention of wayward immune cells and thus increase the risk of myocarditis and other autoimmune reactions). As to how well it works, we hear there are very few side effects. I’ve seen no data yet. If only the Australian Government was trying to help Australian researchers?

The Ministry of Medical-Truth are the same agency that also banned all doctors in Australia from prescribing ivermectin  for Covid, because it might reduce the sales of Pfizer, I mean — because “people might not get vaccinated”.  They actually said that. They also said they banned doctors from using it because some people who weren’t doctors on social media were getting the doses wrong. Like that makes sense. And apparently we were running out of one of the most common drugs on the planet, and still are, because no one in government thought to order any more from Indiamart?

Just in case you wonder who your rulers are Australians

The links:

The TGA Advisory Committee on Vaccines

“The Committee is established under Regulation 39F of the Therapeutic Goods Regulations 1990 and the members are appointed by the Minister for Health.” The ACV was established in January 2017…

Advisory Committee on Medicines Scheduling (ACMS)   The committee that banned ivermectin.

But make no mistake, the man responsible for the TGA (at least for a few more weeks) is Greg Hunt, Minister of Health. Once upon a time he was Director of Strategy at the World Economic Forum (2000–2001). Curious.

The TGA is a disgrace. It’s time to shut it down.

If it were completely captured by Big Pharma, which decisions would it have made differently?

Being slow to approve competing drugs might be exactly what it was set up to do?

May 5, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

The Return to the Good Old Days of Ignoring CDC Recommendations

By Adam Dick | Ron Paul Institute | May 5, 2022

It has been two weeks since a United States district court struck down President Joe Biden’s mandate, imposed through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), that people wear masks when traveling via public transportation, or by taxi or ride-share service, as well as when at related locations, such as airports. After the court decision, most transportation companies and locations have been quick to make clear that people are free to leave their faces uncovered. Many people have been very happy to do just that.

The CDC, however, has not given up on hectoring people to “wear your mask.” On Tuesday, the CDC released a “media statement” titled “CDC Recommendation for Masks and Travel.” Starting off, the media statement declares that the CDC “recommends that everyone aged 2 and older – including passengers and workers – properly wear a well-fitting mask or respirator over the nose and mouth in indoor areas of public transportation (such as airplanes, trains, etc.) and transportation hubs (such as airports, stations, etc.).” Further, the CDC states that it encourages “operators of public transportation and transportation hubs to support mask wearing by all people, including employees.”

Fortunately, the response of many individuals and businesses to this advice ranges from “whatever” to “leave me alone.” More and more people have gotten over inflated fear of coronavirus that never posed a threat of major sickness or death to most people. People have also progressively become aware of the absurdity and destructiveness of forced business closures, “social distancing,” ubiquitous coronavirus testing, experimental coronavirus “vaccines,” mask mandates, and other pseudoscience actions the CDC has pushed since 2020.

America is largely back to the good old days of most people ignoring for the most part when government “public health officials” and people in the media relate CDC guidance that people do this or that. Plus, given the horrid track record of the CDC through the coronavirus scare, more people are now aware of the charade of CDC guidance than ever before. Instead of just ignoring CDC recommendations, many more people than before will feel the urge to research the recommendations and publicly challenge the recommendations when they are found wanting. There should now hopefully also be much more steadfast resistance from the start to any new effort to morph recommendations from the CDC or other so-called health experts into mandates.

Still, the CDC’s media statement this week and the US government hanging on to other coronavirus crackdown measures, including coronavirus shots and testing mandates, to the extent the measures have not been struck down by courts, show that the threat of grand scale tyranny in the name of countering a new purported health crisis remains. In addition, some state and local governments are both holding on to the remnants of coronavirus tyranny and remaining ready to jump back into much more expansive action suppressing freedom in the name of public health.

People must remain vigilant. People must spread the message that the lesson from the coronavirus crackdown is that government violations of individual rights in the name of advancing public health objectives or countering the new disease of the day must be resisted resolutely and vociferously.

People should also keep in mind that, in a variety of circumstances, doctors and other people working the medical field may provide advice that is grounded in the CDC’s priorities and runs counter to the best medical course.

The lure of evil remains strong. To ensure that respect for freedom regained from the coronavirus crackdown tyrants does not fade away, people must remain on guard against and adamantly refuse to accept new encroachment efforts. To keep what has been regained of the good old days, and even expand upon it, people must take action, starting with saying “no” to the health authoritarians at the CDC and elsewhere.

Copyright © 2022 by RonPaul Institute.

May 5, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Solidarity and Activism, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Is the West at war with disinformation or dissent?

By Rachel Marsden | Samizdat | May 5, 2022

When US President Joe Biden announced on April 27 that a new Disinformation Governance Board would serve the Department of Homeland Security, it was just the latest turn of the screw on freedom. This time, it’s an affront to citizens’ right to a diversity of information.

It’s one thing to correct inaccurate information, but this new entity seems more oriented towards narrative-policing that cracks down on the interpretation of information rather than the accuracy of it. Headed by a former communications advisor to the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry, Nina Jankowicz, one of the board’s first responsibilities will be to address “disinformation coming from Russia as well as misleading messages about the US-Mexico border,” according to CBS News. Interesting that these two issues – immigration and foreign conflicts – are currently viewed as two of Washington’s most significant failures, which have given rise to populist dissent. Make no mistake, it’s the dissent that’s the ultimate target.

The fact that a former Ukraine government spin doctor was viewed as the best person to head up the new initiative tells you everything you need to know about its true purpose. Jankowicz published a book in 2020 whose title suggests that she believes the West to be in an online war with Russia. ‘How to Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News, and the Future of Conflict,’ portrays Western narratives as truthful and Russian narratives as “fake news.” Doing so obscures the fact that the mainstream Western media has not been immune to propagating narratives peddled by the state that could retroactively be considered fake news or war propaganda. Meanwhile, Russian media has often provided a platform for those seeking to express – or access – dissenting analysis or information that falls outside of the Western media bubble. Clearly, there are some ‘democracies’ that are bothered by this.

The appetite of Western nations to ensure that their citizens are only fed information that they control through their own highly concentrated government or corporate subsidized media isn’t new. It’s just getting more voracious. Perhaps it’s because the more authoritarian their agenda becomes, the more populist sentiment increases and gives rise to events such as Brexit or the election of Donald Trump, as well as trends such as opposition to US-backed conflicts, the rise in popularity of various populist political parties in Europe, and demonstrations against pandemic mandates, which just happen to be associated with government-issued QR codes.

Dissent is the enemy of authoritarian ambition. Supposedly free countries have manipulated their citizens into believing that censorship of certain views is for people’s own safety and security – hence why the military in Canada, the UK, and France, and now Homeland Security in the US, are involved in narrative policing. In reality, their efforts seem to be more about ensuring citizens’ compliance with their own agenda.

The fusion of domestic security and disinformation came to light as early as 2016, when the European Parliament grotesquely conflated Islamic terrorist propaganda with Russian media, in what seemed to be itself a propaganda effort to undermine the Russian media by equating these two totally unrelated things. But one by one, Western governments have placed free speech under national security control.

France, for example, handed off responsibility for online information arbitration to its domestic intelligence agency (the DGSI) and has reportedly considered involving defense-funded startups in the effort.

Canada has also turned to its security apparatus to shape Canadians’ information landscape – at least twice. The Communications Security Establishment, the country’s electronic spying agency, has been tweeting its own interpretations of disputed events occurring in the fog of the conflict in Ukraine as indisputable fact, while routinely denouncing Russia’s interpretation as invalid.

But Canada’s security establishment isn’t at its first rodeo in attempting to prevent citizens’ thinking from deviating from the state’s messaging. Under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the country’s armed forces deployed a months-long, military-grade propaganda campaign, which employed tactics honed during the war in Afghanistan, to mind-bend unsuspecting Canadians towards Trudeau’s Covid narrative, CBC News reported last year.

Not to be outdone, the psychological warfare specialists of the 77th brigade of Britain’s armed forces have also worked to shape messaging both in favor of the government’s Covid policies and against anything contrary out of Russia. “One current priority is combating the spread of harmful, false and misleading narratives through disinformation. To bolster this effort, the British Army will be deploying two experts in countering disinformation. They will advise and support NATO in ensuring its citizens have the right information to protect themselves and its democracies are protected from malicious disinformation operations used by adversaries,” Defense Secretary Ben Wallace said last year.

The fact that public safety and disinformation have suddenly become routinely conflated should be worrisome to defenders of whatever remnants of democracy that we still have left. Terrorism, health and now disinformation have all served as pretexts for the rapid erosion of our freedoms – all under the guise of protecting us from bad actors. But are we really safer? Or are we just increasingly less free?

May 5, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Popular Ukrainian Zelensky critic arrested in Spain

Samizdat | May 5, 2022

Prominent blogger and critic of the Ukrainian government, Anatoly Shariy, has been detained by Spanish police as part of an international operation, the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) announced on Thursday.

Shariy was arrested on Wednesday in a joint operation by Spanish and Ukrainian cops, as well as international “partners”, the SBU said in a statement.

The agency, Kiev’s successor to the Soviet KGB, said that the opposition figure is wanted on charges of treason by Kiev, among other things. Shariy has been infringing Ukraine’s national security through his activities in the media realm, while allegedly acting on behalf of “foreign” forces, it insisted. The case against the YouTuber with almost 3 million subscribers was launched in February 2021.

Shariy’s arrest “is more proof that every traitor of Ukraine will sooner or later receive his well-deserved punishment. It is inevitable,” the SBU claimed.

The Ukrainian announcement was confirmed by the Spanish police, who told RIA-Novosti that Shariy was detained in the coastal city of Tarragona on May 4 on an international arrest warrant.

Shariy had been granted political asylum in the EU by Lithuania back in 2012. Back then, he said that he was fleeing persecution by the government of Viktor Yanukovich, whom the Western media branded pro-Russian.

Yanukovich was deposed after the Maidan coup in 2014, but the blogger remained a harsh critic of authorities in Ukraine, be it President Petro Poroshenko or his successor Volodymyr Zelensky.

He condemned Russia’s military operation in Ukraine after it was launched in late February but kept pointing out what he saw as flaws in Kiev’s conduct during the ongoing conflict.

The blogger’s political asylum was cancelled by Lithuania in January this year.

Shariy was absent from social media on Wednesday, but on Thursday he took to Telegram to share a photo of his wife feeding parrots in Barcelona, accompanying it with a comment reading: “This really is a comedy.”

According to media reports, the blogger was released from Spanish custody and placed under travel restrictions. He’s to remain in Barcelona where he has a home pending a decision on his extradition to Ukraine.

President Zelensky’s representative at the Constitutional Court has already expressed confidence that Shariy will “face a Ukrainian court and will be held liable in line with Ukrainian laws.”

May 5, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

DON’T VOTE “#GREATRESET”

By Olly Connelly | Daily Chaos | May 5, 2022

It’s local election day in the UK and, as you’ll be aware, elections are underway also in France and in the US.

Local, constituency or national level, if you vote for someone who is not talking about defeating the #GreatReset, then you are voting for Klaus Schwab, you are voting “to own nothing”, for communism directed by fascists, you are voting for tyranny, for censorship, for more fake pandemics and more fraudulent war, you are voting for divide-rule on an epic scale that is destroying families, communities and societies from within despite the farcical topics such as “how to define a woman” for crying out loud, you are voting for the normalisation of Satanism and paedophilia as can increasingly be seen in Biden’s America, you are voting for genocidal war criminals like Tony Blair to never be brought to account while being BBC-platformed to lecture you on using experimental drugs on your innocent children, you are voting to condone yet more phony elections, for Martial law in Western societies as we saw in Ottawa, for the hundreds of thousands in death toll in places like Yemen while the globalists distract with Ukraine, you are voting for CCP-style oppression and their model social credit score to keep you in check, you are voting for the last of our liberty ie an end to cash, for Google’s bloodstream nanobots and Musk’s brain chip, for Gates’ quaxxines and the final cull of the Mama-Papas defeated by the Bezos drones.

DON’T VOTE FOR SLAVERY.

Don’t vote for the Great Reset. DON’T VOTE FOR ANYONE WHO IS NOT ACTIVELY WARNING AGAINST THE GREAT RESET, THEY ARE A FRAUD, A DECEIT…

… At this stage in the game, I tell you, ANYONE in politics or journalism who is not warning of the dangers of the Great Reset is somewhere between fraudulent and downright evil.

If in doubt, if in any doubt, do not vote. In most cases this is almost certainly the best option, to help de-power the them-us elitism, to deny a mandate and to create a window to be able to say, “WE DID NOT ELECT YOU.”

We should have seen, by now, the vile outcome by supporting cheats and liars. We should have seen that voting for the lesser of the evils DOES NOT HELP. Do not make things worse by voting yet again for PROVEN cheats and liars.

Do not mindlessly vote. And yes, at this stage in the game where practically everyone on the global stage is either bought or blackmailed, A VOTE “NOT TO VOTE”, an abstention from the Big Lie, is in no way dishonourable. A vote for more of what we have in power now, on the other hand, is downright moronic.

Here’s to us, and bugger plutocracy!

May 5, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception | , , , | Leave a comment

YouTube CEO announces “misinformation research and initiatives” partnership with Latino rights group

By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | May 4, 2022

YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki has revealed that the platform will be partnering with the largest national Latino civil rights and advocacy organization in the United States, UnidosUS, on “misinformation research and initiatives.”

While Wojcicki didn’t reveal any further details of this partnership, she reiterated that YouTube is “working every day to fight misinformation.”

Wojcicki previously described tackling misinformation as one of her top priorities and YouTube has deleted more than a million videos for containing what it deems to be “COVID misinformation.”

UnidosUS President and CEO Janet Murguía echoed Wojcicki’s enthusiasm for targeting online misinformation in a tweet about the partnership.

“Eager as well to move forward on the key issue of addressing disinfo & misinformation in English & Spanish,” Murguía tweeted.

Murguía added that she’s united with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus (CHC) on UnidosUS’s efforts.

Wojcicki met with members of the CHC last week to discuss Spanish-language misinformation. After the meeting, the CHC said that addressing Spanish-language “dis/misinformation” is an “urgent priority.”

Although the specifics of YouTube and UnidosUS’s partnership have yet to be disclosed, UnidosUS has previously pressured Big Tech platforms to “address” misinformation.

Last October, the group cut ties with Facebook after former employee Frances Haugen’s shared internal documents that suggested the tech giant was aware of the platform having a negative impact on some users.

“We have called attention repeatedly to concerns about the negative impact that the proliferation of hate and misinformation on the platform has had on the Latino community,” Murguía stated at the time. “We know now that Facebook’s failure to adequately address those concerns was deliberate and resulted in even greater levels of hate and misinformation on the site.”

Last December, Murguía lamented that Congress has never held a hearing dedicated to Facebook’s “failure to address Spanish-language misinformation” and demanded that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg “tell Congress why Facebook perpetuates Spanish-language misinformation.”

Related: 🛡 How the term “misinformation” was weaponized as an online censorship tool amid the coronavirus pandemic

May 4, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite | | Leave a comment

PBS agitates to have Tucker Carlson taken off the air

By Russell Cook | American Thinker | May 4, 2022

The taxpayer-funded national network PBS is pushing for less viewpoint diversity, no doubt intended to accelerate the growing push for Tucker and Fox News to be taken off the air. From the PBS Newshour, May 2, 2022: “Tucker Carlson’s influence and his increasingly extreme views” (Amna Nawaz interviews New York Times’ Nick Confessore, who wrote the 4/30 “How Tucker Carlson Stoked White Fear to Conquer Cable“).

Excerpts (emphases added):

Nick Confessore: … He’s the highest rated cable show host in history. And it’s also the most racist show in history. … Every night, that show teaches fear and loathing. He may claim to be a person who opposes racism and prejudice, but what the show tells you every night is to be afraid, to be afraid of people who are in the street asking for police officers to not shoot Black people, be afraid of Afghan refugees who helped us in the war who are coming over here now, to be afraid of Dr. Fauci, and to be afraid of immigration in general, which he posits is part of a cabal, a plot to destroy Western civilization … it’s not just the anti-white racism kind of rhetoric on the show. He’s literally taking ideas that began on the very far right, on arcane corners of the Internet, on neo-Nazi sites …

… Amna Nawaz: Nick, he’s also aggressively defended January 6 insurrectionists and played down how violent that day actually was. … he’s very much in line with the Republican Party and their message. What did your reporting find about that relationship between the GOP and Tucker Carlson?

Nick Confessore: Look, I would say he is the high priest of Trumpism.

“Amy Walter and Annie Linskey on primary election season, Tucker Carlson’s role in the GOP”

Excerpts:

Judy Woodruff: … Amy, let’s start with what we just heard Amna talking to Nick Confessore about … Clarify for us, what is Tucker Carlson’s role in the Republican Party, in American politics?

Amy Walter: … Nick Confessore put it really well when he said that he’s filling the void that had been left by Donald Trump‘s voice being off of social media … He’s also being talked about as a potential 2024 candidate for president. And that’s not idle discussion. I think his name will be very seriously floated, and we may see more to come of a Tucker Carlson trial balloon in 2024.

… Judy Woodruff: And, Annie, what — the darker side of this, which we heard in that conversation, about race… and about the role of the threat that many white Americans feel, what does that say about our politics right now?

Annie Linskey: … I think that was one of the most stunning takeaways, for me at least, from the New York Times reporting, which was just so incredible, is just the extent to which they really documented the ways in which Carlson is normalizing discussions of race that I think would not be considered — are not considered appropriate in many parts of the country. … But Carlson’s show is moving through the window to where they’re becoming more appropriate. And I think that’s what many groups on the left worry about. And I think that is what The Times is reporting is kind of showing us, really the danger that Tucker Carlson and his show presents, is making it more OK to have those kinds of grievances voiced out loud…

According to the PBS NewsHour and the NYT, neither of which seems to have people who’ve watched Tucker’s show at any depth, Tucker espouses Bull Connor–style racism and enables people like you and me to freely advocate talk that escalates toward genocide. His show should therefore be silenced, he should be jailed for insurrectionist incitement before he announces his presidential run, and you and I need to be leery of saying anything against… well, anything. Obey.

May 4, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , | Leave a comment

UK intensifies crackdown against Russian media

Samizdat | May 4, 2022

The UK is forcing social media, internet service providers and app stores to block content from state-sponsored Russian media outlets – RT and Sputnik news agency. “For too long RT and Sputnik have churned out dangerous nonsense dressed up as serious news to justify Putin’s invasion of Ukraine,” Tech and Digital Economy Minister Chris Philp said on Wednesday.

“These outlets have already been booted off the airwaves in Britain and we’ve barred anyone from doing business with them. Now we’ve moved to pull the plug on their websites, social media accounts and apps to further stop the spread of their lies.”

In March, Britain’s media regulator, Ofcom, revoked RT’s broadcasting license. The EU decided to ban RT from broadcasting the same month. RT Deputy Editor-in-Chief Anna Belkina said at the time that Ofcom revoked the license for “purely political reasons tied directly to the situation in Ukraine.” She said that the regulator “falsely judged RT to not be ‘fit and proper’ and in doing so robbed the UK public of access to information.”

The UK also blacklisted the All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company (VGTRK), which operates Russia-1 and Russia-24 TV channels, among others. The UK government’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) accused the broadcaster of playing “a key role in justifying Putin’s aggression against Ukraine.”

Sanctions were also imposed on InfoRos and the SouthFront news websites. The FCDO accused them of spreading “destabilizing disinformation.”

May 4, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Our Digital Panopticon

The CDC has been using phone tracking data to monitor schools and churches. The CIA has also been spying on Americans, with no judicial oversight and without congressional approval.

By Aaron Kheriaty, MD | Human Flourishing | May 4, 2022

Yesterday, Vice broke the story that during the previous two years, as the headline announced, “The CDC tracked Millions of Phones to See If Americans Followed COVID Lockdown Orders.” According to documents obtained by Motherboard, the CDC used phone location data to monitor schools and churches, and wanted to use the data for applications beyond covid: “The documents also show that although the CDC used COVID-19 as a reason to buy access to the data more quickly, it intended to use it for more-general CDC purposes.” The recovered CDC documents, dating from 2021, state that the data “has been critical for ongoing response efforts, such as hourly monitoring of activity in curfew zones or detailed counts of visits to participating pharmacies for vaccine monitoring.”

The documents contain a long list of what the CDC describes as 21 different “potential CDC use cases for data.” These include, among others, monitoring curfews, neighbor-to-neighbor visits, visits to churches and other places of worship, school visits, and “examination of the effectiveness of public policy on [the] Navajo Nation.” Other use cases mentioned in the documents include public health issues beyond covid, such as “research points of interest for physical activity and chronic disease prevention such as visits to parks, gyms, or weight management businesses” as well as “exposure to certain building types, urban areas, and violence.”

Although the data the CDC purchased from the controversial broker, SafeGraph, was aggregated and designed to show trends, “researchers have repeatedly raised concerns with how location data can be deanonymized and used to track specific people.” Researchers have repeatedly demonstrated that that unmasking specific users from these aggregated human mobility datasets is possible. One research team studied fifteen months of human mobility data for one and a half million individuals and published their results in Nature: Scientific Reports: “In a dataset where the location of an individual is specified hourly and with a spatial resolution equal to that given by the [mobile phone] carrier’s antennas, four spatio-temporal points are enough to uniquely identify 95% of the individuals.” They coarsened the special and temporal data and still found “even coarse datasets provide little anonymity.”

“SafeGraph offers visitor data at the Census Block Group level that allows for extremely accurate insights related to age, gender, race, citizenship status, income, and more,” one of the CDC documents reads. Due to its questionable practices, SafeGraph was banned from the Google Play Store in June 2021, which meant that meant that any app developers using SafeGraph’s code had to remove it from their apps. The company includes among its investors the former head of Saudi intelligence. This is where the CDC went to get its tracking data, paying SafeGraph $420,000 for access to one year of data.

Evidence also emerged recently that the CIA, like Israel and Canada, has been similarly using unauthorized digital surveillance to spy on Americans. After supporting vaccine mandates in 2021, the ACLU finally took an interest again in civil liberties in 2022. They expressed alarm when newly declassified documents revealed that the CIA has been secretly conducting massive surveillance programs that capture Americans’ private information.

Like the Israeli spy agency Shin Bet, our federal intelligence agency was spying not on suspected terrorists but on ordinary Americans, with no judicial oversight and without congressional approval, as the ACLU noted: “This surveillance is done without any court approval, and with few, if any, safeguards imposed by Congress to protect our civil liberties.” They concluded: “These reports raise serious questions about what information of ours the CIA is vacuuming up in bulk and how the agency exploits that information to spy on Americans. This invasion of our privacy must stop.” Though ACLU arrived a bit late to the party, as the old saw has it, better late than never.

U.S. Senators Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, both Democrats and members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, called for declassification of relevant CIA documents. In a letter of April 13, 2021 which they made public, the two senators expressed concern that the CIA program was “entirely outside the statutory framework that Congress and the public believe govern this collection [of data], and without any of the judicial, congressional or even executive branch oversight that comes from [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act—FISA] collection.” Despite Congress’s clear intent, with the support of the American people, to limit warrantless collection of Americans’ private records, the senators warn, “these documents reveal serious problems associated with warrantless backdoor searches of Americans, the same issue that has generated bipartisan concern in the FISA context.”

There is a broader legal context for these extra-legal developments in mass surveillance of civilian populations. Since the war on terror began, Western nations have legislatively scaled up their increasingly intrusive networks of mass surveillance (often referred to with the euphemism “bulk collection”). The last decade has seen such measures passed in the U.K., France, Australia, India, Sweden, and other countries—not to mention the AI and facial- and gate-recognition enabled surveillance in China, technology that Xi is already exporting to eager rogue regimes around the globe.

May 4, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception | , , , | Leave a comment

Elon Musk responds to Mike Huckabee’s request for Twitter to remove online anonymity

By Ken Macon | Reclaim The Net | May 3, 2022

Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee has asked Elon Musk to remove online anonymity if his Twitter bid becomes successful, sparking concern from privacy advocates about how Musk will “authenticate all humans” and whether it will involve users handing over ID to use the platform.

“I hope @elonmusk will insist that all Twitter posters use their real names & not be keyboard cowards hiding behind silly little sophomoric screen names. Be man enough or woman enough (if you even know what that is) to stand by what you say! If you can’t own it don’t say it,” Huckabee tweeted.

Twitter has distinguished itself from other platforms like Facebook by allowing users to use pseudonyms. For that reason, people who need anonymity, like whistleblowers and dissidents in repressive regimes, people living in countries where anonymity is the difference between life and death, or even those who have opinions that go against the mainstream, have had a place where they can speak freely without fear of retribution.

In a new tweet, Musk replied to Huckabee indicating that there will be a balance when it comes to authenticating users vs preserving anonymity.

In a series of tweets, US Naval Academy’s associate professor of Cybersecurity Law Jeff Kosseff explained why Twitter should continue to allow anonymity.

“The Musk/Twitter press release states that the company will authenticate ‘all humans.’ I’m not sure what this means, but there is at least a chance that it could compromise users’ ability to be anonymous. In this thread I explain some concerns with this possibility,” Kosseff wrote.

“At least some high-profile commentators have interpreted it as banning anonymity/requiring ID verification. If that is the case, and it applies to “all humans” (rather than just making verification an option for everyone), then that could threaten some of the values that have helped to define and distinguish Twitter from platforms like Facebook that have always required real names.”

Twitter itself supported anonymity in a 2021 blog post, citing a PhD graduate who was able to express her frustration with the lack of job prospects without fearing her current employer would retaliate or losing potential employers.

“Being able to express vulnerability and the messiness of real life is important to Brooke, which is why she Tweets under a pseudonym,” the post read. “This is the handle where she can be herself, including talking frankly about the challenges of job searching, without worrying about turning off a potential employer.”

If Twitter were to collect ID on users, dictatorial governments would be able to pressure it to provide personally identifiable data of critics, journalists, and dissidents. That would contradict Musk’s stand of free speech stance.

May 3, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

PayPal seizes alternative media site’s money

Samizdat | May 3, 2022

Payment processor PayPal has frozen alternative media powerhouse Consortium News’ (CN) donation page without warning, confiscating the site’s $9,348.14 balance with no explanation beyond the claim that “an investigation and review” of the site’s “history” found “some potential risk associated with this account.”

CN was informed via email on Sunday that it couldn’t use PayPal anymore and told “we noticed activity in your account that’s inconsistent with our User Agreement and we [can] no longer offer you PayPal services.” Absent any further explanation beyond the desire to limit “potential risk exposure,” the site was informed that the nearly $10,000 sitting in its account would be effectively confiscated for “up to 180 days,” after which point, “if applicable, we’ll email you with information on how to withdraw any remaining money.”

The seizure came at a particularly damaging time for the reader-funded site, which had just begun a spring fundraising drive. Contacted by CN employees, a PayPal customer service representative confirmed on Sunday that no specific reason had been given by the “back office” for “permanently limiting” the account other than the aforementioned “potential risk.”

“I don’t see any existing case” of a complaint having been filed by “any agency, government or private, or any individual,” they told CN, promising to ask PayPal’s back office to explain its behavior to the website.

More ominously, the PayPal representative informed CN that “if there was a violation,” it was “possible” the $9,348.14 balance in its account would be kept by PayPal as “damages.” According to PayPal’s own documentation, violations include providing “false, inaccurate or misleading information” to PayPal, its customers, or “third parties.”

In a blog post discussing the suspension, CN editor-in-chief Joe Lauria suggested the site had been targeted due to its coverage of the conflict in Ukraine, noting that MintPress News – another well-known alt-media website with similar political views regarding the US and NATO’s foreign adventures – had its own account frozen by PayPal last week. PayPal’s definition of “violations,” Lauria implied, could easily be stretched to include the Orwellian crime du jour of “fake news,” an especially egregious offense during wartime.

Last week, former RT America correspondent Caleb Maupin also had his PayPal account frozen without warning or explanation, as did MintPress employees Alan MacLeod and Mnar Adley. Many on social media have speculated that the payment processor is deliberately targeting those with dissident views on the conflict in Ukraine and US foreign policy in general – “thoughtcrimes” hundreds of other prominent commentators have been deplatformed for in the past.

Consortium News was founded in 1995 by the late journalist Robert Parry, whose claims to fame included exposing the Iran-Contra scandal, in opposition to what the site’s own biography describes as “a crisis building in the US news media.”

Skewering the “pattern of groupthink on issue after issue, often ignoring important factual information because it didn’t fit with what all the Important People knew to be true.”

May 3, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | | Leave a comment

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