Tucker Carlson accused the NSA of spying on his personal communications when he tried to schedule an interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin. I can corroborate his story.
On March 10, Fox News host Tucker Carlson told the Full Send podcast that the US government “broke into [his] text messages” in the summer of 2021, just months before the launch of Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Carlson claimed the spying occurred as he was planning a trip to Russia, where he hoped to record a conversation with the country’s president. According to Carlson, he learned of the surveillance after a US government source arranged to meet him in Washington and proceeded to share information with him that only someone with access to his private, personal text messages could have known.
“This person’s like… ‘Are you planning a trip to go see Putin?’ This was the summer before the war started. And I was like, ‘how would you know that? I haven’t told anybody,’” Carlson recalled.
“I was intimidated,” he added. “I’m embarrassed to admit, but I was completely freaked out by it.”
Carlson’s interview with Full Send did not represent the first time he spoke publicly about the NSA’s surveillance of his private communications. On June 28, 2021, Carlson opened his primetime Fox News show with a monologue accusing the Biden Administration of spying on his team, disclosing that an NSA whistleblower had contacted him and “repeated back to us information about a story that we are working on that could have only come directly from my texts and emails.” At the time, he did not disclose specific details about the story in question.
“The NSA captured that information without our knowledge, and did it for political reasons,” the Tucker Carlson Tonight host declared, asserting his source informed him that the Biden Administration planned to “leak” his private texts “in an attempt to take this show off the air.”
Carlson’s colleagues at Fox proceeded to studiously ignore his allegations, while other mainstream news outlets appeared to mock the host for going public with the information. When anonymous NSA officials announced that an internal agency review found “no evidence” to support Carlson’s claims the following month, the corporate press took them at their word.
Amidst the NSA’s denials, however, a report surfaced that seemed to directly support Carlson’s narrative. On July 7, an Axios “scoop” cited unnamed US officials accusing the Fox host of “talking to U.S.-based Kremlin intermediaries about setting up an interview with Vladimir Putin shortly before [he] accused the National Security Agency of spying on him.”
Though the government officials who planted that story remain anonymous, I can confirm the identity of at least one of the “US-based Kremlin intermediaries” in question.
It was me. They lied.
In April 2021, Tucker Carlson told me that he was trying to book an interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin, but that he kept running into roadblocks. Though Tucker knew I previously worked as an anchor and correspondent for the Russian government-funded news channel RT America in Washington DC, he was not asking for my assistance. In fact, I do not believe he even considered that I could help him book the interview in any way.
Regardless, I attempted to assist Tucker’s pursuit of the interview through a senior Russian government contact. Ironically, the contact had not been established through my time at RT America, but my work as a correspondent for The Grayzone, the online outlet that has employed me since early 2019. The Grayzone is fully independent and not connected to Russia or any other government, financially or otherwise.
In July 2019, I traveled to Caracas, Venezuela, to cover a high-level diplomatic meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement. While in Caracas, I met Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister, Sergey Ryabkov and interviewed him for The Grayzone’s YouTube channel. (Many of the predictions Ryabkov made, including that the US dollar would soon lose its significance in the global economy, are currently playing out as a direct result of US and European sanctions levied in response to the Ukraine war).
Having found his insights on international relations extremely relevant to my coverage of the emerging multi-polar world, I maintained occasional contact with Ryabkov over email in the months following our discussion. When Tucker told me that he was hoping to arrange an interview with Putin, I offered to connect him with Ryabkov.
I had met Tucker in July 2018, when we both covered President Trump’s highly anticipated summit with his Russian counterpart in Helsinki, Finland. Though Tucker had been dispatched to the Finnish capital for an interview with Trump, I personally always believed that a far more interesting conversation would have resulted from an exchange between him and Putin (who was instead left to have a predictably hostile, largely forgettable encounter with Chris Wallace, then of Fox, now at CNN).
When Tucker expressed his desire to interview Putin three years later, I volunteered to put him in contact with Ryabkov by email so they could discuss his plan to visit Russia. I expected to write a basic introductory email, receive a standard “thank you” from both parties, and let Tucker’s team manage communication from there.
Both Tucker and Ryabkov replied to my initial message within hours. Yet their digital exchange took an inexplicable turn.
On the evening of April 16, 2021, I sent a brief email introducing Ryabkov to Tucker. Tucker responded within minutes, informing Ryabkov that he planned to record shows in Russia in the summer of that year. Just over five hours later, Ryabkov replied that he would be happy to talk with Tucker and proposed time slots for a phone call the following week.
I assumed my role was done. Yet on April 20, I received a follow-up email from Ryabkov.
“Strangely, I can not send my message of interest to talk to Mr.Carlson directly to him. I tried it twice with no success,” the diplomat informed me, before asking me to relay his message.
At the time, I did not think much of the issue. I thought that perhaps Tucker’s email service, which was different than mine, had sent the note to spam, or that I had mistyped an email address. In retrospect, however, I should have been suspicious. Both Tucker and Ryabkov had received and replied to my initial message, meaning their respective addresses were typed correctly in the thread. And Ryabkov’s email to Tucker wasn’t going to spam – it was failing to deliver altogether.
The digital communication error between Ryabkov and Tucker was not a one-off event. Weeks later, on May 25, I received a message from Ryabkov’s team explaining that Tucker had failed to reply to a yet another email. They kindly requested I ask Tucker if he had received their message. Once again, he had not.
Roughly one month later, Tucker informed me that a source inside the NSA had contacted him to warn that the US government had caught wind of his effort to interview Putin by spying on his electronic communications. Tucker went public with the story on June 28. As summarized above, virtually every single mainstream reporter, including those at Fox, trusted the denials of the US government rather than rally behind one of their own.
There are three points I must emphasize here. One: it is completely normal and routine for journalists to maintain contact with high-level government sources, domestic or otherwise. Two: it is also normal and routine for journalists to share those connections with trusted colleagues and friends. Three: at the time, I genuinely believed that a Tucker-Putin interview would have moved us closer to peace. Instead, we are currently positioned on the brink of nuclear war.
Oh, and the obligatory fourth point: I am absolutely not a Kremlin operative or “intermediary.” I have no relationship with the Kremlin, and I have not accepted financial support from any state or state-sponsored organization since my departure from RT America in December 2018. Even then, my “relationship” with the Russian government was completely transparent. Would anyone suggest that US or British citizens employed by Al Jazeera, for example, are representatives of the Emir of Qatar? I worked for RT America because they gave me an opportunity to cover the actions of my own country at home and abroad from a perspective that domestic, corporate-run networks would have never allowed. When that reality changed (paradoxically thanks to US, not Russian, government interference), I walked out — but that’s a story for another day.
In truth, even my “Russian” forename is simply a product of the fact that my Indian-American father and American mother could not agree on anything else to call me. So why did US government sources characterize me as a Kremlin intermediary? Do they have any evidence to formally accuse me of being such? Or did they simply dump that information on an unquestioning Axios reporter without even offering them my name?
The answer to the second question is of course, no. The answer to the third: probably. As for the first? Clues can be found in the more recent effort to tarnish Tucker’s reputation through legal machinations and the selective leaking of his private text messages.
Target: Tucker
In March 2021, Dominion Voting Systems filed a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News on the basis that it incurred financial damages as a result of the network’s coverage of the 2020 Presidential Election. Though Tucker is not named in the suit, last year a judge allowed Dominion to seize the Fox host’s private text messages. Within months, the contents of Carlson’s personal texts had made their way to the pages of the Washington Post.
Curiously, coverage of Carlson’s private messages has so far focused on a single comment he made about former President Trump — not Dominion Voting Systems. Earlier this month, mainstream outlets seized on a January 2021 text the Fox host sent one of his producers in which he claimed to “passionately” hate the former president. The story represented an obvious attempt to drive a wedge between Carlson and Trump just before the the 2024 presidential election season officially heats up.
Whether such tactics will succeed in undermining Carlson and Trump’s relationship is a question only they can answer. It is worth noting, however, that Carlson consistently attempted to reorient Trump toward his “America First” agenda throughout the latter’s time in the White House, using his show to offer principled critiques of the former president’s decision to bomb Syria, escalate regime change operations against Venezuela, and assassinate Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani. In June of 2019, Carlson personally persuaded Trump to reject the advice of his national security team and elect not to retaliate against Iran over its decision to shoot down a US drone that had violated its sovereign airspace. The Fox host’s actions not only averted a deadly US military strike on Iran, but a potential regional war.
For anyone who values peace and diplomatic engagement over military conflict, Carlson’s influence over Trump — and the US public, for that matter — must be regarded as positive. Perhaps that is why the press, including his colleagues at Fox, have refused to publicly denounce the US government’s selective targeting of Tucker. After all, aside from a handful of Fox News hosts who have attempted to cop his anti-interventionist style, the mainstream media are in virtual lockstep when it comes to inciting continued US involvement in the Ukraine conflict.
Tucker is by far the most popular US media figure to consistently denounce Washington’s escalations in the Ukraine battle, articulate the looming reality of World War III, and sound the alarm over the threat of global nuclear war. As if such positions did not threaten powerful forces enough already, last December he even dedicated a lengthy show open to investigating the murder of President John F. Kennedy, revealing a source with “direct knowledge” of classified information told him the CIA did in fact have a hand in the assassination.
Though the campaign to cancel Tucker is largely framed in terms of the culture wars and partisan debate over the events of January 6, it is substantially driven by neoconservative interventionists seeking to muzzle the pro-war Uniparty’s single greatest foe. If the Dominion lawsuit succeeds in bankrupting Fox, or even casting Tucker as the network’s scapegoat, it will have succeeded in punishing the media’s pre-eminent opponent of the escalating Ukraine proxy war.
Which brings us back to the question: why did US government sources characterize me as a “Kremlin intermediary” while feeding a “journalist” information about Tucker’s private texts back in July 2021? The answer is simple: US officials weaponized my mere existence, through innuendo, in order to suggest Tucker was involved with Kremlin agents. By undermining his credibility, they aimed to invalidate his character and by extension, his anti-war positions.
Beyond the financial threat it poses to Fox, the Dominion suit similarly aims to discredit Tucker. And politics aside, it poses a major threat to the First Amendment.
What does the fact that a corporation can sue a media organization over critical coverage, allege financial damage, and gain access to a journalist’s private texts say about a society that claims to value a free press? If Dominion is able to target a company as powerful as Fox in such a manner, what does that mean for those of us who challenge corporate and government interests in independent media? Why aren’t more journalists asking these questions?
And finally, if the Fox-obsessed Beltway press corps is truly so concerned with holding journalists accountable for “knowingly lying” to the public, there is no shortage of willful deceptions to reckon with. After all, this week marks 20 years since the launch of the US military campaign in Iraq, a catastrophic war that was directly enabled by lies its greatest cheerleaders in the press still repeat to this day.
Anya Parampil is a journalist based in Washington, DC. She has produced and reported several documentaries, including on-the-ground reports from the Korean peninsula, Palestine, Venezuela, and Honduras.
March 22, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Russophobia, Timeless or most popular | CIA, NSA, United States |
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A mother of two in New Jersey has filed a lawsuit over an alleged smear campaign spearheaded by a military officer after she made a post on Facebook opposing a “polysexual” poster at her seven-year-old daughter’s school.
The lawsuit, which the Thomas More Society filed on behalf of Angela Reading, alleges that North Hanover Township’s police chief together with military personnel at the Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst demanded the removal of her Facebook post, portrayed her as a “security threat” and reported her to several law enforcement agencies in an attempt to silence her.
We obtained a copy of the lawsuit for you here.
“Mrs. Reading’s November 22, 2022, Facebook post was made as a private citizen from her personal social media account to a discussion group about New Jersey schools,” Thomas More Society’s Special Counsel Christopher Ferrara explained.
“In it, she shared how she had attended an elementary school ‘math night’ the previous evening with her seven-year-old daughter, who after reading LGBT-affirming posters in the school’s entry, asked her mother what ‘polysexual’ meant. Mrs. Reading merely questioned why elementary children were being invited to research topics of sexuality, noting that it is not in the state educational standards nor the board of education approved curriculum. Mrs. Reading did not name names or schools, and invited respectful debate.”
Reading’s post was removed and was followed by a campaign spearheaded by US Army Reserve Major Christopher Schilling. The post was forwarded to the New Jersey State Police and the New Jersey Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness.
“This intention to trigger a preposterous widespread law enforcement investigation and state of alarm over Mrs. Reading’s protected speech as if it were an ‘incident’ of potential or even actual criminality, is a violation of Mrs. Reading’s civil rights,” Ferrara said.
According to the lawsuit, the situation escalated because law enforcement officers, members of the military, and the Township abused the power of their offices to not only get Reading’s post censored but also to get the public furious towards her.
“The defendants acted singularly and in conspiracy with one another to deprive and chill the exercise of Mrs. Reading’s rights, including rights protected by the United States and New Jersey constitutions, as well as other laws,” the lawsuit states.
Ferrara added that the defendant’s actions resulted in Reading and her family being “demonized, harassed, traumatized, and excoriated throughout the community, forced to resign their school board positions, and having been made unwelcome, now feel they must seek costly alternative education for their children. All of this is a direct result of a conspiracy to punish a mother who did not welcome a public school’s attempt to force a woke ideology upon her own, and other, young children – and to have the audacity to exercise her right of free speech to do so in a peaceful manner in an appropriate forum.”
March 22, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | United States |
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The New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA) civil rights group has announced that a federal judge has rejected a motion to dismiss a First Amendment lawsuit, Missouri v. Biden, where the government is accused of involvement in censorship.
“The Court finds that the complaint alleges significant encouragement and coercion that converts the otherwise private conduct of censorship on social media platforms into state action, and is unpersuaded by defendants’ arguments to the contrary,” the decision reads.
We obtained a copy of the decision for you here.
The Biden White House thus failed to stop the legal challenge which alleges collusion between the government and Big Tech to suppress information they disapproved of concerning the pandemic and US elections.
The decision not to accept the motion was made in the US District Court for the Western District of Louisiana by Judge Terry A. Doughty, a statement from the non-profit said.
The NCLA explained that it represented doctors Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, Aaron Kheriaty, as well as Jill Hines, and that the suit lifted the lid on the censorship regime that the organization says a number of federal agencies had put in place.
The number in question is “at least” 11 agencies and sub-agencies (including the CDC and the Department of Homeland Security, DHS), the NCLA said, and backed this claim up by information that came out during the discovery process.
Government officials are accused of participating in a lawless censorship campaign that used a wide variety of tools to get social media companies to toe the line, from collusion and coordination, to coercion.
These serious claims laid out in the lawsuit, which Judge Doughty just allowed to proceed, further allege that the result was the censoring, blacklisting and shadow-banning of the clients represented by the NCLA, as well as other methods of silencing them, such as deliberately downranking their content, throttling, etc.
Explaining the decision to deny the motion to dismiss, the judge said that, based on past censorship, the threat of future censorship is “substantial” – rather than being “illusory or merely speculative.”
The NCLA welcomed the ruling, describing it as an important victory in the battle for free speech in the US, and lauded the district court for recognizing the scale and damage of government-orchestrated censorship.
“The Court has seen through the government’s unrelenting efforts to deny responsibility for using its vast power to silence thousands upon thousands of Americans online, often removing factually true information the government did not like,” commented NCLA’s senior litigation counsel, John J. Vecchione.
The case is now headed to a preliminary injunction hearing set for May 12.
March 22, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | CDC, Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, DHS, Human rights, United States |
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The United States government’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), within the Department of Homeland Security, is raising the alarm about the threat of “foreign influence” that is “leveraging misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation.” CISA defines “malinformation” as information “based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.” In 2021, CISA, along with the White House and private sector partners, successfully persuaded Facebook and Twitter to censor accurate information about the origins of the SARS-2 coronavirus and covid vaccines.
And yet CISA is failing to do its job when censoring malinformation, misinformation, and disinformation about climate change, including by “threat actors,” often funded or employed by foreign governments. A Google survey of over 2,300 people conducted last year by the nonpartisan research organization Environmental Progress, which I founded and lead, found that 53% of people surveyed in the U.S. agree with the false statement, “Climate change is making hurricanes more frequent,” while 46% agree with the false statement, “Climate change threatens human extinction.”
I strongly oppose efforts by the U.S. government to censor American citizens by ordering social media platforms to remove content, sometimes while threatening to end Section 230, the federal law that makes companies like Facebook and Twitter possible. Such censorship is a violation of the First Amendment. The journalist Matt Taibbi, former State Department official Mike Benz, and I have all pointed to the emergence since 2016 of a censorship-industrial complex operated and funded by the U.S. government. It should be defunded.
But it’s notable that the censorship-industrial complex has shown no interest in censoring climate misinformation that has led people to believe that climate change is making hurricanes more frequent and threatening human extinction. “An example of malinformation is editing a video to remove important context to harm or mislead,” writes CISA. And yet that is precisely what foreign disinformation threat actors like Greta Thunberg, her allies at the German government-funded Potsdam Institute, and even the U.N.’s own Secretary-General Antonio Guterres routinely do when they share videos of people in poor countries suffering from flooding, which is a direct result of lack of flood management infrastructure, not slightly more precipitation from climate change.

Moreover, the censorship-industrial complex has sought to censor accurate information about climate change and energy. Last June, former Biden Administration Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy demanded censorship of those who criticized the failure of weather-dependent renewables during the blackouts in Texas in February 2021, even though such criticisms were factual. “The tech companies have to stop allowing specific individuals over and over again to spread disinformation,” said McCarthy.
In her interview, she went on to falsely claim that critics of renewables are funded by “dark money” fossil fuel companies — the same false claim that Democrats made of the world’s most influential scientist studying hurricanes and climate change, Roger Pielke, Jr. of the University of Colorado. As such, McCarthy spread disinformation in order to undermine the legitimacy of her opponents.
The U.N. continues to wage its disinformation campaign against the people of the world, as today’s headlines about its new report show. “‘The climate time-bomb is ticking,’” reads the CNN headline. “Scientists release ‘survival guide’ to avert climate disaster,” says BBC. “Earth to hit critical warming threshold by early 2030s, climate panel says.” The U.N. most journalists are implying that scientists have determined that a temperature increase beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels would be catastrophic.
The U.N. report is malinformation. The supposed 1.5-degree “threshold” is political, not scientific, as Pielke and others have shown. Global warming causes incrementally greater risk. Temperatures are expected to rise less than most thought as recently as 10 years ago, thanks to abundant natural gas. And humankind’s physical security is assured, given our success at adapting to more extreme weather and producing more food on less land.

All of this raises a question. Why, if the U.N. and U.S. governments are so committed to censoring disinformation, are they themselves spreading it? Why, in other words, do U.N. officials perfectly fit their own definition of “disinformation threat actors,” and often foreign ones at that?
March 20, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Fake News, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Progressive Hypocrite, Science and Pseudo-Science | United Nations |
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Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network expresses its solidarity with Dr. Ahmed Shehadeh after Panamanian immigration authorities at Tocumen International Airport detained and deported Shehadeh, the head of the Brazilian-Palestinian Institute (Ibraspal), on Thursday, March 16. The Panamanian officials confiscated and held his Brazilian passport while he was transiting at the airport on his way to the second conference of the Palestinian Federation of Latin America, taking place between 17 and 19 March in Barranquilla, Colombia, Ibraspal’s vice president, Sayid Marcos Tenório, said.
“Shehadeh was interrogated by Panamanian intelligence agents, possibly with the participation and support of U.S. and Israeli intelligence,” Tenório said. “The state of Panama is under American occupation. American and Israeli intelligence are targeting anyone working against imperialist Zionist policies.”
Palestinian community sources in Brazil reported that extensive contacts took place with the Brazilian authorities, as Alexandre Padilha (Minister of Institutional Relations), Paulo Pimenta (Federal Deputy) and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs intervened, as did the representative of the Brazilian Embassy in Panama, communicating with the Panamanian authorities until Shehadeh returned to Brazil after his deportation, where his passport was returned to him at Brasilia airport.
Shehadeh was detained and interrogated for many hours before he was told that Panamanian immigration authorities were deporting him back to Brazil rather than allowing him to continue his journey to Colombia and the Palestinian conference taking place there.
Rawa Alsagheer, Palestinian activist and member of Samidoun Network in Brazil, denounced the action of the Panamanian authorities. “This reflects a Zionist and U.S. attempt to target and disrupt the organizing of Palestinians in exile in diaspora, especially in Latin America,” she said.
Brazilian media and social media widely reported on the news of Shehadeh’s detention and deportation, and many Brazilian and Palestinian organizations denounced the Panamanian action. The Panamanian Committee in Solidarity with the Palestinian People also condemned the immigration authorities’ actions.
Brazilian organizations and parties are planning to visit Shehadeh to express their solidarity with the Palestinian people and their rejection of the Panamanian authorities’ decision to prevent him from participating in the Palestinian Federation of Latin America’s conference.
March 19, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Full Spectrum Dominance, Solidarity and Activism, Subjugation - Torture | Human rights, Latin America, Palestine |
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Amidst calls for online censorship
Just days after a Senator was caught asking whether there were systems in place to censor social media in an attempt to prevent a bank run, “disinformation experts” are partially blaming the Silicon Valley bank collapse exacerbation on online conspiracy theorists on social media.
“Russian media outlets, far-right websites, short sellers and doomsday preppers were among those who pushed and amplified conspiracy theories online focused on the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank,” Bloomberg alleges.
According to anti-disinformation for-profit firm Alethea, a wide range of accounts used the bank’s collapse to promote their own agendas.
The firm’s founder Lisa Kaplan told Bloomberg that the claims by venture capitalists speculating the collapse of the bank that were amplified “propagandists and foreign influencers” contributed to the collapse of the bank.
“We assess that these outlets may have increased online panic and contributed to the broader cross-platform spread of false or misleading content about SVB,” Kaplan said to Bloomberg.
“We also assess that conspiratorial narratives may have accelerated panic, which then posed a risk to the broader financial system,” she said.
“This shut down a bank, and I’m concerned about it happening again,” Kaplan added.
Multiple pundits and websites claimed that the bank collapsed because of the prioritizing of environmental, social, and government initiatives over risk management.
March 18, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Full Spectrum Dominance | United States |
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A government-linked academic group pushed Twitter to censor factually correct stories about Covid-19 if they risked “fueling hesitancy” about vaccines, according to the latest batch of internal documents released by the platform’s new owner, Elon Musk.
Published by journalist Matt Taibbi on Friday, the documents show that from February 2021 onwards, senior Twitter management – including former trust and safety chief Yoel Roth – signed up to a Stanford University initiative that would alert them to the latest “vaccine-related disinformation narratives” spreading on the platform.
Titled ‘The Virality Project,’ the initiative was led by a former CIA employee and comprised academics from several universities, as well as researchers from organizations funded by the Pentagon, the National Science Foundation, and the US State Department. The Virality Project also stated on its website that it “built strong ties” with the Office of the Surgeon General, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Department of Homeland Security, among other agencies and departments.
In its briefings to Twitter, the Virality Project recommended that “true content which might promote vaccine hesitancy” – such as stories of side effects and certain vaccines being banned abroad – be censored. Posts raising concern about vaccine mandates were viewed as “anti-vax” misinformation, while “just asking questions” was deemed “a tactic commonly used by spreaders of misinformation,” and posting about the “surveillance state” was deemed a bannable “conspiracy” theory.
It is unclear how often Twitter acceded to the Virality Project’s demands, though Taibbi said that within a month, the platform’s staff began using the project’s recommendations when evaluating content to censor.
At the time, Twitter’s rules on Covid-19 “misinformation” required a specific post to be “demonstrably false,” while permitting “strong commentary,” opinion writing, and satire. The Virality Project, however, urged Twitter management to ban “repeat offenders” before they even made new posts.
Sharing the leaked emails of White House coronavirus czar Anthony Fauci could “exacerbate distrust in Dr. Fauci and in US public health institutions,” the Virality Project warned in a June 2021 briefing, while a follow-up report highlighted the spread of “worrisome jokes” about harassing the door-to-door vaccine promoters deployed by the administration of US President Joe Biden.
“As Orwellian proof-of-concept, the Virality Project was a smash success,” Taibbi wrote on Friday. “Government, academia, and an oligopoly of would-be corporate competitors organized quickly behind a secret, unified effort to control political messaging.”
Since purchasing Twitter in October and installing himself as the platform’s new CEO, Musk has been releasing regular batches of internal documents and communications in a bid to shed light on its previously opaque censorship policies. A tranche of files released in December revealed that Twitter censored “legitimate content” on Covid-19 at the direct request of the White House.
March 17, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, United States |
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The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy people’s data from third party companies – SafeGraph and Cuebiq – who are in the business of tracking physical locations.
The CDC did this in a bid to check how citizens were complying with lockdown and other Covid restrictions, reports The Epoch Times, which has had access to the contracts between the parties.
One of these companies received $420,000, while the other deal was worth $208,000. The CDC was allowed to buy this data thanks to emergency rules enacted because of the pandemic.
They were designed to give the government organization the data it deemed necessary in order to properly react.
This included tracking people for the sake of “evaluating the impact of visits to key points of interest, stay at home orders, closures, re-openings and other public health communications related to mask mandate, and other emerging research areas on community transmission of SARS-CoV-2.”
The data SafeGraph and Cuebiq are able to get hold of and sell on comes from apps installed on phones. In SafeGraph’s case, this information covered points like neighborhood patterns – revealing the frequency at which somebody visited a place “of interest,” as well as where they came to that place from, and where they went from there.
Cuebiq, meanwhile, sold its shelter-in-place index dataset, and that reveals for how long a phone is inside a house, expressed in percentages, as well as the time people would spend in another state. The goal was to assess who was “sheltering in place” as the authorities had mandated.
The contracts were signed only in 2021 but the CDC at first, early into the pandemic, got a taste of the two companies’ location data offer for free.
The organization was not shy about it at the time, either, and in 2020, used the data to produce two studies, covering metropolitan areas in the US. The subject was how often the people tracked were moving around if distancing restrictions were in place – the result was, less often.
The same is true of movement during radical lockdown measures, and US taxpayers also footed the bill that allowed the CDC to come up with this “revolutionary” result: once states started lifting these measures, people started to move around more frequently.
Related: FBI admits to buying geolocation data
March 17, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | CDC, Covid-19, Human rights, United States |
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UK Government’s favourite polling firm says British public overwhelmingly “supports” 15-minute-cities…
The British government’s favourite pollster has been deployed once again.
Only a few days ago, audaciously declaring Brits should “forget the conspiracy theorists”, YouGov tweeted the results from a new poll about 15-minute-cities. They reported that 62% of all Brits support the schemes. While 23% oppose them and 15% don’t know.
In the survey, they explained how such schemes aim to make everyday amenities like banks, shops, and schools closer to residential areas. The major benefit, proponents argue, is as well as convenience, they will negate the need for driving and thus, reduce carbon emissions.
The only problem is, in reality, 15-minute-cities are vastly more complex urban redevelopment models. Integrated as a part of them is “technology and policy interventions” that create “compact urban cells” – at least according to one of its original proprietors, Kent Larson. Not to mention that they were born from the smart city model, which prioritises “electronic methods and sensors to collect specific data”.
This is where Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs) come in. Intending to do exactly what they say on tin, they limit traffic. They seek to do so by limiting residents’ ability to drive in certain areas and at certain times. It is a 15-minute-city precursor designed to purge traffic and free up space.
Now, YouGov contends us desperate conspiracy theorists are over-egging the pudding here. Apparently, conflating 15-minute-cities and LTNs is a mistake. This is despite both sharing a practically identical goal to “improve” accessibility via urban spatial management (or rather dictation).
One could easily argue that without LTNs, 15-minute-cities would not be viable or indeed efficient.
Then, there is the digital surveillance. In order for LTNs to offer “benefit”, there has to be a policing system. London currently possesses seven LTN zones, all of which are monitored via camera. If residents fail to buy the correct permit to drive in a certain area, at a certain time, a camera will capture their license plate and send a fine to the corresponding address. If one ignores that fine, one can be jailed.
According to RAC, almost 7.5 million penalty tickets were issued to drivers breaking LTN rules in London last year. Transport for London (TfL) data further reveals the total number of fines, which cost up to £160, increased by 2.2 million from 2020 — an increase of 41% to 7,472,886.
YouGov failed to notify survey participants of any of this information.
The data they collected amounted to the equivalent of someone asking “hey, do you like the idea of your local shop, bank, or GP surgery being closer to you?” Farcical.
Indeed, YouGov shares a very profitable relationship with the British government. During 2020, the polling firm received a £6,85 million contract to carry out surveys for the Cabinet Office up to January 2023. This equated to a reported 7% of the company’s annual revenue in 2020.
The firm is also directly connected to the government. Nadhim Zahawi, the former jab-passport endorsing vaccine minister, founded YouGov back in 2000 alongside the former owner of Conservative Home, Stephan Shakespeare, an outlet that persistently publishes articles written by various conservative MPs.
It’s well-established as a party-line mouth piece…
These curious conflicts of interest do not stop at the lower levels. British PM Rishi Sunak’s family also runs a company that is actively pushing for further urban digitalisation. The father of Sunak’s wife, Akshata Murthy, is the founder of Infosys, an Indian information technology company that aims to develop the technological infrastructure to implement a global “social credit score” system – a scheme directly tied to the smart city initiative.
So we have a dubious survey, distributed by a polling company riddled with various conflicts of interest, partnered with a government whose head would indirectly benefit if these schemes were adopted…
Politicians fully understand the capability of polling. A 2020 study published in the International Journal of Public Opinion Research that measured the effect of online polls on voting behaviour found advertising majority opinions can sway voting by 7%. In short, voters can be heavily influenced by percieved support for a cause, even if it is unpopular in reality. The same study further found this effect was not confined to general elections but all sorts of political issues.
YouGov knows what it is doing… they just don’t care.
March 17, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | Human rights, UK |
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The US Department of Defense funds private internet monitoring firms NewsGuard and PeakMetrics, which then trawl the web for “misinformation” to censor and demonetize, conservative news site The Federalist reported on Friday.
NewsGuard is a private company that rates news outlets by their “reliability” and reputation for sharing “falsehoods and misinformation narratives.” Before a Congressional hearing last week, journalist Matt Taibbi labeled the company a part of the “censorship-industrial complex,” publishing an image of a $750,000 grant award from the Pentagon to the firm. During the hearing, reporter Michael Shellenberger explained that NewsGuard uses its ratings system to drive advertiser revenue away from conservative sires or other “disfavored publications.”
In an email to Taibbi, Newsguard’s CEO Gordon Crovitz denied receiving government funding, stating instead that the government pays for access to its data. The Pentagon, he wrote, is specifically looking for evidence of “Russian and Chinese disinformation.”
However, NewsGuard received a $25,000 award from the Pentagon in 2020, after winning the military’s ‘Countering Covid-19 Disinformation’ challenge, The Federalist, a conservative news outlet, reported on Friday. A year later, Newsguard was given $750,000 to develop an AI-powered database of “misinformation networks” alongside the Department of Defense.
NewsGuard is one of several such businesses funded by the Pentagon. PeakMetrics was another winner of the Covid-19 challenge, earning a $25,000 grant to develop “social listening” technology for the military. It received a further $1.5 million from the federal government in 2021, but even before that the company had been singled out as potentially useful to the Pentagon.
In early 2020, PeakMetrics took part in the ‘Air Force Accelerator’ program, under which it developed “measuring tools to detect misinformation campaigns.” According to The Federalist, it put these tools to use during the 2020 and 2022 elections in the US. At that point, PeakMetrics solely worked for the US State Department and Pentagon, before later offering its services to the private sector.
It is unclear what the Pentagon aimed to achieve during these election monitoring campaigns. PeakMetrics did not respond to a request for comment by The Federalist.
Aside from paying private companies to develop web surveillance tools, the Pentagon, along with a number of other government agencies and departments, directly engaged in social media censorship in recent years. Internal communications from Twitter published by Taibbi, Shellenberger, and other journalists, showed that the social media giant “directly assisted” the US military’s online influence campaigns and censored “anti-Ukraine narratives” on behalf of multiple intelligence agencies. The platform also received extensive lists of accounts to ban from the US State Department and associated NGOs.
March 17, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Russophobia, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, United States |
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America First Legal (AFL) has filed federal ethics and Inspector General complaints and launched a probe into the Federal Trade Commission’s retaliation against Twitter owner Elon Musk and Twitter for exposing the Biden administration and federal agencies for pressuring Twitter to censor content.
Last week, the House’s Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government released a report detailing how the FTC has been harassing Musk and Twitter over the past few months.
Read the FOIA request, IG investigative request, and Senate ethics request here, here, and here.
AFL filed a complaint with the Senate Select Committee on Ethics requesting an investigation into several Democratic senators, including Elizabeth Warren and Richard Blumenthal, for violating Senate Rule 43, which prohibits partisan communications in an unconcluded federal proceeding. AFL accuses these senators of encouraging the FTC to investigate Musk and Twitter, which further solidifies conservatives’ claims of the Biden administration weaponizing federal agencies.
AFL filed another complaint with the FTC’s Inspector General requesting an investigation into the agency’s chair Lina Khan and other officials for abusing power.
The organization also filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for records that would reveal the reasons for the FTC’s abuse of power.
“The Biden Administration is steadfastly focused on weaponizing the federal government to advance its radical, left-wing political agenda,” said AFL’s general counsel Gene Hamilton. “Most Americans are now aware of politicization at the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Department of Homeland Security. And now, the Biden Administration has turned to the Federal Trade Commission to exact harm on those who oppose their radical agenda–particularly regarding free speech on social media platforms. Weaponizing the FTC to retaliate against Elon Musk and Twitter for exposing the truth about Deep State censorship is reprehensible, and we will not stand by idly.”
March 16, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | FTC, United States |
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Have you ever thought that the Bill of Rights was a bit lacking? Did you ever wish there was a list of obligations detailing those things we owe to the government for the privilege of being born into a certain political jurisdiction? Then, boy, do I have the perfect book for you! Join James for today’s dissection of The Bill of Obligations, the latest turgid tome of trash from Richard Haass, the outgoing president of the Council on Foreign Relations.
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For those with limited bandwidth, CLICK HERE to download a smaller, lower file size version of this episode.
For those interested in audio quality, CLICK HERE for the highest-quality version of this episode (WARNING: very large download).
DOCUMENTATION
March 15, 2023
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Video | COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights, United States |
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