‘Hate crime entrepreneurs’ are cashing in on taxpayers’ money while they try to kill free speech in Britain
© Getty Images/Ray Tang/Anadolu Agency
By Joanna Williams | RT | December 15, 2020
Free speech is under assault in the UK from organisations who inflate the number of supposed ‘hate crimes’ and ‘incidents’ to fill their coffers with government cash and leave us with only police-sanctioned expression.
Make a bad joke on Twitter, give a speech at a Conservative party conference, or refer to someone using the wrong pronouns, and you could find the police knocking on your door.
Last year, the police in England and Wales recorded over 100,000 hate crimes, up eight percent on the previous year.
Hate crime is defined as “any criminal offence which is perceived, by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by hostility or prejudice towards someone based on a personal characteristic.” This can include verbal abuse, intimidation, threats, harassment, or bullying, directed at individuals or groups on account of their race, religion, sexuality, disability or transgender identity. In addition to this – and the cause of much of the door-knocking – police also investigate and report ‘hate incidents.’ A hate incident is not a criminal offence at all, but simply any speech or action that someone from a ‘protected’ group finds offensive.
As I investigate in ‘Policing Hate’, a new report published by the think tank Civitas, in England and Wales today we do not have free speech. We are only permitted to say things that do not offend others. And we do not have equality before the law; some groups of people are awarded additional legal protections to everyone else.
Now, the Law Commission, an independent body designed to review the law and make recommendations to the government, is proposing changes to hate crime legislation. Unfortunately, if enacted, these changes will go even further in curtailing free speech.
To understand why the Law Commission’s proposals are so censorious, we need to look to the influence of groups I’ve labelled ‘hate crime entrepreneurs’. These are charities and campaigning organisations, like Stonewall, Disability Rights UK, and StopHate UK, that support and advocate for people with disabilities, transgender people, and the lesbian, gay and bisexual community.
Many of these groups do a great job of representing their members’ interests. But when it comes to the law, this is a problem – they are neither neutral nor objective. In order to raise the money necessary to keep services functioning and pay staff wages, they need to present the people they support as disadvantaged and oppressed. Hate crime and hate incidents appear to provide one measure of just how victimised a particular group is.
But no matter how many statistics about hate incidents charities compile, we are no nearer to having an objective measure of the verbal abuse or hostility different groups experience. Offence is experienced subjectively. It is entirely possible for two people to hear the exact same joke, or listen to the exact same speech, and for one person to be offended while the other finds only humour or interest. One person might see themselves as a victim of a hate crime while their friend brushes off the same incident with a shrug of the shoulders.
Through their websites and campaigning, groups like Stonewall define hate crime and then encourage their members to see themselves as victims and to report crimes to the police. They then use these inflated statistics as part of their publicity material. Stonewall, for example, claims, “Two in five trans people have experienced a hate crime or incident because of their gender identity in the last 12 months.” This sounds shocking, but it may mean little more than they saw a transgender person being ‘misgendered’ on social media.
Furthermore, many groups that lobby on behalf of particular communities receive government funding for their work. For example, ‘Challenge It, Report It, Stop It’, a previous government hate crime action plan, reports on plans to support a range of groups such as the Jewish Museum, Show Racism the Red Card, Searchlight Educational Trust, and Faith Matters’ ‘Measuring Anti-Muslim Attacks’ (MAMA) project. As a result, these groups are effectively paid by the government to tell groups advising the government (civil servants or the Law Commission) what they want to hear.
Hate crime entrepreneurs have a vested interest in presenting the people they represent as victims. So it is hardly surprising that, when asked by the Law Commission, they argue for the law to be changed to define hate crime ever more broadly and to extend protections to yet more groups. What is surprising is that the Law Commission should draw upon evidence from such organisations in compiling recommendations for legal changes.
As the Law Commission’s paper makes clear, these campaigning organisations, along with academics, have had considerable influence in shaping both the analysis and recommendations that comprise the consultation. The role of hate crime entrepreneurs is evident in the paper’s acknowledgement that, “every submission to the inquiry containing data about local or national trends had agreed that: the situation is getting worse and that, due to large numbers of hate crimes not being reported to third-party services or the police, the true profile of hate crime in the UK is akin to an iceberg, with the majority hidden from view.”
If the legal limits on what we can say are to be determined by those with a financial incentive to be easily offended, then we will have even less free speech than we have at present. If hate crime entrepreneurs get their way, we will be left with nothing other than state-sanctioned, police-approved speech. It is vitally important that, before the Law Commission’s consultation closes on December 24, they hear from people who consider free speech to be the most important, foundational right we have.
Joanna Williams is the founder of the think tank Cieo. She is the author of Women vs Feminism, Why We All Need Liberating From the Gender Wars and is a regular columnist for Spiked. Follow her on Twitter @jowilliams293
The Supreme Court had one last chance to keep the American Republic together. It failed.
By Nebojsa Malic | RT | December 12, 2020
By washing its hands of responsibility to hear the Texas challenge to the 2020 presidential election, the nine Justices of the US Supreme Court may have sealed the country’s fate and made a kinetic civil war much more likely.
On Friday, the highest court in the land decided that Texas “lacked standing” to challenge the conduct of elections in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin under Article 3 of the US Constitution. Yet the article in question explicitly states that the SCOTUS will be the original jurisdiction in “Controversies between two or more States; – between a State and Citizens of another State; – between Citizens of different States,” among other things.
Contrary to media reports, Texas did not seek to “overturn” the election of Democrat Joe Biden. The motion filed by Attorney General Ken Paxton very explicitly called for the court to order the state legislatures thereof to seat the electors, as is their constitutional prerogative. Yes, those legislatures are majority Republican, but nothing guaranteed they would actually back President Donald Trump. After all, Georgia has a Republican governor and secretary of state, and both declared the election clean as a whistle, brushing off all evidence of alleged irregularities.
The very same media that brayed for the past four years about how the 2016 election was somehow tampered with by Russia – never offering any evidence for that – have declared the 2020 one pure as driven snow, the most secure in history, perfect in every way. In what was surely a massive coincidence, it even happened to exactly mirror the 2016 result, with Biden getting 306 electoral college votes to Trump’s 232.
The Silicon Valley tech giants, who in the run-up to the election censored and suppressed the story about Joe Biden’s family business deals overseas – that later turned out to be accurate – and slapped “disputed” warnings on Trump’s claims of electoral fraud the way they never did on ‘Russiagate,’ are now openly censoring any notion that 2020 wasn’t perfectly legal.
You’re now forbidden to say that. Soon you won’t be allowed to think it. In America, the country that invented the constitutional amendment guaranteeing the freedom of speech and thought!
Democrats and their allies in the media and Silicon Valley were eager to declare the Texas motion “seditious.” One influential House Democrat said any Republican backing the lawsuit was “engaging in rebellion against the United States” and should be stripped of their office under the 14th Amendment, originally written to justify disenfranchising the Confederates after 1865.
The irony here is that the Supreme Court could have actually prevented another civil war had it chosen to hear the Texas lawsuit, and then ruled against it on non-pretextual grounds. That, at least, would have sent the message to Trump supporters that the System works, and that they should continue to place their trust in it. There would always be the possibility of a rematch in the 2022 midterms or 2024.
Odds that the Nine would actually side with Texas and block the electors were always slim. The justices are notoriously allergic to rocking the boat – unless the case involves discovering ever-expanding constitutional protections discovered in “emanations and penumbras,” from abortion to Obamacare, that is. The court could have resorted to any of these mental gymnastics they have previously employed to legislate from the bench in an effort to reach some kind of Solomonic solution.
Instead, they literally abdicated their constitutional responsibility – and sent a message to 75 million Americans who voted for Trump that their votes don’t matter. Worse, that the System of government that supposedly made the US special, takes a back seat to the media, Big Tech and the consensus manufactured by people who tend to riot when they don’t get their way.
One can only guess as to how they reasoned. Perhaps that Republicans are law-abiding and won’t revolt – especially since much of the GOP has been more than willing to toss Trump overboard and return to its traditional role of the Democrats’ loyal opposition.
Maybe they remembered Jefferson’s words from the Declaration of Independence, that “all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” Yet right after those words, Jefferson laid out the case for why the Americans of 1776 should do just that.
The Biden-Harris administration, now but inevitable, has said it wants to cancel Jefferson as a racist and “change” America in the name of “equity.” Part of that agenda is abolishing the Senate filibuster and “packing” the Supreme Court by appointing additional justices, to cancel the supposed conservative majority. Perhaps the Nine, including the trio appointed by Trump, figured that this decision would save them from being diluted that way?
As someone who (barely) lived through a civil war, I know a thing or two about not just how they’re fought, but also how they break out and why. The past month has made me realize that the US has actually been fighting one already, probably since just before Trump was elected. In keeping with the times, it has been fought in the legacy and social media, in the courts, in the ballot-counting back rooms, and even on the streets, but hasn’t quite gone “kinetic,” to borrow the Pentagon parlance.
Civil wars begin when a faction decides it can no longer pursue its goals through the political, legal or economic means, as they have all been foreclosed to them. Can anyone argue, with a straight face, that no Trump supporters feel like this?
Whether rightly or wrongly, they believe the election was stolen and that the people who did so got away with it. How likely are they to trust any election going forward? About as much as they trust the media, the corporations, or the courts right now.
The Supreme Court had a chance to defuse this ticking time bomb. Instead, they channeled Pontius Pilate and said “not our problem.” That’s how Bosnia happened. I hope and pray that doesn’t happen here, but fear that it shall.
Nebojsa Malic is a Serbian-American journalist, blogger and translator, who wrote a regular column for Antiwar.com from 2000 to 2015, and is now senior writer at RT. Follow him on Twitter @NebojsaMalic
Stealth Green New Deal language being slipped into take-it-or-leave-it House spending package
AEA Urges Senate and House Leaders to Reject “Sense of Congress” Nonsense
By Anthony Watts | Watts Up With That? | December 14, 2020
WASHINGTON DC – The American Energy Alliance (AEA), the country’s premier pro-consumer, pro-taxpayer, and free-market energy organization, sounded the alarm today on a proposed Sense of Congress resolution that if adopted, could cause a major disruption of America’s energy system.
AEA has obtained a page from a discussion draft dated December 13 at 5:28 PM that appears to include a provision from the Green New Deal-like energy legislation, H.R. 4447, making it a “Sense of Congress” to call for 100% of power demand to come from “clean, renewable, or zero-emission” energy sources. Information around these terms, or how they would be implemented, appears to be left intentionally vague.
Putting Congress on record supporting 100% renewables is a major statement of policy and it should not be tacked onto a massive spending bill with no discussion or debate warns AEA. To make matters worse, this provision appears to give the Secretary of Energy a blank check authorization from Congress to impose 100% renewables.
Thomas Pyle, President of the American Energy Alliance, issued the following statement:
“While most Americans are eagerly looking for news about access to a COVID-19 vaccine, or juggling their expenses and schedules this holiday season, some unnamed Members of Congress are making a last-minute attempt to to sneak bad energy policy into a take-it-or-leave it spending bill before checking out for the year. It’s shameful and should be rejected outright.
“Members of the House of Representatives and the Senate are negotiating behind closed doors to jam a a stealth Green New Deal provision into a massive year-end bill to fund the entire federal government. Language uncovered in a “discussion draft” would give the Secretary of Energy the authority to effectively change the Department of Energy into the Department of Climate Policy.
A major policy shift and resulting disruption of America’s energy system should never occur as the result of a backroom deal to secure a legacy legislative item for an outgoing chairperson. It should be fully transparent, debatable, and subject to amendment. It’s no wonder that Americans are losing faith in their government institutions.”
Yes, Bill Gates Said That. Here’s the Proof.
By Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. | Children’s Health Defense | December 11, 2020
Some chiseler altered Bill Gates’ June 2020 TED Talk to edit out his revealing prediction that we will all soon need digital vaccine passports (slide 1). But after considerable effort, we tracked down the original video (slide 2).
Gates’ minions on cable and network news, his public broadcasting, social media and fact-checker toadies all now insist that Gates never said such things. They say he never intended to track and trace us with subdermal chips or injected tattoos.
They dismiss such talk as “conspiracy theories.”
Well, here it is from the horse’s mouth.
In 2019, according to a not-yet-purged Scientific American article, Gates commissioned the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to build an injectable quantum dot dye system to tattoo stored medical info beneath children’s skin. The tattoo was designed to be readable by an iPhone app.
Gates’ company, Microsoft, has patented a sinister technology that uses implanted chips with sensors that will monitor body and brain activity. It promises to reward compliant humans with crypto currency payments when they perform assigned activities.
Gates also invested approximately $20 million in MicroCHIPS, a company that makes chip-based devices, including birth-control implant chips with wireless on/off switches for remote-controlled drug-delivery by medical authorities.
In July 2019, months before the COVID pandemic, Gates bought 3.7M shares of Serco, a military contractor with U.S. and UK government contracts to track and trace pandemic infections and vaccine compliance.
To facilitate our transition to his surveillance society, Gates invested $1 billion in EarthNow, which promises to blanket the globe in 5G video surveillance satellites. EarthNow will launch 500 satellites allowing governments and large enterprises to live-stream monitor almost every “corner” of the Earth, providing instantaneous video feedback with one-second delay.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation also acquired 5.3 million shares of Crown Castle, which owns 5G spy antennas including more than 40,000 cell towers and 65,000 small cells.
Please make your own copy of these clips — as Gates’ power to disappear inconvenient facts is expanding every digital day.
Democratic National Committee’s ‘intervention’ to blame for chaos at 2020 Iowa caucuses: Audit reveals
RT | December 13, 2020
An audit commissioned by the Iowa Democratic Party has found that the national Democratic Party’s “intervention” in the process led to the delayed and questioned results at the very beginning of the 2020 presidential election.
The Iowa caucuses should have kicked off a frontrunner in the race for the party’s presidential nomination. Two of the candidates – South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders – were claiming they were winning the contest in a key state that often defines the eventual winner. However, inconsistencies in reporting results led many to question them, for example the Associated Press announced it did not have enough faith in the process to declare a winner at the time.
Back then, the eventual nominee, Joe Biden, did not get enough support in Iowa to even be among the top three candidates in the state, trailing behind Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren. However, Buttigieg later handed all the delegates he won in Iowa to the former vice president, giving him a much-needed advantage over Bernie Sanders in the national fight for the nomination.
The report, released on Saturday, found that the DNC was responsible for delaying a new app meant to report results quicker, and their demand for last-minute technology to be implemented into the process ultimately led to a chaotic event.
“Without the DNC’s intervention in that process, the IDP may have reported results in real-time as it intended,” said the report, which also cast blame on the state party for not creating a back-up plan for reporting results.
“As of the Friday before the caucuses, the IDP knew there were only approximately 400 temporary precinct chairs (out of more than 1,700) who had successfully downloaded and accessed the app,” the report said. “The IDP should have taken aggressive steps to scale up its telephone back-up reporting system at that time.”
The leadup to the caucuses was peppered with confusion between state party officials and the DNC. The new report claims development of an app by Shadow Inc. was supposed to begin in July and end in November, leaving two months for training and implementation. The DNC, however, expressed security concerns with the state party, halting negotiations for months, leading to a rushed development process. The app was eventually rolled out only weeks before the caucuses were set to begin.
Shadow Inc. earlier received thousands of dollars from the Buttigieg campaign for developing a separate app. It was also contracted by Joe Biden’s campaign in the past as well.
On election night, the state party found itself unprepared to take results by phone as many volunteers chose not to work with the buggy app. The DNC also made a last minute requirement that Shadow provide them with real-time results so they could double-check state numbers, something the report claims the company was not prepared for and led to a halt in releasing results to the public as discrepancies in numbers were found and the last-minute demand created confusion.
“Attempting to graft an entirely new software element onto the back-end reporting system at the proverbial eleventh hour is likely always going to be problematic, and it was ultimately the cause of a major problem on caucus night,” the report said.
The report found that eventually votes could be confirmed through a manual paper system and claimed results submitted through the app were ultimately “accurately reported.”
DNC officials put the blame of the chaos on state party representatives in the weeks following the caucus.
Critics have responded to the report’s lengthy findings by chalking it up to the DNC trying to control or even “cheat” the results.
“In 2016, the DNC’s top 5 officials were forced to resign when WikiLeaks published proof they systematically cheated to prevent Bernie from beating Hillary,” reporter Glenn Greenwald tweeted on Sunday, referring to emails from 2016 showing national party officials favoring a Clinton victory over Sanders, ultimately leading to multiple resignations.
“In the first caucus of 2020 (Iowa), they cheated again, with the same goal. They blamed the state Party but it was the DNC,” Greenwald added.
Pentagon searching for ‘vetted Official Twitter Partner’ to help it influence platform’s users
RT | December 11, 2020
The US Defense Department is looking to ramp up its real-time surveillance of social media and specifically seeking a contractor already trusted by Twitter to model and influence shifting public sentiment in real time.
The Pentagon is seeking a “small business” software developer that not only enjoys privileged status as a “vetted Official Twitter Partner” but is also capable of picking through the “entire Twitter historical archive for analysis” and monitoring conversations in more than 150 languages, according to a Thursday posting by the department’s Washington Headquarters Services.
The ideal Pentagon partner will be able to “ingest near-real-time social media feeds from Twitter and other platforms” while searching the data ‘firehose’ for multipart search terms, ideally in “most major languages” simultaneously. The program would have to be able to present the results of its real-time analysis “graphically in various formats,” including on “geospatial maps and over time horizons.”
From there, the Pentagon’s corporate colleague would be able to “compute and highlight trend analysis” as well as “sentiment analysis … based on shifting online attitudes.” Essentially, the Defense Department wants a computer program that can accurately ascertain the thoughts and emotions of the social media hive-mind – including tracking “public reactions and significant events as they spike” on any given platform – and alter them if the need arises.
The candidate would also have to be able to “distinguish between real authors and online bots which may be pushing disinformation” – though it’s not clear if the company has to be able to tell the Pentagon’s own bot army apart from garden-variety AI-powered accounts.
All of this information would be packaged into Excel spreadsheets and prioritized for government agencies in terms of what warrants “immediate attention” and what simply forms part of the background of current events.
The Pentagon already deploys multiple sophisticated tools to monitor and influence Twitter and other social media platforms. It was one of the earliest adopters of “sock puppet” software allowing a single individual to control numerous fake social media accounts, and has been working with software companies to measure and analyze “group dynamics” – supposedly to predict “cyber terrorism events” – on social platforms since at least 2012.
In August, the Pentagon inked a $12.2 million contract with Dataminr to perform services similar to those listed in Thursday’s posting. The collaboration was expected to last only three months, however, and was supposed to conclude by mid-November.
While the US military has tracked and infiltrated dissident groups for decades in ‘real life,’ its capabilities in both impersonating and monitoring human conversation online have exploded over the past decade as more of what is considered ‘war’ takes place in the minds of targeted populations. Using private contractors allows the government – technically bound by the First and Fourth Amendments forbidding it from impinging on Americans’ free speech or right of protection from unreasonable search and seizure – to ignore constitutional concerns, as it’s technically an independent corporation violating targets’ rights.
Texas Launches SCOTUS Bid to Save Trump, and Maybe Even the Republic
By Robert Bridge | Strategic Culture Foundation | December 11, 2020
In a dramatic and unprecedented turn of events amid the 2020 presidential election fiasco, the Lone Star State is leading the charge to overturn results in four swing states where multiple irregularities were alleged to have occurred in delivering the presidency to the Democrat Joe Biden. Nothing less than the survival of the Republic as we know it hangs in the balance.
President Donald Trump and 17 Republican-ruled states filed motions this week in support of the Texas’ ‘Hail Mary’ effort to get the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn results in four major swing states – Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – where alleged fraud and irregularities catapulted Biden into the White House. The legal challenge comes just days before the Electoral College is scheduled to formally pronounce on the outcome.
Trump’s legal team has experienced multiple setbacks in its efforts to present its case at the state level. Those failures were not wholly unexpected considering that three of the states being sued are Democrat-run; not exactly places where the scales of justice would tip in Trump’s favor. As for Georgia, Republican Governor Brian Kemp, proving his credentials in the RINO club (‘Republican In Name Only’) has impeded efforts for a recount every step of the way.
The charges being leveled against the states by Rudy Giuliani, the head of Trump’s legal team, are serious despite being almost totally ignored by the mainstream media. The suit accuses both local voting officials as well as Dominion Voting Systems of potential fraud and “severe irregularities.” Several IT experts testified that the voting systems were not only hooked up to the internet, but the votes were tallied at overseas points.
Giuliani outlined the grievances in Atlanta, Georgia, where an alleged water-pipe break, later determined to be a hoax, halted vote counting at a time when Trump’s lead over Biden was looking insurmountable.
“In the city of Atlanta, Republicans were not allowed to watch the absentee mail-in ballot process. Inspections completely cast aside. We have numerous double voters. We have numerous out-of-state voters. And we have specific evidence of intimidation and changes of votes.”
The lawsuit filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton this week presents a compelling argument, yet has attracted mockery and disdain from some legal experts who argue that no state has the right to interfere in the affairs i.e. conducting elections of another state. The Texas-led lawsuit, however, makes the fascinating counter-argument that those four states where fraud is alleged to have happened “threaten the liberty, not just of their own citizens, but of every citizen of the United States who casts a lawful ballot in that election.” In other words, by not holding fair and transparent elections, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have infringed upon the rights of the citizens of other states.
“States have a strong interest in ensuring that the votes of their own citizens are not diluted by the unconstitutional administration of elections in other States,” the amicus brief reads. “When non-legislative actors in other States encroach on the authority of the “Legislature thereof” in that State to administer a Presidential election, they threaten the liberty, not just of their own citizens, but of every citizen of the United States who casts a lawful ballot in that election—including the citizens of amici States.”
The legal motion went on to mention the unconstitutionality of the Supreme Courts in each state overriding the legislative branch by codifying mail-in ballots that were not properly managed. To support its claim it cited Anderson v. United States (1974), which ruled that every voter in a federal election “has a right under the Constitution to have his vote fairly counted, without its being distorted by fraudulently cast votes.”
Whether or not the filing on behalf of 17 states, as well as U.S. President Donald Trump ultimately succeeds or fails to be heard by the Supreme Court is not really the main point. What is significant is not only have so many Republican states joined together in defense of the populist leader, something that many people did not believe would happen, but it underscores the level of anger and frustration so many Americans are feeling over the outcome to this election of extreme consequence. Indeed, many believe the outcome of this presidential contest, given the strange winds now blowing through Capitol Hill, may actually mean the difference between the United States becoming more of a socialist country than a capitalist one.
With so much riding on the line, conservative Trump supporters are growing desperate, not only with the implications of a Biden-Harris presidency, but by the absolute lack of media coverage throughout the saga. And when there is media attention devoted to the legal challenges, it is an arrogant and condescending tone, as if fraud and corruption has suddenly become a new thing.
This is where not the media and the Big Tech social media platforms are playing with real fire. If enough Republican voters come around to the conclusion that Trump was not only cheated out of another term in office, but was never given a fair hearing to forward those grievances, then we may be heading for some very rough times in the land of the free. To lose in an election is one thing, but to lose under highly dubious terms while lacking both the legal and media methods of voicing those concerns, is a recipe for disaster.
By Wednesday, the general attorneys from Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and West Virginia have filed motions with the Supreme Court. Should the highest court in the land agree to hear the case, Texas senator Ted Cruz has agreed to argue on Trump’s behalf.
Not only would such a court case make for some epic television, it may very well save the Republic from another civil war.
Patriot Act Used By The FBI To Collect Internet Browsing Data, Contradicting Claims Made To Oversight
By Tim Cushing | TechDirt | December 8, 2020
The NSA shut down its bulk phone records collection — authorized under Section 215 — after it became apparent it wasn’t worth the effort. Reforms put in place by the USA Freedom Act prevented the agency from collecting it all and sorting it out later. Instead, it had to approach telcos with actual targeted requests and only haul away responsive records. The NSA somehow still managed to overcollect records, putting it in violation of the law. The NSA hinted the program had outlived its usefulness anyway, suggesting it had far better collections available under other authorities that it would rather not subject to greater scrutiny.
But this didn’t end the government’s bulk records collections. It just ended the phone metadata program. The NSA still collects other records in bulk, including banking records and, oddly, books checked out by library patrons. The broad authority of Section 215 could be read to allow the government collect other records, like email metadata and internet activity. Reasoning that people voluntarily create records of their internet use by using third-party services to surf the web, the government hinted it could sweep these up just as easily as it had swept up call records.
The government’s attempt to collect internet history under this authority ran into some friction earlier this year when the Senate voted to block this collection. Senator Ron Wyden directly asked the director of national intelligence (DNI) to inform the Senate whether or not agencies under its purview had gathered internet use records under this authority. He received this answer.
In a Nov. 6 letter to Mr. Wyden, John Ratcliffe, the intelligence director, wrote that Section 215 was not used to gather internet search terms, and that none of the 61 orders issued last year under that law by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court involved collection of “web browsing” records.
Wyden took this response to mean that implementing a ban on collection of internet history records could be put into place without negatively affecting any intelligence gathering activities. But when the New York Times pressed DNI John Ratcliffe on specifics, a new party inserted itself into the conversation: the DOJ. According to its response, the FBI had already done the thing the DNI had just told Sen. Wyden it hadn’t.
In fact, “one of those 61 orders resulted in the production of information that could be characterized as information regarding browsing,” Mr. Ratcliffe wrote in the second letter. Specifically, one order had approved collection of logs revealing which computers “in a specified foreign country” had visited “a single, identified U.S. web page.”
So, the FBI was collecting internet browsing records, albeit with an order that only targeted foreign users visiting one US web page. Still, this wasn’t what the DNI originally said to Sen. Wyden. This set Wyden off. Again. The supposedly honest answer he received in response to his questions wasn’t actually all that honest. As he pointed out in his statement, the belated admission raised questions about domestic surveillance and potential abuse of Section 215 authority to collect something the DNI said no one was collecting. And, if nothing changed, there was no guarantee the Intelligence Community wouldn’t talk itself into believing a collection of internet browsing data would be cool and legal.
“More generally,” Mr. Wyden continued, “the D.N.I. has provided no guarantee that the government wouldn’t use the Patriot Act to intentionally collect Americans’ web browsing information in the future, which is why Congress must pass the warrant requirement that has already received support from a bipartisan majority in the Senate.”
Previous attempts to erect a warrant requirement for the collection of internet data or search histories have failed to reach the president’s desk. This latest admission has refueled the fire to protect Americans (or visitors to American websites) from government overreach. Even if such a collection targets only foreign internet users, there’s no guarantee it won’t sweep up US citizens — like pretty much every other bulk collection has.
At this point, everything is up in the air. There’s a new president headed into office who might be more receptive to reform efforts, but he’s also the man who served the Obama Administration — one that wasn’t all that concerned about domestic surveillance until it became impossible to ignore the documents leaked by Ed Snowden. Even then, its response was tepid at best and it still allowed IC surveillance business to continue pretty much uninterrupted — something it used to justify extrajudicial killings based on little more than metadata. This needs to be fixed, but surveillance reform advocates still lack majority support. And the guy [potentially] headed to the White House has never seemed all that concerned about surveillance abuses.
“Free Speech Is Being Weaponized”: Columbia Dean and New Yorker Writer Calls For More Censorship
By Jonathan Turley | December 11, 2020
We have been discussing how reporters, editors, commentators, and academics have embraced rising calls for censorship and speech controls, including President-elect Joe Biden and key advisers. This includes academics rejecting the very concept of objectivity in journalism in favor of open advocacy. Now, Columbia Journalism Dean and New Yorker writer Steve Coll has denounced how the First Amendment right to freedom of speech was being “weaponized” to protect disinformation. That’s right. A journalism dean and writer declaring that the problem is that free speech itself is allowing too much freedom on the Internet and other forums.
Coll’s comments came in a discussion on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” when he was asked by Kasie Hunt about the need for Big Tech to censor speech. Rather than defend the right of people to express themselves freely, Coll lashed out at companies like Facebook as “motivated, as all companies are, to make money” though at the same time is “acting like a public square.” He decried the failure to have more expansive regulation of free speech and showed little concern or merit for arguments from free speech advocates. Like Harvard academics who recently declared “China was right” about censorship, Coll just assumed that it was self-evident that too much free speech is a bad thing and that these companies need to protect people from harmful or false ideas.
“And yes, Facebook has moved somewhat. They’ve had a better election in 2020 than they did in 2016. They’ve learned to put some brakes on, you know, here and there, but you can’t get away from the fact that their mission is to connect everybody in the world. That’s what motivates Mark Zuckerberg and it’s his passion and he profoundly believes in free speech.”
What is most maddening is that Coll spoke on behalf of journalists in calling for less freedom:
“Those of us in journalism have to come to terms with the fact that free speech, a principle that we hold sacred, is being weaponized against the principle of journalism and what do we do about that,. As reporters, we kind of march into this war with our facts nobly shouldered as if they were going to win the day and what we’re seeing that is because of the scale of this alternative reality that you’ve been talking about, our facts, our principles, our scientific method–it isn’t enough. So what do we do?”
That used to be an easy question. What you do is allow free speech to combat bad speech. What you do is support the right of citizens and journalists to publish without censorship. What you do is to embrace the freedom of expression while reinforcing the need to use that freedom to counter disinformation. Instead, Coll is joining the forces seeking to silence or curtail the speech of others. You do not support free speech by calling for its curtailment. For free speech advocates, it is as compelling as saying that we needed to “save” villages by destroying them in Vietnam. Worse yet, he is doing it in the names of “good journalism.”
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The Tragic Consequences of believing Anti-Science
The Naked Emperor’s Newsletter | January 17, 2023
I try not to write about anyone who has died because if it was my family member I would not want to read any speculations about their death. However, in this case I feel that justice has not been given a chance and therefore it needs highlighting. ... continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Iran War Confusion & Mixed Messaging /Lt Col Daniel Davis
- Israel threatens Gaza flotilla activists with death after abduction
- Met refuses to probe British nationals accused of war crimes in Gaza
- Hezbollah denies activity in Syria amid persistent and false claims
- Melkite bishops concerned over Israeli demolitions in South Lebanon
- Israel’s Obliteration Ecocide from Gaza to Lebanon and Beyond
- UAE deports tens of thousands of Pakistanis, seizes their savings amid war on Iran: Report
- Wheels Down in Tbilisi: Was a Routine U.S. Military Stopover a Deliberate Signal to Iran?
- Trump’s second strike on Iran would be suicidal. But that’s not the reason why he won’t go ahead with it
- Palantir touts record expansion and ‘battlefield’ AI value
- If Americans Knew
- An All-American Retort to Israel’s Invasion of Lebanon
- How Dr. Adam Hamawy’s experience as a surgeon in Gaza inspired him to run for Congress
- Under Trump, Green Card Seekers Face New Scrutiny for Views on Israel
- With World Distracted by War, Extremist Settlers Intensify Attacks in West Bank
- Israel’s brutality toward Gaza flotilla activists – 3 articles
- “Spitting and humiliation are daily. People are afraid to walk in Jerusalem with Christian symbols.”
- How the US-Israel Relationship Weakens America and Harms the World
- 1 in 5 amputees in Gaza is a child, UN warns amid prosthetic care crisis
- 6,000 Gazans lack prosthetic and/or rehabilitation care – Daily Update
- As in Gaza, Israel is targeting rescue workers in South Lebanon, killing more than 100 since March
- No Tricks Zone
- New Study: Declining Trends In 1980-2023 Tropical Cyclone Frequency, Accumulated Energy
- 46 IPCC Scientists Break Rank, Publicly Challenge Long-Standing Dogmatic Climate Claims
- Another Study Links Warming To Cloud Forcing, Shortwave Radiation, Natural Atmospheric Circulation
- Wind Energy Is Toxic, Hazardous To Human Health, Scientific Review Shows
- Oversupply Of Volatile Solar Energy Leads To Record NEGATIVE Prices!
- New Study: Extreme Heat Records, Heatwaves, Extreme Cold Records Declining Across US Since 1899
- It’s The Cold, Stupid! Cold 20 Times More Lethal Than Heat, Multiple Studies Show
- European Institute For Climate And Energy: “Climate Debate is Seldom About Science”
- New Study: The Climate May Be 5 Times More Sensitive To Solar Forcing Than Commonly Assumed
- EV Industry Reached $70 Billion In Losses In 2024 Due To Delusional Green Ideologies
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