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Poland wants to end political censorship online

Poland is one of the few countries pushing to support free speech on monopoly platforms

By Dan Frieth | Reclaim the Net | June 10, 2021

According to Poland’s Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, Big Tech corporations have amassed so much power that they control politics, and the solution is for governments around the world to introduce laws limiting that power.

Polish legislators are working on a bill that would make it illegal for online platforms to censor content that does not break Poland’s laws.

“Today, who sets these rules is really the master of destiny for society and for nation-states,” Morawiecki said in a recent interview with Newsweek. “So today, platforms and communication networks and intellectual property are even more important than the land and the buildings and the technology assembly lines and all the materials that go into creating these digital realms.”

The PM argued for a new approach focused on protecting the power of governments, as well as the well-being of society, accounting for the way the internet and social media has transformed the social, political, and economic environment.

“These dynamics do not make it easier to grasp the elements of the moving parts of the complicated interdependent economic jigsaw puzzle that is our modern age,” Morawiecki said.

“And this is why it is so much more difficult to understand who sets the rules today, because it is no longer the governments that can have this competence over the setting of the rules.

“Huge international corporations in the area of the digital world, in particular, are setting the rules very often that are suitable for themselves, which may not always be a social good.

“This is another form of dominance over the rest of the sectors they operate in, but it may also create dominance over other areas of the lives of citizens in a society.

“And this is why states should now be very active in eliminating censorship and eliminating monopolistic powers of those companies, as well. And this is one of the reasons we started to work on this anti-censorship regulation.”

Morawiecki and members of his political party PiS (Law and Justice Party) are pushing for the introduction of a new legislation to push back against Big Tech. They recently proposed a bill that would allow the government to fine social media companies for censoring legal speech in Poland. Additionally, the legislation would allow social media users in Poland to appeal censorship they deem unfair to the Free Speech Council, which will be formed when the bill passes. A social media platform found guilty of removing legal speech could be fined as much as $13.35 million.

In February, Hungary’s Justice Minister Judit Varga said she was working on a new law to “regulate the domestic operations of large tech companies.” She argued that mainstream online platforms “limit the visibility of Christian, conservative, rightwing opinions,” adding that the “power groups behind global tech giants” are so powerful that they can influence national elections.

In February, Poland’s Justice Minister Sebastian Kaleta echoed the conservative Hungarian government’s sentiments, saying the Polish government was focusing on protecting conservatives.

“We see that anonymous social media moderators often censor opinions which do not violate the law but are just criticism of leftists’ agenda,” he told the Financial Times. “This creates important risks of infringing freedom of speech.”

Morawiecki added that the new legislation is being discussed in parliament, and the government is not only looking at domestic legislation but also discussing it with the European Commission (the legislative arm of the European Union).

“We are in discussion with the European Commission in two aspects of this area. One is vis-à-vis the freedom of speech and eliminating the censorship issue,” said the Polish PM.

“The other one is in taxing companies where they do business—so not letting them go to tax havens like Luxembourg or Cyprus or Switzerland, and not paying taxes at all or very little taxes paid in these other tax haven countries, because I think that Big Tech companies minimizing their tax burden this way is not sustainable for our economies.”

June 11, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | Leave a comment

Why I spoke out against lockdowns

Martin Kulldorff on the necessity of challenging the Covid consensus

Martin Kulldorff, a professor of medicine at Harvard University.
By Martin Kulldorff | spiked | June 4, 2021

I had no choice but to speak out against lockdowns. As a public-health scientist with decades of experience working on infectious-disease outbreaks, I couldn’t stay silent. Not when basic principles of public health are thrown out of the window. Not when the working class is thrown under the bus. Not when lockdown opponents were thrown to the wolves. There was never a scientific consensus for lockdowns. That balloon had to be popped.

Two key Covid facts were quickly obvious to me. First, with the early outbreaks in Italy and Iran, this was a severe pandemic that would eventually spread to the rest of the world, resulting in many deaths. That made me nervous. Second, based on the data from Wuhan, in China, there was a dramatic difference in mortality by age, with over a thousand-fold difference between the young and the old. That was a huge relief. I am a single father with a teenager and five-year-old twins. Like most parents, I care more about my children than myself. Unlike the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, children had much less to fear from Covid than from annual influenza or traffic accidents. They could get on with life unharmed — or so I thought.

For society at large, the conclusion was obvious. We had to protect older, high-risk people while younger low-risk adults kept society moving.

But that didn’t happen. Instead, schools closed while nursing homes went unprotected. Why? It made no sense. So, I picked up a pen. To my surprise, I could not interest any US media in my thoughts, despite my knowledge and experience with infectious-disease outbreaks. I had more success in my native Sweden, with op-eds in the major daily newspapers, and, eventually, a piece in spiked. Other like-minded scientists faced similar hurdles.

Instead of understanding the pandemic, we were encouraged to fear it. Instead of life, we got lockdowns and death. We got delayed cancer diagnoses, worse cardiovascular-disease outcomes, deteriorating mental health, and a lot more collateral public-health damage from lockdown. Children, the elderly and the working class were the hardest hit by what can only be described as the biggest public-health fiasco in history.

Throughout the 2020 spring wave, Sweden kept daycare and schools open for every one of its 1.8million children aged between one and 15. And it did so without subjecting them to testing, masks, physical barriers or social distancing. This policy led to precisely zero Covid deaths in that age group, while teachers had a Covid risk similar to the average of other professions. The Swedish Public Health Agency reported these facts in mid-June, but in the US lockdown proponents still pushed for school closures.

In July, the New England Journal of Medicine published an article on ‘reopening primary schools during the pandemic’. Shockingly, it did not even mention the evidence from the only major Western country that kept schools open throughout the pandemic. That is like evaluating a new drug while ignoring data from the placebo control group.

With difficulty publishing, I decided to use my mostly dormant Twitter account to get the word out. I searched for tweets about schools and replied with a link to the Swedish study. A few of these replies were retweeted, which gave the Swedish data some attention. It also led to an invitation to write for the Spectator. In August, I finally broke into the US media with a CNN op-ed against school closures. I know Spanish, so I wrote a piece for CNN-Español. CNN-English was not interested.

Something was clearly amiss with the media. Among infectious-disease epidemiology colleagues that I know, most favour focused protection of high-risk groups instead of lockdowns, but the media made it sound like there was a scientific consensus for general lockdowns.

In September, I met Jeffrey Tucker at the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), an organisation I had never heard of before the pandemic. To help the media gain a better understanding of the pandemic, we decided to invite journalists to meet with infectious-disease epidemiologists in Great Barrington, New England, to conduct more in-depth interviews. I invited two scientists to join me, Sunetra Gupta from the University of Oxford, one of the world’s pre-eminent infectious-disease epidemiologists, and Jay Bhattacharya from Stanford University, an expert on infectious diseases and vulnerable populations. To the surprise of AIER, the three of us also decided to write a declaration arguing for focused protection instead of lockdowns. We called it the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD).

Opposition to lockdowns had been deemed unscientific. When scientists spoke out against lockdowns, they were ignored, considered a fringe voice, or accused of not having proper credentials. We thought it would be hard to ignore something authored by three senior infectious-disease epidemiologists from what were three respectable universities. We were right. All hell broke loose. That was good.

Some colleagues threw epithets at us like ‘crazy’, ‘exorcist’, ‘mass murderer’ or ‘Trumpian’. Some accused us of taking a stand for money, though nobody paid us a penny. Why such a vicious response? The declaration was in line with the many pandemic preparedness plans produced years earlier, but that was the crux. With no good public-health arguments against focused protection, they had to resort to mischaracterisation and slander, or else admit they had made a terrible, deadly mistake in their support of lockdowns.

Some lockdown proponents accused us of raising a strawman, as lockdowns had worked and were no longer needed. Just a few weeks later, the same critics lauded the reimposition of lockdowns during the very predictable second wave. We were told that we had not specified how to protect the old, even though we had described ideas in detail on our website and in op-eds. We were accused of advocating a ‘let it rip’ strategy, even though focused protection is its very opposite. Ironically, lockdowns are a dragged-out form of a let-it-rip strategy, in which each age group is infected in the same proportion as a let-it-rip strategy.

When writing the declaration, we knew we were exposing ourselves to attacks. That can be scary, but as Rosa Parks said: ‘I have learned over the years that when one’s mind is made up, this diminishes fear; knowing what must be done does away with fear.’ Also, I did not take the journalistic and academic attacks personally, however vile – and most came from people I had never even heard of before. The attacks were not primarily addressed at us anyhow. We had already spoken out and would continue to do so. Their main purpose was to discourage other scientists from speaking out.

In my twenties, I risked my life in Guatemala working for a human-rights organisation called Peace Brigades International. We protected farmers, unionised workers, students, religious organisations, women’s groups and human-rights defenders who were threatened, murdered, and disappeared by military death squads. While the courageous Guatemalans I worked with faced much more danger, the death squads did once throw a hand grenade into our house. If I could do that work then, why should I not now take much smaller risks for people here at home? When I was falsely accused of being a Koch-funded right-winger, I just shrugged – typical behaviour by both establishment servants and armchair revolutionaries.

After the Great Barrington Declaration, there was no longer a lack of media attention on focused protection as an alternative to lockdowns. On the contrary, requests came from across the globe. I noticed an interesting contrast. In the US and UK, media outlets were either friendly with softball questions or hostile with trick questions and ad hominem attacks. Journalists in most other countries asked hard but relevant and fair questions, exploring and critically examining the Great Barrington Declaration. I think that is how journalism should be done.

While most governments continued with their failed lockdown policies, things have moved in the right direction. More and more schools have reopened, and Florida rejected lockdowns in favour of focused protection, partly based on our advice, without the negative consequences that the lockdowners predicted.

With the lockdown failures increasingly clear, attacks and censorship have increased rather than decreased: Google-owned YouTube censored a video from a roundtable with Florida governor Ron DeSantis, where my colleagues and I stated that children do not need to wear masks; Facebook closed the GBD account when we posted a pro-vaccine message arguing that older people should be prioritised for vaccination; Twitter censored a post when I said that children and those already infected do not need to be vaccinated; and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) removed me from a vaccine-safety working group when I argued that the Johnson & Johnson Covid vaccine should not be withheld from older Americans.

Twitter even locked my account for writing that:

‘Naively fooled to think that masks would protect them, some older high-risk people did not socially distance properly, and some died from Covid because of it. Tragic. Public-health officials/scientists must always be honest with the public.’

This increased pressure may seem counterintuitive, but it is not. Had we been wrong, our scientific colleagues might have taken pity on us and the media would have gone back to ignoring us. Being correct means that we embarrassed some immensely powerful people in politics, journalism, big tech and science. They are never going to forgive us.

That is not what matters, though. The pandemic has been a great tragedy. A 79-year-old friend of mine died from Covid, and a few months later his wife died from cancer that was not detected in time to initiate treatment. While deaths are inevitable during a pandemic, the naive but mistaken belief that lockdowns would protect the old meant that governments did not implement many standard focused-protection measures. The dragged-out pandemic made it harder for older people to protect themselves. With a focused-protection strategy, my friend and his wife might be alive today, together with countless other people around the world.

Ultimately, lockdowns protected young low-risk professionals working from home – journalists, lawyers, scientists, and bankers – on the backs of children, the working class and the poor. In the US, lockdowns are the biggest assault on workers since segregation and the Vietnam War. Except for war, there are few government actions during my life that have imposed more suffering and injustice on such a large scale.

As an infectious-disease epidemiologist, I had no choice. I had to speak up. If not, why be a scientist? Many others who bravely spoke could comfortably have stayed silent. If they had, more schools would still be closed, and the collateral public-health damage would have been greater. I am aware of many fantastic people fighting against these ineffective and damaging lockdowns, writing articles, posting on social media, making videos, talking to friends, speaking up at school board meetings, and protesting in the streets. If you are one of them, it has truly been an honour to work with you on this effort together. I hope that we will one day meet in person and then, let’s dance together. Danser encore!

June 7, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , , | Leave a comment

EU: Growing online censorship of presumed “violent extremism” of all ideological varieties

StateWatch | June 7, 2021

EU police agency Europol recently undertook its first ever “Referral Action Day against right-wing terrorist online propaganda,” in which officers trawled the internet to file complaints about material that may contravene platforms’ terms of service.

The “Action Day” followed recommendations made by the Council of the EU and was part of a growing move towards EU and national bodies removing “violent extremist” material from the internet.

However, as “violent extremism” is a term for which – unlike terrorism – there is no legal definition, it has an expansive scope that puts much in the eye of the beholder.

Indeed, the Portuguese Council Presidency states (in document 8372/21) that the current EU threat assessment takes into account “all forms of extremism that could lead to a terrorist threat or to violence.”

Alongside “Islamism/Jihadism”, it is taken to include both the far-right (or “violent right-wing extremism”, VRWE) and “violent left-wing and anarchist extremism” (VLWAE), both of which encompass a broad sweep of ideologies and activities.

A specific recommendation stemming from the threat assessment was for Europol to use Joint Action Days to target “violent right-wing extremist and terrorist online content.”

However, this is likely to precede action against other ideologies – the document also suggests that: “Where appropriate, consideration should also be given to other forms of violent extremism, such as left-wing.”

This is not the end of it. A separate note from the Presidency (7896/21) considers that:

“Taking into consideration the latest assessments provided to the TWP [Terrorism Working Party], the growing polarization in society, whether based on ideological extremisms or not, seems to be a trend worldwide that may fuel violent extremism. It is also assessed that mainly, but not exclusively, due to the economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, a new breeding ground for radicalisation has the potential to emerge.”

And:

“Mainly as a consequence of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, today’s ideological extremism in the EU is no longer restricted to the “classic” VRWE, VLWE or jihadist extremism. Some recent antisystem COVID-19 denier movements have obvious potential for violence; inspired by conspiracy theories, they challenge governments and restrictive measures put in place, by inciting civil disobedience and unrest. Although extremely difficult to label, they need to be addressed since they pose security challenges to EU Member States.”

Thus:

“Bearing in mind this new reality, it is critical to understand the depth of today’s online threats and the extent to which extremists are using the internet. Therefore, an adequate balance between the improvement of operational capacity and the necessary security requirements on PCVE online activities should be met.”

Documentation

Further reading

June 7, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Twitter suspends vaccine skeptic group after it obtained another 3,000 pages of Fauci emails in FOIA request

RT | June 4, 2021

A vaccine skeptics group was temporarily locked out of its Twitter account after claiming that it acquired thousands of new emails from White House Covid-19 adviser Anthony Fauci, with the site labeling the post “disinformation.”

The Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN) took to Twitter on Thursday to announce the upcoming release of 3,000 pages of Fauci emails it said it obtained in a Freedom of Information request, after media outlets published a massive trove of the health adviser’s correspondence earlier this week.

“The Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN) is dropping 3,000 new pages of FOIA’d Fauci emails TODAY, providing further insight into Anthony Fauci’s actions on Covid, vaccine safety and more,” the group said in the now-deleted post, which was preserved in a screenshot shared by conservative activist Michelle Malkin.

The screencap shows that Twitter deleted the post for breaking its policy on “spreading misleading and potentially harmful information related to Covid-19,” though the platform did not specify what aspect of the tweet was false or deceptive.

While Twitter’s Covid-19 disinformation policy states that it will remove content that makes “a claim of fact, expressed in definitive terms” that is “demonstrably false or misleading,” the ICAN post does not appear to meet that standard, making no factual assertions beyond claiming to have the emails. Twitter, which did not respond to RT’s request for comment, has given no indication about whether it contacted ICAN to determine if it really possessed the emails as claimed.

Asked about the authenticity of the alleged 3,000 pages of messages by a Twitter user on Thursday evening, ICAN creative director Patrick Layton said the emails were “requested and produced through the Freedom of Information Act,” and that ICAN’s “legal team is compiling them” for release. Neither Layton nor ICAN itself has revealed any other details about the purported new trove, which remained unpublished at the time of writing.

On its website, ICAN says its main goal is to disseminate “scientifically researched health information” to the public to allow them to make their own informed medical decisions. However, the group has also come under fire for spreading disinformation [sic] on vaccines, identified as a “key anti-vaxxer organization” in a recent report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate.

Obtained by Buzzfeed and the Washington Post, the previous Fauci email dump was published on Tuesday, prompting criticism of the Covid-19 czar from Republican lawmakers, some demanding his firing.

On Thursday, Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) said one email exchange suggested Fauci may have lied when he claimed his agency – the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases – never funded controversial ‘gain-of-function’ research at a lab in Wuhan, China – the city where Covid-19 was first detected.

In the emails in question, Fauci asked his top deputy, Hugh Auchincloss, to review a 2015 study that discussed gain-of-function work at the Wuhan lab. Auchincloss later replied that the study was conducted prior to a US government ban on funding for gain-of-function research, and that another staffer would “determine if we have any distant ties to this work abroad.” It is unclear whether the deputy ever followed up after that message.

“The emails paint a disturbing picture, a disturbing picture of Dr. Fauci, from the very beginning, worrying that he had been funding gain-of-function research,” Paul said in an interview with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham. “He knows it to this day, but hasn’t admitted it.”

Gain-of-function work aims to increase the virulence and lethality of viruses so that scientists can better understand them, but has been deemed risky by some experts, who say the suped-up pathogens could accidentally escape into the world.

Later on Thursday, GOP representatives Steve Scalise (Louisiana) and James Comer (Kentucky) also penned a letter to two Democratic committee heads demanding that Fauci be called to testify before Congress about the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic, saying the emails make the request “even more urgent.”

June 4, 2021 Posted by | Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

YouTube censors Brett Weinstein ivermectin clip

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim the Net | June 3, 2021

Big Tech’s social media platforms, as well as a plethora of corporate media, must still be nursing what is highly likely to feel like some very unpleasant “fresh and raw” egg on their face – after they were “forced” to take an abrupt U-turn in the wake of months of draconian censoring of any mention, and even the very possibility that coronavirus might have been human-engineered – instead of occurring naturally, randomly among China’s wildlife – as the previously approved narrative went.

What “forced” them to do it – (in reality, in a true democracy, nothing should ever be able to force a media outlet to do anything) – was the imperative of always aligning their editorial/moderation/censorship policies with a “preferred” narrative.

But after “the Wuhan lab theory” suddenly gained legit “citizenship status” in the media – it became clear that when the government says “JUMP” – this particular class of social and legacy media will only ever have this one “journalistic” question: “How high?”

It warrants keeping this big, overall picture in mind when considering how other Covid-related censorship topics are now being treated on the internet – and how quickly and seemingly inexplicably the tide may or may not turn on those as well. Whatever that tendency may be – it surely is not a “symptom” of free and independent journalism. Quite the opposite.

And as we wait to see where the “brave new world” might take us next, here’s an example: the censorship evolutionary biologist and DarkHorse Podcast host Brett Weinstein is now facing on YouTube – for exploring another previously outlawed as “heresy” topic – that of the drug Ivermectin’s merit, or lack thereof, in treating Covid patients.

YouTube has deleted a video of Weinstein discussing the topic with one of his peers, Heather Heying. More precisely, the video, “Why is Ivermectin not being used in other countries?,” is now gone from Weinstein’s “podcast clips” channel – while the full-length video still remains available on the main channel.

Does YouTube’s left censorship hand not know what the right hand is doing?

All joking aside, YouTube normally operates on a “three strikes” system – and it’s not at all clear how this might affect Weinstein’s channel, going forward.

June 3, 2021 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Biden allies prompt Facebook to scrutinize allowing spread of election fraud conversations

By Dan Frieth | Reclaim the Net | June 3, 2021

An advocacy group, closely tied to [proclaimed] President Joe Biden, has called on Facebook to review whether its actions, or lack thereof, led to the spread of election fraud claims, according to a report on POLITICO.

The call follows a similar recommendation by Facebook’s Oversight Board, last month.

On Wednesday, Building Back Together, a non-government coalition formed mostly by Biden allies and his campaign advisers, sent a letter to Facebook, calling on the social media giant to commit to an internal review of its contribution to allowing people to make election fraud claims.

Last month, when the Oversight Board upheld Facebook’s decision to suspend Trump (but criticized the indefinite suspension), it made a similar recommendation, calling on the company to conduct “a comprehensive review of Facebook’s potential contribution to the narrative of electoral fraud and the exacerbated tensions that culminated in the violence in the United States on January 6.”

The Board gave Facebook until this Friday to respond to the recommendation.

The Board is a team of 20 individuals with the power to overturn some of Facebook’s content moderation decisions. The ruling on Trump’s suspension is binding; Facebook is supposed to comply. However, the board’s recommendations, such as the one highlighted above, are not binding. That could be part of the reason why Biden allies are pressuring Facebook to take action on the recommendation before the Friday deadline.

Building Back Together senior adviser for voting rights Bob Bauer urged Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg to provide “an unequivocal commitment to the complete public review suggested by the Oversight Board.”

According to Bauer, who served in Obama’s White House and was an adviser in the Biden presidential campaign, if Facebook fails to conduct the review, it would be undermining the credibility of the Oversight Board.

“Unless Facebook engages in the transparent evaluation and review that the Oversight Board demands, it will have discredited the board’s very reason for being within 30 days of its only noteworthy action,” Bauer wrote.

Facebook declined to provide a comment on the Building Back Together letter. However, a Facebook spokesperson said the company would include a response to the review in its formal reply to the Board’s recommendations.

The letter is the coalition’s first significant move into the online misinformation and social media accountability debates. Mostly, Building Back Together has focused on boosting Biden’s policies such as the infrastructure proposal and COVID-19 recovery plan.

So far, Biden’s White House has been cautious about commenting on the issues relating to social media platforms, such as online misinformation.

Speaking to POLITICO, Bauer described allowing election fraud claims as “a profound threat to the health of American democracy.” He added that the Jan 6 riots in the US Capitol proved “what can happen when platforms like Facebook fail to protect against the gross abuse of its platform and amplify those who spread lies.”

According to POLITICO, Building Back Together will continue focusing on election misinformation on online platforms, and is keen to see how Facebook responds to the recommendations by the Oversight Board.

June 3, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

France to Create Agency to Fight ‘Disinformation’ Online

Sputnik – 02.06.2021

PARIS – France will create a government agency to monitor “disinformation” coming from abroad, the head of the General Secretariat for Defense and National Security said on Wednesday.

Stephane Bouillon assured lawmakers that the agency would be tasked with flagging online threats coming from abroad, rather than gathering intelligence, correcting information or establishing truth.

“There are countries, organizations that are hostile to France … that exaggerate and spread disinformation … That’s something to work on,” Bouillon said in parliament.

The agency will employ 40 to 60 people who will trawl through open sources online for clues on disinformation that could set off an “information pandemic.”

The agency will be tested during the German legislative elections in September and an independence referendum in the French overseas territory of New Caledonia in December.

June 3, 2021 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance | | Leave a comment

Google bans Dr. Vladimir Zelenko from sharing Google Docs

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim the Net | June 2, 2021

Google has been expanding censorship around Covid topics and users it disapproves of from the public-facing platforms like YouTube and Search – to Google Docs.

Dr. Vladimir Zelenko – a Westchester, New York-based US physician who became known last year for proposing alternative Covid treatments that was endorsed by then President Donald Trump – is on the receiving end.

After Facebook and YouTube restricted Zelenko’s presence on the social networks and Twitter suspended his account, the doctor is now prevented from sharing documents – six in all – using Google Docs.

The documents once again concern the Covid pandemic, discussing Zelenko’s own approach to the outbreak that included the use of hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin, and zinc, which he says played a significant role in preventing the need to hospitalize patients, Newsbusters reported.

Among the files Google is stopping him from sharing is also a letter he penned to New York Governor Cuomo and an opinion piece on the subject.

But since the same documents can be shared by other users, it is presumed that Google is targeting Zelenko specifically rather than this content per se.

Last year, the Times of Israel wrote that even though President Trump did not name the doctor who had written urging him to support the use of the combination of the three drugs, the description matched that of physician Vladimir Zev Zelenko.

Trump at the time said that he himself was taking this therapy, after “hearing a lot of good stories” about it.

Reacting to the latest round of censorship against him, Zelenko said that he had “called out the globalist elite” for their mishandling of Covid.

June 2, 2021 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Make Way for the Snitch State: The All-Seeing Fourth Branch of Government

By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead | The Rutherford Institute | June 1, 2021

We’re being spied on by a domestic army of government snitches, spies and techno-warriors.

This government of Peeping Toms is watching everything we do, reading everything we write, listening to everything we say, and monitoring everything we spend.

Beware of what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, and with whom you communicate, because it is all being recorded, stored, and catalogued, and will be used against you eventually, at a time and place of the government’s choosing.

This far-reaching surveillance has paved the way for an omnipresent, militarized fourth branch of government—the Surveillance State—that came into being without any electoral mandate or constitutional referendum.

Indeed, long before the National Security Agency (NSA) became the agency we loved to hate, the Justice Department, the FBI, and the Drug Enforcement Administration were carrying out their own secret mass surveillance on an unsuspecting populace.

Even agencies not traditionally associated with the intelligence community are part of the government’s growing network of snitches and spies.

Just about every branch of the government—from the Postal Service to the Treasury Department and every agency in between—now has its own surveillance sector, authorized to spy on the American people. For instance, the U.S. Postal Service, which has been photographing the exterior of every piece of paper mail for the past 20 years, is also spying on Americans’ texts, emails and social media posts. Headed up by the Postal Service’s law enforcement division, the Internet Covert Operations Program (iCOP) is reportedly using facial recognition technology, combined with fake online identities, to ferret out potential troublemakers with “inflammatory” posts. The agency claims the online surveillance, which falls outside its conventional job scope of processing and delivering paper mail, is necessary to help postal workers avoid “potentially volatile situations.”

Then there are the fusion and counterterrorism centers that gather all of the data from the smaller government spies—the police, public health officials, transportation, etc.—and make it accessible for all those in power. And that doesn’t even begin to touch on the complicity of the corporate sector, which buys and sells us from cradle to grave, until we have no more data left to mine.

It’s not just what we say, where we go and what we buy that is being tracked.

We’re being surveilled right down to our genes, thanks to a potent combination of hardware, software and data collection that scans our biometrics—our faces, irises, voices, genetics, even our gait—runs them through computer programs that can break the data down into unique “identifiers,” and then offers them up to the government and its corporate allies for their respective uses.

In this way, we are now the unwitting victims of an interconnected, tightly woven, technologically evolving web of real-time, warrantless, wall-to-wall mass surveillance that makes the spy programs spawned by the USA Patriot Act look like child’s play.

Fusion centers. See Something, Say Something. Red flag laws. Behavioral threat assessments. Terror watch lists. Facial recognition. Snitch tip lines. Biometric scanners. Pre-crime. DNA databases. Data mining. Precognitive technology. Contact tracing apps.

These are all part and parcel of the widening surveillance dragnet that the government has used and abused in order to extend its reach and its power.

The COVID-19 pandemic has succeeded in acclimating us even further to being monitored, tracked and reported for so-called deviant or undesirable behavior.

Consequently, we now live in a society in which a person can be accused of any number of crimes without knowing what exactly he has done. He might be apprehended in the middle of the night by a roving band of SWAT police. He might find himself on a no-fly list, unable to travel for reasons undisclosed. He might have his phones or internet tapped based upon a secret order handed down by a secret court, with no recourse to discover why he was targeted.

This Kafkaesque nightmare has become America’s reality.

Despite the fact that its data snooping has been shown to be ineffective at detecting, let alone stopping, any actual terror attacks, the government continues to operate its domestic spying programs largely in secret, carrying out warrantless mass surveillance on hundreds of millions of Americans’ phone calls, emails, text messages and the like.

Yet the surveillance sector is merely one small part of a shadowy permanent government comprised of unelected bureaucrats who march in lockstep with profit-driven corporations that actually runs Washington, DC, and works to keep us under close watch and, thus, under control. For example, Google openly works with the NSA, Amazon has built a massive $600 million intelligence database for the CIA, and the telecommunications industry is making a fat profit by spying on us for the government.

Most recently, the Biden Administration indicated it may be open to working with non-governmental firms in order to warrantlessly monitor citizens online.

This would be nothing new, however. Vast quantities of the government’s digital surveillance is already being outsourced to private companies, who are far less restrained in how they harvest and share our personal data.

In this way, Corporate America is making a hefty profit by aiding and abetting the government in its militarized domestic surveillance efforts.

The snitch culture has further empowered the Surveillance State.

As Ezra Marcus writes for the New York Times, “Throughout the past year, American society responded to political upheaval and biological peril by turning to an age-old tactic for keeping rule breakers in check: tattling.”

This new era of snitch surveillance is the lovechild of the government’s post-9/11 “See Something, Say Something” programs combined with the self-righteousness of a politically correct, technologically-wired age.

Marcus continues:

“Technology, and our abiding love of it, is crucial to our current moment of social surveillance. Snitching isn’t just a byproduct of nosiness or fear; it’s a technological feature built into the digital architecture of the pandemic era …. the world’s most powerful technology companies, whose products you are likely using to read this story, already use a business model of mass surveillance, collecting and selling user information to advertisers at an unfathomable scale. Our cellphones track us everywhere, and our locations are bought and sold by data brokers at incredible, intimate detail. Facial recognition software used by law enforcement trawls Instagram selfies. Facebook harvests the biometric data of its users. The whole ecosystem, more or less, runs on snitching.”

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, what we are dealing with today is not just a beast that has outgrown its chains but a beast that will not be restrained.

June 1, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | | Leave a comment

Australia’s drug regulator considers referring vaccine hesitant Facebook posts to police

The regulator cited potential two-year jail terms in some instances

By Tom Parker | Reclaim the Net | June 1, 2021

Australia’s drug regulator, the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), is considering referring Facebook posts containing claims about COVID vaccine deaths to the police after a post showing Labor backbencher Julian Hill getting his vaccine was met with mass pushback from vaccine skeptics.

The post was ratioed with almost twice the number of comments to engagements – a common sign that a post is unpopular.

Many of the comments noted that the vaccine is “experimental,” described Hill’s post as “propaganda,” and voiced their objections to the vaccine.

But The Guardian Australia focused on alleged posts from some Facebook users that purportedly contained an image that cited the TGA and claimed that COVID-19 vaccines have caused more than 200 deaths.

The figure is a reference to the TGA’s disclosure in its May 27 COVID-19 vaccine weekly safety report that it has received “210 reports of deaths following immunisation.” However, the TGA insists that only one of these deaths was caused by the vaccines.

After The Guardian Australia contacted the TGA, it said the alleged posting of claims that the vaccine had caused more than 200 deaths were “particularly concerning” and that it would consider referring these posts to the federal police.

Additionally, the TGA noted that it’s a criminal offense, punishable by two years in prison, to represent oneself as a commonwealth body or claim to act on behalf of one.

The Guardian Australia also contacted Facebook which swiftly removed the posts for violating its far-reaching “COVID-19 misinformation” rules.

Despite the threat of police referrals from the TGA and Facebook removing the posts, Hill demanded that Australia’s health minister, Greg Hunt, take further action to “combat vaccine hesitancy, and the bat shit crazy conspiracy theories circulating online.”

He also warned “Australians will continue to be exposed to restrictions and lockdowns… until enough of the population is vaccinated.”

These developments come months after Australian lawmaker Craig Kelly had one of his Facebook posts about masks removed after complaints from the opposition party. Days after this post removal, his account was temporarily suspended and he was then permanently banned a couple of months later.

Facebook also expanded its crackdown on vaccine skeptic content last month by starting to “fact-check” and suppress individual users that repeatedly share misinformation. This followed whistleblowers exposing the tech giant’s secret algorithm that suppresses negative vaccine experiences.

June 1, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , | Leave a comment

Canadian doctor removed from hospital duty after speaking out about COVID vaccine side effects

By Anthony Murdoch | LifeSiteNews | May 26, 2021

LYTTON, British Columbia — A Canadian family doctor says he has been punished by his local health authority because he raised concerns about side effects he observed in some of those who had received the Moderna COVID-19 jab within his community.

“I am no longer allowed to work in the ER,” British Columbia Dr. Charles Hoffe said, according to a True North News report.

Hoffe added that his suspension from the ER came at the end of April, after his local health authority “suspended” his clinical privileges “for the crime of causing ‘vaccine hesitancy,’ for speaking out about my vaccine injured patients.”

In an April 5 letter, Hoffe had written to British Columbia Provincial Health Officer Bonnie Henry that he was “quite alarmed at the high rate of serious side effects from this novel treatment,” in reference to Moderna COVID-19 injections given to 900 mostly Indigenous people in Lytton, British Columbia.

Hoffe said he had observed one patient death, “numerous” allergic reactions, along with three individuals who had “disabling” neurological deficits completed with chronic pain, which persisted “for more than 10 weeks after their first vaccine.”

“So in short, in our small community of Lytton, BC, we have one person dead, and three people who look as though they will be permanently disabled, following their first dose of the Moderna vaccine. The age of those affected ranges from 38 to 82 years of age,” wrote Hoffe.

Following his letter, Hoffe said, he is no longer allowed to work in the ER department of St. Bartholomew’s Health Centre due to his views on the COVID injection. He still can work in his private practice.

“I am still permitted to see patients in my private practice, which is not under the jurisdiction of the Interior Health authority,” Hoffe said. Losing the ability to work in the ER has resulted in his income being slashed by half, which he explained is “the price of advocating for the safety of my patients.”

A community note which was posted on the Lytton Medical clinic door states that Hoffe’s “suspension” by the local health authority will “likely” mean that the “emergency room in Lytton will be closed for at least two weeks out of every month.”

In a recent statement, the College of Physicians and Surgeons of British Columbia (CPSBC) and the First Nations Health Authority (FNHA) said they were aware of “public statements from physicians that contradict public health orders and guidance [being] confusing and potentially harmful to patients.”

CPSBC registrar and CEO Dr. Heidi Oetter threatened to take action against doctors who speak out against the government narrative, saying in the statement that those who “put the public at risk with misinformation may face an investigation by the College, and if warranted, regulatory action.”

May 31, 2021 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Video | , | Leave a comment

Canada: Conservatives’ attempts to protect platform users’ speech online is blocked

By Dan Frieth May | Reclaim the Net | May 31, 2021

Members of the Liberal Party, New Democratic Party (NDP), and Bloc Quebecois rejected a Bill C-10 amendment proposed by the Conservative Party of Canada that would have exempted user-generated content from the bill’s online speech suppression powers. The vote was cast during Monday’s Heritage Committee meeting.

Bloc and NDP legislators have expressed support for the bill, meaning the controversial internet censorship bill is highly likely to pass. Still, Conservative legislators are keen on ensuring the bill does not become law without an exception being created for user-generated content.

Legislators appear to be ignoring all the complaints and criticism of the bill from the public.

Former chairman of the CTRC, the regulator that will oversee online platforms once the bill passes, Peter Menzies has condemned the bill, warning it is “an assault on Canadian’s freedoms.”

Last week, a group of experts in the tech industry, wrote an open letter to Trudeau, urging him to “stop harming the Internet, and the freedoms and aspirations of every individual in this country, and our knowledge economy through overreaching regulatory policies that will have significant, yet unintended consequences for the free and open internet in Canada.”

May 31, 2021 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

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