Warning to the BBC: You can’t gag TCW
By Kathy Gyngell | TCW Defending Freedom | February 23, 2022
THE BBC gets very righteous and uppity when it’s dishing out the criticism – but doesn’t like it when it’s on the receiving end.
A classic example came my way on Monday with a message from TV Licensing about a TCW Defending Freedom blog. Basically, it was asking me to ‘censor’ a sentence they didn’t like.
I wrote back to BBC Director-General Tim Davie and here I’m publishing my reply to him as an open letter. The contents are self-explanatory …
Dear Mr Davie,
I am the editor and proprietor of the website TCW Defending Freedom, which registers between one and 1.4million page impressions a month.
On Monday of this week, we published a blog about Justin Trudeau’s use of emergency powers to end the protest in Ottawa by Canadian truckers.
It contained the following paragraph: ‘For example, violent Black Lives Matter protesters have been free to run riot in the US, while peaceful pro-Trump supporters have been arrested. In the UK, minimal, even helpful, action was taken against disruptive Extinction Rebellion and Insulate Britain protesters, while single mothers are jailed for not having paid their TV licence fee. Unvaccinated citizens are penalised and scapegoated everywhere, while illegal unvaccinated boat immigrants are rescued by coastguards and the RNLI and welcomed generously into society.’
To my surprise, I received an email later that day from Alex Skirvin alexander.skirvin@bbc.co.uk in which he stated: ‘I am getting in touch from TV Licensing regarding your recent piece, ‘Iron fist for the truckers, velvet glove for eco-terrorists.’
‘The piece states: “In the UK, minimal, even helpful, action was taken against disruptive Extinction Rebellion and Insulate Britain protesters, while single mothers are jailed for not having paid their TV licence fee.”
‘This is inaccurate. Nobody is imprisoned for non-payment of the licence fee – the maximum sentence is a fine which may be imposed by a court.
‘If a court fine isn’t paid this is a separate matter, a custodial sentence may be imposed, but that is entirely a matter for the courts. In 2020, there were no admissions into prison associated with failing to pay a fine in respect of the non-payment of a TV licence in England and Wales. To ensure readers are correctly informed, please could you update the piece?’
I would like to ask you the two following questions:
Was this an authorised communication from BBC licensing?
Is it now the BBC’s official view that no one is jailed in consequence of non-payment of the licence fee?
Technically, of course, a custodial sentence is the consequence of non-payment of a fine imposed because of evasion of the licence fee. But the fact remains that the root cause of such a sentence – the sine qua non – is because offenders have not paid their licence fee.
In all the circumstances, I do not regard what our columnist wrote to be inaccurate, and I would also like an apology for being approached in this unprofessional and rather disrespectful way.
We are publishing this as an open letter on the TCW Defending Freedom website tomorrow.
Yours sincerely,
Kathy Gyngell
Editor, TCW Defending Freedom
Leading law firm issues Facebook letter of complaint over ‘anti-Palestinian bias’
MEMO | February 23, 2022
Leading law firm Bindmans LLP has sent a formal letter of complaint to Facebook over its “anti-Palestinian bias.” Instructed by the International Centre of Justice for Palestinians (ICJP), the London based firm demanded explanation for the “systematic” and “far-reaching” censorship of content and accounts related to Palestine.
The complaint was also sent to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of freedom of opinion and expression. It requests an urgent review of, and explanation for, the decisions made by Facebook, which was rebranded last October as Meta Inc, to suspend accounts and posts which are affiliated to Palestinian news agencies, commentators and journalists.
Monday’s letter of complaint to Facebook is the second in nine months sent by Bindmans LLP to the social media giant. A previous communication submitted in May 2021 was made on behalf of five journalists and news agencies in Palestine. Facebook is said to have interfered with their accounts and/or posts and was accused of breaching their fundamental right to freedom of expression as well as its own Corporate Human Rights Policy.
In the May 2021 complaint, the main questions posed by Bindmans LLP included whether the censorship decisions were carried out by an algorithm or by a person exercising their discretion, and details regarding Facebook’s policy in justifying their censorship decisions, in addition to steps taken by the company to resolve unfair censorship.
In its response to the letter, a month later, Facebook said that it had investigated the accounts referenced in the letter and, after further review, has restored content and/or accounts where applicable. Notably, no substantial answers were provided to any of the main questions cited in the original communication.
Despite the commitments made by Facebook in their letter sent in June 2021, the censorship remained, said ICJP in its press release detailing the content of the complaint. The centre is an independent organisation of lawyers, academics and politicians that work to promote and support Palestinian rights.
Monitoring group, Sada Social, which has been documenting the suspension of Palestinian content and accounts on Facebook, recorded in 2021 alone, hundreds of instances of inappropriate censorship of social media content in support of the rights of Palestinians. This censorship was exacerbated significantly during the last Israeli offensive on Gaza in May 2021.
The complaint reinstates the request that Meta/Facebook discloses and reviews its decision-making process, and explains why the accounts were closed, suspended or posts taken down, and whether in doing so an algorithm or human discretion was used.
World Economic Forum pushes digital ID system that will determine access to services
By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | February 22, 2022
The World Economic Forum (WEF), an international organization that works to “shape global, regional and industry agendas,” recently published its latest dystopian proposal – a far-reaching digital ID system that will collect as much data as possible on individuals and then use this data to determine their level of access to various services.
This digital ID proposal is outlined in a report titled “Advancing Digital Agency: The Power of Data Intermediaries” and builds upon a digital ID framework that the WEF has published previously.
Under this framework, the WEF proposes collecting data from many aspects of people’s “everyday lives” through their devices, telecommunications networks, and third-party service providers.
The WEF suggests that this data collection dragnet would allow a digital ID to scoop up data on people’s online behavior, purchase history, network usage, credit history, biometrics, names, national identity numbers, medical history, travel history, social accounts, e-government accounts, bank accounts, energy usage, health stats, education, and more.
Once the digital ID has access to this huge, highly personal data set, the WEF proposes using it to decide whether users are allowed to “own and use devices,” “open bank accounts,” “carry out online financial transactions,” “conduct business transactions,” “access insurance, treatment,” “book trips,” “go through border control between countries or regions,” “access third-party services that rely on social media logins,” “file taxes, vote, collect benefits,” and more.
In this Advancing Digital Agency: The Power of Data Intermediaries report, the WEF positions this digital ID framework as the part of the solution to a “trust gap in data sharing” and notes that vaccine passports, which were mandated across the world during the COVID-19 pandemic, do “by nature serve as a form of digital identity.”
The WEF also praises the way vaccine passports have allowed governments to harvest data from their populations without “notice and consent”:
“At a collective level, vaccine data is an incredible public health asset. The United Kingdom Government in particular has acknowledged this and has suggested that anonymization, pseudonymization and data shielding techniques could be harnessed in a controlled environment to allow for the reuse of that highly sensitive data. In such cases, notice and consent is not required per se for the reuse of the data but the intermediary processes the data undergoes must be done in a controlled environment so that the findings of the data set are made available rather than the data itself.”
Additionally, the WEF provides a specific example of how digital IDs could be used to authenticate a user (by using fingerprints, a password, or identity verification technology) and decide whether they should be granted access to a bank loan by judging their profile (which may include their biometrics, name, and national identity number) and history (which may include their credit, medical, and online purchasing history).
The WEF goes on to suggest that digital IDs will “allow for the selection of preferences and the making of certain choices in advance” and ultimately pave the way for “automated decision-making” where a “trusted digital assistant” “automates permissions for people and effectively manages their data across different services” to “overcome the limitations of notice and consent.”
This push for an invasive digital ID system from the WEF follows it proposing other similar surveillance systems such as turning your heartbeat into a digital ID. Throughout the pandemic, the WEF has consistently advocated for vaccine passports and digital ID.
Beyond these specific proposals, the WEF is infamous for its globalist and transhumanist agendas such as the “Great Reset” (which proposes that people will “own nothing” and “be happy”) and the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” (which, according to WEF founder and chairman Klaus Schwab, will lead to “a fusion of our physical, our digital, and our biological identities”).
Governments and private corporations are increasingly embracing digital IDs. Some governments are also pushing a similar notion – social credit-style apps that monitor citizens’ behavior and reward them for engaging in state-approved actions.
Following the Money on Climate Change Media Coverage
By Chris Morrison | The Daily Sceptic | February 20, 2022
The Associated Press (AP) is assigning another two dozen journalists across the world to cover ‘climate issues’. AP Senior Vice President Julie Pace described the move as a “far reaching initiative that will transform the way we cover the climate story”. Over 20 of the journalists will be new hires and they will be funded by an $8m gift from five billionaire philanthropic organisations, including the Left-wing Rockefeller Foundation. The money is just the latest in a series of such gifts and AP reports that 50 writing jobs are funded from these sources.
AP is not the only large media company to collect such hand-outs. The BBC and the Guardian regularly receive multi-million dollar contributions from the trusts of wealthy philanthropists. It is estimated that Bill Gates has given over $300 million over the last decade to a wide variety of media outlets. Faced with plummeting paid readers and advertisers, mainstream legacy media seems eager to tap a new revenue stream.
The money is spread wide across such media. This month, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting received $1.5 million from Rockefeller to “expand coverage of under-reported and/or inaccurately reported critical public health information”. The Quadrivium Foundation, run by Democrat power couple James and Kathryn Murdoch, is also paying climate wages at AP. On its website, the Foundation notes that it also invests in Climate Central, using meteorologists as “trusted messengers” of the links between extreme weather and climate change. Since it is not possible to link individual weather events to long term climate change with any scientific certainty, this aim looks to be a waste of money, or perhaps not.
‘Trusted messengers’ seems to be a phrase much in vogue around philanthropic operations. Last October, Rockefeller gave $4.5 million to Purpose Global, a non-profit company that aims to help corporate clients with their “cultural intelligence”. The money was given in support of facilitating a “communication network of trusted messengers”. This would “amplify accurate information and combat mis- and dis- information on COVID-19 vaccines”. In September 2020, the Gates Foundation gave the Guardian $3.5 million to “support” its regular reporting on global health. Likewise, the Global Health Security Team at the Telegraph is Gates-funded.
Old school journalists might be a little happier to see less of the ‘trusted messenger’ stuff and more of the requirement to investigate. But critical inquiry of climate change science has been more or less banned from many mainstream outlets. This is despite the fact that the hypothesis that humans cause all or most global warming is unproven, and many scientists look more to natural causes for long term change. Predictions – often termed evidence – of future warming, are based on climate models that have never provided an accurate forecast in the last 40 years. Global warming started to run out of steam two decades ago, and it has been at a standstill for the last seven. When Google Adsense banned the main climate web page tracking accurate satellite data showing the standstill, the interest was confined to just a few outlets, including the Daily Sceptic.
One of the largest suppliers of cash for climate change is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the BBC and the Guardian are two of its favourite giftees. The Guardian has received upwards of $20 million over recent years starting with £6m in 2011 to establish a “millennium Development Goals” feed that provides “compelling evidence-based content”. During the last decade, Gates has given at least $20 million to help fund the BBC World Service and $5.5 million for the Corporation’s Media Action charity.
In that time, the software tycoon, once treated with great suspicion for early monopolistic tendencies, has become a prized ‘talking head’ across the BBC for epidemics, vaccines and anti-meat diets. His recent scary tales of climate change, “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster”, was recently given five airings on prime time Radio 4.
Elsewhere, there are prizes for the best behaved – sorry – most distinguished climate journalist. Every year, the foundation of BBVA, a Spanish bank heavily involved in financing Net Zero projects, hands out €100,000 to the lucky recipient. Last year it went to Marlow Hood of Agence France-Presse, who describes himself as the “Herald of the Anthropocene”, the latter being a political renaming of the current Holocene era. In 2019, Matt McGrath of the BBC pocketed the cash, while in 2020 the award went to – no great surprise – the Guardian.
Much of the BBC money appears to support advocacy in the developing world, although the terms of specific grants are sometimes hard to understand. A letter from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in August 2019 describing the purpose of a $2.03 million grant to the BBC reads as follows: “To help us learn deepen our underpinning of processes and user journeys for different sets of women’s empowerment collectives, develop use cases for where digital can help amplify effects bring efficiencies, and close gender gaps for women”.
No doubt when this non-sensical gibberish was translated into understandable English, the money was spent wisely.
Canada wants to make financial aspects of Emergencies Act permanent
By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | February 19, 2022
Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland wants to make permanent the invasive financial surveillance system introduced as part of the “Emergencies Act” to crush the civil liberties protests.
Freeland had announced the initial powers earlier this week to freeze the bank accounts of those who support the protests.
“As of today, all crowdfunding platforms, and the payment service providers they use, must register with FINTRAC and must report large and suspicious transactions to FINTRAC (Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada),” Freeland said at the time. “This will help mitigate the risk that these platforms receive illicit funds; increase the quality and quantity of intelligence received by FINTRAC; and make more information available to support investigations by law enforcement into these illegal blockades.”
“This is about following the money. This is about stopping the financing of these illegal blockades. We are today serving notice, if your truck is being used in these illegal blockades your corporate accounts will be frozen.”
Under the Emergencies Act, banks are required to freeze accounts without the need for a court order.
Freeland explained: “The government is issuing an order with immediate effect under the Emergencies Act, authorizing Canadian financial institutions to temporarily cease providing financial services where the institution suspects that an account is being used to further the illegal blockades and occupations. This order covers both personal and corporate accounts.”
But now, Freeland has announced that she plans to make some of the emergency measures permanent.
The government also intends to introduce new legislation to make new authorities for FINTRAC.
“We used all the tools that we had prior to the invocation of the Emergencies Act and we determined we needed some additional tools,” Freeland announced in a panel interview on Zoom.
“Some of those tools we will be putting forward measures to put those tools permanently in place. The authorities of FINTRAC, I believe, do need to be expanded to cover crowdsourcing platforms and payment platforms.”
Trevor in Trimley’s letter to PM Justin Trudeau
(Since he claimed the right to freeze everybody’s bank accounts)
February 17, 2022
Dear Justin Trudeau,
How do you do it? It’s like you’re a psychic gifted with an intuitive capacity far beyond the range of normal people. I would never have known the truckers were racist just by looking at them, but apparently you can spot it from a mile away! And how did you know that they have “unacceptable views” without ever talking to them? Genius! Is this the result of special training or were you born this way? I must confess I’m so old-fashioned I still need racists to actually do or say something racist before I know I’m dealing with one. I was singing your praises to Mrs Trevor in Trimley only this morning and she agreed you have special gifts. (Actually she said you have special needs, she gets mixed up sometimes.) My Great Aunt Mabel had the gift too, but sadly those were different times and she was institutionalised. Perhaps when you die you should leave your brain to ‘the science?’
But I know you’re a busy man so I shall get to my point. I should tell you that it is Mrs Trevor in Trimley who prompted me to pen you this letter. She rightly brought to my attention that she has recently sent money (£20 as a birthday gift) to a cousin who emigrated to Canada in 1983, and she is now understandably concerned that Laurence may have gone off the rails since then and joined the ranks of the many hundreds of thousands of Canadians who have become racists, misogynists and terrorists during your premiership. Between you and me, I always had misgivings about “long haired Larry” and would not be the least bit surprised to see him flying a banner inscribed with provocative white supremacist language on it like, ‘freedom!’ (Yeah, sure Larry, freedom for whites like you but what about freedom for people who like to black up on social occasions?)
Mrs Trevor in Trimley’s concern, of course, is that her largesse may be mistaken for funding terrorism and that her bank account could be frozen, or worse, that she might be kicked out of the Women’s Institute if her name emerges on a list of supporters of working class struggles against the powerful, and all as a result of her being thoughtlessly generous to a person without first checking the acceptability of his current views. I offer my sincere apologies for my wife’s generous nature and would like to make a suggestion that I hope makes up for it.
To help us, and other non-Canadians, avoid making similar missteps in future, may I ask that you put in place a clear system that clarifies the views held by Canadian people we may come into contact with. My suggestion is that you ask Canadians to answer a simple “acceptable views” questionnaire, perhaps on a weekly basis? If their answers are published online we’ll be able to see whether or not we’re funding terrorism when we send them money for charitable causes they support, or money at birthdays and Christmas, etc.
My suggested ten questions are:
- Do you like Justin Trudeau?
- Do you admire Justin Trudeau?
- Are you now or have you ever been a member of a political party that opposes Justin Trudeau?
- Do you want Justin Trudeau to utterly destroy the Canadian economy to prevent you from feeling under the weather for a week or two?
- Do you think Justin Trudeau bears a passing resemblance to any notable Cubans?
- Do you think Justin Trudeau is right (they shouldn’t even need to read the rest of this question) that the truckers’ convoy is just as serious an emergency situation as World Wars 1 and 2?
- Do you think Justin Trudeau should stay in hiding for the rest of his life, yes or no? (This is a trick question Justin to confuse anyone who thinks they can cheat the test!)
- Can you, hand on heart, state that Justin Trudeau is right that there are ZERO treatments that work against COVID except for the glorious vaccines that will save the world?
- Would Canada be better off abandoning democracy entirely and installing Justin Trudeau as Supreme Leader?
- Would you like to see Justin Trudeau as President of a one world government?
_____
My grading system would be:
10 pro-Trudeau answers = Acceptable views.
Anything less = A gulag in Saskatchewan, or just Saskatchewan, whichever is harder to escape from.
Once again, please accept our apologies and know that I am fully in support of your stance AGAINST wanting people to die of COVID, and AGAINST racists, misogynists, transphobics, homophobics, terrorists, and everything else that’s impossible for anyone to publicly support, and that you’ve so cleverly founded your political ideology on. Who could ever argue successfully with any of that??!!
Please be assured that any unfortunate error made by Mrs Trimley was just carelessness with her innate human desire to give generously to people less well off than herself and should not be interpreted as a hostile act towards you personally or anyone else lacking those instincts. We’re on your side! To prove it, I have begun a fundraiser with GoFundMe.com to support your campaign to be Dictator of Canada! This is gonna be huge! I’ve kicked it off with a pound. You’re on your way!
Yours sincerely,
PS. I’ve just watched a couple of YouTube videos of the truckers and now you’ve pointed it out, it’s so clear they’re racist! The black racist truckers I saw were obviously the worst. Who are they even racist against??? Is it white people or themselves??? Please advise.
Trevor in Trimley writes open letters to people who should know better. You can read more of his work on his substack.
Zuckerberg’s Facebook empire collapsing
RT | February 18, 2022
Once the world’s sixth largest firm with a valuation of over $1 trillion, Facebook’s parent company Meta finished Thursday’s trading with a value of $565 billion. According to data compiled by Bloomberg, the social media giant has tumbled out of the world’s 10 largest companies by market value, hammered by its worst monthly stock decline ever.
The stock rout has placed Mark Zuckerberg’s company in 11th place behind Chinese Tencent Holdings. Chip giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) holds the ninth spot. The list of the world’s most-valuable companies, ranked by market capitalization, includes Apple, Microsoft, Aramco, Alphabet, Amazon, Tesla, Berkshire Hathaway, and Nvidia.
Data shows that the value wiped out by the selloff in Meta’s shares exceeds the market caps of all but eight companies in the S&P 500 Index. Meta’s share price is down about 40% year-to-date after the company reported two weeks ago that its social media platform Facebook lost about one million users from the third quarter to the fourth quarter of 2021. That’s the first such decline for the company in its 18-year history.
Meta’s stock plummeted 26.4% on February 3 after the company released its weaker-than-expected outlook. The $240 billion loss in market capitalization was the largest one-day loss in US corporate history. CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s personal net worth is down more than $46 billion from the beginning of the year, he’s currently worth $78.8 billion.
Since then, Meta’s share price has extended losses, losing another 13% to date. The company has warned that the rest of the year is shaping up to be a choppy one as it deals with “macroeconomic challenges” and continues its long-term strategic shift “towards building the metaverse.”
DHS says it scans social media for “misinformation” but not “constitutionally protected speech”
But “misinformation” is constitutionally protected speech
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | February 18, 2022
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is doubling down on a recently revealed policy of tying the issue of domestic terrorism with online “misinformation,” as well as keeping an extra eye on trucker protests.
The document derived from an event that spelled all this out first appeared on February 7 as a bulletin, detailing the allegedly heightened threats the US is facing – not least because of “an online environment filled with false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories.”
What was until recently typical of media op-eds and Twitter exchanges has evidently seeped into official policy, so the DHS now explicitly fears that “misleading narratives” found on the internet have the power to undermine trust in US government, not to mention branding free expression and political differences as dangerous “discord.”
Meanwhile, what is sowing true discord – Covid mandates – are mentioned not as a problem in and of itself, but simply something that gives rise to said “misleading narratives.”
“For example, there is widespread online proliferation of false or misleading narratives regarding unsubstantiated widespread election fraud and COVID-19. Grievances associated with these themes inspired violent extremist attacks during 2021,” reads the bulletin.
A week later, after this particular take on the situation raised some eyebrows in the Senate, DHS Counter-Terrorism Coordinator John Cohen is defending the document.
Reports, including in the Washington Times, say that Senator Marsha Blackburn described this particular DHS policy as speech policing, while the nonpartisan Center to Advance Security in America (CASA) wants to know more about the department’s “methodology” in coming up with all this.
But according to Cohen “hard analysis” has taken place (he failed to mention whether it produced any “hard evidence”) which he says shows links between “narratives about government’s response to COVID, the 2020 election, immigration, and race.”
And, he continued, the job of the DHS is not to police thought. One would hope the agency does its job, but a question mark lingers over it since Cohen added that the DHS doesn’t monitor individuals who are engaging in constitutionally protected speech.
“Our job’s not to police thought. Our job is to prevent acts of violence. We don’t monitor individuals engaging in constitutionally protected speech,” he said.
“We’ve put in place a series of protections to make sure that as we’re evaluating online content, it’s only relating to threats, and we’re only handling that information in a privacy, civil liberties-protective way.”
Unfortunately for Cohen’s own “narrative” here, in the US, even what passes as “misinformation” is actually constitutionally protected speech.
As for trucker protests, which are treated in Canada as a national security issue, he said the DHS was monitoring them in cooperation with counterparts across the border.
He diminished the number of participants whose goal was “simply” to express opposition to vaccine mandates by saying there were “some people” who were there for that reason.
But, Cohen went on, there are “significant levels of online and physical participation by ideologically motivated violent extremists.”
YouTube to censor “new misinformation” preemptively
By Tom Parker | Reclaim The Net | February 17, 2022
YouTube, the world’s dominant video sharing platform, has already removed over one million videos for violating its strict and controversial “misinformation” rules. But in a new announcement, the tech giant has revealed that it’s going to be getting even stricter and suppressing “new misinformation” preemptively before it has the chance to gain traction.
YouTube’s Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan described how the video-sharing platform will start “catching new misinformation before it goes viral” in a blog post. The process will involve continuously training YouTube’s machine learning systems with “an even more targeted mix of classifiers, keywords in additional languages, and information from regional analysts” to identify “narratives” that YouTube’s main classifier doesn’t catch.
Mohan added: “Over time, this will make us faster and more accurate at catching these viral misinfo narratives.”
When YouTube does catch what it calls “viral misinfo narratives,” it will reduce the reach of some videos and push viewers towards “authoritative” videos (videos from brands, mainstream media outlets, and health authorities that YouTube has deemed to be authoritative) in search and recommendations.
For topics where there’s no authoritative content, YouTube is considering using news panels being developed (which direct viewers to text articles for major news events), “fact check” boxes (which direct viewers to content from fact-checkers), and new types of labels that add “a disclaimer warning viewers there’s a lack of high quality information.”
However, YouTube has yet to finalize how these labels will work because “surfacing a label could unintentionally put a spotlight on a topic that might not otherwise gain traction.”
Mohan justified these new censorship measures by claiming that “the fresher the misinfo, the fewer examples we have to train our systems” and noted that new narratives often “quickly crop up and gain views.” He added: “Narratives can slide from one topic to another—for example, some general wellness content can lead to vaccine hesitancy.”
YouTube has been proactively targeting “emerging” misinformation since at least 2020 via its “Intelligence Desk.” The Intelligence Desk initiative launched in 2018 to proactively police “inappropriate or offensive content” and in a 2020 interview, Mohan revealed that it was also being used to look “over the horizon” and “stay ahead of” emerging “conspiracy” and misinformation content before it “becomes a challenge” on YouTube.
Va. Public School to Use Precrime Thought-Police Program to Deter Off-Campus, Social Media Hate Speech by Students
The Rutherford Institute | February 17, 2022
FAIRFAX COUNTY, Va. — A Virginia public school system has announced its plan to adopt what has been likened to a precrime surveillance program in order to monitor and deter social media threats, hate speech, bullying and harassment by students. Pointing out that the social media monitoring program being developed and considered by Fairfax County Public Schools (“FCPS”) raises significant concerns about government surveillance and its chilling effect on the lawful speech of students, parents, and other community members, The Rutherford Institute also warned that such a program could give rise to one-size-fits-all zero tolerance policies regarding expressive activity that is misconstrued as negative, critical or hateful.
“While it may appear commendable at first glance, this school-sponsored social media monitoring program is problematic on multiple fronts, not the least of which is the message it would send students that they have no rights: to privacy, free speech, or the freedom to explore different ideas and think for themselves. Indeed, this program is tantamount to an Orwellian precrime program complete with thought police,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “Where such an endeavor runs into trouble is when those overseeing this kind of pre-crime program get overzealous and overreach, targeting students for engaging in lawful behavior that triggers the school’s precrime sensors. In such an environment, students learn to self-censor, critical thinking dissipates, and the schools become breeding grounds for compliant citizens, rather than raising up a generation of individuals with a dynamic understanding of what freedom and tolerance mean.”
In November 2021, Fairfax County Public Schools (“FCPS”) issued an Informal Request for Proposal to solicit and establish a contract for social media software which would seek to detect and collect data from social media, classify aliases and usernames, identify connections between persons, set alerts for active listening, and produce high-level summary reports. FCPS intends to use the software for “social media listening” in order to monitor “threats, harassment, hate speech and bullying” which “may be directed to racial groups or any student or teacher within FCPS.” Yet as The Rutherford Institute warned in its letter to members of the Fairfax County School Board, by reportedly subjecting students, parents, and other community members to constant surveillance, the Social Media Monitoring Program lays the groundwork for a broad range of constitutional violations. Specifically, Institute attorneys point out that the social monitoring precrime program threatens to chill lawful First Amendment activity, undermines parents’ rights, could lead to viewpoint discrimination and a troubling expansion of school zero tolerance policies, and may exceed the scope of the Board’s statutory authority. Denouncing the program as an ill-advised plan that could expose FCPS to legal jeopardy, The Rutherford Institute has asked the Fairfax County School Board to reconsider its adoption of a Social Media Monitoring Program and offered to advise and assist the County in striking a better balance between school safety and the rights of students and parents.
The Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit civil liberties organization, provides legal assistance at no charge to individuals whose constitutional rights have been threatened or violated and educates the public on a wide spectrum of issues affecting their freedoms.
DOCUMENTS
The Rutherford Institute’s letter to the Fairfax County School Board
Ottawa cops crack down on protesters
Workers construct a barrier fence around the parliament building © Getty Images / Scott Olson
RT | February 17, 2022
Police have started to erect fencing around the Freedom Convoy protest in downtown Ottawa, Canada, and have brought in extra officers in a push to clear the demonstration. The move comes after the truckers were threatened with arrest under emergency powers enacted by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Video footage captured on Thursday showed busloads of police arriving in downtown Ottawa, and officers purportedly holding crowd control drills. Meanwhile, workers were seen putting up metal fencing near the demonstration, which has brought traffic in the center of the Canadian capital to a standstill for nearly three weeks now.
Shortly after these videos surfaced, Ottawa Police announced that “residents are seeing a major increase in the number of police officers on our streets.” The force also stated that barriers and fencing are going up around the “core” of downtown Ottawa, cutting the protest off from the rest of the city. Only those who live and work within this area will be allowed to pass the barriers.
“The unlawful protesters must leave the area and will not be provided access,” Ottawa Police stated on Twitter.
Cops on Wednesday began handing out fliers to the protesters, warning them that they could face arrest if they refuse to leave. The notices also said that, thanks to emergency powers enacted by Trudeau on Monday, those traveling to Ottawa to join the protest are now also breaking the law, and face the risk of having their vehicles seized.
“We’re going to take back the entirety of the downtown core and every occupied space,” interim police chief Steve Bell told city councilors on Wednesday evening, adding that his officers would “remove this unlawful protest” and “return our city to a state of normalcy” in the coming days.
The emergency powers invoked by Trudeau also allow the government to order bank accounts linked with the protest frozen, and to suspend the trucking licenses of participants.
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New Book
New Book: No Autoimmunity The Body Doesn’t Attack Itself
Lies are Unbekoming | September 24, 2026
The label for Humira, once the best-selling drug in the world, lists its risks in plain print. One of them, in the label’s own words, is new “autoimmune” disease.
A drug prescribed for a condition labelled autoimmune carries a warning that it can cause a condition labelled autoimmune. That contradiction sits in every box, on a folded paper almost nobody reads.
My new book starts there.
No Autoimmunity: The Body Doesn’t Attack Itself
For seventy years, “your body is attacking itself, and we don’t know why” has ended the conversation for people diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, Hashimoto’s, Type 1 diabetes, Crohn’s and psoriasis. More than eighty conditions now carry the autoimmune label. The diagnosis comes with a prescription for life. It almost never comes with a question about cause.
This book asks the question and answers it from the framework’s own records: its drug labels, its journals, its regulatory filings, and its own experiments. … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Merz regime wants ‘secret police’ – opposition
- Israeli settlers terrorize West Bank Palestinians with state-provided drones: Report
- They see them, then kill them: Israeli quadcopters track, deliberately target civilians in Gaza
- Debunked: Trump’s egregious UNGA claims on war against Iran crumble under scrutiny
- Europe was part of the infrastructure of US aggression against Iran: Deputy FM
- New evidence on the Bucha Massacre
- Italy and France debunk reports CIA issued ‘Russian drone threat’ warning
- How Russia is Rewiring the Global South
- Britain’s elites want you ready to die for a war they keep imagining
- Inside Ukraine’s propaganda operation targeting Americans
- If Americans Knew
- Trump betrayed voters with his campaign lies and prioritized a foreign country once he took office
- Netanyahu calls Israel’s war in Gaza ‘opposite of genocide’ in UN speech to near-empty hall
- Settler Kidnappings: Torture, Sexual Abuse and Terrorisation of Palestinian Abductees as Israel Deepens Annexation of West Bank
- Gaza winter nears as 162,000 tents become unusable, raising fears of humanitarian crisis
- Netanyahu says, “It’s the opposite of genocide”; UN says Gaza economy is world’s ‘most severe crisis on record’ – Daily Update
- Israel’s US-Backed Assault on Gaza Has Created the ‘World’s Most Severe Economic Crisis on Record’: UN
- ‘Protecting U.S. Citizens’… From Israel
- ‘This is where I live now, the back of a truck’: a day in the life of a grandmother in Gaza
- In UN Speech, Iran’s President Displays Pictures of Children Killed by US, Brings Attention to Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal
- Israel displaces hundreds of Palestinians amid wave of demolitions in West Bank
- No Tricks Zone
- New Study: Earth And Venus Surface Warmth Largely Explained By Convection And Lapse Rate, Not CO2 Or Radiation
- 2025 Nature Paper Claiming Worsening Global Drought Gets RETRACTED …Heavily Flawed
- New Study: ‘Global Drought Shows No Detectable Recent Acceleration Under Climate Warming’
- Economic Masterminds: German Socialists Suggest Taxing Productivity Gains Stemming From Using AI
- The South China Sea Has Not Been Cooperating With The Climate Change Narrative
- Energy Crisis: Germany Enters Heating Season With Historically Low Gas Reserve Fill Levels
- New Study: The Antarctic Ice Sheet Gained Mass From 2020-2024 Due To Staggering Snow And Ice Accumulation
- Study: Ocean Heating Rates From Thousands Of Years Ago ‘Dwarf’ Modern Ocean Heating Rates
- Climate Extremists Target, Attack Large-Scale Power Grid Infrastructure In Germany!
- New Study: Antarctic Ice Melt Has Contributed Less Than 1 Centimeter To Sea Level Rise In The Last 30 Years
