Oracle is sued for alleged surveillance network
By Ken Macon | Reclaim The Net | August 22, 2022
The Irish Council for Civil Liberties has launched a class action lawsuit against Oracle’s worldwide surveillance machine. Tech companies have claimed to have “detailed dossiers on 5 billion people,” and generate $42.4 billion in annual revenue, according to the complaint filed at the US District Court for the Northern District of California.
We obtained a copy of the complaint for you here.
The dossiers include names, physical addresses, email addresses, physical movements, online and real-world purchases, detailed online activity, income, and interests, including political views.
Oracle trades the dossiers through the Oracle Data Marketplace, the lawsuit alleges.
“For example, one Oracle database included a record of a German man who used a prepaid debit card to place a €10 bet on an esports betting site,” ICCL wrote in a report announcing the lawsuit.
Lead plaintiff in the complaint, ICCL’s Dr. Johnny Ryan, said: “Oracle has violated the privacy of billions of people across the globe. This is a Fortune 500 company on a dangerous mission to track where every person in the world goes, and what they do. We are taking this action to stop Oracle’s surveillance machine.”
The complaint alleges Oracle is in violation of the California Invasion of Privacy Act, California’s Constitution, the Federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act, and competition and common law.
The complaint has been filed on behalf of all internet users around the globe that have been affected by Oracle’s violation of privacy.
Dr. Robert Malone sues The Washington Post who accused him of spreading “misinformation” online
By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | August 22, 2022
Dr. Robert Malone, an expert in mRNA technology and a vocal Covid vaccines critic who has been consistently censored by Big Tech, is suing the Washington Post for defamation. The lawsuit alleges that the news outlet made defamatory statements against him in an article published on January 24.
The article claimed that Dr. Malone spread “misinformation” in a speech where he said the vaccines “are not working” against the Omicron variant. As evidence the statement was false, the Post cited a paper by the CDC that found that booster shots were protecting people against severe disease.
The Post omitted the part where Dr. Malone said that vaccines, “do not prevent Omicron infection, viral replication, or spread to others.”
Speaking to The Epoch Times, Dr. Malone said: “I said nothing about disease and death at that point in time.” He went on to accuse the Post of selective misquoting and using the CDC study to counter a claim he never made.
The Epoch Times obtained an interview between the article’s writer, Timothy Bella and Dr. Malone, before the article was written. Bella told Dr. Malone, “I have respect for you and your body of work,” and that he was hoping to shadow the doctor during his stay in DC where he gave a speech at a protest against Covid mandates.
Malone initially sent a notice to the Post threatening legal action if the article was not removed or the defamatory statements retracted. When the outlet refused, he filed a lawsuit at a federal court in Virginia.
According to the lawsuit, the article made 10 defamatory statements against Dr. Malone, including that he has been “discredited,” his claims are “not only wrong, but also dangerous,” and that he “repeated falsehoods that have garnered him legions of followers.”
We obtained a copy of the complaint for you here.
“The qualities WaPo disparaged—Dr. Malone’s honesty, veracity, integrity, competence, judgment, morals, and ethics as a licensed medical doctor and scientist—are peculiarly valuable to Dr. Malone and are absolutely necessary in the practice and profession of any medical doctor and scientist. WaPo ascribes to Dr. Malone conduct, characteristics, and conditions, including fraud, disinformation, misinformation, deception, and dishonesty, that would adversely affect his fitness to be a medical professional and to conduct the business of a medical doctor,” the suit states.
“Dr. Malone’s statements concerning COVID-19 and the purported ‘vaccines’ were 100% factually accurate. He has never committed fraud on [sic] engaged in any medical disinformation or misinformation. Further, the so-called ‘vaccines’ do not work, as is abundantly clear from both the scientific and anecdotal evidence to date,” it also says.
Dr. Malone is also currently involved in a lawsuit against Twitter over its censorship.
MEET THE EX-CIA AGENTS DECIDING FACEBOOK’S CONTENT POLICY
By Alan Macleod | MintPress News | July 12, 2022
It is an uncomfortable job for anyone trying to draw the line between “harmful content and protecting freedom of speech. It’s a balance”, Aaron says. In this official Facebook video, Aaron identifies himself as the manager of “the team that writes the rules for Facebook”, determining “what is acceptable and what is not.” Thus, he and his team effectively decide what content the platform’s 2.9 billion active users see and what they don’t see.
Aaron is being interviewed in a bright warehouse-turned-studio. He is wearing a purple sweater and blue jeans. He comes across as a very likable, smiley person. It is not an easy job, of course, but someone has to make those calls. “Transparency is incredibly important in the work that I do,” he says.
Aaron is CIA. Or at least he was until July 2019, when he left his job as a senior analytic manager at the agency to become senior product policy manager for misinformation at Meta, the company that owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. In his 15-year career, Aaron Berman rose to become a highly influential part of the CIA. For years, he prepared and edited the president of the United States’ daily brief, “wr[iting] and overs[eeing] intelligence analysis to enable the President and senior U.S. officials to make decisions on the most critical national security issues,” especially on “the impact of influence operations on social movements, security, and democracy,” his LinkedIn profile reads. None of this is mentioned in the Facebook video.
Berman’s case is far from unique, however. Studying Meta’s reports, as well as employment websites and databases, MintPress has found that Facebook has recruited dozens of individuals from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), as well as many more from other agencies like the FBI and Department of Defense (DoD). These hires are primarily in highly politically sensitive sectors such as trust, security and content moderation, to the point where some might feel it becomes difficult to see where the U.S. national security state ends and Facebook begins.
In previous investigations, this author has detailed how TikTok is flooded with NATO officials, how former FBI agents abound at Twitter, and how Reddit is led by a former war planner for the NATO think tank, the Atlantic Council. But the sheer scale of infiltration of Facebook blows these away. Facebook, in short, is utterly swarming with spooks.
TRUST ME, BRO
In a political sense, trust, safety and misinformation are the most sensitive parts of Meta’s operation. It is here where decisions about what content is allowed, what will be promoted and who or what will be suppressed are made. These decisions affect what news and information billions of people across the world see every day. Therefore, those in charge of the algorithms hold far more power and influence over the public sphere than even editors at the largest news outlets.
There are a number of other ex-CIA agents working in these fields. Deborah Berman, for example, spent 10 years as a data and intelligence analyst at the CIA before recently being brought on as a trust and safety project manager for Meta. Little is known about what she did at the agency, but her pre-agency publications indicate she was a specialist on Syria.
Between 2006 and 2010, Bryan Weisbard was a CIA intelligence officer, his job entailing, in his own words, leading “global teams to conduct counter-terrorism and digital cyber investigations,” and “Identif[ying] online social media misinformation propaganda and covert influence campaigns”. Directly after that, he became a diplomat (underlining how close the line is between those two professions), and is currently a director of trust and safety, security and data privacy for Meta.
Meanwhile, the LinkedIn profile of Cameron Harris – a CIA analyst until 2019 – notes that he is now a Meta trust and safety project manager.
Individuals from other state institutions abound as well. Emily Vacher was an FBI employee between 2001 and 2011, rising to the rank of supervisory special agent. From there she was headhunted by Facebook/Meta, and is now a director of trust and safety. Between 2010 and 2020, Mike Bradow worked for USAID, eventually becoming deputy director of policy for the organization. USAID is a U.S. government-funded influence organization which has bankrolled or stage managed multiple regime change operations abroad, including in Venezuela in 2002, Cuba in 2021, and ongoing attempts in Nicaragua. Since 2020, Meta has employed Bradow as a misinformation policy manager.
Others have similar pasts. Neil Potts, a former intelligence officer with the U.S. Marine Corps, is vice president of trust and safety at Facebook. In 2020, Sherif Kamal left his job as a program manager at the Pentagon to take up the post of Meta trust and safety program manager.
Joey Chan currently holds the same trust and safety post as Kamal. Until last year, Chan was a U.S. Army officer commanding a company of over 100 troops in the Asia Pacific region.
None of this is to say that any of those named are not conscientious, that they are bad people or bad at their job. Vacher, for example, helped design Facebook’s amber alert program, notifying people to missing children in their area. But hiring so many ex-U.S. state officials to run Facebook’s most politically sensitive operations raises troubling questions about the company’s impartiality and its proximity to government power. Meta is so full of national security state agents that at some point, it almost becomes more difficult to find individuals in trust and safety who were not formerly agents of the state.
Despite its efforts to brand itself as a progressive, “woke” organization, the Central Intelligence Agency remains deeply controversial. It has been charged with overthrowing or attempting to overthrow numerous foreign governments (some of them democratically elected), helping prominent Nazis escape punishment after World War Two, funnelling large quantities of drugs and weapons around the world, penetrating domestic media outlets, routinely spreading false information and operating a global network of “black sites” where prisoners are repeatedly tortured. Therefore, critics argue that putting operatives from this organization in control of our news feeds is deeply inappropriate.
One of these critics is Elizabeth Murray, who, in 2010, retired from a 27-year career at the CIA and other U.S. intelligence organizations. “This is insidious,” Murray told MintPress, adding,
I see it as part of the gradual and sinister migration of ambitious young professionals originally trained (with CIA’s virtually unlimited, U.S.-taxpayer funded pot of resources) to surveil and target ‘the bad guys’ during the so-called Global War on Terror of the post-9-11 era.”
MintPress also contacted Facebook/Meta for comment but has not received a response.
ARM’S LENGTH CONTROL
Some may ask what the big fuss is. There is a limited pool of individuals with the necessary skills and experience in these new tech and cybersecurity fields, and many of them come from government institutions. Casinos, after all, regularly hire card sharks to protect themselves. But there is little evidence that this is a poacher-turned-gamekeeper scenario; Facebook is certainly not hiring whistleblowers. The problem is not that these individuals are incompetant. The problem is that having so many former CIA employees running the world’s most important information and news platform is only one small step removed from the agency itself deciding what you see and what we do not see online – and all with essentially no public oversight.
In this sense, this arrangement constitutes the best of both worlds for Washington. They can exert significant influence over global news and information flows but maintain some veneer of plausible deniability. The U.S. government does not need to directly tell Facebook what policies to enact. This is because the people in decision-making positions are inordinately those who rose through the ranks of the national security state beforehand, meaning their outlooks match those of Washington’s. And if Facebook does not play ball, quiet threats about regulation or breaking up the company’s enormous monopoly can also achieve the desired outcomes.
Again, this article is not claiming that any of the named individuals are nefarious actors, or even that they are anything but model employees. This is a structural problem. Put another way, if Facebook were hiring dozens of managers from Russian intelligence agencies like the FSB or GRU, everybody would recognize the inherent dangers. It should be little different when it hires individuals from the CIA, an organization responsible for some of the worst crimes of the modern era.
FROM STATE INTELLIGENCE TO PRIVATE INTELLIGENCE
Facebook has also hired a plethora of ex-national security state officers to run its intelligence and online security operations. Until 2013, Scott Stern was a targeting officer at the CIA, rising to become chief of targeting. In this role, he helped select the targets for U.S. drone strikes across South and West Asia. Today, however, as a senior manager of risk intelligence for Meta, “misinformation” and “malicious actors” are his targets. Hopefully he is more accurate at Facebook than at the CIA, where the government’s own internal assessments show that at least 90% of Afghans killed in drone strikes were innocent civilians.
Other former CIA men at Facebook include Mike Torrey, who left his job as a senior analyst at the agency to become Meta’s technical lead of detection, investigations and disruptions of complex information operations threats, and former CIA contractor Hagan Barnett, who is now head of harmful content operations at the Silicon Valley giant.
Meta’s intelligence and online security team includes individuals from virtually every government agency imaginable. In 2015, Department of Defense intelligence officer Suzanna Morrow left her post to become director of global security intelligence for Meta. The FBI is represented by threat investigations manager Ellen Nixon and head of cyber espionage investigations Mike Dvilyanski. Facebook’s influence operations policy manager Olga Belogolova had stints at the State Department and the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
Before Meta, David Agranovich and Nathaniel Gleicher both worked for the National Security Council. Agranovich is director of global threat disruption at Facebook while Gleicher is head of security policy. Hayley Chang, director and associate general counsel for cybersecurity and investigations, worked formerly for both the FBI and Department of Homeland Security. And Meta’s global head of interaction operations, David Hansell, was once an Air Force and Defense Intelligence Agency man.
One of Meta’s most outwardly-facing employees is its global threat intelligence lead for influence operations, Ben Nimmo, a character MintPress has covered before. Between 2011 and 2014, he served as NATO’s press officer, moving the next year to the Institute for Statecraft, a U.K. government-funded propaganda operation aimed at spreading misleading information about enemies of the British state. He was also a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, NATO’s semi-official think tank.
Perhaps then, it is not surprising that Facebook never seems to find U.S. government influence operations online – they are part of one!
CYBER WAR, CYBER WARRIORS
While Meta has not unmasked any nefarious U.S. government action, it regularly uncovers what it claims are foreign disinformation campaigns. According to a recent Facebook report, the top five locations of coordinated inauthentic behavior between 2017 and 2020 on its platform are Russia, Iran, Myanmar, the United States and Ukraine. However, it was at pains to note that American operations were driven by fringe far-right elements, white supremacists and conspiracy theorists, and not the government.
This is despite the fact that it is now well-established that the Pentagon fields a clandestine army of at least 60,000 people whose job is to influence public opinion, the majority of them doing so from their keyboards. A Newsweek exposé from last year called it “The largest undercover force the world has ever known,” adding,
The explosion of Pentagon cyber warfare, moreover, has led to thousands of spies who carry out their day-to-day work in various made-up personas, the very type of nefarious operations the United States decries when Russian and Chinese spies do the same.”
Newsweek warned that this army was likely breaking both U.S. and international law by doing so, explaining that,
These are the cutting-edge cyber fighters and intelligence collectors who assume false personas online, employing ‘nonattribution’ and ‘misattribution’ techniques to hide the who and the where of their online presence while they search for high-value targets and collect what is called ‘publicly accessible information’—or even engage in campaigns to influence and manipulate social media.”
As far back as 2011, The Guardian was reporting on this enormous cyber force, whose job it was to “secretly manipulate social media sites by using fake online personas to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda.” Yet the ex-military and ex-CIA officials Facebook employs do not seem to have found any trace of their former colleagues’ at work on the platform.
DIGITALLY SWINGING ELECTIONS
Since its beginnings in 2004, Facebook has grown to become a massive global empire and by far the most important news distributor the planet has ever known. The company boasts almost 3 billion active users, meaning that nearly 2 in 5 people worldwide use the platform. A recent 12-country study suggested that around 30% of the entire world gets its news via their Facebook feeds. This gives whoever is in charge of curating those feeds and controlling those algorithms inestimable power. It also represents a serious national security threat for all other countries, especially those that might wish to take a path independent from the United States. That those people are in large part former spooks makes this threat all the more perilous.
This is far from a hypothetical quandary. In November, less than a week before the country’s election, Facebook took the decision to delete hundreds of pages and accounts belonging to individuals and groups that supported the Nicaraguan Sandinista party – a longtime U.S. target for regime change. These included many of the nation’s most influential journalists and media outlets. Considering that around half of the country uses the platform for news and entertainment, the decision could barely have been more intrusive, and was likely designed to try to swing the election towards the pro-U.S. candidate.
Facebook claims that those accounts were bots engaged in “inauthentic behavior.” When those individuals migrated on to Twitter, recording videos identifying who they were to show they were not bots, Twitter immediately deleted those accounts too, in what was dubbed a coordinated attempt at suppression.
The individual behind this attempt was the aforementioned Ben Nimmo, who co-authored an unconvincing report, full of questionable assumptions and allegations. This included an insinuation that accounts following a pattern of activity whereby their Facebook usage levels peaked in the morning and afternoon and dwindled to almost nothing after midnight Nicaragua time suggested they were bots.
Facebook was also used by right-wing Cubans to attempt a U.S.-backed color revolution against the ruling Communist government last year.
Giving any individual or group that much control over the airwaves of communication raises huge questions about national security and sovereignty – doubly so when those individuals are so intimately connected to the U.S. national security state.
When asked what the public’s reaction would be to the news of such an intimate connection between Facebook her former employer, Murray stated that she was unsure whether many would be bothered:
I would like to think that the American public would strenuously object. However the CIA and other agencies have worked over many decades to cultivate a positive – indeed almost glamorous – image in the eyes of the vast majority of the public, mostly through TV series, Hollywood films, and favorable media coverage – so sadly my guess is that the vast majority of the public probably believes that these are the folks who should be in charge.”
However, she said, the news would likely land a very different way in countries that have been the target of Washington’s ire. “As you’re no doubt aware, the CIA has an atrocious public reputation in most parts of the world,” she added.
SPOOKS IN EVERY DEPARTMENT
MintPress has found former representatives of the U.S. national security state in virtually every politically sensitive department at Facebook. This includes even higher levels. Between 2020 and 2021, Kris Rose was a member of Meta’s governance oversight board – the group responsible for the overall direction of the platform. He left his job at the Director of National Intelligence as the president’s daily brief writer to take up the role. Before that, he had spent six years at the CIA as a political and counterterrorism analyst. Meanwhile, Gina Kim Sumilas, Facebook’s director and associate general counsel for the Asia Pacific region, spent nearly twelve years in the CIA before moving into the tech private sector.
There is also considerable overlap with the U.S. government in the company’s front facing staff. Kadia Koroma, for instance, was plucked from her position as an FBI spokesperson in January 2020 to become media relations manager at Facebook. Jeffrey Gelman, policy communications manager for Facebook’s oversight board, is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and held influential roles in both the State Department and the National Security Council. And executive communications spokesman Kevin Lewis spent many years in the White House as President Obama’s spokesperson.
Meta’s vice president of legal strategy is Rachel Carlson Lieber, who went straight from the CIA into Facebook. Her first role at the Silicon Valley giant was as head of the North America regulatory and strategic response, a department that continues to feature a number of former state officials. This includes head of strategic programs, Robert Flaim, who spent more than twenty years as an FBI, and Erin Clancy, who left a 16-year career at the State Department to become a manager of strategic response policy.
Clancy’s official work centered around U.S. policy in the Middle East. Her own bio boasts that she worked on the U.S. sanctions regime placed on Iraq and Sudan. She also worked at the U.S. Embassy in Damascus at the time of the Arab Spring and the beginning of the Syrian Civil War. It is known that she also coordinated closely with the White Helmets, a controversial aid organization that some have alleged is far too close to Al-Qaeda and its affiliates. Even after her Facebook appointment, Clancy moonlighted as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and as a fellow at the Atlantic Council, the hawkish body that serves as NATO’s brain trust.
Why are these national security state officials so attractive to Meta? One reason, Murray explained, is financial. “By snagging a CIA employee a company can save a considerable sum,” she said, explaining that, “The individual has likely undergone extensive professional training (at taxpayer expense) and probably has a security clearance,” something that is difficult, expensive and time-consuming to obtain in private sector work. Therefore, companies dealing with matters of state secrecy (such as defense contractors) have historically courted both current and former officers to fill their ranks, enticing them with much higher salaries than they can receive in government service.
“What is new (or at least newly known to us!) is that now these professionals are being sought after by social media companies like Facebook, Google and others who are now heavily into monitoring, surveilling, and censoring content, and then sharing data about users with U.S. government entities,” Murray added.
Such is the need for these individuals in these fields that private companies often hire former national security agents to do the recruiting for them. For instance, John Papp, who spent 12 years at the CIA as a senior intelligence officer and 4 years as an imagery analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency, went on to work as a recruiter for many of the largest defense contractors in Washington. These included Booz Allen Hamilton, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, IBM and Lockheed Martin. Today, he works as a recruiter for Meta.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Meta also employs former spooks for their internal security operations. The company’s vice president, chief security officer is Nick Lovrien, a former counterterrorism operations officer at the CIA, while its head of insider protection is ex-CIA operational psychologist and “undercover officer” Nicole Alford.
Meanwhile, Meta’s director of global security governance – the individual reportedly responsible for the personal safety of Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg – is Jill Leavens Jones. Jones left her job as a U.S. Secret Service special agent to take the appointment. And director of global security operations Alexander Carrillo continued on as a lieutenant commander in the Coast Guard for several months after his appointment at Facebook. The company also hires former feds to work directly with law enforcement on legal issues. One example of this is former FBI special agent Brian Kelley.
A LONG PATTERN OF INFILTRATION
45 years ago, legendary journalist Carl Bernstein released an investigation documenting how the CIA had managed to infiltrate U.S. and global media. The CIA had placed hundreds of agents into newsrooms and had convinced hundreds more reporters to collaborate with them. These included individuals at some of the most influential outlets, including The New York Times. The CIA needed to do this clandestinely because any attempt to do so openly would harm the effectiveness of the operation and provoke stiff public resistance. But by 2015, there was barely a murmur of disapproval when Reuters announced that it was hiring 33-year veteran CIA manager and director Dawn Scalici as a global director, even when the company announced that her primary responsibility was to “advanc[e] Thomson Reuters’ ability to meet the disparate needs of the U.S. government.”
Facebook, however, is vastly more influential than the New York Times or Reuters, reaching billions of people daily. In that sense, it stands to reason that it would be a prime target of any intelligence organization. It has become so big and ubiquitous that many consider it a de facto public commons and believe it should no longer be treated as a private company. Considering who is making many of the decisions on the platform, that distinction between public and private entities is even more blurry than many presume.
Alan MacLeod is Senior Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, as well as a number of academic articles.
Pakistani police surround ex-PM’s home
Samizdat | August 21, 2022
Ousted former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan has been charged with violating the country’s anti-terrorism laws for allegedly threatening a female judge and two senior police officials during a rally in Islamabad on Saturday night. Video reportedly shot at his home on Sunday evening shows police surrounding the residence hours after a police report was filed against him.
In his speech during Saturday’s rally, Khan threatened to file charges of his own against Judge Zeba Chaudhry, two police agencies, the Pakistani Election Commission, and other political opponents, warning they should prepare to face “consequences” over their abysmal treatment of his chief of staff, Shahbaz Gill. He had organized the rally in Islamabad’s F-9 Park in solidarity with Gill, who was arrested last week on sedition charges.
Later that night, the country’s digital media watchdog, called PEMRA, forbid satellite stations from airing the speech – or any future live addresses from the ex-prime minister – without a time-delay mechanism “to ensure effective monitoring and editorial control.”
Khan has been “continuously targeting state institutions by leveling baseless accusations and spreading hate speech through his provocative statements against state institutions and officers,” PEMRA explained in its directive on preemptively censoring the politician. Khan’s so-called “hate speech” was “prejudicial to the maintenance of law and order and is likely to disturb public peace and tranquillity,” they claimed.
Khan’s attempt to livestream his speech on YouTube was also stymied when the Google-owned video platform was taken offline in a coordinated move by eight Pakistani internet service providers, according to Netblocks. The site returned to functionality as soon as Khan finished speaking.
Khan was ousted as prime minister in April following a controversial no-confidence vote that he dismissed as a US-led conspiracy to have him removed for opposing Washington’s “forever wars” in Central Asia and the Middle East.
University of Massachusetts Lowell bans online speech that could cause “offense”
By Ben Squires | Reclaim The Net | August 21, 2022
The University of Massachusetts Lowell has an Acceptable Use Policy that bans students from using university Wi-Fi to intentionally share, send, or view “offensive” content.
This policy might be a violation of the First Amendment and ignores the fact that most online content is offensive to someone – which, these days, is pretty much any content.
Additionally, the Supreme Court has in multiple cases ruled that speech should not be restricted by the government just because it is offensive to someone.
For instance, in the Texas v Johnson case back in 1989, the Supreme Court ruled that burning the US flag was protected by the First Amendment, arguing: “If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable.”
But that has not stopped public institutions all over the country from restricting free speech in one way or the other.
It would be impractical for UMass Lowell to take action every time a student views or shares something offensive. However, the policy makes it easy for the university to selectively censor speech they do not agree with.
Outrage as Pakistan’s Media Watchdog Bans Channels From Broadcasting Ex-PM Imran Khan’s Speeches
Samizdat – 21.08.2022
Pakistan’s media watchdog, the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority (PEMRA), has banned TV channels from broadcasting live addresses by former Prime Minister Imran Khan.
The decision, effective immediately, was made on the eve of his rally in Rawalpindi on Sunday. According to the regulator, Khan is making “baseless allegations and spreading hate speech.”
“His provocative statements against state institutions and officers… is likely to disturb public peace and tranquility,” the PEMRA added.
The decision has been slammed by members of Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party and his supporters.
Asad Umar, a senior PTI official, took to Twitter, saying that the ban would be challenged in court.
A local journalist said the watchdog’s decision actually had the opposite effect.
Since his ouster from power in April 2021, Khan has held massive rallies across the country, branding the government of his successor Shehbaz Sharif as “traitors” installed by a “foreign conspiracy” hatched in the US. He has also repeatedly said that Washington has made Pakistan a “slave” without invading it. Prior to the no-confidence motion that saw him voted out of power, Khan accused the US of seeking to have him removed.
Another First Amendment lawsuit against Facebook censorship fails
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | August 20, 2022
The US judicial system has dismissed yet another lawsuit filed by censored users of Big Tech’s social media platforms, who allege First Amendment free speech violations.
This time it was the US District Court for the Northern District of California that granted a motion to dismiss filed by the defendant, Facebook (Meta). The plaintiff in this case, Richard Rogalinski, sued on First Amendment grounds after a number of his posts about Covid got censored on Facebook.
We obtained a copy of the decision for you here.
One of the posts expressed Rogalinski’s skepticism about the efficacy of masks, saying that he has not seen scientific evidence of their usefulness, but instead, “just talking heads who want to spread fear and control you.”
To this, Facebook’s “fact-checkers” reacted by adding a warning label claiming the post was “missing context.” The same warning was slapped on a post that saw the plaintiff criticize the Covid vaccine rollout.
Finally, a screenshot of a tweet posted by a doctor who promoted the use of hydroxychloroquine got labeled as “false information” by Facebook and removed.
Originally, the Florida resident filed a class action lawsuit in that state, but Facebook moved to either dismiss or transfer it, after which the judge transferred it to California.
In an attempt to fight against the usual defense that massive tech corporations have when censoring content and users – that they are private operations that have the right to do that, while the First Amendment applies only to state actors – Rogalinski mentioned statements made by former White House press secretary Jen Psaki.
In July 2021 – and the California judge noted in the ruling that this happened “after Meta took action against Rogalinski’s posts” – Psaki told a press conference that the Biden administration is “in regular touch” with major social media platforms, and actively flagging content posted on Facebook that the government thinks are “problematic” on misinformation grounds.
Rogalinski argued that the state “chose the targets and content of the statements that it deemed worthy of the defendant’s censorship” which then resulted in censorship by Facebook.
The plaintiff further accused the government and Meta of communicating directly and specifically about the censorship actions and engaging in the act together by sharing responsibility for the two-step process of censorship.
However, the court disagreed, citing several similar cases, including O’Handley v. Padilla, where the ruling reads that the government “can work with a private entity without converting that entity’s later decisions into state action.”
NYT Smears Dr. Mercola Again With Classic Orwellian Doublespeak
Video link
By Dr. Mercola | August 18, 2022
In July 2021, The New York Times (NYT) published the hit piece,1 “The Most Influential Spreader of Coronavirus Misinformation Online,” in which they made several blatantly false claims about me. Now, the NYT is upping the ante with an entire documentary dedicated to yours truly, titled “Superspreader.”
Ever since my book “The Truth About COVID-19” came out, the global cabal seems to have lost their collective minds. The New York Times has printed demonstrably false information about me on multiple occasions, CNN reporters have invaded my office and pursued me on my bicycle with unmarked vehicles, the president of the United States has utilized his federal agencies to target me — and my personal and business bank accounts were closed.
Twitter has banned anyone from sharing any link to my website, YouTube banned my account with over 15 years of content, while Facebook and Google have done everything possible to make me disappear. It certainly would be much easier to cave under the pressure, but if we don’t stand up for our rights and freedom now — when will it be too late? I will continue ‘superspreading’ truth and health until my last days.
NYT Hit Parade Continues With ‘Superspreader’
In an August 5, 2022, TV review, Alex Reif writes:2
“News can spread like a virus. In our fast-paced world, it doesn’t take long for either to spread around, which is why it’s so important to get your information from a good source.
In the latest installment of the FX series The New York Times Presents, viewers will get a perfect example of this with ‘Superspreader,’ which takes a look at one doctor with a massive following, who is credited as being the top spreader of misinformation regarding the COVID-19 and vaccine in the wellness industry …
One of the pre-credit notes at the end of the documentary states that FDA Commissioner Robert Califf considers misinformation to be the leading cause of death in the country and because of this …
[A]nother highlight of the film is an interview with Imran Ahmed, CEO of the Center for Encountering Digital Hate who ranked Mercola at the top of ‘The Disinformation Dozen,’ a numbers-based list of the twelve most influential people leading the COVID-19 anti-vaccination effort.
We also see how Mercola was de-platformed by several social media companies and how that hasn’t done all that much to stop the spread of misinformation.
At face value, The New York Times Presents ‘Superspreader’ is about Dr. Joseph Mercola, the empire he built, and the people who believe everything he says without question. But what viewers ultimately walk away with is a reminder that if something seems too good to be true, it most surely is.”
The NYT documentary premieres Friday, August 19, 2022, at 10 p.m. Eastern and 10 p.m. Pacific time, on FX and Hulu.
Truth Tellers Are Being Vindicated Every Day
In the NYT’s July 2021 hit piece, the author, Sheera Frenkel, cited an article I’d published in which she says I questioned “the legal definition of vaccines” and declared the COVID shots were “a medical fraud,” for the simple reason that they don’t prevent infections, they don’t provide immunity and don’t stop transmission of the infection.
According to Frenkel, that was misinformation. According to the U.S. government and its “experts,” the COVID jabs worked like any other vaccine. Check out the short video for a sampling of what Bill Gates, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, mainstream media, Dr. Anthony Fauci and President Biden were saying about the shots in early 2021.
The clear message — the promise — was that if you got the shots, you would not get COVID and you would not transmit it to others. Getting the population “vaccinated” would end the pandemic, for sure. Fast-forward to today, and the reality of the situation is beyond self-evident.
Biden, fully vaxxed and boosted has had COVID twice. Ditto for Fauci and a long list of government officials around the world. Outbreaks have repeatedly occurred at events where every single person present was fully vaxxed. So, the reality is that, back in February 2021, I warned that a medical fraud was being committed, and today, evidence from around the world show I was correct.
The shots do not prevent you from being infected, and they don’t prevent you from spreading it to others. As such, the COVID shots do not function as a vaccine at all, and mass vaccination cannot end the pandemic because you’re just as infectious if you get the shot and contract COVID as you would be if you were unjabbed.
Yet, despite the fact that time has vindicated me, the NYT has decided to double down and put out an entire documentary to cement the “superspreader of misinformation” label to my name when it really should be permanently attached to their own. It probably is important to note that they started their efforts on this video last year, in 2021.
‘Easily Disprovable’ Assertions Are in Fact True
In her 2021 hit piece, Frenkel also highlighted my comments about the COVID shots’ ability to “alter your genetic coding, essentially turning you into a bioweapon spike protein factory that has no off-switch.” According to Frenkel, these assertions “were easily disprovable.”
But did she disprove them? No. Here’s the reality: mRNA vaccines are by definition a genetic instruction set. That’s what messenger RNA (mRNA) is. And the mRNA created by Pfizer or Moderna are synthetic instructions that have never before existed in humans.
This is true for a variety of reasons, but the primary one is the substitution of pseudouridine for uridine to prevent the mRNA from being degraded. Natural mRNA is normally rapidly destroyed and this is by design as your body is very precise about producing proteins and does not produce them willy-nilly.
So is there an off switch? Absolutely not. There’s no off-switch programmed into these jabs. They are relying on your body’s normal degradation systems. The biotech industry has even referred to this reprogramming of your body as turning you into a “human bioreactor.”3
If an off-switch existed, the manufacturers would have assured us of that fact by now. In fact, they probably would have used the existence of a timed off-switch as the justification for boosters, but that has never come up. We know for sure that the mRNA jabs last at least 60 days and that is all we have for hard data. They more than likely last for six months and in some cases could last for years.
Asking Pointed, Nuanced Questions Is Bad?
Next, Frenkel went on to state that:4
“When the coronavirus hit last year, Dr. Mercola jumped on the news, with posts questioning the origins of the disease. In December, he used a study that examined mask-wearing by doctors to argue that masks did not stop the spread of the virus …
[R]ather than directly stating online that vaccines don’t work, Dr. Mercola’s posts often ask pointed questions about their safety and discuss studies that other doctors have refuted. Facebook and Twitter have allowed some of his posts to remain up with caution labels, and the companies have struggled to create rules to pull down posts that have nuance …”
So, I not only committed the “sin” of correctly warning people about the vaccine fraud committed, and had the audacity to follow science and reference published research, but I was also guilty of the “crime” of asking pointed, nuanced questions?
When merely asking questions is deemed a dangerous, if not criminal, act, you know you’re living under an authoritarian regime. It’s certainly far outside the accepted norms of “democracy” and “freedom” that the United States has been a beacon of since its inception.
Ineptitude at Its Finest
Further on in her hit piece, Frenkel makes a truly crucial error that no respectable journalist would ever dare make:
“In an email, Dr. Mercola said it was ‘quite peculiar to me that I am named as the #1 superspreader of misinformation.’ Some of his Facebook posts were only liked by hundreds of people, he said, so he didn’t understand ‘how the relatively small number of shares could possibly cause such calamity to Biden’s multibillion dollar vaccination campaign.’
The efforts against him are political, Dr. Mercola added, and he accused the White House of ‘illegal censorship by colluding with social media companies.’ He did not address whether his coronavirus claims were factual.
‘I am the lead author of a peer reviewed publication regarding vitamin D and the risk of COVID-19 and I have every right to inform the public by sharing my medical research,’ he said. He did not identify the publication, and The Times was unable to verify his claim.”
The problem with Frenkel’s assertion is that I did identify the publication. In fact, I emailed her the direct link. So, she lied. Secondly, my paper is beyond easy to locate. Just put my name into PubMed and you’ll find it. Believe it or not, you can even find it using the most biased search engine on earth, Google.
Daniel Engber, senior editor at the typically highly progressive mainstream media outlet, The Atlantic, commented on Frenkel’s clear ineptitude or malicious prevarication in a tweet:5
“A truly bizarre moment in the NYT piece on Joseph Mercola … you can literally verify the existence of this peer-reviewed publication in one second via googling. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33142828/“
Legal Notice Sent to NYT
July 26, 2021, my attorneys sent the following legal notice to Frenkel at the NYT, demanding a retraction of her false statements:6
“Dear Ms. Frenkel,
The undersigned law firm represents Dr. Joseph Mercola in connection with the attached article that was widely published on July 24, 2021. We are providing notice that you have made several false and defamatory statements in this article:
1.You identified that you could not validate that Dr. Mercola published a peer reviewed study on Vitamin D in the severity of COVID-19. Dr. Mercola provided the direct link in response to you (attached) and any journalist or fact checker would simply find the study by searching “Mercola” in PubMed.
2.Your article falsely states Dr. Mercola has been fined “millions” by the FDA. This is completely fabricated, Dr. Mercola has never been fined by the FDA.
… On behalf of Dr. Mercola, we hereby demand you immediately retract the article. We also request that you preserve all communications and documents that relate to Dr. Mercola.”
Where’s the Proof That I Am the ‘No. 1’ Misinformant?
To this day, the NYT insists I’m the No.1 spreader of misinformation online, based on the fabrications of a group called Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) — a “foreign dark money group,” to quote Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley,7 which sprang out of nowhere to create lists of people to be censored into oblivion.
The CCDH’s data gathering is so questionable, even ultra-biased Facebook ended up publicly criticizing it. In an August 18, 2021, Facebook report, Monika Bickert, vice president of Facebook content policy, set the record straight:8
“In recent weeks, there has been a debate about whether the global problem of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation can be solved simply by removing 12 people from social media platforms. People who have advanced this narrative contend that these 12 people are responsible for 73% of online vaccine misinformation on Facebook. There isn’t any evidence to support this claim …
In fact, these 12 people are responsible for about just 0.05% of all views of vaccine-related content on Facebook. This includes all vaccine-related posts they’ve shared, whether true or false, as well as URLs associated with these people.”
At the time that Frenkel made her accusations, a Crowdtangle search for Facebook posts about the COVID jabs, from mid-June to mid-July 2021, also confirmed that my online reach was negligible. Topping the list of top performing Facebook posts expressing negative views about the COVID jabs was Candace Owens, followed by the mainstream news outlet ABC World News Tonight.9
The befuddling reality here is that most of the people identified as “top spreaders of misinformation” actually have negligible reach — at least compared to the people on this Crowdtangle list. None of the CCDH’s “top vaccine misinformants” are on the list above, and our reach certainly has not improved or expanded since then.
If You’re Targeted, You’re On-Target
This naturally raises the question, why were we targeted in the first place? Is it because we have high credibility from being one of the first natural health sites on the web with the most followers? Is it because we’ve spent a quarter of a century gaining people’s trust by mostly being correct about the health care system and criminal Big Pharma behavior?
Is it because we, more than others, have well-established credibility and are directly over the target? Is it because we have the experience and know-how to make accurate predictions? Is it because we see and explain the bigger picture?
Or is it some other reason entirely? It’s a mystery, really, but what is clear is that we’ve been deemed a threat to the official propaganda narrative, and I, for whatever reason, am at the very top of that threat identification list. Well, I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again: I’m beyond truly honored to have been widely disparaged by one of the arms of the U.S. military and intelligence operations.
Being targeted in this fashion — tedious as it may be — is in fact a badge of honor. It tells me I’m doing the right thing, and that I’ve not misinterpreted the intentions behind the COVID machinations. More so than any intuition, it tells me I’m on target.
In the bright light of undeniable reality — as it is, a year later — it’s clear that Frenkel’s hit piece has not aged well. I doubt the NYT’s “Superspreader” documentary will fare much better. In the final analysis, if you want any hope of controlling your health, and that of your family, you’d be wise to understand legacy media speaks in Orwellian Doublespeak and reality is the opposite of virtually everything they are telling you.
Sources and References
White House “Climate Adviser” Banned from the National Academy of Science for Science Fraud
… while White House Officials Beg Social Media to Silence Opponents
By Igor Chudov | August 18, 2022
Climate change is a very important topic! According to Bill Gates-sponsored scientist Kari Nadeau, climate change is responsible for the recent rise in heart attacks, stillbirths, and cardiovascular disease, especially in children. So, knowing how important climate change is, I am paying attention to news about it, though with lesser intensity than I devote to Covid news.
Finally, we have a great climate change story! White House “climate official” Jane Lubchenco was just banned by the National Academy of Science (archive link) for science fraud. She was an editor of a paper written by her brother-in-law. Jane did not disclose this family relationship and promoted her brother-in-law’s article. The article itself contained false data that was known to be out of date at the time the article was written, and thus the paper was fraudulent.
Jane is now not allowed to participate in many scientific activities due to violating ethics rules meant to prevent fraud in science.
What is the White House’s biggest priority right now, when it comes to climate change? Perhaps it is cleaning up the place and making sure that we have honest science? Not really. The priority is demanding that major social networks silence climate change skeptics. Watch this video at 11:10:
The White House adviser says in the interview:
And frankly, the tech companies have to stop allowing specific individuals over and over again to spread disinformation.
I am not a big climate change skeptic — I do not care about climate change all that much right now — but coincidentally, Twitter recently suspended my dog’s account for 7 days.
So, I am not allowed to spread misinformation. The White House, on the other hand, has climate change advisors who perpetrate scientific fraud.
On a more serious note, my dog’s Twitter account was not alone and was suspended among hundreds of others last week, ostensibly for antivax misinformation. Why is this happening now? Why the urgency? It certainly is NOT about helping to vaccinate the public, as COVID vaccine uptake is at historic lows and everyone made up their mind already. Censorship would not help much with vaccination! Why, then, is it intensifying?
My own guess is that these suspensions are not so much related to Covid, but are happening due to the fact that the White House and the woke social networks are preparing for the November elections and want to silence dissent in advance. Why?
- to influence the election, and
- to prevent people from questioning election conduct and fairness afterward
They — the White House, Twitter, Facebook and Google — know that they will have to face very uncomfortable questions about their role in forcing the so-called “Covid vaccine” onto young people, as they “own” the outcome of this. They want to postpone that moment of reckoning and thus are deleting as many dissenting voices as they can.
Israeli Forces Storm, Seal Offices of Seven Palestinian Human Rights and Humanitarian Organizations in Ramallah
Al-Manar – August 18, 2022
The United Nations Human Rights Office today expressed alarm at Israel’s arbitrary closure of seven Palestinian human rights and humanitarian organizations and called on Israel to immediately reverse these decisions, reiterating the High Commissioner’s call to revoke the designations of the organizations as “terrorist” and “unlawful.”
At dawn today, Israeli occupation forces broke into, searched and sealed the offices of seven Palestinian human rights and humanitarian organizations in Ramallah. Their property was confiscated and destroyed. Israeli forces left copies of military orders to close the offices of the organizations.
“The closure orders are a step to enforce previous Israeli declarations of these organizations as “unlawful” and as “terror organizations” in 2021,” said the Human Rights Office in a statement. “Despite offers to do so, Israeli authorities have not presented to the United Nations any credible evidence to justify these declarations. Several Member States have also stated that the evidence shared with them does not justify the designations. As such, the closures appear totally arbitrary.”
The UN office said the shutting down of the organizations represents the latest in a series of attacks that are further drastically shrinking space for human rights and humanitarian work in the occupied Palestinian territory, affecting all institutions working on human rights, including the UN Human Rights Office. “Human rights defenders must be immediately protected from these unjustified attacks,” it said.
The organizations affected are Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association; Al Haq; Bisan Center for Research and Development; Defense for Children International – Palestine; Health Work Committees (HWC); Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC); the Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees (UPWC).
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From the Archives
Alarmist climate science as a textbook example of groupthink
By Paul MacRae | May 1, 2012
A while ago, I received an email from a friend who asked:
How can many, many respected, competitive, independent science folks be so wrong about [global warming] (if your [skeptical] premise is correct). I don’t think it could be a conspiracy, or incompetence. … Has there ever been another case when so many ‘leading’ scientific minds got it so wrong?
The answer to the second part of my friend’s question—“Has there ever been another case where so many ‘leading’ scientific minds got it so wrong?”—is easy. Yes, there are many such cases, both within and outside climate science. In fact, the graveyard of science is littered with the bones of theories that were once thought “certain” (e.g., that the continents can’t “drift,” that Newton’s laws were immutable, and hundreds if not thousands of others).
Science progresses by the overturning of theories once thought “certain.” … continue
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